Cooperate and be damned?

Where does morality come from? For the majority of people who are believers, it comes from God because God is the ultimate good and, therefore, He must have created us with the ability to know right from wrong — as opposed to animals who we assume don’t have this judgemental acumen. But then along came Darwin and the moral naturalists who felt that such a discerning sensibility was an evolutionary hand me-down established by such social creatures as bees, pack-hunting wild dogs and monkeys who cooperate towards a common goal for the betterment of their group or community.

Or, as David Brooks puts in a recent New York Times op-ed, “By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense... we have natural receptors that help us recognise fairness and cruelty.”

He then quotes a study where six-month-old babies were shown photographs of a figure struggling up a hill along with another figure helping him and a third hindering. Apparently, even these early infants demonstrated their preference for the helper over the hinderer.

It’s a short detour from there to altruism, sacrifice and the search for value within the environment of cooperation.
Yet, there’s a problem: cooperation doesn’t axiomatically culminate in goodness or value. The unbelievable degree of teamwork achieved by George Clooney’s gang of casino robbers in Ocean’s Eleven is something that would put whole generations of termites to shame, but does that mean what they did was right?

The Nazis collaborated like a fine-tuned orchestra in running their concentration camps for a ‘final solution’, but is genocide right?

Is there a shred of morality here? Cooperation might have evolutionary value, but is not necessarily principled on ethics because it’s ultimately limited in scope. Survival of the fittest may be transformed into survival of the ‘goodest’, but only in a very restrictive sense where the greater good is conveniently left out.

On the other hand, take a man who says he will not kill any animal for food even if that animal happens to be an accidental germ. Such a person is actually bucking every evolutionary attribute in him that predicates the kind of meal his species intakes. Others may think he’s completely nuts, but no one in his right mind believes he’s a bad person or in any way evil. So much for evolution explaining our morality.