Selfish Genes and Morality

Though the concept of the selfish gene (articulated in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene) is now dated, it is still influential in evolutionary psychology and in some accounts of the nature of morality. Jonathan Haidt applies the concept at the organism level (not the gene level) to endorse Glaucon’s famous picture of humans as beings who act out of self-interest even when they are putatively acting morally. We examine these claims in the light of Richard Dawkins’s claim that the term “selfish” when applied to genes does not have its everyday meaning, but an unrelated technical meaning. Dawkins now invites us to “mentally delete” the passages in his book that apply selfishness and altruism in the everyday sense to the organism. Haidt has declined that invitation. As a result, he is driven to explain human nature as predominantly selfish, so accepting, wrongly, the Glauconian account of ethics. We show that this is a mistake. Once corrected, the puzzle about how altruism and morality could have evolved falls away. Morality is not a trait with only one inflection, but works in two directions, applying both to ethical and unethical conduct.