MK: What do you think is the evolutionary purpose for the human sense of morality? Secondly, do you think this biological endowment means that we can organize human societies in more humane and morally conscious ways than we do now?

SP: The moral sense is not just one thing. According to Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, it comprises intuitions of fairness (which probably come from the evolution of reciprocity), sacred purity as opposed to defilement (which probably comes from our intuitions of disgust and contamination), and hierarchy (deference to authority, conformity to social norms), which is probably based on dominance. None is identical to actual morality in a sense we can defend and justify. Purity leads to moral denigration of people whose behavior repels us; this may explain homophobia. Hierarchy accounts for the veneration of celebrities and the punishment of heretics. Of these, fairness comes closest to normative notions of morality, but even here, people conceive of fairness in terms of tit-for-tat, face-to-face trading of tangible goods and services. The complex web of transactions that define an efficient market, which include interest and middlemen, are foreign to people’s intuitions, and the moralistic persecution of middlemen and moneylenders (Jews being the most obvious example) is a recurring theme in history.

This doesn’t mean that we can’t organize societies to be more humane. It’s just a matter of recruiting some faculties (such as reason and empathy) to counteract others. From the germ of a sense of fairness, which our ancestors applied only within the clan, morality has an inexorable expansive quality – once you realize that other people are like you, it’s harder and harder to maintain that your interests should be privileged over theirs, at least not if you are interdependent with them, and have to negotiate some way to live together.

MK: I’m interested in what you say about recruiting certain faculties like reason and empathy because it seems to me that power structures don’t function like normal human beings. They do not have the same sense of fairness and seem more intent to dominate and control.

I know you were talking about individuals but how can we hope for more just and “fair” conduct between nations when it seems that power itself always acts in the same way. I’m thinking here of the environmental policies of the Bush administration — it is clear that we could be endangering our own species with the amount of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere yet the struggle to maintain the predominance of America — China will be the same — means that we follow suicidal policies to retain our position on the top of the pile.

The same is true for the war in Iraq, which was predicted to increase the chances of terrorism in the West but was carried out to secure energy resources. In short, doesn’t power pervert the normative moral sense of an individual that you described? Does that mean that it is likely we will eventually destroy ourselves?

SP: According to one prominent theory in social/evolutionary psychology, dominance (power), fairness (reciprocity), and communality (sharing) are three very different modes of thinking about social relationships. Someone in power will tend not to think of his relations to his peons in terms of fairness.

On the other hand, I’m not completely pessimistic about the future of the world. Our species did manage to invent democracy, and by a lot of measures, the democratic west better off than we were 200 or 500 or 2000 years ago – no legalized slavery, punishment by mutilation, death penalty for insulting the leaders, legal ownership of women, and so on. Part of this might come from extending modes of thinking like communality and reciprocity that ordinarily apply to restricted circles of people (kin and friends) to humanity in general. Whether the circle will continue to expand widely and quickly enough to prevent us from destroying ourselves is another question.

MK: Do you think the economic organization we call capitalism is conducive to the human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity that you outline?

SP: Probably not – these intuitions are probably tuned to face-to-face, tit-for-tat exchanges, not the complex web of highly indirect transactions that make up a market economy. People seem to have a sense, for example, that interest is inherently exploitative (since you don’t get anything tangible for the interest payments), as are markups by middlemen (since they seem to be parasites), even though economies cannot function without them. The result has been economically ruinous policies such as the prohibition of interest, and recurring episodes of discrimination, expulsion, and genocides against middleman minorities such as the overseas Chinese in Indonesia, the Indians in Africa, and the Jews in Europe. I suspect that you meant the question as an indictment of market economies, but my answer is an indictment of human intuition! I think people should all take economics courses to understand how economies really function and get over the simplistic intuitions that evolution gave us.

MK: Do you think that within this economic system the tendency to dominate and exploit weaker peoples will always be a logical corollarly — “imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism” etc…

SP: History shows us that the tendency to dominate and exploit is far greater with communism than with capitalism (at least the democratic capitalism of Europe and the US). The reason, I think, is that people only contribute altruistically to the good of others if they perceive them to be kin or close community. Otherwise you either have to motivate them by profit (capitalism) or by coercion (communism). As bad as the profit motive may seem, it’s much better than the Gulag, the killing fields, and the “cultural revolution.”

MK: What can sociobiology tell us about how to organise human society?

SP: By “sociobiology” I assume you mean “evolutionary psychology,” since sociobiology is not about thoughts and emotions, and it’s thoughts and emotions that are relevant here. There is no simple answer to your question, but the general idea is that humane and effective social organization should work with human nature rather than try to reshape it – it should have checks and balances on power, so that ambition can counter ambition; it should foster reason, education, and science, so that our cognitive abilities are best equipped to solve problems facing our societies; it should encourage trade and exchange, so that private selfishness can translate into public good and so that other people are more valuable alive and free than dead or enslaved; and it should teach an awareness of history and other cultures, so that people can project themselves into the lives of people who are different from them.

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