Virtue Signaling: Darwinian Politics & Free Speech

A book review of the last publication from Geoffrey Miller

I have seen some of Geoffrey’s work, and I was impressed by his analysis and knowledge. When I saw that he released a book, I was quite excited and ordered it when a paperback version was available.

I was somewhat disappointed that he did not actually write a book. Rather, it’s a collection of pieces he has previously written. The oldest is over 20 years at this point. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the essays, and the collection does make some sense in the grand scheme of the narrative he is presenting.

While I enjoyed it, I still feel like it was somewhat lazy, and the content would be better and more coherent if he had just taken the time to write a book from scratch, which wouldn’t him that much time given how much material and experience he has on the topic.

The main essay of the book, the one with the most value and that I enjoyed the most, was a paper he wrote in 2007, titled “Sexual selection for moral virtues”. It argues that moral virtues, like honesty and kindness, evolved because they are sexually attractive. They advertise genetic quality (for example, good mental health), good parenting abilities and relationship skills. Since they are hard to fake signals (because of the fitness cost), they are reliable and tend to be selected for.

The rough sketch of many of our prized virtues isn’t exclusively human. They can be traced to social primates, and sometimes just mammals in general. They can evolve by kin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selection, and more. His argument is that sexual selection specific is what amplified our moral dimension to such a great degree. While moral philosophy sees morality within actions (X is good, Y is evil), this evolutionary approach sees morality as a judgment of individual character. The point isn’t what action is moral, but rather which individual is a moral one. The paper is quite long and goes into many other facets of the sexual selection of virtue, including personality, intelligence, courtship, virtue ethics, and more. It’s well written and worth a second read which I will do at some point.

The rest of the book is smaller essays, most political related to virtue signalling and free speech. I found all of them decent, but I’m somewhat tired of the topic, and I didn’t get that much out of it. One essay is an exception, “The neurodiversity case for free speech”. While I wasn’t new to the argument, it was very well written, and an incredibly important topic that is rarely talked about. Overall it was a pleasant read, and I hope he publishes more in the future. The more evolutionary theory and the fewer politics, the better.

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Tiago V.F.