The Missing Altruistism Gene

Nobody is suggesting that children deliberately and consciously deceive their parents because of the selfish genes within them. And I must repeat that when I say something like 'A child should lose no opportunity of cheating...lying, deceiving, exploiting...', I am using the word 'should' in a special way. I am not advocating this kind of behaviour as moral or desirable. I am simply saying that natural selection will tend to favour children who do act in this way, and that therefore when we look at wild populations we may expect to see cheating and selfishness within families. The phrase 'the child should cheat' means that genes that tend to make children cheat have an advantage in the gene pool. If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature. [emphasis original]

That's on page 139 of my copy of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and the irony is thick. One of the primary purposes of the book is to make some headway on the naturalist's problem of explaining altruistic behavior, and at the halfway point we find this frank admission that the most intriguing part of the project cannot be completed. If naturalism cannot explain human altruism by appeal to our biological nature, then what else is there? We can't escape by claiming it is a social phenomenon, or if we do, we must admit that some propensity toward altruism has been injected into our social nature from somewhere other than our biological makeup. Either biology completely explains who we are, or it does not. If it does not, then naturalism finds itself in a philosophical pickle.

It's difficult to see how a naturalist can ever fully back up the claim that we "must" (or "should", or "ought to") teach our children anything about morality, since that's exactly the issue at question for the naturalist. To put it bluntly: If we need to teach our children altruism because it is biologically unnatural for them, then it is also biologically unnatural for us, so what is the explanation for our conviction that we ought to be teaching it at all?

I have not yet read beyond the chapter-ending quote above, so perhaps Dawkins makes more headway than he seems to admit here. But if not, then not even Dawkins thinks he's made any real dent in a theist's argument that human morality is not satisfactorily explicable within the framework of naturalism. In fact, a theist might be very much in favor of the idea that the human propensity toward altruism has been injected into our social nature from somewhere non-biological.

[Mon Sep 22 10:22:55 EDT 2008 Edit: I accidentally misspelled "altruism" in the title. The error was pointed out to me and I fixed it...and then realized that "altruistism" is not only amusing (to me, anyhow), but actually kinda gets at a helpful idea. So I'm replacing the misspelled word.]