The First Darwinian Left?

In 1998 and 1999, when Peter Singer proposed a "Darwinian left" as a "new paradigm" for the left, he presented this as an alternative to the "traditional left," and particularly the Marxist left.  Generally, he argued, the left had not interpreted Darwin correctly.  The left had assumed that in explaining human evolution as a product of the "struggle for existence," Darwin had understood human life--and all life--as shaped by the competition of individuals, which supported the view of human nature favored by liberal individualism, rather than the view of the left that emphasized the human need for social cooperation.  This was a mistake because Darwin's account of human evolution, particularly in The Descent of Man, argued that human beings evolved as social animals with moral and intellectual capacities that allowed them to cooperate within their families and groups in ways that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Only recently, Singer claimed, has this cooperative side of Darwinism been brought into clear view by the work of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists who see that human beings are evolved to be both competitive and cooperative.  And while this denies the utopian dream of the traditional left for human perfectibility, it does allow for a Darwinian left to work for a more cooperative society.

According to Singer, the only person on the left who saw this cooperative side of Darwinism was Peter Kropotkin, in his book Mutual Aid, who saw that Darwin's Descent recognized cooperation between animals of the same species as a factor of evolution.  Since human beings were naturally cooperative, Kropotkin argued, they did not need government, which actually impeded their natural cooperation, and they would be more cooperative without government.  Thus, Kropotkin's anarchism lessened his influence with the traditional left, particularly Marxists.

There's one big mistake in Singer's story:  he ignores the long period from 1859 to World War II when many people on the left--socialists and progressive liberals--identified themselves as Darwinians.  It was only after the Second World War that those on the left generally rejected any Darwinian understanding of morality and politics as tainted by the seemingly right-wing history of "Social Darwinism."  It was this later turn away from Darwin that explains why the left reacted with such vehement scorn to the publication of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology in 1975.  When Barack Obama condemns his opponents as Social Darwinists, he is manifesting this leftist tradition of scorn for Darwinism.

To correct Singer's story, David Stack has written The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism, 1859-1914 (2003).  Stack shows the influence of Darwinian ideas on the history of British socialism, particularly the tradition that led into the Independent Labour Party of  Great Britain, which defended its socialist position against Marxism on the left and liberalism on the right.  He identifies a long line of Darwinian socialists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, Annie Besant, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and Ramsay MacDonald.  (Stack's book elaborates an argument first stated in an article available online.)

Stack succeeds in so far as he shows that many of the socialists who were looking for an alternative to Marxist revolution employed Darwinian language in arguing for an evolutionary socialism that would emerge gradually through democratic reforms.  These socialists saw the evolutionary process as a progressive movement towards ever greater cooperation, so that the competitive individualism of capitalism was only a temporary stage on the road to the cooperative society of socialism.

Although he does not express it in this way, Stack's argument can be stated as three premises leading to a conclusion:

1.  Darwinism provides a scientific explanation of the human propensity to social cooperation as part of our evolved human nature, and thus it denies atomistic individualism.

2.  Classical liberalism promotes atomistic individualism, and thus it denies the human propensity to social cooperation.

3.  Socialism promotes social cooperation as superior to atomistic individualism.

Therefore, Darwinism supports socialism.

Stack helps us to see the plausibility in this line of reasoning as explaining the history of Darwinian socialism.  But I see at least five weaknesses in Stack's argument.

The first weakness is that Charles Darwin himself never identified support for socialism as a necessary conclusion from his science.  Stack quotes (p. 2) from a letter that Darwin wrote in December 26, 1879, in which he wrote to a Dr. Scherzer: "What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection."  Far from being a socialist, Darwin was an enthusiastic supporter of the Liberal Party, when liberalism was identified as classical liberalism.

Moreover, some of the Darwinian socialists admitted that there was no support in Darwin's writing for connecting evolution to socialism.  In Socialism and Society (1908), Ramsay MacDonald observed: "The influence of Darwinism upon Socialism does not depend upon whether Darwin's special theories of evolution do or do not lead to Socialism" (109).  Enrico Ferri began his Socialism and Positive Science (Darwin-Spencer-Marx) (1905) by admitting: "It is true that Darwin, and especially Spencer, stopped short half-way from the final conclusions of religious, political and social order, which necessarily follow from their indisputable premises" (xi).

Nevertheless, as Ferri suggests, one might argue that even if Darwin himself did not see the connection to socialism, Darwin's science necessarily leads to socialism as a final conclusion.  But to make such an argument, one would have to offer a careful reading of Darwin's Descent to show that the logic of Darwin's reasoning pointed to socialism.  In fact, none of the Darwinian socialists covered by Stack do this.  With the possible exception of Kropotkin, none of them make any effort to show how their socialist conclusions emerge necessarily from a meticulous reading of Darwin's Descent. 

This indicates the second weakness in Stack's argument.  He has to admit that socialist conclusions are only "loosely drawn from Darwinism" (56, 63, 119).  The Darwinism of Darwinian socialism consists of nothing more than some loose language of biological metaphors--"the organic and evolutionary metaphor" of the "social organism" (53, 79, 81, 119-20).  The metaphor of society as an organism comes more from Spencer than from Darwin, and Spencer stresses that the metaphorical likeness of a human society to a human body is incomplete because while a human body has one central nervous system and brain, a human society has no single mind beyond the separate minds of the individuals composing the society.  This is a crucial point, because the socialist use of the metaphor of the "social organism" presumes that the government in a socialist state can act as one mind over a whole society.

This points to the third weakness in Stack's argument.  The Darwinian socialists had to assume that the Darwinian evolution of cooperation was an evolution towards an ever more socialistic state (47, 60, 83, 120).  But this is not necessarily true.  As Stack admits, both Spencer and Kropotkin saw the natural evolution of cooperation as showing that the state was not necessary for cooperation, and that the state might even rightly be seen as an impediment to the cooperation that can naturally emerge in social life.

The weakness here in Stack's reasoning turns on what one means by "cooperation."  Does one mean voluntary cooperation or compulsory cooperation?  Contrary to the second premise in Stack's argument, classical liberalism does not assert an atomistic individualism that denies cooperation, because liberalism affirms the natural propensity of human beings for voluntary cooperation in society.  One can see that, for example, in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, which presents human beings as naturally other-regarding in their capacity for sympathy and moral sentiments, and it was this reasoning that Darwin adopted in his account of the evolution of the natural moral sense in his Descent of Man.  This is a fundamental claim of liberalism as promoting voluntary cooperation in society as superior to compulsory cooperation enforced by the state.

The natural evolution of cooperation is a recurrent theme of classical liberal thought.  So, for example, Ludwig von Mises in Human Action wrote: "The notion of the struggle for existence as Darwin borrowed it from Malthus is to be understood in a metaphorical sense. . . . It need not be a war of extermination. . . . Reason has demonstrated that, for man, the most adequate means of improving his condition is social cooperation and division of labor."

Classical liberals worry about the concentration of coercive power in the state because they worry about the natural tendency of human beings to be corrupted by the exercise of coercive rule over others.  This point is related to the fourth weakness in Stack's argument.  Stack criticizes Singer for arguing that leftists like Marx "know nothing at all about human nature," because, in fact, Stack claims, Marx had a concept of human nature (64).  But here Stack hides the important point that Singer is making. 

The remark that leftists like Marx "know nothing about human nature" is actually a quotation from the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who predicted that a Marxist socialist regime would become tyrannical.  Bakunin wrote:  "And from the heights of the state they begin to look down upon the whole common world of the workers.  From that time on they represent not the people but themselves and their own claims to govern the people.  Those who doubt this know nothing at all about human nature." 

Marx responded to Bakunin by dismissing his "nightmares about authority" and his "hallucinations about domination."  Of course, Bakunin's nightmares about the tyranny of socialist statism turned out to be accurate prophecies.  Singer rightly observes that a Darwinian view of human nature would sustain Bakunin's belief about the corrupting effects of the natural desire for coercive power. 

At one point, Stack describes the British socialists as experiencing the "thrill of power," and he doesn't find this troublesome (120).  But perhaps he would say that in contrast to the Marxist socialists, the British socialists were not corrupted by the power of the state.

And yet, Stack has to recognize the morally repugnant commitment of many British socialists to coercive eugenic policies, which seems to me to be a fifth weakness in his argument.  Stack writes:

     In a number of ways, the eugenic analysis overlapped with a socialist exegesis of Darwinism--to such an extent that Galton's most important follower, Karl Pearson, defined himself as a socialist.  Firstly, eugenics was a collectivist doctrine.  Whereas Darwin had left the unit of natural selection undecided between the individual and the group, the notion of racial fitness demanded that natural selection be a group process.  Secondly, eugenics rested upon a positivistic faith in scientific rationality, and man's Promethean destiny to wrest control of his future, that echoed the agenda of most socialists.  Thirdly, the instrument of eugenic policy, what Galton called the "agencies under social control" intervening to improve "the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally" was to be the state.  This chimed with the socialist objective of a strong state overcoming the interests of petty individualism.  Fourthly, in the "positive" versions of eugenics, the state was to institute a social health programme that cared for mothers and babies.
     Thus, although eugenics did not, as is sometimes asserted, resuscitate the Enlightenment dream of perfectibility, it did hint at a "rational selection" that would dispose, once and for all, of laissez-faire individualism.  It did so, moreover, by substituting the human mind, in the form of the state, for the vicissitudes of nature.  As Galton put it, "what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly."  This, of course, was the essence of the socialist case.  No wonder historians of both inter-war Britain and France have suggested that we reassess our attitudes towards eugenics, and learn to see it as a progressive force in politics. (86-87)

Stack immediately tries to reject this idea of socialist eugenics by claiming that eugenics assumed a hard hereditarianism that was contrary to the environmentalist explanations of human behavior usually favored by the left.  But this is implausible since the very people that Stack regards as most representative of British socialism were enthusiastic about coercive eugenics.  Indeed, Stack must admit: "There was no question of socialists rejecting eugenics outright" (88).

Darwin rejected Galton's proposals for eugenics as utopian.  Darwin did suggest, however,  that Parliament should investigate the effects of inbreeding to see if cousin marriages might be dangerous. 

The general point here is that socialist eugenics illustrates the danger inherent in socialist statism, in "the socialist objective of a strong state overcoming the interests of petty individualism," and "substituting the human mind, in the form of the state, for the vicissitudes of nature."  If this is the "essence of the socialist case," as Stack indicates, then this illustrates the danger in the socialist preference for compulsory cooperation as opposed to the liberal preference for voluntary cooperation.

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

John West's DARWIN DAY IN AMERICA

I have had a series of debates with John West, the Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute will sponsor our next debate on November 15 at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle.

I have responded to West's book Darwin's Conservatives in various posts, some of which can be found here, here, and here.

West's new book--Darwin Day in America--is being published by ISI Books. The book will be released next month. But I have already read the book in page proofs. It is a very good book in surveying the bad effects of a crude scientific materialism in American public policy. That's why I have written a blurb for ISI Books praising it.

My one point of disagreement with West, however, is that I cannot understand why he wants to blame Darwinian science for all of the bad thinking and bad policies attributed to scientific materialism. For example, he criticizes Louis Sullivan's modern architecture for its "reductionist view of buildings as the sum of their functions and building materials." What does this have to do with Darwin? Well, Sullivan said that he was influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution, and therefore, West concludes, Darwin must have been responsible for modern architecture. But then West also notes that Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright also manifested a mystical romanticism that didn't seem very Darwinian. Again, I don't see that there is any kind of inevitable connection to Darwinian science.

Similarly, West criticizes John Watson for his behavioral psychology. But Watson's denial of human nature and affirmation that human beings come into the world as a "blank slate" with no innate propensities and open to environmental conditioning rejects any Darwinian science of human nature! And yet somehow, according to West, this behaviorist rejection of human biological nature is a consequence of Darwinism. I can't see the logic in this at all.

West assumes that Darwinian science requires a strong reductionism in which "the parts are more important than the whole--to the degree that sometimes the whole seems to be a lot less than the sum of the parts." But in Darwinian Conservatism, I argue that Darwinian biology requires the idea of emergence, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's why I argue against E. O. Wilson's "consilience" as strong reductionism and in favor of "consilience" as emergent complexity.

West presents his argument in almost totally negative terms. He indicates the weaknesses in a strongly reductionist science--particularly, in its moral and political implications. But he never elaborates his positive alternative. (This reliance on negative argumentation is common for the proponents of intelligent design theory.) His argument would be strengthened if he could say: having shown the morally dubious consequences of scientific reductionism, now let me explain to you the moral strength of my alternative conception, which is . . .

West says that Darwin's science cannot support "traditional morality," because it provides no "permanent foundation for ethics," and it abolishes "transcendent moral standards." But then he never explains anywhere in his book the content or ground of those "transcendent moral standards."

At the end of the book, he criticizes Darwin for not appealing to "timeless standards of truth sanctioned by God or nature." He thinks the clearest evidence for this is the "startling passage" about how the morality of human beings would be different if they were hive-bees. If human beings lived like bees, Darwin suggests, "our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering." But why does West find this "startling"? Does he believe that the morality of bees must be the same as the morality of human beings, because all living things are governed by the same "timeless standards"? But surely what is naturally good or desirable for human beings is not the same as what would be good or desirable for bees.

West says that "according to Darwin's framework, everything that regularly occurred in nature must be regard as normal almost by nature." But Darwin's hive-bee passage says just the opposite. What is "normal" for hive-bees is not "normal" for human beings.

So, again, I ask, what is West's alternative conception of morality as based on "timeless standards of truth sanctioned by God or nature"? Could he give us an example of the "transcendent moral standards" that he has in mind? Perhaps he could say that the Bible provides such transcendent moral standards sanctioned by God. But don't we have to pass the Bible through a moral filter to get morally correct conclusions, because sometimes the Bible is contrary to our natural moral sense?

As someone deeply influenced by C. S. Lewis, West might want to appeal to Lewis's idea of the universal morality that he calls the Tao in The Abolition of Man. But isn't it interesting that when Lewis adds his appendix to that book, with examples of the Tao, he is very selective. Lewis quotes from the Bible the commandment "thou shalt not kill." But he does not quote the command to "let no breathing thing live" in the conquest of Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:10-20). Nor does Lewis quote any of the biblical passages endorsing slavery. Thus, Lewis carefully picks out those biblical passages that conform to his natural moral sense and rejects those that don't.

West devotes a lot of attention to the debate over the moral status of fetuses, because he sees abortion as a denial of the human dignity of the fetus. But there is no clear biblical statement that life begins at conception. On the contrary, the only biblical passage that seems pertinent suggests that a fetus's life has less value than that of a fully formed human being (Exodus 21:22-27). Even the papal statesments on abortion concede that the belief in life as beginning at conception cannot be based on the Bible. By contrast, many Jews interpret the biblical account of the creation of Adam as indicating that a fetus does not become human until there is a respiratory system in place, because Adam was less than fully human until God breathed life into him.

When readers of the Bible go through the story of God commanding Abraham to kill his innocent son Isaac as a test of Abraham's faith (Genesis 22), some readers interpret this to mean that we must obey any command of God no matter how immoral it is, and thus we are taught, as Kierkegaard said, that faith in God requires "the suspension of the ethical." But most readers assume that there must be some mistake in this biblical story, because surely God would not command what most of us recognize as an immoral act.

On this and other moral issues, it is not clear how we could grasp the transcendent moral standards sanctioned by God if we did not already have a natural moral sense.

West makes a lot of the connection between Darwin and eugenics. In Darwinian Conservatism, I argue that Darwin supported "good eugenics"--such as legally forbidding incestuous marriages that would produce harmful physical and mental disabilities. The recent efforts of Ashkenazi Jews to discourage the marriage of Tay-Sachs carriers would illustrate such "good eugenics." But I don't see any evidence in Darwin's writing that he endorsed Francis Galton's utopian schemes that we could properly condemn as "bad eugenics." West says that "Charles Darwin himself praised the idea of eugenic restrictions on marriage." But West doesn't notice that Darwin was specifically concerned about the effects of incest, which should be of concern for most people. Nor does West indicate that Galton's utopian eugenics goes back to Plato's proposal for eugenic mating in the Republic (459d). The cause of bad eugenics is not Darwin but utopianism.

Can Virtue be Genetically Engineered?

We are not born virtuous or vicious. But we are each born with innate temperaments and capacities that influence our acquisition of virtue by learning and judgment. As Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics (1103a24-25): "virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature; but by our nature we can receive them and perfect them by habituation."

So, for example, if the virtue of courage in war (as Aristotle says) is a mean between the rashness of being too fearless and the cowardice of being too fearful, then one's inborn temperament will influence how easily one learns true courage. Those who are too fearful and those who are too fearless will find it hard to habituate themselves to hit the virtuous mean of courage.

Most parents understand this, because they see that their children differ in their innate personality traits, and consequently parents must plan the moral education of their children so as to nurture them in ways that fit their distinctive personalities.

Some children are harder to train properly than others. And, unfortunately, a few children might be born with such unruly or callous temperaments that, even in the best environments, they might be inclined to become vicious rather than virtuous.

But what happens as we learn more about the genetic mechanisms that underlie the biological inheritance of psychic temperament and capacity? Does this open up the possibility of intervening through genetic engineering to strengthen those innate traits inclined to virtue and weaken those inclined to vice? From Plato to Francis Galton, this has been the dream of a eugenic utopia in which we could scientifically control the innate propensities of human beings at birth to enhance moral character.

At least in principle, it's hard to deny the possibility of genetically changing human nature so as to favor those innate traits most amenable to moral instruction. And yet, as I have argued in chapter 10 of Darwinian Conservatism, the power of biotechnology for changing human nature has been exaggerated. The most fervent advocates of biotechnology welcome the prospect of using it to transform our nature to make us superhuman. The most fervent critics of biotechnology warn us that its power for transforming our nature will seduce us into a Faustian bargain that will dehumanize us. Both sides agree that biotechnology is leading us to a "posthuman" or "transhuman" future. But that assumption is false. It ignores how Darwinian evolution has shaped the adaptive complexity of our human nature--our bodies, our brains, and our desires--in ways that resist technological manipulation. A Darwinian view of human nature reveals the limits of biotechnology so that we can reject both the redemptive hopes of its advocates and the apocalyptic fears of its critics.

If we keep in mind the adaptive complexity of human nature, we can foresee that biotechnology will be limited both in its technical means and in its moral ends. It will be limited in its technical means, because complex behavioral traits are rooted in the intricate interplay of many genes interacting among themselves, with developmental contingencies, and with unique life histories to form brains that respond flexibly to changing circumstances based on individual judgment. Consequently, precise technological manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible. Biotechnology will also be limited in its moral ends, because the motivation for biotechnological manipulations will come from the same natural desires that have always characterized human nature.

A recent example of the tendency to exaggerate the power of biotechnology for fostering human virtue is Mark Walker's article in the September, 2009, issue of Politics and the Life Sciences, entitled "Enhancing Genetic Virtue: A Project for Twenty-First Century Humanity?" Walker is a philosophy professor at New Mexico State University. Unfortunately, his article is available online only for subscribers to the journal. But here's the abstract:

"The Genetic Virtue Project (GVP) is a proposed interdisciplinary effort between philosophers, psychologists, and geneticists to discover and enhance human ethics using biotechnology genetic correlates of virtuous behavior. The empirical plausibility that virtues have biological correlates is based on the claims that (a) virtues are a subset of personality, specifically, personality traits conceived of as 'enduring behaviors,' and (b) that there is ample evidence that personality traits have a genetic basis. The moral necessity to use the GVP for moral enhancement is based on the claims that we should eliminate evil (as understood generically, not religiously), as some evil is a function of human nature. The GVP is defended against several ethical and political criticisms."

Almost two-thirds of Walker's article is devoted to his responses to the ethical and political criticisms. Without necessarily agreeing with him on every point here, I believe he has taken up these issues in an informed and intelligent way.

My complaint is that Walker's argument never gets off the ground because he never shows the "empirical plausibility" that there are "genetic correlates of virtuous behavior" that are clear, strong, and open to biotechnological manipulation. He quotes behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin as saying that "nearly all personality traits show moderate heritability," and Walker goes on to claim that "since genes influence enduring behaviors, it might be possible to use biotechnology in a manner that would promote virtue, and thus serve as a means to improve ourselves, morally speaking" (29-30). His language is so vague and equivocal--"moderate heritability," "influence," "might be possible"--that his readers have to look for some clear examples of specific genetic linkages to virtue that could be altered by genetic engineering.

In Walker's entire article, I can see only two possible examples of this sort, but neither of these examples give Walker what his argument demands--clear, strong, and manipulable genetic correlates of virtue.

The first example concerns the genetic basis for "novelty seeking." Walker cites two articles claiming to show some connection between novelty seeking (as measured by a questionnaire) and the D4 dopamine receptor gene (32). Both articles were published in 1996 in Nature Genetics. Walker fails, however, to tell his readers that later research has concluded that although there seems to be some kind of connection between the D4 dopamine receptor gene and novelty seeking, the connection is "small" (see J.A. Schinka, E.A. Letsch, and F.C. Crawford, "DRD4 and Novelty Seeking: Results of Meta-Analyses," American Journal of Medical Genetics 114:643-648 [2002]).

The second possible example of a specific genetic link to a specific character trait is in Walker's reference to research on the heritability of "anti-social personality disorder" (ASP). He cites three articles published in 1987, 1990, and 1994. He does not tell his readers that although these articles claim to show some degree of heritability for ASP, they do not identify any specific genes or explain how exactly such genes could work to incline people to ASP. Nor does he cite any of the extensive research over the last 15 years showing that although there does seem to be "a genetic contribution to the emotional dysfunction facilitating antisocial behaviors," there is no direct genetic contribution to the behaviors themselves, and no one has identified any specific genetic linkages or how exactly they work (James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Katrina Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 28-46).

Is it likely that we will someday be able to use genetic engineering to promote virtuous character by precisely altering psychic traits like novelty seeking and ASP? To support his affirmative answer, Walker cites Gregory Stock's Redesigning Humans (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

Readers who go to Stock's book will see a rhetorical strategy of exaggeration followed by retraction. On the one hand, Stock declares that "the arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design." On the other hand, he admits that "our biology might prove too complex to rework." He concedes that "no present genetic intervention is worth doing in a healthy individual, and no present technology is capable of effecting an intervention safely anyway." He acknowledges that many biologists believe that the genetic propensities underlying complex behavioral traits such as personality and intelligence are so intricate that we could never intervene to change these mechanisms without producing undesirable side effects. He also recognizes that these genetic propensities always interact in unpredictable ways with chance events and life history to produce unique individuals in ways that cannot be controlled by genetic technology. "Even for highly heritable traits," he observes, "it will be uncertain what a child's unique amalgam of potential and experience will bring. A vision of parents sitting before a catalog and picking out the personality of their future 'designer child' is false" (3-4, 64, 76-77, 111). It's not clear to me how this supports Walker's confidence in the prospects for the genetic engineering of virtue.

I am not denying the possibility that genetic research can uncover some specific genetic linkages to complex behavioral propensities that are clear, strong, and manipulable. But whether that would substantiate Walker's argument is unclear, because his argument is ambiguous. When he writes about using genetic engineering to "eliminate evil," he seems to imply a reduction of virtues and vices to genetic propensities, which is implausible. But when he agrees with Aristotle that innate propensities are necessary but not sufficient for virtue, because virtue requires a lifetime of learned habituation and individual judgment (38-39), Walker pulls back to a more modest and defensible claim.

Yet even this defensible version of Walker's Genetic Virtue Project invites another question: Has he provided plausible standards of virtue and vice? The success of his GVP assumes that it is guided by some clear standards for the virtues to be enhanced and the vices to be eliminated. What are those standards? And who will be responsible for setting and enforcing the standards?

One possibility is that government will set and enforce the standards. The obvious danger with this, however, is the threat of tyranny--either the tyranny of a few or the tyranny of the majority--that will create something like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Another possibility is that individuals will be free to set and enforce their own standards. In particular, parents will be free to follow their own standards of virtue in genetically engineering their children.

Walker seems to take this route of allowing parents the freedom to decide for their children. He admits, however, that parents might change their minds. They might genetically enhance their children to favor the virtuous dispositions to be truthful, just, and caring; but then they might later be convinced by moral reformers that the true virtues should promote dispositions to be untruthful, unjust, and uncaring. In that case, the parents could send their children to "remedial camps" to make them untruthful, unjust, and uncaring. So Walker seems here to be a radical moral relativist or nihilist, because standards of virtue are arbitrary products of cultural history. This would suggest then that the Nazis could have been more successful than they were if they had had the help of Walker's GVP. Were the Nazis right about the importance of eugenics in shaping virtue, but they failed only because they didn't know enough about genetics and genetic engineering to carry out their project?

But I don't think Walker is a moral nihilist, because he often suggests that he believes there really are some enduring standards of virtue. For example, he identifies was as evil, and he praises Gandhi's pacifism. So would the GVP eliminate evil by eliminating all violence, including military violence? Would this suggest that Aristotle was wrong to believe that courage in war is virtuous? Walker reassures us that even the Gandhian pacifist can be courageous because he resolutely resists evil, even if non-violently. But if the GVP eliminated all evil, why would there be any need for non-violent resistance to evil?

Does Walker really believe that there is no virtue in the courage of soldiers risking their lives for their countries? Does he really believe that using genetic engineering to eliminate any disposition to military courage would make the world better? If he does believe this, how would he enforce this belief through his GVP? Would parents be free to disagree with him and thus choose to enhance military virtue in their children? Is there something about the nature of human life that makes conflict inevitable, and thus creates the need for the virtue of courage in war?

The plausibility of Walker's GVP depends on answering such questions.

Why Eugenics is Good for Jews

Proponents of "intelligent design" at the Discovery Institute and elsewhere have charged that Darwinian biology is immoral because of its association with eugenics. This is part of the rhetoric of Ben Stein's movie Expelled.

But as I have indicated in some previous posts, this crude attack on eugenics as evil fails to consider the sort of good eugenics that Darwin favored. Darwin was worried, for example, about the deleterious effects of inbreeding, and so he wanted the British Parliament to sponsor some studies of the effects of first cousin marriages. (Darwin had a personal interest in this, because his wife Emma was his first cousin.)

The crude propaganda of the "intelligent design" proponents (like John West and those in Ben Stein's movie) assumes that eugenics is purely evil because of its abuse by the Nazis in their attack on the Jews. But this ignores the benefits of eugenics for Jews.

Most American Jews are Askenazim. The Askenazi Jews come from Eastern Europe, and because they were a small breeding population in the Middle Ages, many deleterious genes were propagated in the population. For example, about one in 25 Ashkenazi Jews is a carrier of Tay-Sachs disease, which causes the progressive degeneration of the central nervous system in infants, who usually die by the age of 4. It is a horrible disease, and parents would surely want to minimize their chances of producing children with such a disease. To deal with this problem, there are now many Jewish organizations in the United States that provide genetic screening programs so that Jews can determine the likelihood of their being carriers of such diseases, and then they can try to avoid mating with other carriers. As a result of this, the rate of Tay-Sachs and other diseases among Jews has declined dramatically.

This is what I call "good eugenics." Participation in these counseling and screening programs is voluntary. It is not forced on anyone. But it's available for people who want to make good decisions about reproduction and the prospects for their children. It's eugenics, because it is designed to improve the genetic health of offspring.

What's wrong with this? Isn't it good for Jews to be able to participate in such eugenic programs? Doesn't this show how genetics and Darwinian science can improve human life? Rather than denouncing eugenics as evil, wouldn't it be better to distinguish good eugenics from bad eugenics? Why don't the proponents of "intelligent design" do this? Is it because they are advancing a rhetorical strategy that does not favor intelligent thought about the issues?

For more information about genetic testing and family-planning decisions among American Jews, you can go to the website for the Victor Center for Jewish Genetic Diseases at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.

Deirdre McCloskey and the Evolutionary Science of Liberalism as Symbolic Niche Construction

The most momentous event in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens over the past 200,000 years was the emergence of the Bourgeois Era through the Industrial Revolution (beginning around 1800) followed by the Great Enrichment (beginning around 1860).  The only other equally momentous event was the emergence of the Agrarian Era, when human beings moved from foraging (hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants) to farming (herding domesticated animals and cultivating domesticated plants), which began about 10,000 years ago.

We all recognize the importance of the Industrial Revolution, but few of us recognize that economic historians have uncovered other industrial revolutions at other times and places in history.  Those other industrial revolutions did not bring a Great Enrichment--the explosive growth in wealth sustaining an explosive growth in population over the past two centuries, beginning in northwestern Europe and then spreading around the world.  One of the deepest questions for all of the intellectual disciplines--the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--is how to explain why this has happened.  Or, in other words, why is our world in the Bourgeois Era so very different from the world of all of our ancestors?

Bourgeois Equality (2016) is the third big book in a trilogy of big books that Deirdre McCloskey has written to answer this question.  The previous two are The Bourgeois Virtues (2006) and Bourgeois Dignity (2010).  All three books elaborate arguments that were first set forth in 1994 in an article--"Bourgeois Virtue"--in the American Scholar, written by Donald McCloskey before he became Deirdre.  Every main idea, and sometimes even the exact wording, in the books comes from the article.

The plan for this intellectual project came to McCloskey while she was on an airplane and reading John Casey's book Pagan Virtue (1990).  As suggested by Friedrich Nietzsche, Casey contrasts the pagan aristocratic virtues of Achilles, for whom courage is the primary virtue, and the plebeian Christian virtues of Saint Paul, for whom charity is the primary virtue.  Today, McCloskey thought, most of us are bourgeois, and we are neither pagan aristocrats nor Christian plebeians.  We are neither heroes nor saints.  What are our bourgeois virtues?  Or must we admit, as Gustav Flaubert and other bohemian critics of the bourgeois have declared, that the only way for the bourgeois to become good is to stop being bourgeois?  Bourgeois liberalism has allowed more human beings to enjoy individual liberty, equal dignity, and economic prosperity than ever before in the history of the world.  Prior to 1800, most people everywhere lived in grinding poverty.  Now, few people live in such poverty.  Surely, there must be something good in that, something virtuous.

The greatness of the Great Enrichment is evident in the economic data.  McCloskey summarizes some of the data from economic historians (like Angus Maddison) and from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Penn Tables (put together by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania) (Bourgeois Equality, 5-13).  Expressed in present-day U.S. prices, corrected for exchange rates and inflation, the average human being prior to 1800 lived on $3 a day, which is the average today for Haitians and Afghans.  Today, the world average, which includes the poorest people like the Haitians and Afghans, is $33 a day, which is about the level of present-day Brazil or of the United States in 1941.  So average per person income has increased over the past two centuries by a favor of 10.  And since the world population has increased over that same period from under one billion to over seven billion, we can say that the production and consumption of goods and services has increased worldwide by a factor of 70 (7 X 10).  In the wealthier countries today, the average real income per person per day is well over $100, which means an income growth from 1800 to the present of 2,900%.

Prior to 1800, periods of increasing economic growth could double or triple average daily income--from $3 a day to $6 or $9 a day--but inevitably these periods of growth were followed by a decline back to subsistence levels.  So, prior to 1800, real income per person could increase by 100% or 200% in times of great economic growth, but never by 2,900%, as has happened in the past two centuries.

McCloskey contends that the greatest transformation in human history was not the 450 years of sustained economic growth in England, 1348-1750, at a growth rate of one-tenth or two-tenths of 1 percent per year.  And it was not the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, 1760-1860, with growth over a hundred years of a factor of 2.  The great transformation was the Great Enrichment, with growth of 5.87% per year and a factor of 100 over two centuries (BE, 532).  There had been major growth phases in earlier history elsewhere in the world--early Song China and early Tokugawa Japan, for example--but these were periods in which growth rose by factors of 2 or 3, not factors of 10 or 30 or 100 (BE, 534-35).

Moreover, other measures of improving human conditions of life show the same Great Enrichment.  Average life expectancies have doubled since 1800, for example, and literacy has increased from less than 10% in 1850 to almost 90% today.  The increase in literacy indicates not just material enrichment, but also intellectual and spiritual enrichment.

Social scientists have offered many different kinds of explanations for this unprecedented turn in human history, beginning first in northwestern Europe and North America, and then spreading around the world.  One explanation popular with many economists (such as Douglass North, Daron Acemoglu, and James Robinson) emphasizes the importance of economic, legal, and political institutions that favor economic growth--particularly, property rights, the rule of law, free trade, and general incorporation laws for forming economic corporations, which provided the incentives for economic exchange and innovation.

But while such institutional rules are necessary conditions for economic growth, McCloskey argues, they are hardly sufficient to explain the historically unique explosion in economic development that began after 1800.  Good institutions are necessary, but only quick changes in good ideas can explain the quick move to the Great Enrichment.  Ideas matter, McCloskey insists, particularly ethical ideas about the  bourgeois life.  What changed in the eighteenth century in Great Britain (preceded by the same change in the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic) was that for the first time in human history the bourgeois life of trade-tested betterment--buying low and selling high--was judged not as morally corrupting, as it had been throughout history, but as morally virtuous and thus honorable.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have expressed the bourgeois "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange," which has fostered economic growth.  But it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe that philosophers like Adam Smith defended this as a virtuous activity that should be admired as protected by a system of natural liberty that would recognize the equal liberty and dignity of ordinary people in living their lives as they please.  This change in the ethical rhetoric of ideas brought the Great Enrichment of the nineteenth century.  This change was the move to liberalism, to Smith's liberal idea for "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice" (Wealth of Nations, Liberty Fund, 664, 687).

The institutions of property rights, the rule of law, and free trade can be found in many civilizations throughout human history.  For example, as McCloskey points out, Genghis Khan's Pax Mongolia of the thirteenth century enforced property rights and the rule of law over a land empire stretching from Korea to Hungary, which protected global free trade throughout Central Asia.  China had private property, extensive markets, and large firms many centuries before England had such institutions.  Even ancient Mesopotamia had property rights and trade protected by law four thousand years ago.  What all of these countries lacked, however, was the bourgeois ethics of Smithian liberalism that led to the Great Enrichment beginning in nineteenth century Great Britain.

Institutions without ideas are not enough to explain this.  In fact, as McCloskey points out (BE, 518), even institutionalists like North will occasionally admit this.  In Violence and Social Orders (2009) by North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, there is one passage (pp. 192-93) where the authors must fall back on ideational explanation for the transition to "open access societies": they speak of a "transformation in thinking," a "new understanding," "the language of rights," and "the logic of the argument."  But then they fail to reflect on how this points to the primacy of liberal ideas advanced by people like John Locke and Adam Smith.

If McCloskey is right about the rhetorical appeal of liberal ideas promoting bourgeois ethics, as I think she is, then we must wonder what it is about evolved human nature that makes such ideas rhetorically appealing.  Generally, McCloskey scorns evolutionary science in explaining social and economic history, because she fears that this falls into a crude social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenic materialism, which she sees, for example, in Gregory Clark's explanation of the British Industrial Revolution as arising from "survival of the richest" (Bourgeois Dignity, 266-95).

McCloskey also says, however, that her argument can be put into "evolutionary terms," because "I am arguing that the meme 'trade-tested-betterments are good' had reproductive success, and further, that on the success of the idea depended the material success of the modern world" (BE, 521-22).  This would be a case of cultural evolution, of the sort studied by evolutionary scientists like Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, and Joseph Henrich.  Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have shown that in evolutionary history there are four systems of inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Of these four, the first three are manifest among nonhuman animals.  Symbolic evolution is the one uniquely human line of evolutionary inheritance, which includes the whole realm of conceptual ideas and rhetorical persuasion.  What McCloskey identifies as the Bourgeois Revaluation in liberalism belongs to human symbolic evolution.

McCloskey (BE, 631-39) also embraces an evolutionary theory of liberalism set forth in a paper by Gerald Gaus (2015), who relies largely on ideas developed by Christopher Boehm (1999, 2012) and by Richerson and Boyd (2008).  This is the same evolutionary account of liberalism that has been defended by Jonathan Turner, Alexandra Maryanski, Paul Rubin, and me (in various writings as well as on this blog).

The basic idea, as McCloskey says, is that bourgeois liberalism is "reinstating a pre-agricultural equality" by establishing an equal dignity and liberty for ordinary people--including an "equality of genuine comfort"--that restores the equal autonomy of individuals enjoyed in hunter-gatherer bands for hundreds of thousands of years until the establishment of rigid class hierarchies in agrarian societies. 

As I have argued in some earlier posts, this is a restatement of John Locke's argument for liberalism as the restoration of the natural liberty and equality that hunter-gatherers had in the "state of nature."  Locke's account of the state of nature depended on the reports of Europeans about the foraging life of native Americans.  "In the beginning," Locke declared, "all the world was America."  Now, after two centuries of scientific studies of the foraging way of life, we can confirm Locke's account of the state of nature as mostly right.  And we can see that the modern liberal ideas of equality, liberty, and dignity can be understood as appealing to that evolved human nature as shaped in the hunter-gatherer bands of our evolutionary ancestors.

And yet, one might object that, as Friedrich Hayek pointed out in his evolutionary account of liberalism, the liberalism of the Great Society--of the extended order of exchange in which millions of people can cooperate anonymously for their mutual benefit--requires a repression of the natural instincts shaped by life in ancient families and small bands.  In those families and foraging bands, our ancestors lived in primitive communism, just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels recognized, in which wealth was distributed equally for the common good according to some deliberate plan.  By contrast to this, a modern free market society requires that goods and services be distributed through market prices, which does not conform to any standard of social justice.  The socialist rejection of the market system of allocation in favor of a deliberately planned distribution for the common good appeals to our evolved instincts for the socialism of families and small bands.

In fact, McCloskey observes, our families "are little socialist economies," and the "instinctive basis" for wanting a centrally planned society is that central planning really does work in a family household, and perhaps also in small bands and small business firms (BE, 577, 624).  Moreover, McCloskey notes, the family can rightly be seen as the original social insurance scheme to provide care for children, the sick, the unemployed, and the old (BE, 605).  The problem, however, is that while it is natural for a family or a band to be centrally planned according to the communist principle of  "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," it is not natural for large societies of millions of individuals to be centrally planned; and in such large societies, we need life to be organized by trade.

According to Hayek, this means that in large liberal societies, we must live in two worlds at once that are based on conflicting principles of order.  We must neither apply the rules of the market to family life, nor apply the rules of family life to the market.  Hayek explained: "If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it.  Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once" (The Fatal Conceit, 18).

But as Gaus and I and a few others have argued, Hayek is mistaken in his belief that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a completely socialist or collectivist order with no individual autonomy, and therefore our evolved human nature must be suppressed if we are to live in a free society of autonomous individuals who trade with one another for mutual benefit.  In fact, as McCloskey indicates, there is plenty of evidence for long-distance trading networks among our ancient foraging ancestors (BE, 22, 106-107, 283, 376, 403, 543-59).  Even Hayek himself sometimes concedes that there is evidence for ancient trading (Fatal Conceit, 11, 16-17, 29, 38-45, 60, 133). 

Moreover, there is also evidence, as Boehm and others have shown, that foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over others.  If this is so, then the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.


REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2015. "The Evolution of Darwinian Liberalism." Journal of Bioeconomics 17:3-15.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Gaus, Gerald. 2015. "The Egalitarian Species." Social Philosophy and Policy 31: 1-27.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Maryanski, Alexandra, and Jonathan Turner. 1992. The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Richerson, Peter J., and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul J. Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-41. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rubin, Paul H. 2002. Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Turner, Jonathan H., and Alexandra Maryanski. 2008.  On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Elaboration of some of my points here can be found in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, here, here, here., here., here., here, and here.

The Confucian Way (3): C. S. Lewis and the Tao

A Darwinian science of virtue explains moral order as a joint product of natural propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. It is a mistake to try to reduce morality to one of these three without the others, because each is necessary but not sufficient. Human moral order requires certain natural propensities of the human species as shaped by the history of genetic evolution. But then these natural propensities must be developed through individual habituation and social customs as shaped by the history of cultural evolution. And, finally, we should see that mature adults can deliberately reflect on their individual habits and social customs and exercise their judgment about possibly reforming some of those habits and customs, but without expecting a radical reconstruction that would sweep away all that has gone before. If it is not to be an exercise in utopian fantasy, deliberate choice will always be constrained by human nature and human culture.

One instructive way to think about this tripartite scheme for explaining morality--nature, custom, and judgment--is to see how it runs through the moral reasoning of C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Confucius' Analects. Lewis shows how morality requires moral sentiments that combine emotion and reason as expressed in the universal moral standards of what Lewis calls the Tao, which arises from the complex interaction of human nature, human tradition, and human judgment. Lewis imagines that "a new Natural Philosophy" or "regenerate science" could explain this natural morality scientifically. Darwin's science of the moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature provides the natural science of morality that Lewis seeks. Lewis takes his idea of the Tao from Confucius's Analects. And, in fact, the Confucian tradition of morality illustrates the moral order of nature, custom, and judgment as understood by Lewis and Darwin.

Lewis begins The Abolition of Man as a response to an elementary textbook on English that expresses what Lewis regards as a common but mistaken view of moral language. The authors of the textbook take up the story of Coleridge at a waterfall. When one tourist says the waterfall is "sublime," and another says it is "pretty," Coleridge endorses the first and scorns the second. According to the authors, this illustrates a common confusion in the use of language. These people thought they were making remarks about the waterfall, but in fact they were only making remarks about their feelings. "This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings."

Lewis infers that "the schoolboy who reads this passage . . . will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and, secondly, that all such statements are unimportant" (15). Lewis objects to the implicit separation between the objective world of facts as knowable by reason and the subjective world of values as an expression of emotion. This is a false dichotomy because it ignores the possibility that emotions can be either reasonable or unreasonable, depending on whether the emotions are appropriate responses to reality.

"Until quite modern times," Lewis observes, "all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it--believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt" (25). Lewis believes that this conception was shared by all the great traditions of moral thought--"Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike"--and it is this that he identifies, following Confucius, as "the Tao."

At the root of the Tao--the universal standards of traditional morality--Lewis sees one fundamental thought:

"It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself--just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgment: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it" (29-30).

Lewis insists that the practical principles of the Tao must be accepted if we are to have any practical principles at all. These principles are both sentimental and rational. They are sentimental, because pure reason by itself cannot move us to action without emotional motivation (33-35, 53). They are rational, not in the sense of theoretical rationality, but in the sense of practical rationality, because they constitute the axioms of "Practical Reason"--the self-evident premises of practical judgment that are "so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof" (52-53).

As an indication of their self-evident character, these principles of practical rationality provide the only source for all value judgments. This is not just one system of value, it is the only system of value. Any attempt to totally reject it and create some new system of value becomes self-contradictory, because any supposedly new values turn out to be fragments of the old values. "There never has been and never will be a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. . . . The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in" (56-57).

Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

"Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with" (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

Lewis rejects utopian schemes for radically altering the human condition through biological technology and sociological conditioning, because such utopianism tries to step outside the constraints of human nature and human tradition in a way that can only foster absolute tyranny. In the past, such utopian projects have been frustrated by human resistance. So, for example, proposals for abolishing the natural bonds between parents and children (as in Plato's Republic) have failed to overcome "the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children" (73). But Lewis worries that modern statism with the technology of modern science (such as eugenics) might actually succeed in creating "the world of post-humanity," which would really be the utter dehumanization of humanity, the "abolition of man" carried out by the tyrannical power of some men over others (73, 77, 86).

Although he does not explicitly mention Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Lewis probably has in mind this modern vision of a dehumanized utopia shaped by eugenic engineering and propaganda under the rule of an omnicompetent state. Those like Leon Kass who worry about biotechnology leading to a "posthumanity" of dehumanized degradation have been influenced by Lewis's book as combined with Huxley's novel.

Lewis worries that modern science, with its reductionistic view of human beings and its devotion to the mastery of nature, supports the "abolition of man" that he fears, because while such a science has great power, it lacks the understanding of, or respect for, the traditional morality that alone can provide guidance for the proper use of such power.

And yet, Lewis foresees that "from Science herself the cure might come," if there could be "a new Natural Philosophy" that would not be reductionistic:

"When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying It, it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. The analogy between the Tao of Man and the instincts of an animal species would mean for it new light cast on the unknown thing, Instinct, by the only known reality of conscience and not a reduction of conscience to the category of Instinct. Its followers would not be free with the words only and merely. In a word, it would conquer Nature without being at the same time conquered by her and buy knowledge at a lower cost than that of life" (89-90).

My argument is that a Darwinian account of morality as grounded in the evolved human nature of the moral sense provides the "new Natural Philosophy" sought by Lewis. (Early in his intellectual career, Leon Kass was trying to develop this new Darwinian natural philosophy, until he turned later in his life to his studies of the Hebrew Bible as a religious basis for morality.) Moreover, we can look to the Confucian tradition of morality as an illustration of how our evolved moral sense expresses itself in our natural propensities, our cultural traditions, and our individual judgments.

I will take up those points in subsequent posts.

For some previous posts on Lewis, go here, here, here, here, and here.