Christoffer Skogholt: From selfish genes to altruistic communities?: Evolution, rhetoric, and the possibility of socially shared moral agency

Abstract

This study analyses the possibility of “locating” moral altruism with the help of current evolutionary theory. This is an issue whose relevance for the philosophy of religion is clarified in the first chapter with the help of three framings:

1. What would the success or failure of locating moral altruism reveal about the “ethos of the cosmos”? The ethos of the cosmos refers to whether or not it is hospitable to the evolution and exercise of moral agency.

2. In many religious traditions, humans are claimed to be made in the “image of God”—which is usually taken to imply that humans are capable of moral altruism. However, if evolution, as some evolutionary thinkers seem to argue, makes the emergence of such capacities highly unlikely, then that is an issue of interest for the philosophy of religion. 

3. A third question is whether altruism, if possible, would be “analogically” or “dialectically” related to the evolved emotional dispositions of humans and to the logic of the evolutionary process. That is, would moral altruism require us to rebel against our evolved nature, or would it be a matter of letting our evolved nature flourish by transcending the logic of its evolutionary origin? 

A basic idea explored in the dissertation is that how one answers these questions has to do with how one construes “transcendence”: whether transcendence is a matter of dialectically negating, or analogically going beyond, that which is transcended.

The dissertation consists of three main parts. 

The first offers a detailed analysis of how Richard Dawkins—as one of the most influential proponents of an understanding of evolution that appears to render altruism highly unlikely—argues for this position.

In the second part, a presentation and analysis of common evolutionary approaches to psychology in general, and moral psychology in particular, is provided. 

The third part is a presentation of the evolutionary anthropology of the primatologist and psychologist Michael Tomasello. Tomasello’s account provides an empirically based argument for the evolutionary possibility of moral altruism.

The last chapter summarises and synthesises the analyses previously made, and the idea of a cosmic “cooperative” ethos is explored. 

There, it is also suggested that there is another sense in which our ontological commitments may be relevant for “locating” moral altruism; not in the sense of explaining their evolutionary emergence but in interpreting their significance.