Tamler Sommers, in “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves” (posted here on April 11th), aims to describe the evolutionary origins of the belief in moral responsibility. Sommers argues that understanding the origins of our beliefs, moreover, will support the idea that moral responsibility is an illusion; Sommers believes that evolution “explains away” responsibility.
I am not convinced, however, that evolutionary considerations provide any independent support for scepticism about moral responsibility. I will try and say why.
Sommers’ argument seems to go something as follows.
(1) Ceteris paribus, it is irrational to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas.
(2) Cooperation enhances survival, so some organisms evolved certain (reactive) emotions that “force” them, irrationally, to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas.
(3) Rational organisms, however, are liable to notice the irrationality of the reactive emotions, and repress them. As a result, such organisms are likely to evolve certain entrenched irrational beliefs (such as the belief in free will) that rationalise the reactive emotions.
I will comment on each step of the argument in turn:
(1) It isn’t obvious that cooperating in one-off prisoner’s dilemmas is irrational. (See the work of people such as David Gauthier here, for instance). Moreover, most people seem to acknowledge that adopting certain cooperative strategies (such as the tit-for-tat strategy) in iterated dilemmas is rational.
(2) If it is rational to adopt the tit-for-tat strategy in iterated games, then the reactive emotions (which incline us to use the strategy) shouldn’t be deemed irrational.
(3) In claiming that the reactive emotions may require the support of certain (false) beliefs, Sommers presupposes that these emotions have cognitive content – that they purport to represent certain features of the world. However, Sommers doesn’t consider the possibility that the reactive emotions are fundamentally non-cognitive – that the question of rationality or irrationality doesn’t apply to them at all. (On this view, it is rational to cooperate, given the reactive emotions, but it is neither rational nor irrational to have them in the first place.)
Even if the reactive attitudes do have cognitive content, Sommers doesn’t say why the beliefs that we evolved to rationalise them are false. There appears to be an equivocation between the question of the rationality of the reactive attitudes, and the rationality of the beliefs that putatively justify them.
