Kitcher vs. Singer: Two Views of Ev-Psych's Relevance

Sexual double standards. An instinctual moral sense. Innate tribalism. Tradition vindicated as functional. Markets vindicated as a natural process. It all begins to sound as if Darwin’s world is a rather conservative one (except for requiring no God, of course).

Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy of science at University of California at San Diego, wasn’t happy about this when I communicated with him about it a decade ago. “E.O. Wilson, it should be noted, was a genuine liberal, sometimes distressed by his own conclusions. Today’s Darwinian psychologists seem delighted with what they find,” charged Kitcher. “These endeavors are often defended in the name of free inquiry, and the investigators cast themselves as bold challengers of orthodoxy…In fact, they frequently succeed in capturing public attention precisely because they pander to old stereotypes, especially about the ‘proper’ roles of men and women…and any morally sensitive venture into the biological understanding of human behavior would be much more cautious.”

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For good or ill, it does seem that sociobiology’s impact is, on balance, a conservative one. But no less left-wing a figure than Princeton philosopher Peter Singer — notorious for his defenses of infanticide and bestiality — now says it may be time for the creation of what he calls a “Darwinized left,” and it is clear he means by this a somewhat more conservative, more sociobiological left.

Singer notes the practical limits that evolutionary theory puts on the left’s ambitions to transform selfish human nature. As he put it in a speech on the topic, “Wood carvers presented with a piece of timber and a request to make wooden bowls from it do not simply begin carving according to a design drawn up before they have seen the wood.”

Singer acknowledges that a system that harnesses our instinctual self-interest may be wiser than one that attempts to eradicate or ignore it, and he even notes that arch-capitalist Adam Smith got this idea right two centuries ago. Singer goes further, arguing for the interrelatedness of self-interest and virtue on the basis of the insights gained from “tit for tat” strategies: “By being provokable, [tit for tat] creates a virtuous spiral in which life gets harder for cheats, and so there are fewer of them. Therefore cooperators do better because they are more likely to encounter another cooperator rather than a cheat.”

While praising altruistic actions such as blood donations, Singer recognizes that, as evolutionary theory would predict, our charitable instincts tend to taper off as the beneficiaries become more foreign, more anonymous — less clearly kin. If it is true that our desire to help others is motivated at the gut level by whether we think of them as kin, then we should make redoubled efforts to “expand the circle,” as Singer puts it, of our kin-like relations (and indeed some evidence, such as an aversion to incest even among adoptive siblings or collectively raised children, suggests that relatedness is to some degree a state of mind rather than pure genetics — our kin-regarding instincts can be fooled).

Echoing concerns of anti-urban Founding Fathers such as Jefferson (who thought anonymous city life makes callousness and bad behavior more likely) and concerns of modern paleoconservatives (who argue that a society of anonymous masses and immigrants may not make for good neighbors), Singer asks: “What structures can overcome the anonymity of the huge, highly mobile societies that have come into existence in this century and show every sign of increasing in size with the globalization of the world economy?”

Interestingly — and refreshingly — Singer does not call for a retreat from the increasing interconnectedness of the world but, contrary to many on the left, urges the embrace of globalization (in his book One World: The Ethics of Globalization). You can’t expand the circle of kin-like relations — and accompanying altruistic feelings — while severing the ties of trade between people.