Evolutionary Ethics 239consume resources to no avail if it is not. Further, if some alternative
practice or form of social organization would permit people to act in
ways that were more natural, hence more pleasurable and satisfying,
then it is obligatory to introduce them unless there are strong reasons
for not altering the practice.
This view of the role of evolutionary theory in practical ethics falls well short of
the enthusiastic suggestion of evolutionary theorists, who insist that, since there
are biological, genetic and natural components to our behaviour, we should organ-
ise the social world to match tendencies.
The sense of “matching” envisioned is in any case unclear. Virtually all moral
theorists regard some forms of behaviour observed in our primate ancestors and
probably inherited from them, including reciprocity, empathy, loyalty, and recon-
ciliation, as deserving praise and reinforcement, at least in some contexts. But the
reason why our institutions should “match” our tendencies in this regard is not
that they have evolved, but because we think on independent grounds that they
are good. Reciprocally, the notion that we should “set up” a social world that gives
free rein to aggression, racism, sexism, deceitfulness, and all-around parochialism
because they have evolved has nothing to recommend it. The task for the moral
theorist is to distinguish between, on one hand, natural behaviour whose suppres-
sion is or would be cruel, arbitrary, and pointless, and unnatural behaviour that
it is futile or excessively costly to try to inculcate, and, on the other hand, nat-
ural behaviour that deserves suppression and unnatural behaviour that needs to
be inculcated, even if it is somewhat costly to do so. To base normative ethical
theory on human wants and needs — whether these are the revealed preferences of
social science or are hypothesized as old adaptations — is basically sound, but the
devil is, as usual, in the details. We live simultaneously within a number of differ-
ent mental systems whose contents do not always mesh, and cherished plans and
goals are often in conflict with one another. There are inconsistent preferences,
perverse preferences, short-sighted, imprudent preferences, immoral preferences,
and conflicting and incommensurable preferences. “The maximal satisfaction of
the preference-set of human beings” is not a well-defined concept, or something
it is sensible to aim at. Human life is, in Midgley’s terms “a rough but tolerable
equilibrium” [Midgely, 1978, 282], in which we mostly try for local and speedy
improvement.
But if Darwin was correct, one might wonder, how can there be objective moral
truths or objectively morally better states of the world? Are we not driven to a
metaethical form of what Alex Rosenberg and Tamler Sommers term “Darwinian
nihilism”, [Rosenberg and Sommers, 2003] as articulated by E.O. Wilson and
Michael Ruse: “Ethics in an important sense, ethics as we understand it, is an
illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to co-operate. Furthermore, the
way our biology enforces its ends is by making us think that there is an objective
higher code to which we are all subject” [Wilson and Ruse, 1989, 51]. Fallacious
ideation, it is tempting to speculate, such as a belief in punishing and preserving
gods, and an age-old tendency to confuse kings with gods, is probably a condition