The Evolutionary Psychology Of Human Morality - Rob Kurzban

Talk to me about the evolutionary psychology of abortion policy.

Yeah, so, um, a lot of people think that where your abortions come from is, like, your philosophy in life, and I know you've sort of thought a lot about people's philosophies, and so we all live by these kind of, you know, really high level ethics and so on. But what we've argued is that what you really wanna do is look at where people's interests lie, right? So the evolutionary view points to genetic interests, fitness interests. And so we sort of had this idea, this is a collaboration with my, my former, um, colleague Jason Weeden, that said, well, maybe what's really going on here is that if you think about abortion as a tool that people could use to have a relatively promiscuous lifestyle, right? So the cost of, you know, making a mistake, if you wanna put it that way, go, is relatively low as long as there's abortion services. Um, so maybe what's really going on is people who wanna live a lifestyle in which they can have a sexual strategy which is maybe a little bit more promiscuous and so on, that they're gonna be in favor of it, and the other way too, right? So if you've got people who are living a monogamous lifestyle, what you really don't want is your partner to be tempted to stray, and one way that you could deter them is by making that behavior costly. So, you know, I, I should say I was very skeptical of this explanation when I first heard it, so we gathered a lot of data and, um, it was surprising to me. It turns out that people who have views which, you know, kind of comport with that strategy, who are kind of monogamous, they tend to be opposed to a- abortion services and the reverse. So what's really going on here is that people are sort of using favoring abortion as a way to get the policies in place that advances their reproductive interests. So it's a very ... I, it sounds very cynical.

Yeah.

Um, you know, it'd be great if everyone just had a set of principles which they live by. I mean, if anything, you know, the last 10 years, if they've shown us anything is that, you know, principles go out the window as soon as, y- you know, as soon as people's interests are involved. Um, and so that's, that's basically the idea is that w- if you wanna un- understand people's kind of moral commitments, the first place you wanna look is not to their overarching principles, but you wanna look at where their fitness interests lie.

Why?

Well, so the i- the argument is that over evolutionary time, people who advocated for those kinds of rules and norms that advanced their interests would have had greater reproductive success, so we're sort of designed to figure out ... Look, we live in a moral world. Like, humans are weird. Like, we have these, all these rules about what you can and can't do. You can eat this food, but you can't eat it if you're having this other one. Um, you know, there's always rules about violence, there's always rules about, you know, everything. But what that means is that once you have moral communities, if you can influence what those rules are, you could use those rules to prevent the kinds of things that are gonna be bad for your fitness interests and advance those sorts of things which are gonna be good for your fitness interests. So we're descended from people who strategically played with the rules, like poking them here and there, so that they and their family and their offspring, you know, did better than their competitors. I mean, uh, once you start thinking about it that way, again, it's a little cynical, but it's also scary.