David Wong, on cracked.com writes

“Global warming is going to get really bad in 30 or 40 years, mass starvation, the whole bit.”

“So? I won’t be alive for that. I’m already 72 years old.”

“but… you should care about your fellow man even if it doesn’t benefit you!”

“That’s a false emotional impression, left over from our ancient herd instinct. Surely you’re not saying that it’s ‘better’ to care about your fellow man than not to.”

“Of course I am! People will die if you don’t!”

“So you say it’s better that people live than die? Why?”

“It just is!”

I was shocked and disappointed. He believed in this invisible, unmeasurable force called “better” as much as he believed in man’s equally-unmeasurable ability to discern and act on the “better” thing and that “it just is” right do that “better” thing when given the chance. He believed in things science can’t quantify.

Wong comes up with some interesting ideas about determinism and the subjectivity of what we think of as fact. He points out that even ideas in which humans can find common ground are still not necessarily universal Truths. Commentary about what is ‘right’, ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about genocide or climate change are just as arbitrary as saying that ‘pizza is the best food.’

He says that these ideas are vestigial relics of our evolutionary history, from a time when people lived in herds and relied on each other for their direct survival.

However, these types of behaviors are not ‘vestigial’ and are just as applicable as our hunter/gathering days.

Humans have evolved in a system were the cost of coercion is cheap, and so non-cooperators who seek to benefit without giving anything can be easily shunned. This forced cooperation in the face of ostracism directed the evolution of non-kin dependent social breeding. Our uniquely long stages of development, which gives human brains and bodies time to grow, absolutely requires the strength and protection of a large social unit. Such a social unit can only be formed by individuals cooperating regardless of genetic relatedness.

That is not to say that we evolved in a communist society void of individualism, but the idea that any human can be successful (in the complete darwinian sense) without the support of a large social unit is utterly absurd, even and especially in modern society. The development of (relatively) new technologies have drawn humans closer together than ever before in evolutionary history. The modern state provides protection whole orders of magnitudes greater than the ancient human village, and our ability to coerce fellow humans is even stronger, and quantitatively so.

So while we can recognize the fact that there are no ultimate (big T) Truths in regards to what humans ‘ought’ to be doing, this fact is largely irrelevant.

The differences between us humans and other animals is that our actions can have large scale impacts on this planet and its species. And since evolution directs us to behave in a manner that should optimize our darwinian fitness, we should behave in a way that enables us to bring up healthy children in a clean world, because out children’s fitness is directly related to our own.

So, while a single 72 year old male may not particular be concerned with the problems that could threaten the darwinian fitness of other people’s children, modern society has the ability to make him care. Because his continued survival depends upon the will of the rest of the human community. Despite this, if he still believes that his life has ‘no value’ in any ultimate objective way, his design information probably has other ‘ideas’ and proximate methods for directing his behavior, especially since he could have some cousins floating around somewhere out there, which happen to carry 1/8 the same genetic information as itself.

That’s besides for the fact that if some human came to evolve the belief that reproduction did not matter in the, ultimate objective sense, and opted out, such a genetically encoded behavior would die out within that generation.

So while I politically support a limited, libertarian state, we must recognize that human evolution has created a species dependent on other unrelated members of the species for survival. In this way, we are all responsible for our collective actions, even if some of us only express it in a small way. Hiding behind statements such as “there is no moral objectivity anyway, so I choose passivity” will not work, because the non-kin social cooperators that you depend on demand that you care, especially when it comes to problems in the surrounding community. In fact, the very people that claim to choose passivity are often the first to try to the direct the actions of others, demonstrating that they do, in fact, care what moral compass others in the community use.

Of course, I am not saying everyone should be (or can be) a professional philanthropist or should sacrifice personal well-being for some ‘common good’ because humans, in a Malthusian world, did not evolve that way either. But it does mean that we shouldn’t look upon our humanity as some meaningless void without rhyme or reason, because while there might not be any ‘ultimate point’ to mankind, our ’subjective points’ are still meaningful, as our very existence evolved from them and our continued existence depends on them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 9:32 pm and is filed under evolution, link out, musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.