Drawing of how a Paleolithic hand axe was probably held 

                                     (credit: J. B. Alvarez, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 3.                                    (continued) 

Next, we come to a theoretical criticism of Moral Realism: it is hard to test any hypothesis about a whole society in ways that are rigorously scientific. An anthropologists who wants to test a hypothesis about human tribal behavior can’t simply apply any treatment s/he pleases to a test population. Physicists, entomologists, even ornithologists and zoologists can apply a treatment to a group of the things they study and then compare those subjects to a control group of untested subjects – atoms, bugs, birds, or whatever – to see what effects the treatment had. Social Scientists don’t have similar scientific license.

A treatment applied to a whole tribe in order to compare the tribe to a control group with similar traits in order to see whether the treatment has a predicted effect would be a major violation of the test group’s rights under the morés that we in the West already live by. Scientists today can’t skate near the rights of other humans – individuals or groups – without risking a host of legal charges and extra-legal recriminations coming down on their heads.

Trying to justify violating another person’s human rights by saying that the violating was done in the name of science is simply unacceptable in our times. Nazi scientists objectified other people in that way. Today, such a view would get the scientists involved hounded from their professions or sentenced to long prison terms or even sentenced to be shot.  

Therefore, testing of the Moral Realist model must be done in respectful ways. The scientists can, for example, divide a group of a hundred randomly selected volunteers into two groups, then subject half – with their informed consent – to a treatment of some kind, then check later to see what effects the treatment had on the consenting volunteers.

For example, the subjects may be asked to read an article on a possible sales tax for their state. Then, both test and control groups may be asked to fill out a questionnaire about sales taxes. If half of the subjects are given the article in a blurred copy while the other half are given a clear, easy-to-read copy, we may use the responses to the questionnaires to determine the effects of print quality on opinion formation. The blurred copy readers likely will show statistically significant levels of greater hostility toward all sales taxes.

The larger point is that we can study whole groups without infringing upon the rights of any of the test subjects.

And there are even larger considerations that should be reiterated here.

We have all been living in evolving cultures since cultural evolution began. Is toolmaking the first sign of truly human culture? Or art? Language? Skeletons of people who obviously survived via the compassion of others? (Mead thought a healed femur was the first sign of compassion and thus, of true culture.)

The first stone tools date to over two million years ago. The first ambiguous signs of compassion, however, date to about fifty thousand years ago. Language likely began about that same time. When our cultures became distinctly human – i.e., whole levels more complex than the herd codes of animals – is a matter of heated debate among anthropologists. I don’t intend to try to settle the debate.

But what matters for my purposes in this essay is that we have been, primarily, creatures of cultural evolution rather than genetic evolution for many, many human lifetimes. Furthermore, almost all of our cultural evolution has been too subtle to be seen by the humans who were undergoing the changes. We evolved very gradually, culturally, by trial and error.  We have had little control over the process, and thus, over our destiny, for nearly all of our history as a species. But social science has given us the beginnings of that control. With effective social science, a degree of control over cultural evolution is within our reach; the belief that cultures are made of mystery could end. We could begin to shape our future.   

                                       Anthropologist working in the field

                                   (credit: Angelxoxoxo, via Wikimedia Commons)