My friend Peter recently made a post on Facebook about free will and the evolutionary origins of altruism. The post can be found here. The following is my response to that post:
Insofar as you posit that free will is something that resides within us, struggling against our savage minds, I think you risk committing the homunculular fallacy: needlessly positing another mind within our mind with no added explanatory benefit. Nor do I think that what you describe as free will is necessarily linked to human consciousness. Instead, I would posit that all living things demonstrate free will, in that their state at any given time is not determined solely by their environment. For example, the behavior of a bacterium, though much simpler than that of a human, displays all the meaningful signs of free will. Bacteria, like us, choose how to respond to environmental variables. Some bacteria make choices that allow them to flourish in their environments, and some die out due to (essentially) bad decision-making. In fact, one of the pre-requisites for life is that systems be able to “choose” between those things in their environments that help or hinder continued survival. Evolution doesn’t necessitate determinism at all; if anything, the opposite is true.
As to whether or not evolutionary psychology does a good job of accounting for things like love and altruism, I would say that on a purely practical level, “selfishness” does a good job of explaining the type of love and altruism we practice. Rationally, there should be no difference in your mind between the amount of good being done when you help a stranger, versus when you help a loved one. Emotionally, however, there’s a world of difference. Likewise, why is it that people tend to love, and defend the actions and beliefs of, their parents even when those actions or beliefs border on emotional or physical abuse? We might occasionally do things counter to our moral intuitions, but is there any doubt in your mind what you would do if you had to choose between saving the life of a total stranger (or even a dozen strangers) and the life of your child? If you ask me, our emotions and our moral intuitions are too crazy to come from somewhere as pristine as divine inspiration, or an untarnished realm of human reason and free will.
None of this means that we are monsters, though — it means that we are human.
All of this leads me to my second line of inquiry. Why is altruism any less meaningless if its origin is in selfish behavior? To draw a (somewhat useful) analogy, are the societal benefits of a free market economy any less meaningful because of their bottom-up, and usually selfishly motivated origins — as opposed to the top-down organization applied by governments and more managed forms of economy? When the standard of living of others can be increased due to an individual’s selfish desire to make their own life better, I’m not upset that everybody’s situation improved despite of one person’s selfish tendencies, but rather elated that the individual can pursue their own self-interest and at the same time make other people better off. If there’s one thing that nature has proven repeatedly, it’s the ability of simple, yet distributed, systems to create complex (and sometimes even elegant) solutions to the problems that they face. The fact that things like altruism and love, which seemingly runs contrary to the very core of the evolutionary process, have managed to develop in certain animals is more wonderful than it is disheartening.
Ultimately, I see no reason for us to desire to be purely rational beings struggling against our flawed, fleshy prisons. To use a horribly clichéd sentiment: we are what we are. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t desire to change what we are, but we investigate our minds by inquiring what we are; not what we would like ourselves to be, and by inquiring into the origin of our behaviors and beliefs.
