INTRODUCTION
This article functions in part as an addendum to my Master's thesis, "The
Failure of Gibbard's Norm-Expressivism: A Functionalist Explanation". An impatient reader may
well be able to begin here and emerge with an adequate understanding of my metaethical functionalism
and how it contrasts with norm-expressivism, but better results can be expected by reading the thesis
first.
Can evolutionary theory help us make sense of human normative practices? That is the most
important question that Allan Gibbard addresses in his modern classic of metaethics, Wise Choices,
Apt Feelings -- although the book grew out of his search for an answer to another question: What
is rationality?
Gibbard's non-cognitivist approach to these questions, called 'norm-expressivism', will be alien and
disappointing to evolutionary biologists and evolutionary psychologists, I'm afraid. Where they look
for ways to describe how we might treat aspects of our environment as 'good' or 'bad', or treat human
judgments, behaviors, or goals as 'rational', Gibbard's view is that such description is inadequate;
worse, it's beside the point. The primary meaning we humans apply to our statements to the effect that
something is 'good' or 'bad' or 'rational' is to endorse (or condemn) it.
What about the evolutionary origins or functions of such evaluations? For Gibbard, the answers
lie not in evolved responses to objectively good or bad things in our environment, nor
in recognizing a rational mode of judgment requiring something like reasoning. No,
such evaluations were retained by our ancestors because of the adaptive benefits of social
coordination that come from normative discussion. In other words, it appears, until we had
verbal language at our disposal to enable a process of communal evaluation, there was little benefit
in making personal evaluative judgments -- at least none that has had any significant influence on
modern human normativity.
My thesis, being primarily an exercise in criticism, dealt first with the shortcomings of Gibbard's
perspective and approach, and only secondarily with advocating a different approach. Space
constraints for that project precluded offering much defense of my own alternative method of
illuminating metaethics with evolutionary theory; indeed, even the exposition of that alternative had
to be sketchier than I would have preferred.
Here, then, is my alternative: Metaethical Functionalism -- the view that objective, intrinsic value
can be defined in functional terms, and that evolutionary theory explains the various forms of
instrumental value that we pursue in service to the fundamental kinds of intrinsic value I identify:
Life (the 3-plus-billion-year-old process of begetting begetters, and living, the
homeodynamic process of maintaining an organism's functional integrity).
1. A BETTER THEORY
Gibbard's project is an exercise in Galilean reduction: an attempt to explain phenomena in terms
that ultimately reduce to physics. A purportedly Galilean explanation can fail not just in absolute terms
(providing no physical explanation after all), but also if it is comparatively inferior to another -- one
that coheres better with the Galilean core of beliefs, corresponds better to empirical data, and explains
more than its competitor(s) can. The reasons I offer in my thesis for considering Gibbard's explanation
a failed one might seem to constitute little more than petty criticism unless a superior theory is
proffered. That's what I'll do here.
First, though, let me offer some background and motivation for the view I'm defending.
In scientific circles, hardly anyone disputes that evolutionary theory explains the shared physical
attributes of the members of any given species of organism. Species-typical behavior of organisms is
also now generally explained by evolution. But attempts to explain specially human behaviors
in evolutionary terms are still met with antagonism and skepticism.
When the subject turns to ethics and values, for example, it seems that all but the most radical
evolutionists insist that human attitudes now transcend our biological nature, and operate
independently in a new mental and cultural realm. This view, however, lacks a theoretical bridge to
link, in terms of causes and effects, the purportedly non-biological varieties of human behavior with
their acknowledged biological origins. Substituting for rigorous theory here is little more than
hand-waving: Our neocortex, which evolved to fulfill some function or functions differing in kind
from those it now performs for modern humans, was simply pressed into service by the demands of
our emerging languages and cultures.
At first, one might think the hands aren't waving; they're merely pointing to the obvious. But
several questions have gone begging here.
- Are modern human functions of the neocortex really different in kind from earlier ones, or might
they not be just more complex varieties of the same kind?
- Is our neocortex responsible for the quintessentially human behaviors we attribute to it,
or might other brain regions be implicated?
- Does the neocortex function in the ways we imagine it does -- say, as a unified mechanism for
making judgments?
Not just one, but all three of the presumptions underlying these questions turn out to be mistaken.
I devote considerable space in the thesis to argue that human behavior is essentially primate
behavior, differing only in degree rather than in kind from that of our close cousin species. As a result,
what we construe to be quintessentially "human" qualities (e.g., love, compassion, humor ... and
especially morality) are often quite common among other primates. Moreover, they are generated not
just by our vaunted neocortex, but primarily by our limbic system (also called the 'paleomammalian
cortex').
Are there no traits attributable to the large neocortex that distinguishes our neuroanatomy?
Certainly there are: intelligence, ability to form abstract concepts and evaluate them, heuristic
problem-solving abilities, and communications skills, to mention some of the most prominent. But
these are also traits that bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and other kindred species enjoy in lesser
measure, thanks to their more modest neocortical endowments.
As what may seem to be the final insult, I argue in the thesis that the "unified self" is largely a
myth -- that the judgments we make are not always (or even usually) the deliverances of some
higher-order control exerted over many appetites, desires, interests, and habits. Instead, we have at
least three functionally separate judging mechanisms in operation, and each of them can overpower
the influences of the others in determining our behavior. Regardless of which of these
mechanisms makes a judgment, we naturally accept it as ours.
Unsurprisingly, these separate judging mechanisms are distinguished from one another by the
different methods they employ.
- A primitive emotional judging mechanism (apparently situated primarily in the limbic system)
simply associates the objects, sensations, and events in our lives with emotional "flavors" -- including
evaluations of good and bad that constitute approval or disapproval in varying degrees.
Brand loyalties, racial biases, and nationalism usually operate at this level.
- A heuristic/schematic judging mechanism, which apparently functions by developing holistic,
Gestalt-like concepts in the right hemisphere and attatching them to evaluations from the limbic
system, delivers simple rules of thumb for behavior, learns "scripts" for the standard social roles and
protocols of one's society, and provides intuitive hunches as answers to the problems and questions
of our lives. Now we have the evaluation of abstract concepts rather than of concrete things and
experiences. But these operate nonrationally -- that is, they are not the products of methodical,
dispassionate consideration of alternatives, or of logical argument, but rather of "seeming" right, true,
and obvious. When someone assumes that your physician is a man, or that air travel is more dangerous
than driving on the highway, or that we can solve the world's problems by "giving peace a chance",
they are judging with this mechanism.
- A reasoning mechanism in the left hemisphere allows us to make careful, methodical, deliberate
judgments (including "I don't know yet.") about the questions we face. It is a dispassionate process,
and the avoidance of emotional bias is apparently a component of the most successful algorithms it
uses. It produces the only variety of human judgment deserving of the term 'rational'.
An intuitive assessment (sorry, we don't have the research yet) should convince anyone that the
vast majority of judgments we make are handled by the first two mechanisms. One can tell the source
by the "flavor" of the judgment and its content: if it is emotionally tinged, and concerns concretes, it
has the fingerprints of the limbic system all over it. If it is emotionally tinged, but concerns abstracts,
it is probably a collaboration of right-neocortex and limbic system. And if one can retrace the steps
of reasoning that led to it (not necessarily perfectly; the point is remembering the deliberative process),
then it is a reasoned judgment from the left neocortex.
Nonetheless, people persist in attributing nearly all their judgments to their faculty of reason.
Why? Most likely because they know it is the method of rational judgment, they feel they must be
rational creatures, and infer self-servingly in retrospect that reason produced the judgment. The facility
with which people invent such explanations of their own behaviors is nicely illustrated by research
involving subjects of hypnosis or of commissurotomies (severing the connection between the two
hemispheres -- usually in cases of severe epilepsy), who invent and believe quite plausible false
accounts of behavior they have undertaken, either while under post-hypnotic suggestion or in response
to a cue given only to the right (nonverbal) hemisphere. Gazzaniga (1992) provides examples along
with his theory that a functional unit in the left hemisphere, the "interpreter", is specialized to provide
a coherent account of our experience for our own benefit.
The tendency to ascribe to oneself better motives, greater knowledge, and more ability that reality
may warrant is standard human equipment. Social psychologists call it 'beneficience'. I contend in my
thesis that it accounts for the habitual misattribution of one's emotional and heuristic judgments to the
faculty of reason.
That will probably suffice to communicate my dissatisfaction with prevailing theories and attitudes
concerning human nature and normativity. Let's move along by examining the approach I chose to
improve on them.
Metaethical functionalism began with the hypothesis that human nature seeks a flattering
explanation of human behavior -- one more exalted than would be expected from just another chapter
in the mechanistic story of biological evolution. Given our history of clinging to anthropocentric views
long after the evidence made them untenable (geocentric and heliocentric cosmologies, for example
-- not to mention the doctrine of special creation that still resists displacement by Darwin's
legacy), this hypothesis seems hardly unreasonable. Today, research into the social psychology of
attributions provides solid support for it.
Next, it considered that perhaps the best explanation for human behavior, including human
normativity, would turn out to be the same sort of explanation in physical, biological terms that has
worked so well for human physiology: what Allan Gibbard calls 'Galilean reduction': an attempt to
explain phenomena in terms that ultimately reduce to physics.
Third, it noted the systematic errors of interpreted human perception that fueled the empiricist
revolution in philosophy and science. If we make "useful errors" of judgment when responding to
sensory information we take to be about features of our physical environment, why should we assume
we don't make similar errors when responding to our evaluations of things? Is there any
good reason not to believe that our mechanisms for evaluating are simply adaptations that
allowed our ancestors to respond aptly to some sort of objective, physical, intrinsic value in the world
-- much as we now believe our sensory mechanisms respond (under normal circumstances) aptly to
our environment? Fourth, it rejected the notion that subjective value (the attitudinal
product of valuing) had (as yet) any legitimate claim to being intrinsic value, for
subjective appraisal is neither necessary nor sufficient to confer intrinsic value upon anything.
Moreover, there are only two standards by which judgments of value can be defended as apt (so far).
The first is the evolutionary story explaining how similar judgments increased the inclusive fitness (an
objective value, I argue) of our forebears -- along with the observation that current
circumstances reasonably match those under which the propensity for such judgment evolved. The
second is a game-theoretical analysis of interests, harms, and benefits -- all of which elements depend
on similar judgments of value, yielding a regress that can end only with the identification of some
objective value(s) upon which the subsequent claims depend.
Finally, it identified a physical property deserving to be called 'objective, physical, intrinsic value'
-- one that drives the evolutionary process, and is thereby responsible for every trait humans have
evolved (including valuing).
My view depends upon finding something we can reasonably view as objective, intrinsic value in
nature -- something I call 'reflexive functionality' -- and explaining human normativity in terms of such
intrinsic value. This explanation should be twofold: first, explaining the origin and function, in
evolutionary terms, of human normative practices (which was the essence of Gibbard's project);
second, providing a justification for a particular metaethical scheme that defines 'intrinsic value'
in physical terms, and treats ethics in axiological terms -- as, properly, the pursuit of intrinsic value.
Let's first consider whether there's any point to such a pursuit.
1.1 Objective Value in Nature
There are five good reasons for us to seek something objective that we might justifiably call 'value'
in nature -- in the material facts of existence. First: this search, if successful, would constitute the sort
of Galilean reduction that Gibbard attempts (and that has produced far-reaching theoretical progress
in the sciences). Value theory and ethics can be joined to the Galilean theoretical core.
Secondly, our norms of scientific inquiry, together with a broadly accepted theoretical framework
for the sciences, present us with the default hypothesis that humans are a product of nature -- and,
absent strong evidence to the contrary, that human traits and behaviors are not non-natural, but rather
emerged from an evolutionary process as species-typical traits and behaviors, fine-tuned
developmentally in each individual through interaction with his, her, or its environment. Though it may
seem that some of our attributes have transcended their natural origins, any claim that they have
should be justified by an account of how this might have happened.1 At any rate, nature is the first place to look for an account
of why and how we evaluate, make normative (and other) judgments, and attribute value.
The third reason to seek value in nature is to explain the claim of objectivity that, as Gibbard
correctly points out, people make with respect to their normative judgments. Each normative judgment
is accompanied by the implicit claim that the content of that judgment is true independently of
anyone's acceptance of the judgment (153). When I claim that some state of affairs is "good", my
claim rests ultimately on whether that state of affairs is good, and not on my opinion alone.
If value inheres in certain material states of affairs, then our apprehension of such value might
itself be objective; anyone with the requisite powers of observation will be able to recognize it. When
I assert that Life (as a special kind of material organization) has value, the claim I make can
be interpreted as asserting knowledge of a verifiable property of Life, rather than asserting some
non-epistemic normative authority to pass judgment on Life.2
The fourth reason is that we already use much of our vocabulary of value at times to do
descriptive work, and we can convey information about value without using normative language. It
would be nice for formal theory to reinforce this informal reality. Let's briefly examine two examples.
"Chlorine is bad for bacteria." This doesn't tell us that bacteria do not value chlorine, or even that
humans don't value the effect chlorine has on bacteria. It simply tells us that chlorine interferes in a
serious way with the process of being a bacterium. 'Bad' functions here more as a descriptive rather
than a normative term.
"A human ceases to be a person shortly after his or her brain stops functioning. Joe's EEG has
been flat for six minutes." From this description alone we know that Joe is in trouble; no lamentations
or somber value-laden pronouncements are needed.
Clearly, both of these examples hinge on the unspoken assumption that continued life is of value
to a living organism. Joe, up until recently, was surely aware of this value; a bacterium wouldn't be.
If life were of value to both of them, then that value did not depend upon personal awareness for its
existence, but existed independently of valuing.
Human language reveals a robust, deeply held notion that life is of value to life. We talk of
"survival instincts" and "the will to live" and of "elan vital" -- all notions that presume life to
be vitally interested in its own persistence. Indeed, the history of life is a chronicle of the ways that
persistence has been pursued.
There is a behaviorist definition of value -- one I first found in Ayn Rand -- describing that
pursuit: "'Value' is that which one acts to gain and/or keep."3 People typically treat life (particularly their own and those of their
family and friends) as tops on their list of values. There is widespread acknowledgement that, when
life is in the balance, other human values (e.g., concern for pain and suffering) are relegated to
subordinate status. When asked whether anyone was hurt in a car accident, for example, it wouldn't
be crazy to say, "Not really -- a lot of bruises and cuts, and a few broken bones, but everybody will
be fine." Perhaps there is good reason for this.
The fifth reason to look first to nature in our search for value is to avoid a seductive form of weak
anthropomorphism: we think of Life's telos (its apparent pursuit, seeming almost intentional,
of inclusive fitness) as mirroring human purpose. The thesis discusses the problems such
anthropocentrism introduces into evolutionary inquiries, as well as the evidence that Gibbard has been
misled by those influences.
1.2 Life and Living as Intrinsic Values
It is with some misgivings over the mystical sound of it that I use the capital-L term 'Life' to talk
about the entire scope of earthly biological activity that can be traced to a common origin (or origins;
some viruses, for example, may have no ancestors in common with us). It is most accurate (for reasons
we will explore) to think of Life as a bushlike four-dimensional organism whose branches and twigs
are lineages and individual creatures, rather than simply as a mass-term for the collection of individual
living things now extant.
The same term would function nicely for extraterrestrial analogs having the same essential nature:
being a kind of material organization that replicates itself, probably with variation, from generation
to generation. It would apply similarly to self-replicating von Neumann machines. It might also
serve for more complex systems (say, one in which generation A begets a generation B quite different
from itself, yet which has the ability to beget generation C with the power to beget begetters, etc. --
thereby entitling the system to the name 'Life').
In general, Life is a process of begetting begetters.
I choose this functional definition in keeping with the Galilean purpose of my project: functional
definitions (telling us how some kind of thing distinguishes itself from other kinds) are by
nature explanatory, whereas descriptive ones (telling us that some kind of thing has certain
physical properties) aren't. Indeed, that's the meaningful distinction between explanation and
description.
For Life, though, critics might prefer as a matter of taste to add descriptive restrictions -- say,
including only self-replicating systems of earthly origin, or excluding inorganic machinery -- to an
otherwise functional definition. Such a preference faces the charge of being arbitrary and parochial.
Other critics may complain that my definition would exclude a spontaneously generated creature
having all the essential attributes humans do, save the pedigree and the ability to reproduce. Wouldn't
such a creature be a life? This objection requires the introduction of another definition.
Peter van Inwagen4 says that a life
is essentially a well-individuated, self-maintaining, and self-directing event -- a homeodynamic
event. Though he doesn't treat this description as a definition, we might use it provisionally as a
definition for a concept we need here. We could name that concept, as he does, 'a life' -- thereby
including the human-like creature we hypothetically conjured up. A life includes the notion
of internal goings-on, powered by energy taken from the environment; if the requisite goings-on go
off, the life ceases. In simplest terms, something is alive just so long as it functions to maintain
its essential dynamic structural integrity.
The problem here is that, while this provisional definition applies to organisms down to the
single-cell level, it excludes the simplest (and, unfortunately, apparently the original) form(s)
of Life: single molecules -- nucleic acids, peptides, or whatever sort of molecule first managed to
reproduce itself.5 For these there is no
internal activity, no homeodynamic process; such molecules simply serve as scaffolds upon which
other organic molecules accrete. It was not necessary for them to be alive in order to be part of Life
-- and the most crucial part, at that! According to our two definitions, then, these molecules are part
of Life, but are not alive. This seems absurd. How can this apparent absurdity be resolved?
It's just a matter of semantics. Life and living are intimately associated concepts
for us, because all the forms of Life we normally care about and interact with are living. Indeed,
being one such form possessing a variety of behavioral and cognitive mechanisms that function
to promote our continued living, we naturally take living to be of great importance. Only
recently have some of us been aware of nonliving things that might conceivably be acknowledged as
part of Life. And only recently has anyone considered whether the natural (and reasonable) practice
of defining human activities -- eating, sleeping, running, thinking, crying, flinching, etc. -- in
functional terms, describing what it is they DO for us, should (or even could)
be applied to the activity of living.
In contrast, we are disposed to regard the generational cycle of reproduction as merely something
we humans normally participate in -- important to us at times, but perhaps not at others, and only
sometimes more important to some of us than is living itself. The common-sense perspective has been
that reproduction (with its cumulative effects over generations) is just one of many things that
organisms do -- and who would imagine that biologists would come to believe that virtually all the
other activities organisms pursue serve only (in a big-picture functional sense) to optimize reproductive
success over many generations?
As for our conception of living, perhaps we haven't been inclined to think of 'living' as a
predicate (just as we have decided that 'existence' is not a predicate, but rather a logical quantifier).
But there can be no doubt that living is activity, or that this activity is undertaken by the
organism (or at least by its parts -- a nontrivial distinction) doing the living. Or, perhaps, we
have tended to view living as a mode of being rather than as an activity, simply because it is not an
intentional activity; instead, it happens rather automatically as we respond to appetites,
instincts, and such -- attributes we see as being different in kind from the intelligent, intentional
qualities we suppose are essential to humanity. It is difficult to think of the autonomic functions of our
body -- heartbeat, subtle eye movements, reflex responses, etc. -- as being things we do.
But we can't assume that our common-sense concepts of Life and living map onto
the world exactly as we have always imagined they should, and our Galilean aim requires us to adjust
our concepts and redefine our vocabulary to mesh with our developing metaphysics. That's what I
hope I've done with 'Life' and 'living'.
It is only natural that most people will be inclined to reject my claim that, for humans and all our
cousins, inclusive fitness6 -- the
long-term reproductive success of Life, standardly (and inappropriately, I'll argue) presented as the
long-term reproductive success of an individual -- is a fundamental value, while living
is derivative and of secondary importance.
The seductive alternative is to reverse the priority: take living to be fundamental, and treat
inclusive fitness as incidental. Though I'm sure this view would have wide appeal, I'm equally
sure that it fails.
After all, our aim here is explanatory: What is value, what are evaluation and judgment,
and what places do they have in our lives, in nature, and with respect to one another?
Living, as the purported essence of Life, explains nothing about the diversity of Life today.
Imagine that begetting begetters is not a necessary quality of Life, and that living, by itself, is sufficient.
The first emergent life, even if it had somehow managed to produce all the marvels of art and science,
or even achieve the pinnacle of happiness and enlightenment -- had it failed to reproduce -- would
have been merely the briefest of flashes in the cosmological pan. Yet we know Life to be a burgeoning
triumph of expanding diversity and complexity, spanning more than three billion years to date, and
potentially capable of reaching the farthest corners of the Universe and flourishing for as long as the
Universe itself exists. Living explains nothing save the intrinsic value of continued existence
for individual organisms (to be discussed anon), and the instrumental value of whatever affects that
continuity. It certainly can't illuminate the origins of reproduction, evaluation or judgment.
The process of begetting begetters, however, where variation is introduced routinely in an
environment exerting selection pressures, explains all of this with the story of evolution. Life today
is that very process -- potentially endless and hugely diversified. The quantifiable measure of
its success (how prolific it is through time and space) we call 'inclusive fitness'. Evaluation and
judgment are explained as evolved behaviors with survival and reproductive value.
Furthermore, inclusive fitness explains the origin of living as a ubiquitous feature of
modern life. While monomolecular nucleic acids could reproduce themselves, and variants
occasionally arose, there was an unrealized opportunity (what I will call a 'valence', explained shortly)
for Life to expand much more dramatically. The accidental creation of the first proto-cell (and, though
the origin of cells is nebulous, prevailing theory accepts that there was an evolutionary path from
nucleic acid to full-fledged cell7)
produced a more promising means of converting organic raw material into additional begetters.
Proto-cells, and full-fledged cells in their turn, were more successful at reproducing than were their
monomolecular forebears -- and they very likely expropriated the latter as food for their own
propagation.
Having shown that living is not necessary to be a part of Life, that a successful (in terms of
inclusive fitness) lineage of forebears is, and that inclusive fitness explains living, we should have done
serious damage to the objection (a chauvinistic one, I think) that living is fundamental to Life
(or to any biologically adequate conception of life). But more is required to dispatch it
altogether. An objector might propose that Life, though engendered by monomolecular nucleic acids,
does not include them in its "family tree" -- that Life began with the first unicellular organism, and
everything that went before was merely an accumulation of raw materials.
This proposal, however, is inconsistent with a purely functional definition (whose legitimacy and
importance I hope is now clear) of Life. If we accept that reproduction is functionally essential to the
nature of Life, and that living is not, the objector is reduced to rejecting non-living self-replicators as
part of Life on the ad hoc grounds that they are non-living -- i.e., that they do not possess an
inessential attribute.
What is it about Life and living that gives them intrinsic value? It might be helpful to consider this
question from a number of perspectives.
Let's begin with the perspective most foreign to my own -- the subjectivist view. Cognitively
speaking, we can't say that Life has anything we might call 'intention'. But if it did have
intention, I think it's clear it would choose to do precisely those things it now does just out of
mechanistic necessity. It would value and therefore pursue its own survival as what it is. Its
persistence would be paramount, and flourishing -- spreading as widely as possible in as many forms
as it can -- would be the direction in which it could improve upon mere survival. Gibbard might ask
what it would make sense for Life to value, or what would warrant a judgment of value that Life might
make. The answer should be non-controversial, I think: Life would sensibly value its own continuation
and propagation, and the only warrant required for this evaluation to be sensible is that something
irreplaceable -- Life's nature as a process of begetting begetters, generation after generation -- would
be lost if the material constituents of Life reverted to being merely inanimate, non-self-reproducing
stuff.
For the subjectivist, purposes and interests are values. But this is also true even on a materialistic
or naturalistic interpretation. The difference is that, for these latter viewpoints, purposes and interests
aren't created as an act of individual autonomy, but rather as a logical extension of an entity's
fundamental nature. It's a very Aristotelian notion. Life's interest, and its purpose, is to be Life
-- to the ultimate extent (in both space and time) possible. A life's interest, and its purpose, is merely
to survive -- to be a life. "To be or not to be" is the existential question here (to be pursued
further when we discuss some metatheoretical underpinnings for my theory).
This introduces a potential problem. Why should a life care about Life? There is at least a potential
conflict here between the value of personal survival and the value of global survival. Evolutionary
theory resolves this nicely: personal survival can't obtain unless global survival has produced it. At the
very least, this explains why global survival should be retrospectively valued by an individual
organism: "Thanks for putting me here!" But, once extant, is there any reason for a life to value Life?
Is there any reason for an arm to value the entire human body? Certainly no arm could exist
absent a body -- and existence is a primary concern for anything that has concerns. Should a
twig value the existence of the bush it is a part of? Should a hair value the existence of the bear that
has grown it? We needn't attribute intelligence to these things in order to determine that, had they
intelligence, they would value whatever is necessary to their existence. Most kinds of organism depend
for nourishment on other life, born of the process Life -- so valuing Life would make sense for them.
What of organisms that feed on inorganic material and convert energy such as light to their use? In
such cases, when Life contributes nothing to the short-term survival of a life once it has begun, a
different sort of reason must be found.
That reason is the appreciation of value as value. If, indeed, there is such a thing as
objective value, I think it would be a matter of either error or ignorance not to value it. If the quality
that gives an organism its intrinsic value is its ability to persist via reflexively functional
behavior and its ability to reproduce (as an instrument of Life's reflexive functionality), then it would
be chauvinistic indeed to deny the same kind of value in other organisms ... and in Life itself.
More to the point, however, is this: an arm is merely a device evolved for the successful
propagation of humans, and a hair is merely a device evolved for the successful propagation of bears
(and other related creatures). This is why I said earlier that it is valuable to think of Life as a bush,
whose twigs share its own survival interests. If we focus on the individual organism, we miss
something that is not only important, but fundamental for Life: continuation beyond the
lifespan of an individual organism. This fundamental property of Life creates a valence (which term
I'll explain in section 2.1) for behaviors that "recognize" it by identifying circumstances under which
individual survival should be sacrificed in the interests of Life. Among these behaviors are maternal
aggression on behalf of offspring, human heroism, and ... I hope ... intellectual appreciation of and
commitment to the objective value in Life.
1.3 Purpose and Interests Reassessed
Just as 'value' and associated terms have objective, naturalistic meanings in common usage, so
does 'purpose'. The subjective meaning of 'purpose' is intentional, while the objective meaning is
functional. What is the purpose of, say, a hammer? Pounding nails. That is its primary function,
though one could also use it to hold down papers or to discourage an unwelcome door-to-door
salesman. The hammer, we presume, never intends to pound nails, but that is its purpose
nonetheless. Granted, the hammer's inventor clearly did intend it to pound nails -- as does the
carpenter using it. But in nature, Life is both the discoverer and user of evolutionary developments,
which come to exist accidentally but are refined to better perform some function serving Life's
telos. Intentionality is not an attribute of Life, but rather a trait it evolved in creatures like
humans because it enhanced inclusive fitness.
Similarly, we might talk of two governments who negotiate "in the interest of peace". Peace might
be an interest of both governments, but the direct meaning of this phrase is that peace, in order to
exist, has certain requirements (which might be obtained by negotiation). It is in this sense that living
organisms have an interest in persisting, and that Life has an interest in reproduction. Neither can exist
if those interests are not fulfilled.
It is standard in biology to apply the term 'inclusive fitness' to individual organisms rather than to
Life itself. This can be useful in assessing the success of any given branch of the "bush" of Life, but
it can also be seriously misleading. Part of the problem here looks like a fallacy of division: attributes
of Life (as a mass-term) are transferred to individual lives. Inclusive fitness, the ultimate reproductive
success of Life, is the ultimate interest or "goal" of Life. But I think evolutionary biologists -- including
those whose support I have most relied upon -- have mistakenly assumed that inclusive fitness, treated
as the ultimate reproductive success of an individual and its close kin, is the modern individual's
ultimate interest or "goal". There is good reason for this mistake to be made, for our behaviors do
indeed tend to promote the expansion of our immediate bloodline. After all, evolution can only select
for behaviors according to the significant consequences of those behaviors -- and, up until recently,
the consequences of individual behavior have been restricted to the scope of several generations,
primarily of close kin. But how close is close -- and what are our standards for valuing close
kin over remote relations?
"My" inclusive fitness might ultimately be best served by sending blue-green algae to Mars,
regardless of how well I manage to promote the spread of my genes and those of my close kin. For
even if all life on Earth were suddenly extinguished, the descendants of my remote cousins on Mars
might flourish and evolve for billions upon billions of years. One way to look at this is that my
personal inclusive fitness is not a matter of just the reproductive success of myself and subjectively
close kin, but of all kin -- all Life. The real message here is that my fundamental
interest is identical to Life's fundamental interest: the inclusive fitness of Life. The primary
"goal" of individual organisms, despite appearances, is not personal survival or even personal
reproduction (as is the case for Life), but rather the survival of Life: the part serves the whole, if the
whole is to be healthy.
Still, it's inescapably true that, except for oddities like myself, humans care more for their kith than
for strangers -- and less and less for creatures bearing remoter relationships to us. To tell the truth, I'm
no exception to this variety of caring; I simply want to develop what I think is a better,
philosophically justified reason for caring, and rely upon it in preference to my gut-level biases
whenever the two are in conflict.
Our automatic concern for kin is Life's marvelous mechanism for directing our attention and
efforts toward promoting the one part of itself -- our own branch -- we are uniquely positioned to
affect. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, and leads us to value lives and reproductive success ...
selectively. But I want to care about value because I understand and appreciate why it is value,
not because I am biologically programmed to value certain parts of my environment. I want my
valuing to be a justified response to genuine, objective value.
Metaethical functionalism allows us to do this. First, we note that we play at least two roles in this
universe. We were born into one of them: being a part of Life. But, as individual humans, we can
choose the role of individual, and select goals for ourselves by any means we choose --
coin-flipping, whimsy, deliberation, or deference to authority. Second, we need to prioritize these
roles. How? By examining the value associated with each. Now that I have deconstructed
subjective value, we can't decide simply on the basis of what will make us happy. We need to
decide on the basis of objective value. Whatever objective value turns out to be, I for one want
to promote it; at least I will know that my efforts are of some good to something -- and maybe I can
learn enough to multiply the instrumental value of my life many times over.
We can also, thanks to metaethical functionalism, make justified choices between competing
values. Moreover, these choices are not only justified, but comport well with our evolved moral
intuitions -- something I take to be a good indication that my theory conforms to reality.
To illustrate, I can accept that the intrinsic value of my life represents the same amount of
evolutionary "design work" and the same kind of internal functionality as does the life of any other
man -- so I have no objective basis to prefer the intrinsic value of my life to that of someone
else's. I might justifiably prefer the intrinsic value of my life to that of some organism that is not as rare
or functionally complex as I am, for I can argue that the former is greater than the latter, and greater
value is to be preferred over lesser value. Yet I wouldn't damage even a lesser life gratuitously, for to
do so would be to eradicate some measure (however small) of value from the universe.
Already, then, we have justification for some robustly popular moral norms: for respecting all
living things, for regarding other humans fundamentally as equals, and for giving preferential concern
for the more complex creatures over the simpler, for rare creatures over the commonplace.
Most interestingly, though, we can accept that the intrinsic value of each of our lives is dwarfed
by comparison to the instrumental value we might have on behalf of Life -- ultimately yielding gains
of intrinsic value spanning the universe. Part of my contribution, for example, might be genetic -- but
I expect the greatest part will be cultural -- an avenue that has been available to humans for only a few
generations.
That is the greatest gift of metaethical functionalism. It has justified the commitment to work for
something larger than oneself -- and has shown what that something is!
Of course, I could alternatively spend my life concentrating on my subjective experience of its
functioning: indulging my appetites, thrilling my senses, enjoying interpersonal relationships,
entertaining my mind, and forgetting altogether about Life.
No. I might as well be fertilizer.
That's a rather prejudicial introduction to the next important concern: that individuals can develop
goals unrelated to Life's telos; humans at least clearly do. Most readers have likely been waiting
impatiently for me to put these "purely biological issues" behind me and talk at last about "truly
meaningful human goals". But remember that all human activity supervenes on the process of Life,
without which it could not exist -- and there are potential repercussions for uppity organisms. If their
idiosyncratic goals interfere with the real business of Life, they are likely to die out.
Evidence for this comes in at least three varieties: the existence of so few non-human species
known to pursue non-biological goals; the innocuous irrelevance to biological ends that surviving
non-biological goals (such as a packrat's acquisitiveness with respect to shiny trinkets, perhaps) display;
and our universal judgment that some goals simply don't make sense -- such as Gibbard's example of
starving oneself to death in order to look thin (166), or regularly choosing a drugged stupor in
preference to social, productive, or intellectual pursuits, etc.
I have argued that a simple fact about the fundamental nature of Life (that it is nothing more than
the process of begetting begetters) entails the existence of one kind of intrinsic value (the
perpetuation of Life as a process); that another form of intrinsic value has been derived therefrom
(living, the process of maintaining a homeodynamic integrity as a system of material
organization); that certain states of affairs harmful or beneficial to the existence and propagation of
Life and lives have instrumental value, negative or positive (as do actions concerning them);
that 'human values' -- truth, beauty, happiness, compassion, generosity, love, etc. -- are
naturally pursued as ends in themselves, but are actually derived from instrumental values, and that
to claim intrinsic value for them is problematic at best.
Plato asked whether acts are good because God has chosen them, or God has chosen them
because they are good. We have been asking whether something is good because we value it, or we
value it because it is good. Our Galilean account takes the latter view, casting the general attitude of
valuing as an evolutionary response to objective value.
This is not to say that we have evolved a specific response to each thing we value; far from it. We
respond to kinds of value (or to resemblances to such kinds of value) that have been of
recurrent importance to our forebears -- and upon which natural selection could therefore operate. If
we value things truly valuable to us, and act in response to our valuing, then we are more likely to
attain the objects of our valuing, and benefit from them. This is a lawlike relation among variables: the
individual, a kind of object, the attitude of valuing, and some benefit to the individual (a
valence, about which a metatheoretical explanation is forthcoming).
But does all of the foregoing really apply to modern humans? Even if I have made a convincing
case against subjective value from an evolutionary perspective, there is still the question as to what our
modern, non-biological values are all about. Modern humans value things that were not part of their
ancestors' world, but a Galilean must seek some sort of roundabout evolutionary explanation of why
they are valued.
With subjective value, the object of preference may turn out to have objective value -- and we
expect evolution to have forced subjectivity to conform to objective value regarding the important
aspects of the environments our ancestors inhabited. In such situations, we might say that subjective
value is inductively justified by the repeated presence of corresponding objective value. This sort of
justification is not available, however, for subjective value attached to comparatively novel things and
situations.
But my love of chocolate, for example, can still be explained in terms of certain established values
of my forebears. I have inherited a taste for sweets and fats (both high-energy foods with biological
utility) and a preference for feeling good (neurochemical reinforcement of whatever behaviors led to
my current state); I value those things. Chocolate is sweet and fatty, and contains anti-depressant and
stimulant ingredients (theobromine, caffeine, and perhaps others) -- and so, absent countervailing
negative components of the chocolate experience (say, weight gain), I will naturally value chocolate.
This is only one example of a relatively simple exaptation, but our Galilean commitments require
that we seek similar explanations for any other modern values that aren't directly attributable to
evolutionary adaptation.
© 1997, 1999 Kent B. Van Cleave
All Rights Reserved.
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