Are Rape, Polygyny, and Unjust War Desirable and Thus Good for Homer's Men?

THE GOOD IS THE DESIRABLE

I have been persuaded by Aristotle that “the good is whatever is desirable for its own sake” (Rhetoric, 1362a22; NE, 1113a10, 1139a36-b6).  In his biological studies, Aristotle saw that in their voluntary activities, animals move to satisfy their desires in the light of their information about opportunities and threats in their particular circumstances (On the Movement of Animals).  This does not mean that the good is whatever an animal happens to desire at any moment, because an animal can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable.  Furthermore, what is desirable differs for each kind of animal, because each species has its own species-typical range of desires.  What is desirable also differs for different individuals with different natural temperaments and propensities.  

Human beings have a distinctive range of natural desires, and they are unique in their capacity for deliberate choice in choosing to intelligently manage their desires for the fullest and harmonious satisfaction of their desires over a whole life, which requires prudence (practical reasoning) in judging what is desirable for particular individuals in particular circumstances.

There are at least 20 natural desires: human beings generally desire (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identity, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social status, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) social membership, (10) political rule, (11) courage in war, (12) health, (13) beauty, (14) property, (15) speech, (16) practical arts, (17) aesthetic arts, (18) storytelling, (19) religious transcendence, and (20) intellectual understanding.

Homer's men went to war so that they could win the glory of courageous fighting and then rape the enemy's women and take them as enslaved concubines.  If the good is the desirable, and if Homer's men fought in unjust wars to satisfy their natural desires for sexual mating, social status, and courage in war, was this good for them?  

No.  Lacking good practical judgment, they mistakenly desired what was not desirable for them.  That's why Homer's epics are tragic stories of heroes who suffer from their imprudent choices.  Sexual mating, social status, and courage in war are not truly desirable if they are pursued in such a way as to contradict the other natural desires.  For example, men who satisfy their desire for sexual mating by raping or abducting the wives of other men will provoke violent retaliation by those men who desire the justice of reciprocity--as in Menelaus' retaliation against Troy for Paris' abduction of Helen.

The Trojan War was deeply tragic because both sides lost.  With the fall of Troy, the Trojans were either massacred or enslaved.  And it is said that the best of the Greek warriors were killed in the war (Odyssey 3.108).  At the end of The Iliad, when Priam meets with Achilles to beg for Hector's body, both Priam and Achilles weep for the suffering the war has caused (24.475-550).  None of the Greeks who survived the war could recall the war without tearful regret, which included Nestor, Odysseus, and Menelaus (Odyssey 3.102-115, 4.75-112, 8.521-35).  And when Odysseus met Achilles in the underworld, Achilles regretted his imprudent choice to die fighting in the war for the sake of a glorious fame after death rather than living a long, peaceful life on earth: "Never try to reconcile me to death, glorious Odysseus.  I should choose, so I might live on earth, to serve as the servant of another, some landless man with hardly enough to live on, rather than to be lord over all the dead that have perished" (11.489-92).

WAR AND PEACE

On at least two occasions during the war, Trojans and Greeks attempted to end the war so that they could enjoy the peace they all desired.  At the beginning of Book 3 of The Iliad, Menelaus sees Paris on the battlefield, and he runs towards him "thinking that he could get vengeance" for Paris's abduction of his wife.  Paris is so shaken with fear that he retreats to avoid being killed (3.21-37).  Seeing this, Hector--Paris's brother--shames him: 

Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling, better had you never been born, or killed unwedded. . . . Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels, assembling oarsmen to help you, you sailed over the water, and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a pretty woman from a remote land, whose relatives by marriage are strong spearmen, but bringing a big sorrow to your father, your city, and all our people [demos], to yourself shame but pleasing to your enemies?  And now you would not stand up against Menelaus, loved by Ares?  Thus, you would learn what manner of warrior he is whose lovely wife you have taken.  The gifts of Aphrodite will not help you--your lyre, your hair, and your attractiveness--when you are lying mingled with the dust.  But the Trojans are such cowards!  Were they not, they would have dressed you in a shirt of rocks for all the evil you have done to us (3.39-57).

"Shirt of rocks" is a euphemism for death by stoning. 

Paris responds by saying that Hector has rightly scolded him and not beyond what he deserves.  He does not attempt to justify what he did in abducting Helen and provoking the Greeks to attack Troy.  

He then proposes that he and Menelaus should meet in single combat to the death, so that whoever wins will take Helen and all her wealth.  The Trojans and Greeks should swear oaths of friendship and peace.  After the duel is decided, the Trojans can stay in Troy in peace, and the Greeks can "return home to horse-pasturing Argos and Achaia the land of fair women" (3.59-75).

Hector was happy to accept this proposal.  He began separating the Trojan and Greek warriors and telling them to be seated.  He explained the coming duel and how this would allow all of them to go home in peace.  

Menelaus agreed: "I think the Argives and Trojans can go free of each other at last.  You have suffered much evil for the sake of my quarrel since Paris began it.  As for that one of us two to whom death and doom are given, let him die; the rest of you be made friends with each other."  He asked for Priam to seal the pledges of friendship with sacred oaths because his sons were not to be trusted.  "Always it is, that the hearts in the younger men are unstable, but when an elder man is among them, he looks behind him and in front, so that all comes out far better for both sides."

It is said that both the Greeks and the Trojans were "joyful, hoping now to be rid of all the sorrow of warfare" (3.76-112).  They stripped off their armor and laid it on the ground around them.  They were all seated in silence.  The fighting had ended.

Priam called for his senior advisors, "the elders of the people [demos]," who were known to be "men of prudence" who were the leaders of the Trojans.  When they saw Helen approaching them, they spoke to one another: 

The Trojans and the Greeks in their fine armor should not be blamed for suffering so long for such a woman, being as she is.  It is uncanny how she seems to look like the immortal goddesses.  But still, though she is like this, let her sail away, or she may bring about catastrophe for us and for our children in the future (3.156-60).

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle cited this passage in Homer as illustrating how in the exercise of practical judgment or prudence, we must be on guard against pleasure, because "when pleasure is on trial, we are not impartial judges."  (Here the Greek word adekastoi for "impartial" literally means "unbribed.")  "The right course is therefore to feel towards pleasure as the elders of the people felt toward Helen, and to apply their words to her on every occasion; for it we roundly bid her be gone, we shall be less likely to err" (1109b8-13).  Homer's heroes allowed their lustful desire for sexual pleasure and women's beauty to distort their judgment about when courage in war is truly desirable.  This explains why, Aristotle thought, that while the courage of Homer's heroes resembled true courage in being moved by the desire for the noble and the sense of shame, it was not really true courage as dictated by reason or prudential judgment (1115b15-21, 1116a15-30).  The Trojan elders of the people saw that fighting courageously in a war over Helen was not true courage because it did not serve the best interests of the Trojan people and was therefore imprudent. 

Before the duel began, there were two kinds of appeals to divine providential justice.  Agamemnon prayed to Zeus and other gods to enforce the sacred oaths that they had taken, so that the gods should punish anyone who breaks the oath to accept the outcome of the duel (3.275-291).

Another kind of appeal to divine justice was when the "common people" (laoi)--the ordinary Greek and Trojan warriors--prayed to Zeus:

Father Zeus, nursed on Ida, you are the most magnificent and greatest!  Whichever of these two men is to blame for what is happening to Greece and Troy, let that man die and so descend to Hades, and may we have a truce and pact of friendship (3.320-324).

This was followed by Menelaus praying to Zeus:

Lord Zeus!  Grant that I punish this man who wronged me first, this godlike Paris!  Bring him down low beneath my hands, so that all people in the future shrink from harming a host who treated them with friendship (3.352-355). 

Tragically, the hope of the Trojans and the Greeks that a duel between Menelaus and Paris would resolve the dispute over Helen and end the war was frustrated.  In the duel, Menelaus got the upper hand, but Aphrodite rescued Paris, scooped him from the battlefield, and put him in his bedroom, where Aphrodite forced Helen to join him.  Menelaus ranged like a wild beast looking for Paris.  "None of the Trojans or their noble allies could find where Paris was--though if they had, they would not have concealed him out of friendship.  Indeed, the Trojans detested Paris, as if he were black death" (3.450-54).

Agamemnon spoke to the Trojans, saying that since Menelaus had clearly won the duel, they should return Helen and her treasure and pay an extra compensation as a lesson to people in the future.  The Greeks shouted their agreement.

But then, in Book 4, the gods gathered around Zeus, and they argued over whether they should stir up war again in Troy or allow the warring sides to reconcile in peace.  Hera and Athena wanted the Trojans to be destroyed, and they persuaded Zeus to send Athena down to Troy to spur the Trojans to violate the truce, which would provoke a resumption of the war.

Athena fell to earth as a shooting star, and all the Trojan and Greek warriors who saw this were amazed.  They spoke to one another saying: "Either there will be evil war and dreadful battle, or else friendship will be set between both sides by Zeus, who is appointed to serve up war to human beings" (4.82-84).

Athena entered the crowd disguised as a Trojan named Laodocus, who was looking for Pandarus, the leader of the Trojan allies from Zelea, who was known for his skill as an archer.  She told him that if he shot and killed Menelaus with an arrow, Paris would surely give him great gifts.

"So spoke Athena, and she persuaded his mindless mind [phrenas aphroni]" (4.104).  Phrenai refers to the organs of sense, judgment, understanding, or thought, usually located in the chest.  Aphronos means "lacking in phrenai" or "foolish."  So Homer suggests that this was the mindless mistake of an imprudent man.  Pandarus did shoot an arrow at Menelaus that wounded him, but Menelaus survived.  

Believing that the Trojans had broken their sacred oath of friendship, Agamemnon roused the Greeks to fight.  But he had to persuade the leaders of each military company to persuade their warriors to resume the war.  And "when he saw men shirking from the danger of hateful war, he scolded them in anger" (4.240-241).

The Greek warrior Antilochus was the first to kill a Trojan when he killed Echepolus, a Trojan leader (4.456).  Apollo shouted to the Trojans to enter the battle, while Athena roused the Greeks to fight.

After gory descriptions of some of the fighting in this first day of the new war, Homer concludes Book 4: "So many Greeks and Trojans on that day lay face-down in the dust beside each other" (4.545).

This sequence of events in Books 3 and 4 of The Iliad manifests the fundamental tragedy of the Trojan War and of Homer's world generally.  The tragedy is that Homer's men stumble mindlessly into unjust violence and war despite the fact that their social structure of decision-making allows them to recognize the desirability of peace and the need for moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  That tragedy is deepened by the failure of the gods to support those impartial rules of justice that would peacefully resolve disputes if they were enforced by punishment of those violating the rules.

THE ONE, THE FEW, AND THE MANY

I have written about how the natural desire for political rule often leads to a social structure of public decision-making in which power is distributed between three groups--the one, the few, and the many.  Both the Greeks and Trojans show that three-part structure of power.  

First, there is one preeminent leader--Agamemnon for the Greeks, Priam for the Trojans.  This preeminent leader is often called the basileus.  This is sometimes translated as "king."  But "chief" might be a better translation.

Second, there are a few high-status men who are "leaders" (hegemones) of the community.  This includes the council of elders and the leaders of each company of warriors.  So, for example, Odysseus is the leader of the men he brought to Troy from Ithaca.

Third, the "common people" (designated by the Greek words demos and laoi) constitute the majority of the people in the community, who are not leaders, but who do have some power in so far as they can express their opinions, and they must be persuaded to obey the leaders.  And so, the ordinary Greek and Trojan warriors could shout their support for the truce to end the war, and when the truce was broken, they had to be persuaded by their leaders to resume the war.  While this is certainly not a democracy in any strict sense, the demos do have a voice in decision-making.  We might see here the early roots of democracy in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean civilizations of the Bronze Age, which will eventually evolve into Athenian democracy.

IMPARTIAL RULES OF ACTION

We can also see here the evolution of laws as moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  

The Greeks and the Trojans have to choose a side in the conflict between Menelaus and Paris.  It's not surprising that the Greeks take the side of the Greek Menelaus.  But it's surprising that the Trojans don't take the side of the Trojan Paris.  The Trojans hate Paris for his bad conduct in abducting Helen and for thus provoking the Greek attack on Troy.  Even Paris's brother Hector condemns him and says that the Trojans should stone him to death.  Amazingly, everyone blames Paris as the cause of the war, while no one blames Menelaus because they all assume that he is justified in taking vengeance on Paris.

They seem to have adopted the impartial moral rule that anyone who is guilty of raping or abducting another man's wife should be punished.  This rule is impartial because it applies to anyone guilty of such bad conduct.  Even if the perpetrator is your brother or a member of a powerful family, you must agree to his punishment.

In this case, Paris' punishment would have come from being defeated by Menelaus in the duel, except that the gods allowed Aphrodite to save Paris from being killed, and then the gods allowed Athena to trick Pandarus into attacking Menelaus and provoking a resumption of the war.

THE FUTILITY OF PRAYING FOR DIVINE JUSTICE

Homer shows us that the Greeks and Trojans were mistaken in appealing to the gods to enforce justice.  They prayed to the gods to enforce the religious oaths supporting the truce and to decide the guilt of Paris or Menelaus through trial by combat.  The gods answered these prayers by tricking a man into violating his oath and by saving Paris from defeat in the duel.

Previously, I have written about the problem of relying on divine revelation to resolve conflicts in "The Last Duel" -- the movie and the book.  It's about the last legal trial by combat in France in 1386.  

The film stars Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight who challenges Jacques Le Gris (played by Adam Driver) to a legal duel after Carrouges's wife, Marguerite (played by Jodie Comer), accuses Le Gris of raping her.  Ben Affleck stars as Count Pierre d'Alencon, the lord to whom Carrouges and Le Gris are pledged as vassals.

In the Middle Ages, in legal cases where it was difficult for the courts to reach a decision, one of the parties in the dispute could challenge the other to a duel, in which God would intervene to allow the innocent party to kill the guilty party, who would be condemned to eternal damnation.  In this case, Carrouges was fighting as the champion of his wife, so that if he were killed, this would show God's judgment that both he and his wife were guilty of lying under oath, and Marguerite would be immediately stripped naked and burned at the stake.  Both of their souls would be eternally punished in Hell, while Le Gris's soul would win eternal reward in Heaven.

I have argued that this story--both in the book and in the movie--suggests that we cannot rely on God's Revelation of the truth to resolve legal and moral conflicts.  Rather, we must rely on our human reason to search for the truth.  To decide whether Marguerite was telling the truth about Le Gris raping her, we must use our reason in examining the evidence to decide whether it is probable or not that she was telling the truth.

Similarly, Homer suggests that human beings must formulate and enforce impartial rules of justice on their own without expecting divine support for justice.  If Homer's men had understood this, the Trojans would have stoned Paris to death, they would have punished Pandarus for violating the truce, and they would have negotiated with the Greeks to preserve the truce.

They would have seen that while courage in a just war is desirable and thus good, courage in an unjust war is not.

But, of course, if this had happened, Homer's story of the Trojan War would not have been the epic tragedy that it is.

Was This the Face that Launched the Thousand Ships? Homeric Fighting over Beautiful Women

In Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus, Faustus conjures up the spirit of Helen of Troy and says: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"  

Many readers of Homer have asked the same question--with the same hint of disbelief.  Was this the face that launched over a thousand Greek ships to Troy for a ten-year long war?  Surely so many men would not engage in such a destructive war just to settle a dispute over one woman. 

But as Jonathan Gottschall has pointed out in The Rape of Troy, the primary conflicts in the Iliad and the Odyssey are over sexual access to women.  Moreover, Homer's men compete not just for any women but for beautiful women.  Homer also suggests that this competition for access to women was rendered especially intense by the shortage of available women.

Helen was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world.  She was the daughter of Zeus and Leda.  She married Menelaus of Sparta.  Her abduction by Paris of Troy (or perhaps her elopement with him) started the Trojan War.  But this is only one of many examples in the Iliad and the Odyssey of men attempting to gain sexual access to women claimed by other men.  The Greek warriors fought the Trojans not just to recover Helen for Menelaus but with the expectation that with the fall of Troy the Greeks could rape and enslave the Trojan women as their concubines, which they did.

And, of course, the primary conflict in the Odyssey arises from the suitors' meddling with women that Odysseus claims as his exclusive sexual property--his wife Penelope and his enslaved concubines.  Eventually, Odysseus massacres all the suitors and kills the twelve slave women who have been raped or seduced by the suitors.  He tells Telemachus and two male servants: "Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them.  They will forget the things the suitors made them do with them in secret, through Aphrodite" (Odyssey 22.442-45).

Now it is true that Homer's men are competing with one another not just for women but also for wealth and social status.  But these proximate categories of competition--for status, wealth, and women--all serve the ultimate goal of enhanced reproductive success.  Wealthier high-status men have more sexual access to women, which means greater reproductive fitness.

Men with wealth and high status could be polygynous.  Although Homer's world was legally monogamous in that a man could have only one wife, it was effectively polygynous in that a man could have exclusive sexual access to multiple women, including enslaved concubines.  As a consequence of this polygynous mating by rich and powerful men, many low-status men had no mates at all.

Gottschall shows that the violent competition among the men for sexual access to women was a consequence of a shortage of available young women relative to young men.  This would explain why so many unmarried young men were willing to go to war or join raiding parties with the hope of capturing women.  

There were two reasons for this shortage of female reproductive capacity--the polygynous institution of slave-concubinage that allowed high-status men to monopolize many women and female infanticide (killing female infants either by abandoning them or by feeding the boys more than the girls).

Gottschall concedes that the practice of female infanticide is never explicitly acknowledged in Homer's poems.  But the poems do convey the cultural preference for sons over daughters.  They also suggest that in many families sons outnumbered daughters.

Priam's sons outnumber his daughters four to one; Zeus mentions many illegitimate sons and no illegitimate daughters (Iliad 14.312-28); among the dead 'wives of the might' (11.227) that parade by Odysseus in the underworld we hear of seventeen sons and only one daughter (Odyssey 11.23-332); Nausicaa is apparently an only daughter among five brothers (Odyssey 6.57-65); Briseis mentions three brothers and no sisters (Iliad 19.291-300); Andromache mentions seven brothers and no sisters (Iliad 6.414-30); Hector, Sarpedon, Achilles, and other young warriors have sons and no daughters; and, while we never hear of Nestor's sisters, we know he has eleven brothers along with seven sons (11.692-93) (Gottschall 2008, 128).

The strongest predictor of violence within and between societies is a male-biased sex ration--especially when the number of available young men exceeds the number of available young women.  There is a good biological reason for this: unmarried men have, on average, higher levels of circulating testosterone than married men of the same age.  Testosterone levels also drop when men become fathers and care for their children.  We can assume, therefore, that Homer's world was especially violent because it was saturated with testosterone, particularly in those young men who went off to war hoping to capture women that they could rape and enslave as their concubines.  Charles Darwin recognized this: "When, owing to female infanticide, the women of a tribe were few, the habit of capturing wives from neighboring peoples would naturally arise" (Descent of Man [2004], 660).

Escaping from Homer's world of manly violence, the best way to lower the violence in any society is to enforce a strictly monogamous marriage system, with a roughly equal ratio of available men to available women, so that men are equal in their chance to find a sexual mate.  Indeed, as I will argue in a future post, the evolutionary spread of monogamy among the modern Western liberal societies was largely responsible for the declining violence in those societies.

I will also have to show that while the good is the desirable, what Homer's men desire--rape, polygyny, and unjust war--are not truly desirable and thus not good.

Why Do Homeric Men Fight So Much? "Don't Ask Such a Stupid Question! It's Women! We Fight Over Women!"

Prompted by the popularity of Christopher Nolan's movie based on Homer's Odyssey, the Iliad and the Odyssey have become bestselling books.  Surely many of those people now reading (or rereading) Homer's epic poems will ask the one question that Homer's readers have been asking for thousands of years:  Why?  Why do Homer's men fight so much?  

Some of the readers might also think about how this question about the male warrior culture of Homer's world can be generalized as a question about the human nature of male violence: why is it universally true--across time and across cultures--that most of the perpetrators and victims of violence are men and not women?

This is a perplexing question because male violence is so self-destructive that it seems that everyone suffers from it--everyone loses.  The men in Homer's poems clearly recognize that a peaceful life--with the pleasures of home, wives, and children--is more desirable than a life of "terrible warfare" (Iliad 2.291-96, 22.64; Odyssey 6.180-85).  So it's hard to understand why they don't choose to live a more peaceful life.  

Of course, men like Achilles and Odysseus fight because the heroic warrior wins fame (kleos) and honor (time).  But both Achilles and Odysseus weep when they think about their suffering lives (Iliad, 24.508-555; Odyssey, 8.520-585, 9.1-20).  And when Odysseus sees Achilles in the underworld, Achilles tells him that he regrets his choice to die heroically and win immortal glory in the Trojan war rather than to live a long life in peace: "I would prefer to be a workman, hired by a poor man on a peasant farm, than rule as king of all the dead" (Odyssey, 11.489-492).

To the question of why they fight, Homer's men seem to answer that they have no choice--that events are beyond their control.  Odysseus declares: "We are men to whom Zeus gave the fate of living through hard wars, from youth to old age, until we perish, each of us" (Iliad, 14.85-87).  But this begs the question:  why does Zeus give them this fate, and why do they resign themselves to this fate?

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin's answer was what he called the "law of battle": "With savages, for instance the Australians, the women are the constant cause of war both between members of the same tribe and between distinct tribes.  So no doubt it was in ancient times; nam fuit ante Helenam mulier teterrima belli causa. ['For even before Helen of Troy a woman was a most hideous cause of war.']" (627).  Darwin concluded from this "that the greater size, strength, courage, pugnacity, and energy of man, in comparison with woman, were acquired during primeval times, and have subsequently been augmented, chiefly through the contests of rival males for the possession of the females" (674).

Anthropologists have studied many foraging bands and horticulturalist tribes who live by Darwin's "law of battle."  For example, the Yanomami are an indigenous tribal people of the Amazonian rainforest who live as foraging horticulturalists, and they have been called the "fierce people" because 25% to 40% of all male deaths are caused by war.  When anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon asked one Yanomamo man why they were always fighting, the man thought this was a ridiculous question: "What?  Don't ask such a stupid question!  It is women!  Women!  We fight over women!" (Chagnon 1979, 87).  Chagnon confirmed this when he found that the most successful warriors had the largest number of offspring. 

But why is it men fighting over women rather than women fighting over men?  The Darwinian explanation of this was best developed by Robert Trivers in his Parental Investment Theory of sexual selection (1972).  Females typically invest more in reproduction than do males, and thus the greater parental investment of the females becomes a valuable resource for the males who invest less, and consequently the males will compete among themselves for access to those females' reproductive capacity.  

The difference in parental investment starts with the different sizes of the gametes.  The biological definition of a female is the member of the species with larger sex cells, while the male is the member with smaller sex cells.  Females have a few large and expensive eggs.  Males have many small and cheap sperm.  From the beginning, therefore, reproduction is usually more costly for women than for men.  And once an egg is fertilized, the mother must invest in nine months of pregnancy, followed by years of feeding and rearing her offspring.  Consequently, women need to be discriminating in their choice of mates--hoping to find a male willing and able to invest more in the offspring than just a sperm.

By contrast, men can attempt to produce many offspring with multiple women.  But if every man attempts this, some men will succeed, and other men will not reproduce at all.  It comes down to supply and demand, with a shortage of female reproductive capacity relative to male demand.  As a result, men are inclined to engage in risky, even deadly, competition with other men for access to scarce female reproductive capacity.  Of course, most men most of the time are not fully conscious of their being driven by violent competition with other men for reproductive success.  But evolution has shaped male psychology to fight for sexual access to women and thus maximize their reproductive fitness even without men being fully aware that the ultimate goal of what they are doing is reproductive success.

That this Darwinian explanation of male violence applies to Homer's heroic ethic of masculinity is well argued by Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (2008).  That will be the topic for my next post.

Trump Is a Narcissistic Political Imposter Driving America to Geopolitical Defeat and National Bankruptcy

I have written about the evolution of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.  But I have also written about how Donald Trump's grandiose narcissism could threaten the two pillars of the Liberal Enlightenment--liberal constitutionalism and liberal internationalism.  Now, in the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan--Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump--we have an insider's account of the first year and a half of Trump's second term that shows how Trump's quest for absolute power over the whole world has exploded the liberal norms of constitutionalism and internationalism.  

But Haberman and Swan's analysis of Trump and his presidency falls short in many ways.  For example, they rightly stress the importance for Trump of his claim to be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," but they mistakenly suggest that he is right about this.  They don't see how Trump's disastrous war against Iran shows that he is not as powerful as he claims to be.  They don't see that America's military defeat in Iran is part of a general decline in America's global power caused by Trump that could allow China to become the new geopolitical superpower.  

Haberman and Swan also ignore Trump's massive increases in deficit spending that are driving the U.S. to a colossal debt crisis, which is another example of Trump's political incompetence. 

Haberman and Swan don't recognize that Trump is a narcissistic political imposter who has failed as a political leader just as he has failed as a businessman.  Trump is a con man, and his claim that he has always been a "winner" in both business and politics is all part of the con.  Haberman should be able to recognize this because her previous book on Trump was entitled Confidence Man!

Mary Trump (Trump's niece) is better than Haberman and Swan in explaining Trump's psychological profile as a narcissistic psychopath produced by his father's abusive parenting.

MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN!

Haberman and Swan write about a conversation between Trump and Tucker Carlson.  Carlson warned him not to go to war with Iran.  Trump answered: "We're not doing that."  Carlson responded: "Good, because the only thing that can blow up your administration is if you get into a war with Iran. Your voters don't want any more wars. . . This is a trap set by your enemies.  These people fucking hate you.  And once you get in, it's very hard to get out of it.  And that'll wreck your presidency.  That'll wreck everything.  You won't be able to do anything."  Trump then said: "I don't think there's ever been an American President as powerful as I am."  Carlson replied, "Certainly not since FDR. Really, the only thing that could wreck it is war with Iran" (74-75).

Notice the subtle point in this exchange.  Carlson was warning Trump that going to war with Iran would expose the limits of his power because he would lose the support of his voters, and he would not be able to win the war.  Trump refused to accept this suggestion that his power was limited by saying that no President had ever been as powerful as he was.  Carlson answered by saying sure you're at least as powerful as FDR, but even so, you're not powerful enough to successfully fight a war with Iran without destroying your presidency.

In contrast to Carlson's warnings to Trump about the limits of his power, Benjamin Netanyahu flattered Trump by telling him how powerful he was as America's Commander-in-Chief, and then insisting that the most dramatic display of his power would be to join Israel in a war against Iran.

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Trump was 32 years old, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States; and Trump throughout those years has complained that America has been humiliated by the failure of every President to defeat Iran.  Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump at the White House at the beginning of his second term, and he immediately began working on Trump to persuade him that he could be the first president powerful enough to defeat Iran in cooperation with Israel.

When Israel first launched its 12-day war of bombing Iran on June 12, 2025, the U.S. was officially not involved.  But Netanyahu knew that once Trump saw the apparent success of Israel's campaign on Fox News, he would not be satisfied to be a mere bystander to history, and he would have to jump into the war so that he could be the center of attention.  Specifically, Netanyahu needed Trump to drop "the big one"--the thirty-thousand-pound bunker-busting bomb that only the U.S. has.  When Trump finally decided to enter the fighting for one day on June 21 ("Operation Midnight Hammer"), 14 of these bunker-busting bombs were dropped on Iran's Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant and the Natanz Nuclear Facility.  This was the first time this bomb was used in combat.  Trump announced that Iran's nuclear program had been "totally obliterated."  

Trump also suggested that it was time for "regime change" in Iran.  On Truth Social, he wrote: "It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change.'  But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???  MIGA!!!"

When Trump was asked how helping Israel fight Iran could be consistent with his theme of "America First," he answered: "Well, considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,' and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that" (194).  In other words, "America First" means whatever Trump says it means, and his followers will have to accept that.  

That's his ultimate power: he speaks into existence whatever he happens to want at any moment.  Haberman and Swan quote one senior administration official as saying privately that U.S. policy on any given issue is "whatever Donald Trump said last on the subject," which will then change "in twenty-four hours, or in two hours, or in one minute" (190).

Within a few months after "Operation Midnight Hammer," Netanyahu was back asking Trump to join him in a larger war against Iran.  On February 11, 2026, Netanyahu met in the Situation Room, a restricted space in the lower level of the White House, with Trump and a small group of senior advisors along with intelligence and military officials.  Netanyahu made an hour-long presentation that argued four points.  First, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, could be killed by an airstrike on his compound.  Second, Iran's military power--particularly, its ballistic missile program--could be crippled by airstrikes.  Third, an intense bombing campaign would provoke a popular rebellion to overthrow the regime.  And, finally, a new leader, such as Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last shah, could take power as a secular ruler who could overturn the theocratic government.

The next day, February 12, Trump had another meeting in the Situation Room.  Two senior intelligence officers briefed him on the U.S. intelligence analysis of Netanyahu's presentation.  They judged that the first two objectives--killing the Ayatollah and crippling Iran's ballistic missile program were achievable.  But the second two objectives--a popular revolution overthrowing the government and the installation of a new secular leader--were ridiculously unrealistic.

Trump suggested that for him achieving the first two objectives would be enough to justify going to war.  But Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about two problems.  A major war against Iran would deplete stockpiles of American munitions and missile interceptors that had already been reduced by years of support for Ukraine and Israel.  This would make it difficult for the U.S. to engage in any future war--such as defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.  The second problem was that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz and impede the shipments of oil.  Trump dismissed this because he assumed that Iran would surrender and not have the power to shut the strait.

On the morning of February 28, at 2:30 a.m., Trump announced the war on Iran ("Operation Epic Fury") with a post on Truth Social, with an eight-minute video.  He expected that the war would be over in a few weeks.

Of course, we now have seen that General Caine's two warnings have come true.  Iran's closing of the Strait of Hormuz has been its greatest weapon in defeating the U.S.  And the U.S. now has a severe shortage of munitions and interceptor missiles that will take many years to replenish.

The worst consequence is that Xi Jinping now sees an opportunity to invade Taiwan and to make other moves towards establishing China as the geopolitical superpower to replace the U.S.  Now that Trump has wasted U.S. military resources in the Iran war, while also breaking up the global alliances that have supported U.S. global power over the past seventy years, the U.S. cannot check the expansion of Chinese power.

TRUMP'S ASSAULT ON LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

Trump's war on Iran illustrates his disregard for liberal constitutionalism because only Congress has the constitutional power to declare war, and yet not only did Trump not get a congressional declaration of war, he didn't even consult with Congress about the war, or even announce the war before a joint session of Congress.

Trump's war on Iran also illustrates his scorn for liberal internationalism because he did not seek the support of NATO, the UN, or any nation other than Israel.  Nor did he try to justify the war under international law.

A few weeks before announcing the war, Trump was interviewed by the New York Times.  He was asked if there were any limits on his powers as Commander in Chief.  He answered: "Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It's the only thing that can stop me.  I don't need international law."  Notice that he does not appeal to morality in general but to "my own" morality.

Not only is Trump's power unconstrained by international law, but it is also unconstrained by constitutional law.  For example, I have written about how Trump has in effect denied the constitutional right to due process of law--the Fifth Amendment right that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Trump has the absolute sovereignty that comes from combining the executive, legislative, and judicial powers in his hands.  Trump makes laws by signing executive decrees.  Trump executes those laws that he has made by ordering executive officials to carry them out according to his directions.  Trump judges the laws by interpreting them for himself and deciding how they apply to particular cases and refusing to obey judicial orders that go against his will.  Trump is thus carrying out the Claremont Institute's Red Caesar Plan for America.

That violates the fundamental principle of liberal constitutionalism that to avoid tyranny governmental power must be limited by a system of countervailance with separation of powers and checks and balances between the branches of government, so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition," as James Madison said in Federalist Number 51.

"THE MOST POWERFUL MAN THAT THE PLANET HAS EVER KNOWN"?

Trump's ambition, however, cannot be satisfied by the limited powers granted to the President in the American Constitution.  As he told Haberman and Swan when they interviewed him on March 16 of this year, it is not even enough for him to be the most powerful president who has ever lived, because he must be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," which is what "a historian" had told him he was.  Haberman and Swan later found out that this "historian" was not a professional historian but the long-time caddie for the golfer Gary Player.

Trump had attended an event honoring Player.  Player's caddie asked to speak to the audience to say something about the President.  Later, the caddie sent Trump a two-page text of his speech.  Trump gave copies of this document to Haberman and Swan, and then he began reading from it.  The opening line was "Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known--by a long way."  The caddie historian went down a list of history's most powerful men--Alexander the Great, Caesar, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.  None of them had the global power of Trump.

Haberman and Swan observe:

What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon--and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear.  He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed, between those who liberated and those who enslaved.  What mattered was that they had had huge power--and that he had more (412).

When I read this, I was reminded of my argument that Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Speech in 1838 had warned about the "towering genius" of people like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon who would destroy a constitutional republic like America for the sake of the glory coming from having absolute power, and he predicted that someone like this--someone like Trump--would destroy the constitutional order.

Haberman and Swan conclude their book by agreeing with John Judis's argument that Trump is one of Hegel's "world-historical individuals" like Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon.  And thus they leave their readers with the impression that Trump can rightly be compared with such great men of history, and that he might even be right to claim to be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known."

But this ignores the fact that while the power of people like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon came from their extraordinary competence as political and military leaders, Trump's entire life has shown his incompetence leading to a record of failure.  His bragging that he has always be a "winner" who has never lost is a boastful fantasy that is all part of the con.

THE NARCISSITIC POLITICAL IMPOSTER AND HIS BANKRUPTCIES

Some years ago, I claimed that the fundamental argument in Trump's political campaign rhetoric depends on his myth of himself as the self-made multi-billionaire businessman.  This argument can be put into the form of a syllogism:

Major premise:  Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who knows how to win is elected president.

Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his shrewdness in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.

Conclusion:  Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.

Both of the premises are open to dispute.  I have challenged the minor premise by pointing to the evidence that Trump's business career shows many failures from his imprudent decisions, that he was saved from ruin by his father's life-long transfer of money to him, and so he is not the self-made billionaire that he claims to be.  He had a long string of bankruptcies that would have destroyed him were it not for the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to him from his father.  This started early.  By age 3, the young Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars as an employee of his father.  By age 8, Donald was a millionaire. 

I have also suggested that Trump's financial imprudence as a businessman has been continued in his financial imprudence as a president who has promoted reckless increases in the federal budget deficits and the national debt, which contradicts his promise in his first campaign that he would balance the federal budget and even pay down the national debt.  Once he became president, he never again mentioned that campaign promise.

Trump has added to the national debt at a faster rate than any president in American history.  Before his first term as president, the national debt was under $20 trillion.  Now the national debt is approaching $40 trillion.  The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2026 will be over $2 trillion.  Under Trump, the government has been borrowing about $6 billion per day.  Trump is driving America to national bankruptcy.

That's why I call him narcissistic political imposter.  He boasts that he, and he alone, can lead America to greatness.  But since he lacks any competence for prudent governance, he is actually leading America into decline at home and abroad.  

"THE TERRIFIED LITTLE BOY"

In her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump has offered the best explanation for why her uncle is the man he is.  Donald is the product of his father's abusive parenting:

"Nothing is ever good enough.  This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.  He knows that he has never been loved" (198).

"Though Donald's fundamental nature hasn't changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he's under has changed dramatically.  It's not the stress of the job, because he isn't doing the job--unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.  It's the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing--about politics, civics, or simple human decency--that requires an enormous amount of work" (199).

"Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy.  At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father" (202).

"Donald withdraws to his comfort zones--Twitter, Fox News--casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker.  He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own.  But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy" (210). 

Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey": The Platonic Censorship of Homer and the Bourgeois Virtues of Liberalism

 

                                          Surveying the Filmed Adaptations of Homer's Odyssey

In 1956, I was seven years old, and my parents took me to see the new movie Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas starring as Ulysses (the Romanized name for Homer's Odysseus).  I was fascinated by the adventures of Ulysses.  But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with Ulysses's raging violence.

In 1967, as a college freshman, I read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the first time, and I began to understand why I found Homer's heroes disturbing.  I wondered, why did these men think fame and honor were to be earned through cruel violence in war that often lacked any moral justification?

In 1977, I taught a course on The Iliad in the Basic Program in Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago.  I knew Greek well enough that I could check the translation (by Richmond Lattimore) against the Greek text.  So sometimes in the class we would talk about the problems of translation.  

Since all of us in the class had read Socrates' criticisms of Homer in Plato's Republic, some of our discussions were about whether those criticisms were fair, and particularly whether Socrates was justified in arguing that the guardians in the best city should not read Homer's poetry because its models of conduct--the gods and the heroes--were immoral.

So when I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and read about the debates over the movie, I began to think again about the strangeness of Homer's Bronze Age gods and heroes and about how they have been depicted in American popular culture.

I have come to two conclusions.  First, Nolan's movie is actually a Platonic revision of Homer's Odyssey.  Second, the intellectual response to the movie shows how thoughtful--even philosophical--American popular culture can be in considering what counts as a virtuous life.

CENSORING HOMER

As far as I can tell, the movie has been well received by audiences and most of the movie critics.  But I've noticed that the harshest criticisms are from people who have read Homer's poem, and they criticize the movie for how it distorts Homer's poem to the point that the original meaning of the poem is lost.  

Critics have identified four kinds of distortions.  First, while the world of Homer's Odyssey is full of gods, in Nolan's film, people refer to the gods, but the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who appears is Athena; and consequently the story of Odysseus is an almost totally human drama.  

Second, while Homer's Odysseus wins glory through cruel violence without ever feeling guilty for the injustice of what he has done, Nolan has Odysseus confess to Penelope his crippling guilt.  He has an extended flashback to the atrocities that the Greeks committed during the fall of Troy, and he tells Penelope about the guilt he feels for the Wooden Horse episode:

We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home.  We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt.  To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. . . . What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through the fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed . . . what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

In The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn--who is the author of one of the best translations of Homer's Odyssey--observes: "this resounding speech . . . sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer--who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies--but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. . . . Nolan has merely remade Homer's hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus's adventures values utterly foreign to Homer."

The third distortion of Homer's story in the movie comes from what some critics have identified as Nolan's "woke" feminist interpretation of the Odyssey as showing the toxic masculinity of male dominance in war, politics, and marriage.  This biased reading of the Odyssey could have come from Nolan's reading of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and indeed Nolan has stressed the importance of Wilson's translation as an influence on him.  Wilson was the first woman to write an English translation of The Odyssey.  And many readers have seen a modern feminist slant in her commentary on the book and in her translation.

The fourth distortion is in Nolan's changing Homer's story--perhaps most importantly in Nolan's giving the story a new ending.  Homer's ending comes when many of the people of Ithaca start a civil war in rebellion against Odysseus because the suitors of Penelope killed by Odysseus were their sons.  Athena orders the fighters to stop the war.  The Ithacans drop their weapons and go back to the city.  But Odysseus chases after them to continue the war.  Zeus then sends down a thunderbolt, and Athena orders Odysseus: "Odysseus, you are adaptable; / you always find solutions.  Stop this war, / or Zeus will be enraged at you."  Homer then writes: "He was / glad to obey her.  Then Athena made / the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace / for future times" (24.448-549).

For thousands of years, many of Homer's readers have found this ending unsatisfying.  Nolan's alternative ending has Odysseus giving up his throne to Telemachus and leaving Ithaca with Penelope, seeking peace in exile, sailing west to honor the dead.  The pair muse that people will know the Trojan war only as a song, the songs will forget Odysseus' mistakes, and a new civilization will arise to replace the old Bronze Age civilization.

I believe that all four of these distortions in Nolan's movie come from the influence of Wilson's Odyssey--both her translation and her commentary in the Introduction.  I also believe that Wilson's criticisms of the Odyssey ultimately coincide with the criticisms coming from Plato's Socrates in The Republic, which have to do with the immorality of Homer's gods and heroes.  And while I have no reason to believe that Nolan has read Plato, Nolan could have absorbed Plato's critique of Homer from reading Wilson's book, which motivated him to write a script for his movie that is in effect a Platonic revision of The Odyssey that corrects its moral failings.

This would explain why Nolan plays down the importance of the gods.  Wilson says that Homer's gods "are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law" (30).  Nolan probably anticipated that such gods would be confusing to his modern audience, who assume that divine powers must uphold moral law, and so he pushed the gods largely offstage except for Athena.

Actually, as Wilson indicates, many readers of Homer have seen evidence in his poems that the gods--or at least Zeus--generally enforce moral conduct by punishing the bad and rewarding the good.  After all, The Odyssey begins with Zeus defending the justice of his providence before an assembly of the gods.  He points to the example of Aegisthus, who took the wife of Agamemnon and then killed Agamemnon when he came home from the war, but then Aegisthus was killed by Orestes, Agamemnon's son.  Zeus says that he sent Hermes to warn Aegisthus not to take Agamemnon's wife or murder him because surely Orestes would grow up and then take his revenge.  Aegisthus was foolish in rejecting this good advice.  "But now his death has paid all debts" (1.31-45).

Similarly, Odysseus often invokes the justice of the gods in taking vengeance against Penelope's suitors. He tells them: "You did not fear the gods who live in heaven, and you thought no man would ever come to take revenge" (22.37-40).

I am reminded of John Alvis's book Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).  Alvis argued that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter (in The Aeneid) show divine providence in the service of justice.  Alvis saw the principle of divine providential justice explicitly stated by Virgil, and then he tried to find this in Homer, although it is only "barely implied in Homer" (259).  This is an important issue for Alvis because "the gods must be known if human conduct is to be measured against the most authoritative standards" (vii).  I have written about this as posing the question of moral cosmology versus moral anthropology: must the moral law be grounded in a divine cosmic law, or can it be grounded in a human natural law?

Nolan's Odysseus feels guilty for violating that moral law through his unjustified violence against the Trojans.  But this is not clear in Homer's poem.  Wilson directs our attention to a scene in Book 8 of The Odyssey where Odysseus asks Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse.  Inspired by a god, the bard sings the story of the Trojan Horse--of how it tricked the Trojans into bringing the Wooden Horse--full of Achaean fighters--into the city, and of how Odysseus and the others poured out of the horse and slaughtered the people of Troy.  Now, one would think Odysseus would be happy to hear this song of his glorious triumph.  But instead, he weeps!

Odysseus was melting into tears; / his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman / weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around / her husband, fallen fighting for his home / and children.  She is watching as he gasps / and dies.  She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing / upon his corpse.  The men are right behind. / They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life / of pain.  Her face is marked with her despair. / In that same desperate way, Odysseus / was crying.  No one noticed that his eyes / were wet with tears, except Alcinous (8.521-535).

Wilson suggests there are two possible interpretations of this passage:

The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors.  Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but may other towns and settlements.  Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus' responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities (68-69).

Nolan preferred the first interpretation, and so he has Odysseus feeling deeply guilty for what he has done, and the image of the suffering woman who is a victim of war becomes the flashback memory of Odysseus stunned by the cruel desolation that he caused in leading the sack of Troy.  This interpretation supports Nolan's new ending for the story because it shows Odysseus seeking some atonement for what he has done by going into exile from Ithaca and giving up his throne to his son.

This interpretation might also explain why Plato's Socrates in telling the "myth of Er" in The Republic says that in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus "from memory of its former labors had recovered from love of honor," and it had chosen to live "the life of a private man who minds his own business" (620c).  Elsewhere Socrates says the philosopher "minds his own business" (496d).  It seems that Odysseus had learned from his mistakes in living as a glory-seeking warlord, so that in the afterlife he chose the obscure private life of a Socratic philosopher.  At least that was Allan Bloom's reading in his "Interpretive Essay" in his translation of The Republic (p. 436).

And yet Wilson's second interpretation of the simile comparing Odysseus' weeping to the weeping of the woman suffering in war is well supported by the textual evidence--the idea that this simile invites us "to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities."  Alcinous asked Odysseus to "please explain why you were crying, sobbing your heart out when you heard him sing what happened to the Greeks at Troy" (8.576-578).  Odysseus answered him by telling him "my own sad story" of the many ways he had to suffer in his adventurous travels to finally achieve fame and honor.  His storytelling stretched over four books of The Odyssey--from Book 9 to the end of Book 12.  Early in the story, he relates his attack on the Cicones: "A blast of wind pushed me off course towards the Cicones in Ismarus.  I sacked the town and killed the men.  We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us" (9.40-44).  He gives no justification for this act of piracy.  Nor does he express any sense of guilt for this and other acts of piracy.  At the end of the poem, once he has returned to Ithaca and Penelope, Odysseus tells Penelope that he will resume his piracy: "I have to go on raids, to steal replacements / for all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed, / and get the other Greeks to give me more, / until I fill my folds" (23.355-360).  This is not a man who feels any guilt for his life of piracy.

Like Plato's Socrates, Nolan worried that reading, or hearing, or seeing this story on a movie screen of Odysseus' winning heroic glory through immoral conduct would either endorse such immorality or provoke the moral disgust of the audience.  To avoid that, Nolan censored Homer by revising his story so that Odysseus regrets his life of unjustified and cruel violence and seeks atonement for his guilt.

THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES OF AMERICAN LIBERAL CULTURE

As I have indicated, some of the critics of Nolan's movie have complained that he is being dishonest in hiding the true meaning of Homer's Odyssey from the audience.  Moreover, some have argued, the special thrill that comes from reading Homer is in seeing the great gulf that separates our modern moral sensibility from Homer's Bronze Age world of warlords glorified by poets for their brutal cruelty; but Nolan's movie does not allow his audience to have that experience of being provoked by the violence and mystery of Bronze Age life.

That is not a fair criticism, however, because Nolan has talked openly about how he has changed Homer's story, particularly under the influence of Wilson's translation, and he has encouraged his audience to read, or reread, Homer's Odyssey for themselves, and then argue about how the movie differs from the book.  In fact, in recent weeks, Wilson's translation has become one of the top five books on the Amazon and New York Times bestsellers lists.

This refutes the claim of those Nietzschean critics of American popular culture who say that it has become degraded--perhaps to the level of the "last man"--because people watch movies and television, but they don't read books, particularly "great books."  On the contrary, Nolan's movie has spurred many Americans not only to read the Odyssey in translation, but also to read the original Greek text.  Google Trends reports that people searching "learn Greek" has increased by 400% over the past month compared with the same period last year.

I am reminded of my years teaching in the Basic Program of Liberal Education, which is a Great Books program established in 1946 by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, who believed that cultivating human excellence in a liberal democracy required opening liberal education to all adults.

I have written about how Leo Strauss praised Great Books programs like the Basic Program and explained:  "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.  Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.  Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness."

Here we see that what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues" of a liberal social order can include the intellectual virtues of a liberal education for a philosophic life.

In a liberal popular culture like America, popular media like movies and television can complement the liberal education based on reading classic books.  In the Basic Program, we had Fall and Winter Weekends, where we would meet for a weekend at a lodge in a state park.  One classic text of literature, philosophy, history, or science would be the assigned reading for the weekend.  We would have a series of lectures and discussions centered around that text.  But we would also usually have a movie of some kind that was related to that text, so that we could talk about the intellectual questions raised by both the movie and the book.

At this blog, I have written essays on various movies (such as The Lord of the Rings, The Last Duel, Song Sung Blue, Nuremburg, and Disclosure Day) and on various television shows (such as The Good Place, The Big Bang Theory, and Hill Street Blues).  And in each case, I have argued that these filmed productions of popular culture can raise profound intellectual questions and that they can prompt viewers to read some books that might probe those questions at a deeper level.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey does that.  In her review of the movie for The London Review of Books, Emily Wilson recognizes this point:

In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the "death of the humanities," translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.  Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek.  Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments.  Nolan, who studied English at University College London--where students still study The Odyssey as a first year "foundational text"--is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

But except for this one passage praising Nolan, Wilson's review is relentlessly dismissive of his movie--as when she says, "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script." 

As I have said, Wilson's interpretation of Odysseus' weeping in response to Demodocus' singing of the sack of Troy as a sign of his feeling guilt seems to have prompted Nolan's depiction of Odysseus' deep sense of guilt over what he has done.  So as I read her review, I wondered what she might say about this.  I noticed this passage:

The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie's imagined world.  We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it--a very different point.  Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar--but Nolan doesn't.  The Trojans are dehumanized by their masks; we know none of them by name or face.  The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors, or slaves.  During the sack of Troy--which he supposedly organized--Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

So Wilson suggests that Homer's Odyssey is better than Nolan's Odyssey in helping us to reflect on the moral complexity of a world in which warlords pursue glory through cruel violence, because Homer allows us to see the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims, and to see that even if a warlord might sometimes feel guilty about what he is doing, that does not lessen his enthusiasm for his life of glorious violence. 

People might learn this if watching Nolan's movie prompts them to read Homer's book.

An Exchange With "Darwinian Reactionary": Natural Desires as Functional Causes Designed by Evolutionary History

"Darwinian Reactionary" (DR) has responded in the "comments" section to my two posts on his critical essay on my position.  Below I am posting those two comments, followed by my reply.

Darwinian Reactionary:

I am honored that you deemed my post worthy of reply. Plus I feel I got off lightly; I was fearing if you bothered to reply at all you would go scorched earth. I look forward to reading your next post. I however still disagree with what you say here. Where was Goering's moral sense when the stacks of bodies were piling up? He watched it happen without any qualms. Isn't it remarkable that his moral sense happened to kick in when he was in the hands of his enemies? If he had won, I doubt he would have felt any such regret. Also you say "no plausible argument that the Jews in the concentration camps were "threats to the well-being" of the Nazis." This is a bizarre thing to say as of course Jews were seen as threats to Germany as the Nazi propaganda had spent years proclaiming.

But this is beside the point. You take me to be denying the existence of a moral sense, which is not my point. My goal is to argue that the subjective feeling of disapprobation can not support the weight you want it to. The goal was to poke holes in your account that the good is the fullest satisfaction of natural desires. You yourself saw the problem with this and needed to qualify it with the approbation test. I contend that the moral sense (if there is such a thing) is more than the feeling of or desire for approbations. There are too many people who express disapprobation of your 20 desires, and too many people who express approbation towards evils for this to be the test of the good. Slavery received approbation for 10000 years. You say "DR would say that history shows that there is no natural sense of justice because 'human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others.'" Obviously, since I presented a theory of natural justice, I wouldn't think this, just that approbation isn't the "justice detector."

Friday, 17 July, 2026 

I feel like this is a case of with enemies like these who needs friends. That you like teleoformalism, in outline at least, is very gratifying. As far as your points go, I thought it was clear in the teleoformalism essay that I was directing my comments at a libertarianism that holds the only legitimate functions of state is to protect life, health liberty, and property. Elsewhere I did say "not that there aren’t forms of libertarianism that might meet these objections, only that in order to do so it must extend justice beyond the protection of private property." As far as the DR vs DC article, I know you as a perennial supporter of the libertarian party, and I searched your blog for "libertarianism" to see what you had written, and I had to imagine how Darwinian Natural Right grounds libertarianism, and qualified my claim in saying "this may or may not be Arnhart's actual position." That you are far less a capital-L Libertarian than it appeared is welcome news. I will edit the post and add a note that you have clarified your position and do not hold the views I surmised. As far as your question "Why would we act to fulfill those principles if we thought their fulfillment was not desirable?" We should hold those principles because they facilitate the good, understood as bioformalism. But they are not made good by being desired. I'm a stone cold realist on the good and it is not the result of human psychology any more than what is good for a tree requires desires. Maybe we just need to agree to disagree on this. So anyway, best wishes. (By the way, they were right when they said heavy is the head the wears the crown.)

Monday, 20 July, 2026

REPLY

I will respond to two of DR's claims--that many people have given moral approval to evils such as Nazism and slavery, and that the human good is not made good by being desired.

People give their moral approval to evil only when they mistakenly believe it is good.  DR says "Jews were seen as threats to Germany as the Nazi propaganda had spent years proclaiming."  Well, yes, but that's my point: they were seen as threats only because of the distortions of Nazi propaganda, and not because they really were threats.  This is what I call "fallible beliefs about circumstances."  Moral judgment is often uncertain and imprecise because our knowledge of the circumstances of action is uncertain and imprecise.  We often disagree about moral questions, even when we agree in our principles, because we have differing views of the relevant circumstances.  In fact, much of our moral reasoning is devoted to gathering and assessing the facts pertinent to our practical decisions.  And so, for example, Nazi apologists today have to be Holocaust deniers--they deny that there really was a Holocaust.  Moreover, the Nazi leaders like Goering never publicly affirmed the goodness of the Holocaust.

Similarly, those who have justified slavery have had to argue that slavery is mutually beneficial for the master and the slave, and so they have denied the fact that slavery is a form of social parasitism in which the master exploits the slave as his property.  Aristotle exposed the incoherence in this argument.  Aristotle said "the relation between master and slave, whenever they deserve by their nature to be called such, should be one of friendship and of benefit to both; but if their relation is not such but exists by law and is forced, it leads to contrary results" (Politics, 1255b13-16).  But he also said: "there can be no friendship towards a slave as a slave, but there may be friendship towards him as a human being" (NE, 1161b5).  To justify slavery as natural, a master would have to be a friend to his slave, but the very possibility of friendship presupposes the humanity of the slave and therefore the injustice of enslaving him as though he were not human.

DR says the human goods "are not made good by being desired."  I say that the goods of human life have been made good for us in that we have been designed by human evolutionary history to find them desirable.

In "Bioformalism and the Human Good," DR says:

. . . the majority of people who do seek to live out the good human life, and feel there is something wrong or wasteful in a life of decadence, can know that they are right to feel so.

And so the answer as to why one ought to live out the form of a human life as excellently as possible is that we have been designed to do so, and to find satisfaction in doing so.  Developing our excellences, finding a mate, having children, and reaping the fruits of successful labor are, as close as possible for living beings, universally regarded as the greatest sources of life-satisfaction.

What DR calls "seeking to live out the good human life," or "finding satisfaction in doing so," or "life-satisfaction," is what I and Aristotle call "desire" (orexis).  Aristotle coined the Greek noun orexis from the Greek verb orego, which means "to reach out."  Orexis is the soul's "reaching out" for something in the world.  For Aristotle, it is a general term for all kinds of longing or striving, including physical appetites, social emotions, and intellectual yearnings (De Anima 433a9-b31; Movement of Animals, 700b5-701b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a10, 1139b5).  I use the word "desire" in the same way as a general term for all kinds of psychic impulse or inclination.  With that sense in mind, I defend an ethics of desire: the good is the desirable, and reason judges best how to satisfy the desires.  Ethics is informed desire.  Aristotle agrees: "Let good be whatever is desirable for its own sake" (Rhetoric, 1362a22).  So does Aquinas: "Something is good insofar as it is desirable" (ST, I, q. 5, a. 6).

The evolutionary history of natural desires as functional causes can be explained in Millikan-like terms.  In "Primer on Biological Functions and Norms," DR says:

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which an item or feature is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the item's successful reproduction as opposed to items lacking this feature.  Those properties that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which led to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of the item, and the effect in question is the function of the item.

I can adopt this same language while putting "natural desire" in place of "an item":

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which a natural desire is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the natural desire's successful reproduction as opposed to desires lacking this feature.  Those natural desires that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which led to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of a natural desire, and the effect in question is the function of the natural desire.

And so, in this way, we can explain, for example, the proper function of the natural desire for parental care:

The function of parental care for animals is to protect and nurture offspring that could not survive or grow to maturity without such care.  Throughout the history of the human species, infants have survived and grown only with the help of adults who, being moved by the natural desire for parental care, were willing to feed, protect, and educate their children for many years.  If we accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which favors those functional adaptations that promoted survival and reproduction in evolutionary history, then we can explain this natural desire to care for children as a natural adaptation for human beings as designed by evolutionary history (Darwinian Natural Right, 103).

If the goods of human life (like parental care of children) have been made good for us in that we have been designed by human evolutionary history to find them desirable, then the good is the desirable. 

In Defense of Darwinian Classical Liberalism: A Reply to "Darwinian Reactionary"

In "Darwinian Reactionary vs. Darwinian Conservatism vs. Darwinian Left," Darwinian Reactionary (DR) claims that he and I are the two contenders "for the crown of The One True Darwinian Social and Political Theory."  He argues that his "Political Theory of Teleoformalism" is far superior to my Darwinian Lockean libertarianism.

In response, I will make three points.  First, what I am defending is Darwinian classical liberalism--not libertarianism.  Second, my Darwinian classical liberalism largely agrees with DR's Teleoformalism and its four principles of justice.  Finally, DR fails to see that those principles of justice motivate us to act only insofar as they appeal to the natural desires of evolved human nature.  

Although I often lean towards libertarianism, my thinking has been mostly in the tradition of evolutionary classical liberalism as represented by John Locke, Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, and Friedrich Hayek.  I have also embraced the tradition of Ordoliberalism that began at the University of Freiburg in Germany in the 1930s. The central concept of the Freiburg School was captured by the German word Ordnung or the Latin word Ordo.  Liberalism, the Freiburg theorists argued, requires a market order that is a constitutional order, and thus true liberalism must be an ordo-liberalism.  Some proponents of laissez-faire liberalism sometimes convey the impression that free markets can function best without any rules enforced by government, and indeed some of them (like Murray Rothbard, for example) have been anarchists.  But the Freiburg ordo-liberals have argued that a free-market order is not anarchistic, because it depends upon a constitutional framework that sets the rules of the game of free competition, in which all economic agents meet as legal equals and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange and contract.  This constitutional order of liberty includes both the informal norms that arise through cultural evolution and the formal norms of legal and political design.

This might seem to violate the classical liberal principle of spontaneous order as an unintended order that is free from governmental planning.  But while arguing for the deliberate planning of a constitutional framework of general rules within which markets work spontaneously, the ordo-liberals argue against the attempt to deliberately plan an economy to achieve specific outcomes.  The deliberate planning of the constitutional order can indirectly improve the economic order by facilitating the spontaneous emergence of free economic coordination, but this is very different from the effort of economic planning through specific interventions to achieve directly some desired outcome.  Liberal planning creates general or abstract rules enforced equally over all individuals, so that government does not create special privileges for anyone.  This ordo-liberalism is very similar to James Buchanan's "constitutional economics."

According to DR's teleoformalism, the end of the state is to advance the four principles of justice that serve four biofunctional norms of interpersonal behavior: "tit-for-tat non-interference, kin altruism, mutually beneficial exchange aka reciprocity, and cooperative conventions."  DR claims that while his teleoformalism and my libertarianism agree on the first principle--tit-for-tat non-interference--my libertarianism does not support the other three principles.  But DR is mistaken.  Because my Darwinian classical liberalism agrees with his teleoformalism that the state must advance all four of these principles.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

"The first principle of justice," DR explains, is "the common belief that the state's primary function is to protect individuals from harm from other individuals, groups, or itself.  Teleoformalism interprets harm bioformalistically: harm is any human behavior that reduces an individual's ability to live out its form of life as excellently as he or she is willing and able."  This ability to pursue the good contains "the traditional Lockean notions of life, health, liberty, and property."  So, with respect to this "primary function" of the state, DR agrees with my Lockean liberalism.

THE SECOND PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

The second principle of justice is "kin altruism" in the "private sphere" of "genetically related family members."  Evolution has shaped our human nature so that one of the primary natural ends of life is finding a sexual mate with whom we can produce children and then rear them in the best possible environment for their development into adults.  

DR notes that Locke recognized this in the First Treatise: "For Children being the course of Nature, born weak, and unable to provide for themselves, they have by the appointment of God himself, who hath thus ordered the course of nature, a Right to be nourished and maintained by their Parents" (para. 89).  This right of children to parental care creates a duty for the parents to provide that care (para. 90).  DR doesn't cite the pertinent passages in the Second Treatise, where Locke affirms that parental authority is derivative of parental obligation: "The Power, then, that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their Off-spring, during the imperfect state of Childhood" (para. 58).  DR also doesn't mention that Locke wrote a whole book--Some Thoughts Concerning Education--about the duties of parents to nourish, protect, and educate their children morally and intellectually.

DR complains that Locke says nothing about what should be done if parents refuse to care for and educate their children or otherwise neglect or even abuse them.  In that case, the teleoformalist norms of kin-selection dictate that the state enforce some child protection laws.  By contrast, DR says that some libertarians claim that children are the property of their parents, and therefore they have the right to treat their children as they wish without any interference from the state.

But DR does not recognize that parental ownership of children is only one of four competing theories of the parental role that libertarians have proposed.  The other three are parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental obligations in the creation of peril.  Jake Desyllas (2025) has made a persuasive argument that the first three theories are flawed and that the theory of causal parental responsibility in the creation of peril is the most defensible libertarian theory of parenting, and it is the only theory that is compatible with Lockean liberalism.

Creation of peril is a legal principle in both tort and criminal law that imposes a duty to act when a person's own conduct creates a dangerous situation for someone else, even if the initial act was accidental or unintentional (Alexander 2017).  For example, while you do not generally have a duty to rescue people in a burning building, if you have accidentally started the fire, then you do have a duty to rescue the people who are in danger because of your action.

Similarly, if you engage in sexual intercourse, there is some chance that your gametes will be fertilized, and you will create a child who will be born in a condition of mortal helplessness.  Having put that child in a state of peril, you are positively obligated to care for that child, because refusing parental care would be an act of aggression against that child.  And under the Lockean principle of non-interference or no-harm, the state can intervene to protect the child's natural right to be free from aggressive harm.

Desyllas lays out the argument in five steps:

1. People are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, whether intended or not.

2. As a consequence of creating a child, parents have put another human being (the child) in a state of peril.

3. Children cannot consent to being born.

4. Since the child did not create their own state of peril nor consent to it, the child's peril is entirely the responsibility of the parents.

5. Therefore, parents have a positive obligation to do whatever is necessary to remove the child from a state of peril, since not doing so would constitute an act of aggression as a form of tort (197).

Notice that the positive obligation of parents to care for their child is ultimately rooted in the negative obligation to refrain from an act of aggression that would lead to the child's death and thus violate the child's right to life.  Having created a child who is utterly helpless, parents who would refuse to properly care for that child would allow that child to die, and consequently they have a positive obligation to prevent that mortal peril from happening.  

A Lockean government has the authority to enforce that natural duty of parental care under the non-interference principle of justice--that no man has the right to aggressively threaten the life of another.  Locke suggests this when he says that parental power cannot "extend to Life and Death, any time, over their Children, more than over any body else" (ST, para. 170).  So just as we have no right to aggressively take the life of any other person, parents have no right to refuse to care for their children and thus allow them to die.

But while Locke implied this argument, he did not elaborate it explicitly.  The first clear statement of the causal responsibility for parental care from the creation of peril was in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765).  In his chapter on the rights and duties of parent and child, Blackstone explained:

The duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children is a principle of natural law; an obligation, says Pufendorf, laid on them not only by nature itself, but by their own proper act, in bringing them into the world: for they would be in the highest manner injurious to their issue, if they only gave the children life, that they might afterwards see them perish. by begetting them therefore they have entered into a voluntary obligation to endeavor, as far as in them lies, that the life which they have bestowed shall be supported and preserved.  And thus the children will have a perfect right of receiving maintenance (1979, 1:435).

Blackstone added to the parental duty for maintenance of the child the duties to protection and education.

Desyllas sees here the essential elements of the causal parental responsibility argument:

1. As a result of their action of bringing children into the world, parents are responsible for their children's condition of helplessness.

2. If parents were to fail to care for their children, the result would be that the children would perish.

3. Therefore, parents have an obligation to maintain their children to prevent this from happening.

A Lockean liberal government can rightly enforce this parental duty to care for their children and the right of the children to receive such care under the principles of no-harm and kin-altruism.  Therefore, DR is wrong in arguing that Lockean liberalism cannot legally enforce the parental duty to care for their children.

Indeed, liberal political thinkers have generally recognized the need for the legal enforcement of parental care.  For example, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith observed that as a matter of general legal practice in civilized societies, the duties of familial care are often legally enforced.  Similarly, in The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek argued that while it is usually in the best interest of children to be left to the care of their parents or guardians, 

this does not mean that parents should have unrestricted liberty to treat their children as they like.  The other members of the community have a genuine stake in the welfare of the children.  The case for requiring parents or guardians to provide for those under their care a certain minimum of education is clearly very strong (377).

Moreover, it is clear that DR's teleoformalism generally agrees with Lockean liberalism in seeing the private sphere of life as a realm of liberty.  DR writes: "Other than the rules of non-interference and kin altruism, the private sphere is the place of liberty to direct one's life as one sees fit: what books and media to consume, what sexual activity one wishes to partake, religious practice, hobbies, amusements and entertainment are completely free from state regulation.  Even the wish to not pursue the human good is of no concern to justice."

THE THIRD PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

The third principle of justice is that there should be reciprocity or mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges in the commercial sphere.  According to DR's teleoformalism, the state must regulate the commercial sphere to facilitate these reciprocal exchanges.  "All of the contemporary ways the state regulates business-contract enforcement, union rights, workplace conditions, environmental regulations, nondiscrimination, health regulations--are perfectly just under teleoformalism."

By contrast, DR argues, "although Arnhart includes property and trade among his natural desires, his theory that justice merely entails these desires be allowed to occur cannot accommodate Norms of trade be enforced, and relies on a caveat emptor system where fraud and cheating may be rampant."  But DR cannot cite me as ever having said this.

On the contrary, as I have made clear in my chapter on Adam Smith in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker (4th edition, 2016), classical liberals like Smith recognize that markets must be regulated by the rule of law.  For example, in The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek observed: "If there is to be an efficient adjustment of the different activities in the market, certain minimum requirements must be met; the more important of these are, as we have seen, the prevention of violence and fraud, the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts, and the recognition of equal rights of all individuals to produce in whatever quantities and sell at whatever prices they choose" (229).

THE FOURTH PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

According to DR, the fourth principle of justice is supporting cooperative conventions in the public sphere that allow the cooperation of strangers in public spaces.  Following Ruth Millikan ("Language Conventions Made Simple"), DR recognizes that language is one of the most important examples of  cooperative conventions:

These are common rules that allow mutually beneficial cooperation to occur among strangers.  The conventions are widely distributed so that even people who do not know each other can be on the same page and not have to create mutual understanding over and over again with each new interaction.  Language conventions such as using the word "dog" to refer to dogs are the clearest example.

Another example that he takes from Millikan is driving on the right or left side of a road.  This allows drivers approaching one another to coordinate with one another for safe driving.  To achieve regular conformity to this rule, governments have mandated it as a traffic law.

Classical liberals like Locke explain the "cooperative conventions" that establish "common rules that allow mutually beneficial cooperation to occur among strangers" as arising from popular consent.  Locke's teaching that government arises from the consent of the people is well known.  But it's not well known that Locke explained the emergence of all social institutions as created by popular consent.  Human beings have created not only government (ST, 95-99) but also languages (ECHU, III.2.8), families (ST, 74-83), morality (ECHU, 28.10), and money (ST, 36) by consenting to their existence.  This creation of social institutions by consent expresses the uniquely human capacity of the mind for symbolic thought.

Symbolic thought allows human beings to create laws as moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  Classical liberals recognize that the history of law shows a transition from the illiberal conception of laws as identity rules to the liberal conception of laws as impartial rules.  Henry Sumner Maine called this the move from status to contract.  

In medieval and early modern Europe, for example, the laws were applied differently based on one's social identity.  In many parts of Europe, the nobility either did not pay many taxes or were assessed at a lower rate of taxation than were commoners.  Under the criminal law, the punishments for nobles were less severe than for commoners.  Jews, Protestants, and Catholics faced different treatment by the law.

But Lockean liberals agree with Peter DeScioli that "laws as identity rules" are what he calls "fake laws that are really threats in disguise" that support the dominance of powerful factional coalitions--such as the "nobility"--against "commoners."  Originally, in prehistoric forager societies, the many (the commoners) enforced impartial customary laws against dominant individuals and the ambitious few.  But then with the emergence of centralized states, kings, nobles, and priests were able to enforce fake laws that were really threats to suppress the many.  In a few more liberal societies (like ancient Athens), laws as impartial rules could restrain to some degree the dominant power of the one and the few, which restored to some extent the egalitarian liberty of the foraging state of nature.

Then in modern liberal states, the laws are understood as general rules that apply impartially to all regardless of differences in social status, which goes even farther towards approximating the equal liberty of the evolutionary state of nature.  These are what Douglass North and his colleagues called "open access societies."  Laws as general rules are crucial for the liberal conception of the state as securing individual freedom and social cooperation.  This liberal understanding of the laws as impartial rules of action approximates the law of nature as it arose in the evolutionary state of nature.

 

THE NATURAL DESIRES AS THE MOTIVATIONAL GROUND FOR THE FOUR PRINCIPLES

Although I agree with all four of DR's principles of justice, he fails to recognize the motivational grounding of those principles in the natural desires.  Understanding these principles will not move us to act in accordance with them.  As Aristotle said, "thought by itself moves nothing," because any human action that is deliberately chosen requires a union of reason and desire.  A deliberate choice manifests either "desiring reason" or "reasoning desire" (NE 1139a36-b6).  

DR disagrees, because he thinks that as long as we understand the principles of justice as natural norms, "there is no need for the messy quagmire of sorting through desires for the good."  Really?  Why would we act to fulfill those principles if we thought their fulfillment was not desirable?

Why do we act to fulfill the principles of tit-for-tat non-interference and reciprocal altruism?  Because they satisfy our natural desire for justice as reciprocity.

Why do we act to fulfill the principle of kin selection?  Because it satisfies our natural desires for parental care and familial bonding.

Why do we act to fulfill the principle of cooperative conventions?  Because cooperative conventions as impartial rules of action satisfy our natural desire to be free from the exploitative dominance of powerful factional coalitions.

Why do we pursue the good of justice?  Because the good is the desirable.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Larry. 2017. "Duties to Act Triggered by Creation of the Peril: Easy Cases, Puzzling Cases, and Complex Culpability." In The Ethics and Law of Omissions, eds. Dana Kay Nelkin and Samuel Rickless, 180-196.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blackstone, William. [1765] 1979. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. A facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Desyllas, Jake. 2025. "What Is the Libertarian Theory of Parental Obligation?" Journal of Libertarian Studies 29 (1): 186-209.

Hayek, Frederich. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.