The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution and Moral Progress

Peter Singer (1981, 2011)

In a paragraph

Through reasoning we can take an increasingly impartial concern for the interests of all and broaden the circle of moral subjects to include all sentient beings.  Our evolved moral instincts are not trustworthy, but we can use reason to get beyond our evolved natures and make better choices. 

Key points 

• The impetus for the book was to respond to E.O Wilson’s Sociobiology. Wilson, and the approach now called evolutionary psychology, helps explain ethics but cannot prescribe ethics. It does though throw doubt on our intuitions. What we take as an untouchable moral intuition may be no more than a relic of our evolutionary or cultural history.

• Kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and a degree of in-group altruism is natural for us. Reasoning and the principle of impartiality widens the circle of concern beyond the group.

• Impartial thinking may start from justifying ourselves. But the capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because, like stepping on an escalator, it can lead us to places, we did not expect to go. The recognition of inconsistency comes first, and the feeling that this should be avoided follows from it.

• A widening circle can be observed from Leviticus and the Odyssey through Plato, property rights of foreigners, Myrdal etc. This may be due to reason. Though Marx was not impressed by the power of ideas, the idea of universality had a powerful hold on his thoughts.

• Ethical reasoning, once begun, pushes against our initially limited ethical horizons, leading us always toward a more universal point of view. The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism. The boundary of sentience is not a morally arbitrary boundary unlike the boundaries of race or species.

• The approach should be to imagine myself living the lives of all affected by my decision and adding and subtracting everybody’s preferences. If this is the only rational way of reaching ethical judgments, ethics has a rational basis.

• When morality was thought of as a system of laws handed down from on high, it was natural to think of moral judgments as attempts to describe moral laws which exist independently of us, and perhaps the legacy of past belief in a divine legislator is responsible for our ready assumption that there is something “out there” which our ethical judgments reflect. Now, however, the existence of ethics can be explained as the product of evolution, the need for belief in laws of ethics existing independently of us disappears and as Mackie suggests the idea of objective values is problematic.

• We can clarify the general issue of impartial reasoning and its conflict with conventional ethical standards by separating two questions: “What ought I to do?” and “What ought to be the ethical code of our society?” When we think about our own individual actions, impartial reason is unimpeachable, although scarcely any of us live up to it or even wish to live up to it. A rational ethical code must make use of existing tendencies in human nature. Just as city life does not fit into the abstractly rational patterns of town planners, so a code of ethics for human beings will not fit the abstract imperatives of impartial reason. Human nature is not free-flowing, it cannot be made to flow uphill. The truth may lie between Godwin and Burke.  But rules have only instrumental value and are not exceptionless.

• Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles. Maybe that’s unfair: philosophy does make progress. Better to say, perhaps, that philosophy likes to revisit its old haunts and find something of value in what it did in the good old days.

• From 2011 can see ambivalence about ethics being objectively true. Now realises that to say one’s interest are no more important than other similar interests is to make a normative claim. The denial of objective truth in ethics thus leads not, as I had tried to argue, to preference utilitarianism as a kind of metaphysically unproblematic default position, but to scepticism. But the idea that there could be some normative truths was widely held until logical positivism became dominant.  Parfit shows there are truths as around logic that are neither tautologies nor empirical.  Mackie’s difficulty was in understanding how any beliefs about the world could necessarily be motivating.  But normative and motivating reasons should be distinguished.  For example, even if I am not motivated, I have a reason to deal with oncoming toothache. The existence of objective moral truths allows us to hope to distinguish good reasons for action from illegitimate intuitive responses.

Comments

This excellent book was ahead of its time in setting out what evolutionary psychology means for ethics, the idea that our moral intuitions may be untrustworthy and that our ethics is advancing by applying reason and the principle of impartiality to widen the circle of moral concern.

Little has dated.  References to Sociobiology and Wilson would now be to evolutionary psychology and a number of authors.  Singer now accepts objectivity in ethics and no longer favours desire-satisfaction utilitarianism.

The approach of the Expanding Circle has since been supported by a number of writers, notably by Joshua Greene in Moral Tribes and by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature.  This has allowed Singer to restate his case with more material in The Point of View of the Universe and in Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction.

The Afterword to the 2011 Edition reflects on developments since 1981 and is fascinating.  Singer recounts how he had previously tried to follow the prevailing the view that ethics is non-objective and adopted preference utilitarianism.  He is relieved that he has now been able to abandon this in favour of an objective view of ethics and the classical hedonist form of utilitarianism.  It is striking that Philosophy had gone backwards under the influence of bad non-cognitivist ideas, but ethics may now be moving quickly as it has some catching up to do.

My additions to Singer’s position would be to suggest that normativity is less mysterious on an end-relational understanding, and to see the discussion of instincts versus reason as applying to all of practical reason. 

NOTES

Preface to the 2011 Edition

The Expanding Circle may well have been the first book-length attempt to assess the implications of “sociobiology” for our understanding of ethics.

If I were writing the book today, I would be more open to the idea of objective reasons for action and objective truth in ethics than I was thirty years ago.

Wilson’ 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.  Wilson’s misunderstanding of the import of his own work for ethics provided the impetus for me to write this book, both to explain the fallacy he was making, and to demonstrate that despite it, Wilson’s approach does help us to understand the origins of ethics.

Those parts of sociobiology that relate to human beings are now referred to as “evolutionary psychology.” Although the application of sociobiology to human beings was fiercely opposed by some researchers, the development of evolutionary psychology has had a calmer reception. To that extent, the rebranding has been a resounding success,

I hope that this new edition will help to make it clear (again!) why such attempts are bound to fail, and why philosophers are right to continue to reject such attempts to annex ethics or moral philosophy, while they should welcome scientific help in understanding the origins and nature of ethics as a human phenomenon.

What will increased communications do for the rate at which we make moral progress and expand the circle?

Preface

Ethics is inescapable.  The scepticism that eschews all ethical judgment is possible only when all goes tolerably well: Nazi atrocities refute it more convincingly than volumes of philosophical argument.

By basing ethics on the will of God, believers did away with doubts about the objectivity and authority of morality.  Many religious thinkers now agree with the non-religious that the basis of ethics must be sought outside religion.

1 The Origins of Altruism

Group altruism would work best when coupled with a degree of hostility to outsiders, which would protect the altruism within the group from penetration and subversion from outside. Hostility to outsiders is, in fact, a very common phenomenon in social animals.

2 The Biological Basis of Ethics

Hobbes’s guess about human life in the state of nature was no better than Rousseau’s idea that we were naturally solitary.

The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere.

Edward Westermarck’s The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, published in 1906 – 8, consists of two large volumes.

In our more honest moments, though, we recognize that these are excuses.

My contribution cannot end a famine, but it can save the lives of several people who might otherwise starve.

The preference for “our own” is understandable in terms of our evolutionary history. It is an instance of the kin altruism we observed in other animals, with an element of group altruism added.

The kibbutzim have survived, but they have had to come to terms with the family.

Attempts were made in the Soviet Union to carry out the call of the Communist Manifesto for the abolition of the family.  Why is it that in almost every human society concern for one’s family is a mark of moral excellence?

To say that the duty to repay benefits is the beginning and end of justice is an overstatement; but that it is the beginning is plausible. To “repay benefits” we should add the converse, “revenge injuries”.

There is an evolutionary advantage in having genuine concern for others.

Why is it that “my country, right or wrong!” can be taken seriously? Why do we regard patriotism as a virtue at all? We disapprove of selfish behaviour, but we encourage group selfishness, and gild it with the name “patriotism.”

3 From Evolution to Ethics?

What we take as an untouchable moral intuition may be no more than a relic of our evolutionary history. Relics of our cultural history to place alongside the relics of our evolutionary history.

Critical re-examination of our belief in the sanctity of all and only human life.

Strange focus on motivation

Facts, by themselves, do not provide us with reasons for action.

Ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by scientific investigation.

Sociobiology offers an explanation of ethics.

The standpoint of the observer and the standpoint of the participant

“Existence precedes essence,” as they obscurely put this point — they propose that the choice of ultimate values is simply a commitment, a “leap of faith,” which is beyond any rational assessment, and thus ultimately arbitrary.

If all our ethical beliefs can be accounted for by these means, they are all equally discredited; but we cannot do without all our ethical principles. We still have to decide what to do.

Ethical judgments may have a rational component. In his zeal to take over ethics, Wilson overlooks this position, held by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, Kant, Sidgwick, and many other philosophers.  The fact that we choose our ethical premises does not in itself imply that the choice is arbitrary.

4 Reason

The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places, we did not expect to go.

Could there be a parallel between this account of the development of mathematics and the development of ethics?

Customs are necessarily impartial. Customary morality. English Common Law,

The next stage is that the customs themselves are questioned, as Socrates questioned the accepted standards of his time.

Period of relativism in the process of moving beyond conventional thinking to an independently thought-out ethics.

Taking the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one’s conduct to society as a whole and extending this into the principle that to be ethical, a decision must give equal weight to the interests of all affected by it.

Imagine myself living the lives of all affected by my decision.  Adding up preferences.

Adding and subtracting preferences in this manner — and taking nothing but preferences or interests into account — is one way of settling ethical disputes; but is it the only way? Are we compelled by reason to take this approach? This may be the most difficult, but also the most important, question we can ask about ethics.

For if this is the only rational way of reaching ethical judgments, ethics has a rational basis.

My concern here is with how we might choose a morality for the group.

Does the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one’s conduct to society lead us to a stance from which we give equal weight to the interests of all?

When morality was thought of as a system of laws handed down from on high, it was natural to think of moral judgments as attempts to describe moral laws which exist independently of us. The reality behind moral judgments seemed to be the will of God. Perhaps the legacy of past belief in a divine legislator is responsible for our ready assumption that there is something “out there” which our ethical judgments reflect. Now, however, the existence of ethics can be explained as the product of evolution among long-lived social animals with the capacity to reason. Hence, the need for belief in laws of ethics existing independently of us disappears. And the more we think about what it could mean — outside of a religious framework — for there to be eternal moral truths existing independently of living creatures, the more mysterious it becomes. As the Oxford philosopher J. L. Mackie has said of the idea of objective values.

A dependent validity.  My concern is to deny that the conventional moral rules are valid in their own right, irrespective of their good or bad effects.

These may become your property, and you may leave them to your sons after you; you may use them as slaves permanently. But your fellow-Israelites you shall not drive with ruthless severity. Leviticus 25: 39 – 46.

Plato, however, suggested an advance on this morality: he argued that Greeks should not, in war, enslave other Greeks,

The shift from a point of view that is disinterested between individuals within a group, but not between groups, to a point of view that is fully universal, is a tremendous change.

Is it an accident of history that this should be so, or is it the direction in which our capacity to reason leads us?

The autonomy of reasoning — the feature I have pictured as an escalator.  Once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop.

The idea of a disinterested defence of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.

If a German who owned property in France died, his property was confiscated.

human brotherhood. Foreigners did not acquire the same rights to inherit property as British subjects until 1870.

Myrdal is describing a specific case of the expansion of the moral sphere.

There may be more moral discussion in a democracy, but there will be some in any community.

The feeling of need for consistency among valuations may be more intense in modern times but has been at least a latent force since humans first became able to recognize inconsistencies.

Marx’s own theory leads to the most universal form of human society possible, for he envisaged Communism as a society divided neither by class nor by national boundaries. Though Marx was not impressed by the power of ideas, the idea of universality had a powerful hold on his own thoughts.

Once I have come to see my interests and those of my kin and neighbours as no more important, from the ethical point of view, than those of others within my society, the next step is to ask why the interests of my society shall be more important than the interests of other societies.

Reasoning beings will not, insofar as they do reason, accept this kind of conflict in their beliefs.

Ethical reasoning, once begun, pushes against our initially limited ethical horizons, leading us always toward a more universal point of view.

What kind of brother would waste so much of his food when his siblings are hungry?

The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism.

This does not mean that a human being and a mouse must always be treated equally, or that their lives are of equal value. Humans have interests — in ideas, in education, in their future plans — that mice are not capable of having. It is only when we are comparing similar interests — of which the interest in avoiding pain is the most important example — that the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that we give equal weight to the interests of the human and the mouse.

The old-fashioned animal welfare organizations which cared a lot for domestic pets but little for animals with less emotional appeal to us.

The male bias now apparent in the eighteenth-century appeal to “brotherhood”

Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.

The boundary of sentience — by which I mean the ability to feel, to suffer from anything or to enjoy anything — is not a morally arbitrary boundary in the way that the boundaries of race or species are arbitrary.

They have no preferences — and therefore no interests, strictly speaking — to be considered.

[The circle can be further expanded to future people, future non-human animals and even engineered sentient creatures.]

5 Reason and Genes

We are capable of reasoning; but we are also the products of selective pressure on genes.

Can we really expect beings who have evolved in this manner to give up their narrower pursuits and adopt the universal standpoint of pure reason?

The lesson to be drawn from the spread of contraception is that reasoning beings are not bound to do what makes evolutionary sense.

Dawkins writes, “Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something which no other species has ever aspired to.”

There is no reason to believe that we always do what is in our own interest, whether we take this term either in the usual sense of getting more of what we want for ourselves or in the extended biological sense of enhancing the survival of our genes. We can therefore go on to consider with an open mind the possibility of rationally based altruism.

Common sense tells us that people who give blood do it to help others.

Altruistic impulses once limited to one’s kin and one’s own group might be extended to a wider circle by reasoning creatures who can see that they and their kin are one group among others, and from an impartial point of view no more important than others.

Edward Westermarck noted the tendency of the circle of morality to expand, but he attributed it not to our capacity to reason, but to an expansion of the altruistic sentiments.

The expansion of the community must have played a role in the expansion of altruism.

Outstanding thinkers in different periods and places should extrapolate beyond more limited forms of altruism to what is essentially the same fundamental principle of an impartial ethic.

Lawrence Kohlberg.  Children go through a definite sequence of stages of moral thinking as they develop. In broad terms, the sequence moves from an egoistic level at which morality is seen as a matter of reward and punishment, through a second level of loyalty to group standards, to a third level which seeks out a basis for moral principles which is independent of either self – interest or group standards. Kohlberg believes that there is a logical order in this progression.

“The feeling of need for logical consistency within the hierarchy of moral evaluations”

The recognition of inconsistency comes first, and the feeling that this should be avoided follows from it.  “cognitive dissonance”

6 A New Understanding of Ethics

Impartial spectator — Godwin

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Burke.

Ethics as a mode of human reasoning which develops in a group context, building on more limited, biologically based forms of altruism.

So, ethics loses its air of mystery. Its principles are not laws written up in heaven. Nor are they absolute truths about the universe, known by intuition. The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

The gap between facts and values exists because while we do not choose the way the world is, we do choose what we are going to do. If this choice were totally subjective, the gap between facts and values would open very wide. Emphasizing the rational element in ethical choice, however, narrows the gap between facts and values. Rational criticism of an ethical choice becomes possible, and facts may be relevant to this rational process.

When the debunked principles have been scrutinized, found wanting, and cleared away, we will be left with nothing but the impartial rationality of the principle of equal consideration of interests.

Could so drastic a demolition of conventional morality be right?

We can clarify Godwin’s problem — and the general issue of impartial reasoning and its conflict with conventional ethical standards — by separating two questions: “What ought I to do?” and “What ought to be the ethical code of our society?”

When we think about our own individual actions, impartial reason is unimpeachable. Admittedly, scarcely any of us live up to it or even wish to live up to it.

When I ask myself what it would really be best for me to do — best not in terms of my own interests and desires, but best from an objective point of view — the answer must be that I ought to do what is in the interests of all, impartially considered.

If we are prepared to take an objective point of view, we must also be prepared for extreme demands.

Just as city life does not fit into the abstractly rational patterns of town planners, so a code of ethics for human beings will not fit the abstract imperatives of impartial reason.

A rational ethical code must also make use of existing tendencies in human nature.

The truth may lie between Godwin and Burke.

Human nature is not free-flowing, but its course is not eternally fixed. It cannot be made to flow uphill, but its direction can be altered if we make use of its inherent features instead of fighting against them.

David Hume observed: In general, it may be affirmed that there is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourselves. Hume’s observation is an overstatement. The millions who have freely given their own blood to help others were probably moved by a “love of mankind, merely as such.”

An ethic that relied solely on an appeal to impartial rationality would, however, be followed only by the impartially rational. An ethic for human beings must take them as they are, or as they have some chance of becoming.

Our biological nature, is the reason why we have a system of moral rules, instead of simply a general injunction to promote the interests of all, impartially considered.

An ethic of rules can do this, because rules can be formulated so that obedience is not too difficult. Prohibitions are generally easier to comply with than broad positive injunctions,

Social code of ethics needs moral rules for several reasons: to limit our obligations, to make them more personal, to educate the young, to reduce the need for intricate calculations of gains and losses, to control the temptation to bend ethical calculations in our own favour, and to build the commitment to truthfulness which is essential for communication.

The way to avoid this kind of dishonest nonsense is, of course, to abandon any pretence that moral rules are exceptionless truths. Once we understand that they are social creations, normally useful and normally to be obeyed but always ultimately subject to critical scrutiny from the standpoint of impartial concern for all, the need for Jesuitical reasoning about moral rules vanishes.

Understanding how our genes influence us makes it possible for us to challenge that influence. The basis of this challenge must be our capacity to reason.

Afterword to the 2011 Edition

Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles. Maybe that’s unfair: philosophy does make progress. Better to say, perhaps, that philosophy likes to revisit its old haunts and find something of value in what it did in the good old days.

The case for a biological, rather than cultural, basis to our ethics has been strengthened.

Frans de Waal, Paul Bloom, Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene.

We could attempt to separate those moral judgments that we owe to our evolutionary and cultural history from those that have a rational basis. But in what sense can a moral judgment have a rational basis anyway?

In rereading my earlier text, I can see how ambivalent I was about the idea of ethics being objectively true and rationally based.

To add that one’s own interests are “no more important than the similar interests of others” is to make a normative claim.

The denial of objective truth in ethics thus leads not, as I had tried to argue, to preference utilitarianism as a kind of metaphysically unproblematic default position, but to scepticism about the possibility of reaching any meaningful conclusions at all about what we ought to do.

The view that there could be truths of this kind in ethics was widely held at the time and continued to be accepted by philosophers who came after Sidgwick, such as G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross. In the 1930s, however, logical positivism became dominant

Although the era of logical positivism has passed, the idea of truths that are neither tautologies nor empirical can still seem puzzling. Recently, however, Derek Parfit has written a forceful defence of normative truth.

Consider, for example, the statement: “When we know that some argument is valid, and has true premises, we have decisive reasons to accept this argument’s conclusion” (vol. 2, p. 492). That statement, Parfit argues, is neither a tautology nor an empirical truth. It is a true normative statement about what we have reason to believe.

Mackie’s difficulty here was in understanding how any beliefs about the world could necessarily be motivating.

Whether a belief gives us reasons to do something is a normative question, and whether it motivates us to do it is a psychological question.

I am about to spend a month on a remote island where there are no dentists when I detect the early signs of a toothache coming on.  The fact that next week’s agony does not motivate me to take steps to prevent it, however, does not vitiate the claim that I have a reason to take such steps.

The existence of objective moral truths allows us to hope that we may be able to distinguish these intuitive responses from the reasons for action that all rational sentient beings would have.

[Singer and Parfit are puzzled why there are objective normative truths.  The end relational theory provides an answer.]  [Singer is impressively honest in sharing his uncertainties.]