Battle of the Gods: Moral Conflict in the United States

Abstract: 

In this paper, I explore the neuroscientific, evolutionary, developmental, and social roots of moral conflict in the United States. I begin by exploring how moral systems are inherently derived from intuitions, and their explanations are post hoc rationalizations. I then emphasize why morality and political behavior is more accurately explored through ethological analyses. I also use the ethological analyses and work done by Frans de Waal to make the case that primates have a primordial morality that serves as the basis for human morality. Next, I explore the role Play has in the development of moral systems, societies, and the consequences of improper play on a society. Then, I explore the developmental and evolutionary roots of human behavioral and moral variation and the consequences of such variations on human interactions. Following, I explore the consequences of Rationalism (evidence and reason-based value claims) on societies. I then conclude with a synthesis of the arguments I present in the preceding sections of this paper and a prognosis for the future of America. I finish the paper with pieces of evidence that support the conclusion I draw in Part VI, some ways to change how we develop our moral sentiments, and lastly the utility of sacrifice in the development of the individual and society.

Part I: Introduction – The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Morality

Over the past several months, I have been exploring what it is that makes a moral judgment moral, how moral actors interact with each other, how individual interactions create perturbations that produce group phenomena, and how those group phenomena become fixated in a community, ultimately producing culture. I was compelled to explore this topic at around the time the SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. While I had no specific feeling about the ruling, or its overturning, I was fascinated – if that’s the appropriate word – by the response of both parties involved. The first question I asked, especially as someone who’s studied neuroscience for the past year, was “how is the neurophysiology and anatomy of the brain producing the responses I’m seeing?”. I knew that to begin exploring this question, based on my previous studies, that it would be prudent to start exploring moral phenomena from a psychological, rather than a neuroscientific perspective. The mechanisms mean very little if those physiological processes do not map onto a set of behaviors that are capable of being conceptualized as matters of the psyche, i.e., not expressly matters of neurophysiology. And so, with this in mind, I turned to the best-known moral psychologist I was aware of: Jonathan Haidt. 

I began with Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. Upon my reading of the text, I was pleased to discover that, while his start in the field of Moral Psychology was in some sense stochastic and serendipitous, his passion for Moral Psychology as a field was driven by his desire to help people talk about the things they couldn’t find the words to describe. Like Haidt, I had a desire to explore Moral Psychology to help my fellow Americans, or at least to help myself understand where both parties were coming from. I picked apart Haidt’s book, piece by piece, in my quest to unravel the political strife before my eyes. Yet in doing so, I was left with only more questions. What were the biological roots of morality? How do moral judgments play themselves out between people, groups, and nations? How does the neuroscience of morality relate to political and moral phenomena? While I appreciate Haidt’s work, and will use some of the research he highlighted in his text to clarify my thoughts, develop some theories, and perhaps hypotheses of my own, I still wanted to know more about the topic that had so viscerally captured my attention. 

I then began to study moral judgments, moral philosophy, and the neuroscience of morality. I followed Haidt’s work up with Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality (Joyce, 2006). Contrary to Haidt, thinkers like Joyce do not emphasize the moral emotions as the core foundations for moral decision making and thus are less favorable of arguments stemming from Adam Smith (Smith, 1976/1759) or Hume’s rejection of moral rationalism (Hume, 1960/1777; 1969/1739-40). Instead, Joyce and others, like Joshua Greene, emphasize rationality, with Joyce specifically emphasizing language, not moral sentiments, as the “prerequisite for moral judgment.” I will be upfront in this paper and admit that I do not find this position defendable. Take for example Joyce’s discussion of disgust. 

Joyce seeks to identify the qualitative distinction between visceral disgust and conceptual or contagious disgust (Rozin et al, 1999). Joyce then continues by claiming that “though infants and animals obviously find certain foods distasteful, they exhibit none of the symptoms of extreme offended repulsion that we associate with disgust.” To this claim, I think it is appropriate to ask: what is the difference between “distasteful,” such as a child biting into an exceedingly sour lemon, and extremely offended repulsion, of which such a response may be elicited from biting into an extremely sour lemon. In other words, the salient and qualitative difference between the two phenomena is equivocal. While variants of sentiments may emerge due to contextualized experiences, such as the many ways we can express Love in different languages (e.g., Greek), this doesn’t deprive the underlying sentiment of its animating and compelling force. 

I then followed Joyce’s work up with a book titled Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Liao et al., 2016), which is a collection of essays edited by Liao. The essays in this book use neuroscientific evidence to present philosophical arguments about the neuroscience of morality, explore the neurophysiological and anatomical bases for morality, discuss new methods in moral neuroscience, and present lessons learned from the study of morality through a neuroscientific lens. While there are several authors with whom I agree in this text based on my own understanding of the physiology of the human brain, there are a number of authors with whom I also disagree, Joshua Greene being the foremost. Joshua presents two essays in the text Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality: Why Cognitive (Neuro)Science Matters for Ethics (p. 119) and Reply to Driver and Darwall (p. 170), the latter of which is a response to two other essays in the text that are in response to Joshua Greene by Julia Driver titled The Limits of the Dual-Process View (p. 150) and Getting Moral Wrongness into the Picture (p. 159). These essays are under the second section of the book, Deontology Versus Consequentialism. I think discussing Greene’s take on the rationalist position, or in this case the consequentialist position, will help to show why the rationalists get things so backwards.

He begins by establishing his Central Tension Principle ((Greene, 2014, p. 121): 

The Central Tension Principle: Characteristically deontological judgments are preferentially supported by automatic emotional responses, while characteristically consequentialist judgments are preferentially supported by conscious reasoning and allied processes of cognitive control.

Greene is careful to qualify consequentialist and deontological positions as not merely consequentialist and deontological but characteristically consequentialist and deontological. It is here that we can begin to see Greene’s modus operandi. He does not face ethically consequentialist arguments or deontological arguments as consequentialist and deontological arguments but rather as characteristically consequentialist and deontological positions. He emphasizes that characteristically deontological arguments are framed “in terms of rights, duties, etc.” while characteristically consequentialist arguments are akin to “impartial cost-benefit reasoning.” Greene defines the terms in this manner to help “characterize the tendencies of [the] distinct cognitive systems.” In other words, he wants to get at the idea that the “essence of deontology lies with the automatic settings, and the psychological essence of consequentialism lies with manual mode.” Greene then proceeds to supply a plethora of citations to support his claims about the dual-process theory of moral judgment. 

Greene’s theory heavily emphasizes deliberative thinking in the generation of moral judgements, tacitly suggesting non-deliberative thinking (thinking not governed by intuitions) produce more deontological or rule-based decision making. However, he admits “the point… is not that the dual-process theory predicts every case perfectly, but rather that it captures the general shape of philosophical moral psychology.” I disagree. Once again, this “general shape” produces equivocal conclusions based on highly contextualized evidence such as moral dilemmas proceeding “trick math problems” (Joe Paxton, Tommaso Bruni, and Greene, 2014) or by inducing mirth (Valdesolo and DeSteno 2006, Strohminger et al, 2011), or in clinical cases of patients with damage to the VMPFC (Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex) (Mendez et al., 2005; Moretto et al., 2010; and Thomas et al., 2011) or who exhibit a variant of psychopathic disorder (Koenigs et al., 2012; Glenn, Raine, and Schug 2009; and Glenn, Raine, Schug, and Hauser 2009), or lastly individuals with emotional deficits due to alexithymia (Koven et al., 2011).  If Greene were only making a case for a model of characteristically consequentialist and deontological decisions, this may not be a problem. Instead, he takes this one step further. He asks: “What’s better automatic settings or manual mode?” 

Greene takes a modular route, claiming neither Manual or Automatic responses (Consequential and Deontological respectively) are bad per se, but rather – being modal – are context dependent. He proceeds by arguing that for familiar situations, it is best to use automatic responses, to act on what we have acquired through various sources of information through “genetic transmission, cultural transmission, and learning from personal experience” (p. 131). Thus, for Greene, it is best to use characteristically consequentialist moral decision making on unfamiliar problems, or ones “with which we have inadequate evolutionary, cultural, or personal experience.” It also seems as if what Greene means by automatic responses is that familiar situations were responded to as if one were experienced with the dilemma they were facing. I see no reason why familiar situations -- or situations where it is modularly optimal to respond with an automatic response – imply one ought, or does, respond with a seemingly experience-based, if not in fact experience-based, response; is that only how they’re responding? Nor do I see any reason why, or that it is the case that, unfamiliar situations require or make use of manual, rational thinking (consequentialist decisions); is it the case that unfamiliar situations ought to be responded to with just manual, rational, non-automatic responses, is that even possible; i.e., are we obligated to do something that is impossible? Are the manual responses driven by rational (DLPFC) considerations of the many parameters a scenario may entail or are those parameters (perhaps each differentially) colored, if not outright determined, by sentiment? It is not clear, there is overlap, and where there is overlap, it is best to rely on hands-on, real-world observations of such rationalizations, not models. Haidt enumerates just this kind of work for us in The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012), but also in his research on moral sentiments by emphasizing the post hoc nature of moral reasoning. 

In other words, there’s no clear evidence consequentialist moral judgments are not emotionally laden, post hoc judgments, i.e., in some sense automatic responses. To be fair, Greene does not claim the model perfectly depicts the split in ethics, only that it gets the “general shape.” I think the model, the general shape, is only an artifact of selective evidence. While Greene emphasizes a bi-modal nature of moral judgments with his model, and suggests we make decisions in unfamiliar situations with rational thinking, there’s no clear evidence that rational, evidence based, logical thinking is not colored (if not driven by) automatic responses. I.e., the bi-modal nature of Greene’s model is equivocal, just as Joyce’s claim that language, not sentiments, is the basis for moral judgments is equivocal. Greene responds to an argument that’s similar to my own on page 139 of The Neuroscience of Morality. 

He begins the paragraph with this question: “But, doesn’t act consequentialism ultimately depend on some kind of intuition?” Like Joyce, he relies on qualitative distinctions between different kinds of intuition, e.g., “perceptual, dogmatic, and philosophical.” Here the qualitative differences appear to be more distinct than in Joyce’s argument, but I think they suffer from the same issue. Greene claims Sidgwick’s intuitions “enter consequentialist theory at a very high level (“philosophical” intuition), and not as a reaction to particular actions (“perceptual” intuition) or action types (“dogmatic” intuitions).” Because “act consequentialism is based on a “philosophical” intuition, rather than on “perceptual” or “dogmatic” ones, doesn’t imply that it’s correct,” Greene claims, “but it does shield it from the objection that it’s too tightly yoked to the ups and downs of automatic settings.” To this I ask, is there no overlap between any of these kinds of intuitions, and, where there is intuitional overlap, is that not the kind of intuition that animates moral judgments? I still see no reason, based on my parametric view of moral decision making -- i.e., that a moral arbiter bases his decision on various parameters, some rational and some automatic -- that consequentialist decision making isn’t driven by or “yoked” to automatic responses. In what way, i.e., how are, consequentialist decisions affected by intuition, sentiment, or automatic responses, Greene may ask. The same way any other decision or scenario is affected by the moral sentiments when one assesses or is affected by various parameters. The ask for a qualified kind of intuition takes the argument out of the realm of the observable and testable and places it in the realm of semantics; i.e., if only Greene can get me to qualify just how these intuitions affect consequentialist decisions, he can show how that kind of intuition doesn’t quite animate the moral decision or judgment the way we think it does. I.e., an intuition is an intuition (as Haidt has defined it), and it only obfuscates reality to apply qualitative distinctions to intuitions. Disgust is still disgust even if we define disgust as “distasteful” or “extremely offended repulsion.” The emotion, sentiment, intuition, etc. is still acting as an animating and compelling force. 

Regardless, I did find James Woodward’s essay in this text to be eminently valuable (Woodward, 2016). Like myself, James doubts that there can be a genuine distinction between emotional and cognitive moral judgements and decision-making. James clearly highlights that moral judgements are constructed from cognitive processing that occurs in the emotional areas of the brain. Woodward notes that reason “exerts [an] influence… by modulating an affect-laden value signal that reflects input from other sources (including “emotional” areas) outside of the DLPFC.” I.e., “the DLPFC does not have its own value that somehow supplants or replaces the signal in the VMPFC, so that the DLPFC generates, as it were, purely reason-based valuations.” In other words, the DLPFC, the area highlighted in Greene’s model and responsible for the “manual,” non-automatic, consequentialist decision making is still influenced by areas of the brain responsible for emotion unless other areas of the brain are impaired. This forces us to consider the validity of the notion that “rational” thinking can make use of “reason” to grasp true moral claims without emotional processing; a conception of “Reason” and “Rationale” homologous to the definition of these words provided in Black’s Law Dictionary: 11th Edition (p. 1514). The evidence provided by Woodward through Hare et al. (2009, 2011), however, does not support this conception of “reason.” Just as Haidt identified, and as I have shown through a deconstruction of both Greene and Joyce’s arguments, Woodward shows the empirical evidence does not support a dual-process model, but instead an integrated, networked model (likely a small-world model – Cole et al., 2012 & Reijneveld et al., 2007). Specifically, Woodward states, “other structures that are affective or emotional also play central causal roles in moral judgment and valuing, just as they do in other sorts of valuation [italics added].”

Woodward points out that this doesn’t necessarily defeat the rationalist’s position. They could posit this kind of argument: “the acceptability of moral rationalism turns on whether moral requirements, correct moral judgments and evaluations, and so on, are derivable from considerations supplied by reason.” People don’t have to make moral judgments based on pure reason, logic, or an impartial examination of the evidence, “but as long as such judgments, insofar as long as they are correct, follow from such considerations, that is enough to vindicate moral rationalism.” Yet there’s a significant problem with this kind of argument. Just because there’s a principle, or logical constraint, does not mean a moral judgment necessarily follows from any of those moral principles or logical constraints, or even evidence. Why are there differences in opinion, even when rationalists claim their conclusions are correct? Because the principles they have, their logical considerations, the evidence at their disposal, all are affected by areas of the brain responsible for emotion.

Of note, Woodward is responsible for my conception of moral judgments as parametric evaluations. Woodward’s example of Pedro and Jim is a fascinating demonstration of why trolley problems, a well-known ethical scenario from which Greene derived his dual-model theory, are exceptionally anemic. Here is the scenario: Jim is an explorer in the jungle, and is told by Pedro that he (Pedro) will shoot ten villagers unless Jim shoots one – what would you do if you were Jim; i.e., wouldn’t you pull the lever and kill one person to save five, or push one morbidly obese person onto the tracks to save five? But Woodward points out in his example that to truly respond to this scenario you have to ask numerous questions: e.g., is Pedro telling the truth, what will happen if Jim shoots one of the villagers, how will the other villagers respond, does Pedro get something out of having Jim kill one of the villagers, is Pedro trying to blackmail Jim, how will this affect Jim’s public-image, what is Pedro’s relation to the villagers, what will happen if Jim decides to shoot Pedro instead of the villager, can Jim benefit from turning Pedro in if he kills the ten villagers? Of all the parameters we could use to assess the scenario of Pedro and Jim, why should we only assess whether or not we should kill one villager to save ten, why – like in the trolley problem – should we only take the numerical outcome into account? Clearly, the complexity of moral judgements cannot be constrained purely through rationale, logic, evidence, or principle-based arguments alone; the truly parametric nature of moral decision making in some sense necessitates that we “feel” or intuit how we ought to respond because there are simply too many facts to consider rationally; some of the facts, at least, must be considered intuitively and thus Greene’s model and Joyce’s emphasis on language are insufficient to understand the proximate nature of our moral decisions. Only a model that recognizes the systematic nature of our moral judgments is capable of conceptualizing the physiological processes that give rise to moral judgments. And if I have accurately done the initial work, which is supported by the work of Jonathan Haidt, then it should be clear those moral judgments are rooted in emotions and they are not rational. I.e., our moral judgments are ultimately based on feeling and are not rational, as defined by Black’s Law Dictionary.  

Part II: Ape Political Behavior, Morality, and the A Priori Moral Intuitions 

After my examination of the psychological and neurophysiological processes underpinning moral judgments, I felt as if I still needed to understand what was happening to my fellow Americans. How could the component parts of their neurophysiology explain how they were interacting with each other; how they felt about each other; how they were beginning to treat each other; and how they saw each other? Importantly, how could the behavior, derived from the moral judgments of my fellow Americans be explained? The interactions of the neutrons, protons, and electrons could not explain the movements of the celestial bodies. To answer the new kinds of questions I was beginning to grapple with, I would need, and did, begin to examine them ethologically. But before I could understand human moral behavior, specifically political behavior governed by value (moral) judgments, I needed to examine a less emotionally salient, yet near species: Apes.

I think if one wishes to begin to understand what human political behavior is like, it would help to understand ape political behavior. Specifically, to understand my fellow Americans, I looked to Chimpanzees, the chimpanzees in Frans de Waal’s book, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (De Waal, 1982/2007).  This book opened my eyes to what ape behavior is like, how it plays itself out, how it is measured and analyzed, and just how rich and complex ape and animal behavior in general can be. 

De Waal recognized that dominance comes in two forms: Power and Rank. Power is defined by “who can defeat whom and who weighs in most heavily when a conflict in the group occurs.” No power confrontation is absolutely predictable. De Waal notes that “A young adult of not more than two or three can sometimes put an adult male or female to flight or even coerce them to do something.” Rank, unlike power displays, is “frozen.” Rank can be measured with respect to who greets whom. Children, for example, “are never “greeted” by adult group members: they may sometimes exert real power but they have no formal dominance.” I.e., “if A “greets” B during a certain period, B will never “greet” A during the same period.” In De Waal’s view, chimpanzee formal rank and power do overlap, but it is possible for rank to be separated from power. I.e., just because an ape is dominant does not mean that he will remain dominant. Chimpanzees with a lower rank can “track” whether they are being greeted or are greeting more often, e.g., dominance conflicts between Luit and Yeroen. If “the subordinate party begins to win conflicts more and more often, or if he at least regularly produces fear and hesitation in the dominant party, this will not escape him,” he is tracking his and the other party’s behaviors, he is aware of them, it seems reasonable to assume he has assigned them some value or meaning. Frans then proceeds to say “if this shift in the relationship persists, the “greetings” between [the two parties] will become no more than a hollow formality.”

But Power and Rank are not all that defines political or power relationships between chimps. “Grooming” also defines political relationships between chimpanzees. In his conflict with Yeroen, Luit often tried, and may have been successful at, securing an alliance with females in the chimpanzee community at Arnhem zoo through grooming. Luit’s grooming of the females and offspring of the community was tactical; he timed and moved between the females of the community at Arnhem just prior to intimidation displays towards Yeroen. De Waal even recognizes this: “Was it a kind of “bribe” or an attempt to “arouse sympathy” by his friendly actions?”. His rhetorical questions seem to have been answered, especially given that Luit was eventually able to overthrow Yeroen. However, after their conflicts, the males began grooming each other. After dominance disputes, it is noted that males engage in grooming to “reconcile” their differences. By sitting face to face, looking each other in the eyes, the two parties are able to lower tensions. The significance of this behavior was so important that the two parties “never came into their cage unreconciled, and the fact that they had only two night-fights may well be due to these truces.” I.e., these apes were able to recognize the utility of mutualistic relationships to preserve peace. Yet, grooming is not only used to facilitate peace, to form alliances, or lower tensions. Grooming can also serve as a kind of currency. By holding out their hands, chimpanzees signal they are of lower rank, as the hand gesture communicates to the higher-ranking chimp that the lower-ranking chimp needs permission to perform a kind of behavior or to receive something. Sexual bargaining occurs in this manner when a low-ranking male gestures with his hand to a higher-ranking male so that that male may grant him access to one of the females he has preferential access to. Clearly, grooming behavior – securing, establishing, and maintaining social ties – serves as a kind of currency that can be spent or applied to acquire rank, not just power. 

One of the last key attributes of political relationships in chimps is their triadic awareness. Triadic awareness is “the capacity to perceive social relationships between others so as to form varied triangular relationships.” This capacity is unique in that it allows the chimp to not only be aware of his or her relationship with another chimp, but also the “relationships that exist in the social environment so as to gain an understanding of how the self relates to combinations of other individuals.” Another way to view these relationships is through Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth’s (1990) “non-egocentric social knowledge.” By learning about the relationships that exist between members of a community, an individual may be able to more effectively navigate their social milieu, netting benefits for doing so. 

By examining the political relationships that exist between chimps, de Waal has provided us with three aspects of a political community: a hierarchy defined by rank and power dynamics that are extensively interconnected but also dissociable; social capital acquired through acts of greeting, submission, and grooming used to acquire rank and apply power; and at least, the ability to understand and recognize social bonds between members of a community, such that individual chimps can navigate their social milieu to acquire power and rank. The importance of these aspects of political relationships in chimpanzee communities for our exploration of morality is to begin to highlight that an understanding of values, or morals, and the morals of Americans specifically, need to be conceptualized not merely from a psychological or neuroscientific lens (although that has its uses) but also a behavioral, biological, and sociobiological lens. 

Chimpanzee politics, like American politics (or any politics), is not defined by reason but instead is governed by a set of unstated, a priori rules that tacitly imply the values of the apes who apply them. De Waal’s book Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Primates (De Waal, 1996) helps us explore these a priori rules, how they’re applied, and why they’re applied. In doing so, he helps us understand our moral values, how we apply them, and why we apply them. 

To start, it is clear de Waal does not see chimpanzees as moral philosophers, capable of generating personal value judgments about a given scenario. In other words, while it is my opinion that primates (apes and monkeys) act morally, they are incapable of talking about “what is right, and why, and what is wrong, and why”; they do not have an explicit moral system, i.e., explicit, enumerated morality. However, as I have shown through my analysis of Joshua Greene’s and Joyce’s emphasis on the dual-model of moral decision making and linguistic preeminence in moral discussion and judgments respectively, our recursive abilities afford us very little in the realm of ethical and moral philosophy. We certainly do talk about what is right, wrong, and why as humans, but these discussions are post hoc, personally qualitative rationalizations and thus not scientific. Even those principles we use to logically and strictly define our moral behaviors are only given favor on account of our moral sentiments, intuitions, or feelings. This is borne out, as was discussed in the beginning of this paper, by the fact that, even when we make principled judgments, the output of those judgments is personalized, colored by one’s moral sentiments, intuitions, emotions, or feelings. And thus, while it is relevant to recognize apes are not moral philosophers, what’s more integral to any moral science is not so much what is stated about any particular moral belief system (i.e., what’s right, wrong, and why) but rather how that moral system plays itself out. In other words, the a priori values, their objectiveness, is borne out in a set of behaviors that constrain the political (or social) dynamics of the group. Hence, why it was relevant to discuss the political dynamics of chimps before discussing their morals. I.e., primate norms, or morals, are a genuine, a priori metaphysical framework defining their social (political) behaviors. But in what way do those moral behaviors play themselves out in primates? 

In de Waal’s eyes (De Waal, 1996), the behaviors exemplifying morality are sympathy, norm-related characteristics (a kind of unspoken ethic), reciprocity, and getting along. Sympathy is defined by “attachment, succorance, and emotional contagion; [and] learned adjustment to and special treatment of the disabled and injured.” Norm-Related Characteristics are defined by the observation of “prescriptive social rules; [and] internalization of rules and anticipation of punishment.” Reciprocity is defined by “a concept of giving, trading, and revenge; [and] moralistic aggression against violators of reciprocity rules.” And lastly, Getting Along is defined by “peacemaking and avoidance of conflict; community concern and maintenance of good relationships; [and] accommodation of conflicting interests through negotiation.” 

In all four of these, we can faintly see the outline of the six moral foundations provided to us by Haidt: care/harm, fairness/cheating, ingroup-loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and proportionality/freedom. In the sympathy behavior of primates, we can see the foundations of care/harm and ingroup-loyalty/betrayal. In norm-related characteristics, we can see the authority/subversion, fairness/cheating, and ingroup-loyalty/betrayal foundations. In reciprocity characteristics, we can see the proportionality/freedom and the fairness/cheating foundations. And for behaviors that demonstrate a tendency to get along, we see the ingroup-loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, fairness/cheating, and in some sense, the sanctity/degradation foundations. The sanctity/degradation foundation expressed in behaviors that facilitate good relations between primates requires some qualifying; I will use de Waal’s words to do so. 

Good relations express that members of a community care about their community; they want to preserve their community; they do not want to see it degrade. De Waal defined this kind of community concern as “the stake each individual has in promoting those characteristics of the community or group that increases the benefits derived from living in it by that individual and its kin” (De Waal., 1996, p. 207). In other words, each individual in the community is tasked with upholding the relationships between each member in the community (likely making use of triadic awareness or non-egocentric social knowledge) to prevent the destruction (degradation) of that community and to uphold harmony (sanctity) in the community. 

With that said, I think it is clear that the moral foundations of social behavior in humans and primates fit quite nicely together. Why wouldn’t they? But to be fair, ethological analyses of primate social and political behavior using the defining features of the moral foundations Haidt has provided us would have to be done to further solidify this claim. Regardless, this helps to buttress the idea that social and political behavior (I think it is appropriate to use the terms interchangeably) are defined for all of us by a set of a priori, metaphysical moral foundations (or values). 

In the book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006), a collection of essays responding to some of the claims Frans de Waal has made over the years, we can find arguments that seek to challenge some of Frans’s ideas. I think it will be prudent to examine two essays from the text by Robert Wright and Christine M. Korsgaard to further hash out my own thoughts on the primordial essence of Human and Primate morality. 

Wright’s response to de Waal is titled The Uses of Anthropomorphism. His argument goes like this: “It is a cogent surmise, for various reasons, that in the primate lineage the emotional governance of behavior has preceded, in evolutionary time, the consciously strategic guidance of behavior; given that human beings, though manifestly capable of conscious strategizing, nonetheless have emotions that encourage strategically sound behaviors, it seems likely that our near relatives, the chimpanzees, who exhibit analogous sound behaviors, also have such emotions; if indeed chimpanzees have emotions that could generate strategically sound behaviors, one has to ask why natural selection would add a second, functionally redundant layer of guidance (conscious strategy)?” (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006, p. 91).  Wright follows this by saying that de Waal should avoid using “cognitive” language and should use “emotional” language instead. I.e., he doesn’t think it’s wrong to use anthropomorphic language to talk about the moral behaviors of primates, but he does think it’s only useful to talk about the moral behavior of primates through emotional anthropomorphism. I would go one step further, it makes no sense to talk about moral behavior as if it is a form of rational cognition, even in homo sapiens. 

In humans, the cognitive aspect of our moral behavior is a post hoc rationalization of our intuitions, feelings, or emotions. Thus, to discuss primate moral behavior as if it were humans engaging in the behavior is perfectly permissible because it is still how humans behave; for both, emotional language or language about intuitions is the more appropriate kind of nomenclature. One needs only to recall the work of James Woodward (cited at the beginning of this paper) to recognize that while we do engage in recursive evaluations of scenarios as humans, the assessment of the interconnecting outputs from those evaluations is heavily affected by intuitions. Emotion, intuition, and sentiments are still driving the recursive moral decisions of humans.

Wright then goes on to explain how he is not a “Veneer theorist,” and that he holds a third position. This argument is not quite relevant for the discussion in this section of the paper but perhaps touches on a topic we will get to later: Nature vs. Nurture. Thus, for now, it will behoove us to proceed to the next essay by Christine M. Korsgaard. 

Korsgaard’s main argument goes like this: “a nonhuman agent may be conscious of the object of his fear or desire, and conscious of it as fearful or desirable, and so as something to be avoided or to be sought… But a rational animal is, in addition, conscious that she fears or desires the object, and that she is inclined to act in a certain way as a result.” In other words, human morality is differentiated by the fact that we are not only conscious but engage in self-conscious behavior. In Korsagaard’s words: “Once you are aware that you are being moved in a certain way, you have a certain reflective distance from the motive [whether it is fearful or desirable, e.g.], and you are in a position to ask yourself ‘but should I be moved in that way? Wanting that end inclines me to that act, but does it really give me a reason to do that act?’ You are now in a position to raise a normative question about what you ought to do.” Korsagaard thinks this is what defines reason. According to Korsagaard, “Reason… looks inward, and focuses on the connections between mental states and activities: whether our actions are justified by our motives or our inferences are justified by our beliefs.”  Here we can see the objective, fact-based, impartial position of reason we were treated with through the works of Joyce and Greene, once again (a pattern that may continue to perpetuate itself despite its invalidity). The question that needs to be posed to Korsgaard is whether one, given their allegedly impartial evaluation of a scenario, indeed must do what they think they ought to do. In other words, even if we engage in an impartial, objective, self-conscious, reason-based assessment of a scenario affected by motivating (fearful, disgusting, or desirable) stimuli, does our conclusion necessarily follow from our reason or do we ultimately just intuit it’s the correct act? At the core of this question is whether the moral judgment made through a reasonable assessment of a motivating stimulus is, in fact, a reasoned and intentional act, or is it still motivated by subconscious processes; i.e., do we really have the kind of self-consciousness Korsgaard suggests we do?

In the classic example of Joe and Jane’s behavior (Weathers 2008), the emotionally motivating force, despite no present evidence for its effect (and attempts made to prevent deleterious effects of an incestuous relationship), still affects the moral decision made by evaluators of Joe and Jane’s behavior. When presented with such a scenario (Paxton et al. 2011), accounting for all apparent negative effects, college students still reacted emotionally. Yet, as Korsagaard suggests, when they were given more time, they changed their judgment and found no issue with Julie and Mark’s behavior – they were able to sympathize with Julie and Mark. But again, this conclusion does not mean this moral decision was rational, impartial, or dependent on the evidence, only that the students were able to consider their judgments, or provide an apparently more logical judgment, even if they still were disgusted by Julie and Mark’s behavior. There’s no reason to conclude the moral decision they made was complete; i.e., genuinely self-conscious. For example, there’s still the idea that the relationship could be socially-contagious, even if Julie and Mark keep the night they had together to themselves. Knowing about their night dissolves this reality (the ego still plays a role; the judge knows about Julie and Mark’s night together). I.e., Julie and Mark did not conform to a social norm, they did not conform to the standard imposed on all the students (like the Amish who are shunned for being social deviants – Richerson and Boyd, 2005, p. 185). 

With this in mind, logically or impartially assessing the scenario as it is written is insufficient to determine the morality of the act. The students still know about Mark and Julie; the students’ subjective awareness of the scenario may be a parameter that affects their moral decision; and why shouldn’t it be?  Man is a social animal – and these particular humans necessarily know about Julie and Mark’s decision and may still judge their act to be immoral to uphold the social ties that bind their community and prevent it from becoming inharmonious (degrading, degenerating). The scenario acts as a contagion that the judges upbraid to prevent further corruption – knowledge of the act can be seen as a corrupting force. In other words, the decision cannot be merely impartial; the impartial nature of the moral decision is an illusion, and the more realistic decision may be derived vis-à-vis the social milieu; e.g., through triadic awareness. The subject’s awareness of Julie and Mark’s night must be considered; to be truly impartial and rational, the students had to assess Julie and Mark’s night with respect to themselves and their social environment; they had to step outside of the immediate and see themselves judging Julie and Mark’s night in a particular environment affected by varying laws, social forces, cultures, and histories, at least. A more impartial decision would at least incorporate how the judge plays a role in the judgment vis-à-vis the consequences of the judgment for them socially. What does it mean to admit you think incest, pedophilia, or terrorism are socially acceptable in particular contexts? 

Are the moral judges of Julie and Mark’s act aware of this? If they were, would they still make the same decision? Are they even capable of such impartial decision making? Perhaps they would realize that subjective knowledge of the scenarios presented to them also need to be taken into account. I.e., the knowledge of the act may serve as a vehicle to normalize what they intuitively recognize as wrong. In other words, while self-consciousness does exist in humans, it doesn’t seem humans can be as self-conscious, impartially self-conscious, as we might hope; are they really aware of the motivating forces affecting them (what’s fearful or desirable), or only as many motivating forces as they recognize? Are we not intuiting these are the only motivations we ought to consider? In other words, the “ought” is insufficient because humans, as moral judges, are insufficient – they are not as self-aware or self-conscious as they think; there are no grounds to privilege their capacity for self-conscious reasoning over their intuitions, and in fact, their reasoning may obfuscate good intuitive motivations affecting their moral decisions. Reason, not the moral intuitions, may separate Man from what he ought to do just as much as it has the capacity to provide him access to what he ought to do. 

Korsgaard’s main point: “we develop the capacity to be motivated by thoughts about what we ought to do and what we ought to be like”; we are not simply motivated by the fearful or desirable object, we are aware we’re motivated by the fact that we are motivated by the fearful or desirable object. Indeed, this is the recursive nature of our human brain. However, this doesn’t mean our ability to separate ourselves from our intuitions through manual reasoning means we ought to act on the products of that process, or that we will be better off for doing so; e.g., such an act may generate a self-centered niche separated from the conditions that produced the intuitions guiding and affecting our moral reasoning, creating a kind of dysphoria. Should we genuinely be comfortable with the moral “ought’s” we’re comfortable with? In other words, according to whom is the act we engage in wrong? Are we genuinely self-aware that our acts are wrong? Is conscious reasoning genuinely, in fact, the process by which we do good or can it blind us to the good? 

De Waal responds in a similar manner: 

“Do animals ever intentionally help each other? Do humans?... I add the second question even if most people blindly assume an affirmative answer. We show a host of behavior, though, for which we develop justification after the fact. It is entirely possible, in my opinion, that we reach out and touch a grieving family member or lift up a fallen elderly person in the street before we fully realize the consequences of our actions. We are excellent at providing post hoc explanations for altruistic impulses. We say such things as “I felt I had to do something,” whereas in reality our behavior was automatic and intuitive…”

Just as we may not be self-aware of the rightness of our act, we may not be aware of the wrongness of our act. There’re no clear grounds to believe truly moral acts are derived from reason, not intuitions. 

What we now have is an image of primate morality, in other words, a moral system. Haidt defines morality as follows: 

“Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest to make cooperative societies possible. [italics added]” 

Based on what we have unraveled from the work of Frans de Waal and those who have critically commented on it, I think it should be clear how Haidt’s conception of morality fits onto the behavior of apes. Apes have the same kind of values or intuitions we do, albeit qualitatively different (they are apes after all); they exhibit behaviors derived from those foundations, values, and intuitions; and they use those behaviors to engage in politics or to socialize. While Frans de Waal does not think Apes have morality, in the sense that they have explicit rules to enhance in-group solidarity (De Waal, Marcedo, & Ober, 2006, p. 54), apes do engage in behavior that increases cooperation between members by ameliorating social disputes between members. Besides, morality, or moral systems, need not have explicit “teachings about the value of the community and the precedence it takes, or ought to take, over individual interests.” A moral system may be conceived of as a game of backyard ball, whose rules are not stated – maybe ever -- but implicit and easily grasped once one jumps into the fray. This is more of an informal morality, but it is nonetheless morality. 

For both Apes and Humans, according to Haidt and myself now – I have separated from de Waal – morality’s goal is to increase “cooperation” in Haidt’s eyes and to ameliorate intragroup conflict in my eyes. By ameliorating conflicts, members of an ape community, and human community, are more apt to cooperate (e.g., to escape their enclosure in Arnhem), more likely to gain access to resources by cooperating, playing their role according to their rank (e.g., in tit-for-tat games), they may also gain access to females reserved for higher-ranking members of an ape community, increasing their reproductive fitness, and in the wild, fend off outsiders (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996).

Part III: The Emergence of Complex, Eusocial, Moral Societies Out of Play

I think it is now time to begin introducing human behavior into the mix. After all, I am exploring where, how, and why there are two moral viewpoints in the United States that seem so at odds with each other. In this section of the paper, having discussed the physiological and psychological underpinnings of moral behavior, and having made the argument that morality need not be defined explicitly, but is more a system of intuitively driven behaviors that increase cooperation by ameliorating intragroup conflict for various reasons, I would now like to explore how that behavior plays itself out socially amongst both apes and primates. Thus, this part of the paper will delve into the origins of human societies, how human societies are maintained, the effect of emotional behaviors in human societies, and how moral systems (really behaviors) play a role in preserving human societies. 

Before we delve into the evolutionary origins of human societies, I would first like to begin with some seemingly lighter fare: Play. From the last part of the paper, you may recall that I explained that morality (moral systems) are like a game of backyard ball. But what exactly is happening in a game? Individuals are collectively engaging in play. But what is Play? 

Johan Huizinga, in his brilliant work, Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1950/2014), defines Play as follows: 

Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life.”

Play is behavior constrained by certain values, which in humans may be defined by a set of explicit prescriptions that define what is good or appropriate play. This good or appropriate play is virtuous. Virtue is derived from Latin, and’s root is the Latin word Vir or man. For the Romans, according to Peter Turchin (Turchin, 2006 pp. 155-156), a virtuous man “embodied all the qualities of a true man as a member of a society.” In other words, the virtuous man played his part in accordance with what it was to be an ideal Roman. For the Romans, “The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril.” According to Cicero (whose words we can find in Turchin’s book), “[The virtuous Roman hero] with the prospect of death, envy, and punishment staring him in the face, does not hesitate to defend the Republic, he truly can be reckoned a vir [man].” For Huizinga, this kind of play is inherently agonal, or as we may contemporarily recognize it, “rough-and-tumble.” This kind of social behavior is defined by its competitive nature, exemplified in the form of contests, e.g., which rat will pin whom, or more aptly, who will be a real man, stare death in the face, grapple and wrestle with the prospect of death, and defend the Roman Republic? There’s no legitimate reason to see the gravity of this evocative interrogative as anti-play either. Play, as a defining feature of human societies, and perhaps animal behavior (if not animal societies, e.g., in chimps and other primates), defined itself by the intuitions and values of the people from that society, need not be frivolous but instead may be thoroughly serious, e.g., in the many types of potlatch behavior Huizinga provides us.

For animals, though it is likely fun, play is not merely done for frivolity’s sake either; animals depend on play (as a form of behavior) for their survival. In Ursus arctos (brown bears) Fagen and Fagen (2004), controlling for cub conditions, prenatal and first-year salmon availability, and maternal characteristics, found that the survival of Ursus arctos increases as play increases. Because significant confounds were accounted for, this increase in survivability due to play occurred “independently of… other possible effects.” Fagen and Fagen speculated that “play experience [may relieve] past stresses and [help to build] resistance to future stress.” In a longitudinal study, assessed over a nine-year period, Fagen and Fagen came to the same conclusion (Fagen and Fagen, 2009). In a study by Antonevich et al. (2020), play behavior in the Eurasian Lynx (Lynx lynx) was associated with cubs’ body mass; i.e., the more resources the cubs had available, the more likely they were to initiate play. With the previous finding by Fagen and Fagen in mind, i.e., play potentially increases survivability, and healthier, heavier, and larger cubs (cubs who have greater access to resources) engage in more play, it is possible that play-feedback may occur, increasing the survivability of those who do play, their ability to acquire resources, provide those resources to their young, and thus increase their young’s ability to survive. This play hypothesis is supported by the fact that larger brained species play more (Iwaniuk et al., 2001) and that, at least in carnivores (which may include Apes), brain size is associated with technical problem-solving (which may or may not translate into hunting success) – Benson-Amram et al., 2016. I.e., play increases survivability, resource acquisition, thus creating a feedback that increases technical problem-solving abilities, selecting for brain size, which further increases technical problem-solving ability, resource acquisition, and thus survivability. As we can see, play is one way to increase a species’ ability to survive, acquire resources, develop bigger brains, and to increase their problem-solving capacities. But how does this generate societies? To answer this question, we will turn to Hymenoptera or, more specifically, ants before we finally discuss the origins of human societies. 

While the societies of ants are not derived from their capacity to play, ants are an extremely social species. Specifically, ants are a eusocial species. In The Superorganism (2009) by Holldobler and Wilson, Eusociality is defined as a “truly social species.” For ants, their society, their eusociality, is defined by three parts. “First, its adult members are divided into reproductive castes and partially or wholly nonreproductive workers; second, the adults of two or more generations coexist in the same nests; and third, nonreproductive or less reproductive workers care for the young.” This is the state of the superorganism. More strictly, the superorganism is defined as “an advanced state of eusociality, in which interindividual conflict for reproductive privilege is diminished and the worker caste is selected to maximize colony efficiency in intercolony competition [pp. 8-9].” But where does this come from? This superorganism originated “more than 120 million years ago” (Wilson, 2012, p. 114), specifically at the point when gymnosperms were “largely replaced by angiosperms.” I.e., ants coevolved with flowering plants. The complexity provided by the angiosperms “were richer in substance and more complicated in architecture, hence favorable to more kinds of small animals living in them [Wilson, 2012, p. 124]. With a new diversity of niches and prey available to them, ants radiated from their gymnosperm environments, into the angiosperm environments, where “most of the two dozen taxonomic subfamilies of ants living today [came] into existence.” Eusociality was solidified in ants when “organized groups [groups capable of organizing] beat solitaires in competition for resources, and large, organized groups beat smaller ones of the same species” (Holldobler and Wilson, p. 30). However, eusociality is rare. 

The reason why eusociality is so rare is because it requires members of the species (or community) to sacrifice for the “good of the group.” One resolution to this is kin-selection. For ants, this makes sense. Each member of an ant colony, each dissociable unit, is in effect an extension of the queen, they are part of her phenotype. Each member of the ant colony is hard to see as an individual unit, capable of engaging in personal progeneration. Instead, when workers try to produce on their own, conflict often ensues (Wilson, 2012 p. 145). Thus, because intergroup competition selects for the survivability of the species, and intragroup cooperation increases survivability in social organisms, when intragroup conflict increases, the capacity for any given colony to survive intergroup competition decreases, and thus the more cooperative, eusocial colony survives. Thus, the ant that sacrifices its personal reproductive success is more likely to enable its kin to pass on its genes. Humans, however, are not ants. And yet, eusociality in humans persists. But how? Tribes. 

For ants, the origin of social behavior Is the nest, “especially [nests that are] expensive to make and within reach of a sustainable supply of food (Wilson, 2012, p. 184).” Following, around the nest, the species must care for their young, generating dissociable castes and divisions of labor; some must care for the young, some must protect the nest, some must seek out food and resources, some must prepare those resources for use, et cetera. Various complex environments must also serve as a pressure to promote the emergence of nest behavior and labor divisions. Groups with members that are more similar, phenotypically than genetically, will be better at getting along with each other (Whitmeyer, 1997). Phenotype is also defined as “all traits of an organism other than its genome (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 31). For ants, this phenotypic recognition (how do ants have access to the genotype except through phenotype) is pheromones. Behavior that mimics co-helpers will benefit co-progenitors of a group more than behavior that doesn’t mimic co-helpers; if your pheromones match mine, we can work together. This suggests similar behavioral and psychological phenotypes serve as a selection mechanism, which the individual organism is capable of assessing (West-Eberhard, 2003, pp. 440-468), that increases group cooperation. This enables members of the group to acquire more resources, decrease or ameliorate intragroup conflict more effectively, and fend off threats to the group from other organisms, conspecifics, and the environment. With the inclusion of the concept of phenotypic plasticity, a species, exposed to various different conditions, yet working as a group, may express different phenotypes (e.g., Leaf-cutter ants (atta)) when exposed to those different conditions (e.g., heterophylly in plants). Each of these groups, as members of the single tribal group, for example, are dependent on each other. Thus, the ability to specialize in generating various behaviors generates variants that work together as dissociable, dependent units, to generate more than any one of them could do as an individual organism in diverse environments, against numerous predators, and potentially other cooperating conspecifics. The initial nesting behavior, requiring the division of labor and specialization, creates a feedback that generates more complex social systems and behavioral or phenotypic variants, each dependent on the other for success, yet dissociable enough to remain plastic (e.g., modularity and holism exist simultaneously, depending on the level of analysis you’re exploring). This allows the ant, like Man, to engage in husbandry (e.g., their mutual relationship with aphids), farming (e.g., the fungal farming of leafcutter ants), and the establishment of granaries (e.g., in harvester ants). With that said, how did eusociality develop in Homo Sapiens? To answer that question, we will look to a cladistic analysis done by Alexandra Maryanski (1986; 1987; 1992; 1993; 1995; 1996). 

Earlier, I described ape morality as primordial to emphasize that, while our ape brethren have something like morality, they do not have morality in the sense we understand it. Their morality, more so than being non-linguistic, is non-symbolic. However, how did we get from engaging in the kind of moral behavior our ancestors did to the moral behavior we engage in now? To answer this question, I think it would be helpful if we examined a cladistic analysis of apes to see how we got to the kind of social organizations we have today. For a start, we must recognize that the great apes are not “a natural formation (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 296). Ape groups fuse together and then fissure. In Chimpanzees, our common ancestor, females fuse to groups of fusing/fissuring males and then fissure from them. In “chimpanzees, temporary groups form to patrol the home range, and this group will attack any male who seeks to cross the boundary; in contrast, migrating females from other communities are welcomed as replacements for those who, at puberty, have left their natal community (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 297). In other words, great apes typically only form “mother-offspring ties, do not form permanent groups, and reveal very little intergenerational continuity with the constant transfer of offspring at puberty to other communities (Turner and Machalek, 2018, p. 297).” So how is it that humans are so socially distinct from chimpanzees? 

Around 10 million years ago, the forests of Africa began to recede, leaving immense savannas. Our ancestors, lacking the food they once relied on in the forests of Africa, had to learn to make use of, and develop in, savanna environments. For our ape ancestors who lacked the ability to form groups, this was exceedingly difficult; most of our ape ancestors are now extinct because they were not able to adapt to the savanna. However, life did find a way. 

First, because groups do exist in apes today, even if the bonds aren’t strong, selection on the savanna would favor apes who were able to produce more stable groups (perhaps through play and touch, generating the release of peptides and amines that promote social cooperation). Second, with the use of tools, labor may be divided, some may have hunted more, others may have gathered more (e.g., tubules), others may have cared for the young more, and still others may have protected a central location where food was stored. As previously stated, apes who were less capable of engaging in these kinds of behaviors in the savanna landscape went extinct. Thus, to overcome our almost autistic, in the antiquated sense of the term, social sense, evolution had to target, and did target, the emotional centers of the brain in our hominin ancestors, ratcheting up the group-ish tendencies of savanna apes. This increased the salience of the bonds that tied each member to the other, made us more aware of the emotions of our fellow conspecifics, and allowed further developments to target our ability to infer the intentions of others, form stronger memories, and lastly develop language and symbolic thinking (Turner and Machalek, 2018 pp. 337-64; Coolidge, 2019, pp. 130-151). 

With the development of language and symbolic thinking, particularly associative reasoning rather than discrete reasoning capacities (e.g., Neanderthal Reasoning vs. Homo Sapiens Reasoning, Wilson, 2012, pp. 218-19), symbols could be used to generate ethnolinguistic tribal groups. These symbols could be used to bind members of a group, serve as a phenotypic extension that allowed for more extensive, complex groups (like a pheromone), to show group solidarity (increasing group trust), identify who isn’t a part of the group and protect ingroup members from exploitation, abuse, or conquest by an outgroup (e.g., Odin as a replacement for Tiwaz for the Germanic Tribes to define themselves as a group distinct from Romans, Turchin, 2006, pp. 70-72), and thus increase the fitness of the group, as intragroup cooperation is facilitated in ant colonies. Haidt talks about the significance of these ethnolinguistic, and symbolic, groups in his chapter The Hive Switch, found in The Righteous Mind (Haidt, 2012, pp. 256-84, while Abrutyn and Turner (2017) – in their paper Returning the Social to Sociocultural Evolution: Reconsidering Spencer, Durkheim, and Marx’s Models of Selection -- discuss the social pressures that give rise to these ethnolinguistic groups, particularly religious groups. Yet how are these groups maintained? Why do they not simply collapse? To begin answering this question, I would like to turn to the Waorani and the Semai (Robarchek and Robarchek, 1992). 

The Semai and Waorani were essentially technologically equivalent communities. Both were swidden gardeners and hunters (pulling in relatively good game and hulls), both lived as family groups, the compositions of households were similar, and their settlements were both politically autonomous and lacked a head or chief. However, the Waorani, unlike the Semai, had a homicide rate of 60%. The Semai are essentially peaceful, while it is not impossible for Semai to engage in violence, violence by the Semai is not known to occur. So, what’s causing these differences? The difference between the two people essentially lies in how they perceive the world. I.e., how they symbolically perceive the world. 

Clayton and Carole Robarchek describe the differences between the two peoples as follows (pp. 200-201, Robarchek and Robarchek, 1992), “[The] Semai see themselves as essentially helpless in a hostile and malevolent universe that is almost entirely beyond their control. Their world is populated by a vast variety of supernatural beings, the great majority of which are actively hostile to human beings… In this world of ubiquitous dangers, even the most ordinary activities — gardening, firewood gathering, hunting, eating, even children’s play – are hedged by taboos and circumscribed by rituals in an inevitably vain attempt to ward of the dangers that constantly menace without.” The Waorani, on the other hand, see the “world [as a place] to be exploited. Lone individuals go off for days at a time to hunt and fish, or just to wander. There are few animistic beliefs, little concern with the ‘supernatural’ beings, and few taboos or rituals designed to ward off danger… They are, in general, a thoroughly confident and pragmatic people living in a world that they feel fully equipped to deal with and control [italics added].” 

These two disparate perceptions of the world also produce two distinct perceptions of self. The Semai essentially see themselves as “helpless.” Comfort and recourse from the malevolence of the world lies “in the band, that group of a hundred or so human beings with whom one’s life is bound up from birth to death. Without the support and nurturance of this group, no individual can survive.” Cohesion or, as Turchin (2006) describes it, asabiya is paramount. “To be given nurturance by the community is to be given life itself; to have it denied is to be left exposed to the dangers that menace from without, a message that is constantly stressed and reaffirmed, both directly and symbolically.” In contradistinction, the Waorani are “highly individualistic and autonomous; both men and women are expected to be self-reliant and independent, and they see themselves as such… every person’s survival and well-being is ultimately his own responsibility.” E.g., women are not attended to when they give birth and snake bite victims are sometimes left to the forest. “Until recently, the elderly were not infrequently speared to death by their own kin when they became a burden.” There was no societal cohesion either, “In the event of a raid, all fled for their lives, men often abandoning their wives, and women their children [italics added] (Robarchek & Robarcheck, p. 202).” 

The Semai also feel a great sense of obligation and are bound to their kin. If we consider that the Semai seek comfort and protection in their kin group from the malevolence of the world, a “sense of group consciousness [emerges] on two levels: the kindred and the band.” Emotional, or “affective,” salience “minimizes the possibility of the band splitting into agonistic mutually exclusive factions, and it provides a powerful motive for resolving disputes in ways that are as equitable as possible for all concerned.” Any conflict within the group threatens the cohesion of the group and thus has the potential to cast all members into the malevolency of the inspirited world around them. This high level of affective salience, the essence of morality as I have suggested and the integral component for the emergence of group-ish behavior on the savannahs of Africa 10 million years ago for our hominid ancestors, also motivates members of the tribe to “reprimand… his own kindred if he is found to have any fault”; each member of the tribe is not only responsible for themselves but their kin. The Semai see themselves as siblings as well, and they express this linguistically: “We are all siblings here and we take care of one another.” This phrase is often repeated amongst the Semai. Something like religion, or Animism, also plays an integral role in the Semai community. “In times of sickness and danger, to ward off the attacks of mara’, the malevolent spirits that cause sickness and death,” the gunik, “the familiar spirits,” may be called upon. The gunik are seen as siblings themselves, part of the tribe, and “are passed from generation to generation until, after several generations, parents’ and grandparents’ gunik become, in the generational terminology of the Semai, grandparents to most of the people in the band. They become mai mana, “the old ones,” responsible for the welfare of the entire community, protecting it from the… [malevolent spirits].” In other words, the Semai have a shared cultural heritage they pass down that preserves them from the malevolence of the world, binding them from one generation to the next, presumably going back as far as when the Semai came into being. While this religious tradition may not seem or be rational to us, it’s rational to the Semai and it keeps them alive. All of these elements, including a reaffirmation ritual, preserve the cohesion of the Semai, keep them obligated to one another, and serve to protect them from the world without, decreasing violence in and from the group to virtually zero. 

The Waorani, who are pragmatic individualists, do not have any of the social structures the Semai do. The Waorani never developed mechanisms to prevent conflict between members or to promote solidarity. Instead, “For the Waorani, every kindred, and in the final analysis, every individual, is an independent entity.” The Spirit world of the Waorani is also exceedingly different from the Semai’s. “No spirit familiars come in dreams to offer protection or assistance to their human kin. Wengongi, the creator who set the world in motion, has no significant role in human affairs, and human actions are thus not contingent upon or constrained by more powerful beings or forces. With no tutelary spirits and few animistic beliefs, there are no communal rituals or responsibilities [obligations] linking people together.” Unlike the Semai, whose culture emphasizes group cohesion, social responsibility, and solidarity, the Waorani have “no such cultural or individual values nor is there a concern with group cohesion, and thus there are no comparable internalized controls on conflict and violence… no institutions exist for the resolutions of disputes… the restoration of amity… thus [there are] few constraints, social, cultural, or psychological, on the actions of individuals.” The highly individualistic, seemingly apathetic, Waorani are thus prone to violence. Without the aid of Christian missionaries who helped to end the retributive murders within the Waorani society, it is possible they would have wiped themselves out as a people. 

What is clear is that the two symbolic perceptions of the world, one clearly more affectively (emotionally) derived than the other, affected the behavior of the two groups in two entirely distinct ways despite the numerous commonalities between the two tribes. One’s sentiments, values, and moral (spiritual system) preserved the group, brought the group cohesion, and generated norms (obligations) that kept the group bound to each other. The others’ sentiments were entirely self-driven (in the antiquated sense, autistic), the progenitor of their spiritual system was effectively ambivalent about their existence, what they do, or whether its right or wrong. As a consequence, if it were not for the aid of Christian missionaries and Waorani women who wanted to end the violence within their group, the Waorani would have been wiped out. Under other circumstances, another tribe, band, or warring kingdom could have moved on the Waorani and wiped them out or incorporated them, dissolving the Waorani people forever. Hence it should be clear now just how essential the intuitions and morals are for the emergence of a functioning and long-standing society. The consequences of the near a-spiritual, unintuitive, and unemotional society of the Waorani is backed up by another finding by Sosis and Bressler (2003). They essentially found that religious rituals and taboos promote intragroup cooperation; secular organizations, or tribes like the Waorani who lack such taboos, are less cohesive; ergo, religious tribes, tribes with rituals or taboos (like the Semai), are more adaptive, are better at surviving and perhaps propagating, than non-religious, secular, purely individualistic, reason-based tribes. Regardless, for now, we shall return to where this section of the paper began: Play. 

There were no written records for what caused the violence between the Waorani. And there were no clear records for the origins of the Semai peoples either. Thus, it is difficult to make sense of just how the Waorani got where they were and the Semai did not. Yet, I think I may have an answer, and that answer rests in right play. 

In Jaak Panksepp’s book, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (Panksepp, 2004), play is one of the central topics. Instead of defining what play is for, I think it would be useful to begin to explore the consequences of lack of play, or disorders related to play. I will begin with the latter. 

For Panksepp’s disorders of play may included depression or melancholia, mania, hyperkinetic and attention deficit disorders, and Tourette’s syndrome (p. 297). Panksepp speculates that ADHD is caused by a lack of rough-and-tumble play, leading to a lack of focus in the classroom, generating poorer performances for the students affected by ADHD. He also questions the utility of pharmacological substances in treating ADHD. However, I think his claims about Tourette’s syndrome are a little more dubious. Regardless, Panksepp was certain of at least a few things, particularly, when playing, “animals are especially prone to behave in flexible and creative ways.” For Panksepp, it then follows that “it is not surprising [then] that play interventions have been used in educational and therapeutic settings (i.e., play therapy) to facilitate more efficient acquisitions of new information and behavioral change.” As identified at the beginning of this section, play is not merely a frivolous endeavor, nor should its ends be limited to being “educational and therapeutic,” but it is necessarily a natural behavioral process that generates creative outputs. Going back to our example of Ursus arctos (Fagen and Fagen, 2004; 2009) and Lynx lynx (Antonevich et al., 2020), play clearly has beneficial effects. But what happens when play is prevented? 

For primates, rats being too distinct a species to truly make comparative analyses from, social play is purportedly essential. Panksepp cites four authors in his discussion on social play in primates, C.S. Evens (1967), H.F. Harlow and M.K. Harlow (1969), A.S. Chamove (1978), and M.A. Novak (1979). Panksepp’s summation of these papers is as follows (p. 282): “In most primates, prior social isolation has a devastating effect on the urge to play. After several days of isolation, young monkeys and chimps become despondent and are likely to exhibit relatively little play when reunited. Apparently, their basic needs for social warmth, support, and affiliation must be fulfilled first; only when confidence has been restored does carefree playfulness return.” These observations are supported by the effects certain peptides have on playfulness. “Neurochemically, if one animal of a play pair is given a small dose of an opiate agonist such as morphine and the other is given a small dose of an opiate antagonist such as naloxone, all other things being equal, the animal receiving morphine always becomes the winner (Panksepp et al., 1985)… These effects suggest that brain opioids control social emotionality, so that without brain opioids an animal tends to feel psychologically weaker, causing it to lose because it is more prone to experience negative feelings such as separation distress [italics added].” Thus, from the observations of the primates in the papers Panksepp summarized, and his findings from his study on the relationship between brain opioids and play, it seems clear “social warmth, support, and affiliation” causes the release of opioids in the brain that increase playfulness. Without an environment conducive to socialization and if during development a primate is not socialized, they will not engage in play, benefit from its creative and educational effects, and will be poorer social partners. 

For Panksepp, competitive play, leading to the acquisition of a highly specific skill, leads to more aggressive tendencies. “The new economic dimensions of professional sports have made us realize that in humans, games are simply no longer what evolution meant them to be. Instead of exercising various skills and having a good time, institutionalized play has become the arena for demonstrating one’s acquired and aggressive skills.” In other words, play behavior is separate from aggressive competition, although there’s ostensibly some overlap. The ideal virtues Cicero implied in his discussion on the ideal Roman perhaps are reflective more of the latter, but we must also recognize that such aggressive skills emerge from playful behavior, games of competition, skill, combat, and excellence. Humans may have simply specialized this kind of specialty beyond its initially “intended” use; there’s still no reason to not see violence and aggression, agonistic or agonal play, as forms of right socialization; rough-and-tumble play, for their own sake, is still highly laudable. Yet, like Huizinga (1950/2014) in his book Homo Ludens, there’s a sense that play for the sake of competition isn’t quite play:

“During the first centuries of the Empire, thousands of citizens from all quarters competed in the founding and donating of halls, baths, theaters, in the mass distribution of food, in the institution or quipping of new games, all of which was recorded for posterity in boastful inscriptions… [The] real nature of this passion for splendid donations would be… adequately summed up by calling it the potlatch spirit. Munificence for the sake of honor and glory, for the sake of outdoing your neighbor and beating him – that is what we can discern in all this, and therein the age-old ritual-agonistic background of Roman civilization comes to light… The play-element also appears very clearly in Roman literature and art. High-flown panegyrics and hollow rhetoric are the mark of the one; superficial decoration thinly disguising the massive under-structure, murals dallying with an inane genre or degenerating into flabby elegance dominate the other. It is features like these that stamp the last phase of Rome’s ancient greatness with inveterate frivolity… All the deeper spiritual impulses withdraw from this culture of the surface and strike new root in the mystery religions… when Christianity cut Roman civilization off from its ritual basis, it withered rapidly (p. 178).”

Like the rats Panksepp observed, those whose goal is winning, rather than continuing to play, and to see what comes of that play (to play more), miss the point of play. Such rats will find fewer and fewer play partners as time progresses (Panksepp, 2004, p. 284-85). We can now begin to speculate on what caused the dissolution of the Waorani society.

In a paper by F.F. Strayer (1992), The Development of Agonistic and Affiliative Structures in Preschool Play Groups, the researchers examined the development of social dominance (rank) in young children. The development of affiliative, pro-social, and in some sense peaceful tendencies, increased with age. Young children, ages one to three, expressed the highest rates of agonistic behaviors (competition, threat, and attack). While in children aged one to five years, affiliative behaviors increased (signaling, approaching, and contacting, the latter of which includes actions such as touch, pat, kiss, hold-hands, shoulder-hug). It is clear that from Stayer and colleagues’ work that as children interact with each other, specifically as children are allowed to interact with each other, they begin to socialize themselves. It is not clear from his work or work done by Carol Lauer whether adult supervision in such matters is genuinely essential, unless there’s an emergency. In fact, such interactions may have unforeseen or negative consequences, e.g., it may lead to the assumption that girls, for example, are less agonistic than boys, causing agonistic behavior in girls to be overlooked. This fact, that adults can influence the social development of children, specifically their agonistic and affiliative tendencies, was highlighted by Strayer who says, “Such issues foreshadow the more central question in ethological study: how cultural variants differentially shape the developing socials skills of young children.” 

However, through skillful interactions with their peers, a child may effectively develop friendships, ask for the help of allies, “[enhancing] both their affiliative relationships and dominance rank within the peer group.” In more socially sophisticated individuals, dominance is not necessarily the determining factor in the success of a dyadic competition. Instead, “individual differences in the ability to identify and exploit common social resources,” may be the determining factor; i.e., triadic awareness is essential in social relationships, as discussed in part two of this paper. These findings suggest that “Early peer group structures may provide concrete learning experiences which facilitate the acquisition of interactive, representation and planning skills that are universal prerequisites for successful integration into a functioning adult society.” Without these prerequisites, or through ineffectual adult influence, affiliative tendencies, interacting in a non-agonistic manner, capacities for navigating a complex social milieu, may not properly develop. In turn, what you might observe in such instances is behavior analogous or homologous to that of the Waorani’s.

Thus, what we can see is that play leads to right socialization. By right we must mean that the group’s, really species, need for eusociality is preserved. Without proper emotional and intellectual development, cognitive development may be delayed (Robert S. Fink, 1976), the use and conception of emotions as a mechanism and effecter for prosocial behaviors may be delayed (Rebecca H. Bauer et al., 2021), and language or symbolic knowledge use may be delayed (Marbach and Yawkey, 1980). What I have shown about morality is that it is predicated upon the emotion centers of the human brain. Without proper play, emotional development is delayed, delaying socialization. Understanding our emotions, the emotions of others, formulating that others have intents (Theory of Mind), and playing with different scenarios involving the emotions, non-corporeal bodies, and circumstances of others (Theatre of Mind), requires the development of the emotions, cognitive problem-solving capacities, and the understanding of symbols and language. Without proper, creative, and educational play – play with the end goal of further play in mind, not competitive play – these capacities may either never develop or may be significantly stunted, as was the case in the Waorani. As a result of ineffectual socialization and development, an atavistic stage of Man’s social existence may present itself, one characterized by brutishness, ego-centricity, emotional retardation, or rapaciousness. Man may very well be naturally social, but there’s no reason he must be social – his specialty, his ability to learn, as plastic as it is, affords him the ability to learn to not be social. 

Part IV: The Cause of Human Behavioral and Moral Variation and its Consequences

We come to the fourth part of this paper. The last section dealt primarily with the emergence of morality as a function of our species’ evolutionary history; in particular, how environmental circumstances (the savanna environments of our ancestors) selected for increased emotionality, social bonding, social awareness, memory capacities (which include increased conceptions of the self across space and time), and language or associative reasoning (creativity). These developments led to the emergence of what we qualitatively recognize as human morality from the primordial, and in some sense primeval, ape morality we still find in chimpanzees. However, we left off with the idea that the pro-social tendencies, in some sense eusocial tendencies, of Man (homo sapiens) are contingent upon his development. I specifically stated that there’s no reason he must be social; he may revert back to a less adaptive form – given the typically complex environmental circumstances he finds himself within; a form characterized by brutishness, ego-centricity, emotional deficits or retardation (in the traditional sense), and rapaciousness (as was observed amongst the Waorani). Man, as we understand him, is accurately defined as homo duplex, specifically because, as a result of his capacity for hive-ish behavior (as Haidt would put it) or eusociality (as E.O. Wilson would put it), well-led groups are more effective than poorly-led groups or disparate individuals (Vugt, Hogan, and Kaiser, 2008). I.e., humans essentially know they can get more out of working together than they can working individually and will thus sacrifice for the group to do so. But this capacity is built upon one of Man’s specialties, his ability to learn (Tomasello, 2011; Richerson and Boyd, 1998).  This phenotypic ability is contingent upon different targets of selection, the gene, ontogenesis, the individual’s organic structure, behavior, symbols, and culture; the phenotypic variants of such targets affecting the physiology and environment of the organism, leading to further changes in the genotype and phenotype of the species.

To summarize the model, I will use to discuss development, I will begin with the genotype. The genotype “is the genetic makeup by which an individual or one of its traits can be characterized in genetic comparisons with other individuals or their phenotypic traits… this term may be used to denote the inherited or genetic contribution to a phenotype as inferred from breeding studies… It sometimes refers to the expressed gene or set of genes that influence a particular phenotypic trait (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 31). However, the genome doesn’t need to change for there to be variation. “Biological evolution proceeds not only by making many words (molecules) from a single set of letters (the genetic code). By taking a limited vocabulary of words [the proteins], it can rearrange those into even more enormous numbers of distinctive sentences, and then continually and simultaneously reorganize paragraphs and pages and chapters and books (the phenotypes at different levels of organization) without increasing the volume of the basic vocabulary [the enzymatic products of the macromolecules produced by the exons of the genome] at all (p. 334).” Hence, due to the genome, we have the phenotype. Importantly, effects like this are not necessarily stochastic or random. Instead, under specific environmental pressures, exons coding for specific – not random – enzymes can randomly change to adapt to the specific environmental pressure, such as a physiological pressure or a traditional environmental pressure, e.g., heat. (Moxon et al., 1994 and Wright et al., 1999). 

As stated before, the phenotype is “all traits of an organism other than its genome… the phenotype is the individual outside the genome… the enzymatic products of genes are part of the phenotype, as are behaviors, metabolic pathways, morphologies, nervous tics, remembered phone numbers, and spots on the lung following a bout with the flue… the phenotype can be adaptive or pathological, permanent or temporary, typical or atypical of a species (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 31).” Selection does not occur at the level of the genome. In essence, the genome is preserved by the phenotype, and thus, as the phenotype effects and is affected by the environment or objects in the environment, its ability to preserve the genome, the products of the genome specifically, is what’s selected. Hormones, a phenotype, also have the ability to affect gene expression, or the products of genes (phenotypes). “Hormones (e.g., juvenile hormone in arthropods, steroids in vertebrates) connect a diversity of environmental cues to a diversity of expressed genes. Hormones can participate simultaneously in many kinds of decisions because the level of production of a hormone can respond to environmental inputs through various pathways, as illustrated by the hormonal response to stretch receptors in blood-feeding insects; and because the same hormone can stimulate or inhibit responses in different parts of the body where appropriate receptors are found (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 465).”  In other words, hormone activity elicited by an environmental cue can trigger behavioral and physiological changes that affect the phenotype of the organism, at a specific level, without ever effecting the genome, all with the goal of preserving the genome and passing its products, as targets of selection, into the future. Yet, it is not the genome that’s selected for; it’s the phenotype. 

In humans, at least one, if not the, specialty is our ability to learn (West-Eberhard, 2003, pp 337-352). Our ability to learn, while a specialty, also enables us to solve problems in a wide variety of complex environments. From deserts to tropical jungles, atoll islands to desolate tundra regions, dense coniferous forest to temperate grasslands, and so on, we are able to generate niches; niches that, in turn, affect us. We can create a wide variety of tools, modify those tools, combine different tools, abstract the essential elements or concepts out from a preexisting set of tools, recombine them, and generate a completely new tool. We can learn new ideas, apply those ideas to effect, learn from the consequences of those ideas, and iterate upon the lessons learned. Suffice to say, learning – though a specialty – generates massive amounts of variety in homo sapiens. As a result, our special flexibility generates flexible behavior, fit for the myriad environments humans might find themselves within. The effects of this behavior may generate different phenotypic responses, responses that need not, as already shown, generate any significant genomic variation. However genomic variation undoubtably and likely occurs, for example in groups who are prone to sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease (M. J. O’Brien and K.N. Laland, 2012 and J. Diamond and J.I. Rotter, 2002).  Variants in human phenotype, if not also genotype, can be seen as the product of the Baldwin Effect. 

The Baldwin Effect “is a process by which organic selection leads to evolutionary (genetic) change. Baldwin’s Organic Selection… is differential survival (selection) in which phenotypic accommodations to extreme conditions during individual ontogeny allow enhanced survival of appropriately responding individuals (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 24).” One such example, ten million years ago, could be the differential effect on apes who became more emotionally bonded, more emotional, and more social compared to those who did not, i.e., those apes who went extinct. Selection, as already shown, favored the apes who became more eusocial in the savanna environment. As h. Habilis and h. Erectus continued to radiate from their savanna origins, equipped with the benefits conferred to them by h. Australopithecus, variation in hominin behavior could have been effected by what Mary Jane West-Eberhard calls the ratcheting effect of conditional expression – “the fact that conditional expression matches a phenotype to an environment, making it possible for a phenotype to be exposed to positive selection when it is likely advantageous, and shielded from negative selection by nonexpression in conditions where it is inappropriate. This ratcheting effect could accumulate net directional change under episodic selection in temporally and spatially heterogenous environments, even though the population may experience conditions that temporarily reverse the trend (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 162).” Hence why we can see such disparate behavioral variation in technologically and environmentally similar peoples, e.g., the Semai and Waroani, and thus the many differences in humans from various cultures. While humans universally have the same form, variation in that form is environmentally contingent, meaning that it is also socially contingent. The many kinds of peoples are in fact distinct phenotypically, if not also genetically, meaning they also have different values. In other words, humans do not need to be a social animal, but they, as previously stated, gain many benefits from doing so. However, how exactly they do so is subject to the same environmental mechanisms that produced human eusociality.

For example, one of the main problems that needed to be overcome for humans to develop complex societies was the free-rider problem. Free-riders do not play the tit-for-tat game like everyone else. Turchin described them as knaves. Knaves are essentially parasites. They take from what the group collectively generates without sacrificing for the group to ensure the group’s continued success. In essence, by not sacrificing for the group, by acting selfishly, the free-riders gain more than those who do sacrifice for the group. When moralists, those who conditionally contribute to the group, not out of any sense that they necessarily should contribute to the group, discover the knaves are engaging in this kind of behavior, if they are not allowed to punish the knaves, they stop sacrificing to the group because they know it’s the rational thing to do (they actually can’t emotionally benefit from doing so). However, as Fehr and Gachter in their 2002 (Fehr and Gachter, 2002) study found, if they are allowed to punish the knaves, they not only punish the knaves but they enjoy punishing knaves. The reward centers in their brain, for example the nucleus accumbens area, ventral tegmental area, the basal ganglia, and hippocampus, track the punishing behavior, they anticipate punishing the knaves, they get excited by it, and they get a sense of euphoria for doing so (De Quervain et al., 2004). However, not all individuals hold their fellows to account. For example, “graduate students in economics… tend to behave more selfishly than students from other disciplines (Marwell and Ames, 1981).”

The effects of this game, which serve as the basis to test how exactly the problem of the tragedy of the commons is overcome, also differs between cultures, exemplifying the flexible nature of human behavior and the ratcheting effect of conditional expression provided to us by West-Eberhard. According to Turchin (2006, pp. 120-121), “Cross-cultural variation is not huge, although detectable… in Israel and Japan the modal offer was lower, 40 percent of the pot… In Israel, there was also a substantial number of low offers (10 to 30 percent of the pot), which were very rare in the other three countries. The probability that a low offer would be rejected was the highest in the United States and Slovenia, intermediate in Japan, and the lowest in Israel (Roth et al., 1991).” Researches also conducted similar studies in much more small-scale societies of traditional farmers, herders, and hunter-gatherers. “The amount of cross-cultural variation found in these small-scale societies was much greater than in the modernized ones (although in no society did people behave as would be predicted by the self-interest axiom). The Machiguenga of Peru made the lowest offers… [their] economy is entirely focused on the household; almost no productive activity would require cooperation outside the members of the family.” The less members of the society were integrated, the less they offered. In contrast, “The Ache of Paraguay practice widespread meat sharing and cooperation on community projects… The average proposal made by the Ache was 51 percent of the stake, almost precisely the 50:50 split predicted by fairness considerations… The Lamelara whale hunters of Indonesia go to sea in large canoes manned by a dozen or more individuals. Close cooperation is crucial for a successful hunt. In the ultimatum game the Lamelara are super-fair – the average proposal was 58 percent of the stake (findings from Henrich et al., 2004).” 

Two attributes that could account for this effect are IQ and Agreeableness. Based off evidence from prisoner’s dilemma (PD) experiments from 1959-2003, “For every 100-point increase in the school’s average SAT score,” students cooperated 5-8% more often (Jones, 2008). Agreeableness, the other variable that could be modifying this effect, also affected whether participants were more likely to participate in PD experiments. A standard deviation (SD) increase in agreeableness increases cooperation by 15% (Kagel and McGee, 2014). Of note, group IQ, the first effect considered, apparently is primarily mediated by individual IQ (Bates and Gupta, 2017). In high IQ groups (groups constituted by individuals with high IQs), “cooperation increases… while declining with lower intelligence (Proto, Rustichini and Sofiano 2014).” And in another study by Garett Jones, the author found that “The well-identified psychological relationship between IQ and patience implies higher savings rates and higher folk theorem-driven institutional quality in high average IQ countries. Experiments indicate… intelligence predicts greater pro-social behavior in public goods and prisoner dilemma games, supporting the hypothesis that high national IQ [nations composed of people with relatively high IQs] causes higher institutional quality… higher savings intensity by a variety of measures… and [higher levels of productivity] (Jones, 2011).” In summation, higher intelligence groups will be more likely to cooperate to acquire more resources, more willing to sacrifice (saving resources) and not defect (free-ride), be better at producing resources, and likely to trust others more (Sturgis and Allum, 2010), in turn generating more complex societies (Gottfredson, 1997). In short, this phenotype, likely including the ability to interpret the intentions of others (Theory of Mind) (Engle et al., 2014) and potentially the ability to consider individuals in varying scenarios, each one used to weigh the value of a possible decision or choice (Theatre of Mind), leads to more eusocial societies, more complex societies, societies capable of creating empires. 

Morality is then the evolutionary product of emotion; a phenotype selected through Man’s development in various complex environments (Morality being necessary in some environments more than others); its origins found in contemporary primates. It was forged in a harsh environment requiring group cohesion or what is recognized as asabiya (Turchin, 2006 via Ibn Khaldun), yet not all proceeding environments that Man radiated into were alike, leading to the development of various forms of nesting behavior, different – yet similar --  divisions of labor, numerous forms of social complexity, the need to recall various individuals, events, and facts contingent upon the complexity of the environment a given people find themselves in (facts are not as relevant to some peoples as they are to others); differences in the capacity to intuit and theorize about the intentions of others, all followed by the development of complex behaviors (different types of dance and music), symbols, and languages; the latter of the developments best exemplified by intelligence or IQ; i.e., systematic thinking, which itself varies globally and regionally, and is likely environmentally dependent. While none of these phenotypic differences require significant genetic variation to occur, they can have profound effects on intergroup cooperation and socialization (and also have allelic effects). How can someone who cannot assess the intentions of another ever hope to cooperate with them at a grand scale; how can such phenotypically distinct people hope to develop a complex society if they are not capable of engaging in mutualistic cooperation, sharing, and betting (sacrificing); how could they develop successful institutions of power capable of supporting their people, helping them to acquire resources, reproduce, distribute those resources, and maintain the equilibrium of the people and society; how could such a phenotypically distinct collection of people compete with a more cohesive people? 

Of note, development does not act upon a blank slate, it does not, every generation, create random genetic variation and thus brand-new phenotypes – this process would lose out in the competition for resources to a process capable of generating phenotypes that efficiently capitalize on the resources already available while retaining the ability to create phenotypic variation. Selection, as stated previously, occurs at the level of the phenotype and what is carried over from one generation to the next is the genome, particularly through the germ line. Yet, out of the protein structures manifested by the genome, which can be altered through development (e.g., in the mother’s womb), development can only act, selection for different phenotypic variants can only act, on the phenotype already present (this includes transposons and chromatin marking); you cannot teach a fish to talk like a human, no matter how hard you try. Thus, even though we are genetically similar as humans, we are clearly not phenotypically similar and these phenotypic dissimilarities are largely the product and the interaction between organism, development, and environment, with the genome essentially enslaved to the phenotype; it can only “hope” the phenotype and structural changes work in its favor – so much for the selfish gene (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 93). Thus, while the human niche is learning, and it has afforded Man the ability to adapt to various complex environments, the ability to move between those environments is not so fluid; selection from one environment to the next must still take place. 

For instance, say there was a population with an average IQ of 75, with a SD of 15 points, such that the lower quartile minimum was 60 and the upper quartile maximum was 90. Let’s also assume there’s another population whose average IQ was 110, with a SD of 10 points, such that the lower quartile minimum was 100 and the upper quartile maximum was 120. Given the purported heritability of IQ is around r=.5, (.8 in some studies), how easy would it then be for a large mass of individuals with an IQ of 75 to move into an environment that requires complex problem solving, and how likely is it that they will cooperate with, let’s say, the native inhabitants who have an average IQ of 110? Let’s also say they were not as agreeable as the native inhabitants, there were substantial personality differences between the two people, would they be able to create a complex, flourishing, and functioning society? Let’s also say their moral systems, the behaviors, norms, what was considered permissible and impermissible differed substantially, such that there was very little overlap. How well would these two people cooperate? Now let’s also say there was another group of people with an IQ of 105, SD = 8 points, lower quartile minimum = 97, upper quartile maximum = 113, they were cooperative, willing to share with each other, sacrifice for each other, save up, and could create functioning, complex, dissociable, interdependent institutions (division of labor). In the game of group selection, who would win? The high IQ society affected by the low IQ society or the society with a relatively lower IQ capable of cooperating? The evidence we have covered suggests it is the latter.

While this only serves as an example, the point is this: just because we are genetically alike does not mean we are phenotypically alike. Slight phenotypic differences, differences that are selected for in different environments may not be useful in other environments; the values, behaviors, ideas a group acquires in one environment may not be useful in another environment (Tishkoff et al., 2007). Yet, because the target of selection is previous phenotypic variation, phenotypes carried over from one environment into a new environment have to go through a bottleneck; the old that doesn’t work has to be discarded for the old that does work, and perhaps something new can be acquired along the way if the organism is plastic enough (Badyaev, 2009). Although this may not sound all that interesting, in terms of human relations, this likely produces extremely dramatic and tragic outcomes. Morality, the topic of this paper, the product of evolution, is just one of those phenotypic variations. 

I think we can now actually begin to theorize about what is happening in the United States. Why are Americans at each other’s’ throats? What is happening in America? Why is there such a profound moral divide? To begin to answer this question, where I began at the beginning of this paper, I will turn to the end of Richard Joyce’s book, The Evolution of Morality. 

Part V: The Consequences of Rationalism for Human Moral Systems and their People

A reading of Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality may give the reader (as it has me) the impression that Joyce is anti-intuitionist (although he does suggest intuitions are rationale in a manner not used in this paper); it does not seem as if he is in favor of Intuitionism. Hence why he argues for linguistic dominion over Moral Systems rather than recognizing linguistic justifications follow from intuitions, and even rational moral judgments (e.g., moral judgments about Julie and Mark’s night) are only seemingly devoid of emotional affect; do the moral judges really make a rational judgment or does it only appear as such – are they not ultimately going with their gut, even after they think it over; is their decision genuinely rationally justified? I don’t think there’s any evidence to demonstrate it is.

For a start, why must morality (a moral system) comport to the truth? Remember, moral systems are essentially games (with or without explicit norms), whose telos cannot be conquest, competition, or winning (as it was for the Romans). Instead the goal of the game of morals is to continue playing the game of morals for as long as possible. Winning may be part of the game of morality, but its goal is not winning; the moral game continues regardless of whether a win or loss is incurred. On page 219 of Joyce’s text, he states, “I contend that on no epistemological theory worth its salt should the justificatory status of a belief remain unaffected by the discovery of an empirically supported theory that provides a complete explanation of why we have that belief while nowhere presupposing its truth.” First, does any theory provide a complete explanation? What precisely counts as a complete explanation? One we find reasonable? But then why must we agree that reason alone, or at all, must justify our beliefs, or that it genuinely does? Also, why is truth necessarily relevant for one to act on a moral belief? I am not saying it’s totally irrelevant, but what I am saying is that one has no need to justify their morals through reason or truth. 

For example, take the evolution of lactose digestion in adults into consideration (Holden and Mace, 2009). Before lactose could be digested, it was a matter of fact that one could get sick from lactose. Not all members of a people would necessarily get sick from lactose, but enough may have that it wouldn’t be prudent for everyone to consume lactose. Yet, cultural patterns persisted, such as the rearing of cattle livestock, whose milk may have served as a source of sustenance in times of scarcity, selecting for lactose tolerance and selecting against lactose intolerance. If these desperate people acted on the truth that lactose makes people sick, and they decided not to consume lactose, they may have died. By going against the evidence, in some sense, these people willed a phenotype into existence. As a result, whole cultures arose around the worship of the cow; e.g., Nordic mythology places the cow as a central player in the creation of the world. This irrational view, that the Cow played a hand in the creation of the world, could have saved the lives of these people – the effect of lactose intolerance was irrelevant. The morals and myths surrounding the worship of the Cow did not need to be centered around the idea of truth, nor justified by such an idea, they simply had to ensure the players of the social game could continue playing the social game. The Semai, and their belief of a malevolent, inspirited world, also – though irrational and ostensibly false – plays a significant role in their survival; the truth of the malevolent spirits is irrelevant.

The sacrificial nature of some religions may also be related to this effect. “Must I sacrifice to the gods, to God, why ought I sacrifice to the gods, to God? Why must I abide by these childish and babyish taboos and rituals? What good does it bring me? What justification do you have that I ought to sacrifice for the group, to the gods, to God, based upon an empirical fact – where is this God, these gods? Where is the rationale in abiding by these inane and subordinating taboos? Must I wear all black, dye my hair red, grow my facial hair, and not bathe but once a week? Who says? On what authority? And why ought I abide by that authority?”. 

These seemingly childish questions genuinely present us with a fantastic insight into the problem I am trying to address. Essentially, the good of the group, the need for the group to survive through its ability to cooperate, need not be dependent on truth, rationale, or reason. In a paper by Scott Atran and Joseph Henrich, The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Product, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religion (Atran and Henrich, 2010), the authors demonstrate that, “Differential group survival [yields] an increase in the mean number of costly rituals per group over time… [suggesting] that such rituals and devotions likely generate greater commitment and solidarity within groups.” In other words, “religion, as an interwoven complex of rituals, beliefs, and norms, plausibly arises from a combination of (1) the mnemonic power of counterintuitive representations [their lack of truthiness], (2) our evolved willingness to put faith on culturally acquired beliefs rooted in the commitment-inducing power of devotions and rituals [the more we sacrifice to something, the lower the probability we’ll abandon it], and (3) the selective effect on particular cultural complexes created by competition among societies and institutions.” The more you sacrifice, the more willingly you sacrifice, the lower the probability you will take advantage of the group, the more you demonstrate to the group that they can trust you. “[These belief] complexes tend to include potent supernatural agents that monitor and incentivize actions that expand the sphere of cooperation, galvanize solidarity in response to external threats, deepen faith, and sustain harmony.” Again, we can see that the moral systems’ goal is only partially winning (if at all, i.e., it’s more about resisting external threat). As previously stated, cooperation, group cohesion or asabiya (Turchin, 2006), deepening faith (or emotional ties to the beliefs and thus the group), and the maintenance of harmony to prevent the disintegration of the group through degradation or degeneration (to prevent intragroup strife) are the main goals. The legitimacy of this paper’s claims are borne out in another paper previously cited (Sosis and Bressler, 2003). In other words, by demanding the religious or moral belief be justified (let alone completely justified) misses the point – the point is that the morals bind the group, create group cohesion, and protect the group from abuse and external threat. The moral systems, once again, ensure the social game can go on. And yet, Joyce and people like him demand the moral belief be completely justified, or that a belief should be affected by an empirically supported theory – it neither has to be or ought to be. 

What I am going to propose now is that, what Joyce, Greene, and even Jonathan Haidt in his emphasis on utilitarian virtue ethics miss is this (Haidt seems to have a kind of faith that virtue ethics will just work): morality, moral systems, and thus religions, channel the intuitions into effective group behavior. By effective group behavior, I mean that the intuitions, specifically the moral intuitions, are channeled into a preexisting, demonstrably stable morality phenotype (if we take the moral system to be an extended phenotype of a given people who are predisposed to be attracted to a certain set of behaviors, ideas, or moral aesthetics). Recall that it is not useful for an organism to generate a new phenotype each generation. Thus, because the moral intuitions are a phenotype contingent upon the development of a group of individuals, if they are deprived of a moral system to channel those moral intuitions into [an aspect of their development], a new moral system, in other words a new religion, will emerge [a saltatory phenotypic development]; they may also channel their desire for moral behavior into the closest manifestation of normative judgments: the state. This phenotypic development will necessarily take on a pragmatic form, a form capable of effectively making use of their moral intuitions while discarding previous wisdom traditions that have acquired staying power. Essentially, their new moral system may get them what they want, but it will lack all the wisdom a moral system entails, specifically because some pieces of wisdom are not supported by empirical evidence, reason, or the truth. 

Joyce’s emphasis on the banality of atheistic skepticism ignores this point. Moral systems are not an individual phenomenon (as expressed in my critique of the case of Julie and Mark); they are a group phenomenon, they’re contingent on the group. Joyce claims, “in an earlier era [again, speaking from a position of alleged superiority, as if – coming from a later age -- he’s necessarily wiser] it was feared that religious atheism would lead to a breakdown of civil order – that without the belief in a divine being keeping an eye on human affairs a person would have no reason to eschew depraved acts if confident of getting away with them.” Barring the fact that people do behave more ethically and prosocially when they feel as if they’re being watched (Haley and Fessler, 2005; Shariff and Norenzayan, 2007), the atheist would only act morally if he is bound to a group; why ought he act morally without connection to a group? And what binds him to his group?

Joyce claims that “we generally have strong reasons to act in “prosocial” ways independent of such considerations.” But again, this misses the point: moral systems are not dependent on reason, they are not the product of reason, they are socially contingent and develop in a social context, and make demands dependent on authority, which is an explicitly unreasonable request; i.e., authoritative fallacy; is it wrong because the authority tells you it is so? Is the authority right because he’s an expert, perhaps? Are you, for instance, acting out of faith when you trust the expert? Can you trust the evidence that certifies their expertise, can you even verify it for yourself, or are you putting faith in the expert’s certificate of expertise? How about the institution the expert emerged from? Can you be reasonably certain that institution is worth trusting? Have you ever tried to get a room of 100 people to express all their reasons for doing a particular act, do they agree, even on principle? How about 1,000, 1,000,000 or 100,000,000, et cetera? At the group level, where moral systems emerge, morality is not based on reason. How could it be? An individual acting morally according to his own personal standards of what a moral person ought to be is a genuine abomination that no society would tolerate. As you might see, the rational moralist rests many of his rational considerations in individuals and groups whom he simply trusts or, more accurately, puts his faith in. Many of his personal, individual, and rational considerations are done at the group level, by institutions, experts whom he doesn’t know, accredited in ways that he simply defers to without complete verification of, all of which he simply has faith in – necessarily sacrificing his autonomy to them.  The young deprived of a moral system, left with only the idea that they can derive these moral considerations on their own without a moral system (religion) guiding them, or more accurately a wisdom tradition, realize the autonomous moralist is an abomination, illusion, and absurdity. To offload the burden required of moral decision-making onto the developing youth will turn those young -- who grow up without a moral system to channel their moral intuitions into – to the next, closest thing: the state. These animonious youth turn to the state to alleviate the dysphoria produced by the fact they have no medium to work out their moral intuitions and sentiments. Without an outlet, they’re like a sealed pot of water being heated; eventually, the pressure must be released.  Haidt even provides an example of such a phenomenon in his discussion on the emergence of fascism in Italy. 

To paint a clearer picture of the interaction between the individual, environment, culture (including its systems), and the group, I will turn to a paper written by Tim Ingold titled, Between Evolution and History: Biology, Culture, and the Myth of Human Origins (Ingold, 2002 in Wheeler et al., 2002). Tim is arguing for a specific kind of relational model. It is my opinion that this quote exemplifies what he’s trying to express: [Persons] are not constituted, as the genealogical model implies, in advance of their entry into the lifeworld, but rather undergo a continual formation throughout their lives, within the context of their involvements in specific social and environmental relationships.” In other words, the identity of the individual is a product of the relationship between the individual, their phenotype, their environment, the culture produced by the group to whom they are a part, that group itself, the phenotypes of all the members of that group, and the other objects within that environment. This concept is in line with what Mary Jane West-Eberhard presented in her exquisite work, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (West-Eberhard, 2003).

Tim then provides us with the example of how societies develop around their environment, specifically trees. “With the passage of time, trees develop in strength and stature, as do humans. But their respective lives do not merely proceed in parallel; rather, they are intimately intertwined, as they are with those other inhabitants of the forest… Through their involvement in the human sphere of nurture, trees grow people, just as people grow one another (and trees). An ancient tree that has presided over the passage of many human generations might be regarded as an ancestor of all those who has grown up under its shelter. These human generations have followed the trees into the world, and have drawn support from it. (Ingold, 2002, p. 50).”  In other words, Man doesn’t just grow up around inanimate forces, objects that do his bidding. He is deeply intertwined with his environment, with his culture, technology, and the people around him. Man is as much descended from the trees as he is the progenitor of the trees.

Tim continues, “The conventional term, procreation, captures the sense of begetting implied when we say that one thing is descended from another. It suggests a one-off event: the makings of something absolutely new out of elements derived from immediate antecedents (Ingold, 2002, p. 50).” This is not what we want to express when we are exploring the relationship between individuals, their environment, their culture, their moral system, and how that eventually changes their development, their life, and their experiences. “By progeneration, on the other hand, I refer to the continual unfolding of an entire field of relationships within which different beings may emerge with their particular forms, capacities, and dispositions. The procreated entity is already complete before its life begins: the design is in place, merely awaiting its fulfilment.” This concept is eerily similar to the notion of determination West-Eberhard provides for us: “Phenotype determination, as in “sex determination” or “caste determination,” is the choice made at a decision point. Thus, phenotype determination is influenced by conditions as well as by the nature of the regulatory elements, products of both genotypic and environmental influence during their development (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 68).”  Whether an organism switches on or off (expresses a phenotype or not, including ontogenetic processes), “implies some change in state… under certain conditions. If a process were constantly on or off regardless of conditions, there would be no operative switch. So condition sensitivity is an implicit quality of all switches [italics added]. They mark developmental decision points that depend on conditions.” Once again, in the words of Tim Ingold, “the design is in place, merely awaiting its fulfilment.” In the marble, there is the masterpiece, waiting for the skilled artisan to reveal it, yet its form is up to the artisan, it is not dependent on the marble.  

For Tim, this makes each individual’s path a path of negotiation. “[The] growth of the person may be understood as a movement along a way of life, conceived not as the enactment of role-specifications received from predecessors, but literally as the negotiation of a path through the world… And it is at the points [where contributions are given and received] where the life-lines of different persons cross or commingle that these exchanges occur (Ingold, 2002, p. 51).” The artisan negotiates with the marble, the developmental phenotypes interact with the genome more than they are the product of the genome, yet they are also the product of the environment, with whom they interact, which is the product of their progenitor, who has been affected by and effected the environment the developing organism finds itself within, the environment thus affecting the different developmental phenotypes produced by the genome, which again affect the genome. The deeply integrated and entwined interactions of these processes cannot be merely seen as a one-to-one relation between genotype and organism, traceable from lineage to lineage. Instead, the products of these processes have to be understood as one of deeply interconnected relationships. The artisan is as responsible for the work as the marble is responsible for abiding by his hand, as the artisan is responsible for choosing the right piece of marble, as the Earth is willing to provide for the artisan’s wishes, et cetera. “The life of organisms, instantiated in their activity, is not a derivative output of already evolved capacities but the active process of their formation. In what they do, in their modes of life, organisms set up the conditions not only for their own future development but also for that of others to which they relate. In this regard, they figure not just as passive objects of evolutionary change but as creative agents, producers as well as products of their own evolution (Ingold, 2002, p. 57).” For Tim Ingold, and for the argument I am making here, organisms are not alive, they do not contain life, they are within a process of life. 

In regards to moral systems, moral systems are like an artifact of Man. They are an extended phenotype, a tool that permits cooperation, the resolution of disputes and the preservation of harmony between members of a given tribe. For Ingold, artifacts, like organisms, have life-histories. “Earlier, I [Tim] referred to the way in which, for certain forest-dwelling people, the life-histories of persons are intertwined with those of trees. But what goes for trees could equally well go for artefacts such as buildings. They, too are formed through a process of development within an environment that critically includes their human builders-cum-inhabitants. And through their presence in the environment they, in turn, condition the development of those who dwell in them.” Moral systems, like the forests of Man, are as much a product of Man as Man is a product of them, as much as the moral system is a product of its environment as the environment is a product of the moral system, as Man is the product of his environment. The moral system is part of the living process, it cannot simply be abandoned if one assumes it’s unreasonable or that its claims are unjustified and false. The puerile ego that produces such a thought, and who does not reproach himself, must be seen as the worst kind of knave; the worst free-rider imaginable, one who seeks to upend the moral system that preserves everyone and potentially every societal artifact around him simply because he doesn’t like it. He may certainly have a role to play in the perpetuation of the moral game (the moral system), but he doesn’t have the right to assert his own morals, in the truest sense of right that may still exist. 

On an island, with a group of people who have agreed upon a set of moral precepts (explicitly or implicitly, it makes no difference), he cannot simply decide to act in any way he sees fit and call it moral and reasonable; he literally has no right to assert his own, personal morals. He may seek to convince his fellow island-inhabitants that his act is morally justified, but he must still get them to agree with him. He has no right to force his morality upon them. There is no morality, only autocratic tyranny. A king who holds dominion over his people, yet whose reign is contingent upon their success, is less of a villain than the moral rationalist who seeks to shape the moral system in his personal image. 

I think it is now finally appropriate to talk about what is wrong with America today, what is happening to its people, and why they’re in the state they are in. 

Part VI: The Battle of the Gods in America

So far, we have established five points, which I will briefly summarize here. (1) Morality is not the product of rational processes but is the product of emotional and intuitive processes. (2) Morality’s primordial roots are located in chimpanzees and are best described by the behaviors of moral actors, not the rationalizations of those moral actors, with the goal of the moral actors under any system of morality being continued cooperation between members of the moral community. (3) The development of an individual or group of individuals significantly affects their understanding of emotions and their ability to solve complex social problems. Thus, improper developmental socialization greatly impedes moral behavior, or the understanding of morality. (4) Morality is the product of evolution and can thus be described by evolutionary mechanisms, including developmental mechanisms, meaning that moral systems are the product – and producer – of the diverse peoples and environments around the Earth and, as follows, are diverse themselves. Lastly, (5) undermining moral systems to establish secular, rational moral systems only moves developing youth away from moral systems that gained wisdom from their time in various environments to the state, creating a maladapted population. For instance, the individuals who move towards these secular, state religious-institutions suffer from anomie as a result of the loss or degradation of their moral system and community. The worst of them seek to shape the secular moral system in their own, personal image by force, especially if they perceive the moral system to be a product of individual actors rather than a product of an intertwined relationship between individuals, environment, society, et cetera; the former become enslaved and reliant on the system in their search for meaning and reprieve from the anomie they suffer. 

Hence, we can begin to actually answer the question, “Why are Americans at each other’s throats?”. The response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade is only a symptom of an overarching problem. To put it very succinctly, there are at least two kinds of America; America is a nation composed of nations. While Haidt defined the divide between Americans as a split along moral sentiments, and thus a split between two moral tribes, I think it is much more significant than that. This split (Ghosh, 2019), even according to Haidt, likely emerged out of the development of the political parties within the United States. Developmental effects then led to behavioral and experiential differences, leading to differing conceptions of what it is to live in America, followed by differing conceptions of how to solve the problems in America (Alford, Funk, and Hibbing, 2005; Hatemi et al., 2011; and Block and Block, 2006). These differences, as long as the developmental conditions continue to feedback into the people who produced them, will generate conservatives that are more conservative and progressives that are more progressive. What follows is essentially an ideological divide between peoples within the United States. However, this is only part of the problem. 

America is also a nation of a diverse number of people, very few (if any) of whom share the same cultures, ideas, rituals, practices, or systems of belief (Jensen et al., 2021). As shown above, behavioral differences lead to differences in environmental conditions, leading to differing environmental effects on the individuals in those environments, leading to differing developmental effects, behaviors, experiences, and concepts about what it is like to live in America, ultimately leading to differing conceptions about how to solve the issues in America, some of which will be irreconcilable. These ontogenetic and experiential conditions target particular phenotypes already in existence in the populations at present, and in the various environments the people find themselves within, as well. Like the growing political divide in the United States, the effects of the phenotypic, ontogenetic, and learned differences will likely feedback into the populations they were derived from, exacerbating the differences between peoples in the United States. In turn, what follows is essentially greater division based on phenotypic variations in the various peoples who have immigrated to America, bringing with them the values, practices, rituals, behaviors, and taboos from their nation of origin.

Combined with the fact that the State has become the church of the secular, state-religion, proselytizes for and is sanctioned by the state, and culturally and demographically fewer people are remaining religious (Jones, 2021), anomie will become a more significant issue; depression and mental illness will become more significant issues (Geiger and Davis, 2019). On top of this, as was previously stated, because the individual will be seen as the source of morality, not the group, individual rights based on identity will take center stage. The individual (the knave who seeks to use morality to enrich himself) will demand the group abide by their conception of what is and is not appropriate behavior; disagreement will be seen as denying the rights (really the moral worth) of the individual; we can all generate our own morality right, so why don’t you? 

One response to the anomie produced by the sanctioned and proselyted State religion of the rationalist, logic-based, evidence-centered, authority and institution approved (yet inherently intuition and faith-based) morality will be an increase in the development of various group identities (Trueman, 2021). As Turchin noted, the development of group identities emerges when people are put under pressure. When groups are placed in high-pressure situations, like the Germanic Tribes facing the Romans, eventually uniting as the Alamanni or Franks, they form groups, develop an identity in contradistinction to whom they consider to be a threat to them (e.g., the Romans), and work together as a cohesive group to overcome the threat. These typically emerge on the frontiers of a society. The secular, state-religion of the United States will likely be seen as the source of the threat. In turn, its institutions, elites (or priests), and rituals – at least – will stand as forms to develop distinct identities from, specifically in contradistinction to. New religions (moral systems) will emerge, some based on previously existing ones (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism), some not (Paganism) as a response to this issue. With them will potentially emerge new gods, or conceptions of God, as well. 

Hence, we reach this paper’s conclusion and the proposed hypothesis. 

1. America is divided along political, moral, and phenotypic lines as, in some sense, it always has been. 

2. However, the state, spreading its secular, rationalist morality is likely the root of this issue because it causes division, the degradation of communities, anomie, and accentuates individual rights based on identity without obligation to the group (a variant of free-riding and social parasitism), seemingly deriving its morality from reason and empirical fact, not intuition (this is a lie; it is mostly deriving its morality from its intuitions – authority-based morality – and feelings). 

3. The secular state religion will likely exacerbate divisions in America by creating dysphoria and threatening the stability of the numerous groups in the United States (consciously or unconsciously).

4. New moral systems will naturally emerge as a result of the pressures imposed on peoples by the secular state-religion, which will increase conflict between peoples whose values will be increasingly irreconcilable.

Conclusion: more moral conflicts, and moral systems, will emerge within the United States (e.g., conflicts between individuals who support Roe v. Wade and those who do not.) America is not headed for Civil War, as was the case in 1861, but rather extreme balkanization based in different conceptions of what is considered appropriate or inappropriate moral behavior. America is headed towards a war of gods. 

A pluralistic nation is essentially temporally untenable when you consider developmental plasticity as a mechanism for phenotypic variation in homo sapiens that have already undergone and carry the effects of previous environmental selection with them. While E Pluribus Unum is a great idea, it does not work under conditions that cause extreme phenotypic variation or in which there’s an influx of extreme phenotypic variation, specifically when the increase in phenotypic variants prohibits the integration of those variants into the new environment; there will simply be too many hands and means by which individuals are competing for resources. Part of the decline will also come from the desire of individuals to find refuge in the state, or to acquire power through the state. This will cause an increase in the production of elites who seek employment in the state church as a means of acquiring power for themselves, decreasing the value of real-wages, leading to intra-elite conflict and higher levels of civil strife (Turchin, 2013). In turn, what America is looking at, why there is so much conflict in America, is rooted in the vast and varied differences between peoples, many of which, as time progresses, will be increasingly irreconcilable due to developmental and environmental feedback. With the rise of postmodern holistic nihilism, this effect will likely only be exacerbated; even if they speak a variant of English, they may mean completely different things. Technology, e.g., the ability to quickly find people like yourself, isolate yourself from others not like you and them, and group up with those people online, will also exacerbate this issue (Karmin, 2019). There seems to be a perfect storm of identity conflict brewing within the United States. America is headed towards the state the Waorani found themselves within. Will God save it, too? 

Part VII: Discussion

One of the responses to this will be that we can change the culture, we can resolve this issue if we simply put forward a positive vision, if we properly educate the youth, if we simply vote for the correct candidates. I think these are preposterous claims. I think that there is something fundamentally insoluble about the state of the United States that will necessarily propel it into conflict. A proper reading of Tim Ingold’s paper (2002) should give the reader the feeling that they’re personally responsible for the past, present, and future of humanity – and themselves. However, for Americans to personally solve their problems, they must have the capacity to solve their problems. In other words, selection can only act on already present phenotypes or the potential to manifest those phenotypes. How would Americans, for instance, resolve the illiteracy problem? Who would teach whom? Would they be receptive to the best teachers? Have you ever been in a public high-school classroom, during the school year, in downtown Baltimore? The majority of Americans apparently read below or at proficiency level 3 (Goodman et al., 2013). Such texts are: 

“often dense or lengthy, including continuous, non-continuous, mixed, or multiple pages. Understanding text and rhetorical structures become more central to successfully completing tasks, especially in navigation of complex digital texts. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Many tasks require the respondent construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. Often tasks also demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. Competing information is often present, but it is not more prominent than the correct information (p. B-3).”

Specifically, as of 2012, 52% have a literacy score below level 3. The majority of these individuals were at Level 2, but 18% are at a level 1 reading level or below. The numeracy scale is not much better. As of 2012, 64% of Americans perform at Level 2 or below. Such problems: 

“require the respondent to identify and act upon mathematical information and ideas embedded in a range of common contexts where the mathematical content is fairly explicit or visual with relatively few distractors. Tasks tend to require the application of two or more steps or processes involving calculation with whole numbers and common decimals, percents and fractions; simple measurement and spatial representation; estimation; interpretation of relatively simple data and statistics in texts, tables, and graphs (p. B-7).” 

As noted in Part 4 of this paper, smarter people create more effective institutions. Then let us consider the reading and literacy scores of Americans in light of the testing scores post-COVID (Nerozzi, 2022). Scores for all students fell, while scores for the most at-risk students fell the most. Students with more access to educational resources such as a quiet space, technology conducive to learning, and someone to help them scored higher than those who did not. Higher-performing students also understood when they were struggling more than lower-performing students and sought help to resolve their difficulties. In effect, what we are seeing are the developmental feedbacks we would expect to see if niche construction played a role in the development of children, including their personal development (i.e., how they contribute to their development). However, this isn’t just on the shoulders of the parents and children, but the institutions that effectively represented them (Ham, 2022). If we return to the ideas of Tim Ingold, we can see that we are essentially in a degeneration spiral caused by the interwoven nature of organism, environment, niche, other organisms, et cetera. In education, literacy, and numeracy alone, the adverse effects will likely compound and increase exponentially, leading to further institutional degeneration. There’s no way to improve the culture, the institutions, or the children unless the people are capable of improving themselves, and they are not and will not be able to if the effects continue to compound as I predict they will. 

I would like to explore one more point philosophically, i.e., Man must be connected to nature to truly understand what it is to be moral. Haidt acknowledges that people who grow up in different social milieus have different expressions of the moral intuitions (Haidt, 2012, p. 24-25). This would follow from the conception of morality as a developmental phenotype. However, what I think may be relevant is, as previously stated, Man’s connection to the vicissitudes of life. 

How can Man understand the nuance of when harm is appropriate or inappropriate if he has never suffered himself, if he has never learned from suffering? We learn through conditional habituation and sensitization, and pain or suffering is one such sensation we can become conditioned to. By learning what is appropriate pain – suffering worth enduring – and what’s not worth enduring, we can come to a better understanding of what kind of harm is permissible and what’s not. By seeing nature first hand, we get an appreciation for it – being in nature likely has many health benefits (Tilmann et al., 2018; Franco, Shanahan, and Fuller, 2017); we get a sense of what is and isn’t harmonious; what is and isn’t sanctifying. An exposure to nature could reshape our understanding of why we see the world as a great chain of being, how we understand the great chain of being, and the utility of both negative and positive forces (Keltner and Haidt, 2003; Brandt and Reyna, 2011). In nature, through nature, we also get a sense for what is just authority. Nature has rules, to put it simply. While you can “negotiate” with nature, in the sense that Ingold has described it, you cannot bargain with nature as we do our fellow men. By being in nature, we learn to accept the things we cannot change and to work through such problems without manipulating them as if they were in a virtual space. By doing this, by exploring and negotiating with spaces we cannot bargain with, in spaces where we must discipline and negotiate with ourselves, we develop our problem-solving capacities (Thomas and Harding, 2011; Haga, 2021; and Thomas and Lleras, 2009), we subordinate ourselves to Nature and in doing so become an authority onto ourselves. By becoming our own authority, we learn how to govern ourselves, potentially others, and even become aware of what just and, more importantly, unjust governorship looks like in another. 

From this, I think it is fair to claim that it’s likely that, without exposure to nature, our morals improperly develop. A society that is not exposed to nature, does not experience its vicissitudes, has no sense of what harm is, or what genuinely deserves care, what is beautiful and why it ought to be preserved, and why and when we should respect authority and only subvert it if it’s corrupted beyond repair. A society that does not understand what it is to be part of nature cries out at the slightest and most banal of harms, as if he were coddled his entire life, degrades what is beautiful because he has no understanding of the genuine utility of the aesthetically sublime, and at least is prone to being corrupted, lacking self-discipline, driven to bargain and knavishly manipulate his way out of every problem. A society deprived of nature is sure to develop a morally reprehensible and abhorrent population.  

At the beginning of this paper, I wanted to understand my fellow Americans. I wanted to know why such vitriol existed in the hearts of my countrymen. Over these past few months, by exploring the philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology of morality; by learning about the origin of morality in our ape ancestors; by unraveling the beauty of the developmental process and its relationship to evolution and selection, I have come to a much deeper understanding of myself, my countrymen, the society I live in, the world around me, and all the people within it. I now have a deeper reverence for the world around me, for life, for every organism, and at least my part in the living process of existence. I do not think my country is headed in a good direction, and I do not believe there’s a lot that can be done to solve the problems it’s facing; in fact, I think doing too much will only exacerbate the issues she’s facing. However, I also understand I have a responsibility to my past, to who I am today, and most importantly who and what I could be. I think what most people need to reason about, to think about, and most importantly – if I have not made this point clear enough – really feel through (in the literal sense) is what it is to be good and what is good. 

For a start, I would say good, genuine good, comes from sacrifice. By learning to sacrifice for himself, the worst parts of himself, he may come to know the good in himself and learn how to evoke that good in himself and others. How can one wield power, over himself or others, if he doesn’t know how to sacrifice the worst parts of himself for his own good? How moral is it to force or coerce another to sacrifice that which you will not sacrifice yourself? Yet, to truly know what is an appropriate sacrifice and what isn’t, you must come to know what is good (I think physically). Otherwise, you may make sacrifices that buy you an immediate reprieve (which you may call good) only because you have not considered the fate of yourself or your society in the future. I cannot see this as anything other than love, a deeper love than I think most of my fellow Americans are capable of manifesting, living in, and through because it requires they know of themselves as they are, where they were, and where they could end up, including where they don’t and do want to end up. I do not think there’s evidence to demonstrate the majority of Americans are capable of this kind of thinking. As a result, many of them may engage in the kind of blind sacrifices that buy them nothing more than a little bit of time in a dying society without doing the kind of work necessary to revitalize and preserve that society. And yet, I doubt it would be such a horrible start.

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