"Evolution and Ethics" Seminar at Oxford University

Today, I will be travelling to England. Next week, I will be helping to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics." The following week, Ryan Nichols of Cal State Fullerton will direct a second week in the seminar. The participants are mostly philosophy professors and students from China. This is part of a program organized by Kelly Clark of Calvin College with the support of the John Templeton Foundation. In October, we will all meet in China for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.

Since this topic is intensely controversial, I think the best way to study it is to read texts that represent distinct positions in the debate. So, for each day of my seminar, I have readings that show this debate.

For the first day, I will introduce the readings and comment on how I developed my interest in this area of study. While most of the participants are philosophers, I come at this from the perspective of a political scientist who studies the history of political philosophy from antiquity to the present. Because of that, I tend to stress the historical development of the topic, and I tend to look back to classic texts.

My interest in all of this started with my earliest studies of Aristotle's political philosophy as set forth in his Nicomachean Ethics, his Politics, and his Rhetoric, which present the study of the "regime" (politeia)--the way of life of a political community--as encompassing moral character formation, political behavior and institutions, and rhetoric. I noticed that Aristotle repeatedly compares human beings with other animals, and this led me into studying his biological works, and particularly his account of the biology of political animals.

I also noticed that Aristotle's devotion to biological studies seemed to distinguish him from Plato. Aristotle's criticisms of Plato's Theory of the Ideas seemed to suggest an opposition between Aristotle's biological empiricism and Plato's transcendental idealism. As I have indicated in some posts, this contrast can be overdone if one does not see that Plato's Socrates shows some skepticism about the moral cosmology taught by Plato's Athenian stranger and by Timaeus. But even so, one can see in Aristotle's response to Plato that he saw problems with Platonic idealism, and he saw his biological studies as a turning away from such idealism. One can also see this contrast in Aristotle's defense of rhetoric and rhetorical appeals to the moral emotions, as contrasted with Plato's scorn for rhetoric as mere sophistry. The debate over evolutionary ethics shows this continuing debate between Platonic transcendentalism and Aristotelian empiricism.

I will also suggest, in the first meeting of the seminar, that the history of evolutionary ethics can be understood as showing four waves. The first wave was Darwin's classic statement of evolutionary ethics in The Descent of Man. Although there are obvious gaps in Darwin's knowledge that have been filled by later research--for example, genetics, neuroscience, and careful studies of animal behavior--all of the major insights of evolutionary ethics are already there in Darwin's book. But this first wave of Darwinian ethics came to an end when many Darwinians--particularly, Thomas Huxley--asserted a dichotomy between natural facts and moral values that denied Darwin's evolutionary ethics.

The second wave came at the beginning of the twentieth century with Edward Westermarck's revival and elaboration of Darwin's evolutionary ethics, based largely on bringing together the moral psychology of David Hume and Adam Smith and the evolutionary science of Darwin. Westermarck's work fell into neglect, however, as a consequence of the post-World-War-II revulsion against biological explanations of human nature as associated with the Nazis and Social Darwinism.

The third wave of evolutionary ethics came with the publication of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology in 1975. On the first page of that book, Wilson declared that one great achievement of sociobiology would be explaining human morality as rooted in the emotion control centers of the brain and thus rejecting the rationalist transcendentalism that had become prevalent in modern moral philosophy. This provoked a passionate outcry from those who saw this as crude biological reductionism. In fact, even the leading proponents of "evolutionary psychology" (Tooby, Cosmides, Buss, and others) rejected Wilson's Darwinian ethics as violating the fact-value distinction.

The fourth (and current) wave of evolutionary ethics came with the publication of Wilson's Consilience in 1998. This book was a masterful synthesis of the research done since 1975 supporting Wilson's project for sociobiology as the ground for a grand unification of all knowledge, including ethics. By 1998, the research in ethology, neuroscience, genetics, biological anthropology, behavioral game theory, and gene-culture coevolution confirmed Wilson's claim that the absolute separation of natural facts and moral values was a false dichotomy. Consequently, more and more scholars in psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science are beginning to take evolutionary ethics seriously, although the opponents are still resolute in their opposition.

For the second day of our seminar, we will read selections from Darwin's Descent and George Jackson Mivart's critical review of the book. Here we will see the fundamental debate that continues to run through all of the controversy over evolutionary ethics, a debate that can even be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. Mivart is a Kantian who rejects Darwin's Humean moral psychology as failing to see that morality is autonomous--governed by its own internal, logical rules without reference to human emotions and desires. The influence of David Hume and Adam Smith on Darwin set Darwinian ethics in stark opposition to the transcendental ethics of Kant. That's why Ed Wilson in Consilience explains the ultimate debate in moral psychology as between the transcendentalists who see morality as rooted in some cosmic order outside the human mind and the empiricists who see morality as an expression of the human mind.

For the third day, we will turn to Frans de Waal and other authors in the book Primates and Philosophers. Here we will see de Waal taking the Humean position of Darwin against the Kantian position of Mivart, while de Waal's critics (particularly, Christine Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer) lean towards the Kantian side of the debate, arguing that the moral "ought" belongs to an autonomous realm outside of nature. And yet, all of these critics make concessions to de Waal's Darwinian/Westermarckian account of the moral emotions that suggests some retreat from the position of Kantian moral transcendentalism as based on pure reason.

For the fourth day of our seminar, we will turn to my Darwinian Natural Right and the criticisms of my book coming from John Hare, a philosopher at Yale. Hare is a Christian Kantian. And once again, one can see here the Hume/Kant debate continued in the debate over evolutionary ethics. (I have written some posts in response to Hare.)

For the fifth day, we will discuss Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, with me defending Darwinian ethics against my critics. And, again, I think we'll see the basic contrast between the biological empiricism of my Darwinian naturalism and the transcendental idealism of my critics. And, of course, here, as in all of our reading, we will see the dispute over whether morality is possible without some religious belief in God as the ultimate source and authority for moral law.

I might have a chance to write some posts on the course of the discussions in the seminar.

Why It's Natural to Believe in God: Justin Barrett and David Hume

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I identify the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. I must admit, however, that I have offered very little support--arguments or evidence--for this assertion. But I do believe that the recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. 

The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalisitic account of religion. One of the best surveys of this research is Justin Barrett's Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). Barrett is a Christian evolutionist. And although he never mentions Hume, his work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion (Clarendon Press, 2007). Barrett is a psychologist who specializes in the evolutionary and cognitive psychology of religious belief. His main conclusion is that believing in God is a natural, almost inevitable, consequence of the innate propensities of the human mind as shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history. By contrast, atheism is unnatural, because it goes against the grain of those evolved propensities of the human mind, which is why atheism is so rare in human history. 

Drawing from research in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, Barrett lays the foundation for his argument in the claim that regardless of culture, human beings all over the world and throughout history have had similar minds insofar as they are directed by cognitive structures designed by evolution to perform specific tasks in ways that have been adaptive in human evolutionary history. These "mental tools" operate largely beneath conscious awareness, although they influence our conscious beliefs by making some reflective beliefs more plausible than others. For example, it is clear that human infants are born with a "face detector." They can discern faces and imitate facial expressions, long before they are aware of their own faces. Obviously, such a mental tool would have been adaptive for mammalian offspring who must attach themselves to parental caregivers. 

Research suggests that there are other intuitive mental tools that incline human beings to religious beliefs. (Here Barrett builds particularly on the work of Pascal Boyer in arguing that religion has evolved as a byproduct of innate mental mechanisms shaped by biological evolution.) Human beings seem to have an innate "agency detection device" for identifying objects in the environment--like animals and other human beings--that move themselves for the sake of goals according to mental states like beliefs and desires. Once such agents have been detected, the "theory of mind" tool (ToM) generates predictions about the mental states of these agents and how these mental states might direct their actions.

Human beings need to track their social exchanges with these agents--who owes what to whom--and their minds seem to have a "social exchange regulator" that does this. As naturally social animals whose survival and reproductive fitness has depended on a subtle negotiation of the complex social interactions among human agents, human beings have been endowed by evolution with these intuitive mental tools necessary for social life. Identifying agents is attractive to us because it allows us to explain and predict events and thus make sense of those events by telling stories about how agents act. 

For that reason, our agency detection device becomes hypersensitive: we detect agency based upon limited evidence. Particularly, in urgent situations of distress where we cannot account for what is happening based on natural causes, we are quick to infer supernatural agents at work. When human beings suffer misfortune with no clearly apparent causes, they are naturally inclined to look for supernatural agents at work. They then want to negotiate with these agents--such as ancestral spirits, ghosts, or gods--to protect themselves from harm. 

This sounds a lot like the old idea of anthropomorphism as the basis of religious belief--the idea that human beings project human qualities onto the cosmos. But Barrett's research suggests that anthropomorphism is actually only part of the larger idea of agency. In detecting divine agency, we are not limited to the qualities of human agency. For example, we can imagine that gods are immortal, while human beings are not. 

Much of Barrett's research involves the study of how children develop their ideas of agents--human, animal, and divine. Although the particular content of their religious concepts reflects the religious teaching in their cultural environment, Barrett claims that there are some universal patterns in how children think that suggests they are "intuitive theists." 

Although it is common among those who study religion scientifically to assume that all religions can be explained in the same general ways, and therefore all religions are equal from a scientific point of view, Barrett argues against this, claiming that some religious traditions have a selective advantage in cultural evolution, because some religions are better than others in satisfying the innate mental tools of the evolved human mind. He thinks the Abrahamic monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--are more naturally attractive to the human mind. The human mind is naturally inclined to believe in the divine traits of the Abrahamic God--God as superknowing, God as superperceiving, God as immortal, God as superpowerful, and God as a Creator. (Barrett admits, however, that in some parts of the world--China, for example--monotheism has not been widely successful [91].) 

It is not clear to me that Barrett's favored form of monotheism coincides exactly with the God of the Bible and the Koran. Barrett writes: "I have argued that a superknowing, superperceiving, superpowerful, immortal, and (perhaps) supergood god possesses strong selective advantages, such that once it is introduced, belief in such a god should spread quite well. This supergod concept matches well (but not perfectly) with the God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and other religious traditions as well. However, belief in a deity such as God does not preclude belief in minor gods, particularly ghosts and ancestor spirits. . . . Nothing in the previous discussion precludes the possibility that these spirits (or others) might act locally while a supreme God takes care of cosmic business or serves in a management capacity. I find the historical fact that ancestor worship, saint cults, and other peripheral religious activities continue to exist alongside 'monotheistic' traditions unsurprising. Monotheism does not appear to be a cognitively privileged form of theology except perhaps through considerations of parsimony" (89-90). 

Barrett's qualifications here are remarkable. The "supergod concept" does not perfectly match the God of the Abrahamic religions. In fact, Barrett never quotes any passages from the Bible or the Koran in laying out his "supergod concept." And he actually concedes that some of the central teachings of the Bible--like the Trinity and the Incarnation of Jesus--are not intuitively appealing to the ordinary human mind (82, 100). He also admits that monotheism in practice often coexists with polytheistic beliefs (such as ancestor worship and saint cults). Barrett says that "the threat of eternal damnation or other punishment for disbelief is not a common thread in broadly theistic belief systems and does not even occur consistently in Christianity" (121). So it seems that Barrett wants to interpret his "supergod concept" as excluding any teaching about Hell and eternal damnation. But how is this consistent with the belief that God appeals to our instinctive morality by punishing the bad, even when they have escaped punishment in their earthly life (50, 54-55)? 

Barrett reports that when he presents his arguments in public lectures, many of his listeners conclude that he is attacking religion. Religious believers think he is defending evolutionary science as an alternative to creationism. Atheists think he is confirming their assumption that religious belief arises from some unconscious compulsion of the mind contrary to logic and evidence. But Barrett himself is a Christian evolutionist who sees no conflict between his evolutionary account of religion and his religious beliefs. He writes: "God created people with the capability to know and love him but with the free will to reject him. Consequently, our God-endowed nature leads us to believe, but human endeavors apart from God's design may result in disbelief. Even if this natural tendency toward belief in God can be conclusively demonstrated to be the work of evolved capacities, Christians need not be deterred. God may have fine-tuned the cosmos to allow for life and for evolution and then orchestrated mutations and selection to produce the sort of organisms we are--evolution through 'supernatural selection'" (123).

Barrett concludes that while science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, what we learn from science can be compatible with religious belief. On a number of points, Barrett's position agrees with that of Hume, particularly in his The Natural History of Religion. Hume sees that with only a few possible exceptions, "belief of invisible, intelligent power" is almost universal," because religious belief is rooted in human nature. Religious belief is naturally appealing to the human mind because it allows us to explain human fortune and misfortune as the result of divine agents. 

Hume writes: "Though the stupidity of men, barbarous and uninstructed, be so great, that they may not see a sovereign author in the more obvious works of nature, to which they are so much familiarized; yet it scarcely seems possible, that any one of good understanding should reject that idea, when once it is suggested to him. A purpose, an intention, a design is evident in every thing; and when our comprehension is so far enlarged as to contemplate the first rise of the visible system, we must adopt, with the strongest conviction, the idea of some intelligent cause or author" (85). Moreover, "the universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct, being at least a general attendant of human nature, may be considered as a kind of mark or stamp, which the divine workman has set upon his work" (86). 

Hume thinks that ordinary human beings are strongly disposed to polytheism, and so even within monotheistic traditions, there will be other divinities in popular practice beyond the supreme God. Just as Barrett offers the "supergod concept" as the purest form of religious belief, Hume speaks of "true religion" or "philosophical theism" as the highest attainment of religious thought (34-36, 41, 44, 47-48, 52-53, 58, 71-72, 85-87). 

Barrett stresses the limitations of science and human knowledge generally that push us towards religious belief. For example, Barrett argues, it's just as impossible to prove the existence of other minds as it is to prove the existence of God. We all believe that other human beings have minds like ours. But the mind is invisible and immaterial. We know our own minds by introspective, subjective awareness. But we cannot observe the mind directly, and so we cannot verify or falsify the mind's existence by the normal methods of scientific testing. And yet we are absolutely certain of the existence of other minds. Similarly, we can believe in God's existence as supreme Mind, even though we can't prove this belief by empirical testing. 

Moreover, we cannot scientifically explain the origins of the laws of nature or why the universe has those natural laws that make our existence possible. Here we reach the limits of scientific reasoning about natural causes. 

Like Barrett, Hume stresses our ignorance of causes as the opening to religious belief. He writes: "We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us; nor have we either sufficient wisdom to foresee, or power to prevent those ills, with which we are continually threatened. We hang in perpetual suspense between life and death, health and sickness, plenty and want; which are distributed among the human species by secret and unknown causes, whose operation is oft unexpected, and always unaccountable. These unknown causes, then, become the constant object of our hope and fear . . . the imagination is equally employed in forming ideas of those powers, on which we have so entire a dependence" (40). 

Hume concludes: "The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery. Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning this subject. But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape, into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy" (87). Some of the posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and .here.

Does Darwinism Make Morality Fictional?

In The Descent of Man, Darwin recognizes the uniqueness of human morality. "Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important" (Penguin ed., p. 120) This moral sense is "summed up in that short but imperious word ought," which is "the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause." Darwin then quotes a remark by Immanuel Kant: "Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; whence thy original?"

The quotation from Kant is from a passage in his Critique of Practical Reason, which is immediately followed by a passage in which Kant writes about the sense of duty or "ought" as showing us "man as belonging to two worlds"--the empirical (phenomenal) world of natural causes and the transcendental (noumenal) world of moral freedom. By contrast, Darwin indicates that his explanation of morality will be "exclusively from the side of natural history." A careful reader might see here a fundamental difference between the Kantian approach that sees morality as belonging to a transcendent world beyond the natural world and the Darwinian approach that sees morality as belonging completely to "natural history."

In fact, some of Darwin's first readers saw this, and many of them were deeply disturbed by it. For example, Frances Cobbe wrote a review of the book--"Darwinism in Morals"--for the Theological Review, in which she warned that Darwin's rejection of the Kantian view of morality as transcending natural human experience would destroy all morality.

Cobbe saw a fundamental conflict between two views of morality. "Independent or Intuitive morality has, of course, always taught that there is a supreme and necessary moral law common to all free agents in the universe, and known to man by means of a transcendental reason or divine voice of conscience. Dependent or Utilitarian Morality has equally steadily rejected the idea of a law other than the law of utility" (5-6). Darwin clearly takes the second position. She observed "that the Kantian doctrine of Pure Reason, giving us transcendental knowledge of necessary truths, is not entertained by the school of thinkers to which he belongs; and that as for the notion of all the old teachers of the world, the voice of Conscience is the voice of God--the doctrine of Job and Zoroaster, Menu and Pythagoras, Plato and Antonius, Chrysostom and Gregory, Fenelon and Jeremy Taylor,--it can have no place in their science. As Comte would say, we have passed the theologic stage, and must not think of running to a First Cause to explain phenomena. After all (they seem to say), cannot we easily suggest how man might acquire a conscience from causes at work around him?" (7)

Darwin maintained that although the moral sense was unique to human beings, it would be possible for evolutionary history to produce another species of animal with a different kind of moral sense. "Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man." But the content of the moral sense in such an animal would depend upon the desires and needs of the animal. Darwin explained:

"If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience. For each individual would have an inward sense of possessing certain stronger or more enduring instincts, and others less strong or enduring; so that there would often be a struggle as to which impulse should be followed; and satisfaction, dissatisfaction, or even misery would be felt, as past impressions were compared during their incessant passage through the mind. In this case an inward monitor would tell the animal that it would have been better to have followed the one impulse rather than the other. The one course ought to have been followed, and the other ought not; the one would have been right and the other wrong" (122-23).

It seems, than, that the moral sense or conscience--the sense of moral "ought"--is a "feeling of right or wrong" that varies according to the instinctive desires of the species. So far, the human moral sense is the only moral sense, because human beings are the only animals with the evolved capacities for moral judgment. But if any other species of animal were to evolve such moral capacities, their moral sense would differ from the human moral sense depending upon the differences in their instinctive desires.

Cobbe was appalled by this--by the claim that if bees had a moral sense, it would prescribe a sacred duty for sisters to murder their brothers. She saw this as "affirming that, not only has our moral sense come to us from a source commanding no special respect, but that it answers to no external or durable, not to say universal or eternal, reality, and is merely tentative and provisional, the provincial prejudice, as we may describe it, of this little world and its temporary inhabitants, which would be looked on with a smile of derision by better-informed people now residing on Mars, or hereafter to be developed on earth, and who in their turn may be considered as walking in a vain shadow by other races" (10). She warned: "Our moral sense, however acquired, does not, it is asserted, correspond to anything real outside of itself, to any law which must be the same for all Intelligences, mundane or supernal" (28).

Against what she perceived as Darwin's moral nihilism, Cobbe asserted that ethics was a normative science just like geometry in that both ethics and geometry were based on axiomatic principles that all intelligent beings could recognize as necessary truths. "Love your neighbor" is such a necessary truth of morality, and therefore any intelligent being should eventually understand that moral duty dictates universal love, which would be as true for bees as for humans (29).

Other readers besides Cobbe--including George Jackson Mivart and even Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-discoverer of the idea of natural selection)--warned that Darwin's evolutionary account of morality denied the eternal truth of morality as rooted in the transcendent cosmic order of God, Reason, or Nature. The same warning is heard today from proponents of "intelligent design theory" (like John West and Richard Weikart), who insist that morality cannot be sustained if it is not grounded in some transcendent world of moral truth beyond the empirical world of natural causes.

The reasoning for this worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism--or at least moral skepticism--has been elaborated by philosopher Richard Joyce in two books: The Myth of Morality (2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006). Joyce agrees with Cobbe (and Kant) that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

Joyce believes that Darwin's evolutionary ethics explains the ultimate causes of ethics in a way that confirms David Hume's insight that the human moral sense depends on the human tendency to project emotions onto the world. Hume spoke of the mind's "great propensity to spread itself on objects," because "taste" (as opposed to reason) "has a productive faculty, and gilding and staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation." So it is that "vice and virtue may be compared to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects but perceptions in the mind." And yet, our human moral principles can be enduring, if not universal, insofar as our moral emotions reflect the "universal constitution of human nature." For Hume, the explanation of the origins of human morality ended with some final appeal to human nature as ultimate cause, because he could not go any further to explain the original causes of human nature itself. But here is where Darwin could adopt Hume's account of the natural moral sense, but then go further in developing an evolutionary explanation for how human nature as endowed with a moral sense could have arisen.

But while Joyce accepts this Humean/Darwinian account of morality as an evolved propensity of human nature to project human moral emotions onto the world, he cannot believe that this is a full explanation of morality, because he agrees with Kant that moral concepts necessarily presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts. Like many moral philosophers--from Plato to Kant--Joyce embraces a transcendental view of morality in contrast to the empirical view of morality taken by those like Hume and Darwin. In other words, Joyce agrees with Reme Brague that morality requires a moral cosmology, so that morality can be understood as having an eternal truth as corresponding to some cosmic order of God, Reason, or Nature. But since Joyce denies the reality of that moral cosmos, he must conclude that morality cannot be known to be true.

In this way, Joyce is like Nietzsche, who accepted the Platonic/Kantian teaching that morality must be grounded in some transcendent reality of the Idea of the Good, Pure Reason, or Divine Law, but who denied the truth of that belief in transcendent moral order, and therefore worried that moral nihilism was inevitable. Nietzsche's response to this dilemma was to try to create a new myth with a new religion of Dionysus that would support a new morality of nobility as commanded by new philosophers shaping a new human future.

Joyce's response to his similar dilemma is unclear. On the one hand, he insists that morality is impossible without the "moral clout" that comes from believing in the eternal truth of moral facts, which provides the strength of will to overcome the weakness of will that plagues us when we rely on merely prudential reasoning about what is desirable for us. On the other hand, he also insists that human beings have evolved motivations for good conduct even when they don't believe in God or eternal moral duty (2006: 224).

Joyce admits that a strong sense of transcendent moral duty can often support an authoritarian morality that does great damage. After all, human history gives us many examples of atrocities committed by people who thought they were doing their moral duty.

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

Joyce's answer to this problem is to say that this only shows the danger in wrong moral beliefs! But this makes us wonder how the purity of moral judgment as separated from prudential judgment can be preserved if we have to judge the rightness or wrongness of moral beliefs. According to Joyce, morality "functions to bolster self-control. It imbues certain desirable actions with a 'must-be-doneness,' which raises the likelihood of their being performed. . . . It goes without saying that if this 'must-be-doneness' were attached to the wrong actions--undesirable ones--then it would be disastrous in practical terms" (2001: 181).

But now it seems that Joyce is subordinating his categorical imperatives of moral duty to the hypothetical imperatives of prudential calculation, because now it seems that we don't know whether this "must-be-doneness" really must be done until we have judged that the outcome will be desirable for us! If so, then Joyce ends up agreeing with me that "the good is the desirable."

Joyce's reasoning would be clearer to me if he had compared his position with Edward Westermarck's. Westermarck's elaboration of Darwinian evolutionary morality is remarkably similar to Joyce's--particularly, in the claim that morality arises from evolved moral emotions and therefore that moral concepts have no objectivity insofar as they have no real existence apart from the human mind. But while Westermarck develops his Darwinian ethics as a total rejection of Kant's transcendentalist "two worlds" view, Joyce agrees with Kant that moral concepts by definition must refer to some transcendental realm of eternal cosmic order.

Like Westermarck, I am on the side of Darwin against Cobbe. I agree that believing in a moral law grounded in divine will or transcendent reason might strengthen the moral motivation of people with such a belief. But it seems clear to me that people can still have a strong motivation for moral conduct when they believe that morality has no other ground than the evolved human nature of our moral emotions.

By contrast, Joyce can't decide whether he's on Darwin's side or Cobbe's side. He seems to agree with Darwin that human morality can be fully explained "exclusively from the side of natural history." But then he also seems to agree with Cobbe that human morality cannot be fully explained without some belief in "the Kantian doctrine of a Pure Reason, giving us transcendental knowledge of necessary truths," or in the idea that "the voice of Conscience is the voice of God."

A few of the many posts on related themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

REFERENCES

Cobbe, Frances. 1872. Darwinism in Morals: And Other Essays. London: Williams and Norgate.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. 2nd ed. London: Penguin Books.

Joyce, Richard.  2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Joyce, Richard. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nazi Philosophers: Plato, Fichte, Nietzsche, Heidegger

On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor. In April, the new Nazi government began dismissing Jewish professors from their university positions, including at least twenty German philosophy professors. On May 1, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in a public ceremony.

On May 4, Heidegger at Freiburg University began his first lecture for his course on "The Basic Problems of Philosophy." He said that German students had a new purpose:

"It is determined to find discipline and education, to make itself ready and strong for a political and spiritual leadership conferred on it in behalf of coming generations. The question is whether or not we want to create a spiritual world. If we cannot do so, some kind of savagery or other will come over us and we will reach an end as a historical people."

On May 27, Heidegger was inaugurated as rector of Freiburg University in a ceremony with Nazi flags and many Nazi authorities in attendance. In his inaugural rectoral address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," Heidegger spoke of the need for philosophy to exercise "spiritual leadership" in the present world-historical crisis, so that Germany could fulfil its historical mission as grounded in a new order of being. He concluded by quoting from Plato's Republic.

After his speech, the students pledged their loyalty to Hitler as the leader of the nation. All those present sang the "Horst-Wessel Lied," the anthem of the Nazi Party, as they raised their arms in the Nazi salute, and then they concluded with repeated shouts of "Seig Heil!"

Heidegger never renounced his Nazism or apologized for his active support of the Nazi Party. Even after the war, he continued to affirm the "inner truth and greatness of the movement." That such a prominent philosopher--perhaps even the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century--was a Nazi has created an emotional debate over what this might mean. Recently, a new book by Emmanuel Faye has renewed this debate, because he argues that Heidegger's philosophic ideas continue to promote Nazi-like thinking today. An recent article favorable to the book in The Chronicle of Higher Education stirred anger from Heidegger's philosophic defenders.

There are some big questions here about the relationship between philosophy and politics. Does the support of Nazism by German philosophers show the dangerous tendency of philosophers to support tyranny? If so, what traditions of philosophy are most prone to such mistakes?

Critics of Darwinian science often put the blame for Nazism on the influence of Social Darwinism. But this support for the Nazis among the German philosophers suggests that explaining Nazism as Social Darwinism can't be the whole story. Most of these Nazi philosophers were actually opponents of Darwinian science, because they feared that it promoted a morally corrupting scientific materialism. Against the materialism of modern science, they argued for a metaphysical idealism, which is evident in their interpretations of Nazi ideology.

Hermann Schwarz declared: "The German people have become what the Greeks once were, the human nation to whom the meaning of the universe is linked." Nicolai Hartmann said that Plato was right that "all value is eternal and all meaning eternal meaning." Bruno Bauch agreed with Plato's attack on sophistic relativism and affirmation of "objective values" as set by the eternal Idea of the Good.

For me, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

It's hard to see this, however, if one concentrates just on Heidegger, and fails to see how Heidegger was part of a larger philosophical movement in German history. The controversy over Heidegger's Nazism and the possibility that Nazi ideology was particularly rooted in Heidegger's ideas is misconceived insofar as it ignores the historical circumstances of German philosophy that shaped Heidegger. That broader intellectual history is well studied in Hans Sluga's Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Sluga shows that most of the prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power publicly supported Hitler and Nazi ideology. 30 German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1940, almost half of Germany's academic philosophers were Nazis. But since we have forgotten that history, we give too much significance to Heidegger's Nazism as if it were an isolated case. Sluga's history shows that in fact the many German philosophers who became Nazis manifested a wide range of often conflicting philosophical positions. The common assumption that the major philosophical position supporting Nazism was some kind of moral relativism (such as Nietzschean subjective value relativism) is not correct. Many, if not most, of the Nazi philosophers--for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Bruno Bauch, Hans Heyse, Hermann Schwarz and many others in the German Philosophical Society--were Kantian idealists who assumed a metaphysical order of objective eternal values, and who argued that it was the destiny of the German nation to be rooted in that eternal order of value.

This Kantian philosophical idealism of German nationalism as appealing to eternal values goes back to the founding statement of German nationalism--Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation of 1807. Fichte saw Napoleon's conquest of Germany as creating a world-historical crisis in which the metaphysical destiny of Germany to save humanity could be fulfilled only through extraordinary spiritual leadership that ground German life in an eternal order of values. He developed these four themes--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--in the context of his Kantian idealism. Sluga shows that Heidegger's Rectoral Address and all of the other writing of the Nazi philosophers turn on these same four themes.

The alliance of the German philosophers with Nazism manifests the danger in philosophers becoming corrupted by political power, a danger that goes back to Plato and his Republic in his attempt to ground political order in a metaphysical order of cosmic morality. In asserting the need for philosophers to assume "spiritual leadership" in Nazi Germany, Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers explicitly invoked the teaching of Plato's Republic. Sluga observes: "For the Nazi philosophers, Plato became the most authoritative political thinker and the Republic the most widely read work on political theory" (175).

Heidegger told Karl Jaspers that he wanted to "lead the Leader." He even requested a meeting with Hitler himself. But Hitler was not interested, and they never met.

In Heidegger's writing, all four of the Fichtean concepts--crisis, nation, leadership, and order--assume a transcendental metaphysics, because he sees a "spiritual" meaning in the crisis, in the mission of Germany, in the leadership required, and in the fundamental order that is needed. By speaking of his "spiritual leadership" (geistige Fuhrung), Heidegger appealed to the German idealist tradition for which "spirit" (Geist) was a central theme. So although Heidegger's existential ontology was counter to the German idealist tradition, his metaphysical German nationalism evoked the idealist ideas going back to Fichte.

In the lectures of 1935 that were later published as his Introduction to Metaphysics (Doubleday Anchor, 1961), Heidegger identified Germany as "the most metaphysical of nations" that must move itself and the whole history of the West "into the primordial realm of the powers of being" (31-32) by asking "the fundamental question of metaphysics" as to the meaning of Being (35). In this way, Germany would become the most spiritual of all nations: "For all true power and beauty of the body, all sureness and boldness in combat, all authenticity and inventiveness of the understanding, are grounded in the spirit and rise or fall only through the power or impotence of the spirit. The spirit is the sustaining, dominating principle, the first and the last" (39).

According to Fichte's transcendental rationalism, the history of humanity was the history of reason. In that rational history, Germany was destined to promote true philosophy that would grasp "the eternal archetype of all spiritual life" and thus secure "the education of the perfect man" in the "perfect state." Germany would thus educate its students in the "moral world order." Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers saw Nazism as fulfilling this Fichtean vision of the metaphysical destiny of Germany.

In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche continued the metaphysical nationalism of Fichte. The Nazis often cited this book. In his later writings, however, Nietzsche turned against the transcendental metaphysics of Fichte and Kant. But even so, I would say, the later Nietzsche followed the argument of F. A. Lange's History of Materialism in striving to overcome the degrading effects of scientific materialism through "the standpoint of the ideal" by leading Europe towards a new redemptive religion of Dionysus. He thus turned away from the anti-metaphysical Darwinism of his middle writings--Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and the first four books of The Gay Science--to return in his later writings to the religious longings and metaphysical redemption that he had sought in his youth.

So, despite the conflicts among the Nazi philosophers--between the conservative philosophy of Kantian idealism and the radical philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger--they all took for granted the metaphysical German nationalism of Fichte, which they saw as traceable back to the Greek philosophers, and particularly the political metaphysics of Plato's Republic.

The mistake of the Nazi philosophers was Plato's mistake--the mistake of thinking that political order can be grounded in an eternal metaphysical order as discovered by philosophers who then exercise spiritual leadership in politics.

To avoid this mistake, philosophers need to see that philosophy is primarily an exercise in questioning the order of nature and human existence with no hope of finding any absolute metaphysical answers, and therefore the moral and political order of human life must be grounded in ordinary human experience--human desires and needs--rather than any eternal cosmic order. The Socratic life itself--the life of continual questioning--suggests that Socrates was a philosophic skeptic rather than a Platonic idealist.

Nietzsche embraced this Socratic skepticism in his middle writings by denying any claim to metaphysical knowledge and embracing Darwinian evolution as a science of "humble truths." In this Darwinian period of Nietzsche's writing, he saw the philosopher as a "free spirit" or "free thinker" who devotes himself to ceaseless questioning and lives content with tentative answers. This led him to warn against transcendental longings and tyrannical power sanctioned by delusional appeals to metaphysical order. He endorsed liberal democracy as the best regime for such a free spirited philosopher and scientist, because such a regime would leave such people free to think and question.

Oddly enough, this conception of philosophy as perpetual questioning was apparently embraced by Heidegger, but then he tried to argue that the order of primordial questioning of Being could become the metaphysical ground of German political order. He didn't see that philosophy as questioning would throw into doubt any political claim to metaphysical order.

Understanding philosophy as skeptical questioning should have led Heidegger back to the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, which would have led him away from the illusory metaphysical certainty of German nationalism, and which would have led him to see that Socratic philosophy is most secure in a liberal democratic regime. Instead, Heidegger asserted that Germany was the metaphysical center of Europe, with America at one end and Russia at the other, and "from a metaphysical point of view," American democracy and Russian Marxism were the same.

We might see here that Leo Strauss corrected Heidegger in seeing the danger of tyranny in Platonic political metaphysics, affirming Socratic philosophy as perpetual questioning without metaphysical certainty, and seeing that liberal democracy might provide the best conditions for such Socratic philosophizing.

But as far as I know, Strauss never recognized how this line of thought leads back to Nietzsche's middle writings as shaped by Nietzsche's insight into how a Darwinian science of evolutionary history supports Socratic philosophic skepticism.

Some of these points about Plato, Nietzsche, and Darwin have been elaborated in previous posts found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here, and here.

"What Darwin Never Knew": A PBS Program on Evo Devo

The celebration this year of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species has stirred debate over Darwin's legacy. His supporters praise him as a scientist who formulated one of the greatest ideas ever conceived--the theory of evolution. But some people have complained that this exaggerates his importance and ignores the fact that Darwin was largely ignorant of how evolution works, and that subsequent research was required to explain evolutionary mechanisms and overcome Darwin's ignorance. Moreover, Darwin's critics--proponents of creationism and intelligent design theory--have argued that scientific research over the past century has actually refuted Darwin's ideas.

A good contribution to this debate is the PBS television network broadcast last night (December 29) of a two-hour documentary on "What Darwin Never Knew." This is one of the best television documentaries on evolutionary science that I have ever seen. You can view the entire program online at the PBS website, which includes links to related material.

As the title of the documentary indicates, it concedes that Darwin really was remarkably ignorant of exactly how the evolution of species works, particularly at the genetic level. But the documentary also shows how the latest research in evolutionary science works within the basic ideas set forth by Darwin, even as it fills in all the details that Darwin did not know. And thus it denies the claims of the intelligent design creationists that science has refuted Darwin's theory of evolution.

Of course, a two-hour popular science documentary on such a vast area of research has to be simplified and selective. This documentary concentrates on the research in "Evo Devo"--evolutionary developmental biology--particularly as presented in some books by Sean Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The question is how to explain the remarkable diversity of animal life forms, and particularly, how to explain the diversity of animal species from ancestral species. We might assume that the diverse forms of animal bodies must arise from radically different genes. So, for example, we might think that the wing of a fly and the arm of a human being require radically different genes. In fact, however, the "tool kit genes" for building animal bodies are remarkably similar across all animals. This became apparent when the human genome project showed that human beings have only about 22,000 genes, which is about the same number as other animals.

The differences between animal species come not from differences in their "tool kit genes" but differences in their "genetic switches," which are devices in DNA that tell tool kit genes when, where, and how to act. The gene controlling the formation of a fly's wing is the same as the gene controlling the formation of a human arm. The difference arises during embryonic development as regulatory genes turn the other genes on and off at different times and places in the body.

The beauty of this explanation is that it allows us to explain the origin of new species. Small changes in the timing and pace of these genetic switches can lead to the evolutionary development of new species. So, for example, a fish with fins can evolve into a fish with primitive legs for crawling onto land, when small changes in the genetic switches move from creating fins to creating legs.

This same evolutionary mechanism can explain what makes us uniquely human, with our human capacities for thinking, feeling, and acting. Our human uniqueness depends on the uniqueness of our brains in their size and complexity. The evolution of those brains from smaller and simpler primate brains could arise from evolutionary changes in the genetic regulation of the development of primate brains and nervous systems.

This provides an account of the genetic mechanisms of brain evolution behind what I have called "the emergent evolution of the soul in the brain." The highest human mental capacities--like those for science, religion, and art--arise from human brains that have emerged from primate brain evolution as those brains have passed through ever higher levels of size and organization.

A report on some of the recent research on differences in gene regulatory networks in the brains of chimps and humans can be found here.

Darwinian Ethics and the Moral History of 20th Century Barbarism

As I have indicated in a previous post, I agree with E. O. Wilson that the debate over the origins of ethics is ultimately between transcendentalists and empiricists, and that Darwinian science supports the empiricists. The transcendentalists believe that moral standards arise outside the human mind in some cosmic moral order of God, Nature, or Reason. The empiricists believe that moral standards arise as products of the human mind as shaped by moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments.

In many posts, particularly over the last six months, I have responded to the warning of the transcendentalists (from Plato to Kant to the later Nietzsche) that denying a cosmic moral law--the "death of God"--makes morality impossible and thus brings a collapse into nihilism. This warning might seem to have been confirmed by the moral history of the twentieth century. As I have suggested in a previous post, Jonathan Glover's book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century is an indispensable study of the immoral brutality of the 20th century and an attempt to defend an empiricist view of morality against the transcendentalist claim that such brutality is the inevitable consequence of denying cosmic moral law.

Proponents of Darwinian ethics like Marc Hauser and have shown how scientific research using game theory and artificial moral dilemmas (like the "trolley problem") can support the moral psychology of Darwinian ethics. But such attempts to design laboratory models of moral choice are too contrived and artificial in their abstraction to capture the concrete complexity of real people making real choices in the real world. The ultimate test of Darwinian ethics is to see whether it can account for the real moral psychology of human experience. And for that, we need Darwinian moral history. Glover's book is a big step in that direction, because it provides an empirical moral history, although he does not see how this confirms Darwinian moral psychology.

Glover writes his history as a response to "Nietzsche's challenge"--if we reject the "idea of a moral law external to us," does that mean the collapse of morality in the face of nihilism and the rule of the stronger (11)? Glover's answer to this challenge is "ethics humanized": "If there is no external moral law, morality needs to be humanized: to be rooted in human needs and human values" (405-406). The question then is whether such a purely empirical ethics of human design can be sustained against the brutal history of the 20th century--from Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Pol Pot to Slobodan Milosevic. I agree with Glover's answer, but I think his answer would be stronger if it were framed in the context of Darwinian ethics.

Glover shows how the history of the 20th century illustrates the three great sources of cruelty: war, tribalism, and Belief. He uses "Belief" with a capital B to designate transcendent beliefs--religious or quasi-religious--that are taken as articles of faith beyond question. For Glover, the cruelty of modern war is manifested in trench warfare and the British naval blockade of Germany in World War I, in the area bombing of Germany and Japan and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, and in the atrocities of the Vietnam War. The cruelty of tribalism is manifested in the tribal conflicts in Rwanda and in the conflicts between Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia after the death of Tito. The cruelty of Belief is manifested in the regimes shaped by the utopian ideologies of Marxism (Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot) and Nazism.

Glover also recognizes that the cruelty of war, tribalism, and ideological belief systems usually depends on the work of ambitious politicians who use war, tribalism, and utopian ideology as instruments for their Machiavellian power-seeking (123-28, 132). This points to the need for institutional structures of countervailing power so that ambition counteracts ambition.

War and tribalism show that there is a "moral gap" in the moral restraints on cruelty, because "outside the boundaries of a single community, both self-interest and the moral resources have serious limitations" (28). Although Glover is reluctant to embrace a sociobiological explanation of the innate propensity to group conflict, he does actually accept the idea that human moral psychology has been shaped by evolutionary group selection that favors group conflict (41, 140-44). And yet he thinks that such group conflict can at least be moderated by extending our moral emotions of sympathy and by recognizing the long-term advantages in cultivating cooperation between groups and nations.

Glover thinks that the final solution to the cruelty of military and tribal conflict would be a "proper world police force" to act as a global Leviathan to enforce an international rule of law (149). But Glover never explains how this could be done without risking global tyranny. In at least one passage, he recognizes the problem: "The Hobbesian trap of mutual fear suggests the Hobbesian solution. To police the global village, we could create Leviathan. We could all agree to submit to the power of the strongest. In the world after the Cold War, the emerging approximation to Pax Americana is a bit like this. But the Hobbesian solution has always been a second best. There is no justice in an inequality of power based on mere strength. The power may be used altruistically and wisely. It may also be used selfishly and at whim. And there are dangers in giving anyone total power" (225).

A Darwinian view of evolved human nature would suggest that military and tribal conflicts are inevitable, although we can look for ways to foster cooperative solutions to our conflicts. Such a view would warn against any utopian vision of perpetual peace through an international Leviathan as a recipe for tyranny.

Of course, the critics of Darwinian ethics like to tell the story of how Social Darwinism shaped Nazism to confirm their claim that Darwinism necessarily subverts healthy morality and promotes the immoral cruelty of "survival of the fittest." Glover tells that story. But he also shows that the story of Nazi Social Darwinism is not the whole story of Nazism, because it fails to explain the transcendental appeal of Nazism as a utopian ideology of communitarian morality that gave meaning and purpose to the lives of those who embraced it.

I will elaborate this last point in my next post.

Robert George's Kantian Catholic Conservatism

The New York Times has published a long article on Robert George and his influence with American conservative Catholics and the Republican Party. George is a prominent professor of politics at Princeton University, who is best known as a proponent of John Finnis's "new natural law." Politically, he is best known as a staunch advocate of conservative Catholicism in American politics and a devoted supporter of George Bush's policies.

From my reading of George's writings, this article is remarkably accurate in surveying George's thought. As the article indicates, George is especially devoted to the claim that "reason alone" proves that abortion, embryonic stem cell research, heterosexual sodomy, and homosexual sex are immoral. Reason alone teaches us that marriage is self-evidently good only when it becomes a "one-flesh union" through vaginal intercourse. When a married heterosexual couple engage in any sexual activity other than vaginal intercourse, this is sodomy, and "reason alone" tells us that this is immoral.

George distinguishes between those moral judgments that are self-evident from those that are not. The evil of abortion is self-evident. But the evil of capital punishment is not. So, George concludes, Catholics can reasonably disagree with the Church on the second issue but not the first. He says this despite the fact that the Church has condemned both abortion and capital punishment as part of the "culture of death."


George's appeal to "reason alone" puts him in opposition not only to my conception of Darwinian natural right, but also to traditional natural law thought and many traditions of Christian theology.

According to George, the great debate in moral philosophy is between Aristotle and Hume. Aristotle stands at the head of the tradition of thought that says that there is an objective moral order that is grasped by the authority of reason alone, which must then rule over the passions. This Aristotelian tradition includes Thomas Aquinas and natural law thought. David Hume stands at the head of the opposing tradition that says that reason alone cannot rule, because the passions must motivate human action. According to George, the appeal to pure reason as a source of moral guidance does not require any appeal to the facts of human nature and history, because moral truth rests on principles that are grasped by pure logic as self-evidently true with no regard for nature or history.

I disagree with this on many points. I agree with Hume that morality requires a combination of reason and passion. Passion or emotion provides the motivational direction for moral experience, although reason can elicit or direct emotion based on judgments about the circumstances of action. Pure reason alone cannot move us to action. Both our reason and our emotions reflect the facts of our human nature and history, and therefore moral experience depends on the nature and history of human life.

I also disagree with George in his claim that his reliance on pure reason is Aristotelian. After all, Aristotle is clear in declaring that "thought by itself moves nothing." Human morality requires a combination of reason and desire in practical experience. This is clear in Aristotle's On the Movement of Animals. I see that same combination of reason and desire in Aquinas, who roots natural law in the "natural inclinations" of human beings.

Far from belonging to the philosophical tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, George actually belongs to the rationalist tradition of Immanuel Kant, who insisted that morality rested on pure imperatives of logic with no reference to human nature or human desires.

If morality is rooted in human nature, then Darwinian science can clarify our moral psychology by explaining how our moral experience is grounded in the biological reality of the human mind and body as directed to moral goods. So, for example, we cannot judge sexual morality without some understanding of our nature as sexual animals with natural desires for sexual identity, sexual mating, parental care, and familial bonding.

By contrast, George insists that knowing the "human goods" is a matter of self-evident reasoning that is totally abstracted from any knowledge of human nature. I find that incomprehensible. How can we know what is good for human beings without considering what human beings are like? In fact, George admits that this reliance on pure reason alone is the one point where he is uncertain. "This is a serious issue, and if I am wrong, this is where I am wrong." "I just hope I am right." But if his position really is self-evidently true, why should he have any doubt at all?

As the article indicates, George's Kantian Catholicism clashes not only with my Darwinian ethics, but also with traditional natural law and many lines of Christian theology. Traditional natural law--like that elaborated by Aquinas--recognizes the importance of human reason, but it also recognizes that natural law must be founded in the natural inclinations of the human animal. As Aquinas said, "natural right is that which nature has taught all animals." By contrast, George's Kantian natural law is natural law without nature.

George's Kantian Catholicism is also opposed to the theology of original sin, particularly as understood by many Protestant Christians. George's Kantian rationalism assumes that human reason can grasp the fundamental principles of morality by pure logic alone. But many Christians would say that because of original sin, human reason is defective as a moral guide, and that's why we need Revelation to teach us what is right and wrong.

Even someone like Carson Holloway, who has been a fellow at George's James Madison Program at Princeton, would have to disagree with George's Kantian rationalism, because Holloway would say that our moral knowledge requires religious belief.

We might dismiss all of this as just another philosophical debate with no practical effects on real life. But as this article makes clear, George has become the leader of a powerful political movement uniting conservative Catholics and Evangelical Christians working to control the future of the Republican Party and American politics generally.

Some of my posts on "Darwinian natural law" can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Prudence or Transcendence?--A Reply to Carson Holloway

Carson Holloway is a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He earned his Ph.D. at Northern Illinois University, where I had the great pleasure of being one of his teachers. As often happens with good students, he challenged his teachers; and in particular, he has made disagreeing with me a big part of his career. His book The Right Darwin? is a critique of my Darwinian Natural Right. He has edited a book criticizing my article "Statesmanship as Magnanimity: Classical, Christian, and Modern." And he has written a critical response to Darwinian Conservatism as a contributor to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.

Now he has written two articles on Darwinian political thought for the Witherspoon Institute, which can be found here and here. In criticizing the political interpretations of Darwinism, he compares the Darwinian Left as represented by John Dewey and Peter Singer and the Darwinian Right as represented by William Graham Sumner and me.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Dewey delivered a lecture on "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy." Holloway takes this lecture as the best statement of Dewey's Darwinian thought. According to Dewey in this lecture, Darwin exerted his greatest influence by refuting Aristotelian teleology. Aristotle believed that nature conformed to a rational design such that each thing served some purpose in the order of the universe, but Darwin showed that species evolved through the struggle for existence without any preordained plan or purpose. Therefore, Dewey argues, if we accept Darwinian biology, we have to reject Aristotelian political thought as it rests on an unscientific view of nature.

Holloway seems to accept Dewey's claim that Darwin necessarily denied all forms of teleology. I don't agree. On the centennial anniversary of Darwin's Origin, John Herman Randall delivered a lecture on "The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy." Contrary to Dewey, Randall concluded that, as a result of Darwin's influence, "nature is once more for us, as for the Greeks, full of implicit ends and ideals." Randall argued, "When Darwin led men to take biology seriously once more, they had to reintroduce these functional concepts that physicists had forgotten--means and ends, function, teleology, and time." Obviously, there is confusion among Darwin's interpreters as to whether evolutionary biology denies Aristotelian teleology (as Dewey says) or confirms it (as Randall says).

I have argued that to clear up this confusion, we need to see that while Darwin denied cosmic teleology, he affirmed immanent teleology. The natural evolution of living beings does not conform to any cosmic design. But that natural evolution does produce species that show an internal teleology in being directed to ends or goals. For example, a mammalian species is naturally adapted for parental care, so that mothers caring for their offspring can be explained teleologically as goal-directed behavior. Such species-specific, immanent teleology is the only kind of teleology that Aristotle saw in the living world, and modern biology confirms such Aristotelian teleology.

Holloway is not satisfied with such immanent teleology, however, because he is a metaphysical conservative who believes that the moral order of the universe requires what he has called "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." Although this is not explicitly stated in these two Witherspoon Institute articles, it's clearly stated in Holloway's other writings.

Although Holloway agrees with me that Darwinian science might go far in explaining the range of natural human desires, he argues that this cannot explain human morality, because moral choice requires a ranking of desires--preferring some as good and rejecting others as bad--which requires normative principles that go beyond empirical science.

I have argued that a full Darwinian account of morality requires understanding the complex interaction between natural moral sentiments, customary moral traditions, and individual moral judgments. So, for example, to understand the moral order of property in human life, we need to explain not only the natural propensities to property, but also the customary traditions of property claims and the formal laws of property rights. Resolving conflicts over property or conflicts between the desire for property and other desires requires prudence or practical judgment in deciding what is best for particular individuals or particular societies in particular circumstances. Natural human desires or propensities constrain but do not specify how property is to be defined or arranged in specific cases. I elaborate this point in my chapter on property in Darwinian Conservatism.

This appeal to human prudence is not enough for Holloway, because he believes that morality is impossible without some appeal to a transhuman, cosmic principle of goodness grounded in the divine. In his contribution to the Disputed Question book, he insists that a Darwinian morality of human nature cannot provide any ranking of our natural desires that allows us to choose the good over the bad. "Our ability to distinguish between the good and the bad in human nature depends on some principle that somehow transcends human nature itself. It is this higher source of principle that the older version of natural law could supply and that Darwinian conservatism cannot" (l67).

What is this "principle that somehow transcends human nature"? Holloway is not clear about this. But as far as I can tell, it's the Biblical principle of universal love based on the equal dignity of all human beings as created by God in His image. As I have indicated in my various responses to Holloway, I don't think he has gone far enough in explaining exactly what this principle means, how it is derived from the Bible, why he expects all human beings to live by it, and how it would guide our particular moral decisions.

Does universal love require an absolutely indiscriminate humanitarianism--so that we would love all human beings equally without any partiality at all for those close to us? Would this require absolute pacifism as an expression of the "love your enemies" teaching? Would this require the abolition of private property and private families? Are the Christian socialists and pacifists correct in their interpretation of universal love?

Or would Holloway concede that these positions would go against human nature? But how could he make this concession without falling back into the Darwinian naturalism that he wants to reject?

My elaboration of some of these points in other posts can be found here, here, here., and here.

Do Human Rights Require Religious Beliefs?

What difference would it make if we accepted what Bernard Williams has called "Nietzsche's thought"--"there is, not only no God, but no metaphysical order of any kind"?

One consequence, Nietzsche suggested, is that we could no longer believe that human beings were created by God in His Image and thus endowed with equal dignity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: "The masses blink and say: 'We are all equal.--Man is but man, before God--we are all equal.' Before God! But now this God has died." The modern morality of human equality is secularized Christian morality that cannot be continued after the death of God.

Does this mean, then, that we could no longer hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights? In the second half of the 20th century, the morality of human rights emerged as the first global morality. But if that morality depends on the religious idea of the sacredness of human life, how can we hold onto that morality if we reject its religious foundation?

Some atheists will respond that even without religious foundations, we can appeal to principles of nature or reason as the ground for the true and the good. But if Nietzsche is right, the death of God means not just the death of the Biblical God but the death of all metaphysical order, and thus the death of the whole Platonic tradition of philosophy as the highest human good. If there is no metaphysical order, then there would seem to be no metaphysical foundation for either the moral life or the philosophic life.

These are the questions raised by Michael J. Perry in his book Toward a Theory of Human Rights (2007), which restates the arguments of an earlier book The Idea of Human Rights (1998). Perry argues that the idea of human rights makes sense if we believe that all human beings have equal dignity because of the sacredness of human life as created by God. But if we deny this religious belief and accept the modern secular idea that the universe has no ultimate meaning--that human life was not created to fulfill any cosmic purpose--then we have no good reason to believe in human rights, and the only standards of conduct and thought are those created arbitrarily by human will. So Perry asks: "For one who believes that the universe is utterly bereft of transcendent meaning, why--in virtue of what--is it the case that every human being has inherent dignity?"(17). If we have no answer to that question, Perry insists, then we have no answer to those human beings who assert that they have the right to exploit and abuse other human beings because what we call right is really just the rule of the stronger.

The various responses to Perry's argument--attempts to provide a purely secular justification for human rights--are surveyed in Ari Kohen's In Defense of Human Rights: A Non-religious Grounding in a Pluralistic World (2007). Kohen's book is of special interest to me because he tries to show that a Darwinian evolutionary view of human nature can support the idea of human rights. Of course, this goes against the common view--taken by Perry--that evolutionary science subverts any belief in human rights, or any stable morality, by denying that there is any objective moral order in the universe.

To show how the idea of equal human rights based on equal human dignity arises from Christianity, Perry imagines a religious believer named Sarah who follows the commandment of Jesus to "love one another . . . just as I have loved you" (John 13:34). She sees this teaching elaborating in many more scriptural passages, for example: "We are well aware that we have passed over from death to life because we love our brothers. Whosoever does not love, remains in death" (1 John 3:14). She sees the fundamental teaching of Jesus as universal love, which includes loving your enemies (Matthew 5:44). Consequently, "Sarah loves even those who have violated her, who have failed to respect her inherent dignity" (10).

Sarah interprets this teaching of universal love as supporting an egalitarian humanitarianism expressed as universal human rights. We serve God by serving our fellow human beings as children of God. We give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and care to the sick. In loving one another equally, we love God (153). If we do this, we will be rewarded with eternal life at the Last Judgment (Matthew 25:31-46).

Perry concedes that religious belief is not necessary for being good, because obviously many people with no religious belief are good, and many religious believers are not good. Perry insists, however, that religious belief is necessary if we are to show morality to be "rationally justifiable" as founded on some cosmic ground, on some conception of the universe as meaningful. For the universe to be meaningful, it must satisfy our "deepest yearnings for "ultimate relationships, ultimate belonging" (16). In other words, not only must the universe be orderly, but also that order must be the work of a divinely omnipotent person who cares for us and thus provides for our dignified existence.

Against Perry's claim that the morality of human rights depends on a religious belief in the sacredness of human life, Ronald Dworkin has asserted that "there is a secular as well as a religious interpretation of the idea that human life is sacred," because although sacredness is associated with the religious idea of holiness, the sacredness of human life can be held as a "secular but deep philosophical belief." But Perry rejects this by arguing that Dworkin's "secular sacredness" assumes a universal human consensus on valuing human life, which doesn't exist, because obviously some human beings don't treat other human beings as having supreme value (21). Moreover, even if most of us value human life, that doesn't give it the sacred value that comes from God. It is not enough that other human beings have "value to me," because this will not give them the sacredness that comes from their having "value to God" (19). We need to see the value of human life as conforming to some cosmic standard. If value is to be something more than mere human preference, we need to believe "that the world has a normative order" (28).

To argue that we highly value human life, Perry insists, is not the same as saying that human life really has intrinsic value as measured by an external, unchanging, cosmic standard of meaning--so that the sacredness of human life is grounded in a cosmic order in which human beings are elevated above all other creatures. Here, again, Perry agrees with Nietzsche, who writes: "Naivete: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing! The 'beyond' absolutely necessary if faith in morality is to be maintained" (23).

The failure to provide a cosmic standard of value is also why Perry rejects the positions of Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, who say that human rights rest upon human sympathy and solidarity. Nussbaum and Rorty believe that the lives of human beings have value in so far as we care for them. The idea of human rights is promoted by extending our moral sentiments to embrace ever wider circles of humanity.

Perry objects to this sentimental morality that although normal human beings--those who are not psychopaths--do care for some other human beings, particularly those of their family or tribe, it is not true that normal human beings care for all other human beings equally and impartially (22).

This same objection applies to evolutionary accounts of morality as rooted in human sociality and moral sentiments. Evolutionary science produces "a cosmic process bereft of ultimate meaning," because "far from being created 'in the image of God,' human beings are merely the unplanned, unintended yield of random mutation and natural selection" (24). An evolved human nature supports "social nature" but not universal love. Perry explains: "Few would deny that the social nature of human beings is such that a person who is part of a network of loving family and friends is better off in consequence thereof than one who is not. But this is a far cry from claiming that the evolved nature of human beings is such that being a person who 'loves one another just as I have loved you' (in the radical sense of 'one another') is the most deeply satisfying way of which human beings are capable" (25).

There are, however, some serious weaknesses in Perry's reasoning. First of all, Perry admits that "the plausibility of religious faith" is "a question well beyond the scope of this book" (161). But how can a religious metaphysics make morality "rationally justifiable" if the "plausibility of religious faith" is itself not "rationally justifiable"?

Even if we set aside that problem, he hasn't made a good case for his claim that religious belief necessarily supports a morality of universal love or egalitarian humanitarianism. He admits that in practice, much of the history of religion is a history of brutality. But he would say that this comes from the failure of believers to live up to the true teaching of their religion.

What is that true religious teaching? Perry looks to the Bible. Although he implies that other religious traditions also teach universal love, he restricts himself to biblical religion. Even here, however, he restricts himself to the New Testament. The Old Testament would be a problem for him, because it teaches that God has a "chosen people," who commit bloody atrocities against their enemies in waging holy wars commanded by God.

The New Testament seems more supportive of the universal love ethic that Perry favors. But even here, Perry has to be careful to pass over in silence the New Testament teachings contrary to universal love. Sarah quotes 1 John 3:14--"we love our brothers." But she does not cite the verse in this same chapter of the biblical text that distinguishes "the children of God" from "the children of the devil." This comes in the context of the warning against the "Antichrist" and those who follow him. These letters of John are followed by the last book of the New Testament--Revelation--which prophesizes a bloody apocalyptic war between the believers and the unbelievers.

Only once does Perry quote the New Testament teaching about the Last Judgment (153). When he does this, he does not comment on the in-group/out-group psychology of this teaching. Jesus says that God will separate the sheep from the goats. The sheep will be given eternal life, while the goats will go away to eternal punishment (Matthew 25:31-46). Doesn't this look more like Christian tribalism than universal love?

Sarah interprets the "love your enemies" teaching to mean that she should love even those who violate her and thus deny her inherent dignity. Does this mean that the morality of human rights as based on universal love prohibits any punishment or coercion of those who violate human rights? If so, this contradicts Perry's claim that we must "coerce others, and perhaps even, at the limit, kill others, in the name of protecting the inherent dignity of human beings" (28). If universal love means absolute pacifism, then it cannot support the use of coercion or violence to enforce human rights. But, as President Obama reminded us recently in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, such Christian pacifism would not have stopped Hitler's armies.

Another fundamental problem with Perry's argument is that it has no support in any of the major documents of human rights beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unlike the American Declaration of Independence, which invokes "Nature's God" and the divine creation of humanity, and unlike the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which appeals to the "sacred rights of man" and the "auspices of the Supreme Being," the Universal Declaration never refers to God and never uses the word "sacred." In fact, the drafters of the Universal Declaration debated proposals to include language about divine creation, and they rejected such language. So, clearly, they believed that the "inherent dignity" of humanity could stand on its own without any reliance on the "sacred." Moreover, in speaking about how "barbarous acts . . . have outraged the conscience of mankind," the Universal Declaration seemed to invoke the sort of moral sentiments of sympathy and concern identified by people like Nussbaum and Rorty as the basis for human rights.

As I have indicated in another post, the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (ratified by the UN in 1998) declares that "the human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity," and it identifies this human genome as a product of natural evolution. So here it is clearly indicated that the inherent dignity of humanity arises not from divine creation but from natural genetic evolution.

One product of human evolution is sympathy and the moral emotions of approval and disapproval. We can try to ground our morality in metaphysical principles--God, Nature, or Reason; and we can argue, as Nietzsche and Perry do, that without such metaphysical foundations, morality is unjustified. But it's hard for me to see how such purely metaphysical principles could sustain morality--including the morality of human rights--without the motivational power of moral emotions.

The behavior of human rights activists confirms this. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch elicit support for their human rights campaigns through a rhetoric of emotional persuasion. They tell stories or show us pictures of human cruelty to particular human victims. The more disturbing and vivid the stories and the pictures of cruelty, the more likely we are to feel some identification and thus sympathy with the victims. We then feel outrage against the perpetrators of such cruelty, and we want them to be stopped and perhaps punished.

William Schulz is the former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. In his book In Our Own Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, he dismisses appeals to God or Nature or Reason as insufficient to sustain the morality of human rights. Instead, he agrees with Richard Rorty in relying on David Hume's insight that morality depends on sympathy and the moral emotions that incline us to care for our fellow human beings.

Drawing from his own experience as a human rights campaigner, Schulz tells some stories of the cruelty against which he has fought--like the story of the Salvadoran soldiers who practiced "dewombing"--"a pregnant woman was killed, her fetus ripped from her womb and tossed into the air, to be caught by the soldiers on bayonets." He writes:

"Whenever I hear stories like this, I am, as I think most people would be, both heart stricken for the victims and repulsed by the cruelty. Why do I have those reactions?

"I am stricken at heart because I have the imagination to know at least in proximate form what the experience, the pain, must have felt like. I am stricken at heart because at some level I identify with the victims; I know what it is to bleed" (23).

He goes on to say:

"Robert Frost once observed that poems begin with a lump in the throat, and I think human rights do too. . . . far better than by appeals to God or Nature, is to point to the capacity to identify with others, the capacity for human empathy or solidarity. This is a capacity of such richness and complexity that something like it, at least concerning mothers and children, is required for the propagation of the species. Children in our own culture as young as one have been known to evidence it, and some ethologists even believe it can be identified in animals. It is a phenomenon so widespread, if not universal, that we can hardly imagine a society without it" (24).

But notice the implications of this. This view of morality as rooted in the moral emotions of evolved human nature does not appeal to any metaphysical "beyond" for cosmic support. Those like Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, and Perry would say that without such a metaphysical foundation, morality is impossible. Those analytic philosophers today who look to pure logic to prove the principles of moral obligation as inherent in the logical order of things continue in this Platonic tradition. Against this tradition of metaphysical morality, the appeal to moral emotions assumes a Humean tradition of empirical morality.

In his appendix on "moral sentiment" in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume wrote:

"Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects, as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: The other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation. Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it give pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: After all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is eternal and inflexible, even by the will of the Supreme Being: The standard of the other, arising from the internal frame and constitution of animals, is ultimately derived from that Supreme Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence."

In debates over human rights and morality generally, we need reason to gather the information relevant to our moral choices. Often, the most contentious issues concern rational disagreements over the facts of the case--factual issues as to who did what to whom and why. But once reason has judged the facts, we need the internal moral sentiments to decide whether we approve or disapprove of what we see. Reason can look to "the nature of things." But sentiment draws its standard from "the internal frame and constitution of animals." Because we are the kind of animal that we are, we paint our world with the colors of our moral emotions. Darwin adopted this Humean view of the moral sentiments, while explaining how the "internal frame and constitution of animals" could have evolved naturally.

Consider my previous posts on female circumcision in Africa as an illustration of how the morality of human rights works. As far as I know, the women in Senegal who decided to abolish female circumcision for their daughters didn't reach this decision because they were converted to some religous belief in the equal sacredness of human beings as created in God's Image. They reached this decision through some understanding of the consequences of female circumcision, feelings of concern for the welfare of their daughters, and some practical judgment about how they might organize their reform to ensure that their daughters could get married without being circumcized.

There is a foundation for human dignity, but it's not a transcendent or transhuman foundation--God, Nature, or Reason--but the empirical foundation of evolved human nature as the source of sympathy and the moral sense. We see this in practical arguments over human rights when the proponents of human rights employ not metaphysical reasoning about cosmic principles but rhetorical persuasion to evoke moral emotions. The history of the expansion of human rights is therefore to be understood as what Hume called "a progress of sentiments" as human beings have been persuaded to extend their sympathetic concern to ever wider circles of humanity.

And yet such rhetorical persuasion does not always work. It does not work with those abnormal human beings--like psychopaths--who lack the moral emotions of sympathy, guilt, and shame. Nor does it work when people are so caught up in their fanatical moral commitments that they cannot recognize those outside their moral community as full human beings who evoke moral concern. Such situations create tragic moral conflicts that are settled not by persuasion but by force.

As I have suggested in other posts, the American Civil War is a dramatic illustration of such a tragic moral conflict. The dispute over slavery could not be settled by metaphysical appeals to God, Nature, or Reason. The Bible did not resolve the debate, because it was invoked by both sides in the debate. As Lincoln observed in his Second Inaugural, both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, and each invoked His aid against the other.

In such tragic conflicts, universal love does not work. Instead, we settle the disagreement by force of arms. That's why human rights ultimately rest upon the right to revolution. If human rights are not protected, as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, then human beings have recourse, as a last resort, to "rebellion against tyranny and oppression."