Roger D. Masters, 1933-2023: Natural Right and Biology

Roger D. Masters died in Hanover, New Hampshire, on June 22, 2023.  He was a longtime Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.  He was the man who first stimulated my thinking about how evolutionary biology might be applied to political philosophy--and particularly, how it might solve what Leo Strauss called "the problem of natural right."

He was born in Boston in 1933.  He graduated from Harvard University in 1955.  He completed two years of military service.  Then he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1961, studying under Leo Strauss, who supervised his dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  After teaching for five years in the Political Science Department at Yale University, he began his position at Dartmouth in 1967.  He served as Chair of the Executive Committee of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research.  He was one of the founders of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences.

With the publication of his book The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton University Press, 1968), he became one of the preeminent interpreters of Rousseau.  He published translations of Rousseau.  With Christopher Kelly, he edited The Collected Writings of Rousseau.  He also wrote many articles and books on other political philosophers, including Aristotle and Niccolo Machiavelli.

He is best known for arguing that modern evolutionary biology of human nature can illuminate some of the fundamental debates in political philosophy.  One can see that in his books The Nature of Politics (1989), and Beyond Relativism: Science and Human Values (1993).

Towards the end of this life, he studied the possible effects of toxic lead on the development of the brain in ways that might promote a tendency to violence.

Roger's profound influence on me began in 1978 when I heard him present a paper on "Classical Political Philosophy and Contemporary Biology" at the meetings of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought in Chicago.  He argued that modern evolutionary biology could support Aristotle's conception of natural right.  I was fascinated.  In 1998, my book Darwinian Natural Right was in a way an elaboration of his idea.

Roger invited me to meetings of the Gruter Institute.  We were together at many gatherings of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences.  And in 1996, I participated in a NEH/NSF Summer Institute at Dartmouth College that he directed on "Biology and Human Nature."

I have written about Roger on this blog.  My fullest account of Roger's thinking was my book chapter--"Roger Masters: Natural Right and Biology"--for Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (1999),  edited by Kenneth Deutsch and John Murley.

Here are four paragraphs from the beginning and ending of that piece.

As compared with other students of Leo Strauss who became prominent political scientists, the intellectual career of Roger Masters seems strange.  As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Masters wrote his dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau under Strauss's supervision.  He then established his scholar reputation in the 1960s through his writings on Rousseau's political philosophy.  At that point, it appeared that Masters would follow the same path taken by many of Strauss's students who have devoted their lives to writing meticulous commentaries on the classic texts of political philosophy.  

But after publishing his book on Rousseau in 1968, Masters began to write about evolutionary biology.  For example, he suggested that Rousseau's account of man in the original state of nature should be compared with recent studies of orangutans as evolutionary ancestors of human beings; and he argued that Aristotle's claim that human beings are by nature political animals was confirmed by recent sociobiological theories of human evolution and animal sociality.  Most recently, he has explained Machiavelli's concept of political leadership as rooted in a natural tendency to dominance hierarchies that human beings share with other primates.  The history of political philosophy is largely a debate about human nature.  And Masters believes that debate can be clarified, if not even resolved, by appealing to Darwinian theories of human nature.  To many of Strauss's students, such ideas seem ridiculously perverse.  Yet a few Straussians have been persuaded by Masters that this turn to Darwinian biology is essential for solving what Strauss called "the problem of natural right."

In his effort to root the idea of natural right in modern natural science, and thus solve what Strauss believed was the fundamental problem of natural right--that science seems to have refuted the teleological conception of nature--Masters challenges the dichotomies that have traditionally separated the humanistic study of ethics from the scientific study of nature.  There is no absolute gap between mechanism and teleology if a full explanation of living beings requires accounting for formal and final causes as well as material and efficient causes.  There is no absolute gap between is and ought if human morality is founded on a natural moral sense.  There is no absolute gap between nature and freedom if human freedom expresses a natural human capacity for deliberate choice.  and there is no absolute gap between nature and nurture if habituation and learning fulfill the natural propensities of human beings.  If Masters is right in these claims, then the science of the human good is part of the science of human nature.

Although I find the arguments of Masters largely persuasive, I suspect that many readers will disagree.  As Strauss indicated, most contemporary scholars have responded to the apparent refutation of ancient naturalism by modern natural science in one of two ways--reductionism or dualism.  The reductionists will agree with Masters that moral feelings are governed by the emotional control centers of the brain, but they will conclude from this that belief in the objectivity of morality is only a useful illusion.  The dualists, including many of the students of Strauss, will insist that human biology is irrelevant to human ethics and politics, because human beings as rational beings differ in kind and not just in degree from all other animals, and for that reason Darwin's evolutionary account of human morality and intellect is wrong.  Yet for those of us who regard both of these opposing positions as inadequate, the alternative o0ffered by Masters in his attempt to solve the problem of natural right is one of the most exciting intellectual projects of our time.

I regret that I had little contact with Roger in the last years of his life.  I wish that I had told him how much I had benefited from our philosophic friendship.

I will remember him.