The Evolution of Moral Sense and De-evolution of Accountability

I once posed an ultimatum to myself: If someday someone could pose a reasonable explanation for the evolution of our moral sense, I would potentially need to regard the one last human thing that touches the divine as the mundane consequence of evolution and chance.[1] In other words, I'd be SOL in my search for something supernatural without a natural explanation. Since then, much work has been done in this area, and I believe it's fair to say that, as much as we might prefer not to believe so, there is a physical explanation for our human values.

The Consequences
The consequences (which cannot be overlooked however unbearable they may be) is that what is conventionally called "right" by a community is simply what's practical; the concept and components of morality have arisen by mutations over time to assist the survival of the species and groups within it.

Practical = Right = how most people behave most of the time = what our physical bodies require to produce more physical bodies in greater numbers and survive challenges within their environment and among each other.

When those connections are made, there is no moral accountability in the traditional (religious) sense because there is no higher authority to have created it nor an a priori reason for us to adhere.

You may as well ask why a parasite wasp should or should not lay its eggs inside a caterpillar so its young can eat their way out. There is no right or wrong, there just "is."

I've heard a number atheists (or skeptics if you will) celebrate diversity and life and the universe and our uniqueness etc despite this conclusion, but the celebration is hollow and I can't imagine it sounds any more satisfying to them then it does to me.

There are a whole host of conclusions that follow "Right = Practical," including "the ends justify the means" and other troublesome situation ethics.

Should we incarcerate or rehabilitate criminal offenders? I know what I think we should do, I know that I feel more human, and humane, by rising above emotional rhetoric and appealing to elevated principles.[2]

But I have no compelling or cogent reason to do so, except that I cannot do otherwise, and that is not a reason..

If our moral sense is nothing more or less than the color of our hair, our need for corrective lenses, or our ability to tolerate lactose, then there's no more reason to accept it or change it than those things or any other thing that makes us human.

In 12th Grade at McDowell High School,[3] in a sex education class, one of the film strips we watched (if you don't know what that is, read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_strip) discussed genetic engineering. This was long before such things were possible. A voice narrated artists' renderings of life in outer space, and how we might someday manufacture humans with special abilities to work in confined spaces. In one slide, a group of men in overalls worked in a narrow duct, each wielding a wrench over their head as they tightened bolts. They had no legs. The narrator asked if we might someday be able to engineer humans to work in small spaces, and the artists showed men without legs. 

There was no ethical component to this. The class was, after all, about penises and vaginas and what you do with them, not about right and wrong. Our teacher never questioned it either, that I recall, and this was only 10-20 years after thalidomide babies.[4]


Did you know that in each ejaculation, a typical male produces enough sperm to fertilize all the women in the entire northern hemisphere? I learned that in that class. You can imagine the delight that suddenly stirred in our 17-year-old brains.

[1]
This was me talking to myself in 1981 when I was a freshman and reading Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden and Richard Leaky's People of the Lake, both of which I bought at the Calvin College bookstore and savored beginning to end like a small bag of potato chips through a long movie. Concluding our moral sense evolved doesn't mean there's no entity outside humankind that participates in it, only that there is no need for a supernatural explanation for it.

[2]
It is impossible in any description of values not to use language that has for thousands of years been associated with superstitions and religious beliefs, disregarding for the moment whether or not they have any merit. And even if we could not use such language, the words would be so much less beautiful, for elevated concepts give us elevated wit (in the Neo-classical sense).

[3]
McDowell High School is at 3580 W 38th St, Erie, PA, 16506. It's a very large school. My graduating class was over 700.

[4]
I knew a man who sold thalidomide. He was a pharmaceutical salesman after WWII. He was essentially a nice man but could not examine his actions very closely. He was a pilot in WWII. He dropped bombs over civilian and military targets. He enjoyed bombing trains especially. He would describe the experience like it was a video game, using the word "poof" to describe a direct hit. I asked him if he ever wondered about the people he killed, for he bombed towns and factories also. No, he didn't. As for thalidomide, he blamed the pregnant women for taking it, saying pregnant women will eat anything you give them, it wasn't his fault or the doctors'. His name was Bob. He is gone now. He lived in the same gated community that Paul Schrader's parents lived in at that time, or at least that's what I was told. Schrader directed Taxi Driver and other controversial films. Schrader went to Calvin College too. The professors that chose to comment when I was there were not very fond of him.