Calling conservatives primitive

It will take some time before I’ve laid out my thesis on moral evolution on this blog. A recent post by Robin Hanson did make me want to get ahead of myself, however.

Titled Hole in my hypothesis, it explores an evolutionary psychological view of political values. As I am not familiar with where Hanson’s view comes from, I will not criticize or discuss it. I will merely bring up one of the questions he tries to answer:

The problem is, it is hard to see why most “rich” policies make more sense for rich folk. Why exactly would folks have evolved to, when rich, more prefer abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and leisure, and less kids religion, patriotism, and authority?

I think this is an interesting and important question. It may be that the liberalism that Hanson described just happens to be in fashion now and is a stochastic movement of cultural history that just seems to be important because we happen to be standing in the middle of it. Future rich societies may not work the same way.

But perhaps they will. The view on moral cognition that I hope to elaborate in future blog posts would predict it to be the case, as long as rich societies are secure environments. More specifically, the view holds that morality evolved from empathy in social animals, which served as a heuristic that helped providing care to others in a (probably kinship-based) commune. This empathy was strongly coupled to the “reward system” in the central nervous system and practically came down to a “do not unto others” type ethics.

As cognition developed throughout biological evolution, the empathic response became guided by consequential reasoning, attribution of preferences and values to others, and other higher-order reasoning. This process was reinforced by it allowing for differentiation of individuality and labour, as morality was abstracted from the simulationist concern of “those exactly like me”.

In humans, both systems still exist, albeit with their own logic. The discussion on a recent paper on serotonin and morality hints at the two: a dorsolateral prefrontal system (that is, the part of the brain that lies at the front, on the outward sides on top) processing the more cognitive, often utilitarian moral reasoning and a “limbic” system, processing the gut feeling part of moral reasoning.

This is relevant for Hanson’s question, because the development of ethical philosophy, which is key to understand the rise of liberalism, has mostly relied on the dorsolateral prefrontal system: ethicists sought consistency and unity in moral systems, asking abstract questions about what is virtuous. Now not only does the fact of philosophers existing and spreading their thoughts depend on having achieved some level of wealth, but such reasoning also requires a bit of servitude from the limbic system.

This servitude can be promoted by stable societies, in which mutual trust exists. In such societies, our moral compass is given the opportunity to use its cognitive element and to abstract the moral intuitions given by the limbic system. These abstractions then largely account for liberal philosophy. As the rich societies tend to be the more secure ones, a correlation of liberalism with levels of wealth is to be expected.

In future posts, I will try to add strength to these claims. For now, I’m off to do some work. Let me finish by pointing to interesting research to consider in this context.

References:

Joseph Henrich argued the emergence of markets promoted social norms and encourages humans to punish unfairness, thereby showing how institutional ecology influences moral reasoning:

Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., et al. (2010). Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment. Science, 327(5972), 1480-4. doi: 10.1126/science.1182238

Douglas Oxley looked into physiological responses of U.S. liberals and conservatives and found more fear-related behaviour among conservatives, arguing in favour of a more active limbic system among the latter:


Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., et al. (2008). Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science, 321(5896), 1667-70. doi: 10.1126/science.1157627

If religiosity can be considered an index for values, the United States is the systematic outlier on a wealth-value correlation plot. This effect has been argued to be caused by the insecurity of U.S. life.

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