Evolutionary Ethics 243know each other well [Boehm 2000], in larger societies they gravitate towards
autocratic or at least strongly hierarchical systems, militarism directed against
outsiders, and marked social inequality. This flexibility is at once impressive and
disturbing; it raises important questions for social policy and for the choice of
social leaders. In any case, understanding the roots of political organization and
the alternative forms than human life once assumed enables us to be appropriately
skeptical in face of the noble language in which expansionist and inegalitarian
policies are typically dressed. Democracy, world federalism, and disarmament
movements are counteracting control norms that, at the same time, qualify as
enhancements of the human propensity for reflective thought and pacific behaviour.
Moral progress consists in adjustments of enhancement and control norms in ways
that acknowledge the respect in which features of the contemporary environment
render them obsolete or parasitical, or that show them up as based in ignorance,
or as flowing from goals that reasonable human beings do not share with their
genes.
The study of adaptiveness does not, on this view, directly posit norms or gen-
erate prescriptions. Rather, it contributes to the construction of a scientific image
of human nature, as incorporating what Christopher Boehm describes as a set
of “contradictory dispositions that generate practical ambivalences at the level of
phenotype, ambivalences that help to structure life’s practical decision dilemmas.”
[Boehm, 212] Evolutionary theory can alert us to what arrangements and prac-
tices individuals are likely to find oppressive and what behaviour it is likely to
be difficult to change without considerable effort and imagination. This scientific
image is more objective than the array of basically distorted images of human
nature presented by fiction, historical literature, the daily newspaper, “common
sense”, and other informal sources of information about what people are like; to
base social policy on what peoplebelieveabout members of their species seems
absurd, if one has the genuine option of basing it on what can be known, or at
least surmised with confidence.
None of this implies that nothing can be demanded of humans that is not based
in the proto-morality of our primate ancestors, or that the scientific image can
generate any imperatives. The expansion of the neo-cortex in humans led to the
emergence of cognitive and emotional capacities that expand both the capacity for
advantage-taking, persecution, and organized cruelty, and, at the same time, for
the extension of beneficence and concern well beyond a narrow circle of relatives
and intimates. The ability to posit abstract ideals, to recall a distant past, and
project a distant future in the imagination, to be impressed by the moral lessons
of myths and stories and to try to emulate heroic conduct, to understand and
empathize with or conversely to dissociate oneself from another person’s goals, are
capacities that animals lack. These capacities are species-specific and therefore
heritable, even if the form in which they are developed and expressed varies from
culture to culture. Nor do Evolutionary Ethicists have any basis for denying the
Basic Normative Principle. If traditional ethicists, meanwhile, could be discour-
aged from rejecting the Is-to-Ought-Principle out of hand, conflict between the two