Reactions to ‘Evolution and [...]’ by Timothy Dean

a paper and a thesis

Dean, Timothy: 
 ——— “Evolution and Moral Diversity.” The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. Vol. 7: Morality and the cognitive sciences (2012): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.4148/BIYCLC.V7I0.1775 [and via academia.edu] 
———. Evolution and Moral Ecology. Doctor of Philosophy, UNSW, 2014. https://www.academia.edu/9655354/Evolution_and_Moral_Ecology. 

First I’ll have a quick look at the doctorate’s table of contents.

Looks like the paper might be the “aha moment” in the PhD candidate’s movement. The last sections in the thesis are

                        17.3: From moral ecology to moral dynamics 
                        17.3.1: Moral dynamics.

I’ll have to spend more time than this reaction allows, so there is likely to be a part two as I actually get into the thesis.

Diversity was one of my main queries when I did my masters, that and power, the latter lead to a chain of interviews, and diversity just lead to a map or index of wonders. So what next? This is what Timothy Dean begins to address.

Diversity, in terms of control, is often the main administrative enemy because human attention is small, small as in not good at a range of things occurring in a multi-dimensional extent of action and reaction across time and space. Thus wanna-be emperors of empire or local HOAs often feel there is too much going on, so the need to shrink diversity in the name of order is a very strong impulse. Delegation only gets you so far.

However, diversity is also the highway to the fairs of wisdom and empathy. While it is necessary to accommodate others in growing up oneself into empathy, an acknowledgement of diversity is vital in raising one’s own children. However similar they are never really mini-me-s. Wisdom is gained in the by-ways of empathy.

This is why diversity is part of the getting of wisdom in some traditions like Pyrrhonism. Diversity can challenge dogma, if not totally undermine its conceits. This is why would-be emperors name the sin of heresy after choice, or in modern parlance, options. Generally this diversity is indexed to a geographical map, or the past. Those foreign cities or countries where they do things differently.

Where empires do away with this diversity they lose a highway to wisdom. Empires hate mental effort, in addition, royal inbreeding reduces the capability to do that, if only because it reduces variability of types one must learn to live with, something that critics of democracy never admit. (This is how Stoicism prepared the way for Catholicism).

So it is interesting to turn to moral philosophy which begins with a question about diversity. I now turn to read the paper.

ABSTRACT: If humans have an evolved moral psychology, then we should not expect it to function in an identical way between individuals. Instead, we should expect a diversity in the function of our moral psychology between individuals that varies along genetic lines, and a corresponding diversity of moral attitudes and moral judgements that emerge from it. This is because there was no one psychological type that would reliably produce adaptive social behaviour in the highly heterogeneous environments in which our minds evolved. As such, there was no single psychological type towards which evolution could gravitate. Instead we evolved a stable polymorphism of psychological types, maintained by frequency-dependent selection, each predisposed towards particular social and moral attitudes and behaviours. This can help explain the existence of moral diversity, particularly intra-cultural moral diversity, and seemingly intractable moral disagreement.

So this is about the reality of psychological diversity, a parallel to the genetic diversity of individuals in any population in which evolution is possible. Diversity of types is a given in evolution, c.f. Variability. But why does it not go away (despite the local emperor’s efforts), i.e. becoming a ‘stable polymorphism’ which we can also call the world (ooh a new definition for ‘the world’ = a moral ecology of niche constructors when inter-group competition is low-key).

I have always felt, since reading Mary Douglas 30 years ago, that not only does the diversity explain itself [arises in our variability as individuals in a population], it also makes sure in the confusion of many options, that the variability is maintained through time (culture), even when they are of no current use (old gods) but that conflict and in particular co-operating in order to disagree, is the process by which we maintain diversity of options in order to survive, using that process. Moral ecology indeed.

The emperor’s peace then becomes no such thing. No just does the search for stability or order lead to change, enforcing order changes everything.

In addition the conflicts give rise to new options, new solutions, new innovations, including the ability, once-upon-a-time, to co-opt conflict into co-operation, or at least pro-social outcomes, despite intentions, despite parasites like narcissists. Truly their egos are unimportant to the world they cannot perceive.

I.E. selfishness needs no explanation, no apology, it’s just part of the background noise.

Other points in actually reading the paper

The paper has a good run down, or up, of the diversity of alignments with conservative vis-a-vis risk and stability based on WEIRD data.

A good section on the evolution of social cognition, wherein it can become seen that problem solving other people, is not the solution so much as a problem that does the solving of other issues (prosocially) That’s how I see it without getting bogged down the in the minecraft crafting of logical conundrums in an available tech-tree of game theory and economics (WEIRD Homo economicus).

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The paper ends with :

“The next step will be to put this theorised association between psychological variation and moral diversity to the test. The research in political psychology is intriguing, but it is not asking the same questions as moral psychology. However, I strongly suspect that should moral psychologists develop the appropriate tests, they will find that variation in psychology and personality will contribute to variation in moral judgement and behaviour. We just need to go out and see.”

I’ll have a look at the thesis next to see where Timothy Dean got to.