The US Government's moves towards bailing out financial firms that have made bad economic decisions shows that the United States has adopted a market-socialist economy. Early in the 20th century, critics of socialism like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued that pure socialism could not work because there would be no way to calculate value in a large, complex economy without market prices. Eventually, most socialist thinkers admitted the accuracy of this argument. But then many socialists responded by defending the possibility of market-socialism that would combine market pricing based on private property with central economic planning by government.
The creation in the United States of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac illustrates market-socialism in action. Backed by a government that wanted to provide affordable housing, Fannie and Freddie could act as private firms seeking profits in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but when the bad decisions of these corporations led to turmoil in financial markets, the government could step in with taxpayer money to cover the losses in the hope of stabilizing markets. Now, it seems an even bigger bailout will be designed to use taxpayer money to cover the bad mortgage debt in financial markets.
From the perspective of Darwinian conservatism, it is easy to see that such market-socialism must fail, because it ignores the human nature of private property, free markets, and political ambition. For conservatives, property is rooted in human nature and thus universal, although the specific forms of property reflect the customary traditions and formal laws of particular societies. For socialists and liberals, property is not natural but a purely social construction that can be deliberately changed, or even abolished, to secure social equality. A Darwinian view of human nature sustains the conservative commitment to property as a natural propensity that is diversely expressed in custom and law.
A system of private property and free markets under the rule of law channels the natural desire for wealth to allocate resources productively in a manner that recognizes the imperfectibility of human beings in their limited knowledge and limited virtue. In such a system, human beings gather economic information and make economic decisions based on their expectation that they will reap the rewards of their good decisions and bear the costs of their bad decisions. This gives them the incentive to be prudent, because they know that their imprudence--such as being foolish in undertaking too much debt and risky investments--will be punished by financial failure.
By contrast, in a market-socialist system, losses are socialized. Business managers and shareholders can reap great profits through foolish risk-taking, while assuming that they will not be punished for their imprudence because any losses will be covered by governmental intervention. This creates distortions in the economy as resources are directed to bad investments, creating financial bubbles that inevitably must burst.
Like all other human beings, political leaders are imperfect in their knowledge and their virtue. Moreover, they are moved primarily by the ambition for power. In a system of free enterprise and limited government under the rule of law, political leaders are not given broad powers to manipulate the economy, because their economic ignorance and their political ambition will lead them to create harmful distortions in the economy. Because of their ignorance, they will not know what decisions would be best for the economy. Because of their ambition, they will respond to political pressures in advancing their political careers rather than working for sound economic outcomes. In a market-socialist economy, those with great political influence can benefit from their access to power, but the economy as a whole suffers from the misallocation of resources coming from the ignorance and ambition of central planners. To deny this conclusion, we would have to assume that government planners can have perfect knowledge and perfect virtue, but such an assumption is implausibly utopian.
Such reasoning from Darwinian conservatism does not allow us to predict specific events that are determined by the contingencies of history. But it does allow us to predict the broad tendencies of economic and political life as shaped by human nature. So we can predict that if the federal government of the U.S. continues its market-socialist strategy of bailing out financial businesses with taxpayer money, the financial crisis will be prolonged, which will create an even greater demand for more bailouts, and the vicious circle will eventually bring a massive economic collapse. If such market-socialism spreads around the world, as seems likely, then the collapse will become global.
Some of the logic of this economic analysis can be found in two recent articles found at the Cato Institute website--one by James Dorn and another by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters.
Today's New York Times (September 20) has an article by Joe Nocera with the title "A Hail Mary Pass, But No Receiver in the End Zone." His conclusion is that the people proposing the new bailout plan have no idea how it will work or whether it will work. But political pressures force them to "do something." His final sentence is that "as much as we might hope that the government finally has the answer, it probably doesn't." The fundamental problem is ignorance. "Nobody understands who owes what to whom--or whether they have the ability to pay. Counterparties have become afraid to trade with each other. Sovereign wealth funds are no longer willing to supply badly needed capital because they no longer know what they are investing in. The crisis continues because nobody knows what anything is worth. You simply cannot have a functioning market under such circumstances."
In a state of such ignorance, the only reasonable thing for the government to do is to do nothing and let the market go through a painful period of adjustment. But instead, government planners will offer rescue plans that only make matters worse, at a cost of over a trillion taxpayer dollars. That's market-socialism.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Friday, September 19, 2008
Ron Paul Was Right
When Ron Paul was running in the Republican presidential primaries, he was ridiculed for his warnings that the U.S. financial system as managed by the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury was on the way to collapse. Actually, he and others whose thinking has been shaped by Austrian School of Economics have been predicting this for many years.
Now, we see federal bureaucrats desperately spending hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money in nationalizing financial institutions to avoid a collapse that has building for many years. (We used to call this "socialism.") They do this in violation of the Constitution of the United States, which explicitly states that no spending can occur without congressional authorization. Of course, the Congress has no interest in intervening.
And what do Obama and McCain say? We need more federal regulation.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to say that the federal government should do nothing? Shouldn't we see this as an imbalance in the economy--too much consumption and too little saving and production--created by federal efforts to stimulate the economy? And isn't the only way to work out of this imbalance to endure the pain of a year or so of drastic economic readjustments? Can't we anticipate that federal bailouts with taxpayer money will only prolong the pain?
For an example of the Austrian economics analysis of this crisis, go to an article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website by Antony Mueller.
Now, we see federal bureaucrats desperately spending hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money in nationalizing financial institutions to avoid a collapse that has building for many years. (We used to call this "socialism.") They do this in violation of the Constitution of the United States, which explicitly states that no spending can occur without congressional authorization. Of course, the Congress has no interest in intervening.
And what do Obama and McCain say? We need more federal regulation.
Wouldn't it be more sensible to say that the federal government should do nothing? Shouldn't we see this as an imbalance in the economy--too much consumption and too little saving and production--created by federal efforts to stimulate the economy? And isn't the only way to work out of this imbalance to endure the pain of a year or so of drastic economic readjustments? Can't we anticipate that federal bailouts with taxpayer money will only prolong the pain?
For an example of the Austrian economics analysis of this crisis, go to an article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website by Antony Mueller.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Metaphysical Conservatism Versus Evolutionary Conservatism
In thinking about why many conservatives resist Darwinian conservatism, I have begun to suspect that there is a fundamental conflict here between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism. (Reading Donald Livingston's HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON LIFE has helped me to think about this.)
Beginning with David Hume's criticism of the English Puritan Revolution and Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution, conservatives have rejected the rationalistic metaphysics of political revolutionaries as a dangerous attack on social and political order as rooted in historical tradition. Conservatives like Hume and Burke have recognized the need for reforming the traditional orders of society. But they have argued that such reform is best understood as a gradual, evolutionary process within concrete traditions. By contrast, the metaphysical rebellion of revolutionaries attempts a total restructuring of society to conform to some abstract blueprint of rational perfection. The ideological fanaticism of the past two centuries--Marxism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and so on--manifests the danger coming from such total revolutions of common life by metaphysical thinking.
Darwinian conservatism continues in the tradition of Hume and Burke by explaining the history of moral and political order as arising from a complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and prudential judgments. The Darwinian science of morality and politics is a historical science of human social order in all of its concrete historicity. Any presumed total transformation of social life by reference to some abstract, metaphysical conception of perfect order is rejected as an incoherent and destructive form of utopian perfectibility, which disregards the imperfectibility of human life in its evolving historical contingency and particularity.
But there has been a tendency for some conservatives to challenge the metaphysical revolutionaries by appealing to a conservative metaphysics of sacred order. For example, Richard Weaver contended in his Ideas Have Consequences that any healthy cultural order requires a "metaphysical dream"--a set of transcendent standards for moral order. In his VISIONS OF ORDER, Weaver criticized the Darwinian idea of human evolution for promoting moral degradation by subverting the metaphysical image of human beings as standing at the peak of the divine cosmic order.
In THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, Russell Kirk showed this same metaphysical conservatism when he affirmed "belief in a transcendent order" as the first canon of conservative thought and warned against Darwinian science as undermining conservative principles of transcendent order. By contrast, Frederick Hayek criticized conservatives like Kirk for rejecting the theory of evolution: "I have little patience with those who oppose . . . the theory of evolution or what are called 'mechanistic' explanations of the phenomena of life simply because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irreverent or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his position." This was one reason that Hayek was reluctant to call himself a "conservative." And yet he identified himself as a Burkean Whig. He might rightly be called an evolutionary conservative.
In the recent collection of articles from the
Intercollegiate Review--Arguing Conservatism--published by ISI Books, the lead article serving as a Prologue is Will Herberg's "What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?" According to Herberg, our moral crisis is not the failure to live up to our shared moral standards but rather our loss of any moral standards at all. This "loss of a moral sense" is "a metaphysical and religious crisis." To restore our moral standards, we need some transcendent, metaphysical law that is "binding on man because it is grounded in what is beyond man," and that requires the transcendent standards of religion.
In the same collection, Robert Kraynak has an article warning that although Darwinian evolution is supported by lots of evidence, conservatives should look to "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinism, because Darwinian science provides no account of "the ultimate purpose of the universe." Like Herberg, Kraynak assumes that moral order is impossible without invoking a metaphysical standard of cosmic purposefulness.
Carson Holloway, John West, and other critics of my Darwinian conservatism show the same appeal to metaphysical standards of moral order. Holloway says that my Darwinian account of the moral sense as rooted in natural moral sentiments, customary moral traditions, and deliberate moral judgments cannot provide the proper ground for morality, because morality is impossible without some "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." Similarly, West insists that moral order requires some "transcendent standard of morality," a "permanent foundation for ethics," or some source for morality in "irreducible and unchanging truths." West never explains exactly what these "unchanging truths" are. He does often refer to "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But he never specifies precisely what he has in mind. Both Holloway and West speak of the biblical doctrine of human beings as created in the image of God as supporting a universal, transcendent standard of the equal moral dignity of all human beings.
I cannot see how the metaphysical equality of all human beings could be applied in practice as the transcendent standard for all social order. I understand, of course, the importance of the "self-evident truth" of human equality and liberty in the Declaration of Independence. But even Abraham Lincoln conceded that "perfect social and political equality" was impossible, and that Americans needed to translate this into a "practical equality" compatible with American legal and political traditions. Strictly speaking, universal human equality and liberty would dictate socialist pacifism. And that's why Lincoln and others have had to reformulate the idea of equality to make it consistent with the concrete conditions of particular moral orders.
Did the resolution of the slavery debate in the United States depend on biblical metaphysics? As I have often noted on this blog, many Christians thought the Bible supported slavery and that abolitionism was atheism. How does biblical metaphysics resolve moral debates if we can't agree on the practical moral teaching of the Bible? While Lincoln thought slavery was morally wrong, he also thought it would be imprudent to abolish slavery immediately if that meant violating the Constitution. How do we weigh moral right against the rule of law? Should we say, as some abolitionists did, that the "higher law" must prevail against human law, no matter what the consequences? Shouldn't we worry about the fanaticism of people like John Brown who think they are acting by divine command in cleansing society of evil?
Religious conservatives like Holloway and West believe that morality is impossible without the cosmic purposefulness of "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But which "tradition" is this--Judaism, Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, Mormonism? Are they referring specifically to the Bible as the source of moral and political order? The English Puritan revolutionaries of the 17th century invoked biblical law in their attempt to establish the "kingdom of the saints," and their metaphysical fanaticism had disastrous consequences. I assume that Holloway and West would reject this. But why? Doesn't this show how dangerous it is to look to religious metaphysics for cosmic standards to revolutionize society?
If we want moral and political order guided by "religiously-informed cosmic teleology," how do we avoid theocratic extremism? Not long ago, the Intercollegiate Review published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?" His answer to the question was, No. His reasoning was that in the history of the West, the ultimate standard for order was the law of God, and even in modern liberal democracies, the appeal to individual "conscience" implies that this is somehow the voice of God implanted in human beings. He suggests that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the cosmic standard for all human behavior.
For such conservatives who invoke the metaphysics of theocracy as the only ground of moral order, a Darwinian conservatism that roots moral order in natural sentiments, cultural traditions, and deliberate judgments must be rejected as insufficient. But shouldn't conservatives be suspicious of such theocratic metaphysics as fostering a dangerous fanaticism?
And if we were to rely on a theocratic metaphysics as the source of order, how exactly would we determine the moral content of that metaphysics? Conservatives like West say that we should look to intelligent design theory. But how do we know that the intelligent designer is a reliable source of moral law? And how to we discern that moral law of the intelligent designer? Actually, West and other proponents of intelligent design insist that, in fact, we cannot know anything about the moral character of the intelligent designer. Certainly, intelligent design theory cannot tell us whether the intelligent designer is the God of the Bible who gives a moral law. So it seems that access to the moral law of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" requires faith in certain traditions of revelation rather than reasoning from common human experience. Does this mean that moral and political order is possible only within religious communities that share the same faith tradition? Is this what Brague means by arguing for the necessity for theocracy?
I agree that religious belief is often important for morality. But this does not require that we appeal to theocratic metaphysics as the only source of moral order. We can see religious morality as emerging through the evolved moral order of human life as shaped by the moral sentiments of human nature, the moral traditions of human culture, and the moral judgments of human deliberation. Evolutionary conservatism can support such a moral order, while avoiding the confusion and fanaticism that come from the "metaphysical dreams" of theocratic conservatism.
This post is related to my post from a few weeks ago on "Religious Transcendence and Natural Evolution."
Beginning with David Hume's criticism of the English Puritan Revolution and Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution, conservatives have rejected the rationalistic metaphysics of political revolutionaries as a dangerous attack on social and political order as rooted in historical tradition. Conservatives like Hume and Burke have recognized the need for reforming the traditional orders of society. But they have argued that such reform is best understood as a gradual, evolutionary process within concrete traditions. By contrast, the metaphysical rebellion of revolutionaries attempts a total restructuring of society to conform to some abstract blueprint of rational perfection. The ideological fanaticism of the past two centuries--Marxism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and so on--manifests the danger coming from such total revolutions of common life by metaphysical thinking.
Darwinian conservatism continues in the tradition of Hume and Burke by explaining the history of moral and political order as arising from a complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and prudential judgments. The Darwinian science of morality and politics is a historical science of human social order in all of its concrete historicity. Any presumed total transformation of social life by reference to some abstract, metaphysical conception of perfect order is rejected as an incoherent and destructive form of utopian perfectibility, which disregards the imperfectibility of human life in its evolving historical contingency and particularity.
But there has been a tendency for some conservatives to challenge the metaphysical revolutionaries by appealing to a conservative metaphysics of sacred order. For example, Richard Weaver contended in his Ideas Have Consequences that any healthy cultural order requires a "metaphysical dream"--a set of transcendent standards for moral order. In his VISIONS OF ORDER, Weaver criticized the Darwinian idea of human evolution for promoting moral degradation by subverting the metaphysical image of human beings as standing at the peak of the divine cosmic order.
In THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, Russell Kirk showed this same metaphysical conservatism when he affirmed "belief in a transcendent order" as the first canon of conservative thought and warned against Darwinian science as undermining conservative principles of transcendent order. By contrast, Frederick Hayek criticized conservatives like Kirk for rejecting the theory of evolution: "I have little patience with those who oppose . . . the theory of evolution or what are called 'mechanistic' explanations of the phenomena of life simply because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irreverent or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his position." This was one reason that Hayek was reluctant to call himself a "conservative." And yet he identified himself as a Burkean Whig. He might rightly be called an evolutionary conservative.
In the recent collection of articles from the
Intercollegiate Review--Arguing Conservatism--published by ISI Books, the lead article serving as a Prologue is Will Herberg's "What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?" According to Herberg, our moral crisis is not the failure to live up to our shared moral standards but rather our loss of any moral standards at all. This "loss of a moral sense" is "a metaphysical and religious crisis." To restore our moral standards, we need some transcendent, metaphysical law that is "binding on man because it is grounded in what is beyond man," and that requires the transcendent standards of religion.
In the same collection, Robert Kraynak has an article warning that although Darwinian evolution is supported by lots of evidence, conservatives should look to "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinism, because Darwinian science provides no account of "the ultimate purpose of the universe." Like Herberg, Kraynak assumes that moral order is impossible without invoking a metaphysical standard of cosmic purposefulness.
Carson Holloway, John West, and other critics of my Darwinian conservatism show the same appeal to metaphysical standards of moral order. Holloway says that my Darwinian account of the moral sense as rooted in natural moral sentiments, customary moral traditions, and deliberate moral judgments cannot provide the proper ground for morality, because morality is impossible without some "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." Similarly, West insists that moral order requires some "transcendent standard of morality," a "permanent foundation for ethics," or some source for morality in "irreducible and unchanging truths." West never explains exactly what these "unchanging truths" are. He does often refer to "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But he never specifies precisely what he has in mind. Both Holloway and West speak of the biblical doctrine of human beings as created in the image of God as supporting a universal, transcendent standard of the equal moral dignity of all human beings.
I cannot see how the metaphysical equality of all human beings could be applied in practice as the transcendent standard for all social order. I understand, of course, the importance of the "self-evident truth" of human equality and liberty in the Declaration of Independence. But even Abraham Lincoln conceded that "perfect social and political equality" was impossible, and that Americans needed to translate this into a "practical equality" compatible with American legal and political traditions. Strictly speaking, universal human equality and liberty would dictate socialist pacifism. And that's why Lincoln and others have had to reformulate the idea of equality to make it consistent with the concrete conditions of particular moral orders.
Did the resolution of the slavery debate in the United States depend on biblical metaphysics? As I have often noted on this blog, many Christians thought the Bible supported slavery and that abolitionism was atheism. How does biblical metaphysics resolve moral debates if we can't agree on the practical moral teaching of the Bible? While Lincoln thought slavery was morally wrong, he also thought it would be imprudent to abolish slavery immediately if that meant violating the Constitution. How do we weigh moral right against the rule of law? Should we say, as some abolitionists did, that the "higher law" must prevail against human law, no matter what the consequences? Shouldn't we worry about the fanaticism of people like John Brown who think they are acting by divine command in cleansing society of evil?
Religious conservatives like Holloway and West believe that morality is impossible without the cosmic purposefulness of "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But which "tradition" is this--Judaism, Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, Mormonism? Are they referring specifically to the Bible as the source of moral and political order? The English Puritan revolutionaries of the 17th century invoked biblical law in their attempt to establish the "kingdom of the saints," and their metaphysical fanaticism had disastrous consequences. I assume that Holloway and West would reject this. But why? Doesn't this show how dangerous it is to look to religious metaphysics for cosmic standards to revolutionize society?
If we want moral and political order guided by "religiously-informed cosmic teleology," how do we avoid theocratic extremism? Not long ago, the Intercollegiate Review published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?" His answer to the question was, No. His reasoning was that in the history of the West, the ultimate standard for order was the law of God, and even in modern liberal democracies, the appeal to individual "conscience" implies that this is somehow the voice of God implanted in human beings. He suggests that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the cosmic standard for all human behavior.
For such conservatives who invoke the metaphysics of theocracy as the only ground of moral order, a Darwinian conservatism that roots moral order in natural sentiments, cultural traditions, and deliberate judgments must be rejected as insufficient. But shouldn't conservatives be suspicious of such theocratic metaphysics as fostering a dangerous fanaticism?
And if we were to rely on a theocratic metaphysics as the source of order, how exactly would we determine the moral content of that metaphysics? Conservatives like West say that we should look to intelligent design theory. But how do we know that the intelligent designer is a reliable source of moral law? And how to we discern that moral law of the intelligent designer? Actually, West and other proponents of intelligent design insist that, in fact, we cannot know anything about the moral character of the intelligent designer. Certainly, intelligent design theory cannot tell us whether the intelligent designer is the God of the Bible who gives a moral law. So it seems that access to the moral law of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" requires faith in certain traditions of revelation rather than reasoning from common human experience. Does this mean that moral and political order is possible only within religious communities that share the same faith tradition? Is this what Brague means by arguing for the necessity for theocracy?
I agree that religious belief is often important for morality. But this does not require that we appeal to theocratic metaphysics as the only source of moral order. We can see religious morality as emerging through the evolved moral order of human life as shaped by the moral sentiments of human nature, the moral traditions of human culture, and the moral judgments of human deliberation. Evolutionary conservatism can support such a moral order, while avoiding the confusion and fanaticism that come from the "metaphysical dreams" of theocratic conservatism.
This post is related to my post from a few weeks ago on "Religious Transcendence and Natural Evolution."
David Brooks, "The Social Animal"
In today's New York Times (September 12), David Brooks has a column on "The Social Animal". In arguing that conservatives need to recognize the natural sociality of human beings as rooted in their biological nature, Brooks manifests Darwinian conservatism. (Thanks to Andy Schott for bringing this article to my attention.)
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Sarah Palin on Teaching Evolution and Creationism
The controversy over the teaching of evolution in public school science classes has been revived by Sarah Palin's addition to the Republican presidential ticket. In her campaign for Governor of Alaska, she was the only candidate who said that if Darwin's theory of evolution is taught in a science class, the students should also learn about alternative ideas from creation science and intelligent design theory. The story in the Anchorage Daily News about this can be found here.
As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, on this blog, and elsewhere, I agree with the idea of "teaching the controversy." If students raise questions about criticisms of Darwinian evolution coming from proponents of intelligent design proponents or creationists, why shouldn't they be permitted to study the debate and decide for themselves? My proposal is that students should actually read Darwin himself and see that Darwin recognized the "theory of creation" as the alternative to his theory. If students were to read Darwin along with contemporary statements of evolutionary science and criticisms coming from creationists and ID proponents, students could see that the weight of the evidence and arguments favors Darwinian science. For some of my thinking on this, you can go here and here.
If students were permitted to study this debate, they might see how it opens up some of the deepest questions in the human attempt to understand the natural order of the universe. For example, they might see the ultimate problem of explanation as based on an unexplained first cause. As indicated in the Alaskan newspaper report, the libertarian candidate for Governor pointed to this problem when he asked, "Who intelligently designed the intelligent designer?"
As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, on this blog, and elsewhere, I agree with the idea of "teaching the controversy." If students raise questions about criticisms of Darwinian evolution coming from proponents of intelligent design proponents or creationists, why shouldn't they be permitted to study the debate and decide for themselves? My proposal is that students should actually read Darwin himself and see that Darwin recognized the "theory of creation" as the alternative to his theory. If students were to read Darwin along with contemporary statements of evolutionary science and criticisms coming from creationists and ID proponents, students could see that the weight of the evidence and arguments favors Darwinian science. For some of my thinking on this, you can go here and here.
If students were permitted to study this debate, they might see how it opens up some of the deepest questions in the human attempt to understand the natural order of the universe. For example, they might see the ultimate problem of explanation as based on an unexplained first cause. As indicated in the Alaskan newspaper report, the libertarian candidate for Governor pointed to this problem when he asked, "Who intelligently designed the intelligent designer?"
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Sarah Palin, Political Animal
In both Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I argue for agreeing with Aristotle that generally among political animals, males are "more hegemonic"--more inclined to dominance--than are females. But I also argue that while this difference in the central tendencies in male and female psychology explains why the highest positions of power are generally dominated by men, some women are temperamentally just as ambitious in their pursuit of political dominance as some men. Women like Queen Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher show us that some women can be manly in their spirited desire for political importance.
Sarah Palin is a remarkable illustration of this. She's a political animal who has risen near the top of the American political dominance hierarchy through a combination of persuasive rhetoric, shrewd political judgment, and tough character.
Of course, she is especially remarkable because she has done this while being a mother of five children and living the seemingly normal life of a "hockey mom." Few political women can do this so well. Condi Rice has no husband and no children. Hillary Clinton has one child. Nancy Pelosi has raised five children, but her most intense political activity came after her children had passed out of infancy. For Palin to stand on the stage of the Republican National Convention as Vice-Presidential nominee carrying her five-month-old infant in her arms is extraordinary, and it's obviously part of her powerful rhetorical appeal.
This is as it should be. In a free society, women should be free to compete for the highest levels of political power if they have the temperament to do so. But we can also expect that the natural differences in the propensities of men and women will manifest themselves in that there will generally be more men than women at the top of the political dominance hierarchy. Women like Sarah Palin will be rare. But their rarity only enhances their heroic character as manly women.
Sarah Palin is a remarkable illustration of this. She's a political animal who has risen near the top of the American political dominance hierarchy through a combination of persuasive rhetoric, shrewd political judgment, and tough character.
Of course, she is especially remarkable because she has done this while being a mother of five children and living the seemingly normal life of a "hockey mom." Few political women can do this so well. Condi Rice has no husband and no children. Hillary Clinton has one child. Nancy Pelosi has raised five children, but her most intense political activity came after her children had passed out of infancy. For Palin to stand on the stage of the Republican National Convention as Vice-Presidential nominee carrying her five-month-old infant in her arms is extraordinary, and it's obviously part of her powerful rhetorical appeal.
This is as it should be. In a free society, women should be free to compete for the highest levels of political power if they have the temperament to do so. But we can also expect that the natural differences in the propensities of men and women will manifest themselves in that there will generally be more men than women at the top of the political dominance hierarchy. Women like Sarah Palin will be rare. But their rarity only enhances their heroic character as manly women.
Monday, September 01, 2008
Responses to Dan Smail and Richard Richards on "Biopolitical Science"
At the APSA convention in Boston, the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy sponsored a series of three panels on "Evolution and Morality." For one of those panels, I presented a paper on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics," which is available at the APSA website. The commentators on my paper were Richard Richards, a philosopher at the University of Alabama, and Dan Smail, a historian at Harvard. Dan and Richard generally agreed with most of what I wrote. But they did raise some questions and indicate some problems. Here I will briefly go over my responses.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, my paper develops a theoretical framework for a biopolitical science that would be a science of political animals. Such a science would move through three levels of deep political history--the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of this biopolitical science, I show how this science helps us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.
Dan pointed to four possible problems. First, Dan questioned whether there really is a natural desire to resist dominance that is always "turned on." After all, doesn't a dominance hierarchy require that the resistance of subordinates be "turned off"? Second, he suggested that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is not a good case to study because it was "an act of the highest altruism." Dan wrote: "it would have been perfectly natural if Lincoln had favored his own group, white people, at the expense of black people. But he didn't." By contrast, Dan spoke of Pope Urban II's proclamation in 1095 calling for a crusade as an example of the more common tendency to brutal attacks on those outside of one's group. Third, Dan doubted that a biopolitical science could really explain specific events, and he suggested that such a science could be better developed through a comparison of two or more cases rather than concentrating, as I did, on one case. Finally, Dan suggested that my claim for modern constitutional republicanism as a revival of the egalitarianism that prevailed in ancient foraging societies showed a "fallacy of Edenism"--i.e. a naive progressivist view of history.
To Dan's first point, I would say that, of course, there is a natural tendency for subordinates to defer to dominants. The ambivalence in our political behavioral repertoire comes from the tension between the natural tendencies to dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance. If some human beings were so naturally subordinate that they never resisted being exploited, they would be natural slaves. But the history of slavery suggests to me that there are no such natural slaves, at least among normal human beings.
To Dan's second point, I would say that the Emancipation Proclamation was not so clearly a purely altruistic act. Lincoln's justified it as a military tactic for strengthening the Union attack on the South, although he worried about the resistance of white Union soldiers who did not see the Civil War as a war of emancipation. In fact, critics of Lincoln have accused him of being a racist who used the slavery issue for his own political and military purposes. Frederick Douglass--the black abolitionist leader--referred to Lincoln as "the white man's President." Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves in the border states on the side of the Union. In other words, Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation is morally complicated. And that very complexity is why it's such a fascinating case for study.
To Dan's third point, I would say that yes any behavioral science must arise from a comparison of cases rather than trying to explain a unique case. But the history of slavery ranges over more than two thousand years. A big part of the interest in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is how it fits into that wider history. The problem of explaining unique cases indicates the distinctiveness of historical sciences like evolutionary biology and political science--sciences that study cases that will never repeat themselves in exactly the same way.
To Dan's final point--about the "fallacy of Edenism"--I would say that my deep history of politics is hardly "Edenic." It seems to me that one cannot explain the amazing revolutionary turn towards democratic republicanism since the eighteenth century without seeing this as satisfying some natural human desire to be free from exploitation, a natural desire that must manifest a human universal of evolutionary history. But this is not utopian, because there is no suggestion that human beings could ever live without any dominance hierarchy at all, which would be the dream of the Marxists or the anarchists.
Richard offered various comments on what he identified as my "pluralistic approach" to explanation. Like Dan, he was generally supportive of my position. But he did indicate a few problems. He wondered whether my biopolitical science would be perceived by many people as too fuzzy in its complexity to satisfy the need for theoretical simplicity that seems to make science possible. Formulating and testing scientific ideas usually requires simplified models that abstract from the complexity of the real world. Richard also wondered whether my explanation of Lincoln's career as motivated by ambition might be seen as based on a "folk theory" of beliefs and desires. It often seems that such intentional states depend on subjective mental experiences that cannot be explained scientifically through objective physical causes.
Richard rightly invoked the famous motto "a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." He agreed with me in quoting Aristotle's advice about not demanding more precision or certainty than is appropriate for the subject matter under study. Because moral and political life is so irreducibly complex, it cannot be fully explained in its historical particularity through simplified scientific models. But actually my framework is capacious enough to incorporate some scientific research based on simplified models. For example, as I said in my post on Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, his use of the "trolley problem" in providing scenarios in moral judgment shows how science demands simplified models. This kind of research could be part of biopolitical science. But it needs to be combined with real world history. Another example of simplified models would be experimental evolutionary game theory. Such game theory models can be tested cross-culturally to provide some experimental testing of evolutionary theories of human behavior. But, again, as with Hauser's simplified trolley problems, this game-theory modeling needs to be combined with real historical cases, which is what I am trying to do.
To Richard's point about "folk theory," I would say that such "folk theory" or commonsense psychology is irreplaceable in the behavioral sciences. The subjective experience of self-conscious, intentional states is not objectively observable. We have personal access to our own subjective experience, and then we attribute comparable experience to others. Others can testify to such experience by verbal report. But we cannot directly observe it as we observe physical events. Human psychology depends upon this. Similarly, with animal psychology, we cannot directly observe "animal minds," and so we must project our conscious experience onto them. This creates the problem of anthropomorphism. But if we are studying animals with brains comparable to ours, and if they are close evolutionary ancestors to human beings, we would seem to be justified in attributing mental experience to them.
Natural science can refine, but it cannot replace, prescientific or commonsense psychology. Our ordinary experience of how beliefs and desires explain human behavior is presupposed by all behavioral science. Without such experience, our scientific modeling of behavior through objective, observational data would not work. So, for example, consider fMRI research in which subjects respond to moral dilemmas, and we look for correlated brain changes. Interpreting these brain images would be impossible if we did not have subjective, commonsense experience of human psychology, and if we could not ask our subjects to verbally testify about their subjective experience.
My idea is that a biopolitical science should encompass laboratory experimentation, evolutionary theory, and traditional research in political history. Some of this work will lend itself to simplified scientific models. But the real-world political history will have all the fuzzy complexity of such history.
As I have indicated in some previous posts, my paper develops a theoretical framework for a biopolitical science that would be a science of political animals. Such a science would move through three levels of deep political history--the universal political history of the species, the cultural political history of the group, and the individual political history of animals in the group. To illustrate the particular application of this biopolitical science, I show how this science helps us to understand Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863.
Dan pointed to four possible problems. First, Dan questioned whether there really is a natural desire to resist dominance that is always "turned on." After all, doesn't a dominance hierarchy require that the resistance of subordinates be "turned off"? Second, he suggested that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is not a good case to study because it was "an act of the highest altruism." Dan wrote: "it would have been perfectly natural if Lincoln had favored his own group, white people, at the expense of black people. But he didn't." By contrast, Dan spoke of Pope Urban II's proclamation in 1095 calling for a crusade as an example of the more common tendency to brutal attacks on those outside of one's group. Third, Dan doubted that a biopolitical science could really explain specific events, and he suggested that such a science could be better developed through a comparison of two or more cases rather than concentrating, as I did, on one case. Finally, Dan suggested that my claim for modern constitutional republicanism as a revival of the egalitarianism that prevailed in ancient foraging societies showed a "fallacy of Edenism"--i.e. a naive progressivist view of history.
To Dan's first point, I would say that, of course, there is a natural tendency for subordinates to defer to dominants. The ambivalence in our political behavioral repertoire comes from the tension between the natural tendencies to dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance. If some human beings were so naturally subordinate that they never resisted being exploited, they would be natural slaves. But the history of slavery suggests to me that there are no such natural slaves, at least among normal human beings.
To Dan's second point, I would say that the Emancipation Proclamation was not so clearly a purely altruistic act. Lincoln's justified it as a military tactic for strengthening the Union attack on the South, although he worried about the resistance of white Union soldiers who did not see the Civil War as a war of emancipation. In fact, critics of Lincoln have accused him of being a racist who used the slavery issue for his own political and military purposes. Frederick Douglass--the black abolitionist leader--referred to Lincoln as "the white man's President." Keep in mind that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves in the border states on the side of the Union. In other words, Lincoln's issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation is morally complicated. And that very complexity is why it's such a fascinating case for study.
To Dan's third point, I would say that yes any behavioral science must arise from a comparison of cases rather than trying to explain a unique case. But the history of slavery ranges over more than two thousand years. A big part of the interest in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation is how it fits into that wider history. The problem of explaining unique cases indicates the distinctiveness of historical sciences like evolutionary biology and political science--sciences that study cases that will never repeat themselves in exactly the same way.
To Dan's final point--about the "fallacy of Edenism"--I would say that my deep history of politics is hardly "Edenic." It seems to me that one cannot explain the amazing revolutionary turn towards democratic republicanism since the eighteenth century without seeing this as satisfying some natural human desire to be free from exploitation, a natural desire that must manifest a human universal of evolutionary history. But this is not utopian, because there is no suggestion that human beings could ever live without any dominance hierarchy at all, which would be the dream of the Marxists or the anarchists.
Richard offered various comments on what he identified as my "pluralistic approach" to explanation. Like Dan, he was generally supportive of my position. But he did indicate a few problems. He wondered whether my biopolitical science would be perceived by many people as too fuzzy in its complexity to satisfy the need for theoretical simplicity that seems to make science possible. Formulating and testing scientific ideas usually requires simplified models that abstract from the complexity of the real world. Richard also wondered whether my explanation of Lincoln's career as motivated by ambition might be seen as based on a "folk theory" of beliefs and desires. It often seems that such intentional states depend on subjective mental experiences that cannot be explained scientifically through objective physical causes.
Richard rightly invoked the famous motto "a theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." He agreed with me in quoting Aristotle's advice about not demanding more precision or certainty than is appropriate for the subject matter under study. Because moral and political life is so irreducibly complex, it cannot be fully explained in its historical particularity through simplified scientific models. But actually my framework is capacious enough to incorporate some scientific research based on simplified models. For example, as I said in my post on Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, his use of the "trolley problem" in providing scenarios in moral judgment shows how science demands simplified models. This kind of research could be part of biopolitical science. But it needs to be combined with real world history. Another example of simplified models would be experimental evolutionary game theory. Such game theory models can be tested cross-culturally to provide some experimental testing of evolutionary theories of human behavior. But, again, as with Hauser's simplified trolley problems, this game-theory modeling needs to be combined with real historical cases, which is what I am trying to do.
To Richard's point about "folk theory," I would say that such "folk theory" or commonsense psychology is irreplaceable in the behavioral sciences. The subjective experience of self-conscious, intentional states is not objectively observable. We have personal access to our own subjective experience, and then we attribute comparable experience to others. Others can testify to such experience by verbal report. But we cannot directly observe it as we observe physical events. Human psychology depends upon this. Similarly, with animal psychology, we cannot directly observe "animal minds," and so we must project our conscious experience onto them. This creates the problem of anthropomorphism. But if we are studying animals with brains comparable to ours, and if they are close evolutionary ancestors to human beings, we would seem to be justified in attributing mental experience to them.
Natural science can refine, but it cannot replace, prescientific or commonsense psychology. Our ordinary experience of how beliefs and desires explain human behavior is presupposed by all behavioral science. Without such experience, our scientific modeling of behavior through objective, observational data would not work. So, for example, consider fMRI research in which subjects respond to moral dilemmas, and we look for correlated brain changes. Interpreting these brain images would be impossible if we did not have subjective, commonsense experience of human psychology, and if we could not ask our subjects to verbally testify about their subjective experience.
My idea is that a biopolitical science should encompass laboratory experimentation, evolutionary theory, and traditional research in political history. Some of this work will lend itself to simplified scientific models. But the real-world political history will have all the fuzzy complexity of such history.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
"Biopolitical Science"--An APSA/ASPLA Paper
My APSA/ASPLA conference paper--"Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics"--can be found here by searching under my name.
I warn you, however, that the paper is about 80 pages long.
I warn you, however, that the paper is about 80 pages long.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Nita Farahany on Law and Neuroscience
As I have indicated in a previous post, I will be participating in a series of convention panels on "Evolution and Morality" at the Boston convention of the American Political Science Association, August 28-31. These panels are sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy.
One of the panels will be organized around Nita Farahany's paper on "Law and Behavioral Morality." Farahany is a law professor at Vanderbilt University who brings together law, philosophy, and biology in studying the fundamental assumptions about human nature in criminal law. In this paper, she considers how research in evolutionary science and neuroscience might influence our view of criminal responsibility and culpability.
She claims that as evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience provide biological explanations of human morality, this will strengthen the power of "behavioral morality--the idea that any behavior with a physical cause is either not blameworthy, or is less so." She seems to assume that "blameworthiness" presupposes "free will" understood as an uncaused cause. And, therefore, if we can show there is a physical cause for someone's criminal behavior, then that criminal's behavior "is either not blameworthy, or is less so."
If I have correctly interpreted what she is saying, then I disagree with her. As I have said in some previous posts, I see no reason to believe that legal responsibility and culpability must rest on the idea of "free will" understood as uncaused cause. The only possible uncaused cause is God. All other natural agents are subject to the causal order of nature. But we can still hold people responsible for their behavior as long as we understand moral responsibility correctly. The commonsense notion of liberty is power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. Human freedom of choice is not freedom from nature but a natural freedom to deliberate about our natural desires so that we can organize and manage our desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. This is how Aristotle and Darwin understood moral choice.
Darwin would say that human behavior arises from a complex interaction of innate temperament, individual experience, social learning, external conditions, and deliberate reasoning. Although we are not absolutely free of the causal regularities of nature, we are morally responsible for our actions because of our uniquely human capacity for reflecting on our motives and circumstances and acting in the light of those reflections. Darwin wrote: "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals."
Against Farahany's "behavioral morality," I agree with Stephen Morse--a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in psychology and law--that the law's conception of responsibility does not require "contra-causal freedom." It requires only that human beings have sufficient practical rationality to understand their choices and to act on their deliberate decisions. When rationality is so diminished that someone cannot understand or act on his choices--a child or someone who is insane, for example--then we excuse their behavior and do not hold them fully responsible for their actions. But this conception of moral and legal responsibility as based on the capacity for practical deliberation or rationality does not require any transcendence of natural causality.
Under this commonsense conception of responsibility, research in evolutionary science and neuroscience could have some interesting implications for law, but it poses no fundamental challenge to the traditional understanding of legal responsibility.
Farahany thinks that neuroscience could radically challenge the legal standard of the "reasonable person." The standard of reasonableness is a prediction of what the normal or average person will do in a given set of circumstances. But while the criminal law now relies on a "fictitious concept of reasonableness," neuroscience, Farahany claims, could allow us to "define objective reasonableness by a scientifically robust understanding of human behavior." She writes:
"Suppose, for example, science is able to predict that all people with lesions of a certain size and shape in the frontal lobe who also have certain environmental triggers, such as childhood abuse, will become robbers as adults. Society may choose that given the distribution of normal human capacities, that such persons cannot be held as agents under criminal law when they later rob as adults. Or, society may also decide that because of the aspirational goals of the criminal law--to set norms of human behavior--that even those people will be held criminally accountable when they commit violent robberies, but not when they commit other robberies. Criminal law will have to balance its goals--promoting social welfare, reifying and setting social norms--with preserving its legitimacy. If, indeed, one hundred percent of individuals are unable to comply with a set norm in criminal law, and science can inform this, criminal law will likely need to reformulate this norm."
To "suppose" that biological science could ever give us such 100% predictability of behavior is unbelievable. Isn't this scenario far more "fictitious" than the traditional standards of reasonableness? Such absolute and precise predictability is not achievable for a historical science like behavioral biology. To imagine such a scenario is to ignore the distinctive traits of biological phenomena--individuality, particularity, contingency, plasticity, and historicity. Even genetically identical bacteria show individuality in their behavior. We can't even predict the precise behavior of fruit flies with 100% accuracy. Even identical twins are not really identical, because each will show individual traits. One of the prominent themes of contemporary neuroscience is the plasticity of the brain--because the brain is constantly being reconfigured by experience, and sometimes this reflects mental effort, when individuals consciously overcome abnormal neural circuitry by using mental concentration to change the circuitry. For example, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz has shown how this can happen with obsessive compulsive patients who are taught to use mental effort to change their brains.
Farahany speaks of "certain environmental triggers, such as childhood abuse." How exactly would she specify this precisely enough to enable 100% predictability? Do these "environmental triggers" include all of the cultural history and life history experience of each individual? And how would she specify "childhood abuse"? Does this imply some generic conception that would abstract from all the particularity of concrete cases of abuse? If so, wouldn't this ignore the uniqueness of each case that would create individual variation and thus prevent 100% predictability?
Rather than foreseeing that neuroscience will some day develop deterministic models of human behavior that will replace traditional commonsense psychology, as Farahany suggests, I foresee that neuroscience will, at best, only confirm that commonsense psychology in all of its uncertainty.
Here I am building on some previous posts on the neuroscience of human behavior, which can be found here, here, here, and here.
One of the panels will be organized around Nita Farahany's paper on "Law and Behavioral Morality." Farahany is a law professor at Vanderbilt University who brings together law, philosophy, and biology in studying the fundamental assumptions about human nature in criminal law. In this paper, she considers how research in evolutionary science and neuroscience might influence our view of criminal responsibility and culpability.
She claims that as evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience provide biological explanations of human morality, this will strengthen the power of "behavioral morality--the idea that any behavior with a physical cause is either not blameworthy, or is less so." She seems to assume that "blameworthiness" presupposes "free will" understood as an uncaused cause. And, therefore, if we can show there is a physical cause for someone's criminal behavior, then that criminal's behavior "is either not blameworthy, or is less so."
If I have correctly interpreted what she is saying, then I disagree with her. As I have said in some previous posts, I see no reason to believe that legal responsibility and culpability must rest on the idea of "free will" understood as uncaused cause. The only possible uncaused cause is God. All other natural agents are subject to the causal order of nature. But we can still hold people responsible for their behavior as long as we understand moral responsibility correctly. The commonsense notion of liberty is power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. Human freedom of choice is not freedom from nature but a natural freedom to deliberate about our natural desires so that we can organize and manage our desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. This is how Aristotle and Darwin understood moral choice.
Darwin would say that human behavior arises from a complex interaction of innate temperament, individual experience, social learning, external conditions, and deliberate reasoning. Although we are not absolutely free of the causal regularities of nature, we are morally responsible for our actions because of our uniquely human capacity for reflecting on our motives and circumstances and acting in the light of those reflections. Darwin wrote: "A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives--of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who certainly deserves this designation is the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals."
Against Farahany's "behavioral morality," I agree with Stephen Morse--a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who specializes in psychology and law--that the law's conception of responsibility does not require "contra-causal freedom." It requires only that human beings have sufficient practical rationality to understand their choices and to act on their deliberate decisions. When rationality is so diminished that someone cannot understand or act on his choices--a child or someone who is insane, for example--then we excuse their behavior and do not hold them fully responsible for their actions. But this conception of moral and legal responsibility as based on the capacity for practical deliberation or rationality does not require any transcendence of natural causality.
Under this commonsense conception of responsibility, research in evolutionary science and neuroscience could have some interesting implications for law, but it poses no fundamental challenge to the traditional understanding of legal responsibility.
Farahany thinks that neuroscience could radically challenge the legal standard of the "reasonable person." The standard of reasonableness is a prediction of what the normal or average person will do in a given set of circumstances. But while the criminal law now relies on a "fictitious concept of reasonableness," neuroscience, Farahany claims, could allow us to "define objective reasonableness by a scientifically robust understanding of human behavior." She writes:
"Suppose, for example, science is able to predict that all people with lesions of a certain size and shape in the frontal lobe who also have certain environmental triggers, such as childhood abuse, will become robbers as adults. Society may choose that given the distribution of normal human capacities, that such persons cannot be held as agents under criminal law when they later rob as adults. Or, society may also decide that because of the aspirational goals of the criminal law--to set norms of human behavior--that even those people will be held criminally accountable when they commit violent robberies, but not when they commit other robberies. Criminal law will have to balance its goals--promoting social welfare, reifying and setting social norms--with preserving its legitimacy. If, indeed, one hundred percent of individuals are unable to comply with a set norm in criminal law, and science can inform this, criminal law will likely need to reformulate this norm."
To "suppose" that biological science could ever give us such 100% predictability of behavior is unbelievable. Isn't this scenario far more "fictitious" than the traditional standards of reasonableness? Such absolute and precise predictability is not achievable for a historical science like behavioral biology. To imagine such a scenario is to ignore the distinctive traits of biological phenomena--individuality, particularity, contingency, plasticity, and historicity. Even genetically identical bacteria show individuality in their behavior. We can't even predict the precise behavior of fruit flies with 100% accuracy. Even identical twins are not really identical, because each will show individual traits. One of the prominent themes of contemporary neuroscience is the plasticity of the brain--because the brain is constantly being reconfigured by experience, and sometimes this reflects mental effort, when individuals consciously overcome abnormal neural circuitry by using mental concentration to change the circuitry. For example, Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz has shown how this can happen with obsessive compulsive patients who are taught to use mental effort to change their brains.
Farahany speaks of "certain environmental triggers, such as childhood abuse." How exactly would she specify this precisely enough to enable 100% predictability? Do these "environmental triggers" include all of the cultural history and life history experience of each individual? And how would she specify "childhood abuse"? Does this imply some generic conception that would abstract from all the particularity of concrete cases of abuse? If so, wouldn't this ignore the uniqueness of each case that would create individual variation and thus prevent 100% predictability?
Rather than foreseeing that neuroscience will some day develop deterministic models of human behavior that will replace traditional commonsense psychology, as Farahany suggests, I foresee that neuroscience will, at best, only confirm that commonsense psychology in all of its uncertainty.
Here I am building on some previous posts on the neuroscience of human behavior, which can be found here, here, here, and here.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
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?
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?
Friday, August 15, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
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.
(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.
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.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
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.
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.
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