Episode 26: Robert Richards discusses evolutionary ethics
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What is evolutionary ethics and why is it relevant to human behavior?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Mark Hoper. With us today is Robert Richards, Mars Fishbein Professor of the History of Science and Medicine and Professor in the Departments of Philosophy, History, Psychology, and in the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is also director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Chicago, and he is here to talk with us about evolutionary ethics. Robert Richards, welcome. Well, thanks very much. Happy to talk about evolutionary ethics. So you've pushed the idea recently that the tendency to behave altruistically is something that we humans have evolved as a species.
So maybe we could just begin by talking about what altruism is.
Well, I think there are a couple of different understandings of altruism, but fundamentally, as it's used in biology and I think as we would use it more commonly, it's acting for the benefit of another at some cost to self. So that would constitute altruism. There are things like reciprocal altruism, in which uh you act for the benefit of another with the expectation that they are going to reciprocate and help you out in some fashion. So that would be another kind of altruism. So one might distinguish, for want of a better term, pure altruism, in which there is no expectation of return, from reciprocal altruism when there is r expectation of return.
Would you say that these are both kinds of behavior that the human species has evolved? Or
well I think that, you know, from a biological point of view, you can look to other animals and we have to think of ourselves as animals having been evolved in the way that other animals have. with, however, distinctive traits that we manifest and they don't. But other animals will act for the benefit, for example, of their kin. So a mother bird sitting on the nest will, if there's a predator in the neighborhood, perhaps move off the nest and feign a broken wing in order to lure the predator away from the nest. Now she's acting at some peril to herself, so it's a cost that she is undergoing in order to. benefit her offspring. And we think of that as a benefiting of kin. From a genetic point of view, one might say that what's going on, and this is the way some contemporary biologists would talk about it, is that we have a genetic disposition to, as it were, protect the same genes that are manifest in our kin.
And therefore that's what the mother bird is doing. She's she shares the kinds of genes that would lead her kin actually to act in the in the same way. But the consequence of such behavior, the cost of such behavior, is less than the benefit derived to her, we would put it genetically, her genome. But it's simply that her set of genes. So she's there's a certain sense in which she is protecting her set of genes. genes. Now of course this does not at all enter into the bird's consciousness. They have bird brains, after all.
The bird case is an interesting one where it seems like there's already something that we could describe as altruism going on in in the case of an animal that's evolved that way. But as you've already alluded to, human beings are gonna look a lot more complex than that. And in one way, if they behave altruistically at all It seems like they do so often without regard to kin or who might happen to share their genes. So it seems like the kind of altruism we associate with human beings goes much further than that that we'd associate with birds.
Uh I think that's absolutely so. But we should think about kin first. So why isn't it the case that the mother who has produced offspring, uh a human mother that is, uh when the baby has been crying all night, she just doesn't take the little young one and toss it out the window, except in pathological cases we believe. But she doesn't do it because she's willing to bear that cost in order to to benefit the baby by taking care of the baby and so on.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is evolutionary ethics and why is it relevant to human behavior?
0:19–5:06
2
How does Robert Richards define altruism and distinguish pure vs. reciprocal altruism?
5:06–10:24
3
Why do humans often help non‑kin infants and strangers, and what evolutionary role does this play?
10:24–15:20
4
How does the evolutionary account explain our stronger altruistic response to kin versus strangers?
15:20–20:20
5
What is the role of learning and language‑like development in acquiring ethical behavior?
20:20–23:40
6
Can evolutionary theory justify moral principles, or does it only explain them?
23:40–28:21
7
How do real‑world moral dilemmas (e.g., rescuing a child in a fire) illustrate the tension between instinct and reason?
28:21–32:57
8
Why do large human societies struggle with altruism and how might cultural evolution overcome this?
32:57–35:48
Speakers
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