Comments on: Commentary on Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/10/10/commentary-on-jonathan-haidt-the-righteous-mind/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Fri, 12 Oct 2012 22:16:46 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Hestal https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/10/10/commentary-on-jonathan-haidt-the-righteous-mind/comment-page-1/#comment-14413 Fri, 12 Oct 2012 22:16:46 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2125#comment-14413 If Charles Darwin were still alive, I think that he would say that Edward O. Wilson is one of those “naturalists having sound judgment and wide experience,” that we should listen to. Wilson has written many important books on various topics concerning evolution. His latest, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” may well be his most important. In it, he explains how human evolution has resulted in a fundamental conflict between behaviors that favor the success of the individual human and behaviors that favor the success of groups of humans. He says that these two conflicting behaviors have a genetic basis:

“Alleles (the various forms of each gene) that favor survival and reproduction of individual group members at the expense of others are always in conflict with alleles of the same and alleles of other genes favoring altruism and cohesion in determining the survival and reproduction of individuals. Selfishness, cowardice, and unethical competition further the interest of individually selected alleles, while diminishing the proportion of altruistic, group-selected alleles. These destructive propensities are opposed by alleles predisposing individuals toward heroic and altruistic behavior on behalf of members of the same group. Group-selected traits typically take the fiercest degree of resolve during conflicts between rival groups.”

Wilson’s conclusion is that this conflict, this struggle between two kinds of humans, has only one outcome:

“An unavoidable and perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection, on one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection, on the other side.

… In summary, the human condition is an endemic turmoil rooted in the evolution processes that created us. The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be. To scrub it out, if such were possible, would make us less than human.”

I don’t know how this fits into what you are discussing, but it seems to me that morality has a genetic basis. I say, and I think that Wilson, Jimmy Carter, John Quincy Adams, John W. Dean, the American Psychiatric Association, Martha Stout, and others are saying that there are two kinds of human beings and they hold two different views of morality.

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