The gift (and burden) of a bigger brain: Imaginative Empathy

I've had a review on my desk for a couple of months, though, that I'd like to make an exception for. It is so entirely in line with my own take on ethics and evolution that I must share it with you! It was written by Ralph Blumenau in reference to a book by philosopher Mary Midgely, "The Ethical Primate". I found his review on Amazon, here's what he had to say:

In the last third of the book, then, Midgley considers how in evolutionary terms our moral sense might have developed. Her starting point is a hitherto little noticed comment of Darwin's: indeed, most people did not seem to know that he had written anything at all about ethics. Darwin had observed that parent swallows follow one of their instincts in joining migrating flocks while being apparently untroubled by the rival instinct not to desert nestlings who are left behind to die. In this case an instinct which is temporarily very powerful quite blots out one which Midgley describes as "a habitual feeling which is much weaker at any one time, but is stronger in that it is far more persistent and lies deeper in the character." The reason why the swallows evince no hesitation or feeling of conflict between the two courses is that their intellectual power is not highly enough developed. It is, Darwin wrote, "exceedingly likely that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well-developed, or anything like as well-developed, as in man." Morality develops when creatures become conscious of the inevitable conflict in their feelings; and in the more highly developed animals the signs of the struggle between opposing impulses are quite clearly observable.

Human thought brings with it a number of characteristics which, if they exist at all in animals, do so to a much weaker degree: humans have a well developed possibility of imaginative empathy with the feelings of other creatures: they become not merely self-conscious but also conscious of others. They care about what others are thinking and feeling, not least about themselves. They understand the consequences of actions. When they have violated what the weaker but deeper feelings tell them, they feel guilt; when they observe others violating them, they become judgmental. They understand the consequences of actions. They want to have some control over their conflicting emotions - not just for mechanically "evolutionary" reasons, but because they value the freedom which may prevent them from being passively swept hither and thither by their instincts like a piece of flotsam on a powerful wave. Having become conscious of their instincts clashing, they want to establish for themselves a system of priorities; and the purpose of a moral code is to establish that system of priorities. The priorities they establish bear some signs of "selfish" evolutionary programming: to put the interests of one's children before those of the needier stranger, for example; but it is the capacity of thought and of feeling (Midgley constantly stresses that theories which set these two in a hierarchical scheme are badly reductionist) which gradually widens the range of creatures towards whom we accept increasing degrees of responsibility.

Bam. That's it. Once a creature's brain gets big enough, complicated enough, it can experience imaginative empathy (what an exquisite term) and can start to have morality.

This is partly why relying on outdated moral guidelines established thousands of years ago makes little sense to me. I think our capacity for morality came from our own brains, not from external codes handed down from god - and apparently this perspective can be traced back to Darwin himself. However, it often seems like, despite this wonderful capacity for imaginative empathy, it is more common to find moral-code following people who are not particularly moral at all. This is where we find someone praying 5 times a day who turns around to beat his wife, or who fastidiously uses two sets of dishes, but cares not a whit how the animal she eats on one of those dishes was treated whilst living. This is where we get someone who authoritatively declares that all (human) life, even a blastocyst, is sacred, must be forced to continue to exist, regardless of the existance of nurturing circumstances, yet votes for funding cuts for support services for the already born. The code is superceding the empathy, which to me is just perverse.

One of the main things I've been trying to express in Teardrop Souffle is that insights from modern science, particularly biology, can lead to a deeper understanding of our relatedness with the rest of the natural world. These insights can stimulate our "imaginative empathy"! As a reader pointed out, our empathetically capable big brains also give us the abilty for torture and cruelty, even sadism. An excellent point, and I will add that our big, complicated brains probably hand us neurosis as well. But I dwell on empathy because, as I might have said before, out of Pandora's Box of tragedies that is planet earth, it's my source of hope.


Now, please excuse me while I return to my cool drink by my pool.