Critique 14 – Morality
Critique: “Perhaps most insufferable of all is Jaynes’s suggestion that a human sense of morality could not have predated the first millennium BC, with “the true beginning of personal responsibility.” He’s off by a factor of hundreds. There is ample evidence that an instinct for morality, justice, and even altruism is deeply wired into us by evolution, an adaptation responsive to the environment faced by our earliest ancestors, where it would have been advantageous for group survival. Indeed, a rudimentary moral sense is even found in non-human animals.”
Response: There are significant differences between innate concepts of right and wrong seen in primates and other animals and our modern conscious understanding of morality and ethics – and capacity for long term deception – which is the distinction that Jaynes makes. While some primates have a primitive sense of right and wrong, they cannot act morally or immorally. Only conscious human beings have that capacity. Robinson fails to see this distinction. For further discussion see pages 307-308 and 350-351 of The Julian Jaynes Collection, pages 275 and 286-287 of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Chapter 5 in James Cohn, The Minds of the Bible, and Daniel Dennett, “Julian Jaynes’s Software Archeology.”
Learn about about Julian Jaynes’s theory by reading our latest book, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind: Interviews with Leading Thinkers on Julian Jaynes’s Theory.