Religious Transcendence and Natural Evolution

As I continue to write my response to the seven commentators for the second edition of Darwinian Conservatism, I see a fundamental division between those who look to natural evolution and those who look to religious transcendence.

Neil Blackstone, Lauren Hall, and Timothy Sandefur seem to agree that we can fully understand human beings as products of natural evolution, and so we can base our moral and political reasoning on evolved human nature. Carson Holloway, Peter Augustine Lawler, Richard Sherlock, and John West seem to agree that no evolutionary account of human nature is sufficient, because we need to see that human beings have a supernatural or transcendent end, and that's why we need religion to reveal that cosmic end.

I argue that our evolved human nature includes at least 20 natural desires that constitute the range of universal or generic human goods for all human beings in all societies throughout history. The concrete expression of these goods varies for different individuals in different circumstances. Prudence or practical judgment is required for individuals to judge how best to rank and integrate the generic goods of life in an individualized way that fits the contingent and particular circumstances of each individual.

One of those natural desires is the desire for religious understanding. But the individual expression of this desire as balanced with other natural desires will vary across individuals. A crucial issue is the balance between the desire for religious understanding and the desire for intellectual understanding. For some individuals, the desire for ultimate explanation will be satisfied with taking nature as the uncaused cause for all explanation. But others will move beyond nature to some supernatural uncaused cause. This choice between reason and revelation--Athens and Jerusalem--runs throughout intellectual history.

There are moral and political implications to this issue. While I believe religious longing has to be recognized as part of evolved human nature, and while I think religious belief often supports morality, I think that natural morality as rooted in the generic goods of our 20 natural desires can stand on its own natural ground without religion. Here is where the "transcendent conservatives" disagree with me, because they deny that any healthy morality is possible without the support of some "religiously-informed cosmic teleology" (Holloway's phrase).

After all, they ask, how do we settle conflicts between the natural desires? Doesn't this require some ranking of those desires in some hierarchical order? To do this, don't we need some cosmic teleology of transcendent ends in the light of which we can determine the summum bonum or best life for human beings? Once we can identify the best life as conforming to the transcendent end or purpose of human life in the cosmos, then, they argue, we can resolve our moral conflicts by ranking our human goods from lowest to highest.

Here we come to a fundamental disagreement. My critics assume a dominant-end conception of human goods--the idea that all human goods and ways of life can be hierarchically ranked with one human good or way of life at the top. We might think of Aristotle's claim in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics that the highest and best life for human beings is the contemplative life of the philosopher, because this is the human life that is the most divine. Christian theologians saw this as a pagan intimation of the teaching of revelation that the highest life--the ultimate end for which all human beings strive--would be eternal contemplation of God.

Against this dominant end conception of human goods, I argue for an inclusive-end conception. There is a range of human goods that correspond to my 20 natural desires--goods such as familial bonding, friendship, social status, political rule, wealth, health, aesthetic pleasure, intellectual understanding, and so on. Human flourishing or happiness is constituted by these goods, so that any life without one of these goods would be less than fully happy. For example, a life without any deep friendships would not be a fully flourishing human life. But the importance of friendship as balanced against all the other goods will vary in the lives of different individuals. How one should combine and rank the goods of life requires that each individual exercise prudential judgment in deciding how to arrange and integrate these goods in a way that is appropriate for the contingent and particular circumstances of the individual and for that individual's propensities, abilities, and history. In this view, the end of human life is inclusive of all the human goods, and the ranking of goods will properly differ for different individuals with different forms of life.

Much of what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric seems to support this inclusive end view. According to this view, the philosophic life might be the best life for someone like Socrates. But for other human beings, with different temperaments, abilities, and circumstances, a different kind of life might be best. And yet, since intellectual understanding is a generic good for all human beings, any individual who would be utterly ignorant and lacking any intellectual understanding would not have a fully happy life.

Abraham Lincoln was a deeply intellectual man. This was evident in early years when he engaged in long, philosophical discussions with his friends, and he wrote a long essay questioning the authority of the Bible and its theology. But he did not devote himself to the philosophic life. Instead, he became a lawyer and politician. His love of honor drove him to a life of striving to do something great enough for his country that he would be remembered for ever.

Those like Leo Strauss and his students who think the philosophic life is the highest life for all human beings would say that Lincoln's life was inferior to Socrates', and that the goodness of any human life is to be measured by how far it approximates the life of a Socratic philosopher. Or they might say that the merely moral and political lives of people like Lincoln are good only instrumentally insofar as they serve to secure the conditions for the contemplative life of those few people like Socrates.

This makes no sense to me. Why can't we say that both Lincoln and Socrates led flourishing lives insofar as they satisfied a wide range of natural human goods, even though they ranked and integrated those goods into two different kinds of life?

My inclusive end view of human flourishing is close to what Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen would call "individualistic perfectionism." Den Uyl develops this idea in his book The Virtue of Prudence (1991). Den Uyl and Rasmussen develop it in their book Norms of Liberty (2005). Like my account of "Darwinian natural right," their "individualistic perfectionism" recognizes both human nature and human individuality. Human flourishing manifests human nature in the generic goods of human life. It also manifests human individuality in that human flourishing is the individual flourishing of particular individuals. The basic or generic goods of life--such as health, wealth, friendship, honor, and knowledge--constitute the natural end of human life. Full flourishing requires all of these goods in some form. But the ranking and integration of these goods must properly vary for different individuals, and that's why prudence becomes the supreme moral virtue because it must judge how best to rank and integrate these goods for each individual life. This supports a moral and political argument for societies of ordered liberty as securing the conditions in which human individuals are most likely to achieve humanly flourishing lives.

Transcendent conservatives like Holloway, Lawler, Sherlock, and West reject such a view of morality. According to West, we need some "transcendent standard of morality" rooted in the cosmic order of an intelligent designer or eternal nature. According to Holloway, we need "revealed religion" to provide a transcendent ranking of goods so that we can see one particular form of life as conforming to the cosmic end of all human striving.

For this to work, the transcendent conservatives would have to persuade us to accept a transcendent, religious conception of the universe that is authoritative, clear, and reliable in its moral teaching. How would they do that?

Holloway has appealed to Aristotle's arguments for the supremacy of the philosophic life in Book 10 of the Ethics. He has suggested that Aristotle's arguments show the influence of "revealed religion." But is it clear that Aristotle believed in "revealed religion"? He does invoke some conception of divinity in the Ethics in saying that philosophy is the most divine activity--the human activity most loved by the gods--but it's not clear what exactly he means by this, or even whether he is really serious about it.

Holloway also invokes the tradition of Christian religion. But then it's not clear whether he thinks all human beings can be persuaded to embrace this religion. At times, he speaks of "Catholic Christianity" as though this would be his favored form of religion. But, again, how does he expect to persuade everyone to adopt this religion?

As an alternative to Holloway's appeal to Christian religion, transcendent conservatives might turn to West's argument for an intelligent designer. But as West himself indicates, the intelligent designer is not necessarily the same as the biblical god. And even if we were to accept West's arguments for the existence of an intelligent designer, he never explains why we should attribute any moral authority to this intelligent designer. In fact, Behe worries about the apparent immorality of the intelligent designer in deliberately designing living mechanisms--like malaria, for example--to kill millions of innocent people. But then Behe decides that we cannot know "whether the designer of life was a dope, a demon, or a deity," and after all, "from the bare conclusion of design, I see no necessary major implications for our daily lives." So if Behe is right, recognizing the intelligent designer is not going to give us any moral guidance.

If we are left, then, with Holloway's Christian religion--and perhaps, more specifically, Catholic Christianity--as the only way to provide the transcendent hierarchy of cosmic goods that we seek, how exactly do we enforce this morally and politically? Does this point us to theocracy as the only answer? If so, then transcendent conservatism must reject any free society in which individuals have religious liberty. This seems to be exactly what Sandefur fears in traditionalist conservatism.

If the transcendent conservatives are not implicitly arguing for theocracy, then how exactly do they expect a free society to foster a healthy moral order without a shared devotion to a revealed Christian religion that enforces a cosmic hierarchy of goods?

The inclination of transcendent conservatives towards theocracy was suggested last year in Dinesh D'Souza's book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. D'Souza is trying to persuade American conservatives that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims" (287). He claims that the moral debate today is divided sharply between two positions. On the one side, conservatives believe in a religious morality rooted in "an external moral order" and "external commands." On the other side, liberals believe in a secular morality of the inner self, "the morality of self-fulfillment" (18-20). The liberals' secular morality of self-fulfillment promotes moral corruption through hedonistic self-indulgence and materialism. Traditional Muslims believe that this liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life. American conservatives, D'Souza insists, should admit that they are right. America really is morally corrupt insofar as liberal morality has prevailed in American life. American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against the corruption of such secular morality.

Do the transcendent conservatives--like Holloway, Lawler, Sherlock, and West--think D'Souza is wrong? If so, why? If we need "revealed religion" to support a transcendent, cosmic hierarchy of goods, why doesn't Islamic theocracy provide what we need?

Ross, Lincoln, and the Biblical Morality of Slavery

In response to my arguments for Darwinian natural right and Darwinian conservatism, the most common objection is that a morality rooted in human nature fails if it is not supported by religious belief. This is the major objection coming from religious conservatives like Carson Holloway and John West. The same objection comes from philosophical theologians like C. Stephen Evans and John Hare.

Evans and Hare are both leading proponents of the divine command theory of morality, based on the idea that ultimately the only reliable standard of morality is God's command. They criticize my evolutionary naturalism, because they believe a purely natural morality cannot work if it is not sustained by religious belief in God as the source of all moral standards. Holloway and West seem to make the same argument, although they are not quite as explicit in adopting the divine command theory.

All of these critics look to the moral debate over slavery as illustrating the failure of natural morality without religion. I argue--particularly, in my chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right--that slavery manifested a conflict between the natural desire of the slaveholders to exploit their slaves and the natural desire of the slaves to resist exploitation. Slavery was wrong because it violated the natural moral principle of justice as reciprocity. The resistance of slaves was a reminder to slaveholders that their slaves were not naturally adapted to their enslavement, and that to treat them as slaves was to treat some human beings as if they were not human. But still the self-interest of slaveholders made it hard to immediately abolish slavery without great costs. And the natural tendency to tribalism made it hard for former slaveholders and former slaves to live together as equals. All of these factors--combined with the constitutional status of slavery in the United States--made the debate over slavery the deepest moral crisis in American history.

But according to my critics, such an analysis fails to explain the abolition of slavery, because it fails to see that human beings would never have recognized the immorality of slavery through their natural experience if they had not been taught that slavery was contrary to God's law. According to these critics, we know that slavery is wrong only because we know that slavery contradicts the the moral principle of universal love taught in the Bible. The teaching of Jesus that we should love our neighbors sustains a universal and disinterested love of all human beings equally, and all morality is rooted in this one divine command. The biblical teachings about the universal moral dignity of all human beings as created in God's image and about the Golden Rule as dictating that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us support this universal love teaching. Only in the light of this religious morality of the Bible could human beings finally see the immorality of slavery and then work to abolish it.

I have written about various facets of this topic many times on this blog. But recently I was reminded of it in reading the Rev. Fred A. Ross's book Slavery Ordained of God, which was first published in 1857 and reprinted this year by BiblioBazaar (Charleston, S.C.). Ross was a leading Presbyterian minister and theologian in Huntsville, Alabama, who defended Southern slavery as supported by the Bible. As Mark Noll and other scholars have noted, this was a popular position, because many Christians in the United States read the Bible as sanctioning slavery as commanded by God.

Part of the special interest that Ross's writing has is that Abraham Lincoln wrote a brief response to Ross's proslavery theology. As I noted in my recent posts on Thomas Krannawitter's new book on Lincoln, Krannawitter claims that "Lincoln proceeded to dismantle the pro-slavery theological arguments presented by Ross." But when we look at Lincoln's note on Ross, we see that Lincoln is actually evasive about the Bible on slavery: "The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning." Lincoln then goes on to suggest that "Dr. Ross" is probably moved by selfish motives that detract from "perfect impartiality." Lincoln thus appeals to our knowledge of human nature as a ground for moral discussion rather than the Bible.

But my critics--the proponents of the divine command theory of morality--would say that we cannot recognize the immorality of slavery by purely natural experience. After all, if the slaveholder is satisfying his natural desires for dominance and wealth by exploiting slaves, why should he not think slavery is moral? To see the immorality of slavery, we must move beyond nature to some supernatural morality--the morality of divine command as expressed in the Bible.

But what about the Bible? Is the Bible clearly against slavery? If we look at the "squabble" over the Bible's meaning, can we be sure that Ross is wrong in claiming that the Bible shows God commanding that slavery is right?

Like my critics, Ross espouses a divine command theory of morality. To say that standards of right and wrong exist as natural facts independently of God's will is, Ross insists, atheism. Ross's alternative is that right and wrong are contingent products of God's will. We know what is right or wrong only because, and to the extent that, we know whether God has declared it right or wrong. And for this, we must turn to the Bible as God's revelation of His will. Therefore, we cannot know whether slavery is right or wrong except by seeing what the Bible teaches about God's will as to slavery.

And what does the Bible teach about God's will concerning slavery? The Old Testament clearly sanctions slavery. The ancient Hebrews practiced it, and God commanded it. Similarly, in the New Testament, the Christians accept slavery as practiced by the ancient Romans. Paul teaches slaves to obey their masters, just as he teaches children to obey their parents, and wives to obey their husbands. Ross goes over all the relevant biblical passages to show the endorsement of slavery.

But what about the biblical arguments of the abolitionists--arguments that appealed to the teachings about being created in God's image, about universal love, and about the Golden Rule? Ross responds to each of these arguments by showing that the Bible clearly teaches that human beings are commanded to conform to relationships of authority in which some people are to submit to the authority of their superiors. Children must submit to parents. Wives must submit to husbands. Subjects must submit to government. Slaves must submit to masters. So the teaching of universal love must be interpreted in the light of these moral obligations to submit to authority. That we are all created in God's image does not mean that we are all the same. Children need to submit to the authority of their parents, because the circumstances of children make them dependent on parental care. Such relationships of inferiors and superiors run throughout society, and they are sanctioned by God.

This leads Ross to denounce the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence as an atheistic teaching of Thomas Jefferson that contradicts the Bible. The Bible does not teach that all human beings are born absolutely equal in their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This teaching comes not from the Bible but from the "social compact" tradition of John Locke as adopted by atheists like Tom Paine and Jefferson.

To me, this shows how religious morality--especially biblical morality--can be unreliable, which forces us to fall back on our natural moral sense as rooted in our evolved human nature. Against this, my critics appeal to what they take to be the moral universalism of biblical religion. But this appeal to biblical morality is always vague. They never explain exactly how the Bible specifies our moral norms. And in the case of slavery, they just assume without argument that the Bible is clearly opposed to slavery, and so they never respond at all to those like Ross who support their pro-slavery position with meticulous biblical exegesis.

Lincoln saw this problem with great clarity. In the theological crisis of the Civil War, "both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

For just a few samples of the many posts I have written on this topic, go here, here, here, here, and here.

Fred Ross's book can be found at various places online. For example, here.

A Response to Seven Commentaries, Part 2

I am continuing my response to seven commentators--Blackstone, Hall, Holloway, Lawler, Sandefur, Sherlock, and West.

(3) INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Sherlock and West come to the defense of "intelligent design theory" as a scientific alternative to Darwinian biology.

Their remarks confirm my claim that the case for intelligent design relies almost entirely on negative rhetoric. The proponents of intelligent design win the debate only if they can put the burden of proof on Darwinian science--a burden of proof that they themselves cannot satisfy in proving intelligent design as a positive alternative. They ask for clear, step-by-step explanations for evolutionary history confirmed by empirical observation. Because evolutionary science is a historical science relying on indirect evidence of the past, this is often hard to achieve. That's why Darwin emphasized the "difficulties" for his theory. But the proponents cannot provide any positive alternative explanation of their own. To do that, they would have to explain exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer intervened to create the "irreducibly complex" mechanisms of life. Advocates for intelligent design cannot do this, and they carefully avoid even trying to do it.

Even if there is an intelligent designer, it is hard to understand why He is unable or unwilling to work through a natural evolutionary process. In fact, many religious believers see no conflict between theistic belief and evolutionary science. After all, isn't there more grandeur in having the intelligent power to design laws of nature so that they carry out the designer's plan through natural evolution than in having to repeatedly intervene in the history of nature to fill some gap in nature?

In fact, the leading biologist promoting intelligent design--Michael Behe--actually suggests that theistic evolution could make a lot of sense. In The Edge of Evolution, Behe writes: "The purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws. The purposeful design of life is also fully compatible with the idea of universal common descent, one important facet of Darwin's theory" (232). He also writes: "although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).

Whether one becomes a theistic evolutionist or not depends on how one resolves the problem of ultimate explanation. If one looks to nature as the unexplained and uncaused cause of everything, then one could be an evolutionary naturalist without being a theist. But if one looks to nature's God as the unexplained and uncaused cause behind nature, then one might be a theistic evolutionist. Darwinian conservatism is open to both.

(4) NATURAL LAW AND RELIGION
Sandefur endorses my position by saying, "this is nothing more than good old-fashioned teleological natural law theory, updated with the discoveries of modern science." Against this idea, Sherlock insists that "we cannot have natural law without divine or eternal law." Similarly, West and Holloway say that a natural moral law based on natural science is impossible, because there can be no natural moral standard without some religious or eternal standard of right.

I agree that religious belief can be important in reinforcing a natural morality. But still a natural morality must stand on its own natural ground even without religious belief. After all, as Thomas Aquinas and other proponents of traditional natural law have indicated, the very distinction between natural law and divine law turns on the distinction between natural experience and divine revelation.

Moreover, Holloway, Sherlock, and West are all remarkably vague about how exactly religion resolves moral issues clearly and precisely. For such a religious morality to work, it would have to have moral authority, moral clarity, and moral reliability. But on each of these points, religious morality often falls short.

To have moral authority, we would have to agree on which religious tradition has preeminent authority. Atheists will reject any religious authority. But even religious believers will disagree about which religious source is authoritative. Are Holloway, Sherlock, and West open to just any religious tradition as morally authoritative? Or would they insist on just biblical religions? If it's the biblical religions, how would they resolve differences between Judaism, Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism?

To have moral clarity, the statements of religious morality would have to be clear enough to resolve disagreements. Consider, for example, the case of slavery. Throughout the history of slavery, biblical religious believers have noticed that the Bible endorses slavery and never recommends its abolition. But some believers have tried to interpret the Bible as condemning slavery. This split arose in the United States and made the Civil War a theological crisis. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln dramatically depicted this split over the Bible: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

To have moral reliability, we would have to recognize the moral teachings of religion as reliable. But when religious texts like the Bible teach slavery, polygamy, infanticide, and genocidal warfare, we are forced to question whether these teachings are reliable or not.

We might try to resolve these difficulties by saying--as Holloway, Sherlock, and West sometimes do--that the entire moral teaching of the Bible is reducible to the principle of the equal moral dignity of all human beings as created in God's image and the practical principle of the Golden Rule. Surely, we can all agree to this? In fact, Darwin recognizes the Golden Rule as the "cornerstone of morality" by which we can judge moral progress.

But then it's not clear that this really is the Bible's teaching, or whether it's the teaching that we have read into the Bible based on our modern understanding of humanitarian universalism.

And even if we take this disinterested humanitarianism as the foundation of religious morality, we are still left with insuperable problems that require practical wisdom and natural human experience to resolve. For example, Sherlock identifies himself as "a strict pacifist on religious grounds." But then he adds: "I admit that war has always been and will always be part of human existence." And he endorses the "just war" tradition. But didn't the idea of "just war" arise in Christian tradition as a way of correcting the pacifism of Jesus? An absolute pacifism of "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" does not work in natural human experience, because human beings are naturally divided by group against group conflict in which war is unavoidable. This creates tragic moral conflicts that cannot be overcome by absolute principles of universal humanitarianism. We need prudence or practical judgment working on our natural experience in the world.

Consider the following comments from West: "I actually agree with him that showing a biological basis for certain moral desires could conceivably reinforce traditional morality--but only if we have reason to assume that these biological desires are somehow normative. If one believes that natural desires have been implanted in human beings by intelligent design, or that they represent permanent truths inherent in the nature of the universe, it would be rational to accept those desires as a grounding for a universal code of morality."

So does this mean that we are morally obligated to follow all of our natural desires if we believe they are the product of intelligent design or an unchanging nature? How exactly would that work? If we believe the biblical God to be the intelligent designer, does that mean that whatever that God commands must be obeyed, even if it seems immoral? How can we judge that the intelligent designer or unchanging nature is good if we do not already have some independent standard of goodness derived from our natural moral sense? Is it possible that the intelligent designer used the evolutionary process to create the human species and its moral sense? Is it possible that "unchanging nature" produced human beings and human morality through an evolutionary process? If so, would that make our biological desires as shaped by evolution normative for us?

I have much more that I need to say in response to the seven commentators. But I will save that for my text to be published in the new edition of Darwinian Conservatism.

For some of my previous posts responding to Holloway, go here, here, here, and here.

For Lawler, go here, here, here, and here.

For Sandefur, go here and here.

For West, go , here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The new edition of Darwinian Conservatism will also reprint Michael Shermer's Scientific American article "Darwin on the Right" and Patricia Cohen's New York Times article on the AEI debate on the book. My blog posts on these articles can be found here and here.

A Response to Seven Commentaries on DARWINIAN CONSERVATISM

Imprint Academic will be publishing a new expanded edition of Darwinian Conservatism edited by Kenneth Blanchard (Northern State University, Aberdeen, South Dakota). This new edition will reprint the original text for Darwinian Conservatism. It will also include critical commentaries on the book by seven authors: Neil Blackstone (Northern Illinois University), Lauren Hall (Rochester Institute of Technology), Carson Holloway (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Peter Augustine Lawler (Berry College), Timothy Sandefur (Pacific Legal Foundation), Richard Sherlock (Utah State University), and John West (Discovery Institute). I will write a response to the commentaries. Blanchard will write a survey of the debate.

On this blog, I have already some responses to Holloway, Lawler, Sandefur, and West. In my response for this book, I will incorporate and elaborate some of the points I have made here in some of my previous posts.

I expect to organize my response under four categories: (1) conservative thought, (2) individuals and groups, (3) intelligent design, and (4) natural law and religion.

(1) CONSERVATIVE THOUGHT
Hall and Sandefur agree with me that the evolutionary biology of human nature supports libertarian or classical liberal thought. But they sharply distinguish libertarianism from traditionalist conservatism, and so they don't agree with me that Darwinian science supports a fusion of classical liberalism and traditionalist conservatism. Hall and Sandefur seem to agree in defending a purely secular libertarianism that is suspicious of any religious conservatism that might threaten individual liberty and scientific rationalism.

I will respond by reiterating my claim that Darwinian biology supports ordered liberty as the central idea that unites classical liberals and traditionalist conservatives. Classical liberals look back to Adam Smith. Traditionalist conservatives look back to Edmund Burke. But Burke and Smith were intellectual friends. Burke praised both of Smith's books--The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Burke was a Whig, and the Burkean conservatives recognize themselves to be "liberal conservatives" in the sense that they share Burke's devotion to the Whig tradition of liberty.

Darwin drew heavily from Smith, particularly Smith's theory of moral sentiments. And like both Smith and Burke, Darwin recognized the importance of cultural tradition for moral and political order. Darwin's idea of evolution was derived from the idea of spontaneous order coming out of the Scottish and British Enlightenment.

Although Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk were often personally critical of one another, they agreed on a lot. After all, Hayek identified himself as a Burkean Whig, and Kirk shared Hayek's fear of statist coercion. As Sandefur indicates, some of Kirk's remarks can be interpreted as favoring statist coercion in the enforcement of traditional norms. But Kirk generally recognized that moral order came best from the spontaneous orders of civil society.

The libertarian's devotion to individual liberty and the traditionalist's devotion to social order can be properly combined in that trichotomy of order that I develop in my book--natural order, customary order, and deliberate order. Darwinian explanations of social life must stress all three. As social and political animals, our social life manifests our natural propensities as diversely expressed in customary traditions and as subject to rational deliberation.

I agree with Hayek in stressing the importance of spontaneous order as custom or tradition. But I also argue that this customary order is constrained by nature, and reason can stipulate order within the constraints of both nature and custom.

(2) INDIVIDUALS AND GROUPS
Much of the discussion from the commentators turns on the relationship between individuals and groups. Sandefur contrasts conservatives who see society as a value in itself and libertarians who see society as a value only to individuals. Blackstone contrasts my "tragic vision" of human nature as based on individual-level selection and the "utopian vision" based on group-level selection. On the other hand, Lawler says that my Darwinian science cannot account for the radical individuality of human self-consciousness, which manifests an obsessively self-centered longing for love and fear of death. According to Lawler, Darwinism stresses the importance of the species while denying the individual's insistence that "it really is all about me."

In this discussion, I would agree with Hall who says that Darwinian science shows a "mixed human nature, both social and selfish." As selfish animals, we do think "it really is all about me." But as social animals, we live for the sake of others. The "tragic vision" of Darwinian conservatism sees human nature as showing a conflict between individual-level selfishness and group-level altruism.

It is hard for me to respond to Lawler, because I cannot figure out exactly what he is saying. At times, he seems to be affirming a radical individuality and criticizing Darwinism for failing to respect such individuality. But at other times, he seems to reject this individuality as narcissism and praises Darwinism for showing that our true happiness comes from social engagement. On the one hand, he insists that to be human is to be utterly self-centered. On the other hand, he dismisses such self-centeredness as "the modern error."

I don't understand Lawler's claim that "Arnhart denies that love and death are essential to our being," and that I cannot account for "the fact of our deep loneliness or of our deep longing to be known and loved by other persons." It is odd to say this considering that I stress the natural desires for friendship, conjugal love, parental care, and familial bonding as manifestations of our naturally social animality.

As an Heideggerian existentialist, Lawler believes that existential anxiety in struggling with the meaning of life and death defines our human identity. But contrary to what Lawler says, Darwinian science recognizes this. Darwin observed that human beings were unique in their self-conscious reflection on life and death. Moreover, Darwinian conservatism supports the free society as necessary for securing the conditions in which individuals are free to associate in families, social groups, and churches to answer the transcendent questions of the meaning of life.

I will contine this in a second post.

How Presidential Greatness Subverts Republican Government

Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is one of the best books on Lincoln. It's a collective political biography of Lincoln, William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edwin Stanton, and Edward Bates, which shows how Lincoln brought his political rivals into his presidential cabinet so that he could draw from their intellectual and political strengths even when they disagreed with him. Recently, Barack Obama has said that he would like to follow Lincoln's example by bringing his opponents into his administration to create "the best possible government." In the August 3rd New York Times, Goodwin has an oped piece arguing that while this would be hard to do in today's political environment, our need for good government to meet the crises of our times would be well served by a President surrounded by people willing to disagree with him.

What bothers me about all of this--and what should bother any citizen who favors a republican form of government--is the unstated assumption that the "best possible government" is a purely presidential government. The concern with promoting good deliberation in the White House implies that this is the only place in the government where deliberation occurs and policies are made. The silence about the Congress is remarkable.

This cult of the presidency is the primary threat to the American republic. This cult is evident in our preoccupation with presidential "greatness" and "leadership." We assume that good government requires central direction from the White House. This is very far from the republicanism of the U.S. Constitution. In the Constitution, the first and longest article is the article on the powers of Congress, and those congressional powers are clearly meant to be the center of the government. But now, we have effectively elevated the presidency to the top. Rather than the original constitution, we now live under the sort of regime favored by the Progressives--a regime of presidential leadership overriding the constitutional system of checks and balances.

Lincoln warned in his Lyceum Speech of 1838 that the greatest threat to the American republic would come from the rise of ambitious men who would seek the glory and distinction of becoming the national leader--men like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. But now, far from worrying about Caesarism as a threat to republican government, we assume that good government requires it.

We can see this in the historical ratings game: Who are the greatest presidents? Historians and political scientists play the game by ranking the presidents in terms of their greatness. The latest contribution to this game is Alvin Felzenberg's The Leadership We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game. He ranks the presidents in six categories: character, vision, competence, economic policy, promoting liberty, and foreign policy. Lincoln ranks at the top as the greatest president based on these criteria. But notice, again, the assumption that the whole government and all its policies depend on the President. This is not republican government. This is the presidential government of the Progressives.

Oddly enough, many conservatives have been taken over by such thinking. For example, neoconservatives like Harvey Mansfield have praised George Bush for his "one-man rule" and "imperial greatness." Like many Straussians, Mansfield thinks the best form of government would be the arbitrary rule of the one wise man, and he implies that this supports executive prerogative as superior to the rule of law. As I have indicated in my posts on Mansfield, this shows a dangerous fascination with what Mansfield calls "manly nihilism." Standing behind much of this Straussian scorn for limited government and the rule of law is Carl Schmitt's "decisionism."

As I have indicated in my recent posts on Thomas Krannawitter's new book on Lincoln, Krannawitter falls into the same trap. On the one hand, he rightly criticizes the Progressives for turning all government over to the "vision" and "leadership" of the President. On the other hand, he seems to endorse presidential government by agreeing with Benjamin Kleinerman's suggestion "that it is better for the president to act without law and, in so doing, to explain and defend his actions by speaking openly to the people about the temporary necessities that require such actions." This idea that the president should circumvent the Congress and appeal directly to the people for his authority is the core of the Progressive conception of presidential government.

As I have suggested previously on this blog and in Darwinian Conservatism, republican government based on checks and balances and the rule of law conforms to a realistic view of human nature. There is a natural human inclination to look to one man as the ruler, and some men are ambitious enough to seek the glory of such rule. (This reflects a primate evolutionary legacy of social groups organized around a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male.) But no man can be trusted with unchecked power. And there's a natural human inclination to resist exploitative dominance by one or few individuals. That's why a constitutional republic is designed to balance the powers of the one, the few, and the many.

Presidential government, by contrast, is based on a utopian view of human nature--the idea that the leadership of one wise man is the best government. This is the Fuhrer principle--Schmitt's "decisionism"--that stands against constitutional republicanism.

As citizens in a republic, we should not demand "greatness" from our presidents. We should demand service to a republican structure of government in which deliberation on policy is found primarily in the legislative branches.

Kaebnick on Leon Kass's Humean Morality

I have often expressed my frustration with Leon Kass's failure to lay out a plausible line of reasoning for his positions on science, religion, and morality. Some of my comments can be found here, here, here, and here.

A big part of my frustration is that while much of Kass's writing points to the sort of moral naturalism that I have adopted in defending "Darwinian natural right," he almost never develops his arguments in any clear way, and he often expresses a scorn for modern natural science that is unwarranted.

Kass's famous--if not infamous--article "The Wisdom of Repugnance" illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of his writing. In defending the importance of moral emotion for moral judgment, he rightly invokes a tradition of naturalistic moral philosophy that stretches from Aristotle to David Hume to Adam Smith to Charles Darwin, and it is this tradition that I build upon in my writing. But Kass's article doesn't develop the reasoning behind this tradition. And thus he leaves many readers with the thought that Kass thinks moral judgments are nothing more than irrational expressions of feeling--the "yuck factor" as its derisively identified among bioethicists.

But now in the July-August 2008 issue of The Hastings Center Report, Gregory Kaebnick has an excellent article--"Reasons of the Heart: Emotion, Rationality, and the 'Wisdom of Repugnance'"--that develops an interpretation of Kass's article as implicitly grounded in the same view of moral judgment as that defended by David Hume.

Near the end of his article, Kaebnick notes that my Darwinian Natural Right follows closely the same line of thought that he defends. In fact, I would say that Kaebnick's article is a remarkably clear and concise statement of the main ideas in my naturalistic view of morality as rooted in moral emotions, moral reasoning, and the natural desires of the human species.

In defense of Kass's appeal to natural moral emotions, Kaebnick says: "I am interested only in the thought that there might be aspects of human nature that we do, in fact, value without being able to prove that we should. My goal will be to show that considering emotions integral to moral judgments is philosophically respectable." He does this by defending Hume's account of moral judgments as expressions of a natural moral sense. "Hume's point," Kaebnick rightly explains, "is not that morality is silly or unimportant, but only that logic and empirical investigation alone cannot generate moral judgments. In effect, morality is itself, for Hume, a matter of human nature."

Kaebnick shows that there are four major advantages to Hume's position. First, it is modest, in that it does not require extravagant metaphysical or logical constructions. Second, it shows completeness and unity in accounting for moral experience in an intelligible way. Third, it fits easily with modern natural science, and particularly Darwinian biology. Of course, this is a point that I have stressed. Finally, it fits easily with ordinary moral language.

Kaebnick then seeks to allay the two major fears about the Humean view of morality. To the fears that it promotes moral relativism and has no room for moral argument, he responds by showing how Hume's account of morality is open to moral debate between different moral views that can lead to moral reform and progress. Our moral sentiments are responses to how we see the world, and so we can examine and sometimes change our moral sentiments by scrutinizing our view of the world.

Kaebnick writes: "the Humean position can admit that moral judgments are formed, evaluated, and coordinated cognitively. Not only are they not whims, but they are not merely attitudinal. What the Humean position denies is that we can compel a person solely through force of reason to accept a given moral judgment. Further, the Humean position strongly suggests not only that reason is of limited use, but that much effective moral argument will consist in trying to get a person to share one's basic attitudes. We may rely on tone of voice, on stories, on imagery, even on the bonds of friendship, to try to win a person over. But this is just how moral argument actually is. Fortunately, discrepancies in attitudes are rarely chasms; differences are often a matter of emphasis."

Hume was a moral critic of slavery. And as I have often argued on this blog and elsewhere, studying the debate over slavery and Abraham Lincoln's statesmanship in handling the slavery issue supports Hume's account of moral experience as open to moral reform. Kaebnik mentions the emancipation of slaves as one example of how moral argument can lead to moral progress, but he doesn't elaborate.

The moral progress in abolishing slavery is so evident that even cultural moral relativists must recognize it. For example, Jesse Prinz--in his recent book The Emotional Construction of Morals--takes an emotivist and relativist view of Hume's moral philosophy, and from this, Prinz concludes that the cultural variation in morality shows that morality is so relative to each cultural group that there are no universal moral standards. Every moral system is a cultural construction, and none can claim to be morally better than any other. He recognizes, however, that such a radical moral relativism is implausible if it denies the very possibility of moral progress, as in the obvious moral progress that came with the abolition of slavery. In response to this problem, Prinz affirms that moral progress is possible, and he takes the abolition of slavery as a clear illustration of such moral progress. He surveys many of the arguments against slavery made in the United States and elsewhere as examples of how "standards of assessment" can persuade people to "moral conversion" leading to adoption of new moral systems. But, then, in order to show that such moral progress is compatible with his moral relativism, he asserts that "the standards by which moral progress is judged are not themselves moral standards," because they are actually "extramoral standards." So, for example, to judge slavery as bad because it subverts the norms of reciprocity that sustain social cooperation is an appeal to an "extramoral" standard. But this works only as a sophistical twisting of language in which standards of good and bad that lead to "moral conversion" and "moral progress" are not really moral!

Kaebnick's Humean interpretation of Kass helps to illuminate his writing and the writing of the President's Council on Bioethics. Kaebnick observes: "Much of the writing of the President's Council that has frustrated professional philosophers consists of rhetorical moves that seek to persuade rather than prove. To employ these moves is to admit that one's conclusion cannot be obtained solely by means of inferences. But so it is with morality."

The reader of Kaebnick's article should notice that his philosophical defense of Kass's writing does not depend upon agreeing with Kass's particular conclusions about restricting biotechnology. On the contrary, Kaebnick indicates how a Humean view of the "wisdom of repugnance" leaves us open to questioning and perhaps correcting our initial repugnance towards some biotechnological technique when we discover that our repugnance is not warranted.

Panels on "Evolution and Morality" at the APSA Convention

At this year's convention of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31, in Boston, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy will be sponsoring a series of three panels on "Evolution and Morality." The ASPLP's program can be found at their website.

For one of the panels, I will be presenting a paper on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics." The commentators will be Daniel Lord Smail, a historian at Harvard who is the author of On Deep History and the Brain, and Richard Richards a philosopher of biology from the University of Alabama.

My panel is at 10:15 a.m. on Friday, August 29th, in the Sheraton Boston (39 Dalton Street) in the Sheraton Independence Ballroom West.

The first panel will meet at 4:15 p.m., August 28, with Philip Kitcher giving a paper on "Naturalistic Ethics without Fallacies." Kitcher is a philosopher of biology at Columbia University.

The second panel is at 8:00 a.m. immediately preceding my panel, with Nita Farahany giving her paper on "Law and Behavioral Morality." She works on the intersection of criminal law, behavioral genetics, neuroscience, and philosophy. She's a law professor at Vanderbilt University who has advanced degrees in biology and philosophy as well as her law degree. Is that sick or not?

Eventually, all of these papers and commentaries will be published together as one of the books in the Nomos annual series that has been edited for many years by ASPLP.

All of the papers and commentaries will be available before the convention at a website open only to ASPLP members. But I will also upload my paper to the APSA convention website by the end of this week.

ASPLP has a fascinating format for their yearly gatherings. They select a common theme and have three panels organized around three papers presented by a law professor, a philosopher, and a political scientist. Then, for each of these three panels, they have two commentators, preserving the mix between the three disciplines. If the paper presenter is a political scientist, the commentators are a philosopher and a law professor, and so on. They then gather all of these papers and commentaries, along with other papers on the common theme, and publish them as an annual book published by New York University Press.

Krannawitter on Lincoln, Darwin, & Biblical Historicism

This is the fourth part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

In the first paragraph of his book, Krannawitter refers to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species as influencing P. T. Barnum's exhibit at his American Museum on "Connecting Link between Human and Brute Creation." Krannawitter suggests that the evolutionary theories of Chambers and Darwin denied the equal moral dignity of human beings in a way that supported racist arguments for slavery. This is the first of many references in Krannawitter's book to Darwin, with the suggestion that Lincoln's defense of natural right as based on human equality and opposition to slavery was subverted by Darwinian evolution, which supported the historicism that led to the progressivist attack on natural right and limited government.

Krannawitter's writing on this point is strange. First of all, he says nothing about William Herndon's report that Lincoln read Chambers' book and was persuaded by it. Herndon wrote: "The volume was published in Edinburgh, and undertook to demonstrate the doctrine of development or evolution. The treatise interested him greatly, and he was deeply impressed with the notion of the so-called 'universal law'--evolution; he did not extend greatly his researches, but by continued thinking in a single channel seemed to grow into a warm advocate of the new doctrine." Later, Darwin acknowledged that Chambers' book anticipated many of the main elements of Darwin's own account of evolution. So here, as I have indicated in many previous posts, we see one of the many points of agreement between Lincoln and Darwin.

It is also strange that with all of Krannawitter's references to Darwin, he never cites any specific passage of any writing by Darwin. This reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with Harry Jaffa. He criticized Darwin. I responded by quoting some passages from Darwin's Descent of Man. Jaffa then confessed that he had never read Darwin. Similarly, I see no evidence that Krannawitter has read Darwin.

Jason Jividen is a professor at the University of Saint Francis (Fort Wayne, Indiana), who wrote a dissertation under me on the use and abuse of Lincoln in American political rhetoric, which I expect will soon be published as a book. Recently, he sent me an email message about Krannawitter's book, which included this comment:

"Despite the fact that they paint Darwin and Hegel as the twin evils for natural right, the Claremont/Jaffa types almost always delve much more deeply into historicism (Hegel, Wilson, FDR, etc.) than Darwin. . . . What is often lacking in the Claremont stuff here is an actual demonstration, even in brief, of Darwin's thought, using Darwin's own words, i.e. the method they claim most historians, politicians, and political scientists refuse to do when looking at Lincoln. Rather, there is always something linking Darwin to progressivism and the like using Wilson's words, or Dewey's words or something like that. But if that is all it takes to link Darwin to progressivism/modern liberalism, then we could just as easily link Lincoln with the left simply because they so frequently cite him. Even if they are right about Darwin, one would think that they would need to treat Darwin in the same manner they insist great thinkers should be treated."

I agree. If Krannawitter and the Jaffa followers were to read Darwin, the first thing they might notice is that he was a life-long opponent of slavery. Moreover, much of The Descent of Man is an attack on the theory of scientific racism that the human races are actually separate species. Against this, Darwin argued that all human beings were equal as members of the same species and thus endowed with the uniquely human capacities for language and the moral sense. Here then is the ground for Darwinian natural right as based in a universal human nature. I have elaborated these points on this blog and in various publications, especially the chapter on slavery in Darwinian Natural Right.

Krannawitter might respond to this idea of Darwinian natural right by saying that there is no need for a scientific ground for natural right. He says that "human knowledge of human nature is prescientific and prephilosophic," because "our commonsense knowledge of human nature precedes all philosophic or scientific inquiry" (139). This might be so. But isn't it helpful to have modern science supporting our commonsense grasp of human equality? After all, Krannawitter says that "throughout history, few people have found it obvious that all human beings are equally human," which suggests that "common sense" is not enough.

Although Krannawitter refers often to Aristotle, he never mentions Aristotle's account of the natural slave. If he did, he would have to confront the fundamental issue in the whole debate over slavery: Are some human beings by nature adapted for slavery? Darwinian science supports the conclusion that despite the differences between individuals and races, all normal human beings have those minimal capacities for reason and speech that constitute the universal nature of the human species. The proslavery racists had to argue for a racial science that would deny this. Krannawitter never takes up this debate.

If Darwinian science is not the source of the historicism that subverted the idea of natural right, then where do we find the source? Krannawitter points to Hegel. But doesn't Hegel's philosophy of history ultimately derive from the biblical idea of history? In fact, Hegel acknowledged this when he wrote: "We transform the language of religion into that of philosophy."

This is pertinent to Lincoln and the slavery debate. As I have often noted on this blog, the Bible supports slavery, and so the debate over slavery in America created a theological crisis. Krannawitter recognizes this in his writing about pro-slavery Christian theology. He notes James Henley Thornwell's biblical historicism: "God is in history" (238). And he also comments on Fred Ross's biblical defense of slavery based on the claim that right and wrong are based completely on the will of God, and therefore any affirmation that right and wrong can be known naturally by human reason is atheism. Since the Bible clearly sanctions slavery and never condemns it as wrong, we know that slavery is morally right because God commands it (238-41).

Krannawitter says that "Lincoln proceeded to dismantle the pro-slavery theological arguments presented by Ross" (243). But when we look at Lincoln's remarks as quoted by Krannawitter, we see that Lincoln is actually evasive about the Bible on slavery: "The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation--the Bible--gives none--or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning." He then goes on to suggest that "Dr. Ross" is probably moved by selfish motives that detract from "perfect impartiality." Lincoln thus appeals to our knowledge of human nature as a ground for moral discussion rather than the Bible.

Don't biblical religion and the idea that right and wrong depend ultimately on the will of God expressed over history through revelation provide the basis for historicist relativism? Doesn't a scientific grasp of the human nature of morality provide an alternative to biblical historicism?

For a few samples of my blog posts on Lincoln, Darwin, and Jaffa, you can go here, here, and here.

Krannawitter on Lincoln & Prerogative

This is the third part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

Shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln initiated military responses without a declaration of war from Congress. He called for 75,000 military volunteers, he expanded the Army and Navy, he withdrew money from the federal treasury without congressional authorization, he ordered a blockade of Southern ports, and he authorized his generals in the field to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. This was the first and only time in American history that the writ of habeas corpus has been suspended. In effect, this meant a suspension of all individual rights, because it meant that military authorities could detain individuals in custody without specifying charges against them. In some cases, this was used against public speakers and newspaper editors who were criticizing Lincoln's policies. According to the libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln, this shows us clearly that Lincoln was a tyrant.

By contrast, progressive scholars defended Lincoln's exercise of power as benevolent dictatorship. Krannawitter quotes political scientist John Burgess as praising Lincoln as a "prototype of twentieth-century presidential government, ruling through rhetorical leadership of public opinion rather than an adherence to the text and forms of the Constitution" (318).

Krannawitter wants to defend Lincoln against the libertarian and paleoconservative charge of tyranny. But he wants to do this without embracing the progressive idea of "presidential government" outside the Constitution.

Krannawitter's rhetorical strategy is to employ Benjamin Kleinerman's argument that Lincoln properly exercised the "executive prerogative" defended by John Locke. But in doing this, Krannawitter never explains clearly how such Lockean prerogative can be compatible with American constitutionalism. In the British tradition of the divine right of kings, prerogative was at the core of the kingly power to act with unlimited discretion outside the rule of law. Challenging prerogative was therefore at the center of the British tradition of republicanism. It was important for the American constitutional framers that the American president should not have any prerogative powers allowing him to step outside the Constitution. On this point, they disagreed with Locke. In 1793, James Madison complained that Locke's "chapter on prerogative shows how much the reason of the philosopher was clouded by the royalism of the Englishman."

In adopting Kleinerman's argument, Krannawitter fails to clearly lay out the possible relationships between emergency powers and the Constitution. There are three possibilities. Emergency powers could be totally outside the Constitution, so that a President in times of emergency steps outside the constitutional framework to do whatever he judges best for the country. Or emergency powers could be inside and outside the Constitution, so that a President might invoke certain provisions inside the Constitution--like his oath of office, for example--as allowing him to step outside the Constitution in times of emergency. Or emergency powers could be totally inside the Constitution, so that the President and other officers of government have only those emergency powers specified in the Constitution itself. (Here I am drawing on some arguments that I have elaborated elsewhere, as in my chapter on Locke in Political Questions.)

Following Kleinerman, Krannawitter seems to take either the outside or the inside/outside position. Against them, I would argue for the totally inside position as the only position compatible with American constitutionalism. And, with the possible exception of one short passage in his Message to Congress of July 4, 1861, I think Lincoln followed the inside position. That is to say, Lincoln generally argued that he was able to meet the emergency of the Civil War by exercising powers specified in the Constitution so that it was not necessary for him to step outside the Constitution. In fact, Lincoln expressly denied that he was exercising "an arbitrary personal prerogative" (quoted by Krannawitter at p. 328).

In The Federalist, Hamilton and Madison argued that the Constitution did not contain, and should not contain, "parchment provisions" contrary to "public necessity." Rather, the national government should be given all the powers necessary for meeting every contingency, so that it would never be necessary in an emergency for officers of government to act outside the Constitution. To do otherwise--to force officers in times of emergency to step outside the Constitution--would set dangerous precedents of extraconstitutional action that would destroy constitutional government.

Lincoln's agreement with this stance is clear in his argument that suspension of the writ of habeas corpus is a clear example of an emergency power specified in the Constitution that makes it unnecessary to step outside the Constitution in an emergency like the Civil War. In Article I, sec. 9, the Constitution declares that "the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." This means that the President has the constitutional power to suspend the writ in an emergency if he can show that there is a rebellion or invasion that requires suspension for the public safety. Although this provision is found in Article I, which is predominantly the legislative article of the Constitution, the provision does not specify that this suspension is exclusively a legislative power. Moreover, at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, this provision originally was written with the specification that suspension would be "by the legislature." But this phrase was dropped later, leaving it open as to whom was to do the suspension.

Executive prerogative by Locke's definition is the power "to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it." Progressive scholars like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Imperial Presidency have argued that American presidents have Lockean prerogative, which allows them to step outside the Constitution in time of emergency.

Like Kleinerman, Krannawitter adopts the Schlesinger position. It is hard to see how this is consistent with American constitutionalism. Agreeing with Kleinerman, Krannawitter suggests "that it is better for the president to act without law and, in so doing, to explain and defend his actions by speaking openly to the people about the temporary necessities that require such actions" (333). Isn't this exactly what Burgess proposed--"twentieth-century presidential government, ruling through rhetorical leadership of public opinion rather than an adherence to the text and forms of the Constitution"? But doesn't this contradict Krannawitter's earlier claim that he rejects presidential government through rhetorical leadership as a progressivist distortion of Lincoln?

Isn't it contrary to American constitutionalism and the rule of law to suggest, as Krannawitter does, that "it might be less important to ask whether Lincoln's actions were legal or constitutional, and more important to ask if they were necessary to protect the public good" (325)?

The contemporary application of Krannawitter's promotion of presidential prerogative power is suggested by his embrace of John Yoo's defense of Bush's imperial presidency. I see here a disturbing tendency that Krannawitter shares with many of the Straussians towards elevating presidential leadership over the rule of law. This is evident, for example, in Harvey Mansfield's defense of George Bush's "one-man rule" and "imperial ambition" as an expression of the rule of the wise man. My response to Mansfield can be found here.

Krannawitter on Lincoln and Limited Government

This is the second part of my comments on Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln.

The libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln--people like Thomas DiLorenzo, Charles Adams, Thomas Woods, Walter Williams, Murray Rothbard, and Clyde Wilson--argue that the crucial turn away from limited government and towards modern "big government" came with Lincoln. Following the lead of Harry Jaffa, Krannawitter responds by claiming that Lincoln continued the philosophic and political tradition of limited government coming from the American founding, and that the turn to the modern administrative state that began with the American progressives was a break from Lincoln.

The libertarian and paleoconservative opponents of Lincoln defend the secession of the Southern states as an exercise of a constitutional right essential for limiting the oppressive power of the central government. Therefore, they charge that Lincoln's leadership of the North against the South was an unconstitutional denial of the right of the states to secede.

Krannawitter does a good job of refuting this argument. His main point is the distinction between the natural right to revolution, which Lincoln accepted as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the legal right of secession, which Lincoln denied. The states of the Confederacy could not justify their actions as an exercise of the natural right of revolution, and therefore they had to appeal to some presumed constitutional right of secession. Krannawitter rightly shows that there is little support for such a legal right of secession under the Constitution as ratified in 1789. In fact, the antifederalist opponents of the Constitution complained that the appeal to "We the People" as the ultimate source of national power deprived the states of their sovereignty. In effect, John C. Calhoun and the other proponents of secession were actually antifederalists who were trying to overturn the Constitution that was ratified in 1789.

The weakest part of Krannawitter's argument is that he passes quickly over Madison's Virginia Resolutions and Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which provided the primary evidence for Calhoun's position. Krannawitter's claim is that Madison and Jefferson pulled back from this position after the election of 1800. More needs to be said about this.

The leading proponents of the centralized administrative state of the 20th century--Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Croly, Franklin Roosevelt, and others--repeatedly praised Lincoln as pointing the way to the modern expansion of national power. The libertarians and paleoconservatives agree with this rhetorical use of Lincoln for liberal progressivism, but for them, this is a reason to condemn Lincoln as the father of big government.

Krannawitter responds to this by criticizing the progressives for misusing Lincoln, charging that if they had read Lincoln's writings carefully, they would have seen that Lincoln's defense of natural right differed radically from the ideas of historicist progressivism.

Krannawitter agrees that Lincoln led the way to the most massive expansion of federal power in American history up to that point. But he argues that Lincoln understood that this was all a temporary response to the extraordinary emergency of the Civil War that would end with the end of the war. It is true that much of the expansion of federal power under Lincoln was reversed after the war, but Krannawitter leaves the reader wondering why Lincoln should get credit for what happened after his death.

The reader must wonder about this since Krannawitter admits that Lincoln's Whig economic policies--"internal improvements," a national bank, paper currency without backing by gold or silver, and protective tariffs--were not good policies, although these were exactly the policies that the progressives saw as pointing ahead to the administrative state. In the late 1830s, Lincoln supported a massive program of internal improvements in Illinois that led the state government to the edge of financial collapse. Krannawitter prefers to play down Lincoln's economic policies by insisting that after 1854 Lincoln was more concerned with slavery than with economics. But this rhetorical strategy doesn't work if one sees that the issue of slavery was necessarily intertwined with the economic policies associated with "free labor." It might have been better for Krannawitter to compare Lincoln's economic policies with the teachings of Adam Smith and show that most of the governmental policies Lincoln supported--with the exception of protective tariffs--were regarded by Smith as within the proper realm of government.

In my next post, I will take up the debate over Lincoln's exercise of prerogative power.

Krannawitter on Lincoln & Slavery

Much of American political rhetoric turns on the assessment of Abraham Lincoln. Although many consider Lincoln the greatest American president who is the model for American statesmanship, the many critics of Lincoln say this elevated reputation arises from a falsification of history. Some leftists condemn Lincoln as a racist. But Barack Obama and other liberals praise Lincoln and argue that liberal progressivism follows in the tradition of Lincoln. Many libertarians and paleoconservatives denounce Lincoln as a Machiavellian tyrant who destroyed the American tradition of limited government. But some conservatives--particularly, those influenced by Harry Jaffa--insist that Lincoln's statesmanship was founded on the natural right principles of the American founding and provides a model for political reasoning today. The followers of Jaffa say that Lincoln's natural right statesmanship was subverted by the historicism and relativism of modern Darwinian science. But, as I have argued on this blog, this shows an ignorance of the fundamental agreement between Lincoln and Darwin and of how evolutionary science supports "Darwinian natural right."

Thomas Krannawitter's Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President has just been published by Rowman & Littlefield, and it helps us to think about this debate. Recently, Allen Guelzo's favorable review of the book appeared in The Claremont Review of Books.

This is a good book, perhaps even the best single book for those who want to understand the philosophic character of Lincoln's statesmanship. Although most of the main ideas in the book can be found in the writings of Jaffa, the clarity and precision of Krannawitter's presentation helps the reader to think through the reasoning for Jaffa's account of Lincoln.

I have found this book so intellectually stimulating that I want to offer my comments on the book in a series of posts. I generally am persuaded by most of what Krannawitter says. But I do find some points in his writing either obscure or weak, which I will explain. And yet, even where I disagree with him, I find that he forces me to deepen my thinking.

Of course, what one thinks about Lincoln depends ultimately on one's assessment of his handling of the slavery issue. Krannawitter defends Lincoln's stance on slavery as philosophically and politically correct. To do this, he must respond to many objections. Some critics say Lincoln was a racist. And certainly there are many passages in Lincoln's writings that sound racist--for example, when he says (in his debates with Stephen Douglas) that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." Krannawitter's response is to argue that although Lincoln believed in the moral and political equality of whites and blacks, he had to employ "an esoteric manner" and "rhetorical strategies" in expressing his beliefs, because as a politician he could not directly challenge the racist opinions of many Americans in his day (18-21).

Although I agree with this, I would like to have seen Krannawitter go more deeply into this. He rightly makes the point that "physical difference" could just mean the obvious difference in skin color, so that Lincoln could be saying that as a matter of sociological observation, blacks and whites will find it hard to live together as equals because of the prejudices of color. But did Lincoln ever use the phrase "physical inferiority" or "inferior races," as Douglas said Lincoln did? The newspaper transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates sometimes use slightly different language for the same speeches. According to the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln in the fifth debate at Galesburg used the phrase "inferior races." According to the Chicago Daily Times, he spoke of "physical inequality." But as far as I can tell, Lincoln uses "physical difference" as his phrase in all the other passages.

Lincoln's "esoteric manner" is perhaps conveyed by what he says in the sixth debate in Quincy: "I am altogether unconscious of having attempted any double dealing anywhere--that upon one occasion I may say one thing and leave other things unsaid, and vice versa; but that I have said anything on one occasion that is inconsistent with what I have said elsewhere, I deny."

In deciding whether Lincoln was a racist or not, the testimony of Frederick Douglass--the eloquent ex-slave abolitionist--would seem to be decisive, because he knew Lincoln and engaged in a continuing debate with him about emancipation. In his Freedmen's Memorial speech of 1876, Douglass spoke of Lincoln as "preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men." Unfortunately, Krannawitter does not quote this part of Douglass's speech. In his vehement attack on Lincoln as a racist, Lerone Bennett does quote this passage. But then Bennett never quotes the passage praising Lincoln's statesmanship: "measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Douglass also declared: "Measuring the tremendous magnitude of the work before him, considering the necessary means to ends, and surveying the end from the beginning, infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than was Abraham Lincoln." Although Bennett refers to the Freedmen's Memorial speech as "one of the greatest orations on Lincoln by any African-American," he never quotes any of these passages where Douglass praises Lincoln's statesmanship, because this would subvert Bennett's intemperate denunciation of Lincoln.

Krannawitter rightly emphasizes that Lincoln consistently adhered to the principle that while protecting slavery in the Southern states was a constitutional obligation, prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the Western territories was within the constitutional powers of Congress. I do wish, however, that Krannawitter had noted the one big problem with Lincoln's argument that this was the intent of the Founders--both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison thought that it was unconstitutional for Congress to restrict the Western movement of slavery. It has always been baffling to me that Stephen Douglas didn't bring this up as evidence against Lincoln's position. Krannawitter ignores this point. He refers to Jefferson's remark about the debate over the Missouri Compromise of 1820 being a "fire bell in the night." But he doesn't notice that Jefferson used this phrase in a letter criticizing the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional.

The libertarian and paleoconservative critics of Lincoln often assert that the Civil War was not about slavery at all but about the economic policies of the North in imposing unfair protective tariffs and other economic measures that punished the South. Kannawitter is good in surveying all the evidence showing the falsity of this assertion by showing that the leaders of the secessionist South repeatedly affirmed that protecting slavery was their primary motivation in breaking away. He is especially effective in raising one powerful question, "Why did Southern Democrats oppose Stephen Douglas for the presidential nomination in 1860?" The answer, of course, is that the Southern Democrats split away from the party because Douglas would not guarantee federal protection for slavery in the Western territories even where the majority of the citizens wanted to prohibit slavery.

There's more to come in future posts.

Aristotelian Regime Analysis and Darwinian Group Selection

In Moral Minds, Marc Hauser tries to explain the evolution of human morality from traits shared with other animals. Although he does show how many of the components of human morality can be seen in other animals that cooperate with one another, he recognizes the uniqueness of human cooperation and morality: "We are the only animal that cooperates on a large scale with genetically unrelated individuals and that consistently shows stable reciprocity" (378, 411).

Hauser concludes that explaining the evolution of human morality requires group selection. Here he follows in the tradition of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man: "It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe . . . an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another." The problem, then, is that a social group cannot succeed unless its members cooperate for the good of the group, and yet within the group, it is almost always advantageous for individuals to become cheaters who advance their selfish interests at the expense of the common good. The solution to the problem arises when competition between groups is more intense than competition within groups. Although selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups.

While the idea of group selection has been out of favor among most evolutionary theorists over the past 40 years, recently there has been a revival of group selection thinking. David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson have written an article for The Quarterly Review of Biology surveying the recent research supporting group selection and arguing that group selection should provide the theoretical foundation for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. An abridged version of this article appeared in the New Scientist.

My interest here is in considering the common ground between this Darwinian group-selection explanation of human morality and Aristotle's account of political regimes.

As Hauser indicates, other animals show differences between groups based on differing cultural traditions. But with other animals these cultural differences don't carry much emotional weight. With human beings, by contrast, cultural differences carry the weight of competing moral conceptions of what is good and right. Human beings don't just cooperate as do other animals. Human beings cooperate based on explicit recognition of rules and procedures of cooperation that have moral authority. Thus, groups form around distinctive symbolic markers that constitute moral communities based on some shared conception of what is good and right. Human group selection arises from the competition between these symbolically constituted moral communities. With language, cultural group selection can operate on cultural variation.

Similarly, Aristotle saw that human beings were not the only political animals. But he also saw that human beings were more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech--logos. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Human beings are the most political animals, it seems, because through speech human beings cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other political animals. Through speech human beings can deliberate about the "common advantage" as the criterion of justice. Political communities can be distinguished as different kinds of regime based on how they structure the order of rule to conform to some moral conception of the way of life of the community. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling faction. The political problem, then, is that although people are naturally inclined to cooperate for a common life, they are also thrown into factional conflict by their selfish desires. In the long run, Aristotle suggests, the more just regimes tend to be more stable because they avoid or at least moderate factional conflict.

Could the Darwinian evolution of morality through group selection be understood as an Aristotelian evolution of regimes? Could we see this in the history of government? Certainly, American statesmen like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln believed that the modern republican regime based on limited government by consent of the governed, the rule of law, and private property promised a major advance in political history. For Lincoln, the Civil War was a test of whether such a regime, conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality, could long endure. Do we see here a ground for moral progress through the evolutionary group selection of political regimes?

Natural Right and Biology: Marc Hauser on The Moral Instinct

As Leo Strauss showed in Natural Right and History, one can view the entire history of political philosophy as turning on the question of whether there is any natural right. Some people would say there is no natural right, because all right is determined by custom or convention, and what is customarily right or wrong varies radically across different societies and across history. Others would say that despite this variation in customary standards of right, there are some principles of right by nature that are universal, because they are rooted in a universal human nature. As Strauss indicates, in the central section of his book (156-63), Aristotle would seem to be the best exponent of natural right, and yet Aristotle's teaching is unclear. According to Aristotle, in Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, there is something that is right by nature, and yet "all is changeable." How can there be a universal standard of natural right if all conceptions of right are changeable according to variable moral traditions?

Aristotle was a biologist who studied human beings as moral and political animals. One way of explaining his account of natural right is to say that for him natural right is a universal biological propensity of the human species that is diversely expressed in the variable circumstances of individual habituation and social learning. All social animals have natural instincts for social learning. Social life emerges as a joint product of nature and nurture. Just as human beings have a natural instinct for learning language, but the specific languages they learn will depend on their social circumstances, so too do human beings have a natural instinct for judging right and wrong, but the specific content of their moral rules will depend on their social learning.

I have developed this Aristotelian biology of morality and politics in Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (1998), and I have argued there that modern Darwinian science supports this Aristotelian understanding of natural right.

Although Marc Hauser shows no knowledge of Aristotle or the history of political philosophy, Hauser's Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (2006) provides support for my argument. He surveys the recent research on the biological evolution of morality. He concludes that morality is grounded in biology in a manner similar to the biological grounding of language. Human beings are born with a natural capacity for learning language, which Noam Chomsky has explicated as an innate universal grammar, but the specific content of language varies across different languages within the broad constraints of universal grammar. Similarly, Hauser argues, human beings are born with a natural capacity for learning morality, which depends on a universal moral grammar that belongs to the human species as a product of evolutionary history, but the specific expression of that morality will vary across different moral systems within the constraints set by the innate moral instinct.

Last January, The New York Times Magazine published an article by Steven Pinker on "The Moral Instinct," which surveys the reasoning of Hauser and others on the biological roots of morality. I wrote a post on Pinker's article.

Although I generally agree with Hauser's argumentation, I find some of his reasoning vague and confusing. Here I will indicate a few points where I find it hard to follow what he is saying.

In my book Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls, I noted that John Rawls often appealed to conceptions of human nature rooted in evolutionary biology. In particular, he argued that the very capacity for any sense of justice requires a psychological disposition for reciprocity that must have been shaped by human evolutionary history. He also suggested that we might see this innate propensity to morality as analogous to language as understood by Chomsky: there might be an innate moral grammar underlying our moral experience. A few years ago, John Mikhail wrote a philosophy dissertation at Cornell on "Rawls' Linguistic Analogy: A Study of the 'Generative Grammar' Model of Moral Theory Described by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice." Hauser has organized his book around Mikhail's account of the Rawlsian linguistic analogy.

The problem, however, is that in arguing that the moral instincts show the judgments of a "Rawlsian creature," Hauser never explains how this supports Rawls' argument that justice is based on the principles that human beings in the "original position" would choose behind a "veil of ignorance." One of the most controversial of Rawls' principles is the "difference principle" that inequalities in economic resources are permitted only as long as they benefit the least advantaged. When Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer put some people in a laboratory setting with the rules specified by Rawls, they selected principles of justice that were not exactly as Rawls predicted. In particular, they did not embrace the difference principle. They prescribed that the worst off should not fall below a set level of income, but then they allowed all others to have whatever higher incomes they might earn by contributing more to society. When Rawls was told about this, he responded: "If the results hold up it may be that the difference principle cuts across the grain of human nature." Oddly enough, Hauser tries to save Rawls from refutation by asserting that his difference principle might be embraced by all human beings unconsciously (90-91). But then Hauser never explains how human evolution would have favored an unconscious difference principle as an innate component of the moral instinct, and in fact, he says almost nothing about the difference principle as a fundamental principle of moral judgment.

What Hauser says about the "Rawlsian creature" depends on his contrast with the "Humean creature" and the "Kantian creature." But his cartoonish depictions bear little resemblance to their philosophic proponents. Hauser quotes Hume's famous declaration that "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." But he does not notice the context of this remark that makes clear that Hume believes that reason can direct but not motivate action. Hume writes: "Reason and judgment may, indeed, be the mediate cause of an action, by prompting, or by directing a passion." Ignoring what Hume actually says, Hauser depicts the "Humean creature" as a purely emotivist being with no need for reason at all. Thus, Hauser never considers that the "action analysis" that he attributes to the "Rawlsian creature" was a crucial part of Hume's explanation of moral judgment.

Throughout much of the book, Hauser suggests that morality can best be explained as the work of the "Rawlsian creature" rather than the "Humean creature" or the "Kantian creature." But sometimes he suggests that morality is generally a continuing struggle between all three (418). Unless I am missing something fundamental in this book, he never resolves this confusion.

To test the claims of competing positions in moral philosophy, Hauser relies on research that depends on presenting people with moral dilemmas framed in artificial scenarios--such as the famous "trolley problem." Hauser admits that these scenarios are so artificial and abstract in their distance from everyday experience that they are little more than "toy examples." And yet he insists that the scientific method requires such abstract simplifications. He admits, however, that these "artificial examples" will not be persuasive if they are not combined with "real-life cases" (34-35). He often refers to real historical cases in his book. But he never develops any of these cases beyond a few sentences. For example, he refers to the American debate over slavery. But his remarks are so brief that they cannot capture the complexity of that debate (106, 167, 187). To speak of Abraham Lincoln as a moral "visionary," as he does, misses the reality of Lincoln as a statesman exercising prudence in making compromises that rejected the extremes of the abolitionist and proslavery positions. To say that applying the scientific method to morality requires "toy examples" begs the crucial question of whether there can be a science of morality that is not a historical science of irreducible complexity and uncertainty.

Hume sought to turn moral philosophy into a natural science. But he doing that, he relied as much on historical narrative--like his History of England--as on abstract theorizing. Doesn't a science of morality require such a combination of theory and history?

As I have argued here and elsewhere, a full science of morality would have to move through three levels of study--moral nature, moral culture, and moral judgment. We need to understand the universal moral principles of human nature as they interact with the variable cultural traditions of moral history. And we need to understand how individual moral judgments--like Lincoln deliberating about the Emancipation Proclamation--manifest the peculiarities of individual agents in particular circumstances as constrained by universal moral nature and specific moral traditions. Occasionally, Hauser recognizes this, as when he remarks: "What we need is a better sense of what real people do in real situations in real cultures" (131). But, unfortunately, in this book, we rarely see real people in real situations in real cultures.

If Hauser had devoted more attention to real historical cases, he might have clarified how exactly the universal moral instincts constrain particular moral traditions and individual moral judgments. As it is, Hauser's book leaves us in a fog on this crucial point. This was the problem that Richard Rorty stressed in his review of Hauser's book in The New York Times.

Hauser's problem is Aristotle's problem: if there is a universal, natural standard of right, then why do judgments of right and wrong across individuals and societies show so much variation? The general answer is that this variation is not arbitrary or unlimited, because it shows recurrent patterns that manifest the universal propensities of the natural sense of justice. On the one hand, Hauser explains, the "Weak Rawlsian" would say that the human species has "the capacity to acquire morally relevant norms, but nature hasn't provided any of the relevant details" (298). On the other hand, the "Staunch Rawlsian" would say that human beings are "equipped with specific moral principles about helping and harming, genetically built into the brain and unalterable by culture." Against these two opposing extremes--cultural determinism and genetic determinism--Hauser looks for middle ground: "A Temperate Rawlsian is equipped with a suite of principles and parameters for building moral systems. These principles lack specific content, but operate over the causes and consequences of action. What gives these principles content is the local culture. Every newborn child could build a finite but large number of moral systems."

But by itself, this general answer provokes more questions than it answers. "A finite but large number of moral systems"? How large? What are the finite limits? Sometimes Hauser says the natural moral instinct sanctions only "a narrow range of possible moral systems" (420). At other times, he says it would support "any of the world's moral systems" (426). Does this mean that the universal moral grammar does not allow us to judge any specific moral system as better or worse than others? If so, then moral progress is impossible, because we have no ground for ranking moral systems. So would this mean that moral systems prohibiting slavery are no better or worse than moral systems favoring slavery?

What we need--and what Hauser does not provide--is Darwinian moral history. We need to apply the Darwinian explanation of morality to human history to see how exactly the logic of that explanation works in the complex interaction of moral nature, moral culture, and moral judgment.

Two possible examples are the cases of incest and slavery. Edward Westermarck's Darwinian account of the incest taboo is one of the best examples of Darwinian moral history, because we can see how an evolved natural propensity to avoid incest is diversely expressed in different cultures and different individuals. Although Hauser often mentions the Westermarck theory of incest, he never elaborates it as an example of how a natural moral sense constrains the moral diversity of cultures and individuals (22-23, 166, 199-200, 299, 301). A couple of my blog posts on incest can be found here and here.

I have commented on Abraham Lincoln and the slavery debate many times on this blog. In Chapter 7 of Darwinian Natural Right, I extend my argument for Darwinian natural right by applying it to the history of slavery. I begin with a comparison of ant slavery and human slavery, in which I argue that while slavery among ants and human beings manifests a natural inclination to exploitation, the uniquely human opposition to slavery shows a natural moral sense that resists exploitation. I then argue that throughout the history of the debate over slavery--from Aristotle to Hume, to Thomas Jefferson, to Charles Darwin, to Lincoln--one can see the natural moral sense expressed as a joint product of emotional capacities for feeling moral passions like sympathy and anger and rational capacities for judging moral principles like kinship and reciprocity.

Hauser looks forward to the development of a "science of morality," in which "inquiry into our moral nature will no longer be the proprietary province of the humanities and social sciences, but a shared journey with the natural sciences" (425). I agree with this aspiration towards a unification of knowledge--or "consilience" as Ed Wilson would call it--which would unite the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Darwinian moral history would be an important part of this project. In a previous post, I have called this "Darwinian liberal education."