Stephen J. Pope, Boston College

This presentation will discuss the "biological roots of morality in theological perspective." A variety of contemporary scientific disciplines can be said to shed light on the general question of the "biological roots of morality," including neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive ethology. These sources offer a mixed repertoire of part factual observation, part well-grounded hypotheses, and part speculation. All are informed by a fundamentally evolutionary framework. This presentation will assume as background the previous analyses of evolutionary theory.

It will concentrate instead on what differences they might make to theology in general.

Theology was classically defined by St. Anselm as "faith seeking understanding." The depth of its subject matter is complemented with its comprehensiveness: God and all things in relation to God. It is obvious, then, that a presentation allotted a brief length of time cannot cover much theological ground, especially when concerned with an intellectual movement as complex, multifacited and grandiose as evolutionary theory. The magnitude of the significance of evolutionary theory for Christian theology is perhaps yet to be fully appreciated, but it is at least suggested by the range of issues on which it has stimulated reflection: Creation and providence, Original Sin, the existence and nature of the soul, the imago Dei, human destiny, the sacrament of baptism, etc. It also raises important methodological questions reagrding the interpretation of Scripture and the relation of Scriptural interpretation to scientifically established facts and reasonably plausible scientific theories.

This presentation will focus specifically on the meaning of the "biological roots of morality" for theology. For the vast majority of my colleagues in theology and ethics, the question will be, "what biological roots of morality?" The term "biological" refers to the anatomy, physiology and genetics of living entities (as distinct from the scientific study of these things). "Biological roots" play a decisive role in the development of physical characteristics like eye color and height, physiological conditions like obesity and diabetes, and (to some extent) psychological disorders like depression and schizophrenia. Morality, on the other hand, is part of culture, learned from childhood, transmitted in daily life experience, and essential for the "centering" of one’s life in a system of values and standards. Morality, in contrast, is cultural, not biological, and its "roots" are cultural, not biological. Religious morality is of course is all these things, but it is also also communicated through sacred Scriptures, passed down in traditions, taught by authorities in congregations, and, in one way or another, binding on the consciences of the faithful. For religious people, God either communicates to in distinctive ways (for example, via conscience, spiritual experience, religious leaders, etc.) or uses cultural media as a means of communicating the central truths of life.

One interesting and important avenue of reflection on the "biological roots of morality" is provided in cognitive ethologist Frans de Waal’s Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Good Natured offers a concise summary of years of field work and research by a premier primatologist on the topic of morality. Broadly Darwinian, de Waal argues that a vast array of social behavior evolved in various primate species, most notably chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives. Behavior that is prototypically if not fully moral includes kinds of sympathy, conformity to and enforcement of social regularity, reciprocal giving and taking, maintenance of social alliances and exacting revenge on violators, reconciliation and community concern. Human beings, de Waal believes, did not invent morality out of whooe cloth, in complete independence of social precursors in our hominid past. Morality is essentially a development and extrapolation of key aspects of our inhereted biological ensemble of social inclinations.

The new discipline known as "evolutionary psychology" attempts to understand human behavior in terms of the evolved "psychological mechanisms" ingrained in human nature by the long, relentless process of natural selection (no conscious intention is meant here). Evolutionary psychologists believe that evolution has created an array of species-wide psychological mechanisms which profoundly influence human conduct everywhere. We possess an evolved repertoire of strategies, methods for accomplishing goals, that have tended to be adaptive in confronting problems in the past. Psychological mechanisms are sensitive to cues from the environment and are activated to solve perceived problems.

Buss has worked on a variety of extensive surveys constructed to test the accuracy of evolutionary predictions regarding sex differences in mating preferences. A variety of commonly occurring adaptive problems confronted our ancestors — locating, attracting, and retaining mates — that led to the evolution of psychological mechanisms that enabled them to be relatively successful in addressing these problems. Those who chose a mate well tended to reproduce successfully, those who did not failed. Males preferred mates who were physically attractive, healthy, and a little younger than themselves (all prima facie indications of reproductive value). For example, cultures vary in evaluating what is an attractive percentage of body fat, but all cultures teach men to compete for the most attractive mates. Females preferred mates with higher occupational status who were able to provide resources and protection and who would be stable and willing to make a substantial investment in offspring.

Stimulus in life experience triggers an innate psychological mechanism which is part of a psychological strategy that evolved originally to address standard problems in the primal environment. Jealousy evolved as a psychological strategy to deal with the problem of infidelity. "Ancestral people who became enraged at signs of their mate’s potential defection and who acted to prevent it had a selective advantage over those who were not jealous. People who failed to prevent infidelity in a mate had less reproductive success" (p. 10).

An example (my own) might illumine what Buss seems to mean. A cuckolded boyfriend happens across his girlfriend exchanging passionate kisses with another man in the back of a chevy triggers, This experience immediately triggers the emotion of rage, which is part of our emotional make-up because it has typically motivated action which promotes one’s mating interests. Rather than thinking to himself, "this male is threatening my potential mating interests and I must act," nature has bequeathed him (and all of us) with the emotion of jealousy, which can give rise to one of many actions on a spectrum from vigilance to violence. Rather than dictate one kind of act for all circumstances, jealousy can be implemented in any number of ways, depending on the parties involved and what circumstances permit. The great difficulty facing human beings is that our emotional constitution and its psychological mechanisms evolved in kinds of environments radically different from those in which we live today. Violent jealousy may no longer be as adaptive as it was in prehistoric environments.

Human beings implement strategies through cost-benefit analysis. Short-term goals have to be weighed not only against short-term losses, but also in terms of long-term benefits and losses. So, one hopes, the enraged boyfriend has enough presence of mind to calculate the long-term losses that would be incurred (in terms of jail, fines, disrupted relationships, etc.) even if he successfully assaults the interloper and so instead chooses to act on his jealousy in an alternative way.

A neurophysiological understanding of human behavior is provided by Antonio R. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Damasio does not speak extensively about morality per se, but his analyses and intriguing hypotheses of the mind-brain relation may bear important implications for our understanding of the "biological roots of morality." According to Damasio, every perception, every intention, every affection, and every appeal to moral ideals like compassion or justice are "all based on neural events within a brain." (xvii) Damasio’s main goal is to offer a model of the mind-brain interaction to counter what he takes to be the Cartesian separation of mind from brain and the accompanying view that

Clearly the body is not merely a kind of platform upon which higher functions of the mind must stand as they perform their own independent activities. Antonio Damasio believes that the body provides not simply support and modulation for the brain but also "a basic topic for brain representations." (xvii)

Damasio begins his book with the famous case of the nineteenth century figure Phineas Gage, whose frontal lobe was severely injured when violently punctured by a thirteen pound, one yard-long, and one and a quarter inch thick medal tamping rod. He recovered with his intelligence but not his character in tact. Damage to a sector of his brain impaired significantly his ability to translate into daily life his knowledge of moral propriety or any realistic plans for the future. Gage lacked the ability to neurally "map" onto his cortex feelings experienced at the visceral level, and therefore he was unable to function as decision-maker in daily life.

In another case, a brain tumor destroyed the ventromedial sector of the frontal lobe of a patient named "Elliot." The destruction of this area did not affect his attention span, his memory, or his ability to conceptualize (including domains of social knowledge), but it left him emotionally detached and incapable of effective decision making in ordinary life. He was unable to make emotional assessments of different, which rendered his "decision-making landscape hopelessly flat." (p. 51)

Damasio’s study of these and other cases of brain damaged people led him to believe that cognitive operations relate to brain systems and their components, and that normal processes of feeling, thinking, and judging involve extremely complex simultaneous interactions of numerous systems located in different parts of the brain. Damasio argues very persuasively against the assumption that the brain has one center of control. Reasoning depends upon the complex interaction of multiple brain systems. The kinds of complex reasoning usually associated exclusively with the recently evolved neo-cortex of the "higher" brain does not just "ride on top" of the much older and more primitive "lower" brain associated with the emotions and physical states. Both parts of the brain are intimately connected in reasoning and in emotional experience. "Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation but also from it and with it." (p. 128)

The course of human evolution involved the gradual development of neural circuitry that can generate neural representations which make possible the display of internal images (of which there are many kinds, from perceptual images to sophisticated concepts), and then the ability to act on the basis of these images. These images are, "based directly on those neural representations, and only on those, which are organized topographically and which occur in early sensory cortices." (p. 98, italics in original) These include the "retinotopic maps" in vision and the "body image" that provides a representative neural "map" of the whole body. Thought is always in interaction with body. To be "rational," then, is to be able to make decisions about future behavior on the basis of understanding these internal images.

From these images, Damasio distinguishes "dispositional representations" which recall "somatic markers," a special set of feelings, learned through experience, which alert the person to predicted future outcomes of familiar situations. Emotions thus provide an indispensable "biasing device" for decision making, a claim by which Damasio highlights the interconnection between reasoning and feeling within a vast, complex and overarching physiological complex. "Convergence zones located in the prefrontal cortices are thus the repository of dispositional representations for the appropriately categorized and unique contingencies of our life experience." (p. 182) As Daniel Dennet points out, the frontal cortex is thus not, as often assumed, the "seat of the ego" but simply "an important mediating agent between ancient bases of selfhood and their more modern components." (p. 3) The mind is not simply the neo-cortex but, "the entire organism as an ensemble," ( p. 224), which encompasses neural circuits that continuously monitor the states of them acting organism, including how the organism responds to stimuli from its environment.

One of the most interesting aspects of his book is found in its account of the emotions. The essence of emotion is, "the collection of changes in body state that are induced in myriad organs by nerve cell terminals, under the control of a dedicated brain system, which is responding to the content of thoughts relative to a particular entity or event." (p. 130) Note that emotions always depend upon "contents of thoughts" — some kind of cognitive assessment or evaluation, however simple, immediate or flawed. "Emotion and feeling, along with the covert physiological machinery underlying them, assist us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accordingly." (xiii) Consider the "simple emotions" exemplified in the "fight or flight response," where recognition of a dangerous situation provokes chemical reactions in certain systems, in various circuits and receptors, and in certain neurons, which in turn prepare the body for what is judged to be appropriate behavior given the circumstances. Recognition triggers neurological and other bodily reactions, which in turn feed back to reinforce or modify recognition. It seems reasonable to hold, then, emotions and feelings are not "intangible and vaporous qualities" but rather can be "related to specific systems in body and brain, no less than vision or speech." (p. 164)

The first response of a Christian theologian, or at least a Catholic theologian, to these three approaches to the "biological roots of morality" might well be a simple conditional acceptance. "Acceptance" regards these are three generally plausible ways of describing how the evolutionary process has shaped human nature. "Conditional" means that this acceptance cannot also include naive appropriation of reductionism, determinism, or materialism that has sometimes been advanced by evolutionary theorists.

The key to this conditional acceptance is the acknowledgement of evolution as a primary mode of divine generation of life, the means used by God to create all creatures, including human beings. De Waal indicates that our hominid past bequeathed us as a species with a natural concern for justice, friendship, fairness, sharing and other traits valuable for intelligent social animals. This claim is a longstanding component of Catholic social thought, as is the recognition that human beings as bio-physical entities rather than isolated ethereal souls only artificially attached for a brief time to material bodies.

Buss suggests that underlying some differences between the sexes are evolved psychological tendencies that in different ways we share with other animals, all of whom seek to survive and reproduce. Catholic natural law theory has taken as morally significant that human beings, like all animals, have a God-given natural sexual appetite that is good when ordered morally. Sex is not always but ought to be an expression of deep love, a love which generates a willingness to care for children issuing from sexual union. The human condition presents profound challenges to this commitment which should not be underestimated. Buss’ observations about the relatively indiscriminate nature of sexual desire in males, for example, might have been immediately recognized as concupiscence by St. Augustine.

Damasio, finally, regards human mind as profoundly dependent on the body in general and the brain in particular. The objects of Damasio’s study are the particular brain structures created by God by means of the evolutionary process. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, described human beings as "rational animals." If so, then neuroscience simply offers the most reliable, current explanation of our rationality. The evolutionary process has given rise to species of increased complexity, differentiation, and integration, so it is no surprise to find that the human brain has the kind of complexity investigated by Damasio and other neuroscientists.

There are several strengths of this conditional acceptance. It does not wed theology to a Biblical cosmology or obsolete medieval anthropology. It does not confuse empirical matters regarding human nature with truths of faith. Moreover, it attempts to remain faithful to important claims in the Christian tradition without being limited to them as the exclusive basis for reflection on human experience.

Yet at the same time there are a number of significant objections to it, and from theological as well as other sources. For reasons of time, I will consider only two major objections, the first from Catholic theology and the second from evolutionary theory.

Some evolutionary theorists argue, on the contrary, that since evolution provides an account of the origin of morality, it cannot have a divine origin. Morality is generated by emotional predispositions that themselves were caused by blind natural selection and random variation — not by God. The very fact that we feel a powerful desire for transcendent justification for our morality is, Ruse claims, an "illusion of our genes" that is itself a fitness enhancing product of natural selection. Scientific understanding of the "biological roots" of morality ought to replace the theological understanding of God as the source of morality. Biological modes of explanation replace the religious: evolutionary theory replaces creation, neurophysiology supplants the soul, etc.

Many theological positions ought to be debunked, and at least as often on theological as scientific grounds. But it also needs to be noted that skeptical perspectives often rely on their own undefended and unreflective theological assumptions, including beliefs about who God is, or who a religious tradition takes God to be, the content of God’s will, the structure and contents of religious belief, and so forth. Skeptics often criticize not the most learned, thoughtful, and self-critical perspectives within a religious tradition, but to its most conventional and least intellectually sophisticated adherents. This would be akin to a trained theologian making judgments about scientific theory on the basis of what is believed by people whose only knowledge of science comes from commercial television, word of mouth, and vague recollections of articles from popular newsmagazines casually glanced through in the barbershop.

One very common basis for misunderstanding is the assumption that God refers to a being above or around the world who intervenes at particular points in time and space and then withdraws until it is necessary to return again in order to promote certain divine purposes. The image of Zeus comes to mind, and certainly many Christians understand God in this manner, not the least because of some anthropomorphic depictions of God in the Bible.

Theologically, this view of God is inadequate because it construes God as a god, Being as a being, the Infinite as finite. It restricts God to certain acts or kinds of acts in certain spheres of human experience. In Biblical terms this view is actually a form of "idolatry." It communicates a view of God that ought to be rejected by thoughtful people because it presents as God that which is actually less than God. It is also unhelpful because it completely misconstrues God’s relation to the world as occasional and sporadic whereas in fact faith affirms that, as Creator, God not only causes the world to come into existence but also continues to sustain and order the world every second of its existence. This is one reason why theologian Paul Tillich referred to God as the "ground of Being" who undergirds all being, and why Rahner spoke of God as "holy mystery."

Because God continually sustains and orders the world it is improper to assume that either God or the evolutionary process orders the natural world. This is a false dichotomy based on the assumption that God is an alternative cause of ordering. Theologian Michael Himes, drawing on Thomas Aquinas, explains: "every event is caused . . . completely by both God and natural agencies but in two different ways. The action of God and the natural causal network of creation are distinguished modally, not substantively; certain things are not caused by God and others caused by natural factors; everything is caused by God one hundred percent and caused by natural forces within the world one hundred percent." (Fullness, p. 79; Himes’ emphasis).

From a theological viewpoint, then, it is a mistake to force a choice between religious and biological "roots." Biological theories compete with other biological theories and not with theology, unless theology offers biological theory (in which case it is no longer theology) or, more likely, relies upon inaccurate biological assumptions. Creationism obscures this distinction in treating biblical creation and evolutionary theory as alternate scientific theories. In doing so, creationism forces an unnecessary choice between well-established scientific theory and biblical revelation.

The relation between biological roots of morality and theology is more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. The reductionistic model that equates biological roots with the "essence" of morality will not be acceptable to believers. But the "spiritualistic" view that regards God rather than nature as the "root" of morality is equally suspect. Neither view allows for the possibility that God works in and through the intrinsic ordering of human nature.

With some notable exceptions notwithstanding, Catholic theology has typically resisted those who regard science and religion in essentially competitive terms. In 1870 the First Vatican Council articulated a longstanding principle of Catholic theology, that God is the source of both reason and revelation and that truth from one source cannot contradict truth from the other. (Denz 3017) The ruling assumption is that disagreements in science and religion are capable of reconciliation because these souces are two valid but distinct modes of apprehending what is true. This presupposition was accompanied by great advances in biblical scholarship, which was given a strong incentive by evolutionary theory, among other sources, to interpret the creation accounts in Genesis with a more scientific care, scholarly self-criticism and precision, and to adopt properly the demands of historical consciousness.

Compatibility can be achieved by distinguishing spheres of proper competence. Science is competent to investigate matters of the body, physical motion, chemical interactions, and the like, whereas theology is competent to reflect on matters of faith and morals, spirituality and worship, conscience and the soul. Thus Catholics could be relieved to find themselves excused from repeating the Galileo fiasco and from the prospect of a Catholic version of William Jennings Bryan’s attack on John T. Scopes’ at the famous "monkey trial." The Bible is a religious and moral book, not a scientific treatise that is destined to run the eventual fate of all scientific treatises. In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII recognized evolution as a valid hypothesis (Denz 3896) and encouraged research and discussion on the topic by theologians and scientists.

The Church was able to take this stand because it regarded science as competent to examine the material world, hominid precursors to Homo sapiens, and even the human body — but not the soul. The general tendency was akin to that of Darwin’s lesser known peer, Alfred R. Wallace, who distinguished between biological man and cultural man and who believed that evolutionary theory could explain the bodily structures of human beings but not their spiritual and moral features. In Catholic circles, acceptance of scientific accounts of origins was confined to the biological and physical sphere, which was considered to be sharply distinct from the spiritual sphere of the soul. Catholic philosopher R. J. Nogar, writing for the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1967, exemplifies this point of view:

Man is a rational animal, an animal body informed and energized by a spiritual soul. His intelligence and free choice distinguish him from other primates, and, indeed, from the entire material universe. Man’s capacity for culture, for fashioning a technology, for constructing a language, for judging and reasoning, and for creating societies, arts, societies, laws, and moral and religious codes must be, at root, spiritual. This spiritual capacity cannot have its origins in primate potentialities or in a purely material substrate. The human spirit must haveits origin in the immediate creative act of God.

"Evolution, Human," in NCE vol. 5 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 681.

This view is able to accept evolution by restricting it to the physical-biological sphere. It recognizes that human beings are organic creatures, belonging in the physical world as much as non-human primates and other mammals, and sharing many of their elementary needs and desires. Fixity of species is a scientific matter, so religion need not cling against mounting evidence of a distant but real shared ancestry with non-human primates. The origin of the human body is explainable in terms of biological evolution, but the human soul can only be understood as created by a "coordinate creative act concurrent with, but infintely above," biological evolution. (Ibid, 683) At some point in hominid history, God determined to "infuse" the human soul in the body of a hominid species that had been prepared sufficiently by the evolutionary process to receive the human form.

Thus human animality emerges from biological evolution, and the human soul from a special and immediate divine creative act (floowing Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and Humani generis). This view regarded it as impossible to conceive of bio-chemical reactions or animal instincts giving rise to spiritual activities as noble as knowing and loving. Knowing and loving are the activites of the soul, whose origin in each human life must be considered to be divine. Thus the medieval theologians held that in the process of embryological development, the matter of the embyro was gradually disposed to be able to receive the human soul. Matter cannot create spirit, and therefore each individual soul is created immediately by God and "infused" in the matter. This position led to various controversies in the Middle Ages, including one that has lasted up to our own time over the precise time in the gestation cycle of "animation" (anima being the Latin word for soul), at which point the unborn is considered to have the status of a "person." (see recent TS articles by Shannon et al.)

This position strove to endorse the indivisible "psycho-physical unity" of each individual while also emphasizing the special dignity of the person, an anthropological vision which provided the underpinnings of Catholic personalism and the human rights doctrine of Pope John XXIII and his successors. (see Maritain, Person and the Common Good) It underscores the distinctiveness of the human but underestimates what today we can recognize as significant continuities between humans and other animals. De Waal, Buss, and Damasio, taken together, provide ample evidence of both discontinuities and continuities. Acknowledging the latter is required by intellectual honesty. Recognizing the former is both encouraged by fidelity to the tradition, including most importantly the Scriptures, as well as by moral ideals. Belief in that God has individually shaped each soul supports a powerful sense of the dignity to each person, a dignity that is often thought to be undermined by evolutionary emphasis on human animality.

Current accounts of the "biological roots of morality" offer a profound challenge to the traditional notion of soul in mainstream Catholic theology. Evolutionary accounts of the "biological roots of morality" do not simply and straightforwardly disprove the existence of the soul. I believe that they do challenge the strict distinction between soul and matter. Damasio’s account of neurological activities of the brain illustrates that thinking is not purely immaterial. Recall Nogar’s claim that, "[Human] capacity for culture, for fashioning a technology, for constructing a language, for judging and reasoning, and for creating societies, arts, societies, laws, and moral and religious codes must be, at root, spiritual."(op cit) De Waal’s observations and research indicate that chimpanzee sociality shares more in common with human sociality than could be recognized by Nogar. Indeed, it seems that in most of these categories of action (excluding most obviously religion), chimpanzees display some rough prototypical analogies to human behavior.

Peculiar human abilities of self-awareness, self-reflection, and free choice are made possible by consciousness or mind. Mind arises from the neural activities of the human brain, which itself is one of the most, if not the most, amazing products of a magnificently long and complex evolutionary process. The human brain emerged from the evolutionary process and therefore so did the human mind. Perhaps, then, if we want to speak of the soul in terms of the mind, it would be better to consider the soul not as different from matter but as a quality of matter when it becomes self-aware, self-reflective, and capable of free choice. (We have to prescind at this point from what this means for eschatology.)

Rahner explicitly rejects the traditional insistence on the special and immediate divine creation of each soul on the grounds that it construes God to be a being acting within the casual nexus of the world. Creation of souls is not a miracle, Rahner held, but "moments of the one all-embracing self-communication of God, as viewed from our perspective as historical beings who accept the self-communication of God in specific discrete historical acts of human freedom." (Barnes, 92) Rahner also rejected creation via special intervention because the doctrine causes theological oddities, e.g., the suggestion that God acts twice to creates souls of twins, or multiple times in test tube conceptions. Estimates that up to 40% of conceptions end in spontaneous abortions present a similar awkwardness.

Perhaps evolutionary sources require a re-thinking of matter as much as soul, a move made by Karl Rahner. For Rahner, matter, like all of creation, is impelled by a God-given dynamism of self-transcendence. Matter itself is a kind of "frozen" or "solidified" spirit. (Barnes, 94) and of "materiality itself . . . as the lowest stage of spirit." (94) Thus the soul is not only united to matter — it is "a product of matter; the soul is what matter becomes when matter actively transcends itself under the general dynamic influence of God." (B, 94) The distinctiveness of the person lies not in possessing an immaterial soul but in self-awareness, self-reflection and freedom. These unique human activities are radically different from the character of matter seens in inanimate objects, yet they are all made possible by the ordinary working of neurochemicals in the systems of the brain. The mystery of these evolved biological systems is that they give rise, in countless different manifestations, to religious and moral transcendence of biological objectives.

From a theological-ethical point of view, there is a twofold weakness in evolutionary psychology. First is its rather deterministic perspective. Extensive use of the "mechanistic" metaphor gives a deterministic impression and so do comments explicitly made by Buss such as, "Whereas modern conditions of mating differ from ancestral conditions, the same sexual strategies operate with unbridled force" (p. 14). For Buss, "[c]urrent contexts and cultural conditions determine which strategies get activated and which lie dormant." (p. 15) While Buss encourages reflection on human values in order to decide how we should live and act, his dominant language of "triggering mechanisms" and "activating strategies" does not leave much room for human freedom, and neither does his view that human action is a "‘joint product’ of psychological mechanisms and their environmental influences" (p. 17). It is of course particularly unhelpful to speak with deterministic overtones about events which "trigger" certain "psychological mechanisms" that lead to hostility, manipulation, deception, coercion, or aggression.

The second weakness is its reductionism. Romantic love and "signals" of willingness to invest, example, may have evolved as an adaptive response to the "commitment problem." But love can mean much more than this as well, and it is precisely the "much more" that evolutionary theory typically misses or obscures. Displays of consideration, kindness, cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and loyalty may be effective "tactics" that signify a "willingness to invest" but they may also be a reflection of genuine interpersonal love. There is no need to argue that the true and real meaning (perhaps the "deep structure") of morality can only be understood properly in terms of its evolutionary origins and its significance for inclusive fitness. Neither it is unhelpful to speak of evolution as "the source" or "the origin" of morality. "Biological roots" need not compete with social, cultural, and moral roots, any more than saying that a person’s diet lead to her having a heart attack competes with her family history of heart disease.

St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, described the person as a "rational animal," and understood human beings as constituted by a union of matter and form (rather than in terms of Descartes’ separated res cogitans and res extensa). Aquinas, I should mention by way of anticipation, regarded the soul as the "form of the body," not as a small "pilot in a ship" inside a body that it controls (see ST I, 75-76). Thomas emphasized the continuity between spiritual and the material. The good life was guided by reason but allowed for the healthy and moderate expression of the full range of human passions. Natural desires provide motivation for attaining the goods proper to the body. In contrast to contemporary neuroscience, though, he held that the process of reasoning was immaterial.

Aristotle held that a modicum of "goods of the body" and "external goods" are integral part of human well-being (NE I). Regarding the former, morality is a human institution that exists in the hearts and minds of particular human beings who are themselves biological entities. There are certain biologically necessary conditions for voluntary action. As a general rule, people who are healthy are (other things being equal) in a position to pursue higher goods more effectively than are those wracked by destitution or disease. Regarding the latter, "external goods," it is obvious that as a general rule, people who have a modicum of physical sustenance and well-being can pursue higher goods more effectively than can people who must devote every waking minute to survival and self-protection.

In both senses, human biology constitutes broad parameters of the possible and some general constraints placed upon morality. Biological finitude inhibits the extent to which people can embrace the contemplative life attending to what is noblest in us. At the same time, biological "situatedness" in particular bodies, families, and communities opens up possibilities for the cultivation of virtue and the kind of flourishing attained in the active life. A person’s "easygoing" temperament may make it easier for her to develop the virtue of temperance but harder to become courageous, whereas for a more irascible friend the reverse might be the case.

If Aristotle is correct, each child is born with a range of fairly indeterminate natural abilities, powers, or capacities (dunameis) which exist in human nature prior to practice and which are gradually shaped by training and instruction (habituation) to become the adult’s "second nature," i.e., the virtues or vices that constitute character (NE 1103a20-3). This accords with Melvin Konner, who in The Tangled Wing argues that human beings are naturally capable of a variety of basic emotions: rage, fear, joy, lust, love, grief and greed. Konner’s list is one example of many similar lists of what makes up the innate emotional constitution of normal human beings as we have to evolved to this point.

It is important to bear in mind that these innate dispositions to pursue some kinds of actions rather than others are always instantiated in particular communities and cultures. They are, moreover, are subject to human evaluation and direction. Our moral responses to these predispositions can include introspection, criticism, deliberate re-direction, and revision of the place these have in our lives. Of course intense debate rages over how much human beings can re-direct action that is influenced by these evolved predispositions, and one of the unhelpful suggestions of other images of the role of biology — the image of machinery or the image of programs taken from computers — imply that no revision is possible because the pattern of causality is set unalterably. I think, in contrast, that the more adequate approaches to this issue hold that biological predispositions tend to be fairly general in their directionality (the notion of "open programs").

This generality indicates why we should expect a dazzling variety of moral codes throughout history and between cultures. Our evolved species-wide proclivity to aid closely related kin, for example, takes a wide variety of different expressions in different locales. Moreover, and more disagreeably to the pure sociobiologist, the deeply-ingrained species-wide proclivity to maximize inclusive fitness itself is subject not only to delay and redirection but even to abandonment by all sorts of people — e.g., missionaries and sectarians, social radicals and utopians, artists and poets, philosophers and theologians, scientists and scholars, monks and nuns, prophets and mystics — because of what they consider to be required by a respected authority or at least warranted by the highest good. Put more simply, many people believe that, though certainly important, there is a lot more to life than mating and passing on genes.

Morality is not simply the natural outgrowth of what is biological. For Aquinas, the innate passions that motivate us to pursue the goods natural to us as human beings always take shape through the training of habituation and subsequent moral instruction. The life of virtue is attained after years of shaping, tutoring, and guiding actions intended to pursue the array of goods appropriate to human beings. We are naturally inclined to pursue the objects of our appetites, for example, both physical appetites for food, sex, drink, and rest, and social appetites for companionship and friendship. God has created us with these in-built desires and it is by their routine and persistent working in everyday life that God’s providence typically governs the world.

This view is stronger than that of many contemporary ethicists, who regard biology as merely a necessary condition of the moral life. They hold that morality, like other factors of culture, rests upon but develops as independently of biology. Social scientists tend to emphasize the independence of morality as a cultural entity and moral philosophers stress the autonomy of ethics. For Kant and his heirs, one should never make the claim that natural inclinations indicate what is morally right. The former minimizes the extent to which biology accounts for the content of positive morality, the latter recognizes no role for biology in the content of ethical normativity.

How might evolutionary theory be valuable for theological ethics? I can mention several ways. First, evolutionary theory suggests that human communities have evolved to need, in some form or other, the institution that we call morality. Morality approves of some evolved proclivities and disapproves of others. Morality is "needed" in the sense that it tends to conduce to human well-being, including the ability to generate and sustain reproductively viable offspring. Whatever particular moral system obtains must minimally cover the "moral bases."

This approach to the evolutionary origin of morality is speculative but it seems reasonable enough. We seem to have evolved, as social animals, to need reasonable degrees of order in community, widely shared moral standards that can organize interactions in a way that minimizes conflict, reliable ways of identifying property ownership, commonly held arrangements regarding mating and the rearing of children, and some trust in that the community will provide justice in cases of intra-communal conflict and necessary defense in the face of intercommunal conflict. These are, not coincidentally, all the object of "second table" of the Decalogue, but also of most other moral codes as well.

Second, morality does not have "biological roots" if by that is meant that physiology produces particular moral codes. Like other aspects of culture, the ability of morality to shape human behavior to particular social contexts confers a far greater behavioral flexibility than would the fixed repertoire of purely instinctual responses.

Third, this approach to the origins of morality points to ways in which particular moral standards and ideals provide (whether their agents know it or not) de facto support for evolutionary self-interest. It points up ways in which the invocation of moral standards often supports evolved mating strategies. Thus Buss examines ways in which prohibitions on premarital and extramarital sex and morally-directed emotions like jealousy confirm evolutionary predictions. Buss recognizes of course that moral standards vary from culture to culture and vary within one culture over time, as we see graphically illustrated in the transformation of American sexual mores over the last forty years. But he believes that no matter what sexual mores prevail at a particular time, a father will always prefer sexual fidelity, the channeling of all of the mother’s reproductive energy exclusively to her mate, in order best to ensure certainty of paternity.

Damasio, similarly, believes that "one can envision a meaningful link" between ethical rules, even the most lofty, and more elementary goals and drives. He speculates that just as some animals like wolves, dolphins, and vampire bats display neurally generated complex social behavior, so "It is apparent that humans possess some of those innate mechanisms, and that such mechanisms are the likely basis for some ethical structures used by humans." (p. 261) Elaborate and complex moral systems, however, are taught from generation and transmitted culturally rather than geneticallty. Morality itself emerged in tandem with the emergence of a capacity for suffering and of an awareness of significant vulnerability to further suffering, an ability to remember the past, to anticipate the future, and to make and execute plans affecting the future. Damasio speculates that morality has its origin partially in the human quest for a way to cope with. Perhaps, he writes, "the same simple device, applied to systems with very different orders of complexity and in different circumstances, leads to different but related results. The immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventromedial frontal cortices, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause."

This is because "the consequences of achieving or not achieving a rarefied social goal contribute (or are perceived as contributing), albeit indirectly, to survival and to the quality of that survival." The meaning of this claim and others like it is not clear, but it does sound either reductionistic (everything can be understood as a means for survival, which sounds too crude for Damasio) or excessively vague ("quality of that survival" covers almost everything, and therefore explains nothing). Yet "deciding well" in the social domain might lead to actions which sacrifice or at least serious compromise the quality of one’s survival or even survival itself, e.g., the soldier or the missionary motivated by high ideals. Damasio leaves unexamined what "meaningful links" might join ideals and drives, nor does he provide insight by way of illustration. Some of the highest ideals of human life, I think, cannot be reasonably justified or explained simply in biological terms, however they rely upon neurophysiology for their consideration and execution.

Fourth, morality has roots" in the sense of being correlated with neurological and other bodily substrates. Particular moral codes and ideals are transmitted by education and training, but Damasio suspects that "the neural representations of the wisdom they embody, and of the means to implement that wisdom, are inextricably linked to the neural representation of innate regulatory biological processes." (p. 125)

From the point of view of neurobiology, in one sense biology provides the "roots" the moral life in its production of drives which offer innate motivation to act in morally appropriate ways. For example, the body produces the chemical substance oxytocin which influences a wide range of behavior, including maternal caregiving and emotional attachment between sexual partners. (p. 122) Parental love and marital love is facilitated by oxytocin. "Biological roots" may set the conditions for the emergence of moral claims that confirm and extend what is indicated by "nature," for example, altruism, self-defense and defense of loved ones, parental care, communal loyalty, cooperation and reciprocity.

More broadly, the performance of altruistic acts can be accompanied by "positive somatic markers." These benefit the altruist by feelings of gratification as well as help her to avoid the unpleasant experience that might accompany not having acted altruistically (see p. 176). Cost-benefit calculation weighs not only immediate pain and future reward but also immediate pain and future pain. Damasio here espouses an egoistic view of motivations, at least subtly so. Yet he regards altruism as "true" rather than illusory in cases where the agent’s internal state matches declared beliefs and external performance. Truth is integrity, especially lack of hypocrisy, rather than completely pure motivation untouched by any taint of self-interested motivation. Physiology, in tandem with culture, education, and other sources, motivates people in some cases to want to act for the benefit of others and to "feel good" about so doing. It takes nothing away from such altruism to understand its physiological underpinnings.

According to Buss, rather than particular moral beliefs or a fixed moral code "engraved" in our psyches by nature, we possess general proclivities, desires or valuational preferences to which communities attach moral valuation. Human beings inherit evolved proclivities to learn more easily some things rather than other (the theory of "prepared learning"), for example, a newborn child learns to recognize faces, and to feel some things more easily than others, e.g., attachment between parents and children rather than hospitality toward strangers. These proclivities include, for example, loyalty to one’s own group more than to others, readiness for altruism to kin more than strangers, a willingness to reward those who cooperate and a tendency to punish those who violate reciprocity, and a general desire to treat others the way they treat us. These proclivities are typically evaluated in positive light. Others, equally natural in evolutionary terms, are evaluated negatively. For example, According to Buss, desire for sexual variety is as a general rule stronger in men than in women. This proclivity was an evolutionary "solution" to the challenge of gaining sexual access to a variety of women in ancestral conditions. "Men [today] do not always act on this desire," Buss argues, "but it is a motivating force." (p. 77)

Fifth, Damasio proposes that human reasoning and willing are not non-biological (or immaterial) activities. We are made human by the control of animal inclinations by reason, but reason itself is not "a nonphysical agent [but] a biological operation structured within the human organism and not one bit less complex, admirable, or sublime." (124) This view is anti-Manichean to the core -- matter can be the bearer of spirit.

Human freedom, then, exists within patterns and processes of nature, not outside of them. Human beings do not have unlimited freedom, but we "do have some room for such freedom, for willing and performing actions that may go against the apparent grain of biology and culture." (177) Unfortunately this claim is simply affirmed without much philosophical amplification, but it is clear that Damasio steers clear of two extremes: "materialistic reductionism," which regards moral standards and ideals as simply induced by chemical interactions in the brain without the processes human thought or the exertion of human will, and "mentalism," which considers these as produced exclusively by disembodied cognition in total independence of human physiology. He wants to avoid this dichotomy and to embrace a both/and mode of thought. Thus, he argues that the truth of love, altruism or other free acts of the will are not thrown into doubt from the sheer fact that they support a person’s survival, and are made possible both by brain chemistry and by proper social and emotional nurturance in childhood.

Thus the dependence of "high reason on low brain does not turn high reason into low reason." (xiii) Damasio describes feelings as the "base for what the humans have described for millennia as the human soul or spirit." (p. xvi) Comprehension of the biological mechanics occurring during a thought process does not provide an understanding of the content of what is thought itself (see p. 124). Nor does the powerful connection between "social phenomena" and "biological phenomena" reduce the former to the latter. Our species relies upon both biological mechanisms and "suprainstinctual survival strategies that have developed in society [and are] transmitted by culture, and require, for their application, consciousness, reasoned deliberation, and willpower." (p. 123) Thus he takes the trouble to indicate more than once that he believes his theory "does not cheapen the ethical principle" (xvi). Greater understanding of this "base" ought to increase our wonder, and it need not degrade ethics.

Sixth, evolutionary psychology performs a critical function.

Buss argues that it alerts us to ways in which professional advertisers manipulate consumer behavior by exploiting psychological mechanisms (pp. 64 f.). Evolutionary psychology explains that we are naturally led to engage in bias and self-deception. For example, Buss argues that commitment to marital fidelity is a common strategy for promoting certainty of paternity. This commitment leads people to ignore the presence of casual mating.

Buss is a bit more explicitly cynical, at least about conventionally restrictive sexual morality. Evolutionary psychology performs an ethically critical function: that of uncovering the use of morality as ideological support for certain kinds of mating strategies. This function is analogous to Marx’s ideology critique, but regards the central determinate of action to be evolutionary rather than economic. For example, sexually promiscuous people are criticized, and sometimes even severely ostracized, because they represent a dual challenge, both to commitment to fidelity in married people (presumably by implicitly validating an alternative mode of behavior) and to the likelihood of monogamous commitment in the future for unmarried people (there are fewer people who can be relied upon to make this kind of commitment). Attempting to take a more objective, non-moralistc perspective, Buss regards commitment and promiscuity as simply two mating strategies appropriate for different people in quite different circumstances. Monogamists’ use of morality to support their own strategy do not have the moral high ground, they are only using morality to advance their own evolutionary self-interest. "From a scientific point of view, however, taking the long view over evolutionary time, there is no moral justification for placing a premium on a single strategy within the collective human repertoire. Our human nature is found in the diversity of our sexual strategies. Recognition of the rich diversity of desires within the human repertoire takes us one step closer to harmony." (216)

Neurophysiology also alerts us to moral bias. Somatic markers, feelings generated from "secondary emotions" are learned "biasing devices" often influenced profoundly by mores (174) They facilitate decisions in social situations that are typically so complex that they would otherwise be extremely difficult to handle efficiently. They are seen in positive as well as negative applications, e.g., the "alarm bell" (p. 174). This is subject to education, and a challenge to moral objectivity and open-mindedness. Problem of bias real: "unpleasant body states" may be experienced by people who are brought to disapprove of interracial marriages or gay people, or the handicapped and the body’s neurally-based drive to reduce unpleasant body states can operate as counter-moral reinforce of bigotry. Moral conversion might then lead not only to a modification of thoughts, words, and deeds, but also to a reordering of this neurochemistry, particularly in the prefrontal cortices. (see pp. 182-3) The agent needs to overcome emotional resistance to this correction, perhaps due to the influence of biologically-based drives, for example, Damasio mentions "obedience, conformity, [and] the desire to preserve self-esteem." (191) Being ethically reasonable in this view would include self-scrutiny and social criticism, making sure that group bias that skews perspective away from the truth is not operative. More broadly, for Damasio, knowledge of neurophysiology can help us to understand human conflict and the vulnerabilities of the human mind, and these can in turn contribute to the "management of human affairs." (p. 254)

Seventh, evolutionary psychology can be used for the humane purposes suggested in this last quotation. Evolutionary psychologists are reluctant to offer fully developed normative positions, particularly in the wake of the massive attacks on sociobiology in the last twenty years. Buss emphasizes that knowledge of innate mechanisms gives us power to accomplish whatever moral goals we happen to want to implement, be they concerned with moving from aggression to peace, from deception to truth-telling, from betrayal to fidelity, etc.

Most of what Buss actually offers by way of illustration to this point is common sense. Stronger marriages, for example, will tend to obtain between husbands who are relatively more attentive, loving and good providers and wives who are relatively more emotionally caring and physically attractive than between spouses who are less so. "To preserve a marriage, couples should remain faithful; produce children together; have ample economic resources; be kind, generous, and understanding; and never refuse or neglect a mate sexually." (181) Buss knows that we do not need evolutionary psychology to tell us this, but believes that it allows us to get to the roots of many human disappointments and conflicts and thereby to understand more accurately the depth of the human predicament and the level of commitment required if our conflicts are to be ameliorated effectively. The greatest moral import of evolutionary psychology is its attempt to promote greater interpersonal and social harmony by means of greater understanding. (see p. 214)

Buss hopes that by providing a better understanding of our sexual strategies and innate psychological mechanisms, we will gain greater control over our actions and relationships. Because our repertoire of potential mating strategies is versatile, complex, and varied, we are able to exercise some control over conduct that can be informed by evolutionary psychology. "Knowledge of the conditions that favor each mating strategy," Buss tells us, "gives us the possibility of choosing which to activate and which to leave dormant." (209). We can employ knowledge to avoid the kinds of conditions which tend to activate undesirable aspects of our evolved "incentive system." Conversely, we can deliberately create conditions which elicit desirable kinds of behavior.

Eighth, moral progress involves the proper tutoring of the emotions. Damasio criticizes the ideal of emotional disengagement as a key condition of moral reasoning. Feeling, the "momentary ‘view’ of a part of that body landscape" (xiv-xv), is, he notes, "just as cognitive as other percepts." (xv). Moral perceptiveness and wise judgments result from the ordering and balancing of appropriate emotion and feelings (guided by logic, of course), and not detachment.

This seems to confirm the view of Aristotle and Thomas that virtue is not implanted in us by nature but formed by habit, and therefore that the moral life is a matter of gradually shaping these emotional responses, including their underlying neural machinery, into forms which promote the human good. For this reason, Plato insisted that virtues have to do with feeling pleasure and pain at the right things. (Rep. III,12, 401a-402a; Laws II. 533a-654d. See also NE 1104b10-13) In Damasio’s feedback loop, cognitive processes are induced by neurochemical substances, but neurochemical substances are also induced by cognitive processes. To generalize crudely in an Aristotelian mode, habitually acting in certain ways can shape and organize emotional bodily states and their neurochemical profile (see pp. 149-150).

Accounting for the origin of some human values, even central values, need not exhaust the full range of all human values. Crucial to distinguish what immediately attracts evolved predispositions from what, on considered reflection, is the considered judgment (prohairesis) of the person in light of the person’s most comprehensive beliefs about the good life. "Biological roots" may set the conditions for the emergence of moral claims that transcend what seems to be encouraged by natural selection. The universal application of the golden rule, disinterested regard for others, and love of enemies seem to call people to higher standards than are ordinarily implemented.