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

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

Darwinian Reactionary:

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

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

Friday, 17 July, 2026 

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

Monday, 20 July, 2026

REPLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Darwinian Evolution of Russell Kirk's Permanent Things

In 2010, The Intercollegiate Review published my article on "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism."  I argued that while metaphysical conservatism views human social order as grounded in a transcendent realm of cosmic design, evolutionary conservatism is empiricist in viewing human social order as grounded in common human experience as shaped by human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  I explained how that conflict had arisen in the history of conservative thought beginning with Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, in which one could see the tension between Burke's metaphysical conservatism and his evolutionary conservatism.  I indicated what was at stake between those two positions, and I defended the evolutionary side of this dispute.  I concluded with a practical illustration of the moral implications of this debate as applied to the American moral controversy over slavery.

In some previous posts, I have defended my argument in that article against some critics.  But I now see that I was mistaken about one point.  I thought that Russell Kirk had adopted the metaphysical side of Burke's conservatism and ignored the evolutionary side that would support a Darwinian conservatism.  Now I see that Kirk's writings actually show the same tension between the metaphysical and the evolutionary that first arose in Burke's Reflections.  This thought came to me as I pondered the presentations at the Kirk Center conference on Kirk and Scruton.

KIRK AND THE PERMANENT THINGS

Kirk stated the metaphysical and religious version of conservatism in 1953 in The Conservative Mind.  The first canon of conservative thought, he declared, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead."  Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature."  In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order."  In all of his formulations, he connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design."  Opposed to such conservative thinking were "those scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to undermine the first principles of conservative order" (Kirk 1985: 8-11; 1982: xv).  Here in the early Kirk, we see the common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative order by denying the religious belief in a transcendent metaphysical order.

But then, in Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, Kirk showed how enduring norms for human life, which he called "the permanent things," could be grounded empirically in human experience--human nature, human custom, and human judgment--without any necessary appeal to a metaphysical moral cosmology.  Previously, I had thought that Kirk understood the "permanent things" to be eternal things that therefore depended on a transcendent eternal order in which human nature was an unchanging eternal essence created by God.  Against this, I argued that an evolved human nature that is enduring but not eternal is enough to support an evolutionary conservatism rooted in an evolutionary moral anthropology of natural desires, customary traditions, and individual judgments.  I had not noticed that in the Enemies of the Permanent Things, Kirk had identified the permanent things as "enduring standards" set by an enduring human nature as the ground for "a law of nature."  The permanent things are "patterns or rules which recognize the enduring nature of certain moral and social qualities." Moreover, the norms vary for each species of life: "the norm for the wasp or the snake is not the norm for man" (Kirk 2016: 1, 3, 151).

That this allows for an evolutionary conservatism is particularly clear in one section of the Enemies of the Permanent Things with the title "The Doors of Normative Perception" (2016: 23-29).  The reader of this section should notice the crucial influence on Kirk of two authors C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) and David Hume ("Of the Standard of Taste" and The Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding).  Kirk cites Hume three times in this short section.  This is remarkable because Kirk identifies Hume as the "most formidable of skeptics" (6), and therefore Kirk's reasoning here is compatible with a Humean skepticism that denies religious metaphysics and affirms an evolutionary conception of human nature and the world.  Similarly, in Lewis's Abolition of Man, Lewis is clear that his argument for a natural moral law should be persuasive with skeptics because it does not require any belief in the supernatural.

Kirk says there are "three doors of normative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer" (23).  But while Kirk himself "embraces the transcendent truth of revelation," he chooses not to appeal to revelation in this book because he addresses himself "to doubters, as well as to the converted."  Moreover, Kirk observes that revelation is not a reliable source of knowledge for most human beings because "direct revelation" has been "extremely rare."  Most of the time what is presented as "divine wisdom" has come through "very human prophets" or seers who have not had a direct revelation.  Apparently, Moses had a direct revelation when God spoke to him through the burning bush.  But Moses was the only one who heard the words.  When people who claim to have had a direct revelation try to express what God told them, most of what they say is "inexpressible in language, and almost unthinkable in thought" (24).  So revelation is a source for understanding the permanent things that is incomprehensible to skeptics or unbelievers.

Custom is a better source.  To understand custom, Kirk relies on Hume.  He paraphrases a passage from Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" (Hume 1985: 241):

In morals and taste, says Hume, we govern ourselves by custom--that is, by the habits of the human race.  The standards of morality are shown to us by study of the story of mankind, and the arbiters of those standards are men of strong sense and delicate sentiments, whose impressions force themselves upon the wills of their fellowmen (24).

He also quotes from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume 1902: 5.1.36) about how custom is "the great guide of life."  Custom constitutes "an immemorial empiricism" (26).

But how did this "folk wisdom" embodied in custom come into being?  Kirk suggests:

The answer may be that at the beginnings of civil social order, some individuals--men whose names have perished--discovered the truths that we now call custom and common sense.  Hume's men of strong sense and delicate sentiment, or their primitive forerunners, presumably existed when man was becoming true man, and their insights were impressed upon their primitive fellows. . . . So it may be with the practices and beliefs which we call custom and common sense: originally these may have been the intuitions or the empirical conclusions of gifted individuals, who were emulated by the common man" (26-27).

Notice that Kirk suggests that human nature had to evolve from a primitive state "when man was becoming true man."  Notice also that customary norms arose as "empirical conclusions of gifted individuals."  Kirk goes on to explain that these are "empirical conclusions" about human nature.  "By definition, human nature is constant.  Because of that constancy, men of vision are able to describe the norms, the rules, for mankind" (29).

This suggests human evolution at three levels--human nature, human custom, and human judgment.  Human nature evolves from a prehuman condition.  Then human custom evolves as "gifted individuals" judge the norms or rules that best conform to that evolved human nature.  This three-leveled evolutionary analysis is even clearer in Lewis's Abolition of Man.

LEWIS AND THE TAO

Here I borrow some material from some previous posts.

Lewis sees the Tao as manifested in three levels of social order--human nature, human traditions, and human judgments. At the first level, the Tao is "Natural Law" (56, 95). "Nature" has many senses, and if we define it in opposition to "the Artificial, the Civil, the Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural" (81), then the Tao is not natural. But it is natural in the sense that it belongs to "the very nature of man," because it provides "a common human law of action" (31, 84). The Tao is "the Tao of Man," it is the "only known reality of conscience" that distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature (62, 90).

The nature of Lewis's natural law is not cosmic nature as a whole, but human nature in particular. Cosmic nature cannot provide values for human life, Lewis suggests, because "nature as a whole, I understand, is working steadily and irreversibly towards the final extinction of all life in every part of the universe" (50).

Although natural law is often assumed to come from a supernatural lawgiver, Lewis insists that understanding the Tao as natural law does not require any belief in the supernatural. He writes:

Though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reasoning as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more 'realistic' basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with (61).

At the second level of social order, the Tao corresponds to human cultural traditions--"the human tradition of value," "traditional values," "traditional morality," or "traditional humanity" (54-55, 76, 78, 85). In the Appendix to his book, Lewis provides "Illustrations of the Tao" that consist of short quotations from some ancient texts of moral teaching from Egypt, Babylonia, Israel, Greece, Rome, India, China, Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxon England, and a few texts from early modern England. Lewis's Appendix shows great cultural variability in the moral traditions of human history. But it also shows recurrent themes that reflect how universal human nature constrains these moral traditions--as manifested in Lewis's eight categories of classification: the law of general beneficence, the law of special beneficence, duties to parents, elders, and ancestors, duties to children and posterity, the law of justice, the law of good faith and veracity, the law of mercy, and the law of magnanimity.

At the third level of social order, the Tao allows for individual judgments of value, but only within the broad constraints of human nature and human tradition. Lewis admits that traditional moralities show many contradictions and some absurdities, which invite criticism and improvement. Although the Tao does not permit criticisms and changes coming from outside the Tao--because there are no standards of value outside it--the Tao does permit development from within. So, for example, we can recognize that the Christian version of the Golden Rule--"Do as you would be done by"--is a real improvement over the Confucian version--"Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you"--because we can see that the new positive statement of the rule is an extension of the old negative statement (57-58). Individuals have authority to modify the Tao only insofar as their modifications are within the "spirit of the Tao" (59).

If you lay this alongside what Kirk says about "The Doors of Normative Perception," you'll see a coincidence of thought that shows Kirk was following the same line of reasoning.

THE DARWINIAN EVOLUTION OF THE PERMANENT THINGS

The three-leveled evolutionary analysis of norms presented by Kirk and Lewis corresponds to what I have argued for on this blog--and in various articles and books--the Darwinian evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment.

Moral norms are rooted in the twenty natural desires of our genetically evolved human nature:  a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, freedom from oppressive domination, courage in war, health, beauty, property, language and storytelling, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious transcendence, and intellectual understanding.  

And if the good is the desirable (as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas argued), the best social order can be judged to be the one that secures the widest satisfaction of those natural desires (Adler 1992; Arnhart 1998: 21-36; Aquinas, ST, I, q. 5, a. 1).  When Kirk gives examples of norms--"a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude" (7)--they correspond to some of the natural desires.

The full expression of these moral norms has come through the human cultural evolution of moral tradition.  To understand this, we need an evolutionary science of cultural group selection.  This is what Kirk identifies as the cultural history of custom or tradition.

But then that cultural evolution ultimately depends on the evolution of human individuality because culture is driven by the agency of individuals who formulate the social norms for their cultural groups.  We need to understand the evolved personality and life history of those individuals who are agents of cultural change acting through coercion or persuasion.  Consider, for instance, how the cultural history of the United States was altered by the dominant individuals in the American Continental Congress that drafted and signed the Declaration of Independence, or those in the Constitutional Convention who drafted and promoted the Constitution of 1787.  What we need here is an agent-based evolutionary theory of how individual agents create, maintain, and modify group functional culture.  We need to understand how, as Kirk says, culture is "the creation of a talented little minority, over centuries" (51).

We need what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" that would develop an interdisciplinary science that would explain the evolution of human nature, human culture, and human judgment as part of a comprehensive science of nature as a whole.

That would give us a science of the permanent things.

REFERENCES

Adler, Mortimer. 1992. Desires, Right and Wrong: The Ethics of Enough. New York: Macmillan Pubishing.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica.

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

Arnhart, Larry.  2010. "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." The Intercollegiate Review 45: 22-32.

Hume, David.  1985.  Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary.  Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Hume, David. 1902. Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kirk, Russell, ed. 1982. The Portable Conservative Reader. New York: Penguin Books.

Kirk, Russell.  1985.  The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot. Seventh Revised Edition. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Kirk, Russell.  2016. Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics. With an Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd. Providence, RI: Cluny Media.

Lewis, C. S.  1947. The Abolition of Man.  New York: Macmillan.

The Catholic Integralist Critique of Locke on Toleration: The Holy Spirit Cannot Overcome Religious Pluralism

Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604.  He is Writing in his Study.  The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear.  Below, Scribes Copy His Work.  A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

 

I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires. 

The Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state, and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding.  But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious understanding is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world.  And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement.  Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to Pope Gregory the Great was not clearly heard by others.

The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.  

For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness.  It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market.  I have elaborated this argument in some previous posts.

But I haven't yet responded to Derek Remus's integralist critique of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.  This was originally published at the website for The Josias, the main online outlet for integralism, and then published in print in Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, volume 2: The Two Powers, edited by P. Edmund Waldstein (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022), 335-371.  Remus first wrote this paper as an undergraduate thesis at Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California).  Father Remus is now an Associate Pastor at St. Luke's Catholic Church in Calgary, Canada.

Remus's introduction to his paper is a brief history of Christianity and the relation between church and state.  He then states his thesis--that the Catholic Church is right about the proper relation between church and state, and Locke is wrong.

To support this thesis, the main body of his paper has three parts:  a summary of Locke's claims in A Letter Concerning Toleration, an exposition and defense of the Catholic Church's position on church and state that relies largely on Thomas Aquinas's teaching, and then a Catholic refutation of Locke's position.  

Finally, Remus adds an Appendix on the question of whether the Catholic integralist understanding of church and state can be defended in the modern world where Catholics are in the minority in many Western countries (such as the United States).

I will respond to each of these parts of his paper.  My references to Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration will be to the Liberty Fund edition edited by Mark Goldie (2010).

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE

Remus's first two paragraphs survey the first 1600 years of the history of Christianity in relation to the state:

"The first three centuries of the Catholic Church's existence were a period of violent and bloody persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire--that is, the state.  The Church persevered through this trial, however, and, instead of diminishing, increased in proportion to the persecutions she suffered, until at last she was granted freedom of worship and hers was made the official religion of the Empire.  This was the beginning of that harmonious union between Church and state which gave rise to Christendom--a union in which the state recognized that its proper good was ordered toward a higher good, namely, eternal beatitude, and the Church, to the extent that affairs of state bore upon the salvation of souls, was solicitous about those affairs."

"This union lasted throughout Europe for twelve hundred years.  Then came the Protestant Reformation.  The divine origin of the papacy was challenged; the religious unity of Europe was shattered; Christendom unraveled.  The Church still existed, however, and the question of how governments ought to deal with her under the new order of things became an urgent problem for political philosophers" (335).

Remus then notes that while political philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza thought the head of state should also be the head of the Church to ensure religious peace, Locke thought there should be a separation of church and state, with the church devoted to the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and the state devoted to securing the earthly goods of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Moreover, Locke thought the state should tolerate all religions except when religious doctrines or practices threatened the peace of the community.

Remus observes that the United States has clearly adopted the Lockean position through Locke's influence on American Founders like Thomas Jefferson who insisted on "a wall of separation between Church and State."  Consequently, many American Catholics have adopted the Lockean view of church-state relations as the ideal that all nations should follow.

But this kind of thinking, Remus asserts, is "clearly opposed to that of the Church's Magisterium."  The "Magisterium" of the Catholic Church is its "teaching" function--the authority of the Church through the popes and the bishops to truthfully interpret the revealed Word of God as conveyed through the Bible and the Church's tradition.  So, here, Remus interprets the Church's Magisterium on the relation between Church and state by quoting from the papal pronouncements of three popes--Pius IX (1846-1878), Leo XIII (1878-1903), and Pius XI (1922-1939).  They all agree, in the words of Leo XIII, that the state is bound by divine law to support the "public profession of religion . . . not such religion as [men] may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion"--the religion of the Catholic Church (337).  Here Remus is quoting from the encyclical Immortale Dei (par. 6).  This shows, then, that Locke is wrong in arguing for the separation of church and state, because this contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching.

In this introductory section of his paper, Remus makes three dubious claims.  The first is that from the beginning of Christianity, the Catholic Church has been "the Church," the only Church, because it is the only truly Christian Church, or even "the only true religion," as Leo XIII declared, as confirmed by "certain and most clear marks."  

This denies the historical fact of religious pluralism in Christianity.  Contrary to Remus's assumption that there was no religious pluralism in Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation, the history of Christianity beginning with the first Christians has been a history of disagreement over Christian doctrines and practices as manifest in the many schisms and heresies among Christians.  A Christian schism is when one Christian group divides into two groups that cannot live together as one religious community.  A Christian heresy is one Christian's religious belief that is considered false by other Christians.

Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another.  For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.

The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity.  The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God.  The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism).  The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.

Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies.  That's what I mean by religious pluralism in Christianity.  Later in his paper, Remus speaks of "that great achievement of contemporary man called religious pluralism" (370), as if there had been no religious pluralism until recently.  But that is obviously not true.

This religious pluralism in Christianity also denies Remus's second dubious claim in his introductory section--that there was a "harmonious union between Church and state" that sustained Christendom for twelve hundred years prior to the Protestant Reformation.  Beginning with Constantine, rulers who tried to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, often through violent coercion, were frustrated by the heresies and schisms that made it impossible to sustain any "harmonious union" of Christians.

In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom: Christianity and all other religions would be free from persecution.  Later, in 380, the Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica that declared Christianity as defined by the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official religion of the Empire; and those who disagreed with any part of the Nicene Creed--such as the Arians who denied that Jesus was of "the same essence" as God--could be punished by the Church and the state.  But the debate over trinitarian theology--often a violent debate--continued to fester for centuries.  These and other theological disputes created a religious pluralism among Christians that neither the Church nor the state could suppress.  Remus is silent about all of this theological conflict within Christianity.

The irresolvable problem of religious pluralism in Christianity eventually forced the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council to issue the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration.  This denied the teaching of Leo XIII that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.  

This refutes the third dubious claim in Remus's introduction to this paper--the claim that the Church's Magisterium opposes Lockean religious liberty.  Strangely, however, Remus never even mentions Dignitatis Humanae anywhere in his paper.

Remus might agree with Thomas Pink's argument that Dignitatis Humanae was a change in policy but not a change in doctrine.  Pink explains: "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows."  The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief.  In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.  

Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society.  Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ."  Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II.  That Remus agrees with Pink about this is perhaps suggested by the fact that Remus's paper in Integralism and the Common Good is immediately preceded by a paper by Pink, and both papers are in a section of the book with the title "Religious Liberty."

As I have argued, there are lots of problems with Pink's reading of Dignitatis Humanae.  One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Catholic Church.  Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes the passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism explains this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith.  Remus is silent about all of this.

LOCKE'S FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION

In summarizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Remus correctly identifies four of Locke's main arguments (341-42).  But he fails to recognize the importance of a fifth argument, which is actually Locke's primary argument.  

Remus also fails to see the importance of Locke's numerous references to the New Testament as providing crucial scriptural support for his arguments.  Unlike Locke, Remus provides almost no scriptural support for his arguments--he quotes from the New Testament only once.  Consequently, Remus seems unwilling or unable to refute Locke's claim that the New Testament teaches liberal toleration.

Locke makes four arguments for why the state (or "Commonwealth" as Locke calls it) secures only the "civil interests" or "civil goods" in caring for "the things of this World," and therefore it must be separated from the churches that secure the salvation of souls in "the World to come."

First, the care of souls has not be committed to any civil magistrate by anyone--neither by God nor by consent of the people (LCT, 13).

Second, "the care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (LCT, 13).

Third, even if outward force could influence people's religious beliefs, this would not necessarily lead to the salvation of their souls, because given "the variety and contradiction of Opinions in Religion" among political rulers, most rulers would favor false religions that would lead to the eternal damnation of most people (LCT, 14-15).

Fourth, the duty of the magistrate to secure the civil interests of everyone does not require enforcing any religious belief, because my neighbor's religious beliefs do not affect my civil interests (LCT, 20, 37, 44-46).  Thomas Jefferson expressed this Lockean argument for religious liberty in a memorable way: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.  But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god.  It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Notes on Virginia, Query XVII).

Although Remus rightly identifies these four arguments, he ignores Locke's primary argument set forth in the first pages of the Letter Concerning Toleration--that toleration is "the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," because "every one is Orthodox to himself," and Jesus taught Christians to show "Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind," so that the "Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is . . . agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (7-12).

To prove this, Locke quotes from the New Testament 6 times in this introductory section, and a total of 14 times in the whole of the Letter Concerning Toleration.  He also quotes from the Old Testament 5 times in order to contrast the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament and the religious liberty of the New Testament.  The "Commonwealth of the Jews" was an "absolute Theocracy," so that there was no difference between the Commonwealth and the Church; and "God himself was the Legislator."  "But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth," because Jesus "instituted no Commonwealth."  "Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (42).

As I have argued in previous posts, the proponents of early modern classical liberalism like Locke could plausibly read the New Testament as teaching religious toleration and religious liberty.  Remarkably, Remus is silent about all this.  He quotes from the Bible only once when he quotes Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (357).  So, he never attempts to refute Locke's interpretation of the Bible.

Last year, I wrote about how the coronation of King Charles III of Great Britain showed the acceptance of Locke's liberal interpretation of New Testament Christianity as supporting toleration and religious liberty. 

REMUS'S REDUCED INTEGRALISM

After explaining Locke's account of the separation of church and state, Remus turns to "the way things really are," or to "the truth about Church and state" as taught by the Catholic Church.  This is a teaching about "the primacy of the common good," and defending this teaching must move through five steps, as explained by "the Common Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas" (337, 346-47).

First, Remus shows how the common good is preferable to the private good.

Second, he shows how the end of the state is the political common good.

Third, he shows how religion promotes the political common good.

Fourth, he shows how the end of the Church established by Christ is the common good of eternal beatitude.

Fifth, the rulers of the state are subject to the rulers of the Catholic Church in so far as the lower common good of politics must serve the higher common good of eternal beatitude.

Although Remus does not explicitly say that this teaching is Catholic Integralism, it clearly is.  But what's remarkable about Remus's account of this teaching is that it is a reduced Catholic Integralism.  A full Catholic Integralism, such as found in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and in the history of the Catholic Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, includes the claim that the Catholic Church has the divine right to employ the state as its secular arm in persecuting and even killing heretics.  Remus rejects this claim because he agrees with Locke about "the unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one's neighbor on account of religion" (338, 362).  Although he does not explicitly explain to his reader what he is doing, Remus is reducing or revising the Catholic tradition of integralism by rejecting the traditional integralist claim that the Church is divinely commanded to persecute and even kill heretics.

The clearest indication of what Remus is doing is in his selective reading of Thomas Aquinas and of the history of the Catholic Church's persecution of heretics.  Remus is silent about Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition.  Aquinas taught that heretics--those who claim to be Christians but deny some of the doctrines of the Church--can be rightly compelled to keep the faith.  Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3).  Aquinas cannot cite any passages from the New Testament that condone the killing of heretics, because as Locke pointed out, there are none.  Remus says nothing about this.

Remus also says nothing about the history of the Catholic Churches execution of heretics.  For example, in 1415, Jan Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy.  He sang hymns as he was burned to death.  Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars.  Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians.  Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious.  Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.

Remus says nothing about this.  He claims that God's revealed truth is conveyed to believers by the "grace of the Holy Spirit" (356).  But he is silent about how pious Christians like Jan Hus and the Protestant Reformers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to dissent from the Catholic Church, which exposed them to the violence of the Inquisition.  This shows that the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by conveying the message of revelation so clearly that all or most believers can agree on that revealed truth.

Remus also says nothing about how some of the recent popes--John Paul II and Benedict XVI--have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of violence against heretics.

A REFUTATION OF LOCKE'S "GODLESS STATE"?

Remus begins his paper by promising his readers that he will refute Locke's position on church and state in the light of the Church's position.  But when Remus comes to that part of his paper, his supposed refutation of Locke's "godless state" actually agrees with Locke on some crucial points, which explains why his reduced Integralism is so different from the Church's traditional Integralism.

As already indicated, Remus agrees with Locke that it is unjust to persecute and kill people because of their religious beliefs.  He also says that "the Catholic Church agrees with Locke that it is unjust for the state to force its citizens to perform acts whereby they become members of a given religion, even if that religion is the true one" (362).  The reason for this is that Locke is right in saying that faith is not real if it depends on "outward force" without "inward and full persuasion of the mind."

But still, Remus observes, Locke is wrong not to see how even though the coercive force of the state cannot influence the mind and will directly, that force can influence the mind and will indirectly by creating social conditions that help Catholic citizens fortify their faith and become more effective in persuading non-Catholic citizens to become Catholics. 

Remus says that "in a nation where most people are Catholic," and the rulers are Catholic, there are four ways in which the state can rightly use force to indirectly favor the Catholic Church without directly forcing anyone to become a Catholic (360, 362).   The state can refuse to give marriage licenses to Catholics who have been married in a non-Catholic marriage ceremony, because according to the Catholic Church, this is not a real marriage.  The state can require that students in state schools are instructed in the Catholic faith.  The state can prohibit the building of non-Catholic schools.  And, finally, "the state also has the right to prohibit the propagation of opinions in the press which are opposed to its citizens' attainment of heaven, such as opinions that are blasphemous or constitute an attack on the Church" (360).  This is what I mean by Remus's reduced Catholic Integralism: the state uses force to favor the Catholic Church, but without the killing of people for public heresy and blasphemy that was part of traditional Integralism.

But notice that Remus recommends this only for countries where the majority of the citizens are Catholic, and the rulers are Catholic.  Why couldn't Protestants turn this argument around to say that these same four ways for the state to enforce religious belief could be used to enforce a Protestant religion in countries where most of the people and the rulers are Protestant?

In fact, that was the argument of the High Church Anglican Protestant Jonas Proast, who wrote three tracts criticizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, which provoked a prolonged debate between Proast and Locke.  Like Remus, Proast argued that while Locke was right in saying that the mind cannot directly be coerced into religious belief, Locke failed to see how legal coercion with moderate penalties without persecution could indirectly dispose men's minds to submit to religious instruction.  Also like Remus, Proast insisted that this use of legal coercion to enforce religion was proper only for enforcing the "true religion."  But, of course, for Proast, the evidence clearly showed that Anglicanism was the true religion, and Catholicism was a false religion.  (Proast's three tracts are available in the 5th volume of The Reception of Locke's Politics, edited by Mark Goldie [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], 25-128.)

Here's Remus's response: "To say that the state has a care of souls and that it has a duty to worship God, however, is not to say that the state may adopt whatever religion it happens to like or even judges to be true.  Rather, it is to say that the state has a duty to adopt the religion which has truly been revealed by God, namely, the Catholic religion" (363).  Remus then quotes from Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885), saying that "it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate."  Remus does not notice, however, that Leo cited many New Testament verses as supporting this claim.

The most important New Testament text for Leo and other Integralists as establishing Catholicism as the true religion was Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus says to Peter: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."  The Latin version of these words is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, in letters six feet high.  On these few words rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church.  Catholics interpret these words as teaching that the Apostle Peter was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be the first pope--the Bishop of Rome--and all the other popes have been the direct successors of Peter as the Bishop of Rome, and thus have had the papal authority granted originally by Jesus.

                                                      The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica

Remarkably, Remus says nothing about Matthew 16:18-19.  Locke denies that Jesus ever conferred on any bishop of a church "Ruling Authority derived from the very Apostles, and continued down unto the present times by an uninterrup0ted Succession" (16).  But, oddly, Locke never mentions Matthew 16:18-19.

Locke could have argued that there are good reasons to doubt the Catholic interpretation of these verses.  First of all, these words in the Gospel of Matthew do not appear in any of the other Gospels, which should make one suspicious.  Secondly, it's not clear what Jesus meant by these words.  The word for "church" (ecclesia) occurs only twice in the four Gospels, and it's not clear that Jesus was really thinking about founding a church.  Moreover, Jesus says nothing about Peter having an endless number of successors who would inherit his apostolic authority; and Jesus says nothing about there being bishops in Rome.  And one would think that Jerusalem would be more important than Rome for Jesus.  Furthermore, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Peter ever went to Rome.  There is no contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop in Rome.  And the first indications of there being a bishop in Rome come from the second century.

What is said in the New Testament about the first Christian churches confirm Locke's claim that they were "voluntary and free societies" that did not use violent coercion to enforce belief, although they did excommunicate those they deemed deviants from church norms.  And while these churches had bishops, there is no evidence that there was a strict hierarchy of bishops with the bishop of Rome enforcing orthodoxy on all the churches.

So, again, it seems that the New Testament teaches the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and religious toleration.

INTEGRALIST CATHOLICS ARE INTOLERABLE

In his Appendix, Remus responds to the objection that in modern countries like the United States with religious pluralism, and where Catholics are in the minority, it seems absurd to propose that the Catholic Church should be the established church enforced by the state.  Remus's answer is that yes, in these circumstances, a Catholic confessional state is not practicable, and so it would be imprudent for the Catholic Church to insist that the governments in these countries should subject themselves to the religious rule of the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, Remus argues, the imprudence of doing this does not deny the truth of what he has said about the proper relationship between the Church and the state.  Consequently, Catholics are obligated to strive to win as many converts to Catholicism as they can, as they work toward achieving the social and political power over their societies that will someday allow the Catholics to establish the rule of the Catholic Church and to use legal force to restrict the religious freedom of non-Catholics.

Locke argued that churches that do not teach and practice religious tolerance of other religions cannot themselves be tolerated.  Remus agrees!  "A government which holds in principle that it must treat all religions within its domain equally and that those religions must in turn refrain from any intervention in politics cannot tolerate the Catholic Church and be consistent with itself" (371).

Amazingly, the final conclusion of Remus's argument for Catholic Integralism and against Lockean toleration is that Lockean liberal regimes like the United States must not tolerate Catholic Integralists.

 

The Incoherence of Evolutionary Psychology's Kantian Transcendentalist Morality: Carlton Patrick and Peter DeScioli

In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Edward O. Wilson recognized that crucial for his unification of all knowledge was a biological account of ethics as rooted in evolved human nature.  He rightly noted that in doing this, he was following in the tradition of naturalistic ethics that stretches from Aristotle to David Hume to Adam Smith and to Charles Darwin.  He was also right to see this naturalistic tradition of ethics as being "empiricist" in contrast to the "transcendentalist" ethics of those thinkers like Immanuel Kant who look to a transcendent realm of moral freedom beyond the natural world of human inclinations and experience.  Since I agree with Wilson about this, it always seems strange to me that so many evolutionary psychologists have rejected Wilson's reasoning in favor of a Kantian transcendentalist view of morality, even though this contradicts any evolutionary explanation of morality as grounded in evolved human nature, which makes their account of morality incoherent.

For example, a few months ago, I wrote about Carlton Patrick's article--"Evolution Is the Source, and the Undoing, of Natural Law"--in which he assumed that John Finnis was correct in his Kantian interpretation of natural law as based on some "supernatural or metaphysical explanations" that transcend human nature.  Patrick then showed how evolutionary psychology explains that "when we talk about morality, we are not talking about a cosmic mandate but rather a set of species-wide psychological instincts that are a part of human nature."  But in thus refuting Finnis's Kantian distortion of natural law, Patrick ignored the fact that the natural law as understood by people like Thomas Aquinas and John Locke is rooted in human biological nature in a way that can be confirmed by evolutionary moral psychology.

I have also pointed out how Patrick and his coauthor Debra Lieberman have supported a Kantian rationalist view of ethics as transcending human biological nature, which denies the naturalist view of ethics defended by Locke, Darwin, and Westermarck.

Peter DeScioli is another example of an evolutionary psychologist who accepts Kant's transcendentalist morality, while still developing an evolutionary account of morality that contradicts that Kantian transcendentalism (DeScioli 2016; DeScioli and Kurzban 2009, 2013, 2018; Kurzban, DeScioli, and Fein 2012).  DeScioli repeatedly refers to Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals as showing how moral judgment must depend on the "categorical imperatives" of a transcendental morality (see, for example, DeScioli and Kurzban 2013, 479-480; and Kurzban et al. 2012).  He also endorses George Jackson Mivart's Kantian critique of Darwin's evolutionary moral psychology in The Descent of Man (DeScioli and Kurzban 2013, 479; Mivart 1893, 1973).  Mivart insisted on a Kantian separation between nature and morality.  Although the human body could be explained as a natural product of biological evolution, Mivart contended, the human soul was a supernatural product of divine creation.  And as an expression of the soul's transcendence of nature, human morality manifested a uniquely human freedom from natural causality.

In the Groundwork, Kant posits a radical dualism that separates reality into two metaphysical realms.  Judging what is the case belongs to the "phenomenal" realm of nature, but judging what ought to be belongs to the "noumenal" realm of freedom (Kant 1959, 3-5, 30, 44-45, 67-74, 80 [Academie edition, 387-89, 413, 426-28, 448-56, 460-62]).  The distinction in English between is and ought corresponds to Kant's distinction in German between sein and sollen.  For Kant, the natural world is governed by causal laws that can be understood by natural science; and in this world there can be no free will, because every event must be determined by a causal mechanism.  By contrast, in our moral experience, we praise and blame people in accordance with a moral law that transcends nature and is thus unknowable by natural science; and in this moral world we must assume free will, because moral judgment would be impossible unless we assumed that people were capable of freely choosing to obey or disobey the moral law.  As moral agents, we obey categorical imperatives of what ought to be, but this ought expresses a moral necessity that has no place in nature.  "When we have the course of nature alone in view, ought has no meaning whatsoever" (Kant 1965, 473).  As moral agents, human beings transcend the empirical realm of nature and enter a transcendent realm of freedom that belongs to them as rational beings not governed by the laws of nature.

Kant's separation of is and ought treats morality as an autonomous realm of experience governed by its own internal logic with no reference to anything in human nature such as natural desires and inclinations and the natural pursuit of happiness.  The human pursuit of happiness is not truly moral because it is governed by the empirical hypothetical imperatives of prudence--if you desire to be happy, then you must cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues--but not by the categorical imperatives of pure moral reason--you must obey the moral law without regard to your natural desires for happiness.

This puts Kant in opposition to the ethical naturalists like Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, and Hume, who say that the human good is the desirable, that human morality is the pursuit of happiness, and that the natural moral law corresponds to the order of the natural desires of human nature.

When Darwin developed his evolutionary theory of morality, he adopted the ethical naturalist position rather than a Kantian dualism.  When he began his account of the moral sense in The Descent of Man, he quoted a passage from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason about how the word ought is one of the noblest traits of human beings.  But in the immediately following passage of Kant's book, Kant said this experience of the moral ought shows us "man as belonging to two worlds" (Kant 1956, 90).  Darwin, however, denied this Kantian dualism by indicating that he would approach morality "exclusively from the side of natural history," and he identified the power of the word ought as expressing instinctive moral emotion--"the deep feeling of right or duty" (2004, 120-21, 134, 136, 140, 147, 680).

DeScioli says that his evolutionary theory of morality is on the side of Kant rather than Darwin, because he accepts Kant's claim "that morality consists of 'categorical imperatives,' a set of actions that are morally wrong regardless of the goals these actions are intended to achieve," and DeScioli believes that laboratory research "has found that people often show Kantian moral thinking, focusing on specific actions rather than expected consequences" (DeScioli and Kurzban 2013, 479).   

DeScioli claims that the Kantian morality of categorical imperatives is shown clearly in how most people think about the Trolley Dilemma.  Imagine that you see a runaway trolley speeding down a track, and five people who have somehow become bound to the track will be killed.  You see that there is a switch that will turn the trolley onto a sidetrack and save the lives of the five people.  Unfortunately, however, there is one person bound to the sidetrack who will be killed if you throw the switch.  Should you throw the switch--killing one person but saving five?

Now imagine that you are on a footbridge over the tracks.  You see the runaway trolley and the five people who will be killed if the trolley is not stopped.  There is no switch to divert the trolley onto a sidetrack.  You could jump onto the track and try to stop it.  But let's say that you are such a small person that you're unlikely to stop it.  You notice, however, that there is a fat man standing near you, and if you push him onto the tracks, he will probably stop the trolley, but he will be killed.  Should you push the fat man--killing one person but saving five?

Oh sure, as I have indicated in my previous posts on the Trolley Dilemma, this looks like a silly cartoon.  But it does illustrate the kind of dilemma that some people have faced (perhaps in war), where killing one or a few people might save the lives of many. 

When people are asked about these two trolley scenarios, most will say that they would pull the switch but would not push the fat man.  This might seem strange since most are willing to kill one person to save five in the switch case but not in the footbridge case.  What's the difference between the two cases?

(Actually, in one realistic simulation of the switch case, 5 of 7 individuals froze in fear and refused to throw the switch.)

As DeScioli indicates, the most plausible explanation has been offered by John Mikhail (2011), who says that what we see here is an intuitive moral understanding of the Principle of Double Effect.  Thomas Aquinas stated this principle as part of his natural law jurisprudence.  To reconcile the prohibition of intentional killing with the right to kill in self-defense, Aquinas explained: "Nothing prevents one action having two effects, only one of which is intended, and the other of which is unintended. . . . Therefore, one's action in defending oneself can have two effects: saving one's life and slaying the aggressor.  And so such acts of self-defense, as one intends by them to preserve one's life, do not have the character of being unlawful, since it is natural for everything to keep itself in existence as far as possible" (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 64, a. 7).  Mikhail sees a general principle here: "the principle holds that an otherwise prohibited action, such as battery or homicide, which has both good and bad effects may be permissible if the prohibited act itself is not directly intended, the good but not the bad effects are directly intended, the good effects outweigh the bad effects, and no morally preferable alternative is available" (Mikhail 2011, 148-49).

Mikhail applies this Principle of Double Effect to explain how most people distinguish the switch case from the footbridge case in the Trolley Dilemma.  If there is no morally preferable alternative, most people would pull the switch to intentionally save the five lives, while foreseeing but not directly intending the death of the one person on the sidetrack.  We know that the killing is not intended, because if the person on the sidetrack could escape and save his life, the bystander who pulled the switch would be pleased with this outcome.  By contrast, to push the fat man off the footbridge would be a directly intended killing; and we know that because if the fat man could run off the track to save his life, the intended outcome of the bystander who pushed him would not be achieved.

Mikhail sees this Principle of Double Effect as one manifestation of an "intuitive jurisprudence" rooted in "a common moral nature" and "a common sociobiological instinct" that illustrates the naturally evolved moral sense identified by Darwin in The Descent of Man (Mikhail 2011, 57, 148, 172; Darwin 2004, 132-38).

I don't see how this conforms to Kant's metaphysical morality.  Kant never speaks about the Principle of Double Effect.  And he clearly denies that moral judgment can be rooted in any instinctive moral sense of human nature, because pure moral reasoning belongs to a noumenal realm of pure moral reason that transcends the empirical reality of nature.

And yet, DeScioli insists that how people judge the trolley dilemma manifests the categorical imperatives of Kantian morality.  "Immanuel Kant would argue . . . that when humans face this dilemma, they should not kill one to save five because there is an inviolable moral rule against killing that cannot be broken regardless of the consequences" (Kurzban, DeScioli, and Fein 2012, 323).  In the footbridge version of the trolley dilemma, most people do seem to judge that in that situation, it is wrong to kill one person to save five people.  But in the switch version, most people judge that in that situation, it is right to kill one person to save five.   And so they do not believe in a Kantian categorical imperative that "there is an inviolable moral rule against killing" in all situations, as DeScioli asserts.  Rather, they believe that the rightness or wrongness of killing depends upon the situation.  So that in a situation where one must kill one person to save five people, and that killing is not directly intended, that killing is not wrong.  But in a situation where one directly intends to kill one person to save five people, that killing is wrong.  

Similarly, in a situation where killing an attacker is the only way to save one's life, that killing in self-defense is not wrong, because one is not directly intending the killing, as indicated by the fact that if the attacker were to retreat or surrender, one would not kill him.  A comparable moral principle of the law of just war is that combatants must not directly intend to target innocent people for attack, although innocent people might die as an unintended side-effect of directly attacking military targets.  Combatants may attack and kill enemy combatants who threaten them, but if those enemy combatants surrender, then they may not be killed.  

Here we see that Kant's categorical imperative (never kill) fails, because it does not allow for prudence in recognizing the variability in our moral judgments of right and wrong as applied to variable situations.

In a recent article in Evolution and Human Behavior, DeScioli seems to pull away from his earlier attempts to ground an evolutionary theory of morality and law in Kantian moral philosophy (De Scioli 2023).  He says nothing about Kant.  He argues that moral rules and laws evolved as a strategy for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  And this would seem to be grounded not in Kant's categorical imperatives but in the hypothetical imperatives of Thomistic and Lockean natural law as rooted in evolved human nature.  I will comment on that article in my next post.

REFERENCES

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man.  Penguin Classics.

DeScioli, Peter.  2016.  "The Side-Taking Hypothesis for Moral Judgment."  Current Opinion in Psychology 7:23-27.

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

DeScioli, Peter, and Robert Kurzban.  2009.  "Mysteries of Morality."  Cognition 112: 281-99.

DeScioli, Peter, and Robert Kurzban.  2013.  "A Solution to the Mysteries of Morality."  Psychological Bulletin 139: 477-496.

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