The Holy Spirit Will Fail to Overcome Religious Pluralism at the Papal Conclave

Pope Francis died on April 21 at the age of 88.  The papal conclave to select the new pope must begin between 15 and 20 days after his death, which will be sometime between May 6 and May 11.  

On the first morning of the conclave, the cardinals will assemble in Saint Peter's Basilica to celebrate Mass.  In the afternoon, they will process to the Sistine Chapel while singing Veni Creator Spiritus ("Come, Creator Spirit"), which is an old Christian hymn that invokes the Holy Spirit as it descended upon the Apostles in Jerusalem at Pentecost, which is considered the beginning of the Christian Church (described in the second chapter of Acts).  Christians believe that this fulfilled Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit to all believers, and this inspiration by the Holy Spirit would reveal God's truth to all faithful believers.

If this is true, then we would expect the Holy Spirit to reveal to the cardinals and to all Christians who is to be the true apostolic successor to Saint Peter as the Head of the True Church.  It is easy to predict, however, that this will not happen.  The Holy Spirit's message will not be revealed to all the cardinals, who will disagree as to who should be the next pope.  And even if most Catholics accept the election of the new pope, the non-Catholic Christians will not.           

As I have argued previously, the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by revealing the one true church for all believers.  This shows that the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  There has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  This confirms Locke's argument that since "every church is orthodox to itself," government must practice religious toleration, so that every church is a voluntary association that cannot rightly employ force in compelling belief in its orthodoxy.

                                                        

 

This belief in the Holy Spirit is beautifully conveyed in the pictures above from St. Peter's Basilica.  These images are from the apse at the end of the central nave.  There is an online virtual reality tour of the apse.

In the center of the apse is the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter.  Peter is the "rock" of the Church through whom has passed the apostolic succession linking the popes to Christ.  Beneath the Chair are four huge statues (over 16 feet tall).  The two outer statues are figures of the Latin Church: St. Ambrose and St. Augustine (in the bottom picture above).  The two inner statues are of two Doctors of the Greek Church:  St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom.  Thus, it is suggested that these theologians from both the Latin and Greek churches have a consistent teaching that is descended from the Apostles through Peter.

Above the Chair of Peter is a brilliant dove that is a symbol of the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church through Peter, his papal successors, and the theologians to the truth of revelation.

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

In the history of the Catholic Church, there has been disagreement over the best procedure for choosing a new pope that allows for the intervention of the Holy Spirit.  In the first thousand years of the Church, the selection of the Bishop of Rome, who became the Pope, was by acclamation or the consensus of the clergy and laity in Rome.  (For this history, see Frederic J. Baumgartner, Behind Locked Doors: A History of Papal Elections [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003].)

As Pope Pius XII indicated in his bull Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis (December 8, 1945), this mode of acclamation was considered the best sign of quasi afflati Spiritu Sancton ("as if by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit") (par. 66).  Surely, a clear revelation by inspiration of the Holy Spirit would be manifest in the unanimity of the clergy and laity in Rome.

But then, in 1059, the Church decided that the College of Cardinals should be the electors of the Pope.  Some factions in the Church wanted a unanimous decision from the cardinals, but since this was usually impossible, the Church had to decide how to resolve disagreements.  One method was "compromise," where the College of Cardinals would agree to appoint a small group of cardinals with the right to make the decision for the entire College.

A third method was to allow the cardinals to decide by either a simple majority of votes or by a super majority of two-thirds.

The current procedure that will govern the coming papal conclave was set down by Pope John Paul II in his bull Universi Dominici Gregis (February 22, 1996), which was slightly revised by Pope Benedict XVI.  John Paul said that the cardinals should "accept the interior movements of the Holy Spirit."  But he rejected the method of election by acclamation, which he called quasi ex inspiratione ("as if by inspiration"), because "it is no longer an apt means of interpreting the thought of an electoral college so great in number and so diverse in origin."  Thus, he rejected as unrealistic the possibility that the "interior movements of the Holy Spirit" could inspire unanimity in the cardinals' decision.

He also rejected the method of "compromise"--appointing a select group of cardinals to decide--because he wanted all the electors to express their choice personally.

This left the third procedure--election by secret ballot with the decision made by majority vote.  John Paul favored a simple majority.  But Benedict changed this to a two-thirds supermajority.

John Paul says that the cardinals should pray for "the assistance of Almighty God and the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit," so that they will be "likeminded in their task."  But clearly he did not expect that the "likemindedness" induced by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit could secure unanimity.  

Isn't it obvious that the voting of the papal conclave in May will be decided not by the Holy Spirit but by Church politics?  On the one side are the liberals (or progressives) who want to continue the left-wing Catholicism of Francis.  On the other side are the conservatives (or traditionalists) who want to revive the traditionalism of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  In the middle are the centrists (or moderates), who will probably decide the election.  Donald Trump will surely be endorsing Cardinal Raymond Burke, a conservative who has supported Trump.

One might have assumed that the most traditionalist Catholics would want to claim that the conclave will be decided by the "interior movements of the Holy Spirit" in the minds of the cardinals.  But even the traditionalist Catholics are analyzing the upcoming conclave as if it were a purely political expression of Machiavellian church politics.

For example, the "Catholic Family News" is one of the staunchest traditionalist publications, and yet in the April 2025 there is an article by Serre Verweij on "Decisive Cardinals During the Upcoming Conclave," which explains the various factions at work here--conservatives, moderates, and liberals--and argues that if the conservatives can persuade most of the moderates to vote for an "orthodox candidate," then the next Pope will almost certainly be conservative.  Nothing is said about the Holy Spirit's influence in the conclave.

This confirms Locke's claim that not just "every church is orthodox to itself," but even "every man is orthodox to himself," so that even within the Catholic Church, the conservative Catholics think themselves more orthodox than the liberal Catholics.  Religious pluralism is manifest within every church.

The Evolutionary Symbolic Niche Construction of Liberalism Through Lockean "Consent"

Locke's teaching that government arises from the consent of the people is well known.  But it's not well known that Locke explains the emergence of all social institutions as created by popular consent.  Human beings have created not only government (ST, 95-99) but also languages (ECHU, III.2.8), families (ST, 74-83), morality (ECHU, 28.10), and money (ST, 36) by consenting to their existence.  This is what I have called the evolutionary symbolic niche construction of Lockean liberalism.  Of course, Locke does not use this terminology, but it's the best way to explain what he means in claiming that human beings create social institutions by consenting to them.

We should start by seeing that Locke was answering the fundamental question of modern intellectual life.

HOW MANY WORLDS ARE THERE?

If we accept the modern scientific explanation of the natural world as it arose in the seventeenth century, how can we explain the human mind and human society?

There are at least three ways to answer this question.  One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science.  Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society.  A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices. 

According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature.  According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.

As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best.  There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution.  According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics.  According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.  

So, for example, biology must be consistent with physics and chemistry, but biological phenomena have an emergent complexity that cannot be fully reduced to physics and chemistry.  The mind and society are also emergent phenomena that must be compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, but without being fully reducible to those physical and chemical laws.  Some of my posts elaborating these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010).  Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.

"How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits--as mindful, rational, speech-act performing, free-will having, social, political human beings--in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless, physical particles?  How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts?" (ix)

Like me, Searle assumes that we live in one world--that we live in one reality with physical, mental, and social aspects--and that our explanations of mental and social life must be compatible with the physical sciences but not simply reducible to those sciences.  And so, for example, in Making the Social World,  he offers an explanation of social reality as created and maintained by language, while explaining language as a natural product of the human biological evolution of the brain that enabled the human mind to create social institutions through what he calls "collective intentionality."

I mostly agree with Searle about all of this.  My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics.  If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.

We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality.  Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill.  Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services.  As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it.  But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange.  Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States.  It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such.  Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."  (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)

Similarly, Donald Trump is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures for the Electoral College and who satisfies the qualifications prescribed in the United States Constitution.  

I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States.  I own a house, a car, and other property.  I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country.  Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.

The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions.  The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.

To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism.  Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality.  Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.

Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions.  But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities.  (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)

So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males.  But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.

Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality.  "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty.  In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles.  As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles.  Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species.  Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.

This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract.  But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning.  Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.

Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists.  He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society.  "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature."  His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62).  Both of these claims are mistaken.

Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature."  There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).

This was the first human society that was created by informal consent--collective recognition or acceptance--through language, and language itself was a social creation in which certain sounds were given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" (ECHU, III.2.8).  But this society was not a political society, because there was not yet any consent to a formal government or legal system (First Treatise, pars. 86-93; Second Treatise, pars. 6-14, 25-35, 77-90).  Searle is mistaken, therefore, in assuming that Locke thought there were no human institutions in the state of nature.

Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society.  In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5).  Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).

Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes.  Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.

Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes.  The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence.  Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable.  But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly."  Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4). 

This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist.  Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!'  Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity.  We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!'  'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)

But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas.  And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?

Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7).  Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings.  The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73).  In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.

So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep.  This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11).  And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7).  Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.

Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights.  And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).

But while Searle sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God.  He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."  Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183).  And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions.  In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe."  But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).

Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56).  He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73).  And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.

But then when the Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," this suggests a natural creationism--that is, Nature's God creates through natural law, perhaps through a natural evolutionary process.  And indeed many Christians are theistic evolutionists who see God working through natural evolution.  Locke often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (Second Treatise, pars. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195).

Men might be created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights through the human evolution of a large and complex cerebral cortex that allows them to collectively recognize human equality of rights.

In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments.  Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games.  And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.

Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction.  "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory that refers to plants and animals constructing the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.  For example, beavers alter their environment by building dams, and beavers have adapted this constructed environment (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024) 

This idea was first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.  

We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations.  Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.

As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism.  This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction.  The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.

The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous.  This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues."  In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration:  Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).

Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument.  In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution.  But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.

Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle:  Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions?  Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173). 

Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power.  This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).

Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II.  Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason.  While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradited to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]).  Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy.  The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.

The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle.  

As Winston Churchill observed, "Great battles, whether won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times).

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS LOCKEAN SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION

If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).

The Declaration of Independence is what Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  The American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.  When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW AS SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION

In writing new constitutions for governments at both the state and national levels, the Americans had to debate what kind of constitutional language would best secure their natural rights.  Beginning with the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776, it was common for the state constitutions to have a list of rights that must be protected.  The U.S. Constitution of 1787 did not have a bill of rights, but many of the state ratifying conventions recommended amendments that would provide a bill of rights.  In the First Congress of 1789, James Madison and others proposed such amendments, which were ratified in 1791, and these first ten amendments became known as the Bill of Rights.  Here then is another example of symbolic niche construction through a declaration of status function:  the American people agreed to recognize the first ten amendments as a statement of human rights in America as secured by constitutional law.

One of those stipulated rights is due process of law as stated in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."  A similar provision became part of the Fourteenth Amendment: ". . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

But as I have indicated in some recent posts, Trump has recently claimed that as President he has the power to suspend the right to due process of law--particularly, in his deportation of immigrants who have been sent to a prison in El Salvador.  Trump's argument is that this cannot be an absolute right for all persons in the United States, because in time of emergency, the President must have the power to remove people from the United States without due process of life if he identifies them as dangerous threats to America.

Trump has appealed to the Alien Enemies Act as giving him this power to protect America from "invasions," and he claims that illegal immigrants constitute an "invasion" of the U.S.  The Courts, however, have said that as used in the Alien Enemies Act, "invasions" clearly means military invasions.  And since Venezuela has not invaded the U.S. militarily, Trump cannot deport Venezuelans without due process of law.

There are reports that Trump is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would be another way to suspend the right of due process of law.  He could cite the Constitution's provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ at the beginning of the Civil War, claiming that the Confederacy was clearly in a "rebellion" against the United States, and the public safety required that his commanders in the field needed to suspend the writ to arrest and detain people suspected of being spies or saboteurs for the Confederacy.

Trump would have to convince the courts and the American people that the many illegal immigrants in the U.S. count as an "invasion," which makes it necessary for the President to suspend the writ to protect the public safety of Americans threatened by the criminal violence of illegal immigrants.

Trump could also claim that he was exercising what John Locke identified as executive prerogative--the power of the executive "to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it," which could include suspending individual rights in time of emergency (ST, 160).

This is an illustration of how Americans often have to debate the meaning of their symbolic niche construction of individual rights.  If Americans have agreed to the establishment of due process of law as an individual right, must they agree that this is an absolute right never to be infringed?  Or are their circumstances--perhaps a national emergency of some sort--in which the public good would require suspending that right?  But if so, what counts as a true emergency in which the public good would require allowing the President to exercise dictatorial power in denying individuals the natural rights that we usually want to protect?

The courts and the American people will have to decide.

Ten Principles of Darwinian Lockean Liberalism, Part Two

NATURAL PUNISHMENT

3.  The natural rights to life, liberty, and property are enforced in the state of nature by every individual having the natural right to punish offenders of the natural law--either through forcible punishment or through reputational punishment.

Locke thought that in the state of nature, everyone had the "executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who violated the natural law that no one was to harm another.   Locke claimed that in the state of nature, there is a law of nature "that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions" (ST, sec. 6).  But then he immediately qualified this no-harm principle by saying that one may rightly harm another in punishing someone for an offense against the law of nature.  This must be so because the law of nature could not be a true law if it were not enforced by punishment of those who violate it.  Enforcing the no-harm principle requires harming those who would harm us.

In the state of nature, Locke explained:

"The Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Mans hands, whereby everyone has a right to punish the transgressors of that Law to such a Degree, as may hinder its Violation.  For the Law of Nature would, as all other Laws that concern Men in this World, be in vain, if there were no body that in the State of Nature, had a Power to Execute that Law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders, and if any one in the State of Nature may punish another, for any evil he has done, every one may do so.  For in that State of perfect Equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one, over another, what any may do in Prosecution of that Law, every one must needs have a Right to do" (sec. 7).

Notice that Locke did not rely on divine punishment to enforce the law of nature.  The law of nature, like all the other laws that concern "Men in this World" would be in "vain" if individual human beings did not punish the offenders of that law.  This punishment has two distinct purposes: restraint and reparation (secs. 8, 10-11).  Punishing for restraint is to prevent or deter misconduct, and everyone has the right to punish for this purpose.  Punishing for reparation belongs only to the injured party, who seeks some recompense for the damages he has suffered.

Locke indicated that this human punishment of offenders in the state of nature works at three levels.  Through first-party punishment, individuals punish themselves through conscience and guilt (secs. 8, 21, 122, 209).  Through second-party punishment, individuals punish their tormentor through retaliation and revenge (secs. 8, 10-11, 18-19).  Through third-party punishment, individuals can join with those who have been injured unjustly for a collective punishment of the offender (sec. 10).

Locke also distinguished two general kinds of punishment.  In the Second Treatise, Locke stressed forcible punishment as punishing with physical force those who have inflicted physical harm on their victims, which included capital punishment of thieves and murderers (ST, 11, 17).  In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke identified reputational punishment as a second form of natural punishment: by the "law of reputation," established by a "tacit consent" in "the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world," social opinion calls whatever is socially praised virtuous and whatever is socially blamed vicious; and those who disobey this law are punished with a bad reputation (II.28.10).  In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke advised parents that they should use this law of reputation--social praise and blame--as the most powerful means for shaping the moral character of their children: this was "the great secret of education" for cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues in children and particularly for instilling "civility"--a "respect and good will to all people" (secs. 56-65).

Since the moral standards of this law of reputation vary across cultures, Locke was criticized for being a moral relativist who denied the eternal natural law.  But he responded to this criticism by insisting that despite the cultural relativity, there was some universal regularity in the reputational standards of morality--so that "as to the main, they for the most part kept the same everywhere" (ECHU, II.28.110).

Darwin agreed with Locke.  In his Descent of Man, Darwin explained the evolution of the natural moral sense as rooted in the evolved social instincts of human nature that make human beings intensely attentive to the approbation or disapprobation of people in their social groups, so that they want to have the good reputation for displaying praiseworthy virtues and avoiding blameworthy vices (2004, 120-151).  

Evolutionary anthropologists studying the ethnographic record have confirmed this by finding that there are universal social norms of moral good and evil enforced in societies around the world and throughout history by reputational punishment--norms of social cooperation that include helping kin, loyalty to one's group, bravery, generosity, fairness in social exchange, and respecting property rights (Curry, Mullins, and Whitehouse 2019; Westermarck 1906).

These ethnographies of foraging bands show that they form moral communities through agreement on moral rules and then enforce those rules through the forcible and reputational punishment of deviants (Boehm 2012).  Through gossip, ridicule, and shunning, those who violate the rules are punished with bad reputations, and people will refuse to cooperate with them.  The most pervasive means of reputational punishment, deeply rooted in our evolutionary history beginning with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, is gossip (Boehm 2012; Feinberg et al. 2012; Feiberg et al. 2014; Hoebel 1955; Raihani and Bshary 2019; Wiessner 2005; Wu et al. 2016a, 2016b).  Through gossip, we ridicule, shame, or denigrate people for their bad behavior and thus punish them by giving them a bad reputation that imposes social costs on them.  Empirical studies have shown that most human speaking time--perhaps 65% across cultures--is devoted to gossip (Dunbar 2004).

If reputational punishment is not enough to enforce obedience to the rules, then the community can use coercive force, such as expelling deviants from the group, or, in the worst cases, killing them.  Nevertheless, foragers resort to capital punishment only rarely, and usually it's to punish a murderer.

Forcible punishment creates two possible problems.  The group can be torn apart by conflict.  Or an angry relative of a person killed can take vengeance on the executioner.  To avoid these problems, the group must reach a consensus on the punishment and even persuade the close relatives of the victim to cooperate.  In rare cases, the entire community might participate in the execution.  Or, more commonly, the group will delegate a close relative of the victim to do the killing.

Executing a bully is often dangerous for the executioner, however, because bullies are often formidable and aggressive enough to fight back and harm the executioner.  The solution to this problem, is killing at a distance.  There is plenty of evidence that human beings evolved for throwing and shooting projectiles--rocks, spears, arrows, and bullets--that can kill even the strongest opponent from a safe distance (Bingham 1999, 2000; Bingham and Souza 2009).

Some ancient cave drawings provide evidence for this.  For example, rock drawings from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BC, show this.  In one drawing, we see that on the right there are ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.  Given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group (Boehm 2017).   One study of the ancient rock drawings in the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin identified forty-nine scenes of violent content (such as battles, ambushes, and fights), which included eight scenes of "execution squads" (Lopez-Montalvo 2015).

CONSENT TO GOVERNMENT

4.  To overcome the insecurity of natural rights in the state of nature, where every individual is judge in his own case, and his judgment is often distorted by his personal bias, human beings have consented to formal governments to secure their natural rights through formal laws and institutions for making, enforcing, and adjudicating impartial laws.

Locke recognized that there are at least three problems with relying on the individual right to punish to enforce the law of nature in the state of nature (secs. 123-126).

First, there's the problem of knowledge:  many individuals do not have a clear and unbiased knowledge of the law of nature.  In the Letter Concerning Toleration (43), Locke says that the American Indians are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature."  But in the Second Treatise (sec. 123), he says that in the state of nature "the greater part" of men are "no strict Observers of Equity and Justice."  In fact, some men are so "degenerate" that they have no knowledge of the law of nature, and they become like wild animals in their violent attacks on others (ST, secs. 10-11, 128).

Second, there's the problem of partiality: individuals being partial to themselves often cannot render impartial judgment in their own cases, and they are often negligent or unconcerned in judging the cases of others.

Third, there's the problem of cost:  punishment can be too costly to execute, because the offender will fight back and inflict injury on those who try to punish him.

To solve these three problems, people will give up their powers in the state of nature for legislating, judging, and executing the law of nature (secs. 128-131).  They will consent to enter a political society with governmental institutions for legislating, judging, and executing positive laws for the whole community that conform to the law of nature.  This can solve the problem of knowledge, because the legislative power will publicly promulgate the laws.  This can solve the problem of partiality, because the judicial power will decide legal cases through impartial and fair judges.  This can solve the problem of cost, because the executive power will employ the collective force of the community to punish lawbreakers in ways that minimize the costs of punishment for individuals.  All of this should serve the common good of the whole community--in securing the natural rights of all individuals to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

So while Locke disagreed with Hobbes' claim that the state of nature was always a state of war, Locke agreed that there was such a propensity for the state of nature to become a state of war that people would consent to government to secure a more peaceful life.  Some anthropologists have objected that hunter-gatherer societies have been generally peaceful, even calling them the "harmless people" who have never known war (Fry and Soderberg 2013).  

But Darwinian anthropologists have argued that if hunter-gatherers appear to be peaceful, this is because usually by the time anthropologists have contact with them, the foragers have come under state control, which has had a pacifying effect, just as Hobbes and Locke said: because the state of nature easily becomes a state of war, people will benefit from having governments to enforce laws collectively that dampen their tendency to violent conflict.  Once anthropologists probe into the distant history of foragers, they discover a history of extreme violence that was reduced once they came under governmental authority (Boehm 2012; Lee 1979, 370-400; Wrangham and Glowacki 2012).  

For example, the most violent society ever studied by anthropologists are the Waorani, living in the remote Ecuadorian rainforest, among whom for some time about 60% of all deaths were homicides.  The Waorani themselves wanted to end the killing, and they were happy when they came under a governmental authority that reduced the killing (Robarchek and Robarchek 2008).

Of course, even if people have consented to government to secure their peaceful enjoyment of their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, that government can itself become the greatest threat to their rights.  The inevitable conflicts of interest that arise in every community will incline those with political power to use that power to favor their own interests over the interests of others, and thus government will often fail to promote the public good in securing the natural rights of all.  If government becomes utterly tyrannical, then the rights of those being exploited are less secure under government than they would have been in the state of nature, because in a tyrannical government, the rulers can use the collective force of government to exploit the ruled (secs. 91-93).

Although Locke spoke of individuals "wholly giving up" their right to punish offenders against the law of nature in consenting to government, he made it clear that individuals could reclaim this right whenever they were thrown back into the state of nature (ST, 99, 127-130).  So, for example, we have the natural right to kill a thief who threatens our life and property if there is no officer of government available to protect us, because when the thief exercises force without right against us, and there is no common judge with authority to protect us, we are in a state of war with that thief (18-19).

Similarly, if a tyrannical government exercises force without right in threatening our life, liberty, and property, we can rightly defend ourselves against that government that has put us into a state of war (199-204).

Moreover, even if in consenting to government, we have partially given up our natural power of forcible punishment of those who threaten us, we still retain our natural power of reputational punishment of people through our power of approving or disapproving their conduct, and thus enforcing by popular opinion our social standards of virtue and vice (ECHU, II.28.10-11).

What Locke calls the law of reputation is what evolutionary theorists of cooperation--beginning with Richard Alexander (1987)--have called "indirect reciprocity."  In direct reciprocity, we reciprocate the cooperation or defection of others: if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours (Trivers 1971).  In indirect reciprocity, we reciprocate someone's reputation for cooperation or defection:  if you have the reputation for scratching other people's backs, I will scratch yours.  In large societies, where we need to interact with many people who are not our kin, and with whom we have not had any previous interactions, we rely on their reputations to decide whether we can trust them; and our social happiness depends on our maintaining our own good reputations for being virtuous people.

Insofar as Locke saw this moral law of reputation as compatible with individual liberty, he would have agreed with Friedrich Hayek's criticism of John Stuart Mill's "no-harm principle" in On Liberty.  Mill wrote:

"The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion.  That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any f their number is self-protection.  That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. . . . The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others.  In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.  Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign" (1956, 13).

Following this principle, Mill condemned "social tyranny" as "tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling" and the "despotism of custom." 

Hayek disagreed: "the fact that conduct within the private sphere is not a proper object for coercive action by the state does not necessarily mean that in a free society such conduct should also be exempt from the pressure of opinion or disapproval. . . . John Stuart Mill directed his heaviest attack against such 'moral coercion.' . . . it probably makes for greater clarity not to represent as coercion the pressure that public approval or disapproval exerts to secure obedience to moral rules and conventions" (1960, 146).  In a free society, Hayek believed, society but not the state enforces moral virtue.  The enforcement of moral rules through the social pressure of public approval or disapproval should not be seen as coercion (1960, 62-63, 402, 451).

When Patrick Deneen (in Why Liberalism Failed) scorns Locke's liberalism for its "atomistic individualism" and its failure to cultivate the moral virtues of social life, he says nothing about this--about how Locke insisted on the importance of promoting social virtue through social praise and blame.

Locke thought he could understand the history of government by studying the history of the American Indians.  From his reading of Jose de Acosta and Gabriel Sagard, Locke learned that there were at least three stages in the evolutionary history of government in indigenous America.  

First, among the pure hunter-gatherer Indians, there were no formal governmental institutions, but there were informal leaders selected by the people of each band to mediate disputes and to lead them in war.  Second, among the horticultural tribes, there was a government by councils, in which leaders would have to win the consent of the council members for any decision.  In these first two stages, people enjoyed the freedom that came from government by popular consent that looked like a kind of democracy.

Acosta's third stage was that of autocratic monarchy or empire--like that of the Incan Empire or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico.  Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good."  But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as slaves and treated themselves as gods (Acosta, 346, 359, 402).

Today, political anthropologists and paleo archaeologists who study the evolutionary history of government have seen a roughly fourfold evolution--from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states--that resembles Acosta's three levels.  For example, in the political history of Indigenous North America, there seems to have been a movement from democratic bands and tribes to autocratic chiefdoms and then back to democratic bands and tribes (DuVal 2024; Hamalainen 2022).

For thousands of years, the first American Indian settlers in North America lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherer-fishers in bands with informal leaders whose power depended on persuasion rather than coercion.

Then, between 1500 BC and 500 AD, there is evidence for the systematic cultivation of corn, beans, and squash, which allowed some tribal peoples to settle into horticultural villages that were probably governed by tribal councils and leaders with popular consent.

Around 900 AD, a climate shift (the Medieval Warm Period) brought rising global temperatures, which lengthened growing seasons and supported more intensive and systematic farming.  This eventually allowed for the emergence of cities with centralized power structures.  The best known of these cities are Hohokam (Arizona), Cahokia (Illinois), and Moundville (Alabama).  At the peak of their power, these cities were ruled by elite chiefs and priests exercising religious, political, and economic dominance over the commoners.

But then there was another climate shift around 1300 towards colder, drier, and more unstable weather (the Little Ice Age).  Harvests began to fail, and famines became more common.  By 1400, the cities of Cahokia, Moundville, and Hohokam were abandoned.  People no longer wanted to live in centralized hierarchical cities ruled by elites who exploited the people under them.  Trade, religion, and politics became more democratized in that people chose to live in small foraging bands and horticultural tribal communities where decisions were made by popular consensus.

This popular rebellion against exploitative elite rule illustrates the fifth principle of Locke's political philosophy.

To be continued . . .

Ten Principles of Darwinian Lockean Liberalism

Classical liberals need Charles Darwin.

They need him because the theory of human evolution that Darwin set forth in The Descent of Man that has been confirmed and extended by later evolutionary scientists supports classical liberalism--particularly, as formulated in the writings of John Locke.

It might seem mistaken to speak of Locke's "liberalism" since that English noun appeared for the first time in the 1830s, and the English adjective "liberal" in its moral and political sense appeared for the first time in the writings of Adam Smith and some other Scottish philosophers (Klein 2024).  But when Smith wrote about "allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice," any reader of Locke can recognize Smith's remark as a good statement of Locke's thinking, even though Locke never used the word "liberal" in this way (Smith 1982: 664).  That's why many of the scholarly commentators on Locke have spoken of "John Locke's liberalism" based on the "liberal premise" that "men are naturally free and equal" in their right to "govern their actions as they see fit," so that "no man has an intrinsic or natural right to govern another" without that other man's consent (Grant 1987: 1, 66; Mack 2013).

Similarly, we might doubt Darwin's liberalism since he was not as explicit as Herbert Spencer in affirming the evolutionary argument for liberalism (Mingardi 2013).  But still many people recognized Darwin's scientific thinking as supporting liberalism.  In his review of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1860, Thomas Huxley declared that "every philosophical thinker" hails it as a powerful weapon "in the armory of liberalism" (Huxley 1860).  In 1860, liberalism meant classical liberalism--the moral and political tradition of individual liberty understood as the natural right of individuals to be free from coercion so long as they respected the equal liberty of others.  According to the classical liberals, the primary aim of government was to secure individual rights from force and fraud, which included enforcing laws of contract and private property.  They thought the moral and intellectual character of human beings was properly formed not by governmental coercion, but in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society.  These voluntary associations included churches.  And so the liberals defended religious liberty and toleration.

Darwin himself was a fervent supporter of the British Liberal Party and its liberal policies.  He was honored when William Gladstone (the "Grand Old Man" of the Liberal Party) visited him at his home in Down in 1877.  Like other liberals, Darwin admired and practiced the virtues of self-help, as promoted in Samuel Smiles' popular book Self-Help, with its stories of self-made men.  Darwin was active in the charitable activities of his parish.  He was the treasurer of the local Friendly Society.  In Great Britain, friendly societies were self-governing associations of manual laborers who shared their resources and pledged to help one another in time of hardship.  In this way, individuals could secure their social welfare and form good character through voluntary mutual aid without the need for governmental coercion.

Darwin was also active in the international campaign against slavery, one of the leading liberal causes of his day.  In their book Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore have shown that Darwin's hatred of slavery was one motivation for his writing The Descent of Man, in which he affirmed the universality of humanity as belonging to one species, against the pro-slavery racial science of those who argued that some human beings belonged to a separate species of natural slaves.

Also in The Descent of Man, Darwin showed that the moral order of human life arose through a natural moral sense as shaped by biological and cultural evolution.  He thus provided a scientific basis for the moral liberalism of those Scottish philosophers who argued that the moral and intellectual virtues could arise in a free society through the spontaneous orders of human nature and human culture.

To explain what I mean by Darwinian Lockean Liberalism, I will summarize ten fundamental principles of Locke's liberal political philosophy, and I will indicate how Darwinian evolutionary science confirms each of those principles.

Here are those ten principles:

1.  Every individual possesses the natural rights to life, liberty, and property that arose in the state of nature by popular consent to those rights.

2.  Natural rights express each individual's self-ownership--each person's natural right over himself and his labor--so that all fundamental rights are forms of property.

3.  The natural rights to life, liberty, and property are enforced in the state of nature by every individual having the natural power to punish offenders of the natural law--either by forcible punishment or by reputational punishment.

4.  To overcome the insecurity of natural rights in the state of nature, where every individual is judge in his own case, and his judgment is often distorted by his personal bias, human beings have consented to formal governments to secure their natural rights through formal laws and institutions for making, enforcing, and adjudication impartial laws.

5.  Individuals have the natural right to overthrow--to resist and replace--political rulers who infringe upon or fail to secure the individual's natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

6.  In a free society, the cultivation of moral virtue arises through the law of reputation, which is secured through social praise and blame in which people by a tacit consent determine what is virtue and vice, rewarding the praiseworthy with a good reputation and punishing the blameworthy with a bad reputation.

7.  Moral virtue can be reinforced by belief in God who enforces His moral law by eternal rewards and punishments.

8.  Political rulers are not rightly concerned with the saving of men's souls, and so respect for the natural liberty of individuals to form voluntary associations that include churches requires toleration of religious pluralism.

9.  Free societies benefit from an open borders immigration and naturalization policy because this supports a growing population of industrious and inventive people who have migrated from less free societies, which is an evolutionary process of cultural group selection that favors free societies.

10.  The natural rights to life, liberty, and property are necessary for the natural pursuit of happiness, which is the satisfaction of the twenty natural desires; and therefore, a Lockean liberal symbolic niche construction is the best regime because it secures the widest liberty for individuals to pursue their happiness.

NATURAL RIGHTS IN THE STATE OF NATURE

1.  Every individual possesses the natural rights to life, liberty, and property that arose in the state of nature by popular consent to those rights. 

To understand the state of nature, Locke studied the European travel literature of the 16th and 17th centuries as part of his Baconian project for collecting the factual data about human life around the entire world, including the New World revealed to Europeans after 1492, for developing a natural history of humanity that began in the original state of nature in which the first human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, where all adult individuals were equally free from the exploitative dominance of others (Batz 1974; Talbot 2010).  

"In the beginning, all the world was America," Locke declared, and so the American Indians provide a "Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, 49, 108).  Consequently, he was fascinated by the American Indians as living examples of what the earliest human ancestors might have looked like.

Notice that while Locke did not develop anything like the Darwinian theory of human evolution, he did suggest an evolutionary human nature insofar as he indicated that human nature was first formed in the state of nature--the original condition of our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors.  That is what evolutionary psychologists today call "the environment of evolutionary adaptation" in the Late Pleistocene epoch where the uniquely human species first emerged.

From what he had seen of primitive people living in bands or tribes (like those living in Tierra del Fuego), Darwin inferred that the first human ancestors lived without any formal government, with a "perfect equality among the individuals," although they did have leaders or chiefs who were heads of families and "powerful young men" (Darwin 1962: 205, 216, 230-31; 2004: 158, 689).

Darwinian evolutionary anthropologists have confirmed Locke's account of the state of nature by showing that in hunter-gatherer bands, all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command or bully others.  They live in what some evolutionary anthropologists have called an "egalitarian hierarchy":  while a few individuals act as leaders of the band, they cannot become bullies without provoking resistance to their dominance from people who refuse to obey their orders (Kelly 2013; Boehm 1999, 2012).  

For example, the Ju/'hoansi San (or Bushmen) people of Southern Africa are regarded by many evolutionary anthropologists as the descendants of the earliest human ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers.  Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has studied them, reports that "all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others.  There is a "strong egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do."  "All people as autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights," and so everyone has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who violate them (Wiessner 2005).

There is some archaeological evidence that the cultural adaptation of the San hunter-gatherers resembles the cultural adaptations of human hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Late Pleistocene.  For example, people living in South Africa's Border Cave around 44,000 years ago crafted jewelry and tools that are remarkably similar to the tools and ornaments crafted by San hunter-gatherers in southern Africa today (d'Errico et al. 2012; Villa et al. 2012).  It would be mistaken to infer from this that these Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were culturally or biologically identical to the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari alive today (Pargeter et al. 2016).  But this evidence does suggest that there is some degree of cultural similarity between Pleistocene hunter-gatherers and the more recent hunter-gatherer adaptations of the San (d'Errico et al. 2016).

Since the Late Pleistocene epoch was the environment of evolutionary adaptation in which the human species was shaped, we can infer from this that evolution has built the human brain to favor the equal liberty that individuals enjoyed in the evolutionary state of nature.

SELF-OWNERSHIP

2.  Natural rights express each individual's natural self-ownership--each person's natural right over himself and his labor--so that all fundamental rights are forms of property.

Locke sees that every individual claims ownership of himself and his actions: "every man has a property in his own person.  This no body has any right to but himself.  The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly his" (ST, 27).  By mixing his labor in the natural materials of the world, a person's property in himself is extended to his property in external things.

Evolutionary science can show that the evolved psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership.  The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership (Arnhart 2023; Craig 2015; de Vignemont 2020).

Lockean liberals have seen slavery—the institution by which one person can own another person—as the most radical denial of the natural right of everyone to own oneself.  This was made clear by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, who ran away from his enslavement and became a leading abolitionist orator.  Douglass said that even in childhood, he held onto one idea for freedom and against slavery: “Every man is the original, rightful, and absolute owner of his own body; or in other words, every man is himself, is his self, if you please, and belongs to himself, and can only part from his self-ownership, by the commission of a crime” (1991, 42). 

Now we can see how this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body (Ceunen, Vlaeyen, & Van Diest 2016; Tsakiris & De Preester 2019).

The research on interoception shows that our self-awareness arises from the feelings that we have from our bodies as a neural integration in insular cortex of the signals of the condition of the body.  The interoceptive neural network, having its core in the anterior insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, provides the basis for the subjective awareness of our bodily emotions and social feelings, including pleasure, anxiety, trust, and anger (Craig 2015).

The brain’s interoceptive feeling of self-ownership includes feeling whether other people are likely to be helpful or harmful to oneself, as in the brain’s ability to discriminate trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces, or the propensity to punish people who make unfair offers in an Ultimatum Game.  Our brains evolved to protect ourselves from threats and to seek out cooperative relationships in ways that secure our survival and well-being.

This explains the evolved basis in the brain for Douglass’s Lockean liberal principle of self-ownership in human nature.  In running away from his slave master, and then in arguing for the abolition of slavery, Douglass expressed the evolved natural propensity of the human brain for self-ownership and for moral resentment against those who would threaten the natural human right to self-ownership.  Moreover, Douglass extended this liberal principle of natural human equality in self-ownership to support other natural human rights—including women’s rights, the rights of immigrants, and religious liberty (Buccola 2012).

Brain disorders can disrupt this sense of bodily self-ownership.  One example of this is somatoparaphrenia (derived from three Greek words denoting “body outside the mind”).  People who have had strokes in the right hemisphere of the brain sometimes suffer through a short period in which they deny that their left leg or arm belongs to them.  They can see that their left arm or left leg is attached to their body, but it doesn’t feel like it’s part of their body (Antoniello & Gottesman 2017; Feinberg et al. 2010; Gandola et al. 2012; Vallar & Ronchi 2009). 

Comparing the studies of somatoparaphrenia, similar bodily disorders, and illusions such as the rubber hand illusion, in which the brain is tricked into feeling that a rubber hand is one’s own hand, provides evidence for what Frédérique de Vignemont (2020) calls the Bodyguard Hypothesis: the brain has evolved to protect the body through neural circuits that have a protective body map that creates a sense of bodily ownership and affective motivation to behave in ways that protect the body identified in the body map.  Syndromes of disowning one’s body occur when the body map does not represent a limb that feels alien.  Illusions of body ownership occur when the body map mistakenly represents something as a body part. 

Evolution by natural selection favors those psychological propensities rooted in the brain that enhance our chances for self-preservation, which includes a sense of personal identity expressed in our owning and protecting our bodies, and then extending that sense of self-ownership into the ownership of external property that belongs to us.  In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership (Arnhart 1995, 1998, 2016).

To be continued . . .