The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [51]
Along with everyone else, the most scientistic among us accept these core principles as binding. Such norms reveal their force on us by making our widely agreed-on moral judgments somehow feel correct, right, true, and enforceable on everyone else. And when we are completely honest with ourselves and others, we really do sincerely endorse some moral rules we can’t fully state as being right, correct, true, or binding on everyone. Scientism is not going to require that we give up that feeling or withdraw the sincerity of the endorsement. In a fight with these emotionally driven commitments, they’ll win every time, for reasons that will become clear in Chapter 6. But scientism does recognize that emotionally driven commitment is no sign of the correctness, rightness, or truth of what we are emotionally committed to. As we’ll see, add that recognition to science’s explanation of where the shared norms come from, and you get nihilism.
The second premise we need to acknowledge is that core morality, the fundamental moral norms we agree on, has serious consequences for survival and reproduction. This will be especially true when those norms get harnessed together with local beliefs under local conditions. The connection between morality and sex is so strong, in fact, that each may be the first word you think of when you hear the other. The connection makes for a lot of good jokes. (Did you hear the one about Moses descending from Sinai with the two tablets bearing the ten commandments? “I have good news and I have bad news,” he says. The children of Israel ask, “What’s the good news?” Moses replies, “I argued him down from 38.” They ask, “And the bad news?” Moses replies, “Adultery is still one of them.”)
The idea that the moral core has huge consequences for survival and reproduction should not be controversial. Any long-standing norm (and the behavior it mandates) must have been heavily influenced by natural selection. This will be true whether the behavior or its guiding norm is genetically inherited, like caring for your offspring, or culturally inherited, like marriage rules. That means that the moral codes people endorse today almost certainly must have been selected for in a long course of blind variation and environmental filtration. Because they had an impact on survival and reproduction, our core moral norms must have been passed through a selective process that filtered out many competing variations over the course of a history that goes back beyond Homo erectus to our mammalian ancestors.
Natural selection can’t have been neutral on the core moralities of evolving human lineages. Whether biological or cultural, natural selection was relentlessly moving through the design space of alternative ways of treating other people, animals, and the human environment. What was that process selecting for? As with selection for everything else, the environment was filtering out variations in core morality that did not enhance hominin reproductive success well enough to survive as parts of core morality. (You’ll find much more on how Darwinian processes operate in cultural evolution in Chapter 11.)
There is good reason to think that there is a moral core that is almost universal to almost all humans. Among competing core moralities, it was the one that somehow came closest to maximizing the average fitness of our ancestors over a long enough period that it became almost universal. For all we know, the environment to which our core morality constitutes an adaptation is still with us. Let’s hope so, at any rate, since core morality is almost surely locked in by now.
If you are in any doubt about this point, you are in good company. Or rather, you were until the last 50 years of research in behavioral biology, cognitive social psychology, evolutionary game theory, and paleoanthropology. Until the recent past, no one thought that core