The evolution of morality II: why would we be innately moral?

In the last post I argued that the basis of our morality lies in our natural aversion to other people's distress. Put quite simply, we learn to avoid harming people because we don't like upsetting them.

But why might this tendency to find the pain of others aversive, and to learn the rules of morality on the basis of this aversion, have evolved?

The basic principle of evolutionary psychology is that a trait will become a part of a species' genetic make-up if it is beneficial to an individual's ability to survive and reproduce (if it is fitness-enhancing, in the jargon). This has been characterised as a “selfish” process – genes that harm their bearers (people) will be rooted out in favour of genes that help them to survive and procreate.

But how could this “selfish” process have given rise to a selfless trait – our desire to avoid and alleviate the suffering of other people?

The answer seems to be that a trait that reduces an individual's fitness – their ability to survive and procreate – can nevertheless be selected for and become a part of the species' genetic make-up if it is beneficial to the group that they live in. This is known as group selection.

Let's apply this to our case. A lone individual who is sensitive to the suffering of others might not be very successful, as he would be taken advantage of mercilessly by his selfish peers. But, a group which includes many individuals with this empathetic tendency could be much more successful than their more selfish competitor groups. They would be able to function more harmoniously together and to look after each other when they need help.

Is this the answer to the question of why morality might have evolved?

Moral psychology I: are we innately moral?

A classic question in philosophy is whether humans are by nature good or bad; whether we are born with an innate moral sense and are capable of altruism, or whether the rules of morality are simply things that we abide by for our own, selfish reasons.

Psychologists are able to inform this debate on the origins of morality.

Freud, one of the great early psychologists, held that morality is a function of the superego, which is created by the Oedipus complex through identification with the father or the mother.

But another approach has looked at whether and how people (and animals) can distinguish between moral rules and non-moral rules – whether they think that punching someone in the face is wrong in a different way to not wearing school uniform.

If the rules of morality are just rules like any other rules, then we would not distinguish between these different sorts of transgression. If, however, there is something “special” about morality, then we might expect different sorts of reaction. And if morality is in some sense innate, then we would expect these different sorts of reaction to kick in from an early age.

This is, in fact, what we find.

From a young age, children will distinguish so-called “moral transgressions” (punching someone in the face) from “conventional transgressions” (not wearing school uniform), on the basis that moral transgressions are:

1. Less authority-dependent (they are wrong even if no authority figure says so);
2. More serious; and
3. Less relative (they are wrong in all places at all times)

The basis of our moral sense seems to be that we find the suffering of other people naturally unpleasant.

A young child will stop trying to steal another child's toy if the other child displays a sad face. Rats will learn to press a lever to bring a distressed rat back down to earth from a raised platform, for no other reward than a reduction in the other rat's distress.

It is conceivable that our sense of morality is built up from this fundamental aversion to the suffering of other people, through relatively simple mechanisms of associative learning. We find another child's sadness unpleasant and we associate this unpleasant feeling with the action that brought it about – stealing his toy. We thereby come to find the action, and eventually just the thought of the action, unpleasant as well.

This contrasts with how we come to follow rules like wearing school uniform – we learn to wear school uniform correctly because we know that we will receive some external punishment if we don't. We don't find the transgressive action unpleasant in itself, in the way that we find the effects of stealing another child's toy intrinsically unpleasant.

Even if this is all true, it raises a big question for psychologists and philosophers to ponder: why have humans evolved to find the suffering of others intrinsically aversive?

Forgiving Others Take Your Part ?

Is Forgiveness Good for Us ?

Theology and psychology offer complementary perspectives on the phenomenon of forgiveness. Psychology can illuminate the process of forgiveness and offer strategies that can help people to forgive, while Christian theology has a broader understanding of the concept of forgiveness than that of contemporary psychological literature and offers an ultimate context for forgiveness where these 'rational' approaches might run aground. Where psychology is almost entirely concerned with giving forgiveness, theological discussion is concerned in a more balanced way with both receiving and giving it. Psychological interventions have tended to focus on the person forgiving, with that individual 'standing alone' from any forgiving community, an important aspect of the theology of forgiveness. Both of these could be research emphases that positive psychology could aim to redress. In Tea and Toast this Tuesday we will tackle the latter, examining the role the community plays in forgiving an offence perpetrated against one of its members. Is it possible, for example, for the community to forgive the child murderer ?

Growing Old...

Middle age: The stranger in the mirror

Middle age, I think, having spent almost five of my own middle years writing about it, is rather like falling in love – though obviously nothing like as nice. It resembles love in the sense that when you think it might be about to happen, you spend an awful lot of time wondering what it will be like. When will it start? What will it look like? How can you tell if you’ve got it? Does it come like a change in the weather? Or can you mark a date on the calendar and rely on it to turn up on time?

And when it comes, what difference does it make? Are there things you should have done beforehand? Things you should no longer do afterwards? Are there guides on how to tackle it? Instruction manuals? Role models? Can you afford to ignore it altogether? Oh, tell me the truth about middle age.

At last it arrives and you discover two things: the first is that, like love, there is absolutely no mistaking it. And the second is that it’s nothing like you thought it would be.

Of course, one apprehends middle age on two quite distinct levels. With your conscious mind you begin preparing for it, if only subliminally, soon after your 30th birthday. At 35 you’ve reached the half-way marker of the Biblical three score and 10. At 40, you can definitely feel it closing on you. And by 50, most women (and it is female middle age that I’m considering here) will have begun experiencing the physical changes of the menopause. At that point you know the game is up. Your youth is over and you’d better start getting used to this perplexing next stage of life.

But actually feeling properly middle-aged in the sense of learning how to interpret and inhabit the state is a very different matter from blowing out 40 or 50 candles on a birthday cake. Around the age of 40 I began experimenting with the idea of being no longer young. “Now I’m middle-aged,” I’d say to my hairdresser, or to sales assistants in dress shops. Nonsense, they’d say. Of course you’re not. Nothing of the kind. And I would allow myself to believe them, because I didn’t feel middle-aged inside, just as I’d never consciously felt that I was young.

But youth is something you’re born with, whereas middle age has a nasty habit of ambushing you. That word hovering maddeningly just beyond your brain’s grasp – was it middle age that stole it? The unaccustomed stiffness of your joints in the morning – is that the sign that it has arrived? The haggard beldam advancing towards you in the department store, who turns out to be your own reflection in a full-length mirror – is that the person you must get used to being now?

The French have a term for this sudden grim apprehension of one’s own mortality: le reveil mortel, they call it, the fatal wake-up call. Mine came when I fell off a horse and hurt myself – not seriously, but badly enough to think that I’d never again inhabit my body with the blithe heedlessness that I had enjoyed until the moment before my fall.

In fact I was mistaken. My battered limbs healed up again as good as new, but in my mind the change was irreversible. I felt middle-aged. And having felt it, began to look around me to see what I could expect.

The answer was disconcerting. It is a truism to say that middle-aged women are invisible. But sometimes it is a shock to discover that truisms are true. All my life I had been accustomed to find myself – or rather, an idealised version of the self I would like to be – reflected in the culture: in magazines, in clothes shops, on television, in literature.

But now when I looked around, my contemporaries were nowhere to be seen. Like the children of Hamelin led away by the Pied Piper, we had all vanished. The only images of middle age that remained seemed like stock figures from the commedia dell’arte.

In newspapers, middle-aged celebrities were jeered at for looking old, or mocked for trying to look younger. Their sex lives and bodies were discussed with fascinated revulsion. On the television, middle-aged women humbly offered themselves as the subjects of make-over shows, often with startling – not to say alarming – results. The alternative voice of middle age was represented by television’s Grumpy Old Women who, in the comic guise of telling middle age like it really is – sluttish, surly, rueful, defeated – ably reinforced the grotesque caricature.

Having spent almost 50 years of my life not being a caricature, I didn’t see why I should start now. Literature before the 20th century is full of middle-aged women. Some are attractive, interesting and seductive; some are ugly and boring – just like the rest of the human race, in fact. Not until the mid-20th century, when HRT turned the menopause into a curable disease, do the resonant narratives of middle age, with their distinctive mixture of joy and melancholy, coarsen into caricature or vanish altogether.

I wondered if there might be an alternative to the sparse range of roles I was apparently being invited to inhabit for the rest of my life. Batty old dear, feisty crone, faux gamine – what women of 20 or 30 could imagine settling for such an impoverished version of herself in later life?

And so I began to think about what was happening to me; what had already happened in my life, and what might become of me in the future. And after thinking for a while, I began to write. When I started my book, I thought that a steady nerve and a good haircut would be sufficient protection against most of the challenges of middle age. Five years later, I know better. The experience has proved harder and more painful than I imagined: more full of confusion and loss (and I am still in the middle of it, so who knows what further surprises may yet be to come).

But among the losses of the middle years (grievous, some of them, and entirely irretrievable) I find some unexpected gains. I hoped that these years might be resonant and interesting, and so they are: the bitterness of loss sweetened by friendship, self-knowledge and an entirely unexpected gaiety.

All things must pass, and so shall this of mine, says the proverb. Which sounds a bit doomy, if you choose to view it in that light. But if you take it to mean that nothing endures, neither happiness nor – more importantly – sadness, it is a surprisingly hopeful maxim for this turbulent period of change.

• Jane Shilling’s The Stranger in the Mirror (Chatto & Windus, £15.99) is available for £13.99 plus £1.25 p&p from books.telegraph.co.uk/strangerinthemirror or call 0844 871 1515.