Miller, Geoffrey; The Mating Mind
str. 295, The hidden benefits of kindness
The evolution of morality did not have to get us over some ethical hump to move us from spiteful animal to generous human. We stared in the middle, already sitting on the ethical fence, neutral and apathetic. We just needed some kind of selection pressure capable of favoring kindness. Any good evolutionary theory of human morality must convert the apparent costs of helping others into a realistic benefit one´s genes, by turning material costs into survival or reproductive benefits. If it cannot do that, it cannot explain how moral behaviors like kindness or generosity could evolve. The rules of evolutionary biology demand that we find a hidden, genetically selfish benefit to our altruism.
Some philosophers, theologians, and journalists are unhappy with this hidden-benefit requirement. They wish to define morality as purely selfless altruism, untainted by any hidden benefit. In their view, only the morality of the celibate saint qualifies as worthy of evolutionary explanation. But to my way of thinking, a moral theory of saints explains little about human nature, because saints are rare. Of the 15 billion or so humans who have lived since the time of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has canonized only a few thousand. Saints are literally one in a million. They may by instructive as moral ideals, but they statistically irrelevant as data about real human moral behavior. Moral philosphers are sometimes not clear about whether they are developing a descriptive explanation of human moral behavior as it is, or an ideal of saintly moral behavior as it should be. My interest here is in finding an evolutionary explanation of ordinary human kindness, not in accounting for the outer limits of sanitly goodness.