The components of the master’s degree at the University of Oxford include two essays (one on Edward Wilson and the other on Intellectual Humility), one dissertation (which will be included in these forthcoming series of posts), a written exam that cannot be reproduced here, and one oral defense of any aspect of the above essays.

The master’s dissertation that I’m posting here is about the potential synergistic relationship between evolutionary and theological ethics. Sounds abstruse, but if you invest effort to read the dissertation slowly and carefully, looking up difficult/arcane terms as they appear, you may find the payoff rewarding.

Intended to be the magnum opus of my academic theological journey, I invested all my time and effort in the latter half of 2015 and the first half of 2016 to produce it. If I had chosen to stay for their PhD programme (was offered a place but I declined) and continued on an academic career, I would have picked this field to contribute knowledge.

After submitting the dissertation, I re-read and memorized all my notes to prepare for the written exam and oral defense. The written exam was surreal. It is tradition for Oxford students to wear their gowns when taking the exams. I am grateful that the oral defense examiners were cordial and allowed me to answer their questions and elaborate on them in detail. As mentioned, I received distinctions for all elements of the course and was the only master’s student that year with that achievement.

Here is the first part of the dissertation. The rest will follow in separate posts.

Evolutionary Perspectives on Ethics: A Critical Assessment of their Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Foundations

1. Introduction
2. A Selective History of Evolutionary Ethics
3. Engaging with the Fact-Value Gap and Meta-Ethical Objections for Theological Appropriation
4. Assessing the Levels of Certainty Required for Science
5. Tracing and Appraising the Cumulative Case for Evolutionary Ethics
6. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Theorizing about whether and how the evolutionary process can explain and determine human moral sentiments and ethical systems has had a chequered history. [1] It is no surprise therefore that theorizing about the nature of the relationship between evolutionary ethics and theology is just as controversial. Contemporary criticisms range from the unbridgeable “fact-value”, or “is-ought” gap articulated, in various shades of nuance, by David Hume and G. E. Moore concerning evolutionary theory’s determination of moral norms, the assertion that speculating about the evolution of human moral sentiments and ethical systems merely produces “just-so” stories, and more general objections about how the neo-Darwinian metaphysical picture of the nature of life, being at heart, materialistic, mechanistic, and self-centered, is fundamentally incompatible with much of theology. This dissertation wishes to argue that contemporary evolutionary ethics can and should enter into constructive dialogue with theology. It will do so by engaging with objections roughly correlating with the above locus of criticisms in its main sections. It will begin with a selective history of the development of evolutionary ethics, broadly construed, and its interaction with theology to set the context. It will then move on to the first objection by engaging with the contemporary philosophical debates concerning the “fact-value” gap and the meta-ethical foundations of evolutionary ethics, clarifying theology’s key role in adjudicating this debate for its purposes. It will argue that an updated “Aristotelian” virtue ethic related to Thomistic anthropology, one that affirms both moral realism and the legitimacy of evolutionary theorizing about moral traits, is a philosophically and theologically defensible option, and would be a fruitful model for the interaction between evolutionary science and theology.

The second section will hone in on the debates concerning the nature of scientific inquiry and the standards of science acceptable for use in public policy. It will argue that science need not be held to unrealistically high levels of certainty. By extension, evolutionary science need not be held to unrealistic standards of precision that are alien even to its discipline when theology seeks to incorporate some of its principles. The third section will bolster the claims of the second by tracing and appraising the work of evolutionary ethics proper to determine if certain prominent strands of its work can offer that modest account suggested in the second section. If this cannot be done, it would be unwise to apply its principles to theology. The debate is ongoing and probably will continue to be, as in any healthy and mature discipline. However, this dissertation will argue that a cumulative case for the acceptability of contemporary work in the area can be made, with promising hope for further advancement through cross-disciplinary collaboration. The final section will conclude by re-capitulating the value of attempting to incorporate work on evolutionary ethics with theology, with suggestions concerning where future research may be undertaken for the benefit of both.

2. A Selective History of Evolutionary Ethics

While the writings that have survived from the ancient past show that thinking about the “good life” has preoccupied individuals and scribal traditions across various cultures, [2] it was with the arrival of the theory of natural selection attributed to the work of Charles Darwin and successfully ushered into the 19th-century European scientific consciousness that the observations concerning life’s perennial competition for finite resources were used to speculate on the corresponding evolution of human moral sentiments and ethical systems. [3] What emerged from this speculation was a stream of eugenic thinking – which featured problematic aspects of Lamarckianism – advocated by some individuals collectively referred to as the social Darwinists to promote ‘social conservatism, militarism, eugenics, laissez-faire economics, and unfettered capitalism’ in parts of America and Europe (Laland, Brown 2002: 42; Bowler 1983: 101, 103-104). Their approach was later ignored by influential American anthropologists with “environmentalist” commitments such as Franz Boaz, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the idea soon became complicit with the Nazi ideology of racial purity and sterilizing practices based on a “blending” understanding of inheritance and the “survival of the fittest” mindset, which were rightly castigated as pseudo-science by J. B. S. Haldane, researchers at the Darwin Centennial celebration in 1959 who stressed that the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (MES) prized diversity, and others. [4]

The consequences of this stream of thought led UNESCO to ban biological research on human behaviour in 1952. Nevertheless, theorizing about the evolution of human behaviour returned in the late 1960s and 1970s among discussions at the Man and Beast conference in 1969 at Washington D. C. which helped to mould the ideas behind Sociobiology, the pioneering 1975 publication by Edward Wilson, whose attendance strengthened his belief that ethology, population biology, and evolutionary theory, updated by or founded on the MES, could be fruitfully combined to model the behaviour of animals, including humans. [5] His approach, which was also an outflow of the hardening of the “adaptationist” – in opposition to the “developmentalist” – program from the mid-century, brought to a wider community new evolutionary concepts such as “Hamilton’s rule”, which was synonymous with inclusive fitness and kin selection, and Robert Trivers’ reciprocal altruism. [6] Across the Atlantic, Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, popularized other related concepts such as gene-selectionism, a bold extension of the work of G. C. Williams and Hamilton, the search for evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS) via game theoretical models from the work of John Maynard Smith and George Price, such as the Hawk and Dove game, and the addition of Robert Axelrod’s work on the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma in the second edition of the book to show how cooperation can evolve among interacting populations, including human ones. [7] Since then, evolutionary theorizing about human nature has moved beyond its original disciplinary nexus and has interacted with other disciplines including psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, and economics, spawning new research directions within these disciplines. [8] As a result, these inquiries have increasingly instantiated themselves as received wisdom to the Anglophone world not least through the work of public intellectuals such as Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett and media channels like Discovery Digital Networks. These have imbued the scientific enterprise with a cultural authority on moral matters that were once the purview of religion. [9]

At different stages of their development, various theological traditions have found constructive points of contact with these ideas, in much the same way Christian thinkers throughout history bolstered their theologies with the philosophies and metaphysical systems available to them. [10] Peter Bowler notes that in the 19th century, when ‘reconciliation of evolution with traditional concepts of teleology and design became the chief aim of religious thinkers’, a few Calvinists ‘expressed a willingness to adopt a complete Darwinian scheme, including natural selection’ because they believed that the non-teleological implication of natural selection supports the notion that ‘man is a fallen creature whose salvation must come from a source external to this world’ (1983: 218, 220, 220). [11] Conversely, liberal Christians, who adopted the then majority view that evolution ‘could be seen as an essentially purposeful process’ were willing to assume that ‘the progressive nature of the material world was a deliberate part of God’s plan, intended to teach us how to behave’ (Bowler 1983: 220, 221, 288). Some problematic implications notwithstanding, these trends have found kindred spirits among contemporary Christian thinkers – unfortunately obscured by the resurgence of the fundamentalist demonization of evolutionary theory from the 1980s – who nevertheless correctly discern that, because ‘the basic idea of evolution […] cannot be identified with any particular philosophy or ideology’, (Bowler 1983: 364; Barr 1984: 132) evolutionary theorizing about human nature, including their morality and ethical systems, need not be monopolized by atheistic assumptions promoting their position as the only legitimate interpretation. [12] For example, Kenneth Miller suggests that God ‘made the world today contingent upon the events of the past. He made our choices matter, our actions genuine, our lives important. In the final analysis, He used evolution as the tool to set us free’ (2007: 253). John Haught argues that the messiness of ‘evolutionary science compels theology to reclaim features of religious faith that are all too easily smothered by the deadening disguise of order and design’. Consequently, Christians can shrug off the desire to control the present by mastering the past and be open to the arrival of genuinely new possibilities – including the expansion of altruism and the Christian hope – that the future holds and that the present points to (2008: 5, 99, 107). [13] Martin Nowak has devoted himself in collaboration with others to explore the factors that promote and constrain cooperation in humans via his evolutionary dynamics to secure their future in the biosphere. [14] And Neil Messer offers to ‘redraw the map of evolution and ethics’ with an exploration of its connection to a certain relational concept of sin and a Barthian divine command ethic. [15]

In the section that follows, this dissertation will continue in the tradition of working toward a positive interaction between evolutionary ethics and theology by critically assessing the contemporary philosophical debates concerning the “fact-value” gap and metaphysical foundations related to evolutionary ethics. In so doing, it will forward its preferred model of theological engagement with evolutionary science that is philosophically and theologically defensible.

Endnotes

1. See (Grene, Depew 2004), (Segerstrale 2000) and (Bowler 1983)
2. Notable examples include “Eudaimonia” (εὐδαιμονία) from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, “Universal Love”, or jiān ài (兼愛) from the Chinese philosopher Mozi, and the writings loosely connected by a common thematic feature of exhortation and disputation concerning human life which were later designated “wisdom literature” from the Ancient Near East.
3. Examples of the former include Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and T. H. Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics” Romanes lecture. Examples of the latter include the works of Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton and the 19th century social-Darwinism that built on their foundation.
4. See (Grene, Depew 2004: 254, 329-331; Bowler 1983: 295; Wilson 2012: 95-96; Segerstrale 2000: 30; Clark 2000:200-201; Miller 2007: 174-175)
5. See (Segerstrale 2006: 53), (Wilson, Southworth 1994: 300)
6. See (Amundson 2008: 260) and (Orzack, Forber 2012)
7. See also (Axelrod, Hamilton 1981)
8. See for example (Laland, Brown 2002) and (Lewens 2015b)
9. See (Harrison 2015: 193) and (Dixon 2008: 125)
10. Notable instances include Saint Augustine and the Platonic thought he encountered from the translated works of Plotinus and possibly Porphyry which he used to lay the Manicheanism of his youth behind (Harrison 2000: 13-14), and Saint Thomas Aquinas’ indebtedness to Aristotle’s and Ibn Sina’s metaphysics (Craig 1980: 98)
11. For the comprehensively defended thesis that the movement to a literal interpretation of Christian scripture and debates concerning the severity of the consequences of the Fall to human knowledge contributed significantly to the myriad scientific debates in early-modern Europe, see (Harrison 1998), (Harrison 2007), (Harrison 2011) and (Harrison 2015)
12. See (Clark 2000: 80), (Brooke 2013: 38), (Brooke 1991: 183, 203, 452), (Harrison 2015: 193) and (Grene, Depew 2004: 336). On the flipside, see also (Haught 2008: 207) and (Long 2010: 11)
13. See also (Haught 1998: 413)
14. See (Nowak, Highfield: 2011)
15. See (Messer 2007). Other notable engagements include (Berry, Noble 2009), (Bowker 1995), (Clark 2000), (McMullin 1986), (Midgley 1978), (Midgley 1994), (Nowak, Coakley 2013), (Southgate 2008), (Rolston III 1999), (Russell, Stoger, Ayala 1998) and (Clayton, Schloss 2004)