Ethics, Memes and Morality

Christopher Altman
Department of Philosophy, Pierre Laclede Honors College

moˆralˆiˆty n

1. standards of conduct that are accepted as right or proper
2. the rightness or wrongness of something as judged by accepted moral standards
3. a lesson in moral behavior

An issue of long-standing debate in the study of ethics lies in the problem of infinite regress. If morals are forged from early experience‹molded through impressions delved from authority figures and societal expectations, from whence did they originate? This problem has been addressed in one way or another by many philosophers, frequently with appeal to some higher power that endowed humanity with universal standards. This paper examines the possible origins of ethics as proposed by two influential philosophers: Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. The recently established paradigm of meme propagation is related to the origins of morality.

Aristotle and the Moral Life 

øThe greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.Ó

Aristotle dealt with many of the great questions. What is the ideal life? How should one live? Is there a universal code of morals? Unlike his mentor Plato, Aristotle rejected the theory of the Forms: that there is a universal Form of the Good that we can seek to model our life upon. Plato�s Cave analogy claims that the reality in which we are immersed in is no more than an elaborate deception, preventing us from glimpsing the truth of the Forms, which provides the true basis for morality. Aristotle preferred a model of reality that is more grounded in the immediate, a more practical view which draws directly upon our experiences to find a higher truth. He applied a patient and careful approach to the examination of moral philosophy, with the goal of a model for achieving happiness in human life. 

In Aristotle�s worldview humanity is distinct in our power to reason alone. Morality is not an innate quality - it is learned from a chain of events. Perception is stored as memory; groups of memory cohere to form continuous subjective experience, leading to a  general understanding of the world around us. Morality is this set of rules that applies to the world as we know it. In Book II of Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle 1103a, line 25), Aristotle explains:

øAnd so the virtues arise in us neither by nature not against nature. Rather, we are by nature able to acquire them, and we are completed through habit.Ó

Through the acquisition of morals by experience, Aristotle bypasses the infinite regress problem. Direct experience of the world through sense-perception enables us to develop standards through general principles seen in the world around us. These ¥First Principles of Demonstration,� as he called them, are self-evident. As we can come to know them through intuitive understanding of our experience, they cannot be proven in a scientific sense. Many later philosophers rejected this explanation as unsatisfactory and incomplete.

Kant : Ethics a priori

øIntuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.Ó    
              

A philosopher who felt Aristotle�s First Principles are not self-evident was Immanuel Kant, who saw himself as the catalyst for a profound revolution in philosophy -one that would channel the flow of thought in a profoundly new direction. Kant claimed Aristotle�s First Principles self-evident, though derived from an entirely different route. According to Kant, all moral judgments must be known a priori. Our conceptions of morality aren�t something discovered through experience or deducted through exercise of reason alone ‹ all conceptions of morality are completely independent of the outside world. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that the principles governing human behavior must be synthetic, not analytic: a priori, not a posteriori, and rational, not empical, for ethics to exist at all.

Kant came to this conclusion because morals deal with the world as it ought to be, not how the world is. As such, they cannot be derived from experience, which only shows us how things in the world are. Since moral judgments are independent of the world as it exists, they must be known a priori. Kant drew upon this to construct a metaphysics of morals based on the principle of a universal law, then went on to fulfill his ambition to spark a revolutionary change in traditional ethical philosophy with the establishment of his famous categorical imperative, the guiding principle for the whole sphere of ethics: øAlways act in such a way that you can also will that the maxim of your action should become a universal law.Ó

A leading theme for his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, it fully rests on the foundation that ethics arise a priori. Following Kant�s paradigm of moral philosophy, the problem of infinite regress is not an issue‹morals are a consequence of rationality itself.

Memetics: A Cultural Model

øAn idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you.Ó

-Morris Berman

meme: A unit of intellectual or cultural information that survives long enough to be recognized as such, and which can pass from mind to mind.

- Richard Dawkins

A more recent development that has application in the study of ethics is the science of memetics. Meme theory applies the rules of Darwinian evolution to information theory and transmission and is a relatively new application of the evolutionary paradigm. It can trace its origin to Richard Dawkin�s book The Selfish Gene, a seminal work that quickly became an international best-seller and laid the groundwork for the theory. Dawkins relates the comments of colleague N.K. Humphrey,

ø€memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme�s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn�t just a way of talking Ë the meme for, say, ¥belief in life after death� is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual people the world over.Ó

The scope of memetics expands in conjunction with the exponential outgrowth of information media itself. As telecommunications, the Internet, and artificial intelligence research progresses in accordance with Moore�s Law, this expansion will only accelerate as information transmission becomes instantaneous and memes reproduce freely at the speed of light. As our societies become increasingly global and interconnected, this free spread of ideas will bear even more heavily on the future of cultural development. Memetics provides a perspective from which the trends and transformations occurring in society can be evaluated in a larger context‹that of natural selection.

As memes comprise the elementary component of culture, they can be expected to play a large role in the formation of ethics and values in a given society. Religions and governments can be seen as large-scale memetic belief systems that persist via self-propagation in a dynamic and competitive environment. Such behavioral variables as altruism, aggression, and family structure can be mediated through their propensity to affect the survival of a host population. Just as genes compete for survival in the biosphere, memes compete for dominance in the metasphere of human thought. In this manner, through eons of adaptation, highly complex moral and belief systems can emerge through competitive interaction of specific behavioral traits. 

Cultural evolution through meme perpetuation answers the problem of infinite regress with a testable model. Following the memetic paradigm, ideas evolve and are governed by the rules of Darwinian evolution‹memes are subject to the same laws of mutation and competition as genes. The extent to which meme theory applies to ethics, belief, and morality is subject to interpretation‹just because the model is applicable to cultural development does not imply it is inclusive. However, with the application of memetics to the question of the origin of ethics in society, the scientific method again enters a realm of inquiry once the domain of philosophers. This can be a controversial‹but illuminating advance that allows us to reexamine prior-held conceptions from a new perspective. The increasing complexity of the world around us increasingly demands a multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving, but allows for a more holistic and complete understanding of our universe.

References

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Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, New York. State University of New York Press.

Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York. Oxford University Press.

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Hobhouse, L.T. 1968. Morals in Evolution. New York. Johnson Reprint Corporation.

Hume, David (1711-1776). 1983. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Indianapolis, Indiana. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804). Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar with Introduction by Eric Watkins. 1996. Indianapolis, Indiana. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Kant, Immanuel (1724-1804). Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns. Translated by James W. Ellington. 1981. Indianapolis, Indiana. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

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Nitecki, Matthew H. and Doris V. 1993. Evolutionary Ethics. Albany, New York. State University of New York Press.