Darwinian Conservatism by Larry Arnhart

Kraynak's Reply and the Three Levels of Evolution

2012-01-28T14:00:00.000Z

In response to my recent post on his article--"Justice Without Foundations"--Robert Kraynak has written the following as a comment:

"The main point of my article, 'Justice without Foundations,' was to argue on philosophical grounds that post-modern relativists like Rorty and Darwinians like Dennett and Pinker have commitments to social justice, understood as democracy, human rights, and respect for human dignity that are completely inconsistent with their philosophical and scientific views. Darwinian evolution does not support democracy and human rights or the inherent dignity of the individual. If it supports any kind of moral code, it would be a code of the strong dominating the weak or one 'tribal' gene pool dominating or exterminating another tribal gene pool. Strict Darwinians should look upon, for example, the victims of the Haitian earthquake in cold rational fashion as losers in the struggle for survival, not as objects of compassion or as eliciting aid for the suffering stranger. The attachment of Darwinians to democratic values or to Christian values of universal charity is completely contradictory and irrational. Their claims to the contrary seem to reflect the secularized values of the surrounding Christian culture and a kind of Lamarckian belief that we can inherit culturally acquired values from the non-Darwinian cultures that developed through religion, philosophy, and high culture. None of the above comments [the comments on the post] are really addressing the main point--that Darwinian evolution as a 'metaphysical doctrine' does not support democracy, human rights, and universal human dignity. When Darwinians refer to 'evolved human nature' that includes democracy and human rights, they are sneaking in cultural values not inherited traits--'memes' rather than 'genes' as Dawkins likes to say, also quite inconsistently.

My response to this comment should be clear to anyone who has read the posts to which I linked in my post on Kraynak's article.

Contrary to what Kraynak says here, there is no evidence in Darwin's writing or in the writing on the evolutionary psychology of morality that Darwinism requires that we reject any appeal to compassion or sympathy for suffering human beings. In fact, Darwin is very clear in affirming sympathy as an expression of our evolved social instincts, and recent research on the evolution of morality is very clear about the importance of social emotions in moral experience. I have written many posts about this.

Moreover, when Kraynak refers to "a kind of Lamarckian belief that we can inherit culturally acquired values," he doesn't realize that Darwin embraced Lamarckian cultural evolution, and he doesn't realize that I have argued in many posts and in my books that to explain social order, we need three levels of order: genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and deliberate judgment.

Darwin elaborates on this throughout the The Descent of Man. He summarizes this point near the end of the book: "Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is, yet as far as the highest part of man's nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, etc., than through natural selection; though to this latter agency may be safely attributed the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense."

We have genetically evolved instincts for social learning and deliberate judgment, so that any Darwinian explanation of moral or political order requires moving through three levels of explanation: nature, custom (or habit), and reason. I have illustrated this throughout my writing. So, for example, in Darwinian Conservatism, I have explained the evolution of the moral sense as moving through three levels: moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Similarly, I have explained the evolution of property as moving from natural property to customary property to formal property. Kraynak needs to explain why this is wrong.

A sample of the many posts on these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

Strauss and Seagrave on Darwin and the Declaration

2012-01-25T19:51:00.000Z

This fall, Adam Seagrave will be joining the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University as our newest professor in the field of political theory. He comes from Notre Dame, where he earned his Ph.D. I am pleased to have him as a new colleague, because he will be a great addition to our program in political theory.

I first became aware of Seagrave's work from reading his series of articles on the political theory of natural right, natural law, and natural rights.

While I agree with him on many points, I disagree with him on some fundamental points. The primary source of our disagreements is that Seagrave accepts Leo Strauss's claim that modern natural science--and particularly Darwinian science--subverts any idea of nature that would support natural right, natural law, or natural rights, while I argue against Strauss in defending the idea of Darwinian natural right.

Our disagreement is evident in Seagrave's recent article--"Darwin and the Declaration"--in Politics and the Life Sciences (vol. 30, no. 1, spring 2011, pp. 2-16). He disputes my argument that Darwinian evolutionary science can support the reasoning for natural rights found in the Declaration of Independence and in the argumentation of John Locke that stands behind the Declaration.

Seagrave asserts--and I agree--that the philosophical teaching of the Declaration of Independence assumes both the distinctness and the dignity of the human species. Human beings must be naturally distinct in being different in kind from all other species of animals. And this natural distinctiveness must give human beings a natural dignity as being morally superior to all other species.

According to Seagrave, I fail to recognize how Darwin's evolutionary science contradicts both of these points. Contrary to the first point, Darwin claims that human beings as products of evolution are different in degree but not in kind from other animal species, and thus Darwin denies the essentialist conception of species implicit in the Declaration of Independence and in Locke's reasoning. Contrary to the second point, Darwin grounds the moral dignity of human beings in the evolution of a "moral sense" that depends upon the moral sense tradition of philosophy--from Francis Hutcheson to David Hume and Adam Smith--which assumes a natural sociality that denies the Locke's reliance on natural selfishness and individualism.

Seagrave writes:

The specific points on which my arguments differ from Arnhart's account consist primarily in the following: 1) whether Darwinian evolutionary theory can support the conception of the human species or human nature that is sufficiently stable and distinct to cohere with the idea of natural or human rights found in the distilled Declaration; and, 2) whether "moral sense" philosophy can serve as an adequate or appropriate support for this idea of natural or human rights. While Arnhart clearly answers both questions in the affirmative, I have argued that significant and perhaps insurmountable obstacles to affirmative answers remain. (12)

Most of what I would say in response to Seagrave can be found in previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I'll add just a few points here. First, Seagrave fails to consider the possibility that the reality of human nature as required for the Lockean argument and the Declaration of Independence can be grounded in a biological concept of species that is opposed to Platonic essentialism. That Locke draws from the Aristotelian biological tradition of understanding species is evident when one notices the passages in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that are almost direct quotations from Aristotle's biological writings. For example, Locke's comments on how "we shall find everywhere that the several species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees" (3.6.12; 4.16.2) echo passages in Aristotle's Parts of Animals (681a10-15). Like Locke, Aristotle is criticizing the Platonic tradition of essentialism and defending a biological concept of species rooted in an empirical science of natural history. This biological tradition of thought from Aristotle to Locke is renewed in Darwin's evolutionary account of species, in which emergent differences in kind arise from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity. So, for example, we can explain the distinctiveness of the human mind as an emergent product of the evolution of the primate brain as it increased in size and complexity.

If one assumes, as Seagrave seems to do, that Platonic essentialism is the only way to explain the reality of species, then Locke and Darwin will appear to be nominalists who deny the reality of species. But if one sees the reasonableness of the biological concept of species, then one can see how Locke and Darwin can affirm species as stable realities that we can know by an empirical natural history of probabilistic science.

My second point is to deny Seagrave's sharp contrast between Lockean individualism and individual rights, on the one hand, and the Scottish moral sense philosophy, on the other hand. I am not convinced that Lockean individual rights require a political morality that denies human sociality and the concern for the public good, which would set Lockean individualism in opposition to the moral sense school.

Actually, Seagrave recognizes that Thomas Jefferson--the primary author of the Declaration of Independence--thought that Locke's arguments and the moral sense philosophy were compatible. Seagrave explains this by asserting "that Jefferson himself simply overlooked, or failed to fully grapple with, the significant yet rather subtle tensions between a Hutchesonian public good-based political philosophy and a Lockean rights-based one" (11). Does Seagrave really want to assert that he understands Jefferson's Declaration better than Jefferson himself did?

Jefferson's Declaration begins by invoking the rights of individual "men." But then it moves to the rights of "the People." Seagrave says nothing about this, because in concentrating on the opening sentences of the Declaration, he ignores the rest of the Declaration that speaks of "the People" rather than individual "men." Most importantly, the right of revolution--the right exercised in the Declaration of Independence itself--is said to be a right of "the People." This thought is carried into the U.S. Constitution, which appeals to the authority of "We the People," with no references to the rights of "men."

This move from the individual rights of "men" to the social rights of "the People" is evident in Locke's Two Treatises, which reflects the complexity of human nature as both selfish and social. Seagrave says nothing about this.

Throughout the Two Treatises, Locke indicates that the rights of individuals are constrained by society and the public good. For example, private property is constrained by the rule that there must be "enough, and as good left in common for others" (ST, 27). Human beings are driven into society by their dependence on parental care as children, and the family is the "first society" (ST, 77). Like Aristotle and Darwin, Locke explains the natural sociality of human beings as arising from their biological nature as mammals with extended periods of childhood dependence on parental care. Not only do human beings have a natural desire to care for themselves and their survival, they also have a natural desire to care for their children and other family members as extensions of themselves (FT, 86-97; ST, 52-86). Once individuals leave the state of nature to enter civil society, these individuals have authorized the society or the legislative power to act for the "public good of the Society" (ST, 89). In that society, individuals must submit to the rule of the majority. Moreover, the right of resistance to tyranny is not a right of every individual but a right of the people. Many individuals can suffer a deprivation of rights. But there will be no revolution until the majority of the people are moved to rebel (ST, 230). For as long as society lasts, the rights of individuals have been given up to the community (ST, 242).

This Lockean movement from the rights of individual men to the rights of the people is clear in the Declaration of Independence. Once government is said to be "instituted among men," the Declaration never mentions the "rights" of "men" again. Instead, the Declaration speaks of the "rights" of the "People."

My point here is that Locke and the Declaration combine individual self-interest and social concern in a manner that is close to what one sees in the moral sense philosophers and Darwin. Human beings naturally care for themselves, but they also naturally care for others whom they identify as extensions of themselves. Darwin explains this as a manifestation of evolved human nature. Modern social neuroscience deepens this explanation by showing how human neuroendocrine systems are adapted to sustain our self-conscious care for our embodied identity and for others as mammalian extensions of our ourselves.

Newt Gingrich, Chimpanzee Politician

2012-01-22T12:05:00.000Z

Now that Newt Gingrich has won the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, we have another chance to see how successful he can be in practicing the art of chimpanzee politics in the quest for alpha male dominance. In his case, the similarities between chimpanzee politics and human politics have become part of his self-conscious strategizing. When he became Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1994, he recommended that freshmen Republican representatives read Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics as a good book for understanding Washington politics. He identified himself as the dominant chimp, and many observers noticed the similarities between the Republican power-takeover in 1994 and de Waal's depictions of his power-striving chimps.

Since then, Gingrich has continued to show his interest in evolutionary science and primate politics. In an interview a few years ago, he indicated that if he had not become a historian and politician, he might have become an evolutionary naturalist like Edward O. Wilson.

Gingrich's shrewd techniques in the televised debates show his understanding of how important dominance displays can be in challenging one's rivals. This also shows how easily the demagoguery of a narcissistic bully can sway voters who are desperate for a leader. We can only hope that the voters will eventually discover the dangerous consequences of following someone with such a reckless personality.

And perhaps Mitt Romney will need to study Chimpanzee Politics to learn something about the mistakes of being too timid in debates.

The possibility of a chimpanzee political science has been a topic for various posts on this blog, some of which can be found here and here.

Kraynak's Nietzschean Attack on Darwinian Naturalism

2012-01-18T19:19:00.002Z

The New Atlantis has published an article ("Justice without Foundations") by Robert Kraynak attacking Darwinian naturalism as failing to provide the "foundations" for justice. Apparently, I am one of the targets for his attack, although his reference to me consists of only one sentence: "Some argue that Darwinism provides a coherent theory of 'natural right' that resembles Aristotle's theory (but without the natural teleology); Larry Arnhart, for example, has developed such a theory, which he calls (in the title of his 2005 book) Darwinian Conservatism" (109). Even this one sentence is mistaken, because I have argued that Darwinian natural right really is rooted in a natural teleology, although it's the "immanent teleology" of evolutionary adaptation to species-specific ends rather than the "cosmic teleology" of an intelligently designed universe.

Kraynak says he wants to explain the "strangeness of our day":

What is so strange about our age is that demands for respecting human rights and human dignity are increasing even as the foundations for those demands are disappearing. In particular, beliefs in man as a creature made in the image of God, or an animal with a rational soul, are being replaced by a scientific materialism that undermines what is noble and special about man, and by doctrines of relativism that deny the objective morality required to undergird human dignity. How do we account for the widening gap between metaphysics and morals today? How do we explain "justice without foundations"--a virtue that seems to exist like a table without legs, suspended in mid-air? What is holding up the central moral beliefs of our times? (103-104)

Kraynak surveys some of the writings of Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker as illustrating this modern strangeness of "justice without foundations." He then indicates that to explain this modern predicament we need to adopt the "insights" of Frederich Nietzsche.

The modern Western world is no longer openly Christian and religious, but nor is it free of all Christian and religious influences. Rather, modernity is a secularized form of Christianity in which the religious faith of the Middle Ages has been transformed by the Enlightenment into a worldly form of humanitarianism: the original spiritual notions of Christian charity and equality before God were transformed into a political movement of equal rights and dignity before man, which led to the French Revolution and the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Nietzsche states this point succinctly when he discusses modern politics in Beyond Good and Evil, arguing that "the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement." What he means is that modern democracy arose from the secularization of Christian values, producing a feeling of pity for the suffering of humanity and a morality of equal rights, which seeks to overthrow aristocratic orders by revolutionary movements and to create a more just and compassionate world.

Another formulation that Nietzsche uses to capture the moral psychology of the modern world is that modern man wants the Christian morality without the Christian God. In Twilight of the Idols, he sarcastically criticizes the English people for preserving Christian morality despite their rejection of Christian faith. (114)

Kraynak admits that Darwinian naturalists--like me--do provide a "foundation" for moral order in "an objective idea of human nature" that does not depend upon religious belief. But this Darwinian appeal to nature is confused, he insists, because it ignores the "logical implication" of Darwinian naturalism, which is Social Darwinism--"a view of politics in which the strong inevitably and even legitimately dominate and exploit the weak for their own purposes, and democracy, dignity, justice, and compassion are sentimental relics of Christianity, or, more accurately, prejudices of democratic culture" (108-109).

The modern morality of human rights depends on the concept of equal human dignity, Kraynak insists, and the only secure "foundation" for this idea of human dignity is Biblical religion, and especially the Biblical teaching that all human beings are created in the image of God. We need a "reasonable faith," and "such a reasonable faith is what the Bible offers us." "And it is a faith that shows us that the Judeo-Christian conception of man provides the most plausible account of human dignity--and that divine love is the ultimate foundation of human justice" (120).

There are lots of problems with Kraynak's reasoning. First of all, it's not clear that the Bible supports modern liberal humanism as based on universal human dignity and equal human rights. The only Biblical verse that Kraynak cites as supporting the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God's image is in Psalm 8: "For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor" (119). But Kraynak does not notice that in the immediately following Psalm 9, the psalmist thanks God for destroying his enemies: "the enemy is wiped out--mere ruins forever--you have annihilated their cities, their memory has perished" (9:6). Of course, the Bible is full of such bloody violence as God annihilates Israel's enemies in the most brutal ways. Speaking to Moses, God commands the "curse of destruction" in which every living being in a town must be killed--men, women, and children (Deuteronomy 20:10-20)--although the young women who are still virgins should be kept alive so that they can be raped by the Hebrew men (Numbers 31). Enemies can also be enslaved. And, indeed, the Bible generally supports slavery.

Moreover, the violence commanded by God is directed not just to external enemies but also to Hebrews who displease God. A long list of crimes--including children cursing their parents, homosexuality, and blasphemy--are to be punished with death.

This doesn't sound like a Biblical defense of human rights and liberal democracy.

In fact, Kraynak recognizes this in his book Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, where he stresses the point that "a Christian argument for liberal democracy cannot be found in the Bible, in either the Old or the New Testaments" (54). Moreover, "the biblical conception of human dignity, based on the Imago Dei, is not the same as the liberal democratic conception of human dignity based on autonomous self-determination; and it does not necessarily support human rights" (55).

In his book, Kraynak explains: "Herein lies the fundamental difference between the biblical and the contemporary understanding of human dignity. In the biblical view, dignity is hierarchical and comparative; in the modern, it is democratic and absolute" (60). This difference is evident, he believes, in the biblical "acceptance of the patriarchal household and of social inequalities," in which wives are commanded to obey their husbands, and slaves are commanded to obey their masters (60-61).

Although many modern Christians have embraced liberal democracy and human rights, Kraynak explains this as a consequence of Christians giving up the biblical doctrines of authoritarian hierarchy and theocracy under the influence of Enlightenment liberalism. In particular, Kraynak argues, "a specific strand of Enlightenment liberalism--namely, Immanuel Kant's philosophy of freedom and his notion of the human person as a possessor of inalienable rights--has been the decisive factor in changing Christian politics" (109). So, for example, Kraynak shows how the Kantian Enlightenment idea of a "democracy of the person" was transmitted through Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain, so that finally, in the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, the Catholic Church for the first time in its history endorsed religious liberty and liberal democracy as rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person (146-147).

So while the argument of Kraynak's article is that modern liberal humanism is the "secularization" of Christian values, the argument of his book is that modern Christian humanism is the "sacralization" of an Enlightenment humanism that has overturned the biblical teaching.

There also are problems with Kraynak's use of Nietzsche. He appeals to Nietzsche's "insights" without explaining why we should take Nietzsche as authoritative. Moreover, he does not point out to his reader that what Nietzsche says about these issues in his later writings contradicts what he says in his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science. In those middle writings, Nietzsche accepts Darwinian science as supporting an Enlightenment conception of liberal democracy rooted in an evolved human nature that does not require transcendental or religious conceptions. In these middle works, when Nietzsche was most favorable to Darwinian science, he offers a moderate and sensible endorsement of liberal democracy and humanitarian morality. But in the later works--those favored by Kraynak--Nietzsche shows an extremism that manifests his religious longings for ecstatic transcendence through "will to power" and the "Overman," and its this version of Nietzsche that was adopted by the Nazis. By contrast, Nietzsche's middle writings show how a sensible conception of the moral and intellectual excellence of human beings can be rooted in evolved human nature without any need for a transcendent moral cosmology.

We can see this evolutionary ethics in the history of the modern human rights movement. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 never refers to God and never uses the word "sacred." The drafters of the Universal Declaration debated whether they should include language about human beings as created in God's image, and they rejected this language because they saw it as appealing to religious beliefs that were not universal and not compatible with modern human rights. They believed that the "inherent dignity" of humanity could stand on its own without any reliance on the "sacred." Moreover, in speaking about how "barbarous acts . . . have outraged the conscience of mankind," the Universal Declaration invoked the sort of moral sentiments of sympathy that provide the foundation for the Darwinian moral tradition that embraces the thought of David Hume and Adam Smith.

The "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights" (ratified by the UN in 1998) declares that "the human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity," and it identifies this human genome as a product of natural evolution. So here it is clearly indicated that the inherent dignity of humanity arises not from divine creation but from natural evolution.

One product of human evolution is sympathy and the moral emotions of approval and disapproval. We can try to ground our morality in metaphysical principles--God, Nature, or Reason; and we can argue, as Kraynak does, that without such metaphysical foundations, morality is unjustified. But such purely metaphysical principles cannot sustain morality--including the morality of human rights--without the motivational power of moral emotions.

The behavior of human rights activists confirms this. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch don't invoke the metaphysical order of the cosmos. They elicit support for their human rights campaigns through a rhetoric of emotional persuasion. They tell stories or show us pictures of human cruelty. The more disturbing and vivid the stories and the pictures of cruelty, the more likely we are to feel some identification and thus sympathy with the victims. We then feel outrage against the perpetrators of such cruelty, and we want them to be stopped and perhaps punished.

William Schulz is the former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. In his book In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, he dismisses appeals to God or Nature or Reason as insufficient to sustain the morality of human rights. Instead, he agrees with David Hume's and Charles Darwin's argument that morality depends on sympathy and the moral emotions that incline us to care for our fellow human beings.

Drawing from his own experience as a human rights campaigner, Schulz tells some stories of the cruelty against which he has fought. From this, he concludes:

Robert Frost once observed that poems begin with a lump in the throat, and I think human rights do too. . . . for better than by appeals to God or Nature, is to point to the capacity to identify with others, the capacity for human empathy or solidarity. This is a capacity of such richness and complexity that something like it, at least concerning mothers and children, is required for the propagation of the species. Children in our culture as young as one have been known to evidence it, and some ethologists even believe it can be identified in animals. It is a phenomenon so widespread, it not universal, that we can hardly imagine a society without it. (24)

There is a foundation for human dignity, but it's not a transcendent or transhuman foundation--God, Nature, or Reason--but the empirical foundation of evolved human nature as the source of sympathy and the moral sense. We see this in the practical arguments over human rights when the proponents of human rights employ not metaphysical reasoning about cosmic principles but rhetorical persuasion to evoke moral emotions. The history of the expansion of human rights is therefore to be understood as what Hume and Darwin called "a progress of sentiments" as human beings have been persuaded to extend their sympathetic concern to ever wider circles of humanity.

Darwin identifies the Golden Rule as "the foundation of morality" (Descent of Man, Penguin Classics, p. 151). He sees this as a moral conception that human beings had to learn over a long history of moral experience by which they learned to extend their humanitarian sympathy to ever wider communities. "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 reached, there is only an artifical barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (p. 147).

This quotation from Darwin is the epigram for Robert Wrights book Nonzero. Wright argues that the moral and political history of human civilization is a history of cultural evolution in which human beings discover ways of expanding the range of tit-for-tat reciprocity (the basis of the Golden Rule) to resolve "prisoner's dilemma" problems. Learning how to cooperate with those who are trustworthy while punishing those who are not trustworthy will be favored by both natural selection and cultural evolution.

Steven Pinker uses this same quotation from Darwin as the epigram for the final chapter of his book Better Angels of Our Nature (p. 671), because it captures the evolutionary moral psychology underlying the historical trend towards declining violence, as people have discovered ever better ways to foster peaceful cooperation and avoid violent conflict. The modern humanism of human rights and liberal democracy is the consummation of this progressive history.

And contrary to Kraynak's argument, this does not depend on religious belief. In fact, just the opposite is true: the historical progress towards declining violence has required a taming of the religious fanaticism responsible for so much violence in the past. So successful has this been, that now even the Catholic Popes have recently begun to ask forgiveness for the legacy of violence promoted by biblical religion.

And yet it should be said that the moral persuasion favoring humanitarian morality does not always work. It does not work with those abnormal human beings--like psychopaths--who lack the moral emotions of sympathy, guilt, and shame. Nor does it work when people are so caught up in their fanatical moral and religious commitments that they cannot recognize those outside their moral community as full human beings who evoke moral concern. Such situations create tragic moral conflicts that are settled not by persuasion but by force.

The American Civil War is a dramatic illustration of such tragic moral conflict. The dispute over slavery could not be settled by metaphysical appeals to God, Nature, or Reason. The Bible did not resolve the debate, because it was invoked by both sides in the debate. As Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other.

In such tragic conflicts, universal love does not work. Instead, we settle the disagreement by force of arms. That's why human rights ultimately rest upon the right to revolution. If human rights are not protected, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, then human beings have recourse, as a last resort, to "rebellion against tyranny and oppression."

Elaboration of all of these points can be found in some previous posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Lucretian Liberalism: Ancient & Modern

2012-01-16T21:51:00.000Z

Some libertarians--such as Martin Masse--have noticed that Ludwig von Mises saw classical liberalism as rooted in Epicureanism.

In Human Action--in the section entitled "A Critique of the Holistic and Metaphysical View of Society"--Mises rejects the holistic idea that "society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the individuals" (third revised edition, 1966, p. 145). He sees the classical liberal break from this collectivist notion as expressing an Epicurean view of the world:

The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the spiritual, moral, and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by the philosophy of Epicureanism. It substituted an autonomous rational morality for the heteronomous and intuitionist ethics of older days. Law and legality, the moral code and social institutions are no longer revered as unfathomable decrees of Heaven. They are of human origin, and the only yardstick that must be applied to them is that of expediency with regard to human welfare. The utilitarian economist does not say: Fiat justitia, pereat mundus [let justice be done, though the world perish]. He says: Fiat justitia, ne pereat mundus [let justice be done, so the world does not perish]. He does not ask a man to renounce his well-being for the benefit of society. He advises him to recognize what his rightly understood interests are. In his eyes God's magnificence does not manifest itself in busy interference with sundry affairs of princes and politicians, but in endowing his creatures with reason and the urge toward the pursuit of happiness. (p. 147)

Elsewhere in Human Action, Mises adopts an Epicurean eudaimonism in his "praxeology"--his explanation of human action as purposive behavior--in presenting all human action as directed to removing uneasiness and thus pursuing happiness. The end of human action is that Epicurean tranquility of mind understood as "that state of perfect happiness and contentment at which all human activity aims without ever wholly attaining" (p. 15).

In contrast to the "holistic and metaphysical view of society," the Epicurean liberal sees social order not as an intelligently designed imposition by the state conforming to some cosmic or theological conception of the Good, but as an evolved order of spontaneous rules devised by individuals acting for their own ends. That spontaneous moral order arises through a tacit agreement to cooperation for mutual benefit, which is elaborated in modern social contract theory. This idea was anticipated by Epicurus: "Natural justice is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, that is, neither to harm one another nor be harmed" (5.xxxi).

In embracing this Epicurean utilitarian hedonism, Mises argued against the tradition of natural law, which provoked Murray Rothbard into defending a natural law or natural rights basis for classical liberalism. But I think Mises and Rothbard were not really so far apart on this issue, because Mises recognized that what human beings regard as "useful" reflects the natural desires of their evolved human nature. In appealing to the human nature of social cooperation, Mises was implicitly appealing to a natural law/natural rights conception (see, for example, Socialism, 356-363, 408-409).

That Epicurean philosophy supports modern classical liberalism is also suggested by Leo Strauss. In his book Liberalism: Ancient & Modern, the central chapter and the longest chapter is his "Notes on Lucretius," thus implying that the Epicureanism of Lucretius anticipates modern liberalism. Strauss was famous for stressing the "quarrel between the ancients and the moderns." But in the Preface of this book, Strauss noted the modernity of ancient Epicureanism:

The most extensive discussion is devoted to Lucretius' poem. In that poem, not to say in Epicureanism generally, premodern thought seems to come closer to modern thought than anywhere else. No premodern writer seems to have been as deeply moved as Lucretius was by the thought that nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless, or that the eternal is not lovable. Apart from this, it may suffice here to refer to Kant's presentation of Epicureanism as identical with the spirit of modern natural science prior to the subjection of that science to the critique of pure reason. (viii)

And yet, Strauss worries about the sadness of this Epicurean teaching--that the world that we love is not eternal, because every world is mortal within the eternal universe of atoms in motion. He identifies this as "the most terrible truth" (85, 100, 135). Philosophers can live with this truth with a tranquil mind. But most human beings cannot. And consequently most human beings can find peace of mind only through the "pleasing delusion" of a religious belief that the world of human concern is supported by a loving intelligent designer.

Here is where Strauss and the Straussians depart from Lucretian Epicurean science. Following the Nietzsche of his early and late writings, they look to a new religion--perhaps even an atheistic religiosity--that will hide the "deadly truth" of modern science, and especially Darwinian science. They thus reject the Epicurean and Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings--Human, All Too Human and Dawn. Strauss implied this in his essay on Beyond Good and Evil by emphasizing the importance of Nietzsche's affirmation of "the eternal basic text of Homo natura": Strauss and Nietzsche long for eternity rather than evolution.

This explains why so many of the Straussians--for example, Leon Kass--show such a deep fear of modern evolutionary science and such a deep longing for a new religion to support an intelligent-design cosmology.

The Lucretian Modernity of Darwinian Liberalism

2012-01-10T19:48:00.001Z

Modern science, modern liberalism, and even the whole of modern culture began in January of 1417. That's when Poggio Bracciolini was looking for old books in a monastic library in southern Germany, and he discovered a copy of Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things.

Written near the middle of the first century B.C., Lucretius' book was a poetic exposition of the philosophical atomism of Epicurus. Although Epicurus and Lucretius professed to believe in the existence of gods, they argued that the gods were immortal but natural beings who had no care for human beings, and who never interfered with the natural order of the cosmos. That natural cosmic order was explained as the product of atomic particles combining and dissolving by chance and material necessity. As part of that natural motion of atoms, human beings were purely material beings--in their bodies and their minds--and as such they were mortal. Religious beliefs in the immortality of the soul and an afterlife in which those immortal souls were to be eternally rewarded or punished should be recognized as delusions. Indeed, those delusions based on religious fears were the primary source of human anxiety. To be happy, to be able to enjoy the pleasures of mortal life, human beings needed to overcome their fear of death and of divine judgement. They could do that, Epicurus and Lucretius believed, by understanding the way things really are as a product of the evolutionary history of the world as atoms in motion.

This materialist cosmology of Epicureanism was a radical alternative to the other views of cosmic order in the ancient Greek and Roman world--including Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. And while many of the early Christian theologians could accommodate modified forms of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism as compatible with Christianity, they had to reject Epicurean materialism as utterly contrary to Christianity. The Christian fear of the Satanic temptation of Epicureanism was so deep that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were hidden away and largely disappeared from medieval Christendom.

But then with the passionate revival of ancient learning in the European Renaissance, there was a curiosity, even among some devout Christians, about the long forgotten writings of Epicureanism. As one of the greatest hunters of ancient books in the Renaissance, Poggio was elated to finally discover a copy of Lucretius' text in 1417. But he had no idea that his discovery would lead to a renewal of Epicurean thought that would transform the culture of the Western world. In fact, we can make a good argument that what makes the world modern is the materialist cosmology presented in Lucretius' On the Nature of Things. We are all Epicureans now.

This story has recently been told in a most engaging way by Stephen Greenblatt in his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Norton, 2011), which has received the National Book Award for nonfiction for 2011. The book is wonderfully well-written, perhaps reflecting the fact that Greenblatt is a professor of English literature at Harvard.

It's surprising that Greenblatt never mentions another book published 10 years ago that covers much of the same ground as his book--Benjamin Wiker's Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (InterVarsity Press, 2002).

Greenblatt and Wiker agree in their historical narrative of the modern world as a product of the turn away from the Christian cosmology of intelligent design to the Lucretian cosmology of evolutionary atomism. They disagree, however, in their assessment of this historical turn: Greenblatt celebrates it as moral progress, while Wiker laments it as moral degeneration. Comparing the two books illuminates this fundamental cosmological debate, a debate that runs through much of my writing for this blog.

Wiker is a Fellow of the Discovery Institute, and he wrote his book with the financial support of the Discovery Institute as part of their "wedge strategy" for overturning the modern culture of Darwinian materialism and replacing it with a Christian culture of intelligent design. The back cover of Wiker's book bears endorsements from many of the luminaries of the intelligent design movement, and the Foreword is written by William Dembski.

Dembski indicates the fundamental issue in declaring that Wiker's book poses the primary question between intelligent design and Darwinism: "Is reality fundamentally mindful and purposive or mind-less and material?" (13).

Christians must see the world as intelligently designed by the divine Creator, who exercises providential care over human beings and who judges them in the afterlife as deserving heavenly rewards or hellish punishments for eternity. Christians can interpret many of the ancient philosophers--Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics--as teaching that the world is "fundamentally mindful and purposive" and thus supporting a Christian cosmology. But they can't do this with the atomistic cosmology of Epicurus and Lucretius, which must be seen as the fundamental rival to Christianity.

Moreover, Wiker argues, one must defend Christian cosmology if one wants to defend Christian morality. As a comprehensive account of the universe, every cosmology implies a morality, because every account of nature as a whole implies an account of human nature--the moral and intellectual life of human beings--as part of cosmic nature.

With this in mind, Wiker argues that "the culture wars are cosmological wars" (314). The current debates over the morality of abortion, gay marriage, sexual conduct generally, biotechnology, and the teaching of evolution in public schools are all ultimately rooted in an irreconcilable choice between intelligent-design cosmology and materialist cosmology. The cosmology of intelligent-design provides cosmic support for Christian morality. The cosmology of materialist atomism promotes an individualistic hedonism free from any absolute standards of right and wrong.

Wiker would seem to agree with Greenblatt's summary of the 20 fundamental propositions of Lucretius' account of "the way things are" (182-202):

1. Everything is made of invisible particles.
2. The elementary particles of matter--"the seeds of the things"--are eternal.
3. The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size.
4. All particles are in motion in an infinite void.
5. The universe has no creator or designer.
6. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve.
7. The swerve is the source of free will.
8. Nature ceaselessly experiments.
9. The universe was not created for or about humans.
10. Humans are not unique.
11. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival.
12. The soul dies.
13. There is no afterlife.
14. Death is nothing to us.
15. All organized religions are superstitious delusions.
16. Religions are invariably cruel.
17. There are no angels, demons, or ghosts.
18. The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
19. The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
20. Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder.

Greenblatt and Wiker show how these Lucretian ideas shaped the leading modern thinkers in philosophy and science--including Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Hume, Spinoza, and Darwin.

The one person overlooked here, I think, is Nietzsche. Particularly, in his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science--Nietzsche develops one of the most elaborate modern statements of Epicurean and Darwinian Enlightenment. In his earlier and later writings, however, Nietzsche essentially agrees with Wiker that human beings cannot live well as Darwinian Epicureans without a redemptive cosmology, and we see Nietzsche striving for a cosmology of atheistic religiosity. The agreement between Wiker and Nietzsche is most evident in their scorn for David Friedrich Strauss in his failing to see the nihilistic consequences of Darwinian science. Some of my posts on this point can be found here, here, and here.

Although there is no evidence that Darwin read Epicurus or Lucretius, one can clearly see the fundamental ideas of Darwinian evolution in Book 5 (see lines 837-877) of De rerum natura, although one does not see a clear account of the gradual transmutation of one species into another. Moreover, one sees the fundamental agreement between Lucretius and Darwin in their general cosmology of a world in which complex order arises through a natural evolutionary process that does not require miraculous interventions by an intelligent designer.

Although I find Wiker's intellectual history illuminating, we fundamentally disagree in that I don't share his apocalyptic fear of what he sees as the moral nihilism of the Lucretian/Darwinian cosmology. The disagreement was evident some years ago when Wiker and I had an exchange in the pages of First Things. In the November 2000 issue of First Things, I wrote an article defending "Darwinian Conservatism," which was followed by critical responses from Michael Behe and Bill Dembski, and then my response to them. A year later, Wiker wrote an article in First Things attacking me, and much of his argument was incorporated into his book (see pp. 245-46). There was then a brief exchange between us in a later issue of First Things.

Our disagreement comes at two levels. At the first level, Wiker refuses to see--as I do--that a purposeful human nature can arise within a purposeless cosmic nature. I believe that we can judge the moral and intellectual virtues as contributing to the flourishing of evolved human nature, even when we think those virtues have no correspondence to any cosmic order of intelligent design. Thus we can recognize that there is a natural law for human beings rooted in their evolved natural inclinations without any need to see this natural human order as the fulfilment of some intentionally designed cosmic order.

At the second level of our disagreement, I find Wiker sophistical in his writing. By that, I mean that he intentionally suppresses evidence and arguments that counter his case for Epicurean Darwinism as morally degrading. For example, in trying to cite evidence in Darwin's Descent of Man that he promoted the eugenics that would lead to Hitler's eugenics, Wiker carefully omits any passages that would contradict his interpretation. One illustration of this is how he selectively quotes from a paragraph near the end of Descent (1871, 2:402-403). In his book (252-53), Wiker quotes the following: "Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes such care. . . . Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. All do good service who aid towards this end." Wiker says this last sentence is a "most damning remark" showing his endorsement of eugenics.

But Wiker is quoting here from one paragraph that concludes with this one sentence that he fails to quote: "When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan of ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man." This makes it clear that Darwin's concern here was to study the possibly injurious effects of incest. In particular, he had proposed that the British Parliament should sponsor a study of the effects of first-cousin marriages to see if they had a high rate of physical and mental birth defects in their children. Darwin had a personal interest in this, since his wife Emma was his first cousin, and he worried about whether the ill health of some of his children might be a consequence of inbreeding. Eventually, Darwin's son George carried out the research Darwin sought, and George concluded that the danger inherited defects from first-cousin marriages was very low.

Here then is an example of what I have called "good eugenics," the kind of eugenics that almost all of us would support. For instance, many Ashkenazi Jews have voluntarily organized genetic testing of their children, so that when they want to marry, they can investigate the probability of birth defects in their children (such as Tay Sachs disease), and then decide whether they want to marry and have children. This is eugenics. Indeed, all the laws that prohibit incestuous marriages are based on eugenics--trying to promote "good births." But this is good eugenics. Wiker hides this from his reader because it would weaken his moral denunciation of Darwin.

Similarly, Wiker strengthens his case for the moral superiority of Christian cosmology by carefully refusing to mention any Christian teachings or practices that his readers might find troublesome. For instance, he presenting the moral teachings of the Bible, Wiker never mentions the fact that the Bible endorses slavery and genocide. He speaks of infanticide as a moral abomination. But he never mentions the troublesome story of Abraham being commanded by God to kill Isaac. As I have noted in some recent posts, even Pope John II and Pope Benedict XVI have asked foregiveness for Christian traditions of violence. Wiker is silent about all of this.

Moreover, Wiker is also silent about the Epicurean books of the Bible--Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs--both of which teach the goodness of pleasure. The Song of Songs celebrating erotic love without reference to marriage or reproduction contradicts Wiker's claim that sexual pleasure must always to directed to producing children. The Epicureanism of Ecclesiastes was noted by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles, III.27.11).

Wiker accuses Darwin of racism, but never mentions that much of the argument for the unity of the human species in the Descent of Man was part of Darwin's argument against slavery.

Another troubling part of Wiker's writing is how he warns against the "secularization" of the modern world as the source of our moral degradation, and thus implies that what we need is a "sacralization" of the world, but he never explains what this would mean. Would he have us revert to the world of medieval Christendom based on its intelligent-design cosmology? He mentions those Epicurean Christians--like Giordano Bruno--who were burned at the stake for their Epicureanism. He doesn't condemn this. So would he want to bring back such executions?

Similarly, Wiker condemns homosexuality as evil because it goes against Christian cosmology and Biblical teaching. He doesn't mention that the Bible commands the killing of homosexuals. For centuries, homosexuality was a capital crime. Would he endorse this? If not, would that mean that he doesn't really want to enforce Christian cosmology and abolish Epicurean cosmology?

Furthermore, Wiker assumes that intelligent design reasoning is not only morally but also scientifically superior to evolutionary reasoning, because the evolutionists cannot explain exactly the step-by-step pathway by which all complex forms have evolved. But then he never offers any account of how the intelligent design proponents would explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer did this.

And while Wiker criticizes Darwinism as based on faith rather than demonstration, he never demonstrates the truth of the anthropomorphic analogy behind all intelligent design reasoning--the idea that we can infer divine intelligent agency from what we know about human intelligent agency. As I have argued in some previous posts, this is dubious assumption that needs to be proven.

Rick Santorum's Support for the Intelligent Design Movement

2012-01-08T14:19:00.001Z

As I have indicated in my previous post, I think Rick Santorum should be questioned about his support for the intelligent design movement. What's at issue here is not just a matter of the science curriculum in public schools, because the deeper question is whether Santorum believes that modern evolutionary science is responsible for the decline of Western culture, and whether he thinks the salvation of Western culture requires replacing evolutionary science with a "true science" of intelligent-design creationism.

This is suggested by what Santorum wrote in 2006 in his Foreword to a collection of essays honoring Phillip Johnson, the founder of the intelligent design movement. The book is Darwin's Nemesis: Phillip Johnson and the Intelligent Design Movement, edited by William A. Dembski (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). One of the essays in this book is an attack on me by J. Budziszewski, who argues that my defense of Darwinian natural right is a dangerous denial of the Christian morality required for a healthy culture. Santorum's Foreword suggests that he agrees with this. I have responded to Budziszewski in two posts that can be found here and here.

Phillip Johnson is the person who first proposed the "wedge strategy"--the idea that a carefully crafted attack on Darwinian evolutionary science could become the "wedge" for ultimately destroying all of modern scientific naturalism and then leading to a "renewal of culture" based on intelligent-design creationism.

Here's the full text of Santorum's Foreword:

This volume celebrates Phillip Johnson's leadership in the intelligent design (ID) movement. Scholars who have known Phil best and worked with him most closely assembled in April 2004 at Biola University to present him with a collection of papers in his honor. I wish I could have been there to offer my congratulations and thanks in person. Instead, I have the privilege of writing this brief foreword from Washington.

Since the publication of Darwin on Trial more than ten years ago, Phillip Johnson has provided extraordinary leadership for an extraordinary cause, namely, to rid science of false philosophy. The importance of the cause is clear: what could be more important than showing that only a shallow, partisan understanding of science supports the false philosophy of materialist reductionism, with its thoroughly unscientific denial of formal and final causes in nature and its repudiation of the first cause of all being? As the decline of true science has been a major factor in the decline of Western culture, so too the renewal of science will play a big part in cultural renewal.

Johnson's extraordinary leadership also is clear: rather than fall into the trap of building a cult of personality around himself and his own considerable talents, he has instead helped raise up and promote a whole group of intellectual leaders in the course of scientific renewal. This kind of selfless Christian leadership is a shining example to us all, young and old.

Speaking of the young, I personally wish to commend Phil for the great help he has given me in my efforts to inject a renewed and unbiased understanding of science and its practice into the curricula of our public schools. There is much more for us to do, but working with Phil's colleagues at Seattle's Discovery Institute, we have begun the difficult fight for removing the stranglehold of philosophical materialism on textbook science.

Phil, I congratulate and praise you for your tireless work to return science to a sure philosophical grounding in the nature of things as they really are. Please know that during your Biola celebration, I was with you and your colleagues in spirit. As much as I was delighted when I first heard about this celebration in your honor, I am again delighted now that the proceedings from that celebration have appeared in book form.

Senator Rick Santorum

It is remarkable to have a United States Senator joining the intelligent design movement led by the Discovery Institute. As Santorum's language here indicates, he sees himself as serving the plan of the Discovery Institute for overturning modern scientific materialism--particularly, as expressed in Darwinian evolutionary science--and replacing it with the "true science" of intelligent-design creationism. This plan was first laid out in a secret memorandum--the "Wedge Document"--for establishing the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture. That document can now be found here.

Santorum's support for the intelligent design movement, while serving as Senator from Pennyslvania, included supporting the school board of the Dover Area Public Schools, in Dover, Pennsylvania, when they tried to introduce intelligent design creationism into the schools. This was overturned by a federal judge as unconstitutional in 2005. Some of my blog posts on this case can be found here.

It would be good for someone to ask Santorum if as President, he would be carrying out the plan in the Discovery Institute's Wedge Document for overturning scientific naturalism and replacing it with intelligent-design creationism.

This question could have been asked this morning on the "Meet the Press" Republican presidential debate, particularly when Santorum said that President Obama's failure to support traditional marriage and family life showed Obama's "secular" view of American culture.

Romney, Santorum, and the Debate Over Evolution

2012-01-04T12:42:00.000Z

Now that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have finished in a tie in the Republican presidential primary vote in Iowa, we might expect to see some debate between them over evolution.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Romney is a theistic evolutionist who sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious belief. He is also a thoughtful proponent of religious liberty. These two positions are related, because he can defend the teaching of evolution in public schools as compatible with religious liberty.

By contrast, Santorum is a proponent of "intelligent design theory," who has acted as an agent of the Discovery Institute in Seattle in attacking Darwinian evolution. In 2001, he attempted to attach the "Santorum Amendment" to the "No Child Left Behind Act," an amendment that would have promoted the teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary science.

In his recent campaigning, Santorum has continued to criticize evolution as an atheistic teaching.

Santorum stresses the religious foundations of the American political tradition, and he sees evolutionary science as a threat to those traditional religious beliefs. Romney, however, has defended the tradition of religious liberty and toleration that stretches from Roger Williams and John Locke to the "no religious test" clause of the American Constitution. Like Abraham Lincoln, who adopted the idea of evolution from his reading of Robert Chambers Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Romney sees no conflict between evolutionary science and religious liberty. Like William Jennings Bryan, Santorum thinks that evolutionary science subverts the religious foundations of American political life.

So it's possible that we might see a split among the Republican presidential candidates over evolution similar to what we saw five years ago.

Is There Any Manly Revolutionary Resentment in Pinker's World?

2012-01-01T16:16:00.000Z

It is remarkable that while Steven Pinker says a lot in Better Angels about the "Humanitarian Revolution" and the "Rights Revolution," he never supports the right to revolution or the moral resentment against oppression that often motivates revolution. This reflects his conviction that the decline in violence depends on the soft sentiments of a feminized culture rather than the hard sentiments of a male culture of honor. But I am not convinced that the moral progress of liberal humanism can be sustained without the spirited sentiments of manly resentment against injustice.

Pinker recognizes the importance of the Declaration of Independence as a statement of the "Humanitarian Revolution" (134, 183, 185). But he never acknowledges its affirmation of the right to revolution. Nor does he reflect on the fact that this was a declaration of war signed by men pledging to one another "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."

He also recognizes the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) as a statement of the "Rights Revolution" (134, 257-58). But he never mentions the statements in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration about "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind" and the justice of "rebellion against tyranny and oppression."

Pinker is troubled by the moral psychology of outrage, rebellion, and honor as rooted in the "inner demon" of revenge (529-47), which drives human beings into moralistic violence. But while Pinker endorses Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's idea of how the moral sentiments are expressed by the "impartial spectator" (669-70), he does not recognize Smith's distinction between revenge and resentment. Revenge is the "excess of resentment," Smith explains, and as such it "appears to be the most detestable of all the passions, and is the object of the horror and indignation of every body." But a proper resentment against inhuman oppression is rightly endorsed "when properly humbled and entirely brought down to the level of the sympathetic indignation of the spectator" (TMS, 76-77).

Contrary to Pinker's reliance on the soft, feminine sentiments of nonviolence, I don't see how we can enforce respect for human rights and individual liberty if we don't feel a manly "sympathetic indignation" in response to oppression, and if we don't allow that moral indignation to justify revolutionary violence against tyrannical rule.

Pinker acknowledges the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) in promoting the abolition of slavery by eliciting sympathy for the suffering of slaves (155, 177). But he says nothing about how some black abolitionists criticized Stowe for presenting Uncle Tom as a purely submissive character who cooperated with his slave masters, who thus implicitly confirmed the proslavery claim that blacks were naturally inclined to slavish obedience and lacking in the spiritedness of free men.

Nor does Pinker say anything about Stowe's other antislavery novel--Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)--in which she presents some slaves as moved by moral indignation to revolutionary resistance to their enslavement. Here she depicts slaves who manifest Smith's moral psychology of proper resentment. She writes: "This sentiment of justice, this agony in view of cruelty and crime, is in men a strong attribute of the highest natures; for he who is destitute of the element of moral indignation is effeminate and tame" (Dred, Penguin Classics, 497). (This point has been made clear to me by my reading of Chris Thuot's dissertation on the political theory of Stowe's novels.)

Beginning with John Locke and other early modern liberal theorists, liberal political theory has rested upon an ultimate appeal to revolutionary violence to vindicate the natural human right to liberty. But in Chapter 8 ("Whatever Happened to Revolution?) of James Payne's History of Force, Payne argues that "owing to the evolution against force, the tendency toward revolution has been decreasing" (102). The same thought is perhaps implied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." The suggestion seems to be that if human rights are protected by the rule of law, there is no need for revolutionary violence. And apparently, Pinker believes that the historical trend toward protecting human rights has become so strong that there is no need for revolution and thus nonviolence can be the rule.

But even if the level of revolutionary violence has dropped in recent history, I cannot see how human rights and liberty can be enforced if there is not at least some threat of revolution to check the power of tyrants. In fact, as Arnold Ludwig has shown in his book King of the Mountain, the 20th century shows a clear pattern in which despotic rulers are likely to be deposed by assassination or rebellion. We should regret that some of the most brutal tyrants of the 20th century--such as Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot--did not arouse enough manly resentment in their subjects to provoke revolutionary resistance.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.

Termite Morality and Pinker's Platonic Longings

2011-12-29T14:37:00.000Z

Like Peter Singer, Steve Pinker struggles with his Platonic longings for a moral cosmology.

Pinker shows this in the final pages of Better Angels (694-96). The evidence for declining violence throughout history suggests that history has some cosmic purpose. James Payne wonders whether this indicates "a higher power at work." Robert Wright wonders whether history is a story with a "cosmic author." Although Pinker resists the temptation to see a divine purpose at work in history, he does see some vindication for "moral realism--that moral truths are out there somewhere for us to discover, just as we discover the truths of science and mathematics."

But like Singer, Pinker is ambivalent about whether his belief in moral truths that are "out there somewhere for us to discover" can be justified by a moral cosmology. He writes:

Only an inflated sense of our own importance could turn our desire to escape the Pacifist's Dilemma into a grand purpose of the cosmos. But the desire does seem to tap into contingencies of the world that are not exactly physical, and so it is different from the desires that were the mothers of other inventions such as refined sugar or central heating. The maddening structure of a Pacifist's Dilemma is an abstract feature of reality. So is its most comprehensive solution, the interchangeability of perspectives, which is the principle behind the Golden Rule and its equivalents that have been rediscovered in so many moral traditions. Our cognitive processes have been struggling with these aspects of reality over the course of our history, just as they have struggled with the laws of logic and geometry.

Though our escape from destructive contests is not a cosmic purpose, it is a human purpose. Defenders of religion have long claimed that in the absence of divine edicts, morality can never be grounded outside ourselves. People can pursue only selfish interests, perhaps tweaked by taste or fashion, and are sentenced to lives of relativism and nihilism. We can now appreciate why this line of argument is mistaken. Discovering earthly ways in which human beings can flourish, including stratagems to overcome the tragedy of the inherent appeal of aggression, should be purpose enough for anyone. It is a goal that is nobler than joining a celestial choir, melting into a cosmic spirit, or being reincarnated into a higher life-form, because the goal can be justified to any fellow thinker rather than being inculcated to arbitrary factions by charisma, tradition, or force.

So, on the one hand, the human good of reducing violence is not a cosmic purpose, but only a human purpose. And yet, on the other hand, this goal reflects "an abstract feature of reality," and it can be "justified to any fellow thinker." What does Pinker mean by "any fellow thinker"? His reference to the laws of logic and geometry suggests that he means that any rational being would have to agree on the morality of reducing violence, which suggests a Kantian moral imperative of pure reason that does not depend on the natural inclinations of the human animal. That's what I see as Pinker's Platonic longing.

Would "any fellow thinker" include a rational termite? Edward O. Wilson has quoted the following excerpt from a commencement address by the dean of the faculty at the International Termite University (In Search of Nature, 1996, pp. 97-99):

On one thing we can surely agree! We are the pinnacle of 3 billion years of evolution, unique by virtue of our high intelligence, employment of symbolic language, and diversity of cultures evolved over hundreds of generations. Our species alone has sufficient self-awareness to perceive history and the meaning of personal mortality. Having largely escaped the sovereignty of our genes, we now base social organization mostly or entirely upon culture. Our universities disseminate knowledge from the three great branches of learning: the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the termitities. Since our ancestors, the macrotermitine termites, achieved 10-kilogram weight and larger brains during their rapid evolution through the later Tertiary period and learned to write with pheromone script, termitistic scholarship has refined ethical philosophy. It is now possible to express the deontological imperatives of moral behavior with precision. These imperatives are mostly self-evident and universal. They are the very essence of termitity. They include the love of darkness and of the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil; the centrality of colony life amidst a richness of war and trade among colonies; the sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal reproduction by worker castes; the mystery of deep love for reproductive siblings, which turns to hatred the instant they mate; rejection of the evil of personal rights; the infinite aesthetic pleasures of pheromonal song; the aesthetic pleasure eating from nestmates' anuses after the shedding of the skin; the joy of cannibalism and surrender of the body for consumption when sick or injured (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat); and much more . . .

Some termitistically inclined scientists, particularly the ethologists and sociobiologists, argue that our social organization is shaped by our genes and that our ethical precepts simply reflect the peculiarities of termite evolution. They assert that ethical philosophy must take into account the structure of the termite brain and the evolutionary history of the species. Socialization is genetically channelled, and some forms of it all but inevitable.

This proposal has created a major academic controversy. Many scholars in the social sciences and termitities, refusing to believe that termite nature can be better understood by a study of fishes and baboons, have withdrawn behind the moat of philosophical dualism and reinforced the crenellated parapets of the formal refutation of the naturalistic fallacy. They consider the mind to be beyond the reach of materialistic biological research. A few take the extreme view that conditioning an alter termite culture and ethics in almost any direction desired. But the biologists respond that termite behavior can never be altered so far as to resemble that of, say, human beings. There is such a thing as a biologically based termite nature . . .

Wilson explains: "I have concocted this termitocentric fantasy to illustrate a generalization strangely difficult to explain by conventional means: that human beings possess a species-specific nature and morality, which occupy only a tiny section in the space of all possible social and moral conditions."

Contrary to what is suggested by Pinker and Singer, there are no moral truths written into the order of the cosmos that are justifiable to any thinking being. "Human beings possess a species-specific nature and morality." And, similarly, any nonhuman animal with cognitive capacities for moral reasoning would arrive at whatever moral imperatives were suited for its species-specific nature. So, for example, rational termites would reject "the evil of personal rights."

In imagining how termite morality would differ from human morality, Wilson is following the lead of Darwin, who indicated in The Descent of Man that, if bees were capable of moral reasoning, they would develop a moral sense very different from that of human beings. In her review of Darwin's book, Frances Cobbe was deeply disturbed by this thought, because it denied her belief that moral imperatives were universal and axiomatic truths of the universe that could be discovered by pure reason alone just as we discover the truths of mathematics.

Pinker and Singer often seem to be on the side of Cobbe against Darwin. And yet they are ambivalent about this, because they recognize that an evolutionary morality must be adapted for the natural inclinations of the species, and thus it has no cosmic truth. The human good is a discoverable truth about the human species only as long as the human species exists in its present form. Many contemporary moral philosophers worry that such a species-specific morality that has no foundation in moral cosmology must be purely "fictional."

Some of my blog posts on the Darwin-Cobbe debate can be found here.

Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and the Perils of Paleolibertarianism

2011-12-29T00:01:00.001Z

Some polls are predicting that Ron Paul might win the Iowa caucases next week. As a result of this, Paul is under intense media scrutiny, and the primary center of attention is some newsletters sent out under Paul's name in the 1990s, which suggest racist bigotry.

This is not a new story. The journalistic reports--including that from the New York Times--are restating what has already been reported years ago in the libertarian media world. In the 1990s, Paul was captivated by the influence of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, who were trying to promote a "paleolibertarian" movement that would bring together libertarians with American Southern traditionalists tracing their roots back to John C. Calhoun and the defenders of American slavery.

American libertarians have recognized the strange and incoherent character of this movement, as indicated by this recent blog by Matt Welch and an earlier blog on Reason.com.

The evidence suggests that the bigoted newsletters were written by Lew Rockwell. Ron Paul did not write them. But because of his long friendship with Rockwell, he cannot bring himself to publicly identify Rockwell as the author and repudiate what Rockwell wrote.

Behind all of this is the strange career of Rothbard who fostered the paleolibertarian movement. Rothbard and I had some common interests in the defense of libertarianism as rooted in a natural law/natural right/Darwinian conception of human liberty. I met him on one occasion, and we corresponded over the years. But he was too easily seduced by some strange positions that did not fit well with his libertarian thought.

Just as Barack Obama was forced to repudiate the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Ron Paul will be forced (I hope) to repudiate Lew Rockwell.

A Darwinian Cure for Peter Singer's Platonic Longings

2011-12-22T19:38:00.001Z

It is strange that so many contemporary moral philosophers show a Platonic longing for a cosmic morality of eternal moral truths. One can see this in their response to evolutionary accounts of morality. They either totally reject an evolutionary science of morality for failing to grasp the transcendental truth of morality. Or they accept it as true, but then they worry that this makes morality purely fictional, because an evolutionary morality is not founded in any eternal truth about the universe.

This Platonic longing is evident in the writing of Peter Singer. I was reminded of this in looking at the new edition, published this year, of Singer's The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. When this was first published in 1981, this was the first book-length response to the revival of Darwinian ethics initiated by Edward O. Wilson. It anticipated the agonizing struggle of philosophers over the past 30 years to come to terms with the new biological and evolutionary studies of morality.

One can see the influence of this book in Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, where Singer's idea of the "expanding circle" guided by the "escalator of reason" is a fundamental theme. But while Pinker emphasizes the role of reason in moral progress, just as Singer does, Pinker does not fully embrace Singer's Platonic/Kantian rationalism, because Pinker recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot move us to act without emotion or desire, and because he recognizes that whatever moral truths we discover are contingent truths about our evolved human nature, not eternal truths about the universe (see Better Angels, 642-50, 694-96).

The new edition of Expanding Circle has an "Afterword" in which Singer reluctantly admits that he has lost confidence in his earlier Platonism, although he still can't bring himself to give it up.

In the original book, Singer insists: "there is something in ethics which is eternal and universal, not dependent on the existence of human beings or other creatures with preferences. The process of reasoning we have been discussing is eternal and universal. That one's interests are one among many sets of interests, no more important than the similar interests of others, is a conclusion that, in principle, any rational being can come to see" (105-106).

But then he immediately adds some comments that show his ambivalence about this. He notes that it was easy to believe in "moral laws which exist independently of us" when those laws were believed to have been handed down by God. But now--for people like Singer--this religious belief is impossible. "And the more we think about what it could mean--outside of a religious framework--for there to be eternal moral truths existing independently of living creatures, the more mysterious it becomes" (106-107).

This is "mysterious," because, as John Mackie argued, this implies some very queer metaphysical entities in the universe, something like Plato's Idea of the Good. "How can there be something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways?" (107).

So, in the original book, Singer left his reader wondering whether he really believed in cosmic moral truths that were "eternal and universal," or whether he regarded such a cosmic morality as too "mysterious" to be credible.

In his new "Afterword," Singer points to this part of his book as showing "how ambivalent I was about the idea of ethics being objectively true and rationally based" (198). Now, he admits:

I no longer believe that this argument succeeds. The judgment that "one's own interests are one among many sets of interests" can be accepted as a descriptive claim about our situation in the world, but to add that one's own interests are "no more important than the similar interests of others" is to make a normative claim. If I deny that normative claims can be true or false, then I cannot assert that this claim is true. It too could be treated as just one preference among others--except that now there is no basis for saying that we ought to maximize the satisfaction of preferences. . . . The denial of objective truth in ethics thus leads not, as I had tried to argue, to preference utilitarianism as a kind of metaphysically unproblematic default position, but to skepticism about the possibility of reaching any meaningful conclusions at all about what we ought to do. The only conclusions we could reach would be subjective ones, based on our desires or preferences, and therefore not ones that others with different desires or preferences would have any reason to accept. I was reluctant to embrace such skeptical or subjectivist views in 1981, and that reluctance has not abated over the intervening years. (199-200)

But then, after making this admission, he concludes in the last sentence of the "Afterword" with an appeal to "the existence of objective moral truths" (204).

One can see this longing for a moral cosmology of eternal and universal truths in Plato's dialogues. But a careful reading of the dialogues also suggests that while Plato and Plato's Socrates thought such a moral cosmology might be necessary for the good morals of most people, it was not really plausible, because the universe appears to be morally indifferent. The universe does not care for or about us. But we care for ourselves. And that care for ourselves as an expression of our human nature constitutes the natural ground for the human good as perfected in the moral and intellectual virtues.

Darwinian science provides an evolutionary account of life, including human life, that supports such a naturalistic ethics of human care. The denial of moral cosmology does not drive us into nihilism, because the evolved nature of human beings as caring for themselves constitutes a natural ground for the human good, even though the human species is not eternal or invariant.

These points have been more fully elaborated in some previous posts, which can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Is Pinker Right that the Smarter People are Classical Liberals?

2011-12-21T13:02:00.000Z

The argument of Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature that history shows a general trend towards declining violence has provoked a lot of discussion. But I am surprised that there has been no discussion of the most provocative facet of his argument--his claim that we're becoming more peaceful as we become smarter, and that the smartest people are classical liberals who best understand the reasoning for minimizing violence. Once one sees this point, one sees that Pinker's book is actually a work of political theory presenting the history of declining violence as confirmation for a Darwinian classical liberalism.

Pinker's understanding of how intelligence is linked to peace owes a lot to Peter Singer's theory of how the "escalator of reason" leads to an "expanding circle" of moral concern that eventually embraces all sentient beings. It's not surprising, therefore, that Singer's review of Pinker's book in the New York Times Book Review endorses Pinker's argument. But Singer fails to see that his support for the "Darwinian left" is subverted by Pinker's argument for Darwinian classical liberalism.

As I have indicated in a previous post, Pinker is not as emphatic as is James Payne (The History of Force) in linking declining violence to classical liberalism. Even so, Pinker indicates repeatedly in his book that classical liberalism is the only moral and political theory that recognizes the links between declining violence, individual liberty, and scientific rationalism as promoting human progress.

For example, Pinker recognizes that the classical liberals see that "the world has far too much morality," because the most destructive forms of violence often arise from using violence to enforce some dominant group's conception of morality (622-23). Adopting the moral psychology of Jonathan Haidt and Alan Fiske, Pinker sees an evolution in human history through four models of morality--communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing/rational-legal. The dramatic declines in violence over the last few centuries have depended on the move towards market pricing/rational-legal models of morality, and this is the move made by classical liberals. Pinker writes:

Why might a disinvestment of moral resources from community, sanctity, and authority militate against violence? One reason is that communality can legitimize tribalism and jingoism, and authority can legitimize government repression. But a more general reason is that retrenchment of the moral sense to smaller territories leaves fewer transgressions for which people may legitimately be punished. There is a bedrock of morality based on autonomy and fairness on which everyone, traditional and modern, liberal and conservative, agrees. No one objects to the use of government violence to put assailants, rapists, and murderers behind bars. But defenders of traditional morality wish to heap many nonviolent infractions on top of this consensual layer, such as homosexuality, licentiousness, blasphemy, heresy, indecency, and desecration of sacred symbols. For their moral disapproval to have teeth, traditionalists must get the Leviathan to punish those offenders as well. Expunging these offenses from the law books gives the authorities fewer grounds for clubbing, cuffing, paddling, jailing, or executing people.

The momentum of social norms in the direction of Market Pricing gives many people the willies, but it would, for better or worse, extrapolate the trend toward nonviolence. Radical libertarians, who love the Market Pricing model, would decriminalize prostitution, drug possession, and gambling, and thereby empty the world's prisons of millions of people currently kept there by force (to say nothing of sending pimps and drug lords the way of Prohibition gangsters). The progression toward personal freedom raises the question of whether it is morally desirable to trade a measure of socially sanctioned violence for a measure of behavior that many people deem intrinsically wrong, such as blasphemy, homosexuality, drug use, and prostitution. But that's just the point: right or wrong, retracting the moral sense from its traditional spheres of community, authority, and purity entails a reduction of violence. And that retraction is precisely the agenda of classical liberalism: a freedom of individuals from tribal and authoritarian force, and a tolerance of personal choices as long as they do not infringe on the autonomy and well-being of others. (636-37)

I do have one objection to this. The way Pinker expresses his point here about the "retrenchment of the moral sense" in classical liberalism might be interpreted to suggest that classical liberals must deny the moral longings for "community, authority, and purity." But, in fact, classical liberals allow the expression of these moral longings, as long as they are channelled into the voluntary associations of civil society without any enforcement by violent coercion. So, for example, some believers in biblical religion might want to condemn blasphemers, heretics, and homosexuals as immoral, and classical liberals would allow them to express that condemnation within their religious groups, as long as they do not enforce that condemnation through violence.

And, indeed, over the last few centuries there has been a remarkable decline in such moralistic violence. Blasphemy, heresy, and homosexuality were once capital crimes. But now, in many parts of the world, most people abhor the idea of executing blasphemers, heretics, and homosexuals. For example, in recent years, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have officially apologized and asked foregiveness for the sins of the Catholic Church in sanctioning religious violence. There is no precedent for this in the entire history of the Church. We see here a fundamental change in human cultural history.

How do we explain this change? Pinker's answer is that we are becoming smarter, and a smarter world is a less violent world. Or to be more precise, the smarter we become, the more inclined we are to a classical liberalism that teaches that violence is never justified except to prevent greater violence.

Pinker explains this as a "moral Flynn effect." The "Flynn effect" is named after political scientist James Flynn who is famous for pointing out that average IQ scores have been increasing dramatically over the past century. By today's standard, a typical person of 1910 would have an IQ score that would today be at the border of mental retardation! These increases in IQ scores have come primarily in the subtests that measure abstract thinking, as in the testing of reasoning about similarities, analogies, and visual matrices.

Flynn has argued that this increase in intelligence comes from the influence of modern science, so that now more and more people have been educated to think about the world through the abstract categories and formulas of science. Consequently, we see increases in "the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one's own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds" (654).

Here is where Pinker sees the emergence of a moral Flynn effect: "enhanced powers of reason--specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one's ideas in abstract, universal terms--would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence" (656). "The cognitive skill that is most enhanced in the Flynn Effect, abstraction from the concrete particulars of immediate experience, is precisely the skill that must be exercised to take the perspectives of others and expand the circle of moral consideration."

The importance that Pinker attaches to this point is indicated by the prominence he gave it in his short article for Nature in October, which consisted of a few excerpts from his book

If Pinker is right about this, I suggest, then we should expect that this is the cognitive skill that one sees in the proponents of classical liberalism--those like John Locke, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, and Friedrich Hayek. I will elaborate this point in a future post.

Pinker's bold conclusion is that smarter people are more classically liberal. "The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent to reason itself" (662). Moreover, Pinker explains that this kind of moral intelligence is more closely linked to classical liberalism, which promotes individual liberty in all spheres of life, than to "left-liberalism," which favors using governmental violence to restrain economic liberty.

Pinker presents various kinds of empirical evidence for this link in historical evolution between intelligence and classical liberalism. The psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has shown that high IQ is correlated with political liberalism, and Pinker sees some evidence here that intelligence is more strongly linked to classical liberalism than to left-liberalism.

Ian Deary and his colleagues have shown that British children who showed high IQ in 1970 at age 10 were likely to show socially liberal attitudes in 1990 at age 30. In the article reporting this research, the authors concluded:

In this large, longitudinal study, intelligent children became, on average, broad-minded adults. The state of mind common to the attitude scales used in this analysis is one of objective fairness to other individuals, an overturning of past prejudice that militated against fairness. Brighter 10-year-olds are, at age 30, more likely to hold to a "philosophy emphasising reason and individualism rather than tradition," which how The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines enlightenment. (5)

Pinker also cites the research of economist Bryan Caplan who has shown that brighter people tend to think like classical liberal economists. For example, more intelligent Americans are likely to support free markets and free trade as more advantageous for the country than governmental wage and price controls and protectionism.

Finally, Pinker also cites the research of psychologist Heiner Rindermann showing that a country's level of education and cognitive ability in 1960-1972 predicted its level of democracy, rule of law, and political liberty in 1991-2003. This effect of greater intelligence brings declining violence because democratic governments that secure the rule of law and political liberty lower the level of governmental violence.

REFERENCES

Caplan, Bryan, and Stephen Miller, "Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists: Evidence from the General Social Survey," Intelligence 38 (2010): 636-47. Available online.

Deary, Ian J., G. David Batty, and Catharine R. Gale, "Bright Children Become Enlightened Adults," Psychological Science 19 (2008): 1-6. Available online.

Kanazawa, Satoshi, "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent," Social Psychology Quarterly 73 (2010): 33-53. Available online.

Pinker, Steven, "Taming the Devil within Us," Nature 478 (20 Octobr 2011): 309-11.

Rindermann, Heiner, "Relevance of Education and Intelligence for the Political Development of Nations: Democracy, Rule of Law, and Political Liberty," Intelligence 36 (2008): 306-22. Available online.

Plantinga on Theism and Science

2011-12-15T00:35:00.001Z

The New York Times (December 14, 2011) has a good article on Alvin Plantinga's new book, in which he argues that the true enemy of modern science is not theistic religion but metaphysical naturalism.

Plantinga's scholarship is a remarkable achievement in making a philosophical case for biblical religion, which goes against the grain of modern analytic philosophy's tendency to take atheism for granted.

As I have indicated in a previous post, Plantinga's argument depends on taking a theistic evolutionist position that assumes the truth of Darwinian evolutionary science, while arguing that biblical theism provides support for that science.

I have indicated why I find his argumentation unpersuasive. But what is most interesting about his reasoning is how biblical believers need to accept evolutionary science in arguing that science and religion are compatible.

Thus, Plantinga belongs to a long tradition of theistic evolutionists that includes people like C. S. Lewis, Pope John Paul II, Francis Collins, and Michael Behe.

Empathy in Rat Choice

2011-12-09T15:23:00.001Z

Science has just published an article reporting experiments showing empathy in rats. This supports some of my previous writing on the mammalian basis for empathy as an evolutionary ground for Darwinian natural right.

Here's the abstract for the article:

Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or abject-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contract was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocholate contained with a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific's distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.

The authors report that the female rats were more empathic than the male rats. They also report that the levels of empathic behavior were associated with individual differences in boldness, so that those individual rats with personal propensities to bold behavior were more inclined to empathic behavior.

The authors also argue that this shows that the rats were engaging in deliberate action to free their cagemates.

This supports the claims of Aristotle and Darwin that some nonhuman animals--and particularly mammals--are capable of intentional action in caring for individuals for whom they feel some attachment. Moreover, as indicated by Jaak Panksepp's commentary on this article, research in "affective neuroscience" is uncovering the neural basis for social emotions, which allows us to see how the evolution of morality and politics could emerge from the evolution of the mammalian brain. Human morality and politics are unique insofar as they show the uniqueness of the human capacities for high-level mental processing in the neocortex, and yet even this can be explained by the natural evolution of the neocortical structures of the primate brain.

Many years ago, I was interviewed for a job in the Department of Political Science at the University of Rochester. At that time, the Department was famous for promoting "rational choice theory" in political science--explaining politics through economic models of human beings as rational maximizers of their self-interest. I gave a job talk that was entitled "Emotional Choice Theory," in which I criticized rational choice thinking for failing to see the importance of social emotions in human behavior, which are best explained through evolutionary psychology. As you might expect, my talk was not well received.

If I were giving that job talk today, I might be more persuasive by pointing out how research in evolutionary psychology--as, for example, in studies of empathy in mammalian psychology--has challenged rational choice theory by showing how the economic model of Homo economicus needs to be combined with a Darwinian model of Homo moralis

REFERENCES

Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason, "Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1427-30.

Jaak Panksepp, "Empathy and the Laws of Affect," Science, 334 (9 December, 2011): 1358-59.

Jaak Panksepp, "The Basic Emotional Circuits of Mammalian Brains: Do Animals Have Affective Lives?" Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35 (2011): 1791-1804.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

The End of Manliness?

2011-12-04T11:26:00.001Z

Steven Pinker's history of declining violence in The Better Angels of Our Nature seems to be a history of declining manliness. A pervasive theme of his book is that violence comes from men fighting over matters of honor, and therefore the historical trend towards declining violence requires a turn away from the culture of manly honor.

In the past, wars were fought as contests of honor. But now we know that Falstaff was right about honor--it's only a word, or a social construction, as we would say today (247). War is not glorious and exciting. It is stupid and cruel. We need to puncture the swollen egos of men who fight over who's most important. After all, it's only the silly games of little boys. If we get rid of that macho striving for honor and glory, then we can see that moral progress is measured, as Pinker declares on the last page of his book, by our success in allowing "a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes" (696).

But can we be satisfied by a world of peace without honor, a world of feminine values without masculine virtues, a world of bourgeois comfort without manly courage? In Pinker's long book, he raises this question in one paragraph, only to quickly dismiss it. He is speaking about the historical trend towards a feminized culture favoring peace over violence.

Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory (chapter 8). This has been the trend in the democracies of Europe and the developed world and in the bluer states of America (chapters 3 and 7). Several conservative scholars have ruefully suggested to me that the modern West has been diminished by the loss of virtues like bravery and valor and the ascendancy of materialism, frivolity, decadence, and effeminacy. Now, I have been assuming that violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence, but these men are correct that this is a value judgment, and that no logical argument inherently favors peace over honor and glory. But I would think that the potential victims of all this manliness deserve a say in this discussion, and they may not agree that their lives and limbs are a price worth paying for the glorification of masculine virtues. (686-87)

Although Pinker does not identify these "conservative scholars" who worry about the decline of manly spiritedness as a flattening of the human soul, I suspect that Harvey Mansfield--one of Pinker's colleagues at Harvard--must be one of these people. After all, he's the one who's written the book Manliness, in which he worries that the sort of liberal humanism defended by Pinker fails to satisfy the human need for manly self-assertion.

A few years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on Mansfield's case for manliness in the modern world as an expression of a counter-Enlightenment tradition evident in the work of Straussians like Mansfield. Mansfield is correct, I think, in seeing that the biology of Plato and Aristotle recognises the complementarity of male and female virtues in human biological nature, while also recognising that manliness can be either bad or good, so that we need a virtuous mean between too little and too much masculinity. But I also think that Mansfield is wrong in failing to see how a Darwinian biology supports this ancient insight. If Mansfield were to embrace a Darwinian understanding of the sexual complementarity of evolved human nature, he would not be seduced by the "manly nihilism" of Friedrich Nietzsche and Teddy Roosevelt, which leads him to argue for "one-man rule" by the American President serving a policy of "imperial ambition."

Pinker fails to elaborate a Darwinian response to this Mansfieldian manliness. But there are some hints in his writing as to how the evolutionary psychology of human nature recognises the comprehensive complementarity of male and female virtues, which can promote a decline in violence without a decline in true manliness.

Pinker observes that the greatest human suffering from violence has been caused by the narcissistic personality of tyrants, who show the grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy characteristic of people inflated by unearned self-esteem (519-21). But Pinker fails to point out that such narcissism is different from what traditionally has been recognised as "greatness of soul"--the magnanimity of those men who have earned their self-esteem and who are contemptuous of those who derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of innocent people.

Pinker describes a new martial arts program of the United States Marine Corps, which teaches "a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior." The chant for this new code is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." A former Marine captain who helped to implement this program wrote to Pinker: "When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s it was 'Kill, kill, kill.' The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained marines to be 'protectors of all others--including the enemy, if possible' would have been 0 percent" (264-66).

Pinker doesn't reflect on the deeper implications of this--that the liberal humanism of declining violence might be best promoted, not by denigrating manly honor, but by "a new code of honor" in which men can take pride in their courageous self-discipline in defending human life. After all, if Pinker is right in declaring that "violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence," doesn't that require manly courage from those trained to use violence to prevent greater violence?

Pinker devotes a lot of attention to the argument that the atrocious killing of World War II was caused ultimately by the maniacal narcissism of one man--Adolf Hitler. But he gives no attention to the fact that England's refusal to surrender to Hitler's assault depended crucially on the glorious resoluteness of one man--Winston Churchill. Although there are some dubious facets to Churchill's character and policies, one can see him as manifesting a manly magnanimity that is compatible with, and even necessary for, modern liberalism.

Some of my blog posts on Mansfield can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

You should also see Mansfield's manly interview with Stephen Colbert.

Martha Nussbaum has written a manly attack on Mansfield.

John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Steven Pinker

2011-11-24T16:46:00.001Z

Perhaps the most vehement attack on Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature is John Gray's review in Prospect magazine. Gray is just as vehement in his attack on Frank Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order in The New Republic (November 9, 2011). Both reviews show Gray's angry scorn for liberal capitalist republicanism and his nihilistic disdain for the Enlightenment idea of moral progress.

Gray's commitment to the intellectual tradition of the counter-Enlightenment is evident in his books Straw Dogs and Black Mass, and in an interview with Laurie Taylor. A. C. Grayling has written a good rebuttal. (See Peter Lassman, "Pluralism and its Discontents: John Gray's Counter-Enlightenment," in John Horton and Glen Newey, eds., The Political Theory of John Gray [Routledge, 2007].)

Gray dismisses the idea of moral progress in history as showing a utopian blindness to the harsh reality of the human condition, a utopianism that can only be explained as a secularization in the Enlightenment of the Christian faith in salvational history as leading to a final age of redemptive bliss.

Grayling points to the fundamental idea that Gray ignores: "trying to make things better is not the same as believing that they can be made perfect. . . . meliorism is not perfectibilism." Contrary to what Gray implies, Pinker never claims that human history is headed towards the perfection of perpetual peace--a world without any war or violence. But Pinker does claim that history shows a general pattern of declining war and violence, although the pattern can be broken by random contingencies that lead to irruptions of horrific killing.

Another way of saying this is that Gray fails to see the differences between the French Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the British and American Enlightenments, on the other. Pinker embraces the "tragic vision" of the British and American Enlightenments, in which human progress was constrained by the imperfections of human nature, in contrast to the utopian perfectionism in some strands of the French Enlightenment that explains the excesses of the French Revolution. Pinker writes: "An acknowledgement of human nature may have been the chief difference between the American revolutionaries and their French confreres, who had the romantic conviction that they were rendering human limitations obsolete. In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the Terror, wrote, 'The French people seem to have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species'" (185-86).

A crucial part of Pinker's argument is numerous statistical analyses of historical data showing a decline in violence. How does Gray respond to this? He repeatedly speaks about Pinker's "impressive-looking graphs and statistics," his "not always very illuminating statistics," and his "panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts." That's it. He breezily dismisses the statistics as "impressive-looking" without ever explaining what's wrong with the statistical arguments. In fact, he never even mentions any of the details of these arguments, and thus he refuses to specify exactly what he thinks is wrong with Pinker's statistical reasoning. We can see here the style of writing that Gray prefers--confident assertion unsupported by factual or argumentative reasoning.

Gray might respond to this by insisting that he has demonstrated Pinker's "resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts" by citing the many wars of the past 65 years that are ignored by Pinker. Against Pinker's claim that the world has enjoyed a "Long Peace" since World War II, during which the Great Powers have not fought one another, Gray writes:

The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war--these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning.

Gray's readers are left with the impression that Pinker says nothing about these 19 wars listed by Gray because for Pinker, they are "hardly worth mentioning." But any reader who actually looks at Pinker's book will notice that not only does he mention most of these wars, he offers evidence that they conform to the pattern of declining violence. Consider, for example, the following passage:

To be sure, the American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first decade of the 21st century show that the country is far from reluctant to go to war. But even they are nothing like the wars of the past. In both conflicts the interstate war phase was quick and (by historical standards) low in battle deaths. Most of the deaths in Iraq were caused by intercommunal violence in the anarchy that followed, and by 2008 the toll of 4,000 American deaths (compare Vietnam's 58,000) helped elect a president who within two years brought the country's combat mission to an end. In Afghanistan, the U.S. Air Force followed a set of humanitarian protocols during the height of the anti-Taliban bombing campaign in 2008 that Human Rights Watch praised for its "very good record of minimizing harm to civilians." (266)

Pinker's point is that even as the U.S. continues to fight wars, we can see the pattern of declining violence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because they show "an extraordinarily low number of civilian deaths for a major military operation" (267). If there is a flaw in Pinker's reasoning, Gray has not identified it.

Furthermore, Gray is silent about how Pinker sets the "Long Peace" of the past 65 years at the end of a history of declining violence stretching back to the Stone Age. It's the expansiveness of this deep historical pattern that makes Pinker's argument so powerful. Gray does not even acknowledge this, much less refute it.

Oddly enough, Gray does acknowledge--in one sentence--that "no doubt we have become less violent in some ways." This seems to be an admission that Pinker's argument is at least partially true. But Gray says nothing more about this.

Actually, I suspect that Gray has not bothered to read all of Pinker's book. There is lots of evidence for this in Gray's review. For example, Gray suggests that Pinker has ignored the scientific evidence showing that "human thought and perception are riddled with bias, inconsistency, and self-deception." And yet Pinker actually stresses this point as part of his argument, because he explains that one reason why it's hard for us to see the decline in violence over human history is the "availability bias"--the illusion of calculating probabilities based on examples that are most easily recalled. So we easily remember the dramatic atrocities of the recent past, but we are unaware of the great atrocities of the distant past, so we infer that violence is increasing rather than decreasing, and thus it has become a cliche to say that "the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history," although a statistical analysis of history denies this (189-99). This is one of the main ideas of Pinker's book. Gray says nothing about it.

Gray asserts that The Better Angels of Our Nature contradicts Pinker's earlier book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002). In Blank Slate, Gray says, Pinker's "emphasis on the constancy of human nature limited the scope of future human advance." By contrast, "the decline of violence posited in The Better Angels of Our Nature is a progressive transformation of precisely the kind his earlier book seemed to preclude." But as I have pointed out in an earlier post, Pinker's argument in Better Angels is largely an elaboration of what he said in Chapter 17 ("Violence") of The Blank Slate. There's no contradiction in saying that both violent conflict and peaceful cooperation are rooted in human nature, and so, while violence can never be completely eliminated, we can see moral progress towards declining violence as conditions cultivate the "better angels of our nature."

Another bizarre feature of Gray's review is that he accuses Pinker of not understanding Darwin's evolutionary science. According to Gray, Darwin teaches us that moral progress is impossible, and thus "if Darwin's theory is even approximately right, there can be no rational basis for expecting any revolution in human behaviour." Gray does not cite any particular passages in Darwin's writing to support this conclusion. His only support is a vague assertion that Darwin taught that human beings are just brute animals, and therefore they can never rise above the violence of the animal world. This ignores Darwin's insistence in the Descent of Man that the cultural evolution of reciprocal cooperation supports moral progress. So, for instance, he declares in the last chapter: "The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection."

Gray's assertions about Darwin are as ungrounded as those about Pinker.

Is the Decline in Violence the Road to Voluntaria?

2011-11-20T13:55:00.001Z

Ron Bailey has interviewed Steve Pinker in a video for Reason magazine. One can see here that libertarians like Bailey are attracted to the argument of Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, because they would like to see the evolutionary decline in violence as a historical trend towards a libertarian future in which societies would be organized through voluntary cooperation rather than physical force.

In fact, there are many parts of Pinker's book where he points to the moral and political philosophy of classical liberalism or libertarianism as a prime factor favoring the decline in violence (xxi, 180, 237, 284-88, 636-37, 662-63, 690-92). As I have suggested in my previous post, the libertarian implications of Pinker's argument become even more evident when one looks at James Payne's book A History of Force and notices how much of Payne's thinking has shaped Pinker's writing.

But while Payne is explicit--in the last chapter of his book--in indicating how the historical decline in violence provides "lessons for voluntarists," Pinker refrains from any open endorsement of libertarianism. Payne has adopted the "voluntaryism" of Auberon Herbert, a British libertarian individualist. Although Herbert was sometimes identified as an anarchist, he refused to accept that label, because he thought there was a proper role for government in using force defensively against aggressors who have initiated force, but he denied that government could initiate force to advance seemingly good ends. He regarded the use or threat of physical violence as the greatest evil in human life, because it denied the liberty that was the condition for human happiness. He accepted the purely defensive use of violence against violent aggressors--murderers, thieves, invaders, and so on--as a necessary evil dictated by human imperfection. Herbert's thought has been summarized by Eric Mack and Gary Galles. In recent decades, the "voluntaryist" position has been revived by Carl Watner and others.

Having adopted this libertarian voluntarism, Payne goes further in rejecting violence than does Pinker. Like Pinker, Payne recognizes and celebrates all of the historical trends towards reducing violence. But unlike Pinker, Payne laments that we still rely too much on coercive force. He observes: "Judging from some of our practices, we do indeed appear to believe that force is a sound and proper basis for human institutions. The modern welfare state with all its taxation and regulation utterly depends on it" (249).

In Payne's book on the history of force, there is a chapter on taxation as a form of legalized violence, in which government agents use force or the threat of force to compel people to give up their money.   Although this is widely accepted today, Payne looks forward to the future evolutionary decline in violence as bringing about the abolition of taxation. By contrast, Pinker says nothing about taxation as violence. Nor does he look forward to its elimination as part of the historical trend towards declining violence.

That we could abolish taxation sounds ridiculously utopian to many of us, because we agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes that the coercion of taxation is "the price we pay for civilization." But Payne responds by observing that this is what people in the past thought about torturing prisoners, burning heretics, and other forms of cruelty that were thought to be absolutely necessary for maintaining social order. Through a gradual process of evolution, we have learned that such violent practices are unnecessary and undesirable. Similarly, Payne argues, we will eventually discover that without coercive taxation, we can fund our public projects through voluntary means such as lotteries, user fees, and philanthropic generosity.

Payne has defended his libertarian voluntarism in a series of fictional works written in the style of children's books. In the last book in the series--Princess Narnia Visits Voluntaria--he presents the land of Voluntaria, where people organize their social order through voluntary cooperation.

The people of Voluntaria have no conception of government, and it seems that they have no need for government, and therefore that they are living in pure anarchy. But it turns out that they do have something that looks like government, although it's very limited. In each community, there is a voluntary association to punish criminals--murderers, thieves, and others who initiate aggressive force. If government is defined as an agency for using force, then this is government. But this government uses force only negatively or reactively to restrain aggressive force. If government is defined positively as an agency that initiates public force to solve social problems or to punish nonviolent behavior that is regarded as offensive, then Voluntaria has no government.

If the entire course of human history shows a progressive decline in violence, as Pinker and Payne argue, can we anticipate, as Payne argues, that we are on the evolutionary road to Voluntaria?

Pinker and Payne: Does Declining Violence Mean Increasing Liberty?

2011-11-11T16:03:00.001Z

That human history shows a general decline in violence has emerged in recent years as one of the greatest discoveries of social scientific research. It has taken me many years to realize that. And it has only slowly dawned on me that this has deep implications for political theory, because it provides dramatic support for Darwinian liberalism.

I first began to think about this when I read Michael Doyle's article "Liberalism and World Politics" in 1986 (in The American Political Science Review). He convinced me that the empirical data of wars and violence over the last 200 years strongly supported some of Immanuel Kant's arguments for a liberal peace. Liberal commercial republics are less inclined to go to war than other kinds of regimes, and as the cultural values of liberal commercial republicanism have spread around the world, there has been a decline in war and violence.

In 2000, Robert Wright's Nonzero persuaded me that the entire evolutionary history of life might be rightly understood as a history of expanding cooperation producing ever increasing gains through the logic of nonzero-sum games.

More recently, Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature have surveyed the research showing that this decline in violence is a trend over all of human history from the Stone Age to the present, and this seems powerfully persuasive to me.

This seems to confirm the evolutionary liberalism of the 19th century--particularly, as formulated by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin--because we seem to see here that Darwin was right in his vision of the future: "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." According to Darwin, the most recent advance of sympathy extends it even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that now we can see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."

In Darwinian Natural Right (pp. 143-49), I rejected this as Darwin's "moral utopianism," while I defended Darwin's "moral realism." Darwin's moral utopianism is clearest in the section of the Descent of Man (2004: 147-50) where he cites "our great philosopher Herbert Spencer." In some of my blog posts, I have criticized Spencer's evolutionary utopianism.

But I now think that I was wrong, because recognizing the evolutionary trend away from violent conflict and towards peaceful cooperation arises not from a naive utopianism but from an optimistic realism that vindicates evolutionary liberalism.

This has become clear to me from reading Pinker's Better Angels along with a book that Pinker often cites--James Payne's History of Force. What is implicit in Pinker's book becomes explicit in Payne's book--that the evolutionary history of declining violence confirms Spencerian/Darwinian liberalism, because it shows how human beings through a long history of trial-and-error learning have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression. Moreover, this also confirms the classical liberal insight that declining violence coincides with increasing liberty.

Payne brings this out more clearly than does Pinker, because Payne is explicit in his commitment to classical liberalism or libertarianism. If one accepts the classical liberal or libertarian definition of liberty as arising from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict.

As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the 19th century were the first political theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle. Although previously some political theorists had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life. The classical liberals were the first political theorists to see how the reduction in the use of force was the fundamental condition for human progress. In particular, Payne has adopted the position of Auberon Herbert's "voluntaryism."

Payne's "voluntarism" holds that "all uses of force, even those that seem most necessary and unavoidable today, are slated for eventual displacement" (250). Although this might seem utopian, it's realistic insofar as Payne recognizes that even as we renounce "the assertive use of force," we must accept "the reactive use of force," in using force against aggressors. Pure pacifism or nonviolence does not work as long as there are individuals and groups who will aggressively use force for predatory purposes. "The goal of reducing the use of force cannot be achieved by applying the principle of never using force!" (253)

This evolutionary liberalism allows us to avoid the utopianism of absolute pacifism while allowing for a continuing evolutionary trend away from violence.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Optimistic Realism of Pinker's Darwinian Liberalism

2011-11-05T19:58:00.000Z

When I was writing Darwinian Conservatism, Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate was a big influence on my thinking, because he showed how Darwinian science supported a tragic vision of human nature that is fundamental for traditionalist conservatism or classical liberalism. But some readers of Pinker's new book--The Better Angels of Our Nature--might conclude that Pinker has turned against my thinking, because now he seems to argue that the cultural trends favoring peace have overcome the violent propensities of human nature, and thus he seems to have embraced the utopian vision of the Left that I rejected in Darwinian Conservatism. From my reading of Pinker, however, I think that while he occasionally comes close in the new book to adopting a rationalist utopianism, he generally adheres to an optimistic realism that is compatible with The Blank Slate.

In Chapter 16 ("Politics") of The Blank Slate, Pinker adopts Thomas Sowell's dualistic analysis of the political spectrum that has dominated the last two centuries of political debate. In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell sees a contrast between a Constrained Vision and an Unconstrained Vision. Pinker prefers the terms Tragic Vision and Utopian Vision. In the Tragic Vision, human nature is limited in virtue and knowledge, and these limits constrain what we can do in our social arrangements, so that we should respect those traditional practices that have been tested by experience although they were not rationally designed. In the Utopian Vision, by contrast, human nature changes through changes in our social circumstances, and consequently we can experiment with rationally designed social reforms that change human nature to achieve social improvement, and thus we should not accept any limits coming from traditional institutions that are not products of rational planning. Although there is some fuzziness in this bifurcation, those on the Right are generally on the side of the Tragic Vision, while those on the Left are generally on the side of the Utopian Vision.

In The Blank Slate, Pinker argues that the new biological sciences of human nature support the Tragic Vision of the political right and deny the Utopian Vision of the political left, because the life sciences show the moral and intellectual limitations of human nature that are recognized in the social theory of traditionalist conservatives like Michael Oakeshott and classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek (284-94). He also suggests, however, that as some leftists embrace Darwinian science and give up their utopianism--for example, Peter Singer's "Darwinian left"--there might be new ideological alignments. The non-Utopian left might align itself with the secular right against the religious right (299, 305).

But even as he stressed the constraints on social planning coming from evolved human nature, Pinker also argued that that evolved human nature provided the resources for social progress (159-185). Moreover, he suggested that this natural human capacity for progress was most evident in the history of violence. In Chapter 17 ("Violence"), he showed how the sciences of human nature refuted the belief that human violence was purely cultural and thus easily eliminated by cultural reform. And yet he also showed how the evolutionary logic of violence could explain the situations in which violence can be controlled and reduced.

This is necessary to disentangle the knot of biological and cultural causes that make violence so puzzling. It can help explain why people are prepared for violence but act on those inclinations only in particular circumstances; when violence is, at least in some sense, rational and when it is blatantly self-defeating; why violence is more prevalent in some times and places than in others, despite a lack of any genetic difference among the actors; and, ultimately, how we might reduce and prevent violence. (317)

He then lays out that logic of violence and its decline over history in 18 pages (318-336). Better Angels is a very long (800 pages!) elaboration of this section of The Blank Slate.

In Better Angels, Pinker's sustained defense of Enlightenment rationalism sometimes looks like a defense of the Utopian Vision against the Realist Vision, particularly when he defends Enlightenment humanism against its critics and identifies Edmund Burke--a proponent of the tragic vision of human nature--as one of its leading critics (184-86). But even here, he concedes that Burke's criticism of the French Revolution for its attack on the spontaneous orders of civilized traditions was justified. Pinker praises the American Revolution as superior to the French Revolution, because the Americans worked within the "English Civilizing Process," which supported the exercise of prudence in pursuing social reforms.

Although Pinker never mentions Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), Pinker implicitly accepts Himmelfarb's insight that the Enlightenment took multiple forms, and that while the French Enlightenment embraced a rationalistic utopianism that was disastrous, the British and American Enlightenments embraced a prudent realism that fostered a prudent road to modern progress.

Although Enlightenment reason plays a large role in Pinker's account of the decline of violence, he recognizes that pure reason by itself cannot motivate human beings unless it is joined to the moral emotions, and thus he is on the side of British Enlightenment thinkers like Burke and Hume who were skeptical of abstract rationalism.

And although he is remarkably optimistic about the strength of the historical trends favoring the decline in violence, he is still realistic in recognizing that the complete elimination of all violence and war is impossible. He sees that "a perfect fusion of the interests of every living human is an unattainable nirvana" (689). "Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred" (646).

I am not sure, however, whether Pinker would agree with me that war is one of the 20 natural desires of human beings. I believe that human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. I agree with Pinker that these motives for violence--fear, interest, and honor--can be moderated in ways that promote peace and reduce violence. But I also think that the tragic structure of human social nature makes it impossible to totally eliminate these motives.

I will have to say more in some future posts.

Pinker and the Pope Condemn Religious Violence

2011-10-29T16:58:00.000+01:00

Steven Pinker and Pope Benedict XVI seem to agree with one another in condemning religious violence.

In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker explains the Darwinian evolutionary process by which violence has declined in human history. For Pinker, one manifestation of this evolutionary shift is that while "the Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery," most biblical believers today--Jews and Christians--reject the sanctified cruelty of the Bible. "Sensibilities toward violence have changed so much that religious people today compartmentalize their attitude to the Bible. They pay it lip service as a symbol of morality, while getting their actual morality from more modern principles" (10-12).

Pinker explains this as showing the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers:

Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful. (17)

A few days ago, the Pope acknowledged that violence has often been religiously motivated, while insisting that religious people should find this disturbing, and Christians should feel shame for the history of Christian violence.

As a Christian, I want to say at this point: yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith. We acknowledge it with great shame. But it is utterly clear that this was an abuse of the Christian faith, one that evidently contradicts its true nature. The God in whom we Christians believe is the Creator and Father of all, and from Him all people are brothers and sisters and form one single family. For us the Cross of Christ is the sign of the God Who put 'suffering-with' (compassion) and 'loving-with' in place of force. . . . It is the task of all who bear responsibility for the Christian faith to purify the religion of Christians again and again from its very heart, so that it truly serves as an instrument of God's peace in the world, despite the fallibility of humans.

In other statements, the Pope has made clear that what he is condemning, in particular, are the faults of the Catholic Church in sanctioning the propagation of the faith through violence--as in the Inquisition and the Crusades.

But while Pinker sees this as the "benevolent hypocrisy" of biblical believers who reject the religious violence of the Bible, the Pope sees this as recognizing that religious violence is "an abuse of the Christian faith."

In asking forgiveness for the faults of the Church in promoting religious violence, Pope Benedict XVI continues a position that began with his predecessor--John Paul II. This is remarkable, because as far as I know, this is the first time in the history of the Church that Popes have asked forgiveness for the sinfulness of the Church in supporting unjustified violence.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Pope has previously endorsed a remarkable statement of the International Theological Commission (ITC) in 1999 on "The Church and the Faults of the Past."

Following the lead of Pope John Paul II, this statement explores the reasoning for the Church's confession of faults and asking forgiveness. This is recognized as a radical move: "in the entire history of the Church, there are no precedents for requests for forgiveness by the Magisterium for past wrongs" (1.1).

This is an amazing confirmation of Pinker's argument about the power of the evolutionary historical forces in pushing for a decline in violence, including religious violence.

As the ITC statement makes clear, there are two interrelated problems. How can the Church confess the faults of the past without denying the divine authority of the Church? And how can the Church condemn the religious violence of the Bible without denying the divine authority of the Bible?

To the first question, the answer is that the Church is "at the same time holy and ever in need of purification" (sec. 3). This is supported by Thomas Aquinas's claim that the Church cannot be sinless in its earthly pilgrimage, because the fullness of its holiness will be achieved only in Heaven (3.3, quoting ST, III, q. 8, a. 3, ad 2).

To the second question--about the authority of the Bible--the answer is ambiguous. The ITC statement agrees with Pinker's comment about the Bible--particularly, the Old Testament--being "staggering in its savagery." It is troublesome, then, that the Old Testament never shows the people of Israel asking forgiveness for their unjustified violence against their enemies. Although we see people confessing their sins before God, we don't see them confessing their sins before the people they have injured. Why not?

We can propose various hypotheses in response to this question. First, there is the prevalent theocentrism of the Bible, which gives precedence to the acknowledgement, whether individual or national, of the faults committed against God. What is more, acts of violence perpetrated by Israel against other peoples, which would seem to require a request for forgiveness from those peoples or from their descendants, are understood to be the execution of divine directives, as for example Gn 2-11and Dt 7:2 (the extermination of the Canaanites), or 1 Sm 15 and Dt 25:19 (the destruction of the Amalekites). In such cases, the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness. The experiences of maltreatment suffered by Israel at the hands of other peoples and the animosity thus aroused could also have militated against the idea of asking pardon of these people for the evil done to them. (2.1)

If one reads this passage carefully, one can see a quiet admission that we must recognize that the Bible is mistaken when it reports God as commanding unjust violence. The people of Israel saw no need to be forgiven for acts of violence that they "understood to be the execution of divine directives," and thus "the involvement of a divine command would seem to exclude any possible request for forgiveness." Is this a hint that they were mistaken? That what the Bible reports as "divine directives" for unjust violence is wrong?

Turning to the New Testament, the ITC statement emphasizes that the "frailties of Jesus' disciples" are acknowledged, especially in the gospel of Mark, and this includes Peter, whom the Church regards as the first Bishop of Rome and the source of the apostolic succession for the divine authority of the popes (2.2).

And yet, the New Testament never shows the first Christians confessing the faults of the Old Testament past. Consequently, John Paul II's calls for admitting the guilt of the Church in religious violence "do not find an exact parallel in the Bible" (2.4).

So how do we explain this move by John Paul II, which has been continued by Benedict XVI? One answer suggested by the ITC statement is that there has been a "paradigm change":

While before the Enlightenment there existed a sort of osmosis between Church and State, between faith and culture, morality and law, from the eighteenth century onward this relationship was modified significantly. The result was a transition from a sacral society to a pluralist society, or, as occurred in a few cases, to a secular society. The models of thought and action, the so-called "paradigms" of actions and evaluation, change. Such a transition has a direct impact on moral judgments, although this influence does not justify in any way a relativistic idea of moral principles or of the nature of morality itself. (5.1)

Pinker stresses the importance of Enlightenment thought in supporting the "humanitarian revolution" (129-188) as one of the historical trends favoring a decline in violence. This was part of a larger shift in thought towards classical liberalism, in which religious belief became a matter of individual liberty and conscience expressed in the voluntary associations of civil society but not coercively enforced by government. Now, it seems that the Catholic Church has embraced liberalism in accepting the move from a premodern "sacral society," in which violence could be used to enforce religion, to a "pluralist society" or "secular society," based on religious toleration and nonviolence.

Rather than seeing this as a break from traditional Christianity, we might see it as a return to the position of the first Christians in the New Testament. After all, with the possible exception of the book of Revelation, the Christians of the New Testament are never presented as using coercive violence to compel religious belief. Believers punish heretics by expelling them from their churches, but they never try to execute them. The execution of heretics in the Inquisition had no clear basis in the New Testament. That's why Christians like Roger Williams could argue that a policy of absolute toleration--even for atheists--was part of the New Testament teaching of Christianity, as opposed to the theocracy of the Old Testament.

The evolutionary history of strengthening the "better angels of our nature" to promote a decline in unjustified violence can be rightly understood as a fulfillment of true Christianity.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Steven Pinker and The Evolutionary Decline of Violence

2011-10-15T16:05:00.000+01:00

I am reading Steven Pinker's new book--The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This will be the first of a series of posts on questions raised by the book.

The cover of this book has a beautiful reproduction of Rembrandt's painting of "The Angel Stopping Abraham from Sacrificing Isaac to God," which is based on the famous story of Abraham's faith being tested by God's command to sacrifice his son to God (Genesis 22:10-12). This is a vivid way to capture the argument of the book. Isaac is bound on top of a stack of wood. One of Abraham's hands forcefully holds down Isaac's head. The other hand has held a knife and is thrusting towards Isaac's chest. But the angel has grabbed his wrist so that the knife falls from his hand. (Oddly, the book jacket reproduction is actually a mirror image of the original painting, so that Abraham is stabbing with his left hand rather than his right hand.)

The painting is a compelling depiction of the disturbing questions raised by the story. Abraham is vigorously executing God's command to murder Isaac, which shows his faith. But the angel's intervention suggests that God knows that this is wrong. And yet, we wonder, if God knows it's wrong, why did he command it? Are we being taught that there is no natural standard of right and wrong, because whatever God commands is right? Should we infer from this that, as Kierkegaard argued, this story shows that total faith requires a "suspension of the ethical"?

From Pinker's perspective, what this really shows is the tension between the "better angels of our nature"--as Abraham Lincoln called them--that favor peaceful cooperation and the "inner demons" that move us to violent conflict. The tension is not within God's will, but within human nature. Unfortunately, Pinker suggests, the belief that one is executing God's will can release the inner demons of human nature and suppress the better angels.

We can see this in Thomas Aquinas's writings. Thomas justifies Abraham's binding of Isaac by arguing that it cannot be wrong for God to command us to kill an innocent person, because God's command can never be wrong (ST, I-II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3; II-II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 3; q. 104, a. 4, ad 2). And yet Thomas indicates the contradiction here between natural reason and supernatural revelation when he observes: "Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself it was contrary to right human reason" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2).

Similarly, Thomas justifies the violence of the Inquisition by insisting that any Christian who disagrees with even one article of faith as set down by the authority of the Catholic Church, residing primarily in the Pope, can be rightly "exterminated from the world by death" (ST, II-II, q. 5, a. 3; q. 11, aa. 1-2).

The peak of Christian sadism comes when Thomas teaches that part of the blessedness of Heaven will be that the saved will be able to look down into Hell and rejoice at the eternal torment of the damned (ST, suppl., q. 94, aa. 1-3).

And yet, Thomas shows another side of his teaching when he argues that it does not belong to human law to punish all vices. "Human law is established for the collectivity of human beings, most of whom have imperfect virtue. And so human law does not prohibit every kind of vice, from which the virtuous abstain. Rather, human law prohibits only the more serious kinds of vice, from which most persons can abstain, and especially those vices that inflict harm on others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be preserved. For example, human laws prohibit murders, thefts, and the like" (ST, I-II, q. 96, a. 3). Here Thomas points to the central principle of liberal jurisprudence--that the primary aim of law is not to force people to be perfectly virtuous but to prohibit any conduct that inflicts harm on others, and particularly violent harm.

Pinker's book is about the history of the great transformation in human life by which we have moved from the violent conflict of Thomas's medieval world to the peaceful cooperation of the modern world. Pinker's history is a story of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.

SIX TRENDS
The first trend in the decline of violence was the Pacification Process, by which agricultural civilizations used governmental institutions and formal laws to reduce the violence of raiding and feuding endemic to the state of nature of foraging and horticultural societies.

The second trend was the Civilizing Process, by which centralized authority and commercial society in early modern Europe reduced the violence and brutality characteristic of the Middle Ages.

The third trend was the Humanitarian Revolution, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, by which the European Enlightenment reduced socially sanctioned forms of violence such as slavery and torture.

The fourth trend was the Long Peace, after World War II, the longest period in history in which the great powers have not fought wars with one another.

The fifth trend is the New Peace, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, in which all kinds of organized conflicts have declined.

Finally, the sixth trend, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, is the Rights Revolution, by which human beings have shown increasing disgust towards violence directed at persecuted groups, such as ethnic minorities, women, children, and homosexuals.

Much of Pinker's argumentation for these six trends depends on marshaling the quantitative data showing the decline in violence. The absolute level of deaths by homicide in the modern world--as, for example, in the two world wars--can be very high, and that makes us think that the modern world is much more violent than the premodern world. But Pinker shows that when we look at the level of homicidal violence in proportion to the human population, we can see that the per capita rate of homicide has dropped dramatically across human history.

To understand the causes of violence, we must understand the "five inner demons" of human nature.

FIVE INNER DEMONS
To understand the psychology of violence, Pinker argues, we must understand the complex interaction between many environmental, social, and neurobiological factors.

The first inner demon is instrumental violence, or violence employed as a practical means to any end.

The second inner demon is dominance, or violence employed to gain power or glory in contests over prestige.

The third inner demon is revenge, or violence employed by a moralistic desire for retributive punishment.

The fourth inner demon is sadism, or violence employed because of one's pleasure in the suffering of others.

The fifth inner demon is ideology, or violence employed as a means to achieve some utopian vision of human perfection grounded in a shared utopian belief system.

These five inner demons are countered by four better angels.

FOUR BETTER ANGELS
The first better angel is empathy, or a sympathetic concern for the pains and pleasures of others.

The second better angel is self-control, or the habituated ability to inhibit our impulses based on our anticipation of the bad consequences of impulsive behavior.

The third better angel is the moral sense, or the social norms governing conduct that can sometimes reduce violence, but which can also increase violence towards those outside of one's group.

The fourth better angel is reason, or the capacity of deliberate judgment by which we see ourselves as others see us, by which we expand our moral concern to ever wider circles of humanity, and by which we can plan how to use the other better angels of our nature to improve our social life.

The success of these better angels in promoting peaceful cooperation and reducing violent conflict depends on five historical forces.

FIVE HISTORICAL FORCES
The first historical force is the Leviathan, or the legal and governmental institutions that mediate conflict in ways that reduce the disorder that comes from the selfish impulses that incline us to exploitation and vengeance.

The second historical force is commerce, or the exchange of goods and ideas over ever longer distances and ever larger groups of people, so that we see people as valuable trading partners, and consequently we are less inclined to attack them.

The third historical force is feminization, or the process by which the increasing status and influence of women has promoted feminine caregiving as a check on male violence.

The fourth historical force is cosmopolitanism, or the globalization of human culture by which an increasing number of people expand their circle of sympathetic concern.

The fifth historical force is the escalator of reason, or the growing application of human rationality to recognizing how violence becomes self-defeating and how peaceful cooperation with an ever expanding circle of trading partners becomes beneficial for all.

There is much here that deserves comment. But my first thought is that Pinker's book confirms and deepens much of what I have written about deep history, coevolutionary history, and Darwinian liberalism.

DARWINIAN LIBERALISM
When Thomas Huxley in 1860 proclaimed that Darwin's Origin of Species would become a powerful weapon for liberalism, he anticipated how evolutionary science would eventually explain the emergence of modern liberal social thought as the culmination of the deep evolutionary history of humanity. Pinker's book can now be added to a collection of recent books--including Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (2009), and Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist (2010)--that survey the recent research on human evolution as a history of liberalism.

Every human society throughout history has faced the problem of violence. No society can solve this problem by eliminating violence completely, because the tendency to violence is too deeply rooted in human nature and the human condition. But violence can be contained and managed, and the different kinds of social order can be distinguished by how they do that and by how well they do it. The modern liberal society can be recognized as the best society because it contains and manages violence more successfully than any other social order.

North, Wallis, and Weingast distinguish three broad kinds of social order: the foraging order of hunter-gatherers, the agrarian order of states based on agricultural production, and the open access societies that have arisen only in the last few centuries. In the foraging order, social norms are enforced by vengeance and vigilante justice, so that violence is checked by retaliation. But in the absence of impartial judges and formal law, foraging societies tend to fall into a violent state of nature caught in cycles of feuding and raiding.

Hobbes and Locke saw the need for pacifying this conflict through formal laws and government that came with the establishment of agricultural communities and the invention of writing. But Locke also saw the tendency to despotic violence in agrarian states and thus the need for limited government and the protection of liberty.

The open access order of liberal capitalist republics constrains and manages conflict through free competition and cooperation. An open polity provides free access to political organizations. An open economy provides free access to economic organizations. And an open society provides free access to ideas and culture.

As liberal capitalist republicanism has spread around the world and as the liberal regimes are bound together in global networks of open political, economic, and cultural exchange, violence has been reduced to the lowest levels of human history.

The liberal success in constraining and managing violence promotes the political good of liberty, the economic good of prosperity, and the cultural goods of moral and intellectual excellence.

Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The X-Men and Darwinian Natural Right

2011-10-07T21:50:00.000+01:00

In the current issue of Salvo Magazine, Cameron Wybrow has an article arguing that the story of the X-men--as portrayed in Marvel comics and in films--exposes the weaknesses in my evolutionary conception of ethics.

In the debate between Charles Xavier and Magneto over whether or not the mutants should rule over the normal humans as natural slaves, Wybrow claims, Magneto's assertion of mutant superiority and dominance over the humans conforms to the "pure logic of Darwinism." If evolution is all about "survival of the fittest," where the stronger species exterminates or rules over the weaker, then Xavier's policy of protecting the humans (Homo sapiens) from attack by the mutants (Homo superior) is incoherent because it assumes a "secularized Christianity" that is not supported by Darwinian science.

That the strong should protect the weak is a "Christian sentiment" rooted in the Christian belief that we have ethical obligations based upon an intelligently designed cosmic teleology. "If human beings are to have natural ends, and natural obligations," Wybrow claims, "then any 'evolutionary' process that may have occurred must have been end-directed, producing human beings not as a transient phenomenon but as a goal; and such human beings will have a genuine essence in the classical sense, from which ethical and political obligations can be derived."

Since I reject such a cosmic teleology in arguing for a naturalistic ethics rooted in evolved human nature, Wybrow explains, I contradict myself by appealing to moral sentiments that cannot be sustained without a cosmic teleology directed to human beings as the intelligently designed goal of the cosmos.

In his reply to this article, Michael Mills makes two good points. First, Magneto is wrong in separating mutants and humans as distinct species: "the mutants are simply remarkable outliers of the species Homo sapiens." I agree. In fact, the very term "X-men" indicates this: the mutants are human beings with some "X-tra" powers. Moreover, throughout the X-men stories, we see that the mutants have most if not all of the twenty natural desires that I have identified as distinctive to human beings.

Mills's second point is that this common human nature includes a shared need for cooperation and care for others. Despite their special powers, the mutants are dependent on one another and on the ordinary human beings in their pursuit of a happy flourishing life.

Furthermore, I would point out that Magneto must argue that he is leading a just war of self-defense against the aggressive threat of the normal humans. Xavier's position depends on the truth of his claim that the ordinary humans will not try to oppress the mutants, and therefore that peaceful cooperation is best for both mutants and ordinary humans.

In the X-men comics, there is a "Days of Future Past" storyline in which the ordinary humans set out to persecute the mutants just as the Nazis did the Jews. If something like that were to come true, then Xavier would have to join Magneto in fighting against the humans, just as it would have been justified for the Jews to fight against the Nazis. This would express their natural desires for self-preservation and for justice as reciprocity. Would Wybrow disagree? Would he say that the mutants are morally obligated by a cosmic teleology aimed at human beings to passively submit to oppression?

If Homo sapiens is the goal or end of the whole cosmic process, as Wybrow suggests, does that imply that Christian human beings would be justified in exterminating the mutants as deviations from nature's end? If so, then the human acceptance of this Christian cosmic teleology would justify Magneto's claim that the mutants are in a fight to the death with the normal humans.

Wybrow might respond by insisting that Christianity teaches universal peace and love. But this ignores the bloody violence of the Old Testament and the apocalyptic vision of the New Testament, in which the few chosen people of God triumph in battle, and all others are condemned to eternal punishment. These Biblical themes run through much of the violence of the X-men stories. (Consider, for example, the parallels with Moses and the Book of Revelation in the character of Apocalypse and the alternative reality of the "Age of Apocalypse.")

As I have indicated in a previous post, the sort of argument that Wybrow makes against Darwinism was originally made by Friedrich Nietzsche, and my response to Nietzsche could also apply here. In another post, I respond to the common idea that Darwinism means "might makes right."

Various responses to Wybrow's points about cosmic teleology, the eternity of species as essences, and the concern for the "ought" can be found here, here, and here.

The Human Biology of Property

2011-10-06T17:03:00.000+01:00

In Chapter 4 of Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that a Darwinian view of human nature sustains the traditionalist conservative and classical liberal commitment to private property as a natural propensity that is diversely expressed in custom and law. The particular rules for property rights are determined by customary traditions and formal laws that vary across history and across societies, but that variation is constrained by the natural desire for property. We need to understand the complexity of property across three levels--natural property, customary property, and formal property.

In my chapter, I illustrated this with the historical case of mining law in California. Once gold was discovered in northern California in 1848, hundreds of thousands of people went there to search for gold, and they showed their natural instinct for property by claiming land for mining by taking possession of it, although they were only squatters on land officially owned by the federal government. To settle disputes over mining claims, the miners developed customary rules that they enforced among themselves by social tradition. Then, finally, in 1866, the United States Congress passed a federal mining law that formally legalized these local customs of the miners.

Thus, the property claims of the miners moved through three levels--natural possession, customary rules, and formal laws. This manifests the general structure of Darwinian social order as the joint product of natural desires, cultural practices, and deliberate judgments.

In recent years, a growing number of law professors have become interested in the evolutionary analysis of law, and one prime area of research has been the evolutionary analysis of property law. As surveyed in some articles by Jeffrey Stake and James Krier, this research largely confirms my Darwinian account of property.

This research also provides a scientific confirmation for the evolutionary explanation of property laid out originally by John Locke (in his Two Treaties of Government) and William Blackstone (in his Commentaries on the Laws of England). First, among ancient foraging bands, hunting territory was owned communally by the band--excluding other bands--and personal property (such as weapons, tools, and clothing) was owned individually. These original claims to property were based on possession and occupancy, so that the first person to take and hold possession of something was presumed to own it. This was enforced by customary agreement. But, then, when agriculture was developed, the growing scarcity and thus value of land, made it necessary to settle property disputes through the formal institutions of government, and the invention of writing facilitated this. Finally, with the expansion of commerce and trade, property rights became ever more subject to rules of sale, grant, or conveyance.

Locke saw property rights as rooted ultimately in self-ownership--the natural sense that one owns one's body--and in the extension of oneself into external objects by the labor of taking possession of them. A Darwinian biological psychology explains this as rooted in the human brain and body as evolved by natural selection for survival and reproduction.

The articles by Stake and Krier are especially valuable because of the way they explain the evolutionary basis for property in John Maynard Smith's study of how the "bourgeois" strategy develops among animals to settle disputes over territory and resources. If we imagine two animals competing for access to a particular breeding territory, and if they have an equal opportunity of arriving first and possessing it or arriving later and being an intruder, we might imagine two possible strategies: the Hawk who fights until one animal is injured and retreats, and the Dove who bluffs but never fights. Under certain conditions, the best strategy is a "bourgeois" strategy that mixes the other two: "if owner, play Hawk; if intruder, play Dove." In fact, many animals do seem to play this strategy, so that the possessor of a territory tends to have an advantage over an intruder, and consequently there is a kind of instinctive rule of property that favors possessors over intruders.

The primacy of possession runs through much of our property law, and this could be because it is rooted in the evolved structure of our brains so that it feels right to us. Krier concludes: "Possession, as any property lawyer knows, remains the cornerstone of most contemporary property systems--nine points of the law, the root of title, and the origin of property" (159).

REFERENCES
Krier, James E., "Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights," Cornell Law Review 95 (2009): 139-160.

Stake, Jeffrey Evans, "The Property 'Instinct,'" Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 359 (2004): 1763-1774.

Natural Family Values in Darwinian Liberalism

2011-09-29T02:19:00.000+01:00

One criticism of classical liberalism is that it ignores the importance of family life for social order, because the liberal reliance on the market for organizing social life must subvert the family. This criticism is mistaken, because it overlooks the importance of the family as one of the crucial institutions of the civil society required for a liberal order. A Darwinian liberalism explains the primacy of the family as serving the evolved functions of spousal attachment, parental care, and kinship bonding.

It is true, however, that classical liberals--or libertarians--have not given much explicit attention to family life. And yet, a few--such as Steven Horwitz--have begun to elaborate a classical liberal theory of the functions of the family as shaped by human evolutionary history. In doing that, they show how a Darwinian liberalism can support a conception of the family as an expression of evolutionary natural law.

Horwitz has sketched a Hayekian theory of the family in response to the claim of Geoffrey Hodgson that Hayekian liberalism must deny the importance of the family. Hodgson has written:

"Generally, if contract and trade are always the best way of organising matters, then many functions that are traditionally organised in a different manner should become commercialized . . . Pushed to the limit, market individualism implies the commercialization of sex and the abolition of the family. A consistent market individualist cannot be a devotee of 'family values' . . . They cannot in one breath argue that the market is the best way of ordering all socio-economic activities, and then deny it in another. If they cherish family values, then they have to recognise the practical and moral limits of the market imperatives and pecuniary exchange" (1999, p. 84).

Against this, Horwitz denies Hodgson's claim that Hayekians must assume that "the market is the best way of ordering all socio-economic activities." On the contrary, Horwitz shows, Hayek is clear that markets and other processes of spontaneous ordering are only effective for certain kinds of social activities. Hayek distinguishes "spontaneous orders" as "grown orders" from "organizations" as "made orders," and he makes it clear that any large society requires both kinds of ordering. "In any group of men of more than the smallest size," Hayek explains, collaboration will always rest both on spontaneous order as well as on deliberate organization," because "the family, the farm, the plant, the firm, the corporation and the various associations, and all the public institutions including government, are organizations which in turn are integrated into a more comprehensive spontaneous order" (1973, p. 46).

Spontaneous ordering works best for social coordination where the tasks are very complex and where they involve large numbers of people who interact anonymously. But deliberate organization works best for those tasks of social coordination that are simple enough and involve such a small number of people interacting face-to-face and sharing a common purpose that they can be planned out by deliberate design. The family is one of the social institutions that works best as a deliberate organization rather than as a spontaneous order.

It is important, then, Hayek explains, that we neither apply the rules of the market to family life nor apply the rules of family life to the market. "If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we woud destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once" (1988, p. 18).

Family life serves at least three functions in satisfying our evolved natural desires for sexual mating, parental care, and familial bonding. Parental care provides for human offspring who have evolved needs for adult care to secure their existence, their nourishment, and their social education, which make possible their growth into healthy adults. Childless families satisfy the evolved human desires for spousal love and kinship ties.

As Horwitz indicates, Hayek's idea of "living in two worlds at once" points to the need for the family as an institution in which children can learn the moral rules for both the micro world of face-to-face interactions and the macro world of anonymous interactions in the extended spontaneous order of society.

The Hayekian insight is that families are best situated to do this because of their advantage in knowledge and incentives. The intimacy of the family allows parents to have an intimate knowledge of each child's individual character and situation that allow parents to teach them their social lessons--by both explicit instruction and implicit example--in a manner that is suitable for the individual child. At the same time, parents (normally) have a love for their children that gives them the incentives to care for their children's rearing in a way that is specially designed for them. No extended order of spontaneous cooperation could provide either the knowledge or the incentives that arise within the intimate experience of families.

The reasons that justify private families--because parents have the most knowledge of their children and the strongest incentives to care properly for their children--are comparable to the reasons that justify private property, because private property owners have the knowledge and the incentives to care best for that property.

We might also notice that this special role of the family in transmitting social learning about how best to succeed in society could explain the great transformation that came with the Industrial Revolution. If we accept Gregory Clark's argument about the importance of an evolutionary process of "survival of the richest" by which families that taught their children the bourgeois virtues were more successful in England in the 18th century, which led to the Industrial Revolution, then we could explain this great transition into Hayek's Great Society as a product of an evolutionary transformation in family life.

REFERENCES

Hayek, F. A., Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

Horwitz, Steven, "The Functions of the Family in the Great Society," Cambridge Journal of Economics, 29 (2005): 669-684.

Some related posts and articles can be found here here, here, here, and here.

Testosterone and Thomistic Natural Law

2011-09-21T21:24:00.001+01:00

As we have seen in some recent posts, Thomas Aquinas roots natural law--and particularly the natural law of marriage--in Aristotle's biology, which can be supported by modern Darwinian biology.

So, for example, Thomas explains the natural law of marriage as serving two natural ends--parental care and spousal love--that can be explained by comparing human beings with other animals that show parental care by both parents. For many animals, he observes, the mother alone is sufficient to care for her offspring. But for some animals, such as some species of birds, the mother needs the help of the father or others in caring for offspring, and this is especially true where the offspring are dependent on adult care for a long time during which they need not only nourishment but also social learning if they are to flourish as adults. This is true for human beings, Aquinas argues, who are naturally inclined to be cooperative breeders, which is the natural foundation for human marriage and familial bonding.

If this is true, then we might expect that modern biological research can show the evolved neurophysiological basis for such natural inclinations to parental care. Indeed, there is now extensive evidence that human parenting behavior is facilitated by complex neuroendocrinological mechanisms. And yet, in some respects, the evidence for mother-child bonding is clearer than for father-child bonding. In general, women show a stronger propensity for parental care than men. This is true for most mammalian species. But in contrast to our closest evolutionary relatives--the great apes--direct male care for children is prevalent in many human societies. From this perspective, paternal care is a defining trait of the human species and thus a crucial factor in human evolution.

The hormonal basis for this is becoming ever clearer. In Chapter 5 of Darwinian Natural Right, I surveyed some of the research indicating that oxytocin and vasopressin support parental care and pair-bonding in mammals. Recently, there has been growing evidence for the importance of testosterone in mediating paternal care.

Lee Gettler and his colleagues have just published a new study showing how fluctuations in testosterone modulates male mating and parenting. This article has received a lot of press coverage, including an article in the New York Times. In a commentary on the article, Peter Gray summarizes this study:

"They find that, in a community-based sample from the Philippines, men with higher testosterone level are more likely to marry than men with lower testosterone; that men who marry and become fathers experience decliens in testosterone; and that men who provide more parental care have lower testosterone levels than fathers who provide less care. This is not the first study that has investigated the social dimensions to male testosterone levels. However, it represents perhaps the most rigorous study of its kind conducted on humans, and clearly demonstrates through a longitudinal design that fatherhood causes testosterone decreases in men."

High levels of testosterone make men more attractive to potential mates and make them more aggressive in competing with other men for mating opportunities. Lower levels of testosterone are associated with marriage and child care. Thus, fluctuations in levels of testosterone seem to mediate the tradeoffs between mating and parenting.

For Gettler, this supports his larger theory of human evolution based on a "metabolic model of direct male care." Evolutionary theorists have noticed the shortened interbirth intervals that characterize modern humans as compared with the great apes. Gettler argues that this was made possible by hominid males helping mothers by helping in the carrying of the young, and thus lessening the costs of child care by mothers. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and others have argued that a distinctive feature of human evolution was "alloparenting"--people helping mothers with child-care and thus reducing the burden of maternal caregiving. Gettler emphasizes the importance of direct paternal care for offspring as a crucial part of this alloparenting. The connection of testosterone to male mating and parenting is one proximate mechanism that has emerged from the human evolution of sexual mating and parental care.

This illustrates how modern evolutionary biology can explain the biological roots of human mating and parenting as natural inclinations that constitute Thomistic natural law.

REFERENCES
Lee Gettler, "Direct Male Care and Hominin Evolution: Why Male-Child Interaction is More than a Nice Social Idea," American Anthropologist, 112 (March 2010): 7-21.

Lee Gettler, Thomas W. McDade, Alan B. Feranil, and Christopher W. Kuzawa, "Longitudinal Evidnence that Fatherhood Decreases Testosterone in Human Males," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition, 2011.

Peter B. Gray, "The Descent of a Man's Testosterone," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition, 2011.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Social Science of Happy Atheism

2011-09-16T14:01:00.007+01:00

Against my claim that human beings show an evolved natural desire for religious understanding, some of my critics have argued that the modern history of increasingly secular societies shows that human beings have no natural need for religious belief. On the other side of this debate, some proponents of religion insist that religious belief is necessary both for individual happiness and social health.

The role of Darwinian science in this debate is complex. On the one hand, the evolutionary account of the origins of life, including human life, is seen by many people as supporting a purely secular understanding of life and the universe that supplants any religious understanding of divine creation. On the other hand, some evolutionary theorists argue that human beings have a naturally evolved propensity for religious belief that gives meaning to human life and sustains social cooperation. On the one hand, there are lots of theistic evolutionists, and Darwin himself spoke about the Creator as the First Cause of those natural laws that allow for evolution. On the other hand, public opinion surveys in the United States and around the world suggest that deeply religious believers are less likely to accept the truth of evolutionary science than are people who are not religious.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Friedrich Nietzsche showed an ambivalence about the "death of God" that continues to run through the modern discussion of secularization and its consequences. In his middle writings, Nietzsche adopted Darwinian evolutionary thinking as a "joyful science" for "free spirits." But in his earlier and later writings, he yearned for a new religion that would give eternal meaning to the universe and thus save the modern world from the nihilistic consequences of modern secularism. A similar ambivalence is manifest in all the modern talk about how the inevitable triumph of scientific secularism brings with it a "disenchantment of the world."

This worry about the degrading effects of atheism is an old one. It's expressed in the Bible--in Psalms 14 and 53. In the New Jerusalem Bible, Psalm 14 reads:

The fool has said in his heart,
"There is no God."
Their deeds are corrupt and vile,
not one of them does right.

Yahweh looks down from heaven
at the children of Adam.
To see if a single one is wise,
a single one seeks God.

All have turned away,
all alike turned sour,
not one of them does right,
not a single one.

Are they not aware, all these evil-doers?
They are devouring my people,
this is the bread they eat,
and they never call to Yahweh.

They will be gripped with fear,
where there is no need for fear,
for God takes the side of the upright;
you may mock the plans of the poor,
but Yahweh is their refuge.

Who will bring from Zion salvation for Israel?
When Yahweh brings his people home,
what joy for Jacob, what happiness for Israel!

So is it true that those who believe there is no God are all foolishly corrupt and vile people who can do nothing good?

Phil Zuckerman--an atheistic sociologist--surveys the evidence from social science research supporting his claim that this is not true, because, in fact, atheists are happy, moral people, and societies with large numbers of atheists and people who are indifferent about religion can be healthy societies. Although he clearly wants to emphasize the evidence supporting his position, he does at least point to some of the evidence against his position.

In most countries around the world, Zuckerman indicates, the majority of people have some kind of religious belief. In a few countries--such as Japan and South Korea--some surveys indicate that a majority of the people have no religious belief. In the East, the state of religious belief is hard to determine, because some of the major religious traditions--such as Confucianism and Buddhism--show no belief in the God of the theistic traditions. In the West, many of the European countries show high levels of secularity, with 25 to 50 percent of the people reporting no religious belief. In the United States, religious belief is more prevalent, but even so, some surveys indicate that 5 to 19 percent of Americans have no religious belief. And in the United States, there is some evidence that religious belief has been declining in recent decades, especially among the young.

Older people tend to be more religious than younger people. Women tend to be more religious than men. Less educated people tend to be more religious than more educated people. Among natural scientists and university professors, rates of religious belief are much lower than for the general population.

If atheism were corrupting, as the Psalmist declares, one might expect that atheism would promote criminality. As Zuckerman indicates, that does not seem to be true. Murder rates are lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations. In the United States, the more religious regions of the country have higher rates of violent crime.

American religious believers seem to be more charitable than secular Americans as measured by charitable donations from their income. And yet the most secular countries in the West--the Scandinavian nations--contribute more aid (per capita) to poor countries.

Atheists seem to be capable of heroic altruism. For example, during the Holocaust, the more secular people were more inclined to rescue Jews.

The weakest part of Zuckerman's social scientific case for happy atheism concerns indicators of psychological well-being. Many studies report that religious believers report themselves as happier and less inclined to depression than secular people. Zuckerman tries to counter this by noting that the countries reporting the highest rates of general happiness tend to be highly secular.

The most dramatic indicator of unhappiness is suicide. Among Americans, devout religious believers have lower rates of suicide than secular people. Moreover, the countries with the highest rates of suicide include the more secular countries, particularly in Scandinavia.

The evidence for the influence of religious belief on family life is somewhat mixed. Some evidence indicates that religious believers have lower rates of divorce than is the case for secular people. But some studies contradict this. One difference in the style of family life is clear: religious individuals and religious nations tend to have high birth rates. And since children tend to follow the religious propensities of their parents, this difference in birth rates could lead to a future growth in religious belief as the believers out breed the atheists.

As Zuckerman indicates, one major problem running through all of these studies is that "correlation is not causation." The correlation of religious belief or atheism to various social indicators leaves us unclear as to exactly how or whether religion or atheism directly causes any particular outcome.

Despite all the difficulties in interpreting this research, we can conclude that the Bible is wrong about atheists. It is not true that "their deeds are corrupt and vile, not one of them does right."

REFERENCES
Phil Zuckerman, Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (New York University Press, 2008).

Zuckerman, "Atheism, Secularity, and Well-Being: How the Findings of Social Science Counter Negative Stereotypes and Assumptions," Sociology Compass 3/6 (2009): 949-971.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Uncle Tom Problem

2011-09-11T20:12:00.007+01:00

Does Thomas Aquinas have a solution for the problem of the Christian Uncle Tom?

One of the common complaints about the political effects of Christianity is that it promotes an attitude of humble submission to authority, even when that authority is tyrannical. Christians are taught to love their enemies and to resist not evil rather than to avenge the evils inflicted on them. As a consequence, Machiavelli complained in the Discourses on Livy (II.2), Christianity makes the world weak. In their concern for supernatural redemption in the next life, Christians have no concern for resisting tyrants in this life, which provides the conditions for tyranny to prevail without resistance from those they exploit.

This problem is dramatized in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and in the debate provoked by her novel. I been thinking about this as I have been reading chapters of a dissertation by Chris Thuot on Stowe's political thought. Just last night, some of us--faculty and students--were discussing this at the "Second Saturday Club," a group that meets at my house once a month during the school year.

First published in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin sold millions of copies in the United States, Great Britain, and around the world. It was commonly regarded as a powerful statement of abolitionist rhetoric. Emma Darwin recommended it to her relatives and friends. So she and Charles must have discussed it as contributing to the campaign against slavery that they supported. Proslavery leaders in the American South denounced the novel as false in presenting slavery as far more brutal than it truly was.

And yet even some of the abolitionist leaders--such as black abolitionist William Nell--criticized Stowe's depiction of Uncle Tom as humbly submitting to the tyranny of his enslavement. The novel indicates that Uncle Tom's "getting religion" made him a submissive slave (6). He tells Aunt Chloe to pray for the slaveholders. Although he knows that this is against "natur"--against the natural inclination feel anger towards exploitation--he teaches that to be a good Christian slave, one must allow the "grace" of Christian redemption to conquer one's "natur" (62). It is said that Tom as "a natural genius for religion" (195), which is expressed in his teaching his fellow slaves to passively endure their slavery and obediently serve their masters, with the promise that they will be rewarded by God in the afterlife. The prospect of heavenly reward will compensate them for their earthly suffering.

In the 1950s, the black novelist and essayist James Baldwin famously attacked Stowe's novel for what he regarded as a racist portrayal of black passivity.

This is why the term "Uncle Tom" has become a term of scorn for those who submit to their own exploitation.

But there is an alternative hero in Stowe's novel--George Harris--who is not a good Christian, because he wonders whether there is a God that would allow the slaves to suffer so, and he expresses human "natur" in using violence to resist his slave masters and escape to freedom in Canada, and eventually in going to Liberia. George Harris does not ask for eternal life, but only for earthly liberty, and he willing to die rather than live as a slave. George invokes the Declaration of Independence in his manly assertion of a spirited resistance to oppression (207). This spirited resistance to exploitation shows how "the man could not become a thing" (17-18), which was the position taken by black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass.

Unlike Uncle Tom, George Harris rejects Christianity. He tells his wife: "I an't a Christian like you, Eliza; my heart's full of bitterness; I can't trust in God. Why does he let things be so?" (23). Speaking to a white man who respects him, George observes: "I've seen things all my life that have made me feel that there can't be a God. You Christians don't know how these things look to us. There's a God for you, but is there any for us?" (124).

Stowe shows some ambivalence as to whether Christianity is defensible in its stance on slavery. She recognizes that the proslavery leaders could easily quote the Bible as supporting slavery. And yet she also believed that the general teaching of the Gospel had to deny the justice of slavery, and she hoped that the Christian teaching of humility and love manifested in Uncle Tom's martyrdom could move the hearts of white people to support the abolition of slavery. Still, she suggests that the violent revolutionary resistance to evil manifest in George Harris might be the only way to abolish slavery.

Under the influence of Alexander Kinmont's Twelve Lectures on the Natural History of Man (1839), Stowe believed that there were natural differences between the races that made blacks more naturally passive, obedient, and less prone to aggressive anger than whites, so that blacks were more naturally adapted for Christian morality. Oddly enough, this made blacks morally superior to whites, while also making them more adapted for slavery than whites were. She implies that George Harris was naturally inclined to a spirited resistance to his enslavement only because his father was white, and thus his mixed race birth gave him some mixture of Anglo-Saxon spiritedness.

There is some evidence, however, that Stowe began to change her mind shortly after the initial publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. She wrote a foreword to Nell's The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). Nell commented not only on the black participation in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, but also the black resistance to slavery displayed by Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Nat Turner, and the Virginia maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, who all showed the black history of revolutionary heroism.

In 1856, Stowe published her second novel--Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, in which she portrayed the heroism of a black revolutionary--Dred--who was the son of Denmark Vesey, and who led slaves in revolt from his hiding place in a large swamp. When Dred first appears in the novel (vol. 1, chap. 18), he quotes the Old Testament as favoring vengeance against oppressors and as contradicting the passive obedience taught by the New Testament. By contrast, another slave--Milly--teaches the same Christian passivity taught by Uncle Tom. But in this novel, the heroism of Dred suggests that Stowe is reconsidering her earlier depiction of Uncle Tom as the model of Christian heroism.

Speaking to another slave, Dred aggressively takes his stand:

"When a man licks his master's foot, his wife scorns him--serves him right. Take it meekly my boy! 'Servants, obey your masters.' (Ephesians 6:5) Take your master's old coats--take your wife when he's done with her--and bless God that brought you under the light of the Gospel! Go! You are a slave! But, as for me, . . . I am a free man! Free by this," holding out his rifle. "Free by the Lord of hosts, that numbereth the stars, and calleth them forth by their names. Go home--that's all I say to you! You sleep in a curtained bed.--I sleep on the ground, in the swamps! You eat the fat of the land. I have what the ravens bring me! But no man whips me! --no man touches my wife--no man says to me, 'Why do ye so?' Go! you are a slave!--I am free!" (199-200)

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Thomas Aquinas reads the Bible as supporting the natural moral emotions of spirited vengeance displayed by someone like Dred, and thus Aquinas corrects Jesus's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in the light of natural law as rooted in the natural morality of human life.

Aquinas defends "vengeance" (vindicatio) as a virtue. Against the teaching that we are to always love our enemies and never resist evil, Aquinas insists that vengeance is a part of justice because it expresses a natural inclination shared with other animals to irascibility, a special inclination of nature to protect individuals against harm (ST, I-II, q. 107, a. 2; II-II, q. 50, a. 4; q. 108, aa. 2-3).

Edward Westermarck's Darwinian theory of morality explains this by arguing that human moral emotions are rooted in the evolved dispositions of animals to feel anger towards those that threaten them. This naturally evolved animal inclination to ward off attacks is the deepest root of that sense of injustice that underlies all human morality.

Any question as to whether the black race was adapted for slavery by its natural passivity and lack of spiritness should have been settled by the courage of the black soldiers who fought in the American Civil War. Darwin was fascinated by this, and he was proud to meet Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded the first federally authorized black regiment to fight in the South. Higginson visited Darwin twice in the 1870s, and on the second occasion, he spent the night at Down House. Higginson called Darwin "even a greater man than I had thought him."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins (Norton, 2007).

Stowe, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Robert Levine (Penguin Classics, 2000).

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Darwin Does Not Love You

2011-09-05T18:30:00.005+01:00

Although it's not as popular as the bumper sticker that reads "Jesus Loves You," one occasionally sees the contrasting bumper sticker--"Darwin Loves You."

A few yeas ago, George Levine took this as the title of a book--Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World. As the title suggests, Levine argued that contrary to the claim that Darwinian science contributes to the "disenchantment of the world" identified by Max Weber, Darwinism might actually promote the "re-enchantment of the world." After all, Levine indicated, Darwin shows a love of nature and a wonder evoked by nature's beautiful complexity and grand evolutionary history. So why shouldn't that love and wonder show us the way to a secular enchantment that has no need for a theistic religious view of this world as given a spiritual meaning by its transcendent Creator?

Now, Levine has edited a new book--The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now--which has been the basis for a good essay-review in The New Yorker by James Wood.

Levine argues for a Romantic Darwinism that would combine secular science with a sense of the sacredness of nature without any need for religious transcendence.

I need to think more about this. But my first reaction is that this kind of reasoning gives both too little and too much credit to revealed religion.

It gives too little credit to revealed religion, because it assumes that scientific reasoning has refuted the claims of revelation. I doubt this. Although there are many reasons to be skeptical about religious faith, I have never seen a rational demonstration that revelation must be false.

Moreover, I don't see in Darwin's writings any attempt to refute religious belief. I do see skepticism, especially towards the end of his life. But I also see that he never publicly proclaimed atheism, despite his skepticism. I also see in his writings a persistent effort to leave open the possibility of theistic evolution, the possibility that God as Creator might have employed natural evolution as the means for carrying out Creation.

What I see here is what I call the problem of ultimate explanation. All explanation must start with an unexplained, and unexplainable, ground of all explanation. For the Darwinian naturalist, nature itself--the laws of nature--are the unexplained ground of explanation. For the theist, God the Creator is the unexplained ground. I see no way around this ultimate choice, with no way for either side to refute the other. In a free society, both sides are available as people organize their lives around answers to this fundamental question of life.

But if Levine gives too little credit to religious belief, he also gives it too much credit. After all, the very quest for an enchanted world or sacred secularity is itself a religious quest, or a search for a surrogate religion. Nietzsche saw this when he warned that in the wake of the death of God, many people would be unable to shake off their longing for redemption, and they would seek religious emotions without the need for religious doctrines. He saw Romanticism as one manifestation of this, and he saw David Strauss's religious Darwinism as showing this tendency to want to turn scientific naturalism in a religious direction. Nietzsche himself embraced a Darwinian naturalism free from religious longings only in his middle works--Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science. In his later writings, however, he relapsed into an atheistic religiosity because he could not free himself of his religious longings.

Levine and others seeking an enchanted secularism are like the later Nietzsche in trying to be good atheists while failing to give up their religious longings.

In accepting Weber's "disenchantment" story, Levine assumes that for human life to have "meaning," human purposes must have some resonance with cosmic purposes, and thus he praises Darwin for his "anthropomorphic" view of the universe, his projection of human purposes onto the cosmic order. He sees this as the alternative to the "anthropocentric" or "theocentric" view of theistic religion. But even Levine's romantic anthropomorphism--his imaginative response to nature as mindful rather than mindless--expresses a religious longing.

The alternative to this atheistic religiosity is to see that a purely human purposefulness that has no cosmic support can satisfy the Socratic or Darwinian skeptic. But because of the natural desire for religious understanding, very few human beings can live this kind of life. And nothing said by the scientific skeptic can refute the claims of the religious life.

Darwin loved his wife, his children, and his friends. But he doesn't love you. Darwin is no substitute for Jesus. Darwin and Darwinism are not going to redeem us from the limitations of this world and give us entrance into an ecstatic enchantment.

But Darwinian science can teach us that life has meaning in so far as life has purposes--human purposes. Human purposes arise from those twenty natural desires that constitute our evolved human nature.

That evolved human nature leaves us vulnerable to suffering and death, and it provides no transcendent promise of escaping from that vulnerability, except for those moved by the desire for religious understanding. But it does provide us with the possibility of human goods--human love, human striving, human wonder. For many of us, that's enough.

My earlier blog post on Darwin's understanding of love and death can be found here.

Earlier blog posts on Nietzsche's struggles with Darwinism and religion can be found here, here, here, and here.

One of my posts on the evolution of the desire for religious understanding can be found here.

The Aristotelian Biology of Thomistic Natural Law (2)

2011-08-28T13:24:00.005+01:00

Eric Johnston's dissertation is a valuable study of how Aristotelian biology supports Thomas Aquinas's account of the natural law of marriage. As Johnston indicates, his dissertation is primarily a historical work that tries to understand Aquinas's position, without judging whether that position is defensible as being simply true. But still, it's clear that Johnston is generally supportive of what Aquinas says, and he so he wants to defend Aquinas as making intellectually respectable arguments.

Any defense of Aquinas's biological reasoning today requires some judgment as to whether it is compatible with modern biological science, assuming that we agree that that science is generally correct. And, indeed, Johnston does suggest that Aquinas's biology is roughly compatible on many major points with modern biology, although he does this only briefly and often only in some footnotes.

I would go farther in that direction than Johnston wants to go, and that's why I disagree with him on four points.

First, Johnston assumes that biological science can study only the purely physical side of human life, and therefore it cannot account for the mental or moral reality of human experience (11, 48, 52, 240). But this is not true either for Aristotelian biology or for modern Darwinian biology. Aristotle's biological writings study not just the physical but also the mental capacities of animals, and it's this biological study of animal cognition that is so important for Aquinas. Darwin continued in this tradition in studying the evolution of the mental and moral capacities of animals. Today, the ethology and neuroscience of animal cognition belong to this Aristotelian tradition of biological psychology. It is true that human beings are unique in ways that make them uniquely capable of moral judgment and symbolic reasoning. But even these humanly unique traits can be understood as products of the emergent evolution of primate cognition.

Johnston observes: "modern biology, viewing the animal from a purely physical perspective, cannot engage the question of ensoulment because it does not engage the question of the soul" (240). But while it is certainly true that modern biologists are unlikely to use the language of "soul" and "ensoulment," they will talk about the biology of cognition and mental states. So, for example, as indicated in some recent posts, primatologists will look for evidence that chimpanzees have a "theory of mind."

My second disagreement is that, while Johnston does occasionally defend the Aristotelian biology of sex differences against the charge of sexist bias (27, 158-159, 233-234, 241), I would go farther in this direction in arguing that Aristotle's embryological explanation of male-female differences is close to what we know today from modern biology. Aristotle understood that the formation of a male embryo depended on the action of testicular secretions in the womb, and that in the absence of these secretions, the embryo develops as a female. Consequently, abnormalities of hormonal masculinatization can result in abnormalities of gender identity. I have laid out my reasoning on this in an article: "A Sociobiological Defense of Aristotle's Sexual Politics," International Political Science Review, 15 (1994): 389-415. Some of this same ground is covered by an article cited by Johnston: Michael Nolan, "The Aristotelian Background to Aquinas's Denial that 'Woman is a Defective Male,'" The Thomist, 64 (2000): 21-69.

My third disagreement is that, unlike Johnston, I think that the ecclesiastical persecution of those studying Aristotelian natural philosophy might have made it necessary for Aquinas to engage in esoteric writing to avoid persecution. Dante hints at this in the DIVINE COMEDY (PARADISO, X.82-148). Siger de Brabant was condemned as an Averroist heretic who taught Aristotelian philosophy without regard for Christian faith. Dante puts him in Heaven, and he has Thomas Aquinas praise him as one who "demonstrated truths that earned him envy." Aquinas introduces himself as "a lamb among the holy flock that Dominic leads on the path where one may fatten well if one does not stray off," thus suggesting that Aquinas hid his support for Siger so as not to stray too openly from the faith of the Dominicans.

One place where Johnston might have seen this is in Aquinas's use of embryology to answer the question (in De Potentia, q. 3, a. 9) of whether the rational soul can be transmitted through semen, or whether it must be infused by God's miraculous creation. Johnston notices that this requires an unusually complicated response by Aquinas (241-59). Aquinas indicates that this question of whether natural embryological development can produce the rational soul of a human being "has been answered in various ways by different people" with different "opinions." One of these "opinions" was that yes, indeed, natural reproduction could produce a child with a rational soul. But then the Church condemned such "opinions" and declared that the rational soul must be specially created by God and then infused into the body of the developing child. "Now to maintain that the soul is made by the generation of the body, is to say that it is not subsistent and consequently that it ceases with the body." This is a heresy, and it was one of the propositions condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1277. Thus, Aquinas could not openly embrace this without being condemned as a heretic (cf. ST, I, q. 118, a. 2). Aquinas argues in defense of the Church's position--that the rational soul must be specially created by God and infused into the body--but he refers to this as an "opinion," which might make a careful reader wonder whether he is fully and honestly affirming its truth. For Aquinas, "opinion"--as opposed to "science" or "faith"--is affirming something without firm confidence (ST, I-II, q. 67, a. 3).

Aquinas's argument for this "opinion" is that nature is an instrument in the hand of God, and therefore God can intervene at any time to go beyond what the instrument can do on its own. But if God is able and willing to use nature to create nutritive and sensitive souls, as Aquinas says, then why is He not able and willing to use nature to create rational souls? Although a reader might raise this question, Aquinas cannot openly raise it himself without risking persecution.

This is still an issue today with regard to how far the Catholic Church can go in accepting modern evolutionary science. In 1996, Pope John Paul II appeared to endorse the idea of human evolution by purely natural processes. But he also insisted that while evolutionary science can explain the natural evolution of the human body, the appearance of the rational soul unique to human beings requires a miraculous act of God in the embryological process.

My final point of disagreement with Johnston is in his observation: "His account of the natural law is thoroughly theonomic. Natural law is not a way of discerning the good life in abstraction from God" (296). I agree that any orthodox Christian must believe that all of nature, including natural law, is ultimately part of eternal law as created by God. But it does not follow from this that the power of natural law depends on a belief that it is divinely ordained. If that were so, then there would be no reason for Aquinas to distinguish between natural law and divine law, and thus natural law could not be comprehensible as purely natural without supernatural revelation. If natural law corresponds to the natural biological inclinations of the human animal, then why doesn't the natural power of those inclinations hold true for us regardless of our religious beliefs?

To go back to the example of marriage, all human beings should be able to grasp the natural truth that human beings as sexual animals are naturally directed to parental care and spousal love. And while belief in some theological view of marriage might reinforce those natural inclinations, the natural inclinations can stand on their own natural ground even without religious belief. By contrast, the religious view of marriage as a sacrament symbolizing the marriage of Christ and His Church depends upon faith in revelation rather than reasoning about nature.

In addition to my recent posts, some of my older posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Aristotelian Biology of Thomistic Natural Law

2011-08-27T19:47:00.003+01:00

In some of my recent posts, I have argued that Thomas Aquinas's teaching on natural law is rooted in Aristotle's biology, that this is particularly clear in Aquinas's biological account of the natural law of sex, marriage, and parental care, and that much of this biological reasoning for natural law can be confirmed by modern Darwinian biology.

I must admit, however, that I have not done a thorough study of how Aquinas uses Aristotle's biology in all of his writing. So I was pleased to discover a dissertation that studies how Aquinas uses Aristotle's biology in his account of marriage. Eric M. Johnston wrote a dissertation in 2009 for his Ph.D. in theology at the Catholic University of America, the title of which is "The Role of Aristotelian Biology in Thomas Aquinas's Theology of Marriage." Johnston is now a professor of theology at Seton Hall University. His dissertation is a wonderfully insightful study of all the places in Aquinas's writing where he speaks about marriage, sexuality, and parenthood, and he shows how Aristotle's biological comparisons of human beings and other animals are used by Aquinas to support his understanding of sexual mating and parental care. Johnston's general conclusion is that "Thomas is able to account for all the main Catholic doctrines on marriage through parallels between human and animal procreation" (44).

I agree with Johnston on most of the points he makes. But I disagree on some points.

I agree with the core of Johnston's dissertation, which is to show how Aquinas carefully employed Aristotle's biological writings--especially, The Generation of Animals and The History of Animals--in using animal biology to explain human sexuality, marriage, and parenting. He shows that even when Aquinas does not directly cite Aristotle, Aquinas often uses examples from Aristotle's biological observations.

For example, one of the most important Biblical texts for the Christian doctrines about marriage is the seventh chapter of Paul's First Corinthians. Paul begins this chapter by writing:

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should has his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control. I say this by way of concession, not command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well from them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. (I Cor 7:1-9)

In Aquinas's Commentary on First Corinthians, one of the remarkable features of his commentary on this passage is that he introduces biological comparisons with other animals (from Aristotle's biological writings), although Paul says nothing about this. Aquinas writes:

Natural reason teaches that man use the act of generation according as it is suitable for generation and education of children. But in brute animals, it is found that in certain species the female alone is not sufficient for the training of the offspring, but the male takes care of the offspring with the female. For this, it is required that the male recognize its offspring. Therefore, in all such animals, as doves, pigeons, and the like, solicitude for the training of offspring is inspired by nature. Wherefore, in such animals, intercourse is not random and indiscriminate, but a definite male is joined to a definite female, not one to another promiscuously, as happens in dogs and such animals, in which the female alone takes care of the offspring. But above all in the human species, the male is required for the education of the offspring, which are attended to not only regarding bodily nourishment, but to a greater degree regarding the nourishment of the soul, as it says in Hebrews (12:9): "We have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them." And consequently, natural reason dictates that in the human species intercourse is not random and uncertain, but is by a definite man to a definite female, who in fact made the arrangement through the law of matrimony.

Thus, therefore, matrimony has three goods. The first is that it is a function of nature in the sense that it is ordered to the production and education of offspring; and this good is the good of offspring. The second good is that it is a remedy for desire, which is restricted to a definite person; and this good is called fidelity, which a man preserves toward his wife, by not going to another woman, and similarly the wife toward the husband. The third good is called the sacrament, inasmuch as it signifies the union of Christ and the Church, as it says in Ephesians (5:32): "This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church."

That comparison of human beings with other sexually reproducing animals states the main principles of Aquinas's teaching on sex, marriage, and familial bonding. Like other animals, human beings are driven by a powerful natural desire for sexual mating. Like other animals whose offspring cannot survive or flourish without parental care, and for whom the care of both parents is often necessary, there is a natural need for long-lasting bonding between the mother and the father for the care of the young. But the parental attachment of the father depends on his confidence that he's caring for his own children rather than the children of another man. This must be so, because love of children is an extension of our self-love, so that we love our children as our own. Even adoption requires some such special attachment so that our adopted children seem to be our own. For human children, parental care includes not just bringing children into existence but also feeding them and educating them, because children need a long period of social learning before they can live as mature young adults.

As thus rooted in human biological nature, human marriage has two natural goods--the good of parental care and the good of spousal love.

For Catholic Christians, there is a third good of marriage that is supernatural--the good of marriage as a sacrament of the Church in symbolizing the supernatural mystery of Christ's marriage to the Church as His bride.

It seems, then, that while the first two goods are matters of natural law as rooted in the biological nature of human beings as sexually reproducing animals, the third good surpasses natural law because to recognize marriage as a sacrament, we need the divinely revealed law of the Bible.

But then we might wonder how far Thomas's Aristotelian biology goes in supporting the Thomistic natural law teaching as grounded in natural experience and reasoning without need for divine revelation. We might also wonder how far modern biological science could support this teaching. On both points, I go farther than Johnston wants to go. I'll explain this in my next post.

Tomasello on the Chimpanzee Theory of Mind and Social Ontology

2011-08-19T16:11:00.005+01:00

In response to my previous post, Michael Tomasello has observed that it's not quite true that his research produces mostly negative findings--stressing what chimps can't do. For example, to the question of whether chimps have a theory of mind, Tomasello's answer is that in many respects they do, while in some respects they don't; and this shows how chimps are both similar to human beings and yet different.

Thus Tomasello's negative conclusions about the limits of chimpanzee cognition are in the service of a positive theory of how human uniqueness evolved.

Some years ago, Tomasello concluded that chimps and other non-human primates have no capacity for understanding the psychological states of other individuals. But more recently, he has decided that new experimental research shows that he was wrong, and that chimps can understand that others perceive and know things and have goals or intentions. For instance, experiments in which chimps are competing for food show that they think about what their competitor can and cannot see, hear, or know. In this sense, chimps do have a theory of mind.

And yet, in another sense, they don't, Tomasello argues, because there is no experimental evidence that chimpanzees understand false beliefs--that other individuals can be not only informed or uninformed but misinformed. By comparison, children as young as 4 years old--and perhaps even younger--do understand that individuals can have false beliefs.

Here's the abstract for one of his articles on this point ("A Nonverbal False Belief Task"):

A nonverbal task of false belief understanding was given to 4- and 5-year-old children (N=28) and to two species of great ape: chimpanzees and orangutans (N=7). The task was embedded in a series of finding games in which an adult (the hider) hid a reward in one of two identical containers, and another adult (the communicator) observed the hiding process and attempted to help the participant by placing a marker on the container that she believed to hold the reward. An initial series of control trials ensured that participants were able to use the marker to locate the reward, follow the reward in both visible and invisible displacements, and ignore the marker when they knew it to be incorrect. In the crucial false belief trials, the communicator watched the hiding process and then left the area, at which time the hider switched the locations of the containers. When the communicator returned, she marked the container at the location where she had seen the reward hidden, when was incorrect. The hider then gave the subject the opportunity to find the sticker. Successful performance required participants to reason as follows: the communicator placed the marker where she saw the reward hidden; the container that was at that location is now at the other location; so the reward is at the other location. Children were also given a verbal false belief task in the context of this same hiding game. The two main results of the study were: (1) children's performance on the verbal and nonverbal false belief tasks were highly correlated (and both fit very closely with age norms from previous studies), and (2) no ape succeeded in the nonverbal false belief task even though they succeeded in all of the control trials indicating mastery of the general task demands.

This research is part of Tomasello's larger research project for understanding the evolutionary psychology of social ontology. As indicated by John Searle and other philosophers, we live in two worlds--a physical reality that is true independently of our subjective awareness and a social reality that depends on our subjective awareness. So, for example, a piece of paper money exists physically as a piece of paper regardless of what we think about it, but its value as money depends on our subjective social agreement. All of our social practices and institutions--money, property rights, government, and so on--are like this. All social animals seem to have some cognitive capacities that allow them to create their social worlds. But human beings seem to be unique in having cognitive capacities that allow them to create social worlds that are far more complex, extensive, and flexible than is the case for other social animals. Any evolutionary science of social cooperation must explain this.

Through his experiments comparing non-human primates and children, Tomasello concludes that while chimps are capable of social coordination, which requires that individuals respond to each other's behavior--as, for example, when chimps engage in group hunting or warfare--they do not show the collaboration through joint intentions based on coordinated plans that arises among young children.

The uniqueness of human institutional ontology is evident in how human beings use language to construct social institutions. But Tomasello thinks that the primary entrance into human social reality is through games of pretend play that display their basic structure among 2-year old children. Through games of pretense, children create social activities through agreement with others on the rules of the game, which shows the crucial step towards human social ontology, a step not taken by chimps. (Of course, to pursue this further, we would have to ask how this is different from the play behavior of other primates.)

REFERENCES
Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, "A Nonverbal False Belief Task: The Performance of Children and Great Apes," Child Development, 70 (March/April 1999): 381-395.

Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, "Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind? 30 Years Later," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (2008): 187-192.

Hannes Rakoczy and Michael Tomasello, "The Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions," in S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed., Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle's Social Ontology (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2010), 113-137.

More on the de Waal/Tomasello Debate in Primate Research

2011-08-17T16:40:00.003+01:00

In my previous post, I briefly surveyed some of the issues in the debate between Frans de Waal and Michael Tomasello in comparing the social intelligence of human beings and other primates--with de Waal stressing the similarities and Tomasello stressing the differences.

I have received a few email messages from folks who think I haven't given enough attention to the flaws in Tomasello's research, which point to at least three major problems.

The first problem is that the results of Tomasello's experiments are mostly negative in emphasizing what chimpanzees and other apes cannot do by contrast with human beings. Such negative results leave us wondering whether this comes from some failing in the methodology that prevented the apes from showing their true abilities. Once people like de Waal try out a new methodology that produces positive results for the apes, it's not clear that Tomasello's research with negative results has much interest.

The second problem is that Tomasello's experiments comparing chimpanzees and human infants are dubious because they are conducted mostly with human experimenters, which creates a disadvantage for the chimps. It is easier for human infants to demonstrate their social skills when dealing with a human experimenter than it is for chimps to do this when dealing with a member of another species. We should expect that the full complexity of chimp social intelligence will be manifested only within chimp groups.

The third problem is that Tomasello's negative results often contradict what researchers are seeing among chimps in the wild. So, for example, de Waal's latest experiments showing chimp prosocial behavior conforms to what researchers like Andrew Whiten and Christophe Boesch have already seen among chimps in the wild in Africa.

The fundamental difficulty running through all of this is that in comparing human beings and other apes, we need to explain both the similarities and the differences.

Tomasello observes:

. . . I am among those who are regularly accused of "raising the bar" on chimpanzees; that is, as soon as we discover that something we thought was a human-chimpanzee difference turns out not to be (e.g., understanding goals), we then posit something else as different and uniquely human (e.g., social imitation, normativity). But this raising of the bar results from the simple fact that there are observable differences between chimpanzee and human societies in terms of such things as complex technologies, social institutions, and symbol systems, and those most be explained. If some hypothesis about these differences is wrong, then it is rightfully consigned to the trash heap. But then we must come up with some new hypothesis to explain the difference--and there is a difference.

("Postscript: Chimpanzee Culture, 2009," in Laland and Galef, eds., The Question of Animal Culture, 220)

Despite their apparent disagreements, De Waal ultimately has to agree with Tomasello that we must explain the uniqueness of human beings as well as their continuity with other apes. One can see this in what de Waal says about the evolution of morality in Primates and Philosophers. He refers to his experiments on "inequity aversion" among monkeys as showing "a sense of social regularity" or "monkey fairness" (44-45). But then he concedes that this falls short of the full human sense of morality:

Before we speak of "fairness" in this context it is good to point out a difference between this and human fairness, though. A full-blown sense of fairness would entail that the "rich" monkey share with the "poor" one, as she should feel she is getting excessive compensation. Such behavior would betray interest in a higher principle of fairness, one that Westermarck . . . called "disinterested," hence a truly moral notion. This is not the sort of reaction our monkeys showed, though: their sense of fairness, if we call it that, was rather egocentric. They showed an expectation about how they themselves should be treated, not about how everybody around them should be treated. At the same time, it cannot be denied that the full-blown sense of fairness must have started someplace and that the self is the logical place to look for its origin. Once the egocentric form exists, it can be expanded to include others. (48-49; cf. 20, 22, 54-55, 77, 168, 172)

So even as he stresses the continuity of human beings and other primates, de Waal recognizes the uniqueness of the human sense of fairness, which is based on the human capacity for abstract social cognition that extends care for oneself to care for an expanding circle of others. He says that "this rather abstract yet still egocentric concern about he quality of life in a community is what underpins the 'impartial' and 'disinterested' perspective" (172).

To me, this sounds a lot like what Tomasello is saying when he stresses the uniqueness of the human capacity for "shared intentionality," which supports the normative rules and customs of human social institutions, and thus going beyond the behavioral traditions of animal cultures.

No doubt, some of these issues will go into the next version of my "Primate Politics" course at NIU.

The de Waal/Tomasello Debate in Primate Studies

2011-08-12T10:31:00.009+01:00

As hard as it is to read the minds of our fellow human beings, it is even harder to read the minds of other animals.

Aristotle's biological works are full of observations about animal minds that qualify him as the first animal psychologist. His general conclusion was that there were traces of almost every human mental ability in other animals, which included emotions, parental care, social learning, communication, imagination, practical judgment, and even something close to intellect. He argued that some animals were capable of voluntary action like that of human children, although they lacked the capacity for deliberate choice that arises in human adults. Some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense (HA, 488a7-14). Human beings are the most political animals because through speech or reason (logos), they share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good (Pol, 1253a1-18). Through speech, human beings cooperate for shared ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive that is possible for other political animals. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" (koinon sumpheron) as the criterion of justice (Rh, 1362a15-63b5). A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group (NE, 1160a13-14; Pol, 1279a17-19).

Aristotle's comparative animal psychology includes the observation that monkeys and apes belong to intermediate species close to human beings in that they "share in the nature of both a human being and the quadrupeds" (HA, 502a16). From his anatomical comparisons, which included dissections of monkeys and apes, he concluded that in their feet, legs, hands, face, teeth, and internal parts, the apes are humanlike (HA 502a17-b27; PA, 689b1-35).

And yet, in relying on direct observations of animal behavior and anatomical dissection, Aristotle, like any animal psychologist, had no direct access to the animal mind. With human beings, he had the data of speech, and thus he could study human politics through the study of political rhetoric in which human beings debate their opinions about political life. Other animals communicate in other ways, but this animal communication is often not as rich as human speech, although Aristotle observed the waggle dance of bees, which we now know to be a remarkably complex form of abstract communication.

The fundamental problem is that the social reality of animal life--including human life--is a mental construction of the animal mind that goes beyond the physical reality of the directly observable world. To understand that mental construction of social reality, we have to draw from our inward subjective experience of our minds and our intersubjective world of symbolism. From our observation of animal behavior, we can project some of our mental experience onto them, but we can never be sure how accurate this is.

We have to assume, as Aquinas said, that "the internal passions of animals can be gathered from their outward movements" (ST, I-II, q. 34, a. 4). But then, as Darwin observed in The Descent of Man, in trying to understand the evolution of human mental abilities from the mental powers of our animal ancestors, we face "the impossibility of judging what passes through the mind of an animal" (Penguin ed., 105).

Over the past hundred years, we have had more systematic study of primate behavior and cognition than was done previously. And over the last forty years, we have seen some methodologically sophisticated studies of primates both in the wild and in captivity, and the captive studies have included controlled, and often ingenious, experimentation. But with all of this primate research, we still face the same problem: primate social reality is a construction of animal minds, and judging what passes through those minds is always speculative and uncertain.

Consider, for example, the many news reports this week--in the New York Times and elsewhere--of new experiments that appear to show chimpanzee generosity. Frans de Waal and his colleagues at Emory University claim to show "spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees." Experiments by other groups suggest that chimpanzees are not very helpful to one another, although observations of chimpanzees in the wild suggest the opposite. De Waal has trained his chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center to exchange tokens for food. In this experiment, chimpanzees were paired up and placed in adjoining cages. One chimp could choose a token from a bucket, with tokens of two different colors. One color would exchange for food for oneself but not for the other chimp. The other color would exchange for food for oneself and for the other chimp. In a majority of cases, the chimp would choose the generous option.

Notice the odd features of this experiment. The participants were seven adult female chimps. We must wonder how much we can conclude from the behavior of seven individuals. We must also wonder why only females were tested, particularly since much of the seemingly cooperative behavior among chimps in the wild is male behavior--such as group hunting and warfare. We might question how much generosity we really see here. The report is that the generous tendency for each individual chimp ranged from 52.9% to 66.7%. That suggests that for some of these individuals the choice of tokens was almost random. And even those showing the more generous tendency are not bearing any costs in their generosity.

As indicated in the New York Times article, this research report has been criticized by Michael Tomasello, Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Anyone who follows this kind of research knows that Tomasello and de Waal have been on opposite sides of a debate for many years. Most recently, Tomasello and his colleagues have published a study in Nature arguing that "collaboration encourages equal sharing in children but not in chimpanzees." They show that children around the age of three show equitable distribution of resources with those engaged in collaborative activities, but chimps do not exhibit such equal sharing with collaborative partners. They offer this as evidence for a general theory of human evolution: the uniquely human propensity for social norms of fairness and equity arose among human ancestors who shared resources after collaborative foraging, and the ancient evolutionary propensity arises early in the development of children as an evolutionarily natural trait.

De Waal and Tomasello agree in general that human nature can be explained as a product of evolutionary primate history, so that human beings are similar to their closest living relatives--chimpanzees and bonobos--but also quite different in humanly unique ways. And yet de Waal and Tomasello disagree in their emphasis--de Waal emphasizing the similarities, Tomasello emphasizing the differences--a disagreement that runs through much of the primate research.

This disagreement was evident a few years ago when de Waal and his colleague Sarah Brosnan gained wide publicity for a report in 2003 entitled "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," which seemed to show that capuchin monkeys had a "sense of fairness." Having been trained to exchange tokens for food, the monkeys seemed to be engaged in economic exchange, which is why this kind of research has gained attention from economists. In an experiment to test for "inequity aversion," monkeys who offered a token for food would receive either a slice of cucumber or a grape, and the monkeys clearly favored the grape as more desirable. If one monkey got a slice of cucumber, while seeing that another monkey nearby got a grape, the monkey apparently protested against this, either by refusing to exhange the tokens or by throwing away the cucumber. It seemed as though the monkey was protesting "unequal pay."

But again we might wonder about some of the features of this research. The report was based on the behavior of only five females. Apparently, males had not shown "inequity aversion." We have to wonder then how far we can go in drawing general conclusions from this experiment.

Moreover, as some critics noticed, it was possible that the monkeys weren't showing "inequity aversion" but only frustrated expectations. If a monkey receives a cucumber slice, while noticing that grapes are available, she might feel frustration at not getting the more desirable food, but this would have nothing to do with "unequal pay." Other critics suggested that a monkey perceiving inequity in the distribution of food would want more cucumber slices, not less, to compensate for the inequity.

We might also ask whether these monkeys were really showing a sense of fairness. Even if we are persuaded that the monkey receiving the less favored food was showing indignation in protesting the inequity from the other monkey getting the more favored food, there is no evidence that the monkey getting the unfair advantage felt any guilt. If the monkeys receiving grapes were to throw away their grapes to show sympathy for those receiving only cucumbers, that would be a far more impressive display of a sense of justice.

A few years later, de Waal and Brosnan tried to answer some of these criticisms with new experiments using chimpanzees. They reported that chimps also showed inequity aversion, although chimps in close social relationships were more tolerant of inequity. And yet, once again, Tomasello and other critics pointed out weaknesses in this report. For example, of the 20 individuals studied, 14 refused inequitable exchanges in less than 2% of the trials, which is not very impressive.

Tomasello and his colleagues did a study of their own with 7 orangutans, 6 gorillas, 4 bonobos, and 13 chimpanzees in which the behavior seemed to show that there was no inequity aversion, and thus contradicting de Waal and Brosnan's research.

Some of the details in this debate are surveyed in an article by Kenneth Krause for eSkeptic.

As compared with what de Waal does, Tomasello's research is more interesting in that he performs similar experiments with chimpanzees and young children to see how and at what age the children surpass the chimpanzees. This allows him to argue that the early development of human children replicates human evolutionary history: we see the children starting out with chimpanzee-like abilities but then quickly moving to the uniquely human capabilities that arose early in human evolution. In this way, ontogeny might recapitulate phylogeny.

Some good videos of this research with both chimpanzees and children can be found here. There is also a good PBS Nova video on this and related research by Tomasello and others.

Tomasello's work is embedded within a general social theory of cooperation, which is well summarized in his book Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009). One can see the influence on Tomasello of John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995). Searle argues that we need to understand how social reality differs from physical reality, because social reality is a construction of the mind through the "collective intentionality" of "we consciousness" as opposed to the "I intentionality" of "I consciousness." In social life, we collaborate with one another as we create institutional practices in acting intentionally for shared goals. We thus create "institutional facts" that are just as real as "brute facts" or physical facts, although these institutional realities depend on the work of our minds, and they are not directly observable the way physical reality is directly observable. Tomasello picks up this idea in arguing that human beings are unique in their capacity for "shared intentionality," which allows human beings through their symbolic capacities to engage in cultural niche construction in ways that far surpass chimpanzees and other primates.

What Tomasello is doing is that he's exploring in experimental ways the evolutionary basis for what Aristotle and Aquinas saw--that we are similar to other social and political animals, and yet we are unique in our capacity to use our conceptual and linguistic abilities to create social worlds of shared intentionality that go beyond anything seen in the rest of the animal world.

Tomasello's comparative studies of chimpanzees and children follows in the tradition of Darwin, who methodically studied one of his infant children and compared the child with monkeys and apes to see when the child showed the moral sense that Darwin thought was uniquely human.

If you really want to probe into de Waal's mind, you'll have to go to the video of his interview on "The Colbert Report."

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, and here.

REFERENCES
Brauer, Juliane, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, "Are Apes Really Inequity Averse?" Proceedings of the Royal Society B 273 (2006): 3123-3128.

Brosnan, Sarah F., and Frans de Waal, "Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay," Nature 425 (18 September 2003): 297-99.

Brosnan, Sarah F., Hillary C. Schiff, and Frans de Waal, "Tolerance for Inequity May Increase with Social Closeness in Chimpanzees," Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272 (2005): 253-58.

Hamann, Katharina, Felix Warneken, Julia Greenberg, and Michael Tomasello, "Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children But Not in Chimpanzees," Nature, early online publication, July, 2011.

Horner, Victoria, J. Devyn Carter, Malini Suchak, and Frans de Waal, "Spontaneous Prosocial Choice by Chimpanzees," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, early edition, August, 2011.

Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: An APSA Paper

2011-08-10T11:10:00.003+01:00

On September 1, at 2:00 pm, I will be on a panel ("Biology and Rights") at the 2011 Meetings of the American Political Science Association in Seattle.

My paper is "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: Replies to Critics." It can be downloaded.

Some of the material in this paper has been pulled from various posts on this blog.

Under the title "What Nature Has Taught All Animals," I summarize some of the common ground between Thomistic natural law and Darwinian natural right.

I then reply to six objections that have been raised by my critics:

(1) It is said that I fail to see that natural law depends on a divine lawgiver as its source.

(2) Darwinian science denies the natural teleology that is required for natural law.

(3) Darwinian science denies the reality of species as the ground of natural law.

(4) Darwinian natural right denies human freedom by denying the freedom of reason in ruling over the human desires or emotions.

(5) Darwinian explanations of human nature ignore the importance of culture and habituation in shaping human character.

(6) Darwinian naturalism is self-defeating, because in denying that the human mind was created in God's image, and asserting that the mind arose from a mindless process of evolution, it gives us no reason to trust our mental capacity for true beliefs.

My general claim is that by rooting natural law in a scientific conception of human nature, and by avoiding the contradictions that arise from Thomas Aquinas's occasional efforts to elevate revelation over reason, Darwinian natural right is the natural fulfillment of Thomistic natural law.

Mind Is Not the Only Possible First Cause of All Things: Hume, Darwin, and Strauss

2011-08-03T15:10:00.008+01:00

The most common objection to my arguments for Darwinian natural right is that Darwinian science fails to see that the only possible first cause of natural order--including natural moral order--is divine Mind. So, for example, Francis Beckwith criticizes me for not recognizing that "natural law and our human nature have their source in Mind." This reasoning that the apparently designed order in the world points to a cosmic Intelligent Designer has a long tradition--from Plato's Laws to Aquinas's natural theology to the proponents of "intelligent design theory" at the Discovery Institute.

I agree that this is one possible explanation for the uncaused cause of all natural order. I agree that this satisfies our natural desire for religious understanding by appealing to our evolved instinct for projecting the human mind onto the world. But affirming this possibility as true is an act of religious faith, not of rational demonstration. This religious belief in an intelligently designed cosmos can be neither proven nor refuted by natural reason.

It is possible, therefore, for the theistic believer to be a theistic evolutionist, believing that the Intelligent Designer has used the natural evolutionary process to carry out His plan. C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, and many other theists have taken this position. But, again, this is an act of faith rather than reason.

Affirming the existence of a divine Mind as the intelligent designer of cosmic order cannot be proven by reason, because this is only one possibility among many that we can draw from our natural experience of order. Since there are many different principles of order that we might use to explain the cosmic order of nature, and since there is no demonstrative proof that one principle is better than all the others, we are left in a state of skeptical doubt.

As I have indicated in some recent posts, the supposed proof for the existence of a divine Mind depends on an anthropomorphic analogy of mental agency, which assumes that the natural order of the cosmos is an artifact that points to the mental agency of a divine artisan. Leo Strauss rejected this analogy in suggesting other possibilities: "One realizes the possibility that the first things originate all other things in a manner fundamentally different from all origination by way of forethought. The assertion that all visible things have been produced by thinking beings or that there are any superhuman thinking beings requires henceforth a demonstration, a demonstration that starts from what all can see now" (NRH, 89).

In this passage, Strauss doesn't explain what this alternative possibility is. But in his 1948 lecture on "Reason and Revelation," he did identify Darwin's evolutionary science as an alternative to divine creationism, and thus he put Darwinism on the side of reason against revelation.

In Cicero's De Natura Deorum, Cotta suggests various alternatives to Platonic and Stoic intelligent-design cosmology. In Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo lays out more clearly what these alternative possibilities might be, and he suggests the possibility of evolution by natural selection.

In the Dialogues (part 7), Philo argues that any attempt to explain the order of the universe depends on reasoning by analogy, where we look for some likeness between the order of the universe and the order of those things that we know by experience. Thus we must project the order of some small part of nature onto the whole of the natural universe.

Philo suggests that there are at least four such principles--reason, vegetation, instinct, and generation. The natural theology of intelligent design rests on the principle of reason as the source of order. From our experience with human mental agency in designing things and carrying out those designs, we might infer that the whole universe is the design of a mental agent. But we might just as easily employ the principles of vegetation, instinct, or generation. Plants grow from seeds and develop into intricately complex organisms. Animals engage in complex behaviors that manifest instinct. Animals generate offspring that grow into fully formed adults. In each case, we see principles of natural order that don't require reason. In fact, reason itself seems to be produced by animal generation, so that generation is prior to reason.

Philo observes:

To say that all this order in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from design is begging the question; nor can that great point be ascertained other wise than by proving a priori, both that order is, from its nature, inseparably attached to thought, and that it can never, of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter.

It all depends on judging likenesses:

The world, say I, resembles an animal, therefore it is an animal, therefore it arose from generation. The steps, I confess, are wide; yet there is some small appearance of analogy in each step. The world, says Cleanthes, resembles a machine, therefore it is a machine, therefore it arose from design. The steps are here equally wide, and the analogy less striking.

Or maybe the world was spun out by a cosmic spider:

The Brahmins assert that the world arose from an infinite spider, who spun this whole complicated mass from his bowels, and annihilates afterwards the whole or any part of it, by absorbing it again, and resolving it into his own essence. Here is a species of cosmology, which appears to us ridiculous; because a spider is a little contemptible animal whose operations we are never likely to take for a model of the whole universe. But still here is a new species of analogy, even in our globe. And were there a planet wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible), this inference would there appear as natural and irrefragable as that which in our planet ascribes the origin of all things to design and intelligence, as explained by Cleanthes. Why an orderly system may not be spun from the belly as well as from the brain, it will be difficult for him to give a satisfactory reason.

Later (in part 8), Philo comes close to formulating Darwin's theory of evolution:

It is in vain, therefore, to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain know how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted? Do we not find, that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form. It happens, indeed, that the parts of the world are so well adjusted, that some regular form immediately lays claim to this corrupted matter: and if it were not so, could the world subsist? Must it not dissolve as well as the animal, and pass through new positions and situations; till in a great, but finite succession, it falls at last into the present or some other order?

It seems that what Darwin later developed in the theory of evolution specified what Hume considered a theoretical possibility.

And yet both Hume and Darwin (and Hume's character Philo) indicated that there was some plausibility to the design argument as based on the analogy to the human mind. In the Treatise on Human Nature, Hume declared: "The order of the universe proves an omnipotent mind." In the Natural History of Religion and the Dialogues, Hume acknowledges the power of the argument from design in supporting "true religion" or "philosophical theism," even as he exposes the weaknesses in such reasoning by anthropomorphic analogy.

Similarly, in his Autobiography, Darwin said that he often felt compelled "to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist." But one page later, he concludes: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." Then, on the next page, he says that by the end of his life, he was governed by "scepticism or rationalism."

Does the powerful appeal of the argument from intelligent design show the power of our evolved natural instinct for religious understanding, which shows the working of what Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering identify as our "hyperactive agency detection device"?

In any case, Hume, Darwin, and Strauss show us that we can challenge that religious instinct by showing that the argument from intelligent design rests on an indemonstrable analogy. The natural desire for religious understanding is checked by the natural desire for intellectual understanding. We must choose between revelation and reason.

Some related posts can be found here here, here, here, and here.

John Locke's Biological Naturalism

2011-07-29T14:14:00.004+01:00

Leo Strauss and many of those influenced by Strauss have assumed that John Locke's political philosophy rejected the rule of nature in favor of the rule of convention. They have concluded from this that Lockean liberal thought generally has no ground in nature and thus prepares the way for modern relativism and nihilism. This reading of Locke is mistaken because it fails to recognize that in criticizing the Platonic naturalism of eternal essences, Locke is defending a biologically empirical science of natural history that points back to Aristotle and ahead to Darwin.

In Natural Right and History, Strauss insists that Locke's political philosophy is a revolutionary break with the philosophic tradition of classic natural right.

Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man--as distinguished from man's end--had become that center or origin. . . . The world in which human creativity seems to reign supreme is, in fact, the world which has replaced the rule of nature by the rule of convention. From now on, nature furnishes only the worthless materials as in themselves; the forms are supplied by man, by man's free creation. For there are no natural forms, no intelligible "essences": "the abstract ideas" are "the inventions and creatures of the understanding, made by it for its own use." Understanding and science stand in the same relation to "the given" in which human labor, called forth to its supreme effort by money, stands to the raw materials. There are, therefore, no natural principles of understanding: all knowledge is acquired; all knowledge depends on labor and is labor. (pp. 248-49)

Against this claim that Locke denies "the rule of nature," we might notice Locke's constant appeals to "the principles of human nature," which include the natural desires for survival, reproduction, social life, and knowledge, as expressing the natural pursuit of happiness as the ultimate end of human action (FT, 88-97; ST, 10, 67). "The highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness" (ECHU, 2.21.52).

In recognizing this Lockean appeal to human nature and the nature of human happiness, I agree with John West and with Peter Myers in his book Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

Strauss assumes that in criticizing reasoning about "essences," Locke is rejecting the reality of "natural forms" altogether. But Strauss fails to see how this Lockean skepticism about Platonic essentialism is grounded on an empirical science of biological natural history that goes back to Aristotle, which was to be fulfilled by Darwinian evolutionary science.

Locke rejects those scholastic proponents of reasoning about eternally fixed essences, because they "suppose their words to stand also for the reality of things," and because they understand natural science to consist in "the bare contemplation of . . . abstract Ideas" (ECHU, 3.2.5; 4.12.9). By contrast, Locke argues, "to define names right, natural history is to be enquired into; and their properties are, with care and examination, to be found out" (3.11.24).

Rather than deductive reasoning from supposedly eternal and fixed "essences," Locke thus appeals to natural history as the way to understand "the nature of things themselves" through experience and observation. Such knowledge does not permit demonstration and certainty, but it does provide probabilistic knowledge. We can thus know "the regular proceedings of causes and effects in the ordinary course of nature," and this we call "an argument from the nature of things themselves" (4.16.6). Nature is so highly variable and contingent that we cannot reliably discover the unchanging essences sought by the scholastics. But we can discover with some probability the regular patterns in the natural world. "I would not here be thought to forget, much less to deny, that nature in the production of things, makes several of them alike: there is nothing more obvious, especially in the races of animals and all things propagated by seed" (3.3.13).

This reference to the natural order of the living world of plants and animals is significant because it manifests Locke's biological understanding. Locke was a medical doctor and medical researcher. In his personal library, he had more medical books than books of philosophy. He was an associate of Thomas Sydenham, the most prominent medical doctor and researcher of his time, who promoted medicine as an empirical science of natural history. Similarly, Locke's philosophical science of human nature was an empirical, probabilistic science that looked for recurrent patterns in the variable phenomena of human thought and action, a science of life that could be traced back to Aristotle and that was carried forward by Darwin.

That Locke is drawing from the Aristotelian biological tradition of understanding species is evident when one notices the passages in the Essay that are almost direct quotations from Aristotle's biological writings. For example, Locke's comments on how "we shall find everywhere that the several species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees" (3.6.12; 4.16.2) echo passages in Aristotle's Part of Animals (681a10-15). Like Locke, Aristotle is criticizing the Platonic tradition of essentialism in defending a biological concept of species rooted in an empirical science of natural history.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Does Gay Marriage Perform the Functions of Marriage?

2011-07-25T12:17:00.008+01:00

The "Sunday Styles" section of yesterday's New York Times has a collection of articles on how gays are responding to the legalization of gay marriage in New York State. The recurrent theme is how gay marriage might satisfy the same social needs that are satisfied by heterosexual marriage.

For example, one article by Lisa Belkin is entitled "For the Sake of the Children." Gay men and lesbians want to legalize their marriages as a way of securing their attachment to their children. One mother is quoted as saying, "We feel like we're marrying the kids."

But is this really true? Is the legalization of gay marriage warranted because it performs the same functions as heterosexual marriage?

On his blog, Empedocles denies this in two recent posts on the function of marriage and on answering the arguments for gay marriage.

He argues that the evolutionary function of marriage is to solve the problems that arise from heterosexual intercourse--particularly, the need for producing and rearing children. Since the function of marriage as a social institution is to solve this problem, and since gay marriage would not serve this function, it is just for government to legalize heterosexual marriage but not gay marriage. This does not violate the "equal protection" clause of the United States Constitution, because equal treatment allows for discrimination against those people who lack the qualifications relevant to performing a social function, and gays cannot perform the function of producing and rearing children.

For me, this argument raises three sets of questions.

(1) Do gay marriages perform the function of producing and rearing children? For some gays, the primary purpose of gay marriage is to support the bond between gay parents and their children. Are they wrong about this? If they are, does this imply that gay parenting should be illegal, because gay parenting cannot properly perform the social function of producing and rearing children?

(2) Do childless marriages perform the function of securing conjugal bonding? Many gay marriages will be childless. But, of course, many heterosexual marriages are childless. If Empedocles is right about marriage having only one function--producing and rearing children--then any childless marriage is not really a marriage. Is there any socially relevant difference between a childless heterosexual marriage and a childless gay marriage?

Is conjugal bonding a distinct function of marriage? If so, does that mean that reinforcing the exclusive sexual bond of the marriage partners allows marriage to solve the social problems associated with sexual mating? Has evolution produced conjugal bonding as a natural desire distinct from parental care?

(3) Does marriage require governmental licensing? Empedocles seems to assume that the social institution of marriage cannot function without a system of governmental licensing by which the government acts as the "describer" in specifying what counts as a marriage. But then he also speaks of how "social stigma" is often the most effective means for holding partners to their marriage vows and their parental duties. If so, does that mean that marriage as a social institution depends mostly on the social norms of civil society rather than the laws of the state? Throughout most of human history, marriage has been enforced by social practices without governmental licensing. Does this suggest the possibility of "privatizing" marriage, so that the norms of marriage would be determined by families, churches, and other social institutions without the necessity of getting a license from government?

Some posts on "Darwinian marriage" can be found here, here, and here.

Cicero, Aquinas, and Intelligent Design Anthropomorphism

2011-07-22T17:31:00.010+01:00

Darwinian natural right is the natural fulfillment of Thomistic natural law, because it shows how natural law can be truly natural in so far as it is rooted in evolved human nature, without any necessity for appealing to theistic faith, and thus Darwinian natural right escapes the incoherence of Thomistic natural law.

Thomas Aquinas's natural law teaching suffers from a fundamental incoherence. On the one hand, Aquinas distinguishes natural law from divine law, just as he distinguishes what we can know by natural reason from what we can know only by divine revelation. Although divine law can reinforce natural law for those who are religious believers, natural law can stand on its own natural ground, because it is comprehensible to human beings by their natural experience of their natural inclinations and natural reason, regardless of whether they are religious believers. On the other hand, however, Aquinas embeds his teaching on natural law within a Christian theological teaching in a way that suggests that natural law depends on divine law. But in that case, it seems that natural law is not truly natural. Even the term natural law suggests this by suggesting that there must be a divine lawgiver. Consequently, Leo Strauss and his students have criticized Thomistic natural law as a betrayal of classic natural right.

The Darwinian account of the natural moral sense fulfills Thomistic natural law by grounding it in evolved human nature without any necessity for a theistic cosmology. In doing that, the Darwinian account follows in a tradition of Socratic/Ciceronian skepticism about the theistic cosmology of intelligent design, a tradition that stretches from Cicero's De Natura Deorum to Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

One can see what's at issue here by noticing the one place in the Summa Theologica where Aquinas refers to Cicero's De Natura Deorum. Aquinas is arguing that we must see the world as governed by God when he writes:

Certain ancient philosophers denied the government of the world, saying that all things happened by chance. But such an opinion can be refuted as impossible in two ways. First, by observation of things themselves. For we observe that in nature things happen always or nearly always for the best, which would not be the case unless some sort of providence directed nature towards good as an end, which is to govern. Wherefore, the unfailing order we observe in things is a sign of their being governed. For instance, if we enter a well-ordered house, we gather therefrom the intention of him that put it in order, as Tullius says (De Nat. Deorum ii), quoting Aristotle. Secondly, this is clear form a consideration of divine goodness. . . . (I, qu. 103, a. 1)

Although Aquinas refers to Cicero hundreds of times in his writings, he refers to the De Natura Deorum only three times, and this is the only reference to the book in the Summa Theologica. That's surprising. Since this book is one of the most important statements on ancient theological cosmology, one might think that Aquinas would need to consider this book as he lays out his own theological cosmology. We might explain this, however, by noting that this book contains the most explicit and rigorous attacks on theological cosmology as based on intelligent design reasoning. Aquinas never defends his own theological cosmology against these attacks.

The radical character of the skeptical attack on religion in Cicero's book is indicated by the fact that Hume followed the style and substance of Cicero's book in his own Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which was published after Hume's death because of his fear of persecution. Hume's skepticism about natural theology and the intelligent design argument was continued by Darwin in defending his theory of natural evolution against the theory of special creation.

In the passage above, Aquinas is referring to a defense of Stoic intelligent-design cosmology in Cicero's book coming from Balbus (2.15-17, 87, 95). Remarkably, Aquinas is silent about the vigorous refutation of Balbus's reasoning coming from Cotta, a Roman priest who is also an Academic skeptic. Moreover, Aquinas never responds to Cotta's criticisms of the sort of intelligent-design reasoning that Aquinas himself adopts.

Aquinas restates Balbus's claim that the only alternative to explaining the world as intelligently designed by God is to say that everything happens by chance. But Cotta insists that there's another possibility--that we can explain nature's order as a product of nature itself in which things emerge by the spontaneous order of natural processes without any need to assume a divinely intelligent mind at work. "But not all things, Balbus, that have fixed and regular courses are to be accredited to a god rather than to nature" (3.24).

Furthermore, Cotta indicates, Balbus's intelligent-design reasoning assumes a ridiculous anthropomorphic analogy by which we assume that the whole world is an artifact that implies the existence of a divine artist. Aquinas refers to Balbus's house analogy, which Cotta ridicules:

He says, "If we saw a beautiful house, we should infer that it was built for its masters, and not for mice; so therefore we must regard the world to be the house of the gods." Assuredly, I should so regard it, if I thought it had been built like a house, and not constructed by nature, as I shall show that it was.

Cotta challenges Balbus to prove that we must explain the world as analogous to a human artifact. Like Balbus, Aquinas assumes the plausibility of this analogy without proof. When Aquinas sets out his proofs for the existence of God, one of the objections he considers is: "For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason or will. Therefore, there is no need to suppose God's existence." Aquinas replies: "Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause" (I, q. 2, a. 3, ad 2). Thus, Aquinas assumes that our natural experience with human agency can be anthropomorphically projected onto the world as the work of a "higher agent."

Aquinas makes it clear that natural theology depends on the plausibility of this anthropomorphic analogy of intentional artifice: "In all things moved by reason, the order of reason that moves them is evident, although the things themselves are without reason. For an arrow through the movement of the archer goes straight towards the target, as though it were endowed with reason to direct its course. The same may be seen in the movements of clocks and all engines put together by the art of man. Now as artificial things are in comparison to human art, so are all natural things in comparison to the divine art" (ST, I-II, q. 13, a. 2, ad 3).

Cotta indicates the many problems with this anthropomorphism of intelligent-design cosmology. We know by natural experience how human minds work in executing human intelligent design. But we know nothing about how divine minds could work to create the world. Human minds are always embodied. But it's ridiculous to think that the gods have human bodies, with the mortality and other limitations that come with embodiment. We might say that the gods are disembodied minds. But then it's inconceivable how a mind could have any knowledge without bodily senses.

It's not clear that Aquinas ever responds to such criticisms. Of course, his response might be that our understanding of the Divine Mind requires faith in divine revelation, and "faith and science are not about the same thing," because "the reasons employed by holy men to prove things that are of faith are not demonstrations" (II-II, q. 1, a. 5). But if that's his response, that only confirms Cotta's complaint that intelligent-design cosmology is not based on rational proof but on religious belief.

The ancient Christian writer Lactantius observed: "Cicero was aware that the objects of men's worship were false. For after saying a number of things tending to subvert religion, he adds nevertheless that these matters ought not to be discussed in public, lest such discussion destroy the established religion of the nation" (Divine Institutions, 2.32).

Does this explain Aquinas's reticence--that it was not good to publicly discuss the flaws in intelligent design cosmology, because this might subvert religious and political order?

Cicero has Cotta indicate in De Natura Deorum that Plato and other philosophers had developed intelligent-design cosmology as a noble lie to support popular morality and political order, a noble lie that the philosophers knew to be a lie (1.30, 77). In his Academica, Cicero has Varro argue that when Socrates turned away from cosmology to the study of the human things, this suggested that cosmology has nothing to do with the human good (1.15). Similarly, Cotta suggests that natural right has nothing to do with the cosmos or the gods, because it depends on human social life and on a naturally instinctive conscience by which human beings judge what is right and wrong for human life (3.38, 85).

Darwin deepened this understanding by showing how the "conscience or moral sense" could be explained as arising from the naturally evolved spontaneous order of human instincts, human customs, and human judgments.

And yet Darwin recognized that religious belief could be important for reinforcing this natural moral sense. He also recognized that the natural human desire for ultimate explanation leaves us with a fundamental choice between nature and God as the unexplained ground of all explanation, and thus he left open the unresolved conflict between reason and revelation.

Recent research in the evolutionary psychology of morality confirms and deepens each of these points concerning the evolved instinctive basis of morality, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding.

A good article on Cicero, Aquinas, and natural law is Adam Seagrave's "Cicero, Aquinas, and Contemporary Issues in Natural Law Theory" (THE REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS, vol. 62, March, 2009, pp. 491-523). Seagrave's argues--correctly, I think--that one can see how Thomistic natural law need not depend upon Christian beliefs if one sees it as a continuation of Ciceronian natural law, which was based on an Aristotelian understanding of human nature. Seagrave does not say enough, however, about the crucial issue of Stoic theological cosmology. He points to "the Stoic cosmology which serves as the foundation for the natural law, a cosmology which had been discredited by Cicero himself in his DE NATURA DEORUM and has been widely discarded since Cicero's time." But Seagrave does not reflect on the point that Aquinas embraced a Christian version of the Stoic cosmology. Nor does Seagrave reflect on the possibility that the Darwinian rejection of an anthropomorphic moral cosmology fulfills Cicero's suggestion that natural law need not depend on such a cosmology.

Some previous posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, and here.

Are Honeybees Created in God's Image?

2011-07-17T17:21:00.002+01:00

In commenting on my previous post on Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, "Empedocles" pointed out that the honeybee waggle dance is a dramatic example of how evolution by natural selection favors adaptive behavior that tracks the truth about the world.

This suggests that we can account for the natural evolution of reliable cognitive faculties without assuming a theistic explanation of human mental capacity as a product of divine creation in the image of God.

Plantinga implicitly concedes this point when he acknowledges that natural evolution tends to produce "accurate indicators." But then he insists that this has nothing to do with "true beliefs." He offers no evidence, however, for this assertion that the evolution of "accurate indicators" has nothing to do with the evolution of "true beliefs" in animals with complex nervous systems (like human beings).

Even without attributing any conscious beliefs to honeybees, the remarkable accuracy of their waggle dance illustrates how natural evolution--even without divine guidance--can produce animal cognition and communication that shows an accurate representation of the world as related to the needs of the animal.

Or would Plantinga argue that this can only be explained as the work of God--that the cognitive abilities of honeybees show that they have been created to some degree in the image of God?

The waggle dance of honeybees can be seen in a YouTube video.

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

2011-07-15T18:38:00.008+01:00

One of the primary doctrines of traditional theism is that God created human beings in His image. And if God is pure Mind, that suggests that it is primarily in the human mind that we see that divine image.

That's Thomas Aquinas's teaching. "Since human beings are said to be in the image of God in virtue of their having a nature that includes an intellect, such a nature is most in the image of God in virtue of being most able to imitate God" (ST, I, q. 93, a. 4). "Only in rational creatures is there found a likeness of God which counts as an image. . . . As far as a likeness of the divine nature is concerned, rational creatures seem somehow to attain a representation of that type in virtue of imitating God not only in this, that he is and lives, but especially in this, that he understands" (I, q. 93, a. 6).

One of the best arguments for theism is that this theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing life God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

When I was a college freshman, I first learned this argument from reading C. S. Lewis's book Miracles, and it impressed me as one of the most powerful arguments for theism. 25 years later, as a college professor, I heard Alvin Plantinga present a more sophisticated version of the same argument when he gave a seminar presentation at my university on his paper "Naturalism Defeated."

I agree with Lewis and Plantinga that theistic religion and evolutionary science are compatible, because while science requires a methodological naturalism, it does not require the metaphysical naturalism that denies theism. I also agree with them that the theistic belief in the divine creation of the human mind can support our confidence in scientific reasoning, including evolutionary reasoning. But I disagree with their claim that evolutionary science is self-contradictory or incoherent without theism.

Plantinga has presented his argument in various writings, including the paper "Naturalism Defeated." A short summary of the argument is in the Introduction to Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, edited by James Beilby (Cornell University Press, 2002), which includes critiques of the argument by various authors and Plantinga's reply to the critiques. One of the best critiques in this volume is Evan Fales, "Darwin's Doubt, Calvin's Calvary." Plantinga's argument also comes up in his debate with Daniel Dennett in their recent book SCIENCE AND RELIGION: ARE THEY COMPATIBLE? (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Without going into all the technical details that are so dear to the hearts of analytic philosophers, here's the core of the argument in four steps.

(1) If we understand naturalism as the belief that there is no God--no supernatural Mind outside of Nature that created Nature--and if the naturalist is also a Darwinian who believes that evolutionary science explains the origins of all life, including human life, then the Darwinian naturalist must believe that the mental faculties of human beings originated through evolution by natural selection favoring those random mutations that were adaptive for survival and reproduction.

(2) Natural selection rewards adaptive behavior and punishes maladaptive behavior. But natural selection does not care about the truth or falsity of an animal's beliefs. If beliefs produce adaptive behavior, they will be rewarded by natural selection regardless of whether the beliefs are true or false. Therefore, the evolution of adaptive behavior in our prehistoric ancestors did not guarantee or make it probable that our cognitive faculties would be reliable in generating mostly true beliefs.

(3) From this it follows that the Darwinian naturalist has no good reason to trust his cognitive faculties as reliable. But then it follows that the Darwinian naturalist has no good reason to feel confident that his belief in naturalism is true. Consequently, Darwinian naturalism is self-defeating in that it contradicts itself.

(4) Darwinian science--and science generally--can escape this self-defeating position by rejecting naturalism and accepting theism, because theism believes that our human minds were created by God in His image such that we can understand the intelligible world He has created, and therefore we can be confident in the reliability of our divinely created cognitive faculties. This is compatible with evolutionary science, because we can assume that God has guided the evolutionary process, perhaps by causing those random mutations that He foresaw as facilitating the evolution of the human mind in its capacity for correctly understanding the world. This is also necessary for evolutionary science because it supports our confidence in the validity of human reason and escapes the incoherence of naturalism.

Like Lewis, Plantinga is a theistic evolutionist. He accepts the truth of Darwinian evolutionary science, because he believes that God could have used the evolutionary process to carry out his creative plan, which required miraculous acts by God to guide the evolutionary process towards human beings as having minds manifesting the intellectual image of God.

Dennett and other critics of Plantinga have objected that science requires naturalism, because in all scientific inquiry, the scientist must assume that everything can be explained by natural regularities or laws that are never broken by miraculous events. Otherwise, every regularity or law of science would have to be stated with the qualification unless God performs a miracle and suspends His laws. Such arbitrariness in the order of nature would make natural science impossible. Indeed, the very idea of nature as the stable order of the universe would be denied by the thought that everything is the momentary product of God's arbitrary will.

Plantinga's response is to argue that natural science requires methodological naturalism, but not metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism denies that there is any divine reality beyond nature, and that's the naturalism that renders evolutionary science self-defeating. But methodological naturalism is the assumption that we can explain everything in purely natural terms without invoking anything supernatural. The theist can accept this, because the theist assumes that God has created the order of nature and that He will not interrupt that order arbitrarily. Although miracles are possible, the natural scientist does not normally have to be open to miraculous events in the practice of science. This combination of methodological naturalism and theistic belief in the miraculous power of God is what Plantinga calls "Augustinian science"--the sort of science that Augustine would endorse.

While I agree that theism and evolution can be compatible, I don't agree that theism is absolutely necessary for evolutionary science, because I don't agree that combining Darwinism with metaphysical naturalism creates an incoherent position.

The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is step 2, where he assumes that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in mental fallibility that is familiar to us.

But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable. Even Plantinga concedes (in his debate with Dennett) that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators" (70). So, for example, a frog must have sensory equipment that allow him to accurately detect flies so that he can catch them with his tongue. Similarly, the immune system of the human body must accurately indicate the presence of foreign bodies and then accurately device responses to destroy the invaders. But then Plantinga argues that these accurate indicators don't require true beliefs. It's not clear that the frog has any beliefs. And the human being is probably not even aware of what the immune system is doing exactly.

What this shows, of course, is that much of an animal's adaptive behavior through mental activity does not require conscious reasoning at all. But for those animals who do develop some capacity for conscious reasoning--and most preeminently human beings--the accuracy of this conscious reasoning will be important for adaptation. As Evan Fales argues in response to Plantinga, the highest mental capacities of human beings are so biologically expensive in terms of the investment of energy they consume that it is implausible that evolution would have produced them unless they improved the ability of human beings to track the truth about themselves and their environment. Again, this is going to be fallible, but it's implausible that human beings could be naturally evolved for being in a state of complete and perpetual delusion.

And yet that's exactly what Plantinga asks us to imagine--that we could have been naturally evolved for a state of complete and perpetual delusion. Having taken this step of radical Cartesian skepticism, he then tells us that the only escape from such skepticism is to assume that God would never allow this to happen. But as always is the case for the Cartesian skeptic, this all depends on imagining scenarios that are utterly implausible and unsupported by even a shred of evidence.

For example, consider this possibility for human evolution suggested by Plantinga:

So suppose Paul is a prehistoric hominid; a hungry tiger approaches. Fleeing is perhaps the most appropriate behavior: . . . this behavior could be produced by a large number of different belief-desire pairs. . . .

Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. . . . Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it, but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. . . . or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly recurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a sixteen-hundred-meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.

Well, yes, these weird stories are all logically possible, as the philosophers like to say. But they are also utterly implausible, because there is no evidence that anything like this could have happened in human evolution. Plantinga's claim that there is no clear connection between adaptive behavior and true beliefs in evolutionary history depends on fantasies of his imagination unsupported by evidence. He has to do that, because if he actually looked at the evidence of human evolutionary history bearing upon the emergence of human mental faculties, he would be faced with evidence for the evolution of human cognitive capacities for exploring the world that are generally reliable, even if fallible.

He would also see evidence that human beings can use their fallible mental capacities to correct their mistakes. After all, the very capacity to recognize our fallibility presupposes our skill for reliable reasoning about ourselves and our world. There are good reasons to believe that this can be explained as an outcome of a natural evolutionary process in which divine intervention was not necessary.

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

One might also consider here the evidence that Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel's painting of "The Creation of Adam" reflects Michelangelo's knowledge of the neuroanatomy of the brain.

Does this support Plantinga's argument? Or does it suggest that what we see as the "image of God" in the human brain is a purely natural product?

Thomistic Nihilism, Greek Naturalism, and the Problem of Natural Right

2011-07-11T15:34:00.008+01:00

The problem of natural right is the problem of whether nature has a intelligible order that can be known by human beings and followed as a guide for their lives.

Classic natural right such as one sees in the writings of Plato and Aristotle assumes that nature has an autonomous order of its own that can be known and followed by human beings.

Biblical religion assumes, however, that there is no autonomous order of nature, because nature is continually created ex nihilo by God, and thus at any moment, nature can collapse back into nothingness. Strictly speaking, then, nature as understood by the Socratic philosophers--nature as an enduring, self-contained, necessary order of being--does not exist from the view of Biblical religion.

Biblical religion thus creates the possibility of radical nihilism--the idea that nature depends on the mysterious, arbitrary power of God, and so there is no natural standard for human knowledge and action.

I have written about this contrast between Greek naturalism and Biblical nihilism in the chapters on Augustine and Nietzsche in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls.

This is, I think, Strauss's point when he says that the Bible has no idea of nature, and it is his worry about Biblical nihilism that motivates his criticism of Thomas Aquinas for making natural law too dependent on Biblical revelation.

I agree with Tom West that Strauss's critique of Aquinas is exaggerated. But I do think Strauss is correct in so far as Aquinas never fully escapes from Biblical nihilism.

As indications of Aquinas's nihilism, consider the following statements:

"Both reason and faith bind us to say that creatures are kept in being by God. . . . All creatures need to be preserved by God. for the being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment could it subsist, but would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power" (I, q. 104, a. 1).

"Some have held that God, in giving existence to creatures, acted from natural necessity. Were this true, God could not annihilate anything, since His nature cannot change. But . . . such an opinion is entirely false, and absolutely contrary to the Catholic faith, which confesses that God created things of His own free-will, according to Psalms 134:6--'Whatsoever the Lord pleased, He hath done.' Therefore that God gives existence to a creature depends on His will; nor does He preserve things in existence otherwise than by continually pouring out existence into them, as we have said. Therefore, just as before things existed, God was free not to give them existence, and not to make them; so after they have been made, He is free not to continue their existence; and thus they would cease to exist; and this would be to annihilate them" (I, q. 104, a. 3).

West tries to get around this theological nihilism through an interpretation of Aquinas's teaching on divine providence. West distinguishes three views of providence (67-68). The first view is that there is no divine providence. The second view is that God's providential power is so great and so arbitrary that there is no natural order at all. The third view is that God's providence is manifest in the eternal and unchanging order of nature and in the sharing of providence with human beings who exercise providence through their intellect. The second view, West argues, is the view taken by the Islamic theologians like al-Ghazali who deny the possibility of a natural order of causality as a blasphemous denial of God's unconstrained power. The second view is also taken by modern political theologians like Carl Schmitt. The third view is Aquinas's, which thus escapes from the nihilism of the second view that Strauss attributes to the Bible.

I agree with West that Aquinas does try hard to adhere to the third view, especially in his account of natural law. But he can never completely escape from Biblical nihilism.

One can see this in those many places in his writing where Aquinas embraces a divine command theory of morality--that the good is whatever God happens to command at any moment. For example, Abraham was justified in faithfully obeying God's command to kill his son Isaac: "Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself it was contrary to right human reason" (II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2). Normally, killing innocent people is murder and contrary to natural law. But at any moment God can rightly command murder, because there is no natural law independent of God's arbitrary power.

After examining examples like this of Aquinas's divine command teaching, West explains: "Aquinas thereby draws attention to the unavoidable potential or actual conflict between the commandments of God who acts or seems to act outside the natural order (assuming that God is such a being) and the dictates of human reason. . . . Aquinas enables us to see that there is a choice to be made, theologically, between a willful, mysterious, and ultimately irrational God and a God who always acts in accord with the eternal law of reason" (77).

West leaves us wondering why Aquinas does not always make a clear choice in favor of "a God who always acts in accord with the eternal law of reason." The answer, I think, is that Aquinas cannot make this choice without opening denying Biblical religion.

For me, this is a big issue, because one of the most common objections to my argument for Darwinian natural right is that it fails to recognize that evolved human nature by itself cannot be the ground of moral judgment, because the ultimate ground is God's moral law as the command of his will.

Unfortunately, the proponents of divine-command reasoning fail to see the necessary implication of this teaching, which is nihilism.

Darwinian natural right is the alternative to such nihilism.

Some related posts can be found here, here, and here.

Strauss on the Supremacy of the Philosophic Life: Where's the Proof?

2011-07-11T10:33:00.009+01:00

Having summarized Leo Strauss's critique of Thomas Aquinas's natural law teaching and Tom West's replies to that critique, I will offer some assessments of this debate in the light of Darwinian natural right.

But before I do that, I want to raise a question about an unquestioned assumption in this debate. West never asks whether Strauss has proven that the philosophic life is the highest human perfection--a perfection achieved only by a few wise individuals, in contrast to the great majority of human beings who live merely moral lives that are inferior. West assumes without proof that Strauss is right about this, and West's only concern is to try to show that Aquinas agreed with Strauss about this. But to rely on an unproven assertion--to rely on Strauss's authority--is unphilosophic.

Where's the proof?

Where's the demonstration that the life of philosophy or science is the only good life for a human being? If the philosophic life is the life of relentless questioning and inquiry where one accepts nothing as true unless it has been proven to be true based on what we can see and know for ourselves, rather than relying on faith in what others have told us, then it is self-contradictory to choose such a life as the best life without demonstrative proof that it is so.

Although Strauss generally assumes that the philosophic life is superior in dignity to any moral life, I cannot think of any place in Strauss's writing where he carefully lays out a demonstrative proof that the philosophic life is the only truly good life for a human being. If I am mistaken, and Strauss has provided the proof, then I would be happy to have this pointed out by those who know Strauss better than I do.

Considering the writings of Plato and Aristotle, I can only think of one place where one might think the proof for the supremacy of the philosophic life has been provided--the end of Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. But as I have indicated in some previous posts, Aristotle's arguments there are remarkably dubious. They are so dubious--particularly, when one considers them in the context of the whole of the Ethics--that the careful reader might conclude that Aristotle does not take them seriously, that he is actually mocking the Platonic arguments for the supremacy of philosophy. As I have suggested previously, I think this points to the books on friendship in the Ethics as the true peak of the book, where Aristotle indicates that the happiest life is a life that embraces a wide range of moral and intellectual goods.

For Strauss's reasoning on the supremacy of philosophy, one good place to start is his lecture on "Reason and Revelation," which he delivered in 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary, and which was unpublished until it was published in Heinrich Meier's Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Although it was not published during Strauss's lifetime, it contains language and formulations that appear in his published writings, beginning with Natural Right and History.

Consider the following passage from this lecture:

This view of the relation of philosophy to life, i.e. to society, presupposes that philosophy is essentially the preserve of the very few individuals who are by nature fit for philosophy. The radical distinction between the wise and the vulgar is essential to the original concept of philosophy. The idea that philosophy as such could become the element of human life is wholly alien to all pre-modern thought. Plato demands that the philosophers should become kings; he does not demand that philosophy should become the ruler: in his perfect polity, only 2 or 3 individuals have any access whatever to philosophy; the large majority is guided by noble lies. The quest for knowledge implies that in all cases where sufficient evidence is lacking, assent must be withheld or judgment must be suspended. Now, it is impossible to withhold assent or to suspend judgment in matters of extreme urgency which require immediate decision: one cannot suspend judgment in matters of life and death. The philosophic enterprise that stands or falls by the possibility of suspense of judgment, requires therefore that all matters of life and death be settled in advance. All matters of life and death can be reduced to the question of how one ought to live. The philosophic enterprise presupposes that the question of how one ought to live be settled in advance. It is settled by the pre-philosophic proof of the thesis that the right way of life, the one thing needful, is the life devoted to philosophy and to nothing else. The pre-philosophic proof is later on confirmed, within philosophy, by an analysis of human nature. However this may be, according to its original meaning, philosophy is the right way of life, the happiness of man. All other human pursuits are accordingly considered fundamentally defective, or forms of human misery, however splendid. The moral life as moral life is not the philosophic life: for the philosopher, morality is nothing but the condition or the by-product of philosophizing, and not something valuable in itself. Philosophy is not only trans-social and trans-religious, but trans-moral as well. Philosophy asserts that man has ultimately no choice but that between philosophy and despair disguised by delusion; only through philosophy is man enabled to look reality in its stern face without losing his humanity. The claim of philosophy is no less radical than that raised on behalf of revelation. (146-47)

So, first, there must be a "pre-philosophic proof" that the philosophic life is the only right way of life; then, secondly, this proof is confirmed by "an analysis of human nature." But as far as I can tell, Strauss never provides this "pre-philosophic proof" or the "analysis of human nature" that would confirm it.

"However this may be" is a strange expression in this passage, suggesting that Strauss is inclined to assume the supremacy of philosophy without proving it.

I agree that "an analysis of human nature" can show that there is a range of natural human desires that constitute the natural goods of life, which would include goods such as family life, social ranking, politics, property, friendship, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding. These generic human goods include philosophy or science as devoted to intellectual understanding. But while the philosophic life is certainly a good life for those inclined to it by nature, there is no good reason to say that this is the only truly good life for human beings, that any life other than the philosophic life is a life of "despair disguised by delusion."

The generic standard for a good human life is that it should include all or most of these human goods to some degree. But the ranking of goods--so that one good is stressed more than the others--depends upon the temperament and circumstances of individuals. The philosophic life is best for only a few people--as Strauss recognizes. The philosophic life is best for Socrates, but not necessarily for those who lack Socratic inclinations. Of course, someone who would live a life without any intellectual understanding at all--someone utterly ignorant and lacking in any curiosity about the world--would be living a less than fully satisfying life. But while some desire for knowledge is an element of any minimally good life, there is no reason to say that those few people who live a purely Socratic life of relentless questioning and inquiry are the only happy human beings.

As I have suggested in some previous posts, one of the primary arguments for liberalism is that a liberal society allows human beings to pursue the full range of generic human goods, with individuals free to adopt those ways of life that are suited to their individual and social circumstances.

West quotes Strauss (in a letter to Karl Lowith) as saying: "A man like Churchill proves that the possibility of magnanimity exists today exactly as it did in the fifth century B.C."

But according to Strauss, the life of the great-souled man is a merely moral life that is not a truly good life because it is not a philosophic life. According to Strauss, the life of Churchill manifests "human misery, however splendid" or "despair disguised by delusion."

Where's the demonstrative proof of this strange assertion?

Elsewhere in "Reason and Revelation," Strauss offers a few hints as to what he might take as proof. But he never lays out the necessary evidence and arguments.

He asserts "man's desire to know as his highest natural desire" (149). But he never explains exactly why we should be persuaded that the other natural desires don't count as part of a good human life.

He says that knowledge of the good is the necessary precondition for finding the good (149-50). But to say that we need some knowledge to pursue the good for us does not prove that pursuing knowledge for its own sake is the only good.

He says "if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers" (163). But does he really mean this--that philosophers are gods?

Strauss notes that theologians like to use Pascal's claim that the "misery of man without God" is shown by the craving for distraction and the mood of boredom. Strauss seems to accept this as a reason for rejecting all lives other than philosophy:

these and similar phenomena reveal indeed the problematic character of all ordinary human pursuits of happiness which are not the pursuit of the happiness of contemplation. The philosopher as philosopher never craves distraction (although he needs relaxation from time to time), and he is never bored. Theological psychology is such a psychology of non-philosophic man, of the vulgar, as is not guided by the understanding of the natural aim of man which is contemplation. (163)

Does the proof depend on evidence of boredom? Are philosophers never bored, while everyone else is always bored?

According to Strauss, the proof for the supremacy of the philosophic life depends crucially on the reason-revelation debate--on whether philosophy can refute revelation, or whether revelation can refute philosophy. If this debate remains inconclusive, then "that philosophy is the highest possibility of man" is only a "hypothesis" and thus "a blind decision" (175-76).

What kind of a "decision" is this? Isn't this a moral decision, because it's a decision about how one ought to live, about what constitutes a good life? But if so, then the choice to live a philosophic life is a moral choice. If it's a moral choice, then how can the Straussian philosopher denigrate morality as lacking any dignity?

Some related posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

The Straussian Critique--and Defense--of Thomas Aquinas (4): West's Replies, 5-8

2011-07-10T11:33:00.008+01:00

(5) For Strauss, the most fundamental way in which Aquinas takes the side of revelation against reason is that he presents natural reason as pointing beyond itself to the supernatural end of eternal redemption.

Thomas apparently agrees with Strauss that the natural end of human beings is twofold--moral perfection and intellectual perfection--but that intellectual perfection (the philosophic life) is higher in dignity than moral perfection, and, in fact, the intellectual perfection of the philosopher does not even require moral virtue. In his chapter on "The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right" in Natural Right and History, Strauss explains:

Nature was discovered when man embarked on the quest for the first things in the light of the fundamental distinctions between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes, on the one hand, and between things made by man and things not made by man, on the other. . . . The artificial things are seen to owe their being to human contrivance or to forethought. If one suspends one's judgment regarding the truth of the sacred accounts of the first things, one does not know whether the things that are not man-made owe their being to forethought of any kind, i.e., whether the first things originate all other things by way of forethought, or otherwise. Thus one realizes the possibility that the first things originate all other things in a manner fundamentally different from all origination by way of forethought. The assertion that all visible things have been produced by thinking beings or that there are any superhuman thinking beings requires henceforth a demonstration: a demonstration that starts from what all can see now. (88-89)

In his footnote to this passage, Strauss cites "Plato, Laws 888a-889c, 891c1-9, 892c2-7, 966d6-967e1. Aristotle Metaphysics 989b29-990a5, 1000a9-20, 1042a3ff.; De caelo 298b13-24. Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica i. qu. 2, a. 3."

The citation of Aquinas is to his famous five ways for proving the existence of God based on reasoning from effects to causes and arguing that to explain the visible effects in the natural world, we need to infer a Divine Mind as the invisible first cause. By including citations of Plato and Aristotle, Strauss suggests that Aquinas's natural theology as based on the idea that the universe is intelligently designed can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. In fact, book 10 of Plato's Laws is the first full statement of intelligent design theory.

Strauss then writes:

In brief, then, it can be said that the discovery of nature is identical with the actualization of a human possibility which, at least according to its own interpretation, is trans-historical, trans-social, trans-moral, and trans-religious. (89)

The footnote to this passage quotes a remark from Arthur North Whitehead, and then it cites "Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica i. 2. qu. 58, a. 4-5, and qu. 104, a. 1; ii. 2, qu. 19, a. 7, and qu. 45, a. 3 (on the relation of philosophy to morality and religion)."

West correctly points out (85) that these passages from Aquinas cited here by Strauss seem to be in full agreement with Strauss concerning the "trans-moral" and "trans-religious" character of philosophic wisdom. Speaking of the Decalogue, Aquinas says that "some are moral precepts, which the reason itself dictates when it is quickened by faith; such as that God is to be loved and worshipped" (I-II, q. 104, a. 1, ad 3). This implies that natural reason by itself, if it is not "quickened by faith," does not teach the moral precepts of loving and worshipping God. Moreover, Aquinas explains: "Wisdom . . . is considered by us [religious believers] in one way, and in another way by philosophers. For, seeing that our life is ordained to the enjoyment of God, and is directed thereto, according to a participation of the Divine Nature, conferred on us through grace, wisdom, as we look at it, is considered not only as being cognizant of God, as it is with philosophers, but also as directing human conduct; since this is directed not only by the human law, but also by the Divine law, as Augustine shows" (II-II, q. 19, a. 7). So as a member of the Catholic community of believers, Aquinas must speak of natural wisdom as directed to supernatural ends--the loving and worshipping of God--in contrast to the purely philosophic view of wisdom as "trans-moral" and "trans-religious."

While Strauss criticizes Aquinas for asserting that natural reason points beyond itself to supernatural religious beliefs, West indicates how passages in Aquinas's writing that are cited by Strauss himself imply that Aquinas is only pretending to believe this because his rhetorical situation makes it impossible for him to deny it.

Strauss observes:

If we take Socrates as the representative of the quest for natural right, we may illustrate the relation of that quest to authority as follows: in a community governed by divine laws, it is strictly forbidden to subject these laws to genuine discussion, i.e., to critical examination, in the presence of young men. . . . This is not to deny that, once the idea of natural right has emerged and become a matter of course, it can easily be adjusted to the belief in the existence of divinely revealed law. (NRH, 85

West suggests that this was Aquinas's situation--living in a "community governed by divine laws" that could not be openly questioned without persecution. Therefore, he might have felt the need to disguise himself as "a philosopher dressed up in priestly robes," because this was the only way that he could defend natural right as "adjusted to the belief in the existence of divinely revealed law" (87).

(6) Strauss's sixth objection is that the term "natural law" is self-contradictory, because "nature" as it was originally discovered in ancient Greece was opposed to "law." Turning "natural right" into "natural law" implies that nature's order has been legislated by a divine lawmaker, which turns natural right into a divine positive law.

West replies to this objection by arguing that Aquinas indicates that natural law is a law only metaphorically. Natural law participates in eternal law, which is the unchanging and eternal order of Divine Reason that constitutes the order of nature. The rational creature "has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law" (I-II, q. 91, a. 1-2). Strictly speaking, law implies some oral or written command, and we can speak of the eternal law as spoken by God or written in the Book of Life, but this would be only metaphorical (I, q. 24, a. 1; I-II, q. 91, a. 1, ad 2). Natural law as known by natural reason does not require belief in a divine lawgiver, because by natural reason, we come to know natural law as natural human instincts or inclinations that we can apprehend rationally and formulate as natural precepts of action. The God of natural law is nature's God.

(7) To Strauss's seventh objection--that Christian humility and self-denial deprive us of the proud spiritedness required for healthy politics--West replies that Aquinas actually defends the magnanimous pride and moral vengeance that support natural spiritedness. Aquinas defends magnanimity as a virtue that is compatible with humility, because while magnanimity is truly a virtue for the man who is truly great in comparison with other men, humility is a also a virtue when considering the great man's subordination to God (II-II, q. 129; q. 161, a. 1; q. 162, a. 3, ad 1).

In support of Aquinas, West quotes "a famous remark of Churchill illustrating precisely how magnanimity (which involves believing in one's complete superiority to one's fellow human beings) is perfectly compatible with humility toward God and the cosmos: 'We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow-worm" (57).

West also notes Aquinas's defends "vengeance" (vindicatio)--the natural disposition to see wrongdoers punished (I-II, q. 107, a. 2, ad 2; II-II, q. 108). In doing this, Aquinas has to overcome the apparent teaching of the New Testament--particularly, in the Sermon on the Mount--enjoining universal love, including love of our enemies. Christ's command not to resist evil does not hold in circumstances where it is right to kill our enemies (II-II, q. 40, a. 1).

Aquinas thus recognizes a right to resist evil that can become a right to revolution (II-II, q. 42, a. 2, ad 3).

Aquinas undercuts the selflessness of Christ's teaching of universal love by teaching that we must love ourselves first and then extend our love outward to those closest to us, so that we love some neighbors more than others (II-II, q. 26, a. 4-8, 13; q. 44, a. 8). Thus, Aquinas can teach that "we do not offend God except by doing something contrary to our own good" (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 3, ch. 122). Aquinas thus corrects the New Testament teaching of universal love and selflessness to conform to the natural desires of the human animal as inclined to love oneself and to love others as extensions of oneself. Here Aquinas follows Aristotle's biological account of animal sociality as rooted in friendship or affiliation (philia).

(8) It is hard for West to defend Aquinas against the Machiavellian charge that Christianity promotes "pious cruelty." After all, Aquinas clearly teaches that heretics can be rightly punished with death, and thus he endorses the Inquisition, which was carried out by his own religious order--the Dominicans (II-II, q. 11, a. 3). He also declares that the Church can punish rulers who become apostates by declaring that they have no authority over their subjects (II-II, q. 12, a. 2).

Here, however, Aquinas directly contradicts his teaching that human law is to be guided by natural law rather than divine law. The contradiction even appears within the same article: "lack of faith, in itself, is not inconsistent with dominion, since dominion is introduced by the right of nations, which is human right; whereas the distinction between the faithful and the unfaithful is according to divine right, through which human right is not destroyed" (II-II, q. 12, a. 2). "But if divine right does not destroy human right," West observes, "it is logically impossible for a deviation from divine right (apostasy) to destroy the human right of a magistrate to govern" (92).

Such an obvious contradiction, West suggests, must be deliberate, and it must be deliberately designed to alert the careful reader that the surface teaching is not Aquinas's true belief. Aquinas would have been instructed in such a technique of secret writing by his reading of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed.

As I have indicated in a previous post, Shadia Drury regards Aquinas's support for the Inquisition as a clear example of how he betrayed natural law. But for West, this so clearly contradicts his teaching on natural law that it must have been intended to suggest a secret teaching contrary to what appears on the surface. Needless to say, Shadia is not likely to be persuaded by such a typically Straussian move.

STRAUSS'S RHETORICAL STRATEGY IN ATTACKING AQUINAS
But then we might wonder whether Strauss himself here is engaging in some secret writing. If it is so easy for West to defend Aquinas against Strauss's criticisms--often using passages in Aquinas's writings that are cited by Strauss himself--then may be Strauss knows that his criticisms are not warranted.

As West indicates, Strauss opens Natural Right and History by noting that the only people in his day who are defending natural right are "the Catholic and non-Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas" or "the modern followers of Thomas Aquinas," and he indicates that they are not in full agreement with Aquinas himself, because they reject the comprehensive natural science of Aristotle and Aquinas (NRH, 7-8). This suggests the possibility that in attacking Thomas Aquinas, Strauss is actually attacking the modern followers of Aquinas (people like Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson). For example, it might be that Strauss saw a tendency to dogmatism in the Neo-Thomist proponents of natural law that he wanted to criticize, even though he knew that Thomas himself was not so dogmatic.

The Straussian Critique--and Defense--of Thomas Aquinas (3): West's Replies, 1-4

2011-07-09T13:16:00.005+01:00

Here I will begin summarizing Tom West's replies to Strauss's eight objections to Aquinas's natural law teaching. I will begin with the first four. In some later posts, I will offer my assessments of the issues in this debate.

(1) Contrary to Strauss's claim that Aquinas takes the side of revelation against reason and thus denies the classic teaching of natural right, West argues that Aquinas understands the conflict between reason and revelation, and that he adapts the teaching of classic natural right to the circumstances of medieval Christianity.

From the very beginning of the section of the Summa Theologica on faith, Aquinas draws a sharp contrast between faith as belief in things unseen and reason or science as demonstrative knowledge of things seen (II-II, q. 1, aa. 4-5). This corresponds closely to Strauss's account of the reason-revelation debate. Scientific knowledge comes from what human beings can see and know by natural reason and natural experience. By contrast, matters of faith depend on the authority of scripture, on what we hear from others rather than what we can see for ourselves.

Aquinas declares: "The reasons employed by holy men to prove things that are of faith are not demonstrations; they are either persuasive arguments showing that what is proposed to our faith is not impossible, or else they are proofs drawn from the principles of faith, i.e., from the authority of sacred scripture" (II-II, q. 1, a. 5, ad 2).

That Aquinas understands natural law as depending on human reason but not divine revelation should be clear from the famous passage in which he lays out the levels of the natural inclinations of human beings that are naturally apprehended by reason as being good (I-II, q. 94, a. 2). In this passage, there are no Biblical citations or appeals to divine revelation. There are four kinds of natural inclinations--self-preservation, the sexual generation and rearing of offspring, living in society, and knowing the truth about God. The natural inclination to know the truth about God supports the natural law precept to "shun ignorance." Even here there is no reference to revelation, thus suggesting that this could be the purely philosophic quest to ascend to the first causes of all things through natural reason alone, which would move towards "the highest cause of the whole universe, namely God" (I, q. 1, a. 6). As guided by natural law, human beings answer the question of what God is by natural reason alone.

West sees Aquinas as arguing that God creates two independent paths to guide human beings--natural law as the path of human nature and natural reason and divine law as the path of divine revelation and supernatural faith. By separating these two paths, Aquinas can separate human law and government from the authority of the Church. Human law is derived only from natural law, not divine law. Human law is concerned with religion only in so far as religion promotes the moral order of society (I-II, q. 91, a. 3; q. 98, a. 1; q. 99, a. 3). Priests serve the common good of the people by praying to God for the people, but princes serve the common good by governing the people (I-II, q. 95, a. 4). The clergy have the authority to interfere in secular politics only to prevent tyrants from commanding their subjects to perform idolatrous rituals (I-II, q. 96, a. 4; II-II, q. 60, a. 6, ad 3). Thus, Aquinas argues for a qualified separation of church and state.

It might seem that the natural law is a positive divine law in so far as the natural law is said to be part of the eternal law of God. But West argues that Aquinas identifies the eternal law as the unchanging mind of God--the reason or principle of divine providence--as manifest in the eternal order of nature. Consequently, human beings obey divine providence by obeying the order of nature (I-II, q. 93, a. 5).

West asks (p. 87): "Was Aquinas living 'in a community governed by divine law,' merely pretending to believe in that law, when in fact he was adjusting natural right 'to the belief in the existence of divinely revealed law'? Was he pretending to be a political theologian while in fact being a political philosopher? Was the great saint nothing more than a philosopher dressed up in priestly robes?" West suggests the answer in each case is yes. One must consider the possibility that "in the end Aquinas covertly but firmly took the side of reason over revelation" (86).

To see this, however, we must see that Aquinas is engaging in secret writing--that the exoteric teaching for most readers who see only the surface of the writing differs from the esoteric teaching for the few readers who see beneath the surface. Following the lead of Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing, West argues that Aquinas had to worry about being persecuted for his Aristotelianism, which was a fact of life at the University of Paris, and he had learned from Moses Maimonides the importance of secret writing in such circumstances.

In fact, Aquinas says in the Prologue to the Summa Theologica that this is book for instructing beginners who need "milk to drink, not meat." Moreover, he argues--like Maimonides--that sacred scripture uses metaphorical language to hide the truth from vulgar readers while revealing it to the few thoughtful readers (ST I, q. 1, a. 9; q. 68, a. 3; I-II, q. 98, a. 3, ad 2; II-II, q. 40, a. 3).

Moreover, when Aquinas examines sacred doctrines, he always tries to interpret them in such way as to render them rationally comprehensible to natural reason, which suggests that human reason is the standard by which divine revelation is to be judged. In those cases where Aquinas cannot interpret a doctrine as reasonable--as, for example, with the doctrine of original sin or the belief in miracles--he contradicts himself in ways that point to the problem, and he indicates that he must answer "according to the Catholic faith," and thus suggests that he cannot openly question the Church's authority (I-II, q. 81, aa. 1-3; II-II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2; q. 104, a. 4, ad 2; Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 3, chs. 100-101).

(2) To Strauss's second objection--that Aquinas's natural law is inflexible and thus leaves no room for prudence--West replies that Aquinas actually allows for flexibility and prudence. In applying general principles to the contingent circumstances of action, practical reason must have a wide latitude for judgment (I-II, q. 94, aa. 4-6). Although Aquinas does say that the general principles of natural law are unchangeable, these general principles are very few, and they seem to be reducible to the vague idea that "good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided," which seems to correspond to Aristotle's teaching that all human actions aim at the good (I-II, q. 94, a. 2).

Moreover, even with respect to the apparently fixed principles of the Decalogue--such as the prohibitions against lying and stealing--Aquinas allows for variation in exceptional circumstances where public safety or individual need require it (II-II, q. 66, a. 7; q. 110, aa. 1-4). "Necessity knows no law" (I-II, q. 96, a. 6).

West also argues that the flexibility of Aquinas's natural law teaching extends even to divorce and birth control. Aquinas indicates that while divorce in the Old Testament was "against the principle of a sacrament," it was not against nature (I-II, q. 102, a. 5, ad 3). Marriage as a sacrament of the Church is a matter of divine revelation, and this does not allow for divorce. But marriage as rooted in natural inclinations might allow for divorce in exceptional circumstances.

Aquinas teaches that "against the good of man is every emission of semen in such a way that generation cannot follow" (Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. 3, ch. 122). The Catholic Church has interpreted this to prohibit any form of birth control other than "Natural Family Planning" (NFP). But West argues that this does not follow from Aquinas's standard, because no method of birth control is so completely effective that "generation cannot follow." In fact, NFP is actually more effective than most other forms of birth control in preventing conception.

Furthermore, West argues, in the circumstances of the modern Western world, where the death of infants and children has become rare, birth control actually promotes the ends of family life, because it allows parents to insure that they not have more children than they can possibly rear and educate.

West concludes that the Catholic Church's condemnation of artificial birth control cannot be supported by Thomistic natural law.

(3) West denies Strauss's assertion that Aquinas sees a "basic harmony between natural right and civil society." In fact, Aquinas clearly states that there is a disproportion between natural law and civil society. "Human law does not prohibit everything that is forbidden by the natural law." This must be so because

Human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, form which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and such like. (I-II, q. 96, a. 2)

West sees this as pointing towards the modern Hobbesian and Lockean teaching that government should be largely limited to protecting life, liberty, and property.

(4) Contrary to Strauss's claim that Aquinas's doctrine of synderesis or conscience is an unreasonable conclusion from his belief in divine revelation, West argues that conscience for Aquinas is nothing but the human mind's grasping of the natural inclinations as good. First the mind must apprehend these natural inclinations as setting the ends of action, then prudence judges the best means for achieving these ends (I, q. 79; II-II, q. 47, a. 6).

Moreover, it is not true, as Strauss says, that this teaches the universal promulgation of natural law equally to all human beings. Some human beings are more prudent than others, and thus human judgment is fallible (I-II, q. 94, a. 4; II-II, q. 47, a. 5).

The Straussian Critique--and Defense--of Thomas Aquinas (2): Strauss's Objections

2011-07-07T18:50:00.006+01:00

Leo Strauss suggested at least eight objections to Thomas Aquinas's teaching on natural law.

As I set them out here, the first five are summarized in Natural Right and History at the end of the chapter on "Classic Natural Right," pages 163-64. The sixth objection is stated in Strauss's essay on "Natural Law," pages 137-38. The seventh and eighth objections are attributed to Machiavelli, but Strauss seems to endorse them.

(1) The first objection is the most fundamental: Thomas's natural law is not really natural law--that is, a law that is knowable to natural reason alone--because it depends upon belief in divine revelation. Thomas subordinates philosophic reason to religious faith. Instead of promoting the effort to understand things based on what we can observe for ourselves and demonstrate rationally, Thomas assumes that we must submit to the the unquestioned authority of religious texts and religious leaders claiming divine inspiration. He thus takes the side of revelation against reason, and thereby rejects the idea of natural right or natural law as a standard of right and wrong comprehensible to unassisted human reason.

(2) The second objection is that in thus relying on religious dogma, Thomas renders the natural law so inflexible that there is no room for prudence to exercise judgment in deciding what should be done in particular circumstances. "There is a universally valid hierarchy of ends," Strauss believed, "but there are no universally valid rules of action" (NRH, 162). Even if we can rank some objectives as universally higher than other objectives, we must recognize that in exceptional circumstances, objectives that are normally lower in rank than others can become more urgent. So, for example, in times of war or great emergencies, political leaders might have to rank the public safety of their political community as the highest objective. Thomas does not allow for such prudential flexibility, and that's why, Strauss suggested, that Montesquieu broke away from the Thomistic view of natural law to recover some reasonable latitude for statesmanship.

Illustrations of the inflexible absolutism of Thomas's natural law, Strauss claimed,would include the Catholic prohibition of divorce and artificial birth control. Prudence should allow us to see circumstances in which divorce and birth control are reasonable means for achieving the natural goods of life.

(3) A third objection from Strauss is that Thomas's natural law teaching assumes a harmony between natural right and civil society. This ignores the possibility--suggested by Plato--that the naturally best way of life might be philosophy, and the relentless activity of philosophers in questioning the opinions of their fellow citizens might conflict with the requirements of political society.

(4) A fourth objection is that Thomas's reliance on religious faith leads him to assume unreasonably that the natural law is universally promulgated to all human beings by a divinely implanted synderesis or conscience.

(5) Strauss's fifth objection is to Thomas's claim that natural human striving for happiness points beyond itself to a supernatural end. Strauss sees Thomas as agreeing with him that natural reason recognizes that intellectual virtue and moral virtue are the two natural ends of human life, that intellectual virtue is higher in dignity than moral virtue, and that intellectual virtue does not require moral virtue. But then Strauss sees Thomas as trying to overcome this problem by claiming that natural reason actually teaches us that the final end of human life is supernatural--eternal union with God in Heaven--and thus neither philosophic nor moral activity can satisfy human beings. This presumes that natural law must be fulfilled in divine law, which takes us back to what Strauss saw as the fundamental mistake in Thomas's natural law teaching--the denial of natural reason's sufficiency for human beings in order to promote human dependence on supernatural revelation.

(6) Strauss's sixth objection is that while natural right is a coherent idea, natural law is not, because the very term "natural law" is self-contradictory. The original Greek discovery of nature turned on the contrast between "nature" (physis) and "law" or "custom" (nomos). Consequently, the idea of "natural law" is confused, particularly because it suggests the necessity for a divine lawgiver, so that Thomas's natural law is actually divine positive law.

(7) As a seventh objection to Thomas's Christianity, Machiavelli argues that Christian humility and otherworldliness deprives people of the manly pride necessary for a healthy political life. Christians are not inclined to resist political tyranny and defend political liberty because they are taught not to care about the things of this world, and they are taught to love their enemies and thus to offer no resistance to evil. Such humble submissiveness allows evil to triumph. Strauss stated this Machiavellian teaching in a way that suggested he endorsed it.

(8) Similarly, Strauss seemed to accept another Machiavellian criticism of Christianity--the tendency of the Christian church to "pious cruelty," the tendency to a moral fanaticism in punishing those regarded as unbelievers, apostates, or heretics. The brutal violence of the Inquisition illustrated this tendency.

Thus, oddly enough, from this Machiavellian point of view, Christianity appears to promote opposing dispositions--either unreasonable timidity or unreasonable ferocity--both of which are contrary to the teachings of natural right and prudential judgment.

In my next post, I will summarize Tom West's replies to these objections before I offer my assessment of this debate.

The Straussian Critique--and Defense--of Thomas Aquinas

2011-07-06T20:37:00.004+01:00

Leo Strauss and the Straussians show ambiguity and ambivalence in their understanding of Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic natural law teaching. On the one hand, one would expect them to be proponents of Thomistic natural law in so far as this belongs to the tradition of "classic natural right" that they generally defend. And yet, on the other hand, the religious dogmatism and otherworldly attitudes of Thomas's Catholic Christianity run contrary to the prudent flexibility and rationalist naturalism that the Straussians see in the classical view of natural right manifest in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.

The important issue here is not merely a matter of how to interpret Strauss, but rather the question of whether natural law can resolve what Strauss called "the crisis of liberal democracy." Modern liberal thought has largely rejected the appeal to natural standards--as in natural right or natural law--for judging moral and political life, which tends to promote a relativist or historicist view of life that makes it impossible to defend liberal democracy against its enemies. The threat of totalitarianism in the 20th century deepened this crisis, and in response to this, many serious thinkers in the 1940s and 1950s sought a revival of natural law thinking as possibly providing the natural standards of judgment that were need to defend liberal democracy against totalitarianism. Strauss's writing was seen as part of this intellectual movement. In the Foreword to Strauss's Natural Right and History, Jerome Kerwin described the book as defense of "the traditionalists natural law doctrine" to counter the threat from twentieth-century totalitarianism. But it's not clear that Strauss's defense of "classic natural right" in this book includes a defense of "traditionalist natural law" as associated with Thomas Aquinas.

In the 21st century, the threats from totalitarianism--fascist, Nazi, and communist--don't seem as urgent as they were in earlier decades, although political Islamism sometimes seems to pose a similar threat. But if we now hope for a global political order based on promoting "human rights," we must wonder whether the idea of "human rights" presupposes some notion of a universal human nature that implicitly invokes something like traditional natural law reasoning.

Strauss's critical analysis of Thomistic natural law can help us to decide whether natural law is defensible in the circumstances we face today. A good place to begin in studying that Straussian analysis is a paper by Thomas G. West (of the University of Dallas)--"Thomas Aquinas on Natural Law: A Critique of the 'Straussian' Critique." This long paper (100 pages) was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in 2006, and it can be downloaded at the APSA website.

West defends Aquinas against Strauss's criticisms by arguing that Aquinas takes the side of reason against revelation in a way that conforms to Strauss's own position, although Aquinas had to hide this teaching to avoid alienating his Catholic readers. And yet West also argues that Strauss intimates that he understood this, and that Strauss's apparent criticisms of Thomas were actually intended to be criticisms of the distorted Thomism advocated by some of the Thomist philosophers and theologians of Strauss's time.

As I will indicate in a series of posts, I agree with West on most of his points. But I also think that West does not see that Thomas's taking the side of reason over revelation depends upon his biological account of natural law as founded on a biological understanding of human nature as a set of dispositional properties. Moreover, West does not see how this biologically grounded natural law can be supported by modern Darwinian biology in a way that solves what Strauss identified as the fundamental problem for natural right in the modern world--the apparent denial of classic natural right by modern natural science.

I will be referring mostly to Aquinas's Summa Theologica (ST), but also to some of his other writings. All of Aquinas's writings with parallel Latin/English texts can be found at Joseph Kenny's website.

Strauss, Darwin, and the Reason-Revelation Debate

2011-07-03T15:25:00.007+01:00

Darwinian science completes the Greek philosophic substitution of "natural order" or "natural morality" for "divine law" by providing a natural explanation for how the order of the cosmos could arise by natural evolution, within which human morality could arise as an expression of evolved human nature. In this way, Darwinian science took the side of reason against revelation, but without being able to refute the possibility of revelation. Thus does Darwinian science fit into the reason-revelation debate as understood by Leo Strauss.

In his lecture in 1948 on "Reason and Revelation," Strauss indicated that the irreconcilable conflict between revelation and philosophy or science is manifest in the conflict between the Biblical story of Creation and Darwinian evolutionary science.

In "Progress or Return?"--reprinted in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism--Strauss puts this conflict in the context of "the basic question of how to find one's bearings in the cosmos." He explains:

The Greek answer fundamentally is this: we have to discover the first things on the basis of inquiry. We can note two implications of what inquiry means here. In the first place, inquiry implies seeing with one's own eyes as distinguished from hearsay; it means observing for oneself. Secondly, the notion of inquiry presupposes the realization of the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings. This implication, I think, is decisive: it was on the basis of the principles of Greek philosophy that what later became known as demonstrations of the existence of God or gods came into being. This is absolutely necessary, and that is true not only in Aristotle, but in Plato as well, as you see, for example, from the tenth book of the LAWS. An ascent from sense perception and reasoning on sense data, an ascent indeed guided, according to Plato and Aristotle, by certain notions, leads upwards; and everything depends on the solidity of the ascending process, on the demonstration. The quest for the beginning, for the first things, becomes now the philosophic or scientific analysis of the cosmos; the place of the divine law, in the traditional sense of the term, where it is a code traced to a personal God, is replaced by a natural order, which may even be called, as it was later to be called, a natural law--or at any rate, to use a wider term, a natural morality. So the divine law, in the real and strict sense of the term, is only the starting point, the absolutely essential starting point, for Greek philosophy, but it is abandoned in the process. And if it is accepted by Greek philosophy, it is accepted only politically, meaning for the education of the many, and not as something which stands independently. (255-56)

As Strauss indicates here, the proofs for the existence of God by inferring invisible divine causes from visible natural effects were first developed by Plato and Aristotle--particularly, in Book 10 of the Laws, where Plato sketched the reasoning for intelligent design theory or natural theology, the same fundamental reasoning later developed in medieval natural theology and in the contemporary intelligent design theory of Bill Dembski and Michael Behe. Paul first introduced this into Christianity in his Letter to the Romans (1:20), when he declared (under the influence of Greek philosophy): "The invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

Strauss also indicates, however, the essential fallacy in such reasoning--"the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it is first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings." Indeed, this anthropomorphic assumption that our experience of human mental agency can be projected onto the cosmos runs through Plato's reasoning in the Laws and the longing of Plato's Socrates for a cosmos ruled by Nous. Dembski shows this same anthropomorphic assumption when he says: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences." This rhetorical strategy hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and logic, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not, because while the working of human intelligent design is known by natural experience, the working of divine intelligent design is not.

The rational ascent to divine law is the starting point for Greek philosophy, but a starting point that is abandoned in the move from divine law to natural order or natural law. This requires the fulfillment of Greek natural philosophy, which sought to explain the cosmic whole as a product of nature and chance, within which human art could arise through custom and reason(Laws, 888e-89e).

But Greek natural philosophy faced three seemingly insurmountable problems. The first problem was that despite the weaknesses in the intelligent design argument, there did not seem to be any plausible alternative for explaining the apparent design in the natural world. If the irreducible complexity in the universe is not a product of divine design, then how else can we explain it?

The second problem was that a purely naturalistic explanation of the cosmos could not easily explain human moral order without falling into a radical relativism or nihilism. If the cosmos is not the product of a God who is also a moral lawgiver, does this mean that there is no cosmic support for human morality, which is a purely artificial and therefore arbitrary product of human will?

The third problem is that it's unclear whether even the most successful natural philosophy can refute the claims of revelation. If natural philosophy must assume that miracles are impossible--that there are no breaks in the causal regularities of nature--doesn't this beg the question at issue? How does natural philosophy prove the impossibility of miracles?

Darwinian science supports the fulfillment of natural philosophy by solving--at least in principle--the first two problems. But it leaves the third problem unresolved.

Darwinian science solves the first problem by showing how natural order can arise through an evolutionary process of spontaneous order emerging from random variation and selective retention, by which irreducibly complex orders can arise without intentional design.

Darwinian science solves the second problem by showing how moral order can arise through the natural evolution of a human moral sense shaped by social instincts, social learning, language, and deliberate judgment. The human good is not a cosmic good, but it is a natural good in so far as it conforms to human nature.

Darwinian science does not solve the third problem--the reason-revelation debate--because it cannot refute the possibility of miracles--the possibility of miracles in natural history that are not detectable by natural science or the possibility that natural evolution itself is a miracle as arising from laws of nature originally created by nature's God.

Darwinian science can explain the evolutionary psychology of religious belief as prompted by the anthropomorphic fallacy, because it can explain this as an extension of our evolved social disposition for "mind reading" and detecting agency. As cognitive scientists like Jesse Bering and Justin Barrett have shown, we can explain the natural desire for religious understanding as the work of a "hyperactive agency detection device," which was first suggested by Darwin in his evolutionary theory of religion in The Descent of Man.

And yet even this does not resolve the reason-revelation debate, because even if we accept this evolutionary explanation of religious belief, we are free to see religion as either an adaptive illusion (as Bering does) or as an adaptive truth (as Barrett does).

In any case, Darwin made it clear--especially in his AUTOBIOGRAPHY--that in the choice between the life of reason and the life of revelation, he had deliberately chosen the life of reason: "As for myself, I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."

The continuing importance of Leo Stauss is reflected in the recent NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (July 3, 2011), where Harry Jaffa identifies Strauss as "the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century."

Related posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Biology of Thomistic Natural Law: ST, I-II, q. 94, a. 2

2011-06-27T20:39:00.015+01:00

At the convention of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, September 1-4, I will be presenting a paper entitled "Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right: Replies to Critics." I will be answering all of the various objections that have been offered to my claim that Thomas Aquinas's natural law can be understood as rooted in human biological nature.

The best statement of Thomas's natural law reasoning is in his "Treatise on Law" in the Summa Theologica (I-II, q. 90-114). Within that section of the book, the most notable passage is question 94, article 2: "Does the natural law contain several precepts or only one?" Here Thomas sketches the general precepts of natural law as organized in three levels.

In my paper, I will argue that the content and structure of these precepts manifest human biological nature as presented in the biological science of Aristotle and Albert the Great (Thomas's teacher and mentor). I will also argue that this biological understanding of natural law is compatible with Darwinian evolutionary biology.

Here's my translation of one passage from this part of the Summa:

. . . The precepts of the natural law in a human being are related to action as the first principles to matters of demonstration. But there are several indemonstrable first principles. Therefore, there are also several precepts of natural law.

. . . The precepts of the natural law are related to practical reason as the first principles of demonstration are related to speculative reason. For both are self-evident principles. . . .

Now, there is a certain order to be found in the things that fall under human apprehension. For what first falls within our apprehension is being, the understanding of which is included in everything that one understands. And so the first indemonstrable principle is that the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time, which is based on the nature of being and nonbeing, and all other principles are based on it, as the METAPHYSICS says. And as being is the first thing that without qualification falls within apprehension, so good is the first thing that falls within the apprehension of practical reason. And practical reason is ordered to action, since every agent acts for the sake of an end under the meaning of good. Consequently, the first principle in the practical reason is one founded on the meaning of good, namely, that good is what all things seek. Therefore, the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil. And all the other precepts of the natural law are based upon this, so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as human goods or evils belong to the precepts of the natural law as things to be done or shunned.

And since good has the meaning of an end, and evil the meaning of the contrary, hence it is that all those things to which human beings have a natural inclination are naturally apprehended by reason as being good and, consequently, as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil and objects of avoidance. Therefore, the order of the natural inclinations is the order is the order of the precepts of the natural law.

Because there is first in a human being an inclination to good in accordance with the nature which he has in common with all substances, inasmuch as every substance seeks the preservation of its own existence according to its nature. And according to this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life and preventing the the contrary belongs to the natural law.

Secondly, there is in a human being an inclination to things that pertain to him more specially according to that nature that he has in common with other animals, and accordingly, those things are said to belong to natural law "that nature has taught all animals," such as the intercourse of male and female, the education of children, and so forth.

Thirdly, there is in a human being and inclination to good according to the nature of reason, which is proper to him; thus a human being has a natural inclination to know the truth about God and to live in society. And so whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law, for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding this inclination.

BEING AND GOODNESS
Thomas has said that while being and goodness are the same, they differ in that goodness appears under the aspect of desirableness, because the good is the desirable (I, q 5, a 1). Being and goodness are the same, because the good is that by which something becomes what it is by developing its potentiality to actuality, which is its perfection. Every living being has some tendency or inclination; it aims at an end or goal. The good of each living being is its self-fulfillment.

The growth of an acorn into an oak tree or a puppy into a dog illustrates this. It is good for a plant or animal to grow to maturity. It is bad for its growth to be impeded by unfavorable circumstances. Thus, we recognize a puppy to be defective if it cannot develop fully the potentialities of its species. Goodness is not some external standard imposed on things from the outside; it is rather the unfolding of the innate tendencies of things. It is therefore self-evident that the good is to be sought, because by definition the good is what each thing seeks. To say that all things should seek the good is simply to endorse what all things strive to do anyway.

While speculative reasoning apprehends the being of things, practical reasoning apprehends the being of things under the appearance of their desirability or undesirability. Thus, practical reasoning is not a matter of pure logic, because it requires a combination of the rational and the inclinational, so that things are apprehended practically in relationship to one's desires as either facilitating or impeding one's inclinations. Consequently, all those things to which we have a natural inclination are apprehended by reason as being good. The order of our natural inclinations then set the order of the precepts of the natural law.

Thomas distinguishes three levels in the natural inclinations. But from what he says elsewhere in the Summa, we can add a fourth level. As influenced by Aristotle's scientific theory of biological inheritance (GA 767b24-69b31), Thomas saw three levels of the human biological desires. These desires are "generic" as shared with other animals, "specific" as shared with other human beings as rational animals, or "temperamental" as showing the individually unique traits of a particular human being (ST, I-II, q 10, a 1, ad 3; q 46, a 5; q 51, a 1; q 63, a 1). There seems, then, to be four levels of natural inclinations: substantial nature, generic nature, specific nature, and temperamental nature.

SUBSTANTIAL NATURE
Following the teaching of the Neoplatonic Book of Causes, Thomas sees the first level of reality as the creation of "being" (ens) or "existence" (esse). All substances seek the preservation of their being. Human beings share in this most fundamental level of reality in their natural inclination to survival. This corresponds to the natural biological desire for self-preservation.

Because of this natural desire for self-preservation, it belongs to natural law that killing in self-defense is justified, while unjustified killing of another human being is punished as murder (I-II, q 100, a 8, ad 3; II-II, q 64, a. 7).

GENERIC NATURE
As animals, human beings share in the natural inclinations of other animals, and particularly the mammalian animals that reproduce sexually and invest care in their offspring. In explaining this animal level of natural law, Thomas quotes from the ancient Roman jurist Ulpian: "Natural right is that which nature has taught all animals." Here the term "natural right" (ius naturale is interchangeable with "natural law" (lex naturalis). To illustrate the natural inclinations that human beings share with other animals, Ulpian referred to the sexual intercourse of male and female and the parental care of offspring as animal propensities that sustain human marriage and family life in conformity to natural law. Quoted at the beginning of Justinian's Institutes (533 A.D.), Ulpian's remarks entered the medieval tradition of natural law reasoning, and they were cited by Thomas when he explained natural law as rooted in the natural inclinations or natural instincts that human beings share with other animals. Each species of animal has a natural law corresponding to the natural inclinations of the species. The natural law for human beings is similar to the natural law of those animals who need to engage in the mammalian bonding between male and female and between parent and offspring. "Natural right in the strict sense" applies only to this level of common inclinations shared by human beings and other mammals (I-II, q 91, aa 4, 6; q 95, a 4, ad 1; II-II, q 57, a 3; Suppl, q 65, a 1, ad 4).

Thomas observes that unlike plants and inanimate entities, human beings and other intelligent animals display reason and desire in their movements (I, q 78, a 4; q 80, a 1; q 83, a 1; I-II, q 6, a 2; q 40, a 3; q 58, a 1; Commentary on Aristotle's "De Anima", secs. 629, 874). Intelligent animals consciously apprehend the objects of their desires, gather and assess information in their environment relevant to their desires, and then act according to their judgment of how best to satisfy their desires. In doing this, they learn to apprehend physical things and other animals as pleasurable or painful, useful or harmful, friendly or hostile. They act voluntarily in that they initiate acts as guided by some knowledge of their goals. They remember the past and anticipate the future. As social animals, they judge the intentions of other animals and communicate with them to act for common ends. They display and recognize social emotions such as love, hate, and anger. They learn from experience, and they transmit what they learn to others.

In so far as Thomas thus recognizes the continuity between human beings and other intelligent animals, he takes a position that is compatible with the Darwinian idea that the human species evolved from ancestral species of nonhuman animals, although Thomas never developed the idea of evolution. This supports Anthony Lisska's claim that Thomas's view of human nature and natural law is rooted in a "biological paradigm" (Aquinas's Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], pp. 68, 96-109, 131, 189-91, 198-201, 218-22, 258).

The biological character of Aquinas's reasoning about natural law as rooted in natural desires is clear in his account of marriage and familial bonding. He speaks of the human disposition to marriage as a "natural instinct of the human species" (SCG, bk. 3, chap. 123). On his account, the primary natural end of marriage is to secure the parental care of children, while the secondary natural end is to secure the conjugal bonding of male and female for a sexual division of labor in the household.

Among some animals, Aquinas observes, the female can care properly for her offspring on her own, and thus there is no natural need for any enduring bond between male and female. For those animals whose offspring do require care from both parents, however, nature implants an inclination for male and female to stay together to provide the necessary parental care (SCG, bk. 3, chaps. 122-23).

Just as is the case for those animals whose offspring could not survive or develop normally without parental care, human offspring depend upon parents (or parental surrogates) for their existence, their nourishment, and their education. To secure this natural end, nature instills in human beings natural desires for sexual coupling and parental care. Even if they do not have children, however, men and women naturally desire marital union because, not being self-sufficient, they seek the conjugal friendship of husband and wife sharing in household life.

Marriage as constituted by customary or legal rules, Aquinas says, is uniquely human, because such rules require a cognitive capacity for conceptual reasoning that no other animals have. Even so, human rules of marriage provide formal structure to natural desires that are ultimately rooted in the animal nature of human beings. Aquinas explains the natural laws of marriage in the light of Aristotle's biological studies of animal sexuality, reproduction, and parental care (compare Aquinas, SCG, bk. 3, chaps. 123-124; and Aristotle, HA, 571b3, 608b19, 610b35, 613a6, 613b33, 617a10).

SPECIFIC NATURE
The third level of natural law is uniquely human because it corresponds to the uniquely human capacity for reason, which gives human beings a self-conscious awareness in deliberately formulating a plan of life for the fullest satisfaction of their natural desires over a complete life. This includes not only social desires for living in society but also "the natural inclination to know the truth about God," which corresponds to what I have identified as the evolved natural desire for religious understanding.

Aquinas believes that the natural human desire to understand the causes of all effects leads to the desire to understand the ultimate causes--the uncaused causes--of everything, which can only be finally satisfied by the eternal contemplation of God in Heaven. The way to this supernatural happiness requires revealed religion and divine law, which surpasses natural law.

But even at the level of natural law, there is a "natural instinct" for reverence that supports natural religion. Moreover, it is natural for human laws to support religion in so far as it contributes to the moral order of human life (ST, I, q 12, a 1; I-II, q 3, a 8; q 99, a 3; II-II, q 81, a 5; q 85, a 1; SCG, I, 11; III, 25, 50-51, 57, 119).

Notice that the natural inclination "to know the truth about God" is not necessarily a natural inclination to know God. The "truth about God" might be atheism. This points to Aquinas's distinction between natural reason and supernatural revelation. Faith in revelation cannot be a matter of rational demonstration. So the natural inclination "to know the truth about God" seems to be the natural inclination to know the ultimate causes of things, which supports the life of philosophy or science. That's why the natural law precept following from this natural inclination is "shun ignorance."

Notice Thomas's remarkable silence about revelation in this article of the SUMMA. In this article, there is not a single reference to the Bible. The desire "to know the truth about God" is identified as a natural inclination requiring natural reason guided by the natural precept to "shun ignorance." From the point of view of natural law, it seems, "knowing the truth about God" is an exercise of philosophy or science in investigating the ultimate causes of things, which does not depend upon faith. Here we see the contrast between reason and revelation.

"To have faith is not in human nature," Thomas insists (II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1). To "know the truth about God" cannot be faith, because faith is beyond natural reason and can only come by a supernatural infusion from God (I-II, q. 104, a. 1, ad 3; II-II, q. 6, a. 1; q. 8, a. 1). Of those who see the same miracle or hear the same sermon, some will believe, and others will not. Natural reason by itself could never lead us to have faith, because faith must ultimately be a supernatural gift from God.

Although Darwinian science can neither confirm nor deny the supernatural truth of revelation and divine law, Darwinian science can explain natural religion as an expression of the evolved natural desire for religious understanding. We can see the evolution of religion in the evolved tendency of human beings to project their experience of mental intentionality and their "theory of mind" onto the universe as they move beyond nature to nature's God. We can also see how such religious belief reinforces the moral order of a human community.

TEMPERAMENTAL NATURE
At the level of temperamental nature, each human individual is unique in the innate dispositions that constitute individual identity. By natural temperament, "one man has a natural aptitude for science, another for fortitude, another for temperance, and in these ways, both intellectual and moral virtues are in us by way of natural aptitude, inchoatively, but not perfectly" (ST I-II, q. 63, a. 1).

So, for example, although sexual mating and parental care are natural inclinations for most human beings, some human beings are temperamentally inclined to refrain from sexual mating and parental care, and thus they are naturally suited for celibacy (ST, Suppl, q 41, a 2, ad 4).

This raises an interesting question. Aquinas condemns homosexuality as "contrary to nature," because the only natural sexual activity for human beings is heterosexual intercourse (ST, I-II, q 94, a 3, ad 2). But if homosexuality manifests a natural temperament of some individuals, who show a natural inclination for same-sex conjugal bonding, and if this does not hinder heterosexual marriage and parenting, could tolerance for homosexuality be warranted by natural law?

THE BIOLOGY OF THE SOUL
All of these levels of the natural inclinations can be studied by biological science because "the soul is united to the animal body" (ST, I, q. 76, a. 7). Even the "intellectual soul" of a human being is united to the human animal body, although the emergence of the human "intellectual soul" in the body of the human embryo requires a special infusion from God (ST, I, q. 116, a. 2).

Aquinas suggests, however, that this miraculous intervention by God in embryological development cannot be known by biological science, because it depends on faith, which cannot be rationally demonstrated. "Faith and reason are not about the same things," and therefore "the reasons employed by holy men to prove things that are of faith are not demonstrations" (ST, II-II, q. 1, a. 5). Thus, there remains an irreconciliable tension between science and faith, reason and revelation.

This explains why Pope John Paul II, in a statement to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, accepted evolutionary science, while also insisting that "the spiritual soul is immediately created by God."

Considering what Aquinas says about the natural law of knowing the truth about God and shunning ignorance in the exercise of natural reason, we might wonder whether the reliance on faith rather than science violates natural law.

Aquinas does say, of course, that the ultimate end of human life is the supernatural happiness of the afterlife. But he is clear that this does not belong to natural law, because this supernatural realm can be known only by divine law. The moral and intellectual virtues that perfect our natural inclinations according to natural reason depend on purely natural human experience. Natural law is not directed to a supernatural end. Consequently, the theological virtues by which human beings are directed to a supernatural end must be directly infused by God. "The power of those naturally instilled principles does not extend beyond the capacity of nature. Consequently, man needs in addition to be perfected by other principles in relation to his supernatural end" (I-II, q. 63, a. 3, ad 3).

Is Aquinas covertly taking the side of scientific reason against biblical revelation, even as he promotes the most rational interpretation of biblical revelation because of its moral benefits?

Some posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Pope's statement can be found here.