Reason, Evolution, and the Possibility of Cooperation

“Cooperation” has distinct meanings in biological and moral contexts. In nature, “cooperation” is commonly equated with “altruism,” and involves an apparent fitness cost to the actor. In the moral context, it is often employed to describe the behaviour required by a particular subset of morality, namely that of distributive justice. The existence of cooperation in nature poses a difficulty for those who seek explain it in evolutionary terms. There is an analogous problem in normative moral theory of reconciling cooperative behaviour with rationality. The constraints imposed by natural selection in the former context and by rationality in the latter make explaining or justifying cooperation difficult. Insofar as the social contract tradition is concerned with articulating or justifying the terms of social cooperation, these two problems are united through the contract metaphor. I examine these two structurally similar problems through the lens of the social contract tradition. In the descriptive arena, I argue that cultural group selection provides the most plausible explanation of the emergence of altruistic behaviours in nature. In the normative context, I argue that David Gauthier’s argument for the rationality of adopting the disposition of constrained maximization provides a defensible route to reconciling morality with rationality. I draw two conclusions with respect to how these two enterprises are connected. First, I argue, contrary to many critics of an empirically informed ethics, that the descriptive and normative projects are very much dependent upon one another. Insofar as culture is required for a descriptive account of the emergence of cooperation, and to the extent that reasoning about which norms ought to govern our interactions plays a role in their transmission, our descriptive account not only leaves room for normative considerations, but in fact requires them. Second, I argue that there is a convergence in the outcomes of both the descriptive and normative projects. I show that the explanation of the existence of cooperation that I favor also provides us with an explanation of the emergence of dispositions that structurally resemble those that Gauthier defends as rational. And thus we arrive at an account that brings together rationality, evolution, and morality.Ph