Hive Morality and Human Politics

Very short summary: In this essay, I argue that humans’ evolutionary history makes them prone to moral self-righteousness. Not only is morality unnecessary for the evolution of cooperation, in some cases, morality can make the achievement of cooperation more difficult. In human societies, the ultimate cooperative stage occurs when individuals are willing to reflect on and eventually revise their moral beliefs. From this perspective, one of the key functions of politics is to establish the conditions for peaceful moral disagreement.

Casual observation indicates that we are surrounded by species with very strong dispositions toward cooperation. The most significant cases are eusocial insects like ants, honeybees, wasps, and termites. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes noted,

“It is true, that certain living creatures (as bees, and ants), live sociably one with another, (which are therefore by Aristotle numbered amongst political creatures), and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgements and appetites, nor speech, whereby one of them can signify to another, what he thinks expedient for the common benefit; and therefore some man may perhaps desire to know, why mankind cannot do the same.”

The highly cooperative character of some species has puzzled biologists and philosophers alike. Our human intuition suggests that cooperation is tied to morality. After all, especially in what game theorists call “social dilemmas,” our personal interests push us to avoid the sacrifices entailed by cooperation while hoping to benefit from others’ efforts. Without morality, the case for cooperation seems hopeless. Individuals who free ride on others’ contributions ensure that if everyone does the same, no one contributes and cooperation never emerges. Still, cooperation is endemic in the natural world, despite the fact as Hobbes notes, that bees and ants haven’t developed anything that deserves to be called “morality.”

It’s now widely acknowledged that this reasoning puts the cart before the horse. Cooperation is not the result of a preexisting morality. It’s the other way around: human morality evolved from the development of cooperative relations.[1] Cooperation without morality depends on evolutionary mechanisms biologists are familiar with. In the case of eusocial insects, their highly cooperative organization follows from their genetic haplodiploidy, i.e., males only have one set of chromosomes, while females have two (as in humans). This increases the degree of genetic relatedness (as computed with Hamilton’s rule). For instance, parents and their children share 50% of their genes by descent (each child gets half of ...