Are emergent systems moral?

What is the moral status of adaptive, evolved systems? It’s not easy to say. They’re emergent, unplanned. Morality is about choice, alternatives, consequences, and adherence to guiding principles. But evolved systems just are.

You can’t ask what the morality is of predation, of the fact that an enormous number of animals survive by devouring other animals, or the fact that many animals have developed means to avoid or resist or counteract those attampts at predation. You can ask what the morality is of bombardier beetles or skunks or parasitic wasps or intra-uterine cannibalism in sharks.

What is the morality of having males risk their lives in competition for mates, or in defense of the herd, or in maintaining physical features and displays that greatly increase their risk of death? What is the morality of having to gestate and feed a dependent organism with your own body in order to perpetuate your species, with all the costs and risks that entails?

There simply isn’t an answer to such questions. And morality, such as it is, may demand that we conform to and embrace many such evolved systems, from hunger to fear to sleep, despite the systemic and individual costs and dangers and problems. Or, at the least, life demands that we make our choices from within the constraints of such a framework.

Whatever it is that moral choice is about, it has to be about actual, tangible choices and alternatives. There’s no point in judging people for not taking alternatives that do not exist. Life is not lived in a vacuum of pure theory, although theoretical conceptualization may help us think through our options and their possible outcomes. 

    Morality, as with evolved systems, seems to be aimed toward positive outcomes, but moral principles and conclusions are not necessarily distillable from any given outcome. The term, “positive outcome”, after all, is up for debate, and is in many ways defined and constrained by the evolved systems themselves, established in some manner and time to which we do not have access. We didn’t get to vote on most of what makes up the business of the biological world, the mechanisms that regulate it, or the principles that guide it.

So how do the systems know what they are aiming at? That also is up for debate. Why does life seek certain outcomes, and what outcomes is it seeking? Insofar as life seeks the preservation of life, it has no trouble whatsoever accomplishing it by means of death, in fact by means of mostly death. Apparently the conditions of the universe are such that it is necessary and beneficial to do so. In order for the tiny fraction of life that exists today to exist, it required the deaths of a million times what it is.

  For a single, simple species to propagate and survive, the majority of all its young must die just to provide a few surviving adults, and those adults must be the descendents of all the previous generations who have died and been left behind, and all kinds of other forms of life must die to sustain it during its lifetime, and in its own body scores of cells must die every day to be replaced by those that replace them, and finally they too will die. Life is but the tip of an iceberg keeping itself above the waves moment to moment in the storm, supported beneath every moment by a vast, depthless mountain of death that descends to the deepest abyss.