The Tragedy of the Biological Imperative -- The Ethics in Nature
Chapter
Overview
Overview
Abstract
One reading of the evolution of human moral agency (in the biological and social sciences) empirically vindicates Nietzsche’s speculative account of moral psychology. But a curious irony attends this vindication: Nietzsche prescribes a divergent value system that now appears biologically impossible. It now appears that had it not been for the (proto-moral) pressures to regularly subordinate one’s own desires, no human agent would ever have evolved. Current orthodoxy in biology has it that recurrent adaptive social pressures would have favored hominids that could obey (implicit) social rules of the group; this in turn would have favored psychological mechanisms of self-control. Those individuals who were unable to restrain themselves in the face of a disputed resource (and blindly entered into conflict) fared worse, on average, than those who could reliably recognize instances wherein conflict would be costly. And one way in which self-control is achieved is by primitive deferential dispositions—one felt the need to subordinate oneself to others. Indeed, social selection against despots appears to be much older than h. sapiens. We argue, then, that so-called “false consciousness” was a biological prerequisite for hominid survival and that Noble morality, though it would persist, would remain biologically unstable. Nietzsche’s complaint that “one morality for all is detrimental to the higher men,” while perhaps true read ontogenetically, is false read phylogenetically. However, we go on to claim that while social selection would not have favored a Noble morality, other selective pressures would have ensured that admiring such a system was biologically beneficial.
