Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (2): Deliberate Choice Versus Free Will

One of the most common criticisms of my position is the charge of biological determinism. It is said that any attempt to explain human thought and action as biological denies "free will," and this denial of "free will" makes it impossible to explain how human beings can be morally responsible for their thoughts and actions.

Two years ago, Stephen Dilley wrote an article directing this criticism against me, to which I responded in a post. I raised some questions for Dilley in that post, which I sent to him. But he chose not to respond. Subsequently, he wrote a conference paper for the 2009 convention of the American Political Science Association. But, again, he chose not to respond to my questions. I am still interested in how he would answer my questions, if he ever chooses to do so.

I am reminded of Dilley's concept of "free will" now as I teach my course on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In Book 3 of the Ethics, Aristotle explains how in judging virtues and vices, we recognize actions as "voluntary" (ekousion) or "deliberately chosen" (proairesis). Children and nonhuman animals can act voluntarily when the origin of the act is in themselves--in their beliefs and desires. Only human adults, however, can act with deliberate choice, when they self-consciously choose present courses of action in the light of past experience and future expectations to conform to some general plan of life. Aristotle derives this analysis from his biological writings--especially, On the Movement of Animals. I have adopted this Aristotelian understanding of volition and deliberate choice, while arguing that this arises from the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain.

Notice that there is nothing in this Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of volition and deliberate choice to suggest the concept of "free will," if by "free will," we mean "uncaused cause." In fact, there's a good argument for the claim that the idea of "free will" is not found in the ancient philosophers, because it did not arise prior to the early Christian Church fathers (such as Augustine).

"Free will" is a projection onto human beings of a divine power, because only the Biblical God can act as an "uncaused cause." Of course, that points to the fundamental problem--the absurdity of attributing to human beings a power that belongs only to God--which is why theologians like Jonathan Edwards have rejected it.

This raises lots of questions. If we can't explain moral responsibility without the concept of "free will," as Dilley assumes, then how did Aristotle do it? Or would Dilley say that Aristotle was mistaken in not understanding that "free will" was required? If "free will" is required, exactly how is it possible for human beings to exercise a power that belongs only to God? How would Dilley answer Edwards?

Notice, however, that I admit in my previous post on Dilley that, as far as I know, no one has yet worked out a detailed explanation for exactly how the human mind arises from the evolution of the brain. And yet there is lots of evidence pointing to the evolutionary history of the primate brain as passing over some kind of critical threshold at which fully human mental capacities appear. Once that happened, human beings were able to exercise a freedom of thought and choice that no other animal has.

In Darwinian Conservatism, I illustrate this through the work of Jeffrey Schwartz with patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, who can be taught to use "directed mental force" to change the neural circuitry of their brains in countering the effects of OCD.

Would Dilley say that the reality of "free will" has nothing to do with the emergent evolution of the primate brain? If so, what alternative explanation does he have? In his first article, he complains that in my reasoning, "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes are out of the picture." But then he never explains exactly how "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes" create human mental freedom. When Schwartz is dealing with his patients, exactly where, when, and how do "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes" intervene to show a "free will" that transcends nature?

Dilley assumes a Kantian distinction between the determinism of the "phenomenal" world of nature and the freedom of the "noumenal" world of morality. But he never explains exactly how that "noumenal" world enters the "phenomenal" world of natural experience. According to Kant, the "noumenal" world is unknowable by natural experience. But if it's unknowable by natural experience, how did Kant know it?

In his APSA paper, Dilley has one footnote that reads: "The notion of 'free will' used in this essay will be clarified below." But I was unable to find that promised clarification anywhere in the essay.

If he could provide that clarification, I would be grateful.

Free Will and Dilley's Secrecy

In Stephen Dilley's APSA conference paper, he writes:

This essay proposes that Arnhart's conservatism fails for a more fundamental reason: it implies determinism of the human mind such that human beings are incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality, including conservative morality. Arnhart's allegiance to Darwinism--with its sole reliance on material-efficient causes and rejection of human telos and essentia--fails to ground 'genuine' free will. But without free will, morality and traditional values become meaningless. Thus the proposed union between Darwinism and conservative beliefs cannot be sustained.

In a footnote to this statement, Dilley writes: "The notion of 'free will' used in this essay will be clarified below." In my recent post, I noted that he never fulfills his promise to explain what he means by "free will." I said that "it's hard to know how to respond" to his criticisms without this explanation.

Now, in his most recent statement, he complains that it's not right for me to ask for this explanation, because he is making a purely negative argument against me that does not require any positive argument from him. He even says that he wants to keep it a secret as to whether he really believes in free will: "nothing in my article implied that I personally accept 'agent causation' or 'uncaused causes.'"

So, in effect, Dilley is saying: I want you to respond to my criticism that your position implies "that human beings are incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality," but I am not going to give you any definition or explanation of what I mean by "free will."

Well, if these are the rules of the debate, then I might as well surrender.

All that I can do is to point to what I have said about "natural freedom" in Darwinian Natural Right (83-87) and in various posts on this blog. My fundamental claim in these remarks is that "free will" as "uncaused cause" makes no sense in application to human beings. Whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused. Against the incomprehensible claim that human beings have the free will to act as divine uncaused causes, I argue that the common-sense notion of human freedom is the power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. We are free when our actions and thoughts are determined by our deliberate choices.

Against this conception of natural freedom, Dilley assmes a radically reductionist view of causal determinism: when a human being chooses what to do or think based on his beliefs and desires, "he no more chooses his actions than a domino chooses its action in a falling line." So, for Dilley, the causal determinism of our deliberate choices is no different from the causal determinism of falling dominoes. Apparently, for Dilley, the only escape from this reductionist determinism is "free will," but then he's not going to tell us what he means by "free will," or even whether he believes there is "free will."

One possible explanation for Dilley's secrecy is that while he believes morality is meaningless without "free will" as "uncaused cause," he doesn't believe there is such "free will." In that case, he would be a moral nihilist, and he would be criticizing me for not facing up to the truth of moral nihilism.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism: Dilley's Syllogism

How many evil consequences of Darwinian science can you imagine? 

Until recently, I could imagine quite a few.  But now that I have read an essay by Bruce Gordon, I can think of hundreds of evils coming from Darwinism.  I don't have room here for Gordon's complete list.  So I'll give you a short sample.  According to Gordon, the "cultural poison of Darwinian philosophy" leads to the following:  hedonism, narcissism, totalitarianism, eco-terrorism, fetal farming, state-enforced active euthanasia, Marxism, fascism, nihilism, "hollow men," "ceding national sovereignty to effete international bureaucracies," multiculturalism, affirmative action, "central government planning of all aspects of life," "cultural guilt and self-loathing," and "a Hegelian religion of the state as the immanent unfolding of the Absolute Spirit."  The final outcome of all this is "that the noonday sun of Western strength is spent and will fade into the twilight of an ignoble dissolution . . . our hope must fade, and night descend" (175-83). 

Wow.  If you're like me, you had never imagined that so much evil stuff could come from the idea of Darwinian evolution.

So how exactly does Darwinian science bring the descent of human civilization into a night without hope and rule by "effete international bureaucracies"?  To answer that question, you'll need to read the book in which Gordon's essay appears--Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley and newly published by Lexington Books. 

Most of this book is a criticism of my argument that Darwinian evolutionary science supports classical liberalism.  Of the thirteen contributors to the book, eleven criticize my position, one supports one part of my position, and one generally supports my position.  Here are the eleven critics: Stephen Dilley, Benjamin Wiker, Peter Augustine Lawler, Jay Richards, Angus Menuge, John G. West, Logan Paul Gage, Bruce Gordon, Richard Weikart, Roger Masters, and Michael White.  Shawn Klein agrees with me only partially. Timothy Sandefur is the one hero who generally (but maybe not totally) agrees with me.

This post is the first in a series of posts in which I will respond to this book.  I begin with the argument that seems to be embraced by the first nine critics in the above list, and I will call the argument Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter.

Although Dilley does not state it in exactly this way, his argument seems to be this:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism" (19, 23,158-59).  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding" (159).  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the first nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal" (198), although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal (9-10, 13-14, 158).

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others" (10).  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

The nine critics don't explain clearly what they mean by Christianity or how exactly specific doctrines of Christianity lead to classical liberalism.  They sometimes refer to the "God of the Bible," the "biblical worldview," or "Judeo-Christian orthodoxy," which suggests they are embracing both the Old Testament and the New Testament, both Judaism and Christianity (19-20, 26, 154, 158-60, 171, 189, 193, 198).  Does this exclude Islam?  Gordon argues that the "Christian worldview" in its purity excludes "Islamic religious identity" (196).

The only doctrinal teaching of the Judeo-Christian tradition that they mention is the idea of imago Dei: "In very broad strokes, this interpretation emphasizes both the dignity of human beings--as creatures fashioned in the imago Dei--and their depravity, having been subject to Adam's Fall" (11).  It is the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God's image that they see as the foundation of classical liberalism, and so if Darwinism denies this imago Dei doctrine by teaching that human beings were "created from animals," Darwinism thereby denies classical liberalism (198) and promotes all the evils listed by Gordon that are bringing about the complete collapse of Western civilization. 

This summarizes the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which laid out the plan for attacking Darwinian evolution and advancing "intelligent design theory" as a way of saving Western culture from the corrosion of scientific materialism.  Most of these nine critics have been associated with the Discovery Institute.

Although the nine critics generally agree that Christianity dictates the classical liberalism of Locke, they sometimes contradict themselves on this point.  For example, Benjamin Wiker refers to Locke as a Deist and implies that Locke appealed to Christianity only for the sake of persuading "the less enlightened" (44).  Wiker also identifies Hobbes as the true "father of modern liberalism" and explains: "In Hobbes we see the shift from morality rooted in natural law as defined by God and embedded in a teleological view of nature in which human moral goodness is defined by the perfection of our God-given nature, to morality entirely rooted in this-worldly passion and self-preservation embedded in an entirely non-teleological view of nature and human nature."  Moreover, he indicates, "this seems a great anticipation of, and hence entirely compatible with, Darwin's account of the evolution of morality" (45-46). 

In his book Moral Darwinism, Wiker argues that Locke was a Epicurean materialist who promoted a science of hedonism that would later be fulfilled by Darwin.  He also argues that insofar as Locke's ideas crept into the American founding, they became the seeds of moral corruption in American political life.  Oddly, Wiker doesn't mention this in his contribution to Dilley's book.

Do the nine critics really agree on Dilley's Syllogism?  I am not sure.  But I will assume that they do, because this gives me a coherent line of reasoning to which I can respond in my forthcoming posts.

Although I disagree with the nine critics in many ways, I agree with some of their points.  Peter Lawler and I are not far apart.  And I will indicate my agreement with Jay Richards, who shows that I have been wrong in suggesting that it's inconsistent to affirm free markets and deny Darwinian evolution.

Dilley's book should be read alongside Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, edited by Ken Blanchard (2009).  This book reprints the text of Darwinian Conservatism, followed by critical responses from eight authors, including three of the authors in Dilley's book (Lawler, West, and Sandefur).  This book concludes with a response from me and a good essay by Ken Blanchard on the Aristotelian character of Darwinian conservatism ("Natural Right and Natural Selection").

The Emergent Freedom of the Mind in the Brain: A Reply to Stephen Craig Dilley

In the 2008 issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stephen Craig Dilley--a philosopher at St. Edward's University--has an article on "Enlightenment Science and Globalization." He attacks my Darwinian conservatism because of its "Enlightenment claim that the laws of nature and material causes are sufficient to produce 'emergent' human minds capable of the kind of free will consistent with moral responsibility." The problem, he warns, is that this "implies determinism of the mind and the disintegration of morality."

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that the human mind or soul can be explained as a product of the emergent evolution of the brain. 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 allowing 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 of life.

Against this, Dilley develops two kinds of criticism. First, he complains that my account of the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain is too vague, because it does not explain the specific details of how exactly the evolution of the primate brain gives rise to the human mind. Second, he argues that since I never explain "how mental events and properties can transcend the limits of physical causation," but rather assume "the sufficiency of purely natural causes to account for all things in heaven and on earth," I must implicitly accept that all human actions are causally determined by material causes and natural laws. This assumption that all mental activity has natural causes leads to the "disintegration of morality," Dilley insists, because it denies the possibility of free will and thus denies that people can be held morally responsible for their actions.

To the first charge, I plead guilty. I don't provide a detailed explanation for exactly how the human mind arises from the evolution of the brain, because as far as I know, no one has yet worked out such an explanation. Lots of evidence points to the evolutionary history of the primate brain as passing over some kind of critical threshold at which fully human mental capacities appear. But it's hard to say how exactly that happens. Our situation is comparable to our ignorance prior to the 1950s of how exactly genes work. We knew a lot about the outcomes of these genetic mechanisms. But we didn't know exactly how these mechanisms worked. In fact, even today, genetics is still shrouded in great mystery. The same is true for explaining how human self-conscious thinking and willing arises in the brain as shaped by a history of genetic evolution. But even so, we can say that the evidence supports the general conclusion that the mind arises in the brain by some kind of natural causality.

Does Dilley have his own detailed explanation of how exactly the human mind originated? If he does, he does not lay it out it in this article. It's hard to know how to respond to his criticism of my account of the evolutionary emergence of mind, because he offers no alternative explanation of his own.

Similarly, it's hard to respond to his criticism of my account of human mental freedom, because he never explains his alternative. At one point, he complains that in my reasoning, "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes are out of the picture." But then he never explains exactly how "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes" create human mental freedom.

Against the Kantian account of moral freedom as freedom from nature, I argue that our moral experience requires a notion of moral freedom as freedom within nature. The uniqueness of human beings as moral agents requires not a free will that transcends nature--as Dilley seems to believe--but a natural capacity to deliberate about one's desires.

We hold people responsible for their actions when they act voluntarily and deliberately. They act voluntarily when they act knowingly and without external force to satisfy their desires. They act with deliberate choice when, having weighed one desire against another in the light of past experience and future expectations, they choose that course of action likely to satisfy their desires harmoniously over a complete life. Such deliberation is required for virtue in the strict sense, although most human beings most of the time act by impulse and habit with little or no deliberation.

Children and other animals are capable of voluntary action. But only mature human adults have the cognitive capacity for deliberate choice. Being morally responsible is not being free of one's natural desires. Rather, to be responsible one must organize and manage one's desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. One must do this to attain the happiness of a flourishing life, which is the ultimate end of all human action.

I reject any contrast between free will and determinism as a false dichotomy. Moral freedom should be identified not as the absence of determinism but as a certain kind of determinism. We are free when our actions are determined by our deliberate choices. I doubt that we ever have any real experience of people acting outside the laws of nature. Moral judgment assumes a regular and predictable connection between what people desire and what they do. To hold people responsible for their actions, we must assume that their beliefs and desires causally determine their actions.

I reject the idea of free will as uncaused cause. I agree with Jonathan Edwards that whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined. In fact, the very idea of free will as uncaused cause comes from the biblical conception of God, and so, as Martin Luther observed, "free will is a divine term and signifies a divine power." Against the absurd idea that human beings could have such a divine power of free will as uncaused cause, I would say--like Edwards--that the common-sense notion of liberty is the power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice.

So what is Dilley's alternative? It's not clear. He refers to "agent causes." He never explains what that means. But since he rejects my idea that in human choices, our beliefs and desires causally determine our actions, I can only infer that he is implicitly appealing to free will as uncaused cause.

If that's what he is doing, then I would respond to him as I have to Denyse O'Leary. Like O'Leary, Dilley seems to adhere to a Gnostic dualism that insists on an absolute separation of mind and body. This Gnostic scorn for the natural world as incapable of embodying spiritual freedom denies both Christian orthodoxy and common sense.

Is Dilley implying that we cannot explain the emergence of the human mind without invoking "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes"? If so, could he explain how exactly this works? And could he explain why God was either unable or unwilling to create the human soul through natural evolution?

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (5): The Absurdity of Menuge's "Free Will"

Beginning with Darwinian Natural Right in 1998, I have often responded to the charge that I promote a biological determinism that denies the moral freedom presupposed by classical liberalism and traditionalist conservatism.  As I have indicated many times, I deny that human beings have "free will," if that is understood in a Kantian way as an uncaused cause that transcends nature.  I have argued that human beings have the natural freedom of deliberate choice, which can be understood as a product of the emergent evolution of the primate brain once it passed over a critical threshold of size and complexity in the human frontal lobes.  As I said in Darwinian Natural Right, "the uniqueness of human beings as moral agents requires not a free will that transcends nature but a natural capacity to deliberate about one's desires" (83).

Beginning in 2008, Stephen Dilley has written a couple of papers criticizing me for not realizing that moral responsibility is impossible without a "free will" that transcends nature.  He claims that I promote "determinism of the mind and the disintegration of morality" in a manner that denies the human freedom required for classical liberalism.  In 2008 and 2010, I wrote a series of blog posts responding to Dilley, and he wrote a reply, which can be found here, here, here, and here.  Now, Angus Menuge has written a chapter ("Darwinian Conservatism and Free Will") in Dilley's new book that repeats Dilley's criticisms.  Menuge is oddly silent about my responses to Dilley. 

Countering Menuge's chapter, Shawn Klein has written a chapter for Dilley's book arguing that classical liberalism presupposes that individuals are capable of self-directed action, and that this is consistent with an evolutionary account of volitional consciousness.  Although I agree with most of what Klein says, I don't agree with his identification of volitional consciousness with "free will," because I reject the common understanding of "free will" as uncaused cause.  I also disagree with Klein's insistence that philosophy must be absolutely separated from science.  I know that this has been a standard assumption of Anglo-American analytic philosophy.  But it has never made sense to me. 

Menuge begins by quoting Friedrich Hayek on moral responsibility as indicating that conservatism presupposes the belief that people have "free will" (93).  This reliance on Hayek is strange.  If Jay Richards is right that Hayek was "a broad-minded materialist rather than a theist" (84), then I don't see how Hayek supports the argument for "Christian classical liberalism" or for the "unashamedly dualistic philosophy" of Kant that Menuge promotes (100).

Menuge also relies on John Locke (101-102).  But this is even more strange.  According to Locke, to ask whether the will is free is an "unintelligible question" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, ch. 21, secs. 7-31).  Locke believes "that a man is not at liberty to will, or not to will, anything in his power that he once considers of; liberty consisting in a power to act or to forbear acting, and in that only" (sec. 24).  Jonathan Edwards elaborated Locke's position in arguing that liberty is the power to act as one chooses, regardless of the cause of the choice.  Such freedom of choice is not an uncaused cause, because whatever comes into existence must have a cause.  Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined.  Thus, the idea that human beings could have "free will" in this sense is contrary to Biblical religion, which teaches that God is the only uncaused cause.

Edwards was arguing against the Arminian notion of moral freedom as the absolute self-determination of will.  That same Arminian notion of "free will" as separated from natural causality was adopted by Kant.

I agree with Locke and Edwards in denying that it makes any sense to think that human beings have "free will" as an uncaused cause.  The very idea of "free will" comes from the biblical conception of God.  As Martin Luther observed, "free will is a divine term and signifies a divine power."  Against the absurd idea that human beings could have such a divine power of "free will" as uncaused cause, I suggest that we affirm the common-sense notion of freedom as the power to act without external constraint, which constitutes deliberate choice.

We hold people responsible for their actions when they act voluntarily and deliberately.  They act voluntarily when they act knowingly and without external force to satisfy their desires.  They act with deliberate choice when, having weighed one desire off against another in the light of past experience and future expectations, they choose that course of action likely to satisfy their desires harmoniously over a complete life.  Such deliberation is required for virtue in the strict sense, although most human beings most of the time act by impulse and habit with little or no deliberation.

Children and other animals are capable of voluntary action.  But only mature human adults have the cognitive capacity for deliberate choice, because only they have the fully developed prefrontal cortex that makes this possible.  The prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the third decade of an individual's life.  (See my previous post on Joaquin Fuster's lecture on "The Neurobiology of Liberty" at the MPS conference in the Galapagos.) 

That's why every human society makes some kind of distinction between children and adults, in which children are not held fully responsible for their behavior and are put under the guardianship of their parents or other adults.  Locke emphasizes this in his Two Treatises of Government, arguing that children are not born free and equal, because it is only the mature development of their cognitive faculties in adulthood that enables the power of deliberate choice that gives them their natural freedom and equality with all other normal adults.  Sandefur points to this in his contribution to Dilley's book (264).

In contrast to Locke, Menuge makes no distinction between children and adults in defending "libertarian free will" as belonging to "the self as continuant" that never changes.  Does this mean that children have the same "free will" as adults, and so children have the same moral responsibility as adults, because "the self as continuant" is unchanging?  Is "the self" responsible for itself, for being the kind of self that it is?  So, must the self create itself? 

What Menuge calls "libertarian free will" seems to be an uncaused cause, which is exactly the divinization of human will that Locke and Edwards rightly rejected as absurd.

Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Stephen Dilley's Reply

Here is Stephen Dilley's reply to my recent series of posts on his edited book.

A Reply to Professor Arnhart

Stephen Dilley

Associate Professor of Philosophy

St. Edward’s University

Austin, TX

stephend@stedwards.edu

Larry Arnhart has been kind enough to review Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism. Given that he wasn’t able to accept my original invitation to write a chapter in the book, I’m pleased that he has now engaged it so thoroughly. He has also generously allowed me to respond to his review. To my mind, Arnhart’s commitment to open dialogue is a fine example of many of the ideals of classical liberalism.

As for Arnhart’s review of DE & CL, his comments span nine posts, most of which focus on specific chapters of the book. I will let the authors of those chapters (respectively) take up their own dialogue with Arnhart, if they wish. Instead, I will limit my reply to the key claim that Arnhart directs at my introductory chapter. His central claim is that I defend the following argument, which he mislabels “Dilley’s Syllogism”: 

1.      Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity

2.      Darwinism denies Christianity

3.      Therefore, Darwinism denies Classical (Lockean) liberalism

Although there’s much to say about premise two, I’ll focus elsewhere. The main reply I wish to make is simply that I don’t defend “Dilley’s Syllogism.” Good heavens! I don’t even regard that argument as deductively valid. Moreover, I’m not even sure what premise one means. Does it mean that classical (Lockean) liberalism is historically founded upon Christianity? Or that classical (Lockean) liberalism is conceptually founded upon Christianity? Or that classical (Lockean) liberalism is metaphysically grounded upon Christianity (in some sense)? Or something else?

In my introduction I point out that some Darwinian conservatives, like Arnhart, see themselves as the heirs of the Anglophone strain of classical liberalism while other thinkers, including Christian classical liberals, “see themselves as more supportive of classical liberalism.” An attentive reader will observe that, in this section, I simply describe the basic tenets of Christian classical liberals, as they see it, including their claim that Christian theism provides a superior (and crucial) metaphysical foundation for classical liberalism. I don’t defend the truth of the view. And I certainly don’t do anything as bold as claiming—much less arguing—that Christian classical liberalism is in fact the historical, conceptual, or metaphysical foundation of classical (Lockean) liberalism. I simply report what some Christian classical liberals believe.

So, it turns out I don’t assert or defend “Dilley’s Syllogism” in my introduction. By attributing that syllogism to me (and then attacking it), Arnhart misrepresents my position. Unfortunately, in my view, Arnhart mischaracterizes or oversimplifies some other chapters in the book, as well. But why argue about the matter? Fair-minded people should scrutinize DE & CL for themselves. I would also encourage them to read carefully Arnhart’s Darwinian Conservatism. Doing so will make for a richer—and more accurate—assessment of the great ideas in play.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (4): How Christianity Supports Liberal Tolerance

The first premise of Dilley's Syllogism is: "Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity."

We must wonder about what kind of Christianity would support classical (Lockean) liberalism.  Through much of the history of Christianity--beginning with the Constantinian regime of the Roman Empire--Christians have insisted on a confessional state in which legal coercion is used to enforce Christian doctrines, and unbelievers, heretics, and apostates are punished by the state.  Presumably, this is not the kind of Christianity that Dilley has in mind, because this would be an illiberal Christianity.  As Roger Masters indicates in his contribution to Dilley's book, the Lockean teaching of religious tolerance was crucial for the emergence of liberalism as a way of pacifying religious warfare and avoiding legally enforced persecution.

Clearly, the kind of Christianity that Dilley has in mind is a liberal Christianity that would teach liberal tolerance.  He indicates this when he quotes approvingly from an article by Richard John Neuhaus on "The Liberalism of John Paul II."  In that article, Neuhaus praises the Catholic liberalism of John Courtney Murray and Pope John Paul II.  "We affirm not a confessional state but a confessional society," Neuhaus declares, because religious belief is a voluntary choice of individuals living in civil society, and thus religious groups can promote their beliefs through persuasion but not through coercion.  The coercive power of the state is to be used only to enforce the civil peace.  As Neuhaus indicates, John Paul recognized that the Catholic Church had had a history of violating religious liberty and tolerance by using coercive violence to enforce religious belief, and John Paul declared that he and all Catholics should ask forgiveness for this history of religious violence.  Previously, the Church had argued that persecution was biblically authorized, but liberal Catholics like Murray and John Paul argued that such legally coercive persecution was contrary to the New Testament.

As I have argued in a previous post, this liberal Christianity embraced by Dilley, Murray, John Paul, and Neuhaus is the New Testament Christianity of Roger Williams.  More clearly than any other Christian author in the Reformation, Williams saw that legal toleration to protect the liberty of conscience was a return to the original position of New Testament Christianity as opposed to the Mosaic regime of theocracy and persecution in the Old Testament.  He argued for a "wall of separation" between church and state, in which the state would be restricted to enforcing "civil peace."  This promoted a liberal policy of legal toleration of both religious and moral pluralism.

The Christian classical liberal in the tradition of Williams will reject the legal moralism of some evangelical Christians and some Catholics (like Robert George, for example) who assume that any good regime must legally coerce people into virtue.  They will reject this because it cannot work, because it denies human liberty, and because it contradicts the New Testament.

I must wonder, however, whether my nine critics in Dilley's book can fully embrace the liberal Christianity of Williams.  If they believe that social order is impossible when people do not believe in orthodox Christianity, wouldn't that suggest the necessity for a "confessional state" in which a specified orthodoxy is enforced coercively by law?  Wouldn't that suggest that the only healthy social order is a theocracy, in which heretics, apostates, and blasphemers (such as the Darwinians) are persecuted as threats to the social order?

By contrast, Darwin's evolutionary account in The Descent of Man of the emergence of moral and religious beliefs shows how the moral order of civil society can arise without any coercive enforcement of religious beliefs by the state.

Moreover, as I have indicated in my previous post, Darwin's principle of dual causality allows for the possibility of believing in original divine action through "primary causes," while recognizing the regularity of the evolutionary process working through the "secondary causes" of the observable order of nature.

I have written previously about how the position of Roger Williams has been adopted by the most recent popes.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (3): Dual Causality and Theistic Evolution

The second premise of Dilley's Syllogism is: "Darwinism denies Christianity."

I disagree.  Darwinian evolutionary science does not resolve the reason-revelation debate in favor of reason over revelation, because that science rightly understood (as I understand it!) recognizes that neither side in this debate can refute the other.  Darwinian evolutionary science also recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.

In taking this position, I am on the side of Charles Darwin as against Richard Dawkins.  Darwin never claimed, either in public or in private, that his evolutionary science proved atheism.  By contrast, Dawkins has proclaimed that the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 made it possible for the first time in history to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, because evolutionary science provided a rational refutation of revelation.  Remarkably, my nine critics who embrace Dilley's Syllogism agree with Dawkins that Darwinism is atheism, even though they think this Darwinian atheism can be refuted by revelation and intelligent design theory.

The religious appeal to God as the uncaused cause of nature cannot be refuted by reason. All natural explanations of the world--including Darwinian science--must assume that ultimately the order of nature is the unexplained ground of all explanation. But there is no way by rational proof to deny the possibility that nature itself is the contingent product of nature's God.

Darwin recognizes this in adopting the principle of dual causality, which originated in medieval Islamic and Christian theology.  He speaks of the laws of nature as manifested in evolution as "secondary causes," which leaves open the possibility of God's creative power acting through "primary causes" to create the original order of nature itself.  I have elaborated this point in a previous post.

Darwin thus allows for theistic evolution, which has been adopted by a long line of Christian thinkers, including C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Alvin Plantinga.  Darwin rejects the "theory of special creation," which sees God as having to intervene miraculously in nature to specially create each form of life.  But Darwin allows for God to be understood as the First Cause, the uncaused cause of matter and life.

Most of my critics in Dilley's book seem to recognize that Darwin adopted the principle of dual causality, with natural evolution working through "secondary causes" and the Creator working through "primary causes" (3, 25-26, 87, 275-77, 284, 290).  Bruce Gordon, however, seems to reject the principle of dual causality as a blasphemous denial of God's omnipotence (168), which could be interpreted as his endorsement of a radical divine voluntarism that would make natural science impossible by denying the lawful regularity of nature (87, 162).

Darwin's dual causality allows him to conclude The Origin of Species with this famous sentence:  "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, are being evolved."

Dilley suggests that Darwin was not really serious in thus writing about life as "originally breathed by the Creator" into the first organisms, because he believes that for Darwin this language was merely a dishonest rhetorical gesture to placate his Christian readers (25).  Dilley quotes from a letter that Darwin wrote to Joseph Hooker in 1863: "I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion & used Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared' by some wholly unknown process.--It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter."  But notice what Darwin is saying here.  He regrets that using the "Pentateuchal term of creation" might be read as endorsing a literal reading of the Creation story in Genesis, which is what Biblical creationists have done.  And yet he wants to recognize the ineluctable mystery of how matter and life originated "by some wholly unknown process." 

Like C. S. Lewis, Darwin probably saw the Creation story in Genesis as a "myth" or "Hebrew folk tale."  (I have written about Lewis's position here and here.)  But he also saw this story as pointing to a mystery--the problem of ultimate explanation--that might be beyond the limits of natural reason.

All explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained.  To the question of why nature exists or why it has the order that it does, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience.  That's just the way it is! 

Now, of course, some religious believers will argue that we can reason to the existence of God as the simplest way of explaining the existence and the order of the natural world that is presupposed in all scientific explanations.  But those like David Hume can insist that there is nothing in our ordinary experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing.  Moreover, the religious believers might admit that they cannot explain why God is the way He is.  Thus, in looking for ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused Nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.  I have elaborated this thought in a previous post.

In response to such mystery, Darwin suggested in The Descent of Man, religious belief might have evolved through the natural tendency of the human mind to project intelligent agency and design onto the world by analogy with our experience of human intelligence.  Intelligent design theory is founded on such reasoning by anthropomorphic analogy.  In recent years, evolutionary theorists like Pascal Boyer, Justin Barrett, and Jesse Bering have elaborated Darwin's thought into a general theory of religious belief as an evolutionary expression of the human mind's propensity for detecting intelligent agency.  This leaves open the question of whether religious belief is an adaptive truth (as Barrett believes) or an adaptive illusion (as Bering believes).  But in either case, religious belief belongs to our evolved human nature.  Thus, as I reported in an earlier post on the MPS conference in the Galapagos, Leda Cosmides and Father Robert Sirico agreed that atheism is unnatural, because it is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Some previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, and here.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of Natural Religion

In this season of the year, our greetings of "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays" acknowledge our natural human propensity to religious beliefs and rituals, while also acknowledging that in the modern liberal social orders in which many of us live today, we respect religious liberty and toleration.  "Merry Christmas" doesn't favor any one Christian tradition over any other.  And "Happy Holy Days" recognizes that there are some non-Christian religious observances during this season--particularly, the Jewish festival of Hanukkah.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism that I have defended explains the naturalness of religion as rooted in our evolved human nature.  It also explains why we need religious liberty and toleration so that all individuals have the equal liberty to pursue their natural desire for religious experience in their own way.

My position has provoked lots of criticisms, of which two are most prominent.  The first is that Darwinian Lockean Liberalism is incoherent insofar as Darwinian atheism denies the Christian foundations of Lockean Liberalism.  The second is that Lockean religious liberty and toleration denies the truth of Christian Integralism (Catholic or Protestant) that there is one true church--the true Christian Church established by Jesus Christ--and that this Christian Church can rightly use the secular authority of government to enforce the Orthodoxy of that Church.

I have previously responded to these two criticisms (here and here).  But after thinking more about these issues, I have decided to lay out a slightly revised version of my previous responses.

Various authors have countered my position with a syllogistic rebuttal (Dilley, 2013; Holloway, 2006; West, 2006).  I will call this “Dilley’s Syllogism” because Stephen Dilley formulated it in his Introduction to his edited book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

The conclusion of this syllogism is false, because the major premise is only partly true, and the minor premise is totally false.

The major premise has been asserted by those of my critics who are proponents of what they call “Christian classical liberalism” or “theistic classical liberalism” (Dilley, 2013, pp. 19, 23, 158-59).  I have inserted “Lockean” into the syllogism because these critics generally appeal to Locke as “the quintessential classical liberal” (Dilley, 2013, p. 198).  The only doctrinal teaching of Christianity that they mention as supporting Lockean classical liberalism is the idea of imago Dei: that all human beings have been created in the image of God (as declared in Genesis 1:26-27) seems to endow them with the equal moral dignity that supports the classical liberal teaching that all human beings are created equal in their moral dignity as equally endowed by God with natural rights (Dilley, 2013, p. 11). 

Locke seemed to adopt this idea in speaking about the law of nature as grounded in the nature of human beings as God’s “workmanship”:

Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.  For Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another’s Pleasure (ST, 6).

Locke identified this idea of men being God’s property because they are his workmanship with man being created in God’s image, in the sense that all members of the human species were created as “intellectual creatures,” which gave them dominion over the “inferior creatures,” but without giving any human being dominion over any other human being, because all men were equal in having a human mind that was a likeness to the Mind of God (FT, 30, 39, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 56).

But Locke also claimed that natural rights were rooted in every man’s self-ownership (ST, 27).  Now, as Peter Laslett (1970, p. 100) observed, this principle of human self-ownership “almost contradicts his principle that men belong to God, not themselves.”  “Almost”?  Can men both belong to themselves and belong to God?  I have argued that evolutionary neuroscience can explain the human experience of self-ownership as rooted in the interoceptive capacity of the embodied brain.  But the human experience of being owned by God might be harder to explain scientifically.

The apparent contradiction between Locke’s principle of self-ownership and his principle of divine ownership can be resolved by seeing that Locke made what Michael Zuckert has called a “two-track argument,” in which “one track is theistic, the workmanship argument, an argument of natural theology; the other track is the appeal to self-ownership” (Zuckert, 2002, pp. 4-5; 2005, p. 431).  Locke believed that the workmanship argument would require a rational theology that could prove the existence of God.  From “the idea of ourselves as understanding, rational creatures,” we would have to infer “the idea of a supreme Being, infinite in power, goodness, and wisdom, whose workmanship we are” (ECHU, IV.3.18).  Through an anthropomorphic analogy, we could project from the idea of our own minds and other human minds the idea of a Divine Mind.  Thus, man would create God in man’s image (ECHU, IV.3.27; IV.10.1).  But then Locke admitted that having the idea of God in one’s mind does not prove God’s real existence (ECHU, IV.10.7; IV.10.19; IV.11.1).

Since he doubted that reason could prove God’s existence in support of the workmanship argument, Locke developed the self-ownership argument that would provide a purely natural ground for his law of nature.  He wanted to appeal to a rational theology of divine workmanship, but if that failed, he could fall back onto his natural self-ownership argument.  These two tracks—God and nature--are suggested by Locke’s repeated appeals to “the Laws of God and Nature” (FT, 56, 124; ST, 60, 66, 90, 93, 142, 195).  The “fixed and permanent rule of morals” could be “firmly rooted in the soil of human nature,” and human nature could be understood as created by “nature or God” (1997, p. 125).  Notice that the creative source of human nature is nature or God.

Consequently, the major premise of Dilley’s Syllogism is only partly true.  Yes, Locke’s classical liberalism can be grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation in the image of God as supporting the workmanship argument.  But Locke suggested that reason can neither prove nor disprove creationist theology.  And that led him to appeal to the self-ownership principle as a purely naturalistic argument that did not require any theological assumptions.  Another way of saying this is that Locke left the Reason/Revelation debate open, believing that neither side can refute the other.  And so, he often invited his readers to consider both what “Reason” taught them by their natural experience and what “Revelation” taught them through their reading of the Bible (ST, 25).

The minor premise of Dilley’s Syllogism—Darwinism denies Christianity—assumes that the Darwinian scientist believes that scientific reason can refute Christian revelation and thus supports atheism.  But even if this is true for some Darwinian scientists, it is not true for all--not even for Darwin himself.  Moreover, Darwinian evolutionary science recognizes that there is a natural desire for religious understanding, and so atheism is contrary to our evolved human nature.  But even though religious belief is natural for most human beings, what they believe about the supernatural will be determined by faith rather than reason.  And since religious believers can never reach agreement about the content of their faith, they must accept the fact of religious pluralism and recognize how that religious pluralism dictates the religious toleration that secures religious liberty.

Of course, there are Darwinian atheists.  Richard Dawkins, for example, has said that “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”  He thinks the Argument from Design has always been the best of the arguments for the existence of God, because the complexity of the living world appears to be the work of an intelligent designer—just as William Paley’s watch implied the existence of a watchmaker—and so we might infer that God is the Intelligent Designer of the living world.  David Hume rightly criticized this reasoning as illogical because it rests on a false analogy between human intelligent design and divine intelligent design.  We have all seen human intelligent designers at work as part of our ordinary human experience.  But we have never seen a Divine Intelligent Designer creating everything out of nothing.  This is not part of our ordinary human experience.  It is fallacious, therefore, to use apparent design in nature as evidence for the existence of God.  But even if Hume was right about this, Dawkins has observed, Hume did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design in nature.  It was only in 1859, when Darwin showed how evolution by natural selection could explain complex biological design, that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins, 1986, pp. 5-6).

And yet Darwin himself denied that his theory of evolution promoted atheism.  Consider what he said about “the Creator” in the last two paragraphs of The Origin of Species.  He rejected the common “view that each species has been independently created,” and he proposed instead that “it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.”  Then, in his famous last sentence, he spoke of the “grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” and that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved” (1936, pp. 373-74).

Here we see that Darwin adopted the medieval Scholastic metaphysics of “dual causality” in distinguishing supernatural primary causes and natural secondary causes (Maurer, 2004).  The Creator did not miraculously create each species of life separately.  But He did originally exercise primary causality in impressing the laws of nature on matter and breathing life into a few forms or into one.  Then, from that simple beginning, the Creator allowed all the forms of life to emerge through the secondary causes of the natural evolutionary process.

At this point in his life, Darwin was what today we would call a “theistic evolutionist” or “evolutionary creationist”—someone who believes that the existence of God as the Creator is compatible with evolutionary science.  Indeed, Darwin said that it was “absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist.”  And even when, towards the end of his life, he became an agnostic, he insisted: “In my most extreme fluctuations, I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God” (1879; 1969, pp. 92-96). 

In the creation/evolution debate among Christians today, many Christian thinkers—such as Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, Darrel Falk, Alvin Plantinga, and Justin Barrett—have defended evolutionary creationism in arguing that, just as Darwin said, one can be both a theist and an evolutionist (Collins, 2006; Stump, 2007).  Remarkably, even the “young-Earth creationists,” who believe in the literal six-days-creation story in Genesis and a 6,000-year-old Earth, concede that Darwin’s Origin of Species refuted the traditional belief that God specially created all species of life, because they agree that all species emerged through evolution by natural selection.  But they also insist that God had to specially create all the “kinds” of animals and plants, so that the evolution of species could unfold within the limits of those “kinds” (with “kinds” corresponding to the taxonomic level of “families”) (Wood, 2008, 2011; Wood and Murray, 2003; Ham, 2017, pp. 14-26).   This resembles what Darwin said about the Creator breathing life into “a few forms or into one,” from which all species could then evolve by natural selection.

Darwin and the evolutionary creationists agree with Locke that religious belief is natural for human beings because they are naturally inclined to infer from their knowledge of their own minds and the minds of others that there must be a divine mind that exercises a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to the natural intelligent agency of human minds.  Darwin observed that when “conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity,” he “felt compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man,” which made him a theist (1969, pp. 92-93).  

Similarly, some evolutionary psychologists—such as Justin Barrett and Jesse Bering--have argued that the natural evolution of religious belief is rooted in the propensity of the human mind to detect rational agency in humans and other animals and then to infer a supernatural intelligent agency analogous to that of human minds (Barret, 2004; Bering, 2011).  But as we have seen, this anthropomorphic analogy between human and divine minds is dubious, and even if this explained the natural evolution of the idea of God in the human mind, that would not prove the existence of God.

This led Locke to conclude that believing in the existence of God is ultimately not a matter of reason but of faith.  And since “faith is not knowledge,” we cannot know what the true religion is (Locke, 1870, pp. 94-96; 1997, pp. 248-50; ECHU, IV.17-18).  Consequently, political rulers cannot coercively enforce belief in the religious orthodoxy of the true church, because religious believers cannot agree on what that orthodoxy is.  “Every man is orthodox to himself,” Locke observed in the Letter Concerning Toleration.  And “every church is orthodox to itself” (2010, pp. 7, 21, 38).  The simple fact of religious pluralism—that religious believers cannot agree on religious orthodoxy—supports Locke’s liberal argument for religious liberty and toleration of all religious sects that inflict no injury on others.  Religious liberty and religious pluralism create a free marketplace of religion in which religious movements must compete for adherents.  Those religious groups that succeed in satisfying the natural desire for religious understanding gain a larger share of the religious market (Seabright, 2024).

The mistake of the Christian Integralists (both Catholic and Protestant) in rejecting Lockean religious liberty and toleration and affirming Christian Theocracy (or Christian Nationalism) is their failure to see how any theocratic attempt to suppress religious pluralism must be oppressively unjust and also contrary to the religious voluntarism practiced by the early Christian Churches.

We can see then how a Darwinian Lockean Liberalism can explain natural religion and can secure the religious liberty and toleration that respect religious pluralism and allow every individual to satisfy his natural desire for religious understanding in his own way, while allowing all others the same religious liberty.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

REFERENCES

Barrett, J. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bering, J. 2011. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life. New York: W. W. Norton.

Collins, F. S. 2006. The Language of God. New York: Free Press.

Darwin, C. 1879. Letter to John Fordyce, May 7. Cambridge, UK: Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter No.: DCP-LETT-12041.

Darwin, C. 1936. The Origin of Species & The Descent of Man. New York: Random House, The Modern Library.

Darwin, C. 1969. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin. Ed. N. Barlow. New York: W. W. Norton.

Dilley, S., ed. 2013. Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ham, K. 2017. "Young-Earth Creationism." In J. B. Stump, ed., Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

Holloway, C. 2006. The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy. Dallas: Spence Publishing.

Laslett, P. 1970. Introduction. In: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government: A Critical Edition with an Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, by Peter Laslett. Second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-152.

Locke, J. 1870. Four Letters on Toleration. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Locke, J. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, M. Goldie, ed. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Maurer, A. 2004. "Darwin, Thomists, and Secondary Causality." The Review of Metaphysics 57: 491-514.

Seabright, P. 2024. The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stump, J. B., ed. 2017. Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

West, J. G. 2006. Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest. Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press.

Wood, T. C. 2008. "Species Variability and Creationism." Origins Number 62: 6-24.

Wood, T. C., and M. J. Murray. 2003. Understanding the Pattern of Life: Origins and the Organization of the Species. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman.

Zuckert, M. 2002. Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Zuckert, M. 2005. "Locke-Religion-Equality." The Review of Politics 67: 419-431.

Debating Darwinian Liberalism (9): Gage on the Eternity of Species

In Dilley's book, Logan Paul Gage argues that I am wrong in claiming that Darwinian science can support classical liberalism, because I fail to see that classical liberalism requires an essentialist conception of species as eternal that is denied by Darwinism.

Gage writes:

     "Arnhart thinks modern Darwinians can walk a middle road between essentialism and nominalism (Arnhart 1998, 235).  But this is untenable.  At issue is whether the term species represents a stable ontological reality (that is, a substantial form and/or divine idea) rather than a temporarily useful description.  The essentialist says yes, the nominalist no.  There is no middle ground.  Arnhart's asservation that species can be 'enduring' without being 'eternal' is a distraction.  He is right that individual organisms' similarities are not arbitrary given universal common descent, but the designation of 'species' (if meant in the classical sense) on a given group of individuals is.  In this way, Arnhart and Darwinian conservatives do not just deny the eternality of species but their classical ontological status.

     "The broader Western tradition--from which classical liberalism inherits much--embraced essentialism. . . ." (145)

He then indicates that the nominalism that he rejects was espoused by Locke.  But now Gage is contradicting himself.  If classical liberalism is rooted in essentialism, and if Locke was "the quintessential classical liberal" (198), then how was it possible for Locke to embrace nominalism rather than essentialism? 

I have defended a Darwinian conception of species in Darwinian Natural Right (232-38) and many times on this blog.  Gage dismisses my arguments quickly: "There is no middle ground.  Arnhart's asserveration that species can be 'enduring' without being 'eternal' is a distraction."  A distraction?  What is that supposed to mean?  My argument is that as long as a species has an enduring pattern of distinctive traits, that enduring pattern is real even if it is not eternal.  Is Gage a Platonist who believes that nothing is really real unless it is eternally unchanging?  Is Gage denying the extensive evidence for the extinction of species, because he believes no species ever has, or ever will, go extinct?

Later on, Gage warns about the dangers that will come from "changing human nature" through biotechnology.  "If modern conservatives merely argue that the reason the Left should not seek to remake the family, sex differences, and so on, is because it is impossible to change human biological nature, what will they say as these changes become more and more possible?" (149) 

This makes no sense.  If Gage is convinced that the human species is eternal, then he must believe that changing human nature is impossible.  I have noticed this same contradiction among the many conservatives who worry about the "abolition of man" through biotechnology, while professing to believe in the eternity of species (for example, see Bruce Gordon at pp. 170-171).

A few of my posts on the biological reality of species can be found here, here, and here.

This concludes my series of posts on Stephen Dilley's edited book--Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism.  I have invited Dilley to write a response that I will post on this blog.  I extend the same invitation to those who contributed to his book.

The Question of Free Will: Stephen Dilley's Reply

Recently, I wrote a post on Stephen Dilley's argument that I deny free will and thus endorse a determinism that would make moral responsibility impossible. He has written a response to this post, which I provide here in its entirety.

ON DETERMINISM AND MEANINGFUL MORALITY: A REPLY TO PROF. ARNHART
Stephen Dilley
Department of Philosophy
St. Edward's University
Austin, Texas

September 17, 2010

I am thankful to Prof. Arnhart for his generosity in allowing me to reply on his blog to the questions he raised about my 2008 essay. Since the original exchange between us took place two years ago, some background may be helpful. In my original article (as well as my APSA paper in 2009), I argued two central claims. First, I contended that Prof. Arnhart's account of the emergence of the human mind implies determinism of the mind, which renders human beings incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality. Second, I held that his deterministic view is incompatible with traditional conservative understandings of human volition and moral responsibility. The first of these claims is the most fundamental, so I will focus on it in what follows. (Readers who would like a copy of my original article can email me at stephend@stedwards.edu.)

In two blog posts, Prof. Arnhart responded to my article, asking me a number of questions--more than a dozen, by my count. Since I cannot respond to all of them in the space of a blog entry, I will instead focus on his central queries, which form the basis for most of his other questions. Prof. Arnhart's key questions arise as part of his main response to my criticisms of his account of the origin of the mind as well as the implications of his view for human volition. He asks:

Does Dilley have his own detailed explanation of how exactly the human mind originated? If he does, he does not lay it out in this article. It's hard to know how to respond to his criticism of my account of the evolutionary emergence of mind, because he offers no alternative explanation of his own. Similarly, it's hard to respond to his criticism of my account of human mental freedom, because he never explains his alternative.

Regarding my critique of his view of human volition, he also queries:

So what is Dilley's alternative? It's not clear. He refers to "agent causes." He never explains what that means. But since he rejects my idea that in human choices, our beliefs and desires causally determine our actions, I can only infer that he is implicitly appealing to free will as uncaused cause.

In his original post, as well as his recent follow-up, Prof. Arnhart also picks up on my observation that his naturalism prohibits appeal to "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes." He wonders if I believe that these entities explain the origin of the mind and volition. He then goes on to critique this view, as well as the notion of free will as "uncaused cause," asking me a range of questions about Aristotle, Jonathan Edwards, and the like.

There are two salient features of Prof. Arnhart's inquiries: first, he states that "it's hard to know how to respond" to my criticisms of his view of mind and will because I do not supply an alternative. Second, he wonders about my (undeveloped) alternative, critiquing what he takes to be my reliance on non-material causes or uncaused causes.

So what can I say for myself? My main reply, in brief, is that his questions send him in the wrong direction. The point of my article (as well as the 2009 APSA paper) was to offer a critique of his position. That is, my intention was to raise criticisms of his positive account by contending that it led to determinism, which I argued destroys any meaningful account of human morality, including traditional conservative morality. I did not intend--and still do not intend--to offer a positive account of human volition or the origin of the human mind. The simple fact is that I do not need to give my own account in order to criticize Prof. Arnhart's account. One does not need a positive theory of one's own in order to argue that a colleague's theory is mistaken. I do not need to own my own baseball team in order to recognize that the Seattle Mariners play lousy ball. Nor do I need my own developed foreign policy in order to recognize that randomly bombing other countries just for kicks makes for sketchy diplomacy.

(As it happens, I have puzzles or questions about the major theories of the nature of human volition as well as questions about the major theories of the origin of the mind. In my article, I included talk of "agent causes" and related concepts in order to explain a "common sense" view of free will--held by conservatives and non-Westerners--which I juxtaposed to Prof. Arnhart's deterministic perspective; nothing in my article implied that I personally accept "agent causation" or "uncaused causes.")

But, more to the point, my personal account (or lack of account) about the nature of human volition and the origin of the mind is entirely irrelevant to the key point at issue--namely, whether Prof. Arnhart's view leads to the disintegration of meaningful morality. To see this, suppose for the sake of argument that my own views about the human mind and will are pathetically mistaken--on par with something, say, Paris Hilton would dream up after a long night of cocktails. Does this imply that my original criticisms of Prof. Arnhart's view are incorrect? Not the least. Does it also imply that Prof. Arnhart's account harmonizes with meaningful morality? Of course not. It may be the case that both of our views are incorrect. And just because I may have a false or unjustified (or non-existent) positive account does not epistemically or logically preclude me from point out difficulties in his positive account.

(If Prof. Arnhart has an interest in criticizing alternative views of mind and will, I would suggest he take a look, among other places, at the work of analytic philosophers like J. P. Moreland, Angus Menuge, Steward Goetz, and Charles Taliaferro. I think there is much to admire, as well as to wonder about, in their work.)

So, I am puzzled by Prof. Arnhart's claim that "it's hard to know how to respond" to my criticisms of his views because I don't supply an alternative. Surely, even if my own positive theory is crazy or non-existent, he must still reply to the criticism that his view leads to determinism and the disintegration of meaningful morality, including conservative morality. This is the key point. And, for the record, it is not clear to me that Prof. Arnhart has given a satisfactory response to this challenge.

Perhaps I should end my response here. But because it seems to me that Prof. Arnhart has not adequately met the challenge, let me briefly trace some of its contours once again. The task for Prof. Arnhart is to show how meaningful morality--including the morality presupposed in conservatism--is compatible with his determinism. He takes a Humean compatibilist tact, which holds that determinism and human mental freedom do not conflict (see DNR, pp. 83-87). To my knowledge, Prof. Arnhart has not given a clear and exact definition of determinism, but, as I gestured in my original article, his naturalistic metaphysics implies something like the following: event or entity X is determined if and only if X arises entirely due to prior material causes and, given these causes, could not have been different. What Prof. Arnhart's determinism implies for human beings is that a given individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. could not have been different. As such, all of the individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. are entirely outside of his control. Even if the individual has "freedom" in the compatibilist sense that he always acts according to his beliefs and desires (as opposed to acting due to external coercion), his beliefs and desires are still determined by prior material causes completely beyond his control. He may feel "from the inside" as if he is choosing, but this is an illusion. He no more chooses his actions than a domino chooses its action in a falling line.

As I see it, Prof. Arnhart's determinism destroys meaningful morality. It is nonsense to say that a person "ought" to do something when he has no control over whether or not he can. Should we condemn a paraplegic for failing to save a drowning child? If so, then why not rebuke a toaster for moving slowly in the fast lane? Or why not chastise a coffee machine for not photocopying? Likewise, it does not make sense to condemn Hitler for his actions when he could not have done otherwise. Like the toaster and the coffeemaker, his actions were entirely the product of forces beyond his control.

Prof. Arnhart may appeal to the evolution of the neocortex as gracing human beings, unlike toasters and coffeemakers, with the "emergent" property of deliberation and choice. But as I show in my article, Arnhart's account of emergence does not escape determinism--a claim that Prof. Arnhart did not dispute in either of his blog responses. If he now disputes this claim, I am puzzled as to why he did not do so earlier and why, more fundamentally, he self-consciously adopts Humean compatibilism, which attempts to reconcile freedom and determinism. (Typically, a person only attempts to reconcile two views when he accepts both; reconciliation is unnecessary when he has rejected one or both views.)

Accordingly, the pressing question for Prof. Arnhart to answer straightforwardly is: how can there be meaningful morality (consonant with conservatism, no less) when his view implies that each individual's beliefs, desires, actions, decisions, etc. are entirely the product of prior material causes (in play before his or her birth)and that given these causes, an individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. could not have been different? Even if rival theories of the human mind and will are deeply mistaken, Prof. Arnhart must still provide a compelling answer to this question.

One final point remains: in my opinion, Prof. Arnhart does not fully appreciate the implications of determinism for his whole project. To point to just one example, if determinism is true, then all of an individual's beliefs, like her behaviors, are products of material forces beyond her control. (While we don't typically exercise direct control over our beliefs, the typical pre-theoretic view--rightly or wrongly--holds that we have some level of volition that allows us to have at least some indirect influence on our belief formation, say, by spending time reading relevant sources, listening carefully to both sides, trying to weigh evidence judiciously, and the like.) But on Prof. Arnhart's view, none of these activities is within our control. In fact, the ultimate reason a person accepts the claims she does is entirely due to material causes prior to her birth, causes which preclude her from accepting any other claims. He beliefs, like her behavior, are due to causes beyond her (direct or indirect) power.

Why, then, does Prof. Arnhart accept the tenets of his own Darwinian Conservatism? Why does he accept the "emergence" thesis of the origin of the human mind? And why, I wonder, did he miss the point of my original article? The answer is because he was determined to. Given the array of physical causes prior to his birth, he could not have believed anything else. And why do scads of biologists accept that the neo-cortex evolved by natural processes from some simpler primate brain? The familiar refrain sounds again.

It seems to me that this view comes as close as anything to destroying the justification for our beliefs as well as rationality itself. (For those who are interested, Angus Menuge, Victor Reppert, and Alvin Plantinga, among others, have independently given rigorous formulation to this general line of thinking.) By Prof. Arnhart's lights, the reason that I persist in my stubborn unbelief of his views, and that he does not, is because neither of us could do otherwise. Our intellectual lives, like our actions, are essentially meaningless. Material causes have swallowed us whole.

A Thousand Posts (5)

2013
This was the year of my Darwinian Grand Tour--from Chicago to the Galapagos to Houston to Atlanta to Freiburg, and a few places in between. 

In April, I presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Convention in Chicago on "Nietzsche's Darwinian Liberalism." 

In June, I was travelling in Peru, Ecuador, and the Galapagos Islands.  The trip to the Galapagos began with a week-long yacht tour of five of the larger islands, followed by a week in Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on the island of San Cristobal, where I participated in the Mont Pelerin Society meetings on "Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty."  For those MPS meetings, I wrote a paper on "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." 

In October, I lectured at Lone Star College-Kingwood, where John Barr was teaching a remarkable course entitled "The Emancipators: Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and the Making of the Modern World." 

Also in October, I spoke at the Philadelphia Society meeting on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things" in Atlanta. 

In December, I went to Freiburg, Germany, where I lectured for a workshop on "Liberalism and the Evolutionary Agenda," organized by Ulrich Witt, the Director of the Evolutionary Economics Group at the Max Planck Institute (Jena). 

I saw the MPS meetings and the Freiburg workshop as especially important moments in the recent intellectual history of evolutionary classical liberalism.

January 1 was the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and so I began the year with a post on "Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in Evolutionary History," in which I showed how Lincoln's classical liberalism was based on an evolutionary understanding of human history.

Then, I wrote a long series of posts on Nietzsche (from January to April, in September, and in December).  This work on Nietzsche was connected with my graduate seminar on Nietzsche that I taught in the fall semester.

My main argument is that the Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period (1878-1882)--particularly, Human, All Too Human (1878)--is superior to Nietzsche's earlier and later writings. 

I first began to see this from my reading of Lou Salome's book on Nietzsche, the first book ever written on Nietzsche, and in some ways still the best book.  Lou had insights that came from her brief friendship with Nietzsche (April to October, 1882), when Nietzsche repeatedly proposed marriage, and she turned him down.  She saw that once Nietzsche broke off his friendships with her and Paul Ree, he moved away from the evolutionary science that dominated his middle period.

The Darwinian science of Nietzsche's middle period is morally, politically, and intellectually superior to the mythic metaphysics of his early and late writings.  This Darwinian science is morally superior because it promotes a sober morality of moderation that restrains tendencies to intoxicated extremism.  This science is politically superior because it promotes a prudent respect for liberal democracy that restrains tendencies to tyrannical power-seeing.  And this science is intellectually superior because it can be grounded in empirical evidence and methodical reasoning rather than the delusions of enthusiastic fantasizing.  In contrast to the Darwinian science of the middle period, the distinctive teachings of the late Nietzsche--the will to power, eternal return, and the Ubermensch--are morally corrupting, politically dangerous, and intellectually confused.

In Nietzsche's later writings, we can see how the Darwinian refutation of the universe as a moral cosmology provoked a turn to art and an atheistic religiosity as mythmaking to escape from this "deadly truth."

The attraction of Nietzsche's later writings and rejection of the free-spirited evolutionary science of his middle period is evident among the Nazis and the Straussians.

I wrote a series of posts on Nietzsche's "Sociobiology of Animal Morality" and on his "Aristocratic Liberalism."

I use the term "aristocratic liberalism" to convey the thought that while a liberal regime secures equal liberty under the rule of law, it also thereby secures inequality of results in allowing for "the natural aristocracy of virtues and talents" (as Thomas Jefferson called it).  Aristocratic liberalism can thus combine the ancient concern for social virtue and the modern concern for individual liberty.  The aristocratic liberalism of Nietzsche's middle period is in contrast to the aristocratic anti-liberalism of his later writings.

Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism can be sketched out as four affirmations and four negations:  affirming constitutional democracy, liberal pluralism, religious liberty, and cosmopolitan globalization, while denying socialist statism, "great politics," anti-Semitism, and atheistic religiosity.

Nietzsche's evolutionary aristocratic liberalism is very similar to what Douglass North and his colleagues identify as the modern "open access society," which was the subject of a post in April.

Also in April, I defended Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism in his middle period as superior to the aristocratic radicalism that Bruce Detwiler saw in Nietzsche's later period.  Detwiler failed to see that his good criticisms of Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism don't apply to Nietzsche's aristocratic liberalism.  Detwiler also failed to see how that aristocratic liberalism was rooted in the Darwinian science that Nietzsche embraced in his middle period.

I also pointed out that Strauss failed to see how his account of Nietzsche as surfing the "third wave of modernity" that led to Nazism does not apply to the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche's middle writings.

In the first half of July, I wrote a series of 6 posts as "An Evolutionary Tour of the Galapagos" that was based on my tour of the islands on the Cormorant.  (In early February of 2017, I did a second tour of the Galapagos on the Cormorant; and I wrote another series of 12 posts on "Thinking About Galapagos.")

In the second half of July, I wrote a series of 14 posts on the lectures and discussions at the Mont Pelerin Society conference.  The Mont Pelerin Society was founded in 1946 by Friedrich Hayek as an organization for people who wanted to think about classical liberalism in the modern world.  Hayek saw classical liberalism as rooted in an evolutionary science of liberty and spontaneous order.  In recent years, there has been growing interest in how contemporary sociobiology and evolutionary science might apply to Hayek's evolutionary conception of liberalism.  This was the concern of the MPS meetings in the Galapagos, which brought together some of the leading evolutionary scientists and classical liberal thinkers. 

In my paper for the conference--"The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism"--I argued that evolutionary moral psychology has largely confirmed the truth of the liberalism defended by Adam Smith and Hayek.  But I also argued that Hayek's socialist "atavism" thesis--that socialism appeals to our evolved instincts, but liberalism does not--is mistaken.  I made the same argument at the Freiburg workshop.

From the end of July into the first week of August, I wrote a series of 6 posts on the book Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, edited by Stephen Dilley, which had recently been published by Lexington Books.  Of the 13 authors in this book, 9 are opponents of Darwinian classical liberalism, and most of their criticisms are directed at me.  2 of the authors seem neutral, and 2 seem to be defenders (somewhat) of Darwinian liberalism.

The argument that seems to be embraced by the nine critics can be called Dilley's Syllogism, because it's stated by Dilley in his introductory chapter:

Classical (Lockean) liberalism is founded on Christianity.

Darwinism denies Christianity.

Therefore, Darwinism denies classical (Lockean) liberalism.

Consequently, the nine critics are proponents of what they call "Christian classical liberalism" or "theistic classical liberalism."  They also identify this with the liberal political thought of the American founders, and so they defend "the rich theistic classical liberalism embodied in the American founding."  I have inserted "Lockean" into the syllogism because the nine critics generally appeal to John Locke as "the quintessential classical liberal," although they also often identify Adam Smith as a paradigmatic classical liberal.

The nine critics say that they are attacking "Darwinian conservatism," which "integrates a Darwinian conception of human nature with the essentials of classical liberalism, drawing on the work of Locke, Smith, Hayek, and others."  They identify the most prominent proponents of Darwinian conservatism as me, Thomas Sowell, Robert McShea, James Q. Wilson, Michael Shermer, and Francis Fukuyama.  Most of their attacks, however, are directed at me.

Most of the nine critics are associated with the Discovery Institute, and most of what they say conforms to the famous "Wedge Document" of the Discovery Institute, which lays out a strategy for saving Christian civilization from the moral and political degradation promoted by Darwinian science, a strategy that depends on "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolution.

In my series of posts, I answer their criticisms.

One of my posts on the MPS meetings was on Richard Wrangham's lecture on his "chimpanzee model" for explaining the evolution of war.  This is part of an intense debate among biologists and social scientists over whether Hobbes was right that the state of nature is a state of war or whether Rousseau was right that it was a state of peace.  Those on the Hobbesian side think that war has been natural for chimpanzees and human foragers.  Those on the Rousseauean side deny this. 

Although I agree with Wrangham and lean towards the Hobbesian side, I argue that the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean.  Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.  Hobbes was partly right.  Rousseau was mostly wrong. And Locke was mostly right.  I wrote posts on this in August and September.  (This became part of my paper "The Biopolitical Science of Locke's State of Nature" that I presented at the 2015 meetings of the American Political Science Association.)

I have written a long series of posts on the evolution of war among chimps and humans (August of 2013, September and November of 2014, June of 2015, January of 2016).

In September and October, I wrote about my participation in the national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Atlanta on Russell Kirk and "The Permanent Things."

In my lecture, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not permanent is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.

That’s not enough, however, for a metaphysical conservatism that appeals to a transcendent moral cosmology of eternal order as intelligently designed by the Creator.

This contrast between evolutionary conservatism and metaphysical conservatism was displayed in the debate between Friedrich Hayek and Russell Kirk at the 1957 meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

At the Philadelphia Society meeting, I was disturbed by how many of the speakers assumed a divine command theory of ethics, so that we cannot know what is right or wrong except by obeying God's commands, particularly in the Hebrew Bible.  As I suggested in my remarks, this is dangerous, because it would mean accepting slavery and the brutal despotism of Mosaic law.

Almost all of the speakers at the meeting were uncritical in their praise of Kirk.  The only critics were me and Alan Charles Kors.  Kors is a prominent historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his studies of the intellectual history of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe.  Kors defended the French Enlightenment, which was a bold move before an audience of Kirkian conservatives.  I defended Friedrich Hayek's evolutionary conservatism as an alternative to Kirk's metaphysical conservatism.

Kors and I were in complete agreement.  That might seem odd, particularly since Hayek presented his Burkean evolutionary conservatism as rooted in the British and Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the French Enlightenment. 

But Kors argued that what Burkean conservatives criticize as the excesses of the French Revolution--the Jacobins and the Reign of Terror--manifest the intellectual legacy of Rousseau rather than the philosophes.  After all, Rousseau was a vehement opponent of the philosophes.  Leaders of the French Enlightenment like Voltaire and Montesquieu opposed every form of despotism and supported the tolerance, liberty, and commercial spirit that they saw in Great Britain.  Robespierre's "Republic of Virtue" was inspired not by the thought of Voltaire or Montesquieu but by Rousseau's Social Contract.  For example, Robespierre's "Religion of the Supreme Being" was explicitly an attempt to enforce Rousseau's teaching that all citizens must embrace a deistic religion, and that neither atheists nor Christians can be true citizens.

In his speech, Kors often referred to Hayek in ways that suggested that most of French Enlightenment thought was in agreement with Hayek's evolutionary liberalism, which I defended in my speech.

In December, I wrote 6 posts on the Freiburg workshop on liberalism and evolution.

One of the benefits for me of this workshop was that it helped me to think through my ambivalence about Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.  I am persuaded by Hayek's claim that Darwinian science supports the fundamental idea of classical liberalism that social order--including morals, markets, and laws--can arise as a largely spontaneous  or unintended order from the interactions of individuals acting to satisfy their individual desires.  But I am not persuaded by Hayek's account of exactly how cultural evolution produces the modern liberal order. 

My conclusion is that we need to see how Darwinian science corrects the mistakes in Hayek's account while confirming Hayek's insight about how liberal thought can be rooted in an evolutionary science of spontaneous order.  Naomi Beck was one of the participants in the workshop, and I saw her critique of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism as reinforcing this conclusion.

At least half or more of the participants were proponents of Hayekian classical liberalism who were interested in the possibility of grounding liberalism in evolutionary science, although they were unsure as to whether Hayek was correct in the details of his evolutionary theory of liberalism.  A few of the participants--including Beck--were opponents of Hayek and of liberalism in general.  This was similar to the situation at the Mont Pelerin Society conference in the Galapagos Islands last summer, where much of the discussion turned on the assessment of Hayek's evolutionary liberalism.

In the discussions at the MPS meetings and at the Freiburg workshop, I criticized Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires a suppression of our natural human desires.  This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human instincts.  Here is where Hayek’s argument for liberalism becomes incoherent.  

If a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?  And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why does it fail?  

As I have indicated in various posts, I see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.  At the MPS meeting, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement with Hayek on this point.  At times, they seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong, because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation, and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

At the Freiburg workshop, I agreed with Naomi Beck in criticizing Hayek for not reading Darwin and considering his theory of cultural evolution.  Remarkably, Hayek in The Fatal Conceit dismisses Darwin as having nothing important to say about cultural evolution, although Hayek never cites Darwin, and thus leaves the reader with the suspicion that Hayek never read Darwin. 

Darwin's Descent of Man offers an elaborate account of the evolution of morality that should have been important for Hayek.  Darwin presents the evolution of morality as moving through three interacting levels--natural instincts, cultural traditions, and individual reason.  To me, this seems more reasonable than Hayek's attempt to deny instinct and reason in elevating culture as the only ground of morality.  That was one of my arguments in my paper for the Freiburg workshop.

A portion of my Freiburg paper was published in the Journal of Bioeconomics (2015) 17:3-15.  I reprinted this as a post in May of 2015.

I have written many posts on how Darwinian biology supports Aristotelian teleology. One of the best of these posts was written in September with the title "The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand."  It highlights the remarkable work of Allan Gotthelf in showing how Darwinian evolutionary biology restored Aristotelian teleology to biology and thus showed how modern biology can sustain Aristotelian natural right.  Strauss claimed that the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."  Gotthelf demonstrated that Strauss was mistaken about this.

In October and November, I wrote some posts on the foolishness of longing for immortality and the wisdom of Wallace Stevens' insight that "death is the mother of beauty."

I also wrote some posts on music--Wagner's Die Meistersinger (February) and Parsifal (November) and Handel's Messiah (December).