The Journal of Value Inquiry 30: 531-545, 1996. (~) 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlandv.

Evolutionary ethics and moral theory MICHAEL STINGL Department of Philosophy, The Universi~ of Lethbridge, Lethbridge. Alberta, Canada TIK 3M4

1. Introduction Several years ago Elliott Sober lodged two criticisms against sociobiological efforts of the 1980s to ground ethics in evolution. 1 On the one hand, Sober cautioned that even if the biological explanation of human moral behavior involved a kind of altruism that served to maximize individual fitness, the psychological explanation of that same behavior need itself have nothing to do with altruism in this sociobiological sense of the term. 2 On the other hand, cautioned Sober, there is much more to ethics than altruism understood in its usual psychological sense. So even if psychological altruism could be successfully traced back to evolutionary altruism, this would hardly show that ethics itself could be traced back to the same source. 3 In this essay I look back toward the 1980s, at developments in both sociobiology and moral theory. My argument is that separated by the lines of the two different disciplines, the tools to answer Sober's criticisms were already present at the time. I do not defend a sociobiological account of ethics that ties it too closely to reciprocal altruism and expectations of mutual benefit. My argument is in the direction of Darwin's original idea that in behaving morally, human beings are motivated by considerations regarding a common good. 4 The argument turns on an idea broached by the evolutionary ethicist Michael Ruse. 5 The idea is that we ought to regard the general rules of traditional moral theories, such as utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, as rough empirical hypotheses about the general form of the human cognitive and motivational capacity for moral behavior. 6 The difficulty Ruse ignores is that whatever other claims biologists might want to make about this capacity, it will no doubt be the sort of rule-governed psychological faculty that will require a theoretical line to be drawn between competence and performance. Given the significance of such a distinction in linguistics and the experimental study of rationality, we have no reason to suppose that moral performance

532 will stand in any direct relationship to moral competence. 7 More specifically, we have no reason to suppose that our considered moral judgments will not be biased by systemic performance-based errors. This means that to properly understand the human capacity for moral behavior, we will need at once a theory of moral competence and a theory of moral performance. Neither theory can be developed apart from the other. A quick illustration of this point comes from linguistics. Consider the sentence: The son of the Pharaoh's daughter is the daughter of the Pharaoh's son. For many speakers of English, this sentence is nonsensical. According to some linguists, this is because most speakers of English follow a rule which tells them, when confronted with a complex noun phrase like "the son of the Pharaoh's daughter," to take the left-most internal noun phrase, in this case "the son," to be modified by the remainder of the more complex phrase. 8 The sentence becomes tautologically clear when one parses either of its two more complex noun phrases in the opposite direction, taking its right-most noun as the modified portion of the phrase. The question is whether the rule "parse complex noun phrases left to right" is an aspect of an English speaker's linguistic competence or linguistic performance. Including it as a rule of syntax makes for a more cumbersome grammar and seems otherwise misguided; in this ease, where we ought to draw the line between competence and performance seems clear. But if we draw the line in such a way that sentences like the one above are well-formed, we do so only by accounting for our original judgment of their unacceptability as a systemic kind of performance-based error. Linguistics thus requires concurrently well-developed theories of both performance and competence. The problem with the general moral rules characteristic of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, as Ruse presents them and as they are often understood, is that they are explanatorily inadequate as theories of either moral performance or moral competence. These points are respectively addressed in sections 2 and 3. In section 4, I turn to the question of performance-based error and draw on the results of the earlier sections to develop a rough hypothesis about the relationship of moral competence to moral performance.

2. The theory of moral performance Ruse's understanding of Kantian ethics is general and to the point: never treat another person as a means to an end in which he or she has no share. 9 Ruse's understanding of utilitarianism is more problematic. He ignores the

533 chief utilitarian development of the 1980s, indirect utilitarianism. 10 He briefly distinguishes between act and rule utilitarianism, but then sends readers off to a book by J.L. Mackie, who argues that this is a distinction without a difference.11 The confusion deepens when Ruse says that sociobiological considerations probably favor rule utilitarianism, except in cases of the kind described by Peter Singer's famine relief article, cases where individual utilitarian agents are required to impoverish themselves and their families to save others who are dying of famine.12 Yet it was to block just this sort of anomalous act utilitarian result that theories of rule and indirect utilitarianism were initially developed. Indirect utilitarianism and the avoidance of results like that in the famine relief case will be important to the argument developed in later sections. The more immediate problem with the fundamental principles of utilitarianism and Kantian ethics is that they are too general to yield explanatorily adequate rules of moral performance. At this level of explanation we do better to ignore such principles, focusing instead on the more specific aspects of our actual moral practices to which the principles respond. There is more to Kantian ethics, of course, than the Categorical Imperative, and more to utilitarianism than the principle of maximizing utility. But from the point of view of a biologically based approach to ethics, the question of how the less general rules of either theory are related to their most general rule is just the question of how to draw the line between moral competence and performance. By adopting the initial simplifying assumption that each theory can be identified with its most general rule, I proceed in a way that I hope will beg the fewest questions. One way to understand the general rule of utilitarianism is as a theoretical response to the agent-neutral aspects of our moral behavior, such as the minimally decent Samaritanism that requires us to benefit strangers when we can do so at a comparatively small cost to ourselves, or the heroic sacrifice of individual interests to the common good required in catastrophic circumstances. 13 Both of these more specific rules give all moral agents a single, shared aim, that of maximizing, in certain moral contexts, aggregate welfare. In contrast, we can see the general rule of Kantian ethics as a theoretical response to those agent-centered aspects of our moral behavior that act, for the most part, as constraints on any such agent-neutral aim. Our obligation to be a minimally decent Samaritan, for example, is constrained by an agent-centered prerogative: a permission, peculiar to each individual agent, to take on and pursue the personal projects, goals, and commitments that will give his or her life its structure, meaning, and identity. Each agent is thus allowed to prefer the satisfaction of his or her own interests to those of others to the extent that

534 this may be necessary for each to live his or her own life. This prerogative is itself constrained, however, by the commitments an agent undertakes in asserting it; these commitments establish, again for each individual agent, a set of special obligations toward particular others, whose interests must then be preferred, to the degree the agent has committed himself or herself, to those of all others. Finally, both prerogatives and special obligations are limited by a third type of agent-centered constraint: in asserting a prerogative or in fulfilling a special obligation, there are certain direct violations of the person that no one moral agent may visit upon another. Our agent-centered duties tell each of us that we ourselves should not murder, lie, steal, or break our promises. The three types of constraints, taken together, give each individual agent a unique set of moral aims: each agent must pay exclusive moral attention to his or her own prerogatives, special obligations, and duties. The foregoing taxonomy of moral rules will have been familiar to moral philosophers, since discussion of its roles was an integral part of the moral theory of the 1980s.14 [ draw attention to the taxonomy here because as an embryonic theory of moral performance, it suggests an empirical content far richer than the general moral rules of either Kantian ethics or utilitarianism. To some extent we do care about community interests in an agent-neutral way. Unlike the social insects, however, we also care about developing and protecting our individual life plans, which typically have at their core a set of special relationships with individuals whose interests we put before those of the community at large. Given these general characteristics of human beings, we might expect the most theoretically significant disruptions in moral performance to occur precisely at the junctures of the roles sketched above. It is here that we might expect the most cultural variation, historical change, and moral argumentation, and hence, the most salient evidence for hypotheses about an underlying moral competence. In limited defense of these expectations, I conclude this section with three examples of conflicting rules of moral performance. More important is the role these examples will play in the arguments of subsequent sections, arguments intended to develop a theoretical framework for investigating the evolution of moral thought and action, not to develop an exhaustive marshalling or even categorization of all available empirical evidence. Consider first the Nuer. 15 Although the members of this African tribe are reported to be fiercely democratic and individualistic, their austere pastoral life seems to allow little room for a highly structured agent-centered prerogative. What is significant about the Nuer in the present context is the interplay between their general responsibility to their tribe and their special obligations within its various sections. Each Nuer tribe segments itself into primary, sec-

535 ondary, and tertiary sections, and although the Nuer talk about these sections, or segments, in terms of kinship, such kinship is not necessarily biological. Each male Nuer has a shared responsibility to fight for the tribe in its battles against other tribes, and a duty of some stringency not to steal cattle from or kill other members of the tribe; most homicides are, nonetheless, linked to not infrequent disagreements over the ownership of cattle, the center of Nuer existence. The prohibition against homicide becomes more stringent as one travels down through the segments, and at lower levels its violation is the chief reason for blood-feuds. Blood-feuds institutionally resolve violations of the prohibition against homicide by making possible direct compensation in the form of the death of the original aggressor or a male agnate, or alternatively, indirect compensation in the form of a mutually agreed upon but necessarily significant number of cattle. That the death must be avenged in one way or the other defines an onerous special obligation for the male agnates of the deceased. What is interesting about this institution is the fact that a segment may find its feud against another segment of the same order preempted by a larger feud between that second segment and some higher-order opposing segment; in such a case the first feud must be set aside, as the two original segments unite against the outside segment. Since feuds can go on for long periods of time, a Nuer's obligations are hard to describe without contradiction, for whether or how one Nuer is obliged to act with regard to another will vary with moral context. If we are talking only about their two immediate segments, the first may be obliged to kill the second or steal some of his cattle; but if we are talking in terms of higher-order segments, the first may have a duty to assist the second in his attacks and raids on other Nuer, as well as defend him and his cattle against similar aggression. A similar sort of situation exists among the Karimojong, who during the wet season live in permanent, settled kin groups, but who during the dry season must split up in search of water. Lucy Mair offers this circumspect description:

9 . . herdsmen who meet at one watering place will come from many different settlements, and no one will expect to meet the same people each y e a r . . . . The Karimojong realize this and say, 'The sun mixes us up.' They are most mixed up at the height of the drought, when a number of herds and their herdsmen combine to use the same water and grazing and to keep others out of it. If a conflict of this kind occurs, loyalties are clear. The 'insiders' in this temporary group must stand together against the outsiders, whatever ties of kinship or neighborhood may bind them to the outsiders at other times, t6

536 I will return to such contextually resolvable moral conflicts below. As one last example of moral tension located at a juncture of the taxonomy sketched above, in this case a conflict resolved by historical change, consider the movement to abolish slavery that began in the eighteenth century in Britain and the United States. In an important pair of articles in the American Historical Review, Thomas Haskell follows the lead of David Brion Davis in charting a middle course between the two diametrically opposed accounts of this movement, the naive view exemplified by W.E.H. Lecky's claim that the movement against slavery was "among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations," and the cynical view of those Marxist historians who would understand this movement exclusively in terms of the hegemonic interests of the economically ascendant bourgeoisie. 17 On Haskell's view, the rise of the market and the "action at a distance" it made a regular feature of contract law forced a redrawing of the line between the generally accepted limit on the agent-centered prerogative of the time and those minimally decent actions that the newly empowered bourgeoisie could be expected to perform to benefit others at a comparatively small cost to themselves. What changed was not the general form of the rules, but the degree to which agents were able, individually and corporately, to effectively benefit others without suffering what could generally be regarded to be an unreasonable material cost to themselves. To the extent that significant and successful moral resolution can be expected to occur at the junctures of the taxonomy sketched above, the taxonomy itself must be considered explanatorily inadequate as a theory of moral competence. If we suppose moral competence is part of the explanation for why these conflicts get resolved in the way that they do, we are left with Ruse's original idea that our underlying moral competence might be best described by something like the general rules of Kantian ethics or utilitarianism. Insofar as it may not be possible to integrate these two rules into a single, unified theory, we are left with two possibilities: an as yet undiscovered third rule of greater generality, or the simple fact that our moral competence is not a fully integrated psychological faculty.

3. T h e t h e o r y o f m o r a l c o m p e t e n c e

Ruse, like several prominent moral philosophers of the 1980s, is tempted by the second hypothesis: 9 my hunch is that perhaps at times in moral activity there are simply insoluble dilemmas. Our moral capabilities break down, and any decision

537 we may make means that in some respects we must do what we think is wrong. We have utilitarian yearnings and we have Kantian yearnings, and some phenomena bring both sets into (conflicting) play. 18 In this section, I argue that such reasoning is too hasty. My argument focuses on the human capacity for impartiality, the psychological capacity that enables us to abstract, cognitively and motivationally, from the direct pull of our own desires and interests and interests to a cognitive and motivational perspective from which we can understand and feel the pull of the desires and interests of others. Impartiality seems the right place to look for a link between biology and ethics for several reasons. First, given the fact that human altruism is not directly wired-in like the altruism of the social insects, some intermediate psychological mechanism must be part of the biological story that connects human social cohesiveness with inclusive fitness. Moreover, given the general malleability of human consciousness, a general capacity for moral thought and behavior is more likely than a capacity designed along the lines of fairly fixed rules, like "don't go to bed with your siblings." The important biological question is to what extent such a capacity must incorporate an expectation of return, a question I address in section 4. Finally, utilitarianism and Kantian ethics can be paired with two very different conceptions of impartiality, which can be directly tied to the main difference between their respective general rules. It may be that one of these conceptions will fit better than the other into a more complete explanation of human moral behavior than that provided by the theory of moral performance alone. In the remainder of this section, ! address the question of how thinking about impartiality from the twin perspectives of biology and ethical theory may enable us to formulate a preliminary hypothesis about the relationship between moral competence and moral performance. Whatever else is remarkable about our capacity for moral thought and behavior, what seems essential to it is an ability and willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others; it is precisely this aspect of morality, for example, that is venerably encapsulated in the Golden Rule and its many formulations. But how, exactly, are we to understand this notion? Utilitarianism presents us with one powerful model of impartiality. From the completely impersonal perspective of the ideal spectator all desires and interests count equally, without regard to where they might be located across individual lives. This perspective generates the theory's general rule that in cases of moral conflict it is better to satisfy more of these desires and interests than fewer. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls responds to this way of understanding impartiality with a powerful model of his own, the veil of ignorance. 19 According to Rawls, the chief problem with the impersonal point of view

538 of the ideal spectator is that it fails to take into account where desires and interests are in fact located: separate persons have their own separate bundles of desires and interests. To maximize the total number of interests satisfied we may have to sacrifice some bundles to enlarge others; we may, that is, have to use some persons as means to ends in which they have no share. The veil of ignorance ensures a Kantian respect for the separateness of persons by requiring us to think about morality from something less than the completely impersonal point of view of the ideal spectator. From behind the veil, ! know I will be a person with a unique set of desires and interests; I just don't know which such person I will be. It is easy to see how the completely impersonal conception of impartiality could give each moral agent the same general aim, and hence, how it could support a general moral rule agent-neutral in form. It is less easy to see how the second conception of impartiality might support the absolutely agentcentered general moral duty of Kantian ethics, that no moral agent may ever use another as a mere means to a greater good. John Taurek supplies an interpretation of the second conception of impartiality that shows how it could support just such a rule. z~ He asks us to imagine a case in which we could save the lives of five strangers or the life of one. In such a case he says that we should "treat each person equally by giving each a chance to survive," perhaps by flipping a coin. 21 With objects, he says, things would be different: If six objects are threatened by fire and I am in a position to retrieve the five in this room or the one in that r o o m . . . I will naturally preserve the many rather than the one. Why? Because the five objects are together five times more valuable in my eyes than the one. 22 But with people, it is the loss of life to each person, separately, upon which I must focus. Each person's potential loss, says Taurek, must have the same significance to me, reasoning impartially, as it would have to that person alone. This is to take the separateness of persons seriously indeed, so far as Taurek is himself prepared to follow this line of reasoning regardless of the number of people involved: five, fifty, or five hundred thousand. In defense of this sort of result, Alan Donagan takes the following heroic line. z3 First, he denies that large scale, truly calamitous events could ever occur as the result of obeying one's Kantian duties to oneself or others. Small scale events are another matter: obeying the Categorical Imperative may sometimes result in the loss of more lives rather than fewer. This is tragic, says Donagan, but who is to say that such tragedy is not simply a part of the moral life?

539 From the point of view of moral philosophy, this response may seem glib; from the point of view of biology, it is simply implausible. The general worry with any moral rule that gives different agents different aims is the fact that it may prove to be directly collectively self-defeating. Consider, for example, Derek Parfit's argument that special obligations can create situations where if each moral agent fulfills his or her own, all do worse in terms of the very values the obligations were meant to protect. 24 To illustrate and support Parfit's argument, let us return to the example of the Karimojong. Trying to give one's kin access to a watering place one already occupies with strangers would seem to respond directly to whatever special obligations one might otherwise be supposed to have toward such individuals; but then, so would a similar effort on the part of the strangers toward their kin. Were all to act in accord with their special obligations so understood, all would do worse in terms of the very values presupposed by those obligations. In cases like this, moral tragedy threatens to translate quickly into biological extinction; not surprisingly, the Karimojong's special obligations are duly limited. A similar point can be made about the more narrow segmental obligations of the Nuer. Were these obligations not contextually limited, the Nuer would likely no longer be with us. As it is, the way in which these moral considerations slide back and forth across the various segmental levels is relatively smooth and easy. What seems to be behind such slides are overlapping sets of corporate interests, the composition of the sets varying with the moral context. Insofar as differing sets of corporate interests seem to dictate when and where slides will occur, the hypothesis of an underlying agent-neutral moral competence appears empirically preferable to that of an agent-centered moral competence. Corporate interests would seem to establish overriding agent-neutral aims to which the Nuer respond both cognitively and motivationally. It might seem possible to square the foregoing examples with a Kantian account of our moral competence. Donagan, for example, might suggest that they simply involve a tacit social agreement, based on individual prudence in the face of readily predicted dangers, to protect more lives rather than fewer; this is the tack he takes in his discussion of the spelunkian explorers who must blast one of their number from a narrow cave opening to save the rest from drowning. 25 But this begs the question of why we are morally comfortable with such tacit agreements. Moreover, the deeper question for the biologist is how human beings got to be intelligently social in the first place. Moral competence, not a social contract, must ultimately be invoked in explaining cases like the ones above, and the problem with a Kantian theory of moral competence is that it gives moral agents, at the deepest level, agent-

540 centered aims. Given the conditions of human evolution, such aims can too easily be supposed to have been directly collectively self-defeating. Relative to the inclusive fitness of humans evolving in small groups, five lives saved is almost always going to better than one. Combining ethical theory with biology thus suggests the following rough hypothesis: it is more likely that our moral competence is agent-neutral than agent-centered in its general form. The argument for this hypothesis builds on the idea of Robert Trivers's early and important paper on human morality, which stresses the significance of the Prisoner's Dilemma situations in the evolution of human altruism. 26 The idea of the current argument is that the kinds of dilemmas described above are of similar importance regarding the general form of the psychological capacity for altruistic behavior. It is worth noting that my argument is no more committed to group selectionism than is Trivers's argument. 27

4.

The relationship

of competence

to p e r f o r m a n c e

I have until now ignored the chief sociobiological objection to both agentneutral and agent-centered conceptions of our moral competence: on either hypothesis, human altruism would seem to be too biologically altruistic. As Ruse points out a number of times, reciprocal altruism carries with it some expectation of return: 9 . . the Darwinian is probably inclined to conclude that we . . . get a gradation of moral sentiments between non-relatives. I doubt that natural selection would set up any strong sense of obligation towards people from whom there is absolutely no possibility of return, or who never were, are, or could reasonably be expected to be in my community....28

But as Ruse also admits: It is open to the Darwinian to argue that morality is but one of the urges promoted by reciprocal altruism. Non-moral, restricting feelings are also produced by the same mechanism. Morality gets us to help and cooperate, and the rest of us ensures that morality does not get out of hand and prove biologically disadvantageous. 29 Call the first possibility the graduated view of our moral competence, the second the modular view. In the remainder of this section I argue for the modular view, which sees our moral competence and our capacity for rationally self-interested behavior as two separate psychological faculties. Rational

541 self-interest, like a graduated moral competence, might be expected to restrict our cooperative feelings to those from whom there is some expectation of concern. 3~ On a modular view, our moral competence would pull directly against the limitations of this restriction. Return again to the Nuer and the relative ease with which they slide between their various levels of special obligation and tribal responsibility. This suggests a much more open-textured underlying moral competence than the graduated view would seem to allow, one which directly responds to a basic problem of the early human environment, dramatic and unpredictable changes in corporate interests. Such changes could have easily affected groups that, prior to some catastrophe, never "were, are, or could reasonably be expected to be" part of the same community. Perhaps a graduated view of our moral competence can account for the examples of the Nuer and Karimojong. But a more general problem remains: a graduated theory of our moral competence is primarily agent-centered in its general form. Like Kantian ethics, it will always face the possibility of situations in which following its dictates would be directly collectively selfdefeating. In such situations we might each succeed, for example, in saving more of our own kin than anyone else's, but only at the ultimate cost of saving fewer of our own kin than we otherwise might. So too for warriors, cattle, or whatever other meager resources might have been available to us in the early human environment. The point is that in the dilemmas we might plausibly suppose to have significantly marked our biological past, we would have done better in terms of the very values presupposed by the graduated view were we able to respond to these values in an immediate, agent-neutral way: as values to be maximized from an impersonal point of view. To be sure, in many such contexts the "impersonal" point of view would have been a fairly parochial one, for example, "the village's point of view." But other contexts would require a more open-textured competence, one which could take into its point of view the interests of other villages, or indeed, other collections of villages. As significant hazards of the early human environment, catastrophic dilemmas might be expected to have loomed large in the evolution of our moral competence. Still, given other natural limitations on the diverse sets of corporate interests that might also be expected to develop in such environments, it is also predictable that an agent-neutral moral competence, a competence cognitively and motivationally cued at the deepest level to corporate interests, would become graduated in most other contexts of moral performance. So on the modular view, graduated performance practices would not only be the direct result of other psychological factors, such as self-interest and kin altruism, but as well, the indirect result of an underlying competence synchronized

542 to expanding and contracting patterns of corporate interests. The result of this view would be a competence/performance distinction that accounted for the graduated, agent-centered aspects of moral practice as performance-based, and its agent-neutral aspects as competence-based. I suggest here the biological equivalent of an argument made by moral philosophers like Parfit that utilitarianism is indirectly collectively selfdefeating. 31 If we all tried to act directly on the shared ultimate moral aim of utilitarianism, we would not succeed in achieving it; hence, were that in fact our aim, we would do better to adopt secondary moral rules that would allow us to achieve it indirectly. The parallel point in terms of an evolutionary account of morality is that an agent-neutral moral competence would require rules of moral performance. Considered historically and cross-culturally, the development of such rules need not be supposed to have been entirely selfconscious, or entirely successful; more importantly, it need not be supposed to have occurred in isolation from other cognitive, motivational, cultural, and historical factors. Precisely because of the presence of such external factors, we should fully expect, on the hypothesis of an agent-neutral competence, two theoretically significant kinds of performance-based error. The first kind of performance-based error is entirely benign. A rule of performance which best enabled us to achieve our underlying agent-neutral aims might, on occasion, directly conflict with those aims. In such cases, environmental, cognitive, or motivational factors might make it better to favor the indirect rather than the direct dictates of our competence, and hence, the direct dictates of the rule of performance. In a deeper sense, then, these "errors" are not errors at all: they are the best means, all things considered, of indirectly achieving our competence-based aims. Thus, the much discussed decision strategy tit-for-tat, with its expectation of mutual return, could turn out to be an extremely important rule of moral performance on the hypothesis o fan agent-neutral moral competence. 32An agent-centered rule that dedicated individuals with agent-neutral aims to the detection and ostracism of cheaters would stand an extremely high chance of being developed in any context of easily threatened corporate interests. The second kind of performance-based error is not benign, theoretically or otherwise. Because of ignorance, nepotism, changes in historical circumstance, or a host of other factors, a particular moral practice or set of practices may stand in direct conflict with the aims of our underlying moral competence. If the modular view developed above is correct, such cases will elicit strong moral pressures for social change. Let us return to the movement to abolish slavery. If Haskell's analysis is correct, the development of capitalism made readily available the sort of action at a distance that moved stopping the slave trade from outside the

543 bounds of minimally decent Samaritanism to inside. Prior to 1750, the misery of slavery was widely considered a great evil; after 1750, it became an evil that could be effectively extinguished. To use Haskell's own analogy, slaves were, for the abolitionist, the strangers in need that starving Ethiopians are for us. The abolitionists no more expected a return for their efforts than we would, were we to send a contribution to a famine relief fund. 33 What separates us from the abolitionists is their clear perception of effective means for extinguishing the evil that presented itself to them. 34 For this reason, what good Samaritanism required of them is not what it now requires of us. On an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence, we are not at this point in history required to impoverish ourselves or our families to save famine victims. A graduated theory of our underlying moral competence only makes sense of the change in our moral thinking brought about by the abolitionists if we suppose the Marxist analysis in one of its stronger or weaker variants to be historically accurate. All such analyses share the claim that the abolitionists were moved to some degree by the economic benefits that would accrue to the socially ascendant groups of the industrial revolution with the collapse of the slave trade and slave labor. 35 According to Haskell's argument, all such analyses fail to capture the true motives of the abolitionists.

5. Conclusion

This example, like the others, demands further discussion. My conclusion must therefore remain modest: an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence is not biologically implausible. Agent-centered rules like tit-for-tat, prerogatives, special obligations, and duties not to harm others might be best regarded as belonging to the theory of moral performance rather than the theory of moral competence. For biologists who may think otherwise, the general argument of this essay is that any claims to the contrary must be based on more empirically well-developed theories of our moral competence and moral performance. More adequate theories of both kinds are worth developing, even if by themselves they determine nothing about how we ought to live our lives. Biology may help us understand the broad taxonomical categories of moral performance. It may also explain why, at the deepest levels of our moral thinking, we so easily slide into agent-neutral ways of reasoning. But how we ought to live our lives is something that must be determined by social experiment and moral argumentation. Discoveries regarding the empirical nature of morality cannot be made independently of the actual workings of our moral competence, which is itself only one factor in broader social and

544 psychological processes that are capable of leading human beings down any number of more or less morally laudable paths. 36

Notes 1. Elliott Sober, "Evolutionary Altruism, Psychological Egoism, and Morality: Disentangling the Phenotypes," in Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki, eds., Evolutionary Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 19%216. 2. Ibid., pp. 204-211. 3. Ibid., pp. 212-214. 4. For discussion of Darwin's views about human ethics, see Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 185--230. 5. Michael Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Applvach to Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 6. Ibid., pp. 250-258. 7. Thomas Bever, J.J. Katz, and D.T. Langendoen, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Ability (Sussex, UK: The Harvester Press, 1977); L.J. Cohen, "Can Human Irrationality be Experimentally Demonstrated?", The Behavioral & Brain sciences, 4 (1981), pp. 317-370. 8. See D.T. Langendoen, "A Case of Apparent Ungrammaticality," in Bever et al., An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Ability, pp. 183-193. 9. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, p. 210. 10. See, for example, L.W. Sumner, Abortion and Moral Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), and R.M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, andPoint (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). 11. J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 136-140.

12. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, p. 238; and Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy & Public/~ffairs, 1.3 (1972), pp. 22%243. 13. The terminology of agent neutrality and agent centeredness comes from Derek PaNt, Reason and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For the notion of minimally decent Samaritanism, see Judith Jarvis Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion," Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1.1 (1971), pp. 47~6. For a discussion of agent-neutral sacrifices in catastrophic circumstances see Thomas Nagel, "War and Massacre," Mortal Questions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), ch. 5. 14. The taxonomy receives its fullest discussion in Thomas Nagel, The View.fi'om Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), ch. 9, and Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism: A Philosophical Investigation qf the Considerations Underlying Rival Moral Conceptions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 15. E.E. Evans-Prichard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). 16. Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 27-28. 17. Thomas Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts I an lI," American Historical Review, 90. 1--3 (1985) pp. 33%361,547-566. See esp. pp. 340-341. 18. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, pp. 249. See also Thomas Nagel, "War and Massacre," and Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism. 19. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), ch. 3, section 24. 20. John Taurek, "Should the Numbers Count?", Philosophy & Public ,~ffairs, 6.4 (1977), pp. 293-316.

545 21. Ibid., pp. 306, 303. 22. Ibid., p. 306. 23. Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 172-189, 206-209. 24. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 95-100, and "Comments," Ethics, 96.4 (1986), pp. 832872. See esp. pp. 84%,854. 25. Donagan, The Theory of Morality, pp. 178-179. 26. Robert L. Trivers, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism," The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46.1 (1971), pp. 35-57. 27. For a comprehensive discussion of group selectionism and its possible relationship to human altruism, see David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober, "Reintroducing Group Selection to the Human Behavioral Sciences," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17 (1994), pp. 585-654. 28. Ruse, Taking Darwin Seriously, p. 239. See also pp. 219, 222, 239. 29. Ibid., p. 242. 30. For an extended argument, see David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 31. Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 24-49. 32. For the general importance of tit-for-tat as a decision strategy in situations requiring cooperation, see Robert Axelrod, The Evolution o[ Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 33. Haskell, "Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility," pp. 353-359. 34. Ibid., pp. 357-359, 556-559. 35. Ibid., pp. 341-347. 36. For a similar conclusion, see John Collier and Michael Stingl, "Evolutionary Naturalism and the Objectivity of Morality," Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), pp. 4 7 ~ 0 . The current essay owes much to discussions with John Collier, as well as to comments from several anonymous referees.