When having discussions with people about God, I have found that it is not uncommon for evolution to make its way into the discussion. I think it's fair to say that this is popularly imagined to be the main contender against the "religious" view; we have no need of God, given that evolutionary biology explains so much. This holds true when the discussion turns to matters of morality. When I have, in talking to self-proclaimed atheists, raised the question of where we get our ideas about morality, I have sometimes been told that our moral sentiments are evolutionary; I was once given the example of altruistic behaviour among bees. At the time, I made the point that there are many things which are evolutionarily advantageous- to destroy competing populations when resources are limited, for example- which we would consider immoral. I did not hear a satisfactory response to this point, and I maintain that this is a serious problem. Recently, however, I have been considering some deeper problems with this view. I would like to explore two here.

The first problem, which I think is the less serious (but still damaging) is that on this view, evolution has not produced one morality, but many moralities. Profound differences in moral opinion can be found all throughout the world, often between populations who have lived in very close proximity to each other for generations. I don't think this is at all controversial to note; it is no small contributor to our species' horrible penchant for armed conflict. I think of the recent strife in the north of Nigeria.¹ Here we see the same brutal dynamic at work: a conflict of moralities, most likely to be won (if you can call it winning) by those with the greater weight of arms. If evolution had bestowed the same moral intuitions on all the people involved, then there would have been no conflict. Thus we must contend with the problem: given that evolution has created so many different versions of "morality", whose are correct?

This may be turned into a painful dilemma. I would put it this way to the proponent of the evolutionary-morality view: "do you think there are any people in the world who are, right this moment, doing things they shouldn't be doing?" I find it very hard to imagine anyone answering "no"; for completeness's sake, in that eventuality, I would be forced to point out that if you cannot say people should not commit serial murder, or child abuse, or the gleeful torture of animals, then you are in no place to have a discussion about morality. Anything you call "morality" must be something so inhuman as scarcely to deserve the name. In any case, I suspect that the vast majority of people would answer "yes"; this highlights the problem. Both Mr. A, who has answered in the affirmative, and Mr. B, who is right that moment doing something Mr. A thinks he shouldn't be doing, are equally products of evolution. Clearly Mr. B believes he should be doing whatever it is he's doing, or else he wouldn't be doing it. Millions of years of natural selection (with a smattering of chance mutation) have contrived to produce mutually exclusive moralities in people. On the hypothesis that our moral intuitions derive ultimately from the evolutionary process, it becomes impossible to say that either man is right.

This brings us to the second, and more serious, problem. This view relies on defining morality as nothing more than those instincts and intuitions which evolution has produced. This is self-referential in the extreme. It is rather like defining "moral perfection" as "the behaviour which I currently exhibit". This would be to say nothing meaningful at all; the definition is wholly arbitrary (and unbelievable). Crucially, it has no normative value; that is, it cannot be used to determine how we should act in the world. This definition reduces "morality" to a statement of empirical fact: we human beings exhibit moral drives and impulses which are purely (or mostly) consequences of our evolutionary background. It does not tell us why those drives and impulses are good, much less explain how we are ever meant to decide which ones should take precedent over which.

I would build on this second problem with the observation that those very same drives and impulses are perfectly compatible with systems of thought which are deeply uncongenial to our secular, Western sensibilities. The theory of evolutionary altruism is the one which has most commonly been held up to me as "proof" that evolution can satisfactorily explain our moral instincts. In brief, this is the theory that altruistic behaviour (that is, self-sacrificing behaviour which benefits one's in-group) confers benefits on populations who practice it, thereby enabling them to survive for longer. If we are to take this theory as a fact (something I am far from granting), we are still no closer to morality, for one disconcerting reason: it is perfectly compatible with any one of the fascist or communist regimes which made the twentieth century such a living hell for so many millions of people. The demand for self-denial, for guns over butter, for mandatory self-taxation,² for a dystopian present in the promise of a utopian future; evolutionary altruism enables all these ills. The voluntary sacrifice of individual goods for the sake of the collective, though beneficial to the in-group, may just as easily sustain a brutal dictatorship as a benevolent democracy.

To conclude my thoughts: under this evolutionary-morality schema, you are as much a product of evolution as those people whose actions you condemn. Unless you are prepared to abandon any claim to morality, you must try somehow to account for the difference. Evolutionary science itself gives you no mandate to to do so. Quite the opposite: it can do no more than describe with total neutrality a set of plain biological facts. This should make us very hesitant to lean on evolution as an explanation for our moral intuitions; it simply cannot sustain the weight.