Evolution and the Veil of Ignorance

I’d like to begin by explaining three concepts. The first concept is reciprocal altruism. It is often summed up as “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine”, but this is an oversimplification. There is no conscious expectation of reciprocation involved. Unconscious bacteria exhibit reciprocal altruism by producing substances, collectively referred to as biofilms, that protect not only themselves but also the bacteria around them, with the “expectation” that in return for this expenditure of energy, the other bacteria in the biofilm will also expend energy producing these substances. Similarly, the one conscious species whose thought processes we can reliably analyze - humans - do not generally keep tally sheets of how much they have done for someone and how much they expect in return. While we will forsake a friend who abuses our generosity, the vast majority of the favors we do are not done with any conscious expectation of reward. Nor is our altruism limited to friends who are capable of helping us in return; we also give money to beggars we will never see again, and even donate to organizations that help faceless, nameless people on other continents who will never know that we helped them, let alone be able to repay us.

The second concept I’d like to discuss is natural selection. You probably already have a working knowledge of this, so I would simply like to address a common misconception: natural selection operates at the level of genes, not individuals or species. It is often said, even by scientists who should know better, that an organism performs a particular behavior “for the good of the species”. This is not the case. Species are not selected for, genes are. A possible rebuttal to this “for the good of the species” talk is that individuals only act for the good of the species when doing so benefits themselves, as in reciprocal altruism. But again, this is not quite true. Individuals are not selected for either, genes are. This is the reason for the second form of altruism, kin selection, in which an individual makes sacrifices for the benefit of its close relatives, or rather, for the benefit of the genes they share with these close relatives. The most extreme example of this is eusocial insects. The vast majority of ants, bees, and termites are infertile; they will never be able to pass on their genes. Instead, their lives are devoted to helping pass on the genes they share with their fertile relatives, particularly the queen(s) but also for the males who inseminate her.

The final concept is the veil of ignorance, a philosophical technique for determining the morality of a practice or policy. Pretend, for a moment, that you know absolutely nothing about yourself. You do not know your race, your gender, your religion, how wealthy or influential your parents were, your strengths and weaknesses, your opinions, anything. Knowing absolutely nothing about yourself, and therefore nothing about what your life will be like, would you support, for instance, slavery? Would you find this institution desirable, not knowing whether you yourself would be a slave or a master? Would you support a theocratic government, not knowing whether or not you would believe in the official religion? Would you support disability payments, not knowing whether you would be receiving them or paying them?

Now to tie it all together: natural selection operates from behind the veil of ignorance. It has no “knowledge” of the future. When a group of genes have been selected to be passed on, natural selection knows nothing about the creature they will create, whether it will be strong or weak, smart or stupid, fast or slow. In the case of humans, it has no knowledge of whether it will be rich or poor. All that natural selection can do is select for genes that program the host for a general series of behaviors that will result in those genes being passed on. And in humans, genes for altruism have been selected for. Obviously natural selection is not a conscious entity; I have referred to it as if it were such as a simplification. But nevertheless, it has come to a conclusion: a gene pool that contains genes for altruistic behavior is superior, in terms of how likely those genes are to be passed on, to a genome whose genes encourage selfish behavior.

It is often said that science does not make moral judgements. This is true, but as a utilitarian, I believe that it is only through the scientific study of a particular action’s consequences that we can arrive at an objective judgement about the morality of that action. As such, that we have been programmed by natural selection to help others has very real moral implications: genes that produce altruistic behavior are more likely to be passed on than genes for selfishness, and since organisms are nothing more than the sum of their genes, what is good for the survival of our genes is, with a fair number of exceptions, good for us. And since a group is nothing more than a collection of individuals, what is good for an individual is, again with exceptions, good for the group. Natural selection has decided, from behind the veil of ignorance, that a species that gives help to those who need it is better off than an identical species whose individuals look out only for themselves. We would do well to heed its lesson.