On Aug 5, 9:01 pm, "curmudgeon" bresnan.net> wrote:

- Wickedness

Apart from the sometimes destructive behavior carried out by people
who lose their head in a crowd, how else may we account for man's
inhumanity to man?...

...- How Could Wickedness Evolve?

...selfishness in general can be said to have evolved phylogenetically
from the lowest creatures through to us. Selfishness has hardly been
wiped out; in fact, the majority of anyone's daily acts are probably
selfish. The point at which selfishness turns into wickedness, by
human standards, is when it begins to hurt others-those others whom we
have endowed, in principle, with 'rights'. Selfishness may be sought
in the nature of the deed-such as taking more than one's share of
resources-or we may attribute it to a person's character in general.
Thus, 'He's selfish' if he doesn't hold the rights of others in
regard. In the first instance of selfishness, grabbiness, it is a pure
animal trait; in the second instance, lack of consideration, it is a
deficiency in the more recently developed human trait of sympathy or
taking-the-perspective of another. Either case, from a genetic point
of view, could successfully evolve in humans.

Undoubtedly, the present human gene pool is characterized by 'moral
pluralism'; it contains large amounts both of sympathetic traits and
large amounts of unsympathetic ones. A grabby person will succeed by
getting more than his share (in hominid days the harsh environment
might have encouraged real ferocity); the only selection factors
operating against selfish characters would be the possible consequent
inability to attract a mate, or even the risk of being ostracized by
the community.

Humans can achieve a greater intensity of selfishness than animals.
This is due to certain factors inherent in our cultural situation
which provide that ambition and greed will reap more dramatic rewards
for Homo sapiens than for any other species. First of all, owing to
the founding of economy, it is possible for a person to accumulate
vast resources; this very stock furnishes an incentive for exploiting
others. Secondly, our social and economic structure makes political
power fairly fluid; power, like resources, can be accumulated by
ruthless individuals. Thirdly, we have a whole layer of 'psychological
life' which animals do not, and this provides the possibility for one
person to wield considerable psychological power over another. For
example, our need for security and self-esteem make us vulnerable to
manipulation by others. (As far as,I know, chimpanzees do not have
such 'Freudian problems'.) In sum, selfishness, greed, and ambition
are expressions of 'normal' inclinations to selfishness; they are not,
strictly speaking, deviations from being human. They are, as one says
glumly, 'all too human'.

- : Pathologies of Morality.

Some wickedness, however, may be properly categorized as pathological.
Consider the psychopath who stands on a street corner with a machine
gun, mowing down everybody in sight. Or consider the socially
maladjusted child or adult who cannot seem to learn what others want
of him. These persons do not appear to possess traits which would have
evolved to make a selfish person prosper. Rather, these persons appear
to have a failure of pathology somewhere-either in their genetic
constitution or in their social development.

There is an interesting psychiatric diagnosis known as character
disorder. Patients in this category have extreme moral awareness with
regard to how other people behave-indeed they may exhibit righteous
indignation at the tiniest breach of etiquette, and yet they are
remarkably unrestrained in their own actions. Even the most
impassioned remonstrating with them about the hurtful effect they have
on others seems to fall on deaf ears. As their family members often
lament, 'You cannot appeal to their moral senses.' Yet, as I have
said, these same persons are by no means ignorant of right and wrong.
The reason why I mention this pathology is because it carries some
hint that we may possess some assemblage of the mind which helps us to
construct our character, separately from the mere act of learning
social sensitivity. The persons mentioned above-whose syndrome is
readily recognizable to a clinician-have not failed in their
development of sensitivity to the acts of others upon them, or upon
third parties. Their faulty wiring seems to be only in the area of
their own character development. Typically, they do not know the
limits of their rights (psychiatrists say they have a magnificent
'sense of entitlement'), and they do not possess a balanced sense of
reciprocity. Of course I have used the term 'faulty wiring' without
any firm evidence that 'wiring' is involved. Character disorder is
often attributed to problems of upbringing, but we simply do not know
to what extent the brain may have epigenetic rules to guide moral
development. Charles Lumsden (personal communication) notes, 'If data
from other domains of cognitive development are any guide, then I
would expect that out of the universe of all possible ethical systems,
some specialized develpmental mechanisms would innately constrain the
human mind to "choose" a small subset.'

Lawrence Kohlberg, using Piaget-tvpe interviews with children, thinks
he has found a predictable unfolding of moral thinking in a normal
child. At stage one, children simply believe they must obey authority
figures in order to avoid punishment. At stage two, the child has a
sense of the need to keep promises and, inverting the Golden Rule
somewhat, they believe that it is right to 'do unto others as they do
to you'-the beginnings of reciprocity. At stage three (reached by late
elementary school), the good-boy orientation develops; one should
conform in order to be well thought of, and should do one's part for
the good of the group. At stage four, one believes that laws are
valuable in their own right, and that one should place the welfare of
society above one's local interests. The fact that these views seem to
develop in predictable sequence lends some weight to the likelihood
that we are pre-programmed to learn certain moral views.

If the child's moral development does follow such a pattern then we
may be seeing here an example of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
The early stages in our hominid ancestry may have included such
morality as is found in confoimity to behavioral norms and obedience
to parents (stage one). Then, perhaps in the Australopithecus period
there would have developed a sense of fairness in regard to reciprocal
transactions (stage two). Later with the further evolution of culture
in Homo, these things could have emerged as moral principles, laws,
and public exhortations for self-sacrifice (stage three). Finally, in
the human hunter-gatherer stage, the moral system would have been
extended to include justifications or religious rationalizations for
the social order (stage four). And, with benefit of hindsight, I might
add that these things would have led to an intellectual concern with
moral philosophy and ethics.

Human Evolution - A Philosophical Anthropology