Donald Cameron's The Purpose of Life

This article by Dan Polansky is an original philosophical analysis of a book by engineer turned philosopher Donald Cameron called The Purpose of Life: Human Purpose and Morality from an Evolutionary Perspective, Woodhill Publishing, 2001. A summary of the main argument of the book may still be available in Wayback Machine.

You can learn from this article by reading it, reading the sources linked, by questioning what you read, and by using what you read as a basis for further questions and related online research. This is within Wikiversity original research allowance; in case of doubt, do not believe anything that follows.

Cameron's book is an attempt to derive objective ethics from evolutionary biology to guide our ethical dilemmas and to provide an overall direction in life. An earlier similar undertaking was by Wilson and Ruse, Moral Philosophy as Applied Science, 1986. The subject matter is normative evolutionary ethics or prescriptive evolutionary ethics. The philosophy the book presents is interesting even if incorrect. This is a characteristic it shares with great many philosophies. What follows presents the philosophy and shows it to be incorrect or at the very least problematic and inconclusive.

Initial considerations
To achieve his objective, Cameron sets up the following axioms:


 * Non-random source: The values must have a non-random source.
 * Something matters: Normative nihilism is rejected.
 * Consistency: Values must be consistent; in particular, if A is preferable to B, and B is preferable to C, then A must be preferable to C.
 * Real-world values: The values or objectives need to be specified in terms of the world outside of the mind rather than of internal states.
 * Evolution: The values of animals including humans originate solely from biological evolution by natural selection.

Cameron dismisses the possibility that values could originate from culture. He dismisses that values could originate through memetic evolution, which amounts to the same, the dismissal of cultural evolution as a process by which values originate.

From the axioms, Cameron claims to derive the following principle, which he calls Evolutionary Value Principle (EVP):
 * The correct set of values in any evolved being is the one which will give its holder's genes the maximum advantage in terms of natural selection.

In practical terms, it means to have many children and descendants in general or at least descendants of one's relatives. Cameron addresses the is-ought problem by pointing out that he has some normative or "ought" axioms and that therefore he is not in the error of deriving an "ought" solely from "is". The claim Cameron makes is that this derivation and system of ethics is compelling, not based on mere moral feelings but rather reason, and that certain principles such as kin altruism, reciprocal altruism and display altruism make it possible to derive from the principle specific normative rules limiting human behavior, moral principles. He offers to abandon centuries of allegedly barren philosophical ethics that uses excessive polysyllabic hard words in favor of something that is very much like engineering or mathematics. He offers investigation of some ethical test cases in the light of the principle such as abortion and eugenics. He mentions the possibility that his ethical theory will become dominant in the pool of ethical theories held by humans as a result of being most conducive to the genetic reproductive success of those who hold the theory.

Cameron considers some previous attempts to derive ethics from Darwinian biological evolution, including Herbert Spencer and Adolf Hitler, arguing that the attempts of these two do not match EVP. Cameron provides interesting quotes about the relation of Darwinian evolution to ethics and values from Daniel Dennett, Edward O. Wilson, J. D. Rockefeller, Julian Huxley, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and Susan Blackmore. Most of these indicate we can rise above our genes, with which Cameron seems to disagree. However, by Cameron's own account, people often do misalign themselves with their EVP genetic interests and therefore are capable of doing so; that is a state of affairs, not an "ought". And culture plays a role in that misalignment. Cameron engages in a cultural activity to bring people back to the alignment, which many people will reject, and therefore are in fact capable of doing so.

Evaluation and criticism
Let us now turn to evaluation and criticism. There are multiple problems with his ethical theory:


 * The dismissal of cultural evolution by variation and elimination of cultural elements as a source of values is factually incorrect.
 * There is no way acceptable private ethics can be derived from reciprocal altruism and display altruism, that is, ethics restricting behavior when no one is looking and one cannot be found out. Only when the actions are traced by other agents can reciprocal altruism take force.
 * There can be some success in deriving some public ethics and politics via reciprocal altruism and display altruism. For instance, it is quite possible to imagine how people holding EVP could agree to make a publicly enforced law to prohibit murder. But multiple ethical test cases are not obviously derivable to our taste, such as infanticide, slavery, aggressive war against a technologically weak nation and destruction of natural heritage; this may well apply to a host of other ethical test cases.

Let us consider these objections in turn in greater detail.

Cultural evolution
If by values we mean values people hold and corresponding behaviors they show, values do originate in part from cultural or memetic evolution, that is, variation and elimination of cultural elements such as descriptive beliefs and normative beliefs. In its most abstract form, the process is analogous to Darwinian natural selection: there is some variation of cultural elements and there is some ensuing elimination of some varieties. For instance, if a cult of suicide arises and the cult leader calls upon all his followers to commit suicide, the result is a significant elimination of the particular normative belief from humans, together with the humans. There are less harmful forms of elimination of cultural elements, which do not depend on the elimination of humans. Cameron's EVP itself is not a result of genetic evolution alone but a cultural evolution, and incorporates descriptive theories brought about by cultural evolution. In particular, it incorporates the modern notion of gene and differential genetic replication that were unknown to Darwin, from which he can obtain kin altruism. And his notion of reciprocal altruism referring to tit-for-tat algorithms dates to 20th century. Various cultures have varying prohibitions and different people in those cultures take different moral stances on controversial issues, and these are not driven purely genetically but rather often by cultural affiliation and various in part random circumstances. One may counter that cultural evolution is in part random and the source was supposed to be non-random, but the variation part in the biological evolution is in part random as well, and it is the elimination part of the process that is non-random, eliminating outright parasitical cultural elements from the pool as well as some other elements. Cameron seems to realize most of this: there is a whole chapter Cultural evolution in the book. However, in the chapter, I found nothing to show that values do not originate in part from cultural evolution. Cameron could argue values do originate from cultural evolution, but not "correct" values. By the same token, values do originate from biological evolution, but not "correct" values, yet his EVP speaks of "correct" values. Should Cameron have to accept cultural evolution as a source of values, he might have to adopt the following Cultural Evolutionary Value Principle:


 * The correct set of values in any evolved being capable of cultural transmission of values is the one which will give the set of values itself the maximum advantage in terms of the number of its followers.

Another similar formulation, in the form of an imperative, is "maximize the number of followers of this imperative". Such a principle, a cultural replicator, is quite different from the biological EVP: it does not prefer the biological reproduction of one of the followers over that of another. This is not to say that this is a morally palatable principle, but it is a principle that seems to follow from Cameron's axioms if one accepts that cultural evolution is able to produce values and therefore serve as a not entirely random source of values; the axiom requiring non-random source is met and the only axiom that is rejected is the one that claims that the only source of values is biological evolution. Since Cameron indicates his EVP could become dominant in the pool of ethical theories held by humans by being most conducive to their genetic success and since the cultural EVP maximizes that dominance by its formulation, the two principles appear to be set up to compete for the domination of the pool. A minor note is that the derivation from cultural evolution is still "evolutionary", and would therefore fit Cameron's book title well. Disregarding cultural evolution as a source of values structurally similar to biological evolution on the most abstract level is a descriptive problem with his theory.

Further reading:
 * Cultural evolution

Private ethics
To derive ethical principles from EVP, Cameron relies on reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat. This does not work when someone is about to do a misdeed in a way that no one ever learns about it. Tit-for-tat works by agents reciprocating in kind for good or bad behavior toward them. But if one steals from someone else without the other person even learning about it or learning who it was, there is no threat of response in kind or retaliation and tit-for-tat does not work. If the person is to maximize their genetic success, they are in fact compelled to transgress whenever they can get away with it and can benefit their family. This is not to say that the person would publicly announce their intention to make such transgressions. Since reciprocal and display altruism can be used to derive public ethics, we could try to obtain from it private ethics by adding an axiom or imperative. The imperative could be similar to Kant's categorical imperative, and could be phrased as follows:
 * Whether acting in public or in private, only transgress public ethical principles if you could wish to advocate and enforce a public change to those principles that would make your proposed action no longer a transgression.

Thus, you must not murder even if no one is looking since you would not possibly advocate for relaxation of murder prohibitions that would apply not only to you but also to others. There may be some problems with the principle, such as that the relaxation of the public ethical prohibition considered could be very narrow, such that it would allow the transgression to you but effectively to no one else, but this is against the spirit of the principle. A more precise formulation of the principle is lacking. In any case, this principle is not derived from EVP. But it is the private ethics that is arguably the genuine ethics, not merely a display for others to achieve personal objectives. Therefore, the claim that Cameron's philosophy has finally given us an objective derivation of ethics fails; for private ethics, rather than deriving prohibitions, it requires their violation whenever it benefits genetic reproductive success of the violator. The added principle is akin to Kant's categorical imperative, suggesting that Kant's work has produced an interesting philosophical result rather than being part of an entirely barren part of philosophy known as ethics. Whether the formulation given by Kant is easy to apply and whether his application is convincing is another question: to me, Kant's derivation of unconditional prohibition of lying is unconvincing. One may take Kant's idea as a starting point and improve upon it. Be it as it may, EVP does not provide for private ethics and another solution or addition is required.

Further reading:
 * Categorical imperative

Derivation of public ethics and policies
It is quite imaginable how one could derive prohibition of some forms of murder as an act of reciprocal altruism: I am forbidden from murder but so are others, and the prohibition is enforced. But what about infanticide, slavery, aggressive wars against technologically weak nations, and destruction of nature?

Infanticide
Cameron considers the subject of abortion and notes that from the genetic perspective and reciprocal altruism, the cut-off date for life protection is rather arbitrary and can be conventionally set to the date of birth. His discussion of infanticide is that it is not obviously prohibited but that holding human life sacred is an important factor for cooperation, and that human birth is a natural cut-off point after which the life is protected. He notes that for abortion derivation from EVP, discussion of personhood does not enter the deliberation. Now consider the possibility that doing without the baby would be genetically beneficial, for instance to prevent exhaustion of resources that would be missing for other children and their descendants. In the past, abortion was dangerous for mothers. If we applied Cameron's principle of the cut-off point being rather arbitrary, we might have wanted to allow mothers to kill the unwanted child after birth, to eliminate risks of mother's death resulting from the previously dangerous abortions. We can still maintain the position that murder in general is prohibited but we may grant mothers' an exception that they can kill their child in the first month after birth. This does not seem to inhibit cooperation of the coldly calculating rational agents performing calculations from EVP and looking at their moral feelings with distrust. Infanticide is not a particularly socially dangerous behavior, unlike general murder; those making the laws do not need to fear for themselves and for almost all of their subjects that they may be killed as a consequence of legal infanticide. The notion that infanticide is immoral stems from the simple idea that any intentional killing of an innocent human is a murder and should be disallowed; any complication of this simple idea needs a special justification and a more challenging ethical reasoning than the subjects of ethics may be able of. Once we start arguing in terms of what is socially dangerous and what not, we are on the slippery slope to collectivist totalitarianism, in which humans can be dispensed with when it is collectively useful. Since Cameron urges that we may not like some of the consequences of EVP but that we are compelled by the strength of the argument to accept them anyway, Cameron may not use his moral sense to assess various cases, and he is probably not supposed to engage in philosophical deliberations such as when does personhood start; by his own selling point, he is supposed to engage in moral calculation and derivation from the discovered first principle of EVP. If we reject infanticide, we must reject EVP, or we must supplement it by our moral sensibilities, thus being in part "irrational" by deferring to ethical feelings.

Further reading:
 * Infanticide

Racial slavery
It is not obvious how its prohibition can be derived from reciprocal altruism. The master race could reciprocate among themselves while barring rights from the slave race. By doing so, the master race could derive genetic benefit in terms of copies of the genes, and would have no reason to abandon slavery. The benefit would be derived by having it easier to amass resources and use them to support their descendants. The book does not have "slavery" in its index, and I have not found slavery covered there.

Further reading:
 * Slavery

Aggressive war
Aggressive war against a technologically weak nation: It is not obvious how reciprocal altruism can prevent attackers from attacking: they would have all the natural resources to gain to support their children and grandchildren, at the cost of loss of human life that, from their genetic perspective, has not much of value for them. In chapter War, I found no discussion of this ethical test case.

Further reading:
 * War

Destruction of natural heritage
Te only preservation of natural heritage that follows from EVP is that which is conducive to reproduction of human genes. Thus, humans could desire to preserve some ecosystems for the pharmaceutical utility they provide. If humans consider to destroy large parts of biological or non-biological nature (species, landmarks) to increase their population, there seems to be not much in EVP to prevent them from doing so. The book index does not contain "conservation" or "preservation".

Further reading:
 * Environmental ethics

Lying
EVP does not seem to give an easy answer for when lying is allowed. Pursuit of truth is indispensable for many endeavors but lying, including joint lying, is of quite some collaborative utility in some settings, and does not need to run a significant risk of being found out, thus not being exposed to reciprocal altruism. The book index does not contain "lying".

Further reading:
 * Lie

Altruism in self-sacrifice
Cameron states: "We can now understand why the Evolutionary Value Principle is not a simple recipe for selfishness. In fact, it supports all of the altruism that we see around us." While EVP is not a recipe for pure selfishness, the second sentence is untrue: not all altruism observed is supported by EVP. In so far as EVP is about to change human behavior, it is incompatible with at least some forms of altruism that we have seen in the world. Some people have been known to sacrifice themselves to save strangers, and neither kin altruism, reciprocal altruism nor display altruism seem to make such a sacrifice rationally derived from EVP. There could be some non-obvious derivation of some self-sacrifice, but it would be odd to find that each self-sacrifice that a person ever engaged in happened to match what would be rationally derived from EVP. The book index does not contain "self-sacrifice" or "selflessness". On the other hand, unrestrained selflessness is not required by many mainstream ethical theories.

Further reading:
 * Altruism

Descendant maximization
Asking people to have many children: In the argument summary, Cameron highlights having many children as a noteworthy consequence of his moral philosophy. Later in the book, Cameron admits that it could be genetically preferable if it can be enforced for the people of a nation to have no more than a limit of children, which was done in China, to provide a better level of overall development of the nation. This makes sense since Cameron's descendant maximization naturally leads to resource exhaustion and while each person on their own refraining from having many children does not solve the problem since others may not follow, a universally enforced limit does. Such a state enforcement may be unnecessary if people forego having many children without state coercion. Paradoxically, coldly calculating EVP follower seems commanded to have many children unless the limit is mutually enforced whereas a non-EVP pleasure-seeker may forego having many children for convenience, engaging in what appears to be ethical behavior if we want to avoid running out of resources without state coercion. Since having many children is on public display, there could hypothetically be a derivation of child limit from reciprocal altruism or tit-for-tat without law, but Cameron does not make this point, and it is not clear such a derivation is possible. Cameron points out his discovery of EVP lead him to have 9 children instead of 2. To encourage people to have some children rather than being childless seems fine, and can be done without reference to EVP, but to encourage them to have that many children seems unwise or outright unethical and reckless.

Further reading:
 * List of people with the most children

Animal rights
In covering this subject, Cameron points out that people who show unnecessary cruelty to animals are likely to be cruel to people as well and that avoiding cruelty is very useful for cooperation. He explains how a dislike of cruelty towards animals could have evolved without indicating clearly what a cold rational calculation from EVP prescribes. One consequence of EVP seems to be that any use of animals in medical research and in scientific experiments including what amounts to torture is fine since the genetic interests of humans are not at stake. Cameron does not clearly indicate that unnecessary cruelty is forbidden by EVP; a dislike has evolved, but it could be one of the things evolved that a rational agent would reject based on cold calculation. If we accept that unnecessary cruelty is to be avoided, does meat eating count as unnecessary cruelty? Vegetarianism is practicable, and therefore meat eating is not strictly necessary. Does at least keeping animals for meat tightly confined in what for them must be uncomfortable conditions count as unnecessary cruelty? About sport fox hunters Cameron says that they may be less ideal for cooperation but that there is no reason to spend effort to persuade them to stop hunting; thus, hunting being unnecessary does not make it unethical to Cameron. Cameron rightly points out that we cannot protect all animal life as if it were human life since the life of predators is in conflict with the life of their prey.

More test cases could be covered such as beauty, leisure, sports, arts and the sciences that are not so useful, but for the normative ethical assessment, the cases covered should give a fairy good idea.

Further reading:
 * Animal rights

Ambiguity of EVP
It is not entirely clear what is meant by "give its holder's genes the maximum advantage in terms of natural selection". Would it be ideal for an EVP follower to invent cloning so that all the genes get best copying chance? Or is it actually desirable that the usual recombination takes place so that the genes can still evolve? By going for recombination, only some of the genes are being copied so it does not maximize the copying success of all the genes in the short run.

Moral realism or a value realism
Cameron says: 'To believe a value is quite different [from believing a fact]. There is no external reality which "exists" somewhere.' He further says that to believe a value is to wish to enter into a multi-person agreement to uphold the value and enforce it. At the same time, he indicates the reader has learned the "truth of what your own values ought to be". In the EVP statement, he speaks of "correct" set of values. In his axioms, he says that "Nihilism is the opinion that there are no values: that nothing matters at all. It is hard to disprove, but does not seem to be a practical choice for any living organism." This seems like a contradiction: on one hand, there is no reality of values, on the other hand, some "oughts" are "true", some sets of values are "correct" and "nihilism" is rejected. And he is incorrect: The belief that "there are no [objective/correct] values" is not impractical for a living organism: what is impractical is to hold no values and have no goals. A person may hold and profess values without believing they are "true", "correct", "out there" or "part of objective morality". A person would readily say we ought not murder without delving into their philosophical position of what that sentence means, that is, whether some "oughts" are true or correct, whether by uttering the sentence the person proposes to enter into a multi-person agreement, or whether the sentence is an imperative and an associated threat in disguise. A person may not even have reflected on the available positions. For comparison, Wilson and Ruse who also try to extract ethics from biological evolution indicate that we are deceived by our genes to believe there exists objective morality to support cooperation. This makes them definitionally moral nihilists who nonetheless support certain values including nature conservation ethics, going beyond EVP.

Further reading:
 * Moral realism

Implied value assumptions
The phrasing used in Cameron's text reveals some implied value assumptions that are not explicitly stated as axioms:


 * The clarity and precision of engineering and mathematics is better than the muddle and indeterminacy of philosophy.
 * To have an algorithm to answer all questions of a field is good.
 * To have a definite answer is better than having multiple competing incompatible answers and arguments.
 * Public discussion of the purpose of life is better than keeping the deliberation to oneself.
 * All people aligning themselves with the same purpose of life is good.
 * To avoid believing false descriptive claims is good, and this is true for all classes of false descriptive claims.
 * Being completely rational as regards the purpose of life and ethical action is better than being in part emotional or irrational.

Descriptive ethics related to EVP
There is a descriptive project to engage in serious and qualified attempts to understand the implications and consequences of EVP. This is not a project to endorse EVP but rather to assess it fairly; one can make a mistake in assessing its consequences. Since EVP seems to be a candidate overarching principle of normative evolutionary ethics, it is of broader interest than to just one book. One reason why the question of what would an EVP-rational agent do and thus what is EVP-ethical and EVP-unethical is interesting is that it would be expected to much closer track actual human behavior than modern cultural normative ethical principles: the deviation of EVP-ethics from moral instincts would be caused by moral instincts having evolved in an ancestral environment different from the modern one, and by limited rationality of humans. The project of deriving consequences of EVP would be part of descriptive evolutionary ethics in so far as the investigator would not endorse any set of values, merely descriptively investigate what principles follow from the foundational EVP principle. That is to say, the investigator does not need to accept A to investigate what B follows from A. Comparing EVP to actual laws, one may for instance note that inheritance laws usually approximate EVP by setting relatives of the deceased as the default heirs rather than the state as a collectivist law could do.

Further reading:
 * Descriptive ethics

Is EVP any good?
It does provide an overall direction in life, but it alone does not derive private ethics at all and in the realm of public ethics and policy making, it leaves infanticide, slavery, aggressive wars against weak nations and destruction of nature unresolved in a matter that our sensibilities find palatable, along with other likely problematic test cases. It rejects cultural evolution of values as a source of value information, their variation and elimination. It is not clear whether the same criticism applies to all variants of normative evolutionary ethics. Nonetheless, we may find EVP informative to a limited extent. When EVP allows something we find unacceptable, we may check whether there is a near-unanimity or rather a philosophical debate. Infanticide is a case in point: some philosophers argue in favor of its permissibility. But we do not need EVP to pick infanticide as a topic for ethical deliberation and debate. EVP can be seen as one additional philosophical voice in the discussion. On the other hand, it is questionable what value can be put on a principle that is problematic on so many counts, even for the purpose of broadening the discussion. EVP may succeed in highlighting a principle available even without EVP: if you think you are any good and have some good qualities such as regard for others or considerable talent, you should consider not going childless or else the genes that encode these good qualities do not get replicated and passed into future generations.

Alternative to EVP
As an alternative to EVP, some form of philosophical ethics is required, engaging in some of the forms of deliberation that Cameron finds fruitless, engaging our moral sensibilities, which can be decried as mere feelings. While a lot of ethical writing is needlessly obscurantist, not all of it. Deliberations about personhood in fetuses are not obscurantist and do not need to rely on difficult words such as deontology and consequentialism. In our ethical dealings, we integrate our moral sensibilities with reasoning so we are not dealing with raw feelings changing inconsistently from moment to moment. We can acknowledge that the specific content of our ethical reasoning depends both on evolved biological propensities and on the kinds of facts, arguments and reasoning that are part of our cultural heritage. Our values are of both biological and cultural origins and our public attempts at ethical reasoning are cultural activities. To quote Richard Dawkins: "We, alone on Earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." There, selfish replicators are genes and cultural replicating elements known as memes. The proposal of Cameron is to be guided by the interests of the genes only, and yet it is memes such as the theory of natural selection and the modern synthesis which incorporates genetics that inform his actual ethical theory. His theory is of cultural origin, and thus, his holding values espoused by the theory is of cultural origin. We can make allies with both biology and culture, and not disregard our ethical sensibilities and related attempts at ethical deliberation. We may sometimes find a debate on an ethical issue to be inconclusive or hard to decide on since compelling arguments are raised by both sides; Cameron's proposed ethical engineering, even if we assume it gives unequivocal answers, fails to produce palatable results and sides with genetic evolution over cultural evolution for no clear reason.

Further reading:
 * The Selfish Gene

Cultural EVP
As an addendum, let us consider whether the Cultural EVP introduced as an analogue of EVP is palatable. It says that the correct set of values is one that maximally benefits itself in terms of the number of followers. A quick look into history suggests its capacity for being unpalatable: we only need to find a religion or ideology that a large number of people followed and that produced or still produces results that we find objectionable, especially reckless sacrifice of individuals for a larger aim. While EVP is gene-selfish, Cultural EVP seems to be excessively collectivist with no clear regard for human freedom and autonomy, for the rights of individuals. One may argue that sets of values that respect individual rights will eventually outperform competing sets of values, but that is not obvious. When one sides with individual rights, it is not because one believes they are destined to win. The notion that the most powerful ideology or set of values is per definition the best one seems hard to accept. If a set of values is going to win anyway because of a historical or evolutionary law, why fight for it or argue in its favor? It will do fine on its own. The notion that one ought to adopt the set of values that is likely to prevail in future or is likely to bring about the future is criticized by Karl Popper under the head of "moral futurism".