REACTION: Bertini's 'Introduction The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics: From Animal Prosociality to Human Morality'
A list of reactions to other evolution~morality papers and chapters and textual matter can be found at Reactions to papers on evolution~morality.
This post is crossposted at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com.
Bertini, Daniele. 2020. ‘Introduction The Evolutionary Approach to Ethics: From Animal Prosociality to Human Morality’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12(3). DOI:10.24204/EJPR.V12I3.3411 [via academia.edu or philarchive.org]
This paper was chosen next because of the word prosociality which wikipedia captures as Prosocial behaviour and wherein Daniel Batson is quoted:
the term "was created by social scientists as an antonym for antisocial."[22]
Apparently actual intention to do good is not required, so culpability is not necessary either I guess, but the behaviour results in benefits to people or society as a whole. This is a curious index, an outcome akin to some moral judgement is used as an index to judge non-intentional deeds or movements.
Comparing this term prosociality with worlding I see the lack of intentional stance is common to both. However on this foray into exploring a, for me, new word, I was hoping to see more on the general drive to socialize behaviour, and not that the behaviour was good for ‘society’. That even introverts are likely to do once they have ‘recharged’ their people-battery, even if it to just chill and say little.
Prosociality does not look like to be the word for that drive or inclination. If it was lacking then that would be possible described as asocial rather than anti-social, as both prosocial and anti-social behaviour are drawn to interact in a social context or arena, regardless of intention.
I.E. antisocial behaviour has to respond or target some social elements or rituals, just as prosocial does.
If somebody was asocial there would be no anti-social or prosocial behaviour per se by them. What then is the word for the opposite of asocial?
The smart answer here is ‘social’. But if I just said that no one would know what I was talking about because of the fish-in-water perspective.
Abstract. Evolutionary research on the biological fitness of groups has recently given a prominent value to the role that prosocial behaviors play in favoring a successful adaptation to ecological niches. Such a focus marks a paradigm shift. Early views of evolution relied on the notion of natural selection as a largely competitive mechanism for the achievement of the highest amount of resources. Today, evolutionists from different schools think that collaborative attitudes are an irremovable ingredient of biological change over time. As a consequence, a number of researchers have been attracted by evolutionary studies of human behaviors. Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals (particularly primates) can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality. Others deny one or the other of these claims, or both. The papers in the present special issue address how these topics impact ethics and religion.Okay, so this is the same context of evolutionary contexts I want for the opposite of asocial. This is behaviour directed towards being with others one should be competing with because they are the most similar to ourselves.
Some think that a continuity among prosocial attitudes of human beings and other social mammals (particularly primates) can be detected, and that this fact has relevance for accounting for human morality.
But they already call it prosocial, so already we have leaped over the gap. How do we get to social in the first place. Obviously it is yet another continuity. But.
The introduction begins with Bertini telling a shaggy dog story. This introduces his introduction to the special issue. The rest of the introduction works as context/s for the papers in the special issue.
We get a description of traditionalist Darwinians which “holds that evolutionism denies the legitimacy of the cognitive and behavioral strength and validity of ethics.” They often debunk morality religion etc. so things likely prosociality tool kits including altruism, tolerance, theory of mind, are to be regarded as hiding actually selfish toolkits (as yet no discussion of social toolkits… —social as in opposite of asocial).
Certainly narcissists would agree with that, having as they do, no insight into empathy and that everything is really a selfish binary war (perhaps it would be better to call them empathophasic in line with those who have no mind’s eye (aphantasic) or no inner voice (endophasia). The empathophasic would then be a type of Kosmophasic if empathy is a requirement for worlding.
Bertini then classifies and labels two groups working on prosociality with an evolutionary context,
“second and the third paradigms in evolutionary research on morality are bound together on account of their respective distance from traditional Darwinism. I will label the former as Unorthodox Darwinism and the latter as the Continuist View. Both fronts hold that morality (and religions as well) is the outcome of evolutionary mechanisms. However, contrary to traditional Darwinism, they reject the claim that the evolutionary origin of ethics should debunk its legitimacy”
and
“The difference among the two consists in that, while the Unorthodox Darwinian holds that prosociality is a by-product of evolution - which reveals it as having an adaptive value in increasing the biological fitness of social animals, and, accordingly, develops peculiarly in different species-, the Continuist View theorist thinks that any prosocial behavior is related to empathy, and empathy is embodied by either an interspecific mechanism of hormonal regulation or the related mechanisms of different species.”
This makes me a continuist.
Apparently the Continuist View is attacked by both evolutionary biologists (perhaps even because of Gould’s separate magisteria sort) and moral philosophers (who harp on about what I regard as a derivative value, e.g. duty) (and who I often regard as minecraft players).
At this point Frans de Waals gets a mention as the leading proponent of the Continuist View and there is some feathering of this view towards and away from among those dutifully bound by their Kantian logicks.
In his discussion Bertini works through:
dichotomy between moral actions and the intention of performing it (go back above to where I used the word culpability),
Bertini's empirical sympathy for evolution in relation to moral philosophy as a must-see,
such that the dichotomy is answered by relying “on the principle that the peculiar manner in which something is exemplified affects the content of exemplification in some way”
such that “even if you hold (as I do) that morality is not to be completely accounted for by a natural history of the evolution of its ingredients, the way these ingredients concur to actualizing a moral action determines at least the phenomenology of the occurrence.”
‘genealogical relations’ gets a guernsey
“there is no clear reason to resist the tendency to consider prosociality and norms of kindness and sociability as fundamental expressions of our interests for caring for others, and to evaluate caring for others as a fundamental ethical phenomenon which falls within the core territory of morality”
Tradcore Darwinism and moral philosophy get a going over again for their lack of prosociality towards each other (while, I add, still engaging in the opposite of asocial in the noyaux). This tradcore repeat introduces some more of the papers in the special issue.
As does the riffing on Unorthodox Darwinians’ view on prosociality's by-product nature (a happy accident I guess, not particularly parsimonious I feel). Some under this Unorthodox Darwinian label hold a partial continuity between animal prosociality and human altruism is possible. But Bertini says that Continuists should read Celglie's paper and answer his arguments, as well as Pinsent who uses eating as an example of common ground between humans and animals to critique the continuist view.
As I use a hunger metaphor (hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake) as the basis of my own framework, I wonder if I have already answered Pinsent's argument… will have to read that one.
Bertini finishes, and so shall I, with
In my view, reasonings of this kind demonstrate how far evolutionary research on prosociality can push open-minded inquirers of morality, religions, and typically human attitudes and behaviors.