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 the 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 win 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 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.

The Aristotelian and Darwinian Teleology of Ethics and Politics: A Reply to "Darwinian Reactionary"

My argument for Darwinian natural right originated as a response to what Leo Strauss had said in his Introduction to Natural Right and History.  Strauss observed: "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe.  All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them."  This dependence of natural right on a teleological view of the universe was clearly seen by Aristotle, Strauss explained.  But the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."

I agreed with Roger Masters that Strauss was wrong to suggest that the question of teleology depended on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle's teleology was primarily biological, and so the question was whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature, and whether modern Darwinian biology supports such a teleological explanation of organisms.

My answer to this question was that Darwinian biology really does support Aristotelian teleology.  My thinking here was decisively influenced by my reading of Allan Gotthelf's dissertation at Columbia University--"Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality" (1975)--and some of his other writing (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 238-43).  I was persuaded by Gotthelf that Aristotle's final causality is best interpreted as living nature's irreducible potential for form: the development, structure, and functioning of a living organism manifest the actualization of its potential for organic form, an actualization that depends on, but is not reducible to, the natural potentialities of its material elements.  Moreover, far from refuting Aristotle's teleology, modern Darwinian biology provides an evolutionary explanation for living nature's irreducible potential for form.

Understanding the Darwinian teleology of human nature supports a teleological standard for both ethics and politics.  Teleological ethics is based on Aristotle's idea that "the good is the desirable" (Rhetoric 1362a22), that there are at least twenty natural desires of evolved human nature, and that to achieve the harmonious ordering of our often conflicting desires over a whole life, which constitutes human happiness or flourishing, requires good habits of choice and prudence--the moral and intellectual virtues examined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  We can then see that cultivating those virtues is the natural end of a good social order.  We can also see that a classical liberal--or liberal conservative--social order is best in cultivating those virtues.

Teleological politics is rooted in the evolved political psychology of human nature as a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few politically ambitious individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a regime, with these ambitious few competing for the top position.  Deference is the natural propensity of most individuals to submit to those who are politically dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of subordinate individuals to resist exploitative dominance.  We can judge political regimes as better or worse, depending on how well they satisfy these evolved political desires of human nature.  And we can see that a liberal constitutional republic that establishes limited government with a balance of powers under the rule of law is the best political order, because it satisfies the evolved desire of the ruling few to dominate while also satisfying the evolved desire of the subordinate many to be free from exploitative dominance, which secures a balance between governmental authority and individual liberty.  What I am calling the "liberal constitutional republic" corresponds to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call "inclusive institutions" and what Douglas North and his colleagues call the "open access society."

But now the "Darwinian Reactionary" (DR) is criticizing my teleological ethics and politics.  The "Darwinian Reactionary" blog has been running now for almost 13 years.  Recently, DR posted an essay entitled "Darwinian Reactionary vs. Darwinian Conservatism vs. Darwinian Left."  He says that his blog was originally inspired by his reading of Peter Singer's Darwinian Left and my Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism.  He was looking for someone who understood the implications of Darwinian science for ethics and politics.  He saw that Singer was good in showing how a Darwinian understanding of human nature made a socialist utopia impossible, but Singer didn't offer any clear program for what the ethics and politics of a Darwinian Left would look like.  

DR agreed with my attempt to revive an Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural ethical and political norms grounded in Darwinian biology.  But he found that while he agreed with many of my premises, he disagreed with most of my conclusions.  He suggests "that Arnhart is neither sufficiently Aristotelian nor Darwinian."  The main reason for that failure, he asserts, is that "Arnhart is missing the bridge between these two titans," which is "the work of Ruth Millikan, and when you walk across that bridge, I would contend, you end up with my positions."  Here he is referring particularly to Millikan's 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Causes (MIT Press).

He argues for both an ethical theory, which he calls "bioformalism," and a political theory, which he calls "teleoformalism," that he regards as superior to my Darwinian natural right of ethics and politics.

TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS

DR's starting point is Millikan's evolutionary theory of teleological functions.  He explains:

Millikan's Darwinian account of teleology holds an item's proper function is the effect which was replicated because it provided a reproductive benefit.  In the case of living things, we can see that it is the distinctive form of life itself that has been selected for replication because this form of life has proven to be reproductively advantageous.  This is the account of the good that I have called bioformalism.  For humans this is to develop our skills and excellences as children, to attract the best mate possible, to bear and support children, and to work cooperatively with others in order to produce the most advantageous environment in which to live.  The reason Arnhart does not take this path, I would contend, is partially an ignorance of the literature on function, or not fully seeing how it can be applied to Aristotelian teleology, despite spending a lot of time discussing what he calls 'immanent teleology.'  He never cites Millikan despite her being more responsible than anyone for the revival of teleology through a Darwinian lens.

I never cite Millikan because when I read her book, I didn't see that she had added much to what Allan Gotthelf had written about Aristotelian/Darwinian teleology in 1975, 19 years before the publication of her book.  Millikan did not cite Gotthelf in her book, so I assume she was ignorant of his work.  

Most of what DR says about Millikan's theory corresponds to what I have said about "functional causes" and "natural ends" (DNR, 101-105, 238-248).  For example, DR says that part of the teleological good for human beings is "to bear and support children."  I agree.  Because this corresponds to what I say about 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 were willing to feed, protect, and educate them 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, it would seem likely, therefore, that the desire to care for children is a natural adaptation for human beings (DNR, 103).

But while DR seems to agree with this account of natural desires, he argues that I can't properly explain the distinction between true or normal desires and false or abnormal desires.  To say that the good is the desirable, I have argued, is not to say that the good is whatever we happen to desire at any moment, because we can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable.  DR insists, however, that I need Millikan to explain this.

Millikan's Normal conditions are much better at doing the work that Arnhart wants his poorly defined notion of a true desire to do.  And so when Arnhart says "an animal can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable," we can translate this as "When desires work Normally, they will produce their selected effect; in abNormal conditions (say, when the individual is guided by false beliefs or mental illness), a desire might not benefit the organism the way it has been designed."  For example, perhaps an adolescent male is engaging in risky behavior.  We can postulate that the impulses of adolescent males to engage in risky behavior have been built into us in order, say, to develop one's strength for conflict, or perhaps display fitness to females, or to learn and push one's limits for competitive advantage.  If the individual is badly injured in this behavior, the desire has not produced the effect it was selected for, that is, conditions are abNormal and not gone "according to (nature's) plan.

Well, okay, I can agree with this "translation" of my thought.  But I don't see that this adds anything substantive to what I have said about the "four sources of moral disagreement"--fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires (both normal and abnormal variation in human desires) (DNR, 44-45).

DR also argues that I don't have a good answer to the criticism that my list of twenty natural desires is naive in that it includes the "positive" desires but not the "negative" ones. For example, why not include cruelty and exploitation as natural human desires? The suggestion is that I haven't offered any justification for including only the "nice" desires on my list. Actually, there can be a dark side to most if not all of these natural desires. Obviously, cruelty and exploitation often arise from the natural desires for social ranking and war. And, in fact, many of my critics have criticized me for including war on my list of natural desires. 

But there is a criterion of selection favoring what is truly desirable over what is mistakenly desired that is implicit in the natural desire for friendship.  I understand "friendship" in its broad Aristotelian sense of "social affiliation," which coincides with what David Hume and Adam Smith called "sympathy," and which is the ground for all the moral sentiments and virtues.  In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides a comprehensive account of the social and political formation of the virtues through "friendship" (philia), which for Aristotle is a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some care for one another.  And so, for example, Aristotle identifies "political friendship" as the social glue that binds a people into a political community of mutual care for one another.  

Similarly, Hume and Smith identified "sympathy" as any kind of "fellow feeling" among human beings.  Darwin adopted this idea and made "sympathy" one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order.  More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word "empathy" in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call "sympathy," or what Aristotle would call "friendship."  All agree with Aristotle that the various forms of friendly feeling or social bonding that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species are originally rooted in the natural affection of parental care for offspring (NE, 1155a1-33, 1159a27-37, 1160b23-62a29).  "In the household, are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice" (Eudemian Ethics, 1242b1-2).

In explaining a man's desire to be worthy of praise and not blame, Smith observed, "Nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men" (TMS, 117).  When we praise others, we do so because we think they are truly virtuous, not because of their deceptive appearance of virtue that hides the reality of vice.  If we think they have deceived us into thinking they are more virtuous than they really are, then we blame them.  Therefore our rules of morality dictate that we praise what is truly praiseworthy and blame what is truly blameworthy.  We then feel guilty if we violate these rules ourselves, which is conscience.  A man who feels guilty, Smith explained, "anticipates the contempt and derision from which nothing saves him but the ignorance of those he lives with.  He still feels that he is the natural object of these sentiments, and still trembles at the thought of what he would suffer, if they were ever actually exerted against him" (TMS, 118).

Smith observed that our natural desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments--which I call our natural desire for friendship--makes it painful for us to even imagine that others would not share our sentiments.  We judge ourselves by how we appear to an imaginary impartial spectator who is not deceived by mere appearances, so that we care not only for our real reputation, but even for our imaginary reputation.  Of course, it is easier for us to do what is praiseworthy when we are actually praised for our good conduct, and that's why only a few individuals are high-minded enough to always do what is truly praiseworthy, even when they are not actually praised, or even when they are unfairly condemned.

Although Darwin never used Smith's phrase impartial spectator, Darwin's account of morality as arising from social instincts of sympathy and reason conforms to Smith's impartial spectator procedure (Descent of Man, 136-148).  And as it was for Smith, Darwin saw this procedure as motivating our concern for both our real and our imagined reputations.  He observed: "Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us--of their imagined approbation or disapprobation; and this all follows from sympathy, a fundamental element of the social instincts.  A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be an unnatural monster" (Descent, 136).  Darwin recognized that Smithian sympathy is variable across individuals, and some few individuals, perhaps pure psychopaths, might show little or no concern for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, which would make such a person "an unnatural monster."  Similarly, Smith suggested that those who could commit dreadful crimes without feeling any pangs of remorse would have to fall into "the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete insensibility to honor and infamy, to vice and virtue" (TMS, 118).

What Smith and Darwin described as the emergence of moral sentiments from the mutual sympathy of sentiments is what evolutionary theorists today would call "reciprocal altruism."  We cooperate with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange.  I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity).  It's tit for tat.  People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputations as untrustworthy cheaters.  And the most reliably trustworthy people are those who live under the all-seeing eyes of the imaginary impartial spectator.

But DR thinks this is all wrong.

Human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others; the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis.  As an additional example, I recall reading an account of Native Americans who had captured a young girl from another tribe.  At first they seemed to welcome her into the tribe and treated her kindly, until one day they tied her to a tree, and the entire tribe took turns firing arrows into her until she was a bloody pulp.  That's human nature for you.  The tribesmen in my example were not a band of psychopaths, they were not mentally defective, they were not irrational, or subhuman and lacking in some innate moral sense possessed by other humans. . . . Harming one's enemies is ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history. . . .

DR notes that in my blog posts on human rights, I have quoted Darwin about how human beings can extend their sympathy to embrace all of humanity:

Darwin saw a history of moral progress in which human sympathy has been gradually extended from the family to small tribes, then to large nations, and eventually to all of humanity. In the Descent of Man, he wrote: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." 

DR objects:

I have to disagree with Darwin here, the barrier is not artificial.  Evolution would demand that sympathies extend to those who are actually cooperators, and distrust and animosity extend to those who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being.  It would not entail that we extend sympathy to competitors.

DR quotes me as saying that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "shows how moral outrage against atrocities expresses a universal morality," and that "we judge that as a rule human beings have a right to life because the killing of innocent people would elicit moral emotions of disapproval from any normal human being."

But DR objects: "human history is absolutely swimming in cases where the killing of innocent people was celebrated on a mass scale.  If the good is just what other people approve of, then Nazis or the tribesmen in my example are good."

DR is mistaken when he says "the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis."  As far as I know there is no evidence that the Nazis approved the evils of Nazism.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that the Nazis approved of Nazism because they believed (mistakenly) that it was good--perhaps even a transcendent good.  That's why some historians of Nazism have written books about "Hitler's Ethic" and "The Nazi Conscience."

Richard Weikart argues that Hitler illustrates how the greatest evils are often perpetrated under the appearance of doing good--especially, if the apparent good is a utopian vision that seems to justify any means to the utopian end. I agree with this, because I am persuaded of the Aristotelian principle that people tend to act for the good, or at least for what appears good to them. It is unlikely that any influential moral or political movement can prevail if it does not appeal to some moral sense that a great good is being achieved. The problem, however, is that human beings are often mistaken in their moral beliefs, particularly when they are seduced by some utopian conception of radical transformation that requires evil means to apparently good ends.

According to Weikart, the fundamental end for Hitler's ethic was the evolutionary improvement in the human species. Hitler interpreted the Darwinian conception of evolution as dominated by a struggle for existence as teaching that the only moral imperative was the survival and reproduction of the superior races over the inferior races. The Aryan or Nordic race prevalent in the German Volk arose in evolutionary history as the superior race. Promoting the progressive expansion of that race would therefore promote the biological improvement of the human species.

As I have indicated in previous posts, many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantians who believed in "eternal values" and in Nazism as fulfilling that eternal moral order. Moreover, Claudia Koonz's book The Nazi Conscience (2003) shows how the Nazi regime was organized around a strict communitarian morality of sacrificing selfish interests for the good of the community. Also, Jonathan Glover's moral history of the 20th century shows how the greatest atrocities were committed by those moved by a fanatical utopian belief in the goodness of their cause.

That the Nazis had a moral sense was clear in the Nuremberg Trials as portrayed in the recent movie Nuremberg. On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Douglas Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136).  It "spoiled everything" because there was no way for the Nazis to evade the moral disgust that it elicited. 

Now, while it is true, as DR says, that "harming one's enemies is a ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history," if "one's enemies" must be people "who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being," there was no plausible argument that the Jews in the concentration camps were "threats to the well-being" of the Nazis.  Those Jews were clearly innocent people, and the Nazis could not say that killing innocent people was good.

And as to DR's story about the Native Americans torturing and killing the young girl from another tribe, I would need to know more about the circumstances and motives in this case.  Would those Native Americans have said oh we just enjoy killing innocent young women for fun?  Or would they have said we discovered that she was a threat to us, and so we killed her in self-defense?

That we condemn the perpetrators of great evil--like the Nazis--and want to punish them testifies to the natural moral sense as part of our evolved human nature.  One sign that that moral sense is an evolved instinct of the human mind is that it appears early in human development: even babies have a sense of justice.

The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.  He had just watched a puppet show with three characters.  The puppet in the middle rolled a ball to the puppet on the right, who passed it right back to him. It then rolled the ball to the puppet on the left, who ran away with it.  At the end of the show, the 'nice' puppet and the 'naughty' puppet were brought down from the stage and set before the boy.  A treat was placed in front of each of them, and the boy was invited to take one of the treats away.  As predicted, and like most toddlers in this experiment, he took it from the 'naughty' one--the one who had run away with the ball.  But this wasn't enough.  The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head.

In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom reports this as one of the experiments conducted at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University (p. 7).  He presents these experiments as showing that Charles Darwin was right in claiming that evolved human nature shows a natural moral sense--a sense of right and wrong--that is manifest in babies in the first few years of life, appearing at such an early age that it must be a natural instinct that requires little or no social learning.  (Bloom summarized some of his reasoning in an article in the New York Times Magazine here.)

Bloom also argues that these experiments confirm Adam Smith's moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they show that Smith was right in observing that we are naturally social animals, with evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is expressed as sympathy or empathy, through which we judge others and judge ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation.  When we see people suffering unfair injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves into their situations--perhaps even projecting ourselves into a puppet show.  That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of rights, because we judge rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.  This is what I have called Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism (here, here, and here).

Consider how Bloom's experiments with babies illustrate these points.  The toddler who recognized the naughty puppet and decided that he deserved punishment showed a combination of reason and emotion.  He had the cognitive capacity to understand that the puppet in the middle had been harmed by the puppet on the left who ran away with the ball.  He also had to sympathize with the imagined resentment of the puppet victim, which motivated his punishment of the bad puppet by taking away the treat and slapping him.  Notice that this third-party punishment is a disinterested or impartial judgment, in the sense that it concerns actions that don't directly affect the baby himself.

The cognitive understanding of the puppet show by itself would not have motivated the moral judgment without the moral emotion of sympathetic resentment.  Psychopaths illustrate this.  Bloom relates the story of a thirteen-year-old mugger who viciously attacked elderly women.  When a reporter asked him about the pain he had caused a woman, the boy was surprised by the question and responded: "What do I care? I'm not her."  He had a rational understanding of what he had done, but his moral judgment was impaired by his lack of moral emotions such as sympathy and guilt.

If these babies show a naturally evolved propensity to third-party punishment, then we need to explain the evolutionary process that produced it.  There are at least three theories for this.  We might explain this through group selection, in that groups with third-party punishment tended to outcompete groups without such punishment.  Or we might explain this through individual selection, in that individuals inclined to third-party punishment earned good reputations that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Or we might explain this though an evolutionary combination of revenge and empathy, in that individuals imagine themselves in the shoes of a victim and then respond as if they themselves had been harmed.

But presumably 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."

My next post will be on DR's "political theory of teleoformalism."