DeScioli, P.
Evolution and Human Behavior
Volume 44, Issue 3, May 2023, Pages 195-209
Abstract
Humans are lawmakers like we are toolmakers. Why do humans make so many laws? Here we examine the structure of laws to look for clues about how humans use them in evolutionary competition. We will see that laws are messages with a distinct combination of ideas. Laws are similar to threats but critical differences show that they have a different function. Instead, the structure of laws matches moral rules, revealing that laws derive from moral judgment. Moral judgment evolved as a strategy for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action—rather than by hierarchy or faction. For this purpose, humans can create endless laws to govern nearly any action. However, as prolific lawmakers, humans produce a confusion of contradictory laws, giving rise to a perpetual battle to control the laws. To illustrate, we visit some of the major conflicts over laws of violence, property, sex, faction, and power.
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Moral rules are not for cooperation
We have briefly summarized the major divisions and operations of moral judgment. Why then did humans evolve such elaborate powers of the mind devoted to moral rules? What is all this rule making for?
One common opinion is that moral rules are for cooperation. That is, we make and enforce a moral code in order to cooperate more effectively with other people. Indeed, traditional theories beginning with Darwin assume that morality is the same as cooperation. These theories successfully explain many forms of cooperation, such as why humans and other animals care for offspring, trade favors, respect property, communicate honestly, and work together in groups. For instance, theories of reciprocity explain why humans keep records of other people’s deeds in the form of reputation, why we seek partners who are nice, kind, and generous, why we praise these virtues, and why we aspire to attain them.
However, if we look closely, these theories explain cooperation, not moral judgment. Cooperation pertains to our decisions to benefit or harm someone, whereas moral judgment pertains to our judgments of someone’s action as right or wrong. The difference is crucial because these mental faculties operate independently and they evolved separately. For instance, people can use moral judgment to cooperate but also to cheat, such as a thief who hides the theft because they judge it to be wrong, or a corrupt leader who invents a moral rule that forbids criticism of the leader. Likewise, people use moral judgment to benefit others but also to harm them, such as falsely accusing an enemy of murder to imprison them.
Regarding their evolutionary history, moral judgment is a recent adaptation while cooperation is ancient and widespread, some forms as old as the origins of life and multicellular organisms. Recalling our previous examples, social animals like gorillas, baboons, lions, and hyenas cooperate in numerous ways. They care for offspring, share food, respect property, work together in teams, form reputations, and judge others’ characters as nice or nasty. But these species do not communicate rules of action, nor do they learn, invent, and debate the rules. Like language, moral judgment most likely evolved recently in the human lineage, long after complex forms of cooperation.
From the Conclusion
Having anchored ourselves to concrete laws, we next asked, What are laws for? This is the central question for any mental power because it persists only by aiding an animal in evolutionary competition. In this search, we should not be deterred by the magnificent creativity and variety of laws. Some people suppose that natural selection could impart no more than a few fixed laws in the human mind, but there are no grounds for this supposition. Natural selection designed all life on Earth and its creativity exceeds our own. The mental adaptations of animals outperform our best computer programs on routine tasks such as loco-motion and vision. Why suppose that human laws must be far simpler than, for instance, the flight controllers in the brain of a hummingbird? And there are obvious counterexamples. Language is a complex adaptation but this does not mean that humans speak just a few sentences. Tool use comes from mental adaptations including an intuitive theory of physics, and again these abilities do not limit but enable the enormous variety of tools.
