Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
initiates a basic move beyond the parameters of our own nature to the
situation of another.
Ehrlich calls such an experience empathy and relates this to the devel-
opment of what he labels “conceived values”—values evolved to help
deal with the social environment.
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This is also the arena of ethics, an
evolved system of culturally shared understandings of right and wrong.
Critical here is altruism, which sociobiology explains on the basis of
inclusive fitness (for one's relatives) or reciprocity (for strangers). Ehrlich
makes two interesting observations in relation to this. First, the origin
of ethics cannot be traced to chimpanzees: “Chimps have no way to share
values; ethics had to await at least the evolution of language, of an effi-
cient method of sharing the ideas that were presumably generated by
notions of empathy. There appears to be an unbridgeable gap between
the ethical capabilities of human beings and those of chimpanzees.”
Second, explains Ehrlich, “empathy and altruism often exist where the
chances for any return to the altruist are nil. Indeed, careful psycholog-
ical experiments suggest that much of human helping behavior is
divorced from any real prospect of reproductive or other reward.”
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The basis of such behavior, Ehrlich argues, is empathy, and it “would
seem a necessary prerequisite for such altruism, and many of our empa-
thetic feelings are unrelated to personal advantage.”
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Empathy is an
evolved capacity to feel for others, and while it will have a high degree
of variability in its expression and may indeed have some limits to its
expression, its presence is another fact of our experience not satisfacto-
rily explained by appeal to our genome. What Ehrlich calls empathy is
at least analogous to Duns Scotus's concept of affectio justitiae.
The point of differentiation, of course, is the source of such an affec-
tion. For Ehrlich, empathy comes from the process of gene-culture coevo-
lution. For Duns Scotus, the affectio justitiae is ultimately a result of our
being created in a certain way by God, though Duns Scotus is not a lit-
eralist in his understanding of how that creation occurred. But the more
critical point, in my judgment, is that both have identified an extremely
similar behavior in humans based on experience. Humans in fact can
transcend their nature by stepping beyond themselves and acting for the
benefit of another. Both affirm that humans have the capacity to see a
good outside of themselves and to pursue it or use it as the basis for con-
structing an ethic. And here is the foundation that Dawkins needs to
ground his claim that humans alone can rebel against their genes.
