Yesterday I participated in ‘
The Battle of Ideas Festival' in London, where along with three other panelists I debated the impossibly broad question "
Does evolution determine human behaviour?" As usual, I'd not prepared enough for the talk, and found myself muttering some nonsense on-stage that the audience graciously suffered. But here's what I should have said:
Many evolutionary theorists struggle to articulate a non-determinist morality that allows any room for free will. This is because, when followed to its full, logical conclusion, evolutionary psychology can lead only to a deterministic moral philosophy. This is not to say that evolutionary processes themselves are deterministic. They are dynamic. But when it comes to the discrete social behaviours of individual human beings, and the psychological forces that are responsible for such behaviours, the subjective self is impotent to affect the person's biological destiny.
If a married, middle-aged man hires a prostitute, it is because the decision is in accordance with his present physiology, which arises as a consequence of his unique developmental experiences, which occurred within a particular cultural environment in interaction with a particular inherited genotype, which he inherited from his particular parents, who inherited genetic variants of related traits from their own particular parents, ad infinitum. Furthermore, this man's brain acted without first consulting his self-consciousness; rather his neurocognitive system enacted evolved behavioural algorithms that respond, either normally or in error, in ways that favoured genetic fitness in the ancestral past.
In the example, this man's self merely plays the role of a spectactor in his body's sexual affairs. Thus there is no-one here to hold personally accountable for his behaviour even though he may be exposing his wife to a sexually transmitted disease and exploiting a drug addict for his own pleasure. There is only the embodiment of a man who is helpless to act in any way that is contrary to his particular nature, which is a derivative of a more general human nature. Here, the self is a deluded homunculus that thinks it is participating in a moral game when in fact it is just an emotionally invested audience member.
If there is, in reality, no free will, then the individual stands outside of judgment. Attributing responsibility to others becomes a meaningless convention that reflects only a naïve psychology of the causes of their behaviours.
But I don't suspect I've convinced you.
