An Exchange With "Darwinian Reactionary": Natural Desires as Functional Causes Designed by Evolutionary History

"Darwinian Reactionary" (DR) has responded in the "comments" section to my two posts on his critical essay on my position.  Below I am posting those two comments, followed by my reply.

Darwinian Reactionary:

I am honored that you deemed my post worthy of reply. Plus I feel I got off lightly; I was fearing if you bothered to reply at all you would go scorched earth. I look forward to reading your next post. I however still disagree with what you say here. Where was Goering's moral sense when the stacks of bodies were piling up? He watched it happen without any qualms. Isn't it remarkable that his moral sense happened to kick in when he was in the hands of his enemies? If he had won, I doubt he would have felt any such regret. Also you say "no plausible argument that the Jews in the concentration camps were "threats to the well-being" of the Nazis." This is a bizarre thing to say as of course Jews were seen as threats to Germany as the Nazi propaganda had spent years proclaiming.

But this is beside the point. You take me to be denying the existence of a moral sense, which is not my point. My goal is to argue that the subjective feeling of disapprobation can not support the weight you want it to. The goal was to poke holes in your account that the good is the fullest satisfaction of natural desires. You yourself saw the problem with this and needed to qualify it with the approbation test. I contend that the moral sense (if there is such a thing) is more than the feeling of or desire for approbations. There are too many people who express disapprobation of your 20 desires, and too many people who express approbation towards evils for this to be the test of the good. Slavery received approbation for 10000 years. You say "DR would say that history shows that there is no natural sense of justice because 'human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others.'" Obviously, since I presented a theory of natural justice, I wouldn't think this, just that approbation isn't the "justice detector."

Friday, 17 July, 2026 

I feel like this is a case of with enemies like these who needs friends. That you like teleoformalism, in outline at least, is very gratifying. As far as your points go, I thought it was clear in the teleoformalism essay that I was directing my comments at a libertarianism that holds the only legitimate functions of state is to protect life, health liberty, and property. Elsewhere I did say "not that there aren’t forms of libertarianism that might meet these objections, only that in order to do so it must extend justice beyond the protection of private property." As far as the DR vs DC article, I know you as a perennial supporter of the libertarian party, and I searched your blog for "libertarianism" to see what you had written, and I had to imagine how Darwinian Natural Right grounds libertarianism, and qualified my claim in saying "this may or may not be Arnhart's actual position." That you are far less a capital-L Libertarian than it appeared is welcome news. I will edit the post and add a note that you have clarified your position and do not hold the views I surmised. As far as your question "Why would we act to fulfill those principles if we thought their fulfillment was not desirable?" We should hold those principles because they facilitate the good, understood as bioformalism. But they are not made good by being desired. I'm a stone cold realist on the good and it is not the result of human psychology any more than what is good for a tree requires desires. Maybe we just need to agree to disagree on this. So anyway, best wishes. (By the way, they were right when they said heavy is the head the wears the crown.)

Monday, 20 July, 2026

REPLY

I will respond to two of DR's claims--that many people have given moral approval to evils such as Nazism and slavery, and that the human good is not made good by being desired.

People give their moral approval to evil only when they mistakenly believe it is good.  DR says "Jews were seen as threats to Germany as the Nazi propaganda had spent years proclaiming."  Well, yes, but that's my point: they were seen as threats only because of the distortions of Nazi propaganda, and not because they really were threats.  This is what I call "fallible beliefs about circumstances."  Moral judgment is often uncertain and imprecise because our knowledge of the circumstances of action is uncertain and imprecise.  We often disagree about moral questions, even when we agree in our principles, because we have differing views of the relevant circumstances.  In fact, much of our moral reasoning is devoted to gathering and assessing the facts pertinent to our practical decisions.  And so, for example, Nazi apologists today have to be Holocaust deniers--they deny that there really was a Holocaust.  Moreover, the Nazi leaders like Goering never publicly affirmed the goodness of the Holocaust.

Similarly, those who have justified slavery have had to argue that slavery is mutually beneficial for the master and the slave, and so they have denied the fact that slavery is a form of social parasitism in which the master exploits the slave as his property.  Aristotle exposed the incoherence in this argument.  Aristotle said "the relation between master and slave, whenever they deserve by their nature to be called such, should be one of friendship and of benefit to both; but if their relation is not such but exists by law and is forced, it leads to contrary results" (Politics, 1255b13-16).  But he also said: "there can be no friendship towards a slave as a slave, but there may be friendship towards him as a human being" (NE, 1161b5).  To justify slavery as natural, a master would have to be a friend to his slave, but the very possibility of friendship presupposes the humanity of the slave and therefore the injustice of enslaving him as though he were not human.

DR says the human goods "are not made good by being desired."  I say that the goods of human life have been made good for us in that we have been designed by human evolutionary history to find them desirable.

In "Bioformalism and the Human Good," DR says:

. . . the majority of people who do seek to live out the good human life, and feel there is something wrong or wasteful in a life of decadence, can know that they are right to feel so.

And so the answer as to why one ought to live out the form of a human life as excellently as possible is that we have been designed to do so, and to find satisfaction in doing so.  Developing our excellences, finding a mate, having children, and reaping the fruits of successful labor are, as close as possible for living beings, universally regarded as the greatest sources of life-satisfaction.

What DR calls "seeking to live out the good human life," or "finding satisfaction in doing so," or "life-satisfaction," is what I and Aristotle call "desire" (orexis).  Aristotle coined the Greek noun orexis from the Greek verb orego, which means "to reach out."  Orexis is the soul's "reaching out" for something in the world.  For Aristotle, it is a general term for all kinds of longing or striving, including physical appetites, social emotions, and intellectual yearnings (De Anima 433a9-b31; Movement of Animals, 700b5-701b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1113a10, 1139b5).  I use the word "desire" in the same way as a general term for all kinds of psychic impulse or inclination.  With that sense in mind, I defend an ethics of desire: the good is the desirable, and reason judges best how to satisfy the desires.  Ethics is informed desire.  Aristotle agrees: "Let good be whatever is desirable for its own sake" (Rhetoric, 1362a22).  So does Aquinas: "Something is good insofar as it is desirable" (ST, I, q. 5, a. 6).

The evolutionary history of natural desires as functional causes can be explained in Millikan-like terms.  In "Primer on Biological Functions and Norms," DR says:

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which an item or feature is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the item's successful reproduction as opposed to items lacking this feature.  Those properties that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which led to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of the item, and the effect in question is the function of the item.

I can adopt this same language while putting "natural desire" in place of "an item":

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which a natural desire is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the natural desire's successful reproduction as opposed to desires lacking this feature.  Those natural desires that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which led to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of a natural desire, and the effect in question is the function of the natural desire.

And so, in this way, we can explain, for example, the proper function of the natural desire for parental care:

The function of parental care for animals is to protect and nurture offspring that could not survive or grow to maturity without such care.  Throughout the history of the human species, infants have survived and grown only with the help of adults who, being moved by the natural desire for parental care, were willing to feed, protect, and educate their children for many years.  If we accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which favors those functional adaptations that promoted survival and reproduction in evolutionary history, then we can explain this natural desire to care for children as a natural adaptation for human beings as designed by evolutionary history (Darwinian Natural Right, 103).

If the goods of human life (like parental care of children) have been made good for us in that we have been designed by human evolutionary history to find them desirable, then the good is the desirable.