You’d be hard pressed to find group of people who don’t consider themselves to be particularly good on some fundamental level. I challenge you to pick any political party (left or right), union, fraternity, or religious group. It takes no stretch of the imagination to predict how they might respond if asked. Though churches may be full of sinners, you’ll quickly discover that in fact not all sinners are created equal. Visit the nearest jail, and while you may find some penitent, many more prisoners will be ready to share a story explaining how the actions which got them locked up were entirely reasonable if you could only see the situation from their perspective.
Growing up, each of us is implored to “be good”. Whether it’s while goofing off in class, following a choice curse word to an annoying sibling, or coming from the pulpit, we are asked to restrain our natural inclinations and to behave ourselves.
Privately, nearly everybody pauses from time to time to consider whether something we’ve done was really the right thing. Was it wrong of me to date my friend’s ex so soon after their break up? Should I have given more charity this year? Was I awful to embellish my resume for the job I really wanted?
What do we mean by good?
On the face of it, when people use the word good they really mean one of three things:
- Moral, as in “My neighbor is a really good guy. If anyone in town needs help, he’s always the first to lend a hand.”
- Satisfying, as in “This chocolate cake is so good. I’d drive an hour for another slice.”
- Effective, as in “Despite his messy personal life, Tiger Woods is a really good golfer.”
Each of these meanings really points to the same thing though. We call Tiger Woods a good golfer because an effective golfer is more satisfying to watch (at least for the few among us who can stomach more than 5 minutes of the most beautiful game on TV). Similarly, the neighbor who frequently lends a hand can probably be relied on to help us if we ever needed it. Therefore, when we say anything is good we are really describing how well or poorly we believe it aligns with our interests. All debate on morality is really a discussion on human self-interest.
This may sound strange. How can good be related to our self-interest? After all, we very much don’t want to do so many “good” things we believe we should. We don’t instinctively want to give a large portion of our income to charity, but we all know that would be very noble. We similarly would feel afraid to sacrifice our lives for our country, even though the highest honors are reserved for those heroes. There seem to be loads of examples where the “right thing to do” goes directly counter to our personal desires.
The Greater Good
Let’s look at that first example more closely. Bob decides to give his lifesavings to build a school for poor children in his town. If he follows through, he would be universally considered a pretty darn good person. Other people in his town would almost certainly applaud the donation and find a way to publicly honor him. If Bob gave his lifesavings to feed starving African children on the other side of the world, many people in town would still praise this action, but they’d be a lot less likely to all gather around and name a building after him. After all, there would be no immediate impact to the people in the local community.
Let’s examine Bob’s motivations a bit more closely than what is typically comfortable. If he decides to build the school for local kids rather than send the money to Africa, he can correctly anticipate that it will build an enormous amount of goodwill for himself in town. This goodwill could help him in the future. Maybe he’ll get elected mayor or put on the board of the local utility company. These would be personal selfish reasons. However, donating everything he owns can’t be fully explained by this because no amount of goodwill is likely to yield a positive return on this huge expense. Therefore, we must conclude that Bob’s unusual generosity really comes from the satisfaction he desires from seeing his community strengthen and prosper. While few people are ready to part with their lifesavings, there are many people who do have a genuine desire to make a positive impact on their local community, even at some personal expense. However, Bob’s compassion can also be seen as a form of self-interest, where the self is defined at the gene level, as opposed to the individual person level.
The Evolutionary Roots of Morality
At the root of our compassionate behavior (and for that matter, all of our behavior) are billions of years of evolution. Fossils record how evolution has shaped our bodies. Humans evolved from small rodent-like mammals at the time of the dinosaur destroying asteroid, to become bipedal, and ultimately into our present forms. Most scientifically inclined people readily accept this. However, what is less considered is how our minds and emotions have similarly been shaped by evolutionary forces.
Consider a society where it is socially acceptable for a strong man to murder his weaker brother and seize his belongings and wife. We naturally feel appalled by the idea of this, and we are not alone. Across species (wolves, apes, humans, even birds) we find evidence of pro-social behavior. Chimps punish individuals who are unexpectedly aggressive towards others, crows give each other gifts, and elephants help and support each other in times of need. Many species (including humans) evolved to feel appalled or enamored by certain social behaviors, and those feelings comprise our internal sense of morality, of right and wrong. Just as birds have an innate understanding of how to build nests, even when they’ve never been taught how to do it, the vast majority of humans have innate intuitions towards several basic moral concepts: sharing with those in your group, punishing disloyal tribesmen, punishing hypocrites (those who pretend to be pro-social but are not), avoiding sources of impurity and disease, and honoring those who sacrifice themselves for others. The existence of these innate pro-social feelings enabled our ancestors to outcompete and eventually win out against groups which did not have these innate moral feelings.
Getting back to Bob and his school, his compassion for those in his community (while more pronounced than average) is indirectly tied to his own wellbeing and the ability for his genes to propagate through the prosperity of his wider community, who historically would have shared genes with him passed down from common ancestors. Therefore, even though he may feel that he is acting in a purely selfless way, in fact he is following his instincts as honed by evolution.
Morality and Religion
Moral instincts exist and feel quite real, and like so many aspects of the human body, have origins which were entirely unknown until the advent of modern evolutionary biology. Organized religions are also a part of this evolutionary process, although developing just in the past few thousand years. While religions provide a sense of community and cozy answers to many of life’s questions, those benefits could be found elsewhere prior to religions, as we’ve had tribes and legends since long before recorded history. The key contribution of religion to evolutionary fitness is the way it allows for cooperation on a much larger scale than previously possible.
Prior to religions, the natural instincts of individuals allowed them to navigate the two primary modes of human coexistence, cooperation and competition. The vast majority of humans can internally balance both the importance of being helpful and loyal to their tribesmen while simultaneously nurturing a deep seated hatred and fear of neighboring tribes who they may wish to raid and destroy. The ability to harbor both perspectives is useful because you can’t conquer neighboring tribes by yourself, but doing so is a huge evolutionary opportunity to seize resources and mating opportunities.
Religions allowed for trust and cooperation across much larger groups of people. If the only thing motivating you not to lie is the consequence from tarnishing your personal reputation within your group, then perhaps you can cooperate with 100-200 people successfully before that motivation disappears. If the thing motivating you not to lie is a fear that you will anger God and go to hell, then you can successfully cooperate with millions of other like-minded individuals, despite the opportunities for taking advantage of others. A clear example of this was how the Arabic tribes went from squabbling bands of a few hundred individuals apiece to a roaring army that swept across the map of Late Antiquity in just the two generations after the advent of Islam.
Morality and Free Will
Many secular people have difficulty understanding the worldview of religious individuals. They have can’t imagine how anyone could really believe the world was created in seven days, that Jesus truly rose from the dead, or that Muhammed journeyed across the sky on a winged horse. However, secular Western-acculturated people share much more in common with the religious worldview than they would care to admit.
Most religions cannot functionally operate without the concept of free-will. Religions need the concept of sinful and good behavior to power the divine system of reward and punishment, and free-will is needed to make the system seem fair. If someone truly was in a situation where their only available choice was to sin, then how is it fair for God to punish that person with eternal damnation when they didn’t even have the option to do otherwise? Secular individuals, while not framing moral choices with the colors of divine approval, make the exact same underlying assumption as their religious counterparts: People can make good or bad choices. Which one they choose makes that individual a good or bad person and therefore worthy of either public reward or punishment.
However, if we pay close attention to the process through which individuals make choices, we can see that there is no room for free-will to exist. Every choice an individual makes is a direct result of their environment or their biology. Both of these stem from the circumstances of birth over which no one has any control. If you personally had been born as Mahatma Gandhi or as Mao Zedong, you would have made the exact same choices as they did because you would have had the same natural inclinations, same mental capacities, same education, same incentives, same experiences, and same societal pressures. There is no part of a person which can choose otherwise than what the chain of cause and effect will yield. It only seems that way because we experience the process of making choices subjectively on a day-to-day basis. If an advanced alien who was unaware of our concept of free-will looked down from their spaceship at an individual and could trace all the environmental and genetic factors which led to a particular action, they would have no reason to assume that there was some extra component of “free-will” which was needed to additionally explain their actions. After all, how many of us wonder about the free-will of the semiconductor chips on our cell phones when we place a call?
Like our innate moral feelings, the subjective experience of free-will is also an artifact of evolution. Even though actions are pre-determined, our inclination to judge, reward, and punish others for their choices evolved because it is useful for societies to self-regulate and prosper. The illusion of free-will is useful both for influencing others and for managing our own lives, even if it is not a biological reality.
Should We Live Moral Lives?
So, if free-will is an illusion, and good and evil are not objective realities, should we live moral lives? Why should I not just do whatever the heck I want (no matter how bad or evil) if morality is not an objective standard? Alternatively, why should I not stay home and just give up on everything if my choices are pre-determined and there is no objective moral significance to my actions outside of evolutionary fitness.
For the first question, I would suggest that you already do whatever the heck you want. Just as we are not truly free to choose our actions, we are also not free from consequences. We all have our desires and goals in life, which we pursue regardless of whether we understand their source. If you go around violating moral norms, you are going to cause yourself all kinds of trouble achieving your goals. Whether the thing that stops you from stealing a Ferrari is fear of God or fear of prison, it doesn’t really change the fact that there is a major risk which stops you from even thinking about breaking into the dealership. Also, just because friendship, compassion, and love are consequences of our deep evolutionary history does not make pursuing those goals any less satisfying and wonderful to experience.
For the second question, this is a bit of a trickier question. Meaning plays a central role in how we define ourselves, what our goals are, and how we value our life experiences. I think of the book “A Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frankl, who describes how meaning was the key he identified that allowed him and others to survive the Holocaust in Auschwitz. However, just because your decision to pursue your chosen career was not subject to your free will, and your love of your children has no moral significance outside of its meaning to you (a tiger’s moral code might define the highest good as having you all for lunch), you can still find relative meaning in them.
When you make a choice, even though you could not have done otherwise, it can help to consider how the action you are taking is not just a decision isolated to yourself but is actually a part of the unfolding of the cosmos and is deeply connected with every previous event. You may not get to compose the music but you do get to play in the symphony.
Final Thoughts
Letting go of free-will actually opens the door for something beautiful. If you consider every choice people make as one of several equally available options that the person could have made, then it is easy to feel proud of your accomplishments and to judge harshly when poor choices are made. After all, how easy is it to feel like we earned a particular scholarship because of our hard work, or that the homeless bum on the street is there because of his particular moral failings.
However, by taking the perspective that our actions and those of others could not have gone differently than they did, a new door opens. The accomplishments of yourself and others were made possible by the good fortune of birth and opportunities. Even the most hardened criminal becomes a creature of pity due to the circumstances which brought him there. His unfortunate crimes hold no more moral significance than the destruction of a tornado or some similar natural disaster. Harsh words against you no longer feel so threatening because you can start to see them as the natural result of an uncontrolled emotional pain stirring within the person who hurls them at you.
Letting go of the familiar frame of free will offers us a form of humility and compassion which are not readily found elsewhere. Not a false humility or hypocritical compassion which we put on display in the hope of future gain, but a true sense of how the world flows through us blamelessly and praiselessly in our day-to-day lives. A burden is lifted, and a fear is extinguished. We see the familiar with new eyes. When my religious friends talk about the infinite compassion of God, I think there really is something to that concept. When the roots behind every action and decision can be seen as clearly as the action itself, then compassion and understanding flow effortlessly.