Christine Clavien

Philosophy of science

I am currently working on the following topics:

1. * The respective merits and limits of group selection versus Hamiltonian explanations of cooperation among social species.

1. * The conceptual and methodological difficulties related to interdisciplinary approaches to specific research topics such as cooperation, altruism or normative behaviour.

1. *  The significance and ontological substrate of key concepts commonly used in biology such as fitness, force of selection, or gene.

1. *  How scientists could best deal with creationism.

Experimental philosophy

In collaboration with Michel Chapuisat and Fabrice Clément, I am currently conducting an experiment designed to gain a better understanding of the psychological processes underlying moral punishment. In particular, we hope to i) find evidence for a psychological tendency towards moral punishment and ii) sort out whether self-regarding calculus pervades human motivation to punish moral norm infractions.
The experiment is about deciding to vote (or not) for the best candidate of a music competition, although she is morally contemptible. In this study, subjects are placed in the role of third-party punishers (they are not personally involved in the situation) and cannot gain reputation from punishing (the anonymous condition is secured). In such a context, punishment cannot easily be interpreted as self-directed, e.g. as personal retaliation act or as attempt to acquire good reputation.

Moral philosophy

I am interested in gaining a better understanding of how people evaluate situations and how they are moved to act. I am currently developing a descriptive model that allows an important role for affects and emotions. The underlying idea of this “affective picture of moral activity” consists in distinguishing between various kinds of value judgements, some being cognitively more complex than others. “Sophisticated judgements” are displayed at the level of rational considerations and allow for complex evaluative thinking, implying the acceptance of norms and values; on the contrary, “basic value judgements” are primitive and non-reflective ways of assessing the world, but they greatly influence our choices of values and norms and allow for motivation thanks to their close relationship with emotional reactions. If these hypotheses prove to be correct, this model will not only help us to understand the way humans are driven to adopt particular norms and values and form their moral judgements. It might also provide an interesting frame in which to resolve the old philosophical debate of internalism versus externalism, in other words, the debate over the possibility that moral judgements motivate action.

Title: From Biological Altruism to Morality
Original french title: L’éthique évolutionniste: de l’altruisme biologique à la morale

Short summary
This PhD work is a contribution to evolutionary ethics, a particular approach to ethical questions (origins of morality, metaethics, foundation of moral principles) that goes back to the second half of the 19th century and is inspired by evolutionary biology. Nowadays, evolutionary ethics has become a rich and complex interdisciplinary field that rests not only on DARWIN's ideas but on a vast range of recent developments in research fields such as evolutionary biology, game theory, psychology, neurology, anthropology, empirical economics, and cognitive sciences in general.
This research covers the main scientific theories and empirical data relevant to evolutionary ethics. It also shows how this field remains within the scope of moral philosophy without coming down to one single line of thought; it is best understood as a methodology, a new way of grasping the phenomenon of morality. The main aim of this research is to define the proper use of this methodology, that is, to identify the limits and possibilities of an evolutionary and scientific approach to morality. It appears that among the wide variety of possible views, few resist criticism.

Key words : altruism, cooperation, culture, emotion, ethics, evolutionary ethics, evolution, value judgment, metaethics, morality, motivation, norm, moral realism, reciprocity, group selection, kin selection, sentimentalism, naturalistic fallacy, error theory, theory of evolution, game theory, value

Content

Moral philosophers often develop systems that remain largely detached from empirical data which stems from natural and cognitive sciences. In my PhD work, I take the opposite view and propose the outline of a moral theory based on evolutionary considerations as well as on recent developments in new research fields like cognitive sciences, evolutionary anthropology, game theory or empirical economics.

The first part of the thesis deals with the question of altruism. Following Elliot Sober and David Wilson, two logically distinct sorts of altruism are analysed: evolutionary altruism and psychological altruism. It is shown that the former is not directly linked with morality though its evolution is a necessary condition for the evolution of the second (the latter being, as I argue against Sober, a constituent of morality). In other words, an etiological link makes evolutionary altruism relevant to ethics. This significance however is restricted to descriptive explanations of the way moral thinking and activity have appeared and been shaped in the course of human history.

Another topic discussed in the first part of the thesis is the possibility of altruistically motivated actions. Against psychological egoism, the view that humans are always selfishly motivated, some arguments are provided in favour of the possibility of genuine altruistic motivation. They rely on a distinction between motive and motivation, the latter but not the former being relevant to the debate; it is argued that once we focus on the problem of motivation, it becomes clear that actions out of empathic emotions are altruistic (in the psychological sense).

The second part of the thesis aims at approaching traditional ethical questions from an evolutionary and scientific point of view and at defining how and to what extent this methodology might contribute to ethical reflection. A division of the ethical domain into distinct fields helps clarify the limits and possibilities of such an “evolutionary ethics”. My research focuses on the three following fields: descriptive ethics, metaethics, and normative ethics.

At the level of descriptive ethics, it is shown how evolutionary theories as well as experimental research can shed light on the origin, functionality and processing of faculties or mechanisms bound to moral activity (theory of mind, cultural transmission, social and altruistic emotions, normative and evaluative thinking, rational thinking etc.). In contradiction to a long-standing tradition in evolutionary ethics, I do not commit myself to the idea that moral thinking and moral behaviour are evolutionary adaptations (even though they are results of evolutionary processes); my view is that morality is better understood as a by-product that “surfs” on other adaptive capacities and mechanisms.

At the metaethical level, mainly for reasons internal to the evolutionary approach, it appears that moral realism is not a convincing view (notwithstanding an important tradition in evolutionary ethics that holds precisely this view). Indeed, I argue that an evolutionary ethicist cannot consistently sustain that moral properties or moral facts exist in the world and that truths pertaining to these properties or facts are independent of one’s beliefs about or attitudes towards them. Of all the various ways of being a moral realist, none of them are acceptable to an evolutionary ethicist. Non-naturalist forms have to be ruled out simply because they do not fit in well with evolutionary theory. Naturalistic forms are less obviously but nonetheless incompatible: those that postulate moral properties (or facts) that supervene on natural properties do not fit with an evolutionary picture of the world and those that opt for a reductionist strategy defeat the purpose of moral realism. Finally, I try to show that refuting moral realism does not imply opting for an error theory, as some well known evolutionary ethicists (i.e. M. Ruse) have argued for.

Evolutionary methodology proves to be more fruitful at the descriptive and metaethical levels than at the normative one. The “is-ought gap” has to be taken seriously; descriptive considerations no matter how precise, cannot provide sufficient foundation for moral norms. However, I argue that there are contexts in which empirical data can be taken into account in the justification process; here is introduced what I call the “reinforced common sense strategy”. Moreover, I point to the fact that commitments at the descriptive and metaethical levels have a considerable impact on the way justification of norms as well as the sphere of their validity have to be conceived of: norms have no universal validity and cannot be given an a priori foundation.