John West's God

Here I add to my previous post on John West's article in The Intercollegiate Review.

At the end of The Origin of Species, Darwin writes: "Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual."

Then, in the final sentence of the book, he writes: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

In this last sentence, Darwin is echoing the language of the Bible in Genesis (2:7): "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Darwin thus suggests that a theistic belief in God as Creator of the first forms of life could be consistent with accepting an evolutionary account of natural history as due to "secondary causes." This is the position taken by theistic evolutionists--including people like C. S. Lewis and Francis Collins.

John West casually dismisses this possibility:

Strictly speaking, Darwinian evolution begins after the first life has developed, and so Larry Arnhart is correct that it does not necessarily refute the claim that there is some kind of "first cause" to the universe that stands outside of "nature." But this "first cause" allowable by Darwinism cannot be a God who actively supervises or directs the development of life. Such an absentee God is hard to reconcile with any traditional Judeo-Christian conception of a God who actively directs and cares for His creation. In the end, the effort to reconcile Darwinism with traditional Judeo-Christian theism remains unpersuasive.

But why should we accept West's assumption that God was unable or unwilling to execute His design through the laws of nature? Why shouldn't we read the Bible as presenting the Divine Designer as having fully gifted His Creation from the beginning with all the formational powers necessary for evolving into the world we see today?

Of course, any orthodox Biblical believer must believe that God has intervened into nature in miraculous ways. The Christian must believe, for example, that the dead body of Jesus was resurrected back to life in a way that could not be explained by natural causes. But notice that in the Bible, once God has created the universe in the first two chapters of Genesis, God's later interventions into nature are all part of salvational history. God intervenes into human history to communicate His redemptive message to human beings, but he does not need to intervene into natural history to form irreducibly complex mechanisms that could not be formed by natural means. The Bible suggests that God created the world at the beginning so that everything we see in nature today could emerge by natural law without any need for later miracles of creation.

Moreover, the miracles of salvational history--such as the resurrection of Jesus--add nothing to the natural morality required for earthly life. Rather, these miracles of salvation confirm the supernatural morality required for eternal life.

Theists believe that God designs every living being either through the ordinary laws of nature or through extraordinary miracles. So if Darwinian biologists can explain all living beings as products of a natural evolutionary process, theists can ponder this as a wondrous display of God's designing power working through natural laws.

John West in "The Intercollegiate Review"

The Fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review has two articles on the debate over Darwinian conservatism. My article is entitled "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." John West's article is entitled "Darwin, Scientism, and the Misguided Quest for Darwinian Conservatism." This issue of the journal is available online.

West works at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, where he leads the campaign for "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian science. In response to my book Darwinian Conservatism, West wrote Darwin's Conservatives: A Misguided Quest (Discovery Institute Press, 2006). I have written many posts responding to his criticisms. Some of them can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Since West's article adds nothing to his earlier book, I see no need to add much to my earlier responses to his book. But I should make a few points.

West's main idea is that conservatives should reject Darwinian science because it represents "scientism," which he defines as "a credulous belief that modern science can answer all important questions about human life and that scientists have the right to dictate public policy merely because of their presumed technical expertise" (34). More specifically, he says that Darwinian scientism "refers primarily to the claim that the mechanism of evolution is an undirected material process of natural selection acting on random mutations, and furthermore to the reductionist corollary of this view that seeks to understand mind, morality, and religion as fully explicable by such a blind material process" (35).

West does not cite any passage in Darwin's writings that would support such a reductionist view of "mind, morality, and religion." In fact, West ignores Darwin's extensive comments on how cultural evolution, rational judgment, and religious belief shape moral history in ways that cannot be reduced to evolution by natural selection. In The Descent of Man, Darwin repeatedly indicates that although natural selection has shaped the social instincts of human beings, the primary causes of moral progress are "the approbation of our fellow-men--the strengthening of our sympathies by habit--example and imitation--reason--experience, and even self-interest--instruction during youth, and religious feelings" (Penguin edition, p. 163). This doesn't look like reductionism to me.

Moreover, throughout my writing, I have emphasized how explaining moral and political order requires a complex interaction of genetic evolution, cultural evolution, and deliberate judgments. West ignores all of this in his claim that Darwinism requires genetic reductionism.

West's article is organized around five questions: "(1) Does Darwinism support or subvert traditional morality? (2) Does it erode or reinforce the basis of capitalism? (3) Does it promote or undermine limited government? (4) Does it nurture or weaken religious faith? (5) Finally, is the evidence for Darwinism so overwhelming that all rational people must accept it?" (35).

(1) TRADITIONAL MORALITY. "According to Darwin," West claims, "specific moral precepts develop because under certain environmental conditions they promote survival. Once those conditions for survival change, however, so too do the dictates of morality" (36). West doesn't cite any passages from Darwin to support this sweeping assertion.

Survival surely is important for morality. Or does West deny this? Whenever Moses has to give a reason for the people of Israel to obey his laws, he says that obeying the law will allow them to live and propagate themselves (Deuteronomy 4:1, 4:40, 5:29, 6:1-3, 24, 8:1, 11:8-9, 20, 22:7, 23:9-14, 25:15, 30:15-20). Does West disagree?

Of course, survival is only a minimal condition of morality. I argue that the natural desire for life is only one of 20 natural desires that constitute the natural standards for moral order.

Through experience and reasoning, Darwin declares, we can conclude that the Golden Rule--doing unto others as we would have them do unto us--"lies at the foundation of morality" (Descent, 151). West doesn't comment on this claim or explain how it can be part of a crudely reductionist view of morality.

West complains that Darwin recognizes that polygamy has been practiced in many societies, which West interprets as an attack on monogamy. Would West say that that the Old Testament and the Koran are immoral because they teach the propriety of polygamy? Thomas Aquinas noted that polygamy was "partly natural," although it was "partly unnatural" in that the sexual jealousy of the co-wives promotes disorder. A Darwinian view of marriage would support this same conclusion in favoring monogamy over polygamy, while acknowledging that in some circumstances polygamy might be justified. It's not clear to me why West rejects this.

Like many of Darwin's critics, West is deeply disturbed by Darwin's suggestion that if bees had morality, their morality would differ from human morality. But does West mean to suggest that bee morality should be exactly the same as human morality?

(2) CAPITALISM. West claims that Darwinism cannot support capitalism, because a Darwinian understanding of commerce would require a Malthusian view of economics as a zero-sum game. But in making such a claim, West has to ignore all of the Darwinian research on the evolutionary benefits of cooperation and reciprocity. Robert Wright's book Nonzero summarizes much of this research.

(3) LIMITED GOVERNMENT. West argues that Darwin promoted a utopian eugenics, which subverted the conservative principles of limited government. To do this, West has to denigrate Darwin's insistence that utopian eugenics (like that proposed by Francis Galton) violated our "sympathy," which is "the noblest part of our nature" (Descent, 159). The only form of eugenics that Darwin ever endorsed was laws against incestuous marriages.

Darwin observes that in civilized societies, we "check the process of elimination" by protecting the weak and disabled. This "must be highly injurious to the race of man." This is what West quotes as evidence that Darwin favored the sort of eugenics that would later be practiced by the Nazis.

But West acknowledges that this passage is immediately followed by Darwin's warning that we should not practice such eugenics. Darwin writes:

"The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind."

This seems to be a clear rejection of eugenics--to "neglect the weak and the helpless" would be "evil," because it would violate that "sympathy" that is "the noblest part of our nature." Amazingly, West dismisses this casually with the comment that "such misgivings represented a lame objection at best." "A lame objection"? How could it be a "lame objection" to see eugenics as violating "sympathy," when Darwin insists, again and again, that "sympathy" is the foundation of our natural moral sense? Here we see West straining in his effort to distort Darwin's text to get the conclusions he wants.

(4) RELIGION. I have argued that Darwinian science leaves open the question of religious belief. In searching for the unexplained ground of all explanation, we can either invoke "Nature" as the final ground, or we can look beyond Nature to "Nature's God." Darwin suggested this when he spoke about the "two books"--the Book of God's works, and the Book of God's words--as the two sources of understanding. He ended the Origin of Species with a vivid image of God as the Creator of Nature's laws. It is possible, therefore, to be a theistic evolutionist.

West rejects any possibility of being a theistic evolutionist. He doesn't even mention that Michael Behe--the leading biologist supporting "intelligent design"--suggests the possibility of theistic evolution in his book The Edge of Evolution. Behe says that treating the Bible as a science textbook would be "silly" (166), and he insists that there should be "no relying on holy books or prophetic dreams" (233). If one does not read the Creation Story literally as six-days-of-creation, then it is possible to combine belief in an intelligent designer with belief in the natural laws of science. "The purposeful design of life to any degree is easily compatible with the idea that, after its initiation, the universe unfolded exclusively by the intended playing out of natural laws" (232).

West concedes that Darwinian science leaves open the possibility of God as "first cause." "But this 'first cause' allowable by Darwinism cannot be a God who actively supervises or directs the development of life. Such an absentee God is hard to reconcile with any traditional Judeo-Christian conception of a God who actively directs and cares for His creation" (40).

But notice that West here is silent about something he acknowledges in some of his other writing: the "intelligent designer" of "intelligent design theory" is not the Biblical God. That's why many "creationists" have rejected "intelligent design theory" as a new form of atheism. After all, West rejects "biblical literalism" (41). As Behe says, intelligent design theory does not tell us "whether the designer of life was a dope, a demon, or a deity" (238).

(5) SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE. In claiming that scientific evidence denies Darwinism, West cites an article by Douglas Axe, who is an employee of the Discovery Institute. West doesn't tell his readers that some biologists have disputed the way West uses Axe's article. For example, in one analysis of the article, the author concludes: "the claims that have been and will be made by ID proponents regarding protein evolution are not supported by Axe's work. As I show, it is not appropriate to use the numbers Axe obtains to make inferences about the evolution of proteins and enzymes. Thus, this study does not support the conclusion that functional sequences are extremely isolated in sequence space, or that the evolution of new protein function is an impossibility that is beyond the capacity of random mutation and natural selection."

I have debated John West on various occasions. A few years ago, one of our debates received coverage in the New York Times, which can be found here.

Plato in China

Whenever I speak with professors of philosophy, I am often surprised by how many of them embrace a Platonic rationalism in their thinking, particularly in moral philosophy. What I mean by that is that they assume that all of morality must rest on an intuition of a cosmic order of goodness or badness, right or wrong, so that moral thinking is like mathematical thinking in being concerned with grasping some eternal patterns of universal and eternal truth.

For many philosophers, this Platonic conception of morality is so strong that they cannot even comprehend how morality could be understood as rooted in the empirical reality of human nature, because for them moral philosophy is not an empirical study at all, but rather a purely normative study, and the standards of normativity transcend any empirical reality of human experience. One can see this in their method of thinking, which relies heavily on thought experiments based on purely imaginary scenarios beyond anything we could know by ordinary experience or historical study. John Rawls' conception of the "original position" is one example of this.

I saw this at the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" last week at Peking University in Beijing. The conference brought together Chinese philosophy professors and students with American philosophy professors. All of the American philosophy professors were members of the "Society of Christian Philosophers." I was the sole political scientist at the conference.

As a political scientist who studies the history of political philosophy and the application of Darwinian science to political philosophy, I tend to think of moral and political order as arising from human history, and I use Darwinian science to illuminate that history as part of human evolutionary history. This sets me against those moral philosophers who assume that moral order--the normative order--must transcend human history as being "merely empirical." I find this scorn for the empirical reality of human history and the striving for a transcendent world of utopian normativity to be strange.

I suspect that I am missing something--that I am overlooking something that would explain why this Platonic transcendentalism is so appealing to modern philosophers. I would be grateful if anyone could explain this too me.

In my keynote lecture for the conference, I spoke about "The Human Sources of Darwinism and Confucianism." As I have indicated on this blog, I see six possible sources for moral order: 1. cosmic God, 2. cosmic Nature, 3. cosmic Reason, 4. human nature, 5. human culture, 6. human individuals. The Platonic philosophers assume that moral order must be grounded in the cosmic sources, so that moral standards are somehow written into the structure of the universe, and human morality is judged by how well it imitates the moral cosmos.

Against this moral cosmology, I argued for a moral biology that sees moral order as rooted in the human sources--human natural desires, human cultural traditions, and human prudential judgments. I indicated how this moral biology could be seen in both Darwinian ethics and Confucian ethics. I used some historical examples--such as the debate over slavery and the Asian debate over filial piety--to illustrate my points.

I anticipated that this argument would be rejected by almost everyone in the audience, and that's what happened, because almost all of the philosophers in the audience were so dominated by Platonic rationalism that the thought of studying morality empirically, scientifically, and historically, was incomprehensible to them.

Platonic philosophers want a morality of eternal truth, absolute rules, and universal love. By contrast, a Darwinian moral biology offers not eternal truth, but historical contingency, not absolute rules, but prudential judgment, not universal love, but tragic conflicts.

Darwinian moral psychology accepts the historical contingency of morality as shaped by the genetic history of human nature, the social history of human culture, and the personal history of human individuals. The generic goods of human nature--the 20 natural desires--are stable and universal across all of human history, for as long as the human species exists. But the human species and the generic goods rooted in that species-specific nature are evolutionarily contingent. Human cultures are also contingently variable, although they are constrained by the generic propensities of human nature. Human individuals are unique, as shaped by their unique life histories, and so they must judge what is best for them as adapted to their individualized lives, but this individuality of moral judgment is constrained by human nature and human culture.

As far as my audience of philosophers was concerned, what I talked about was almost completely irrelevant to moral philosophy, because my "merely empirical" claims offered no access to the "normative" standards sought by moral philosophers.

I was encouraged, however, by the fact that the other keynote speaker--Ryan Nichols, a professor of philosophy at Cal State-Fullerton--took an empirical approach to morality that provoked the audience of philosophers almost as much as my speech. Nichols offered an empirical study of how the Confucian teaching about filial piety has shaped a disposition in many Chinese children to allow their parents to dictate to them their choice of mates for marriage. He put this in the context of parent-offspring conflict (as understood by Robert Trivers), and showed how the teaching of filial piety had become a cultural tradition used by parents to manipulate their children to serve the interests of parents. Nichols's historical study of the culture of Confucian teaching was thus put within the context of Darwinian science applied to the study of a cultural tradition.

Nichols argued that philosophers should engage in experimental and historical studies for testing scientific hypotheses about moral conduct. He recognized, however, that most philosophers today will not be inclined to do this, because their preference is for "armchair philosophizing"--that is to say, reasoning by purely a priori standards in ways that cannot be open to empirical study.

Like me, Nichols was challenging the Platonic rationalism of the philosophers. And, like me, Nichols was frustrated by an a priori rationalism that scorns science, history, and empirical studies as irrelevant to true moral philosophy.

Part of the explanation for this might be that these philosophers were all Christians, and traditionally Christian philosophers have been attracted to Plato and Platonic thinking because it seems to support the moral cosmology that many Christian philosophers think is necessary.

I am also reminded of E. O. Wilson's claim in Consilience that explaining ethics ultimately turns on the debate between empiricism and transcendentalism. Wilson sees the biological explanation of ethics as taking the side of the empiricist tradition from Aristotle to Hume. By contrast, he sees most contemporary philosophers as taking the transcendentalist side--either religious transcendentalism or secular transcendentalism.

Conference on Science and Virtue, Nov. 4-5

Peter Augustine Lawler and Marc Guerra are directing a series of conferences on "Science and Virtue."

The first conference will be at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia), November 4-5. Some of the details for the conference can be found at their website.

I will be presenting a paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue." My argument will be that a Darwinian science of human nature supports Aristotle's understanding of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. I will be elaborating some of the points that have appeared in some of my recent posts.

Arnhart in China

Today, I will be travelling to China for 10 days.

I will be part of a conference in Beijing on "Evolution and Ethics," which will include professors and students from the United States and China. Some of these people were participants in our previous seminar on this subject at Oxford University last January. Our papers for this conference will be translated into Chinese and published as a book in Chinese.

The title of my paper is "The Human Sources of Darwinian and Confucian Ethics." My argument will be familiar to anyone who has read my posts over the past few months, particularly those on Confucianism.

Can our lives have any meaning in a Darwinian world? That's the question in the debate over evolutionary ethics.

For many people, the one big problem with Darwinian science is that it denies that life has any meaning. If we are just animals produced by a natural evolutionary process that doesn't care about us, or for us, and if like all other animals, we live only for a moment, and then die, how can human life--how can my life--really matter?

Aren't we different from other animals in that it's not enough for us that we exist--we need some reason for our existence? And for many of us, the only satisfying reason comes from seeing our lives as part of a cosmic drama. Doesn't Darwinism deny that there is any cosmic drama, because it explains the history of life in the universe as emerging through impersonal forces that work without design or intelligence? Isn't that why Friedrich Nietzsche warned that Darwinian science was "true but deadly"?

Our search for meaning is a moral search. To live meaningful lives, we need to see our lives as good lives, conforming to enduring, if not eternal, standards of what a good life should be. For almost 2,000 years, Western culture was dominated by a cosmic model of the universal as a moral order. Combining Platonic and Biblical elements, this cosmic model provided a cosmological standard for morality: it taught that to be truly good, to satisfy our deepest longings, we must imitate the good order of the universe as the product of the cosmic Intelligent Designer.

But, then, in the 19th century, Darwinian science seemed to deny that our standards for a good life have any cosmic support. A Darwinian cosmos is not a product of morally intelligent design, and therefore human morality seems to be a purely human construction in a universe that has no moral order to it. If Darwin's universe has no cosmic moral order, doe that mean that human morality is merely a work of human fantasy?

Such ideas have consequences. Some of the atrocities of the past century have been attributed to Darwinian science by those who see, for example, a clear line of influence from Charles Darwin to Adolf Hitler. After all, weren't Hitler and the Nazis Social Darwinists?

Darwinism creates a similar kind of problem for the Asian tradition of Confucianism. Confucian philosophers have said that our search for the moral meaning of our lives is the search for the Dao--for the "way" or "path" of life. Which way should we go to find the right way or true way of life? They have said that to find our way in life, we must live according to the "Way of Heaven" (tiandao) and follow those moral and political leaders who have the "Mandate of Heaven."

But when Chinese intellectuals discovered Darwinism in the first half of the 20th century, many of them concluded that Darwinian scientific materialism refuted the belief in "Heaven" as a cosmic moral order, and thus refuted the Confucian tradition of morality. Then, having rejected the heavenly standard of morality, many Chinese Darwinians concluded that the only scientific standard for morality was "survival of the fittest" in the "struggle for life."

One of the Chinese intellectuals impressed by Darwinian thinking was Mao Zedong. Some historians have wondered whether the brutality of Mao's rule over China showed the catastrophic consequences of a Darwinian science that denies cosmic moral order.

And yet, I think this fear of Darwinian science as subverting morality is mistaken. We can find meaning--moral meaning--in a Darwinian world. To see this, we need to see that morality does not require a moral cosmology. Darwinian science can explain morality as rooted in evolved human experience--in the evolutionary history of human nature, human tradition, and human judgment--even without any support from a moral cosmos. A belief in a morally designed cosmos can reinforce morality for those who have such a belief, and Darwinian science leaves this open as a metaphysical possibility. But the moral meaning of our lives does not require such a cosmic ground for morality.

In my paper, I will lay out my reasoning for this conclusion in four steps. First, I will indicate how the debate over evolutionary ethics ultimately falls into two opposing positions. On the one side, the transcendentalists reject evolutionary ethics because it does not provide the moral cosmology that they think is absolutely necessary. On the other side, the empiricists accept evolutionary ethics because they see it as conforming to the purely human sources of moral order. Darwinian ethics will be rejected by those who belong to the transcendentalist tradition of Plato and Kant, who believe that ethics is a cosmological and normative science of categorical imperatives. Darwinian ethics will be embraced by those who belong to the empirical tradition of Aristotle and Hume, who believe that ethics is a humanistic and factual science of hypothetical imperatives.

Second, I will indicate why the empirical account of the human sources of morality provided by Darwinian science is sufficient, without any necessity for a moral cosmology.

Third, I will contend that the Confucian moral teaching is an example of a great moral tradition that can be explained through Darwinian empiricism without any need for a transcendental appeal to "Heaven" as a moral cosmos.

Finally, I will argue that a Darwinian ethics supports a Confucian liberalism, in which moral order arises from the spontaneous order of civil society through social persuasion rather than governmental coercion. A Darwinian liberal Confucianism would secure a free society of individuals freely pursuing their social lives in families and voluntary associations, in which they would be free to explore the ultimate questions of the meaning of life in the universe.

There is some practical urgency for China today in reconsidering the Confucian tradition. As I have indicated in some previous posts, there is a growing sense in China that Marxism is dead as a source of moral or political legitimacy in China; and consequently, many Chinese intellectual leaders are wondering whether China might have to revive Confucianism as the ground for moral and political order.

I will be interested to see what the Chinese professors and students at our conference think about this.

Philippa Foot, 1920-2010

Philippa Foot died a few days ago on her 90th birthday.

As I explained in a post that I wrote last spring, I see her arguments for the hypothetical imperatives of natural goodness as one line of reasoning for Darwinian naturalism.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (8): Existential Friendship

In previous posts, I have suggested that what Aristotle calls "friendship" (philia) corresponds to what David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin call "sympathy"--as terms for every kind of "fellow feeling" or social bond between human beings.

For Aristotle, a friend is "another self," and thus one's own self-conscious awareness is deepened by seeing oneself reflected in one's friend as a mirror. The most profound form of friendship might be called "existential friendship." This is suggested in those passages of the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle uses the term to einai for "existence." "Existence is desirable and lovable for all" (1168a1-10). We love existing, and consequently we love those activities through which we exist, and we love other human beings in whom we can see our existence at work. Love of others is an extension of one's self-loving existence. Mothers love their children as extensions of their own self-loving existence, and this mother-child bond is at the origin of all social bonding.

The experience of existential friendship is most fully depicted in the following passage, where the term "existence" (to einai) appears four times (1170a25-b19):

It appears then that life in the ruling sense is sensation or thought. Now if living itself is good and pleasant (and it seems to be so from the fact that all desire it, and those who are decent and blessed most of all, since the life they lead is most choiceworthy and their living is most blessed), and if one who sees is aware that he sees, and one who hears is aware that he hears, and one who walks is aware that he walks, and similarly in the other cases, there is something in us that is aware that we are at work, so that whenever we perceive, we are aware that we perceive, and whenever we think, we are aware that we think, and if being aware that we are perceiving or thinking is being aware that we are (since our existence is a good thing by nature, and it is pleasant to be aware of the the good that is present in oneself), and if being alive is choiceworthy, and especially so for good people, because their existence is good and pleasant for them (since people are pleased by being additionally aware of something that is good in itself), and if a serious person is the same way toward a friend as he is toward himself (since the friend is another self), then just as one's own existence is choiceworthy for each person, so too, or very nearly so, is that of a friend.

But one's existence is choiceworthy on account of the awareness of oneself as being good, and such awareness is pleasant in itself. Therefore, one also ought to share in a friend's awareness that he is, and this would come about through living together and sharing conversation and thinking; for this would seem to be what living together means in the case of human beings, not feeding in the same place like fatted cattle. So if existence is choiceworthy in itself to a blessed person, since it is good and pleasant by nature, and that of one's friend is very nearly the same, then a friend would also be something choiceworthy. But that which is choiceworthy for him ought to be present to him, or he will be deficient in that respect. Therefore, for someone who is going to be happy, there will be a need for friends of serious worth.

Thus, as Aristotle says in the EUDEMIAN ETHICS: "To perceive and to know one's friend is somehow necessarily to perceive and somehow know one's self" (1245a35-38).

This full self-awareness of one's personal existence through activities of sensing and thinking shared with one's friends is said to be a "blessed" (makarios) state, the Greek term for the "blessed ones"--the gods--or for human beings enjoying a fully happy life of unimpeded pleasure in existence. This existential friendship is for Aristotle what the beatific vision of God in Heaven is for Christians (see Augustine, City of God, xxii, 27-30). In Thomas Aquinas's commentary on this passage, he feels compelled to add a qualification that is not found in Aristotle's text: "Here he is discussing the kind of happiness that is possible in this life" (sec. 1911). Obviously, Aquinas is worried that Aristotle's readers might conclude that this existential friendship brings the deepest happiness simply, and so they might fail to see the need for the beatitude of Heaven. Repeatedly, Aquinas has to tell his readers that Aristotle's account of happiness is restricted to earthly happiness, and is therefore inferior to the transcendent happiness of Heaven (secs. 113, 129). Of course, Aristotle never says this. On the contrary, Aristotle suggests that existential friendship achieves the deepest happiness of which human beings are capable, which comes through the full and unimpeded activity of sensing, thinking, and desiring.

Moreover, the happiness of existential friendship does not come from a solitary life of contemplation, which casts doubt on the claim in book 10 of the Ethics that the life of solitary contemplation is the highest. This also denies the famous teaching of Descartes--derived from Augustine--that becoming fully aware of our existence requires a withdrawal from social life into a purely inward experience of one's existence as pure thought thinking itself. For Aristotle, each person's self-conscious existence is a social activity. I think with my friends, therefore I am.

The natural sociality of human intellectual existence is confirmed by the modern Darwinian idea of the "social brain" in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. The evolution of the primate brain was probably driven, not by the need to understand the complexity of the physical world, but by the need to navigate through the intricacies of the social world, which required the ability to read the minds of one's fellow primates in negotiating the terms of social cooperation.

The discovery of "mirror neurons" indicates that the primate brain has been designed so that a primate individual can enter the minds of other primates by mentally simulating their conscious experiences. The need of primate offspring for prolonged parental care, which included many years of social learning, created evolutionary pressures for the evolution of primate brains capable of what Aristotle describes as existential friendship.

A previous post on sympathy and mirror neurons can be found here.  Another post on the liberalism of Aristotelian friendship can be found here.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (7): Friendship & Sympathy

The longest section of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to "friendship" (philia) (books 8-9). For Aristotle, "friendship" becomes a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some mutual care for one another.

In this way, Aristotle's "friendship" coincides with what David Hume and Adam Smith called "sympathy"--any kind of "fellow feeling" among human beings. Charles Darwin adopted this idea and made "sympathy" one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order. More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word "empathy" in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call "sympathy," or what Aristotle would call "friendship."

Running through all of this research is the idea that "friendship," "sympathy," or "empathy"--the psychological disposition that underlies social bonding--arises originally from the biological bond between parent and child, and particularly, mother and child.

Aristotle observes that human beings are not only political animals by nature but also household animals by nature. Indeed, the human coupling instinct is in some sense more natural than the political instinct, because human beings could exist in families even without living in political communities, as was the case throughout early human history when human beings lived in foraging groups of families. Moreover, the various forms of friendly feeling that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species, radiate out from the natural affection between parents and offspring that human beings share with birds and other animals (1155a1-33, 1159a27-37, 1160b23-62a29). "Consequently, in the household are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice" (EE, 1242b1-2).

Darwinian biologists have noticed that animals with the greatest cognitive capacities are often those with the longest periods of childhood dependence on adults. Aristotle agrees:

It would seem that nature wishes to provide for a sensation of attentive care for the offspring. In the lower animals, nature implants this only until birth; in others, there is care for the complete development of the offspring; and among the more intelligent animals [phronimotera], there is care for its upbringing. Among those who share in the greatest intelligence, there arises intimacy and friendship even towards the completely grown offspring, as among human beings and some quadrupeds. (GA, 753a8-14)

Through their love for their children as extensions of themselves, husbands and wives strengthen their marital bond because children are a common good, which is why childless marriages are more easily dissolved (1162a16-28). The parental affection of mothers is greater, however, than that of fathers, both because mothers must invest more effort in pregnancy and childbirth, and because they are more certain of their maternity than fathers are of their paternity (1161b16-29, 1166a1-9, 1168a20-27).

Beyond the bonds of kinship, unrelated individuals can develop friendly affection based on a reciprocal exchange of benefits. Rejecting any cosmological explanation of friendship as a force of attraction in physical nature, Aristotle argues that friendship must be a psychic relation among animals, "for there is friendship when like-mindedness [eunoia] is reciprocal" (1155b34). In the noblest friendships, people benefit others without expecting anything in return. But all or most people choose what is beneficial to themselves. In most cases, therefore, the recipient of a benefit is expected to return the equivalent of what he has received. Social conflict arises when people think this reciprocity has not been maintained (1162b22-65b37).

Not only personal friendships but also political communities are held together by a reciprocal proportionality of benefits (1132b33-33a5). People unrelated to one another can form associations based on calculations of mutual benefit. The political community arises from less associations to secure the common advantage of citizens for the whole of life (1159b25-62a34). Every community rests on some sense of friendship founded on the common advantage of its members. Although the strongest feeling of common advantage is among those who are biologically related, other bonds can arise as there is any reciprocal sense of shared needs.

As a consequence of his biological understanding of animal bonding, Aristotle sees the moral and political obligations of human beings as a series of concentric circles around the individual. Insofar as justice coincides with friendship, the claims of justice vary in proportion to the nearness of attachments (1155a16-29, 1159b25-60a8, 1165a14-36). One's obligations are stronger to closer relatives than to more distant ones, and stronger to close friends and fellow citizens than to strangers, although there is some friendly attachment to all members of one's species based on shared humanity (philanthropia).

As a biologist, Aristotle affirms the unity of humankind as one species, "simple and having no differentiation" (HA, 490b18). He believes there can be a kind of sympathy among animals of the same species, and this is especially true for human beings, so that "we praise those who love their fellow human beings" (1155a20-21). But the humanitarianism of human beings will always be difficult to cultivate and almost always weaker than their egoism, nepotism, and their patriotism. This explains the mistake of Plato's Socrates in proposing the community of wives and children and the communal ownership of property for the guardians in the Republic: it is unreasonable to ignore the natural love of oneself and one's own that makes it difficult for people to live together if they must share everything (Pol, 1262b22-25, 1263a41-b41). In fact, Socrates concedes that even in the best political community, the warriors would have to be taught that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies (Plato, Republic, 332a-3, 375a-e, 469b-d; Cleitophon, 410b).

Aristotle's biological claim that parental care for the young is the root from which all other social bonds grow finds support in Darwinian biology. "The feeling of pleasure from society," Darwin believed, "is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections, since the social instinct seems to be developed by the young remaining for a long time with the parents" (2004, 129).

This personal bonding between parents and their offspring distinguishes the vertebrates from the insects. Despite the functional similarities between insect and vertebrate societies, the crucial difference is that, in contrast to the impersonal character of insect societies, the vertebrates depend on personal recognition among members of a group. The efficiency of insect divisions of labor among castes was made possible by the evolutionary novelty of sterile castes, which means that the colony becomes the unit of natural selection. But vertebrates depend on individual reproduction. The cooperating castes among social insects are generally sterile, which lessens the genetic competition between cooperating individuals, which makes possible the evolution of self-sacrificial altruism. Among the social vertebrates, by contrast, genetic competition between cooperating individuals impedes the evolution of self-sacrificial altruism. As Edward Wilson has noted, the evolutionary path taken by the social vertebrates involves a trade-off, because it "enhances freedom on the part of the individual at the expense of efficiency on the part of society" (1971, 460). This explains whey the city described in Plato's Republic looks in some respects more like a bee hive than a community of human beings.

Modern ethologists have shown the importance of the mother-infant bond, especially for primates, as the root of all social bonding. Psychologists have noted the harmful, and sometimes fatal, effects of maternal deprivation on infants. We have learned much about the neural and hormonal changes during pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation that promote maternal behavior (as surveyed by Sarah Hrdy and Melvin Konner). Evolutionary psychologists have gathered evidence for the idea of Robert Trivers that, since females generally invest more in their offspring than do males, females tend to be more devoted to the raising of the young (Trivers 1985, 203-38).

On this, as on so many points, evolutionary psychologists are rediscovering what was originally discovered by Aristotle in his biological studies.

Some posts on the biology of friendship, sympathy, or empathy can be found here, here, and here.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (6): Hare on Aristotle's Platonic Religion

As a proponent of the divine command theory of ethics, John Hare (a professor at Yale University) criticizes my Darwinian ethics for not recognizing that morality without belief in God is impossible.

In his book God and Morality: A Philosophical History (2009), Hare tries to show the fundamental influence of theistic religion in the history of Western ethical philosophy. He concentrates on four philosophers--Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, and R. M. Hare. These four thinkers represent four periods--ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary. They represent four kinds of ethical theory as concentrating on virtue, will, duty, and consequences respectively. And they represent four conceptions of god--God as magnet, God as lover, God as sovereign, and God as model. He pairs each of the four philosophers with successors who abandoned the theological premises of their forerunner. I am paired with Aristotle, Jean-Paul Satre is paired with Scotus, Christine Korsgaard is paired with Kant, and Peter Singer is paired with R. M. Hare.

For the Aristotle chapter, Hare begins with a photograph and a description of Raphael's depiction of Greek philosophy in his sixteenth-century fresco in the Vatican--The School of Athens. Plato and Aristotle stand at the center of the painting. Plato's right arm is raised vertically, and his right index finger is pointing to heaven, while his left hand holds his book Timaeus vertically. Aristotle's right arm is extended horizontally, his right hand is spread out with his palm gesturing down towards the center of the group, and his left hand hold his book Nicomachean Ethics horizontally. The obvious suggestion is that Plato is a more "vertical" thinker, in pointing upward to the heavens or the divine, while Aristotle is a more "horizontal" thinker, gesturing downward towards the human beings around them.

Hare suggests, however, that this difference between the vertical Plato and the horizontal Aristotle is only a matter of emphasis, and that in fact Aristotle incorporates into his thought the vertical dimension of Platonic religion. He supports this with the claim that Raphael was probably influenced by Renaissance thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Egidio da Viterbo who had sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. Some scholars of Renaissance art believe that Raphael was guided by a program laid down by Egidio, who argued that Plato and Aristotle agreed that humanity combined two natures--the sensual nature that is embedded in matter and the rational nature that is free from matter. While Aristotle stressed the material side of human experience more than did Plato, Aristotle showed his agreement with Plato in the tenth book of the Ethics by affirming that the highest part of humanity is pure intellect, which grasps what is divine and eternal by imitating the Divine Intellect.

This introduces Hare's argument that Aristotle agrees with Plato's religion--God as Cosmic Intellect towards which all human beings are drawn by their intellectual love of the Ideas. This is what Hare calls "God as magnet"--the magnetic force of the divine radiating out through the great chain of Being.

Hare offers plenty of textual evidence for this conclusion. For example, in the Timaeus, it is said that God has given human beings Intellect as a divinity that looks up to heaven, while struggling against the mortal desires of the body.

When a man devotes himself to the love of learning and to true prudence, and has exercised himself in these things above all others, then there is every necessity, I suppose, that he think thoughts that are immortal and divine (if in fact he touches on truth); and again, to the extent that human nature admits to a share in immortality, he does not fall short of this; and since he's always caring for his divine part and keeping well-arrayed the divinity that dwells within him, he is supremely happy. (90b-c)

This sounds a lot like what Aristotle says about the contemplative life in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics.

We should not follow the recommendation of thinkers who say that those who are men should think only of human things and that mortals should think only of mortal things, but we should try as far as possible to partake of immortality and to make every effort to live according to the best part of the soul in us; for even if this part be of small measure, it surpasses all the others by far in power and worth. It would seem, too, that each man is this part, if indeed this is the dominant part and is better than the other parts; so it would be strange if a man did not choose the life proper to himself but that proper to another. And what was stated earlier is appropriate here also; that which is by nature proper to each thing is the best and most pleasant for that thing. So for a man, too, the life according to his intellect is the best and most pleasant, if indeed a man in the highest sense is his intellect. Hence this life, too, is the happiest. (1177b31-78a8)

But as I have noted in some previous posts, the reasoning offered by Plato and Aristotle for this divinization of the human intellect and the elevation of the contemplative life as divine is remarkably dubious. So the careful reader might wonder how seriously to take this.

Hare is ambiguous about this. On the one hand, he clearly thinks we are intended by Aristotle to take his theological language seriously. On the other hand, Hare admits that this theology of the contemplative life is "in tension" with much of what is taught in the Nicomachean Ethics (17). Hare observes: "Unfortunately Aristotle gets tentative when he starts talking about God" (19). At least initially, Aristotle is drawing from traditional religious opinions--as in Homer's depictions of the gods. But it's not clear whether Aristotle is sincere about this. Sometimes he speaks of gods in the plural, but then he shifts to speaking of God in the singular. He says that God or the gods are so self-sufficient in their lives that they don't care about human beings. But then he says they love philosophers. Sometimes he suggests divinity is inside us, but at other times he suggests divinity is outside of us.

Aristotle indicates that traditionally the gods were originally human beings who were divinized for their heroic deeds by their fellow human beings, which suggests that talk of divinity is just one way of talking of heroic human virtue. Aristotle quotes Homer as having Priam recognize the exceptional goodness of Hector by saying he was a God, and thus "people are turned from humans into gods by a surpassing degree of virtue" (1145a20-24).

Moreover, Hare is never clear as to what difference this confusing theological language makes for Aristotle's ethical teaching. His general argument is that the case of Aristotle illustrates how morality is impossible without God. But Hare never explains exactly how Aristotle's conclusions about morality depend on his theology. The only clear case of this is that Aristotle apparently thinks that elevating the philosophic life over all other lives requires religious language, but the confusing character of his reasoning makes the reader wonder if he is completely serious about this.

Hare tries to argue that my Darwinian Aristotelianism is not really Aristotelian, because it ignores the theological foundation--the "vertical" dimension--of Aristotle's ethics. But, then, he concedes that I and Aristotle are in agreement on the fundamental principle that the good is the desirable, and the human good is the harmonious satisfaction of our natural desires over a complete life, which is happiness (55, 69, 71, 254, 271, 278). And yet, Hare also insists that since I don't accept Aristotle's theistic religion, I can't resolve the tragic conflicts in human desires: "Arnhart is stuck in a difficulty that Aristotle is not" (72).

I argue that sometimes the natural human desires create tragic conflicts between human beings that can only be resolved by force or fraud. For example, in the conflict over slavery in the United States, in which the master's desire for mastery came into conflict with the slave's desire to be free from exploitation, the only final resolution came with the Civil War.

Generally, Hare argues that a religiously grounded morality is free of tragedy. Thus, the theistic teaching of universal love allows theists to overcome tragic conflicts of interest. But Hare is never exactly clear how this works. Does universal love require absolute pacifism and socialism in which all human beings would love one another impartially without any bias towards themselves or those close to them?

Consider the famous case of the Dutch householder hiding a Jew in her attic during the Nazi occupation of her country. When the Nazis come to her to ask if there are any Jews in her house, is it immoral for her to lie? Here, Hare admits, is a tragic situation where the woman must lie but then confess that she had violated the moral law against lying. Hare explains: "Putting the difficulty theologically, the person who lies is breaking God's command, but perhaps (given the situation) in the hope of mercy" (282).

"In a similar example," Hare writes, "some bishops in the early Christian centuries required soldiers who had killed, even in a just war, to abstain for a while from Communion on their return" (282-83). So does this mean that just killing in war is against God's commands? But God will forgive us for our sin of not loving our enemies?

Hare explains: "The position we imagine as ideal is one in which all the people involved, including ourselves, are loved the same. But that is not a position we in fact occupy. It is the position God occupies, if there is a God" (285). It is hard for me to see how this provides any reliable guidance for our moral conduct.

Even with all of his insistence that morality without God is impossible, Hare actually concedes that there is a natural moral sense that allows atheists and believers to understand one another's moral language. Some people might understand the chemical properties of water, while others might not. But they could all talk about "water" with mutual understanding, without having to talk about its chemical properties. Similarly, Hare suggests, theists and atheists can talk about what is "right" or "good" with mutual understanding, even though the atheists will not share the belief of the theists that what is "right" and "good" ultimately arises from God's commands (272).

If that is Hare's position, then he's agreeing with me that while religious belief can reinforce our moral judgments, our morality can stand on its own natural ground as part of our evolved human nature even without religious belief.

Related posts can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (5): Animal Psychology and Pleasure

Darwin argues that human beings differ from other animals in degree but not in kind. This is often thought to be a refutation of Aristotelian biology. But while Aristotle had no theory of the evolution of species from ancestral species, a fundamental principle of his biology is the continuity between human beings and other animals, not only in their bodies but also in their mental powers, which enters his moral and political writing in those many passages where he explains human psychological nature by comparison with other animals.

Consider the following passage from the History of Animals (588a15-89a10):

In most of the other animals, there are traces of the qualities of soul that are more evidently differentiated in human beings. For there are both gentleness and savagery, mildness and harshness, courage and timidity, fear and confidence, spiritedness and trickery, and, with respect to intelligence [dianoia], something like judgment [sunesis], similar in many ways, just as we have spoken of the parts of the body. For some of these qualities differ only more or less with reference to human beings, and so is man in reference to many things of animals. Some of these qualities are greater in man, others are greater in other animals, but in others they differ by analogy. For instance, in many there is art, wisdom, and judgment, so there is some other natural capacity. This is most evident if one considers the condition at the age of infancy. For in infants it is possible to see traces and germs of their future dispositions, since there is no difference, so to speak, between the soul of a beast and the soul of an infant. So it is not unreasonable if some psychic qualities are the same, others resemble one another, and others are analogous. For nature passes little by little from the inanimate to animals, so that this continuity prevents one from seeing a border or perceiving on which side an intermediate form lies.

The same holds for the actions of life. For of plants the function appears to be nothing other than producing another similar to themselves, which arises through seeds, and similarly of some animals there is no function other than reproduction. Therefore, the actions of thse sort are common to all. But if sensation is added, then their lives with respect to sexual intercourse will differ through the pleasure of this activity, and with respect to parturition and the nurturing of the young. Some animals, therefore, just like plants, complete the reproduction of their progeny according to the seasons. Others trouble themselves about the feeding of the young, but whenever this is completed, they separate themselves and have nothing more in common with them. Still others who are more intelligent [sunetotera] and shares in memory live a longer time and in a more political manner with their offspring.

one part of the life of animals, therefore, is devoted to the actions concerning reproduction, another part to the actions concerning food. For on these two all their serious pursuits and their life happen to concentrate. Their food differs mostly according to the matter of which they are constituted. For the growth of each will happen according to nature from this. Further, whatever is according to nature is pleasurable; and all animals according to nature pursue pleasure.

Notice the eight points that Aristotle makes in this passage.

1. Human psychic powers are more clearly differentiated forms of powers found in other animals. Thus, there is an unbroken continuity between all species of life.

2. These common powers include both traits of moral temperament (such as courage, for example) and cognitive capacities for reasoning and judging.

3. In comparing human beings and other animals, their powers are either the same or different in degree or similar by analogy. In the case of analogy, different powers serve similar functions.

4. These comparisons are clearest if one considers human infants, because in some sense there is no difference between a young child and a non-human animal.

5. Animals are naturally adapted for survival and reproduction, and therefore the practical structure of their lives varies according to how each species feeds and propagates.

6. Unlike plants, some animals must care for their young, and how they do this shapes the life of each species. Some animals only feed the young at the beginning of life. But those who are more intelligent develop more lasting bonds with their young. Thus, higher levels of animal intelligence are connected to more extended parental care.

7. Such long-term nurturance of the young is the natural ground from which political life grows.

8. Animals, having some capacity for sensation, act to satisfy their natural desires because by nature this gives them pleasure.

All of these points enter into Aristotle's moral and political science. Consider, for example, the importance of pleasure.

"Whatever is according to nature is pleasurable, and all animals according to nature pursue pleasure." Having developed this thought in his biological works, Aristotle incorporates it into the Nicomachean Ethics. All human action is governed by pleasure and pain, as is true for all animals (1104b4-5a16). A good man is one who feels pleasure and pain in the right manner. To deny the goodness of pleasure would be an implausible denial of the testimony of all animals. Since all creatures, the mindless as well as those with some rational judgment, pursue pleasure as good, it must be good in some sense. A man could not endure even Plato's Idea of the Good if it were painful to him (1153b25-36, 1158a24-25, 1172b35-73a5).

While pleasure is not always the direct object of desire, pleasures accompanies the satisfaction of every desire, which supports the observation that the good is the desirable (1174b15-76a29).

Each animal has a species-specific pleasure corresponding to its species-specific function, for pleasure accompanies the activity fulfillment of whatever inclinations constitute the nature of a species. Therefore, "the pleasures of a horse, of a dog, and of a human being are different" (1176a6). But although the pleasures of each species tend to be the same, what human beings find pleasurable varies to some extent. In extreme cases, human beings can be impaired or ruined so that what is pleasurable for them is not truly pleasurable in the sense of perfecting human nature. Such people don't understand what they truly desire (1153b25-36, 1176a3-22).

The pleasures of the good and the bad differ just as the pleasures of children and adults differ, and we can properly judge the pleasures of the good person to be superior just as we do those of the adult (1174a1-3, 1176b23-25). Some pleasures are natural to human beings (or to other species), while others are unnatural. Of course, the unnatural pleasures are natural in the weak sense that they have natural causes; but they are unnatural in the strong sense that they disrupt the normal balance or order in an animal's life. Among human beings, unnatural pleasures arise either through injury or through habit or through evil natures. So, for example, a person might be driven by a mental disease to kill and eat his mother. Or a person abused from childhood might take pleasure in sexual perversion. Or a person born with some mental disorder might take perverse pleasure in eating human flesh or abusing his children (1148b15-49a20).

Those who would guide the education of the young and the general formation of human character must understand the motivational power of pleasure and pain (1172a19-26). Consequently, "theorizing about pleasure and pain belongs to the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, to which we look in calling one thing good and another bad in an absolute sense" (1152b1-8). Furthermore, as a philosopher, he understands that the intellectual life is the most pleasurable insofar as a human being in the highest sense is his intellect (1178a5-8).

Darwin also concluded that human beings found their natural pleasures in satisfying their instincts for conjugal, parental, and social bonding generally. As refined by habit and reason, these instinctive pleasures shape the moral sense of human beings. Any person without such instincts would be an "unnatural monster" (2004, 136, 140, 148; 1987, 619-22). Moreover, Darwin thought that in some savage circumstances, bad habits and insufficient reasoning would lead people to commit "unnatural crimes" (2004, 140-50). But with the progress of civilization a few people, he believed, would discover the intense pleasures of the intellect as the source of the greatest human happiness (1987, 548-49).

For both Aristotle and Darwin, therefore, morality rests on a natural union of instinctive feelings and rational judgments. They would agree neither with Hume's exaggerated claim that reason is the slave of the desires, nor with Kant's exaggerated claim that reason discovers the moral law in complete abstraction from natural human desires. For Aristotle and Darwin, reason complements the natural desires by arbitrating conflicts between them to conform to a coherent plan of life, in which each natural desire finds its fullest and most appropriate expression.

Although perhaps never fully attainable, the goal of rationally ordering all the natural desires into a coherent whole can at least be more or less approximated. Success will depend not only on the individual's character and thought, but also on his physical circumstances and on the way of life of his political community.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (4): Natural Right and Biology

One of the most famous--and enigmatic--passages in Aristotle's writings is his account of natural right (or natural justice) in Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Although the whole passage takes up no more than one page, it has provoked continuing controversy throughout the history of political philosophy. Thomas Aquinas saw it as an early statement of what he called "natural law." But some commentators--like Leo Strauss--have complained that Aristotle's distinction between "nature" (physis) and "law" or "convention" (nomos) makes the "natural law" a contradiction in terms. This debate is complicated by the fact that Aristotle does speak of "natural law" in the Rhetoric (Book 1, chap. 13).

My argument is that if this passage is read in the light of Aristotle's biological works, we can see that it suggests, in contrast to Plato, that natural right arises not from the cosmological order of the universe, but from the biological order of human nature.

Here's the passage (1134b18-35a5):

Of the political sort of justice, one kind is natural [physikon] and another is legal/conventional [nomikos]. What is naturally just has the same power [dunamis] everywhere, and is not affected by whether it seems so to people or not, but what is conventionally/legally just is something that at first makes no difference to to this way or some other way, but when people have established it, does make a difference, such as being released for a ransom of one mina, or sacrificing a goat but not two sheep, and also those things that people set down by law for particular situations, such as sacrificing to Brasidas, and things of the sort that are decided by a vote. And it seems to some people that all justice is of this sort, because what is by nature is unchangeable and has the same power everywhere, just as fire burns both here and among the Persians, while they see what is just being changed. But this is not the way it is, though it is so in a certain sense, and while among the gods, no doubt, nothing changes at all, among us there is something that is by nature even though everything is changeable; nevertheless, one kind of thing is by nature and another kind is not by nature.

What sort of thing, among the things that are capable of happening in different ways, is by nature, and what sort is not but is legal/conventional and by agreement, even if both are equally changeable, is clear. And the same distinction will fit other things, for the right hand is stronger by nature, and yet it is possible for everyone to become ambidextrous. The things that are just by law/convention and expediency are like units of measure, for the measuring units for wine and grain are not equal everywhere, but where they are sold they are greater, and where they are bought they are less. Similarly, the things that are just not naturally but by human law/convention are not the same everywhere, since the kinds of regime are not the same either, but there is only one kind of regime that is by nature the best everywhere.

Notice that both natural justice and conventional justice are kinds of political justice. Since human beings are political animals by nature, human justice must be political justice. By contrast, much of what Plato seems to teach is that human justice must imitate some cosmic order of universal justice.

Notice also the contrast between the physical phenomenon of fire, which burns the same way in all human societies and the biological phenomenon of right-handedness, which is somewhat variable among human beings. In his biological writings, Aristotle observed that animals with bilateral symmetry manifested "sidedness" in their movements, favoring one side over the other. Human beings were by nature right-handed, and yet they could make themselves ambidextrous (497b30, 705b21). In the Laws (794d), Plato recommended that all children should be taught to be ambidextrous, because this would be advantageous for soldiers.

Beginning with Darwin, biological research has turned up evidence that right-handedness is a genetic propensity favored by human evolution. Much of this research is surveyed in Stanley Coren's The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left-Handedness (Vintage Books, 1993). Many animals show handedness--favoring one hand over the other. In all human societies throughout history, right-handers are probably roughly 90% of the population. So left-handedness is common, but it is always a trait of the minority. The human fossil record of tool-use suggests that these tools were used predominantly by right-handers. Historical evidence--such as human pictures over long periods of history--suggest the same right-hander dominance.

There is substantial evidence that right-handedness is a genetic propensity of the human species--a species-specific trait of human beings just like having two hands, two feet, and a visual system that perceives color. Although in recent years, there have been some reports of evidence that left-handedness is genetically determined, much research (such as Coren's) suggests that left-handedness is not genetically caused but rather a consequence of early developmental trauma--such as birth stress--that somehow alters the development of the brain towards left-handedness.

So this is an example of how our biological nature shows not natural necessities (like the burning of fire) but natural propensities that hold "for the most part" but not always. Moreover, it's also an example of how human learning--people forcing themselves to become ambidextrous--can counter the natural propensities.

This biological example points to how the natural biological desires of human beings support natural right as both universally true for human beings and yet always variable. So, for example, Aristotle stresses the natural desires for sexual mating, parental care, familial bonding, and friendship as supporting the virtues. And yet while these desires are natural propensities for most human beings, and thus constitute the generic goods of human life universally, there is great variation in these desires across individuals and societies.

This indicates that Strauss was wrong in his claim, in the Introduction to Natural Right and History, that Aristotelian natural right depended on a cosmic teleology of the universe that had been refuted by modern natural science. But this also indicates that Strauss was closer to the truth when he observed later in this book (94) that human nature could provide an immanent teleology for natural right: "However indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions. . . . We must therefore distinguish between those human desires and inclinations which are natural and those which originate in convention."

This latter remark points to what I have defended as a Darwinian natural right rooted in the immanent teleology of evolved human nature.

Free Will and Dilley's Secrecy

In Stephen Dilley's APSA conference paper, he writes:

This essay proposes that Arnhart's conservatism fails for a more fundamental reason: it implies determinism of the human mind such that human beings are incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality, including conservative morality. Arnhart's allegiance to Darwinism--with its sole reliance on material-efficient causes and rejection of human telos and essentia--fails to ground 'genuine' free will. But without free will, morality and traditional values become meaningless. Thus the proposed union between Darwinism and conservative beliefs cannot be sustained.

In a footnote to this statement, Dilley writes: "The notion of 'free will' used in this essay will be clarified below." In my recent post, I noted that he never fulfills his promise to explain what he means by "free will." I said that "it's hard to know how to respond" to his criticisms without this explanation.

Now, in his most recent statement, he complains that it's not right for me to ask for this explanation, because he is making a purely negative argument against me that does not require any positive argument from him. He even says that he wants to keep it a secret as to whether he really believes in free will: "nothing in my article implied that I personally accept 'agent causation' or 'uncaused causes.'"

So, in effect, Dilley is saying: I want you to respond to my criticism that your position implies "that human beings are incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality," but I am not going to give you any definition or explanation of what I mean by "free will."

Well, if these are the rules of the debate, then I might as well surrender.

All that I can do is to point to what I have said about "natural freedom" in Darwinian Natural Right (83-87) and in various posts on this blog. My fundamental claim in these remarks is that "free will" as "uncaused cause" makes no sense in application to human beings. Whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused. Against the incomprehensible claim that human beings have the free will to act as divine uncaused causes, I argue that the common-sense notion of human freedom is the power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice. We are free when our actions and thoughts are determined by our deliberate choices.

Against this conception of natural freedom, Dilley assmes a radically reductionist view of causal determinism: when a human being chooses what to do or think based on his beliefs and desires, "he no more chooses his actions than a domino chooses its action in a falling line." So, for Dilley, the causal determinism of our deliberate choices is no different from the causal determinism of falling dominoes. Apparently, for Dilley, the only escape from this reductionist determinism is "free will," but then he's not going to tell us what he means by "free will," or even whether he believes there is "free will."

One possible explanation for Dilley's secrecy is that while he believes morality is meaningless without "free will" as "uncaused cause," he doesn't believe there is such "free will." In that case, he would be a moral nihilist, and he would be criticizing me for not facing up to the truth of moral nihilism.

The Question of Free Will: Stephen Dilley's Reply

Recently, I wrote a post on Stephen Dilley's argument that I deny free will and thus endorse a determinism that would make moral responsibility impossible. He has written a response to this post, which I provide here in its entirety.

ON DETERMINISM AND MEANINGFUL MORALITY: A REPLY TO PROF. ARNHART
Stephen Dilley
Department of Philosophy
St. Edward's University
Austin, Texas

September 17, 2010

I am thankful to Prof. Arnhart for his generosity in allowing me to reply on his blog to the questions he raised about my 2008 essay. Since the original exchange between us took place two years ago, some background may be helpful. In my original article (as well as my APSA paper in 2009), I argued two central claims. First, I contended that Prof. Arnhart's account of the emergence of the human mind implies determinism of the mind, which renders human beings incapable of the kind of free will necessary for meaningful morality. Second, I held that his deterministic view is incompatible with traditional conservative understandings of human volition and moral responsibility. The first of these claims is the most fundamental, so I will focus on it in what follows. (Readers who would like a copy of my original article can email me at stephend@stedwards.edu.)

In two blog posts, Prof. Arnhart responded to my article, asking me a number of questions--more than a dozen, by my count. Since I cannot respond to all of them in the space of a blog entry, I will instead focus on his central queries, which form the basis for most of his other questions. Prof. Arnhart's key questions arise as part of his main response to my criticisms of his account of the origin of the mind as well as the implications of his view for human volition. He asks:

Does Dilley have his own detailed explanation of how exactly the human mind originated? If he does, he does not lay it out in this article. It's hard to know how to respond to his criticism of my account of the evolutionary emergence of mind, because he offers no alternative explanation of his own. Similarly, it's hard to respond to his criticism of my account of human mental freedom, because he never explains his alternative.

Regarding my critique of his view of human volition, he also queries:

So what is Dilley's alternative? It's not clear. He refers to "agent causes." He never explains what that means. But since he rejects my idea that in human choices, our beliefs and desires causally determine our actions, I can only infer that he is implicitly appealing to free will as uncaused cause.

In his original post, as well as his recent follow-up, Prof. Arnhart also picks up on my observation that his naturalism prohibits appeal to "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes." He wonders if I believe that these entities explain the origin of the mind and volition. He then goes on to critique this view, as well as the notion of free will as "uncaused cause," asking me a range of questions about Aristotle, Jonathan Edwards, and the like.

There are two salient features of Prof. Arnhart's inquiries: first, he states that "it's hard to know how to respond" to my criticisms of his view of mind and will because I do not supply an alternative. Second, he wonders about my (undeveloped) alternative, critiquing what he takes to be my reliance on non-material causes or uncaused causes.

So what can I say for myself? My main reply, in brief, is that his questions send him in the wrong direction. The point of my article (as well as the 2009 APSA paper) was to offer a critique of his position. That is, my intention was to raise criticisms of his positive account by contending that it led to determinism, which I argued destroys any meaningful account of human morality, including traditional conservative morality. I did not intend--and still do not intend--to offer a positive account of human volition or the origin of the human mind. The simple fact is that I do not need to give my own account in order to criticize Prof. Arnhart's account. One does not need a positive theory of one's own in order to argue that a colleague's theory is mistaken. I do not need to own my own baseball team in order to recognize that the Seattle Mariners play lousy ball. Nor do I need my own developed foreign policy in order to recognize that randomly bombing other countries just for kicks makes for sketchy diplomacy.

(As it happens, I have puzzles or questions about the major theories of the nature of human volition as well as questions about the major theories of the origin of the mind. In my article, I included talk of "agent causes" and related concepts in order to explain a "common sense" view of free will--held by conservatives and non-Westerners--which I juxtaposed to Prof. Arnhart's deterministic perspective; nothing in my article implied that I personally accept "agent causation" or "uncaused causes.")

But, more to the point, my personal account (or lack of account) about the nature of human volition and the origin of the mind is entirely irrelevant to the key point at issue--namely, whether Prof. Arnhart's view leads to the disintegration of meaningful morality. To see this, suppose for the sake of argument that my own views about the human mind and will are pathetically mistaken--on par with something, say, Paris Hilton would dream up after a long night of cocktails. Does this imply that my original criticisms of Prof. Arnhart's view are incorrect? Not the least. Does it also imply that Prof. Arnhart's account harmonizes with meaningful morality? Of course not. It may be the case that both of our views are incorrect. And just because I may have a false or unjustified (or non-existent) positive account does not epistemically or logically preclude me from point out difficulties in his positive account.

(If Prof. Arnhart has an interest in criticizing alternative views of mind and will, I would suggest he take a look, among other places, at the work of analytic philosophers like J. P. Moreland, Angus Menuge, Steward Goetz, and Charles Taliaferro. I think there is much to admire, as well as to wonder about, in their work.)

So, I am puzzled by Prof. Arnhart's claim that "it's hard to know how to respond" to my criticisms of his views because I don't supply an alternative. Surely, even if my own positive theory is crazy or non-existent, he must still reply to the criticism that his view leads to determinism and the disintegration of meaningful morality, including conservative morality. This is the key point. And, for the record, it is not clear to me that Prof. Arnhart has given a satisfactory response to this challenge.

Perhaps I should end my response here. But because it seems to me that Prof. Arnhart has not adequately met the challenge, let me briefly trace some of its contours once again. The task for Prof. Arnhart is to show how meaningful morality--including the morality presupposed in conservatism--is compatible with his determinism. He takes a Humean compatibilist tact, which holds that determinism and human mental freedom do not conflict (see DNR, pp. 83-87). To my knowledge, Prof. Arnhart has not given a clear and exact definition of determinism, but, as I gestured in my original article, his naturalistic metaphysics implies something like the following: event or entity X is determined if and only if X arises entirely due to prior material causes and, given these causes, could not have been different. What Prof. Arnhart's determinism implies for human beings is that a given individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. could not have been different. As such, all of the individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. are entirely outside of his control. Even if the individual has "freedom" in the compatibilist sense that he always acts according to his beliefs and desires (as opposed to acting due to external coercion), his beliefs and desires are still determined by prior material causes completely beyond his control. He may feel "from the inside" as if he is choosing, but this is an illusion. He no more chooses his actions than a domino chooses its action in a falling line.

As I see it, Prof. Arnhart's determinism destroys meaningful morality. It is nonsense to say that a person "ought" to do something when he has no control over whether or not he can. Should we condemn a paraplegic for failing to save a drowning child? If so, then why not rebuke a toaster for moving slowly in the fast lane? Or why not chastise a coffee machine for not photocopying? Likewise, it does not make sense to condemn Hitler for his actions when he could not have done otherwise. Like the toaster and the coffeemaker, his actions were entirely the product of forces beyond his control.

Prof. Arnhart may appeal to the evolution of the neocortex as gracing human beings, unlike toasters and coffeemakers, with the "emergent" property of deliberation and choice. But as I show in my article, Arnhart's account of emergence does not escape determinism--a claim that Prof. Arnhart did not dispute in either of his blog responses. If he now disputes this claim, I am puzzled as to why he did not do so earlier and why, more fundamentally, he self-consciously adopts Humean compatibilism, which attempts to reconcile freedom and determinism. (Typically, a person only attempts to reconcile two views when he accepts both; reconciliation is unnecessary when he has rejected one or both views.)

Accordingly, the pressing question for Prof. Arnhart to answer straightforwardly is: how can there be meaningful morality (consonant with conservatism, no less) when his view implies that each individual's beliefs, desires, actions, decisions, etc. are entirely the product of prior material causes (in play before his or her birth)and that given these causes, an individual's beliefs, desires, actions, etc. could not have been different? Even if rival theories of the human mind and will are deeply mistaken, Prof. Arnhart must still provide a compelling answer to this question.

One final point remains: in my opinion, Prof. Arnhart does not fully appreciate the implications of determinism for his whole project. To point to just one example, if determinism is true, then all of an individual's beliefs, like her behaviors, are products of material forces beyond her control. (While we don't typically exercise direct control over our beliefs, the typical pre-theoretic view--rightly or wrongly--holds that we have some level of volition that allows us to have at least some indirect influence on our belief formation, say, by spending time reading relevant sources, listening carefully to both sides, trying to weigh evidence judiciously, and the like.) But on Prof. Arnhart's view, none of these activities is within our control. In fact, the ultimate reason a person accepts the claims she does is entirely due to material causes prior to her birth, causes which preclude her from accepting any other claims. He beliefs, like her behavior, are due to causes beyond her (direct or indirect) power.

Why, then, does Prof. Arnhart accept the tenets of his own Darwinian Conservatism? Why does he accept the "emergence" thesis of the origin of the human mind? And why, I wonder, did he miss the point of my original article? The answer is because he was determined to. Given the array of physical causes prior to his birth, he could not have believed anything else. And why do scads of biologists accept that the neo-cortex evolved by natural processes from some simpler primate brain? The familiar refrain sounds again.

It seems to me that this view comes as close as anything to destroying the justification for our beliefs as well as rationality itself. (For those who are interested, Angus Menuge, Victor Reppert, and Alvin Plantinga, among others, have independently given rigorous formulation to this general line of thinking.) By Prof. Arnhart's lights, the reason that I persist in my stubborn unbelief of his views, and that he does not, is because neither of us could do otherwise. Our intellectual lives, like our actions, are essentially meaningless. Material causes have swallowed us whole.

Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics (3): Holloway on Courage and Nobility

About 15 years ago, I taught my graduate seminar on "Evolution and Political Theory" for the first time. One of the students in that class was Carson Holloway. Although he was interested in the idea of a Darwinian political theory, he was also skeptical about it, because he thought it did not rightly recognize the importance of religious belief for moral and political order.

By the second or third meeting of the seminar, the graduate students were clearly divided into two groups--those defending Darwinian political theory and those criticizing it. The two groups even sat on opposite sides of the seminar table. Those attacking Darwinian science called themselves "the priests," and they were lead by Carson. Those defending Darwinism called themselves "the scientists," and they were led by another student--Dave Ivers, who now teaches at Eastern Michigan University. It was an amazing class. Typically, I would start each class by asking a question. Then, the two opposing teams would go after one another for the rest of the class. I was little more than a referee. I always remember this as the best example of what a graduate seminar should be like.

Ever since then, Carson has elaborated his criticisms of "Darwinian natural right" in a series of publications, beginning with The Right Darwin? (Spence Publishing, 2006). Most recently, he contributed an essay to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question (2009). I have responded to him in that book and in various posts for this blog. But I don't think I have ever responded fully to Chapter 3 of his book--"Ennobling Democracy" (pp. 41-70).

Carson argues that Darwinian ethics reduces morality to "mere sociability or decency" and thus ignores what Aristotle recognizes as the transcendent longing for "nobility or beauty of character," which expresses a "natural religious longing" that requires a "publicly sanctioned revealed religion" (45-46, 58). Thus, "virtue as Aristotle understands it requires that we transcend virtue as Darwinism understands it" (51). In some of my other responses to Carson, I have questioned his appeal to "revealed religion" and his attributing this to Aristotle. But I haven't responded to Carson's comments on the nobility of true courage in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

In Book 3 of the Ethics, Aristotle takes up the virtue of courage. He defines it as a mean with regard to fear--and particularly, with regard to the fear of death. Death is the most fearful thing, "for it is the end of one's life, and for the dead nothing is thought to be either good or bad" (1115a27). Courage in the face of death is noblest in war. The cowardly person fears death too much. The rash person fears death too little. The courageous person faces death in the right way, at the right time, in the right circumstances, as dictated by reason. The courageous person fears death in war, but he also fears the bad reputation that would come from being a coward (1115a10-15).

Aristotle then goes through five ways in which the term "courage" is used. The courage of citizen-soldiers in war is first, and it most resembles true courage, because like Homer's heroes, the citizen-soldiers face death in war because they are afraid of being punished and being dishonored.

Aristotle later goes on to say that the truly courageous people are those who have complete virtue, and therefore happiness, and so life is most worth living for them. Consequently, they will be courageous in war, because they will want to be noble. But these truly courageous people might not make the best soldiers. The best soldiers might be those with less to lose, who might risk their lives for little gain (1117b1-20).

In The Descent of Man (Penguin, 2004), Darwin explains how the virtue of courage might have contributed to moral progress through evolutionary group selection.

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element in their success, the standard of morality and the number of well-endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase. (157-58)

In Darwinian Natural Right, I quote this passage and compare it with Aristotle's account of courage as manliness in the face of death in war. Carson criticizes me, however, for not seeing that while Aristotle recognizes the courage of citizen-soldiers, he does not think that this is true courage. The courage of soldiers in war typically comes from a social concern for the good of one's group and a desire to be praised by one's fellow citizens and to avoid being blamed. But this desire for honor, Aristotle suggests, falls short of the desire for nobility, which moves the truly courageous. According to Aristotle, the love of nobility or moral beauty transcends the sociable concern for being praised or honored, Carson argues, and it points to a transcendent or religious conception of perfection that goes beyond the mediocre morality of social praise and blame.

My response to this criticism turns on two points--one about Aristotle and another about Darwin. First, I would note that what is commonly translated as "noble" in Aristotle's text is the Greek word kalon--the "beautiful." Occasionally, Carson acknowledges this when he speaks of nobility as "moral beauty." The concern for nobility, Aristotle suggests, is a concern for appearing beautiful in the eyes of one's fellow human beings. In our common speech today, we sometimes convey this when we tell someone who has done a noble deed, "that was a beautiful thing that you did."

Aristotle says that doing what is "beautiful" is "the end of virtue" (1115b13). Moreover, Aristotle repeatedly speaks of virtue as what is praised, and vice as what is blamed (1101b32,1103a10, 1109b30-35, 1155a17-21). Praise and blame are the common tests of virtue and vice. And thus our morality grows out of our sociality, because we are naturally concerned with winning social approbation and avoiding social disapprobation.

Of course, as Aristotle suggests in his account of magnanimity (in Book 4 of the Ethics), those with the greatest virtues are so confident in their knowledge of their virtue that they don't depend on the praise or honor coming from others. The truly virtuous are concerned not so much with being praised as with being praiseworthy. That might explain what Aristotle means by true courage as distinguished from the courage of citizen-soldiers.

A similar thought can be found in Darwin's Descent:

The moral nature of man has reached its present standard, partly through the advancement of his reasoning powers and consequently of a just public opinion, but especially from his sympathies having been rendered more tender and widely diffused through the effects of habit, example, instruction, and reflection. It is not improbable that after long practice virtuous tendencies may be inherited. With the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality. Ultimately man does not accept the praise or blame of his fellows as his sole guide, though few escape this influence, but his habitual convictions, controlled by reason, afford him the safest rule. His conscience then becomes the supreme judge and monitor. Nevertheless the first foundation or origin of the moral sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of the lower animals, through natural selection. (682)

So while the "first foundation or origin of the moral sense" was in the "social instincts," including the sensitivity to social praise or blame, human reasoning and experience has led to moral progress so that for some human beings, individual conscience has become "the supreme judge and monitor."

Darwin seems to be pointing here to what Adam Smith identified as the "impartial spectator." We begin with a concern for how we appear to others--we want to look good in their eyes. But eventually, we can imaginatively conceive of how we would appear to a well-informed audience of spectators, and that becomes our conscience or inward monitor. We might then act in whatever way seems praiseworthy to us, even when our behavior is blamed by those around us.

Now, Carson might want to point to Darwin's appeal to "the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity" as supporting moral conduct that transcends ordinary praise and blame. This does show Darwin's recognition that religious belief can promote moral progress. But for Darwin, this conception of an "all-seeing Deity" can be understood as a product of human cultural evolution. "The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture" (682).

Aristotle shows the same respect for religious belief that supports morality. But there is no suggestion from either Aristotle or Darwin of a "divine command theory" of morality as impossible without some knowledge of God as the only source of moral norms. Instead, Aristotle and Darwin see religious morality as sanctioning the natural morality that arises from ordinary human experience and cultural evolution.

My previous posts responding to Carson Holloway can be found here, here, here, and here.