THE SOUL OF REASON

The material presented here is taken from a working paper titled The Soul of Reason:  An Argument for a New Post-Modern Realism in Social Theory and Philosophy.  (D. H. Bowles 2020)

III.  The Moral Ontology of Mutual Constitution

In 2002, Steven Pinker published The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature, in which he sets up the post-modern social construction view of social and moral ontology as a straw man antagonist, against which he promotes the modern neoliberal view of self-interested ontological individuality.  Pinker argues (in Chapter 16, “Politics”) that what he calls “the new sciences of human nature” are fully supportive of a commitment to modernist self-interested ontological individuality that “falls smack into in the social contract tradition” (i.e., the neoliberal consensus) in social theory.  What Pinker is referring to as “the new sciences of human nature” is actually what is more commonly called the new Darwinian synthesis in the biological and social sciences that was anticipated by E. O. Wilson with Sociobiology: the New Synthesis (1975) and advanced by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976).  The foundational statement for what becomes the field of evolutionary psychology is provided In 1992, by anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides in a lengthy book chapter titled “The Evolutionary and Psychological Foundations of the Social Sciences.”  This is where Tooby and Cosmides characterize the social construction view of human nature and social ontology as the Standard Social Science Model, or SSSM.

Wilson’s Sociobiology famously created a firestorm of controversy between its proponents and large numbers of academics in the critical social sciences who did not find the arguments of the new Darwinian synthesis concerning the evolution of self-interested human nature and social ontology to be persuasive.  But Wilson’s view of things has, apparently, well . . . evolved.  Here he is writing in The New York Times, June 12, 2012:

Are human beings . . . built to pledge our lives to a group, even to the risk of death, or the opposite, built to place ourselves and our families above all else?  Scientific evidence, a good part of it accumulated during the past 20 years, suggests that we are both of these things simultaneously.

          The key to the mystery is the force that lifted pre-human social behavior to the human level.  The leading candidate in my judgment is multilevel selection, by which hereditary social behavior improves the competitive ability not of just individuals within groups but among groups as a whole.

          At some point in the history of the human species, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, versus group level selection, with competition among groups. . . .The conflict . . . can be succinctly expressed as follows:  within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.   . . . The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor.  . . . Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue . . .

          So it appears that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection.  We are suspended in unstable and constantly changing locations between the two extreme forces that created us, and we are unlikely to yield completely to either force as an ideal solution to our social and political turmoil.

Wilson’s revised position has ignited a new firestorm of academic controversy, but this time within the community of proponents of Pinker’s “new sciences of human nature” who appear to be quite galled by his apostasy, and who categorically reject the role of group-level selection and the associated dynamics of multi-level selection in human evolution.[1]

Now, I want to draw your attention to the clear parallel between what I criticized above as Veblen’s systematically imposed bias against self-regard, and Wilson’s own stated valuation, which appears in the final sentence of the immediately preceding quotation:  “. . . individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue . . .”  It might also be worth mentioning at this point that Etzioni’s effort to establish “the same principled, primary [ontological] standing” for individual autonomy as was given to social structure exhibited precisely the same sort of (explicitly stated, no less) value judgement.  In fact, this particular view regarding the moral ontology of self vs group (or other-regarding) identity and interest is so common that I would argue we can characterize it rather succinctly as the conventional moral meme.  If you just start looking for it, you will find it everywhere.  But it’s really not that simple, is it?  In the foundational commitment of the neoliberal consensus to ontological individuality, the conventional moral meme is actually inverted, and the Virtue of Selfishness (Ayn Rand, 1964) is valorized.  But what about a social ontology of mutual constitution, conditioned by multi-level selection, that gives rise to the competing moral intuitions[2] of individual vs. parochial group identity and interest?  Is Wilson (or Veblen?  or Etzioni?) really justified in applying the conventional moral meme to that?  I would argue that he is not.

What we are confronted with here, in the context of the problem of social ontology, is a classic problem of moral dilemma:  as moral agents, we are often required to make choices–in good faith–between competing moral duties.  In this case, the dilemma is to choose to act in the interest of self, or in the interest of our group identities and memberships (parochial or otherwise).  In the choices with which we are confronted in our day-to-day lives, these identities and interests may not conflict; but it is not unlikely, or even uncommon, that they will.  There is no set of rules that can always tell us which way to choose.  (This could also, by the way, be thought of as the existentialist dilemma.)

The work of psychologists Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind, 2012) and George Lakoff (Moral Politics, 1996) provides us with abundant empirical evidence for the competing moral intuitions of 1) parochial group identity and authority, and 2) individual identity and autonomy.  Haidt, in particular, cites the role of multi-level selection in the creation of what he calls homo duplex:  our simultaneously selfish and groupish natures.  But, taken together, Haidt and Lakoff also present us with something of a puzzle:  there appear to be not two, but three distinct competing moral intuitions at play in the human psyche.  And, they show that all three of these are present in each of the moral systems which lie at the foundation of our competing political ideologies.  The differences among these constitutive moral systems lie in the differential weighting of the competing moral intuitions.

But what about that third, so far unspecified, competing moral intuition that both Haidt and Lakoff have independently detected and documented, but which does not seem correlated with either of our ontological categories of mutual constitution?  A clue to its identification can be found in the complete specification of the problem of social ontology, which is this:  the enduring tension between both 1) individual and group identity, and 2) competing parochial identities.  Now, it just so happens that when we look carefully at Haidt and Lakoff’s third competing moral intuition, it looks a little bit like something that could be called a moral intuition of expansive (vs. parochial) community.  But, if we attribute the ontology of mutual constitution to the process of multi-level selection, as we have been here, that would only appear to provide an ontological basis for self-interested individuals and parochial groups.  The question must then arise, “where is the ontological ground to be found for a moral intuition of expansive (vs. parochial) community?”

Footnotes

[1] In the new Darwinian synthesis, drawing on Hamilton’s (1964) concept of inclusive fitness, the existence of altruistic behavior in humans is explained by what is called kin-level (not individual-level) selection.

[2] By moral intuition, we refer to the conscious manifestation of an ontologically-grounded moral duty or obligation.

IV.  The Problem of Consciousness

Table of Contents

Conceptual Schematic of the Argument

Abstract

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