Hermann Goering's Natural Desire for Dominance: The Movie "Nuremberg"

 

                                                    The Trailer for the Movie "Nuremberg"

The movie "Nuremberg," based on Jack El-Hai's book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, is the story of how American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley studied the imprisoned Nazi leaders who were brought before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945-1946, and how Kelley became particularly fascinated by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who had been Hitler's designated successor until he fell from Hitler's grace near the end of the war.  The movie stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley.  All of the acting is superb, and it's a powerfully moving and intellectually stimulating movie.

The movie and the book have made me wonder how Goering would fit into the evolutionary psychology of political leadership that I have developed in this blog and in my books.  I have written about psychopaths in this blog and in Darwinian Natural Right.  And I can see that Goering and the other Nazi war leaders had some psychopathic traits.  But Goering was not a pure psychopath.  Goering was a grandiose narcissist who was driven by a natural desire for alpha-male dominance as described by Arnold Ludwig.  

Donald Trump shares those same traits, but his political situation differs from Goering's.  Goering pursued dominance in a totalitarian dictatorship that did not allow anyone to challenge Nazi Party rule.  Trump's desire for dominance has led him to establish a competitive authoritarianism in his second term, in which there is some weak countervailance to his dominance coming from the threat of electoral defeat.  If Trump were to cancel the midterm elections next year, that would turn America into a totalitarian dictatorship like Nazi Germany.

JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG

Just before the final collapse of Germany in the spring of 1945, Goering suggested that he should become the Fuhrer once Hitler was dead, which led to Hitler's order that he be killed.  Once it became clear that Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.  That left Goering as the highest ranking Nazi leader left alive.  On the day before Germany's surrender on May 7, Goering sent a letter to U.S. military command offering to help the Allies form a new government for Germany with Goering himself as the new leader.  When Goering was captured by U.S. troops, he asked to meet General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, so that he and Eisenhower could arrange for the new government of Germany.  But instead, Goering was taken to a prison camp in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where he joined fifty-two other high-ranking German leaders.

In early August, Captain Douglas Kelley arrived at Mondorf.  He had worked in the medical service of the U.S. army, and his new assignment was to maintain the mental fitness of Goering and the other Nazi inmates.  Kelley wanted to find out if there was a "Nazi mind" that would account for their heinous deeds.  His great ambition was to write a book on this based on his studies of the captive Nazis, knowing that this would make him famous.  If the psychic flaws of the Nazi personality could be understood, then this might prevent the future emergence of another Nazi-like regime.

On August 8, the four Allied powers (France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR) agreed on a charter for an International Tribunal that would try the Nazi war leaders for war crimes.  Nothing like this had ever been done.  The U.S. took the leading role, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson agreed to head the prosecution.  Jackson targeted Goering as the top-ranking Nazi who need to be convicted.  The International Tribunal would meet in Nuremburg, Germany.  On August 12, the Nazi prisoners were moved to a prison in Nuremberg to await their trial.  Kelley moved there with them.  

Kelley spent hundreds of hours with all of the prisoners, but he was most interested in Goering.  They developed a strange personal relationship, perhaps even a friendship, based on mutual respect.  Kelley's primary psychiatric methodology with all the prisoners was the Rorschach ink blot test.

On October 20, the Allied prosecutors delivered their indictments against the prisoners to the tribunal.  That same day, Gustave Mark Gilbert arrived at the Nuremberg prison.  He was charged with maintaining the mental welfare of the prisoners so that they would be fit to stand trial.  But Gilbert was a psychologist who had the same ambition as Kelley--he wanted to write a book that would explain the psychology of the Nazis.  He was also like Kelley in that he relied on the Rorschach ink blot test for studying the minds of the Nazi prisoners.

Goering liked to brag about his heroic achievements as a military and political leader.  He had been a flying ace in World War I.  He was once shot down. He was credited with shooting down twenty-two enemy planes.  At the end of the war, he flew the unit of planes he commanded into Germany while refusing to surrender to the Allies.  He received his country's highest military award for his exploits.

Goering told Kelley how he first heard Adolf Hitler give a speech.  In the early 1920s, he heard Hitler in Munich speech shout: "You've got to have bayonets to back up your threats."  Goering explained: "Well, that was what I wanted to hear.  He wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'that's the party for me! Down with the Treaty of Versailles, goddammit! That's my meat!" He saw that this young, small party was open to new members who could quickly rise to leadership positions--"that meant I could soon be a big man in it."  This desire for becoming a "big man" confirmed his mother's prediction: "Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!" (El-Hai, 11).

That he became a great man seemed clear by the long list of titles he had in World War II, which he was happy to rattle off to Kelley: President of the Reichstag, Hitler's deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the massive Hermann Goering Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, and Reich Forestry and Hunting Master.  Goering was most proud of the title Reichsmarschall--a rank similar to a six-star general--held only once before, two hundred years earlier, by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was the most distinguished field marshal in the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty.

Goering insisted to Kelley that he had become the supreme leader of Germany once Hitler died:

The people flocked to us, the old soldiers swore by us--and I became head of the nation. . . . Too late you would say?  But perhaps not.  Anyway, I made it. . . . You know I shall hang.  I am ready.  But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man.  If I cannot convince the court, I shall at least convince the German people that all I did was done for the Greater German Reich.  In fifty or sixty years, there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany.  Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home (El-Hai, 114).

On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136). 

By the end of December, Kelley decided that since he had not seen his wife in almost three years, it was time to go home.  When Goering learned that Kelley was leaving, he broke down and wept.  By late January of 1946, Kelley was reunited with his wife in Chattanooga.  This left Gilbert in Nuremberg to continue his psychological studies of the prisoners during the trial.  Here the movie changes the story.  In the movie, Kelley stays in Nuremberg for the whole trial.

And so, in the movie, Kelley was in the audience for Goering's dramatic jousting with prosecutor Robert Jackson in March of 1946.  When Jackson presented documents signed by Goering that referred to the "final solution" to the Jewish problem as evidence that Goering knew about the extermination of Jews in Germany, Goering responded by pointing out that these documents identified the "emigration" of Jews out of Germany as the "final solution," and nothing was said explicitly about exterminating millions of Jews.  

Goering argued that neither he nor Hitler himself knew anything about the deliberate killing of Jews in the camps.  If any Nazi leader was responsible for the Holocaust, Goering insisted, it was Heinrich Himmler, who had died by suicide at the end of the war.  Although most people in the audience probably did not find this persuasive, it did show that the Nazis had not left any documentary evidence that explicitly recognized mass killing of innocent Jews as a deliberate policy.

Goering used the witness chair as a stage for a powerfully assertive speech as if he were speaking at a Nazi Party Rally.  One series of speeches lasted twelve hours over two days.  Everyone saw that Goering was enjoying himself in his passionate display of mastery.  He declared: "The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, their fortunes, their freedoms, their life, and for this I call on the Almighty and the German people as my witness."

Janet Flanner of the New Yorker reported: "When the former Reichsmarschall strode from the witness stand to the prisoner's box after his last session with Mr. Jackson, he was congratulated and smiled upon by his fell-Nazis there, like a gladiator who had just won his fight" (El-Hai, 145).  Indeed, the movie suggested this by filming the scene of Russell Crowe entering the courtroom, with the camera focused on his back and the wide courtroom audience before him, which replicates a scene in Gladiator, when Crowe enters the Coliseum, knowing that he will fight to a glorious death. 

At the end of September in 1946, the judges of the Tribunal delivered their verdicts.  Of the 21 prisoners, 3 were acquitted, and 18 were found guilty.  11 (including Goering) were sentenced to death by hanging. 7 were given prison sentences.  

Goering admitted to Gilbert that his attempt to affirm the glory of the Nazi years and win the admiration of the German people had failed. "You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more.  When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial, it won't be necessary to condemn him.  He has condemned himself" (El-Hai, 150).

Wanting to escape the indignity of hanging, Goering asked that he be killed by a firing squad.  But his request was denied.  

The night before he was to be hanged, Goering bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide that he had somehow hidden from the guards.  His suicide was his final act of defiance.

Remarkably, as the movie indicates in its closing intertitles, Kelley also killed himself with cyanide in 1958.  This ended his own life-long struggle with his inner demons.

NAZIS INTERPRETING INKBLOTS

Both Kelley and Gilbert thought the only way to probe into the deepest recesses of the Nazi Mind was through the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which had been developed in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist.  Rorschach created a set of ten inkblots that were intentionally drawn to be ambiguous.  He thought that when patients were asked to describe what they saw in these inkblot drawings, they would reveal their mental disorders and personalities, even when this was beyond the patients' conscious awareness.  So, for example, if patients responded with lots of descriptions involving color, that indicated that they were emotional and impulsive.  Or if they described people engaged in cooperative activities, that indicated that the patients found social interactions to be pleasurable and helpful.

                                                      How the Rorschach Inkblot Test Works

Although the Rorschach test was popular among psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, there is now a general agreement that this test has very limited uses, and that for most purposes it is little more than a variation of astrology and palm reading (Wood, Nezworski, and Garb, 2023).  The test has some validity for detecting disorders such as schizophrenia that involve perceptual distortion and disorganized thinking.  And some of the Rorschach test scores are related to IQ.  But the Rorschach test scores have little validity for providing a general understanding of personality.  And it is certainly not a psychological x-ray that can detect mental realities of which the patient is unaware of.

The failure of the Rorschach test in evaluating the Nazi prisoners became evident when Kelley and Gilbert could not agree in their interpretations of their inkblot tests.  Kelley saw imagination, boldness, and even genius in Goering's responses.  Gilbert saw the mediocrity of Goering's intellect and a lack of originality.  Kelley thought the Rorschach tests of the Nazis revealed that there was no mentally disordered "Nazi mind," because they were ordinary mentally healthy people, which showed that many mentally healthy people could become Nazis in the right circumstances.  By contrast, Gilbert thought the Nazis were mentally disordered in having antisocial personalities with no sympathy for the suffering of others.  Gilbert identified Goering as an "amiable psychopath" with a sadistic aggressiveness (1948).

And yet Kelley and Gilbert could agree on one facet of Goering's personality--his restless desire for dominance and power (El-Hai, 10-11, 74, 113-14, 134, 140; Gilbert, 1948, 212, 220, 225).

DOMINANCE, DEFERENCE, AND RESISTANCE TO DOMINANCE

The political psychology of Nazi politics manifests the tense interaction of three natural propensities of our evolved human nature as political animals: dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance (or counter-dominance).  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  Deference is the natural propensity of many individuals to submit to those few who are dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of many individuals to resist being dominated.

The desire for dominance and the grandiose narcissism of a man like Goering are easily mistaken as signs of a psychopathic personality.  But as I said in Darwinian Natural Right, pure psychopaths--people who have all the psychopathic traits identified by Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare--cannot be successful in the pursuit of dominance and power, because the behavior of pure psychopaths will always be self-defeating in that they cannot act prudently for any long-term goal.  As Cleckley said: "The psychopath shows a striking inability to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be one regarded as good or evil.  He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all" (Arnhart, 1998, 222).  By contrast, Goering showed self-control and deliberate planning in his pursuit of dominance--in his quest to become the Big Man.

As Goering explained to Kelley and Gilbert, he and Hitler easily won the support of the German people because most people are easily persuaded to defer to the dominance of charismatic leaders.

Nazi Germany did not have a constitutional system of countervailing powers that would have allowed legal resistance to Nazi Party rule.  For example, the Nazi rulers could not be turned out of office through elections.  But Goering and Hitler did see illegal resistance--both armed and unarmed--to their dominance over Nazi Germany (Wikipedia, 2025a).  Over 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities.  Tens of thousands of Germans were executed by the Nazis.  And hundreds of thousands of Germans deserted from the Wehrmacht, and many defected to the Allies or to anti-Fascist resistance forces.  There were also at least 42 assassination plots to kill Hitler, and some of them came close to succeeding (Wikipedia, 2025b).  (Hitler would have benefited from reading the longest chapter in Machiavelli's Prince, which is about assassination plots as the greatest threat to the Prince who is hated by many of his people.)

All of these armed and unarmed ways of resisting the unjust dominance of rulers are expressions of what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all individuals to punish those who violated the natural law of individual liberty.

Of course, ultimately the most successful resistance movement was the military resistance of the Allied forces that defeated Germany.  As Leo Strauss (2007) observed in a lecture in New York in December of 1943, what really influenced the Germans who supported Nazi rule was not the silly Nazi doctrines like Aryan racial superiority but rather the Nazi promise that Nazi arms and diplomacy would bring "the solution of all German problems by a short and decisive war," which "convinced a substantial part of the German people that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays."  Strauss believed that "this doctrine is subject to the test of sense-experience."  First, that this was not going to be a short and decisive victory for Germany became clear as early as 1940 when the British Spitfires blunted the attack of Goering's Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (July to October of 1940).  By December of 1943, people had seen with their own eyes that the Allies were defeating Germany on the battlefield.  And Strauss foresaw that this "re-education of Germany" would be "consummated by a meeting of British-American and of Russian tanks" in Berlin, and "by the harmonious cooperation of the Western and Eastern occupying forces in bringing to trial the war criminals."  The Nuremberg Tribunal accomplished that.

LESSONS FOR AMERICA?

Many people who see "Nuremberg" will detect a subtext in the movie that suggests questions about America: Can a Nazi-like dictatorship arise in America?  And if so, can this American dictatorship be brought to trial for its crimes?  Can an American dictatorship be overthrown by a popular resistance movement? Is Trump driven by the same desire for dictatorial dominance that drove Hitler and Goering?

That the answer to this last question is yes should be evident once we remember some of Trump's most arrogant boasts about his power--such as "As president, I can do anything I want."

We can hope, however, that unlike Goering and Hitler, Trump will always face the limits on his power that come from a constitutional system of countervailing powers, in which, as Publius said in The Federalist: "Ambition counteracts ambition."  But Trump has been setting aside that constitutional system and replacing it with a competitive authoritarianism--a hybrid regime that combines elements of democracy and authoritarianism, which has emerged around the world over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War (Levitsky and Way, 2002, 2010, 2025).  A competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

A fully authoritarian regime (like Nazi Germany) allows little or no countervailing power.  A fully democratic regime (like the U.S. until recently) allows strong countervailance. A competitive authoritarian regime (like what Trump is establishing in his second term) allows weak countervailance.

Through various ways, the U.S. could become a fully authoritarian regime.  Trump could declare a state of national emergency that requires canceling the midterm elections next year.  Or the Supreme Court could adopt a version of the Unitary Executive Theory that means that there are no constitutional limits on the power of the President--and therefore Trump is right when he says that as President, he can do anything he wants.

If that were to happen, then we would have to hope that many Americans would join the resistance to dictatorial dominance that has started with the "No Kings" protests.  But these protestors will have to be willing to face imprisonment and violent suppression from the government.  We would also have to hope that military personnel and law enforcement officers would refuse to obey illegal orders from Trump.

It is a dark time in America.  But it could become much darker, perhaps even as dark as in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.

 

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

El-Hai, Jack. 2013. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and the Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. New York: MJF Books.

Gilbert, G. M. 1948. "Hermann Goerig, Amiable Psychopath." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43: 211-229.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs 104 (March/April): 36-51.

Strauss, Leo. 2007. "The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews." The Review of Politics 69: 530-38.

Wikipedia. 2025a. "German Resistance to Nazism."

Wikipedia. 2025b. "Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler."

Wood, James M., M. Teresa Nezworski, and Howard N. Garb. 2023. "The Rorschach Inkblot Test: We See an Unsinkable Rubber Ducky." Skeptical Inquirer 47 (6): 39-45.

Are Most of Us Going to Hell? Is Don Giovanni Already There?

J. D. Vance has said that Kamala Harris "can go to Hell" for her failure to investigate the killing of 13 U.S. military service people during the evacuation from Afghanistan in August of 2021.  When he was asked whether he should apologize for using such language, he said that he would not apologize for using "a colloquial phrase" to express his moral disgust with Harris.  Of course, he is right that most of us today use the words "go to Hell" as a "colloquial" expression of our emotional disgust with someone.  

This suggests that we have forgotten that for most of Christian history, orthodox Christians spoke of "going to Hell" as a literally true Christian doctrine--that most human beings after they die will go to Hell where they will be eternally tormented by God as punishment for their wickedness.  As I have indicated in my recent posts on Vance and his association with Catholic Integralism, Vance professes to be a traditionalist Catholic who believes in the truth of Christian orthodoxy, who also believes that the identity of America as a Christian nation depends on enforcing belief in that Christian orthodoxy.  

For the Catholic Integralists, the highest end of man is to avoid eternal torment in Hell and enjoy eternal beatitude in Heaven.  And achieving that end requires a Catholic theocracy: the temporal power of the state must serve the spiritual power of the Catholic Church, the only true Church that can lead human beings to eternal salvation and away from eternal punishment.  But as I have argued previously, the Catholic Integralists don't really believe this, because they are still liberals who accept the liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Moreover, people like Vance and the Catholic Integralists--and most Christians generally today--believe that the truth of Christian orthodoxy has been divinely revealed by the Holy Spirit through scripture and tradition.  But that belief is denied by the fact of religious pluralism--by the fact that devout Christians cannot reach agreement on fundamental Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of Hell as eternal torment for most human beings.  This confirms Locke's claim that "everyone is orthodox to himself," and for that reason we need to secure the religious liberty and toleration that will allow a free debate over religious doctrines without any coercive enforcement of one church's orthodoxy over another's.

Last year, the Gallup polling organization reported that the proportion of Americans professing to believe in God, Heaven, and Hell has declined over the past 24 years.  In 2001, 90% believed in God, 83% believed in Heaven, and 71% believed in Hell.  In 2023, that had gone down to 74% (God), 67% (Heaven), and 59% (Hell).  In some other countries, the percentages are lower.  In Great Britain, for example, it's 49% for God, 41% for Heaven, and 26% for Hell.  Hell is always less popular than Heaven.  Nevertheless, the international surveys report that in a few countries--like Egypt and Morocco--almost 100% of people report believing in Hell.

Over the years, I have written many posts on the evolutionary history of Heaven and Hell.  And in the last four hundred years of that evolutionary history, particularly in Europe and North America, there has been a notable decline in belief in the Christian orthodox doctrine of Hell as the place for the eternal torment of most human beings.

DID DON GIOVANNI GO TO HELL?

Recently, I had to think more about this when my wife and I attended performances of Verdi's La Traviata and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Santa Fe Opera.  Don Giovanni was a legendary libertine who was reputed to have seduced (or raped) over 2,000 women.  The Italian libretto for Mozart's opera, written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, is based on this old story.

At the beginning of the opera, in seventeenth-century Seville, we see the Don struggling with Donna Anna, who is resisting his sexual assault.  Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, comes out of his palace, and he challenges Don Giovanni with a sword.  At first, the Don is reluctant to fight with an old man, but finally he draws his sword and easily kills him.  Leporello, the Don's servant, is horrified by what he has seen.  The Don and Leporello leave together.  

Meanwhile, Donna Anna and Don Ottavio, her betrothed, come out of the palace and are shocked by the dead body of the Commendatore.  Together, they sing about their "oath to the gods . . . to avenge that blood."  That sets the recurrent theme in the opera of "vengeance" as indicated by the many appearances of the Italian word vendetta in the libretto.  Every woman who is assaulted or betrayed by Don Giovanni seeks vengeance against him.  And as they warn other women about his predatory ways, the Don fails in all his attempts at new conquests because he cannot escape his bad reputation.

Near the end of the opera, the Don and Leporello are walking through a graveyard with monuments and statues, including one of the Commendatore.  The Commendatore's marble statue speaks: "You will cease laughing before dawn!"  Mozart uses three trombones here for the first time in the opera.  In the eighteenth century, trombones were used mainly for religious music and for supernatural scenes in operas.  This sudden entrance of trombones in what is a comic opera must have awed Mozart's audiences.

Don Giovanni is surprised, and he asks Leporello to read the inscription on the statue: "Here I await vengeance [vendetta] on the wicked man who brought me to my death."  Leporello is frightened.  But the Don is amused.  He invites the statue to come to dinner.  The statue agrees.

Later, Don Giovanni is having a grand party in the banquet-hall of his palace.  The statue arrives and enters the room.  He invites the Don to have dinner with him.  The Don agrees.  He gives his hand to the statue as his pledge.  The statue's hand is freezing cold.  He orders the Don:  "Repent, change your life, it is your last moment!"  Giovanni refuses to repent.

Roaring flames begin to surround Giovanni, and demon voices are heard from below: "All is as nothing compared to your crimes! Come!  Worse is in store for your!"

Giovanni cries: "Who tears my spirit?  Who shakes my innards?  What twisting, alas, what frenzy!  What hell.  What terror."

With the demon voices screaming, Giovanni cries "Ah!" as he is enveloped by flames and sinks to hell.

A few minutes later, all of the main characters appear in the room.  Leporello explains what happened: "right over there the devil swallowed him up."  Don Ottavio says: "we all have been avenged by heaven."  The opera ends with all singing the "very ancient song"--"And the death of wicked men is always just like their life."

Don Giovanni has always been one of the most popular of all operas.  And some opera critics have said that it is the greatest of all operas.  And yet many people have found the end of the opera with the Don's descent into Hell unsatisfying.  This ending just does not feel right.

                     Don Giovanni, the Commendatore Scene, from the Movie Amadeus

Or perhaps it does not feel right only for modern secular audiences and opera directors who have no understanding of Mozart's Catholic Christian conception of Hell as the place where evil men like Don Giovanni will be eternally tormented for their sins.  

But that's not a good answer, because the religious language in Don Giovanni sounds more like a vaguely pagan polytheistic view of the Underworld rather than a Christian view of Hell.  The characters invoke "the gods" without any reference to the God of the Bible or to Jesus.  In explaining what has happened to the Don, they say that he has gone to be with "Proserpina and Pluto"--the ancient Roman gods of the Underworld.  This is very strange for people supposedly living in the Catholic Spanish world of 17th century Seville!

Furthermore, whenever the characters appeal to a "just heaven" to punish Giovanni, they seem to be projecting their own personal vendetta onto "heaven."  For example, Donna Elvira tells Giovanni: "A just heaven willed that I would find you, in order to accomplish its own vendetta and mine."

What I see here is confirmation of Judge Morris Hoffman's claim that evolution has built our brains to punish cheaters.  Our brains incline us to three kinds of punishment.  As first-party punishment, most human beings punish themselves for cheating through conscience and guilt.  As second-party punishment, wrongdoers are punished by retaliation and revenge (delayed retaliation) from their victims.  As third-party punishment, we punish wrongdoers for harming others with retribution.

It's clear to me that Don Giovanni has no moral conscience or sense of guilt, and so he doesn't punish himself for his wrongdoing.  He's a psychopath or what I have called a "moral stranger"--someone who does not feel the moral sentiments that most of us feel.

Nevertheless, Giovanni is punished by the second-party retaliation and revenge coming from his victims and by the third-party retribution coming from those who observed his wrongdoing.  If he really was sent to Hell by the gods of a "just heaven," that would be a supernatural form of third-party punishment.

Stephen Barlow--the Director of the Santa Fe Opera's production of Don Giovanni--disagrees with my claim that Giovanni has no conscience, and he even designed his production of the opera to show that Giovanni's guilty conscience drove him to kill himself at the end, and this self-inflicted punishment takes the place of his being thrown into Hell.

Barlow's idea was to alter the staging of Don Giovanni to make the story similar to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Dorian Gray is a young man in Victorian England whose beauty is admired by both men and women.  When an artist paints a portrait of Dorian, he realizes that while he will always be beautiful in the painting, he will lose his beauty as he ages.  So, he wishes that the face in the portrait would age, while he remains young and beautiful.  His wish is fulfilled.  He devotes his life to beauty and sensuous pleasures, and he experiments with every vice, even murder.  Reflecting the increasing degradation of his soul over the years, his portrait becomes ever more hideously ugly, while he still looks beautiful.

Struggling with his guilt, he decides that he must destroy the only evidence of his vicious conduct--the portrait.  He takes a knife and stabs the picture.  Doing that, he actually stabs himself in the heart and dies.  The next day, when people find his body, they see a withered and ugly corpse, while the portrait beside him is young and beautiful again.

To mimic this story, Barlow staged his Don Giovanni in Santa Fe as set in Victorian England.  At the opening of the opera, the audience sees a young and beautiful Giovanni having his portrait painted.  Then, at the end of the opera, the statue of the Commendatore is replaced by a portrait of the Commendatore, who looks like an aged and ugly Giovanni.  The Commendatore steps out of the portrait to challenge Giovanni.  Refusing to repent, Giovanni rushes toward the painting and stabs it with a knife.  But then Giovanni falls back and collapses.  He has actually stabbed himself and dies.  His guilty conscience has driven him to kill himself.

I do not see any evidence in the music or the libretto of Don Giovanni to justify Barlow's claim that Giovanni is punished and finally killed by his own guilty conscience.  The Don as depicted in this opera acts like a psychopathic libertine who has no conscience, whose punishment comes not from himself but from those provoked by his wrongdoing into a vendetta of retaliation and retribution.

I suspect, however, that many people in the Santa Fe audience found Barlow's clever alteration of the opera's ending more satisfying than Mozart's staging of the Don's descent into the eternal torment of Hell.  This is because in recent centuries, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, belief in the Christian doctrine of Hell as a place of eternal torment has been in decline, particularly in Europe and North America.

In my next post, I will say more about this cultural evolutionary history of the symbolic reality of Hell, so that increasingly many people today, even devout Christians, can no longer believe in that traditional doctrine of Hell.

The Natural Desire for In-Group Loyalty Denies Animal Rights: Frans de Waal on the Biological Ethics of Animal Emotions

I have defended an evolutionary theory of morality as rooted in the moral emotions of evolved human nature.  In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, this evolutionary theory belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, Edward Wilson, and Frans de Waal--a tradition that is set against the Platonic and Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.

I have written previously about how de Waal's version of this evolutionary theory recognizes both the continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals (de Waal 2006).  According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships.  These moral sentiments can be seen in some form in many species of nonhuman animals.

De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality.  Through social praise and blame, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community.  These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation.  In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society.  Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals.  For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups engage in "policing behavior"--these males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded.  Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond the morality of other animals in that human beings can formulate social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.  Much of this abstract rulemaking depends on the human capacity for language.

Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human.  De Waal observes: "I know of no parallels in animals for moral reasoning" (2006, 174). We are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others.  But we can also use our distinctly human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an imagined "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith called it), so that we want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone.  We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation.  From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience, so that even when other people do not punish us for our bad conduct, we punish ourselves by feeling guilt or shame.  Those few human beings who never feel guilt or shame are psychopaths who have no conscience because they do not feel the moral emotions.  (I have written about psychopaths as "moral strangers.")  There is no evidence for anything like conscience or the impartial spectator in nonhuman animals.  (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator.")

And yet even if nonhuman animals do not show the full range of human morality, these animals do show some of the moral emotions; and therefore, de Waal argues, these nonhuman animals do deserve to be treated with some moral respect.  But then we might wonder whether these animals have equal rights.  Are we morally obligated to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings, as Peter Singer has argued?  Must we see the immorality not only in racism and sexism but also speciesism?

Recently, de Waal and Kristin Andrews have surveyed the evidence from affective neuroscience suggesting that many animals, even invertebrates, experience emotions of pleasure and pain that should give them some moral standing (de Waal and Andrews 2022).  Through emotions and felt experience (sentience), organisms judge experiences as attractive or aversive, and these physical and mental states of attraction or aversion prepare the organism for adaptive action.

So, for example, since there is increasing evidence that lobsters are sentient and experience emotions of pleasure and pain, de Waal claims, it is wrong for human beings to kill them by boiling them.  Either we shouldn't kill them at all, or there should find some ethical way to kill them.

But then de Waal recognizes that Singer's argument for equal animal rights fails because it's morally impossible for human beings to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings.  This is impossible because there is an evolved natural desire for in-group loyalty.  This belongs to my list of the twenty natural desires.  

There is an expanding circle of human moral concern that begins with each individual being concerned for himself and then extends first to the individual's family and friends and beyond that to the community, tribe, or nation, and beyond that to some humanitarian feeling for distant strangers who might be brought to one's attention, and then finally to all life forms.  But typically, the moral emotions of sympathy become weaker as they are extended farther out on the expanding circle (de Waal 2006, 163-66).

Loyalty is a moral duty in that we expect people to care more for those close to them than to distant strangers or to nonhuman animals.  Inevitably, there are conflicts of interest within and between species.  So that moral systems are inherently biased towards the in-group.  For that reason, the moral sentimentalists like Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, and de Waal, who speak of the impartiality required for moral sentiments recognize that this cannot be an absolute impartiality but only an apparent impartiality.  After all, if human beings were absolutely impartial, they would not care for themselves, for other human beings, or for other animals, because nothing would really matter.

That we should feel some sympathy for other animals, particularly for those animals that are close to us or that elicit our parental care, is an expression of our morality.  We know that one sign that a child might grow up to be a psychopath is that he is unusually cruel in his treatment of animals.  And it is mostly a he, because most psychopaths are male.

But still most of us agree that it is right to kill animals for food and other products, and that it is right to use animals for painful medical experiments necessary for developing drugs and therapies for human beings and for the scientific understanding of mammalian physiology and neurology.  We should feel some concern for minimizing animal suffering.  But we feel much more concern for minimizing human suffering.

As Westermarck observed, "absolute impartiality . . . would concede to all sentient creatures equal rights," but "impartiality . . . is not absolute, only relative, that is, impartiality within certain limits" (1900, 185).  Our sympathy for nonhuman animals is limited by our partiality for human beings.  "Humanity to animals" does require "that we ought to pay some regard to their feelings," Westermarck suggested, but this does not mean "that they should be regarded equally with the feelings of men" (1932, 213).

Even our sympathy for other human beings is limited by our in-group loyalty.  In war, fighting for one's country against the enemy is a moral duty.  Betraying one's country is treason.  But still, it can be a moral duty to refuse to fight in an unjust war.

REFERENCES

de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

de Waal, Frans, and Kristin Andrews. 2022. "The Question of Animal Emotions." Science 375: 1351-52.

Westermarck, Edward. 1900. "Remarks on the Predicates of Moral Judgment." Mind 9: 184-204.

Westermarck, Edward. 1932. Ethical Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company.

Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism: A Reply to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine

Conservatives need Charles Darwin.  

Explaining why that is so was the purpose of my article in the Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review. My article was entitled "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  This was followed by John West's article criticizing my argument entitled "Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian Conservatism."  My article can be found online.  Some of the writing in this article came from blog posts here, here, and here.

Last week, the Theology Pugcast had a one-hour podcast discussion of my article.  The three discussants were C. R. Wiley (a pastor in Vancouver, Washington), Thomas Price (a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary), and Glenn Sunshine (Professor Emeritus of History at Central Connecticut State University).  (I am grateful to Clifford Bates for drawing my attention to this podcast.)

The three discussants reach a common conclusion: Arnhart is wrong because he disagrees with us.  They offer many assertions about how they are right, and I am wrong.  But they offer very little evidence or argumentation to prove their assertions.  Watch the video, if I am wrong, please correct me.  Notice how Price laughs at the beginning, as if it is ridiculous that anyone would disagree with them.

I will comment on nine points of disagreement.

1.  ARE THERE ANY DARWINIAN CONSERVATIVES?

Wiley begins by saying that he was shocked to see my article in The Intercollegiate Review, because while he generally agrees with the articles in IR, he disagrees fundamentally with my article.  When he saw the title of the article, he assumed it would criticize Darwinian Conservatism and support Metaphysical Conservatism; and so he was deeply disturbed to see that it actually defended Darwinian Conservatism.

At first, he seems to deny that there are any Darwinian conservatives, because after all conservatism must be anti-Darwinian.  But then he says that maybe there are some Darwinian conservatives, although he implies that they can't be real conservatives.

He is silent about my history of the incipient ideas of evolutionary conservatism beginning with David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke, of how those ideas were picked up by Charles Darwin in his account of the evolution of morality, and of how those ideas were revived by conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and James Q. Wilson.

I set this empirical and evolutionary line of conservative thought against the transcendent and metaphysical conservatism of people like Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver.  Kirk said that the "first canon" of conservative thought was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty," and consequently "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature," which assumes "a transcendent moral order."  He connected this to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence" and Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  According to Kirk, the primary enemy of this metaphysical conservatism was Darwinian science.  Similarly, Weaver insisted that a healthy cultural order required a "metaphysical dream of the world," so that people could imagine their cultural life as a "metaphysical community" fulfilling a cosmic purpose.  And like Kirk, Weaver worried that Darwin's theory of evolution denied this "metaphysical dream" of cosmic order by explaining human beings as products of a natural evolutionary process governed by material causes that were not directed to any cosmic purposes.

Against this metaphysical conservatism, Hayek objected to the "obscurantism" of a conservative attitude that rejected Darwin's theory of evolution as morally corrupting.  He elaborated his view of Burkean "Old Whig" liberalism as belonging to a British empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design tradition.  In the evolutionary tradition of Hume, Smith, and Burke, Hayek explained, "it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility--the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution."  Hayek suggested that Darwin's theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.

Notice that both sides of this debate appeal to Burke.  As I show in my article, one can see in Burke's writings the split between the metaphysical and evolutionary versions of conservatism.  On the one hand, Burke says that human morality must be grounded in a religious metaphysics of cosmic design; and he cites Plato's political theology of design (in Book 10 of Plato's Laws): the authority of human laws must be founded on a religious belief in cosmic moral order as part of a divinely designed universe in which the good are rewarded and the bad punished.  

On the other hand, Burke rejected Richard Price's religious metaphysics of history and the Christian Platonism of his moral philosophy.  Price argued against the moral naturalism of Hume and the Scottish moral sense philosophers, and he scorned the idea that morality was rooted in natural moral sentiments. He contended instead that moral knowledge was a rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God.  Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke evoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the empirical foundation in human nature of moral experience.  Here he showed his agreement with the ideas of Hume and Smith, which would later be taken up by Darwin.

Early in his life, Burke had expressed his skepticism about metaphysical causes in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  He had explained that in looking for the "efficient cause" of sublimity and beauty, he did not pretend to explain the "ultimate cause," because he was pursuing a purely empirical inquiry into sense experience:

"That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any inquiry of ours.  When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depths.  All we do after, is but a faint struggle, that shows we are in an element which does not belong to us."

I assume that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would say that I am completely wrong about this history of conservative thought as split between empirical evolutionary ideas of natural morality and transcendent metaphysical ideas of cosmic moral order.  But I can't be sure because they are silent about all of this.

2. TWO DIFFERENT METAPHYSICS?  THE PROBLEM OF ULTIMATE EXPLANATION

They do say a lot, however, in criticizing the title of my article.  "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism" implies that Darwinian conservatism is not metaphysical.  On the contrary, they say, my Darwinian naturalism is actually a metaphysics; and so the dispute here is between two different metaphysics.  This must be so because any fundamental view of reality must depend on some metaphysical first principles about the ultimate ground of all things.  A naturalistic metaphysics assumes that Nature is the ultimate ground of Being.  A theistic metaphysics assumes that God is the ultimate ground of Being. 

If we define metaphysics as the branch of philosophy concerned with the first principles of all things, then Darwinian naturalism might seem to be metaphysical.  But as I indicated in my article (pp. 22-23), I was using the word metaphysical in the sense of supernatural or transcendent, which is recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary, and in that sense Darwinian naturalism is not metaphysical.

Actually, I have argued that while Darwinian science, like all natural science, requires a methodological naturalism that allows for the possibility of a metaphysical theism, it does not require a metaphysical naturalism that denies metaphysical theism.  A methodological naturalism means that we must adopt as a methodological principle that all of our scientific explanations must be grounded in the laws of nature without any appeal to supernatural revelation.  But this methodological naturalism leaves open the possibility that as a matter of faith we might move beyond nature to nature's God as the First Cause of nature.  This is the basis for those scientists who have embraced theistic evolution or evolutionary creation--the idea that God created the Big Bang and the laws of nature that have allowed the evolutionary unfolding of cosmic history. 

In fact, Darwin himself was open to a theistic metaphysics, because as I have indicated in a previous post, he accepted the Thomistic principle of "dual causality" in distinguishing "secondary causes" from "primary causes." While God might by understood by faith as the First Cause of all things, the evolution of species occurred through the "secondary causes" of natural evolutionary laws, and consequently there was no need for God to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create each species.  Thus Darwin allowed for the theistic evolution that has been embraced by people like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, Deborah Haarsma, and Alvin Plantinga.  I have written about this in a previous post.

Darwin concluded--in both the Origin and Descent--that there was no necessary contradiction between his theory and religious belief. In the concluding chapter of the Origin, he declared: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one." He quoted a remark by the Reverend Charles Kingsley: "it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

His famous last sentence of the book evoked the image of the Creator as First Cause, borrowing language that echoes the Biblical book of Genesis: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

This opens the possibility of a theistic evolution for those who seek a reconciliation of religious belief and evolutionary science.

At some times in his life, Darwin identified himself as a theist.  At other times, particularly in his later years, he identified himself as a skeptic or agnostic.  But he always insisted that he was not an atheist.  In any case, he never believed that the Genesis story of Creation in six days was to be taken literally.  I have written about some of this here and here.

Nevertheless, the critical point for my argument is that Darwin could explain the evolution of morality and social order as a purely natural process.  He recognized that while religious belief was often important in the cultural evolution of morality, this moral evolution could be understood as a matter of natural law without any necessary appeal to a supernatural revelation.

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine repeatedly say that this naturalistic explanation of moral evolution must fail because nature isn't self-explanatory without God.  Nature must have its transcendent source in God.  Ultimately, we must ask: Why is there anything at all?  The only possible answer, they say, is God.  But then, of course, we must ask: Why is there a God?  And why is He the way he is?

Here we face the problem of ultimate explanation: all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained.  To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience.  That's just the way it is.

Why is there something rather than nothing?  Well, why not?  

There is nothing in our experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing.  Indeed, we cannot even understand absolute nothingness, because we have no experience of absolute nothingness.  Therefore, if we are reasoning from our ordinary experience of the world, the existence of an omnipotent God who created everything out of nothing is highly improbable or even incomprehensible.

If we appeal to the existence of God as the ultimate cause of nature's order, we still cannot explain the ultimate cause of God.  Burke pointed to this problem in speaking of the futility of looking for the "ultimate cause."  It might seem very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but it is just as unlikely that God would exist uncaused.  Since we have never directly observed God creating everything out of nothing, but every day we observe the causal regularities of nature, the existence of an uncaused nature is to the skeptical thinker far more probable than the existence of an uncaused God.

As Darwin said, "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."  Metaphysical conservatives like Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say the mystery is solved by believing in God as the Creator ex nihilo.  But that commits the fallacy of explaining a great mystery with an even greater mystery.

Moreover, it should be noted that the Bible never says that God created everything ex nihilo.  That "out of nothing" doctrine was imposed by some Christian theologians.  But the first two chapters of Genesis suggest that the Creator was working on some preexisting formless matter, which is not nothing!

Consequently, in our search for ultimate explanations, we must appeal either to nature (if we're a skeptic) or to God (if we're a believer) as the unexplained ground of all explanation.  Thus does the natural desire to understand lead us to this most fundamental of choices--nature or God, reason or revelation.

Darwin was a Socratic scientific philosopher who chose reason over revelation, but with the understanding that reason cannot refute revelation.

I have written many posts elaborating these points.  Some can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

3. DOES METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM INCLINE TOWARDS THEOCRACY?

At this point, we might wonder whether this metaphysical debate makes any difference for our moral and political life.  If I am right, it does make a difference, because metaphysical conservatism inclines towards theocracy.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine object to this by saying that a theocratic (or God-centered) metaphysics does not necessarily dictate a theocratic politics.  "We're all in a theocratic reality," Price asserts.  But this need not dictate theocratic politics, Sunshine says, if we see that God is interested in human liberty.

In my article, I pointed to some examples of metaphysical conservatives who support theocracy.  I noted that the Intercollegiate Review had published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?"  His answer to the question was "No."  He argued that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the metaphysical standard for all human action.  

I also noted Dinesh D'Sousa's book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he tried to persuade American conservatives that "conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims."  Traditional Muslims believe that America's liberal morality will destroy their religion and their way of life.  American conservatives, D'Souza insisted, should admit that the Muslims are right.  America really is morally corrupt.  American conservatives should join with fundamentalist Muslims in fighting against secular morality and fighting for theocratic morality.

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about D'Sousa's book.  But Wiley asserts that I have distorted Brague, because what he calls theocracy does not mean theocratic politics.  After all, Wiley observes, some conservatives like Doug Wilson have argued for "theocratic libertarianism."

This is a confusing use of the word "theocracy" that departs from the root meaning of the word.  The English word "theocracy" is a translation of the Greek word theocratia that was coined by Josephus as a term for ancient Israel as ruled by the Mosaic laws.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines "theocracy" as 

"A form of government in which God (or a deity) is recognized as the king or immediate ruler, and his laws are taken as the statute-book of the kingdom, these laws being usually administered by a priestly order as his ministers and agents; hence (loosely) a system of government by a sacerdotal order, claiming a divine commission; also, a state so governed: esp. applied to the commonwealth of Israel from the exodus to the election of Saul as king."

This doesn't look like libertarianism to me.  On the contrary, it looks more like the theocratic regime sought by conservative Catholic integralists who argue that politics must order the lives of citizens to direct them to the eternal salvation of their souls, and for this the temporal power of government must be subordinated to the spiritual power of the Church.  Some integralists point to the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX in medieval France as their model.  This is a Christian version of Israel under the Mosaic law or of Plato's theocratic city in the Laws. 

This suggests to me that deciding whether a G0d-centered metaphysics requires a theocratic political regime will depend upon whether one is looking to the God of the Old Testament or the God of the New Testament.  As I have indicated in a previous post, Roger Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for denouncing the Puritan rule there as a theocracy enforcing Mosaic law that was contrary to the New Testament, where the Christian churches were voluntary associations that did not persecute heretics or unbelievers.  In Rhode Island, he established a political order that tolerated all religions and even atheists.  This showed how God-centered Christians could reject the theocratic God of the Old Testament and embrace the Lockean liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty suggested in the New Testament.  One can see this, for example, in the Christian Lockean liberalism of C. S. Lewis.

4.  IMMANENT TELEOLOGY VERSUS COSMIC TELEOLOGY

In a Lockean liberal society with religious liberty, where people will not be persecuted for heresy, blasphemy, or atheism, some people will be guided by a religiously-informed cosmic teleology, while others will be guided by the immanent teleology that is part of our evolved human nature.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that evolutionary science cannot support any teleology.  Price says that I illicitly import formal and final causes into my reasoning.  But they assert this without responding to my argument that while the evolutionary explanation of morality cannot appeal to the cosmic teleology of the metaphysical conservatives, the evolutionary explanation does recognize the immanent teleology of living beings.  

Cosmic teleology is the metaphysical conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or Creator.  By contrast, the immanent teleology of organic life is manifest in the goal-directed generation, structure, and activity of individual organisms.  Even if evolution by natural selection is not purposeful, it produces organic beings that are purposeful.  Plants and animals grow to maturity, and once grown, they act for ends set by the functional nature of the species.  Human beings act to satisfy the natural desires of their evolved human nature.

Darwin recognized the teleological character of his evolutionary science.  In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology."  In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that."  When Darwin read some of Aristotle's biological works, he saw that he and Aristotle were in agreement about biological teleology.  I have written about this.

5. DID DARWIN NATURALIZE GENOCIDE?

If Darwin has a teleology, Sunshine suggests, it must be an immoral teleology of survival of the fittest leading to genocide.  This must be so because Darwinian evolution is driven by competition within the species.  He quotes this passage from Darwin's Descent of Man:  "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races" (1871, I:201; 2004 [Penguin ed.], 183).

When Sunshine says that evolution is all about competition within the species, he ignores Darwin's insistence that the evolution of human morality arises from human sociability and sympathy (Descent of Man, I:70-106; 2004, 120-151).  It is true, however, that Darwin recognized tribal conflict and group selection: "It is no argument against savage man being a social animal, that the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other; for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species" (I.85; 2004, 132).  Darwin thought that one of the "chief causes of the low morality of savages" was "the confinement of sympathy to the same tribe" (I.97; 2004, 143).  

Nevertheless, Darwin looked forward to the cultural evolution of morality towards a universal humanitarian sympathy: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races" (I:100-101; 2004, 147).

This cultural evolution of morality allows us to recognize the immorality of tribal warfare, such as that endorsed by the Old Testament.  Moses said that Yahweh told him to wage holy war in which the captured enemy towns would be put under a "curse of destruction," so that "thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth" (Deuteronomy 20:10-18).  So in the holy war against the Midianites, the soldiers of Israel killed all of the adult men, but they saved the women and children as captives.  When Moses saw this, he was enraged.  He ordered them: "So kill all the male children and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves" (Numbers 31:7-20).  Our evolved moral sense allows us to see the evil in such tribal brutality.

But then what should we say about the passage quoted by Sunshine, where Darwin speaks of the "civilized races" exterminating the "savage races"?  We should notice, first of all, that unlike Moses Darwin did not sanctify this as commanded by God.  We should also notice that Darwin was reporting what he had observed during his trip around the world on the Beagle, and that he recognized the evil in such tribal cruelty.  As I have noted in a post on this, Darwin condemned the Europeans who were exterminating the indigenous people of South America, Australia, and New Zealand.  Even if the Europeans were "a little superior in civilization" and superior in military power, Darwin observed, they were "inferior in every moral virtue."

Thus did Darwin show how an evolved moral sense could support his moral condemnation of European tribal brutality.

6.  WAS NIETZSCHE RIGHT ABOUT THE CHRISTIAN BASIS OF ALL MORALITY?

And yet Wiley, Price, and Sunshine say that Darwin failed to see that his morality was derived not from natural human evolution but from his Christian culture.  Although Darwin was not a Christian, he still held onto a Christian morality.  Even if he thought he was an atheist, he was a Christian in his moral practice.  Because if he had really been an atheist, who believed that there was no God to institute moral law by divine command, then he would have believed that "If God is dead, everything is permitted," and he would have become a murderous psychopath like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine talk a lot about this point when they say that atheists like Richard Dawkins and Jurgen Habermas are actually "Christian atheists" insofar as they show the cultural influence of Christian morality.  

Wiley, Price, and Sunshine have picked up this idea from some remarks by Friedrich Nietzsche and Jordan Peterson's interpretation of those remarks.  They are very enamored of Peterson, and they say they want to have him appear in a Theology Pugcast podcast.

I have criticized this Nietzsche/Peterson/Dostoevsky idea that morality is impossible without the Christian belief in morality as created by Divine Command.  Some of my posts on this can be found here, here, and here.  On a related point, I have argued that the modern idea of universal human rights can be grounded in Darwinian biology without any need for religious beliefs (look here, here, and here).

In these posts, I have argued that Peterson's reasoning is silly.  The only reason we don't commit murder is because we believe that God commands us not to murder.  So if we believed that God was dead, we would commit murder.  Therefore, if we don't commit murder, our actions show that we are not atheists.  But then, eventually, as modern atheism becomes such a deeply felt belief that it becomes expressed in our actions--once we have consumed God's corpse, and there's nothing more to eat--we should expect that we will all become murderers.

If this were true, we would expect to see empirical historical evidence that religious belief is correlated with a low homicide rate, and declining religious belief is correlated with a high homicide rate.  But there is a lot of evidence for declining violence over the past centuries, with some of the steepest declines in the less religious countries. 

In fact, even Peterson cites Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature as supporting this conclusion: "The probability that a modern person, in a functional democratic country, will now kill or be killed is infinitesimally low compared to what it was in previous societies (and still is, in the unorganized and anarchic parts of the world)" (58).  Oddly, Peterson does not notice how this contradicts his prediction that the modern death of God must necessarily turn us all into murderous Raskolnikovs.

It's surprising to me that in all the commentary on Peterson that I have read, no one has pointed out this fundamental contradiction in his arguments.

Moreover, Peterson ignores all the problems with his Divine Command Theory of morality.  For example, what should a father do if God commands him to murder his son (Genesis 22)?  Is murder the right thing to do when God commands it?  Amazingly, even Thomas Aquinas says that murder is right if God commands it (ST, II-II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 1).  Would Wiley, Price, and Sunshine agree with this?

7.  DOES DARWIN REDUCE ALL HUMAN DESIRES TO SURVIVAL AND REPRODUCTION?

But having argued that a naturally evolved moral sense is a more reliable guide to morality than Divine Command, I know that Wiley, Price, and Sunshine would object by saying, as Wiley does, that Darwinian morality is crudely reductionist because the only moral ends are survival and reproduction.

Surely, however, survival and reproduction are important moral ends.  Whenever Moses has to give a reason for the people of Israel to obey his laws, he says that obeying the law will allow them to live and propagate themselves (Deuteronomy 4:1, 4:40, 5:29, 6:1-3, 24, 8:1, 11:8-9, 20, 22:7, 23:9-14, 25:15, 30:15-20).  The natural desires for life and parental care are human universals.  Do Wiley, Price, and Sunshine deny this?

Of course, survival and reproduction are only the minimal conditions of morality.  I argue that the natural desires for life and parental care are only two of 20 natural desires that constitute the natural standards for moral order.  Wiley, Price, and Sunshine are silent about this.

8.  PLANTINGA'S EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT AGAINST NATURALISM

In all of my responses here to Wiley, Price, and Sunshine, I have assumed the validity of Darwinian evolutionary science in explaining human nature and human morality.  But they say that Alvin Plantinga has proven that a purely naturalistic science cannot claim any rational validity unless it accepts a metaphysical theism. 

Plantinga argues that the theistic doctrine of the human mind as created by God in His image provides the necessary support for the validity of human thought, including the validity of modern science. If we embrace Naturalism--the view that nothing exists except Nature, and so there is no God or nothing like God--we are caught in self-contradiction: if human thought originated not from a divine Mind but from the irrational causes of Nature, then we cannot trust our minds as reliable, and thus we cannot trust our belief in Naturalism. Naturalism destroys itself by destroying the rationality of believing in Naturalism, or anything else. Insofar as science--including evolutionary science--depends on the validity of human thought, and insofar as theism is the indispensable support for trusting in the validity of human thought, science is not only compatible with theism, science depends upon theism.

Remarkably, however, Wiley, Price, and Sunshine invoke Plantinga's argument without even mentioning, much less answering, the powerful criticisms of that argument.  It's as though they think they need not concern themselves with the criticisms, because Plantinga agrees with them, and therefore he must be right.

The weak link in Plantinga's argument for metaphysical naturalism as self-defeating is his assumption that adaptive behavior is completely unrelated to true belief. The evidence of evolutionary history suggests that evolution produces cognitive faculties that are reliable but fallible. The mental abilities of animals, including human beings, are fallible because evolution produces adaptations that are good enough but not perfect, and this results in the mental fallibility that is familiar to us.

But despite this fallibility, the mental faculties cannot be absolutely unreliable. Even Plantinga concedes (in his debate with Daniel Dennett) that in the evolution of animals, "adaptive behavior requires accurate indicators."  So, for example, a frog must have sensory equipment that allows him to accurately detect flies so that he can catch them with his tongue. Similarly, the immune system of the human body must accurately indicate the presence of foreign bodies and then accurately devise responses to destroy the invaders. But then Plantinga argues that these accurate indicators don't require true beliefs. It's not clear that the frog has any beliefs. And the human being is probably not even aware of what the immune system is doing exactly.

What this shows, of course, is that much of an animal's adaptive behavior through mental activity does not require conscious reasoning at all. But for those animals who do develop some capacity for conscious reasoning--and most preeminently human beings--the accuracy of this conscious reasoning will be important for adaptation. The highest mental capacities of human beings are so biologically expensive in terms of the investment of energy they consume that it is implausible that evolution would have produced them unless they improved the ability of human beings to track the truth about themselves and their environment. Again, this is going to be fallible, but it's implausible that human beings could be naturally evolved for being in a state of complete and perpetual delusion.

And yet that's exactly what Plantinga asks us to imagine--that we could have been naturally evolved for a state of complete and perpetual delusion. Having taken this step of absurd Cartesian skepticism, he then tells us that the only escape from such skepticism is to assume that God would never allow this to happen. But as always is the case for the Cartesian skeptic, this all depends on imagining scenarios that are utterly implausible and unsupported by even a shred of evidence.

Only those who find Cartesian skepticism plausible will find Plantinga's argument plausible.  Indeed, Plantinga's argument originated with Descartes.

For example, consider this possibility for human evolution suggested by Plantinga:

So suppose Paul is a prehistoric hominid; a hungry tiger approaches. Fleeing is perhaps the most appropriate behavior: . . . this behavior could be produced by a large number of different belief-desire pairs. . . .

Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. . . . Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it, but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it. . . . or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a regularly recurring illusion, and, hoping to keep his weight down, has formed the resolution to run a mile at top speed whenever presented with such an illusion; or perhaps he thinks he is about to take part in a sixteen-hundred-meter race, wants to win, and believes the appearance of the tiger is the starting signal; or perhaps . . . . Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.

Sunshine quotes from this passage about Paul the prehistoric hominid as an example of Plantinga's profound insight.

Well, yes, these weird stories are all logically possible, as modern philosophers like to say. But they are also utterly implausible, because there is no evidence that anything like this could have happened in human evolution. Plantinga's claim that there is no clear connection between adaptive behavior and true beliefs in evolutionary history depends on fantasies of his imagination unsupported by evidence. He has to do that, because if he actually looked at the evidence of human evolutionary history bearing upon the emergence of human mental faculties, he would be faced with evidence for the evolution of human cognitive capacities for exploring the world that are generally reliable, even if fallible.

He would also see evidence that human beings can use their fallible mental capacities to correct their mistakes. After all, the very capacity to recognize our fallibility presupposes our skill for reliable reasoning about ourselves and our world. There are good reasons to believe that this can be explained as an outcome of a natural evolutionary process in which divine intervention was not necessary.

I have written about Plantinga's argument here, here, here, and here.

9.  SLAVERY, THE BIBLE, AND THE EVOLVED MORAL SENSE

One example of our evolved ability to use our fallible mental capacities to correct our moral mistakes is our ability to see that while slavery has been practiced for thousands of years, it has always been "a great crime," as Darwin called it (2004, 141-42).  And here using our evolved moral sense to correct our mistakes includes correcting the Bible's endorsement of slavery.  

I developed this argument in the last section of my Intercollegiate Review article.  Remarkably, however, Wiley began the Theology Pugcast podcast by saying that they would ignore this section of the article.  He offered no explanation for this except to say that I had "an ax to grind" in this section.

In this section of the article, I claimed that the contrast between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism was illustrated in how they differ in their understanding of the moral debate over slavery.  Darwinian conservatism can recognize the immorality of slavery as contrary to our evolved moral sense.  Against this, my critics have argued that any moral condemnation of slavery must ultimately rest upon a religious metaphysics that sees slavery as contrary to God's law.

Hume, Smith, and Darwin saw slavery as a violation of the moral sentiments--particularly, those sentiments that enforce justice as reciprocity.  Slavery is a form of social parasitism, as can be seen in slavery among ants.  And since human slaves are not naturally adapted to their enslavement, they will resist their exploitation; and slaveholders will have to impose their rule over their slaves by force and fraud.  In the effort to justify slavery, slaveholders will espouse a fraudulent ideology of paternalism that claims that the slaves are naturally benefited by their enslavement.  Proslavery ideology in the American South asserted that black slaves were physically, morally, and intellectually inferior to whites in their biological nature, and so these black slaves were happier when they were enslaved to white masters.  One of the primary motivations for Darwin's writing of The Descent of Man was to refute this ideology of scientific racism by showing that all of the human races were members of the same human species with the same moral sense that condemned slavery as parasitic exploitation.

The critics of Darwinian conservatism have insisted, however, that a Darwinian account of morality cannot sustain a moral case against slavery, which requires a universal morality based upon the cosmic moral law of a religious metaphysics as taught by the Bible.  The problem with this reasoning is that the Bible supports slavery.

Metaphysical conservatives like Richard Weaver have admired the "older religiousness" in the American South before the Civil War, and they have recognized that part of the Southern religion was faith in the Bible as supporting slavery.  According to Weaver, slavery "is well recognized in the Old Testament, and it is not without endorsement in the New; indeed, a strict constructionism interpretation almost requires its defense."  Similarly, historian Mark Malvasi (writing in the conservative journal Modern Age) has seen the American South as the last bastion of the "Old Republic," which was founded on "a genuinely Christian slavery."

Malvasi identified the Reverend Frederick Ross's Slavery Ordained of God, published in 1857, as one of the best statements of the biblical justification for slavery.  Ross adhered to a divine command theory of morality.  Ross insisted that to look to natural standards of right and wrong independently of God's will was atheism.  (He condemned the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence as an expression of Thomas Jefferson's atheism.)  We know what is right and wrong only because, and to the extent that, we know whether God has declared it right or wrong.  And for this, we must turn to the Bible as God's revelation of His will.  Therefore, we cannot know whether slavery is right or wrong except by seeing what the Bible teaches about God's will as to slavery.

Ross noted that the Old Testament clearly endorsed slavery.  The ancient Israelites practiced it, and God commanded it.  Similarly, in the New Testament, the Christians accepted slavery as practiced by the ancient Romans.  Paul taught slaves to obey their masters, just as he taught children to obey their parents and wives to obey their husbands.

The dispute over the Bible's handling of the slavery issue divided the Christian churches in America before and during the Civil War.  Americans had looked to the Bible as the revelation of the sacred order of the universe that would resolve all moral disputes by the cosmic authority of God's law.  But in this greatest moral crisis in American history, the Bible failed to provide any clear answer in the dispute over slavery between North and South.  As Abraham Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural Address, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

In such a situation, human beings must appeal to some natural moral sense like that espoused by Hume, Smith, and Darwin.  Darwinian conservatives can explain this moral sense as rooted in evolved human nature and as shaped by moral sentiments, moral traditions, and practical judgments.  Unlike the metaphysical conservatives, who claim that all social order must conform to some supernatural order of intelligent design or divine creation, evolutionary conservatives see social order as the product of ordinary human experience as guided by nature, custom, and prudence.

That's why conservatives need Charles Darwin.

I have written about the debate over slavery and the Bible here and here.

I have invited Wiley, Price, and Sunshine to write a response to this post.  If they do so, I will be happy to post it here.