Right and Wrong

>>Unfortunately, evolutionary explanations have two major >>failings. First, they can't explain caring about biologically >>distant individuals.

From JOURNAL OF SOCIAL AND EVOLUTIONARY SYSTEMS,
www.complexsystems.org/essays...h1.html
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.........sociobiologists have promoted a truncated view of social life which, among other things, has had the unfortunate side-effect of narrowing the scope of evolutionary ethics. Edward O. Wilson launched his discipline-defining work, Sociobiology (1975), with the startling assertion that altruism is "the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism...possibly evolve by natural selection?" The implication was that social life is based primarily on altruism, and many sociobiologists (including Wilson) adopted W.D. Hamilton's view that there are only three classes of social behavior: Altruism (or self-sacrifice for another), selfishness (raising one's own fitness at the expense of another), and spite (lowering one's own fitness in order to diminish that of another).
What Hamilton, Wilson and other pioneer sociobiologists left out of their typologies was "egoistic co-operation," joint, coordinated or reciprocal actions that are mutually beneficial (not at all altruistic). Plato, Aristotle, Spencer (and Adam Smith, for that matter) all appreciated that social life can be mutually advantageous, in many different ways. In addition to indivisible "collective goods" (sensu Mancur Olson), there are also many "corporate goods" -- jointly produced products that are divisible and that can be shared in more or less "equitable" ways.
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So, altruism only seems like a problem if you exclude the mental equipment evolved for societal relationships from consideration.

Well, first... I would say the very fact that mirror neurons exist refutes your points. If your points were accurate then why would we even evolve such cognitive systems, and thus the capacity for empathy? But let's get a little deeper into it--

<<Contrary to popular belief, selection doesn't select by species, it selects by individual, and perhaps by limited group.>>

That's quite an over-simplification. Species compete with each other for resources, and species which exhibit adaptave traits will have an advantage. Species which compete succesfully will survive and those that don't will go extinct. That's natural selection.

So let's go a step further back--imagine a breeding group (social species only) where a mutation introduces altruistic behaviors on the part of a few individuals. The breeding group as a whole benefits, which means that each member of the group benefits, including those with the mutation--thus the new behavior is adaptive. But for the new behavior to propagate within the group requires something more... it would be necessary that the individuals that display the new behavior either have an advantage within the group, or at least don't have any disadvantage.

So it would be necessary that there be a second behavioral adaptation, i.e. the group as a whole would have to learn to appreciate those altruistic behaviors and so the individuals in question would achieve higher status and better mating opportunities, etc. But it's important to note that the second behavioral adaptation would also be advantageous--breeding groups which adopted such a strategy would produce more altruistic individuals and everyone benefits. Such groups would have a distinct advantage over their both intra and extra-species competitors. Their populations would swell and go out to mix with other breeding groups within the species, thus transmitting both new behavioral adaptations (altruism itself and the social appreciation of it) into other groups. Soon all the breeding groups within the species are exhibiting both new behaviors.

Of course this is only possible with the more intelligent social species, but maybe that's why such behaviors are are found within all the more intelligent social species--elephants are frequently known to risk themselves to save family members, especially the young, and no a genetic relationship isn't required; dolphins sometimes take this to the extreme, where adult after adult will swim into a school of Orca trying to save one individual who is often already dead. Humans, BTW, have been known to act in similar ways...

So it's really a very simple concept--breeding groups which learn to appreciate altruistic behaviors with increased status and breeding opportunities have a competitive advantage over other breeding groups, and thus the traits propagate through the species. Species which adopt these traits prosper and there competitors go extinct.

<<Unfortunately, evolutionary explanations have two major failings. First, they can't explain caring about biologically distant individuals. We would have a survival benefit to prefer family members and maybe extension of families (e.g. tribes), but the more genetically remote the individual, the less evolutionary reason to care.>>

The problem is that, unlike some other species, we can't identify whether someone else is genetically related to us just by smelling them. So the evolutionary mechanism required to produce these behaviors would, of necessity, be generalized--it would depend on our own learned definitions rather than an actual genetic relationship. So if we learn to think of 'biologically distant individuals' as a part of our family/tribe/nation/species etc... then those mechanisms would come into play. In other words... if you grow up thinking of black people as animals then those empathic mechanisms won't apply to black people. If you grow up thinking of black people as people, then those empathy neurons will allow you to 'feel their pain' and motivate you to act to ease that pain. It all depends on where each of us, individually, draws the line between 'us' and 'them.' In a tribal culture it is likely those mechanisms applied to the current family/tribe group only, but in our current technological society our tribe, for all practical intents and purposes, has expanded to include the whole human race, and for some of us, other species as well.

<<Second, evolutionary explanations don't provide any reason why someone should care. The fact/value gap tells us that merely describing what causes morality (even if true) doesn't entail what we ought to do. Suppose for example that racism can be exmplained by survival impulses to prefer perceived in group members over perceived out group members (regardless of whether the perception is based on biological reality). Would that entail that we should be racists? No.>>

That is a very interesting paragraph because it mixes up so many different ideas all at once. Let me try to untangle it--in the first sentence you used the word "should." Let's throw that out right away. People care because they do, and if they don't then telling them that the "should" isn't going to make any difference. A better question would be 'why is it that most people _do_ care?' What makes people care about others they have never met? Why did people in California cry when the planes hit the twin towers? Why did we cry when the tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square? Why do we cry when we see pictures or hear stories of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany? Is it because some preacher told us we ought to feel that way? Or is it something more basic, more innate? Is it a question of dogma... or a question of empathy...?

As for the question of 'what we ought to do...' that is the eternal question, isn't it? And even among religious folks there is seldom significant agreement on that... Even when everyones hearts are in the right place they often disagree on what should be done to make things better. Empathy neurons may provide us with a biologically inborn way to feel each others pain (and joy) but they don't include a magic instruction book on what to do about it. So the end result is we all do our best, and that's all that can be asked of us.

<<Suppose for example that racism can be exmplained by survival impulses to prefer perceived in group members over perceived out group members (regardless of whether the perception is based on biological reality). Would that entail that we should be racists? No.>>

It all depends on where we, each of us individually, draws the line between 'in-group' members and 'out-group' members. In a more primitive tribal culture it would make evolutionary sense to draw that circle closer to home and prefer your own family/tribe to "others." In todays world it makes more sense to draw that circle around the planet itself and include everyone in the 'in-group.' And that very idea is part of the new secular morality, which didn't derive from any religion, but rather came from a pragmatic recognition that the 'tribe' has expanded to include the entire planet.