Arguments for traditional moral progress

Buchanan and Powell agree we are unfit to deal with the present challenges of unprecedented technological advancement. Notwithstanding, in its strongest form, their argument concludes we do not need moral enhancement to solve this problem because traditional moral progress is a more effective and safer solution. Their main argument is that our evolved morality is not inflexible enough to frustrate traditional attempts towards moral progress.

Buchanan and Powell claim that moral enhancement advocates (whom they call evoliberals) and their opposition (evoconservatives) share the evolutionary assumption that our evolved moral traits are sufficiently innate and inflexible to make substantial moral progress via traditional means impossible, although the two groups draw opposing conclusions. Once we reject the assumption that human nature is sufficiently inflexible to justify a pessimistic view of the prospects of moral progress, the positions of both moral enhancement advocates and evoconservatives are refuted. The two authors proceed to then argue against this assumption both in theory and in practice.

Theoretically, the fact that our moral dispositions are evolved adaptations does not justify the claim that they are insufficiently flexible. An explanation can concern either the history or the current state of its explanandum; explanations can be either diachronic or synchronic. Suppose we wish to explain the way the human heart is divided into its four chambers. If we say the human heart has four chambers because it evolved out of a common ancestor with a three-chambered heart as an adaptation for better cardiovascular efficiency because an additional chamber better separates oxygenated from deoxygenated blood, that is a diachronic explanation. If we instead say the human heart has two small chambers and two large ones, that oxygenated blood flows from the lungs to the upper left chamber to the bottom left and to the body and so on, that is a synchronic explanation. A synchronic explanation provides factors immediately responsible for its explanandum, a diachronic explanation provides the distant historical factors; the former offers proximate causes, whereas the latter distal causes. Accordingly, Buchanan and Powell argue that evolutionary theories provide only a diachronic explanation that relies on a distant history in order to draw conclusions about the evolved function of certain traits. These traits require a synchronic explanation to be fully understood. That is, evolutionary accounts explain why a certain, otherwise unlikely, biological configuration becomes recurrent by showing how it is an evolutionary adaptation to recurrent past evolutionary pressures. It does not produce an explanation of all the current aspects of the trait. The fact that a trait has a function in order for it to be an adaptation to certain environmental conditions does not entail that the trait cannot be currently modified by culture. In their own words,

The question of moral malleability turns on the nature of morality’s proximate (synchronic) causes, not on its distal (diachronic) causes. In other words, what matters for purposes of gauging the plausibility and durability of moral progress is the nature of the moral psychology we currently possess regardless of how or why morality originated.

Put more technically, synchronic properties, which determine how moralities develop from a complex interaction of genetic, epigenetic and environmental causes, ‘screen off’ diachronic properties in relation to the alterability of human moral psychology.2 (pp 351–352)

Empirically, history is full of examples of substantial moral progress overcoming our moral failings. The two authors cite the abolitionist movements and a decrease in intergroup wars as major examples of what they call the inclusivist anomaly, whereby we expand our sphere of concerns beyond those of our own group. According to them, the standard evolutionary account of human morality says our altruistic propensities are necessarily parochial, as humans were subjected to the pressures of intergroup competition, which selected only groups who were able to cooperate internally while competing with outgroups whenever necessary. An unrestricted tendency towards cooperation would have been disadvantageous and selected against.10 The fact that human societies have been able to develop higher levels of moral sensibility for outgroups, undergoing structural changes for their sake, shows that culture can produce moral progress despite going against our evolved inclinations. The authors also offer an evolutionary explanation for this inclusivist anomaly, claiming that under conditions of low environmental stress, such as the absence of intergroup conflict, violence, scarcity or parasites, it is actually advantageous to be able to cooperate with outgroups. They argue that our evolved morality is plastic and can be moulded by culture much more than both evoliberals and evoconservatives suggest. Therefore, it seems their main point of disagreement is over the flexibility of our evolved morality and not necessarily over whether or not it was shaped by natural selection.

Their argument claims that a belief in an insurmountable obstacle for traditional means of moral progress is flawed, because it is based on an inaccurate view of how evolution shaped human morality. Their conclusion is that:

We agree with the evoliberals headline that there is an ‘Urgent need to enhance the moral character of humanity’, but we do not think that BME [ie, moral enhancement] is likely to be a very effective and plausible means by which to do so.2 (p 373)

Later on, they clarify that this conclusion does not solely dominate their assessment and that they do not advocate for dismissing moral enhancement entirely. However, they clearly judge moral enhancement to be a much inferior solution to traditional moral progress. In order to evaluate their objection to moral enhancement, their arguments for moral enhancement not being a ‘very effective and plausible means’ should be investigated by themselves . This conclusion requires a significant degree of certainty over which means of moral progress to pursue. I will argue we lack such certainty. The arguments for claiming that traditional moral progress alone can yield the unparalleled and much-needed level of moral progress in order to meet our radically new environment are not that certain. They present convincing arguments in favour of moral progress as an effective way of improving some moral failings, but their arguments do not justify the claim that traditional moral progress should be preferred to meet the unprecedented challenges posited by modern technology and society. I will list several reasons to be uncertain of their reasoning; I do not intend to offer a refutation of their arguments, but to cast doubt over how sure we can be of their conclusion that we should favour traditional moral progress alone or place a substantially greater emphasis on it. Their conclusion requires two claims, that technological moral enhancement is not required to produce the necessary moral progress and that traditional forms will be sufficient. I will now analyse them separately.

Is moral enhancement needed if morality is flexible?

Regarding their first claim, some degree of flexibility does not mean moral enhancement is unnecessary. One can make the argument for moral enhancement without assuming that human morality is extremely inflexible. An advocate of the moral enhancement project does not need to claim that moral traits are inflexible, only that some of them might be sufficiently hard to change via cultural means so as to justify the pursuit of technological modification.

Buchanan and Powell’s first major example of the inclusivist anomaly is the abolition of slavery, which was a long process met with extreme resistance, even in the form of wars. Moral enhancement via technological intervention might present a less costly and bloody means to achieve such moral progress. If abolitionists could have developed a technology that would help slavery advocates to perceive slaves as human beings equal to themselves, this could have prevented the American Civil War.⁵ Perhaps we can avoid the bloodshed that could be implied by enforcing an expansion of basic human rights in populations that currently oppose granting those rights to people of all genders, sexual orientations or races. Moreover, it seems that treating members of all groups with some basic concern for their freedom and well-being might indeed have been advantageous in those periods in the prehistoric environment that were relatively peaceful and disease free. Historical examples might only reveal cases of moral progress that consisted of merely shifting which moral traits we exhibited rather than overcoming them. Under certain stable and peaceful environments, being able to coordinate trade and mating between groups would produce higher fitness and there is, in fact, plenty of evidence that early humans engaged in such exchanges.11 But, under this explanation, respect towards outgroups evolved only to the extent that it enabled such basic trading. The extremely high levels of large-scale cooperation necessary for overcoming the extreme risks listed in the second section seem to go much further beyond a basic respect for outgroups and what would have been selected for in our ancestral environment. Therefore, moral enhancement would remain a desirable option in place of traditional costly moral progress even when this moral progress is possible via traditional means, and the extreme and unparalleled levels of moral progress required might be unattainable via traditional means, simply because a reason for them was wholly absent during our evolutionary history.

Buchanan and Powell would have to offer a decisive argument to show that such levels of moral progress are feasible via traditional means, and attainable with lower costs than via technological intervention. The fact that human morality is sensitive to cues present in our evolutionary past is no such argument. As far as one of their prime examples indicates, the abolition of slavery, it is an argument that certain types of moral progress seem to be achievable via traditional means only after much bloodshed. In the next section, another of their exemplary cases of the inclusivist anomaly will be called into question as well.

Traditional moral progress may not be enough

Their second claim that traditional moral progress is sufficient is also not securely established. First, it is worth noting that a defender of moral enhancement need not claim that traditional moral progress is unlikely, only that it can be helped by non-traditional technological interventions. Moreover, as I will argue, there is significant room for disagreement regarding how easily we can overcome obstacles to moral improvement without directly interfering with our evolved biology. For instance, even one of the most notable past instances of successful traditional moral progress mentioned by Buchanan and Powell, the abolition of slavery, has not been carried out without its shortcomings.

It is plausible that much of our moral progress has come about via accidental and non-moral advances. For instance, the lower frequency of wars does not seem to be solely caused by moral progress. Buchanan and Powell might concede as much and claim some of this reduction was not caused by moral progress proper but merely improvements from a moral point of view; that is, improvements that lead to a morally better situation but that are not improvements in our morality. However, if it is the case that there are significant alternative causes for the reduction in armed conflict aside from moral progress, and that moral progress made only a minor contribution, then one of their key examples of moral progress fails. Indeed, more rigorous work on nations’ proclivity towards war argues that this has increased in modern times, and that the fact that wars have decreased is a consequence of nations now being more spread out.12 That is, nations are avoiding war against each other not because they have become more peaceful, but because they have become, on average, more distantly placed.⁶ One may argue that what really matters is the actual frequency of wars. However, intuitively, peace seems to mean a state where people are intentionally not committing violence and not just doing so extrinsically. A prison might have lower violence than a certain neighbourhood, but it might still not be considered a more peaceful place exactly because the individual proclivity towards violence is higher despite the fact that violence itself is not. Proclivity matters for morality. One of the most convincing examples the two authors cite might plausibly be an unintentional consequence of the technological capability to spread across the globe; an improvement from a moral point of view but not moral progress proper.

Although there is an overall trend of decreased violence throughout human history, conflicts have been more sporadic from modernity until now, but also deadlier and more focused on non-combatants who are likely to be under-represented in statistics and whose killing is a greater atrocity. World War II has been the deadliest conflict in human history, with the highest death toll per year, both as a percentage of the global population and in absolute terms.13 Approximately half of those killed were non-combatants, which decreases the reliability of the data. Recent violence has taken a fat-tailed distribution, one in which there is a low probability of extreme events that are hard to predict. Statistical analysis that takes this into account concludes we cannot assume our recent peaceful period after the world wars resulted from a real trend of decreased violence instead of a trend of more sporadic, but deadlier, violence.14 Moreover, even the relatively peaceful period after World War II seems to have come accompanied by the new risk of nuclear annihilation and may have partially resulted from it due to nuclear deterrence.

The two authors suggest this recent decrease in wars was brought about by the rise of liberal democracies, which are less likely to engage in conflicts than more centralised governments. Suppose we grant this claim and reject the plausible possibilities that conflicts have either become unlikelier but deadlier or unlikelier unintentionally. When it comes to technologies with the potential for global or existential catastrophe, it is not enough that on average societies have been shifting away from overly centralised power structures and closer to liberal democracies. However, for a worryingly high risk of global catastrophe to remain, it is enough for one rogue nation to gain access to these technologies. The claim by advocates of strong moral enhancement that moral enhancement alone is necessary and sufficient in order to solve our moral failings requires the assumption that everyone will take their moral pills. On the other hand, Buchanan and Powell’s claim requires the assumption that every society with access to powerful technologies will be a liberal democracy.

The costs of spreading moral progress across the globe are not trivial. They cite the spread of liberal democracies as a primary example of this. However, one of the latest intentional attempts to spread democracy, the Iraq War, has cost the world over $1 trillion15 and hundreds of thousands of human lives.16 The total wealth possessed by all Irish nationals and their government is less than that value.17 Just in financial costs alone, implementing democracy in one rogue nation can cost more than the total economic value of one advanced nation. Although the costs are hard to estimate, it is challenging to conceive how implementing a form of moral enhancement that reduces outgroup aggression in one rogue nation would have cost more than $1 trillion or incur more violations of basic rights than the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings (of whom a significant percentage were innocent civilians). One might claim that this is an extreme example of failure for traditional moral progress, but we cannot ignore such cases. As mentioned, it is enough to have one rogue nation with access to powerful technologies in order to jeopardise a global effort to reduce extreme risks to humanity.

Buchanan and Powell’s claim that a trait’s synchronic aspects (the current state of a trait) screen off diachronic aspects (the history of a trait) is given as support for their rejection of ‘evoliberals’ reliance on evolutionary history. It ultimately supports their rejection of a need for moral enhancement due to evolved inflexibility. However, although the claim is true, it does not actually support their conclusion. They argue that such a claim enables them to say that the current state contains more possibilities than the causal/evolutionary history would suggest, rendering evolutionary explanations less relevant than a trait’s current state. But if the diachronic aspects are constrained (screened off) by the trait’s synchronic states, the latter must contain fewer possibilities than the former. This is the case even on a colloquial usage of the term. For instance, when patients are screened off from a certain medical evaluation, fewer patients remain at the end of the screening procedure. A constraining process, screening off, reduces the number of possibilities. In the case of evolution, the diachronic explanation entails that current traits must be an evolved solution to some recurrent evolutionary challenge, but there is a wide range of possible solutions to any given proposed challenge. A full synchronic account would provide a complete description of a current trait, thus screening off which one of those possible solutions came to be realised. But if evolutionary theory is correct, then it cannot give an account that is impossible according to evolution. If current states really contained more possibilities than aetiological history would suggest, then we would have to find violations of evolutionary theory everywhere. We would have to find possibilities not suggested by evolutionary theory, traits that would not have evolved as the result of past evolutionary pressures. Rather, we find traits that are the realisation of one possible solution, out of many, to recurrent evolutionary challenges. Of course, most of these solutions are suboptimal and complex, this is within the possibilities of natural selection and to be expected.

Diachronic explanations are of little relevance compared with detailed synchronic explanations when deciding if and how it is technically feasible to carry out a focused intervention. A surgeon intending to operate on a human heart would not know where to cut if he was relying on an evolutionary explanation of why the human heart was selected to have its current configuration. A competent surgeon needs a detailed physiological and anatomical model of the human heart, a synchronic account. Evidently, evolutionary accounts can sometimes help elucidate the possible reasons behind the human heart’s current configuration, but they are merely auxiliary. However, when it comes to interventions that will have intergenerational or societal consequences, we often look into history. The distant past might be irrelevant when determining if and how it is technically feasible to change a specific feature of our immune system, but the reasons this feature evolved matter for assessing the long-term consequences of this change. For example, suppose it is the case that dust and seafood allergies are caused by the misfiring of a feature of our immune system that evolved to defend us against being poisoned by certain animals that went extinct.⁷ Then we have reasons to expect that deactivating such a feature would be beneficial. If, however, we were to discover that this feature evolved to protect us against some once lethal but now dormant pathogen, then we have reasons to expect that deactivating this feature would be dangerous. We might have a full synchronic account of this specific feature of our immune system with all its physiological and molecular detail, but without at least hypothesising about its evolutionary history we would fail to see how such a feature protects us against a dormant pathogen. Only evolutionary history would reveal that this feature evolved to protect us against a currently inactive pathogen. Removing this feature would render our immune system defenceless against a lethal pathogen that might become active in the future. Again, if diachronic aspects are ‘screened off’ by synchronic states, the latter must contain fewer possibilities than the former. Thus, a trait’s evolutionary history can inform us even when we have a full synchronic account. When intervening in a feature that can have consequences over long time periods, diachronic explanations become more relevant because they can reveal how that feature is likely to change across time. In that respect, moral progress is more like intervening in the immune system and less like heart surgery. Whether traditional or not, moral progress does not consist of focused interventions whose consequences are immediate and easily identifiable; its repercussions are intergenerational and complex. Moreover, moral progress directly engages with safeguarding and enabling the flourishing of humankind. It is no surprise that more profound and ultimate explanations should be more heavily involved.

Given their extensive use of historical examples, Buchanan and Powell are likely to agree that moral progress is not akin to focused interventions. One way to make sense of their claim that synchronic explanations are what matters when intervening with moral psychology is that human history is so recent that it can be considered to contain only proximate events. Perhaps, for them, whatever happened before human civilisations emerged are distal events which are the concern of diachronic explanations such as human evolution, and whatever happened after are proximate events which are the concern of synchronic explanations such as human history. It seems counterintuitive to place human history with the set of synchronic explanations, thus putting interventions with historical consequences closer to heart surgery than to changes in our immune system. More importantly, their strict separation between diachronic and synchronic explanations gives insufficient weight to the fact that moral traits have been subjected to evolutionary forces from the Pleistocene period to contemporary history, and that inclusivist moralities are also adaptive strategies coevolving with more ancient moral traits, and as such are subject to environmental cues only to the extent that they had been selected for in our most recent evolutionary history. They correctly identify inclusivist tendencies that would arise in the absence of human and non-human threats, but do not mention that such a response, also being an adaptation, cannot be completely freely shaped by cultural moral progress. As discussed, we may have evolved an adaptation that enables us to have a basic respect for outgroups in safe environments, but it seems unlikely that we could have evolved the degree of large-scale cooperation necessary to overcome the extreme risks listed here.

A significant part of the traditional moral progress achieved by human civilisation has also been carried out by changing our genes and, consequently, biochemistry. There is substantial empirical evidence that human evolution has continued since the Pleistocene,18 and has accelerated.19 Scientists expect that this was primarily a result of increased sexual selection,20 which more heavily selects based on social behaviour than other forms of natural selection. There is preliminary evidence that several of those selective forces have, in fact, influenced genes connected to social behaviour21; and hence to moral behaviour as well. Therefore, a strict preference for traditional methods instead of technological moral enhancement does not result in leaving the biological basis of morality untouched, but in letting it be manipulated via cultural means alone. If biological changes form part of the mechanisms through which past moral progress has been realised, then the argument against intervening in our moral traits cannot use past successful moral advances as its basis. Altering the biological basis of our moral traits has been one of the means through which moral progress has happened. While moral progress might have been intentional, its consequences for moral traits were not and took centuries to effect. Why should we strongly prefer slow and unplanned alterations over technological interventions? If sexual selection has been one primary driver of the recent changes in our moral traits exerted by traditional moral progress, then rejecting technological means of directly intervening in our moral traits amounts to a strong partiality for sexual selection over technological manipulation as a means of changing moral traits. The argument for preferring sexual selection over careful and intentional technological manipulation allied with traditional methods is difficult to make. It seems unlikely that our sexual preferences alone would be a factor more conducive to human flourishing or reducing extreme risks than sexual preference paired with intentional technological manipulation of moral traits. In fact, Bostrom has argued that in the absence of a globally coordinated policy to control human evolution, uncontrolled evolution will lead to the elimination of the kinds of beings we care about.22