Biological values

This article is one of a series investigating biological agency and its relationship to human agency. These articles include: What is life? – the crucial role of agency in determining what it is to be alive; Purpose – the semantic link between agency and purpose, and the history of teleology; Biological agency – a description of what it is to be a biological agent; Human-talk – the application of minded and human terms to non-human organisms; Being like-minded – the way our understanding of minded human agency is grounded in mindless biological agency; Biological values – the evolutionary grounding of human values in mindless behavioral orientation, Agency & evolution – the evolutionary development of human agency out of biological agency; and Morality – moral naturalism as the grounding of human morality in biological normativity.

For a summary of the findings and claims made in these articles see the Epilogue at the end of this article which claims that many of the words we associate with human intentional psychology and human agency become more scientifically coherent when applied more generally in biology. Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world. 

Introduction – biological values

We intuitively recognize and understand other living organisms more by what they do (their actions, behavior, or agency), than what they are made of. We would give rocks more respect and attention if they jumped up and gave us a bite.

Organisms are not passive, like rocks – they act on, and respond to, their conditions of existence with a flexible unity of purpose that identifies them as autonomous biological agents.^[1] 

The articles ‘What is life?‘ and ‘Biological agency‘ provided reasons for the scientific acceptance of organisms as functionally organized individuals whose goal-directed behavior expresses real agency and purpose. This biological agency is not a fictional creation of human minds – it is not agent-like – instead, it is a real process in nature that, in the course of evolution, made human subjectivity possible. Biological agency is not an invention of human minds, it created human minds.

Without an agential account of biological activity – what organisms, including their structures, processes, and behaviors, are ‘for’ – biological explanation becomes incoherent . . . just a list of unexplained and unrelated facts.

Biological agency is a real and defining property of life but we have great difficulty in attributing agency to organisms that do not have minds. Talking about ‘mindless agency’ (non-cognitive agency) can seem like a contradiction in terms. It produces a cognitive dissonance that is the topic of this, and several other, articles on this website.

The problem is that the language of intentional psychology creates an unscientific gulf between the minded and mindless – between those organisms with conscious intentions and those organisms that are merely goal-directed. The intellectual impact of the distinction runs deeper than this because it tends to associate the mindless with the inanimate rather than the living. This is a gulf that does not reflect the real evolutionary connection that exists between humans and the community of life.

This article investigates what is probably the most controversial ‘biologizing’ or ‘psychologizing’ of cognitive discourse – the claim that mindless values are real in nature and that these are what ground human values. This is a scientific claim about the relationship between human values and evolutionarily related phenomena that occur in nature.

For most people values are, by definition, products of human minds so the notion of mindless or non-cognitive values is a contradiction in terms. This article claims that biological values are not an oxymoron, but an objective fact. The universal propensity of all living organisms to survive, reproduce, adapt, and evolve means that organisms adopt rule-following or normative behavior. While human values and ethical systems are uniquely different cognitive evolutionary developments they share with other organisms many normative characteristics that indicate shared evolutionary ancestry.

This article shows how biological ‘values’ are an integral part of biological agency and argues that human values and morality are grounded in our biological nature.  Also: how biological values are shared by all organisms; how minded human values are a specialized evolutionary development of biological values; and how the proximate values of human agency are grounded in the ultimate values of biological agency.

Values

One way of understanding and explaining biological agency is to investigate its drivers – what it is that motivates behavior and initiates action. For humans, these drivers are often referred to as ‘values’ (related in complex ways to other concepts like desires, beliefs, attitudes, intentions, intuitions, instincts, reasons, and so on). Values, then, are what motivates behavior – and we need not necessarily constrain this understanding to the uniquely human case.

Human values

In the typical case we think of values as human mental attitudes, feelings, or beliefs that arise internally and motivate our individual behavior. One special category or kind of value that is considered uniquely human we refer to as ethics or morality (defined formally as normativity, the study of right action and its rules or principles). Ethics is behavior that is strongly influenced by reason: it is more a study of what we ‘ought’ to do, rather than what we are ‘inclined’ to do.

While values tend to be internally generated, personal, and individual, ethical systems are usually the outcome of a more communal and cooperative process – the reasoned prescriptions, principles of conduct, or codes of behavior derived externally from religious doctrine, parents, education systems, the law, and such. These are prescriptive systems of behavior developed in the context of sociality, language, and rational self-reflection. 

The concept of ‘values’ is semantically broad and so the words ‘values’, ‘ethics’, ‘morality, and ‘normativity’ are often used interchangeably, with the role of reason in this mix of concepts being keenly debated. 

A loose categorization refers to internally sourced motivations as ‘desires’, and externally influenced factors based on knowledge as ‘beliefs’.

Biological values

The idea of biological values might seem like nonsense because values, though not necessarily a consequence of conscious deliberation or intention are, nevertheless, products of conscious minds.

The behavior of most organisms is not a matter of conscious intention, but simply the way they are. A dilemma now arises because while this behavior is undeniably mindless it is also objectively goal-directed and therefore agential. Indeed, it is difficult not to compare this goal-directed behavior to a  human ‘attitude’, ‘perspective’, or ‘point of view’ (see Being like-minded, and Human-talk). Clearly, mindless agency though different from minded agency has a likeness grounded in evolutionary history.

Biological values express the behavioral orientation (inherent propensity) of organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish (biological axiom). The biological axiom resembles a set of generalized but mindless rules for living, like a human code of conduct, and that is why it is referred to here as an expression of biological normativity.

Biological values express flexible agential behavior as propensities to do one thing rather than another, akin to human-like ‘preferences’ or ‘choices’. However, as a mindless form of normativity, descriptions of biological values are not recommendations for behavior or judgments about behavior, they are objective statements about the way organisms are.  In this sense, mindless biological values are objective values.

The universal values of biological agency have been achieved through the infinite array of structures, processes, and behaviors that we see across the community of life. Human values and ethics are just one specialist and minded evolutionary elaboration of universal biological values.

The similarity between mindless agency and human intentions is not a coincidence: it was real mindless agency that made possible the evolution of human subjectivity (see the evolution of biological agency).

Mindless values

This presents a dilemma. We are accustomed to thinking of values as being the products of minds – as being strictly human mental phenomena. When understood in this way, talk of biological values becomes nonsense (the mainstream view) and the expression ‘mindless values’ an oxymoron.

But if values are strictly mind-based then we need a clear scientific way of denoting the flexible behavioral propensities demonstrated by non-human organisms, This is not a trivial matter since it is these propensities that distinguish the living from the non-living, and made human subjectivity possible.

In the absence of an adequate terminology this web site has suggested the use of the expressions ‘biological agency’ and ‘pre-cognition’.

So, what then is the connection between human values and these more generalized biological values described here as a behavioral disposition?

The statement by Yuval Harari at the head of this page inadvertently expresses simultaneously the competing ideas discussed in this article.

On the one hand ‘you can’t get ethics out of nature‘ can be interpreted as the mainstream view that science provides us with factual information about the way the world is;  it cannot possibly tell us about the way the world ought to be. Values are prescriptive and subjective, while science is descriptive and objective. These are different realms (magisteria) of discourse as immortalized by the oft-quoted sentiment of philosopher David Hume that you cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. It also establishes an insuperable barrier between science and non-science.

On the other hand ‘you can’t get ethics out of nature‘ implies that ethics must be, in some sense, a part of nature. If a non-human authority like God did not ordain morality, then it must have emerged out of nature in some way . . . if only from our highly evolved and reasoning human brains that are, themselves, a product of nature.

Our current understanding of values is that they are strictly a product of human mental activity, a view that decisively divorces values from non-human organisms.  The difficulty is that values are also deeply embedded in behavior and evolutionary history. All living organisms share the universal, objective, and ultimate behavioral propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. It is these ultimate goals that underpin all behavior, including that of humans. Human values are a uniquely minded evolutionary development of these more generalized biological ‘values’ that exist throughout the community of life. That is, human values, including human morality, are grounded in the universal mindless characteristics of biological agency.

Human agency

Humans, like all other autonomous organisms, express their agency by acting on, and responding to, their conditions of existence in a behaviorally directed and unified but flexible way that is grounded in the objective, universal, and ultimate goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing. 

Popular definitions of human agency point to the strong connection between agency and action, but they also emphasize the uniquely human kind of autonomy that depends on mental factors that include cognitive and volitional processes like intentions, choices, preferences, foresight, hindsight, the capacity for abstract thought, the use of symbolic languages, and the exercise of free will.

Behavior

Behavior refers to the actions and reactions of an organism in response to its conditions of existence. While the conditions of existence for all organisms can be expressed in universal terms (the necessity to survive, reproduce, and flourish) the means of achieving these ends are as variable as the range of structures, processes, and behaviors available within the community of life. Behavioral actions range from simple reflexes and basic motor movements to complex social interactions and cognitive processes. Behavior is a concept with relevance in psychology, biology, sociology, and more, and it is strongly associated with decision-making and communication.

Behavior is a universal method of communication between organisms as each establishes its own autonomous agency in relation to other biological agents. For most organisms this is not achieved by sharing thoughts and words; it is demonstrated within the limitations and constraints of the structures, processes, and behaviors available to each organism as they can be applied within the limitations and constraints of their internal and external environments.

The values of organisms (defining ‘value’ broadly as ‘that which motivates behavior’) are not what goes on in minds, but what is demonstrated in behavior.

Biological values are empirical properties of all organisms; they were manifested in animal and plant behavior many million years before humans and their minded values evolved out of them. Human minded values and moralities are grounded in this foundation of biological values.

However, our understanding of human agency emphasizes minded, subjective, factors. We are aware of how our own thoughts and feelings direct our behavior and therefore influence outcomes in the world. And we understand that much of the motivation for our human behavior is psychological in origin. But, while inner states may drive behavior, they are difficult to both access and interpret.

But biological agency is communicated clearly and directly between organisms through actions (behavior). We perceive the agency of a crab when it snaps its claws, of a snake when it strikes, and of a dog when it growls. We understand agents primarily by how they act on the world, not by their internal states. This also applies to humans. I understand that you are angry when you shout and strike out. I also understand, but not so well, when you use the symbols of language to convey your inner state to me, but I have no understanding at all when you simply feel angry.

Behavior & language

Humans, in addition to bodily behavior, represent their inner states using the symbols and sounds of language in both symbolic notation and speech. A mental vocabulary of intentional psychology includes words like ‘value’, ‘purpose’, ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘deliberation’, ‘preference’, ‘intention’, and so on. We have a mutual human understanding of the inner states that these symbols and sounds represent.

But in biology, if we want to compare modes of agency then we must use behavior as the comparator. Even among humans, we say that actions speak louder than words.

The power of human conscious symbolic communication is evident in the sociality that has enabled humans to dominate planet Earth. However, in biological terms, mindedness is a specialized and uniquely human evolutionary development arising out of, and grounded in, biological agency . . . it is still subject to the mindless goals of the biological axiom which are the preconditions for life itself. Subjectivity exists in brains located in bodies that must meet these preconditions.

Biologically, human subjectivity is just one of nature’s many internal mechanisms generating behavior that interacts with the world.

Principle – the subjectivity of human agency, including the development of language and sociality that allowed humans to dominate planet Earth, is subordinate to the biological agency that is grounded in the preconditions for life itself

The vocabulary of human intentional psychology is an anthropocentric language because it describes internal processes using a species-specific (Homo sapiens) terminology of desires, beliefs etc. Biological science does not provide us with a descriptive terminology for each individual species, it would be too complicated and time-consuming. That is why we so often describe biological agency using the language of human agency.

We freely transpose our understanding of ‘heart’ from one species to another but not, say, the idea of ‘reason’. This is because reason is inextricably associated with human minds. This poses the question – hearts exist in nature by evolutionarily derived gradation. Could reason exist in nature by evolutionary degree: is there a mindless precursor of minded reason?

Biological priority

Only by understanding the ends and goals of biological agents (organisms) can there be coherent explanations of what structures, processes, and behaviors are ‘for’. These goals are not a causal pull from the future (backward causation), a supernatural force, or a metaphorical imposition of human mental states onto nature . . . they are simply a behavioral orientation or propensity in the present that is unique to living organisms and which has a natural limit or end.

This is how biology is different from mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Most importantly, goals in nature are not restricted to the conscious intentions found in human minds, they are also displayed as the empirically verifiable behavioral propensities of mindless organisms. Human minded goals are highly evolved developments of mindless goals.

Without a consideration of agential goals, biology becomes a collection of dis-associated facts. Biological parts must be explained in terms of functionally organized wholes, and so biological explanations begin with (or assume) the integrated unity of an autonomous biological agent (organism). Biological explanations must begin with ‘ends’ – it is ends and agency that take explanatory priority. This does not mean that ends have causal efficacy, but they are prior, in explanation, to their constituent parts and the causal events that lead to these ends. Only by first understanding the goals of a biological agent do the parts make sense. Bricks, window frames, cement, and tiles on a building site only become meaningful when we understand what a house is.

Ends have no causal efficacy, but they are not supernatural abstractions, fictions, or creations of the human mind, they are real ends and limits to real biological processes.

Behavior takes explanatory priority in respect to agency because behavior acts directly on the world outside the organism.

Like other organisms, humans are motivated by the universal, objective, and ultimate biological goals (values) of survival, reproduction, and flourishing (biological axiom) and the internal processes that drive this motivation. We treat human motivation as mostly psychological, but mental representations exist in brains that are subject to the universal limitations and constraints of the bodies of which they are a part. Our brains, and the uniquely human capacity for reason, can dominate but not override these goals because it is these goals that are the preconditions for life.

Scientific reduction

Does the world ultimately consist of number, information, matter in motion, fermions and bosons, or something else?

Our answer to this question is important because we unconsciously rank the objects of our experience in relation to the answer we give. That is, our understanding and explanation of the world will relate to this assumed foundation.  So, for example, if we regard ‘everything’ as consisting of matter in motion, then our intuition is that organisms must be subordinate to these conditions: organisms must be described in these terms. But what if we regard ‘everything’ as grounded in ‘number’ or ‘information’ – what then? How are we to describe an organism in terms of number?

The problem is that there is an arbitrariness about our choice of what constitutes ‘everything’.

On this web site it is argued that ‘everything’ is most efficiently gathered under the rubric of ‘process’.  This changes our current perspective on living organisms.

Viewing organisms as ‘matter in motion’ (a presumption inherited from the Scientific Revolution) they become physicochemical aggregations of matter undergoing change. But, under process philosophy, the former preoccupation with different kinds of matter (subatomic particles, atoms, elements, molecules) is replaced with an interest in different kinds of process.

Life is most informatively comprehended, not as a unique form of physicochemical matter, but as a uniquely agential kind of process. 

It is, of course, possible to explain agency in terms of the structures and processes that generate behavior. This can have many scientific benefits. For example, in considering how DNA codes for the structures, processes, and behavior that maintain our bodies and minds we can treat DNA as, in some way, prior to our biological agency, and we certainly treat our human intentions as the source of our human agency.

But this only makes explanatory sense in the agential context of autonomously integrated and goal-directed functional organisms.

But to an outsider, an observer, or scientist, it is behavior that provides the most straightforward and accessible comparator of agency, not the symbolic representation of inner states, or the enumeration of chemicals of ever decreasing size. To the world (and a dispassionate scientific observer), it is the behavior of bodies that is the most obvious and direct vehicle of agency, not the internal processing and matter that generates the behavior (like the processing in minds).

If we are to understand the role of agency in the biological world we must look to behavior, not mental representation or chemical composition.

Principle – biological agency is best understood and explained in terms of the behavior of living bodies interacting with the world. The internal processing of human minds is a uniquely human and specialized evolutionary development of biological agency.

So, although the internal processes generating agency can be subject to empirical investigation their explanation is subordinate to the ultimate goals of the autonomous organisms.

Humans have brains that express agency in a uniquely minded way that is communicated using the power of language as a means of mental representation. We describe mental states, but cannot be sure of what occurs in other minds. Even among humans it is actions (behavior), rather than their words, that bear the weight of agency.

The acknowledgement of agency as an expression of bodies rather than minds has substantial scientific consequences. It is a more inclusive form of agency because our bodies have biological limitations and constraints that our minds do not. Attitudes, deliberations, and beliefs can indeed change the world, but only via the medium of behavior: behavior has direct causal efficacy, intentions are indirect.

Scientifically we must treat the agency of all organisms from the same third-person comparative perspective; we cannot make a first-person exception for ourselves.

Organisms, including humans, communicate their agency directly through their behavior. This behavioral orientation is indistinguishable from the behavioral orientation of humans that we associate with values.

Values may originate from internal processes, but they find expression in the motivation of behavior. In this sense a human is no different from an amoeba, crab, or oak tree. And, since all agential behavior is grounded in the universal, objective, and ultimate goals of the biological axiom there is, here a congruence of values and goals.

If we want to make a scientific comparison between the agency of humans and the agency of all other organisms, then we must do so by comparing behaviors.

No organism has direct experiential access to the internal motivating conditions of other organisms. It is the integration of each organism’s structures and processes into a unified and autonomous expression of flexible and purposive behavior that communicates goals. We can speak of these goals using words such as ‘reasons’, ‘purposes’ or, in the human instance, as values or intentions. This is an expression of biological agency whose internal motivation, in the case of humans, happens to include mental processes.

This is as true of humans as it is of other organisms. Obviously, we not only walk, mate, and eat, we also think, classify, imagine, and theorize. But the only way I have direct access to your experience – except through the behavioral medium of speech (language) – is through your behavior. Humans share the experiential privacy of all creatures. Our minds, brains, and the behavior they generate (which includes speech), are evolutionary embellishments that are subordinate to the universal goals of the biological axiom – they are just one more tool in the evolutionary toolbox.

Principle – values as demonstrated in behavior rather than language are a universal and objective property of biological agents (including humans): they are grounded in the biological axiom

Proximate/ultimate goals

Humans share with other organisms the objective, universal, and ultimate biological goals of survival, reproduction, and flourishing: this is clearly demonstrated in human behavior. These are the goals that define life and biological agency. 

However, we are not consciously aware of these goals because they are mindless and mechanical goals that emerged out of our evolutionary history. They are, so to say, the goals of our bodies, not the goals of our minds. They are goals that are a necessary part of our biological constitution as autonomous organisms: the biological preconditions for our existence. 

Human agency is a special kind of biological agency that arose as a minded evolutionary development of mindless biological agency. Human minded goals are, in this sense, only proximate goals that serve the ultimate and mindless goals of biological agency: our conscious goals are determined by more generalized biological conditions.

Our mindedness gives us a feeling of agency so strong that we find it difficult to conceive of mindless goals, let alone mindless goals to which our minded goals must defer. But if biological goals do not apply, then life will cease – that is why these goals are a precondition for life. The deference of the proximate minded goals of human agency to the ultimate mindless goals of biological agency is best understood through actual cases that show how biological goals have, with evolution, taken on minded forms.

So, for example, we humans eat for minded proximate ends (taste and smell stimulation and the satiation of hunger), that have the mindless ultimate biological goal of survival. We have sex for minded proximate ends
(orgasm, physical and emotional gratification), but also for the mindless ultimate biological goal of reproduction. We develop moral and political systems seeking the minded proximate ends of happiness,
wellbeing, and pleasure, while serving the ultimate and mindless biological end of flourishing.

Evolution has mindlessly bequeathed humans their minded proximate goals along with mental ‘treats’ to encourage them on the path to ultimate biological goals. Evolution can express mindless ‘cunning’.

Talk of evolutionary ‘treats’ and ‘cunning’ might seem absurdly fanciful until we contemplate the miracle of the human brain and subjectivity that was made possible by mindless processes.

Armed with this knowledge we might think that we can combat biological ‘cunning’ with human reason . . . until we realize the Catch 22. Though reason-based moral and other cultural behavioral codes can dominate our biology, they can never transcend it. To do so would be a denial of life.

Principle – the proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share, grounding characteristics with the mindless and ultimate goals of biological agency. Thus, while human goals are expressed in the uniquely minded (subjective) language of intentional psychology, they usually simultaneously share (objective) grounding characteristics with mindless nature.

The philosophical problem

Philosophical complications associated with the distinction between the minded and the mindless have always dogged biological science, and they haven’t gone away. This relates to the difficulty of describing real mindless biological agency (as outlined in the biological axiom) without using the language and concepts of human minded agency. The problem is that the likenesses being compared relate to shared evolutionary history, and have been confused with literary metaphor (see metaphor fallacy).

When we see organisms behaving in human-like ways (showing anger, reproducing, fleeing, seeking food & shelter) it is hard to avoid using language that usually applies strictly to humans. How do we capture real but mindless biological agency without using the language of human consciously minded agency?

This dilemma arises most obviously in relation to the use of semantically mind-rich words like ‘purpose’, ‘design’, ‘knowledge’, ‘memory’, ‘learning’, ‘reason’, and ‘value’. The problem is that within the semantic range encompassed by these words are agential properties that we humans share with other organisms. These are properties that relate to biological (and not necessarily minded) agency.

Over time philosophers have warmed to the (evolutionary based) idea that the likeness between human cognitive states and the behaviour of organisms runs deeper than a casual literary resemblance (it is usually treated as cognitive metaphor, or perhaps a convenient heuristic). Perhaps there really can be ‘reasons without a reasoner’ (Dan Dennett), and ‘purposes without conscious intention‘ exhibited by organisms that are ‘for without foresight‘ (see article on biotelological realism), and that there can even be ‘knowledge without a knower’ (David Deutsch).  There is also obvious and intricate design in living organisms that we need not account for by reference to God or by reading human cognition into nature because, in nature, there is ‘competence without comprehension’ (Dan Dennett).

We dismiss the idea of non-human organisms having values because we accept the traditional assumption, and conventional semantic usage, whereby values are the product of human brains. The quick, obvious, and neat conclusion . . .  that applying these words to non-human organisms is cognitive metaphor, needs review.

The conventional distinction is, at face value, unproblematic. The idea of an oak tree having values is absurd, because an oak tree has neither a mind nor a brain. When we find ourselves using the language of human mental states in relation to organisms that do not have mental faculties, we treat such usage as ‘as if’ anthropomorphism (human-talk) with no basis in reality. In such cases we are mistakenly gifting organisms with cognitive faculties.  So, when we say, ‘that oak tree wants some water’ we are describing the plant in metaphorical and teleological ways ‘as if’ it had conscious human intentions. This is clearly just a figure of speech.

But, on closer inspection, examples like this are not so clear-cut as they might, at first, appear. This web site argues that our understanding of the concept of ‘value’ becomes more scientifically coherent when it extends beyond the human domain to non-human organisms. Though the language we often use is indeed cognitive metaphor, the situation it describes has underlying reality. The plant does not need water in the same way that humans need water, but it does require water if it is to survive.

When we make such statements, we do not intend to gift non-human organisms with cognitive faculties, rather, we are acknowledging the unspoken but grounding significance of the biological axiom for all
organisms – we are observing that circumstances are frustrating the attainment of objective, ultimate, and universal biological goals. We are struggling with the distinction between human agency and biological agency.

The problem arises because, while human goals are expressed in a uniquely minded way, they also share objective grounding characteristics with mindless nature: the evolutionary relationship is one of both
similarity and difference. The proximate and uniquely minded goals of human agency evolved out of, and share grounding characteristics with, the mindless and ultimate goals of biological agency.
This is discussed in more detail in the article on being like-minded.

From the third-person perspective of behavior, the powerful first-person sensation that we feel for ‘self’ and ‘other’ fades into insignificance. Our behavior may be complex and driven by subjective intention, but our behavioral expression of agential autonomy is the same as the behavioral autonomy expressed by all organisms.

In biological terms, human cognitive states are inner processing that generates outward behavior. All living organisms, as biological agents, share the universal and ultimate behavioral orientation expressed in the biological axiom. Humans, however, express this ultimate behavioral orientation in proximate minded ways that can be communicated to others using language. These uniquely minded and proximate human values are, nevertheless, grounded in the universal values (behavioral propensities) expressed in the biological axiom.

When describing values and purposes, we can adopt a scientific third-person perspective that reports on behavior in a factual way. As expressions of behavioral orientation these are, nevertheless, values . . .  objective values. We can say, for example, ‘If that tree does not receive water it will die’, ‘that hyena is running away from the lion’, ‘spider webs catch flies that the spiders devour as food’, ‘the boy scoffed the sandwiches’, and ‘she slapped his face’.

Alternatively, we can adopt a first-person anthropocentric interpretation of these situations by saying ‘the tree wants water’, ‘the hyena is frightened’, ‘spiders build webs to catch flies’, ‘the boy was hungry’, and ‘she was angry’.

Our inner mental processing is a fascinating and important aspect of scientific investigation. The point, however, is that when we make a scientific comparison between one organism and another the comparison of their methods of behavior-generating inner states becomes too complex and too detached from what happens in the world.

Though humans can communicate about cognitive states using language comparisons between the inner processes of different organisms that generate their behavior, are best expressed in person-neutral behavioral terms.

When moving from strictly human subjective discourse into comparative biology, values are most effectively communicated scientifically in terms of behavior. Though humans can represent values in their minds, communicate with one-another about them using language, and investigate mental processes in scientific laboratories – values are most directly communicated, not in terms of internal processing, but of external behavior. Values are an expression of agency expressed in behavior that takes explanatory priority over its causal antecedents.  That is, internal processing does make sense unless we already understand its outcomes.

Principle – Semantically mind-rich words like ‘purpose’, ‘design’, ‘knowledge’, ‘memory’, ‘learning’, ‘reason’, and ‘value’,so closely associated with human agency, include within their semantic range mindless properties of biological agency that are shared with mindless organisms.

For the better

Aristotle noted that changes in nature were frequently ‘for the better’, that organisms responded to environments and situations with adjustments to their structures, processes, and behaviors that furthered their existence.

He had observed that organisms display both the short- and long-term agential behavioral flexibility that today we call (functional) adaptation. Evolutionary biologists describe this as ‘fitness maximization’ – a technical expression describing the biological axiom in more abstract terms.

We humans can investigate the efficacy of functional adaptations. So, for example, we might judge that a plant is looking ‘healthy’, or that it ‘needs’ watering. We might consider that our hearts are ‘strong’ or ‘weak’. We all, biological scientists included, constantly assume that environments may ‘help’ or ‘hinder’ both our own existence and that of other organisms.

These are scientific conclusions, rather than ‘value judgements’ (‘for the better’), because they are grounded, not in human subjectivity, but in biological necessity, the agential preconditions for life. It is logically possible to deny and challenge the preconditions for life in the short term, but over the long term it is biologically incoherent. When Aristotle claimed that it was ‘better to live than not live’ he was reporting on the objective behavior of the organisms around him, not making a human subjective judgement about life.

The link between the values of biological agency and human morality is discussed later.

Behavioral flexibility

Emphasis on behaviour draws attention to the agency that uniquely defines what it is to be alive.

Though behavior may be initiated by both internal and external factors, it is always processed internally in the provision of an integrated response. Organisms are not passive and indifferent like rocks; they respond in a unified autonomous way to what is going on both inside and outside their bodies. It is this capacity to adapt to circumstance in a flexible goal-directed way that reveals their agency. We can conduct scientific experiments on the internal processing that drives behaviour, but it is the resultant behavior itself that is closest to the world and outcomes.

Behavior & language

Treating human mindedness as just one more tool in an evolutionary toolbox might seem unnecessarily demeaning. Humans miraculously transmit information from one brain to another using sounds that have been framed into language. Surely, brains and speech are not just any behavioral tool? Though not communicating direct experience, language is certainly a powerful tool, remembering our tacit understanding that ‘actions speak louder than words.

Humans communicate values through the behavioral medium of language. This is how we come to understand cultural codes of behaviour such as ideologies, religions, the meaning of ‘money’, and so on.
These are, of course, the abstract mental representations of symbolic culture, but they only acquire shared social meaning through their influence on behaviour.

Being humans, we place great emphasis on ideas (our mental representations) – the values in our minds. But the power of ideas lies not in their subjectivity, but in the way they play out in the objective world of behavioral interaction. Our brains, and the subjective ideas they generate, are evolutionary tools helping us to achieve the human proximate goals that are grounded in the ultimate goals of biological agency.

Once we acknowledge biological agency, we recognize the universal goals of the biological axiom as values that are the motivators of behaviors that unite the community of life.

Human values

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational animals whose behavior is a consequence of careful deliberation. But human agency, values, and behavior are a response to a host of internal and external influences, many of which do not engage the reasoning capacity of our brains. Enumerating some of these will provide the context for a discussion of human values and their role in our moral systems.

We have many bodily needs that barely register in our consciousness, but which are a vital part of our existence – processes like eating, breathing, excreting, metabolizing, and so on. These are all concerns that impact our behavior, but they are widely ignored – just background biology that we can do nothing about.

There are also both unconscious and subconscious mental processes that influence our behavior and over which we have little control. Internally generated factors influencing our behavior as values include those instincts, inclinations, and intuitions that are the stuff of the new academic discipline of moral psychology.

It is within this biological context that morality must be viewed. 

Belief-desire theory

Like all biological agents, humans act on, and react to, their environments. It is the interweaving of these two influences, the internal (organismal needs) and external (environmental (cultural) constraints on our organismal needs) that frames our daily lives.

The individual

The ultimate and powerful autonomy of organisms that grounds biological agency evolved into the proximate human minded and conscious distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’.

It is this personal and social concern for the individual that is often at the core of human values and morality.

Beliefs & desires

For simplicity we can simplify the complex motivation of human behavior into a belief-desire theory with beliefs and desires treated as the two key motivating drivers of human behaviour and agency.

‘Desire’ is a convenient catch-all term for conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mental representations of mostly internally generated intuitions, instincts, biological needs, and so on. Desires provide motivation for individual action and we speak of them using words like ‘preference’, ‘choice’, and ‘value’. These desires may be conscious or unconscious – as simple as hunger, or complex as the lust for power.

Beliefs are mental representations that provide a context for interaction with the world. They concern our understanding of the world and they include, for example, factual and religious beliefs.

In general terms beliefs include our understanding of both material culture (the physical nature of the world, the objects it contains, and the environments we occupy) and symbolic culture as culturally generated symbolic traditions, values, and moralities. Both beliefs and desires are communicated through behaviors and speech.

Naturally beliefs and desires will conflict when individual needs are constrained by environmental limitations. The subsequent interaction between internal and external influences then forms the arena for biological adaptation, with human reason a part of the internal processing guiding behavior.

Human morality

Most human values relate to ‘internal’ individual impulses, instincts, appetites, intuitions, and bodily needs. For simplicity these have been referred to here as ‘desires’.

However, the idea of morality draws attention away from individual needs to the shared material and symbolic values that regulate the behavior of communities. These are not decided by the individual but by the community or, in many instances, by an official code of conduct which, in the case of religious doctrine, is set out in a sacred text.

Probably because of its religious history, and its direct impact on our lives, we treat human morality as something very special. But from a biological perspective, as we have seen above, it is a mode of environmental adaptation.

Every organism has its own ways of adapting to environmental conditions and sometimes this involves mindless collective behavior (consider a termite mound). Humans adopt collective behavior as systems of beliefs communicated between individuals using language.

Biologically we can think of ‘desires’ as the autonomous agential propensities generated internally and expressed in the universal behavior of all organisms as expressed in the biological axiom. On the other hand ‘morals’ are the adaptation of these propensities to the conditions that exist outside the organism. ‘Morality’ then becomes the uniquely human minded (using symbolic language) method of environmental adaptation. Termites have adopted collective environmental behavioral adaptations to meet environmental constraints but being ‘mindless’ such behavior cannot be dignified with the term ‘morality’.

Codes of behavior

As a declaration of what ultimately motivates all organisms, the biological axiom is like a universal code of behavior, a statement of biological normativity.

The problem is that while the biological axiom might be a satisfactory statement of universal behavioral orientation (how we are), it does not tell us how we ‘ought’ to be; it is a statement of ‘inner need’, not ‘environmental adaptation’. In other words, morality can be in direct conflict with our organismal values as moral codes attempt to curb our less social organismal proclivities.

Evolution is not perfect; it has bequeathed us many biological appetites that do not serve us well. To tame these appetites, it is often pointed out that we use reason as an overseer. It is detached reason that saves us from ourselves. The role of reason as a behavioral guide is central to our philosophical and cultural tradition. Reason is our most powerful human evolutionary tool.

If we refuse to acknowledge the role of reason in communication, then we cease to communicate. It is in the moral sphere that reason really shines.

Morality

Opening a book on ethics you are confronted by a bewildering array of ideas about the source of
normativity. Do we ultimately submit to the human ‘will’ that dominates our intellects (voluntarism)? Is morality a personal matter involving the reasoned examination of our beliefs and motivations (reflective endorsement)? Or maybe morality is more about social regulation as a means of maximizing human welfare through a societal cost-benefit analysis (utilitarian consequentialism)? Or is morality about establishing universal rules based solely on reason as completely independent of our desires, interests, and emotions (deontology)?

One obvious approach to the complexity of these questions is to acknowledge that, since every physical trait that we possess is ultimately a product of evolution then it is reasonable to examine our minds and their intellectual products from an evolutionary perspective.

What happens when we look at morality through the lens of evolutionary biology?

Moral naturalism

What are the grounds for moral obligation? Who, or what, determines our behavior by deciding what we ought to do? Where does normativity – our belief that there is right and wrong action, better and worse options – come from?

The view presented on this web site is that moral claims, though manifest most obviously in the proximate goals we associate with human minded behaviour, are grounded in the universal, objective (mind-independent), and ultimate conditions of the biological axiom. Moral naturalism is a simple form of ethics devoid of theoretical complication and grounded in our place within the natural world. A world in which moral facts reduce to natural facts, and moral language reduces to claims about the natural world: moral claims are natural claims (analytic naturalism).

The biological axiom describes how minded behavior is grounded in a universal mind independent behavioral disposition (moral realism, cognitivism) in a world of natural objects and properties (metaphysical naturalism) that can be empirically verified (epistemic naturalism).

Moral autonomy

In biology organisms are the basic units of autonomous agency, their structures, processes, and behaviors serving the goals of the agents of which they are a part. Brains are parts of entire organisms and subordinate to the biological limitations, conditions, and constraints of the entire organism. It is people, as whole organisms, that are responsible for their behavior, not their body parts or bodily processes.

Beliefs and desires may motivate humans, but it is their actions that count. We are committed to jail for our actions, not our thoughts.

Every organism is an autonomous agent existing within an environment that provides it with sustenance and reproductive opportunities. Biological agency is the objective, universal, and ultimate behavioral propensity of autonomous organisms to survive, reproduce, and flourish (biological axiom). This is a form of behavioral autonomy that can be promoted or impeded by both internal and external factors.

Only humans are consciously aware of their own autonomy and the fact that situations can ‘help’ or ‘hinder’ their existence. While the notions of ‘helping’ and ‘hindering’ are subjective human creations, the objective circumstances that impact other organisms are not. Only humans can represent an organism’s autonomous agency in their minds, but that does not mean that this agency only exists in human minds. Only humans have a conscious sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’ but that does not mean that organismal autonomy (biological agency) does not exist, and that it too is a creation of human minds. Mindless agency is a reality.

Reason

Aristotle separated humanity from the rest of nature based on our capacity to reason. He expressed this in his usual brilliant way of succinctly combining similarity (genus) and difference (species) by calling humans ‘rational animals’.

From a biological and scientific perspective reason does not exist in its own realm, like a God presiding over events: it too is an evolved product of our biology; it is not apart from us. Reason is an evolved mental tool that helps us to refine our proximate human goals, but it can be understood in the wider context of ultimate and universal biological goals? In this more generalized and mindless sense, reason is the sifting, sorting, and fine-tuning that exists at the agential interface between organism and environment – part of the mechanical propensity to attain goals. It is the ‘selection’ part of Darwin’s natural selection, and its outcomes are adaptations.

Expressed in human terms, reason is a mediator between our autonomous and agential organismal selves (our desires) and our human environment of symbolic and material culture (our beliefs about the world). In an individual lifetime reason combines foresight and hindsight with individual and collective knowledge to establish behaviors that serve both proximate goals and, ultimately, the goals of the biological axiom. Part of the universal process of adaptation of organism to environment.

By taking environment into account, reason looks beyond self (desire) and is therefore a counterforce to the selfishness (egoism) that flows inevitably from our organismal autonomous agency.

Though reason can override our ‘desires’ it is not separate from them. Reason is not apart from biological agency, but a highly evolved biological regulatory tool acting on it.

It is tempting to regard reason as somehow rising above earthly things, providing us with reasons (what we ‘ought’ to do) that are totally independent of our desires. This allows us to see things from The Point of View of the Universe (see, for example, the moral realism of De Lazari-Radek & Singer, following Sidgwick) in which reason is a source of objective morality because it can provide us with ‘ . . . self-evident rules that lead us cogently to trustworthy conclusions that are . . . mutually consistent and that we can . . . clearly and distinctly apprehend to be true so that there can be . . . no conflict between two intuitions’.

This is a worthy aspiration, but we are living organisms, not pure reason.

It is not reason that makes morality objective but the non-negotiable biological axiom. Reason can dominate, but it can never divest itself entirely of the ultimate biological values that produced it. Some moral claims display a noble detachment from self-interest but most bear the imprint of life because they arise out of life and are the creations of life.

It is a characteristic of life that it has a perspective on the universe. In a world of perspectiveless facts there can be no logical grounds for value. Life, unlike the constants of physics, or the detachment of mathematics, assumes a ‘point of view’. To deny life’s point of view is to deny life itself. Denying the biological necessity of the biological axiom is logically possible, but it is biologically incoherent. That is why our human desire for health and happiness is not logically necessary, but self-evident . . . biologically necessary.

Human proximate values permit a behavioral flexibility that is unlikely to find consensus and hence the loss of objectivity, while ultimate mindless biological values are universal, objective, and non-negotiable.

We rightly strive for the success of reason, but we must be humble in the knowledge that its apparent triumphs are, of biological necessity, grounded in the biological values that give it purchase. The reasoned moral decisions that we think overcome biological normativity simply fall back on second order biological normativity. Without biological value, however small, reason is an empty and incoherent concept. It is ultimately from biological values that morality gets its objectivity, not from reason.

In the interplay between organism and environment, between desire and belief, reason is a mediator that can dominate desire, but it can never eradicate the goals of the organism of which it is a part.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2021 definition of reason as, ‘the ability to use knowledge to attain goals’ in his book, Rationality, brings reason in direct contact with questions concerning life’s proximate and ultimate goals. ‘When you combine self-interest and sociality with impartiality – the interchangeability of perspectives – you get the core of morality’ (The Golden Rule, p. 68). This is, of course, morality understood in human proximate minded terms, not the ultimate terms of the biological axiom.

The challenge of this series of articles on biological agency has been to look beyond the proximate minded goals of human agency to their grounding in the ultimate goals of biological agency. Widening Pinker’s analysis of reason from the human to the biological domain we can see how nature is saturated in mindless ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ that supports it in the maintenance of the ultimate goals of biological agency. Reason must find purchase on something (goals) if it is to make sense. Without its foundation in the universal, ultimate and objective goals that establish biological normativity, reason is an incoherent concept

Biological normativity

All organisms express the agential goals of the biological axiom; they are the preconditions for life. And, since humans refer to the factors that motivate behavior as ‘values’ then, in this sense, these goals are also values. They are the values that motivate the behavior of all organisms and thus resemble universal principles, or rules for life, that can therefore be aptly referred to as biological normativity.

These are scientifically investigable goals that give life a behavioral orientation that is like a human perspective, or point of view. They are, paradoxically, behavioral facts that express a point of view, and that is why the term ‘value’ is appropriate in this context: both an objective statement of the way organisms are while, at the same time, expressing their behavioral orientation like a ‘mindless striving’. This does not deny that humans are self-reflective, self-aware, and reasoning organisms that use words and minded representations in ways that other organisms do not, and cannot. However, these mental phenomena are, as it were, superimposed on (are an evolutionary development of) the grounding behaviour shared by all organisms, both minded and mindless.

As with biological agency in general, the resemblance between biological and human values is not a
metaphorical likeness – it is not ‘as if’ non-human organisms had values, the likeness is real in the sense that human values evolved out of biological values, there is an evolutionary connection. Our semantics, however, fails to capture this reality.

The biological condition described by the biological axiom might well be the source of human value – but are they a source of morality? Do they tell us what we ‘ought’ to do?

Biology – unlike mathematics, physics, and logic – is more about overall trends, gradations, and statistical generalities than absolutes – and it is full of exceptions. We see many ways to defy our desires and the universal goals of the biological axiom – the way we are. These biological goals may be universal, objective, and ultimate for life as a whole, but they are not absolute – and there are many individual exceptions. We can choose to be childless, we might use contraception, we may be born homosexual, and we could decide to remain blind when given the option of sight. We may even opt to keep our hands on a redhot plate, always choosing pain and suffering over pleasure, happiness, and wellbeing. We can be sincere misanthropes, even transhumanists with a technological desire to artificially transcend our species. The only necessity is the biologically necessary condition that, on balance, there is conformity to the goals of the biological axiom. To do otherwise is to deny life, which is logically possible, but biologically incoherent.

Moral facts are life’s universal, ultimate, and objective behavioral orientation expressed in the diversity of human proximate (reasoned) moral behaviors expressed in symbolic language as ‘what matters’ to humans. But proximate moral claims (reasons for) are, of biological necessity, grounded in ultimate evolutionary behavioral facts as reasons for the behaviour of all living organisms (the biological axiom).

There is no doubt that normative statements feel very different from informative, empirically based, and descriptive scientific statements. Facts do not motivate in the way that evaluative and moral language does.

But we assume that it is our minds that determine what ‘helps’ and ‘hinders’, and what is ‘right’ and wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It is our minds that provide the reasons why some things ‘matter’. We forget that our subjectivity is an evolutionary development of the biological agency that defines all life, and which is most elegantly expressed in the biological axiom. When human minds evolved, along with their uniquely conscious and reasoning subjectivity, this universal, objective, and ultimate biological behavioral orientation was transformed into a minded form that was, in part, expressed as moral codes of behaviour fine-tuned by reason as another emergent minded property. Moralities are human symbolic creations that are grounded in natural facts.

As a matter of biological necessity, we have a behavioral orientation which is simply an expression of the way we are. Human proximate goals may modify, and, at times, overrule the biological drivers of our biological being, but they cannot transcend them.

Normative claims are being increasingly treated as claims about reasons for behaviour with facts supplying these reasons. This is a recognition of the teleological character of all biological behaviour, not just that of humans since the ultimate reasons for the behaviour of all organisms is the same (biological axiom).

The view expressed here is that the behaviour of organisms is grounded in the way they are, with the way they ‘ought’ to be an evolutionary superimposition of human proximate minded reasons onto this behavioral foundation. Hume’s claim that ‘ought’ cannot change the way something ‘is’ ignores the fact that for all organisms their existence is itself an expression how they ‘ought’ to be, since the way they are is a ‘point of view’, ‘perspective’, or behavioral disposition.

Aristotle’s teleological belief that an organism is ‘trying’ to be what it ought to be catches the point that the reasons for biological behaviour are grounded in organismal factors, but he is unclear about the way that reason, as a biological tool, provides human proximate reasons to fine-tune what ought to be.

Evolution is brilliant, but it is not perfect. Reason’s many proximate goals find their ultimate purchase in the goals of the biological axiom, which defines ends but not means.

Principle – human values are the uniquely minded expression of biological values that evolved in Homo sapiens

Principle – the goals of moral reasoning (e.g. Thou shalt not kill) are grounded in proximate human values (needs, wants, desires, inclinations, instincts, impulses, beliefs, attitudes) that are, in turn, grounded in ultimate and mindless biological values (survival, reproduction, flourishing). Reason can substantially overrule these biological values, but it is grounded in them

Facts & values

There is a long and influential tradition in Western philosophy that draws a hard line of demarcation between facts and values and, by extrapolation, between science and ethics – and, indeed, between science and the humanities. By extrapolation, this distinction gathers wider significance by separating minded humans (valuing creatures) from mindless organisms that have no, or limited, mental capacity to make value judgements.

This is a precept that has a firm grip on Western intellectual thinking, which is inclined to dogmatically divide statements and claims into two camps (sometimes referred to as magisteria): on one side there are the objective and empirically verifiable hard facts of science (which can be true or false) and, on the other side are subjective matters of opinion, sentiment, feeling, or attitude. The latter are the rubbery values, expressed in part by ethics, that are much more a matter of inclination.

There are two highly misleading notions built into this representation of the world: first, the confusing semantic distinction between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ and, second, the mistaken philosophical distinction

Subjective & objective

‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ are weasel words that can, and do, impede our scientific understanding of the world.

My ‘wants’, ‘needs’, ‘preferences’ (and, indeed, the entire lexicon of human intentional psychology) – including my values and opinions, as well as ‘consciousness’, are (ontologically) subjective in the sense that they are mental states. But mental states are open to empirical analysis, most obviously through the medium of behavior (in the human case this includes the behavior of speech). Consciousness is a subjective experience, but it is the topic of keen scientific research.

Confusingly, there can be facts about values and beliefs. ‘I like blue cheese’ is (ontologically) a subjective statement in the sense that it expresses my subjective (mental) state of ‘liking’; but, since I really do like blue cheese – it can be scientifically verified – it is also an objective (epistemic) fact. So, for these reasons, me liking blue cheese can be described as a subjective fact. The first-person (subjective) experience can also be described from a third-person (objective) point of view.

This can lead us to unexpected, counter-intuitive, and seemingly contradictory conclusions. Most significantly, science investigates the world of values from the third-person point of view of behavior. From this perspective all organisms, even plants and microscopic unicells, have behavioral orientations that display values, most obviously those that express the universal values of the biological axiom. That human values are located in minds is inconsequential.

All organisms, humans included, express values as facts about the way they are. The minded expression of values is simply the human expression of universal values. The similarity between human intentions and the universal goals of the biological axiom arise, not because we are reading our own subjectivity into nature, but because the proximate and subjective goals of human conscious intention evolved out of the ultimate and objective goals of the biological axiom.

When you say, ‘That oak tree needs water’ you are using the subjective language of cognitive metaphor: but the situation it describes has underlying reality. Though the plant does not need water in the subjective way that humans need water, it does require water if it is to survive. We are describing objective (factual and ultimate) goals in human (subjective and proximate) terms. In this sense the above statement expresses both fact and value because humans express both ultimate objective biological values and proximate human subjective values at the same time. Human values can express biological facts. By making such statements we are not gifting non-human organisms with cognitive faculties, rather, we are acknowledging the unspoken and grounding significance of the biological axiom for all organisms.

Philosophical foundations

The fact-value distinction was most clearly articulated by Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) who observed that a deductive argument must have values in the premises if it is to have values in the conclusion . . . that no normative conclusion can be validly derived from factual premises. In other words, we cannot move deductively from the way the world is to the way it ought to be. Hume’s claim gave rise to a famous dictum in philosophy known as ‘Hume’s guillotine’, which expresses this more succinctly as a logically necessary condition: ‘You cannot derive an ‘ought from an ‘is’’. That is, a moral judgment, a prescription, or value, cannot be derived from something factual, a description: you cannot make judgements about what should be, based on what is.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) seemingly agreed with Hume by saying in his Critique of Judgment (First
Introduction, X240) that ‘ . . . to think of a product of nature that there is something which it ought to be
presupposes a principle which could not be drawn from experience (which teaches only what things are)’. Much later, Cambridge philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958) in a slightly different context claimed that any connection between a normative property (like goodness) and a natural property (like pleasure) is open to doubt (his ‘naturalistic fallacy’). Or, re-expressed as the ‘open question argument’, that no moral property can be identical to a natural property. It is pointed out, for example, that because something is ‘natural” or ‘intuitive’ does not make it ‘right’. My natural inclination to scoff sugary products does not make eating sugar ‘good’. In simple terms, conditions in nature cannot determine moral principles.

The biological axiom applies to both minded and mindless organisms with the understanding that minded organisms are an evolutionary product of mindless organisms. Thus its objective goals are expressed by humans in the form of subjective intentions. In this way it becomes simultaneously a statement of fact and value – of objective behaviour that is, in the human case, expressed as mental intention. It is an objective description of the behaviour of all organisms that, in its evolved human minded form, takes on a prescriptive role.

The prevailing view of Aristotle’s statement ‘It is better to live than not live’ would be that it is a subjective value judgement that has no logical necessity. But, paradoxically, its meaning is manifest mindlessly and objectively in the behaviour of all non-human living organisms (even though it is only humans that can represent this meaning in their minds). It is not expressed in the behaviour of mindless rocks. It is also a tacit understanding of our own human existence and the medicine that supports it, even though, on rare occasion, it might go awry.

If human values are the subjective representation of biological facts, then it is precisely the conditions of
nature that are the foundation for moral principles.

The claim that human values are subjective and unrelated to scientific facts is profoundly misleading. The empirically verifiable behavioural facts of the biological axiom underpin the proximate minded values expressed in human speech and translated into behaviour. This applies even in those instances of cultural values and moralities where reason dominates organismal values.

The moral position expressed on this web site is that of a moral naturalism in which morality is grounded in the objective and natural facts of the biological axiom as a scientific statement of the ultimate preconditions for all life. All proximate human minded claims are open to scientific investigation.

Source of value

For us humans, as members of the community of life, the biological axiom describes the biologically necessary grounding conditions of our behaviour. This is an ultimate and mindless behavioral orientation (biological normativity) that does not engage thought or words: it does not make recommendations for behaviour, or moral judgements about behaviour. . . it is simply what we do as living creatures . . . the way we are.

Historically, these mindless goals were sufficient to establish the physical conditions necessary to produce human brains and their emergent properties. Human minds have their own proximate goals that are subordinate to the ultimate goals of the biological axiom. It is these proximate goals that are foremost in human minds and which are expressed in language and moderated by reason. Because reason is associated with moral systems that can prevail over biological impulse, reason is sometimes regarded as separate and distinct from impulse – that it can transcend the biological necessity of the biological axiom that defines what it is to be a living organism. But reason is not separate from us, it is an evolved biological tool whose biological function is to investigate possible minded proximate paths on the way to mindless ultimate biological goals’ It is ultimately grounded in biological impulse. Without goals, reason is an incoherent concept. The ‘ought’ of morality is grounded in the way we ‘are’.
As philosopher Hume also observed, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can
never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them (Treatise on Human Nature 2.3.3 p. 415),
this being an acknowledgement of the grounding of human value in the instinctive demands of the biological axiom, no matter how these are constrained by reason.

The statements by Aristotle and Pinker at the head of this article are not grounded in reason (they
are not logically necessary), they are grounded in mindless biological goals – in biological necessity. Explore the cognitive dissonance we feel when they are denied.

Logic is conservative because it does not distinguish between the ‘is’ of living organisms and the ‘is’ of the inanimate world. The ‘is’ of living organisms assumes the ultimate behavioral orientation of the biological axiom which, in human proximate form, underpins or guides the reasoned claims of moral language and behaviour.

Principle – Human values are grounded in universal biological values that may be regulated using the uniquely human form of conscious deliberation we call reason.

Principle – human values are a minded way of expressing (biological) facts

Commentary

In its most abstract, simple, and generalized form, value may be understood as a tendency for one thing to occur rather than another. Thus, wherever there is order, there is a hint of value . . . of ‘directionality’ within the potential randomicity and chaos. We glimpse this directionality in the regularities (constants, principles, or laws) of the universe that make prediction possible, and which give the universe itself a crude behavioral orientation – just the glimmer of a point of view or perspective – a teleology of the faintest kind.

This wispy directionality in the universe changed dramatically when small parts of its matter formed into units that expressed their own individual directionality. These units replicated themselves incorporating information from their external environment in a feedback loop of change (algorithm of life) that reinforced their capacity to survive, reproduce and flourish (biological axiom). These autonomous units of reproducing matter expressing a new form of individual agency in the universe are what we now call organisms and their expression of autonomy as biological agency.

The biological axiom expresses the necessary autonomous agential preconditions of existence for all organisms: it is a behavioral orientation, stance, perspective, or attitude in relation to their surroundings, a form of behavior referred to here as biological agency. Since it is these goals that motivate the behavior of all organisms they are simultaneously, and appropriately, referred to as values.

Our health as humans (and, by extension, all organisms) is regarded as self-evident: it is not a matter of philosophical or scientific speculation or contention – it is a biological truth . . . an axiom . . . it is the point of departure for everything in biology. As Richard Dawkins expresses it: ‘We are survival machines‘. This may not be a logical necessity, but it is a biological necessity.

Organisms, while maintaining their kind over many generations, also incorporated change in relation to their environments in a process of evolution. The biological axiom was the unity of purpose integrating the structures, processes, and behaviors that motivated the actions of every organism as a biological agent. The changes that occurred under replication in different environments resulted in a general increase in physical complexity and the myriad of physical forms (species) that today constitute the community of life.

Human agency evolved out of this biological agency and is therefore a form of biological agency, but its internal motivation for action derives, in part, from the brain with its conscious abstract thought, foresight, hindsight, reason, and the capacity to communicate with other humans using language. These mental properties allowed humanity to dominate planet Earth, but two factors must be taken into account when considering the power of the mind.

First, the behavior of all organisms is determined by internal processing. That is, humans share this characteristic with other organisms. What is unique is not the processing but the particular kind of processing.

Second, humans emphasize the mental aspect of their values because that is what they experience directly as the motivation for (what determines) their behavior.

Third, and most importantly, it is not internal processing but behavior that interacts directly with the world. Internal processing is minimally accessible to others. It is behavior (not internal processes, thoughts, and intentions) that is the most powerful and meaningful expression of agency. Even among humans who can communicate their internal states (feelings, attitudes, intentions) using language, we recognize that actions speak louder than words, and we all understand an angry lion. Agency is most effectively communicated through action (behavior) and behavior is universal, while conscious processing is essentially unique to humans.

Fourth, human behaviour stems from subconscious and unconscious sources – essentially the motivating factors of the biological axiom – as well as conscious intentions, and it is these sources that ground human behavior. Much human behavior is an uncomplicated expression of these universal biological values – our need for shelter, safety, a partner, food and so on. Reason is, as it were, an evolutionary tool that helps us achieve these ends. But is it correct that these values do not tell us what we ‘ought’ to do only what we are inclined to do? That normativity, as some form of collective moral code, is strictly and uniquely a human matter? I am inclined to eat large quantities of sugar but ‘ought’ I eat sugar?

The prevailing view today is that moral discourse is, of necessity, restricted to those organisms capable of conscious and rational interests and choices (humans), although some concession is sometimes given to sentient animals that can experience comfort and pain. Whether organisms other than humans can have interests’ will be discussed elsewhere in the article on environmental ethics which explores the
community of life. Humans use reason to regulate the natural instincts and intuitions inherited from our biological past.

The power and worthiness of reason is not in doubt, but it does not exist in a transcendental way above and beyond our biological values. It is still biological values that underpin my decision to eat less sugar. And, while reason’s human values prevail in proximate circumstances, they remain subordinate to ultimate biological values. The possibility of extending the ethical domain beyond its current anthropocentric domain to include the entire community of life is addressed elsewhere.

The conceptual distinction between the minded and mindless seems abrupt and absolute while organisms exist within a physical and biological continuum resulting from cosmic and biological evolution. We quickly accept the distinction between minded and mindless values while ignoring the factors that organisms with minds and those without minds have in common.

Some of the assumptions associated with the semantic cut-off that we make between the minded and mindless pre-date the theory of evolution to a time when it was believed that God created each species as separate and distinct. There was no biological connection between ‘ensouled’ organisms like humans, and the mindless organisms that were created by God to serve human ends. The division between the minded and mindless was absolute. Evolution now tells us a different story. Only since Darwin have we realized that shared physical characteristics are a consequence of descent with modification. But this principle has not yet been applied to mental phenomena. In the pre-Darwinian world of species that were immutable and discrete, the minded values of humans were unique and special. In a world of evolutionary descent with modification from a common ancestor, human values, while having unique characteristics, also share some characteristics with their evolutionary antecedents: the uniquely mindful properties of humans have arisen out of characteristics that are shared with other organisms.

The assumption that there are no values in nature was also reinforced by the post Scientific Revolution philosophical domination of science by physics and mathematics. While Aristotle saw purpose in nature, later scientists found it impossible to extract values from physics and mathematics. And, since the prevailing view was that biology is, by reduction, an extension of mathematics and physics, it too could have no real purpose, agency, or value.

All life is predicated on the necessity of the values inherent in its agency. To deny these values is to deny life itself. Denying the biological necessity of the biological axiom is logically possible, but it is biologically
incoherent in the same way that our human desire for health and happiness is not logically necessary, but self-evident. The goals (purposes, reasons, behavioral orientations, values) of the biological axiom
constitute the mindless, objective, and universal behavioral preconditions for all life. This does not deny
that humans are self-reflective, self-aware, and reasoning organisms that use words and minded
representations in ways that other organisms do not, and cannot. However, these mental phenomena are, as it were, superimposed on (are an evolutionary development of) the grounding and universal agency exhibited by all organisms, both minded and mindless. Human minded values are proximate values while mindless biological values are ultimate values. It is mindless concepts over which minded ones are layered. Human agency, purpose, values. learning, memory, reason, knowledge, purpose (etc.) are the uniquely minded evolutionary developments of characteristics that are present in rudimentary form more generally in nature. These characteristics of human agency, glimpsed more generally in nature, are not a metaphorical human creation but a result of real evolutionary connection. Science may come to recognize this, but present semantic convention does not.

Organisms are, of their very nature, manifestations of value. For an organism to exist without value is to
deny its existence. Biological values are part of what it means to be a living creature. Biological values
define and are the engine of biological agency; they are a biological necessity.

Only humans are consciously aware of the biological values of non-human organisms, not the organisms
themselves. But this does not mean that humans create these biological values or read their own values into nature. Biological values are demonstrated in the goals of organisms as expressed in their behaviour and are most succinctly summarized in the biological axiom which notes the universal propensity of living matter to survive, reproduce, and flourish. To this can be added the ultimate biological imperative alluded to by Aristotle that it is better to live than not live’. The biological axiom and biological imperative are statements of the inherent disposition of all life-they are statements, not of icgical necessity, but of biological necessity.

The sharp distinction between the minded and mindless in nature is not reflected in a similar sharp
distinction between those organisms that express value (humans) and those organisms that do not (non-humans). Instead, we see universally shared biological values that are the necessary preconditions for life. The biological axiom is a statement of both fact and value since it simultaneously describes what organisms do, and what motivates their behaviour.

Biological values are the ends or goals towards which all organisms (including their structures, processes, and behaviour) are ultimately directed, while human values are a human-specific (minded) supplementary evolutionary development of biological values.

Human values arose out of universal biological values, and this is why the idea of an oak tree, for example, having values, is not absurd. Both oak trees and humans share the (mindless) values of the biological axiom. It is not ‘as if’ oak trees have values, just that oaks do not share the uniquely human minded ones. We make value judgements in relation to non-human organisms using minded language e.g. we say an oak tree ‘wants’ water not because we believe that oak trees have minded intentions, but because we are aware that oak trees share with humans the values expressed in the biological axiom – and we express this connection using language applied to ourselves. When we use the language of intentional psychology in relation to mindless organisms this is usually, not because we think that non-human organisms experience cognitive states, but because we empathize with the biological values that we share. In behavioral terms, biological normativity is the lived expression of both unconscious (mindless) and of biological agency as the propensity to survive, reproduce, and flourish. These ultimate biological values manifest differently in each biological agent. The physical structures, processes, and behaviors adopted by a spider to obtain its life energy, produce offspring, and flourish are very different from those of a sea urchin, engage in sex for physical and emotional pleasure, and engage in cultural activity that promotes wellbeing eucalyptus tree, or the minded and proximate values of human s who eat to satisly hunger, smell and taste, and happiness.

In adopting this perspective on values, we come to realize that it is biological values that are ultimate values while human values are a proximate means to ultimate biological ends. Humans pursue the ultimate ends of the biological axiom through the proximate ends of happiness and wellbeing while human morality, while still evolutionary past.

There are many reasons why we ignore universal biological values: human arrogance, the inversion of
reason (Only humans, as reason-representers, can appreciate the mindless and wordless significance of the biological axiom as embedded in the behaviour of non-humans. Because this significance can only be appreciated by human minds does not mean that it only exists in human minds.
) , the metaphor fallacy and the fact (only appreciated since Darwin) that we ignore the physical
complexity of a value-graded world is enough to make us turn away.
(genetic) continuity and connection, the graded organic complexity, of the community of life. The sheer
We can, however, acknowledge the anthropocentrism of our human value system in several ways, most
passions or will – our universal biological values.
notably by recognizing that our much-vaunted reason is ultimately driven by our evolutionarily grounded

One major reason why we ignore and deny biological values is because, as human beings, we are not really aware of their ultimate significance, only our proximate goals. We are not consciously motivated by its (ultimate) goals of survival (our lives do not seem under threat), instead we pursue more immediate (proximate) goals. We are not mentally preoccupied with perpetuating our genes or even with the immediate problem of happiness and wellbeing.

The acceptance of the reality of biological values, like the acceptance of the reality of biological agency, will not be brought about by insisting on a change in linguistic usage – as an improvement in our semantics. This will happen gradually, but first must be the scientific acceptance of the reality of biological values as being part of the fabric of existence. This provides us with a more compelling scientific account of nature since the assimilation of human values to biological values acknowledges the uniquely mindful properties of human values while at the same time recognizing that they evolved out of, and share grounding characteristics with, their mindless evolutionary antecedents.

Our anthropocentrism persuades us to use human language (mostly the language of intentional psychology) to describe nature. This challenges us to see what is human in non-human organisms while, at the same time, dismissing real biological traits as cognitive metaphors. We would do better to invert this mode of thinking by trying to understand what it is in organisms that not only resembles human subjectivity but also makes it evolutionarily possible. Instead of looking in non-human organisms for something that is uniquely human, we must look to humans for characteristics that are shared with other organisms.

The goals that characterize biological agency demonstrate a behavioral disposition that in humans would be referred to as ‘values’. Indeed, it was these mindless ‘values’ that made human minded values evolutionarily possible. Biological ‘values’ are part of the real fabric of biological science. It is a quirk of intellectual tradition and the English language that a semantic gulf has been placed between humans and other species. While minded and mindless values are clearly different, science would be better served with an acknowledgment of their close biological connection.

Though word meanings cannot be changed at will, in science it is possible to refine categories and concepts to better represent the world; and that is what is proposed here for the notion of value. It is an intuitive usage that already has some acceptance.

First published on the internet – 1 March 2019

. . . 26 September 2023 – revision