Is it good to cooperate?

Figure 1: the ten commandments

Over the past couple of millennia or so, many people have given quality time to deriving our morals from first principles, to plucking our morals out of the void. While many other people settle for them being handed down on tablets from on high.

For my part, I have just given some time to the anthropologically flavoured reference 1, previously noticed at reference 2, which tries to ground morality in the cooperation which makes societies work, makes them effective and successful, boiling this down to the seven basic behaviours listed left in figure 2 below. Validated by a trawl through the large anthropological database to be found at reference 3.

Figure 2: the behaviours

I like the way that all kinds of morals can be grounded in our being social animals, with the attendant needs to manage conflict and to promote cooperation, with an early driver being our long and more or less helpless childhoods. Another was hunting and gathering, which work better as team activities. While more recently, something less than 15,000 years ago, we invented farming, which clearly works better when there are property rights. With language being a splendid enabler: animals are not without morals, but having language is better.

But I think the authors try too hard to ground these morals in genes, which I find unnecessary, and try too hard to do everything, which I think is unhelpful. For example, the need for hygiene generally and the need to be careful about what we eat and drink, from which needs morals are drawn, do not have much to do with cooperation. On the other hand, it is interesting to see the extent to which these seven behaviours can be seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom, among animals which certainly do not have language and perhaps among animals which we might not think of as being conscious in the way that we are.

Some might argue that the business of not eating bacon is not a matter of morals; one’s relations with food do not count as morals, it is our relations with other people that do. To which one could respond with another example. So while some sexual morality can be derived from the need to live at peace with one another, I did not notice anything about the need to avoid inbreeding, often achieved in the past by totem groups and exogamy – groups which were cemented by all kinds of ritual practises, adherence to which becomes a matter for morals by extension, by transitivity. And exogamy which was echoed in parts of Italy until quite recently by it being considered more or less respectable to kidnap your bride from a neighbouring village. Indeed, not very manly not to.

From where I associate to the Spain of Napoleon’s time, where robber bands and guerrilla bands had leaders who had to be prepared to defend their leadership position with their knives, more or less at any time of day or night. And from there to an anecdote drawn from West Africa, where the king was allowed lots of wives; but, when he was no longer up to it, when he no longer commanded their respect, they went in deputation to the elders who made the necessary arrangement for his (fatal) removal. And from there to a story we were told one evening when I was a Wolf Cub, about how the lead wolf in a pack had to be prepared to defend his position – and to be prepared to leave the pack when his time was up, assuming he had survived. Behaviour which is very much to the fore today’s Tory party, which has, it should be said, made progress to the extent of allowing women, which wolves do not.

The authors were also keen on game theory, the non zero sum variety, which could, it seems, be used to model the social behaviour of hunter gatherers. However, in this paper, the authors restrict themselves to telling us that game theory tells us this and that, without going into it properly, which they have no doubt done elsewhere. This also I find unnecessary, although it may well appeal to game theorists.

For my part, for didactic and enforcement purposes, I believe in keeping morals nice and simple; which convenience can trump the original needs that they subserve. It is easier, for example, to have a rule that says that beef is bad rather than a rule which says that beef is bad in certain circumstances, or is only allowed in special circumstances. Going further, we teach a child that this or that behaviour is good or bad, and that is sometimes enough. Not always appropriate – or even possible –  to clutter the child up with reasons and arguments. Just do it – or don’t do it, as the case may be. Complexity is for grown ups. A slightly different example is given by speed limits: the speed limit is to be obeyed at all times, the facts that the road is empty and that it is the small hours of the morning notwithstanding.

Morals may also play to our penchant for rituals, lists, classifications and binary judgements, a penchant which I think goes further than just serving to bind the group together.

Putting this another way, our systems of morals have logics and needs of their own, which may result in their not being entirely consistent with the objectives we started out with. But they might, nevertheless, be the best that can be done.

An alternative approach is to be found at the psychologically flavoured reference 5, which tries to ground morality in the five topics listed below. Validated by 35,000 people filling out a moral foundations questionnaire through reference 6.

Figure 3: the pairs

Five pairs which substantially overlap with, but which lack the simple grounding of the seven behaviours in group wealth, health and happiness.

With purity being the odd one out here, with purity being a widely valued property – even down to some people not caring to mix certain kinds of foods or certain kinds of raw materials – perhaps derived from the generalisation of rules about hygiene, including here rules about food. I quote from reference 2: ‘concerns about bodily and spiritual purity [being] ubiquitous in anthropological accounts of morality’ – where spiritual purity seems to be about being free from bad thoughts, a simple extension from food being free of bad stuff.

Nevertheless, I thought that the seven behaviours identified by reference 1 were probably fairly universal, certainly when our societies were a lot simpler than most of them are now, and were a good place to start. But bearing in mind that the working up of those basic behaviours into the morals of real societies can come in lots of varieties, some of which will work better than others, rather as some implementations of the SQL standard are better than others.

I leave it to others to judge whether the authors ‘have shown how morality-as-cooperation, through the use of game theory, exhibits a theoretical precision and explanatory scope that supersedes that of previous cooperative accounts of morality’. Which strikes me as rather a strong claim.

I close with the thought that maybe some of this stuff could usefully be taught in schools, to give children and young adults a solid grounding in the civic virtues; an entirely satisfactory substitute for learning the precepts of holy books by rote. Although here, in the once Christian world, one might go on to compare and contrast with our own ten commandments.

References

Reference 1: Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies - Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, Harvey Whitehouse – 2019.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/more-seven.html.

Reference 3: https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/ehrafe/. Inter alia, a database of anthropological records. Public access to the catalogues but membership required for access to the records themselves. A distinguishing feature seems to be that the database has been indexed down to the level of the paragraph, rather than stopping at the document, making it possible to do very tricky searches.

Figure 4: the database

Reference 4: http://www.wennergren.org/. The funder for this paper; included as an example of the way things are done in the US – with my impression being that this sort of organisation is more prominent there than it is here. Academic monuments to the rich as an alternative to bits of figurative statuary in Westminster Abbey. Or at greater length: ‘The Wenner-Gren Foundation is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2016. It was founded in 1941 with an endowment of approximately US$2 million in Servel and Electrolux stock, funds that Axel Wenner-Gren and his lawyers were sheltering from the US Internal Revenue Service. Over the foundation’s 75-year history, nothing has been added to the endowment, but it has grown to approximately US$165 million. Wenner-Gren has never been a large foundation in the sense of Rockefeller or Mellon, but it has had a disproportionate impact on the field of anthropology. The foundation and the field have in essence grown up together. Wenner-Gren preceded the other major US funder of anthropology, the National Science Foundation, by almost two decades and, through its grants, fellowships, sponsored symposia, and publications, has always been there for anthropology…’.

Reference 5: Mapping the moral domain - Graham, J., B. A. Nosek, J. Haidt, R. Iyer, S. Koleva, and P. H. Ditto. 2011.

Reference 6: https://www.yourmorals.org/index.php. A rather odd outfit.