Aristotelian Liberalism

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have defended an Aristotelian conception of liberalism in two books--Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991) and Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2005).

I am largely persuaded by their Aristotelian liberalism, which resembles what I have defended as "Darwinian natural right" and "Darwinian conservatism," and this suggests the possibility of a "Darwinian liberalism." This should not be as confusing as it sounds if one keeps in mind that what I defend as "conservatism" is a "liberal conservatism," and what the two Dougs defend as "liberalism" is a "classical liberalism" or "libertarianism" that many conservatives would embrace. I will try to clarify all this in a series of posts. In this first post, I will briefly summarize their argument, and then I will briefly note some of the ways that my conception of Darwinian natural right supports their argument.

The idea of Aristotelian liberalism might seem contradictory. After all, modern liberalism (particularly as coming from John Locke) claims that the proper aim of government is to secure the rights of individual liberty without any legal enforcement of morality, while the Aristotelian tradition of political philosophy seems to claim that the proper aim of government is to shape the moral character of citizens to secure the common good. While Aristotelians seem to say that statecraft is soulcraft, liberals seem to say that this is wrong, because a government that would try to shape the moral character of souls to perfect them would become tyrannical in denying individual liberty.

The two Dougs reject this dichotomy between Aristotelian social virtue and Lockean individual liberty. This is clear in their disagreement with Leo Strauss. In his interpretation of "modern natural right" as conveyed in Locke's account of property, Strauss in Natural Right and History (248) observes: "Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man--as distinguished from man's end--had become that center or origin." The two Dougs disagree with this comment:

"We uphold the shift of emphasis made by theorists of modern natural right; yet we do not think that arguing for natural rights requires that one reject the natural end of man as the standard for morality. It is not necessary to accept the alternative of either the fulfillment of the individual or the natural end of man as mutually exclusive. Making the individual the moral center of the universe does not require that one accept nominalism, mechanism, or hedonism, nor does accepting essentialism, teleology, and eudaimonism, at least as we have described them . . ., require rejecting individualism. It is possible for the fulfillment of the individual to be interpreted in terms of the requirements for human well-being. There can be a view of the ego or self that is neither otherworldly nor Hobbesian, but Aristotelian. Further, the achievement of man's natural end need not be interpreted along Platonic lines. There is no such thing as the flourishing of 'man.' There is only the flourishing of individual men. The human good neither exists apart from the choices and actions of individual human beings nor independent of the particular 'mix' of goods that the individual human being must determine as appropriate for his circumstances. Strauss's dichotomy betrays a disturbing tendency, often found among proponents of natural right and natural law, to reify the concept 'natural end' and make it some good that competes with the good of individual human beings. Our argument for natural rights begins, then, with the rejection of the dichotomy between the fulfillment of the individual human being or self and the attainment of man's natural end" (LAN, 92-93; NOL, 257).

The two Dougs argue that there is a natural end to human conduct, because there are certain generic goods required for a good human life--eudaimonia or flourishing--that are rooted in a universal human nature. For example, health, wealth, honor, and friendship are goods for all human beings. So, for instance, one could not live a flourishing human life if one had no friends at all. Here then is the natural telos for human beings: human flourishing requires the fullest expression of the generic goods of human nature.

But although we can conceive of these generic goods by abstraction, the actual reality of these goods is always individualized and agent-relative, because the human good is always the good for someone in particular, and the ranking or balancing of these diverse goods will be different for each individual based on the talents, temperaments, and circumstances of the individual. Against the "dominant end" conception of ethics that assumes that there is some one ranking of goods that is best for all human beings, the two Dougs defend an "inclusive end" conception of ethics that sees the human good as encompassing all the generic goods with the ranking of goods being determined by what is best for particular individuals in particular circumstances. So, then, they reject the idea that the philosophic life is simply the best life for all human beings in all situations. Intellectual activity is a generic good, and so a human life without any intellectual activity would be less than fully flourishing. But while a life devoted to intellectual activity as the highest good is good for Socrates and those individuals with Socratic dispositions, this is not necessarily the best life for all individuals.

Determining how best to organize or balance the various generic goods in a manner appropriate for some particular individual in particular circumstances is a matter of practical judgment or phronesis. There are no universal rules of ethics to decide this for all individuals in all situations. We look to the generic goods as constituting the natural standard of the human good for all human beings. But choosing the best form of life for each individual is a matter for the practical judgment of each individual.

The political problem of liberalism, therefore, is how to allow individuals to pursue their flourishing as individuals without interfering with the ethical pursuits of other individuals. Moreover, since human beings are by nature social animals, they cannot flourish without living their lives in association with others in various kinds of social groups based on friendship and voluntary interaction. So, a political/legal order needs to allow individuals to live together in ways that do not favor one form of life over another. This is what the two Dougs call "liberalism's problem."

The solution to liberalism's problem requires distinguishing between normative principles and metanormative principles. Normative principles are those social standards of the good life that human beings formulate as they exercise practical judgment in creating and maintaining those forms of human flourishing that they judge best suited for them as individuals. Metanormative principles are those political/legal standards that allow human beings with diverse forms of life to live their moral lives without interfering with others.

The primary metanormative principle for the two Dougs is self-direction as secured by the negative right to liberty. All of morality requires self-direction, because we are not truly moral if we have not chosen our moral paths through our own judgments. Something good for me is not really my good if I have not chosen it for myself. Being self-directed does not guarantee self-perfection, because we can make self-directed choices that are counter to our true self-perfection. So, for instance, if we choose to not have any friends or to never engage in any intellectual activity, we will not achieve full self-perfection even though we are self-directed. But in securing self-direction, by legislating that all individuals have the right to liberty, understood as the negative right not to have their self-direction denied by force or fraud from others, a liberal government secures the possibility of self-perfection.

The two Dougs argue that this establishes a link between ethics and politics that provides ethical legitimacy for politics but without identifying ethics and politics. They say that the ancient political philosophers were right to claim that ethics is a self-perfecting activity of actualizing the natural potentialities of human beings, which is the natural end of human life. They were wrong, however, in thinking that politics could coerce citizens into self-perfection. But the two Dougs also say that modern liberal political philosophers were right to claim that politics could not rightly enforce directly any standards of self-perfection. They were wrong, however, to suggest that moral standards were merely subjective or hedonistic. The ancients were right about ethics, but wrong about politics. The moderns were right about politics, but wrong about ethics.

Notice that here the two Dougs come close to what I identified in a previous post as "Midwestern Straussianism," which asserts--against Strauss--that modern liberalism is good in its political teaching as securing individual liberty and limited government, and that this modern liberal politics can be combined with ancient Aristotelian ethics. Aristotelian liberalism combines virtue and liberty.

There are at least four points in the reasoning of the two Dougs where my Darwinian natural right would support them: teleology, generic goods, individuality, and sociality.

1. Teleology. Aristotelian ethics requires natural teleology, because it asserts that the human good is a natural end for human conduct. Often, those like Strauss have said that this Aristotelian teleology is a cosmological or theological teleology that has been refuted by modern science. But the two Dougs note that Aristotelian teleology--as opposed to Plato's cosmic teleology--is a "biocentric teleology." Even if it is indefensible to think of the physical cosmos as aiming towards ends--perhaps the cosmic ends of a cosmic designer--it is still defensible to see living beings as naturally aiming for ends, as in the growth of plants and animals to maturity or the striving of mammalian animals to care for their offspring. As I have often argued, this biological teleology is sustained in modern Darwinian science as an immanent teleology of species-specific ends that does not require a Platonic cosmic teleology.

2. Generic goods. The two Dougs offer a list of generic goods that they identify as universal ends for all human beings rooted in human nature. They are a little unclear as to the grounds for this claim. I would argue that their list corresponds closely to my list of twenty natural desires, which I see as rooted in the evolved nature of human beings. These goods are not cosmic goods, because they are relative to the nature of the human species. What is good for human beings is not necessarily good for other species. So contrary to Plato, there is no transcendent Idea of the Good. And contrary to Kant, there is no categorical imperative for all rational beings in the universe. Instead, morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives relative to the goods of the species.

3. Individuality. The two Dougs stress that although we can generalize about generic human goods, these goods don't really exist as pure abstractions. Rather, they exist as good for particular individuals in particular circumstances. They thus recognize the biological fact that every living being is unique in its individuality. Although plants and animals show general traits that characterize each species, each member of the species is an individual, and thus what is good for each individual must be what is suited to that individuality. The need for practical judgment or prudence follows from this biological individuality, because since there are no universal rules for what is good for each individual in each situation, there must be some judgment of what is best for each in each case.

4. Sociality. Contrary to the common assumption that liberal individualism must take an atomistic view of individuals as utterly solitary in the state of nature, the two Dougs insist that human beings are naturally social animals. This natural sociality manifests the evolved biological nature of human beings as social mammals who must live in social groups to fulfill their natural potentialities. The dependence of human offspring on parental care shows this social nature from birth. (Unfortunately, as I will indicate in a future post, the two Dougs say almost nothing about the natural need for parental care and the fact that all human beings are born dependent on parental authority.) Because of their natural mammalian sociality, human beings are naturally inclined to form and maintain social groups, beginning with the family. This provides biological support for the two Doug's in their emphasis on the distinction between society and the state. When Aristotle declares that it is natural for human beings to live in a polis, his conception of the polis obscures this distinction. But if we recognize the distinction, we can see that human beings are naturally inclined to and capable of forming social groups and engaging in social activity in civil society without the coercive activity of the state. Here in civil society is where our moral habituation and moral judgment are secured. A liberal state cannot guarantee that civil society will properly shape human social life for ethical self-perfection. But a liberal state can secure the possibility of self-perfection by protecting the possibility of self-direction through the right to liberty. By contrast, those like Hobbes who deny the natural sociality of human beings must look to the collectivist coercion of the state as the only way to secure social cooperation.

In these and other ways, a Darwinian biological science could support Aristotelian liberalism as a Darwinian liberalism.

Some comments on Rasmussen and Den Uyl in a post from a couple of years ago can be found here.

For the other six posts in this series, go here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Can Virtue be Genetically Engineered?

We are not born virtuous or vicious. But we are each born with innate temperaments and capacities that influence our acquisition of virtue by learning and judgment. As Aristotle said in the Nicomachean Ethics (1103a24-25): "virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature; but by our nature we can receive them and perfect them by habituation."

So, for example, if the virtue of courage in war (as Aristotle says) is a mean between the rashness of being too fearless and the cowardice of being too fearful, then one's inborn temperament will influence how easily one learns true courage. Those who are too fearful and those who are too fearless will find it hard to habituate themselves to hit the virtuous mean of courage.

Most parents understand this, because they see that their children differ in their innate personality traits, and consequently parents must plan the moral education of their children so as to nurture them in ways that fit their distinctive personalities.

Some children are harder to train properly than others. And, unfortunately, a few children might be born with such unruly or callous temperaments that, even in the best environments, they might be inclined to become vicious rather than virtuous.

But what happens as we learn more about the genetic mechanisms that underlie the biological inheritance of psychic temperament and capacity? Does this open up the possibility of intervening through genetic engineering to strengthen those innate traits inclined to virtue and weaken those inclined to vice? From Plato to Francis Galton, this has been the dream of a eugenic utopia in which we could scientifically control the innate propensities of human beings at birth to enhance moral character.

At least in principle, it's hard to deny the possibility of genetically changing human nature so as to favor those innate traits most amenable to moral instruction. And yet, as I have argued in chapter 10 of Darwinian Conservatism, the power of biotechnology for changing human nature has been exaggerated. The most fervent advocates of biotechnology welcome the prospect of using it to transform our nature to make us superhuman. The most fervent critics of biotechnology warn us that its power for transforming our nature will seduce us into a Faustian bargain that will dehumanize us. Both sides agree that biotechnology is leading us to a "posthuman" or "transhuman" future. But that assumption is false. It ignores how Darwinian evolution has shaped the adaptive complexity of our human nature--our bodies, our brains, and our desires--in ways that resist technological manipulation. A Darwinian view of human nature reveals the limits of biotechnology so that we can reject both the redemptive hopes of its advocates and the apocalyptic fears of its critics.

If we keep in mind the adaptive complexity of human nature, we can foresee that biotechnology will be limited both in its technical means and in its moral ends. It will be limited in its technical means, because complex behavioral traits are rooted in the intricate interplay of many genes interacting among themselves, with developmental contingencies, and with unique life histories to form brains that respond flexibly to changing circumstances based on individual judgment. Consequently, precise technological manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible. Biotechnology will also be limited in its moral ends, because the motivation for biotechnological manipulations will come from the same natural desires that have always characterized human nature.

A recent example of the tendency to exaggerate the power of biotechnology for fostering human virtue is Mark Walker's article in the September, 2009, issue of Politics and the Life Sciences, entitled "Enhancing Genetic Virtue: A Project for Twenty-First Century Humanity?" Walker is a philosophy professor at New Mexico State University. Unfortunately, his article is available online only for subscribers to the journal. But here's the abstract:

"The Genetic Virtue Project (GVP) is a proposed interdisciplinary effort between philosophers, psychologists, and geneticists to discover and enhance human ethics using biotechnology genetic correlates of virtuous behavior. The empirical plausibility that virtues have biological correlates is based on the claims that (a) virtues are a subset of personality, specifically, personality traits conceived of as 'enduring behaviors,' and (b) that there is ample evidence that personality traits have a genetic basis. The moral necessity to use the GVP for moral enhancement is based on the claims that we should eliminate evil (as understood generically, not religiously), as some evil is a function of human nature. The GVP is defended against several ethical and political criticisms."

Almost two-thirds of Walker's article is devoted to his responses to the ethical and political criticisms. Without necessarily agreeing with him on every point here, I believe he has taken up these issues in an informed and intelligent way.

My complaint is that Walker's argument never gets off the ground because he never shows the "empirical plausibility" that there are "genetic correlates of virtuous behavior" that are clear, strong, and open to biotechnological manipulation. He quotes behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin as saying that "nearly all personality traits show moderate heritability," and Walker goes on to claim that "since genes influence enduring behaviors, it might be possible to use biotechnology in a manner that would promote virtue, and thus serve as a means to improve ourselves, morally speaking" (29-30). His language is so vague and equivocal--"moderate heritability," "influence," "might be possible"--that his readers have to look for some clear examples of specific genetic linkages to virtue that could be altered by genetic engineering.

In Walker's entire article, I can see only two possible examples of this sort, but neither of these examples give Walker what his argument demands--clear, strong, and manipulable genetic correlates of virtue.

The first example concerns the genetic basis for "novelty seeking." Walker cites two articles claiming to show some connection between novelty seeking (as measured by a questionnaire) and the D4 dopamine receptor gene (32). Both articles were published in 1996 in Nature Genetics. Walker fails, however, to tell his readers that later research has concluded that although there seems to be some kind of connection between the D4 dopamine receptor gene and novelty seeking, the connection is "small" (see J.A. Schinka, E.A. Letsch, and F.C. Crawford, "DRD4 and Novelty Seeking: Results of Meta-Analyses," American Journal of Medical Genetics 114:643-648 [2002]).

The second possible example of a specific genetic link to a specific character trait is in Walker's reference to research on the heritability of "anti-social personality disorder" (ASP). He cites three articles published in 1987, 1990, and 1994. He does not tell his readers that although these articles claim to show some degree of heritability for ASP, they do not identify any specific genes or explain how exactly such genes could work to incline people to ASP. Nor does he cite any of the extensive research over the last 15 years showing that although there does seem to be "a genetic contribution to the emotional dysfunction facilitating antisocial behaviors," there is no direct genetic contribution to the behaviors themselves, and no one has identified any specific genetic linkages or how exactly they work (James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Katrina Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain [Oxford: Blackwell, 2005], 28-46).

Is it likely that we will someday be able to use genetic engineering to promote virtuous character by precisely altering psychic traits like novelty seeking and ASP? To support his affirmative answer, Walker cites Gregory Stock's Redesigning Humans (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

Readers who go to Stock's book will see a rhetorical strategy of exaggeration followed by retraction. On the one hand, Stock declares that "the arrival of safe, reliable germline technology will signal the beginning of human self-design." On the other hand, he admits that "our biology might prove too complex to rework." He concedes that "no present genetic intervention is worth doing in a healthy individual, and no present technology is capable of effecting an intervention safely anyway." He acknowledges that many biologists believe that the genetic propensities underlying complex behavioral traits such as personality and intelligence are so intricate that we could never intervene to change these mechanisms without producing undesirable side effects. He also recognizes that these genetic propensities always interact in unpredictable ways with chance events and life history to produce unique individuals in ways that cannot be controlled by genetic technology. "Even for highly heritable traits," he observes, "it will be uncertain what a child's unique amalgam of potential and experience will bring. A vision of parents sitting before a catalog and picking out the personality of their future 'designer child' is false" (3-4, 64, 76-77, 111). It's not clear to me how this supports Walker's confidence in the prospects for the genetic engineering of virtue.

I am not denying the possibility that genetic research can uncover some specific genetic linkages to complex behavioral propensities that are clear, strong, and manipulable. But whether that would substantiate Walker's argument is unclear, because his argument is ambiguous. When he writes about using genetic engineering to "eliminate evil," he seems to imply a reduction of virtues and vices to genetic propensities, which is implausible. But when he agrees with Aristotle that innate propensities are necessary but not sufficient for virtue, because virtue requires a lifetime of learned habituation and individual judgment (38-39), Walker pulls back to a more modest and defensible claim.

Yet even this defensible version of Walker's Genetic Virtue Project invites another question: Has he provided plausible standards of virtue and vice? The success of his GVP assumes that it is guided by some clear standards for the virtues to be enhanced and the vices to be eliminated. What are those standards? And who will be responsible for setting and enforcing the standards?

One possibility is that government will set and enforce the standards. The obvious danger with this, however, is the threat of tyranny--either the tyranny of a few or the tyranny of the majority--that will create something like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." Another possibility is that individuals will be free to set and enforce their own standards. In particular, parents will be free to follow their own standards of virtue in genetically engineering their children.

Walker seems to take this route of allowing parents the freedom to decide for their children. He admits, however, that parents might change their minds. They might genetically enhance their children to favor the virtuous dispositions to be truthful, just, and caring; but then they might later be convinced by moral reformers that the true virtues should promote dispositions to be untruthful, unjust, and uncaring. In that case, the parents could send their children to "remedial camps" to make them untruthful, unjust, and uncaring. So Walker seems here to be a radical moral relativist or nihilist, because standards of virtue are arbitrary products of cultural history. This would suggest then that the Nazis could have been more successful than they were if they had had the help of Walker's GVP. Were the Nazis right about the importance of eugenics in shaping virtue, but they failed only because they didn't know enough about genetics and genetic engineering to carry out their project?

But I don't think Walker is a moral nihilist, because he often suggests that he believes there really are some enduring standards of virtue. For example, he identifies was as evil, and he praises Gandhi's pacifism. So would the GVP eliminate evil by eliminating all violence, including military violence? Would this suggest that Aristotle was wrong to believe that courage in war is virtuous? Walker reassures us that even the Gandhian pacifist can be courageous because he resolutely resists evil, even if non-violently. But if the GVP eliminated all evil, why would there be any need for non-violent resistance to evil?

Does Walker really believe that there is no virtue in the courage of soldiers risking their lives for their countries? Does he really believe that using genetic engineering to eliminate any disposition to military courage would make the world better? If he does believe this, how would he enforce this belief through his GVP? Would parents be free to disagree with him and thus choose to enhance military virtue in their children? Is there something about the nature of human life that makes conflict inevitable, and thus creates the need for the virtue of courage in war?

The plausibility of Walker's GVP depends on answering such questions.

Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness

Philippa Foot is the author of one of my favorite essays in contemporary moral philosophy--"Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives," reprinted in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). She is a British philosopher best known as one of the leading proponents of Aristotelian virtue ethics. After teaching for many years at Somerville College, Oxford, she taught at many other schools until she retired from teaching at UCLA. In her essay, she argued that moral judgments are "hypothetical imperatives in the sense that they give reasons for acting only in conjunction with interests and desires." We do sometimes declare moral rules about what one ought to do or not do, as if these rules were binding as pure dictates of reason regardless of any one's interests or desires. But we do the same with rules of etiquette, when we want to insist that these rules of proper conduct can't be disregarded without incurring our scorn. In both cases, we expect people to obey the rules without asking why they should do so. But, of course, people can challenge the rules, and then we are forced to justify them as desirable. So moral rules have no better claim to be categorical imperatives than do rules of etiquette.

Foot's essay provoked intense opposition from other moral philosophers who accused her of "attacking morality," because so many philosophers had been persuaded by Immanuel Kant that moral judgments as categorical imperatives must be distinguished from hypothetical imperatives. In his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant explained this distinction: "All imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. The former present the practical necessity of a possible action as a means to achieving something else which one desires (or which one may possibly desire). The categorical imperative would be one which presented an action as of itself objectively necessary, without regard to any end" (trans. Lewis White Beck, p. 414). Hypothetical imperatives are judgments of prudence as to what conduces to happiness, which is the natural end of human life. But categorical imperatives are commands of pure reason that bind all rational beings without regard to happiness. One can see here Kant's radical break from Aristotle, and from ancient ethics generally, because while Aristotle regarded prudence as the supreme virtue, Kant dismissed prudence as outside of morality. Kant did this because he wanted morality to belong to a transcendent realm of "noumenal" experience beyond the natural realm of "phenomenal" experience. Through pure practical reason, he believed, human beings could grasp absolutely necessary principles of morality beyond the contingencies of human nature and natural experience. In this way, he insisted, human beings as rational agents could free themselves of their animal nature, including their animal desires for happiness.

For those philosophers who agree with Kant, it was shocking, therefore, to have Foot dismiss Kant's morality of categorical imperatives as an illusion or fiction based on the belief that declaring a categorical "ought" has some magical force that is so intrinsically binding that it must be obeyed without question. But when we declare that we simply must or have to or ought to do what morality demands, Foot observed, we are really just saying how strongly we feel about the importance of some moral norm. If someone challenges us to explain why this norm is so important, we must then explain how, given the character of human life, human desires, and our present circumstances, following this norm will generally be better for us because it will make our lives happier. We then move from the language of categorical imperatives to that of hypothetical imperatives: if you want to live a satisfying human life, then you need to embrace this norm as one means to that end.

In some hard cases, however, this persuasive appeal to hypothetical imperatives doesn't work because we're dealing with people whose beliefs or desires are so radically different from ours that there is no ground for persuasion. In some cases of tragic conflicts, there is no resolution except by force. I have often cited the American Civil War as an example of a tragic moral conflict that was settled by force of arms. I have also pointed to the problem of psychopaths as moral strangers who are beyond moral persuasion because they lack the moral emotions and desires necessary for a moral sense. Since we can't persuade them, we coerce them for our own protection.

From a biological point of view, we could say that morality consists of hypothetical imperatives constrained by our biological nature as social mammals. Considering the nature of the human species, human beings have certain universal natural desires--such as sexual mating, familial bonding, parental care, cooperation through reciprocity, and others--that set the generic ends of human life, and so we can judge moral norms by how well they promote those ends.

Foot moved in this direction in her book Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2001). She defended a naturalistic view of ethics by arguing that the moral evaluation of human actions has the same logical structure as the natural evaluation of other living beings. Unlike the non-living world, plants and animals show a teleological structure in the nature of each species. We can then judge an individual plant or animal as to how well it fulfills its natural end. So, for example, we can judge the roots of an oak tree as good if they effectively draw water and nutrients from the soil and support the weight of the tree. By contrast, we can't make a similar evaluation of the rustling of the tree's leaves in the wind, because we don't see this as contributing to any natural need of the tree. Similarly, we might judge social mammals by how well the mothers nurture and train their offspring to fulfill their needs as social animals. Thus, our evaluations of plants and animals can be grounded in natural facts about their species, which we learn by studying their natural history.

In a similar way, Foot suggests, we can evaluate human actions by how well they serve the natural ends of the human species as shaped by natural history. There are similar "patterns of natural normativity" that human beings share with other living beings. And yet, of course, human morality is also unique in so far as human beings have a capacity for moral judgment and deliberation that comes from being rational animals with language, which separates them from other living beings. But, still, there's an underlying structure of evaluation through the life form of the species that applies to all life. "To flourish is here to instantiate the life form of that species, and to know whether an individual is or is not as it should be, one must know the life form of the species" (91). Or, as Peter Geach once said, "human beings need virtues as bees need stings" (44). In this way, Foot employs the same kind of reasoning that I use in Darwinian Natural Right in considering natural teleology (chapter 9)and the normative structure of animal movement (chapter 2).

Foot's position in Natural Goodness becomes confusing, however, when she suggests that she wants to depart from some of what she said in "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives." In the essay, she indicated--and I agree--that the hypothetical imperatives of morality are dependent on human interests and desires. Human conduct requires a combination of reason and desire, with reason deliberating as to how best to satisfy our desires harmoniously over a whole life. This Aristotelian and Humean conception of the union of reason and desire in moral experience runs through much of my biological account of morality. And yet, in her book, Foot apparently denies this by saying that moral judgment does not require any appeal to human wants, desires, or feelings. A moral reason for acting moves people to act regardless of their wants, desires, or feelings.

Foot writes: "Recognition of a reason gives the rational person a goal; and this recognition is . . . based on facts and concepts, not on some prior attitude, feeling, or goal. The only fact about the individual's state of mind that is required for the explanatory force of the proposition about the requirement of rationality is that he does not (for some bizarre reason) deny its truth. He only needs to know, like most adults, that it is silly to disregard one's own future without special reason to do so. No special explanation is needed of why men take reasonable care of their own future; an explanation is needed when they do not. Nor does human cooperation need a special explanation. Most people know that it is, for instance, unreasonable to take benefits and give nothing in return" (23).

But notice that a reason for acting compels us only if we are "reasonable" in exercising "reasonable care" about the future and so are not so "silly" as to not care about future consequences of our actions. In another passage, she says that it is "a part of rationality for human beings to take special care each for his or her own future" (24). She then adds: "This in no way precludes recognition of the part played by 'sentiments' such as (negatively) shame and revulsion or (positively) sympathy, self-respect, and pride in motivating human virtue. I think David Wiggins is right often to have stressed this side of Hume's moral philosophy."

On the one hand, like Kant, she thinks a moral reason for acting compels us to act regardless of our desires. On the other hand, like Aristotle and Hume, she thinks moral rationality assumes that we are taking "special care" for our future. I think the latter is closer to the truth.

Moving in the direction suggested by Foot's essay, I would argue that ethics is informed desire. The good is the desirable, and reason judges how best to satisfy the desires over a whole life, which often requires settling conflicts between desires by judging how one desire fits with others in some deliberate conception of a whole life well-lived.

This view of ethics as arising from reason and desire--ethics as rooted in natural human desires, as requiring habits of right desire, and as guided by prudential reasoning in judging the contingencies of action--was originally developed by Aristotle in his ethical and biological writings. Other philosophers in the tradition of ethical naturalism, such as Hume, have defended a similar understanding. Just as Aristotle declared that "thought by itself moves nothing," Hume declared that "reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will."

Kant turns away from this tradition, because in taking a Hobbesian view of human nature as crudely selfish and hedonistic, Kant cannot believe that morality can arise from the animal nature of human beings. So, instead, he looks for transcendental norms of pure practical reason through which human beings can escape their human nature and exercise a moral freedom beyond the laws of nature.

Foot was right in rejecting this Kantian illusion that pure reason by itself--without any grounding in natural human inclinations--could move us to moral conduct. She was right to see morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives dependent on our natural desires. And she was right to see the normative structure of those desires as rooted in the natural history of the human species.

Foot was right to reject the idea that morality is nothing more than an arbitrary expression of subjective emotivism--the kind of thinking proposed by philosophers like C. L. Stevenson. In her search for the objective, factual ground of morality, she ultimately found that ground in the biological nature of living beings, so that what is good varies according to the nature of the species. "Natural goodness" denotes not some eternal, cosmic necessity of Reason, Nature, or God, but the evolved nature of particular forms of life. Against Plato and Kant, Foot would seem to agree with Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin that there are no universally necessary principles of the good, because the good varies according to the desires and capacities of each species.

This last point has been elaborated in some other posts, which can be found here, here., here., here., here, here, and here.

[Foot died on her 90th birthday a few months after this post was written--October 3, 2010.]

The Darwinian Evolution of Comics

The first volume of The Evolutionary Review has just been published by the State University of New York Press. This will be a yearly volume edited by Alice Andrews (SUNY at New Paltz) and Joseph Carroll (University of Missouri at St. Louis). The editorial policy is to provide "a forum for evolutionary critiques in all the fields of the arts, human sciences, and culture" and thus promote E. O. Wilson's vision of "consilience" as the unity of all knowledge through evolutionary science. The website for this publication can be found here. I know Joe Carroll, and I have long admired his work in promoting Darwinian literary theory. I now must admire his brilliance in putting together a journal that combines depth of thought and engaging literary style in showing how scintillating evolutionary reasoning can be.

One of the best essays in this new journal is Brian Boyd's "On the Origins of Comics." Boyd is an English professor (the leading expert on Nabokov), who has recently written On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (Harvard, 2009). His essay (with full-color comics!) can be found here.

So what does Darwinian evolution have to do with the history of comics? Well, Boyd shows how evolutionary reasoning can illuminate any human activity, including the arts, and in this case, one of the most popular of "low arts." The main point--which I have stressed often--is to see that Darwinian thinking is not reductionistic or one-leveled but multileveled in seeing the complex historical interaction of genetic evolution, cultural/symbolic evolution, and individual judgment.

At the beginning of his essay, Boyd writes:

"Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers' attention in this frame or with that angle. And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular. Far from reducing all to biology and then to chemistry and physics, it easily and eagerly plugs in more local factors--in a case like comics, historical, technological, social, artistic and individual factors, for instance--the closer we get to particulars. Evolution accepts multilevel explanations, from cells to societies, and allows full room for nature and culture, society and individuals."

Later in the essay, he summarizes some of the main points in his Darwinian history of comics:

"Comics, as they established their language in the early 1900s, solved the problems of sequential narration in image and word in ways that appeal to deep human cognitive preferences. In modern comics each frame tends to create a single impression that can be taken in at a glance and a situation either visually explicit in instant icons or immediately clarified by prominent speech balloons. The sequence from frame to frame usually allows a brisk clear flow of attention and low-cost comprehension. Search time can be reduced to a second or two. Verse around the world uses controlled phrase lengths that in written form become line lengths, whereby poets shape the attention of their audience, releasing just as much at a time as our auditory present and the storage space of working memory can hold (Frederick Turner). In the same way, comics concentrate and reward comprehension within the clearly delineated attention-sized units of the single simplified comic frame, without the superfluous detail or distracting multiple foci of Outcault's panoramas."

Later, he writes:

"Comics tapped deep-rooted cognitive capacities and appealed to deep-rooted cognitive preferences as they discovered a whole series of ways to lower comprehension costs and raise the benefits of even a moment of reading time. They appeal to our craving for story, humor and surprise, for high-quality information in sight and speech, and for likely payoff at low cost. They prefocus expectations, reducing search and comprehension time through genre (comic strip funnies), series (Garfield), and therefore familiar characters (brazenly egotistical cat, blithely hapless owner, self-duping dog) and narrative contours (cat satisfies greed), so that hundreds of millions of readers can reach with minimum effort the promised hit of humor, the surprise of just where that comic trajectory will land today."

Comics are a cultural invention of the last 150 years. But they appeal to our evolved human nature, which includes a natural desire for story-telling, which can be satisfied through narrative pictures and words. The particular aesthetic techniques of comics have evolved through individual artists finding solutions to their problems--concerning how to engage the attention of a mass audience--which then become part of a cultural tradition conditioned by social, economic, and technological conditions (like printing, newspapers, and mass literacy).

The Secret Teaching in Aristotle's Natural Science

One of the most common criticisms of "Darwinian natural right" is that Darwinian science denies the cosmic teleology necessary for natural right. For example, in his contribution to Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, John West insists that natural human desires can be the ground for a universal morality only if "one believes that natural desires have been implanted in human beings by intelligent design, or that they represent permanent truths inherent in the nature of the universe"; but "Darwinism explicitly denies that natural desires are either the result of intelligent design or an unchanging nature." Straussians offer a similar criticism when they quote Leo Strauss's claim (at the beginning of Natural Right and History) that classic natural right depends on an Aristotelian conception of cosmic teleology that has been denied by modern natural science.

This assumption that the human good must be a cosmic good runs through the fusion of Platonic cosmology and Biblical creationism that constituted the Medieval Cosmic Model that dominated much of Western history up to the 19th century. Last summer, I wrote a long series of posts arguing that, in fact, the Socratic philosophers were skeptical of any cosmic teleology, and that they saw the human good (moral and intellectual) rooted in human nature in a manner that would be consistent with Darwinian natural right. Some of those posts can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

It is often assumed that modern natural science overturned Aristotle's natural science by refuting the cosmic teleology that was fundamental for his science. But this overlooks the evidence that Aristotle did not really believe many of the doctrines commonly attributed to his science. When Thomas Hobbes warned against the "vain philosophy" of the Aristotelian Scholastic theologians, he suggested that their "supernatural philosophy" was not really part of Aristotle's true teaching. He observed: "And this shall suffice for an example of the Errors, which are brought into the Church, from the Entities, and Essences of Aristotle: which it may be he knew to be false Philosophy; but writ it as a thing consonant to, and corrobative of their Religion; and fearing the fate of Socrates" (Leviathan, chap. 46, paragraph 18). Similarly, Moses Maimonides argued that Aristotle knew that there was no scientific demonstration of the eternity of the world, and that Aristotle's apparent endorsement of this idea was a merely rhetorical appeal to popular opinions (The Guide of the Perplexed, part 2, chaps. 15, 25). So some careful readers of Aristotle have concluded that the overt teaching of his scientific writings sometimes contradicts his true secret teaching, which suggests that possibility that his secret teaching might be compatible with modern natural science.

That's the argument of David Bolotin's book An Approach to Aristotle's Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing (SUNY Press, 1998). Through a meticulous analysis of some of Aristotle's reasoning in the Physics and On the Heaven, Bolotin tries to show that Aristotle deliberately uses weak arguments to lead his careful readers to suspect that he doesn't really accept the conclusions apparently set forth in those writings. Bolotin suggests that Aristotle employs secret writing as a rhetorical strategy to protect his natural science from persecution. In the ancient Greek cities, natural philosophers were commonly thought to be atheists, because they seemed to explain the world as governed by purely natural causes with no need for divine powers. Socrates at his trial was accused of being an atheistic natural philosopher. And Aristotle himself was eventually forced to leave Athens to avoid the fate of Socrates. If one takes account of Aristotle's rhetorical strategy in concealing his true views of science, Bolotin concludes, one can see that his true teaching is consistent with modern science, and that it is also in some respects deeper and broader than modern science.

I generally agree with Bolotin. And yet I don't think he gives enough weight to Aristotle's turn away from theological cosmology to empirical biology as set forth most clearly in the Parts of Animals (642a28-30, 644b22-645a37). Here Aristotle indicates that Plato's Socrates was mistaken in identifying the study of nature with the study of cosmology or astronomy and in failing to see how political philosophy could be grounded in the study of biological nature. This is crucial for the question of teleology. Because even if there is no warrant for a cosmic teleology, there can still be an immanent teleology rooted in the goal-directed order of living beings. Like Strauss, Bolotin fails to notice how Aristotle's best examples of natural teleology are biological rather than cosmological (see, for example, pages 19-22, 24, 43-44).

Bolotin concludes his book with a brilliantly formulated summary of his main ideas (pp. 150-52). Because it's so well stated, I'll quote from it at length:

". . . let us briefly contrast what he says openly regarding the topics I have been discussing with the views that I argue he really held. He teaches openly that our visible world has always existed and will always exist; that one of its principles is a substrate that persists throughout all change; that there are also eternal and changeless forms, which by their actin upon this substrate give rise to the natural beings; that the development of a natural being is set in motion for the sake of the good toward which it tends; that the manifest or perceptible character of the world, as for instance the continuity of its bodies and of their motions, is also its most intimate character, even beyond the range of any possible perception; that the up and the down, as they appear to us on earth, are also features of the world in itself, which characterize the places in which light and heavy bodies fulfill their natures; and, more generally, that there are permanent and proper places for the several elements, including earth, whose proper place is the absolutely fixed center of the world. If my arguments have been correct, however, he was well aware of the dubiousness of the claim that our visible world exists forever; he did not believe that any natural beings come into being from a persistent substrate (and all the less, from the action of eternal and changeless forms on such a substrate); he did not seriously claim that the end toward which a natural being tends to develop is in any sense anticipated by the moving cause or causes of that development; he did not believe that the manifest or perceptive character of the beings also belongs to them independently of our perception, but rather focused on it in the belief that the beings as we perceive them are what we properly mean by the beings themselves; in saying that the up and the down and the other differences of place are not just arbitrary designations, but genuine features of the whole itself, he meant by 'the whole' the experienced whole, which exists as such only for human beings; and similarly, in saying that the earth remains unmoved at the center of the world, he meant that what we experience as the stability of the earth beneath us is part of the normal human perspective, within which natural beings are seen in their truest light."

"What emerges from this contrast between Aristotle's surface teaching and his genuine views is that in the former he presented the natural world as being far more completely intelligible than he believed it was. For if the visible world is eternal, and if natural beings result from the action of eternal forms on a persistent substrate, then it can seem intelligible at least in principle why there are the kinds of beings there are. There arises, of course, the question of why the forms are the ones they are; but even this question can appear to be answered sufficiently, if not completely, if everything natural is brought about for the sake of the good. Moreover, if natural motion is directed toward the good, then the tendency of living beings toward the attainment of their mature forms can appear to be explained with the kind of clarity with which we explain our own purposeful actions. Even the rising and falling of light and heavy bodies can appear to have the intelligiblity of end-directed motion if in moving to their proper places they are becoming more completely the kinds of beings they are. And finally, if we accept Aristotle's arguments for infinite divisibility, then at least to this extent, our knowledge need not be limited to the beings as we perceive them, but can encompass what lies beyond the perceptible realm. In Aristotle's serious view, however, natural beings do not arise from the action of eternal forms, and neither is there any other principle that can make intelligible--except conditionally, given that there is in fact an ordered world--why there are any of the kinds of beings that we know there are. As for the growth of these beings, he knew from experience that they typically develop in more or less the way their parents did, and he understood that their development is necessarily somehow coherent if they are to live; but he also knew that he could not understand the full necessity for this development or any purpose directing it. Though he did have an explanation of why lighter bodies tend to rise, his account of this phenomenon relies on the more primary fact, which he did not really try to explain, that the medium in which they do so presses downward. And more generally, he regarded the task of natural science to be the articulation of the manifest character--understood as the truest being--of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover."

"Now to understand why Aristotle presented what he knew to be such an exaggerated picture of the degree of intelligibility of the natural world, we must consider the implications of the limitedness of the achievement of what he regarded as genuine natural science. For his denial that natural science can finally explain the given world--and in particular his acknowledgment that it can not discover its ultimate roots--seems to leave him unable to exclude the alternative that this world might partly consist of, or otherwise owe its existence to, a mysterious and all-powerful god or gods. If there are such gods, as was suggested by Homer and Hesiod, among others, we can not rely on what reason and normal experience indicate as to the limits of what beings can do and of what can be done to them. What I have called the manifest character of things could not be their truest being but at most their usual way of being, and the most important truth about them would have to include their capacity to undergo miraculous change. In other words, so long as this theological alternative is not ruled out, the very assumption that there is nature, or that beings must become and perish in accordance with fixed natures, remains questionable; and the pursuit of a science of nature remains a dubious and perhaps even a wholly misguided one. Aristotle must refute, then, the claims of this theology in order to vindicate the possibility of natural science. And the primary reason for his exaggerating the intelligibility of the world is to indicate what would have to be the case in order for natural science to be able to complete this task itself."

Bolotin's account of Aristotle here supports many of the arguments that I have made on this blog. Aristotle casts doubt on the claim of Socrates (in the Phaedo) that Mind is responsible for all things and for directing all things to what is good. There is no scientific support for such a cosmic teleology. Nor is there any scientific ground for Plato's teaching that there are eternal and changeless Ideas or Forms. Natural science can articulate the manifest order of the world as we know it by experience, and this we can say is nature. But natural science cannot explain the ultimate roots of this given natural world by explaining why it is this way and not some other way. Natural science can take nature as self-evident--that's just the way it is! But this appeal to self-evident natural experience cannot prove that nature could never be in any other way, or that nature as we know it could not have been originally created by all-powerful god or gods.

Bolotin's account of Aristotle suggests that Aristotle is close to David Hume in crucial respects. Like Bolotin's Aristotle, Hume sought a science of nature rooted in a science of human nature that would be free of theological beliefs. As part of this project, Hume could explain religion as a product of natural history, and he could spot the flaws in the cosmological arguments for God's existence. But, still, Hume saw the fundamental contingency and mystery of nature as a given world, the ultimate origins of which are beyond human reason. Hume could not, therefore, prove that nature was not the work of a divinely intelligent designer. Here Hume was in the same boat with Charles Darwin, who fulfilled the Aristotelian/Humean project for explaining the order of nature in purely natural terms, but who could not rationally explain the ultimate origins of nature, because "the mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us."

As I have often suggested, we see here the fundamental tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding. This is, as I think Bolotin suggests, the irresolvable choice between reason and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem.

Culture Vultures and Sick Societies

As sociologist George Homans once observed, many social scientists are "culture vultures." Culture vultures explain social behavior by saying that this is "because of the culture." The problem is that this doesn't really explain anything, unless we can explain why a culture is the way it is and how it came to be that way. To explain how and why cultural beliefs and practices work (or don't work) the way they do, we need to explain how cultural history is constrained by human nature. But modern proponents of the idea of culture often reject this, because they think of culture as a constructive activity that transcends nature.

Immanuel Kant originally formulated the modern concept of culture (Kultur), particularly in his essay "Speculative Beginning of Human History" and in his Critique of Judgment (secs. 83-84). Kant conceived of culture as that uniquely human realm of artifice in which human beings escape their natural animality to express their rational humanity as the only beings who have a "supersensible faculty" for moral freedom. Through culture, human beings free themselves from the laws of nature. Although culture has become a vague concept in the social sciences, it retains all of the central features prescribed by Kant. (1) Culture is uniquely human. (2) It is uniquely human because only human beings have the understanding and the will to set purposes for themselves by free choice. (3) Culture is an autonomous human artifice that transcends nature. (4) Culture is the necessary condition for forming moral values.

This understanding of culture entered English anthropology in 1871, when Edward Tylor in Primitive Culture defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Beyond anthropology, this concept of culture supports the common view of the "social sciences" and the "humanities" as separated from the "natural sciences." The "sciences of the spirit" (Geisteswissenschaften) must be separated from the "sciences of nature" (Naturwissenschaften). This same separation supports the idea of history as the human transcendence of nature.

Darwin's argument for the continuity between human beings and other animals denies the Kantian concept of culture by denying the dichotomies on which it rests: biology versus culture, nature versus nurture, instinct versus learning, animality versus humanity, facts versus values. But those social scientists who accept Darwin's argument provoke intense opposition from their colleagues. For example, the conflict between biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists often becomes so heated that they have to be put into separate academic departments, because they can't find any common ground.

Human societies are cultural constructions. But cultural constructions are not arbitrary products of some autonomous realm of mental experience that floats above the natural world. The cultural constructions of human society are constrained by the natural desires and natural conditions of human existence.

Far from being set apart from biology, culture is part of animal biology, because if culture is defined as the behavioral transmission of information through social learning and social traditions, then many animals have cultures. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb recognize this in their book Evolution in Four Dimensions, when they present animal cultures as belonging to behavioral inheritance as one of the four dimensions of evolution.

In this way, Jablonka and Lamb break from the Kantian conception of culture as transcending biological nature. But then they also argue for symbolic culture as uniquely human, because it manifests a capacity for symbolic abstraction that goes beyond animal communication through signs.

Although I agree with them about the human uniqueness of symbolic culture, I am dissatisfied by their failure to elaborate a Darwinian science of symbolic culture and by their occasional suggestions that symbolic culture can become a purely arbitrary construction. I agree with them that although social events are unique as products of contingent circumstances, we should be able to develop "a general theory of historical cultural changes" (228). But while I think such a general theory of culture requires a general theory of human nature--of the regularities of natural human desires and propensities--as constraining cultural evolution, Jablonka and Lamb sometimes imply that they accept a Kantian conception of culture as showing a human freedom in transcending biological nature. They write:

"A broader view of heredity and evolution makes explicit the wealth of possibilities that are open to us, and the fact that our activities, as individuals and as groups, construct the world in which we live. In particular, recognizing that we have a history and can plan our future, that we are able to construct shared imaginary worlds and systematically explore them and strive for them, greatly expands our freedom. The plasticity of human behavior is enormous. On the basis of present biological knowledge, there is no way one can dismiss the power of historical social construction and explain the social and behavioral status quo in terms of genes or memes. We cannot transfer explanatory power and responsibility to these entities!" (380).

Here and elsewhere in their book (203, 230), Jablonka and Lamb come close to espousing a radical utopianism in which the uniquely human capacity for symbolic culture allows us to construct any imaginable world and then live in that imaginary construction. They say nothing about the history of utopias or of how that history shows that human biological nature frustrates utopian hopes. In Darwinian Natural Right, I devoted a lot of space to the history of utopias--from Plato's Republic to John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community to the Jewish kibbutzim--to show how the ultimate failure of these projects manifests the limits set by human biological nature.

"All societies are sick, but some are sicker than others." That's how anthropologist Robert Edgerton begins his book Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (1992). In contrast to the radical freedom for cultural constructions celebrated by Jablonka and Lamb, Edgerton argues that all societies can be rightly judged by how well they conform to human nature, and when we do that, we discover that most societies are maladaptive. Some societies serve the natural needs and desires of human beings better than others, but no society is fully successful. More particularly, Edgerton argues against the common assumption (particularly among anthropologists and Rousseauian philosophers) that primitive societies were always happy and harmonious, in contrat to the despair and conflict in modern urban societies. In laying out his evidence from anthropological studies, Edgerton shows how the evolved biological nature of human beings--their evolved desires and propensities--constrain cultural or symbolic evolution, so that those societies that frustrate natural human needs must necessarily become maladaptive.

Edgerton writes: "Populations the world over have not been well served by some of their beliefs such as, for example, those concerning witchcraft, the need for revenge, or male supremacy, and many of their traditional practices involving nutrition, health care, and the treatment of children have been harmful as well. Slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice, torture, female genital mutilation, rape, homicide, feuding, suicide, and environmental pollution have sometimes been needlessly harmful to some or all members of a society and under some circumstances they can threaten social survival" (p. 1).

The belief in witchcraft is a product of human symbolic culture that has appeared throughout human history. It is an example of a highly maladaptive belief that shows how prone human beings are to irrational beliefs that cause unnecessary harm. For instance, Edgerton cites the case of the Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, who had one of the highest homicide rates ever recorded by anthropologists, and most of the homicide victims were people thought to be witches. Even in Renaissance Europe, the belief in witchcraft caused social disruption.

In parts of Hindu India, people have believed that a widow could become divine by immolating herself on her husband's funeral pyre. Anthropologist Richard Shweder has explained this practice of sati (or "suttee") as a heroic act that manifests "the deepest properties of Hinduism's moral world." But Edgerton recognizes it as another example of a delusional cultural practice that is maladaptive. He notes that sati has been prescribed only for women--widowers feel no duty to burn themselves to death to join their deceased wives. He also notes that most widows have resisted social pressure in choosing to live rather than killing themselves. Along with Chinese foot-binding and female genital mutilation, sati shows how practices harmful for women can be imposed on them by male-dominated cultures.

Cultural beliefs and practices are almost never equally beneficial for all members of society because individuals and groups have conflicting interests. Those with greater power and status will often favor beliefs and practices that allow them to exploit those with less power and status. Slavery is one prominent example of such an exploitative cultural practice. Similarly, tyrannical rulers have used their power to exploit those over whom they rule. The assassination of tyrants and rebellion against tyrannical rule show the popular resistance to maladaptive exploitation.

Warfare can be an adaptive practice insofar as every society must defend itself against military attack. But excessive militarism can become self-destructive. Many traditional societies have become caught in a cycle of blood feuding that leads to extinction.

I agree with Edgerton that the anthropological record of cultural evolution supports not cultural relativism but cultural evaluation. If we recognize the natural desires of human biological nature, we can judge societies by how well they satisfy those desires. We can then distinguish between those cultural beliefs and practices that are more adaptive and those that are maladaptive.

Does such a stance allow us to see progress in human social evolution? I think so. We can judge that the best regime (so far) is liberal democratic capitalism, because such a regime tends to be adaptive for most human beings in most circumstances. A liberal society allows human beings to freely pursue their diverse moral and religious visions without fear of repression from those who disagree with them, and it also allows for a freedom of scientific inquiry that ultimately increases our knowledge of and mastery over nature. A democratic polity allows human beings to organize political rule so that the power of rulers is limited and checked in ways that promote the common good and restrain the tendency to exploitation. A capitalist economy creates incentives for productive market exchanges that foster economic prosperity.

By many obvious measures, this modern regime of liberal democratic capitalism is more adaptive than previous regimes. Never before in human history have so many human beings lived such healthy and happy lives. This has emerged through a historical process of trial and error, and this historical process will continue to produce cultural innovations in the future. We haven't reached the "end of history." But we can say that while liberal democratic capitalist societies are sick, they are not as sick as most other societies in our history.

We might also judge that the best world regime (so far) is an international system of sovereign nations with international norms for free trade, just war, and human rights. This also has emerged by historical trial and error, which will continue into the future. And despite all the horrors of world history over the past century, we can see that this system of liberal internationalism is more adaptive for human beings than previous world systems.

Darwinian Evolution in Four Dimensions

People often question me about why I stress the importance of reading Charles Darwin's writings rather than relying on modern textbook presentations of evolutionary biology. After all, hasn't there been great progress in biological science since the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species a 150 years ago? This is certainly true. But it is also true that in many respects Darwin's original understanding of evolution is superior to the prevailing views of today's "Neo-Darwinians." Contemporary proponents of Darwinism like Richard Dawkins tell us that biological evolution is ultimately reducible to the natural selection of random genetic mutations. More and more critics are pointing out the flaws in such a genetic reductionist view of evolution, and they are arguing that we need to explain the complex interaction of multiple levels of evolution that cannot be reduced to the gene-centered view of Neo-Darwinism. But if one studies Darwin's writings, one notices that what these critics are proposing is actually a return to Darwin's original theory.

Consider Darwin's summary of his theory in the last paragraph of the Origin:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing a Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Notice that Darwin states his "laws" of evolution in a very general and abstract way--the laws of reproduction, inheritance, variability, and struggle for life. If some entities can reproduce themselves, if these entities show heritable variation, and if some of this heritable variation affects their chances of surviving and reproducing in the competitive struggle for existence, then evolution by natural selection will occur. Stated in such a general way, these laws could apply as well to the evolution of human culture as to the evolution of animal anatomy. And, in fact, much of Darwin's Descent of Man is a study of the cultural evolution of human morality.

Notice also that Darwin thinks that heritable variation can arise from "the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse." This means that Darwin embraces Lamarck's idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. So the common story that Darwin overthrew Lamarckianism is false.

In the 1930s, the "Modern Synthesis" of evolutionary biology combined a Neo-Darwinism that rejected all Lamarckianism with Mendelian genetics. It was assumed that genes were the only units of heredity, that variations in genes are random and not affected by the developmental history of the individual, and that selection favors individuals with genes that make them more adapted to their environment than others. Consequently, evolution was understood as some change in the genetic composition of some group of organisms.

In recent decades, empirical research and theoretical arguments have thrown this Modern Synthesis of Neo-Darwinism into doubt, because it seems that a gene-centered theory cannot fully account for the evolution of life. Some people are even saying that this is an intellectual revolution that will destroy Darwinism.

One of the best critiques of Neo-Darwinism is by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (MIT Press, 2005). But rather than overturning Darwinism, Jablonka and Lamb see their critique as a renewal of Darwin's Darwinism.

The argument of Jablonka and Lamb is that in evolution the genetic system of inheritance is only one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, and that these multiple dimensions of inheritance show a Lamarkian evolution of acquired characters, just as Darwin believed.

To illuminate their general point, Jablonka and Lamb use an analogy to show how different systems of heredity can work along with the genetic system. We can think of a piece of music that is represented by a score, the notes written on paper. This score can be copied as it is passed on through the generations. Although a few mistakes in copying might occur over time, generally the score will be accurately transmitted. We might then see the relationship between the musical score and the musical performance as analogous to the relationship between a genotype and a phenotype in biology. Although mutations in the genotype will be transmitted to future generations, changes in the phenotype will not be transmitted, and so the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters does not occur.

But with the invention of new means of transmitting music--such as musical recordings and broadcasts--it becomes possible to transmit the musical performance (the "phenotype") by inheritance. It is also possible that popular performative interpretations of the music might bring notational changes in the score, and in this way the musical "phenotype" would change the musical "genotype."

In a similar way, Jablonka and Lamb argue, there are systems of inheritance beyond the genetic system that allow phenotypic variations to be transmitted across generations. All organisms have two systems of inheritance--the genetic system and the epigenetic system. Many animals have a third system--the behavioral system. Human beings are unique in that they have not only these three systems, but also a fourth--the symbolic system. The full complexity of evolution arises from the intricate interaction of these four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance, which correspond to various levels of complexity from the genome to cells to organisms to groups.

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. Jablonka and Lamb accept this as true, but they also criticize genetic reductionism and determinism for failing to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone, and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. What Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (600-200 B.C.) would be an example of a turning point in the symbolic evolution of humanity, in which Confucius, the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, and Plato acted as agents of symbolic innovation that has been inherited across the generations for the last two thousand years.

Neo-Darwinian theorists can hardly deny the reality of symbolic or cultural evolution. So they have developed their own theories of how this works. Dawkins is famous for his theory of "memetics"--the idea that "memes" (units of cultural replication) can evolve as "viruses of the brain." The evolutionary psychologists (like John Tooby and Leda Cosmides) explain cultural evolution as a historical process of social learning constrained by the genetically evolved biases of the brain. Although Jablonka and Lamb see some partial truth in these approaches, they also see them as inadequate for explaining the uniqueness of symbolic evolution as shaped through the constructive activities of individual and social agents in history.

The four-leveled account of evolution could explain Aristotle's biological studies of political animals. Human beings are not the only political animals, Aristotle observed, but human beings are more political than the other political animals because the human capacity for logos--speech or conceptual reasoning--allows human beings to organize their political life around shared conceptions of the good and the just. Jablonka and Lamb might say that while human beings share with other animals a capacity for political culture based on behavioral inheritance, only human beings have a capacity for political symbolism that creates a shared symbolic meaning for political life.

I will be writing more posts on these four dimensions of evolution.

Darwin's World of Pain and Wonder

Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on February 12, 1809. Some of my thoughts about this remarkable coincidence and the deeper connections between Darwin and Lincoln can be found in some previous posts here, here, and here.

This past year has produced many celebrations and publications related to the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species. The latest issue of The New Atlantis has an article by Algis Valiunas that offers a brief summary of Darwin's life and work, based largely on Janet Browne's two-volume biography. Although Valiunas's article is notable only for its shallowness, it does have a good title: "Darwin's World of Pain and Wonder." Contrary to the assertions of Darwin's existentialist critics like Peter Lawler, Darwin pondered the meaning of love and death. In particular, the death of his ten-year-old daughter Annie left him with deep scars. Trying to explain the cosmic meaning of suffering was part of the motivation for his scientific inquiry. But through his pain, he also felt wonder--the wonder of the human mind's capacity for uncovering the intelligible order of nature, while still facing the unfathomable mystery of the origin of all things.

It is regrettable that so few people actually read Darwin and see the power and poignancy of his mind at work. A few years ago, I suggested that the best way to resolve the dispute over the teaching of Darwinian evolution in high school biology classes would be to allow students to actually read Darwin himself. Most of the criticisms of Darwin can be found in Darwin's own writings--especially, The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Darwin openly confronts what he calls the "difficulties" for his theory, and he shows how the alternative to his "theory of natural selection" is the "theory of special creation." If high school students were allowed to read Darwin's writings and then read some of the writings from the proponents of "intelligent design," the students could weigh the evidence and arguments and make up their own minds. But when I proposed this, I was attacked by people like Chris Mooney--author of The Republican War on Science--who insisted that high students were not smart enough to read Darwin for themselves and then reach their own conclusions. Instead, Mooney insisted, they should read only textbooks that tell them what the "experts" think, and they certainly should never be permitted to read any writings criticizing evolution from the viewpoint of "intelligent design."

My original proposal was laid out in a short article for Inside Higher Ed, which can be found here.

Recently, I was delighted to hear about a high school course on evolution at Seattle Academy taught by Melinda Mueller. She agreed with my proposal for teaching Darwin, and she has organized her class around having her students read Darwin's Origin. She found that these high school students were quite capable of reading Darwin for themselves and assessing his argument. As a final class project, she had her students create a webpage--"Virtual Museum of the Origin"--for which each student "curated" a chapter of the Origin.

I would be happy to hear about any other high school biology teachers who have done something like this.

There is a deep point at issue here. We live in an Age of Science and Technology, which began some four centuries ago. But we still do not have a broad understanding of what that scientific vision of the cosmos means for human life. Teaching science to our students through ordinary textbooks doesn't provide such an understanding. But reading Darwin as part of what I have called "Darwinian liberal education" could promote the sort of human understanding of our scientific age that we need. What we need, as suggested by Karl Jaspers, is a Second Axial Age--a period of deep philosophical, scientific, and religious reflection on the meaning of human life within an evolutionary cosmos.

My earlier post on "Darwinian liberal education" can be found here.

The article by Valiunas can be found here.

My post on "Darwin's Understanding of Love and Death" can be found here.

The Natural Desire for War in the Axial Age

Of the desires that I have included on my list of 20 natural desires, none has elicited more criticism than the desire for war. Here's how I have described that desire:

"Human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with other groups. Human beings divide themselves into ethnic and territorial groups, and they tend to cooperate more with those people who belong to their own group that with those outside t heir group. So when the competition between communities becomes severe, violent conflict is likely. Human beings desire war when fear, interest, or honor move them to fight for their community against opposing communities. War shows the best and the worst of human nature. War manifests the brutal cruelty of human beings in fighting those they regard as enemies. Yet war also manifests the moral sociality of human beings in fighting courageously for their group. One of the prime causes for the emergence of large, bureaucratic states is the need for increasing military power. War is an instrument of politics, and like political rule generally, warfare is a predominantly male activity."

Critics such as Carson Holloway, John Hare, and C. Stephen Evans have objected that war violates the fundamental moral imperative of universal love and humanitarian compassion. In response to such critics, I have argued that a morality of absolute pacifism is unreasonable because it denies the natural morality of human life as based on a love of one's own and a spirited disposition to defend oneself and one's own against attack. Despite the persistence of pacifist traditions, pacifism has never provided a stable ground for any enduring social order.

But then Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006) would seem to show that all the major religious traditions in the world teach nonviolence. She surveys the history of the emergence of the major religions during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. From about 900 to 200 BC, the great spiritual traditions arose in four parts of the world--Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Christianity and Islam were later developments out of these spiritual movements of the Axial Age. Despite the diversity of teachings in these traditions, Armstrong sees a recurrent moral teaching based on the Golden Rule, which dictated universal love and compassion for all human beings, and perhaps even for all creatures, which therefore required nonviolence. This then allows Armstrong to criticize all religious movements based on "holy war" and the coercive imposition of religious orthodoxy as violating the original teaching of the Axial sages.

And yet any careful reading of Armstrong's book shows that she has to ignore or play down the evidence that works against her favored interpretations. For example, she begins her book with Zoroaster (or Zarathustra). Although he probably lived earlier than 900 BC, he formulated many of the religious ideas that would be taken up during the Axial Age. He foresaw a final cosmic judgment when the good would be rewarded with eternal life in bliss and the bad punished with death, which led him to an apocalyptic vision of a final battle between the forces of good and evil. Armstrong rejects this, however, as "a militant piety that polarizes complex reality into oversimplified categories of good and evil," which violates the spirit of "an Axial-style faith" (12). This sets the pattern for her whole book. Whenever one of the Axial thinkers recognizes the need for war, Armstrong dismisses this as deviation from her preferred message of nonviolence and universal love.

Armstrong has a hard time fitting the ancient Greeks into her account of Axial spirituality. The Homeric heroes embody a manly ethos of heroism in war that she cannot accept. She rightly points out that Homer's poignant depiction of Achilles' sympathy for Priam shows an insight into the tragic suffering caused by war. But she assumes that the Greeks were mistaken in not allowing such sympathy to lead them to pacifism (125-34). After recounting the victory of the Athenians over the Persians at the battle of Salamis, she concludes: "Salamis was an Axial moment, and yet, as so often in Greece, it was a martial triumph and led to more warfare" (267). She can't allow herself to consider the thought that this illustrates how the history of the Axial Age might have turned on military battles.

She takes for granted--without any supporting argument--that human beings could eliminate the tragic conflicts of life by adopting a stance of complete nonviolence, and so she can't understand why human beings are so foolish that they can't see this. She never considers the possibility that her own unexamined pacifism might itself show an imprudent blindness to the tragic character of human life.

Armstrong also has a hard time with the Hebrew Bible, one of the most important texts to emerge during the Axial Age. The Hebrew Bible manifests a sober realism in its depiction of human conflict. God himself is a warrior leading his people into battle. Of course, Armstrong doesn't like this. She looks for a pacifist message in Second Isaiah's prophecy of the "suffering servant" of Yahweh. But even here she is disturbed by the depiction of Yahweh as leading the people of Israel to battle against their enemies. She has to dismiss this as a corruption of the true teaching of the Axial vision. Moreover, she doesn't consider the implications of the fact that the Persian ruler Cyrus is called by Second Isaiah the "messiah," the "anointed king" of Yahweh. It seems that Yahweh uses the military might and political prowess of Cyrus to liberate the Hebrew exiles in Babylon (251-57). But Armstrong refuses to acknowledge that the spiritual history of the Axial Age depended on military and political history.

Although the New Testament came after the Axial Age, Armstrong praises the message of Jesus--particularly in the Sermon on Mount--for fulfilling the Axial vision of nonviolence. But again, she has to ignore those elements of Jesus' teaching that undercut the message of pacifism, such as the eternal expulsion of sinners from the Kingdom of God, and she says nothing about the apocalyptic vision of the Last Battle in the Book of Revelation.

The radical requirements of pure nonviolence are manifested in the life of the Jains in India who could hardly move without feeling guilty for stepping on an insect, a blade of grass, or a cobweb. Any activity could cause injury to some creature (288-90). Armstrong praises them for their "truly heroic restraint," without any thought for the silliness of such behavior.

In the ancient Hindu religious traditions, human beings were understood as having sacred duties to fulfill the requirements of each social class, which included warriors and rulers, who had to fight in defense of their communities. Thus, the ethics of nonviolence came into conflict with the requirements of social order. This is evident in one of the great texts of the Axial Age--the Bhagavad-Gita. The great warrior Arjuna has a sacred duty to lead his people into a war, but he hesitates because he doubts the justice of the war, and he fears being punished for his violent karma. Krishna, his charioteer, convinces him to fight by instructing him in spiritual wisdom. Krishna eventually reveals himself as Vishnu, the divine Lord of the Universe. Arjuna is granted a wondrous vision of the god as the supreme monotheistic deity. The primary theological teaching of the Gita is that the god is the source of all that exists, and the primary moral teaching is that one should do one's duty as determined by the social circumstances of one's birth, which includes the duty of a warrior to fight courageously in war. Armstrong stresses Krishna's argument that Arjuna can fight in a spirit of detachment from personal gain, but she fails to ponder the conclusion that social duty often requires violence, and thus pure nonviolence is contrary to the human condition.

Pure nonviolence denies the natural desire for justice as reciprocity. A natural moral sense of justice as reciprocity arises from the human tendency to respond in kind--returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. This tendency to reciprocity is enforced by moral passions found in most human beings: they are inclined to feel gratitude, love, and benevolence in return for benefits conferred on them; they are inclined to feel anger, hatred, and malevolence in return for injuries inflicted on them; they are inclined to feel guilt, shame, and regret for their violations of their reciprocal obligations to others. Pure nonviolence denies the spirited resistance to evil that enforces justice. (One might wonder, for example, whether the brutal atrocities of the Khymer Rouge in Cambobia could have been stopped if the Buddhist monks had led a movement of violent resistance.)

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

Goldstein's Appendix: The Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Goldstein's Appendix on the "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" is stunning in its concision, clarity, and cogency. In 53 pages, she lays out the logic of each argument as a series of premises leading to the conclusion "God exists," and then she points out the flaws in each argument that refute it.

Not only does she take up the classic philosophical arguments, she also puts into logical form the emotionally compelling longings that underlie the religious experience of most human beings. So, for example, she includes not only the "cosmological argument," but also "the argument from the intolerability of insignificance."

Here are the 36 arguments:

1. The Cosmological Argument
2. The Ontological Argument
3. The Argument from Design
A. The Classical Teleological Argument
B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity
C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
D. The Argument from the Original Replicator
4. The Argument from the Big Bang
5. The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants
6. The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws
7. The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences
8. The Argument from Personal Coincidences
9. The Argument from Answered Prayers
10. The Argument from a Wonderful Life
11. The Argument from Miracles
12. The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness
13. The Argument from the Improbable Self
14. The Argument from Survival After Death
15. The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation
16. The Argument from Moral Truth
17. The Argument from Altruism
18. The Argument from Free Will
19. The Argument from Personal Purpose
20. The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance
21. The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity
22. The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics
23. The Argument from Holy Books
24. The Argument from Perfect Justice
25. The Argument from Suffering
26. The Argument from the Survival of the Jews
27. The Argument from the Upward Curve of History
28. The Argument from Prodigious Genius
29. The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity
30. The Argument from Mathematical Reality
31. The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal's Wager)
32. The Argument from Pragmatism (William James's Leap of Faith)
33. The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason
34. The Argument from Sublimity
35. The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe (Spinoza's God)
36. The Argument from the Abundance of Arguments

If you read her Appendix, you will notice how often her refutations depend on citing three kinds of fallacies--The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance, The Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another, and The Fallacy of Wishful Thinking.

Many of the arguments for the existence of God depend on the assumption that if science has not yet provided a full explanation for something, that shows that this must be something that has been created by God. This is the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance. Scientific knowledge is always going to be incomplete. And there probably are some fundamental problems that will never be fully explained by science because of the limitations of human experience and human reasoning. But the mere fact of human ignorance does not dictate the conclusion there there is no natural explanation at all, and that this must be the work of God acting outside of nature. As Goldstein indicates, this is the most common fallacy in the arguments of the "intelligent design theorists": if molecular biologists have not yet explained the step-by-step evolutionary history of bacterial flagella (or any other living phenomenon), that is assumed by the IDers to prove the existence of an Intelligent Designer.

There really are some fundamental mysteries in the universe. But to invoke God as the explanation shows the Fallacy of Using One Mystery to Explain Another. Goldstein identifies at least six great mysteries:

1. First Cause
2. consciousness
3. free will
4. unique self-identity
5. mathematical reality
6. the uniqueness of the universe

The first great mystery is evoked by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? There is no good scientific or philosophic answer for that question, which points to the problem of ultimate explanation. We can keep passing the buck, but the buck must stop somewhere. To say that God is the First Cause--the Uncaused Cause of everything--doesn't resolve the mystery because then we have the mystery of how to explain God. If we can say that God is uncaused or self-caused, then why not say that the Universe is uncaused or self-caused?

Similarly, human consciousness or the uniqueness of human personal identity might forever remain deep conundrums without full scientific explanations. But to say that God created human consciousness and unique human persons only replaces one kind of mystery with another.

Perhaps the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians like Peter Lawler who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Wow.

That's my response to Rebecca Goldstein's new novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.

Her book captures the emotional and intellectual depth of the tension between religion and science in the modern world better than any other book I have ever read. Her book helps me to think through many of the topics that have come up on this blog--particularly, questions about whether Darwinian science can fully account for, and satisfy, the moral, intellectual, and religious longings of human beings.

Having received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University, she has
written a series of philosophical novels. She received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" prize for her ability to "dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of imaginative storytelling." She is the partner of Steve Pinker, the evolutionary psychologist at Harvard, and her main character in this new novel--Cass Seltzer--is based partialy on Pinker.

Seltzer is a psychologist who studies the psychology of religion. He writes a book entitled The Varieties of Religious Illusion that shows how the psychology of religious experience expresses emotional attitudes that have almost nothing to do with arguments. His book has an Appendix that summarizes the "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" along with refutations, showing that the arguments against the existence of God are stronger than those for the existence of God. His point is that such logical argumentation is largely irrelevant, because it does not weaken the emotional experiences of human life that sustain the longings for transcendence that find their satisfaction in religious attitudes. Surprisingly, Seltzer's book becomes an international best-seller after the 9/11 attack as people want to understand why religious passions remain so strong in a world dominated by scientific reasoning that has apparently refuted religious belief.

Seltzer's Appendix appears as the Appendix to Goldstein's novel. Thus, the personal psychological struggle over the existence of God is conveyed in the drama of the novel, while the impersonal logical argumentation over the existence of God is presented in the Appendix. The novel has 36 chapters with titles to indicate that each chapter portrays through story-telling an argument for God's existence. So, like a Platonic dialogue, Goldstein's book combines poetic drama and philosophic argument.

Like Plato, Goldstein shows that the erotic longing for transcendent meaning and purpose can only be satisfied by religious myth and mysticism, even as she also shows that reason refutes all the rational arguments for religious belief.

I will say more about this book in some future posts. But for now, I'll just say that Goldstein has given us a wonderfully rich and disturbing depiction of how in the modern world we still have not resolved the mutual irrefutability of reason and revelation. The formal arguments for religious belief can be refuted by logical reasoning. But reason cannot dispel the fundamental mysteries surrounding the meaning of our existence in the universe. Reason gives us no solution to the human predicament in facing what Goldstein calls "the brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides."