The Genetic Basis of Human Rights

The modern human rights movement begins with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The idea of human rights would seem to depend on the idea of human nature. Although the Declaration never speaks of "human nature," it does refer once to nature in declaring that the family "natural"(Article 16). Moreover, the references to the "inherent dignity" of "all members of the human family" and the declaration that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" implies some shared human nature that is the source of human rights.

Originally, Charles Malik a Lebanese Christian and Thomist proposed the following language for Article 16: "The family deriving from marriage is the natural and fundamental group unit of society. It is endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights antecedent to all positive law." The drafters accepted the first sentence but rejected the second, because they wanted a purely secular statement that did not depend on religious belief. Similarly, proposals to refer in Article 1 of the Declaration to human beings as "created in the image and likeness of God" were not adopted. According to someone like Richard Weikart, in his warnings about the "Darwin to Hitler" connection, disregarding the traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine of human beings as created in God's image makes healthy morality impossible. But clearly, the drafters of the Declaration disagreed, because they thought that the shared repulsion towards Nazi barbarism and the determination to declare a universal morality of human rights that would condemn such barbarism manifested a natural morality that did not depend on religious belief.

This cosmopolitan morality of human rights must somehow be grounded in human biological nature. And yet many of the theorists of human rights are nervous about recognizing such an appeal to human nature because they fear that this would require an indefensible "essentialism." The problem here, as I suggested in a post from a few weeks ago, arises from a false story about "essentialism"--the story that beginning with Aristotle, biological species were regarded as absolutely eternal and invariable in their logically defined "essences."

This will be the first of a series of posts on how a Darwinian conception of human nature supports the modern conception of human rights.

In at least one of the recent documents on human rights, the biological basis of human rights is explicitly recognized. The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights was adopted by UNESCO in 1997 and then ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1998. The text can be found here.

The first four articles are put under the title "Human dignity and the human genome":

Article 1
The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.

Article 2
a. Everyone has a right to respect for their dignity and for their rights regardless of their genetic characteristics.
b. That dignity makes it imperative not to reduce individuals to their genetic characteristics and to respect their uniqueness and diversity.

Article 3
The human genome, which by its nature evolves, is subject to mutations. It contains potentialities that are expressed differently according to each individual's natural and social environment, including the individual's state of health, living conditions, nutrition and education.

Article 4
The human genome in its natural state shall not give rise to financial gains.

Here we can see much of the complexity and tension in appealing to human biology as a ground for human rights. Universal human rights assume a "fundamental unity of all members of the human family," which in turn assumes an underlying unity in the human genome, because membership in the human species requires some shared genetic basis. But the human genome brings about not only the unity of humanity but also its diversity. No two human beings are genetically identical. So even if human beings are roughly equal at birth in being identifiably human, they are not completely identical. Here we can see the implicit worry that some human beings might be excluded from the human family because of genetic differences that some people would consider abnormal or inferior.

We can also see here the fear of genetic reductionism. Although being genetically human is the precondition for being treated with the dignity that human beings deserve, human beings are not fully reducible to human genetics.

The human genome is recognized as a product of evolution and thus subject to evolutionary change through mutations. But there is enough genetic stability to sustain the reality of the human species.

That genetic humanity consists of potentialities that are diversely expressed in each individual through the interaction with the natural and social environment of the individual, which includes physical conditions, bodily functioning, and social learning.

Human genes by themselves do nothing. They shape human life only though genetic potentialities that work through complex interactions with the physical and social world. That's why human biology is much more than genetics. The biological nature of human beings depends on the coevolution of innate tendencies, social history, and individual judgment.

The universality of human genetic nature allows for universal human rights. But the moral history of human rights will reflect the complex contingencies of social and political history.

That we can treat human beings with "dignity" depends on certain natural moral sentiments and on practical judgments about how best to express those sentiments. That requires more thought about how Darwinian science might support the modern language of human rights as a language of cosmopolitan morality.

Incest, Again

Marlene Sokolon was a graduate student of mine who now teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. When she was my student, we had a standing joke between us whenever she would complain about how often in class I wanted to talk about incest.

And here I am bringing it up again! I do that because understanding our moral condemnation of incest touches in some way on almost all of the topics that come up on this blog.

The incest taboo is one of the clearest cases of a human universal, because every human society has some rules about prohibited incest. But there is also variation as to what counts as incest. Even within the same society, there can be great variation, as in the United States where state laws differ as to whether cousins can legally marry.

Our condemnation of incest as immoral illustrates how hard it is to rationally justify moral judgments that depend on deep moral emotions of repugnance.

The Darwinian explanation for the incest taboo--particularly as developed by Edward Westermarck--is the most fully developed example of how Darwinian ethics works. That's why Edward O. Wilson brings it up so often in his writing, and why some of the proponents of evolutionary psychology have devoted so much attention to it.

Three of my previous posts on the incest taboo can be found here, here, and here.

The 24 comments on the first post are fascinating in showing the range of responses that this provokes.

Darwinism and Religion in Canada: My Lecture at the University of Regina

Last Friday, I lectured at the University of Regina in Canada on "Does Darwin Subvert or Support Morality?" The lecture was sponsored by the Departments of Philosophy and Classics and Political Science. The funding for the lecture was provided by Shadia Drury as holder of the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at the University of Regina.

The lecture was attended by about 70 students and faculty from many different departments. Everyone seemed seriously engaged in the topic, as indicated by the fact that everyone stayed attentive for two hours or more of lecturing and discussion.

The religious objections to Darwinian science are more common in the United States than in Canada, and generally I find that Canadian academics think this is a distinctly American debate that has no resonance in a predominantly secular country like Canada. But I noticed that some of the students who spoke with me after the lecture were serious religious believers who were looking for ways to reconcile their religious beliefs with Darwinism, and they were pleased that I was open to that possibility. I suspect that religious belief is taken far more seriously by many Canadians than Canadian academics are willing to admit.

I also noticed this in some of my dinner-table conversation with faculty members. We were discussing some of the most prominent Canadian academics, and some of them expressed shock that one of the most influential academics in Canada--Charles Taylor--was a Catholic who has argued for the importance of religious belief and warned about the dangers of "secularization." Taylor's recent book A Secular Age seems to be part of a "return to religion" movement sweeping across large areas of academic life in Europe and Canada.

Shadia Drury is one of those fearful of the influence of academics like Taylor, who give too much importance to religious belief as an expression of multicultural freedom.

Shadia is open to some of my arguments for using Darwinian science to support the idea of natural right or natural law as rooted in evolved human nature. But she is uncomfortable with my claim that war is a natural desire, because she fears this gives too much encouragement to a militaristic view of the world that is dangerous. This is related to her condemnation of the Straussians for supporting what she regards as an unduly aggressive view of American foreign policy.

On my way to Regina, I finished reading Peter Minowitz's new book Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers. It's a comprehensive and detailed defense of Strauss and the Straussians against critics like Drury. Shadia told me that she hasn't yet seen the book. It would be helpful to have her write a response to Minowitz's book as well as the book by the Zuckerts--The Truth About Leo Strauss.

The Emergent Evolution of the Soul in the Neocortex

In Darwinian Conservatism, I have a chapter on "Emergence" (104-111). Against the charge that Darwinian science is reductionistic because it denies the uniqueness of human mental freedom in denying that the mind has any freedom from the material mechanism of the brain, I argue that Darwinian evolution actually denies both reductionism and dualism and sustains the idea of emergence as a third alternative.

The simplest expression of the idea of emergence is that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. As we pass through levels of complexity in evolution, we see new properties at higher levels that are not fully reducible to the lower levels. That's why, for example, biology is not fully reducible to physics and chemistry. So the idea of emergence denies strong reductionism, because it denies that the higher levels of organization can be completely reduced to the lower levels. But the idea of emergence also denies dualism, because it denies any radical separation of matter and mind.

Part of my argument here concerns the "emergent evolution of the soul in the brain" (109-111). We should say that only human beings have a soul, which gives them an intellectual and moral freedom that other animals do not have. And we should explain this soul as an emergent product of the evolution of the brain once it passed over a critical threshold of size and complexity in the neocortex, particularly in the frontal lobes.

The evolution of the primate brain shows a trend towards increasing size and complexity of the neocortex, which allows for greater behavioral flexibility in these animals. This trend reaches its peak in the human brain. Larger and more complex frontal lobes give animals the capacity for voluntary action, in the sense that they can learn to alter their behavior in adaptive ways. In human evolution, the growth in the size and complexity of the frontal lobes passed over a critical threshold allow human beings to use words and images to compare alternative courses of action through mental trial and error. Consequently, human beings are capable not just of voluntary action but of deliberate choice, by which they self-consciously choose present courses of action in the light of past experiences and future expectations to conform to some general plan.

Recent research in neuroscience on the evolution of the neocortex gives some support to this kind of reasoning. A short review of this research is Pasko Rakic's article "Evolution of the Neocortex: A Perspective from Developmental Biology," Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10 (October 2009): 724-35. Here's the abstract for the article:

"The enlargement and species-specific elaboration of the cerebral neocortex during evolution holds the secret to the mental abilities of humans; however, the genetic origin and cellular mechanisms that generated the distinct evolutionary advancements are not well understood. This article describes how novelties that make us human may have been introduced during evolution, based on findings in the embryonic cerebral cortex in different mammalian species. The data on the differences in gene expression, new molecular pathways and novel cellular interactions that have led to these evolutionary advances may also provide insight into the pathogenesis and therapies for human-specific neuropsychiatric disorders."

Normally, this article would be available only to subscribers. But for the next six months, it can be accessed online along with some other articles on the evolution of the brain.

Some previous posts related to this topic can be found here, here, and here.

Does the Death of God Mean the Death of Morality? A Darwinian Response to Nietzsche's Challenge

"As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness--there can be no doubt of that--morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe--the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles." Thus declares Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals (third essay, sec. 27).

Nietzsche's prediction of the gradual disappearance of morality over the 20th and 21st centuries was based on his claim that this would follow from the decline in the belief that morality was founded in some eternal, divine order of the universe. Traditional morality could not survive once human beings saw the truth that all morality was only a human invention with no support in divine will or natural order.

This is what Jonathan Glover calls "Nietzsche's challenge" in his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (2000). Glover's book is a disturbing history of the inhuman brutality of the twentieth century--from Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Pol Pot, and so on. This might make us worry that Nietzsche's prediction was accurate--that the "death of God" really has brought on a nihilistic collapse of morality. And that's why we hear so much talk now about the need for a "return to religion." How else can we preserve our most cherished moral concepts based on the belief in the sacred dignity of human life if we have no belief in the sacred?

Glover tries to answer Nietzsche, however, by arguing that his moral history shows that despite the evil cruelty of that history, morality survives even without any necessary foundation in an eternal moral law. "The alternative is to keep ethics afloat without external support. If there is no eternal moral law, morality needs to be humanized: to be rooted in human needs and human values" (406). We can see a "humanized ethics" founded in human psychology that does not require any external metaphysics to support it.

Glover sketches a human moral psychology that has a number of elements. To a large degree, morality is a matter of self-interest. As social animals, we need the cooperation of others, and that cooperation is fostered by social trust based on reciprocity: human beings are naturally inclined to punish cheaters and reward the trustworthy. One can see the logic of reciprocal cooperation in the research of evolutionary game-theorists who show how cooperation can arise among egoists who discover that "tit-for-tat" is the best strategy for social behavior. These norms for social cooperation can then be enforced through social pressure and conventional moral rules.

Of course, Glover recognizes that narrow self-interest is not sufficient for morality, because clever cheaters often succeed. But there are other psychological propensities favorable to morality. Human beings do show natural inclinations for sympathy and respect for others: we feel disgust when people are mistreated, and we feel grateful to those who are generous and compassionate.

We also care about our moral identity. We want to have the character of a certain kind of person, and we feel shame and guilt when we fall short of the character to which we aspire. That's what we mean when we speak of "living at peace with oneself."

And yet even with all of these psychological propensities to morality, our moral history is replete with failure--as Glover indicates in his vivid and painful history of cruelty in the twentieth century. Human psychology includes propensities to evil as well as good. And some individuals in some circumstances give in to--even enjoy--those evil inclinations.

The most common problem for morality, Glover indicates, is the "moral gap" between "insiders" and "outsiders." We are inclined to cooperate with those who belong to our moral community--friends, relatives, fellow citizens, fellow believers, and so on. But we are inclined to be nasty to those outside our community. We seem to be naturally tribal animals. That's why so much of our moral history is about the difficulties of extending our circle of moral concern to wider groups.

A Darwinian science of morality would support all of these points about human moral psychology as a ground for morality that is independent of any religious or metaphysical conception of moral order.

The logic of cooperation through reciprocity is clearly Darwinian. In fact, the famous research of Robert Axelrod on the "tit-for-tat" strategy is explicitly presented as an evolutionary conception. Evolutionary game-theory is all about the Darwinian grounds for moral cooperation. The core ideas can be found in Darwin's Descent of Man, who recognizes the natural human propensity to reciprocal behavior--returning good for good and bad for bad.

Darwin also recognizes the importance of social pressure--praise and blame--and conventional moral rules in enforcing norms of good conduct. Darwin believes that human beings are uniquely moral because they have linguistic and cognitive capacities that allow them to formulate and enforce social standards of cooperative behavior.

Darwin also stresses the importance of sympathy or respect for others--the ability to imaginatively share the experiences of others--as a foundation for the moral sense. Here he follows the lead of Adam Smith, David Hume, and the Scottish moral philosophers in emphasizing the moral sentiments as sustaining social cooperation. Now, neuroscientists can investigate the neural bases of such social emotions--perhaps through systems of "mirror neurons," for example.

And just as Glover speaks about moral identity--our concern for having a certain kind of character--so does Darwin speak about how we use our cognitive capacities for self-reflection to organize our moral and intellectual lives into coherent patterns.

But also like Glover, Darwin recognizes our natural tribalism. If Darwin is right about the evolution of morality, then all morality is biopolitical. Morality does not arise as an imperative of cosmic order, divine will, or pure reason. Nor does morality arise as an arbitrary choice of individual whim or cultural artifice. Rather, morality arises from the emergent evolution of human nature. If Darwin is right about the evolution of human morality as a process of evolutionary group selection, then human morality is not absolutely disinterested or universalizable, because it is biased in favor of insiders and against outsiders.

This circle of group identity can be expanded. Darwin writes: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." Eventually, this can become a "disinterested love for all living creatures." In fact, Robert Wright's book Nonzero is a history of the world understood as a progressive expansion of nonzero-sum cooperation as human beings discover ever wider and more complex ways to cooperate with others for mutual benefit.

But many moral philosophers (like Peter Singer, for example) make a mistake in interpreting this as meaning that morality strives for the abstract principle of complete impartiality or disinterestedness. For Singer, the fundamental moral principle is the impartial consideration of the interests of all sentient creatures. Moral reasoning does require that we generalize across our moral community in the service of the common good. But complete impartiality would make morality impossible. If we were completely impartial, we wouldn't care about anything--nothing would matter. Contrary to Singer's "animal liberation," it is impossible for a moral system to give equal consideration to all life on earth. We might well want to minimize animal suffering, but we will properly care more for our fellow human beings than we do for nonhuman animals. Moreover, even within the community of humanity, we will care more for those close to us than for those far away. So there will always be some tension between loyalty and moral inclusion. Our humanitarian sympathy will typically be weaker than our love for our own.

This explains the complex tension in our moral lives, including international political debates over the nature and enforcement of "human rights." We are naturally tribal animals. And while our tribalism inclines us to cruelty towards outsiders, it also sustains loyalty, which is a moral duty.

This Darwinian moral psychology can be judged by how well it accounts for our human moral history. Religious belief and metaphysical conceptions of eternal moral order have been part of that moral history. But even if we doubt the truth of religious or metaphysical conceptions of morality, we can still sustain morality based on our natural human psychology.

Elizabeth Blackburn's Nobel Prize

Elizabeth Blackburn has just received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The news stories about her are reviving the debate over how Leon Kass arranged to have her expelled from the President's Council on Bioethics and then replaced by Kass's friend Diana Schaub.

My posts on this debate can be found here and here. The New York Times article on Blackburn's prize can be found here.

The Religious Longings of Strauss and Nietzsche

"Beyond Good and Evil always seemed to me to be the most beautiful of Nietzsche's books."

That's the first sentence of Leo Strauss's article on Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, which is the only substantial piece of writing by Strauss on Nietzsche. I have often puzzled over that first sentence, because Human, All Too Human has always seemed to me to be the most beautiful of Nietzsche's books. In my recent series of posts on Nietzsche, I've explained why I rank that book as Nietzsche's best. It's one of the books from Nietzsche's middle period, when he fully embraced Darwinian evolutionary science, and broke away from the religious longings that run through his earlier and later writings. The fundamental idea of Human, All Too Human is stated near the beginning: "everything has evolved," and "man has evolved."

In his later writings, and certainly in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche reverts back to his earlier fear of Darwin's "science of universal becoming" as "true but deadly," and he uses "the eternalizing powers of art and religion" to give "eternal meaning to existence." This move from evolution to eternity includes an affirmation of the eternity of the human species--"the eternal basic text of Homo natura.

As I have argued in an earlier post, Nietzsche moved from the Christian Pietism of his childhood to the Dionysian Pietism of maturity, and this required a move away from the Darwinian evolution of his middle writings to the Dionysian eternity of his later writings.

Is Strauss moved by the same religious longing for eternity that Nietzsche shows in his earlier and later writings? In his article, Strauss certainly does stress the importance of Nietzsche's atheistic religiosity and his appeal to the "religious instinct."

That Strauss and Nietzsche might share a similar religious longing is suggested by the following story about Strauss told by Hans Jonas in his Memoirs (p. 49):

". . . His family had been Orthodox, and it had cost Leo intense spiritual pain to tear himself away from his traditional upbringing. It hadn't been easy for him to make philosophy his guide, to free himself, that is, from all preexisting dogmatic assumptions when it came to the ultimate questions bearing on God and the world. This freedom, which was essential to being a philosopher and incompatible with adherence to a specific religion or revelation or god, this intellectual necessity of becoming an atheist in order to be a philosopher, tormented him all his life. He did make the leap, but he could never shake off the sense that he'd committed an act whose correctness could never be proved once and for all. That hurled him time and again into a fundamental state of doubt as to whether following the path of rational enlightenment, which requires the denial of established articles of faith, is consistent with the truth and beneficial to the human being. He suffered from the necessity of being an atheist. An experience we had as emigres made this clear to me. When I got to England in 1933, he was there, too, and we saw each other quite often. Leo Strauss was living in London at the time with his young wife and her little son from her first marriage. On a fall day--it must have been in 1934--we went for a walk in Hyde Park. We'd walked along in silence for quite a while. Suddenly he turned to me and said, 'I feel terrible.' I said, 'Me too.' And why? It was Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, and both of us were not in the synagogue but were walking through Hyde Park. That was telling. For him much more than for me, for in my case relinquishing our traditional faith had been much easier, having already been accomplished by my parents; I'd grown up in a climate in which you could think freely about such things. But for Strauss it was a source of torment. 'I've done the equivalent of committing murder or breaking a loyalty oath or sinning against something.' This 'I feel terrible' came straight from his soul."

Doesn't this sound a lot like Lou Salome describing Nietzsche's anguish in struggling with his religious yearnings from his Lutheran childhood and his fear that modern scientific naturalism could not satisfy him?

Some of my earlier posts on these points can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

"Darwin's Darkest Hour": A PBS Film

Tuesday evening, October 6, PBS television stations will broadcast a special two-hour "Nova" film--"Darwin's Darkest Hour." The story in the film turns on the domestic life of Darwin during the weeks around the time that he received the famous letter from Alfred Russel Wallace indicating that Wallace was ready to announce his own theory of evolution, which forced Darwin to publish the work that he had kept hidden from the public for many years. The film will also depict the tension between Darwin and his wife Emma over the religious implications of his theory.

PBS has a good website for the program. The interview with the script writer--John Goldsmith--suggests that the film is based on some good historical research.

Arnhart in Canada

On Friday, October 9, at 3:30 pm, I will be lecturing at the University of Regina in Canada. The title for my lecture is "Does Darwin Subvert or Support Morality?" (Can you guess my answer?)

My host is Shadia Drury, a member of the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Regina.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on Shadia's new book on Aquinas. She's best known as the leading critic of Strauss and the Straussians. Catherine and Michael Zuckert have shown--in their book The Truth About Leo Strauss--that Drury's books on Strauss were the primary source for all the journalistic coverage of the Straussian influence in the Bush administration, which was a big story a few years ago.

Darwin, Thucydides, and International Relations

Any general theory of politics assumes a theory of human nature. A small but growing number of political scientists have been applying a Darwinian theory of human biological nature to various topics in political science. The final aim of such work would be to turn political science into a biopolitical science. So, for example, research in human biology and Darwinian theory can illuminate the study of international relations. One can see this in two books: Bradley Thayer's Darwin and International Relations: On the Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict (2004) and Stephen Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005).

Although they agree on many points, Rosen and Thayer disagree on the implications of a biological approach to international relations for assessing rational choice theory. Rational choice theorists assume that human beings are by nature rational egoists who rationally maximize their interests. Applying rational choice theory to international relations means that decisions of war and peace are explained as rational calculations of interests by states competing with one another. Thayer believes that a Darwinian view of international relations confirms rational choice theory by explaining the human nature of rational egoism as ultimately caused by natural selection in the evolutionary competition of human beings for scarce resources. Rosen believes, however, that a biological understanding of human nature shows that rational choice theory is only partially true, because in stressing rational calculations of interest, it ignores the emotional dispositions of fear and honor as factors shaping human decisions in international relations.

In his history of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides has some Athenian envoys in Sparta say that the imperial policies of Athens are motivated by fear, interest, and honor. Rosen says that the aim of his book is to show "that there is a biological argument that Thucydides was right, that fear and honor play a role in human politics along with calculations of interest, but also that the other issues he analyzed, such as the nature of the political systems present in the ancient Greek world, matter as well" (2). Human beings are inclined by their biological nature to be rational egoists, and so the rational choice theorists are right about this. But that same biological nature also inclines human beings to feel social emotions that make them care about others and about their status in relation to others. So, for example, their emotional desire for honor and fear of being dishonored might move them to act contrary to their material interests. Moreover, Rosen argues, these complex motivations of human biological nature are manifested in the military and political behavior of states in international relations.

Rosen applies research in neuroscience on the complex interplay of reason and emotion in the brain and endocrine system to explain the decision-making of leaders in times of international crises. Through case studies, he argues that American presidents have had to make quick decisions in complex international circumstances through emotional pattern recognition shaped by memories of emotionally charged experiences from the past. They thus employed neural pathways of information gathering and decision-making shaped by natural selection in human evolutionary history.

Rosen argues that while the termination of war can result from calculated decisions about material interests, this can also result from a collapse of the will to fight among the losers, which arises from emotional distress with a neurophysiological basis. Again, Rosen's general point is that decisions about war and peace arise from the complex interaction of reason and emotion as shaped by the evolved nature of the human brain.

One prominent manifestation of evolved human nature in international relations is the natural desire for status and dominance. Those who fill the highest offices for deciding issues of war and peace tend to be ambitious people who desire dominance over others. Rosen identifies such people as mostly high testosterone men who manifest a desire for dominance shaped in evolutionary history where men competed with one another for preeminence. People like Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill are moved by a desire for distinction--for honor and glory--tht goes beyond any selfish calculation of material interests.

Tyrants show a similar desire for dominance. But Rosen argues that ambitious leaders like Lincoln, FDR, and Churchill do not have the tyrannical souls of people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. He claims that tyrannical behavior emerges from "the personal character of tyrants combined with the institutional character of tyrannies" (178). Rosen's point here is unclear. But the idea seems to be that those of tyrannical temperaments will rise to the top in turbulent circumstances where there are few institutional checks or limits on the ruthless and opportunistic pursuit of power.

One fundamental lesson that emerges from Rosen's biopolitical analysis is the need to channel the rivalry of politically ambitious people through an institutional structure of checks and balances so that ambition counteracts ambition. Here, again, Rosen agrees with Thucydides, who suggested that factional conflict in the ancient Greek cities could have been tamed by mixed regimes in which oligarchic and democratic elements balanced one another.

Although Thayer agrees with Rosen in using biological science to explain international relations, Thayer sees biological explanations as apply only to the level of ultimate causes in the genes, as distinguished from social and cultural explanations as applying to the level of proximate causes in the environment. Human behavior arises from a complex interaction of ultimate and proximate causes.

Thayer argues that evolutionary biology contributes to the general theories of international relations by explaining the ultimate causes of the rational egoism assumed by realist theory and rational choice theory. Human beings are rational egoists because natural selection has favored the rational calculation of selfish interests as best adapted to the survival and reproduction of individuals in evolutionary history.

According to Thayer, evolutionary biology also contributes to the particular topics of international relations by explaining the ultimate causes of war and ethnic conflict. Human beings wage war to acquire and defend resources, because this was favored by natural selection in evolutionary conditions where competing for scarce resources enhanced fitness. Human beings are inclined to ethnic conflict because in-group/out-group distinctions, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism conferred competitive advantages in human evolutionary history.

Unlike Rosen, Thayer does not argue that biology goes beyond rational choice theory by showing the importance of emotional motivation in human decision-making. And yet Thayer repeatedly acknowledges the power of emotions in human social behavior. For example, he speaks of the "profound emotions" of war, which include "profound love of comrades, the deepest hatred of the enemy, fear of death, and fear of disappointing the other men" (191). He also refers to the "emotional depth of national identity" (232). I think he's mistaken in not considering how such emotions--deeply rooted in the brain and endocrine systems of human nature--might go beyond "rational choice."

Nor does Thayer consider the moral emotions as expressions of human biological nature. He quotes Adam Smith as describing the egoism of Homo economicus, and he claims that evolutionary theory confirms this economic understanding of human nature. But he says nothing about Smith's account of the "moral sentiments" as the natural ground of moral judgment. Nor does he mention the influence of Smith on Charles Darwin's theory of the "moral sense" as rooted in human biological nature.

This is an important point because many social scientists have recently been employing experiments in evolutionary game theory that confirm the importance of moral sentiments for instilling a sense of right and wrong that motivates people to punish wrongdoers, even when this punishment requires some sacrifice of material interests. Moreover, neuroscientists are now uncovering the neural roots of these moral sentiments in the emotional control pathways of the brain. This natural moral sense manifests itself in international relations when individuals and nations act out of a sense of justice to aid the perceived victims of injustice and to punish those who have injured them. The tradition of "just war" arises out of such moral sentiments.

Like many of the proponents of "evolutionary psychology," Thayer assumes that biological science cannot explain moral experience because science is concerned with factual claims rather than value judgments, and he attributes this fact/value distinction to David Hume. But Thayer misses Hume's point. Hume distinguishes is and ought in order to show that moral assessments are derived not from pure reason alone but from moral emotions. Yet far from denying that moral judgments are judgments of fact, Hume claims that moral judgments are accurate when they correctly report what our moral judgments would be in a given set of circumstances. Correct moral judgments are factual statements about the species-typical pattern of moral sentiments in specified circumstances.

Darwin saw that the ethical naturalism of Smith and Hume allowed morality to become an object of scientific study, because scientists could study the natural roots of moral judgment in the evolved moral emotions of the human animal. Recently, biologists such as Edward Wilson and economists such as Robert Frank have renewed Darwin's project for a scientific study of morality as founded on natural moral emotions. Thayer says that the question of whether rational choice theorists should include "moral commitment" as a factor in human behavior constraining egoism is "beyond the scope of this book" (86). But then we must wonder why a Darwinian theorist would reject the Darwinian tradition of ethical naturalism.

Explaining morality is important for political science, because political controversy is driven by moral passions, and therefore a complete science of politics must include a scientific account of morality. A biopolitical science would explain morality in politics as an expression of the natural moral desires of evolved human nature.

Such a broadly conceived biopolitical science would have to study not only the genetic evolution but also the behavioral and cultural evolution of human beings and other poltical animals. Thayer tends to reduce human biology to genetics, and so when he speaks of "ultimate causes," he seems to assume that these are genetic causes. This follows from his acceptance of Richard Dawkins' claim that all Darwinian explanation is ultimately about "selfish genes." Thayer believes that "the organism evolved largely to satisfy the wants of the gene, and in a similar manner egoism evolves through a population" (70). There are two problems with this. Biology is much more than genetics. And a purely genetic science is not going to explain much about politics, which depends on higher levels of complexity far beyond the genes.

As I have argued in some previous posts, DNA by itself does nothing. The causal power of DNA depends on interactions at many levels of biological complexity--interactions within a cell, between cells, between organisms, and within ecological and social communities. These interactions determine the expression of genes, and the patterns of gene expression can evolve in response to behavioral and cultural evolution.

Studying the genes by themselves would tell us almost nothing about politics. But studying the genetic interaction with behavioral and cultural evolution would tell us quite a lot about politics. For example, Thayer stresses that warfare is not unique to human beings, because other animals (such as ants and chimpanzees) wage war in ways that resemble human warfare. But Thayer does not indicate that the patterns in animal warfare show behavioral and cultural evolution. When Jane Goodall wrote about war among her chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Preserve, she wrote a historical chronicle that was unique to Gombe. Now many primatologists have reported diverse behavioral traditions among various chimpanzee groups, not only in war but in other activities, that suggest that each chimpanzee community has its own repertoire of cultural traditions. Thayer downplays the importance of environment or culture as "proximate causes." But he does not clearly indicate that cultural evolution is just as much a part of biology as genetic evolution.

To develop a scientific understanding of politics, we need a science of human nature that studies the coevolution of many causes at many levels of complexity--from genes to brains, then to behavior and culture, and finally to symbolic communication as the uniquely human adaptation. If we could achieve that, then political science could become a true science by becoming a biopolitical science. And such a biopolitical science might confirm that ancient political scientists like Thucydides got it right after all.

Three Cheers for Midwest Straussianism!--Strauss, Science, and the Zuckerts

Although I never met Leo Strauss, I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the 1970s where I studied under friends and students of Strauss such as George Anastaplo, Joseph Cropsey, and Herbert Storing. For many years, I have been a political science professor at Northern Illinois University in a department that has had a long tradition of faculty members who were students of Strauss--including Morton Frisch, Gary Glenn, and Martin Diamond.

Under this Straussian influence, I have adopted many of the ideas and habits of the Straussians, such as the deep respect for the history of political philosophy from Plato to the present and a devotion to a careful reading of the classic texts of political philosophy. But in many respects, I am not an orthodox Straussian. For example, I have always been skeptical of the stark ancients versus moderns dichotomy of the Straussians, along with the assumption that the ancients are better than the moderns. A related point of disagreement is that while Strauss and the Straussians are generally suspicious, if not scornful, of modern science as showing the bad traits of modernity, I regard modern science, and especially Darwinian biological science, as a great achievement of the human mind that can illuminate political philosophy.

Now, having read Catherine and Michael Zuckert's book The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (2006), I finally have a label for my position. I'm a "Midwest Straussian"!

Other people have noticed the debate between the "West Coast" and the "East Coast" Straussians. But the Zuckerts are the first to identify the "Midwest" Straussians as occupying a third position in this debate.

This debate arises from what the Zuckerts describe as the "tension-ridden legacy" of Strauss (21). The tension is clearest in the three following propositions that constitute Strauss's position on American liberal democracy:

1. America is modern.

2. Modernity is bad.

3. America is good.

To resolve the obvious contradictions between these propositions, each of the three schools of Straussian thought has had to deny, or at least downplay, one of the three propositions. The West Coast Straussians (led by Harry Jaffa) reject the first proposition, because they argue that the American founding is actually rooted in ancient (especially Aristotelian) thought. The East Coast Straussians (led by Allan Bloom) stress the first and second propositions, while questioning the third proposition, because they doubt that America can ever overcome the moral and intellectual defects of its modernity. The Midwest Straussians (led by Martin Diamond) deny or at least express doubts about the second proposition, because they are impressed by the apparent improvements in the human condition brought by modernity that seem to show clear progress beyond ancient thought. Thus, the Midwest Straussians cast doubt on what the Zuckerts identify as Strauss's "signature idea"--his "return to the ancients" (252-53).

According to this scheme, I would place myself under the category of Midwest Straussian, because I agree with those like Diamond who argue that the American regime manifests the progress that modern political thought has made beyond ancient political thought. The modern liberal constitutional regime provides for individual liberty, civil society, commercial prosperity, and limited government, which secure the conditions for moral and intellectual excellence more fully than was done in the ancient or medieval world.

As the Zuckerts rightly indicate, "modernity" as the Straussians understand it includes modern science. So, the second Straussian proposition--that modernity is bad--includes the proposition that modern science is bad (see, for example, 28, 33, 37-41, 50, 56, 61, 65, 68, 70-72, 78, 82, 84-85, 88, 96, 99-100, 112-14, 192-93, 208, 236-37, 244-45, 252, 255-59). My defense of Darwinian science and Darwinian natural right obviously denies this proposition, and so, again, I am in the Midwest Straussian camp.

On this question of the goodness of science, the Zuckerts are not as helpful in their analysis as they are on other issues, because they speak about "Aristotelian cosmology" as opposed to modern physics without seeing the importance of Aristotle's distinction between cosmology and biology.

The Zuckerts rightly notice that one of the biggest obstacles to Strauss's "return to the ancients" was that Strauss accepted modern natural science in its refutation of "Aristotle's view of the eternity of the world and the species, or his natural teleology" (37). It took Strauss a long time to figure out how to get around this. They write:

"Unlike some of his students (or his students' students), Strauss did not try to resurrect Aristotelian natural science by showing that it is compatible with modern natural science. [In a footnote here, the Zuckerts cite David Bolotin's book on Aristotle's physics and my book Darwinian Natural Right.] He came to think that would not be necessary, even if it were possible. Further study of Maimonides and Farabi convinced Strauss that they were not so much Aristotelian as Platonic philosophers. They did not deduce the characteristics or qualities of the best human life from an understanding of the natural order as a whole. Nor did they propagate Plato's doctrine of the ideas. . . . Philosophy, as represented by Plato's Socrates, constituted a fully satisfying form of human existence that could be enjoyed by private individuals in less-than-perfect regimes. Based entirely on reason, Socratic philosophy nevertheless involved something less than a claim to full knowledge. . . . Explicitly lacking knowledge of the most important things, Socrates did not affirm the truth of any particular account of the cosmic order, although he did have to be able to show why no available account was entirely satisfactory in order to maintain his paradoxical claim that he knew that he did not know. Since modern natural science also explicitly provides less than full knowledge of the whole, Socratic philosophy was compatible with it in a way Aristotelian cosmology was not (38)."

One can see here some of the main themes of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers, which I have taken up in some previous posts. As I indicated in those posts, I generally agree with Catherine's argument that Plato's Socrates distances himself from the cosmological teachings of the Athenian Stranger and Timaeus. But I also indicated that Catherine never really explains Socrates' yearning for some cosmology in which Mind rules everything; nor does she explain why some of the greatest philosophers--from Aristotle to Nietzsche--failed to see that Plato was not a Platonist. Furthermore, the Zuckerts don't explain how Plato could reject the doctrine of ideas while simultaneously affirming the Socratic doctrine that "being is divided into essentially different kinds (or ideas)" that are eternal (112).

But here my main concern is to question the loose language here about "Aristotelian cosmology." As I have noted in previous posts, Aristotle spoke of the cosmology of eternal order as based largely on mythic stories. By contrast, he spoke of the biological study of living beings as closer to human life and more open to direct study. While cosmological science (like that of Timaeus) looks for the eternally fixed order of being, biological science looks to the temporal flux of becoming.

Aristotelian natural right does not depend on a cosmology of eternal, teleological order. It depends on the biology of human nature and its immanent teleology. That empirical biology of human nature is not so far away from modern Darwinian biology. The way that the Zuckerts cite my book indicates that they have missed the point of the book, which is to argue that empirical biology manifests an immanent teleology of enduring but not eternal species that does not depend on any cosmic teleology of eternal order.

In contrast to Aristotle, Plato gave almost no attention to biology, because he was more interested in looking for the eternal patterns promised by mathematical knowledge or astronomy. But then Plato (or Plato's Socrates) could not account for the relationship between the invariant patterns of intelligible being and the variant patterns of sensible becoming.

Modern Darwinian biology continues in the tradition of empirical biology begun by Aristotle. Darwin's evolutionary science is a clear advance beyond Aristotle--one that Aristotle himself would surely have welcomed. In this and other respects, therefore, modern science shows progress in the philosophic study of nature and human nature. Modern science is good, and the modernity that sustains modern science is good.

That's why I'm a Midwest Straussian.

The Idea of Species and the False Story about Essentialism

A major objection to my notion of Darwinian natural right is that Aristotelian natural right assumes an essentialist understanding of species that has been refuted by Darwinian evolutionary science.

My idea of natural right assumes that human beings exist as a distinct species or kind of animal with characteristic traits, which include natural desires that incline human beings to certain natural ends. I can then argue that whatever fulfills those ends of the human species constitutes the natural human good.

But Darwin denied the eternal fixity of species by claiming that species emerge by a historically contingent process of evolution from ancestral species, which would seem to deny the objective reality of species boundaries, since they are in perpetual flux. According to biologists like Ernst Mayr and philosophers like David Hull, Darwin's intellectual revolution was his denial of the ancient Platonic and Aristotelian conception of species as defined by eternal, discrete, and unchanging essences, and his affirmation of species as nothing more than historical lineages that come into being and pass away. Hull has concluded from this Darwinian denial of essentialism that since Homo sapiens is a historically contingent entity, like every other species, there is no such thing as human nature. David Buller, a student of Hull's, has elaborated this point in arguing that evolutionary psychologists do not understand how the evolutionary account of species as historical lineages denies any belief in human nature as anything more than a "superstition."

In chapter 9 of Darwinian Natural Right, I responded to this line of thought by arguing that although the Darwinian must deny the eternity and fixity of species, and thus deny the claims of a transcendentalist essentialism, the Darwinian must still affirm the reality of species as natural kinds. Although species are not eternally fixed, since they have evolved from ancestral species, that does not make them any less real during the time of their existence. I also argued that Aristotle in his biological works anticipated the modern Darwinian criticisms of essentialist classification. Aristotle's biology was misinterpreted in the Middle Ages by those religious believers who viewed his logical concept of "species" as a biological concept of fixed kinds conforming to the teaching of biblical creationism, in which species become eternal ideas in the mind of God.

In the essentialist tradition of biological classification, logical division was used to classify organisms into genera and species with definitions based on essential properties that are necessary and sufficient for defining each species. So, for example, the essentialist definition of human beings was that they were the rational animals. They belonged to the genus of animals, while being uniquely distinguished from other animals by their rationality. The essence of human nature was thus captured through the necessary and sufficient properties of rational animality, properties that were fixed, discrete, and unchanging.

But contrary to the common view, I argued, Aristotle did not employ this method in his biological writings. On the contrary, he criticized the artificiality of applying logical division to biological phenomena, as Plato did. In his logical works, Aristotle did define "species" through the possession of essential, or necessary and sufficient properties. But in his biological works, he generally accepted the popular classification of species and genera, while turning his primary attention to studying how living beings were adapted for a specific kind of life in a specific kind of environment. The essential traits of a biological species are essential because of the functional role they play in the life of the living being.

When Darwin claimed that all species have evolved from ancestral species so that each species is adapted to a specific manner of life, he was closer to Aristotle than to those nominalists who would deny the natural reality of species.

So, I am now pleased to report that the scholarly writing on the "species problem" seems to be moving towards this position as I argued it in 1998. Increasingly, historians of science and philosophers of biology are questioning the "essentialism story" told by Mayr and Hull that presents Darwin's "populational" thinking as a revolutionary rejection of the "essentialist" thinking that ruled over biology for two thousand years. Instead, scholars are rediscovering a tradition of Aristotelian biological empiricism that broke away from Platonic essentialism and prepared the way for Darwin.

Some of this new scholarship was surveyed a few years ago in an article criticizing the "essentialism story"--Mary Winsor, "Non-essentialist Methods in Pre-Darwinian Taxonomy," Biology and Philosophy, 18 (2003), pp. 387-400. Now we have two new books that elaborate the issues in this scholarly debate. Newly published is John S. Wilkins, Species: A History of the Idea (University of California Press, 2009). Soon to be published is Richard Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). I have read Wilkins' book, and I have read a few chapters from Richards' manuscript. Wilkins is a philosophy professor at the University of Sydney. Richards is a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama.

Wilkins provides an encyclopedic history of the idea of species from Plato to the present. Running through his history is his argument for the falsity of the essentialism story as told by Mayr and Hull. His argument rests on three claims (x-xi, 231-34).

His first claim is that the essentialism story fails to distinguish species as a logical concept from species as a biological concept. Living species are not the same as formal species. Beginning with Plato, there is a logical tradition of universal taxonomy, which attempts to classify all possible objects into categories defined by necessary and sufficient properties. Beginning with Aristotle, there is a biological tradition of reasoning about species that are identified by a range of traits that are not reducible to logical essences of necessary and sufficient properties.

Wilkins' second claim is that Aristotle's biological writings began a "generative conception of species" that runs through the tradition of natural history as empirical science. Living species are identified by their generative power, which constitutes a lineage by which living form is passed through a reproductive process. Sometimes Wilkins identifies this generative conception of species as beginning with Lucretius and the Epicureans (25-27, 227-228). But I would stress the importance of this generative conception for Aristotle in his book on the generation of animals.

Wilkins' third claim is that in the tradition of empirical biology, species are understood as types rather than essences, and types allow for variation, while essences do not. Biologists can recognize individual organisms as conforming to the type of a particular species, even though there is great individual variation around the type.

As I indicated in Darwinian Natural Right, Darwin is ambivalent about the reality of species. In some passages of his writing, he seems to be a nominalist or conventionalist who views the identification and classification of species as a matter of convenience for the human mind that has no ground in nature. But in other passages, Darwin affirms the natural reality of species by claiming that only evolutionary biology can uncover the natural basis of classification by seeing that "community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking," and therefore, all true classification "must be strictly genealogical in order to be natural." Wilkins is not completely clear about this. Generally, he argues that Darwin believed in "species as real things in nature (albeit temporary things)"; and therefore he was a "species realist" (129-30). But then Wilkins also says that for Darwin "species are the outcomes of the evolutionary process acting on varieties and are not real entities themselves" (230).

The fundamental reason for this ambiguity, I think, is suggested by Wilkins' qualifying phrase--"albeit temporary things." In the Platonic tradition, there's a tendency to identify reality with eternity--what is really real must be eternal. That's why Platonists typically look to mathematics as a model of timeless truths. But unlike mathematics, biology is the study of temporal processes that are everchanging. Unlike mathematical objects, living things come into being and pass away. But Aristotelians and Darwinians can say that the temporality of living things and processes takes nothing away from their reality. A living being is real for as long as it exists.

Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz was one of the leading critics of Darwin's theory of evolution when Darwin proposed it in 1859. As a Christian Platonist, Agassiz regarded species as thoughts in the mind of God and therefore fixed essences that could not have evolved through any historical process. Here then is the Platonic essentialism that those like Mayr and Hull conjure up as the dominant tradition of biological thought prior to Darwin. For Agassiz, Darwin's denial of the eternal fixity of species was a denial of the very reality of species.

Agassiz wrote: "If species do not exist at all, as the supporters of the transmutation theory maintain, how can they vary? And if individuals alone exist, how can differences which may be observed among them prove the variability of species?" In a letter to Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin responded: "How absurd that logical quibble 'if species do not exist, how can they vary?' As if anyone doubted their temporary existence?" (quoted by Wilkins, 158).

Darwin did not doubt the "temporary existence" of species. But for a Platonic essentialist like Agassiz, "temporary existence" is not real existence at all.

Richard Richards goes more deeply than does Wilkins into the history of how Aristotle's biological studies of species were overlooked or distorted by a medieval tradition of Christian Platonism that read Aristotle as a Platonic essentialist who could be brought into alignment with a biblical creationist conception of species as eternally fixed in the mind of the Creator.

My defense of an Aristotelian and Darwinian conception of species and of the reality of human nature can be found in some previous posts here and here.

Cosmology, Morality, and Divine Law: Remi Brague's Response

Over the past two months, I have written a series of four posts on two of Remi Brague's books--The Wisdom of the World and The Law of God. He has sent me an email message responding to my comments, and he has kindly agreed to allow me to post that message here. He writes:

"You have somewhat overstated my commitment to the pre-modern view that I endeavored to delineate in my two books. They are written in the manner adopted by historians of ideas. I describe a worldview that I deem to be obsolete. I do not condone it. I simply ask how we could possibly meet the consequences of its disappearance.

"You write that I am 'defending the idea that moral and political order depends upon a cosmic order of divine design," while I try to show, conversely, that the "denial of cosmic moral order leads to moral confusion if not nihilism." This runs counter to my intention.

"What I do claim is that, according to the standard ancient and medieval worldview (that brooked exceptions, as we both observe), such an order used to depend on a cosmic order.

"You ascribe to me the claim that 'the idea of a morally neutral cosmos did not appear in Western thought prior to the modern era.' This is diametrically opposed to what I wrote--for instance, when I discuss the atomistic worldview (see ch. 4: 'The Other Greece'), or when I quote Marcus Aurelius on pp. 76-77 and again p. 218. I simply claim that this idea was kept at bay by the mainstream platonic-abrahamic synthesis, which drove its rivals out of the market. What you write about Socrates is right, and is precisely what I contend. But again, those aspects of Plato were simply forgotten in the latter tradition. Plato's dialogues were not known to Europe before the 15th century (see my The Legend of the Middle Ages, the University of Chicago Press, 2008, fourth part).

"The same holds true for your sentence according to which I defend 'the premodern idea that norms of human practice must rest upon belief in divine law.' The general thrust of my book is that the idea of a lawgiving God was done away with by Paul, who kept only the Ten Commandments. They constitute some sort of basic survival kit of humankind, hence they are accessible, at least in principle, to human moral conscience and are not revealed, because they need not be.

"You wrote that I 'give the reader the impression that the modern turn away from cosmic or divine norms leads to a nihilistic collapse. But then, by the end of the book, (I) conclude that an 'autonomous ethics' of 'common morality' without religion is indispensable.' The contradiction arises from the impression given to the reader, but this impression is wrong. As for the last sentence, I simply meant that such an ethics is possible, nay that it is real. But I don't venture into the third category of modality . . . Whether religion--and which religion(s)--did prop this common ethics or undermined it could be, partly at least, a question for historians.

"I have some reservations about that concept of 'nature' that you wield, for instance, when you mention 'the nature of the human species.' It looks like the Epicurean and, for that matter, modern (Hobbes) concept of a primitive, 'rough' state of things. Whoever defends the idea of natural law takes his/her bearings from the Aristotelian concept of nature as the full development of the potentialities of a being (see Politics, I, 2, 1252b32-33) and/or from the Stoic concept of a nature that sets morality in the most elementary instincts of man. Hence, the discussion between supporters and opponents of 'natural law' is desperately lopsided.

"Whether one can ground morality on the Darwinian description of what evolution has made of man looks doubtful to me, not because it is Darwinian, but because it is a description. Hume's old problem of the 'ought' that you can't derive from the 'is,' or the fact/value problem is hardly solved.

"Furthermore, whereas I am pretty confident that a secular worldview can enable people to get on together in a well-ordered society, because it is the interest of the individuals to do so, I doubt that it can give mankind as a species good reasons to survive, more crudely, to beget children.

"Again, many thanks for the care with which you have read my things and for your interesting discussion."

For those interested in his Law of God book, Professor Brague recommends two recent symposia on the book that have been published in Modern Age, 51, winter 2009, pp. 26-46, and in the Political Science Reviewer, 38, 2009, pp. 1-104.

Remi Brague on Divine Law & Common Morality

In recent months, my posts on the question of cosmic teleology have included comments on Remi Brague--particularly, here, here, and here.

Brague is a philosophy professor at the Sorbonne who has written some of the best studies of cosmological thinking and divine law in the history of philosophy and culture. He has had a lot of influence on Straussians and American conservatives in defending the idea that moral and political order depends upon a cosmic order of divine design, which has been subverted by modern science and philosophy, including Darwinism.

Against Brague, I have argued that we can understand the moral and intellectual goods of human life as rooted in evolved human nature, which does not necessarily depend on any cosmic order or divine law.

Despite my disagreements with Brague, I admire his writing, because he allows his careful readers to see the weaknesses in his position. For example, as I have noted previously, he at least hints that the skeptical questioning of Platonic cosmology began with Plato's Socrates.

Similarly, in his book The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (2007), he sets out to defend the premodern idea that norms of human practice must rest upon belief in divine law; but then by the end of the book, he admits that one can reasonably look to "common morality" as founded in human nature without any necessary support from religion.

Brague begins this book by quoting Leo Strauss: "the divine law, it seems to me, is the common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy. . . . The common ground between the Bible and Greek philosophy is the problem of divine law. They solve that problem in a diametrically opposed manner" (18). This quotation is from an essay by Strauss in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (248). But this quotation leaves us wondering what is meant by the "diametrically opposed manner" in which the Bible and Greek philosophy solve the problem of divine law.

After the Strauss quotation, Brague explains: "Greek divine law is divine because it expresses the profound structures of a permanent natural order. Jewish Law is divine because it emanates from a god who is master of history. In both cases, it is external to the human and transcends the quotidian." But if one looks at Strauss's essay, it seems that he wants to suggest an even sharper opposition between the Bible and Greek philosophy. First of all, Strauss casts doubt on any intelligent design cosmology by pointing out "the fundamental difference between human production and the production of things which are not manmade, so that no conclusion from human production to the production of nonmanmade things is possible except if it be first established by demonstration that the visible universe has been made by thinking beings." Strauss then goes on to say that in Greek philosophy, the idea of divine law is replaced by the idea of natural order or natural law or natural morality. Thus, divine law is abandoned. "And if it is accepted by Greek philosophy, it is accepted only politically, meaning for the education of the many, and not as something which stands independently" (Rebirth, 255-56).

Although Strauss does not draw this conclusion, I would say that Darwinian science completes the Greek philosophic substitution of "natural order" or "natural morality" for "divine law" by providing a natural explanation for how the order of the cosmos could arise by natural evolution, within which human morality could arise as an expression of evolved human nature.

Oddly enough, Brague himself seems to move towards such a position towards the end of his book. At the beginning of his book, Brague sets out to show how--using Kant's terms--the premodern world saw morality as "heteronomy" (a law based on cosmic or divine standards external to human beings) as opposed to the modern project of viewing morality as based on "autonomy" (a law that human beings give themselves)(vii-viii). Moreover, he gives the reader the impression that the modern turn away from cosmic or divine norms leads to a nihilistic collapse. But then, by the end of the book, he concludes that an "autonomous ethics" of "common morality" without religion is indispensable. "There is no religious morality," he says. Rather, "there is a common morality capable of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, 'secular,' or other interpretations." The role of religion is "not to add to morality, but rather to provide it with the nourishing environment" (259-61). This "common morality" sounds a lot like Darwin's natural "moral sense," which does not require religion although it can benefit from religious beliefs and practices.

The crucial turn in Brague's book comes in his account of Paul's remarks on natural law in the opening chapters of his Letter to the Romans: "When Gentiles who do not have the law keep it as by nature [phusei], these men, although without the law, serve as a law for themselves [nomos heauto]. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts. Their conscience bears witness together with that law, and their thoughts will accuse or defend them" (Romans 2:14-15). This is the primary passage in the New Testament for the idea of "natural law" that human beings can know even without any belief in divine law. And it clearly shows, as Brague admits, that the idea of moral "autonomy" arose long before the modern project.

This natural law is what Brague calls "common morality," which contains "the elementary rules that permit the coexistence of individuals and the permanence of the species, what C. S. Lewis called 'the Tao'" (90). The reference to Lewis is to The Abolition of Man, where Lewis claims that in all human cultures through history, there is evidence for a shared morality that can be known without any particular religious beliefs.

And, again, I would say that this is what a Darwinian ethics would recognize as the natural morality that satisfies the conditions for human flourishing, the conditions that secure "the coexistence of individuals and the permanence of the species." To justify these as conditions for a good human life, we don't have to appeal to some cosmological morality or divine law. We only have to see how these conditions conform to the nature of the human species.

C. S. Lewis and the Medieval Model

C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964) sketches the "Medieval Model" of the universe and shows how that model shaped medieval and Renaissance literature. He shows how that cosmic model arose by combining ideas from Plato (especially the Timaeus), Aristotle, the Stoics, the Neo-Platonists, and the early Christians. This model was crafted during the first centuries of the Christian era and became the prevalent conception of the cosmos throughout the Middle Ages. Its influence on literature continued even through to the end of the seventeenth century.

Lewis's book helps us to see the moral, political, and philosophical implications of the modern scientific model of the cosmos, including Darwinian evolution, by showing us what the modern model replaced. In fact, much of the opposition to the evolutionary view of the cosmos is motivated by a longing for the Medieval Model.

One important point that emerges clearly in Lewis's book is that this Medieval Model of the cosmos depends on pagan ideas. Although it is "eminently religious," it is "not eminently Christian" (18-19), because much of it was out of harmony with biblical religion (45-46, 49-51, 76, 79, 119-20). I stress this because it shows that other than the biblical doctrine that God created the universe, biblical religion does not require any specific view of the cosmos; and it certainly doesn't require the geocentric cosmology of the Medieval Model.

That's why even though Lewis admires that model--"the old Model delights me" (216)--he concedes that it is "not true." And as I have indicated in a previous post, Lewis was a theistic evolutionist.

Lewis's appreciation for the Medieval Model is more artistic than philosophical or scientific. His primary concern, he says, is with the "emotional effect" of the Model rather than its literal truth (112).

As an indication of the primacy of artistic emotion over scientific truth in such models, Lewis indicates that medieval philosophers and scientists treated the model as merely "provisional" (16). "It is not in the nature of things that great thinkers should take much interest in Models. They have more difficult and more controversial matters in hand. Every Model is a construct of answered questions. The expert is engaged either in raising questions or in giving new answers to old ones. When he is doing the first, the old, agreed Model is of no interest to him; when he is doing the second, he is beginning an operation which will finally destroy the old Model altogether" (18).

This is the point I have suggested in some of my recent posts on Platonic cosmology: even as Plato has Timaeus and others lay out elaborate cosmological designs, Plato implies that the skepticism of Socratic questioning will never support a dogmatic commitment to any cosmic model.

But even if we doubt the literal truth of such a model, Lewis insists, we should recognize the artistic sublimity of the Medieval Model. He writes:

"Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out--like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the Medieval Model, you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall.' When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life. And, looking in, we do not see, like Meredith's Lucifer, 'the army of unalterable law,' but rather the revelry of insatiable love. We are watching the activity of creatures whose experience we can only lamely compare to that of one in the act of drinking, his thirst delighted yet not quenched. For in them the highest of faculties is always exercised without impediment on the noblest object; without satiety, since they can never completely make His perfection their own, yet never frustrated, since at every moment they approximate to Him in the fullest measure of which their nature is capable. You need not wonder that one old picture represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile as a girl dancing and playing with her sphere as with a ball. Then, laying aside whatever Theology or Atheology you held before, run your mind up heaven by heaven to Him who is really the centre, to your senses the circumference, of all; the quarry whom all these untiring huntsmen pursue, the candle to whom all these moths move yet are not burned" (119).

Lewis would say that this "revelry of insatiable love" expresses a truth about the erotic nature of the human soul in striving for eternal truth and union with God. So even if we deny the literal truth of the Medieval Model, we can take seriously the psychic truth of human longing.

Lewis argues that although the Medieval Model is "not true," the move to the Modern Model of the universe is not "a simple progress from error to truth" (216, 222). The reason for this is that every model captures some but not all of the total truth. A model accounts for some aspects of what we experience in the cosmos under the influence of some prevailing psychological propensities. Our choice of models inevitably shows our "taste in universes" (222-23).

The literal truth of models is always limited by their dependence on metaphors. After all, that's what we mean by the word "model." So, for example, Lewis observes: "The fundamental concept of modern science is, or was till very recently, that of natural 'laws,' and every event was described as happening in 'obedience' to them. In medieval science, the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct" (92). Our selection of cosmic metaphors is important. "On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon our universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations" (94).

We should remember here that Darwin's idea of "natural selection" is a metaphor that treats nature as acting like a human breeder of plants and animals. In the 6th edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin added (in chapter 4) a defense of this metaphor: "It has been said that I speak of natural selection as an active power or Deity; but who objects to an author speaking of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets? Every one knows what is meant and is implied by such metaphorical expressions; and they are almost necessary for brevity. So again it is difficult to avoid personifying the word Nature; but I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us. With a little familiarity such superficial objections will be forgotten." So in trying to give a literal meaning to his metaphor "natural selection," Darwin uses another metaphor--"natural laws"!

Here we see why, as Lewis suggests, serious thinkers will always treat cosmic models as provisional formulations that approximate, but never fully capture, the whole truth. But even so, we can judge how well our models approximate the truth by seeing how well they account for the facts--both the material facts of the physical world and the mental facts of the psychic world. And by that standard, Darwin could argue for the superiority of his model to the older model.

Richard Weikart's New Book--HITLER'S ETHIC

What difference would it make for our view of morality if we rejected the Platonic/theistic cosmology of intelligent design in favor of a Darwinian cosmology of evolutionary order?

In the Platonic dialogues, the Athenian Stranger (especially in book 10 of the Laws) and Timaeus argue that morality requires a moral cosmology of intelligent design. Much of the tradition of biblical theology--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--has adopted a similar position: God the Creator has intelligently designed His universe to conform to His good ends, and He has created human beings in His Image so that they are endowed with a conscience that can grasp God's moral law. Much of the opposition to Darwinian science has come from Platonic philosophers and religious believers who fear that a Darwinian morality is corrupting, because it denies the intelligent-design cosmology necessary for any healthy morality.

Some of these critics of Darwinian morality have pointed to Adolf Hitler's Nazi morality as a terrifying illustration of how dangerous a Darwinian morality can be. Richard Weikart's book From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (2004) argued that the evils of Nazism showed the consequences of adopting a Darwinian view of morality that rejected the traditional Judaic-Christian morality based on the belief that human beings have equal moral dignity as created in God's Image. If human beings have evolved by a natural process of evolution in which the strong prevail over the weak in the struggle for existence, then, the Nazis concluded, the rule of the biologically stronger races over the weaker races must be a moral imperative rooted in the laws of evolutionary nature as studied by science.

Some of my previous posts on this book can be found here, here, here, and here.

Weikart's new book--Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (2009)--is a sequel to the earlier book. While the earlier book concentrated on the history of Social Darwinism as shaping Nazi ideology, this new book concentrates on Hitler's own writings as showing the fundamental influence of Darwinian ethics.

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

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

The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the "leadership principle," eugenics, and genocide. But Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence.

Proponents of Darwinian ethics--like myself--should be honest in recognizing the impressive evidence that Weikart marshalls from Hitler's writings and speeches to show how Hitler's thought and actions were driven by a coherent view of Darwinian ethics.

But once this is conceded, then we are left with at least three questions. First, was Hitler's Darwinian ethics scientifically correct? Second, was it logically derived from Darwin's science? Third, what alternative view of morality is Weikart offering us?

In response to the first question, Weikart admits that Hitler's evolutionary thinking was scientifically false--often ridiculously so (201-202). But Weikart's point here is that its falsehood was not evident at the time. In Hitler's times, many prominent people--including many prominent scientists--embraced the same crude ideas about the evolution of superior races that run through Hitler's thought.

Weikart's response to the second question seems to be that even if Hitler's ethic did not arise by logical necessity from Darwin's teaching, Darwin's language could easily be interpreted as supporting Hitler. Although I agree with Weikart that some of what Darwin says is open to Hitler's Social Darwinist interpretation, any careful reader of Darwin would have to conclude that Hitler and the Nazis had to distort Darwin's teaching to get the conclusions they wanted.

First of all, it should be noted that, as Weikart indicates, Hitler never uses the term "Darwinism" or refers directly to Darwin. The only evidence that Hitler ever specifically mentioned Darwin comes from a report by Otto Wagener, a Nazi associate of Hitler (36, 41, 185). In any case, it is clear that Hitler had no direct knowledge of Darwin's writings.

And yet Weikart insists that Hitler's writing shows the influence of thinkers who did read Darwin and who did find support for their Nazi thinking in Darwin's writing. Weikart admits that Darwin never recommends violence against "inferior races," and he never says anything to support anti-Semitism. But Darwin does describe the conflict between "the higher civilized races" and the "lower savage races," which was interpreted by Darwinians like Ernst Haeckel as supporting scientific racism.

But here Weikart overstates his case and glosses over weaknesses. For example, he notes that Haeckel taught that the human races were actually separate species (57-58). But he doesn't tell his reader that Darwin denied this, and that affirming the unity of the human species was part of Darwin's life-long argument against slavery and scientific racism. Moreover, while Weikart cites Daniel Gasman's book on the fundamental influence of Haeckel on Hitler's Social Darwinism, Weikart does not mention the fact that Gasman argues that Haeckel's thinking "had little, if anything at all, to do with Charles Darwin" (The Scientific Origins of National Socialism). Here is one of many examples of where Weikart passes over in silence evidence and argument that works against his position.

As Weikart indicates, Hitler was a crude genetic determinist who believed that not only physical traits but even morality and culture were inherited genetically along racial lines, so that moral and cultural evolution depended on genetic evolution. But Weikart doesn't indicate to his readers that Darwin denied this. Although the capacity for human morality requires biologically inherited social instincts and cognitive abilities, the actual progress of morality and civilization depends more on social learning, cultural traditions, religious ideas, and individual reasoning than on biological evolution by natural selection. (See, for example, in the first edition of the Descent of Man, vol. 1, pp. 72, 165-66, 173; vol. 2, pp. 326, 404.)

As our final question for Weikart, we might wonder what exactly he is suggesting as an alternative view of morality that would avoid the horrors of Hitler's Nazism. In his earlier book, he spoke of traditional "Judeo-Christian ethics," particularly as based on the idea of humans with equal dignity from being created by God in His Image. Is this the alternative to Hitler's evolutionary ethics? Well, not exactly. Weikart admits that Hitler often refers to God as Creator and to human beings as created in His Image (38-39, 50-51, 56, 85). Weikart says he wants to write another book showing that Hitler was "neither an atheist nor a Christian" (40). He doesn't explain this except to say that if Hitler was a "theist," he was a "theistic evolutionist"--that is, someone who thought God did His creative work through a natural process of evolution (51). "Hitler saw evolutionary ethics as the expression of the will of God" (40).

So where exactly did Hitler go wrong, according to Weikart? Weikart writes: "In none of the relevant quotations from Mein Kampf does Hitler state that humans were specially created in the recent past by the miraculous intervention of God. On the contrary, Hitler repeatedly insisted that humans are subject to inescapable natural laws and that they are the product of eons of change. He often presented evolution as a universal process encompassing humans as well as other creatures" (51).

So what exactly is Weikart suggesting here? To avoid the evils of Hitler's evolutionary ethics, it seems, it is not enough to believe that God created human beings in His Image. Is Weikart saying that one must be a young-earth special creationist who believes that human beings were created a few thousand years ago in the Garden of Eden? Is he saying that believing that God would use a natural evolutionary process to bring about His creative intentions would necessarily lead to something like Hitler's Nazi ethics?

If Weikart is suggesting that the only reasonable basis for morality is young-earth creationism based on a literal 6-days-of-creation reading of Genesis, then he is in disagreement with the Discovery Institute's promotion of "intelligent design theory" as something distinct from young-earth creationism. If this is Weikart's position, then he is also opposed to those many thoughtful Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have become theistic evolutionists--people like C. S. Lewis, for example.

Unfortunately, this book is grossly overpriced by Palgrave Macmillan. Although it is only 254 pages long with a plastic binding, the publisher's price is $80, and the Amazon price is $54. Instead of buying this book, you should find a library copy and photocopy it.

Writing at the Discovery Institute's blogsite, Weikart has responded to this review of his book.

Does the Life of the Mind Require a Platonic Cosmology?

Over the past two months, I have written a series of posts on the moral and intellectual implications of Platonic cosmology, its dominance of Western culture for almost two millenia, and the overturning of that cosmology by modern science, especially Darwinian science. As most elaborately stated in the Timaeus, that Platonic cosmology presents a cosmic model of divine intelligent design in which there is an eternal and purposeful order that constitutes the cosmic standards of moral and intellectual perfection.

The fundamental claim of that Platonic cosmology is that Mind (nous) governs everything, and that this cosmic Mind has designed everything for what is best. By contrast, the fundamental claim of Darwinian science is that the design of the universe arises by a natural evolutionary process that does not require a cosmic Mind.

What difference does this make for the intellectual life of human beings? Sometimes, it seems that the Platonic/Socratic argument for the supremacy of the philosophic life as the best human life depends on the principle of "mind rules all"--so that the life of the mind can be understood as an erotic striving to contemplate the eternal ideas of that noetic cosmic order. But, then, sometimes it seems that the Socratic life of philosophy can be justified as satisfying the deepest human needs and desires, regardless of whether this is grounded in any kind of cosmic Mind.

Some of the critics of evolutionary science have warned that any denial of divine intelligent design is self-defeating, or self-referentially incoherent, because this would deny the grounds for any confidence in human reason, and thus deny the rationality of science or philosophy. If our human minds are products of an irrational evolutionary process, then we have no reason to believe our cognitive faculties are reliable. But if this is the case, then we have no reason to trust our belief in evolutionary science. So we are caught in a self-denying position. Those like C. S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga would say that the only escape from this confusion is to conclude that our confidence in human reason--and in the claims of the philosophic or scientific life--presupposes a theistic cosmology in which Mind has created the universe with noetic order and created our human minds to discover that order. (This argument that evolutionary naturalism without theism is self-refuting can be traced back at least as far as the writings of Arthur Balfour and G. K. Chesterton.)

Much of the writing of Plato seems to point in the same direction, and yet there is also evidence in the dialogues of a Socratic skepticism about any cosmology of intelligent design, and thus an openness to the thought that cosmic order might have arisen by a natural process that does not require cosmic intelligence or intentionality.

I am inclined to believe that we can account for the reliability of the human mind, and thus support the claims of philosophy or science, through an evolutionary explanation for the origins of the human mind. But sustaining that position will require some future posts.

Three New Books on Darwinism, Philosophy, & Biotechnology

Some of my writing has appeared in three recently published books.

Philosophy After Darwin: Classic and Contemporary Readings, edited by Michael Ruse, has just been published by Princeton University Press. This book brings together a broad selection of writings on the philosophic implications of Darwinism, along with helpful commentary by Ruse. It includes readings from Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Alvin Plantinga, E. O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, David Sloan Wilson, and many others.

This book reprints two selections by me--a couple of chapters from Darwinian Conservatism and an essay on "The Darwinian Moral Sense and Biblical Religion."

Ruse has carefully selected the readings to convey the contrasting positions in the continuing philosophical debates over Darwinism. So, for example, a reading from Singer on "the Darwinian Left" is followed by the reading from me on "Darwinian conservatism." Plantinga's argument that Darwinism undermines a naturalistic epistemology is followed by Evan Fales' critical response to Plantinga.

This book should be useful both for those scholars interested in the philosophic debates over Darwinism and for teachers looking for a text to introduce these debates to students.

The other two books on my table have been mentioned previously on this blog. Biotechnology: Our Future as Human Beings and Citizens, edited by Sean Sutton, has been published by the State University of New York Press. This book captures the philosophic debate over biotechnology with essays by Leon Kass, Ron Bailey, Ron Green, Lee Silver, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Richard Sherlock, and me. My contribution is entitled "The Bible and Biotechnology." The theological side of this debate runs through at least five of the essays.

Finally, I will put in another plug for Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Ken Blanchard and published by Imprint Academic. This book reprints the entire text of Darwinian Conservatism, followed by critical assessments from Neil Blackstone, Lauren Hall, Carson Holloway, Peter Lawler, Timothy Sandefur, Richard Sherlock, Michael Shermer, and John West. I have a response to these critics. And then Blanchard has an excellent concluding essay on "Natural Right and Natural Selection," which takes up the Aristotelian character of Darwinian natural right.