The Evolutionary Psychology of Lex Rex

                                    A Contemporary German Print of the Execution of Charles I

The evolutionary psychology of Lex Rex--that the law rules over the king--depends on two points.  First, we need to see how as opposed to regicide by assassination (murder), regicide by legal execution (as in the trial of Charles I) affirms the impersonal rules of law as superior to absolute monarchy's rule by personal threats.  This understanding of law as impersonal or impartial moral rules is unique to human beings because it arises from the natural evolution of the human capacity for the language of rational symbolization.

The second point is that the denial of the sacred authority of the king to rule with impunity was part of the cultural evolution of the rise of theocratic sacred monarchy (beginning in ancient Mesopotamia) and its decline (beginning in 17th century England) culminating in the Lockean liberalism of King Charles III's Christian monarchy.

Two Kinds of Regicide

In the first systematic and quantitative study of regicide in Europe, Manuel Eisner (2011) has collected data on the frequency of violent death and regicide among 1,513 monarchs in Europe between AD 600 and 1800.  He has distinguished four categories of violent death: accident, battle death, murder, and legal execution.  He found that in the seventh century, the frequency of regicide was 2,500 murders per 100,000 years in office.  There was a long decline in regicide.  So that by the eighteenth century, the frequency of regicide was about 200 per 100,000 years in office.  By comparison, the homicide rate in Western Europe today is around 0.6-1.5 per 100,000 person-years.  Clearly, then, European kingship before the Industrial Revolution was one of the most dangerous occupations in the world, comparable to that of soldiers in combat.

Eisner found that for most of this history, regicide by assassination was carried out within the noble elite in the competition for political rule.  But, then, by the seventeenth century, regicide became a matter of legal execution--the execution of Charles I in England in 1649 and the execution of Louis XVI in France in 1793.  In the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James II was deposed and defeated in war without being executed.

The decline in regicide seems to be part of the general historical decline in homicide (Eisner 2003; Pinker 2011).  This general pattern of declining violence seems to be associated with a Hobbesian pacification process, in which the state claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and with a Lockean liberal culture of bourgeois virtues that arise in modern commercial societies, in which people learn to control their violent impulses for the sake of peaceful economic and social exchange.

Jane Goodall and other primatologists have presented evidence that chimpanzees are similar to human beings in the practice of political assassinations.  There is plenty of evidence of chimpanzees from one community killing individuals from another community, which looks like warfare.  Goodall's observations of chimpanzee intercommunity violence have now been confirmed by similar observations from many chimpanzee communities across Africa.  

What is most surprising about this is that lethal violence within chimpanzee communities is extremely rare (Newton-Fisher and Emery Thompson 2012).  Chimpanzees often become aggressive in conflicts with one another, but they usually resolve their conflicts without physical contact; and even if there is some physical violence, it is almost never lethal, even though chimpanzee canines are powerful weapons for wounding and killing victims.  Most aggression between adult males consists of bluffing attacks without physical contact--threatening gestures and vocalizations and charging displays.  (This is also true for human beings, who often engage in bluffing displays of aggression, but for whom homicide is rare, despite the publicity given to homicidal violence.)

After decades of observations of chimpanzee communities across Africa, there have been only four documented cases of lethal violence between adult males of the same community, in which a coalitional gang of adult males killed a lone victim.  Kaburu et al. (2013) point out that the individuals killed in these cases were either low-ranking males or they were previously deposed alpha males.

In the revised edition of his Chimpanzee Politics, Frans de Waal reported that in the summer of 1980, Luit--the alpha male of the chimpanzee community in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands--was attacked brutally and killed by Nikkie and Yeroen, who had previously been alpha males (de Waal 1998, 211-214).  De Waal describes the bloody scene: "Apart from biting off fingers and toes and causing deep gashes everywhere, the two aggressors removed Luit's testicles, which were found on the cage floor."  This looks like a political assassination.  But it's hard to know whether this case of lethal violence among captive chimpanzees is an abnormal consequence of their captive conditions.  The killing of Luit occurred at night, when the chimps were confined in their night cages.

Kaburu et al. claim to report the first case of lethal violence among wild chimpanzees in which the victim was the incumbent alpha male.  PM was the alpha male of the M-group of chimpanzees in the Malale Mountains National Park in Tanzania when he was killed on October 2, 2011.  He had been the alpha male since 2007.  After a bloody fight between PM and PR, the beta male, PR left.  A weakened PM  was then attacked brutally by a coalition of four other adult males, including two former alpha males (AL and DE).  AL was the alpha male overthrown by PM in 2007.  After the killing, there was a period of social instability.  AL became the alpha male for a short time.  But by November, PR had become the alpha male and is now the alpha male of the M-group.

Kaburu et al. explain this as an opportunistic attempt by AL (the third ranking of 10 adult males) to seize the alpha position once he saw that PM was weakened by the fight with PR, although AL was unable to hold his alpha position for long against the challenge of PR.

When I asked Michael Wilson (a primatologist at the University of Minnesota) about whether there were any other cases of alpha males being killed, he mentioned two cases at Gombe.  Vincent was the alpha male of the Mitumba community at Gombe.  He fell from a tree and severely injured himself.  He lived for another three months before two adult males attacked and killed him.  Michael says he has not yet written a report of this case.

The second case was that of Goblin, another alpha male at Gombe.  He was severely attacked and would have died if a vet had not treated his wounds.  Kaburu et al. mention this case, but they claim that Goblin had been deposed from his alpha position before the attack.

Even if chimpanzees show a few cases of political assassination of an alpha male, which is comparable to the political assassination of a king among human beings, it is clear that chimps are incapable of the legal execution of a leader, because legal execution implies laws as impartial moral rules, which requires the uniquely human capacity for rational symbolization.

Previously, I have written about Peter DeScioli's argument that laws are moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action, which arose first in the human environment of evolutionary adaptation--or in what Locke called the "state of nature."  Laws as impartial rules require moral judgment, which is unique to human beings, because moral judgement depends on the human rational or symbolizing mind that can grasp and share the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just.  

Dominant chimps rule by personal threats: if you challenge my alpha male dominance, I will punish you.  Tyrannical humans sometimes rule by personal threats.  But humans can also formulate impartial laws for judging who has the right to rule:  in America, whoever is elected president by the proper constitutional procedures has the right to rule as president as long as he is constrained by the rule of law.

Charles I claimed to rule by the law of absolute monarchy--that "the king can do no wrong" and is thus above the law--but this was really a personal threat disguised as impartial law.  Because by impartial law, kings must follow the laws like anyone else.  And so, if the king commits murder by initiating a Civil War in which he kills his own people, then he is guilty of murder and should be punished for it as any other murderer would be.  The legal trial and legal execution of Charles I affirmed that principle--that Law is king over the king.

The Cultural Evolution of Sacred Monarchy from Hammurabi to King Charles III

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia to illustrate the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy.  He observed that on the right we see 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.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that 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.   

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  Previously, I have written about this as showing the evolution of equal liberty through capital punishment.

But then about seven thousand years ago, the first agricultural settlements appeared in the ancient Near East.  And about five thousand years ago, the first urban states appeared.  The city of Uruk emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around 3,200 BC.  These states were the first sacred monarchies, in which the king claimed the absolute power to rule by divine right.  This claim to rule by divine authority is evident in the black stone stela that present the Laws of Hammurabi that were compiled toward the end of the reign of Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC), who was the sixth ruler of the First Dynasty of Babylon.

The Louvre stela is almost seven and a half feet tall.  The top one-third of the stela shows the sun-god Shamash, the god of justice, seated on his throne, with King Hammurabi standing before him.  It is not clear whether the god is dictating the laws to Hammurabi, or Hammurabi is presenting the laws to the god, or Hammurabi is accepting the rod and the ring that are the emblems of authority.  In any case, this conveys the clear message to the viewers--even the many illiterate people who cannot read the laws--that Hammurabi's laws are divinely authorized by the god of justice.

The evidence collected by anthropological archaeologists--that has been surveyed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus in The Creation of Inequality--has shown that in the first monarchic states, the power of rulers over their subjects could not be legitimated by reason alone, and rulers had discovered that they needed to pretend that they ruled by divine right--that political rule was sanctified by a religious cosmology.  Originally, the first human beings had no rulers other than the gods, but eventually they were persuaded that some human beings could rule with divine authority.

Every society has some cosmological explanation for how human beings and their world came into existence, and this cosmological creation story provides moral sanction for their social order.  Typically, the world begins as a formless chaos, and then some supernatural spirits create order out of this chaos, including the creation of human beings.  This creation story constitutes the moral charter for a society because it provides a sacred origin for the moral rules of a society. And thus religious belief is an evolutionary adaptation for binding people together into social groups.

Originally, among nomadic hunter-gatherers, the cosmological creation story sanctioned a celestial dominance hierarchy: the invisible supernatural beings were the alphas, the invisible ancestors were the betas, and the living human beings were the gammas.  Therefore, originally, all living human beings were equal in their subordination to the invisible gods and ancestors.  Inequality of social ranking arose when some living human beings successfully claimed that they or their clans were divine or divinely sanctioned for rule over others, and thus there was a cosmological justification for inequality.

Here in ancient Mesopotamia is the first cosmic teleology of human law as rooted in divine law, which is developed in Plato's Timaeus and the Bible, and which becomes the theme of the Divine 
Cosmic Model of the universe that runs through human civilization for four thousand years.  

But even though this mysterious magic of a sacred monarchy could win the deferential submission of people, a tyrannical monarchy often provoked the resistance of the people.  As I have indicated in my posts on Hammurabi's Laws and the Mesopotamian kingships, whenever a king increased his exploitation of his people--through increased confiscation of grain, increased taxation, increased conscription of soldiers and laborers--this provoked flight or rebellion.  The records of the Mesopotamian states are full of evidence of people running away from their states--slaves running away from their enslavement, soldiers running away from their conscripted service in war, taxpayers running away from oppressive taxation, laborers running aways from coerced labor, and people generally running away from cities racked with famine and contagious diseases.  

There is also evidence that over 3,000 years of Mesopotamian life, there were hundreds of rebellions.  Historian of the Ancient Near East Seth Richardson (2010, 2016) has noted that rebels against the state were described by state authorities as "the violators of contracts (mitgurtu, rikistu)."  The Akkadian words mitgurtu and rikistu denote agreement, consent, contract, or treaty.  Richardson has observed:  "These motifs relating to violation-of-contract strike a familiar chord to us moderns, since they suggest the premise of a social contract between ruler and ruled, or at least the existence of legal treaties and loyalty oaths" (2010: 9).

Not only in ancient Mesopotamia, but also throughout the ancient Mediterranean world--the Near East, Greece, and Rome--one sees the same pattern of rebellions against the state in which rebels assert their natural freedom from oppression and thus confirm Locke's understanding of government as dependent on the consent of the governed (Howe and Brice 2016).

But this raises a question:  if there was so much popular resistance to the tyranny of sacred monarchy, then why was it the predominant form of government for five thousand years?  Throughout most of this history, the number of monarchies far exceeded the number of nonmonarchies.  

But then around 1900, the number of nonmonarchies surpassed the number of monarchies.  Today, there are very few monarchies in the world, and most of the most prominent monarchies today--like Great Britain--have a purely ceremonial monarch who has no sovereign power to rule.  This raises a second question:  why has monarchy declined in the last few centuries?

As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are at least two kinds of answers to the question of why monarchy was the prevalent form of government for thousands of years.  The first answer is that historically monarchies have been limited in their exercise of sovereign power over their people, and thus they have been limited in their capacity for the sort of tyrannical exploitation that provokes popular resistance.  For example, the evidence from those first monarchic states in ancient Mesopotamia shows an odd contradiction between their claims of absolute sovereignty and the reality of their severely limited powers.  For example, in their written legal codes, one can see what Seth Richardson has identified as "the curious absence of the state in the text." In the prologue and epilogue to Hammurabi's Code, Hammurabi claims absolute divinely granted authority over Babylonia.  But in the hundreds of laws in his code, there is almost no reference to himself or to the central state as providing judgment or enforcement of the law.  Most of the laws seem to assume private enforcement: when something goes wrong, the wronged party must act on his own with the help of local people to investigate, try, convict, and punish the guilty parties. 

What we see here is what Richardson has called the "presumptive state": the early states in Mesopotamia were presumptive in claiming a sovereignty that they did not in fact possess. Their rhetorical claims for absolute sovereignty have been mistakenly interpreted as evidence for the reality of Oriental Despotism.

Over the past 5,000 years, some states have expanded their power to rule through autocratic bureaucracies--for instance, China under the Song dynasty (960-1279).  But even the most powerful states have had to rely to some degree on law enforcement by private individuals acting through customary laws of vengeance and compensation.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, some states began to extend their law enforcement power by inventing modern professional policing.  Previously, people had policed themselves.  Robert Peel founded the London police in 1829.  The English Reform Act of 1835 extended this system of policing to all municipal boroughs.  Boston established the first American police force in 1838.

As long as monarchic states could not fully enforce their laws directly on their people, and their people were free to police themselves, those monarchic states had little power to tyrannically exploit their people.

The second answer to why monarchic states predominated for thousands of years is that in large societies where people are disconnected, the king provides a readily available focal point for legitimating government.  As I have indicated in a previous post, John Gerring and his colleagues have argued that from the appearance of the first states in the ancient world to the beginning of the modern era about 250 years ago, monarchy was the most common political regime because it was the most efficient solution to the problem of selecting leaders to coordinate social order in large societies where people are isolated from one another.  In the modern era, however, improvements in the technology of communication--for example, the printing press, newspapers, national postal systems, the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet--made it easier for people in large societies to communicate with one another and thus to mobilize a mass public for social coordination, which allowed elites to develop new systems of rule that did not need a central locus of sovereignty in a monarch (Gerring et al. 2021).

But doesn't this beg an obvious question--Why can't kings use modern mass communication to glorify their monarchic rule over their people?

We can answer that question by considering again the causes of the English Civil War, which led to the first trial and execution of a king.  Thomas Hobbes (in Behemoth) indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War.  The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests.  The printing press also facilitated the production of thousands of books and pamphlets debating theological and political questions.  This contributed to the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church.  As a consequence, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible (Hill 1993).  People like John Cooke could publish books arguing that the Bible did not support absolute monarchy.  And when the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II had to order the burning of such books as the greatest threat to the monarchy.

The success of modern mass communication in popularizing ideas of religious and political liberty has made it ever harder to defend absolute monarchy with the coercive enforcement of one national church.  This was dramatically manifested in the coronation of King Charles III on May 6, 2023, which was broadcast around the globe.  In the Coronation Liturgy--as designed by Charles himself--we saw a subtle interweaving of Old Testament and New Testament traditions that reconciled the conflicts between them by favoring the liberal interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Roger Williams and John Locke.

Since Henry VIII, the English King has been "Defender of the Faith"--first the Catholic Church and then the Anglican Church, which meant that the King would enforce a theocracy.  But King Charles III has identified himself as the "Defender of Faith"--that is, all religious faiths.  And indeed the coronation procession into Westminster Abbey included "faith leaders" from a dozen or more religious traditions.  Moreover, the Coronation Oath included a pledge "to foster an environment in which people of all faiths and beliefs may live freely."  Notice that "beliefs"--as distinguished from "faiths"--suggest that even atheists "may live freely" under the rule of Charles III.

The coronation of Charles indicated how his kingship will follow the model of Christ's persuasive kingship rather than the theocratic kingship of ancient Israel.  At the beginning of the coronation, Charles was greeted by a Chapel Royal chorister: "Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings."  Charles responded: "In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve."

Here Charles echoed the words of Jesus when he warned his followers not to strive for authoritative rule over others:  "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them.  Not so with you.  Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave--just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matt. 20:25-28).

Charles thus intimated here that he is a king who has no coercive authority over his people, particularly in matters of religious belief.  At most, he can only exercise the sort of persuasive authority that comes through Christian preaching.

Unlike the Stuart dynasty, the King of the House of Windsor rules over Great Britain as a purely ceremonial head of state that exercises no sovereign power in what is really a liberal Parliamentary democracy where Law is King.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Cooke, John.  1649.  King Charles, His Case, or An Appeal to All Rational Men Concerning His Trial at the High Court of Justice.  London: Peter Cole.

DeScioli, Peter.  2023.  "On the Origin of Laws by Natural Selection."  Evolution and Human Behavior 44: 195-209.

Eisner,  Manuel. 2003.  "Long-Term Historical Trends in Violent Crime."  Crime and Justice 30: 83-142.

Eisner,  Manuel.  2011.  "Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600-1800."  British Journal of Criminology 51: 556-577.

Filmer, Robert.  1991.  Patriarcha and Other Writings.  Ed. Johann P. Sommerville.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flannery, Kent and Joyce Marcus.  2014.  The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.   

Gardiner, Samuel Rawson.  1906.  The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gerring, John, et al.  2021.  "Why Monarchy? The Rise and Demise of a Regime Type." Comparative Political Studies 54: 585-622.

Hill, Christopher.  1993.  The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books.

Howe, Timothy, and Lee Brice, eds.  2016.  Brill's Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean.  Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.

Kaburu, Stefano S. K., Sana Inoue, and Nicholas E. Newton-Fisher. 2013. "Death of the Alpha: Within-Community Lethal Violence Among Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains National Park." American Journal of Primatology 75:789-797.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Ed. Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Newton-Fisher, Nicholas E. and Melissa Emery Thompson. 2012. "Comparative Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence." In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War, 41-60. Eds.Todd K. Shackelford and Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pinker, Steven. 2011.  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  New York: Viking.

Richardson, Seth.  2010.  "Writing Rebellion Back Into the Record: A Methodologies Toolkit."  In Seth Richardson, ed., Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World, 1-27.  New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society.

Richardson, Seth.  2016.  "Insurgency and Terror in Mesopotamia."  In Howe and Brice 2016, 31-61.

Robertson, Geoffrey.  2005.  The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold.  New York: Pantheon Books.

de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Conservatives (Still) Need Charles Darwin. Responding to the Kirk Center's Conference on Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.

That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things.  I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence.  In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."

I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009).  In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).

Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton."  Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism.  Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton.  Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.

THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM

James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton.  He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution.  While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought.  Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience.  Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.

I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017).  But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.

As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously.  I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers.  Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14).  But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.

Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment.  As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.

But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism.  In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism.  Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience.  Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.

By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good.  But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism.   As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable.  We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness. 

SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM

Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism.  While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.  

As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie.  After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.

I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine.  As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle.  Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols.  Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine.  Art reveals that truth through symbols."  In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions.  Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics."  Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology.  Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning.  And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. 

The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating.  How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?

Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal.  As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation.  He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."  In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature.  Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause.  Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution:  God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.

This supports a conservative view of religion.  The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence.  But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.

To be continued . . .

Does the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Deny Christianity?

 

                              Jupiter's Four Galilean Moons--Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto

                 The European Space Agency Launches the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE)

JUICE's Journey to Jupiter with Gravity Assist Flybys at the Sun, the Earth, and Venus

On April 14th, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the "Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer" (JUICE) spacecraft on its way to Jupiter to explore three of the major moons of Jupiter--Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto--including a prolonged orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.  Because Jupiter is so far away from the Earth, and because of the need for gravity assist flybys of the Sun, Earth, and Venus, the spacecraft will not reach Jupiter until July of 2031.  In the fall of 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper to explore Jupiter's Europa.  Clipper will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, which is a more powerful launch vehicle than ESA's, and consequently Clipper will actually reach Jupiter in April 2030, a year ahead of JUICE.  

One of the primary reasons for these exploratory missions to the moons of Jupiter--and particularly, Europa and Ganymede--is to look for signs of extraterrestrial life.  We might wonder why human beings want to search for extraterrestrial life.  Is this a foolish pursuit?  What difference would it make for us if life were discovered on these moons?  

Can Christians accept this?  Or must Christians insist that we know from the Bible that the only form of extraterrestrial life is angels (supernatural spirits without bodies), and so extraterrestrial embodied life is impossible?  Or could the discovery of extraterrestrial material life beyond the Earth be understood as compatible with the central doctrines of Christianity?

The four largest moons of Jupiter were first discovered in January of 1610 by Galileo when he turned his newly invented telescope towards the night sky.  In March of that year, he published his discoveries in The Starry Messenger.  For many reasons, this was one of the most important discoveries in the history of science.  One reason was that it seemed to be clear evidence against the geocentric model of the universe and for the heliocentric Copernican model, because Jupiter's moons were orbiting around Jupiter and not around the Earth.  Another reason for the importance of this discovery is that some people saw it as suggesting the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  Johannes Kepler published a letter to Galileo, which included his claim that Galileo's discovery of the four moons made it probable that there was life on Jupiter.  After all, if Jupiter with four moons is so similar to the Earth with one moon, then why shouldn't Jupiter have living inhabitants just as the Earth does?  Galileo himself, however, cautiously resisted Kepler's suggestion.  

But despite Galileo's caution on this point, the telescopic discoveries in astronomy, beginning in the 17th century, renewed a debate over the possibility of extraterrestrial life that had begun in ancient Greece and then reappeared in the late 13th century as a debate among Christians over whether extraterrestrial life was compatible with Christianity.  The documents in this debate have been conveniently collected in one volume by Michael J. Crowe in The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).  

An assessment of this debate from the perspective of a conservative Catholic has been written by Benjamin Wiker--"Alien Ideas: Christianity and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life" (Crisis Magazine, November 4, 2002).  Wiker argues that the search for extraterrestrial life is an anti-Christian attack on religion rooted in the atomistic materialism of Epicureans like Lucretius.  I have already challenged Wiker's stance in a series of posts.

Against Wiker are those Jesuit astronomers who work for the Vatican Observatory, who see no conflict between the possibility of extraterrestrial life and Christianity.  Some years ago, Jack Hitt wrote a long article on how these Catholic scientists think about this debate--"Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?" (The New York Times Magazine, May 29, 1994).

In his didactic philosophical poem--On the Nature of Things--Lucretius defends the Epicurean understanding of nature as arising from the spontaneous, random, and purposeless motions of atoms, without any need for intelligent design by the gods.  From this atomistic conception of nature, he infers that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that this earth and sky is the only one to have been created and that all those particles of matter outside are accomplishing nothing," and that we are bound "to acknowledge that in other regions there are other earths and various tribes of men and breeds of beasts" (2.1056, 2.1078).  He thus affirmed the plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial life.

In this way, he was opposed to Plato (particularly in the Timaeus) and Aristotle (particularly in On the Heavens and the Metaphysics), who argued that the cosmos was governed by a divine mind (Plato's Demiurge, Aristotle's Prime Mover) according to a divinely purposeful design.  They inferred from this that there was no plurality of worlds.  As Aristotle said: "the unmovable first mover is one both in definition and in number; so too, therefore, is that which is moved always and continuously; therefore, there is one heaven alone" (Metaphysics 1074a37-39).  (I have written some posts contesting these popular interpretations of Plato and Aristotle as proponents of cosmic divine teleology as opposed to the natural immanent teleology of Darwinian natural right.)

From the beginning of Christianity, many Christian theologians have embraced Christian versions of this popular interpretation of this Platonic and Aristotelian theological cosmology as opposed to Epicurean atomism, and this has led them to deny a plurality of worlds with extraterrestrial embodied life.  But beginning in the late 13th century, some Christians have seen a plurality of life-worlds in one cosmos as compatible with Christianity.

The debate here is over whether the plurality of worlds can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

THE STORY OF CREATION

The key Biblical text for the Story of Creation is the opening chapters of Genesis with its account of the six days of creation.  

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). On the first day, God created light and separated it from darkness.  

On the second day, God created the vault that He called "sky" to separate the water above the vault from the water below the vault. 

On the third day, God gathered the water under the sky to one place, so that the dry ground appeared.  He called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters "seas."  He then allowed the land to produce vegetation--seed-bearing plants and trees.

On the fourth day, God let there be two great lights in the sky to separate day from night on the Earth.  The greater light (the Sun) would govern the day.  The lesser light (the Moon) would govern the night.  He also made the stars in the vault of the sky to give light on the Earth.

On the fifth day, God allowed the seas to teem with marine animals, and he allowed birds to fly above the Earth across the vault of the sky.

On the sixth day, God allowed the Earth to produce the land animals.  And then, God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth" (Genesis 1:26).

The first problem for any reader of this first chapter of Genesis is deciding how much of this was intended to be interpreted as literal history and how much of it is figurative poetry.  Deciding that question is crucial for determining whether this Biblical account of Creation can be compatible with the natural sciences of cosmology, astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology.  As I have indicated in previous posts, Christians cannot reach any agreement on this issue, which is most evident in how revelation through the Holy Spirit has failed to resolve the creation/evolution debate among Christians.

Consider what a literal reading of this first chapter would teach us.  God created everything in the Universe in six days.  The Universe is geocentric in that the Earth is at the center.  (Wiker observes that "early Christians held to a geocentric universe.")  Above the Earth, the sky is a solid vault that separates the waters above from the waters below, which is the boundary between heaven and earth.  This cosmic geography saw the sky as having a form and function similar to what was found in the ancient Near East.  Most people believed that the sky was solid.

In that solid sky, there were the Sun, the Moon, and the stars.  The Earth was the only planet in the Universe.  And the Moon was the only moon in the Universe.  The stars did not have any planets orbiting around them.

All life was found on or a little above the Earth.  So, there was no extraterrestrial life.  There were, however, divinities or spiritual beings (angels?) who lived in the heavens.  Notice that when God speaks of creating human beings, He speaks in the plural ("Let us make man in our image").  The Bible often has God speaking in the plural (for example, Gen. 3:22; 11:7; Deut. 32:8; Job 1:6; 2:1; Isa. 6:8.  Sometimes, God sits on a throne and meets in a council with "all the multitudes of heaven standing around Him" (1 Kings 22:19-23; Job 1:6; 2:1).  So, there was no extraterrestrial bodily life beyond the Earth.  Christians who believe this will have to say that the search for extraterrestrial life is foolish and anti-Christian.

Notice that if we accept the literal reading of the Bible's cosmology, we will have to say that modern science has shown that the Bible's teaching is false.  So, for example, if we think the Bible is teaching that the universe is geocentric, then this is denied by modern astronomy.

But then Christian scientists (like Francis Collins and Deborah Haarsma) will say that much of the Bible uses figurative stories of the sort that would have been comprehensible to the people of the ancient Near East that were not intended to be taken as literal history.  The Bible, therefore, is not a science textbook but rather a book that tells us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galileo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."  The scientific study of the Book of Nature must be separated from the religious study of the Book of Scripture, although the two books should ultimately be compatible.  Many scientists (like Galileo and Darwin) and many Christian theologians (like Pope John Paul II) agree on this conception of God speaking through two books.

Moreover, Christians need not read the Book of Scripture as denying the possibility of extraterrestrial life.  For example, Thomas Chalmers was one of the leaders of Scottish evangelical Christianity in the 19th century; and he wrote extensively about how the Christian Revelation could be harmonized with the enlarged cosmos of modern astronomy that might include extraterrestrial life in many worlds beyond the Earth.  In one text, he began by quoting from the book of Psalms:

"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Psalm 8:3-4)

Chalmers saw here a suggestion that God's universe is so vast and varied, extending far beyond what is visible to the naked eye, that we should see the Earth as only "one paltry and insignificant portion of it," and "how minute is the place, and how secondary is the importance of our world, amid the glories of such a surrounding magnificence."  And so, "to an eye which could spread itself over the whole, the mansion which accommodates our species might be so small as to lie wrapped in microscopical concealment; and, in reference to the only Being who possesses this universal eye, well might we say, 'What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou shouldest deign to visit him'" (Crowe, 245, 250, 253, 268-69).

Chalmers suggests that we can see this expansiveness of God's universe confirmed by what modern astronomy tells us about the many stars that are suns with planets orbiting around them just as our Earth orbits around its star.  And we can imagine that "worlds roll in these distant regions; and these worlds must be the mansions of life and of intelligence."  In the remote future, we can foresee that our Sun will die or the Earth will fall into it, and then our world will disappear.  But the many other worlds of life and intelligence orbiting other stars will survive.  This shows that what God did in the first chapter of Genesis to create the human world on Earth, He has done for other distant planets to create other worlds of intelligent life.  The Bible does not explicitly recognize these other worlds, but we should not assume that the Bible's silence is a denial of their existence.

THE STORY OF SALVATION

If the purpose of the Bible is to teach us "how to get to heaven"--rather than "how the heavens go"--then we must consider whether the Bible's story of salvation--based on the doctrines of Adam's Fall, the Incarnation of Christ, and the redemption of humanity through Christ's sacrifice--is compatible with extraterrestrial life.  Nicholas of Cusa in 1440 seems to have been the first thinker in Latin Christianity to affirm a plurality of inhabited worlds in space.  Remarkably, despite his radical views, the Church made him a cardinal in 1448 (Crowe, 27-34).  But then a few years later, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian William Vorilong became the first Christian author to raise the question of whether the idea of a plurality of worlds could be reconciled with the Christian doctrines of divine incarnation and redemption.  

Did the people who live on other worlds beyond the Earth sin just as Adam sinned?  If they did, would Christ have to be incarnated in each world and then die in that world to redeem them?  Or would the redemptive life of Christ on Earth be enough to universally redeem those sinners in the other worlds?  Or is it possible that the people on those other worlds did not make Adam's mistake, and so they were sinless and did not need redemption?  Chalmers implied that he could not decide between these alternatives (Crowe, 26-27, 37, 220-21, 224, 229, 242, 256-58, 325-332).

Jack Hitt reports interviewing some of the Jesuit astronomers affiliated with the Vatican Observatory and asking them about the theological implications of discovering extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Would you baptize an extraterrestrial?  One priest answered, "only if he asked for it."

The Rev. George Coyne, S.J., identified himself as a Jesuit astrophysicist.  He was a close associate of Pope John Paul II and the director of the Vatican Observatory.  Hitt reports Coyne's answer to the question: "'O.K., so I meet this 'person.'  I would ask him: 'Are you intelligent?  Self-reflexive?  In the traditional sense do you have what we can call a soul?'  Good.  'Nice to meet you.'"  He says he would then find out if their civilization sinned, then if it was redeemed, then if the redeemer was a man named Jesus, and then: 'If they say, Oh yes, now you have a theological problem.  How could Jesus Christ be our redeemer on earth and of another planet and still be the one Son of God?  Could he have had several incarnations?  That's a pretty ticklish theological problem, and I don't know the answer.'"

Wiker, however, thinks the answer is clear: "we find no evidence of speculation about extraterrestrials among the early Christians.  Not only did such speculation run directly against the central doctrinal claims of Christianity, but it also smacked of Epicureanism (which entailed, among other things, the denial of the immortal, immaterial soul, heaven, and hell).  Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors."

Furthermore, Wiker insists, not only is extraterrestrial life a doctrinal error, there is no scientific evidence for it despite many years of scientific searching for it.  But is that correct?

ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE?  EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE?

Wiker argues:

"By the end of the 20th century, scientists had demonstrated to all but the most zealously intransigent that--humble Earth excepted--our solar system was devoid of intelligent life and most likely devoid of any life.  Further, as biologists discovered the ever-greater complexity of living organisms and the delicate balance of conditions that make them possible, it became clearer and clearer that fewer and fewer places in the universe could meet the conditions required for even the most rudimentary forms of life."

"Yet the dismal result of the high-tech search for extraterrestrials only stirred advocates all the more, resulting in the optimistic but defensive battle cry: 'The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.'  While this might warm the dwindling fires in the enthusiast's heart, it pays little service to reason.  To be blunt, since it was the negative result of a century-long search for aliens, the absence of evidence is the evidence for absence.  What else could it be?"

But it's not quite right to speak of "the negative result of a century-long search for aliens" for three reasons.  First, it ignores the fact that the first evidence for exoplanets (planets outside the solar system) appeared only in 1996; but now, as of today, there are 5,346 confirmed exoplanets in 3,943 planetary systems with 855 having more than one planet.  There are now some estimates that there are at least 20 billion Earth-like habitable planets in the Milky Way Galaxy alone.  So, the search for extraterrestrial life on those planets has just begun within the last 25 years.

The second problem with Wiker's dismissal of the search for extraterrestrial life as a failure is that he ignores the recent intensity in the exploration of the solar system, which began in the 1970s with the first robotic exploration spacecraft, starting with the Pioneer 10 mission to Jupiter.  For example, there is plenty of evidence that the icy moons of Jupiter have liquid water oceans on them, and some of them could have geothermal and water-rock interactions on the bottom.  Europa is an ocean world entirely covered by sea ice.  Europa actually has more liquid water than does Earth!  In the 1980s, oceanographers discovered deep-sea life with a food chain based not on photosynthesis but on chemosynthesis linked to hot vents on the seafloor.  The subsurface ocean on Europa is kept liquid by heating due to tidal interaction with Jupiter. Everywhere on Earth that has these conditions gets colonized by microbial life.  Wiker says nothing about this.

That points to the third problem for Wiker.  Even though he is right that the exploration of the solar system has not found any clear evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life, there is growing evidence for the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial microbial life (or perhaps fossil evidence of its past existence).  Increasingly, astrobiologists are concluding that microbes are the most likely forms of extraterrestrial life because the necessary conditions for such life are so much more common in the universe than the necessary conditions for intelligent life.

Wiker's insistence that we are unlikely to ever find any evidence for "even the most rudimentary forms of life" beyond the Earth is implausible, because he is silent about the growing evidence for likely conditions favorable to microbial life in places like the oceans of Europa.  Does Wiker believe that if we were to find microbes on one of the icy moons of Jupiter, that would deny the central doctrines of Christianity?

Finding microbes in the Solar System beyond the Earth or on exoplanets might not seem spectacular.  But consider the implications.  This would show that the processes that lead to the origin of life are not peculiar to the Earth, and they might be common in the Universe.  The history of life on Earth has been one of continual development from the simplest forms of life to the most complex, with every increasing degrees of living sensitivity and intelligence.  If life is a general phenomenon in the cosmos, then so is intelligence.

And with the evolutionary development of symbolic intelligence, there will be minds capable of asking questions about the intellectual and spiritual meaning of it all, and about whether their extraterrestrial souls need to be saved.

Todd May and "The Good Place": Can Aristotle Give Us Human Meaning in a Silent Universe?

NBC's philosophical comedy series The Good Place has a podcast for each episode hosted by Marc Evan Jackson (who plays Shawn in the show).  In the podcast for Chapter 19 ("The Trolley Problem"), Jackson interviews William Jackson Harper (who plays Chidi, the professor of moral philosophy) and Todd May (one of the moral philosophers who has been a consultant for the show).

May says that Michael Schur, the creator of The Good Place, first contacted him by email, because Schur had read his book Death, The Art of Living.  They talked a lot through Skype sessions, and May then flew to Hollywood to talk with the writers.  Schur liked to quote May's remark from his book on death that "Mortality offers meaning to the events in our lives.  Morality helps to navigate that meaning."  Human life would not be better without death, May argues, because the inescapable fact of death gives moral weight to our decisions about how to live the mortal life that we have.

That theme of mortality might seem to contradict the setting of the show in the afterlife, where people live immortally either in the Good Place or the Bad Place.  But May notes Schur's remarks about how in thinking about the show he decided that it was not really about any religious conception of an afterlife, because it was actually about "the ethical conception of the afterlife," in which imagining an afterlife with rewards for the good people and punishments for the bad people is an artful--and entertainingly funny way--to think through moral philosophy.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that Schur sought out May, a devoted atheist who thinks moral philosophers today must find "human meaning in a silent universe"--the subtitle of his book A Significant Life (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  This might appear to contradict the role of those in The Good Place who are immortal beings in the afterlife who judge the goodness and badness of human actions.  But in much of the show--as in the episode on The Trolley Problem--the struggle with moral dilemmas is carried out within human experience without any appeal to any transcendent or divine standards of right and wrong.  Certainly, the interesting discussion of this episode in the podcast is all about how human beings make choices and try to justify those choices based on their human reason and emotions.

This has led me to wonder whether May's Significant Life could be read by viewers like me who are looking for a philosophic exploration of the questions raised by The Good Place.  Does he really show us how to find "human meaning in a silent universe"?

Or, perhaps, we should first ask how he knows that the universe is silent--that the natural order of the cosmos tells us nothing about how we should live, because the cosmos is indifferent to human beings, who have arisen as only accidental products of an evolutionary process that does not care for or about human beings.  Apparently, the answer is that May thinks he knows that to be true because that's what the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus said--that we need to confront the absurdity of the human condition in that we have been thrown into a universe that gives no meaning to our lives.  Camus is the first philosopher May cites--on the second page of his book--and he just assumes that Camus is right about our need to live within the indifference of the universe.  But isn't it very unphilosophical to accept such a claim without offering reasons or evidence supporting the claim?

Although he does not elaborate the point, May does suggest that if we accept the truth of Darwinian evolution, we must accept that we are "cosmic accidents" or "evolutionary contingencies" in an indifferent universe (15, 175).  But he offers no argument to prove that this is a necessary conclusion from Darwinian science, and he is silent about those scientists who defend theistic evolution, which is the subject of some posts (here, here, and here).

Schur seems to agree with May in taking the existentialist teaching about the absurdity of human life as obviously true.  In fact, Schur has said that when he was 11 years old, he stayed up all night reading Woody Allen's Without Feathers, a collection of some comic essays, and he knew then that he wanted to become a comedy writer like Allen, whose comedy is full of existentialist angst about the absurdity of the human condition in a world where God is dead.  Schur became a writer for NBC's Saturday Night Live.  He then went on to become the creator and writer for the comedy series The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.  Having been so successful with these series, Schur was given a free hand by NBC to devise The Good Place in any way he wanted, which allowed him to try something daring.

In the first Good Place podcast, Schur explained the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism on his plan for The Good Place.  His first idea for the show was to have Eleanor die and be sent to The Good Place by mistake, so that she has to hide the fact that she should really be in The Bad Place. When she reveals the truth to Michael in the middle of the season, he then must help her to avoid being sent to the Bad Place. But Schur foresaw that that storyline would lose its interest by the end of the first season.  So he devised a shocking twist that he took from Sartre's play No Exit--where three people are condemned to the Hell of living forever together in a room where they torture one another through their personal conflicts: "Hell is other people."  And so in the final episode of the first season of The Good Place, we discover that Michael has deceived them (and the viewers), because Eleanor and the others have not been living in The Good Place but in The Bad Place, so that in their conflicts with one another, they have been torturing themselves.

And yet despite the agreement of Schur and May with the existentialist's dark view of the absurdity of human life in a silent universe, they both look for some philosophic way to find human meaning and morality in a universe where there is no cosmic or divine support for human purposefulness.  In his podcast interview (near the end), Schur indicates agreement with Peter Singer's utilitarianism, although he admits that he cannot agree with some of Singer's extreme views.  Schur embraces Singer's utilitarian claim that the greatest happiness of the greatest number of sentient creatures is the good, and therefore we are obligated to be charitable in helping to alleviate the suffering of our fellow human creatures.  This utilitarian morality is displayed in The Good Place, but it is also cast into doubt by the Trolley Problem.  Chidi admits that while he accepts the rational principle that killing one person is justified to save five people, he is emotionally resistant to killing one person for the sake of harvesting his organs to save the lives of five people who need organs.  Here his moral emotions teach him the principle of double effect, which I have taken up (here  here, and here).  I have also criticized Singer and utilitarianism (here, and here,).

The Trolley Problem

Unlike Schur, May does not turn to utilitarianism as a way to render human life meaningful.  Rather, May begins A Significant Life by summarizing Aristotle's account in the Nicomachean Ethics of how the moral and intellectual virtues can bring happiness (eudaimonia) as the fulfillment of human longing.  When I first saw this, I wondered whether May would agree with my defense of a Darwinian science of Aristotelian liberalism, which I have laid out in various posts (here, here, and here).  Alas, I soon saw that May had missed the mark.

May argues that Aristotle's ethics cannot make human life meaningful for us for three reasons, which arise from three mistaken interpretations of Aristotle.  First, May says that we cannot accept Aristotle's assumption that meaningfulness comes from a cosmic teleology--that meaning "is always there, inscribed in the nature of things, part of the furniture of the universe," part of "a rational cosmic structure."  Aristotle begins the Ethics by saying that everything acts for its end--its telos--which is its good, and so to live according to our human telos is to fulfill our human good (11-12, 21-22, 26).  May asserts that none of us today can believe this.  "The problem for us is that we are not Aristotle, or one of his contemporaries.  We do not share the framework of his time.  The universe is not ordered in such a way that everything has its telos.  The cosmos is not for us as rational a place as he thought" (12).

There are two dubious claims here.  The first is the assumption of historicist relativism: that every philosopher's thinking is determined by the cultural beliefs of his time, and so there is no trans-historical truth.  "We do not share the framework of his time."  We must share the framework of our time, which is different from Aristotle's time.  The most obvious problem with this is that it is self-refuting:  if there is no trans-historical truth, then historicist relativism cannot be true.  We are Cretans declaring that all Cretans are liars.

May's second dubious claim here is that Aristotle's natural teleology is a cosmic teleology--that if living beings have natural ends, this must have been determined by a cosmic order of purposefulness.  May is completely silent about Aristotle's explicit rejection, early in the Ethics, of Plato's Idea of the Good--the Platonic belief that whatever is good for any being must conform to the transcendent Good of the Cosmos.  Oddly, then, May's claim that Aristotle's ethics depends on the cosmic morality of "a rational cosmic structure" assumes that Aristotle is not an Aristotelian but a Platonist!

Aristotle was a biologist, and his biological science shaped his empirical science of ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics as rooted in an immanent teleology rather than a cosmic teleology.  In contrast to Plato's attempt to ground ethics in a moral cosmology, Aristotle grounded ethics in a moral biology.  (Actually, as I have indicated in some posts, it is not always clear that Plato's Socrates accepted the moral cosmology of Plato's Timaeus or Plato's Athenian Stranger.)

A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics supports the empiricist tradition of ethics that runs from Aristotle to David Hume and Adam Smith to E. O. Wilson.  This empiricist tradition of thought sees ethics as rooted in human experience--in human nature, human tradition, and human judgment.  By contrast, the transcendentalist tradition of ethics, from Plato to Immanuel Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good as somehow woven into the order of the cosmos--a cosmic God, cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason.  A Darwinian science of ethics can show how the moral order of human life arises as a joint product of natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments.

If I am right about this, this would show--contrary to May's historicist relativism--that modern Darwinian science can confirm the truth of Aristotle's ethics.

I have elaborated these points in posts here, here, here, here, here., and here.

May's second reason for saying that Aristotle's ethics cannot render human life meaningful is that his concept of eudaimonia or happiness is too objective or impersonal to allow for individual diversity: Aristotle's eudaimonia "is a way of being that is the goal of any human life" (26).  May suggests that Aristotle does not recognize how the meaningfulness of my life might rightly differ from the lives of others.

But this ignores that fact that in his Generation of Animals, Aristotle distinguished between three levels of inherited traits among animals.  An animal species, including the human species, shows generic traits shared with some other animals, specific traits shared with members of the same species, and temperamental traits that differ among individuals of the species.  Thomas Aquinas adopted this biological idea from Aristotle as showing three levels of natural law corresponding to generic nature, specific nature, and temperamental nature.  So while we can recognize the generic goods of human life that generally characterize human nature, we can also recognize that the proper ranking and organization of those goods for each individual human being will vary, and that will require prudential judgment.  The study of such individual variability belongs to the biological science of animal personalities.  (I have written about this here and here.)

May's third reason for why he thinks Aristotle's ethics cannot render human life meaningful is that morality and meaningfulness are so different that a good life in Aristotle's terms could be a meaningless life.  Meaningfulness, May contends, comes not from moral values but from narrative values: we can understand our lives as stories with narrative structures and themes that give them meaning.  In trying to explain this separation of meaning from morality, however, May has to contradict what he says about Aristotle's ethics.

The narrative values that make our lives meaningful, May says, arise from the fact that our lives have trajectories that arc from birth to maturity to death, and so the meaning of our lives arises from the narrative themes of our life stories.  But May says that he first saw this idea of life as a trajectory with a storyline in Aristotle's ethics (3, 61, 63).  And in fact Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics has many illustrations from poetic storytellers like Homer.  So May seems to contradict himself in claiming that Aristotelian morality cannot comprehend the meaningfulness that comes from the narrative values of storytelling.

Storytelling as a way of exploring the moral meaning of human life is manifest in television comedies like The Good Place.  Aristotle wrote about the art of storytelling in his Poetics, concerned primarily with tragedy, and in a book on comedy that has been lost.  If you read Aristotle's Poetics and then listen to the podcasts for The Good Place, you will see that television writers and actors are practicing Aristotle's art of storytelling in a way that both entertains and instructs their audience as they explore possible scenarios for human beings striving for moral meaning in their lives.

But in trying to separate the meaning of our stories from the morality of our lives, May adopts Susan Wolf's understanding of meaning as different from morality, which she sums up in one sentence: "Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness."  She elaborates this idea this way: "A person's life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some thing or things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged. . . . One must be able to be in some sort of relationship with the valuable object of one's attention--to create it, protect it, promote it, honor it, generally to actively affirm it in some way or other" (51).

If one accepts this idea of meaning, May observes, then a good life according to Aristotle's ethics is not necessarily a meaningful life.  A good person could do good deeds "without feeling absorbed by what he or she does," without "a sense of engagement" in one's good life.  One could be good in being an selfless altruist in sacrificing one's own well-being for the good of others.  And thus one would be living a good life but utterly alienated from and bored with one's life, a passive life without any active intensity, and therefore one would be living "an alienated but moral life," which would b e a meaningless life (52-53, 91, 111-12).

What May says here, however, contradicts what he says about Aristotle's ethics.  As May says (correctly), for Aristotle the good or flourishing life is "an ongoing activity" (energeia in Aristotle's Greek).  The good life is "active and engaged with the world."  "It is an ongoing expression of who  one is."  "It is one's very way of being in the world" (5).  A good life is dedicated to "self-cultivation" (8).  A good life in Aristotle's understanding, therefore, cannot be "alienated" or lack "a sense of engagement."  If this is so, then May cannot say that a good life can be a meaningless life.

Moreover, May admits that the narrative values of a meaningful life largely coincide with what Aristotle identifies as the moral and intellectual virtues.  So, for example, courage is a moral virtue for Aristotle, and "a courageous life is one we might admire not only as a morally worthy life but also a meaningful life" (76).  We can say that "where a person is engaged with her life and is living morally, the meaningful and the moral will likely coincide" (112).

Still, May wants to insist that morality and meaningfulness can diverge in some cases.  One of his examples of this is Lance Armstrong.  Armstrong is famous for his success as a professional road racing cyclist, who showed the narrative values of "courage, commitment, and intensity" in surviving testicular cancer and then winning the Tour de France multiple times (106).  But Armstrong is also infamous for lying about his practice of illegal doping.  So we are ambivalent about someone like Armstrong: we admire him in some ways, while condemning him in other ways.  Armstrong's life, May contends, is both meaningful and immoral.

But wouldn't Aristotle rightly say that Armstrong is partly moral--in displaying the virtues of "courage, commitment, and intensity"--but partly immoral--in displaying the vices of dishonesty and cheating?  His life is not fully admirable because it is not fully moral.

As far as I can tell, May gives us no good reason to doubt that Aristotle's virtue ethics is the best philosophic framework for understanding the human pursuit of the good life.  He also gives us no good reason to doubt the possibility that Aristotle's ethics can be supported by modern evolutionary science.

So as The Good Place continues its run, we will have to wonder whether a Darwinian and Aristotelian science of the virtues can best explain the human struggle with the meaning and morality of life that this show depicts.

We should also consider how a liberal social order secures the freedom of thought and speech that allows us to openly think through these deep questions of life through popular culture.

Finally, we should question the common claim of the critics of liberalism that the degrading effects of bourgeois liberalism are evident in popular culture--particularly, in TV programming.  Shows like The Good Place should force us to consider the possibility that there has been a steady increase in the cognitive complexity of popular culture in modern liberal societies.  Does watching television make us smarter?  I have written about that here.