Chapter
Eleven
The function of consciousness
the modern sense of subjectivity, play a role in moral decision-making? Is the
capacity for moral action one of the adaptive functions of consciousness?
Here is a simple moral dilemma – and a true story. One night Sue’s son rang and
told her that a publisher had offered him $500 to use a photograph of his on a
textbook cover. He was delighted but asked them to send him the fee in pounds
instead of dollars. To his surprise, he received two cheques – one in pounds and
one in dollars. He was thinking of tearing one up; should he?
What do you think he should do? And what advice do you think Sue, as his mother,
should give him? Why?
This scenario involves a moral choice only because we have concepts of right and
wrong, of fairness, of stealing, and of justice. We are not entirely selfish creatures
and we do care about others and about behaving well ourselves. Where do these
feelings come from? Some people believe that a God-given soul or spirit is the
source of morality. Others think that moral decisions require consciousness, or
even that one of the functions of consciousness is to guide morality. Others think
that different societies impose different ethical concepts on their members and
that morality is relative. Yet, the more we learn about the evolution of morality,
the more clearly we can see its origins in our ancestors.
One factor is kin selection. All animals that care for their young, including humans,
also care for other close relatives. This is because those relatives share some of their
genes, and so aid to relatives is also aid to some of one’s own genes – depending
on the closeness of the relationship. Another factor is reciprocal altruism, or doing
good so that good will be done to you, which can be observed in many species,
including vampire bats who share meals of blood and tiny cleaner fish that clean
larger fish without being eaten by them, as well as chimpanzees and wolves. Often
the favour has to be paid back at a later time, and this means that individual animals
must be able to recognise each other and keep track of who has and has not recip-
rocated. They must then keep cooperating with the good sharers and punish the
freeloaders, otherwise cheats would make successful sharing impossible. ‘Human
beings [. . .] are uniquely good at reciprocal altruism’ (Matt Ridley, 1996, p. 84).
The evolution of reciprocal altruism is thought to have generated gratitude, sym-
pathy, guilt, friendship, and trust, as well as moralistic aggression (the punish-
ment of offenders) and the giving of gifts. Models derived from the mathematics
of game theory have shown that certain types of behaviour, and certain mixtures
of cheating and altruism, are more stable than others. In these and many other
ways, we can understand how and why we humans have evolved the capacity
for morality and our notions of fairness, trustworthiness, and virtue (Matt Ridley,
1996; Bloom, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Joyce, 2007).
Do we need consciousness on top of all these evolved tendencies in order to
make truly moral decisions, or to think about such issues as aid to Africa, taxa-
tion and healthcare policy, abortion or assisted suicide? To stick with the simple
dilemma above, if Sue’s son decides to tear up the cheque, why will he do so?
Among possible answers are that his separate conscious mind intervened in the
brain’s activity to make the moral decision, that his consciousness is an emergent
property which can influence the decision through downward causation, that
consciousness is an epiphenomenon and played no role at all in this or any other