The Aristotelian and Darwinian Teleology of Ethics and Politics: A Reply to "Darwinian Reactionary"

My argument for Darwinian natural right originated as a response to what Leo Strauss had said in his Introduction to Natural Right and History.  Strauss observed: "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe.  All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them."  This dependence of natural right on a teleological view of the universe was clearly seen by Aristotle, Strauss explained.  But the "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."

I agreed with Roger Masters that Strauss was wrong to suggest that the question of teleology depended on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle's teleology was primarily biological, and so the question was whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature, and whether modern Darwinian biology supports such a teleological explanation of organisms.

My answer to this question was that Darwinian biology really does support Aristotelian teleology.  My thinking here was decisively influenced by my reading of Allan Gotthelf's dissertation at Columbia University--"Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality" (1975)--and some of his other writing (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 238-43).  I was persuaded by Gotthelf that Aristotle's final causality is best interpreted as living nature's irreducible potential for form: the development, structure, and functioning of a living organism manifest the actualization of its potential for organic form, an actualization that depends on, but is not reducible to, the natural potentialities of its material elements.  Moreover, far from refuting Aristotle's teleology, modern Darwinian biology provides an evolutionary explanation for living nature's irreducible potential for form.

Understanding the Darwinian teleology of human nature supports a teleological standard for both ethics and politics.  Teleological ethics is based on Aristotle's idea that "the good is the desirable" (Rhetoric 1362a22), that there are at least twenty natural desires of evolved human nature, and that to achieve the harmonious ordering of our often conflicting desires over a whole life, which constitutes human happiness or flourishing, requires good habits of choice and prudence--the moral and intellectual virtues examined in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education, and Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.  We can then see that cultivating those virtues is the natural end of a good social order.  We can also see that a classical liberal--or liberal conservative--social order is best in cultivating those virtues.

Teleological politics is rooted in the evolved political psychology of human nature as a tense balance between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few politically ambitious individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a regime, with these ambitious few competing for the top position.  Deference is the natural propensity of most individuals to submit to those who are politically dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of subordinate individuals to resist exploitative dominance.  We can judge political regimes as better or worse, depending on how well they satisfy these evolved political desires of human nature.  And we can see that a liberal constitutional republic that establishes limited government with a balance of powers under the rule of law is the best political order, because it satisfies the evolved desire of the ruling few to dominate while also satisfying the evolved desire of the subordinate many to be free from exploitative dominance, which secures a balance between governmental authority and individual liberty.  What I am calling the "liberal constitutional republic" corresponds to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call "inclusive institutions" and what Douglas North and his colleagues call the "open access society."

But now the "Darwinian Reactionary" (DR) is criticizing my teleological ethics and politics.  The "Darwinian Reactionary" blog has been running now for almost 13 years.  Recently, DR posted an essay entitled "Darwinian Reactionary vs. Darwinian Conservatism vs. Darwinian Left."  He says that his blog was originally inspired by his reading of Peter Singer's Darwinian Left and my Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism.  He was looking for someone who understood the implications of Darwinian science for ethics and politics.  He saw that Singer was good in showing how a Darwinian understanding of human nature made a socialist utopia impossible, but Singer didn't offer any clear program for what the ethics and politics of a Darwinian Left would look like.  

DR agreed with my attempt to revive an Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural ethical and political norms grounded in Darwinian biology.  But he found that while he agreed with many of my premises, he disagreed with most of my conclusions.  He suggests "that Arnhart is neither sufficiently Aristotelian nor Darwinian."  The main reason for that failure, he asserts, is that "Arnhart is missing the bridge between these two titans," which is "the work of Ruth Millikan, and when you walk across that bridge, I would contend, you end up with my positions."  Here he is referring particularly to Millikan's 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological Causes (MIT Press).

He argues for both an ethical theory, which he calls "bioformalism," and a political theory, which he calls "teleoformalism," that he regards as superior to my Darwinian natural right of ethics and politics.

TELEOLOGICAL ETHICS

DR's starting point is Millikan's evolutionary theory of teleological functions.  He explains:

Millikan's Darwinian account of teleology holds an item's proper function is the effect which was replicated because it provided a reproductive benefit.  In the case of living things, we can see that it is the distinctive form of life itself that has been selected for replication because this form of life has proven to be reproductively advantageous.  This is the account of the good that I have called bioformalism.  For humans this is to develop our skills and excellences as children, to attract the best mate possible, to bear and support children, and to work cooperatively with others in order to produce the most advantageous environment in which to live.  The reason Arnhart does not take this path, I would contend, is partially an ignorance of the literature on function, or not fully seeing how it can be applied to Aristotelian teleology, despite spending a lot of time discussing what he calls 'immanent teleology.'  He never cites Millikan despite her being more responsible than anyone for the revival of teleology through a Darwinian lens.

I never cite Millikan because when I read her book, I didn't see that she had added much to what Allan Gotthelf had written about Aristotelian/Darwinian teleology in 1975, 19 years before the publication of her book.  Millikan did not cite Gotthelf in her book, so I assume she was ignorant of his work.  

Most of what DR says about Millikan's theory corresponds to what I have said about "functional causes" and "natural ends" (DNR, 101-105, 238-248).  For example, DR says that part of the teleological good for human beings is "to bear and support children."  I agree.  Because this corresponds to what I say about the natural desire for parental care:

The function of parental care for animals is to protect and nurture offspring that could not survive or grow to maturity without such care.  Throughout the history of the human species, infants have survived and grown only with the help of adults who were willing to feed, protect, and educate them for many years.  If we accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which favors those functional adaptations that promoted survival and reproduction in evolutionary history, it would seem likely, therefore, that the desire to care for children is a natural adaptation for human beings (DNR, 103).

But while DR seems to agree with this account of natural desires, he argues that I can't properly explain the distinction between true or normal desires and false or abnormal desires.  To say that the good is the desirable, I have argued, is not to say that the good is whatever we happen to desire at any moment, because we can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable.  DR insists, however, that I need Millikan to explain this.

Millikan's Normal conditions are much better at doing the work that Arnhart wants his poorly defined notion of a true desire to do.  And so when Arnhart says "an animal can mistakenly desire what in fact is not truly desirable," we can translate this as "When desires work Normally, they will produce their selected effect; in abNormal conditions (say, when the individual is guided by false beliefs or mental illness), a desire might not benefit the organism the way it has been designed."  For example, perhaps an adolescent male is engaging in risky behavior.  We can postulate that the impulses of adolescent males to engage in risky behavior have been built into us in order, say, to develop one's strength for conflict, or perhaps display fitness to females, or to learn and push one's limits for competitive advantage.  If the individual is badly injured in this behavior, the desire has not produced the effect it was selected for, that is, conditions are abNormal and not gone "according to (nature's) plan.

Well, okay, I can agree with this "translation" of my thought.  But I don't see that this adds anything substantive to what I have said about the "four sources of moral disagreement"--fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires (both normal and abnormal variation in human desires) (DNR, 44-45).

DR also argues that I don't have a good answer to the criticism that my list of twenty natural desires is naive in that it includes the "positive" desires but not the "negative" ones. For example, why not include cruelty and exploitation as natural human desires? The suggestion is that I haven't offered any justification for including only the "nice" desires on my list. Actually, there can be a dark side to most if not all of these natural desires. Obviously, cruelty and exploitation often arise from the natural desires for social ranking and war. And, in fact, many of my critics have criticized me for including war on my list of natural desires. 

But there is a criterion of selection favoring what is truly desirable over what is mistakenly desired that is implicit in the natural desire for friendship.  I understand "friendship" in its broad Aristotelian sense of "social affiliation," which coincides with what David Hume and Adam Smith called "sympathy," and which is the ground for all the moral sentiments and virtues.  In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides a comprehensive account of the social and political formation of the virtues through "friendship" (philia), which for Aristotle is a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some care for one another.  And so, for example, Aristotle identifies "political friendship" as the social glue that binds a people into a political community of mutual care for one another.  

Similarly, Hume and Smith identified "sympathy" as any kind of "fellow feeling" among human beings.  Darwin adopted this idea and made "sympathy" one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order.  More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word "empathy" in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call "sympathy," or what Aristotle would call "friendship."  All agree with Aristotle that the various forms of friendly feeling or social bonding that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species are originally rooted in the natural affection of parental care for offspring (NE, 1155a1-33, 1159a27-37, 1160b23-62a29).  "In the household, are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice" (Eudemian Ethics, 1242b1-2).

In explaining a man's desire to be worthy of praise and not blame, Smith observed, "Nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men" (TMS, 117).  When we praise others, we do so because we think they are truly virtuous, not because of their deceptive appearance of virtue that hides the reality of vice.  If we think they have deceived us into thinking they are more virtuous than they really are, then we blame them.  Therefore our rules of morality dictate that we praise what is truly praiseworthy and blame what is truly blameworthy.  We then feel guilty if we violate these rules ourselves, which is conscience.  A man who feels guilty, Smith explained, "anticipates the contempt and derision from which nothing saves him but the ignorance of those he lives with.  He still feels that he is the natural object of these sentiments, and still trembles at the thought of what he would suffer, if they were ever actually exerted against him" (TMS, 118).

Smith observed that our natural desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments--which I call our natural desire for friendship--makes it painful for us to even imagine that others would not share our sentiments.  We judge ourselves by how we appear to an imaginary impartial spectator who is not deceived by mere appearances, so that we care not only for our real reputation, but even for our imaginary reputation.  Of course, it is easier for us to do what is praiseworthy when we are actually praised for our good conduct, and that's why only a few individuals are high-minded enough to always do what is truly praiseworthy, even when they are not actually praised, or even when they are unfairly condemned.

Although Darwin never used Smith's phrase impartial spectator, Darwin's account of morality as arising from social instincts of sympathy and reason conforms to Smith's impartial spectator procedure (Descent of Man, 136-148).  And as it was for Smith, Darwin saw this procedure as motivating our concern for both our real and our imagined reputations.  He observed: "Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us--of their imagined approbation or disapprobation; and this all follows from sympathy, a fundamental element of the social instincts.  A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be an unnatural monster" (Descent, 136).  Darwin recognized that Smithian sympathy is variable across individuals, and some few individuals, perhaps pure psychopaths, might show little or no concern for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, which would make such a person "an unnatural monster."  Similarly, Smith suggested that those who could commit dreadful crimes without feeling any pangs of remorse would have to fall into "the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete insensibility to honor and infamy, to vice and virtue" (TMS, 118).

What Smith and Darwin described as the emergence of moral sentiments from the mutual sympathy of sentiments is what evolutionary theorists today would call "reciprocal altruism."  We cooperate with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange.  I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity).  It's tit for tat.  People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputations as untrustworthy cheaters.  And the most reliably trustworthy people are those who live under the all-seeing eyes of the imaginary impartial spectator.

But DR thinks this is all wrong.

Human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others; the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis.  As an additional example, I recall reading an account of Native Americans who had captured a young girl from another tribe.  At first they seemed to welcome her into the tribe and treated her kindly, until one day they tied her to a tree, and the entire tribe took turns firing arrows into her until she was a bloody pulp.  That's human nature for you.  The tribesmen in my example were not a band of psychopaths, they were not mentally defective, they were not irrational, or subhuman and lacking in some innate moral sense possessed by other humans. . . . Harming one's enemies is ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history. . . .

DR notes that in my blog posts on human rights, I have quoted Darwin about how human beings can extend their sympathy to embrace all of humanity:

Darwin saw a history of moral progress in which human sympathy has been gradually extended from the family to small tribes, then to large nations, and eventually to all of humanity. In the Descent of Man, he wrote: "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 once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." 

DR objects:

I have to disagree with Darwin here, the barrier is not artificial.  Evolution would demand that sympathies extend to those who are actually cooperators, and distrust and animosity extend to those who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being.  It would not entail that we extend sympathy to competitors.

DR quotes me as saying that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "shows how moral outrage against atrocities expresses a universal morality," and that "we judge that as a rule human beings have a right to life because the killing of innocent people would elicit moral emotions of disapproval from any normal human being."

But DR objects: "human history is absolutely swimming in cases where the killing of innocent people was celebrated on a mass scale.  If the good is just what other people approve of, then Nazis or the tribesmen in my example are good."

DR is mistaken when he says "the evils done by Nazis did receive approval from other Nazis."  As far as I know there is no evidence that the Nazis approved the evils of Nazism.  There is, however, plenty of evidence that the Nazis approved of Nazism because they believed (mistakenly) that it was good--perhaps even a transcendent good.  That's why some historians of Nazism have written books about "Hitler's Ethic" and "The Nazi Conscience."

Richard Weikart argues that Hitler illustrates how the greatest evils are often perpetrated under the appearance of doing good--especially, if the apparent good is a utopian vision that seems to justify any means to the utopian end. I agree with this, because I am persuaded of the Aristotelian principle that people tend to act for the good, or at least for what appears good to them. It is unlikely that any influential moral or political movement can prevail if it does not appeal to some moral sense that a great good is being achieved. The problem, however, is that human beings are often mistaken in their moral beliefs, particularly when they are seduced by some utopian conception of radical transformation that requires evil means to apparently good ends.

According to Weikart, the fundamental end for Hitler's ethic was the evolutionary improvement in the human species. Hitler interpreted the Darwinian conception of evolution as dominated by a struggle for existence as teaching that the only moral imperative was the survival and reproduction of the superior races over the inferior races. The Aryan or Nordic race prevalent in the German Volk arose in evolutionary history as the superior race. Promoting the progressive expansion of that race would therefore promote the biological improvement of the human species.

As I have indicated in previous posts, many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantians who believed in "eternal values" and in Nazism as fulfilling that eternal moral order. Moreover, Claudia Koonz's book The Nazi Conscience (2003) shows how the Nazi regime was organized around a strict communitarian morality of sacrificing selfish interests for the good of the community. Also, Jonathan Glover's moral history of the 20th century shows how the greatest atrocities were committed by those moved by a fanatical utopian belief in the goodness of their cause.

That the Nazis had a moral sense was clear in the Nuremberg Trials as portrayed in the recent movie Nuremberg. 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 Douglas 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).  It "spoiled everything" because there was no way for the Nazis to evade the moral disgust that it elicited. 

Now, while it is true, as DR says, that "harming one's enemies is a ubiquitous occurrence in human nature and history," if "one's enemies" must be people "who are actually competitors and threats to our well-being," there was no plausible argument that the Jews in the concentration camps were "threats to the well-being" of the Nazis.  Those Jews were clearly innocent people, and the Nazis could not say that killing innocent people was good.

And as to DR's story about the Native Americans torturing and killing the young girl from another tribe, I would need to know more about the circumstances and motives in this case.  Would those Native Americans have said oh we just enjoy killing innocent young women for fun?  Or would they have said we discovered that she was a threat to us, and so we killed her in self-defense?

That we condemn the perpetrators of great evil--like the Nazis--and want to punish them testifies to the natural moral sense as part of our evolved human nature.  One sign that that moral sense is an evolved instinct of the human mind is that it appears early in human development: even babies have a sense of justice.

The one-year-old decided to take justice into his own hands.  He had just watched a puppet show with three characters.  The puppet in the middle rolled a ball to the puppet on the right, who passed it right back to him. It then rolled the ball to the puppet on the left, who ran away with it.  At the end of the show, the 'nice' puppet and the 'naughty' puppet were brought down from the stage and set before the boy.  A treat was placed in front of each of them, and the boy was invited to take one of the treats away.  As predicted, and like most toddlers in this experiment, he took it from the 'naughty' one--the one who had run away with the ball.  But this wasn't enough.  The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head.

In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Paul Bloom reports this as one of the experiments conducted at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University (p. 7).  He presents these experiments as showing that Charles Darwin was right in claiming that evolved human nature shows a natural moral sense--a sense of right and wrong--that is manifest in babies in the first few years of life, appearing at such an early age that it must be a natural instinct that requires little or no social learning.  (Bloom summarized some of his reasoning in an article in the New York Times Magazine here.)

Bloom also argues that these experiments confirm Adam Smith's moral philosophy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, because they show that Smith was right in observing that we are naturally social animals, with evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is expressed as sympathy or empathy, through which we judge others and judge ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral sentiments of approbation or disapprobation.  When we see people suffering unfair injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves into their situations--perhaps even projecting ourselves into a puppet show.  That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of rights, because we judge rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.  This is what I have called Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism (here, here, and here).

Consider how Bloom's experiments with babies illustrate these points.  The toddler who recognized the naughty puppet and decided that he deserved punishment showed a combination of reason and emotion.  He had the cognitive capacity to understand that the puppet in the middle had been harmed by the puppet on the left who ran away with the ball.  He also had to sympathize with the imagined resentment of the puppet victim, which motivated his punishment of the bad puppet by taking away the treat and slapping him.  Notice that this third-party punishment is a disinterested or impartial judgment, in the sense that it concerns actions that don't directly affect the baby himself.

The cognitive understanding of the puppet show by itself would not have motivated the moral judgment without the moral emotion of sympathetic resentment.  Psychopaths illustrate this.  Bloom relates the story of a thirteen-year-old mugger who viciously attacked elderly women.  When a reporter asked him about the pain he had caused a woman, the boy was surprised by the question and responded: "What do I care? I'm not her."  He had a rational understanding of what he had done, but his moral judgment was impaired by his lack of moral emotions such as sympathy and guilt.

If these babies show a naturally evolved propensity to third-party punishment, then we need to explain the evolutionary process that produced it.  There are at least three theories for this.  We might explain this through group selection, in that groups with third-party punishment tended to outcompete groups without such punishment.  Or we might explain this through individual selection, in that individuals inclined to third-party punishment earned good reputations that enhanced their survival and reproduction.  Or we might explain this though an evolutionary combination of revenge and empathy, in that individuals imagine themselves in the shoes of a victim and then respond as if they themselves had been harmed.

But presumably DR would say that history shows that there is no natural sense of justice because "human history is filled with limitless examples of evil that did receive the approbation of others."

My next post will be on DR's "political theory of teleoformalism."

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.

Caster Semenya and the Biological Justification for Sex-Segregated Sports

Over the years, I have written about the case of Caster Semenya--the Olympian and World Champion runner who has been excluded from running as a woman because she is a chromosomal (XY) male with a disorder (or difference) of sexual development.  The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF)--now named World Athletics--has banned her from running as a woman because she has the elevated testosterone levels of a man that give her an unfair advantage over women in athletic competition.

In her new book--The Race to Be Myself (Norton, 2023)--she says that her case is "about the struggle for universal human rights" (304); and for this reason, she has appealed her case to the European Court of Human Rights.  I have argued that the natural desire for sexual identity is one of the twenty natural desires of evolved human nature.  Semenya identifies herself as a "masculine woman" with the "natural body" of a chromosomal male with some of the bodily traits of a woman--such as a vagina but no penis (1-2, 173, 184, 279, 283, 303). She says that her body is not a man's body.  Nor is it the body of a transgender woman.  Does she have a natural human right to express her sexual identity as a "masculine woman" by competing athletically with other elite women runners?

I have argued that the natural desire for sexual identity is (mostly) binary.  For most of us, our biological sex is clearly male or female.  And for most of us, our gender identity corresponds to our sexual identity as male or female.  But in rare cases, an individual's sex is a biological mosaic of male and female traits.  Semenya is one of those rare exceptional cases, as she herself says.  Is it therefore fair to exclude her--as a chromosomal male with a female gender identity--from competing in women's races?  Should she either compete with other men, or artificially reduce her testosterone levels to the female range, and then compete with women?  Or should she compete in a third category--"intersex"?  There is a tragic conflict of desires here between Semenya's desire to run as a "masculine woman" in women's races and the desire of biologically typical women to compete with other biologically typical women.

Although I lean to the side of the IAAF in this debate, I see good arguments on both sides; and so, I remain undecided.

MORAL DISAGREEMENT AND VARIABLE DESIRES

The fundamental problem here is the moral disagreement that arises from naturally variable desires, and the need for prudence or practical judgment to resolve such cases.  I identified this problem in Darwinian Natural Right (44-49).

If the good is the desirable, and if there is a natural pattern of desires for human beings that includes the twenty natural desires, why do human beings fall into moral conflict?  The pervasiveness of moral disagreement is the one fact most often cited by proponents of moral relativism, who believe there are no natural, universal standards for resolving moral debate.  It does not follow, however, from the fact of moral controversy that there are no natural standards for moral judgment.

There are four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.  In considering variable desires, we see both normal (typical) and abnormal (atypical) variation.  The normal variation arises from age, sexual identity, and individual temperament.  Natural human diversity is such that the young do not have exactly the same desires as the old, men do not have exactly the same desires as women, and individuals with one temperament do not have exactly the same desires as those with another temperament.  

The abnormal variation in desires arises from abnormality in innate dispositions or in social circumstances.  So, for example, while human beings are normally social animals with social desires that incline them to feel the pleasures and pains of those close to them, a few human beings are psychopaths who lack the social desires that normally characterize human beings, and these people are moral strangers who are not open to moral persuasion.

Intersex individuals like Semenya show an atypical variation in their desire for sexual identity.  Semenya's "natural body" (as a biological male with some female traits) inclines her to identify herself as a "masculine woman," who does not fit into the sexually binary categories of men's and women's athletics.

SEMENYA'S AMBIGUOUS SEXUAL IDENTITY

Here's how Semenya describes her sexual identity:

"I have what is called a difference in sex development (DSD), an umbrella term that refers to the varying genetic conditions where an embryo responds in a different way to the hormones that spark the development of internal and external sexual organs.  To put it simply, on the outside I am female, I have a vagina, but I do not have a uterus.  I do not menstruate, and my body produces an elevated amount of testosterone, which gives me more typically masculine characteristics than other women, such as a deeper voice and fewer curves.  I cannot carry a child because I don't have a womb; but, contrary to what many people think, I do not produce sperm.  I can't biologically contribute to make new life" (1-2).

Semenya says that at puberty, she developed typically masculine features, and she began fantasizing about girls.  She announced to her friends and family that she was "into girls" (54-55).  Later, she developed romantic feelings for a girl that she married.  At the marriage ceremony, Semenya dressed as a man, while her bride dressed as a woman.  She thought this was right because she had always been very masculine.  She and her wife now have two children by IVF.  She denies that she is a lesbian (193, 212, 248, 269).

Semenya's "difference in sex development" is 5a-Reductase 2 Deficiency, which is caused by a mutation in the gene encoding the enzyme 5a-reductase type 2 (5aR2).  5aR2 catalyzes the transformation of testosterone (T) to 5a-dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which drives the process of the sexual differentiation in the external genitalia during the development of the male fetus in the womb.  5aR2D in chromosomal males arises from deficient 5aR2 activity, resulting in decreased DHT levels.  Consequently, at birth, males will show ambiguous genitals--a micropenis or no penis and what looks like a vagina.  Sometimes, as in Semenya's case, these biological boys will be raised as girls.  But then at puberty, these biological males develop typically masculine features, because pubertal virilization is driven by elevated testosterone rather than DHT.

The circulating testosterone concentrations in Semenya's bloodstream is within the range for typical adult males (from 8 nanomoles per liter [nmol/L] to 25 nmol/L), which is much higher than the range for typical adult females (0.4 nmol/L to 2 nmol/L).  The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) has said that this has given Semenya an unfair advantage in competing with women.  One can see this just by looking at the World Records for Running.  In every event, from the 100-meter race to the marathon, the world record times for men is lower than for the women.  For example, in Semenya's best event--the 800-meter race--the world record for men is 1:40.91, while the world record for women is 1:53.28.  The IAAF has pointed to scientific studies concluding that the primary reason for this large sex difference in athletic performance is exposure to high levels of endogenous testosterone in males beginning at puberty.  These male advantages associated with higher testosterone are considered the justification for sex-segregated sports (Hunter et al. 2023).  

In 2009, the IAAF told Semenya that she could compete in women's events only if she took estrogen pills that would reduce her testosterone levels to no more than 10 nmol/L for six months.  Notice that this is still far above the range for typical females.  In later years, the IAAF changed its regulations to drop the maximum level of testosterone first to 5 nmol/L and then to 2.5 nmol/L (Semenya, 195, 267, 299).  For over five years--from January of 2010 to August of 2015--Semenya took the estrogen pills.  By June of 2010, her testosterone had dropped below the 10 nmol/L maximum; and she was then free to run in IAAF races.  Once again, she was winning 800m races with good times like 1:59.90 and 1:58.16.  Any time under 2 is a good time for an elite female runner.  But still these times were well above her gold-medal-winning time of 1:55.45 at the Berlin World Championships.

After IAAF lost a court case in 2015 about their testosterone regulations for women, the regulations were dropped, and Semenya stopped taking the estrogen pills.  One year later, Semenya won the gold medal for the 800m at the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics with a time of 1:55.28.  8 women ran in the 800 meters women's final.  Of those 8, 3 of them were chromosomal (XY) males with disorders of sex development (DSD) who identify themselves as women.  Those 3 intersex women have levels of testosterone far higher than normal for women.  These 3 were the winners of the race: Caster Semenya (Gold), Francine Niyonsaba (Silver), and Margaret Nyaira Wambui (Bronze).  One of the women who lost that race--Great Britain's Lynsey Sharp--expressed her frustration in televised interviews with having to compete against intersex individuals with the unfair advantages that come from male testosterone levels.  She and other female runners called for the IAAF to impose new regulations that would ban biologically male DSD athletes from women's events.

In 2018, the IAAF announced new rules:  athletes with DSD competing with women in the 400m, 800m, and 1500m distances would have to lower their testosterone levels down to 5 nmol/L for a period of six months before they were eligible to compete.  Then, in the spring of this year, the IAAF announced new regulations requiring women with DSD to lower their testosterone to 2.5 nmol/L or below for a continuous twenty-four months.  Semenya is contesting those new rules in her appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

THE IAAF'S BEST ARGUMENT

In her book, Semenya gives her version of her dispute with the IAAF as presented in 2019 at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland (Semenya 274-88).  Reading this along with a recent article by scientists supporting the IAAF's position (Hunter et al. 2023) makes clear the best arguments on both sides of this debate.

The best argument for the IAAF is that the biological basis of sex differences in athletic performance show that biological males--including those with DSD--have an unfair advantage in athletic competition with women, and therefore fairness requires that these men be excluded from women's athletic events.

This argument makes three claims.  First, in elite athletic competition, the performance of men tends to be superior to that of women.  Second, a primary reason for this is the sex differences in anatomy and physiology as determined by sex chromosomes and sex hormones, so that adult men on average are typically stronger, more powerful, and faster than women of similar age and training. Third, biological males with DSD (such as 5a-reductase 2 deficiency) will on average have this male advantage over women in athletic competition.  Semenya seems to accept the first two claims, but she rejects the third one.

The claim of male athletic superiority is easily supported by glancing at the world records for athletics.  Consider just the racing events, for instance, in which all of the world record times for men are faster than those for women.  In the 800m race, the world record for men is 1:40.91, set by David Rudisha running for Kenya at the 2012 Olympic Games.  The record for women is 1:53.28, set by Jarmila Kratochvilova running for Czechoslovakia at the Munich World Championships in 1983.  In the Marathon, the world records were set just two months ago.  The men's record is 2:00:35, set by Kelvin Kiptum running for Kenya at the Chicago Marathon.  The women's record is 2:11:53, set by Tigst Assefa running for Ethiopia at the Berlin Marathon.

One good criticism of this kind of evidence is that what looks like a male superiority in biological ability is really only a consequence of the differences in the cultural circumstances of men and women.  For a long time, women have been discouraged from participating in athletic activity.  In 1896, at the first Olympic Games in the modern era (in Athens, Greece), no women were allowed to compete.  In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as an officially registered competitor.  In 1984, the first women's Olympic marathon was held in Los Angeles.  It was not until 2021, that there were similar numbers of women and men at the summer Olympics in Tokyo.  So, historically, women have had much less time and opportunity to develop their athletic skills than the men have.

In 1992, the journal Nature published an article by two biologists with the title "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" (Whipp and Ward 1992).  They pointed out that over the previous century, both men and women were improving their world record times in racing, but the rate of improvement for women was double that for men.  The predicted that if these trends continued into the future, the world record times for women in the marathon would be the same or better than those for the men by 1998.  They also predicted that the records in all other racing events would be no different for men and women by the middle of the 21st century.

This has not happened, however, because beginning sometime after about 1985, the rate of improvement in women's running times began to slow and level out, so that there has been no intersection with the times for men.  In all of the running events, the gap between men's and women's world records is narrower than it has even been, but it's still there.

The best explanation for this continuing performance gap, according to the second claim of the IAAF, is that this shows biological sex differences:

"Sex differences in athletic performance that involve strength, power, and/or endurance are sizable and determined by biological differences between males and females.  Adult men ov average are stronger, more powerful, and faster over short and long distances than women of similar age and training status.  The sex differences emerge with the onset of puberty, coinciding with the increase in endogenous sex hormones, in particular testosterone in males . . . . The sex differences in the world records and best performances of many athletic events that rely on endurance and muscular power ranges from 10% to 30%. . . . The largest sex differences are apparent for sports and events relying more on muscular power such as in weightlifting, jumping events, and short distance swimming. . . ." (Hunter et al. 2023: 2332-33).

On the other hand, sports that rely less on muscular power such as archery and shooting show minimal sex differences in performance.

But even if we agree with all this--that typically biological males tend on average to have an advantage in athletic competition over typically biological females--it's not clear that this must hold true for atypically biological males with DSD like Semenya.

 

SEMENYA'S BEST ARGUMENT

Consider what Semenya says here:

". . . The IAAF's position was that women with high testosterone levels had an unfair advantage equal to the advantage that male athletes had over female athletes.  On its face, this is ridiculous.  We are not men.  I am a great runner, and I train with men, some of whom I can maybe give a hard time to on my best day, just like any other elite female athlete could, but I have never been able to even approach an elite male runner's times.  Likewise, there are plenty of men who normal 'male' testosterone levels whose only hope of beating a female athlete with 'female' levels is in their dreams" (238).

In fact, Semenya observes: "The IAAF knew that not one woman with a confirmed DSD diagnosis had ever even approached the running times of male elite runners" (269).  If biological males with DSD have the same advantage as normal males over women in athletic competition, then why don't runners like Semenya achieve the same running times as elite male runners?  Since Semenya's running times are within the range of other elite female runners, that suggests that she does not have an unfair male advantage over her competitors.

To counter this argument from Semenya, some IAAF officials have accused her of cheating by running slower than what she is capable of, thus hiding the fact that she has the same male advantage as other elite male runners (Semenya 281-83).  But this is implausible.  Throughout her running career, Semenya's great ambition has been to break the world record time for the 800m in the women's event, but she has never done that.  If she was easily capable of breaking this record, why would she slow herself down and fall short of the record?

There is one alternative explanation.  Most men with normal male testosterone levels cannot run faster than elite female runners; and even most good male runners who can run as fast as elite women cannot run as fast as elite male runners.  Is Semenya a good male runner who is good enough to compete with elite female runners, thus showing his male advantage, but not good enough to compete with elite male runners?  If so, could this be true for other "46 XY males with DSD"?

I don't have good answers to those questions.

AN "INTERSEX" OLYMPICS?

In any case, we should consider that one way out of this debate would be to create a third category for sexually segregated athletic competition--"intersex" events in which atypicaly males/females could compete against one another.  This would be similar to what is done now with the Paralympic Games--a highly successful event for athletes with disabilities.

Kenya's Margaret Wambui--the biological male with DSD who won the bronze medal in the 2016 Olympic 800m event when Semenya won the gold--has proposed this.  But Semenya rejects it.

REFERENCES

Hunter, Sandra K., et al. 2023. "The Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance: Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine." Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 55: 2328-2360.

Semenya, Caster. 2023. The Race To Be Myself: A Memoir.  New York:  W. W. Norton & Company.

Whipp, Brian J., and Susan A. Ward. 1992. "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Nature 355 (January 2): 25.

The Evolutionary Ethics of Beauty in Chinese Footbinding and Female Circumcision

 

      

                                                Chinese Footbinding: "Lotus Feet" and "Lotus Shoes"

Having written in my previous post about the Darwinian ethics of beauty as an evolved natural desire, I can imagine that many readers want to object that there is no universal moral standard of beauty, because there is no agreement across individuals or across cultures about what counts as beauty.  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then aren't judgments of beauty subjective, arbitrary, and culturally relative?  

Chinese footbinding and female circumcision are often mentioned as two examples of this.  For almost a thousand years, many Chinese women mutilated their feet by binding their toes under the soles of their feet, breaking bones and crippling themselves so badly that it was hard for them to walk.  They did this because they thought women with tiny feet were beautiful, and men would not marry them if their feet were unbound.  Most of us find this grotesquely ugly.

Similarly, hundreds of millions of women across central Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have had their genitals mutilated by their mothers when they were children:  their clitorises were cut off (clitoridectomy), and sometimes the sides of the vulva were sewn together (infibulation), leaving only a tiny hole for the flow of urine and menstrual blood.  To make sexual intercourse possible, their husbands must rip them open.  These women believe that clitoridectomy and infibulation make their genitals beautiful, and that men will not marry women who have not gone through this.  Once again, most of us find this repulsive rather than beautiful.

I contend, however, that the mere fact of moral disagreement about beauty and other human goods does not prove that there are no natural, universal standards for moral debate.  I begin by identifying the four sources of moral disagreement and arguing that such moral controversy allows us to engage in moral deliberation in which we appeal to a universal pattern of natural human desires as the norm for settling our disputes.  I then turn to Chinese footbinding and female circumcision as illustrations of moral debates that can be resolved by moral persuasion.

MORAL DISAGREEMENT

There are four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.  Consequently, ethics is not a demonstrative science in which one properly seeks certainty and precision.  Because of its uncertainty and imprecision, ethics requires the sort of practical judgment rooted in experience--what Aristotle and the Greeks called prudence (phronesis)--that cannot be reduced to abstract rules.  But still, the ultimate standard for ethics is the pattern of natural desires that belongs to our evolved human nature.

Fallible beliefs about circumstances.  Moral judgment is often uncertain and imprecise because our knowledge of the circumstances of action is uncertain and imprecise.  We often disagree about moral questions, even when we agree in our principles, because we have differing views of the relevant circumstances.  In fact, much of our moral reasoning is devoted to gathering and assessing the facts pertinent to our practical decisions.

For example, if parents believe that the social circumstances of their life make it impossible for their daughters to marry well if they are not mutilated (by footbinding or female circumcision), then many parents will force their daughters to be mutilated.  But if parents believe there are ways to resist or change those social circumstances, so that their daughters can marry well without being mutilated, they will do so. 

Fallible beliefs about desires.  The good is the desirable.  But we are often unsure about what we truly desire, because we often desire what we discover is not truly desirable.  Even when we think we know what we desire at some particular moment, it is not always clear whether satisfying that momentary desire will impede the satisfaction of a more important desire in the future.  Much of our moral deliberation with ourselves and with others requires reasoning about the consistency or contradiction of diverse desires over a complete life.  Furthermore, we often disagree about whether individually or socially arbitrary desires properly specify our natural desires.  

For example, while some women in some societies have believed that to satisfy their natural desires for sexual mating, familial bonding, and having children, they must have their genitals or their feet mutilated, these customary desires for female genital mutilation and female footbinding are founded on mistaken beliefs that frustrate the natural desires of both men and women.

Variable circumstances.  The variability in the practical circumstances that distinguish one individual from another and one society from another requires variability in our moral judgments.  Although the pattern of natural human desires is universal, satisfying those desires in different individual and social circumstances requires different patterns of conduct appropriate to the circumstances.

For example, in societies with social conventions that make female footbinding or female circumcision a requirement for a woman attracting a good husband, women cannot violate those conventions without being punished, which makes these conventions self-enforcing.  Consequently, to succeed in gradually abolishing those conventions, women and men will have to join social movements in which many people agree that they will not impose footbinding or circumcision on their daughters, and they will not allow their sons to marry women with bound feet or mutilated genitals.

Variable desires.  There is both normal and abnormal variation in human desires.  By "normal," I mean the central tendency in the distribution of a trait.  By "abnormal," I mean a wide deviance from the central tendency.  The normal variation arises from age, sexual identity, and individual temperament.  Natural human diversity is such that on average the young do not have exactly the same desires as the old, men do not have exactly the same desires as women, and individuals with one temperament do not have exactly the same desires as those with another temperament.  (I have written about the importance of individuality, historicity, and animal personalities in biological nature.)

The abnormal variation in desires arises from abnormality in innate dispositions or in social circumstances.  For example, while human beings are normally social animals with social desires that incline them to sympathize with the pleasures and pains of those close to them, a few human beings are innately predisposed to become psychopaths who do not feel these sympathetic emotions.  Consequently, the most extreme psychopaths are moral strangers to the rest of us, because they do not share our moral sentiments; and to protect ourselves from them, we must either ostracize them (lock them up) or execute them.  (I have written about the biological psychology of psychopaths.)  And sometimes abnormal social circumstances such as the customs of female footbinding and female circumcision promote arbitrary desires that frustrate natural desires.

CHINESE FOOTBINDING

In China, from the Song dynasty (960-1279) to the Qing dynasty (1636-1912), many Han Chinese girls and women had their feet regularly wrapped tightly to keep their feet small.  Oten toes were broken as the feet were rolled into an morbidly tight ball.  The ideal was to compress the arch of the foot, even breaking it, so that the foot was no longer than about 4.5 inches long, although this ideal was rarely achieved.  Bound feet were thought to be beautiful and sexually attractive to men, so that men preferred to marry women with bound feet, and unbound natural feet were regarded as ugly and disgusting.  Footbinding caused many physiological and orthopedic maladies for these women throughout their lives, including difficulty in walking that reduced their physical activity (Levy 1966; Ko 2005).

This practice of footbinding was originally concentrated among elite Han Chinese, but over the years it spread to other classes.  Although there is little data about the number of women who had footbound feet, there were probably at least one or two hundred million footbound women.  And yet although this custom of footbinding was traditional for many centuries in China, it was largely abolished within a few decades around the beginning of the twentieth century.  

In the efforts of social scientists to explain the origin, maintenance, and cessation of Chinese female footbinding, there have been two prominent theories.  According to the Hypergamy Hypothesis, parents used footbinding to increase the likelihood that their daughters would marry up (to richer and higher status men) at higher rates in open marriage markets in competition with natural-footed girls.  It began with Midred Dickemann's papers on female claustration, female genital mutilation, and footbinding (1979, 1991, 1997).  

Dickemann's insight was that hypergamous marriage was rooted in evolved mate preferences.  Men (on average) want to mate with women who show the physical beauty of youthful fertility; and in long-term mating, men want women who will assure them of paternal certainty, so that the men are not cuckolded.  Women (on average) want to mate with men who have the wealth and status to provide for them and their offspring; and to persuade men to make a long-term investment in them and their children, women will provide cues of sexual fidelity, particularly for the most desirable men.  Hypergamy becomes especially important in societies that are highly stratified, that have high patriarchal inequality, and that practice polygyny (multiple wives).  High-status wealthy men have the resources to outcompete men with less resources in winning the most desirable young brides.  In such circumstances, young women will often prefer to be a second or third wife of a wealthy man rather than the only wife of a poor man.

Although all men have faced the problem of paternal uncertainty (especially before DNA testing)--not knowing for sure that they are the biological fathers of the children born to their wives--this problem becomes acute for polygynous men who have multiple wives to guard.  And, again, these men will want to mate with women who show the signs of sexual fidelity.

All of these conditions are true for traditional China.  And in ancient China, it was believed that binding the feet of women would reduce the chances of there being unfaithful to their husbands, because women with bound feet have less physical mobility, and thus they are less likely to wander away from home to have sexual trysts.  Bound feet were also perceived as beautiful because men prefer women with small feet.  Therefore, Chinese parents who wanted their daughters to marry well would bind their feet so that they could outcompete natural-footed women in the marital competition for high-ranking men.  Daughters often resisted being bound and complained about the pain and suffering it caused, but parents insisted that without this they could never marry well.

This is the Hypergamy Hypothesis that evolutionary social scientists have offered to explain the origin and maintenance of Chinese footbinding.  This hypothesis can also explain the cessation of footbinding in the early decades of the twentieth century, once the social circumstances changed so that natural-footed women could marry well.

Over the past thirty years, a few social scientists have offered an alternative to the Hypergamy Hypothesis in explaining Chinese footbinding--the Labor Market Hypothesis.  Melissa Brown, Laurel Bossen, and Hill Gates have been its leading proponents (Bossen and Gates 2017; Brown 2016; Brown et al. 2012; Brown and Satterthwaite-Hillips 2018).  The idea is that footbinding was a form of labor control by parents to use their daughters for handicraft work within the home--carding cotton, spinning thread, and twisting hemp that brought in cash or goods necessary for the survival of the family.  As Brown says: "five-year-olds like to run and play, not sit in one place for the hours required to produce such quantities of thread (or other products).  By making it hurt to walk, footbinding served as labor control to keep girls at their handwork" (Brown 2016, 517).  Brown and her colleagues can then explain the cessation of footbinding beginning at the end of the nineteenth century by saying that this was when the mechanized production of cloth and its distribution through railways eliminated the need for such handicraft work.  They also try to show the falsity of the Hypergamy Hypothesis by presenting evidence that there was no correlation between footbinding and marrying up.

It is difficult to test these two hypotheses against one another because there is so little quantifiable data about footbinding in Chinese history.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates have assembled a database based upon interviews with elderly Chinese women at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.  In the early 1990s, Gates interviewed women in Sichuan Province.  In 2006-2011, Brown and Bossen interviewed women in three other regions of China--the Central, North, and Southwest.  These were all inland and primarily rural areas, because it was only here that there were numbers of living women at the end of the 20th century who had experienced footbinding, since footbinding had been ended in coastal areas and urban centers before these living women had been born.  These elderly Chinese women were asked a series of questions about their experiences in growing up in China.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates built their database through a sample of these participants: 36 participants from the Central region was added to 261 from the North and 142 from the South, for a total of 439 participants; this was then added to the much larger total from Sichuan of 3,275.  Thus, they had a grand total of 3,714.

From their analysis of this data, Brown, Bossen, and Gates conclude: "for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects.  We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility" (Brown et al. 2012, 1035).  They also say: "For most women, throughout most of the 20th century, FB [footbinding] made no significant difference in their ability either to marry at all or their ability to marry 'up'" (Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips 2018, 2).  They also conclude that there was a correlation between the footbinding of daughters and their handicraft labor.  They claim that this refutes the Hypergamy Hypothesis and confirms the Labor Market Hypothesis for explaining footbinding.

But notice the contradiction in what they say here.  On the one hand, "for most women," there was no significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up.  On the other hand, they concede that there was a significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up among their Sichuan participants, who comprised 87% of their total number of participants!

Ryan Nichols has pointed to this contradiction as one of the many weaknesses in the reasoning of Brown, Bossen, and Gates.  They obfuscate this contradiction by saying that "for most regions," there was no correlation between footbinding and hypergamy, which obscures the fact that for most of their participants (particularly those in Sichuan), there was a correlation (Ryan 2021; Chowdhury, Zhang, and Nichols 2022).

By saying that "for most regions" (that is, three out of four regions), there was no significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up, Brown, Bossen, and Gates treat the Central region (with only 44 total participants, of whom only 6 were footbound) as evidentially equal to the Sichuan region (with 3,327 total participants, of whom 994 were footbound).  As Nichols points out, readers have to carefully study the actual numbers to see how the language of "for most regions" distorts the evidence.

Moreover, as Nichols suggests, the correlation between footboundness and hypergamy would probably have been even higher than it is if Brown, Bossen, and Gates had not reduced the data prior to testing by throwing out all data from cohorts of women in which a majority were not footbound.

Nichols has identified other flaws in their reasoning.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates speak about the Labor Market Hypothesis and the Hypergamy Hypothesis as if they were mutually exclusive.  But this ignores the possibility that once parents have decided that footbinding will improve the mating prospects of their daughters, they might use their daughter's labor in handicrafts as a strategy for mitigating their costs.  Consequently, the Labor Market Hypothesis and the Hypergamy Hypothesis are mutually compatible.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates say nothing about this possibility.

They also ignore the fact that to test the Hypergamy Hypothesis, there must be an open marriage market in which there is sufficient competition between footbound and natural-footed women.  If there is a largely closed market, in which almost all of the women are footbound, then there is no test for the Hypergamy Hypothesis.  Notably, in the Sichuan data, there is a slightly more open market, because footbound girls were less than 90% of birth cohorts.

This is a devastating critique of the attempt to refute the Hypergamy Hypothesis.  As far as I know, Brown, Bossen, and Gates have never responded to this critique.  I have sent messages to them asking for some reply to Nichols.  Brown and Gates answered my messages but offered no reply.  Brown indicated that she might write a reply sometime in the future.

THE MORAL DEBATE OVER FOOTBINDING

Consider now how our moral judgment about Chinese footbinding can be based on the four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.

Parents naturally desire that their daughters should be mated with good husbands who will provide well for their daughters and their children.  So if parents believe that the circumstances in their society make it unlikely that their daughters can marry well if their feet are not bound, then many parents will force footbinding on their children.  But this belief can be mistaken.

Indeed, we know that across traditional China, there was great variability in the practice of footbinding across time, region, and class.  Most Chinese parents did not bind the feet of their daughters because they did not believe this was necessary for the daughters to marry well, and that it would impose unnecessary suffering on their daughters.  From the origins of the practice in the Song dynasty, there were scholars who criticized the practice as wrong.  

Other than the Han Chinese, most Chinese ethnic groups--such as the Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans--did not engage in footbinding.  Even among the Han, many Han Chinese (such as the Hakka Han) rejected footbinding.  Moreover, those Chinese parents who did practice footbinding provoked resistance from their daughters.  Many footbound daughters loosened their bindings or ceased binding after marriage.  Most bindings were not maintained over an entire life.  When Brown, Bossen, and Gates asked their interviewees about whether they found footbinding desirable, almost half of them said it was not, and only about a fifth of them said they accepted it in some manner.  So there was widespread disagreement among the Chinese as to whether footbinding was desirable, which allowed for a moral debate, in which the critics of footbinding could argue that it frustrated natural human desires.

A popular campaign against footbinding was based on the argument that footbinding was "unnatural," and that "natural feet" were desirable for both women and men.  The first Natural Foot Society was founded in 1895.  Then many natural foot societies began to appear.  This and similar groups engaged in three kinds of activity (Levy 1966; Mackie 1996).  They promoted an educational campaign on the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet.  They showed that the rest of the world did not practice footbinding, and that China was losing respect in the world because of it.  Finally, following the example of American temperance societies campaigning against alcohol, members of natural foot societies pledged neither to bind their daughters nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet.

As suggested by Gerry Mackie's evolutionary game-theoretic analysis, footbinding was an evolutionarily stable strategy for parents only when it was a self-enforcing social convention.  As long as this convention was generally accepted in a social group, parents who tried to violate it by refusing to bind their daughters' feet would be punished because their daughters could not be married to the most desirable men.  But once enough parents could be persuaded to join natural foot societies and pledge not to bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry footbound women, they created a new mating market in which natural-footed women could find good mates.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION

There has been a similar moral debate over the desirability of female circumcision, in which parents mutilate the genitals of their daughters because they think this will make them more desirable for marriage.  Actually, the debate is even evident in the dispute over the proper terminology for this practice.  Calling it "female circumcision" suggests that it is no worse than "male circumcision."  But critics insist that clitoridectomy and infibulation are much more harmful to women than is cutting off the foreskin is for men.  Some people prefer the more neutral language of "female genital cutting."

Since I have already written a series of posts on female circumcision, I don't need to say much more about it here.  I will only point out that the moral debate over female circumcision shows the same character as the moral debate over footbinding: it's a dispute over fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.

For example, consider the debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Fuambai Ahmadi over the morality of female circumcision.  Ali was born in Somalia. She was raised as a Muslim, living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. As a child, her genitals were mutilated by family members practicing "female circumcision" as a way of ensuring female virginity by excising the clitoris and sewing up the vagina. In 1992, she fled to Holland as she ran away from a forced marriage to a cousin who was a Somali Canadian.  Now, Ali has become a fervent opponent of female genital mutilation and the Islamic beliefs that support it.  She also denounces those feminist multicultural relativists who argue that some African women have chosen to embrace the cultural tradition of female circumcision, and that any criticism of this by Westerners is cultural imperialism.  Ali rejects this multicultural relativism by appealing to universal human rights based on natural human desires that set a standard for condemning traditional practices like genital mutilation.

On the other side of this debate is Fuambai Ahmadu, who was born in Sierra Leone and reared in the United States, and became an anthropologist who has studied female circumcision among her native Kono ethnic group in Sierra Leone. At age 22, she decided to travel back to her native village so that she herself could be circumcised. She now provokes intense controversy by writing and lecturing in which she criticizes people like Ali for their campaign against female circumcision as Euroamerican cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism. She claims that she herself has not felt any impediment to her sexual life or any other harm from her circumcision, which was an excision of her clitoris. Moreover, she insists that most circumcised African women find deep satisfaction in their circumcision, which refutes all of the reports about the supposed harms from female circumcision.

The ultimate question in this debate is whether female circumcision is truly desirable for those African mothers and daughters who have practiced it.  Ali says it is not.  Ahmadu says it is.  This is a factual question.  For various reasons, I think Ali makes the better argument.

One reason for this is that Ahmadu's position becomes confusingly incoherent.  On the one hand, she says that the African mothers and daughters engaged in female circumcision find it desirable.  On the other hand, she admits that many African women have rejected it, and many have organized themselves into groups pledging to one another that they will not circumcize their daughters or allow their sons to marry a circumcized girl.  And there is evidence of a drastic drop in Africa in the rate of female genital mutilation, comparable to what happened in China with the cessation of footbinding.

Ahmadu even admits that forcing girls to be circumcized is wrong, and that women should remain uncircumcized until they are young adults and able to decide for themselves whether they want this.

Ahmadu is also confusing about her own decision as an adult to be circumcized in her African tribe.  She says that she has not lost the capacity for clitoral orgasm, which makes us suspect that she did not have her clitoris completely cut off.  She might have had only a ritual scratch or mark on her clitoris.  This is one way that African women have avoided the most harmful forms of female circumcision.

In all of this, we see that if the good is the desirable, then we can debate the goodness of practices like footbinding and female circumcision by judging whether they are truly desirable in satisfying the evolved natural desires of universal human nature.

REFERENCES

Bossen, Laurel, and Hill Gates. 2017. Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Brown, Melissa. 2016. "Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation: An Empirical Illustration of Niche Construction and Social Inheritance." Human Nature 27: 501-532.

Brown, Melissa, Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates, and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips. 2012. "Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconstruction of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation." The Journal of Asian Studies 71: 1035-1067.

Brown, Melissa, and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips. 2018. "Economic Correlates of Footbinding: Implications for the Importance of Chinese Daughters' Labor." PLoS ONE 13 (9): e0201337.

Chowdhury, Laura Smith, Yile Zhang, and Ryan Nichols. 2022. "Footbinding and Its Cessation: An Agent-Based Model Adjudication of the Labor Market and Evolutionary Sciences Hypotheses." Evolution and Human Behavior 43: 475-489.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1979. "The Ecology of Mating Systems in Hypergynous Dowry Societies." Social Science Information 18: 163-195.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1991. "Women, Class, and Dowry." American Anthropologist 93: 944-946.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1997. "Paternal Confidence and Dowry Competition: A Biocultural Analysis of Purdah." In Laura Betzig, ed., Human Nature: A Critical Reader, 311-328.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ko, Dorothy. 2005. Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Levy, Howard. 1966. Chinese Footbinding. New York: Walton Rawls.

Mackie, Gerald. 1996. "Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account." American 
Sociological Review 61: 999-1017.

Nichols, Ryan. 2021. "Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handcraft Labor: Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding." Evolutionary Psychological Science 7: 315-325.