Modern Wisdom - #573 - Dr Victor Kumar - How Did Human Morality Evolve?

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

Dr Victor Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, part of the Mind & Morality Lab's Moral Psychology Research Group and an author. Morality might seem like something that exists independently of humans. Things are either good or bad, the current evolutionary state humans in in should not impact this judgement. Yet it seems that culture and evolution heavily influenced each other, and they influenced morality too. Expect to learn why Asian people get red faces when they drink alcohol, which moral emotions can be detected in chimpanzees, why sympathy can be seen as investment advice, how come some people can consume milk and others can't, whether moral grandstanding and performative empathy on Twitter can be explained by evolution, the reason for altruism existing and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy A Better Ape - https://amzn.to/3WZM4qO  Check out Victor's website - http://www.victorkumar.org/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Victor Kumar. He's an assistant professor of philosophy at Boston University part of the Mind and Morality Labs Moral Psychology research group and an author Morality might seem like something that exists independently of humans. Things are either good or bad. The current Evolutionary state humans are in should not impact this judgment. Yet, it seems that culture and evolution heavily influenced each other. And the influenced morality too. Expect to learn why Asian people get red faces when they drink alcohol, which moral emotions can be detected in chimpanzees, why sympathy can be seen as investment advice, how come

some people can consume milk and others can't? Whether moral grandstanding and performative empathy on Twitter can be explained by evolution, the reason for altruism existing, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Victor Kumar. Why would evolutionary theory at all be involved in a conversation when studying morality? It's a pleasure to be on the show. The reason is because we are our evolved beings. We are, we didn't create morality from scratch. We inherited from our ancestors.

We have similar capacities for morality that are shared with other animals, like chimpanzees. And so the first step to understanding morality is to understand where it came from. Okay. Does morality not just come out of culture? Is this not just something that humans create out of the wishy washy nowhere of interacting with each other? of interacting with each other? I mean, it comes out of culture too, because culture evolved. So culture evolves just like our genes do. We have information. We pass it on.

Information that allows us to succeed in our environment is more likely to be transmitted to the next generation. So when we think of morality as being evolved, it's not just genetic capacities to field pro-social emotions and care about other creatures. It's also a culturally evolved system of norms and institutions and all of these things combine to produce human morality. So, you call that gene culture co-evolution?

That's right, yeah. There's been a huge literature over the past couple of decades, trying to explain how it's not just that genes evolve and culture evolve, but they co-evolve together. They influence each other's evolution. Okay, so could you give me an example of how culture has influenced genes? Yeah, that's a great question. So one of my favorite examples of this has to do with the gene that creates alcohol aversion. So there are some populations in different parts of the world that are averse to alcohol,

that is when they drink it, they're face flushes, they get kind of sick. Asian flush. My business is not in scuddy. That's right. And the reason for that is that those populations in Asia were among the first people to take domesticated rice crops and turn them into alcohol. And so there was this evolved cultural practice of domesticating rice, turning it into alcohol, and that created

a selection pressure on our genes. That is, individuals who were averse to alcohol were less likely to become alcoholics and get drunk and ruin their own lives, and those are their family. And so, they were more likely to pass along their genes to the next generation. No way. That's why Asian flush comes from. That's right. That is incredible.

So, because the sort of person who would be either neutrally or positively predisposed to consuming alcohol would be more likely to be in situations that would stop their survival and reproduction, people for whom their bodies ended up having this response where they got hot and red face and they felt sick were less likely to do that, they're less likely to take the risks and make the errors, which means that they're more likely to pass their genes on. So Asian flush is an adaptive response to encourage people genetically to not drink in order to not do stupid shit while they're drunk. That's right. Yeah.

So you blow in my mind. That's so interesting. That's so good. Yeah, I've been responsive examples like this. Keep in coming. I want to know some more. Give me some others. Sure.

Yeah. So another famous one has to do with lactase tolerance. Sorry, lactose tolerance. Most mammals lose the genes from producing the enzyme lactase that allows us to digest lactose in milk. Humans are one of the only exceptions. There are some populations across the world that keep this enzyme and that allows us to continue drinking in milk and dairy products

eating dairy products through adulthood. And the reason for this is, and this is just, you know, it seems like the best hypothesis because of where those genes are located in the world, is that those are the places where human beings had domesticated cows or goats. And so there was a selective advantage in being able to continue to consume dairy without getting sick. And you know, there's been some new research on this that adds a little twist, but basically the only twist is that these really happened in places that were prone to starvation. And so the key thing was to be able to drink dairy without experiencing diarrhea and becoming dehydrated. So that's another example though of a culturally evolved practice, which is raising

goats and cows for milk, influences the evolution of our genes to produce this enzyme that allows us to eat milk, drink milk, a drink milk, a drink milk, going to eat dairy products without experiencing dehydration. Does this suggest that all humans went through a stage of lactose intolerance and then there was a remutation which was adaptive and the people that were descended from that particular cohort became better, or does it seem like the sort of loss of the lactase occurred all at the same time and then it was stopped within certain cohorts. Does that make sense? I think the idea is that it was the original universal trait is that this enzyme disappeared in after childhood, and then just in a few populations, there evolved this ability to retain the enzyme in adulthood. Does mother's milk, when you say after childhood, is that because you need to be able to

have it? Is mother's milk, like it's not dairy, but how does that work? Yeah, I mean, it is a form of dairy that has lactose in it. And so that's why we have this gene in childhood so that we can drink butter or snow. Okay, very interesting. So, we're gonna use the word morality a lot. What are you defining as morality?

Yeah. So, I mean, ultimately, the idea is to understand morality in the same way that we understand our agricultural practices as this co-evolution between culture and genes. But what is it that we're trying to explain? I think there's lots of different things that fall under the category of morality. But some of the main things we'd want to explain is our emotions, the feelings that we have towards one another, like sympathy, caring about other people suffering in and of itself, that's one aspect of morality, another aspect of morality.

And this is something that we don't seem to share with other animals, is humans have social norms. They have rules that prescribe how we should and shouldn't behave, and that we enforce on other people as well. So these are two of the key elements of human morality, emotions and norms. We want to understand how these things evolve through biological and cultural evolution. All of the examples that you've given there are social in one form or another. They involve multiple people. Is this such a thing as individual morality in your view? I think that people do develop moral codes that apply to themselves.

You know, people think that I have an obligation to keep myself healthy and that has nothing to do with other people. But I don't think that that is an evolutionarily ancient tendency, the tendency to apply morale to yourself. The thing that's evolved is the social aspect of our thinking and our behavior. And the more individual stuff that just comes later, that's sort of a byproduct of evolved social morality. OK, so most traits that have stuck about, except for some strange byproducts are here because they're adaptive, right? They help us to survive and or reproduce.

In what ways is morality adaptive? Yeah, well, some morality is adaptive in that it enables cooperation. You know, one of the things that we have in common with other animals, like chimpanzees, is that we live in social groups that in which we rely on one another to survive. But the thing about humans is that we have lived in richer cooperative groups than other animals. So we cooperate in a wider range of ways. We cooperate when it comes to childcare in ways that other animals don't. We cooperate when it comes to fighting other groups in ways that animals don't. Our cooperative schemes schemes are much richer and so we need a richer morality in order to cooperate with one another. So in this way is morality

just a set of inbuilt guidelines and rules that create effective more effective cooperation under incredibly complex and criss-crossing situations. That's right. I mean, that's part of it. Part of it is that it's these inbuilt tendencies, but remember because morality is the product of gene culture, co-evolution, it's also this culturally transmitted set of rules and practices and institutions that in each generation combined with our inborn inheritance to produce the morality that different societies construct. Presumably this must mean that over time, progressions in culture unlock particular genetic

progressions and progressions genetically unlock particular cultural progressions. That is definitely the case when it comes to the long view of human evolution over the course of tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's a much more difficult question to know whether that is continuing to happen, whether different groups across the world are changing the morality in terms of their genetic inheritance in response to different cultural conditions. You know, it's very hard to study, it's easier to study evolution over the long scale, it's much harder to know how humans are evolving now or in the last few decades or centuries. You say that received wisdom has it that just because a trait is biological

does not mean that it is inevitable, but another piece of wisdom not yet widely received is that just because a trait is cultural does not mean that it is optional. What does that mean? Yeah, so I think that a lot of people think that if something's really cultural, if it's not part of our genes, it's not part of our built-in biology, then it's something we can change. But that's not necessarily true. I mean, there's many aspects of our culture that we need for development to which is care by caregivers in very early childhood. I mean, often historically, it's come from mothers, but of course, it can come from other

parents as well. This is something that is cultural, at least in part, but it's not optional. That is human beings cannot develop in a normal functional way unless they have this important cultural input in their childhood. Interesting. So that's an interesting example because it's not optional for the child, but it is optional for the parent. Yeah, optional for the parents, but not optional for the child, but it is optional for the parent. It's optional for the parent, but not optional for the child and for future generations to continue to exist and to flourish. Yes.

If you're a grand parent optimizing machine, it's no longer optional. Yeah, that's more about the reproduction rather than the survivability part. Is there any other examples of this about the optionality or lack thereof of cultural stuff? Yeah, I mean, so one of the lessons that has come out of working cultural evolution over the last decade or two is really the important way in which human beings are social learners.

We don't come up with our ideas from scratch, or two is really the important way in which human beings are social learners. We don't come up with our ideas from scratch, we don't mainly experiment with the world on our own. We learn ideas from other people. We learn ideas, especially from peers who are a little bit wiser than us. So learning from peers is having peers that are social models that you can learn from is a part of culture that's necessary for humans to develop properly to raise the next generation but it's not optional. We need social learning from peers in

order to succeed in our environments. Without social learning from peers, you would be at a severe disadvantage when it came to survival. That's right. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yeah. That is interesting. It is very strange to consider that there are elements of culture that are non-optional as a part of proceeding forward. Okay. So what does the human's moral mind consist of? Yeah, so there, you know, human minds, moral minds are incredibly diverse across societies, but I think there are some features that each human being has in common, at least as long as they've had proper caregiving in their early childhood. So one aspect is we have a rich set of moral emotions that we feel toward other people especially within our family and our social groups. So these are emotions like sympathy but also trust, respect. This is respect is a good one because it's something that other

other primates don't have, you know, in chimpanzee groups, respect only flows in one direction, it flows up to the dominant male and your group. But humans have mutual respect. We don't try to dominate, I mean, we don't always try to dominate it. We should have an impulse to have relatively egalitarian groups where we can we stand on the same level as other people in our group. So this is one aspect of of evolved morality. Another aspect is moral norms. So norms like not hurting other people, helping people when they are in need of help, norms about respecting other people's autonomy. There's quite a wide set of norms, but they,

all, human societies all tend to have some similar types of norms in common. So we have norms, for example, about not causing harm to other people. We have norms that are about respecting other people's autonomy, norms that have to do with fairness. And these are interpreted in wildly different ways across societies. In some places, fairness is about equal distribution of resources. In other places, it's about giving people what they're owed depending on how much effort they put in or what their social status is. So these are two aspects of human morality and the third one and this is one that I think psychologists don't pay enough attention to is the human capacity for

moral reasoning. This is another thing that sets us apart from the apes. We have the ability to change what our moral views are. And we don't do it in the way that philosophers generally reason about morality. We don't start off with first principles and apply them to specific cases. A more typical way that humans reason about morality is we do something called moral consistency reasoning or treating like cases alike. You know, somebody in your group, somebody that you trust might say, well listen, why are you treating him that way? You wouldn't want to be treated that way yourself. Or to think of a more modern example, many people come to be vegetarians or vegans or reduced thermic consumption because they think

somebody in their social group pointed out like, hey, you really care about dogs, you wouldn't want dogs to be tortured in that way. Why do you think it's okay to torture pigs or cows in that way? So moral emotions, moral norms, and a capacity for moral reasoning. These are the main ingredients of evolved biocultural morality. Are there any emotions that aren't moral? Oh, yeah, plenty of emotions. the main ingredients of evolved biocultural morality. Are there any emotions that aren't moral? Oh, yeah, plenty of emotions.

So fear doesn't need to be a moral emotion. I mean, sometimes you can feel fear towards other people that are trying to exert their moral power over you. But many times you feel fear towards non-human objects or in situations that don't have anything to do with our reality. That's interesting. Are the primary moral emotions are the most moral emotions that we've got? Are there a little bundle of them? Yeah, so this is like, it's an open question.

What falls in here, but I think some of the main contenders are sympathy, reciprocity, or rather the trust, the emotion of trust that underlies reciprocity, respect that we've already talked about, and there's another one that doesn't get much play in Western ethics and Western thinking too, which is connected with loyalty, but it's like the emotional bonding that forms between people, not just because we're part of the same group,

but because we're bonded as mates or as close friends or coalition partners. When it comes to respect, you said that typically, in terms of primates, respect flows one way, which is from the subordinates to the person that's the chief ape or chimpo, whatever. Yeah. What is the difference between humans and chimps that makes us require mutual respect as opposed to one way respect? Yeah, I think it again has to do with the richer and more egalitarian forms of cooperation that humans have relied on,

for hundreds of thousands of years. So chimpanzee groups can, they don't have to, they cooperate, but not very much. And so they can get away with one dominant ape hogging all the resources, if that's what they want, hogging all the mating opportunities, if that's what they want hogging all the mating opportunities if that's what they want

but the This kind of has lit this limits cooperation away like for example if you and I are in an ape group and you're taking all The food the fruit or the meat when we get it then I have kind of less of an incentive to To give it my all in the next cooperative run. But if we're in circumstances which humans found themselves in, where they desperately needed to cooperate in order to fend off their territory from attackers in order to access new forms of food, like for example scavenging and hunting other animals, then we need to operate on terms of relative equality before we're going to really both of us give it our all and cooperate to do these harder, more complicated tasks. So we have to give up

dominance relationships in order to cooperate in a more complex and reliable way. I had David put on the show not long ago and he was talking about how chimp societies are 100 times to 500 times more violent in terms of the number of violent incidents than humans are, but they are 100 times less lethal. So he said that interestingly one of the outcomes that you get from that is a huge predisposition amongst humans to avoid conflict. As soon as you move on from it being a pushing, shoving match, that's actually going to take quite a while for you to kill somebody else to you with a heavy rock or a sharp stick or a spear or a gun or a, you know, progress on with your lethality of weapon of choice, you end up having an incentive to very, very much avoid that kind of physical interaction. And I suppose that this is where dominance versus prestige from a leadership perspective comes in.

Why in a human society would you want a complete tyrant at the absolute top? Unless it was somehow helping you. And that means that the only way really that tyrants in human society can stick about is if they have a little cohort of sicker fans or whatever around them that can help them to kind of keep everything. And then they need a military arm and they need a bunch of supporters below them as well. When it comes down to sympathy, I remember reading, I think it was Jonathan Hyde or Robert Wright maybe who said, they put forward, they thought sympathy was investment advice. They said that sympathy suggests to humans which other humans will be the most appreciative

of their efforts toward them. So I'm going to guess that sympathy helps us to redistribute resources in a more efficient manner. Is that right? I think that's certainly part of it. I mean, part of this view of sympathy that you just suggested seems to be about the communicative function of sympathy. Me expressing sympathy for you,

communicates something to you about who's worth your reinvesting in. But I also think that another aspect of sympathy is just that if we are really bound up together, if my interests are bound up with yours, then it behooves me to make sure that you have enough food that you're happy that you're not going to run off and join another cooperative scheme without me. So when social interaction becomes less and less of a zero-sum game, when your positive outcomes

are really bound up with mine, then it benefits me not just in a communicative way, but it benefits me to act in ways that serve your interests, because your interests will serve your interests will benefit mine. Okay. What I've got in my head here is the fact that in a small-scale society, sympathy makes an awful lot of choice. If you were to start to scale that up a little bit more where you are less reliant on the others in your group, less reliant on the others in your group surviving, that would suggest

to me that sympathy would start to get turned down. Does that seem to make sense? Absolutely. And I mean, the thing about human societies, 400,000 of years, is that we've lived in very small groups where you know other people, you really are bound up to them in terms of all kinds of cooperative activities.

And this may be true, least for tens of thousands of users, but certainly in the last few, 100 and 1000 years, we live in much larger societies where there aren't the same cooperative dependencies between people who are living in the same city or the same village as you. And so here, I think there really is, there isn't the same incentive to feel and express sympathy towards others. And what we've seen, I think, in society, societies

that have persisted, is that we've seen that there have evolved cultural institutions that manage the work of cooperation for us. So we don't have to rely on you and I having a personal relationship. We've got a system of laws that will punish me for hurting you and you know a bunch of people who will enforce it in less of a whole list. If I was to steal your property, if you were some down and out person who lived on benefits and somehow somewhere and then I came in and stole your final tin of beans or whatever it was, there is the potential that you would use laws which are like legislative written down norms that would then be enacted by a wing that is an exterior enforcer of those norms, the police, who would then come and say, give that to the beans back.

Not only is it theirs, but there is then this sort of cultural sense that somebody who is down and out is deserving of not being pushed around. That's why seeing videos of two guys fighting in the street feels very different to seeing a video of a guy pushing over Granny. Uh-huh, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's right. I think that's the way in which some of the functions of human morality have in recent centuries and let it have been outsourced to political legislative enforcement apparatuses. What about are there less moral but still slightly moral emotions? Like did you have any in mind? Well, I'm not sure. I'm thinking about that you've got those four across the top, but there's a whole list of emotions that humans do have.

I'm wondering whether there are secondary, if there's a secondary set of them as well. Yeah, there are another set of emotions that are not really specific to, that motivate a specific kind of behavior, like helping people or not taking advantage of them. There's another second order set of emotions that are things like guilt on the one hand or shame and resentment or moral anger. So these are emotions that kind of keep you in check by getting people, by motivating

people to follow the moral rules that are around because you'll impose some emotional cost on yourself, you'll feel guilt or shame if you violate the rules or other people will experience anger and retaliate against you if you violate the rules. So I think of these emotions like shame and resentment. These are fully, fully immoral emotions. They're just a little bit different than the ones we've been talking about already. Yeah, that adds in another area here that I think I was missing.

Shame being self-flagulation about transgressing a moral norm that maybe even nobody else knew about. Perhaps even something that didn't affect anybody else, a promise that you made to yourself about the kind of person that you would be, I am going to get up at seven o'clock in the morning tomorrow morning and I woke up at nine o'clock and I feel like a piece of shit. Or guilt around eating a cookie or about stealing that tin of beans from Granny, it's an internal police system that doesn't require the law and the legislation and the police to come around. You do it to yourself. That's right. And I think that's because even in modern societies, we need both internal

morality and the morality that's externalized onto our institutions, because of course we still have these close personal relationships with people around us who depend on us, and that's the kind of thing that shame regulates. And when it comes to things about which we're shameless, that's when we need the external institutions. In your opinion, is it right to say that there are good or bad emotions? I think that emotions can be used in good and bad ways. I think that there are philosophers who argue that some emotions are inherently bad, like

anger or disgust. Disgust is maybe one of those that you had in mind that it's kind of halfway moral. But I think all of these emotions have their place. I mean, anger of course can lead to violence. It can be self-stultifying because expressing anger may lead other people to distrust you or avoid you. But anger is also important as a motivator. I mean, it can motivate people to fight against injustice. It

can motivate people to hold people responsible in their interpersonal relationships. If you don't feel anger at your wife or your husband, unless they're a perfect moral being, you're probably not going to have a functioning relationship where you are holding each other responsible and developing and developing your relationship in positive ways. Moral disgust is an interesting one because drawn into that is all manner of bigotry and prejudice and predisposition and stuff like that. What role does moral discuss have? I understand the reason why looking at rotting meats or the smell of feces or open wounds, stuff like that. I understand why that would create a sense of disgust. First off, is the moral disgust system,

I don't know whether you've ever looked at it from like a neurobiological, neuroscientific perspective, is it the same system that's activated? Yeah, so this is an open question. There are people in the literature who argue on different sides of this issue. I don't think it's been solved yet.

There does seem to be things in common between basic pathogen discussed and moral discussed. So for example, there are studies suggest that similar parts of the brain, the insular cortex are activated when people experience disgust towards rotten food versus towards people who are dishonest or exploitative.

There's also research that suggests that when you're experiencing moral disgust, people make the gate base. They do the disgusted facial expression that's typical of pathogen disgust. So that's some evidence that suggests it's one in the same motion or similar variation on the same emotional system that's responding to pathogens and moral issues. But I think this is maybe one of the best cases for an emotion that is a moral emotion. It's related to morality, but it's not good. It's a bad emotion.

I don't think that's right because I think that disgust has its place too. One of the things that people feel moral disgust towards is a class of violations that have to do with reciprocity. So things like cheating, dishonesty, exploitation, people experience moral disgust towards those things. And one reason disgust is useful as an emotion is because of what it motivates. It motivates us to withdraw and avoid and engage in distancing. And that can be a really effective form of punishment. That is, in a cooperative species like ourselves, when people are avoiding you or withdrawing from you, that is a very powerful indirect punishment because it deprives you of social connections. So I think that even moral

disgust has its place too. I saw a study that came up recently that looked at the greatest status affecting criteria for attractiveness. Most status increase in criteria, and this is on a scale of 0 to 8, how many points it increases or decreases. So being a trusted group member, 3.05, being intelligent, nearly three, getting accepted at a prestigious university, being an exceptional leader, having a wide range of knowledge, being creative, always being honest, being able

to speak well in public, having a job that pays well, having a good sense of humour, having an executive position being climbed, being brave in the face of danger, having a college education and being a hard worker. So that goes from like five to two and a half. And then the reverse, the most status-de status decreasing criteria, failing to perform a group task, getting dismissed from school, being lazy, being unable to control one's sexual behavior when drunk, being unreliable, acting immature or irresponsible, being mean or nasty to others, expressed racist remarks, bringing social shame on one's family, having bad manners, takes illegal drugs, getting a sexually transmitted disease,

being stupid, being unclean or dirty, and being known as a thief. Being known as a thief by 20% is the biggest status decrease in criteria. And that made me think about what you were just talking about, that it is inherently, it is inbuilt with the trust within the group. The moral disgust that you would have toward a thief, somebody that can't buy their very nature, cannot be trusted, to have the group's interests at heart, so we need to move away from them.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I do think that this study indicates the morality being a moral person continues to affect your reproductive potential. being a moral person continues to affect your reproductive potential. And I think that disgust can and underpin this exact kind of response that people have towards immoral people, which is to avoid them. You've mentioned that our closest relatives in the private world do not have these moral emotions. Have you got any idea at what point humans would have evolved these

Yeah, so I do think that chimpanzees and bonobos have some Analog of moral emotions. They do have emotions like sympathy the key one that I think distinguishes us from Bonobos is respect mutual respect and so It's you know, it so it's very hard. The evidence is so depleted and scattered to figure out when these things evolved. I think the best way to think about it is to piece together different kinds of evidence, genetic, archaeological evidence, and to try to figure out when forms of cooperation evolved that would have required more equality between primates compared to the kinds of cooperative activities that chimpanzees

and presumably are common ancestors with them engaged in. One thing, this is something that Michael Thomas-Sellow points to, One thing that you see in the archaeological record is that humans around the time of when our genus evolves, two million years ago, is a period of time where humans are starting to rely in a regular way on meat. Initially know, initially probably scavenging meat, maybe even just finding bones and breaking an open, getting the marrow from them. But eventually cooperating in a way to chase off other predators, bring down prey ourselves. And this was the kind of thing that we needed to do, we need to cooperate in order to do it. We need to cooperate in a more dependable that we needed to do, we needed to cooperate in order to do it. We needed to cooperate in a more dependable, fine-tuned way to carry out a hunt.

And lions can do it without human morality, but they're much fiercer predators than us. We needed to use our intelligence rather than our bare strength or speed. We also needed to use something you mentioned earlier, the more elaborate tools that humans had begun to create around this period of time. So this is one form of cooperation among others that seems to have arisen around roughly two million years ago when our genus Holo was evolving in Africa. And so this is likely the period of time where a more complex and richer set of moral emotions, including mutual respect, probably evolved. I'm thinking about the relationship, the sort of gene culture, co-evolution,

element of emotions. Have you looked at any particular cultures or subgroups of people that have unique blends of emotions where maybe one particular group shows a particular emotion way higher or lower than others based on whatever pressures or environment is happening around them? Yeah, one of the great studies of this, this is by psychology psychologist Richard Nisbit and his co-author, Doug Cohen. So this has to do with honor cultures. So there's traditional honor cultures in different parts of the world and these are places where people in these cultures are more likely to feel anger in response to perceived insults or threats. So this is a, these

are distinct populations where people are experienced more intense anger and experience it in response to these insults and threats at kind of at a more of a hair trigger. And the explanation, and this is a cultural evolutionary explanation that Nisbit and Cohen give, is that these are parts of the world that in which people had portable property. They were, for example, goat herders whose property could be easily stolen. And they also lived in places that didn't have that institutional apparatuses, those kinds

of institutional apparatuses that we talked about, robust legal and political institutions that would enforce property rights. And so what you needed to be like in these honor cultures is you needed to get angry when people insulted or threatened you because if you didn't, people would think you're weak and they'd take your property. So this is, you know, human morality is flexible and it can and continues to change in different places and times, but this is one clear way in which moral anger seems to have been heightened in response to this adaptive problem, which is keeping your property in a world where there's no institutional support. I learned a couple of weeks ago about a law in Texas, which is where I currently am, that allows any two willing

participants to legally fight as long as a police officer is present to act as a referee. So this is completely permitted. Both of them don't even need to give verbal agreement, although I think Washington is somewhere else that this is permitted to. But you do need to have a police officer present. You need to say this is permitted to, but you do need to have a police officer present, and you need to say this is what we're going to do, and this is completely legal. I also found out that the distance between the two benches in the House of Lords in the UK

is one sword held out at Arms length. So if you have to hold a sword out at Arms length, and that's the distance between the two. And I'm going to get, I mean, the British thing is much more vestigial, I suppose, in that it's no one's taking a sword into the House of Lords anymore. But you can still see there, right? It's like, here is a transgression and here is one solution, which is an outlet, which allows people to use this on a culture and enact it in a particular way. And then another one is a protective mechanism to ensure somebody who tries to enact on a culture

can't get too carried away and chop the head off their political opponent. Yes, and one of the things that Nisbdenkoan talked about is the way in which honor culture is typical of the American South and has persisted there in part because the first settlers of the American South came from parts of the UK that relied on hurting animals and, you know, same conditions, property is portable, no institutions to enforce it.

I wonder, I mean, I don't think that Cohen and Nisba talked about this, but, you know, you have to wonder whether this is the ancestral condition. But these are the conditions that humans tended to live in throughout most of human history. Property was portable, no robust institutions. And really, it's the absence of honor cultures in various parts of the world that is historically unusual. And it's much more common to have. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, that would play kind

of hard to prove, I suppose, but that would play very much into the Jonathan Heights theory around the progress that we're seeing at the moment, you know, if you were to live at any time in history, even going back and everybody has this idea, you know, when you've spent way too much time on your phone one afternoon, you think, God, I wish I was a nomadic caveman. This would be way easier. I wouldn't be distracted by all this technology and I'd get enough sun on me and all the rest of it, but maybe you would be living in a human society where there is three times the amount of anger that we have now because you don't have the external institutions or apparatus to be able to enforce norms. So to your job, somebody transgresses to your job.

Right. And of course, Stephen Pinker has been another person who's written a lot about this and about the ways in which violence was much more a regular part of our lives until the last few centuries. What's your thoughts about altruism here? You know, it's commonly spoken about in the

evolutionary psychology literature and we've mentioned sympathy, we've mentioned sort of cooperative resources, hunting, so on and so forth. What have you come to believe about how altruism came about? Yeah, I mean, I think that we've been talking about altruism. These moral emotions are forms of altruism. There are cases where people, at least, to some degree care about the interests of other people in and of themselves, and not just as a means to their own happiness or their own interests. So, you know, sympathy, it's not just sympathy for you as long as you can do something for me.

It's, you had to be able to do something for me over the long history of time for this sympathy to evolve, but sympathy now in human beings is caring about other people for their own sake. And we also, you know, think about the norms too, enforcing norms, punishing people for their own sake. And we also even think about the norms to enforcing norms, punishing people for violating norms. That is a kind of altruism too, because it involves making a personal sacrifice and maybe exposing yourself to retaliation. But you care about making sure others are doing their part in various kinds of cooperative activities. What ways do norms differ from emotions in that case or even culture?

Yeah. So one thing about norms is that they can have a really specific content. Emotions are kind of broad in general. They're like, care about this other person in some way, but norms are much more specific. They can say, well, listen, if you have cooperated to take down this bison, then you get these parts and the other person gets these parts. That's what the rules say. So, you know, this kind of follows the, one of the developments we've been talking about in human evolution, which is cooperation becomes richer and more complex. And the more complex cooperation becomes the less you can rely

on fuzzy emotions and the more you need concrete norms with very specific instructions about what you are and are not allowed to do. Okay, are there categories of moral norms? Have you lumped them into particular buckets that are commonly found? Yeah, so Jonathan Hyde, who you mentioned before, has somebody who has tried to come up with a set of categories for moral norms. And I've offered a similar kind of classification in my work. So we both think that harm norms are one category. These are norms that tell us

harm norms that not to hurt other people or to aid them when they're in need. Fairness norms are another category. We've also talked about which is things like equal distribution, giving people with their own reciprocity norms are another kind. These are like tit for tat, you do what you do for me and I do what I promise to do to you, promises kind of fall into this category. And then another really important one is autonomy norms, which I think I talk about, but not quite in the way that, not quite emphasizing this aspect of being free from interference and domination from other people.

So these are some categories of norms, and each of them kind of fits with an emotion. You know, harm norms fit with sympathy. It's because we feel sympathy helps us conform to norms, proscribing harm. Respect is the emotion that leads us to fulfill autonomy norms. It's because we have mutual respect for each other that we're not going to interfere in each other's projects or try to control what each other do. And so there are these different categories of norms.

And I think what other people haven't noticed yet is that there's also these categories of emotions and it seems like how they all arose is that they co-evolved. The emotions are part of our genetic heritage, the norms are part of our cultural heritage and it's because we've had both of them for so long that we have this system of emotions and norms that fits together. What I'm fascinated about talking about this is the, how would you say, most recent prevalence of moral grandscanning, scapegoating, performative empathy, and stuff like that.

It's been enabled by the internet and social media for people to be able to take positions which are socially praised, but it has removed most of the cost of somebody having to have a hard signal of authenticity that they've actually done it. That's the performative part. Have you considered how stuff like moral grandstanding and scapegoating and performative empathy kind of fit into this broader world view and how all of the incentives work and stuff like that. Yeah, Virtue Signaling is another example in the same category that you're talking about. I think it comes down to this difference that you pointed to earlier, which is that for

most of human history, we've lived in these smaller groups, maybe a 50 or 100 members and we really had reliable information about other people's character and what they do in hard times. And now we live in much larger societies where you don't, you know, there's not the same opportunity to know what's really behind other people's words. And so we've had to, people can engage much more in cheap talk. And because, you know, we don't have the same awareness and intimacy with one another. So I think that the phenomenon of grandstanding and virtue signaling arises in this society where we can't, we have no firmer way to track people's reputations and their behavior, and we have to rely on what

they say. And so this opens the door for people to perform their moral commitments and garner sympathy and prestige and all kinds of other social goods by talking a big game. Yeah, seeming like you do good rather than actually doing good because at the moment most people are assessed by their opinions rather than their deeds. We don't get to see what, nobody gets to see what happens when you get off the conversation. And this is an incredibly rich deep version of what most people put out on the internet, right, which is either just images or just text. And yet it's kind of funny that in a world in which you can get obligation, free status and goodwill, the incentive is always going to be there for people to overplay the hand about how moral they are. Yeah, I mean, this is exacerbated by the internet and social media, which, you know, makes

all, turns so much of our interactions into a communicative game. And it's unclear what the solution to this problem, because there are occasional instances where people are demonstrably engaged in behavior that's inconsistent with the virtues that they've been signaling, but it's so rare. It's so rare that it doesn't change the incentive structure. There's still a massive incentive to virtue signal. Okay, so what's religion? Is religion a norm? Is religion a culture? Is it...

There must be evolved independently in tons and tons of places all over the planet. How have you come to believe religions development occurred? Yeah, and so this gets at thinking about, we've been talking about gene culture co-evolution, but now the issue is more strict cultural evolution, independent of major changes in our genetic heritage. So over the last, we've talked about the moral mind, emotions, and norms, and how they fit together.

But this moral mind also fits with our social institutions that have evolved culturally over the last 10 or 50,000 years. So, we have various kinds of social institutions, political institutions, military institutions, family institutions, and one of the most important institutions in human history is religious institutions. So religious institutions have shaped our moral mind, not just in terms of religious ideology, but religious practices and rituals have changed and expanded our moral minds to encompass people who are from the same religious tribe. So, Joe Henrik and Narn Zion have done some really

important work on this. And one of the ideas that they put forward is this idea that religions, religious institution, the way that I would put it. So this is bit of my spin on this, is that religious institutions have been really important in the cultural evolution of morality by expanding our moral circles. You know, generally, who you feel sympathy and respect to in human history has been your group, your band of 100 people. And one thing that religious institutions did is that they allowed us to see other people who showed the same religion as members of the same extended family, brothers and sisters. And so they, this kind of cultural adaptation, interacted with our moral minds to expand our

moral circles, to encompass the whole religious tribe and not just our local bands. Yes, because we already had the capacity for sympathy to people, but because we were in a Dunbar number group of whatever a hundred That was usually what we were used to. Then we said, early on, you get into a big city where you don't rely on other people, especially in a modern agricultural world, where if you have sufficient resources, you don't actually care how everybody else is getting on.

Even your farmer dies, there's another farmer probably not too far away that you can go to. So religion in your view opens up the scope of this to re-engage with a broader group of people. Yes, yeah. And I think it's been, I think religious institutions predate agriculture. I have been around for a really long time and are responsible for the way in which humans, possibly starting 50 to 100,000 years ago, started to live in tribes. That is not just the band, but a group of bands that are linked together via ethnicity and

dialect and religion. So this again relates to an idea in Henrik, which is something that we maybe didn't talk enough about, which is the really way, the important way in which morality has covaled with our knowledge and technology. So roughly a hundred thousand years ago, you see this explosion in the fossil record of tools and technology, things like, um, mirrors and spear throwers and bow and arrows, but also things like sewing needles and various kinds of craft work. And what seems to have arisen during this period of time is that humans are beginning to live in religiously unified tribes, groups of groups. And the key thing here, this is something that Henrik talks about, is that what that, what living in a tribe does, is that it expands our collective brain. It creates a larger number of people who are communicating with each other, generating ideas, filtering

each other's ideas, and becoming more intelligent because of our intellectual cooperation. So, um, there's a religion along with other social institutions has been really important in human history because it's allowed us to cooperate on a larger scale, which allows us to do things like farming and agriculture, but it also allows us to be smarter and generate more ideas and more technology, and so morality, institutional morality, that expanded our circles has been really important for the evolution of our brains, our minds, and our intelligence. I'm just thinking about the fact that religion as a cultural response to the a cultural response to the difficulty of coordinating large groups of people. And that 150 or 200,000 years ago, if you're in a familial tribe of maybe 25 to 50 people, you probably don't need religion. You might have ideas and stories that you tell about the Sun Rising and so on and so forth, but the more, I know, like, pro-social, human element of religion,

I would imagine doesn't really need to exist. There would be no adaptive reason to have that. And you already feel such a strong sense of kinship, especially if it is like it's just a pan generational group, you know, you and 25 of your family. You don't need to layer any more on top of that. That's enough to say that someone would have said, you know, we are the chosen ones and we have been placed here and blah, blah, blah, blah, some proselytizing cavemen. But do you know what I mean? It seems like— Yes, yes.

Yeah. And there's a clue in the archaeological record that I think supports what you're suggesting, which is that, you know, up until about 50 or 100,000 years ago, humans are confined to small portions of the African continent. And it's perhaps only until we can cooperate in a larger tribe that we have the manpower to extend out of Africa, to not just make some incursions into Eurasia, but to overpower the other human species that live there at the time and ultimately

to rely on each other in our tribe to colonize the entire world. This would suggest then that the bigger that a human society gets, the more religion would be useful. Yeah, I mean, I think that generation, generalization is likely to have been true until some point in human history. I think we can think of counter examples like China as a huge country and has not been as religious as other countries in recent century or so.

So I think that, I mean, here's the thing to think that religion was a very important institution in organizing society, determining the size of an effective cooperative population. But in more recent times, there are other kinds of institutions that have been able to do the job just as well or better. And so, you know, you think of very authoritarian kinds of political institutions that can control people's behavior in a way that's just as or more effective than religious ideologies and practices. Other institutions have been rising in relative

problems compared to religion, I think, over the last few centuries. What have you come to believe about the place that religion has then? The collapse of grand narratives and the listlessness and the existential dread of the modern world, despite the fact that we're more convenient than ever, people are feeling lost and alone and so on and so forth. It seems like religion independently arose all over the world. That would suggest that it is an incredibly useful adaptive response to the issue of being human.

Now, presumably, it's humans made across humans, but also will give you some individual existential comfort about the malaise of just being a fallen creature. What have you come to believe about the role and the reason that religion is here and sort of its current position and lack thereof in the modern world and what that means kind of for individual happiness and group cohesion. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that historically religion has given people a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose that has answered these deep philosophical existential questions. And it's really interesting to know why it has been fulfilling that purpose

less and less effectively for more and more people over the last few centuries I mean, you know philosophers like me might think well the arguments against religion are so strong things like you know religious religious theory was supposed to explain why we have Plants and animals and human beings on the first place. And now we have a much better explanation in terms of our wini and evolution. So maybe it's the arguments, maybe it's things like the problem of evil, but maybe it's something more practical too. I mean, I think that people have noticed the ways in which some major religious

domination denominations have not really been out for their own interests, have been exploiting and abusing members of that religion. And so it's not really the abstract philosophical arguments, but the like, you're not taking care of me. And therefore, I don't trust the account you give of who I am and why I matter. But I think there's this real emptiness now. I don't know that we've found anything that can effectively take the place of religion. Isn't it interesting that religion and the church, churches served a, like a practical purpose, right? Like they created a foundation for communal, belonging, sense, ritual, connection to yourself

and not only people around you, but the world around you, so and so forth. So it did things, right? It needed to create a story around that. And what we lost really was faith in the story, not faith in the things. It was the story of the rebirth or of the ascent to heaven on a winged horse or of you know the path out of Israel or whatever like different culture it was that you came from. But what was lost was something that was like pretty undeniably good practically because of issues that people had narratively.

Yeah, I mean I think you're identifying these two important aspects of religion. One is the belief aspect and the stories and what the afterlife promises and the other is not belief element of religion, but a practice element of religion. It's what we do together, how we come together, how we engage in rituals that mark important events in our history. And that part still matters. And they can, those practices in rituals can still matter even if, even if you don't believe in the stories anymore. And I'm not sure that we've got other new institutions that engage in those kinds of rituals and practices that really resonate with people. No, I would say as well that I wonder whether part of the commitment to the practice inevitably

comes out of an element of belief that you, what happened, the baby and the bathwater both go out together and that trying to create a, quote unquote, secular religion, you talk about, I have a friend who's a cultural Christian, so he likes to go to church on Sunday and do the sacrament and sing the songs and he doesn't believe and he is an incredible outlier. I mean, one friend that's like that as far as I can tell and whether it's CrossFit or yoga or psychedelics or whatever you practice of choice, every single time there is usually some sort of story that gets put on top and the stronger the story or the more narrative-based it is, the stronger the belief.

Some people really love CrossFit, but they don't love CrossFit as much as they love yoga, and some people that really love yoga really love it, but they don't love it as much as people that like psychedelics, like psychedelics. you know because there is more story there is more drama narrative around it that seems to support the practice i don't know maybe that's just bro signs but it seems right to me no i think that's right i mean i was drawing the distinction between the belief in practice elements of religion and i think you're right that these two things go together that the barit the belief's can can really attach you

to the practices and you and provide them with more meaning and significance. I mean, I think so much of modern culture is practiceless. You know, it is belief and exchange of information and ideas and communication on the internet, but it doesn't, there isn't any practice or ritual that it goes along with. And there's certainly none that seems to unify people. I mean, you mentioned a few different things here, like yoga and cross-food and psychedelics, and we can find others. But these things are so fragmented. It's very small, disparate communities that are engaging in each of these things. And nothing that really binds large members of our culture or our country together. In your opinion, is it possible to have an objective moral code?

What you've suggested here is that morality kind of is this emergent, adaptive solution that humans have to the problem of cooperation at scale. And you have that comes along for the ride and you have norms and you have emotions. Is there a first principles this is moral, this is not moral solution? Yeah, so we've been talking largely about the science and morality and now we're getting more clearly into moral philosophy. more clearly into moral philosophy. So I think that's the first natural place to go when you're thinking, is there an objective morality? Can you give me an objective moral code that gives me the fundamental principles that just divides everything else?

And the thing is, philosophers have been working on that for thousands of years and they've got approximately nowhere. We have gotten very little agreement about what the fundamental moral principles are. But I do think that there has been serious agreement about some moral issues, not fundamental principles, but certain kinds of social changes in our society that everyone or everyone that we want to have as part of the conversation thinks of as progressive. Things like the elimination of chattel slavery, greater equality between men and women, reduced

prejudice towards ethnic minorities towards gay and lesbian people. There are progressive changes that I think we should be far more confident that these changes are progressive. Then we are in any abstract theory that explains why these things are right or wrong. And so I think the best hope for finding some kind of objective morality, objective in the sense that we think that it's not, we don't just agree, but we think other people were wrong and that we are getting, we are coming to this

view from more information about ourselves and what the world is like. I think that the best hopes for an objective moral philosophy is to think about how and why these progressive changes happened, the kinds that I mentioned. And to think about the psychological and cultural mechanisms behind them, and whether those mechanisms can be exploited

in the future to bring about future progressive changes, things like addressing massive social inequality, thinking about anti-trans prejudice, thinking about global injustice the way in which people from developing countries are gonna suffer from climate change and other kinds of disasters. I think that we're not gonna figure out whether utilitarianism is true or not,

but we might be able to figure out how utilitarianism is true or not, but we might be able to figure out how we've made progress in ways that we all agree our progress and how to build on those and to find agreement about other pressing problems that we haven't solved. What could you imagine as overshooting when it comes to that particular type of dynamic. That's interesting overshooting. So, you know, addressing some of these outstanding problems, but going too far in one direction, is that what you have in mind? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I think that there, you know, one of the things we see in human history is expansion of the moral circle, coming to care about more than just your tribe, and not just your religiously unified bit, uber tribe, I think that it is possible to go too far into this cosmopolitan direction

and to think that other people that strangers matter just as much as your loved ones and your friends do. I think that this is probably a tendency on the left to minimize the importance of intimate connections between friends and family and to overestimate the degree to which you have an obligation to strangers that aren't part of your family or your tribe. That's interesting. Yes, and I do understand the dynamic that you're talking about where the sort of depedestalization of motherhood, the depedestalization of the family, almost being seen as some sort of privileged or oppressive institution. We've seen this in like those once every couple

of months in sane news article titles that come up about like the family is a patriarchal institution. I saw one a little while ago. The myth of motherhood is a myth that men created in order to keep women down and stuff like that. And you think, well, it would have been very, very difficult for motherhood and for humans to have survived without motherhood having been there. And it is a, the subtext behind that is

motherhood is a myth. You should care about everybody the same amount that you should, that you would care about your children. Yeah, I mean, I think that there are aspects of family institutions that are worth preserving. The bonds that people have towards family members, the important relationships between children and caregivers that can't be replicated, can't be outsourced to our institutions. So I think those parts of family institutions are worth preserving. I guess I also think that there are aspects of our historically evolved family institutions

that are oppressive towards women that force them to occupy subordinate social roles within the family and to assign low status to motherhood. Just doing the jacket. And one of the fascinating things that I've noticed is I don't disagree that for a good chunk of time there wasn't parity in education, employment, freedom, autonomy, voting rights, you know, bank accounts, ability to drive, remember reading this article about, the concerns in the early 1900s that the bicycle

would emancipate women to be able to go out on their own without the supervision of their husbands, because typically women would only be able to go out like linking up presumably linking arms with their partner or whatever. So I do get that. However, what you have seen, and that was what that article showed, is that if you push the progressivism too far, you end up, I would you say, like demonizing some of the inherent beauty and wisdom that the feminine brings into the

world, right? In order for you to say that motherhood, the maternal instinct is a myth that men created. It inevitably puts women who are mothers back into that second class citizen role that they only just got emancipated from. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that a kind of feminism worth having is one that expands up options and possibilities for women.

And that doesn't say that only the new possibilities are worth having and traditional roles as mothers and caretakers aren't. I mean, I think that what's really the key part of the feminist movement that I think many people should agree is worth preserving and continuing is expanding liberty, expanding the freedom of people of all genders, to occupy social roles and economic roles that they are interested in doing. You know, I think that new options doesn't mean we should devalue the old ones. Yeah, I would agree. Look, Vic, I really appreciate your time today.

Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the work that you do? Well, they can read my new book called Better 8 with Richmond Campbell. They can also check out my website for links to new articles that I've written. And I have an essay in the Boston Globe, for instance, which I'm not like to read. Very cool.

Thanks, Victor. All right. Thank you so much. It was great to talk to you, Chris.