Westermarck and Incest Laws

I have written a number of posts on Edward Westermarck's Darwinian theory of the incest taboo, one of which can be found here.

Westermarck's theory illuminates some of the reasoning for Darwinian natural right. First of all, it provides one of the best illustrations of a Darwinian account of morality as arising from a complex interaction of genetic propensities, cultural traditions, and individual judgments. More specifically, it's an example of how this reasoning can be applied to the study of law.

Last week, I led my students in my philosophy of law class in a discussion of an article in the Harvard Law Review on incest laws in the United States. Although the author of this anonymous Note shows no knowledge of Westermarck's theory, one can see how the article's analysis would have been deepened by some application of Westermarck's theory.

The Note shows the great diversity--and even confusion--in the incest laws of the United States as they vary across states. The author proposes a new standard that would create consistency in the laws. The new standard would be based on a distinction between consensual and nonconsensual incest. Where individuals are in a "natural dependency" relationship of caretaker and dependent--as in mother and child--sex would be prohibited. But "consenting adults" would be free to engage in sexual relationships with one another. The underlying principle is John Stuart Mill's principle of individual liberty. Although this standard is unlikely to be enacted in law, it does point to the need for clarification of our incest laws.

To illustrate some of the confusion in the law, consider some of the cases covered in the article. Rhode Island law permits Jewish marriages between uncles and nieces. In In re May's Estate (1953), a New York court had to decide whether an uncle and niece married in Rhode Island had a valid marriage in New York. The court upheld the marriage, because it "was not offensive to the public sense of morality to a degree regarded generally with abhorrence and thus was not within the inhibitions of natural law." The author of the Note agrees with the outcome of this case but dismisses the appeal to "natural law" as purely "subjective" judgment.

In the case of Israel v. Allen (1978), the Colorado Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a statute that prohibited marriage between siblings related by adoption. The parents of the married couple in question had married when the children were teenagers. The court argued that biologically unrelated people are less likely to produce children with genetic defects due to inbreeding. Consequently, the marriage of adoptive siblings doesn't produce the same "natural repugnance" or "moral condemnation" as a marriage of people who are biologically related. Moreover, in this particular case, there was no evidence that the adoptive siblings had ever lived together in the same household. Again, the author of the Note accepts the outcome of this case but scorns the reasoning in the decision. The court's reasoning is said to be confused because it tries to establish some standard of what counts as an acceptable family, but in this case these adoptive siblings both are and are not members of the same family.

Applying Westermarck's theory would help us to understand what is going on here. When children are reared in the same family from an early age, they are naturally inclined to feel a sexual aversion towards those with whom they have been reared. This propensity to learn such an aversion is probably the consequence of an evolutionary history to favor behavior that is less likely to result in inbreeding that reduces fitness. This is largely an unconscious psychological process. But it can also be reinforced by conscious reasoning insofar as societies become aware of the problems of inbreeding.

We can predict that our moral repugnance will be strongest towards incest within the nuclear family, which explains why all states in the United States prohibit the marriage of full-siblings and between parents and children. But we typically feel less abhorrence towards the marriage of step-relatives who have not grown up together. And we disagree in our reactions towards cousin marriages. Many states permit cousin marriages, but the majority prohibit cousin marriages. The psychology of the Westermarck effect allows us to explain what would otherwise seem to be utter confusion in the laws of incest.

How exactly we should write our laws on incest is a matter of customary traditions and deliberate choices. Our formal laws might move in the direction suggested by the author of the Note, which would give "consenting adults" a lot of freedom in deciding whom they want to marry. But we could still enforce customary social norms through social pressure even without legal coercion.

As I have indicated in a previous post on the "good eugenics" practiced by American Jews, some Ashkenazi Jews have procedures for testing children to see if they are carriers of Tay-Sachs and other genetic maladies, and then they use voluntary means to encourage their children to consider the potential risks in their choice of marital partners.

We should use legal coercion only to enforce those norms that we can all agree on as expressing our deepest moral sense about clear harms that we want to avoid. But we can also enforce the moral norms of civil society through social persuasion without formal legal coercion.

A Revised Book Project: "Natural Right and Biology"

After receiving suggestions from various people and thinking more about it myself, I now have a revised version of my book project--

NATURAL RIGHT AND BIOLOGY: A DARWINIAN HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

1. DARWINIAN HUMAN NATURE

2. ANCIENT NATURAL RIGHT: ARISTOTLE

3. MEDIEVAL NATURAL LAW: AQUINAS

4. MODERN NATURAL RIGHTS: HOBBES, LOCKE, AND ROUSSEAU

5. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS AND POLITICS: HUME, SMITH, AND WESTERMARCK

6. NIHILISM AND NATURALISM: NIETZSCHE

7. SOCIAL DARWINISM: SPENCER, HAECKEL, AND HITLER

8. PHENOMENOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGY: JONAS AND KASS

9. LIBERTY AND JUSTICE: HAYEK, RAWLS, AND NUSSBAUM

10. OUR TRANSHUMAN FUTURE?

Obviously, writing such a book will require more than one year! But I will be able to incorporate material from some previous writing, including some of my blog posts here.

Nietzsche and "Morality as Animal"

My new book project will probably have to include a chapter on Friedrich Nietzsche, because Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to think through the moral and political implications of Darwinian science.

Nietzsche shows two opposing positions in his responses to modern science generally and Darwinian science in particular. In his early and late writings, Nietzsche worries that the scientific teaching of evolution is "true but deadly" because it denies the transcendent norms that motivate human greatness. In his book On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1873), he warns: "If the doctrines of sovereign evolution, of the fluidity of all concepts, types and species, of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal--doctrines that I consider true but deadly--are thrust upon the people for another generation with the rage for instruction that has by now become normal, no one should be surprised if the people perishes of petty egoism, ossification and greed, falls apart and ceases to be a people; in its place, systems of individualist egoism, brotherhoods for the rapacious exploitation of the non-brothers, and similar creations of utilitarian vulgarity may perhaps appear in the arena of the future."

But in Nietzsche's middle writings--particularly, Human, All Too Human (1878) and Dawn (1881)--he explains that while he rejects the possibility of the "absolute truths" assumed by "metaphysical philosophy," he affirms the "unpretentious truths" discovered through the scientific investigation of historical reality. Since "everything has evolved," and "man has evolved," everything is historically contingent, and therefore there are no eternal truths. And yet a properly historical science of evolution can discover the "unpretentious truths" of historical development. So, while human nature is not eternal, because it has evolved as the product of a historical development, we can draw historical generalizations about human beings that are true for as long as human beings exist in their present form. Although the historical knowledge that comes from science is limited and contingent, it is a genuine kind of knowledge. "True science," Nietzsche believes, is "the imitation of nature in concepts."

At the beginning of HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, Nietzsche writes: "Everything essential in the development of humanity took place in primeval times, long before the four thousand years we more or less know about; during these years humanity may well have not altered very much. But the philosopher sees 'instincts' in man as he now is and assumes that these belong to the unalterable facts of humanity and to that extent could provide a key to the understanding of the world in general: the whole of teleology is constructed by speaking of the man of the last four millennia as of an eternal man towards whom all things in the world have had a natural relationship from the time he began. But everything has evolved: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently, what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty."

This historical science of human nature includes a natural history of morals. By Nietzsche's scientific account, morality does not elevate human beings beyond the natural world, because human morality arises from the natural evolutionary history of animal life. In Dawn, he explains: "The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery--in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues--are animal: a consequence of that drive that teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal."

Explaining "morality as animal" conforms to a Darwinian science of human beings as animals shaped by a history of natural evolution. But many human beings regard such an explanation as a degrading view of human beings, because it denies their spiritual character as elevated above the natural world by some divinely instilled longing for eternal redemption.

Nietzsche shows this same fear in his early and late writings when he worries about Darwinian evolution as "true but deadly." The religious imagery of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the teaching of eternal return satisfy Nietzsche's religious longing for transcendence by "eternalizing" earthly life. This religious motivation in Nietzsche was seen by Lou Salome, one of his closest friends and the woman who rejected his proposal of marriage. As a skeptical free thinker, Salome agreed with Human, All Too Human and the other books from Nietzsche's middle period of writing for "free spirits." But in his later writings--particularly, Thus Spoke Zarathustra--she saw a religious mysticism that she rejected, and which she attributed to a religious yearning that Nietzsche could never overcome. This seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Nietzsche described his experience in writing Zarathustra as "inspiration" and "revelation."

In my chapter on Nietzsche, I will defend his evolutionary science of morality in Human, All Too Human and Dawn as sensible; and I will reject the atheistic religiosity of his transcendent longings as unreasonable.

"Natural Right and Biology"--A Book Project

This week, I have been celebrating my appointment as a "Presidential Research Professor" at Northern Illinois University, which will begin in July.

One of the benefits of this position is that it will allow me to take a year off from teaching in 2009-2010 to work on a new book. My thinking about this book project has been changing. But as of now, what I have in mind is a book that might be entitled Natural Right and Biology: A Darwinian History of Political Philosophy.

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have defended the idea that an Aristotelian conception of natural right might be reformulated as rooted in a Darwinian understanding of human nature and human history. In this new book, I foresee elaborating this idea through a Darwinian account of natural right moving through the history of political philosophy.

My tentative sketch of chapters for this book looks like this:

1. DARWINIAN HUMAN NATURE

2. ANCIENT NATURAL RIGHT: ARISTOTLE

3. MEDIEVAL NATURAL LAW: AQUINAS

4. MODERN NATURAL RIGHTS: HOBBES, LOCKE, AND ROUSSEAU

5. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMANITY: HUME, SMITH, AND WESTERMARCK

6. LIBERTY AND JUSTICE: HAYEK, RAWLS, AND NUSSBAUM

Yes, I know, it's ridiculously ambitious. But I'm going to give it a try.

Darwin at the University of Chicago's Basic Program Retreat

The Basic Program in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago is a "great books" program that was originally established by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in 1946. When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I taught in the Basic Program for four years (1974-1978).

Twice a year, the Basic Program has a Weekend Study Retreat at the Illinois Beach Resort in Zion, Illinois. This is organized around a particular theme and set of related readings. This year's spring weekend (May 1-3)will be devoted to Charles Darwin to commemorate the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The assigned readings will be from the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.

I will be giving the Friday night lecture, speaking on "Does Darwin Support or Subvert Morality?"

On Saturday, Michaelangelo Alloca will speak on "More Fun than a Barrel of Monkey Trials: Darwin's Complex Relationship with Religion," and John Melsheimer will speak on "What Does 'Species' Mean in the Origin of Species." On Sunday morning, George Anastaplo will speak on "On the Suggestive Origins of Darwin and Lincoln." Each lecture will be followed by small-group discussions.

Saturday night will be devoted to a delightful cabaret performance by Richard Milner--"Charles Darwin: Live and In Concert." Milner is an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who specializes in the study of evolution and the life of Darwin. His one-man musical on Darwin's life has been performed around the world.

This should all be great fun.

Information about the program and how to register can be found at the Basic Program's website. More information about Milner's performance can be found at his website.

Insect Politics

Ant farms don't seem to be as popular today with young boys as they were when I was a boy. There were plastic ant farms that allowed ants to build their nests in containers with plastic windows so that you could watch them at work. But I preferred to use Mason jars filled with dirt.

One day, I went to my back yard to examine my ant colony, and I was terrified to see that my black ant colony was under attack from a red ant colony. The fighting was vicious. Since this was at the peak of the Cold War, I imagined that my ants were fighting off the Red Army. After a few hours of battle, my ants were completely overrun by the Reds. It was a sad day.

Years later, when I was a college student reading Aristotle, I was pleased to see that Aristotle agreed with me that ants were political animals. According to Aristotle, some animals are solitary and others gregarious. Of the gregarious animals, some are political. Some of the political animals have leaders. Leaders can help a community by directing it to its common ends, but leaders can also harm a community when they lead factions that divide it. The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function (koinon ergon). Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

And yet, Aristotle explains, human beings are more political than other political animals because of the uniquely human capacity for speech. Other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain. But human beings can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good. Through speech, human beings can deliberate about the collective good. A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common advantage of all of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private advantage of its ruling group.

If we were to follow Aristotle's lead, we would have to see political science as embracing all of the political animals, which would allow us to compare human politics with the politics of other political animals. I have argued for doing that in various articles and in Chapter 3 of Darwinian Natural Right.

In identifying ants, bees, and wasps as political animals, Aristotle recognized what biologists today see as the highly social nature of the eusocial insects belonging to the order Hymenoptera. These insects live in colonies that can have as many as 20 million members. One or a few members reproduce. Most of the other members act as workers who rarely reproduce. The colony members are all female, with queens being reproductive. Males are produced only for short periods of mating. The size and complexity of these social insect colonies make them comparable to human communities.

Apparently, Aristotle did not recognize that other group of eusocial insects--the termites--belonging to the order Isoptera. In some ways, the termites are more like humans than are the hymenopteran insects, because in termite colonies, a king lives with a queen, and the workers are often both male and female, with some division of labor between the sexes.

There have been great advances in the study of insect societies. Much of this research is surveyed in two recent books--Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (Norton, 2008); and Jurgen Gadau and Jennifer Fewell, eds., Organization of Insect Societies (Harvard University Press, 2009).

I argue that this research supports Aristotle against Hobbes. In contrast to Aristotle's claim that human beings were by nature political animals comparable to the social insects, Hobbes insisted on a radical separation between animal societies as founded on natural instinct and human societies as founded on social learning. Unlike Hobbes, Aristotle saw no unbridgeable gulf between animal instinct and human learning, because he thought that almost all animals have some natural instincts for social learning, and some are intelligent enough to live as social and political animals.

The organization of complex animal societies requires communication. Among human beings, the primary forms of communication are audiovisual--as in language and nonverbal signalling. Among social insects, the primary form of communication is chemical signalling. All researchers recognize the complexity of insect communication. Some--like Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol--even argue that ants engage in teaching. Other researchers--like Ed Wilson--argue that insect learning is more hard-wired genetically.

Wilson and Holldobler have identified three forces in the evolution of insect sociality--individual selection, group selection, and collateral kin selection. Through individual selection, individuals cooperate to enhance their individual survival and reproduction. Through group selection, individuals cooperate within a group to outcompete other groups. Through collateral kin selection, individuals cooperate to spread genes shared by collateral kin. Ed Wilson and David Sloan Wilson emphasize group selection as more important than collateral kin selection. But other scientists in the tradition of W. D. Hamilton emphasize kin selection.

In any case, one can see here a deepening of Aristotle's insights, because Aristotle saw political life as rooted in the extension of parental care and in the cooperation of individuals for the common good of their group in competition with other groups.

A biopolitical science bringing together Aristotelian political theory and Darwinian biology would include the comparative politics of humans and insects.

Some of the continuing debates over the evolution of insect sociality are briefly surveyed in two recent articles in Science--one by Elizabeth Pennisi (February 6) and another by Virginia Morell (March 6).

Shadia Drury on Aquinas's Betrayal of Natural Law

Shadia Drury is a professor of political philosophy at the University of Regina in Canada. She is best known for her criticisms of Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and their influence on American politics. A brief statement of her general attack on the Straussians can be found here.

Strauss and his students are commonly identified as critics of modern relativism and historicism who looked to premodern conceptions of "natural right" or "natural law" as providing enduring standards for morality and politics. But Drury argues that this is only the deceptive exoteric teaching of Straussianism. When one uncovers the esoteric teaching, one sees that the Straussians are actually secret atheists and Nietzschean nihilists who deny that there are any natural standards for morality or politics. But they see this nihilism as a deadly teaching that would corrupt human life for the multitude of human beings. Only the philosophic few are capable of facing up to the deadly truth of nihilism, and they are careful to promote the noble lies of religious belief and natural right for the many. The superiority of the Nietzschean philosophers as the creators of all values is the only enduring standard for the Straussians.

Against the secret nihilism of the Straussians, Drury argues that there really are some natural standards for morality and politics, which can be found in the tradition of natural law reasoning. But while she looks to Thomas Aquinas as providing the best formulation of this tradition, she is deeply suspicious of Aquinas's Christian account of natural law, because she sees in Aquinas's writing a religious fanaticism and an unhealthy asceticism that promotes theocratic tyranny and a gloomy denial of earthly life.

In her most recent book--Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of Natural Law (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008)--Drury lays out her reasoning for how Aquinas betrayed the promise of natural law and how that promise might finally be fulfilled by saving natural law from Aquinas's distortions.

I have written many posts on how my account of Darwinian natural right supports a reasonable version of natural law. Drury's position is similar to mine, although I stress more than she does the modern scientific grounding of natural law, and I think her polemical style of writing sometimes leads her to overstate her arguments.

The philosophic supporters of Aquinas over the last hundred years have praised him for reconciling faith and reason, for promoting a moderate view of politics that secures liberty, and for countering the life-denying attitude of Augustinian asceticism with a life-affirming endorsement of nature's goodness. Drury denies each of these claims.

While Aquinas appears to be defending human reason and the philosophic life as autonomous in a way that should not threaten biblical faith, Drury tries to show how Aquinas ultimately puts reason under the command of faith. Aquinas's fideism is evident, for example, in his praise of Abraham's irrational faith in God's command to kill his son Isaac. One can also see this in how Aquinas distorts Aristotle's teaching to conform to biblical theology. (Here Drury actually agrees with many of the Straussian commentators on Aquinas, who also stress the ways in which Aquinas must twist Aristotle's texts to fit into a biblical view of the world.)

Many of the modern defenders of Aquinas assert that his natural law reasoning supports a moderate political teaching about the need for limited government free from theocratic fanaticism. And yet, Drury argues, Aquinas actually makes clear that secular political power is subordinate to the ecclesiastical power of the Pope as directed to the highest ends--the eternal salvation of souls. That this supports theocratic tyranny is clear, Drury thinks, in Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition and the Crusades.

I agree with Drury that Aquinas does show a tyrannical fanaticism in his argument that the Pope has the authority to order the execution of heretics. Aquinas was a Dominican. Pope Gregory IX in 1233 gave the Dominicans the supreme authority over the Inquisition, which became for many centuries one of the most brutal exercises of tyranny in all of human history. Drury rightly criticizes Aquinas for endorsing the work of the Dominicans in the Inquisition.

But sometimes she overstates her case. She suggests that Aquinas argued for the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity (60-64). But this is not exactly true. Aquinas said that compulsion could be properly used against heathens and Jews only to prevent their hindering the Christian faith--but not to compel their belief. Only heretics could be rightly compelled to keep the faith (see Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). I agree with her, however, that Aquinas's support for compelling and even executing heretics manifested a tyrannical fanaticism contrary to justice and liberty. I also agree with her in lamenting that almost none of the modern scholarly supporters of Aquinas--with the exception of Josef Pieper--have faced up to Aquinas's defense of the Inquisition.

Against the tradition of the Inquisition, religious conservatives today should respect the modern Western tradition of religious liberty. In this, they follow the New Testament teaching of Christianity about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. After all, the Christians in the New Testament formed churches as voluntary associations of believers, and they never sought the coercive power of the state to enforce their religion. Paul stated a libertarian principle by which the Christians should enforce their religious norms on those who belonged to their churches, but should not act coercively against those outside the church. "For what is it to me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside" (I Corinthians 5:12-13). This would allow churches to excommunicate heretics, but nothing more.

Aquinas is often praised for recognizing the natural goodness of life and thus steering away from the gloomy asceticism of the Augustinian tradition. But Drury correctly points out the many ways in which Aquinas continues the masochistic asceticism of Christianity. This is most evident in the scorn for sexual love and the elevation of celibacy. Underlying this attitude of self-abnegation is a tendency towards the Gnostic dualism of spirit and flesh, in which the natural goodness of human embodiment is denied. (As I have indicated in some previous posts, much of the Christian scorn for a Darwinian view of human nature comes from a Gnostic yearning to transcend the biological reality of the human body.)

Again, however, Drury occasionally overstates her point here. For example, she writes: "Aquinas claims that the man who loves his wife too much is an adulterer" (88). What Aquinas actually says is that "the man who is too ardent a lover of his wife acts counter to the good of marriage [procreation of children] if he use her indecently" (ST, II-II, q. 154, a. 8). The point here is not to condemn "the man who loves his wife too much," but to condemn the man who engages in non-reproductive sex with his wife. Still, I agree with Drury in seeing this as an unhealthy denial of the pleasures of sexual love within marriage.

Towards the end of her book, Drury lays out her reasoning for restoring the lost promise of natural law by basing it totally on reason and natural experience, without any necessary appeal to divine law or ecclesiastical authority. This would, she insists, provide an alternative to the relativism and conventionalism of much modern and postmodern thought today. While I can endorse most of what she says here, I think she doesn't go far enough in considering how modern science supports natural law by showing how it manifests evolved human nature.

At one point, in a dialogue between "Modernity" and "Aquinas," Drury has "Modernity" say: "I must admit that my love affair with science was a mistake," because she had looked to science for "secular salvation" (132).

I see no "secular salvation" in modern natural science. But I do see a rational account of nature and human nature rooted in ordinary human experience that should sustain a modern conception of natural law. Drury believes that "nature provides not only the raw materials but also the goals" for human life, and thus a modern natural law must be founded in a teleological conception of human nature (141, 146, 154, 162, 167). Although modern Darwinian science cannot support a cosmic teleology by which everything in the universe is directed to some cosmic end, it can support an immanent teleology by which living beings are directed to the ends of each species.

In explaining what he means by the "natural inclinations" or "natural instincts" underlying natural law, Aquinas repeatedly compares human beings to other animals who share some of the same inclinations as human beings. Quoting Ulpian, Aquinas declares that natural right is "that which nature has taught all animals."

Darwinian science and the evolutionary account of the natural moral sense allow us to provide a modern scientific foundation for this Aristotelian insight into the biological character of natural right.

Darwinian science can confirm the importance of religious belief as satisfying a natural desire for religious understanding. It can also confirm the social utility of religious communities in enforcing cooperative norms. And yet it also supports the need for religious liberty and the danger of theocratic power, because Darwinism recognizes the imperfections of human nature such that no human being can be trusted to exercise a presumed divine authority over other human beings.

On this blog, I have indicated my reasons for disagreeing with Leon Kass and other Straussians who scorn modern science as a threat to human morality and dignity. This should be another point where Drury and I are on the same side.

Drury has invited me to lecture at the University of Regina in October. Perhaps then we can discuss some of these issues.

The Yuck Factor and the Evolution of Moral Disgust

Conservatives often appeal to moral emotions such as disgust and anger as important for moral judgment. One example is conveyed in a phrase made famous by Leon Kass--"the wisdom of repugnance." If some proposed technique of biotechnology--such as cloning, for instance--elicits deep disgust in many of us, then, Kass suggests, this should be taken seriously as an expression of moral concern.

Kass's critics have rejected such thinking as irrational in allowing emotions to cloud our moral reasoning. After all, can't we easily think of many situations were feelings of disgust support immoral positions such as racism and anti-Semitism?

The defense of Kass's position has been hindered by the fact that Kass and his supporters have often failed to explain the philosophic and scientific tradition supporting the importance of moral emotions for moral judgments. As I have argued in a previous post, Kass's reasoning belongs to a tradition of moral naturalism that stretches from David Hume to Adam Smith to Charles Darwin--a tradition that recognizes the emotionality of moral experience and that denies that pure reason by itself can explain moral judgment.

Moral reasoning is important to moral judgment, because our moral emotions are responses to how we interpret the practical circumstances of life, and so we can reason ourselves into and out of our emotions depending on how we interpret those circumstances. As I have indicated in previous posts, the incest taboo illustrates this. Incest provokes deep disgust in the minds of most of us. But our individual reasoning and cultural learning influence what we consider to be incestuous behavior. Some people and societies regard cousin marriage as incest and thus disgusting. But those who conclude that cousin marriage poses very little risk of physical or mental disabilities in the offspring might feel no disgust with cousin marriage.

Now we have new research exploring the evolutionary and neurophysiological bases of moral disgust. The February 27th issue of Science has a research report by H. A. Chapman et al. entitled "In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust" and a commentary by Paul Rozin et al. entitled "From Oral to Moral."

Here's the abstract for the Chapman article:

"In common parlance, moral transgressions 'leave a bad taste in the mouth.' This metaphor implies a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to toxicity and disease, yet convincing evidence for this relationship is still lacking. We tested directly the primitive oral origins of moral disgust by searching for similarity in the facial motor activity evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), basic disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). We found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oral-nasal rejection response. These results suggest that immorality elicits the same disgust as disease vectors and bad tastes."

The logic of this reasoning turns on the principle of preadaptation--what evolves for one purpose can be used for another purpose. What originated as a system for rejecting bad food could be extended--through genetic or cultural evolution--to a system for evaluating some things or thoughts as disgusting and thus causing withdrawal from those disgusting things or thoughts.

This research confirms Darwin's insights in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In the Descent of Man, Darwin had argued for an evolutionary theory of morality as rooted in a natural moral sense expressed in moral emotions or sentiments. Here he followed in the tradition of Hume and Smith, who argued that without the motivational power of moral emotions, pure reason alone could not explain moral judgments. Moreover, Darwin tried to show how these moral emotions could have arisen from primitive animal instincts. His book on the emotions was designed to show that there were some universal facial expressions of human emotions that suggested primitive origins shared with other animals. Expressions of disgust were one example of a universal pattern suggesting moral emotions.

This new research correlating specific facial muscle movements with the disgust felt when human beings think about unpleasant tastes, cockroaches, incest, or unfairness (in the "ultimatum game") suggests the evolutionary origin of disgust in distaste.

This could explain why Hume and others in the Scottish moral tradition emphasized the importance of "good taste" in moral experience as grounded in human nature.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1970s, I attended one of the first classes that Kass taught there. It was a class on the moral and biological psychology of the passions. The reading list included Darwin's Expression of the Emotions, as well as Book 2 of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Descartes' Treatise on the Passions. I was writing a dissertation on Aristotle's rhetorical theory, and I was interested in how Aristotle developed the moral psychology of the passions in the Rhetoric. I was also interested in how Darwin's work could be seen as uncovering the biological roots of such moral psychology in evolved human nature. It was clear that Kass had similar interests in the possibility of a Darwinian ground for Aristotelian moral naturalism. This was reflected in Kass's first book--Towards a More Natural Science--which influenced my thinking about "Darwinian natural right."

But then in later years, Kass began to move away from Aristotelian and Darwinian themes as he turned more and more to biblical writings, which culminated in his book on Genesis--The Beginning of Wisdom. He seemed to look more to an biblical ethics of divine command rather than an Aristotelian/Darwinian ethics of human nature. And yet his talk about the "wisdom of repugnance" shows a glimmer of that earlier attempt to explore the natural roots of morality in moral emotions.

Darwinian Natural Right in Primitive Law

My conception of Darwinian natural right includes an account of law. A full account of social order requires a nested hierarchy of three kinds of order--natural order, customary order, and rational order--so that custom is constrained by nature, and reason is constrained both by custom and by nature. Law manifests these three levels of order. The proponents of natural law are correct in seeing that law presupposes the natural desires and capacities of human beings. The proponents of customary law are correct in seeing that law presupposes custom. And the proponents of positive law are correct in seeing that law in the strict sense is the stipulation of the lawmaker. In fact, law is the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation.

Darwinian natural right assumes that natural law reflects the twenty natural desires that constitute human nature as shaped by genetic evolution: human beings generally desire a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, war, health, beauty, property, speech, practical habituation, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding. These natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary evolution of law. Within the constraints of natural desires and customary traditions, there is some freedom for the exercise of prudential judgment in stipulating legal decisions and rules.

Opponents of the natural law position argue that there is no evidence for a universal human nature shaping the history of law. Cultural relativists say that law is purely a product of customary traditions that vary radically across societies and across time. Legal positivists say that law is ultimately a product of some lawmaking power unconstrained either by nature or by custom.

The study of primitive law helps to clarify this debate, and I think it provides support for Darwinian natural right. Perhaps the best single study of primitive law is E. Adamson Hoebel's The Law of Primitive Man (published first in 1954 and reprinted in 2006 by Harvard University Press). Hoebel was an anthropologist specializing in legal anthropology. He was best known for his work on the law of the Cheyenne Indians.

In the first part of this book, Hoebel lays out his general theoretical approach to the study of primitive law. He identifies himself as a "functional realist" who studies the behavioral reality of legal practice, as opposed to the conceptual abstractions of natural law or positive law theories.

In the second part of the book, he has five chapters on law in five primitive societies (ranging from the simplest to the most complex): the Eskimos, the Ifugao (in the northern Philippines), the American plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne), the Trobriand Islanders (of the northeast coast of New Guinea), and the Ashanti (on the Gold Coast of West Africa).

In the last part of the book, he offers some general conclusions about the relation of law to religion, the functions of law, and the evolution of law. Hoebel puts his study in the context of Darwinian evolution. "Man emerged from the subhuman, supersimian state a million and more years ago" (291). As compared with chimpanzees, who are intensely social animals, who even have some rudimentary capacity for cultural learning ("protoculture"), the earliest human ancestors used their uniquely human capacity for speech to develop cultural learning far beyond anything seen in other animals (7-8). Using comparative studies of primitive foraging societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, combined with archeological and fossil evidence of human evolution, allows Hoebel to infer what Paleolithic human societies were like (290-91).

Hoebel proposes a "postulation theory of law." Every group or society is organized around a set of fundamental postulates or values that represent "a limited selection from the total of human potentialities, individual and collective" (17). For each primitive society that he studies, Hoebel surveys the anthropological studies and formulates the set of postulated values that constitute the legal culture for that society.

I would say that what Hoebel calls "the total of human potentialities" corresponds to what I would call "human nature." What Hoebel calls the "limited selection" from within these potentialities corresponds to what I would describe as custom and stipulation selecting from within the potentialities of human nature those values that seem adapted to the particular needs and circumstances of a particular society.

So, for example, there is a natural desire for property expressed in every human society. But the specification of what counts as property and of the rights and duties of property varies across societies. Property in land is often not important for nomadic people. But it is very important for those like the Ifugao who get most of their food from growing rice.

I identify political rule as one of the twenty natural desires. But it might seem that primitive societies have no structure of political rule because they have no governments. "The Eskimo is what some would call an anarchist," Hoebel observes. "He has no government in the formal sense" (81). But this lack of "formal" government still leaves open the possibility of "informal" rule.

My claim is that human beings are by nature political animals, because they naturally live in social systems that require (at least occasionally) central coordination. In civilized human communities, such as bureaucratic states, this centralized coordination is formal and enduring. But in primitive human communities, such as hunter-gatherer bands, this centralized coordination of society is informal and episodic.

The Eskimos show this in their following the leadership of headmen. Hoebel explains: "The headman possesses no fixed authority; neither does he enter into formal office. He is not elected, nor is he chosen by any formal process. When other men accept his judgment and opinions, he is a headman. When they ignore him, he is not. Headmen are those who can hunt and 'who by their extended acquaintance with the traditions, customs, and rights connected with the festivals, as well as being possessed of an unusual degree of common sense, are deferred to and act as chief advisers of the community.' Such are the germs of political authority among the rude societies of mankind" (82).

This is what David Hume had in mind when he described in his essay "Of the Origin of Government" how the "love of dominion" as rooted in the "principles of human nature" would motivate leaders in savage societies who get prestige from acting as dominant individuals, although this dominance would depend on the voluntary consent, or at least acquiescence, of the other individuals in the society. In this way, the Lockean idea of "original contract" really does explain the primitive origins of law and government, although the later history of government has been decisively shaped by war and conquest.

I see in Hoebel's study confirmation of most if not all of the twenty natural desires rooted in evolved human nature, because one can see these natural desires expressed in some form in all of these primitive societies.

One can see, for instance, in all of these societies the desire for sexual mating and the need for social regulation to manage the conflicts created by sexual competition. The most common cause of homicide is men fighting over women. And this requires elaborate customary norms for marital bonding and resolving disputes over sexual partners.

Similarly, the prohibition of incest is universal in these primitive societies, although there is variation as to what counts as incest because kinship is sociologically defined. This variation is constrained by what the Darwinian would recognize as the "Westermarck effect." The incest taboo is strongest within the nuclear family, because of the tendency to feel a sexual aversion towards those with whom one has been reared from an early age. But this effect is not so strong outside the nuclear family--as with cousins. This pattern is clear in Hoebel's book, which also shows that even primitive people have some awareness of the deleterious effects of inbreeding, and thus some of their customary norms of incest avoidance could be deliberately formulated (109-10, 118-19, 131, 183-86, 191, 239, 254, 264, 291, 303).

My blog posts on the Westermarck theory of the incest taboo can be found here and here. Some of the comments on the first post offer some fascinating personal testimony.

There is some question, however, as to whether the natural desire for intellectual understanding can be found in these primitive societies. One Eskimo said this to an anthropologist: "Too much thought only leads to trouble . . . We Eskimos do not concern ourselves with solving all riddles. We repeat the old stories in the way they were told to us and with the words we ourselves remember . . . You always want these supernatural things to make sense, but we do not bother about that. We are content not to understand" (69).

Does this suggest that the desire to understand does not show itself in primitive societies? After all, as I have indicated in my post on George Anastaplo's study of non-Western cultures, there is a lot to be said for the claim that science or philosophy arose first in ancient Greece along with the discovery of the idea of nature.

At the end of Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that the desire to understand can be explained as a product of evolution, although this requires moving through the higher stages of cultural evolution. We can see in some other animals the tendency to curiosity or playful exploration that is the natural root of the human desire to understand. But the fullest development of the theoretical life as devoted to understanding for its own sake is manifested only after the cultural invention of writing. Only then was symbolic thought brought under the control of analytic reasoning through formal logic and systematic reflection. Preliterate primitive societies cannot show that search for understanding that arises in literate civilized societies, which eventually leads to philosophy and science.

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, and here.

Adam Gopnik on Darwin and Lincoln

It is a remarkable coincidence that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day 200 years ago--February 12, 1809. In some previous posts, I have suggested that this should lead us to think about the points of contact between these two men.

Many books are now being published in connection either with the Lincoln bicentennial or the Darwin bicentennial. But one book combines the two--Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Knopf, 2009). Gopnik is an award-winning writer for The New Yorker; and, as one might expect, this book is wonderfully written. A short excerpt from the book has been published in the February issue of Smithsonian magazine, which can be found online.

Gopnik's main theme is that Lincoln and Darwin were alike in helping to shape the "moral modernity" of "liberal civilization" as based on democratic politics and scientific reasoning--"science and democracy, an idea of objective knowledge arrived at by skepticism and of liberty available to all" (14, 18, 21). Gopnik uses the term "liberalism" in such a broad sense that it encompasses both the political "conservative" in American politics as well as the political "liberal" (18).

According to Gopnik, the crucial change associated with Lincoln and Darwin is the move from a "vertical" view of human life to a "horizontal" one. This is the move from "angels" to "ages." Previously, human beings saw themselves as looking up to the divine realm and down on the subhuman creation. With modernity, they began to see themselves as living in history--looking back to the past and ahead to the future--so that they were neither set above the natural world nor striving towards the supernatural world.

I have learned a lot from reading Gopnik's book. In particular, he has helped me see more clearly than I have previously the importance of the distinctive writing styles of Lincoln and Darwin. I also agree with much of what Gopnik says about the "liberalism" of Lincoln and Darwin.

I also think there is great insight in Gopnik's observations about how Darwinian science recognizes (and even explains) the gap between general knowledge and individual experience. "Individual experience is not reducible to general laws, not because of some mysterious essence that defies scientific explanation but because the explanation, as Darwin saw, begins with the existence of the irreducible individual case" (200). As Gopnik sees, there's an emotional reality to this--our knowledge of the common experience of life gives us no understanding or consolation before our personal tragedies.

Gopnik makes some mistakes. For example, he says that Darwin referred to his idea of evolution by natural selection as a "theory" to set it apart from any theological explanation of origins (185-86). But, in fact, Darwin concludes THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by comparing his "theory of natural selection" and the "theory of creation." Darwin did not deny that creationism was a "theory." He did deny that this theory was as well supported by evidence and reasoning as his theory.

As far as the general themes of Gopnik's book, I disagree on three points. I don't agree with Gopnik that the liberalism of Lincoln and Darwin requires atheism. I don't agree with Gopnik's ignoring Darwin's evolutionary explanation of morality. And I don't agree with Gopnik's claim that Darwin's science has absolutely no political implications.

Although he suggests that Lincoln was an atheist, Gopnik is forced to recognize the biblical character of Lincoln's rhetoric and the fact that Lincoln frequently--especially in the Civil War--invoked God and conveyed a providential view of history. Gopnik speaks of Lincoln's faith as "the most vexed question in all the Lincoln literature" (126). Gopnik's attempt to answer this question turns out only to be a restatement of the question.

The young Lincoln was an atheist, Gopnik indicates, but the older Lincoln had experienced too much grief from death in war and death in the family to accept the idea of a universe governed only by natural necessity (130). "He came increasingly to believe in Providence, but it was a Providence that acted mercilessly through history, not one that regularly interceded with compassion" (131). This was most evident in Lincoln's later speeches--most memorably in the Second Inaugural. Gopnik compares this to Karl Marx's "new religion of history."

Although Gopnik rightly notes the Old Testament style of Lincoln's later speeches, he does not notice that Lincoln quotes from Jesus in the Second Inaugural, which suggests the influence of New Testament Christianity on Lincoln's providential view of history.

Gopnik shows us that both Lincoln and Darwin were moved by their personal experiences with death--Lincoln's boy Willie, Darwin's girl Annie--"to seek some form of transcendence, some meaning beyond the human cycle of breathing and eating and dying, even while resisting the supernatural meanings of faith." They found this transcendence in the "mystical sense of the power of time--time the explanatory force, the justifying force that gives meaning to life by asking us to think in the very long term" (186-87). This "faith in deep time" supports Lincoln's "private mysticism touched by public secularism" and Darwin's "shining inward faith in tension with scientific skepticism" (188).

Gopnik concludes his book by saying that the "Darwin and Lincoln, along with all the other poets of modern life" can affirm "mystical materialism" or "intimations of the numinous." The "space between what we know and what we feel" allows us to believe in "angels and ages, and both at once" (202-204).

Doesn't this contradict Gopnik's assertion that the modern liberalism of Lincoln and Darwin is necessarily atheistic? Isn't Gopnik forced to admit that they both show a religious longing for transcendence? And doesn't this suggest that the modern life of liberal democracy and scientific reasoning cannot obliterate the natural human desire for religious understanding?

I am reminded of that most famous of modern atheists--a contemporary of Lincoln and Darwin--Friedrich Nietzsche. Lou Salome--Nietzsche's friend and love interest--noted that Nietzsche never succeeded in becoming a scientific atheist, because he could never shake off his religious longings. Like his Zarathustra, he became "the most pious of those who don't believe in God."

When Gopnik speaks of how the "poets of modern life" will give us "intimations of the numinous," I am reminded of Nietzsche's prediction that modern artists would cater to the yearning of modern people to feel religious emotions without the burden of having to believe religious doctrines.

By comparison with Lincoln and Nietzsche, Darwin often seems serene in his scientific rationalism. And yet, even Darwin speaks of the limits of reason in striving for ultimate explanations for why nature is the way it is. As he wrote in his Autobiography, "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."

My second point of disagreement with Gopnik concerns his silence about Darwin's evolutionary explanation of morality. When Gopnik comments on Darwin's early notebooks and The Descent of Man, he says nothing about how these writings show Darwin's preoccupation with explaining human morality. Darwin knew that there could be no complete science of human life that did not include a science of human morality.

But like many of the proponents of evolutionary psychology, Gopnik invokes the "fact-value" distinction in assuming a dualistic separation between moral values and scientific facts. Human morality cannot be explained scientifically through the study of natural facts, because morality arises from free human choices. "It might be true, for instance, that life is brutal and pointless, but we can choose to live as though it were otherwise. . . . we all choose to live as though what we are doing has meaning and purpose beyond the day and moment" (195).

Like the existentialist philosophers, Gopnik appeals to human freedom from nature as creating a realm of choice that cannot be accounted for by modern science. But then he never explains how this metaphysical dualism of human freedom and natural causality can be compatible with Darwin's science, and especially Darwin's science of morality as rooted in evolved human nature.

Darwin and Lincoln did not regard the immorality of slavery as merely a matter of free choice. After all, slaveholders could freely choose to believe that slavery was morally right. Darwin and Lincoln thought slavery was wrong because it was contrary to the natural moral sense.

My final point of disagreement with Gopnik concerns his denial that Darwinian science has any political consequences. He writes: "The truth is that Darwin implies no politics: one can be a passionate Darwinian and be of the far right, the right, the liberal center, the left, or even the far left; great Darwinians have been found all around the room" (192). In fact, Gopnik declares, Darwinism does not even imply a liberal politics, although it does imply a "liberal science" (197-98).

Is that really true? Gopnik says that "traditionally, it was leftists, and Marxists in particular, who, despite the allegiance of Marx to its master, were the most hostile to Darwinism" (190). In proposing a "Darwinian left," Peter Singer argues that Marxism was a utopian vision contrary to evolved human nature as studied by the Darwinian. He admits that a "Darwinian left" would have to be "a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a coolly realistic view of what can be achieved."

As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, much of this "deflated" leftism would be acceptable to conservatives, who have long assumed that conformity to human nature is a fundamental standard for good social policy. In his Darwinian Left, Singer recognizes this at the end of the book when he hopes for a "new kind of freedom" that might one day "take us beyond the conventional Darwinian constraints" in human morality and social life.

Doesn't this show that leftists like Singer can never fully escape the utopianism of the leftist tradition of thought? And doesn't it show that any such utopian vision must be contrary to our evolved human nature as confirmed by Darwinian science?

Debating Darwin at Forbes.com

The bicentennial of Darwin's birth has brought lots of media attention to the continuing debate over the scientific, moral, political, and religious implications of Darwin's theory of evolution.

For example, the March issue of Discover magazine has a good section on evolutionary topics, including an article by Karen Wright where I make a cameo appearance.

An interesting collection of short essays is at Forbes.com, the online edition of Forbes magazine. Hana Alberts has edited a package of essays by twenty authors--ranging from proponents of Darwinism like Lionel Tiger and Denis Dutton to creationist/intelligent design opponents like Ken Ham and John West. Unfortunately, the brevity of each essay--averaging about 700 words--means than none of the authors can achieve much depth. But still the diverse range in the essays captures much of the current debate over Darwinism.

My essay for this collection is entitled "We Are The Moral Animals."

I will comment briefly on a few of the essays, beginning with the advocates for Darwin and then turning to the critics.

Denis Dutton makes an interesting point about how Darwin's idea of sexual selection--as opposed to natural selection--implies teleology, because in choosing mates, human beings have exercised purpose and intention in shaping evolution by sexual selection. He concludes that "prehistoric decisions honed the human virtues as we now know them: the admiration of altruism, skill, strength, intelligence, industriousness, courage, imagination, eloquence, diligence, kindness and so forth."

Of course, this still does not support any kind of cosmic teleology. And as Michael Flannery indicates, Alfred Russel Wallace broke with Darwin and sought to provide for such cosmic teleology by arguing that the human mind or spirit manifested the workings of some cosmic intelligence. I would say that Darwinian science does allow for an immanent teleology, as I have argued in an
earlier post.

Helen Fisher claims that recent scientific evidence confirms Darwin's belief that some nonhuman animals feel romantic love. She goes on to distinguish four personality types rooted in four distinctive brain systems. There is probably something to this, but it is grossly oversimplified. We simply don't know how to correlate personality to brain structure. She seems to rely on brain scanning research. But she fails to acknowledge the speculative character of this research.

Owen Jones is one of the leading law professors applying evolutionary reasoning to the study of law. His essay here, however, is too vague to convey much about his reasoning. At the end of the essay, he implies that he takes the idea of the "naturalistic fallacy" for granted: science cannot tell us "what we should want to accomplish," but it can help us to get to where we want. As I have said in some previous posts, I don't find this persuasive, because I don't see why the "ought" should be put in some transcendent realm beyond science.

Leo Tilman tries to summarize his account of "financial Darwinism," which he has laid out in a new book. Applying evolutionary reasoning to economic history is intriguing. It has a long history going back at least to Joseph Schumpeter. I have some posts on this--particularly on Niall Ferguson's recent book on "the ascent of money." But Tilman is so vague in his writing that I can't figure out what he is saying.

Joseph Carroll's essay is a good, brief statement of "literary Darwinism," which has also come up in a few of my posts.

But what about the critics? Kathryn Tabb says that "intelligent design has maintained a purely negative agenda seeking to disprove science's ability to answer questions instead of offering new approaches within the naturalist framework." This observation is confirmed by the fact that all of the critics here--Ken Ham, John West, Michael Egnor, and Jonathan Wells--employ a purely negative rhetoric in that they attack Darwinian science without offering any positive alternative of their own. As I have often noted, this is the preferred rhetorical strategy for creationists and intelligent-design proponents.

Ham and West accuse Darwinian science of promoting racism. But this is an odd charge considering how dedicated Darwin was in his opposition to slavery, as indicated by Adrian Desmond's essay. Moreover, neither Ham nor West acknowledge that much of the support for slavery was rooted in biblical religion, a topic that I have explored in various posts.

As I indicate in my essay, the real motivation for opposing Darwinian science is the fear that it subverts morality, although this ignores the ways in which a Darwinian account of the natural moral sense supports morality. West shows this fear of the moral consequences of Darwinism. I have written many responses to West, one of which can be found here.

Wells offers his standard arguments for his claim that Darwin's theory is not supported by evidence. Some of my responses to him can be found here, here, and here.

That Discover magazine article by Karen Wright ("We All Live in Darwin's World") is now available online.

Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality

One sign of the radical character of Charles Darwin's ideas is that even some of his strongest supporters have rejected much of his thinking. This is clear in the case of Darwin's evolutionary account of morality.

When Darwin first published his naturalistic account of the moral sense in 1871 in The Descent of Man, his friend Thomas Huxley defended it against Darwin's Kantian critics--like Frances Cobbe and 
S. George Mivart--who insisted that morality required a supernatural transcendence of nature.  But later Huxley joined the critics, particularly in his famous 1893 lecture on "Evolution and Ethics." In this lecture, he adopted the Hobbesian-Kantian view of ethics, in which the moral improvement of humanity requires a self-abnegating denial of human nature, because human beings in their natural state are selfish and asocial. Huxley adopted the Kantian concept of culture as a uniquely human realm of activity that transcends biology. He interpreted Darwin's "struggle for existence" as a Hobbesian war of all against all. Because of the "moral indifference of nature," he declared, one could never derive moral values from natural facts. He concluded "that the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it," and thus building "an artificial world within the cosmos."

For over a century after Huxley, many of the strongest proponents of Darwinian science have followed Huxley's lead in rejecting Darwin's explanation of morality as rooted in evolved human nature, because they have assumed that human morality belongs to a transcendent realm of cultural artifice and free will that is beyond the natural realm of causal forces open to scientific study.

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology provoked a great controversy, because on the first page of the book, he claimed that ethics was rooted in human biology. He asserted that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved through natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural environment.

This attempt to revive Darwin's biological study of morality was rejected by some of the leading theorists of Darwinian science. For example, evolutionary biologist George Williams adopted Huxley's Kantian claim that ethics cannot be rooted in human nature because of the unbridgeable gulf between the selfishness of our natural inclinations and the selflessness of our moral duties. As the only rational and cultural animals, human beings can suppress their natural desires and enter a transcendental realm of pure moral duty.

Richard Dawkins took the same position. When his book The Selfish Gene was published in 1976, most commentators saw it as generally agreeing with Wilson's Sociobiology. But they did not notice that the last paragraph of Dawkin's book asserted a Kantian dualism that implicitly rejected Wilson's sociobiological ethics. Dawkins proclaimed that human beings were unique in their capacity for "deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world." "We alone on earth," Dawkins concluded, "can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators." In a 1997 interview, Dawkins explained: "What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T. H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don't want to live in a Darwinian world. We may want to live in, say, a socialist world that is very un-Darwinian."

Like Thomas Huxley, Williams, Dawkins, and many other theorists of evolutionary psychology have rejected Wilson's sociobiological ethics because they think that ethics requires a transcendence of human biology through culture and reason. Unlike Wilson and Darwin, therefore, the proponents of evolutionary psychology have generally rejected the idea that biological science can account for the moral conduct of human beings.

In 1996, Wilson gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) in Evanston, Illinois. This is one of the leading organizations in the world for academic researchers who apply Darwinian theories of human nature to the study of human behavior. It might seem, then, that they should accept Wilson's "sociobiology," which he had defined in the first chapter of Sociobiology as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior." And yet the members of this organization had decided to use the term "evolutionary psychology" as the label for their intellectual project, while avoiding the term "sociobiology." Wilson's speech in 1996 and their reaction to it made clear that the reason for their uneasiness with Wilson's "sociobiology" was their rejection of his biological account of ethics.

Wilson's speech was entitled "The Unity of Science." He argued that the ultimate aim of human understanding of the world was to achieve a unity of knowledge in which the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities would be brought together into one science. As a crucial part of that unification, ethics would be fully explained in biological terms as rooted in human nature, in the moral emotions or sentiments of the human animal. In 1975, in the very first paragraph of Sociobiology, Wilson has declared that he wanted to explain ethics as ultimately rooted in "the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain," which had been shaped by an evolutionary history of natural selection. In 1996, he was elaborating this idea for his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which would be published in 1998.

The audience at the HBES convention was shocked by Wilson's speech, because they were disturbed by his suggestion that a science of natural facts could explain the ethics of moral values. After all, isn't there a radical dichotomy between science and ethics, facts and values, is and ought? Isn't it a "naturalistic fallacy" to think that one can infer a moral ought from a natural is? John Beckstrom, the local organizer for the HBES convention, wrote a letter to Wilson after the convention condemning Wilson's speech. Beckstrom insisted on the is/ought dichotomy as enforcing a total separation between natural science and normative ethics. "You seemed to be advocating normative uses of sociobiology," he explained. "If you were, I would have to oppose vigorously your position, and I expect many in attendance with whom I later discussed your speech, would do likewise."

Until recently, most of the leading thinkers in evolutionary psychology have adopted Beckstrom's position, which falls into the tradition of Huxley in rejecting Darwin's biological science of morality. It is notable, therefore, that in recent years, the rapidly accumulating research on the biological bases of morality has become so impressive that some evolutionary psychologists are beginning to concede that Darwin was right, and Huxley was wrong.

One sign of this is how the textbooks in evolutionary psychology are being revised. In the first edition of David Buss's Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, published in 1999, there was nothing said about morality. But beginning with the second edition, published in 2004, Buss added a short section on "The Evolution of Moral Emotions." In the first edition of John Cartwright's Evolution and Human Behavior, published in 2000, there was nothing on morality. But in the second edition, published in 2008, Cartwright added a whole chapter on ethics.

In the Preface to this new edition, Cartwright writes: "It was with some trepidation that I ventured to write a chapter on ethics, but if, as part of the paradigm of naturalism, evolutionary psychology offers to provide a scientific account of the mind in all its manifestations, then it should be able to illuminate the nature of moral reasoning and help to clarify the source of our strong moral passions. After all, it is not scientifically credible that the origin of our moral convictions should lie outside the plane of human nature."

I agree. And I am pleased that some of the leaders in evolutionary psychology are beginning to come around to what some of us recognized long ago--that Darwin was right to see that a complete evolutionary science of nature and human nature must include a naturalistic explanation of morality.

A couple of my recent posts on evolutionary morality can be found
here and here.

Evolution and Thomistic Natural Law: A Reply to Stephen Pope

I have often argued that a Darwinian view of evolved human nature supports traditional natural law reasoning, particularly as developed by Thomas Aquinas. I have laid out my arguments in many posts, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here. and here.

My position has been challenged by Stephen Pope in his book Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Pope's general argument is that "our growing knowledge of human evolution is compatible with Christian faith and morality, provided that the former is not interpreted reductionistically and the latter is not interpreted in fundamentalist ways." He also argues that the tradition of Thomistic natural law can be brought into harmony with Darwinian science. I agree with all of this.

Considering our fundamental agreement, I am confused by Pope's criticisms of my position in Chapter 11 of his book, where I am considered along with Alasdair MacIntyre, Jean Porter, and Lisa Sowle Cahill, under the title "Natural Law in an Evolutionary Context."

He offers at least five criticisms. First, he seems to agree with John Hare that "if every satisfaction of a natural human desire is good, . . . then Arnhart is not entitled to render a moral condemnation of slavery because it is produced by what he calls our natural human desire for dominance" (274). But I never say that every satisfaction of a natural human desire is good. In fact, much of my writing in Darwinian Natural Right is about how conflicts in our desires lead us to see that what we happen to desire at any one time is not necessarily truly desirable for us over a whole lifetime. Moreover, I devoted a long chapter in Darwinian Natural Right on slavery as showing a tragic conflict of desires that can only be resolved by prudence and the recognition that slavery violates our natural moral sense. Pope does not explain what he thinks is wrong with this reasoning.

Pope's second criticism is that I ignore the importance of history and variation in the moral codes of different cultures (276-77). But, again, in Darwinian Natural Right, I offer elaborate studies of cultural diversity in the handling of moral issues surrounding slavery, infanticide, female circumcision, marriage, and other topics. And, again, I emphasize the importance of prudence in deciding what is best for particular individuals in particular cultural circumstances.

His third criticism is that "acting 'according to nature' in an evolutionary sense may be immoral from a human standpoint" (277). But this ignores my Darwinian account of how the emergence of the human capacity for moral deliberation allows us to reflect on our natural desires and decide how best to manage those desires to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived.

His fourth criticism is that I am a biological reductionist, because I say that "biological goods" are the only goods, and thus I depart from Aquinas, who sees the "rational goods" as superior. But Pope does not cite any passages where I dismiss the "rational goods" of life. In fact, I include "practical reasoning," "intellectual understanding," and "religious understanding" as natural human desires.

His final criticism is that "Arnhart's 'naturalization' of ethics ignores completely the Thomistic view of human life as a journey to God" (278). But this ignores the fact that in Darwinian Natural Right (265-66) and elsewhere, I have recognized that Aquinas sees the highest ends of human beings as directed to eternal happiness with God. My point here is that such supernatural happiness belongs to divine law rather than natural law, and thus it depends on revelation that goes beyond natural experience. Pope seems to agree: "Natural law is necessary but not sufficient for Christian ethics. The good calls for the transformation of our motivations, attitudes, and intentions, and in a way and to a degree that surpasses our natural human capacities" (296). If Pope agrees with me about this Thomistic separation of natural law directed to natural ends and divine law directed to supernatural ends, then I don't understand what he is criticizing.

Another Response from John Lemos

John Lemos has sent me the following response to my last blog post on his comments.

"When I say that I have no special interest in defining goodness or the good, and then I go on to say that when things do their characteristic activity well they are good, this is not problematic. If I say 'when things do their characteristic activity well they are good,' I am not thereby defining goodness, rather I am predicating goodness of such things. I want to say that this is a common way in which many things are good. This is how watches, hearts, cars, and lungs are good. And I want to suggest that human beings are good in a similar way. this is not a definition of good.

"I am open to there being other things which are good and that these other things may be good for different reasons, reasons other than the successful performance of their defining activity. Perhaps, pleasure and beauty are good but for different reasons.

"Additionally, I am open to the possibility that goodness is a nonnatural property. You ask for an explanation of what a nonnatural property is. In response, and waxing Moorean on this, I would say a nonnatural property is a simple property that is incapable of definition in terms of any natural properties. Moore, himself, held this view about goodness and some other properties, such as redness and greenness, as well as other colors. Further, the presence of such nonnatural goodness may supervene on the occurrence of certain natural properties, such as the well functioning of a thing, while not being identical with such. Redness seems to work this way too. It's occurrence supervenes on the occurrence of certain wavelengths of light, but redness is not identical with those wavelengths of light.

"These are some of my initial thoughts about your latest post. I have not responded in full here. Let me think about the rest.

"BTW, I recently studied a piece you wrote some while ago, 'Conservatives, Darwin, and Design: An Exchange,' which appeared in First Things. Comments from Behe and Dembski are provided along with your replies. In enjoyed this piece quite a lot, and I am in much agreement with things you say there. I think your take on the relationship between the truth of the Darwinian theory of evolution and religion is probably quite similar to mine, and this is probably reflected in the later chapters of my book, especially the first half of Ch. 5 of my book, where I discuss evolution and the rationality of religious belief."

Barack Obama Is No Abraham Lincoln

For a couple of months now, we have been told that Barack Obama's First Inaugural Address was going to be comparable to Abraham Lincoln's inaugural addresses. After all, Obama himself has built his political career on comparing himself with Lincoln. Obama has obviously thought a lot about this. And I have written posts about the Obama-Lincoln connection.

But today--with Obama's inaugural address--we see that Obama is no Lincoln. Obama's speech was utterly flat. He said nothing that will be remembered by anyone.

He did, however, set a somber tone by suggesting that the current economic crisis will not be overcome in a short time. Is he lowering expectations, because he knows how bad the situation is?

I remind you that last September and October, when so many people were saying we needed federal bailouts to pull us out of the financial crisis, I said that if we followed the path set by Bush, McCain, and Obama in going for federal bailouts, that we would prolong the economic crisis. I predicted that rather than an economic adjustment of one or two years, the rush to federal bailouts and other federal interventions in the economy would prolong the recession into a depression of five to ten years.

Well, I must say, sadly, that I see nothing to contradict my prediction. Isn't it clear that with the federal bailouts, we have now entered a long period of economic depression to rival the Great Depression of the 1930s?

I predicted that the Congress's unconstitutional delegation of unlimited power to the executive branch (the Treasury Department) to spend the bailout money as they wished would lead to corruption. Anyone understanding the imperfections in human nature--in knowledge and virtue--would predict that Paulson and others in the Treasury Department would use their power to reward their friends on Wall Street. Now the Congress is complaining about how no one really knows where the bailout money has gone. But wasn't this easily predictable?

I suspect that Obama is preparing us for this new depression. He knows that expanding the federal deficit to bailout one economic interest after another is not going to resolve the economic crisis. On the contrary, it will make it worse. But he has to appear to be doing something. His job, then, is to prepare us for five to ten years of depression--comparable to FDR's depression--by claiming that it's not his fault.

Get ready for a very rough ride.

Another Reply to Lemos

I have posted John Lemos' response to my earlier comments on his book Commonsense Darwinism. In reading his response, a few thoughts come to mind.

Lemos writes: "I have no special interest in defining good or the good, but I do think that things are good when they do their characteristic activity well." That's a confusing sentence. He begins by saying he has no interest in defining good, and then he defines good as a thing's performing its characteristic activity well!

He suggests that he might agree with G. E. Moore that goodness is a "nonnatural property." It would help me a lot if he could explain what this "nonnatural property" is.

He says that he departs from my position in that he defines the human good as doing well at practical reasoning. I am not sure why he thinks I disagree with this. My list of twenty natural desires includes "practical reasoning," and I give a lot of attention to the need for prudence.

Perhaps he would say that he disagrees because for him "practical reasoning" is not a desire or dependent on desire. But then I would ask, what makes practical reasoning practical, if not desire? He appeals to Aristotle. But doesn't Aristotle insist that "thought by itself moves nothing," because practical thought is always tied to desire? Doesn't Aristotle say that deliberate choice is either "desiring thought" or "thoughtful desire," because practical reasoning requires the union of reason and desire?

John Lemos on the Good Human Life

Recently, I wrote a blog post responding to John Lemos' new book Commonsense Darwinism. He has written a reply, and he has given me permission to post it here as follows--

"I enjoyed reading your blog post regarding my recently published book. I can understand your puzzlement concerning my critique of your view, because our views are similar. However, I do believe there are some differences in our positions that may be significant, and, naturally, I think that my view is better because of these differences. In what follows, I will try to clarify some of these differences. My comments will be brief, perhaps, overly brief, but they may still be of some use to me and you.

"I see the difference between your view and mine as follows: you view the good as what is truly desirable and what is truly desirable is that which promotes the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life. In contrast, I have so special interest in defining 'the good.' (See p. 67 of my book.) But I do have a conception of what a good human being is. A good human being, like other good things, does well in the performance of its defining activity. Thus, since practical rationality is distinctive of human beings, good human beings do well at practical reasoning; and to do well at this requires the possession of the virtues.

"Now, while practical reason aims at the attainment of happiness, the human good (doing well at practical reasoning) is not identical with whatever promotes the fullest satisfaction of desires over a complete life. Consider that one can make irrational decisions that promote the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life, but this would not be doing well at practical reasoning, and so it would not be consistent with human goodness. As an example of a decision that might promote the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life but is irrational, consider a situation where I agree to marry a woman that I do not know in the least, and I end up being quite happy with her for the rest of my life. The decision is irrational (and, hence, not consistent with human goodness), but it ends up promoting the fullest satisfaction of my desires over a complete life. Many other cases of such irrational decisions leading to the fullest satisfaction of desires could be given.

"Additionally, on my view one can attain the human good (do well at practical reasoning) and still be very unsatisfied due to various misfortunes. Living virtuously in the prudent pursuit of happiness is to live a good life, but it is not necessarily to be satisfied. Many of our rational decisions have to do with making decisions that are most likely to promote our welfare, but sometimes what what most likely to occur does not, and we are harmed by the less likely consequence of our decision.

"Also, having the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life is not equivalent to having lived a good human life. Aristotle, himself, is quite skeptical of this. (See Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, where he criticizes Eudoxus' hedonistic conception of the good life.) One can desire bad things and have the power to acquire them and have little conscience and in this way achieve the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life. Or, as Aristotle notes, you might be a fully contented idiot and yet not be living a good human life.

"My view of human goodness must acknowledge a connection between human goodness and the satisfaction of desire since good practical reasoning aims at happiness. But, on my view, they are distinct. Goodness is the prudent pursuit of a happy life involving the virtues--since virtuous choice and action are the best means to such a happy life. But they (virtuous choice and action) are no guarantee of a happy life. So, goodness again is not simply what promotes the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life.

"Finally, my approach links human goodness to the defining activity of human beings in a way that allows for the kinds of rationally warranted conclusions about goodness that we make regarding other natural objects and artifacts. We say clocks are good when they tell time well, and hearts are good when they pump blood well. So, too, humans are good when they do well at their characteristic activity, rational activity. My conception of the good human being allows a way to bridge the gap between facts and values in a way that is consistent with common intuitions about the goodness of many other things, like clocks, cars, hearts, lungs, etc.

"In contrast to my approach, I feel that you try to bridge the is/ought gap with a naturalistic definition of the good as what promotes the fullest satisfaction of desire over a complete life, and I worry that this falls prey to Moore's critique of naturalism. In contrast, as I said earlier, I have no special interest in defining good or the good, but I do think that things are good when they do their characteristic activity well. This is a way for things to be good. My own approach is open to the possibility that goodness may be a nonnatural property, as Moore maintains, that supervenes on certain natural properties, one of which is the successful performance of the characteristic activity of a thing."

Is Human Nature a Superstition? A Response to David Buller

Over the past twenty years, evolutionary psychology has become remarkably influential, particularly among psychologists and anthropologists. It has also won lots of journalistic coverage. Simply stated, evolutionary psychology strives to develop a Darwinian science of human nature founded on a study of the human mind as shaped by evolutionary history. The leading proponents of evolutionary psychology include Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, Margo Wilson, Martin Daly, and Steven Pinker.

Although I have not embraced all of the ideas associated with evolutionary psychology, my appeal to a Darwinian science of human nature, including the twenty natural desires that characterize the evolved psychology of human beings, has a lot of common ground with the intellectual program of evolutionary psychology.

One of the best critics of evolutionary psychology is David Buller, a philosophy professor who is a colleague of mine at Northern Illinois University. His criticisms are laid out in his book Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (MIT Press, 2005). A very brief summary of his criticisms appeared recently in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. The best short summary of his book is his chapter on evolutionary psychology in the third edition of Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (MIT Press, 2006), edited by Elliott Sober. Some of the reviews of Buller's book and his replies to critics can found at his home page.

Some of the proponents of evolutionary psychology have written responses to Buller. Some of these can be found at the website for the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California-Santa Barbara. One of the best responses to Buller is the essay-review by Edouard Machery and H. Clark Barrett in the journal PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE.

I think that in general these proponents of evolutionary psychology have persuasively answered Buller's criticisms. But I also agree with some of Buller's criticisms. I agree with him that the evolutionary psychologists sometimes stress the uniformity of human nature in such a way as to ignore the individual diversity that manifests the psychological polymorphism that has emerged from human evolutionary history. I also agree with him that in claiming that we all today have a "Stone Age mind" adapted to the environment of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, the evolutionary psychologists mistakenly assume that there has been no human evolution over the past 10,000 years.

But on the most crucial point--the very idea of human nature--I am on the side of the evolutionary psychologists. In the last chapter of his book, Buller argues that there is no human nature, and that, as Michael Ghiselin has said, "human nature is a superstition" (419-20, 480).

If one defines human nature in a silly way (as Buller does), then human nature does not exist. But if one defines human nature in a sensible way, then human nature surely does exist.

Buller's silly definition of human nature is that it would have to consist only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.

It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. What we take to be typically human traits are shared with other animals. These traits are highly variable across individuals because no two individuals are ever exactly the same. And as a legacy of the unending process of evolution, these traits are historically contingent in that human traits always differ across evolutionary time.

But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.

Many if not most of these traits are shared with other animals, which is exactly what one would expect from the evolution of species from ancestral species. But the fact that human beings share many traits with other mammals, for example, does not deny the importance of mammalian traits as part of the human suite of traits.

Although this suite of traits is generally recurrent across the human species, every human individual is unique, just as every animal individual is unique, and so there will be great variation across individuals. But, for example, the fact that some individuals will be born without legs does not deny the importance of a bipedal gait as part of the human suite of traits.

This species-typical suite of traits does not have to be eternal to be real for as long as it exists. The human species with its present suite of traits evolved from ancestors that did not have this suite of traits. And we can imagine that in the evolutionary future, the human species could go extinct or could evolve in some radically new direction. But the fact of evolutionary change does not deny the reality of the evolved human nature as we know it today and in recent evolutionary history. As Aristotle said in criticizing Plato's doctrine of the Ideas, "a white thing that lasts for a long time is not whiter than a white thing that lasts for a day."

Implicitly, Buller concedes the sensible definition of human nature, because he speaks of human anatomy, human physiology, and human psychology as realities that can be scientifically studied. But human anatomy, human physiology, and human psychology are all facets of human nature; and thus Buller implicitly affirms the reality of such a human nature as sensibly defined.

As Buller indicates, Cosmides and Tooby have compared their evolutionary science of psychology to the science of human anatomy. Just as one can look at Gray's Anatomy and see the anatomical adaptations that generally characterize the human species, so one should eventually be able to study human evolutionary psychology and see the psychological adaptations that generally characterize the human species. Buller speaks of this as an "analogy" between human anatomy and human nature. But, actually, it's more than an analogy, because human anatomy and human psychology are both facets of human nature, although Cosmides and Tooby choose to concentrate on the psychological facets of human nature.

Buller complains that Gray's Anatomy shows similarities among human beings "at a relatively coarse scale." But "at finer scales," human beings differ in their anatomy. No two human beings are anatomically identical. And he argues this is also true for human psychology. To speak of human psychological universals, we must "appeal to very coarse-scale common characteristics" (426).

Well, yes, but what's wrong with that? Buller says that "psychology may one day provide us with descriptions of some very widespread regularities among the minds of our conspecifics" (456). I would say that this is exactly what we mean by the psychology of human nature. Human anatomy is real, and the science of human anatomy is a real science, even though human anatomy is individually variable and a contingent product of human evolution. Likewise, human psychology is real, and the science of human psychology is a real science, even though human psychology is individually variable and a contingent product of human evolution.

So if we define human nature as constituted by "very widespread regularities" among human beings in their minds and bodies, then human nature exists. Among those "very widespread regularities," I would include the twenty natural desires that constitute the motivational basis for moral psychology. Because of the variability in those desires and in the circumstances of action across individuals and across societies, we need prudence or practical judgment in deciding what is best for particular individuals in particular circumstances. But the regularity in the human nature of those desires sets some general standards--even if "at a relatively coarse scale"--for moral thought and action.