INTRODUCTION

November 2009 saw the commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the notorious massacre of six Jesuits, their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celia, at the University of Central America. March of 2000 commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the following December marked the kidnapping, rape, and murder of the four American churchwomen – Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel and Jean Donovan. Such commemorations are important for the world, but they are especially important in El Salvador because of the way in which memories of injustice have been systematically denied and repressed. All of these figures were deeply committed to peace in El Salvador, but they insisted that the way to attain authentic peace is through justice. Their lives were rooted in a Catholic Christian faith and enlivened by the Second Vatican Council, according to which the church is most herself when she walks in solidarity with the poor and advocates policies to end structural injustice.

Thirty years after Romero's martyrdom, we are now in the age of “transitional justice” in which the language of reconciliation has come to play an increasingly important role in our moral lexicon. This is particularly true of Christian ethics, especially after the public successes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its charismatic chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The international acclaim of the TRC (not always articulated as loudly in South Africa itself) sometimes tempts us to forget that the language of reconciliation was employed in El Salvador, as well as in Chile and Argentina, well before the South African experiment was conceived. Yet human rights activists in Latin America often suspect that appeals to reconciliation amount to a subtle attempt to evade accountability. Nowhere is this more the case than in El Salvador, whose history from colonialism to the present has been pervaded by impunity.

The church promotes mercy, forgiveness, and reconciliation as primary expressions of the virtue of charity, the grace inspired love of God and neighbor. Christian contributions to transitional justice around the world have often focused on reconciliation.

Ethicists and evolutionists alike have asked whether the intellectual acceptance of human evolution requires us to give up the common assumption that we are responsible for our acts. Morality itself would be fatally compromised if science somehow demonstrated that human freedom and moral responsibility were illusions. For all their disagreements, many evolutionists and Christians concur that we must make a choice between two irreconcilable and mutually exclusive alternatives: either “free will” or evolution. This chapter, on the contrary, argues against this false dichotomy.

The chapter is structured in three steps. First, I will examine critically some of the literature on the “free will and determinism” question produced by various evolutionists, most of whom assume some kind of a reductive fatalism. I argue here that the epistemologically and ontologically reductionistic views of some evolutionists cannot explain away the experience of free choice or demonstrate that it is illusory. Human freedom in its most important senses escapes the purview of science. Sociobiology fails to account for our first-person experience of human action, the starting point for reflection of our capacity for free choice as moral agents. We all have abundant evidence from our own lives of being able to do one thing rather than another and acting on the basis of what we judge to be good reasons. Sociobiology fails in its attempt to explain away this experience as illusory.

This chapter explores the practical significance of the approach to natural law presented in the previous chapter. I examine various types of scientifically based arguments about what evolution implies, or does not imply, concerning sex, marriage, and family, and investigate whether and how evolved capacities and needs are captured in institutions of marriage and the family and in moral norms governing sexual behavior. This cluster of topics provides a particularly interesting context for investigating whether there is an evolutionary basis for the moral norms advanced by the natural-law tradition of Christian ethics, and whether there might be evolutionary support for modifying these norms in some ways. In evolutionary terms, we can ask whether certain moral beliefs have supported acts or practices that are more adaptive than their alternatives. This involves descriptive as well as properly normative concerns. Identifying certain acts or practices as more in keeping with our “inclusive fitness” does not in and of itself provide sufficient moral justification for acts and practices under consideration.

The chapter has three sections: the first concerns evolutionary theory, the second offers a natural-law evaluation of evolutionary views of sex, and the third considers some aspects of normative ethics in the domain of sex, marriage, and family. My thesis is that contemporary natural-law ethics ought to attempt a critical and selective appropriation of evolutionary views of sex, marriage, and the family in light of its inclusive vision of the human good.

This chapter examines both evolutionary and Christian theological accounts of “human nature,” including its innate, biologically based needs and inclinations. I argue that evolutionary insights into our cognitive, emotional, and social capacities can inform Christian ethical understanding of human flourishing.

Evolutionary psychologists think of human nature as the collection of species-typical goal-directed mechanisms designed by natural selection. These mechanisms constitute a “human nature” that is virtually the same in all “modern” human beings, namely those living in the past 100,000 years or so. Biologists have argued that our “sweet tooth” and our natural craving for fatty foods, for example, reflects our predecessors’ evolutionary adaptation to ecological conditions of periodic scarcity that rewarded maximum consumption and storage of calories in body fat. These dietary proclivities were adaptive for Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands but they cause well-known health problems for people living in modern developed sedentary societies.

Central among our species-typical evolved inclinations is our need to form personal attachments and to participate in communal life. Evolutionists hold that the human psyche manifests basic conflicts between and among the teachings of culture and the demands of biologically based proclivities. They stress the inner tensions that reside in our emotional constitution as human beings and not only those due to the particularities of our cultures or personal life histories. Konrad Lorenz used the helpful phrase “Parliament of Instincts” to communicate the dynamic interaction between many different and competing motivations in the human psyche.

This chapter examines four evolutionary theories regarding religion, offers a critique of them, and then argues that our knowledge of human evolution can be compatible with Christian ethics and the religious faith that it reflects. It begins with a discussion of the place of evil in nature because that presents the central objection to Christian faith.

RELIGION REJECTED BY EVOLUTION: THE “PROBLEM OF EVIL”

The challenge posed by the “problem of evil” was based not only in a growing awareness of the pervasiveness of pain, competition, and wastefulness in the natural world but also in the recognition that these are “built into” the very structure of nature itself. The advent of evolutionary theory brought with it the question of whether a good God could be the Creator and providential Governor of such a natural order.

Young Darwin assumed the truth of conventional Anglican Christianity, and as a college student he was impressed by the argument of design put forth in William Paley's Natural Theology. His reading of Lyell's Principles of Geology on the Beagle, however, convinced him that the earth changed gradually over a much longer period of time than either conventional science or religion had been aware. Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population significantly shaped his view of human society as marked by the same ruthless “struggle for existence” that he found in the world of biological organisms.

The major counter-position to the previous chapter's theological interpretation of evolution comes from evolutionists who argue that the evolutionary process is so pervaded by chance and contingency that it cannot possibly be described as a “purposeful” divine creation. If true, neo-Darwinism would undercut the religious foundations of Christian ethics. If evolution is not part of a purposeful world, Christian convictions are false and Christian ethics is an exercise in futility and self-deception.

The neo-Darwinian approach to purpose in nature is best understood in light of the broad shift of modern philosophy and theology away from ancient and medieval habits of discerning teleology, or final causality, or intrinsic ends, in nature. The modern project proceeded on the assumption that nature is best explained mechanistically, that is, in terms of efficient and material rather than formal and final causes. Christian ethics, on the other hand, has traditionally understood the natural world to constitute an overarching finality reflecting the purposive wisdom of the Creator.

This chapter addresses the question of whether knowledge of evolutionary contingency does indeed provide evidence for the supposition that nature is purposeless. I will first examine the argument for this position advanced by S. J. Gould and then the replies to it by biologist Simon Conway Morris and by astronomer William Stoeger, SJ. The latter two thinkers provide reasonable support for thinking that evolutionary directionality is consistent with a religiously based belief in the divine purpose of evolution.

Chapter two criticized several major moral theologians from the natural-law tradition for ignoring human evolution. I now turn to four prominent moralists from that same tradition who do take seriously our evolutionary origins, namely Alasdair MacIntyre, Larry Arnhart, Jean Porter, and Lisa Sowle Cahill. After this analysis I argue that knowledge of evolution confirms some aspects of Thomistic natural law and calls for a revision of others.

NATURAL LAW AND HUMAN EVOLUTION: RECENT EFFORTS

Knowledge of human evolution calls for a change in the way we think about biological nature in general and human nature in particular. It brings a heightened awareness of the presence of tension and conflict among particular goods and virtues, and the consequent need for concrete moral decisions that involve trade-offs, denial, and sacrifice of some goods for the sake of others. Human evolution has left us with a heterogeneous, mixed, and conflicted set of human inclinations and the goods toward which they move. Human nature is in some ways at odds with itself, divided by conflicting inclinations that are brought into working order, and not complete harmony, only through intentional effort and discipline.

I have argued in this book that knowledge of human evolution can complement the moral and anthropological commitments found in the Thomistic approach to natural law. This tradition emphasizes our natural inclination to various kinds of goods, from survival and sustenance to sociality and friendship. These inclinations are based in our evolved species-wide emotional and cognitive constitution.