This is the midterm paper I wrote for Buddhist Ethics class in 2015. The first half of the course was taught by Dr. Matthew Kosuta. Mainly, we discussed the theory of evolution and ethics. Some insightful comments from Dr. Kosuta are also retained here. This is an reflective essay, not so rigorously scholarly, so it is easy to read by everyone.
The general aim of this essay is to make sense of Buddhist ethics in evolutionary perspective. For analytical approach is my favorite, I will not start with Buddhist ethics, but with evolutionary theory. I also separate Buddhism from ethics (or morality which I take them as synonymous), and take a skeptical stance towards so-called “Buddhist ethics.” I will doubt at first whether there is such thing. My strategy is pushing aside any presumption first and trying to make sense out of the subject bit by bit from zero position (or at least from a minimum point). So, I will start with a naïve mind (or pretend to be as much as possible) and go forward with curiously scientific mind.
What evolutionary theory is all about?
Put it simply, evolutionary theory is about ‘how come’ of us. How I, you, everybody, and all other living things come into being. There must be an explanation, and it should be a convincing one. Through human history, there are many accounts of this sort. But most of them no longer make any sense now. We live beyond the age of “just take it for granted” or “believe it for we have been told like this.” We now possess an incredible power of investigation which we call ‘science.’ With this tool, we can doubt in anything even in the tool itself, and we have ways to figure it out.
I do not take science as an ideology comparing to religion, political ideas, etc., like postmodern thinkers do. I regard science as the tool that brings us (the most) reliable knowledge. This type of tool can be found in everywhere concerning truth, even in religious settings. To the question of “how we come,” evolutionary explanation is overwhelmingly accepted, not only in scientific circle, but also in public sphere (except some societies firmly bound with certain religious ideology). So, I will make a jump to ignore competitive accounts and accept evolutionary theory as a scientific fact. Concerning about theory and fact of evolution, Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known biologist, makes a very good explanation.
Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world’s data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. […] In science, ‘fact’ can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
How evolution explains the process of our becoming? Since this essay is not intended to be a scientific paper on evolution, I will go through the account in a less scholarly manner. We all began with the most fundamental organism with only one cell. This organism had one critical aspect that never before happened, the ability to live by itself (self-organization). With this ability, it could respond to the environment, it ate, grew, and eventually reproduced by dividing its fat body into two.
The main and blunt reason why it did such things is that it must survive, otherwise it would be meaningless to happen in the first place. This survival is the principal force of evolution. I do not imply any philosophical speculation here when I use ‘meaningless,’ and I do not think it has any meaning to become alive. I think it just happened by randomness of the nature which can be shown (‘explained’ is a problematic word here) by quantum phenomena (and I will not go that deep here).
When the primary organism reproduced itself, there became more and more organisms. Each life had its own way of living. For the fact that organisms cannot occupy the same space, and everyone must eat for its own, there were inevitably competitions among the group of organisms. When the competitions occurred, there must be winners and losers. The winners continued to survive and reproduce, the losers died out.
What factor that made some be able to beat others? Biologists explain this with (genetic) mutation. When former organisms gave rise to their offspring by copying themselves, there is a chance that the copied were not one-hundred percent identical to their parent. This made them respond to the environment differently according to how far they differed. Some differences were beneficial, some harmful, and some neutral. Those who got beneficial mutation could beat others by their special new features. Charles Darwin called this process natural selection. Those who have the features that contribute to their survival survive, otherwise they die out. This process takes a very, very long time.
At some point of this process, two organisms mutated in the way that they could cooperate each other. In some case they merged together to be a new organism with two cells inside. This occurrence made the chance of beating the competitors higher. The likelihood to survive increased. Then, multiple-cell organisms emerged. As time went by, 3.5 billion years since the first organism emerged, we are here with a smart phone in our pocket.
Before we move to the next section, I would like to emphasize two points that relate to what we will discuss. First, once reproduction occurs, there must always be competitions among organisms, because the law of material things dictates that. Second, cooperation of organisms has far more benefit than the individual. This does not mean that we, a multi-cellular organism, are better or have higher survival rate than bacteria, single-cellular organisms. We just happened in the line of our process. Bacteria also have their own line. Evolution process is not about superiority or perfection of beings, but rather about chance of survival.
Evolution and ethics
Here we come to ethics. Let us clarify the concept first. In my Macmillan English Dictionary, ‘ethics’ is read as “a set of principles that people use to decide what is right and what is wrong.” The definition is close to ‘morality’ in the same book, “principles of right or wrong behavior.” When I played around with my dictionary, I found another word, ‘conscience’ read as “the ideas and feelings you have that tell you whether something you are doing is right or wrong.”
The definitions I found make me think hard. If ethics or morality is about principles, it can be only human beings that have the mind that can use principles to decide what to do. It is absurd to think that animals have any principle as a basis of their behaviors (or maybe in a very simple way). The word ‘conscience’ may be better, because it is about feelings that make us do something, and animals seem to have some similar kind of feelings. But, the trickiest point is about ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ In what way we define ‘right’, in what way ‘wrong,’ and for whom? If it is right only for me, is it ethical or not? Most of us will say it is unlikely. Right should mean right for everyone.
Let us think about evolution process again. Every single organism has a primordial force to survive. It must struggle at any cost to keep it alive, even at the expense of its fellow organisms. Ethical or not? When two or more organisms join together to make a better life for their survival at the expense of their competitors, is it ethical or not? It seems to me that evolution process is not about ethics or morality at all. We just impose our idea onto the natural process that knows nothing about our speculation or conceptualization. The nature just goes as it does.
I think what scholars and scientists think in terms of ‘evolutionary ethics’ is about how cooperation comes in the first place and what its implication is. Altruism is what they mean by ethics here. So, the definition of ethics must be narrowed down to “what is right and wrong for others,” not just only one individual. This can be read as what benefits the group is ethical, what benefits only an individual is unethical. I find this implication absurd, because these two conditions come from the same drive—survival of the individual.
Where the sense of right and wrong come from then? David Sloan Wilson explains in this way. Ethics or religion as a whole is the product of cultural group selection. The main purpose of religion is to solve the problem of “cheating from within” that usually makes group in trouble. For Wilson, religion is an adaptation for this very purpose, to hold society together. He draws many examples to show that cooperation in animals is for the group survival, such as honey bees, bacteria, fascinating slime mold ‘Dicty,’ and much more.
Therefore, ethical thought in humans evolves from group selection for its survival. This sounds close to Durkheim’s classic idea of religion as the society itself. And it is in the same line of another Wilson, Edward O., who proposed the idea of biological-based ethics since 1970s. E. O. Wilson studied cooperation in insect’s world and coiled the term sociobiology to suggest that our social nature has biological basis. I will not elaborate the idea here.
I agree with the idea that group cooperation has many things to do with biology as I have shown in a simple way above. But, I contend again, it is not about ethics or morality at all. It is just a mechanism to hold group together. Organisms band together for a better opportunity of survival of each individual. First and foremost they think (or feel) for themselves first and they think that the group survival is helpful for their survival, so they keep the group coherent.
For those who think that their own survival has more priority, they sacrifice the group for their own benefit—this is the ‘cheater’ or ‘free rider’ case. In my view, there is no morality in the struggle for one’s survival. The critics of the Wilsons’ argumentations usually point to what we call in logic “naturalistic fallacy.” They try to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ meaning that the natural process is what it is but we anyway try to read what we should do from that process.
Francisco Ayala thinks about this issue in a different way. He thinks that what we call ethical behaviors are consequences of human intellectual capacity. He proposes three conditions: (1) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions, (2) the ability to make value judgment, and (3) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. These abilities are dominating in human beings, and have limited functions in animals. They are results of high development of the brain that can entertain abstract thoughts. These abilities come together with our cultures, the virtually higher-order emergent entity from our biology. In other words, without these abilities, our culture cannot be formed.
What is the difference between a group of organisms and human culture? This is my idea. They are the same but human culture is far more complex. In an animal group, there is a simple form of information exchanges between the individuals to keep everything in check. In human society, information exchanges are enormously complicated, because relationships between human members are far more complicated.
When many cultures come into existence, they follow the pattern of primitive organisms. Cultures as entities compete with one another, as we see in warfare between groups. Sometime they join together to make a better chance to survive, as we see in a union of countries. With the capacity of human thinking, we can anticipate and calculate what is good for our society and good for each individual in turn, and we can make it happen without waiting for the natural process to act on it.
However, the real world does not simple as that. Each culture has very complex structure of relationships. Each culture has different value systems, because they have different collective memory and awareness—the storehouse of knowledge. Each member in cultures has various capacities to calculate the future, some are good at it, some not. Some who have a good skill may not have power to direct society, some may have power but brainless. And each culture has a difference in efficacy of internal control and environmental response, so some cultures are more powerful than others. With these factors and other variables, thus we see the world’s dynamics as they are.
Where is the place for morality then? From my perspective, morality is a kind of signal generated by culture via collective knowledge and memory of the individuals in order to hold the group together for each individual’s benefit. This signal has unquestionably biological basis as we also see, to some extent, in other animals. Morality will never work perfectly because of the varieties of the individuals (various kinds and levels of value judgment that is amalgamated by culture in turn) and the randomness of nature.
The term “cultural evolution” is somewhat misleading, because there is no such thing as culture to evolve by itself. The members of culture evolve and make culture come into being, and then culture itself develops and affects its members in turn. Relationship between culture and its members is interplay between bottom-up causation (from each member to culture) and top-down causation (from culture to each member).
Culture cannot exist without its members, but the individual can move from one culture to another (Once a culture exists, in rare case a single individual can survive outside the culture, because new members are always born into a culture). We can understand this picture more clearly by comparing with our biological body, which is composed of cells and a higher-order entity by which we call ‘self.’ Self cannot exist without biological basis (especially brain), but parts of our body can be grafted to another body (except brain, I suppose). Self is a virtual entity like culture. A unified self is an illusion as a unified culture.
The most conspicuous aspect of human capacity is that we can figure out what is going on and we can change the process of nature. We could breed dogs with artificial selection long time ago, and now we can decode our genome and manipulate any gene at will. At first we group together and build up our culture by teaching-learning process, and we store acquired knowledge in our collective memory. Then in turn, this culture determines our being. We are born into and belong to our culture. At cultural level, we are no longer directly in the process of natural selection, because we do it by our collective ‘self.’ Encountering today genetic engineering, brain sciences, and other scientific progression, Darwin would be excited.
There is an interesting case: Why does an individual sacrifices himself (even his life) for the survival of the group? This makes little sense in terms of evolutionary theory. There are cases in the animal world that some animals protect young cubs that are not their offspring from predators, and at a predator’s presence, some send a signal to warn their group at their own risk to be caught, and soldier ants fight to their death to protect their group. In the animal world, there is some mechanism to do that.
In the human world, we can do it in two ways, I think. One is from instinct like animal, when we help a kid from drowning at the risk of our life. We do not think about it, we just do it. Another way is from culture, we are dictated by our culture to sacrifice our life to protect the whole society in the name of honor or a better next life or whatever. This cultural cause can supersede the instinct. Culture can tell you not to help someone who is dying, for example. There was a case of one of King Rama V’s consort who died in water because the rule says not to help the king’s consorts when they drown. Culture can also cause a horrendous destruction like the Holocaust. Thus, with culture the spectrum of possibility what can happen is widen beyond our imagination, because this is not a natural process anymore.
A crucial question comes up, is science undermining morality if we think in this way? Is Dostoyevsky right when he says if God does not exist, everything is permissible? Should we bring God back for this very reason? Since God or any moral authority does not have a place to stand in evolution process, by what criteria we should live our life? This is a philosophical question, not a practical one. In the real world we do not think about morality rationally, we just follow our culture’s norms, which have worked quite well for a long time. When this kind of questions happens, it is a signal indicating that the old standard are no longer well-functioning, and it needs to be adjusted, otherwise our culture will disintegrate.
Evolution, Ethics, and Buddhism
Now we come to the last part, perhaps the most intriguing point. Again, before we go any further, I would like to clarify what we will be talking about. Buddhism is a huge entity. Let us think about it simply, what Buddhism is all about? The very essence of Buddhism is about liberation. I think all Buddhists will agree. Liberation from what? The only relevant answer is dukkha or suffering. Why is suffering a problem here, since the world just goes as it is? There is no suffering in the world’s perspective, but only in our perspective. The Buddha’s teaching has nothing to do with material suffering. We suffer just because of our ill-perception of the world. If our perception of the world changes, then we will be liberated. It is easy as that in principle, but to practice we must undergo the process of reprogramming the mind. Meditation is one of the ways, and it is not quite easy to do (or start to do).
Where is the place for ethics in this liberation process? The most relevant practice is described in the Noble Eightfold Path. There are three items related to ethics, namely right speech, right conduct, and right livelihood. These practices concern only for the individual who aims at liberation. We must do these in order to keep away from any trouble relating to our living, otherwise we cannot advance any practice. I think the Buddha’s primary concern was not about society at all. He was just a psycho-therapist in his time. When he helped other people to get liberated, his work was done. What happened next is not about the essence of Buddhism, but the development of Buddhist cultures. We glean knowledge, form communities, make ethics (in the modern sense) happen, and split into many strands. Sometimes we learn from each other, sometime we dispute. Then here comes Buddhism as we see today.
What is Buddhism, or religion in general, in terms of evolutionary theory? In my view, all religions are products of culture, i.e., the outcome of collective memory and awareness. They come out to serve many purposes, but they have one thing in common. Once the founders declare their teachings, the main purpose of this new knowledge is to benefit each individual in the way the founders intend. They might be for political purpose like Judaism or Islam (to some extent), or therapeutic purpose like Jesus’s and the Buddha’s, or to exercise one’s intellect like various schools of thought in India. Some people buy into the new ideas, some do not. Some ideas work well at the time, some do not. Some ideas persist for a long time, some do not. Once this new knowledge store in public memory, it will be a germ of new religion or knowledge to come.
In modern ethics’s perspective, Buddhism did not provide, in the first place, the solution of how to live together or how to make a better world, because it does not the primary concern. Once Buddhist communities were established, the Buddha taught how to live together inevitably. We call this Vinaya for monks and household ethics for laity. The Vinaya is the set of rules like code of conduct. Household ethics is guidance the Buddha gave to lay followers to alleviate their suffering. How to live together is the only one aspect of it.
Conclusion
Then, is ethics or morality a product of evolutionary process? My answer is that the term ‘ethics’ is not a scientific term, because it implies value judgment. If we scope down to ‘altruism,’ this is in the process of evolution. The notion of ethics itself comes from culture, which is once a natural process. Once culture is well-established as an entity, it is no longer a natural process (if ‘natural’ means not by human intention).
Does Buddhism come from evolutionary process? We can say ‘yes’ as long as we regard culture as a product of the process, and religion is a product of culture in turn. But for me, I prefer the answer ‘no,’ because Buddhism occurred in well-established culture by human intention (which Darwin called ‘artificial selection’). We go beyond natural selection at culture level.
Buddhism happens in the first place just for alleviating mental suffering of social members. When Buddhism becomes a part of culture, it entails many things to come including so-called Buddhist doctrine and ethics. Therefore, there is no such thing as Buddhist ethics in the first place. There is only the ethics postulated by a culture, which has the Buddha’s teachings as a component. So, there might be several versions of Buddhist ethics. Although there are some teachings concerning good behaviors that come directly from the Buddha, it is not ethics that we understand in the modern sense. It directly leads to liberation.
For the Buddha, there is no survival to struggle, for there is no ‘thing’ to survive in the first place. If we shall die, let ‘it’ dies. How natural process can produce such attitude?
Notes