3.4.1 The Ancient Debate

Why do humans have morals?

For thousands of years philosophers have agreed that morality is useful. It provides social cohesion, group cooperation, and sharing of goals. Secular Western ideas of morality are founded around belief in a social contract, where humans accept cooperative competition around shared, mutually beneficial goals. Yet, these explanations of morality involve a voluntary action of humans, as though humans agreed to adopt morality. Only hundreds of thousands of years ago during emergence on the savanna there was no religion, ethics, language, or culture. When hominid sub-species were competing for resources forces acting on humanity were non-volitional. The human need for moral restraint evolved through natural forces and it is these, not volitional ones, which must explain its operation.

Yet throughout history, explaining morality by natural forces has proved exceptionally difficult. Since as long as humans can remember historically there has always existed moral injunction in society, such as tribal law, religion, or the social or ethical teachings of that society. However, also as far back as Greek times astute philosophers noticed that the teachings always represented somebody's view of how people should behave, and it was usually the view of those already holding power. This applied especially to the teachings of a religious priesthood that seemed to arise in every civilization. In every society throughout history including modern ones, moral teachings arose first within religion, which were always there before philosophy or science. So, by the time rational explanations arrived morality already existed. Either religion was an attempt to explain a property that had always been there, or morality was not a pristine human need but only a need that religious teachers implanted in people's minds to serve religious ends.

Still, despite that it universally originated in religion there is evidence that morality is also a pristine need. One argument is that society still needs morality to function even without religion. Only this need should also be explainable in secular terms, as a social contract in which moral behavior is ultimately enforceable by laws people agree among themselves. Only the theory of the social contract fails to explain the most puzzling aspect of morality. This is that apart from anything society enforces the human psyche contains deep moral feelings of remorse, shame, and guilt. If anything, the great appeal of religion lay not in its story telling, but its explanation of these deep feelings in terms that people could understand. More intriguing, this puzzle remains after thousands of millennia of debate and over a century of scientific explanation. Long before the theory of evolution, philosophers astute enough to see that moral teachings were manipulated by society could also see that people were individually selfish. Only there is no advantage to having moral feelings among beings who are naturally selfish, or no explanation of why the feelings would arise. There have been attempts to explain this in terms of seeking an ethical mean. Eating produces pleasure, but too much eating causes stomach cramps, which causes pain, so the inhibitions might be a form of motivational balance. Other theories have tried to extend this to a general ethical calculus, which ensured that one person's pleasure did not impinge on another's pain. Still, none of these theories were convincing against how people truly acted and felt, while nothing could explain how these forces would arise naturalistically, to an extent of being part of human biology.

The theory of evolution, which explained how biological attributes arose through natural selection, should have been able to explain how moral feelings arose. Except far from proving why morals would be selectively fit, evolution theory has so far only proven the contrary: that displays of moral-appearing behavior are nothing but disguised selfishness, by which individuals seek ways to maximize propagation of DNA over that of rivals who have been cheated or outmaneuvered. However, while these mechanisms have been proven by math they still do not explain why humans feel or act the way that they do. Illicit sex or an unwanted pregnancy can evoke feelings of guilt or remorse, and these deep feelings were selected by fitness. But a direct connection of why it would be fit to evolve inhibitions about sex, especially as fitness is propagating DNA makes no sense at all. Theorists think that the problem must be some incredibly subtle mechanism of a game within a game that is causing this, if there is any explanation at all. Theories of psychological inhibitions such as those of the sub-consciousness of parental programming make slightly more sense, but these have no explanation, or credible one, of why the inhibitions evolved in the first place, and so on.

Frustration over the inability to produce a credible secular explanation of moral feelings has also led the inquiry into a different direction. This to effectively give up any attempt to explain moral feelings in their own terms, and instead try to undermine people's convictions in the existence of moral feelings at all. Every individual is intensely aware of powerful, deep, moral sentiments that strike the psyche, often motivating our behavior more strongly than direct sensation on the skin. The argument then becomes that we only "think" we are experiencing these feelings, due to how our brains have been conditioned by society. This argument takes several forms. One is a misunderstood philosophical proposition that statements of moral judgement do not say anything. Another is to exaggerate childhood or social conditioning of the alleged subconscious, without any attempt to explain why it was fit for humans to evolve such a powerful subconscious in the first place, if all it did was mislead people. Finally, we have attempts to invoke the latest findings from evolution that moral behavior in animals is of appearance only, and the real motivators of behavior are the genes. E O Wilson supposes that instinct evolved directly into morality, and in the example of sexual choice among birds a moralistic result did arise from nothing more than a rule that genes are selfish. None of the birds exhibited moral conscience, or a need for morality as sentiment. Except this makes the problem worse. If species survive and propagate in the wild without moral sentiment, it makes it harder to explain why moral feelings evolved in humans. If among choices evolutionary advantage is paramount, why does nature not avoid sentiment and resolve the options by instinctual moves alone?

Again, the standard answer is that we only think we are being moral when we perform an action, whose underlying motive is selfishness of the genes. But if humans could resolve choices by instinct, there would still be no need to develop moral sentiments which organisms engaged in a struggle for survival would be better off without. In evolution, any change comes at a fitness cost, which must be measured against something else that could adapt, such as being more cunning, for an equivalent cost. So, what would be the payback for individuals allowing themselves to be fooled by sentiment against an individual who was not fooled by it? While if we are only fooled by genes into thinking we are enacting moral behavior, what about the choices of the scientist who explains all this. Why have not the genes fooled him too?

There is no answer to these objections, except to point out that they are not really attempts to explain morality, but explain it away, especially in religious terms. The final recourse of secular failure to explain morality is to attack religion, not by an alternative explanation of moral feelings, but by demonstrating that there is no scientific foundation to religious beliefs. Yet, religion is not just its explanation of moral feelings, but a complex social phenomenon, involving ritual, chant, worship, mass psychology, symbolism, belief, cult following, and social bonding. Why people follow religion is never explained that easily. Even if a gene or molecule happens to explain a few moral feelings it still must explain very broad behaviors to account for something as complex as religion. So, while many attempts by science at one-off explanations of morality-cum-religion are interesting, they have little enduring impact on either the theory of morality, or people's religious outlook. Again, we emphasize these theories are more for explaining away morality (it is not there) rather than explaining morality (it is there -this is how it works).

So how does the Theory of Options explain morality?

Well, there are three broad categories of explanation.

1. The first, crucial explanation is why strong moral feelings would be a direct fitness advantage to individuals evolving along a pathway maximizing the options of behavior.
2. Having explained why these feelings would exist as part of the evolved human physiology and emotional make-up, next we explain how these feelings came to be interpreted historically, within developing social needs as religious and ethical edict.
3. Finally, we give a broad interpretation of why possessing morals increases options of behavior in a general sense.

Let us now see how it all works. 

The hardest part to explaining morality is accounting for why the feelings arise at all. This is done in later chapters, but the primary point is accepting that "feelings" are qualitatively just biochemically-induced mood. There is say, an alleged human 'sexual guilt' feeling that provokes much discussion. But this does not mean there is a 'sexual guilt' biochemical in the brain that punishes us solely and exclusively for sexual misdemeanors, or a 'sexual guilt' gene specifically for regulating an alleged guilt aspect of sexual behavior. Rather, there is a range of emotions, moods and sentience that humans experience, which evolved for a range of fitness needs. Humans might feel a certain quality of internal pain of remorse over an act of betrayal. And they might feel a similar quality of pain for a blundered business opportunity. We seem to understand why pain in the latter case was fit, but not in the former, because one instance of the pain assists selfishness, but the other works against it. Only we are seeking a fitness reason in each instance for an entire transaction that embraces a mixture of sentiment, reflex and advanced complex perceptions of the higher cortex conditioned by thousands of years of leaning and culture. If we are to understand such complex transactions we need to do it in steps. All we need to explain as fitness, really, is why this particular quality of pain exists in the human repertoire of responses to emotional input.

Again, we can see the fitness reasons best from a perspective of maximizing options, although this too is just resolving a complex process into several steps. We determine first, from general evolution why humans evolved at all, before focusing on details of why particular sentiments or feelings evolved. Once we see that humans were evolving along the pathway that maximized options of behavior, the way the entire human neurology was structured makes more sense. For humans it not necessarily fit say, to evolve so-called moral inhibitions as we understand them in modern terms as hard-wired reflex. However, along the fitness pathway of maximizing the options of behavior it was extremely fit to evolve a large, flexible brain, though this might have nothing to do with morals or inhibitions in the first instance. Yet for other reasons to do with the fitness pathway plus the speed of human evolution, large, flexible brains that evolve quickly have a very high ratio of learned to instinctive neurology. In most animals the learning ratio is fractional so a majority of behaviors are instinctive, like in ants or bees. In chimps, the most intelligent animals, the 'learning ratio' is 2.5 to one, but in human it is about eight to one. Now we can demonstrate why for such a high learning ratio there will need to be powerful instinctive inhibitors of learning, retention, and behavior if the brain is to work reliably. These inhibitors and controllers of behavior, very fit for the purpose for which they were pre-adapted by evolution, could be as easily mistaken for feelings of "moral inhibition" at a different phase or time of human development.

Even so, identifying pre-adapted moods and feelings as a possible source of moral inhibition is not intended to show that such feelings are not also valid as moral regulators. Pre-adapted never means uselessly adapted, the way the appendix allegedly is. On the contrary it means a solution for one evolutionary problem became solution for another. Highly evolved morality in this sense has a direct fitness advantage, in that it is a modifiable constraint on behavior. Normally, in the wild, in brute Darwinian selection, behavior is constrained by selective pressures of fitness, where constrained means 'forced to follow a certain path' like physical objects being constrained in falling motion by gravity. In evolution, the track through behavioral space creatures are forced to follow is dictated by needs of survival and procreation. Morality allows humans to break this, to explore behavioral paths not dictated by brute survival. The natural geodesic of water is to flow downhill, but if we encase water in a pipe, we can force it to flow uphill. When we encase human behavior in a metaphorical pipe of morality we constrain it to move in directions outside its Darwinian geodesic. But because humans ultimately control the direction of morality, morality itself becomes the mechanism by which humans obtain greater options of movement in behavioral space.

In general too, humans evolve not towards adaptation for a specific environment, but towards general adaptation of their biology for change. The end-point to human evolution is an organism with maximum biological options. Because morality is the easiest constraint to change, maximum biological options will occur when the only constraints on behavior are moral ones. Any organism needs food, sex, procreation, and all other organisms are trapped by their mode of evolution into a struggle for these. Their options are constrained by biological reality. One mistake, and other options become zero. Humans wanted to act free from this constraint, and individuals were selected displaying this ability to modify and control behavior outside of impulse. The orthodox connotation of Darwinism is that humans are winners of evolution, that they are say in a biological sense fitter than chimps. Yet strangely, humans are loosers of the Darwinian struggle. Human ancestors were forced out from the woodlands by the more successful Darwinian adaptations, which stayed on to become modern chimpanzees. Humans never wanted to be trapped in this struggle again. We are organisms, and all organisms want food, sex, and procreation, but humans want it on their own terms. We want it as choice. In personal discipline we force our biology through diet, exercise or sexual constraint to do things it does not want. We are reminding our own biology, and reassuring our psychology who is in charge. Human evolution, in these terms, is substitution through all our behaviors of biological constraints for moral ones.

But even if morality makes us masters over our biology, in our evolutionary past morality arose from biology. So, why would biology that previously controlled us exclusively, put another property in charge? If we evolved biologically from one mode into another what was the true evolutionary motive for this change? The ancient savanna had no philosophers to work out that morality was the optimal behavioral constraint because it could be changed easily. There was only an anthropoid species struggling for existence in difficult times. The individuals of these species might have struggled slightly less with each other within a group and struggled more between groups. This way, Darwin's observation of morality favoring groups could act. But for individuals within species to modify there had to be a fitness advantage to morality, sufficient for selection pressures to favor it. So, what were these advantages?

Many researchers have studied this. It begins with a process of inserting a delay between instinctual desire and response, such as do not consume food on the spot, but share or store it. All higher mammals exhibit this inhibition slightly, though for animals like squirrels storing nuts it is instinctive. Yet instinctive behavior, even for storing food, is not as flexible as the option to store food only when it is opportune. When animals use genuine choice it is more flexible, so there must also be an internal "reward" of good feelings about implementing this delay when it yields long-term survival options. For humans with a complex range of behaviors, these inhibition rewards will be not just for sharing food. Cooperating on the hunt, caring for the sick and wounded, raising orphaned children, trusting women left home in a group to remain sexually faithful, are all behaviors which make a group more cohesive and efficient, giving it advantages competing with other groups. Only again, processes of how individuals with these favored traits were selected for reproductive fitness is disputed. They were sexually selected individually, or group selected by belonging to successful groups, or a combination. Whatever it was, we presume that by the end of the first phase of human evolution, about 2.5 million years ago, there was instinctual delay to pre-human behavior and the adumbration of instinctual "good feelings" reward to its practice. This would affect the several fully erect Australopithecus subspecies now competing as groups.

The instinctual phase of moral development, however, is orthodox evolution. If the delay were instinctive, there must be an instinctual reward mechanism of good feelings for an impulse suppressed. This reward mechanism might take many forms, such as stroking from others in the group as works with dogs, feelings of self-gratification, or even instinctual feelings of remorse for loss of self-control. Whatever it was, perfecting neural circuits for the complete transaction from impulse-restraint-reward would be complex, taking a long time to evolve. Plus it would be tedious evolutionary labor if all inhibition reflexes performed roughly the same function, such as impulse-response-reward. Obviously, there is a more efficacious way to design these circuits. Within the last 2.5 million years the size of the imaginative part of the human brain, the higher cortex, was evolving rapidly. The impulse of behavior would be there. Instinctual punishment and reward was a new form of reflex, and needed refinement. But the moral reason for the delay could be for sharing food on one occasion but sexual fidelity the next, and something else later. So, why not shift the reasons for the delay to the higher cortex where they could be changed more easily to circumstance? The disadvantage to higher cortex behaviors is that they must be learned, but programming a behavior by learning is faster and more flexible than evolving it by reflex.

Most important, the rapid expansion of the brain in latter human evolution was by expansion of the learning circuits of the higher cortex. The reflexive neurology of the lower and middle brain must be refined by innumerable generations of natural selection. But versatile learning circuits of the upper brain can be multiplied rapidly. So even in hard fitness terms the more responses that can encephalized in the upper brain, the faster brain size can expand. Plus we get optimization of function characteristic of all human evolution. Moving general response to the upper brain then;

1. makes the responses flexible
2. allows for rapid expansion of brain capacity
3. leaves the original reflexive circuits of the deeper brain more specialized for instinct and natural reflex.

But it all will work only if leaning can sublimate the power of reflex. Yet reflex, stimulus, pain, hunger or sexual urge, is only biochemical. If biochemistry can act on consciousness as stimuli it can also act as mood, even stronger than stimulus. It is fit to have a large brain. It is fit to transfer responses from fixed circuits to bountifully available variable ones. And it is fit to ensure that the entire process works reliably. The powerful biochemical moods that ensure encephalization works can be used to enforce moral feelings. But while in human evolution the group selects the use of human biology, nature still selects the basis of individual fitness. Successful encephalization is a fitness trait in humans, while a fitness bi-product of encephalization is powerful biochemical regulating moods and circuits, which form the basis of moral feelings. Later, under different social circumstances and once humans have language these feelings will be interpreted as emotional guides to moral behavior. (See also 1.3 The Human Geodesic, plus 5.2 The Origin of Morality, 5.3 The Origin of Ethics and 5.4 The Origin of Religion.)

Evolutionary biology feels it has worked a triumph when it has explained moral-appearing behavior in birds without invoking a need for morality in a modern ethical sense. Yet, with a little more application of the theory, it is possible to explain how moral feelings arise in humans without the need for morals in an ethical sense either. Only the non-ethical reasons why moral feelings arise in humans are not the same as the non-ethical reasons they arise in birds, and the debate is unable to move beyond that point.

If the early fitness advantage to morality was that it aided encephalization, this helps explain why we cannot agree whether morality is inherited or learned. In humans the middle section of the impulse-delay-response transaction is shifted to the higher cortex, and becomes learned behavior. Impulse is always reflex, but the response part of human morality is also reflex, and is inherited behavior. If humans feel shame, love, exhilaration, grief, as a physiological effect it is a product of reflex. Yet, why humans feel a particular effect in that circumstance arises from a chain of events forming an impression in the higher cortex. So on one hand, the brain has optimized the moral response function until it becomes the single most powerful reflex, overcoming even fear of death. But it has left motivators of this powerful reflex in what is the imaginative part of the human brain. It is this double effect of an easily influenced cortex combined with the powerful response of reflex which can make human moral transactions so unpredictable, when harmful cultural influences control the learning program. As with intelligence though, arranging the brain this way was an expedient of biological design. It is easier biologically to produce billions of non-specialized neural circuits in the higher cortex and leave it to learning, than to patiently design by trial-and-error evolution the complex neural circuits of reflex.

Moral feelings as both a product of evolutionary mood and a learned response of the higher cortex also account for the disputes over morality as a means of social control. Morality is partly reflexive and partly learned, but with learned parts controlled and manipulated by society. Plus the leaned and reflexive parts to morality are often in conflict both within the individual psyche and with the broader interpretation by society of what morality means. The Chapter on Ethics defines this conflict between learned and reflexive moral response as the ethical problem of society. Though it existed through thousands of years of civilization it has never been satisfactorily solved.

This learned and reflexive aspect of morality creates three immediate problems of how naturally evolved morality impacts on society. The first difficulty is correlating a correct theory of knowledge (epistemology) with a correct theory of morals (ethics). The same neural process handles knowledge and moral perceptions. The senses (reflex) gather the data, the higher cortex processes the data for meaning, and the senses respond. But it is not agreed that the final part of the transaction yields similar qualities of truth. Socially, humans agree that the senses and reflexes used for processing technical data should be emotionally neutral. Among humans the evidence of sight is final. In court and in science, you either saw it or you did not. But for moral knowledge inner feelings are not neutral, and humans never universally agreed that they should be. Thus, people remain free to "feel" moral truths intuitively regardless of what the rational philosophy tells them that they should believe. Also, rational philosophy, strictly, is only about the subject-predicate relationship of propositions. It is not about the truth-value of feelings arising in instinctual segments of mind, except for giving a scientific explanation of how such feelings arise. So, if an individual "feels" within his or her being love, God, anger or shame, we are not sure what it means in a rationalist sense to say that those feelings are not logically valid, at least to the individual who experiences them. Instead, we should try to better understand which processes drive individuals to experience the moral impressions that they do, and decide from that the true moral options we as a species possess.

The second difficulty with having moral reasoning concentrated in the higher cortex but moral response instinctive is that the reasoning part of morality can be abandoned. This brutal feature was undoubtedly an expediency of evolutionary design. The survivalist function of the higher cortex is a learned enhancement of reflex. When times were tough, hunting, fighting, and foraging would keep the higher cortex not yet human size fully occupied. Moral reasoning would itself have to compete, Darwinian style, for neural space in the higher cortex. Take an example of looking after the old, or sick and wounded. When times were good this could be a moral act with long term benefits. But when times turned tough the old and the sick could be abandoned, just as the moral reasoning which says one should care for them can be abandoned in the brain and the neural space for moral reasoning can be turned to the more immediate tasks of survival. We see the evolutionary advantages to a species who can be moralistic when times are good but brutal when times are tough, over another species, forced by limited neural flexibility to fixed responses to however the environment changes. More brutally, being permanently locked into moralistic-type behavior would also be a loss of options. So there might be a very nasty 'gene' somewhere in our biology, which tells us to occasionally test the power of the moralistic type inhibitions to ensure that we are not allowing our behavior to become too locked into any particular response. This would be a 'kick-over-traces' and shock everybody gene. This is another inherited problem of our moral make up, which we are never sure how to handle in modern, civilized terms.

The final manner by which our inherited moral make up affects us concerns the difference between options exercised wisely and response to impulse. Life for organisms in the wild is one of predictable responses. Humans escaped from this mode of evolution, but we imagine that in tribal life the conditions of survival were severe enough that choices of food, sex, survival, and procreation were limited anyway. So there was no temptation to revert back to impulse. There could even be a selection process here, in that individuals who abandoned moral delay for impulse were banished from the tribe, or tribes which reverted to response by impulse were wiped out by morally disciplined competitors. But once civilization arrives this natural restraint enforced by a limited range of options disappear, and vastly.

An extreme bad example from history of lack of natural restraints to morality was the life of the Emperor Nero. Nero provided himself a great many options of behavior, but he never exercised these in a moral sense, and certainly not a human one. If a person is deprived of food to the point that he must scrounge every morsel, that person has lost his human definition, which is the exercise of human options. The behavior is totally constrained by biological necessity, and for him human evolution has been in vain. But at the other extreme if a person confronts himself with banquets, but gorges himself without restraint, plus other excesses, that individual too has reverted to the biology of impulse. He too has lost capacity for choice, and made mockery of human evolution in an obscene way. This vast imbalance in material options available to humans dependent on their social status is itself a product of the opportunities and deficiencies of civilization. We have reached the point in civilization where broad ranges of unconstrained options (of food, sex, drink, drugs,) are available to many people, and we are unsure what restraints should we impose on this, if any. Critics argue that if options are not naturally constrained why should they morally be so, and why not enjoy life as impulse anyway? Historically, a function of religious ethics was dealing with this, but with a decline of religious influence secular answers must be found. Such answers are not easy. The Theory of Options still teaches the moral restraint increases options, but it is difficult to demonstrate this convincingly, as effectively as religious teachings might do in other circumstances.

Briefly then, the topic of morality is complex. The Theory of Options accepts the modern view that morality arose from humanity's evolutionary past, but points out the hopelessness of trying to relate something as complex as morality a single event in the past, or a to few specific ones. Instead, morality arose in the whole complex of human evolution; the gradual shift from evolution by competition between individuals to competition between groups, optimization of biological adaptation towards general ends, and the encephalization of generalized response from the circuits of reflex to those of the higher cortex. However, while moral reasoning has been encephalized into the learning part of the brain, moral emotional response in humans is deeply by reflex, and a powerfully human feature of our biology.

Also, the exact process by which events in human evolutionary past resulted in changes to human development can only come from painstaking research. That is why the starting point of morality should be not the human past, but something we have more data about, which is what humans are today. Whatever humans ancestors were millions of years ago, humans today are morally responsible individuals. Through evolution, humans have become biologically adapted to the point of exercising maximum options available to any creatures on the planet, considering that maximum options occur when the primary constraints on behavior are moral ones. While morality is a constraint on behavior it is provides opportunities as well, by forcing human behavior to act outside the behavioral geodesic of animals. This demonstrates the advantage to humans in having morality. Morality is not only the most expedient constraint to suffer under because it can be quickly modified, but as an ephemeral constraint it can open fresh behavioral possibilities when it forces humans to act against instinctual geodesics.

Even so, this is only the briefest possible treatment of this subject. Later chapters on ethics, religion and culture will deal more with specific issues of morality.