The "Inner Logic" of Equal Liberty in Evolved Human Nature: A Response to Darrin McMahon

THE "INNER LOGIC" OF EQUALITY

I have written about Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights as an illustration of the Darwinian neurohistory of human rights, in which the understanding of human rights arises from the human brain's evolved capacity for feeling empathy for the victims of injustice.  

Part of her argument is that human rights have a kind of "inner logic" or a "kind of conceivability or thinkability scale" (150). She illustrates this by showing how the French revolutionaries of 1789 were driven by the logic of human rights to extend the circle of humanitarian concern. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen had declared: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."  The abstract universalism of this declaration inevitably inclined them to extend that equal protection to new groups of human beings, and thus expand the circle of human empathy.  So, for example, once the French revolutionary leaders had granted religious liberty not only to Catholics but also to Protestant Christians, this made it easier to see the need for granting liberty to Jews.

Another example of the "inner logic" of equal liberty being extended to ever more groups of people is how the right to vote in America has been broadened so far that eventually almost all adult citizens have the right to vote.  Hunt illustrates this with a letter from John Adams to James Sullivan on May 26, 1776.  

Since the Americans had begun their revolutionary overthrow of British rule, the Second Continental Congress had called upon the American states to begin writing their first constitutions.  Part of the debates over those constitutions was the question of voting rights.  In England, electors had to own a 40-shilling freehold (land that produced an annual rent of at least 40 shillings).  In the American colonies, because of the cheapness and availability of land, this property requirement allowed between 50 percent and 80 percent of all while males to vote, which was a much wider franchise than was the case in England, where no more than 20 percent of adult males could vote.  But even so, when the Revolution began, some Americans questioned these property requirements for voting.  If republican government was based on the consent of the people, and if all the people had an equal right to consent to the laws, then it would seem to follow logically that all the citizens should have an equal right to vote.  That was the argument of James Sullivan for universal suffrage in Massachusetts, which he presented to John Adams.

Although Adams agreed that this was a logical application of the principle that all human beings have an equal natural right to consent to government, he warned Sullivan that making such a proposal was risky:

"Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So fruitful a Source of Controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to alter the Qualifications of Voters.  There will be no End of it.  New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.  Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.  It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell."

Adams admitted to Sullivan that women "have as good Judgment, and as independent Minds as those Men who are wholly destitute of Property."  And so, once the property qualification for men is abolished, there will be no grounds for denying the right to vote to women.  "There will be no end of it."

Thus, Adams foresaw that declaring the equal human right to consent to government would logically require the constant expansion of the right to vote so that finally all citizens would have an equal right to vote.

Similarly, Abraham Lincoln saw the Declaration of Independence as setting a standard of human equality of rights that would be constantly approximated as its influence spread and deepened over American history.  The authors of the Declaration declared that "all men are created equal" in "certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"This they said, and this they meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.  In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon.  They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere" (Lincoln 1989, 1:398).

Thus it was, Lincoln claimed, that the Declaration of Independence "gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance" (1989, 2:213). 

Lincoln's contribution to fulfilling this "promise" of equal rights was to issue the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and to lead the Union in defeating the Confederacy in the Civil War so that the emancipation of slaves could be fully enforced in the South.  After his death, during the Reconstruction era, the North forced the Southern states to respect the equal rights of the freed slaves.  But with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white supremacist leaders were able to establish Jim Crow laws that enforced a system of racial segregation that denied the equal rights of black citizens. 

In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial and speaking to 250,000 people at the March on Washington, Martin Luther King invoked Lincoln's rhetoric of equal liberty and particularly his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence as providing the "standard maxim of free society."  King began his "I Have a Dream" speech by pointing to Lincoln.  (I have written about this speech as showing the superiority of King's rhetoric of equality over George Wallace's rhetoric of freedom as separation.)

"Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.  . . . But one hundred years later, the Negro is still not free."

He then turned to the promise of equal liberty in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

"In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.  When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.'  It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note."

He explained his Dream, repeating "I have a dream" eight times.  He began:

"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:  'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

In this way, King advanced the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s as the fulfillment of the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence.

McMAHON'S CRITIQUE

And yet, Darrin McMahon (in his book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea) has argued that Hunt,  Lincoln, and King were all wrong about the Declaration of Independence as supporting the "inner logic" of equality as a progressively unfolding tendency in history.

Lincoln was wrong, McMahon claims, for two reasons.  First, far from promising equality for all men, the Declaration of Independence was really only a promise of "white freedom," so that black slavery would be preserved (166).  Second, "the Declaration was less a promissory note for the future, or a charter of individual rights, than an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163).

Although McMahon does not mention Stephen Douglas's debates with Lincoln, McMahon's two points here repeat the two claims made by Douglas about the Declaration of Independence.  In defending the Dred Scott decision that blacks could not be citizens, Douglas insisted that the signers of the Declaration "referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared all men to have been created equal," and that the only purpose of the Declaration was "justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown" (Lincoln 1989, 1:399).

Because he agrees with Douglas, McMahon can say that King was wrong in describing the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal as a "declaration of intent" and a "promissory note" that would be fulfilled in time.  Actually, McMahon observes, "it is doubtful . . . that the Declaration intended any such thing, and still less that Jefferson's well-worn proposition was meant to portend the coming equality of all" (371-72).

Similarly, McMahon insists that Hunt was wrong about the proposition that all men are created equal having an inherent tendency that would drive revolutionaries to extend equal rights to all human beings.  In Hunt's "inner logic story," "equality is presented in strikingly idealist and teleological terms, as if it were gradually, yet inexorably, spreading across the globe according to some powerful necessity, overcoming barriers one by one" (219).  Clearly, McMahon thinks such a teleological conception of history patently absurd.

But McMahon's arguments for these conclusions are weak.  First of all, his assertion that the Declaration of Independence promises only "white freedom" is not grounded in the text of the Declaration.  The Declaration says that "all men" are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.  It does not say that only "all white men" are created equal.

In some previous posts, I have shown that Jefferson and the other founders always condemned slavery as an unjust violation of natural human liberty, and that slavery must eventually be abolished, although they disagreed about how and when slavery could be abolished without disastrous consequences.  Actually, Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a clause condemning the King for supporting the British slave trade:

"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another" (Jefferson 1984, 22).

Jefferson reports that this clause was struck out because some of the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia wanted to continue the foreign importation of slaves, and because some people in the northern colonies had engaged in the commercial shipping of slaves.

Notice that slaves are identified as "men," and thus entitled to the "rights of life and liberty" that belong to "all men."  Notice also the reference to the "market where MEN should be bought & sold."  Since female as well as male slaves were sold on the market, this must imply that "men" is being used in a generic sense to include women as well as men.  If so, then the affirmation in the Declaration that "all men are created equal" must include slaves and women.

Enslaving human beings is said to be a "cruel war against human nature itself."  This appeal to human nature as the moral standard for natural rights appears often in Jefferson's writings, where one repeatedly finds language about "the rights of human nature" and the abolition of slavery as "a complete emancipation of human nature" (1972, 87; 1984, 116).

Some of the most important Black Americans of the founding era recognized that the Declaration's principle of human equality of rights meant that slavery was an unjust violation of natural right.  In one sentence, McMahon identifies the African American preacher Lemuel Haynes as saying this (162).  But there were many other Black Americans who said the same thing (Basker 2023: 132, 152-54, 190-93, 251, 367, 510-511). 

One of those Black Americans directly engaged Jefferson himself and accused him of contradicting the principle of human equality in the Declaration of Independence by holding black slaves.  Benjamin Banneker was an African American mathematician and scientist.  He was the child of a free black mother and a formerly enslaved father from Africa.  On August 19th, 1791, he sent a long letter to Jefferson, who at the time was the Secretary of State in President Washington's cabinet.  He explained to Jefferson that slavery violated "the rights of human nature," because as human beings by nature, black slaves were endowed with all the natural rights to which all human beings are entitled.  Banneker quoted from Jefferson's Declaration: "We hold these truths to be self, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  He charged Jefferson with contradicting this principle of human equality "in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves."

Along with his letter, Banneker enclosed his hand-written manuscript of an astronomic almanac that applied his knowledge of astronomical mathematics to predict the positions of astronomical bodies for the next year.  He presented this to Jefferson as evidence of the intellectual abilities of a black man.

Jefferson responded to Banneker in a letter of August 30, 1791:

"No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talent equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America.  I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit.--I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which you whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them."

On the same day, he wrote to Condorcet:

"I am happy to be able to inform you that we have now in the United States a negro, the sone of a black man born in Africa, and of a black woman born in the United States, who is a very respectable Mathematician.  I procured him to be employed under one of our chief directors in laying out the new federal city on the Potomac, and in the intervals of his leisure, which on that work, he made an Almanac for the next year, which he me in his own handwriting, and which I inclose to you.  I have seen very elegant solutions of Geometrical problems by him.  Add to this that he is a very worthy and respectable member of society.  He is a free man.  I shall be delighted to see these instances of moral eminence so multiplied as to prove that the want of talents observed in them is merely the effect of their degraded condition, and not proceeding from any different in the structure of the parts on which intellect depends."

These letters were published shortly after they were written.  Some of Jefferson's Federalist critics saw this as evidence that Jefferson was actually a dangerous abolitionist.

Notice that Jefferson does not dispute anything Banneker said about slavery infringing on "the rights of human nature" and about the natural mental and moral talents of blacks that are suppressed by the "degraded existence" of slavery.

Notice also that Jefferson does not say that "all men are created equal" applies only to white men, which is what McMahon says.  Actually, McMahon does not even mention this correspondence.

Now, it is true that the purpose of Jefferson's Declaration was to declare the independence of the United States as "Free and Independent States" under international law and "Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown."  But this does not mean that the Declaration's affirmation of the natural equality of men as endowed with unalienable rights was not critically important.

McMahon relies on David Armitage's The Declaration of Independence: A Global History for his claim that the Declaration was not "a charter of individual rights" but rather "an intervention in international law that justified secession from the British Empire" (163, 451n.12).  But I have shown that Armitage's denigration of the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration is unjustified.

Armitage observes that the Declaration was a "document of state-making" declaring that these previously dependent colonies in the British Empire were now free and independent states in the international system of states.  "The rest of the Declaration," he explains, "provided only a statement of the abstract principles upon which the assertion of such standing within the international order rested, and an accounting of the grievances that had compelled the United States to assume their independent station among 'the Powers of the Earth'" (17, 66).  Therefore, the abstract principles in the second paragraph (about the rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness") were "strictly subordinate to these claims regarding the rights of states, and were taken to be so by contemporaries, when they deigned to notice the assertions of individual rights at all" (17). 

But notice that in the first sentence of the Declaration, it's "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" that "entitle" this "one people" to claim a "separate and equal station" among "the Powers of the Earth."  And so, the immediately following paragraph ("We hold these truths . . .") explains exactly how the Laws of Nature and Nature's God "entitle" them to become free and independent states.  Even Armitage says that their claims to independent statehood "rest upon" these principles, which provide the foundation for their claims.  This denies his attempt to denigrate the second paragraph as unimportant or dispensable, because this paragraph constitutes the indispensable ground for entitling them to independence as states. 

It was that second paragraph of the Declaration that King saw as the "declaration of intent" or "promissory note" that would be fulfilled by achieving the equality of rights for both white and black Americans.  But McMahon objects that the Declaration did not in fact intend this, and "King likely knew that too."  McMahon explains: "To assume that the underlying logic of the country would eventually work itself out--that the founding principle of equality would somehow force Americans into line by dint of its inherent justice and right--was to risk 'complacency' and 'comforting myth.'  King was anything but complacent" (372).

McMahon here is referring to a paragraph in King's essay "A Testament of Hope":

"It is time that we stopped our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.  These fine sentiments are embodied in the Declaration of Independence, but that document was always a declaration of intent rather than of reality.  There were slaves when it was written; there were still slaves when it was adopted; and to this day, black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive.  Americans who genuinely treasure our national ideals, who know they are still elusive dreams for all too many, should welcome the stirring of Negro demands.  They are shattering the complacency that allowed a multitude of social evils to accumulate, Negro agitation is requiring American to reexamine its comforting myths and may yet catalyze the drastic reforms that will save us from social catastrophe" (King 1986: 315).

Contrary to what McMahon suggests, King is not denying that the Declaration was a "declaration of intent" to eventually guarantee equal liberty for all American citizens.  Rather, King's argument is that to fulfill that "declaration of intent," we must give up the "comforting myths" in "our blithe lip service to the guarantees of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness," and then we must satisfy the "Negro demands" for "the drastic reforms" required to finally guarantee equal liberty for all.

THE EVOLUTIONARY "END OF HISTORY" IN LOCKEAN EQUAL LIBERTY

But then, we must ask, what explains those "Negro demands" for the "drastic reforms" that would secure the equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence?  

One answer, suggested by Christopher Boehm's evolutionary theory of "reverse dominance hierarchy," is that these "Negro demands" express the natural desire of our evolved human nature to be free from exploitative dominance and to exercise the equal liberty to which all human beings are naturally inclined.  That's what John Locke saw in the evolutionary state of nature.

In the first chapter of his book, McMahon adopts Boehm's theory as the best explanation of the original foraging society in which the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy was shaped:

". . . the theory balances nicely the bipolarities of our nature.  For at work in the construction of reverse dominance hierarchies is both something like a will to power and a will to parity, a drive for dominance and a drive for fairness, a desire to rise up the ranks and a resentment of those who do so by bullying others.  The reverse dominance hierarchy accommodates both hierarchical and anti-hierarchical feelings at once.  As one anthropologist's East African informant summed up the logic, 'All men seek to rule, but if they cannot rule, they prefer to remain equal'" (38).

This evolutionary theory of egalitarian hierarchy and the "bipolarities of our nature" runs throughout McMahon's history of equality, either explicitly or implicitly.   In the last paragraph of his book, he reaffirms the primacy of this evolutionary psychology of dominance, deference, and counter-dominance:

"Resisting hierarchy is part of who we are as a species.  But we are also better than any other at building it back up, using the vaunted wisdom of Homo sapiens to construct regimes of hierarchy and domination of a scale and intensity unknown in the animal kingdom.  We will never make them go away entirely, and we must be mindful of how our views of equality can serve to reinforce them.  But we hold it in our power to make them less severe, and more fair, by recalling the vigilance of our ancestors who have fiercely resisted upstarts and fought against the force of things, imagining equality in different figures and forms" (419). 

At the beginning of McMahon's history, we see the equal liberty of our foraging ancestors: "equality, and its early concomitant, freedom, . . . were arguably among the greatest blessings our foraging ancestors knew, even if they didn't know it.  The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).

Then, beginning in the Neolithic era, we see the transition into agricultural settlements and urban states in which rulers become despotically dominant and most human beings live as peasants or slaves.  Once this despotic inequality reaches a breaking point, moral and religious reformers begin to denounce the injustice of the elites; and resistance to domination is expressed as peasant revolts.  These are signs of what McMahon calls a "legitimation crisis" (78-79,  82-83, 146-47).

McMahon does not recognize how this idea of "legitimation crisis" points to the Lockean idea that all government depends on the consent of the people, and that even the most powerful tyranny needs at least the acquiescence of the people to dominance.  Sometimes McMahon exaggerates the power of the first "god kings" in Mesopotamia and elsewhere, and he ignores the evidence that these states were weakened by resistance and rebellion (60-62).

The most recent stage in this history of egalitarian hierarchy is the emergence of modern liberal democracies over the past three hundred years.  McMahon recognizes these evolutionary stages of history in Peter Turchin's "Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism" (84-85).   First, human foraging bands moved away from the extreme inequality of ancestral primate groups to the egalitarianism of the foraging order.  Second, human beings moved away from foraging egalitarianism to the extreme inequality of archaic states.  Finally, in recent centuries, human beings have moved to constitutional democracies that approximate the egalitarianism of the foraging order.

McMahon does not notice that this confirms Boehm's claim that modern liberal democracies fulfill the natural human desires for equal liberty as they were shaped in the foraging state of nature (Boehm 1999: 225-258).

Previously, I have written about the similar three-stage evolutionary history of Douglass North and his colleagues: the foraging order, the limited access order, and the open access order.

McMahon does not recognize how this evolutionary history of egalitarian hierarchy culminating in the equal liberty of modern liberal democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's argument for the "end of history".  History as the human search for the fully satisfying social order might have come to an end, he suggested, because with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War Two and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, liberal democracy remains with no serious challenger; and most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order.  In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy--equal liberty for all--have not been completely attained.  Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves.  Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like.

In one sentence, McMahon speaks about Fukuyama's claim "the 'the end of history' was on the horizon and that it was the 'march of equality' that was taking us there, to a time when political evolution would end in liberal democracy for all" (400).  McMahon argues that this idea has been refuted by the evidence that over the past fifty years there has been a global turn to massive inequality, even in the modern liberal democracies.  He thinks the proof for this is clear in Thomas Piketty's collection and analysis of the data for economic inequality (404-405).

But McMahon makes no attempt to answer the many criticisms of Piketty's handling of his data--criticisms that I have surveyed in some previous posts.

McMahon also says nothing about the fact that countries ranking high on the Human Freedom Index tend to have the lowest Gini coefficient scores.  Liberal social orders have low levels of inequality and high levels of freedom.

Moreover, McMahon ignores the fact that Lockean liberal social orders tend to have Gini coefficients comparable to those for foraging societies.   This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the evolutionary state of nature.

I take all of that as evidence that Fukuyama was right about the "end of history": the "inner logic" of equal liberty in evolved human nature has reached its consummation in liberal democracy.

REFERENCES

Basker, James G., ed.  2023.  Black Writers of the Founding Era.  New York: The Library of America.

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

Hunt, Lynn.  2007.  Inventing Human Rights: A History.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1972.  Notes on the State of Virginia.  Ed. William Peden.  New York: Norton.

Jefferson, Thomas.  1984.  Writings.  Ed. Merrill D. Peterson.  New York: The Library of America.

King, Martin Luther.  1986.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches.  Ed. James M. Washington.  New York: HarperCollins.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 volumes.  Ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher.  New York: The Library of America.

McMahon, Darrin M.  2023.  Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.