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 (Francesco d'Errico et al. [2012] "Early Evidence of San Material Culture Represented by Organic Artifacts from Border Cave, South Africa," PNAS 109: 13214-13219; Paola Villa et al. [2012] "Border Cave and the Beginning of the Later Stone Age in South Africa," PNAS 109: 13208-13213).  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 (Justin Pargeter et al. [2016], "Primordialism and the 'Pleistocene San' of South Africa," Antiquity 90: 1072-1079).  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 (Francesco d'Errico et al. [2016]. "The 'To Be or Not to Be' of Archaeological Enquiry," Antiquity 90: 1079-1082).

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 . . .