5.2.1 Why Humans Have Morals

Theories of morality are like Glendower's boast; anybody can claim to explain morality, the difficulty is convincing the remainder of humanity that the explanation is the correct one. Only this should be expected. Humanity's inaugural moral theories came from religious teachers such as Abraham, Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed; one-in-a-thousand-year persons who met needs of times which seem past. Even philosophers who contributed significant moral theory have been men like Socrates, St. Augustine, Confucius or Kant, whose ageless wisdom is not easily emulated. In a like manner poets who have gained moral authority have been of the stature of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Omar Khayyam. Of the scientists, Einstein alone perhaps enjoyed the stature of his moral views possessing an inherent authority. While of scientists who expounded moral theory only Freud seems to have enjoyed any stature, though his contribution remains controversial, even among scientists.

Yet one claim of the Theory of Options is that it can explain morality, and in a secular manner which is both correct and makes moral sense. So what is required here?

The first requirement is realistic expectations. Whatever a final secular explanation of morality, humanity's great ethical legacy of thousands of years of religious and moral wisdom will not suddenly disappear, to be replaced by a formula for an alleged morality "gene" or "molecule" in human biochemistry. Knowledge increases options, and knowledge of why humans follow ancient moral wisdom increases moral options, by explaining the range of values humans feel secure with. But morality itself, and moral dilemma, will not disappear the first time it can be explained. Modern science can now explain pain, fear, and death as reactions in the body's biochemistry. But that does not stop real life pain, fear, and death posing genuine moral trails, which each person must deal with as deep needs of the inner psyche.

It is similar with morality. Many people feel that once religious belief has a secular explanation, commandments allegedly from God, like the famous Ten Commandments, will no longer be morally binding. But that argument sounds like people having difficulty discerning right from wrong in secular terms. One would not claim that murder is wrong merely because it is against the law, and murder would not become right if it ceased being a punishable offense, as might happen in war. Instead, every human action whether or not within any historically derived set of laws or commandments must face an accounting. Just as every human being, no matter how assured they feel in one instance, must face loneliness, pain, fear, and death. A scientific explanation of life's realities helps humans understand life's true options. But technical explanation of realities might not alone morally equip individuals with how to adequately handle them.

The other requirement of realistic expectations is appreciating what is to be explained. Moral ideas form in the higher human cortex with the agency of speech and language, while the most complex ideas reflect thousands of years of religious and ethical debate. Yet as these complex thoughts course through the higher cortex they provoke physiological passions that formed in biological prehistory, before language, ethics, or religion existed. The Theory of Options can explain;

1. Why, following the advent of language and culture, religious and ethical ideas developed in the direction that they did.
2. Why in prehistory, human physiology evolved those passions which ethical and moral ideas, once they arose, could hook into and motivate.
3. Why, within the broad perspective of life on Planet Earth, after 3.5 billion years of evolution, the last available evolutionary niche of behavior required behavioral constraints so complex that they must be transacted through human psychology enacting moral codes.

Taking these three explanations we can then formulate an overall theory of morality. But the only "one shot" explanation of morality the Theory of Options can provide, is to state, simply, that humans have morality because it increases options. Beyond that, how morality increases options, and why it does, requires a very careful explanation indeed!

The arguments of this book have proceeded this way. Chapters 1.3 The Human Geodesic) and 3.4 The Theory of Morality explained that morality is a modifiable constraint on behavior. Morality provides increased freedom of movement in three-dimensional behavioral space-time by forcing human behavior into paths outside usual Darwinian constraints. The next two chapters, 5.3 The Origin of Ethics and 5.4 The Origins of Religion will explain why, after human culture formed its ethics and religion developed in the direction which it did. This chapter, on the origins of morality, will explain the scientifically most difficult aspect of morality. This is how in prehistory the human individual evolved a biology which, after civilization occurred, made human behavior easily malleable to moral and ethical teaching. The complication is not explaining how any of these changes were to group advantage, but how individuals modified. Though there are group selective processes in human evolution such selection can only operate once individuals become sufficiently differentiated by conventional selection, that they split into racially or sexually distinct groups.

Of course, accounting for how individual fitness advantage creates moral attributes to behavior causes great controversy. Plus it is where all theories of it eventually fail. Moral behavior appears altruistic, but wherever altruistic behavior occurs elsewhere in nature scientists have explained it through direct genetic motive. Only while this might work for birds and insects, human moral motives are so varied that attempts to explain them all by genetic motive alone become hopelessly convoluted. Or they become disconnected from the scientific reality of just how much information can be transmitted genetically anyway.

Yet, moral or altruistic behaviors occur for genetic reasons too, only not direct ones. Instead, genes evolve a morally capable biology for human individuals. For example, we have a large, learning capable brain, which can connote moral and ethical ideas. Our species also evolved methods of powerfully communicating ideas to other members of the group to influence group behavior. These include vocalization, versatile facial expressions, voice inflection, face coloration, plus head, body, hand and arm gesturing. Also, our species has a 'group dependent' biology, in that humans hunt and live cooperatively, the human female requires assistance with birth, humans must jointly nurture the young for long periods, and the human female enjoys the sexual means to enforce long term pair-bonding and sustained male interest. Finally, but controversially, human individuals experience deeply felt passions, which philosophers will one day label moral feelings, almost from not knowing what else to call them. These are feelings of love, shame, devotion, anger, remorse and so on. To the extent such feelings affect us physiologically by change of heart rate, face color, or mood they can only have arisen from evolutionary needs, regardless of which moral needs such passions serve today.

However, although we must account in strict evolutionary terms for each biological attribute facilitating moral behavior, it is only the final attribute, moral feelings, which we must exclusively explain for moral ends. This is because other attributes; large brain, facial versatility, human sexuality, and so on evolved the way they did for many reasons. The large cortex say, while it enables moral reasoning, it also assists hunting, planning, throwing, and foraging, so its fitness advantage can be explained in these terms. Similarly, the human face has a versatility to express subtle shades of moral judgment, such as the silent rebuke that 'I will not say anything, but this disgusts me'. Only while human facial language is a genuine attribute for enforcing group values, the value it expresses can be about many things; sex in some instances, but courage in battle for another. So, while we must explain the fitness advantage to facial expressions, we need not explain in the same genetic terms the moral values facial contortions might express, as these might have different explanations still. And while facial expressions are a significant enabling technology for human behavior, chimps highly evolved them too. So whatever the fitness advantages for such expressions they existed at least five to six million years, long before moral concepts in a ethical sense first arose.

If anything, we notice heritable 'morally enabling' attributes in all higher mammals that utilize group loyalty, cooperation, and social conformity in the primitive herd or pack. We can train a dog say, to exhibit behaviors moral in human terms, such as sacrificing its own life for that of its master, or even sacrificing the dog's offspring to save the master's offspring. That dogs can be taught this whereas a cat might not results from instinctual loyalties or group sensitive behaviors evolved for survival in the primitive wolf pack. But we need only explain biological propensities for dogs in natural terms, rather than moral ones. To return to gestures expressing feelings, dogs have also highly evolved them, only for dogs it involves ear, tail, limb and neck movements. Perhaps the fitness advantage for higher primates is to concentrate expression of feeling in the facial muscles alone, rather than needing the whole body. A fitness advantage of expressing emotion in the facial muscles alone is that it leaves the hand free for other tasks. Only cynically, many modern humans seem to have had their evolution arrested at the hand gesturing stage.

5.2.2 Thoughts and Feelings

The real issue then, is not mechanisms of expressing moral feelings but the feelings themselves. All higher mammals exhibit feelings of emotional quality. Desire, affection, anger, jealousy, pride and shame exist at sentient levels in higher primates such as chimps, and partially exist among animals humans domesticate such as dogs or horses, whose ancestors evolved complex social hierarchies in the wild. Yet, such feelings are most strong in humans. Especially, humans imagine that they can 'feel' within themselves if an action meets a criterion of being morally good or bad. And this criterion is often not how nature might evaluate such moves for individual fitness alone. In other species individuals are motivated to gain advantage over fellow competitors for food and procreation. But in the human species innate drives even stronger than sex, hunger, or aggression can inhibit fitness moves. These inhibitions force humans into another round of evaluation, not about fitness possibilities of a move, but if move meets group needs in a moral sense. So, what motivates such feelings? We can say such inhibitions serve the good of the group, and they do, only we still must explain how they evolved as an advantage to individual fitness, which is where all such explanations unravel.

Let us take the problem step at a time.

Firstly, because of our obsession with feelings expressing sexual mood, science has helped propagate a misconception over the physical basis of thoughts and feelings, which needs clarifying. Modern psychology greatly concerns that the thought 'guilt', especially about sexuality, produces a feeling 'guilt' such as empty stomach, mild nausea, or whatever. So, without discerning that thoughts are reflective while feelings are reflexive, we invest great theoretical effort in discovering the cause of this mysterious 'guilt' feeling. But because we fail to discern the physiological basis of feelings from the psychological basis of thoughts, the search for a 'feeling' is conducted among modern, structured thoughts produced from language, culture, or beliefs that allegedly lead to such feelings. This produces the now familiar litany of explanations about moral feelings concerning religion, "Judaic-Christian" beliefs, Nietzsche, Freud, Queen Victoria, sexual repression, and so on. But always the attempt is to explain away the psychological basis of 'guilt' or other moralistic feelings. Whereas what we really need to explain is the physiological need for such feelings, or how possessing them was a fitness advantage to hominid individuals, eons before religious, psychological, or sexual repression was even conceptually discernable within extant language and cultural structures of those primitive times.

It is worth belaboring this point of what is meant by 'feelings' to avoid the traps incumbent in any discussion of morals. To the extent that they produce any physiological effect, feelings manifested as sensation are a product of evolution. They are stimulated in the body's biochemistry by neural pulses emanating directly from the reflexive brain, despite that the trigger pulses can come from the higher brain. But moral concepts, those involving constructs requiring grammar for elucidation, are a product of the higher cortex and do not draw on any evolutionary program. Moral precepts arising from beliefs such as Christianity, Islam, or ethical wisdom must be learned. The other aspect of moral behavior, 'forward planning' the moral consequence of an action is another utility for which the planning capability of the human frontal cortex might be utilized. If anything, while all humans inherit capability to forward plan the moral consequences of their actions, cynics will observe it is a capability insufficiently employed by most people, now and throughout history.

So, while human biology is evolved for transacting moral behavior within a group, there is nothing innately moral to how thoughts evolve biologically in the higher cortex. Theories such as sociobiology try to teach that moral ideas exist "pre-formed" in the cortex, but this cannot be correct. Lion cubs raised in captivity must be re-taught to kill in the wild. So if a basic behavior like how to kill is learned in reflexive creatures like lions, then most behaviors remotely moral are learned in humans. Also, if a human child were raised by wolves, its natural behavior would not exhibit moral concepts such as not to steal or kill. On the other hand, humans raised in civilization can abandon moral behavior in appalling circumstances such as war, or abandon it for criminal or depraved reasons. So, if the Theory of Options concedes anything to Darwinism about how natural selection forms morality, it is only that in humans options are maximized by not fixing moral reasoning in genes. This way moral reasoning is forced to compete Darwinian-style for neural space in the higher cortex, depending on other demands of circumstance.

What we are saying then is that feelings as physiology arose from evolution, and they arose for evolutionary reasons to do with fitness of individuals. But in modern humans those feelings are triggered by thoughts coursing through the modern human psychology, and those thoughts might not have an evolutionary basis at all. If anything, often only the probing of the highly trained specialist can determine why certain natural triggers of anger, embarrassment or trauma are being provoked at all. We too in this section are not trying to explain every nuance of psychologically motivated idiosyncrasy. We wish at this stage only to explain why these powerful emotional triggers evolved at all, and their specific fitness advantage.

Yet, how might one explain the notorious 'guilt' feeling? Or how does one explain the true basis of moral feelings, as a fitness advantage to individuals?

5.2.3 The Role of Encephalization

Interestingly, there is one more process of evolution, concerning encephalization of instinct into morality, which can provide an answer. It arises from the fitness advantage in evolutionary design to transfer as many actions as possible from 'hardwired' circuits of reflex, to 'softwired' circuits of learning. Learning circuits need only be designed once by evolution, and then can be multiplied by simple genetic instruction. Plus learning circuits offer more options of behavior, especially adapting behavior to new circumstances. The drawback of learning is that it might not be reliable under stress, and we see this all the time. With food, reflex is to consume it immediately. But the learned response is to store or share it, which offers long term flexibility. Only the two needs often conflict. In lower animals like squirrels storing nuts, both needs can be designed into reflex, but this looses flexibility. One way to resolve this dilemma however is by a special reflex, that we might call a "transfer circuit". Such circuits would supervise encephalization, rewarding the individual with "good feelings" when it worked, and punishing the individual with "bad feelings" when it failed.

Try to see it this way.

There might be two feelings in conflict; one to eat food, one to preserve it. The first instinct will always be 'hardwired'. If the instinct to preserve food can be converted into a learned response, however, its delay length can be varied with circumstances, which would increase behavioral options. The trick is to effect the "transfer". Hunger, as reflex to eat food immediately will always be there, so it must be counterbalanced by a still more powerful feeling which teaches that it also feels "good" not to surrender to instinctual needs. Crudely, if we convert reflexive constraints into learned ones, and it works to an extent that the learned constraint "holds" we feel good inside. Conversely, if we attempt a conversion, and we fail to an extent that the learned constraint does not "hold", then we feel "bad" inside. If it is a fitness advantage to convert instinctual constraints to learned ones, then it is of advantage to have a regulating mechanism to ensure that the learned constraints will work or "hold" as effectively as reflexive ones.

So, it is not in a brutal sense fit to have morals, but even in a brutal sense it is fit to have a large brain. But also for fitness reasons, large brains that evolve quickly require a very high proportion of learning neurology, which for different fitness reasons again, require other mechanisms again to make such brains work reliably. Also, the human birth-growth cycle traps the human species into long periods of nurturing the young, so there must also be "transfer" circuits that ensure the power of learning over reflex. If parental instructions are passed on in genes, retaining them is automatic. But within the human eight-to-one learning only about 15% of instructions will be 'unbreakable' genetic code and the rest must be learned. So if learning is to be effective, parental instructions must stick. This takes us back to the psychologist's dilemma of how to explain why drives of parental programming arose by evolution.

Such "transfer circuits" are the likely evolutionary basis for the origin of moral feelings, to the extent that humans have 'moral' feelings at all. When hominids began evolving into creatures no longer locked into behavior by reflex, they began giving themselves choices. But if a creature grows wings and flies, it must give itself new methods of navigation. Similarly, when a creature gives itself options no longer dictated by reflex, it also needs fresh behavioral mechanisms for "navigating" the new possibilities. And hominids increase options by transferring behavioral controls once locked into hardwired circuits of reflex into new, more flexible, softwired circuits of learning. But this process of encephalization will only work if the new learning circuits prove as reliable as the old circuits of reflex. To ensure integrity, nature provides one more set of reflexive circuits, encoded in genes. To ensures that the "transfer" process works the new creature will experience "feelings" which motivate learning to override reflex, or at least seek a balance of which response is more appropriate for the circumstance. These integrity and transfer circuits, which form for reasons not directly related to morality, nevertheless manifest themselves in the human psyche as a sentiment philosophers will one day label "moral feelings". Moreover, we can explain the individual fitness advantages to such circuits as mere exhibition of self-control, rather than any particular moral function. Certainly, we see an ability to enforce and retain learning as a fitness advantage. And we see successful encephalization as a fitness advantage, especially one for increasing behavioral options, because more adaptable the behavior, the more chance of surviving in changing environments.

There is a great difference then, in the approach of the Theory of Options to the origin of moral feelings, as opposed to theories that explain morality from genetic motive alone. Darwinian theories seek to explain moral motive arising directly from genes. Yet, feelings formed through the physiological processes of evolution cannot reflect in their biology moral precepts that arose post-emergence in human society. Instead, the closest there is to a biological basis of morality is the process of encephalization, or evolutionary shifting of reflexive behavior to the higher learning cortex of the brain. When any species utilizes encephalization some part of its biology must ensure that there is motive for the learning circuits to work. This will be by rewarding 'good feelings' to the act of learned behavior overriding more urgent demands of reflex, and punishing by 'bad feelings' those instances when the potential of the learning capable cortex is squandered on impulse. Because humans have a high eight-to-one learning ratio, the fitness motive for the success of encephalization must be very powerful in the human species. Plus with half the human lifetime involved in learning, humans only get evolutionary payback for this prolonged biological investment in learning when it is passed on. This creates receptivity to programmed learning by human children from seniors, something psychologists have long recognized, but have not been able to explain in evolutionary terms.

Yet ironically, expunging from theories of human biology so-called 'evolutionary morality' is the first step to a balanced, correct, scientific explanation of morality. Morality, for the concept to have meaning, is not a direct attribute of biology, but confrontation of humans with the options of their creation. Society imposes moral values, and humans evaluate these in the higher cortex, then they forward plan, or fail to, the consequences of each action bearing a moral impact. But while this complex evaluation (or lack of it) is proceeding in the higher cortex, deep within the lower brain exists other, highly structured physiological (biochemical) responses to thoughts programmed for different reasons by evolution eons ago. So if an individual makes a bad career move which reduces his social options, he might experience a feeling similar to the notorious sexual 'guilt' biochemical reaction. And if a person once taught to believe in God now questions it, that individual might too experience a bad feeling, though not from God. Ironically the guilt feeling comes from a Darwinian "wasting-evolutionary-payback-time-invested-in-learning" biochemical reprimand.

A further complication is that individuals do make genuine 'bad career moves' with sexual partners, and do enact foolish, impulsive and "fail-to-learn" behaviors in a sexual context. Such behaviors will provoke a 'guilt feeling' response, maybe in a person who was also taught in childhood that certain sexual behaviors will be 'punished' by God. And the people who invented the reasons for God's punishments wrote from their own 'guilt feeling' experiences. So they probably conjectured remarkably well about the types of actions people would imagine God was punishing them for. On the other hand, some people's psychology is scrambled to an extent of believing that some cult leader is a messenger of God. But if that person offers disciplined devotion to the new leader, the act of discipline might provoke an evolutionary 'good feeling' reward for allowing learned response to triumphing over reflex. Worse, if that person had previously surrendered to a life of impulse, the 'good feeling' will be so forceful as to convince the misled individual that he or she really has met a messenger of God. The evidence will be the euphoria feeling so quickly evinced by devotion to him.

The origin of morality then, and the origin of moral feelings is not the same thing. Feelings, to the extent that they are physiological effects are not innately "moral" or any other quality not part of nature. On the other hand certain feelings, which greatly motivate behavior in humans, become by human idiom associated with morality. This is because when we violate in our psychology precepts that we have been taught are 'moral' our biology reacts in a manner to what it instinctively evaluates as poor fitness moves from its evolutionary program. Yet for all the 'color' we imagine arising from our feelings they might reflect only basic moves such as whether encephalization is working or not, whether learning is holding or not, or whether our move gained for us acceptance or rejection by the group. In short, our feelings fulfill a fitness purpose of guiding us to whether or not our moves increase options. But the middle brain, where feelings originate, is not the higher brain, with a more complete picture of our surroundings. The middle brain can only compare responses the higher brain tells it with how it can measure what the body is doing. As we all know, sometimes our higher brain wants the world to believe one thing but our middle brain "betrays" what our body is experiencing. We do not have in morally influenced behavior a unified transaction of stimulus-thought-response, and especially one which could be localized to a single gene, or even a single 'thought' of the higher cortex. Instead, a concatenation of thoughts and feelings interact, often several times over, with thoughts providing both volitional and subconscious assessment of surrounding reality. But feelings also 'feed back' primal reaction to thoughts, sense data, and physiological state, based on an evolutionary program of how to best motivate the individual to choose moves which increase long term options.

Yet all this concatenation of thoughts and feelings is assessed, not just once by one individual, but over the entire human experience. From this there nevertheless arises a general impression that feelings ultimately motivate people to perform not merely a fitness 'good' for the individual, but a moral 'good' for humanity as a whole. So, where does this impression come from? What is its basis in evolutionary terms?

There are two answers. One is that the human gene pool has become complex and intermixed. So any "selfish gene" residue effect from a more competitive past is now distended throughout the species, though with lingering prejudices towards one's own group and lineage The other point is that the evaluation of fitness in humans, even an instinctual one, is largely transferred to the psychology anyway. Here it is subject to the full vicissitudes of social conditioning, where the physiology of moral reflex only reacts to how the psychology has been programmed.

But how have humans programmed the psychology to evaluate behaviors? What is the true basis of learned teachings about behavior and decision making? How have humans learned to distinguish moral right from wrong in an ethical sense? And if this did not occur by evolution, by what process then does it occur?

Let us now consider this next major origin problem; the origin of ethics.