Does Darwinism Make Morality Fictional?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REFERENCES

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

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

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

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

Evolution and Ethics at Oxford: From Charles Darwin to C. S. Lewis

The seminar on "Evolution and Ethics" that I directed at the University of Oxford last week left me with many questions to ponder.

Most of the participants were professional philosophers (professors and advanced students) from China and from Calvin College. As I anticipated, much of the discussion turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in previous posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

After discussing this general debate in our first meeting, we turned in the second meeting to the debate between Charles Darwin and George Jackson Mivart. As far as Mivart is concerned, Darwin's evolutionary account of the moral sense stresses the role of the moral emotions and thus misses the essence of morality as pure rationality. Mivart insists: "It is judgment and not feeling which has to do with right and wrong." Mivart fails to see, however, that Darwin recognizes the role of reason in moral judgment that makes morality uniquely human, because it depends on human intellectual capacities, but he also recognizes the role of emotion and social instinct in motivating moral actions. The emotions and instincts underlying human morality can be seen in other animals, which shows the building blocks of moral experience in animal nature.

Although some of the participants in the seminar were receptive to Darwin's moral naturalism, many were deeply skeptical of whether his naturalism could account for the moral ought, for that sense of imperative normativity that seems to transcend emotion and desire, and which is so prominent in Kant's moral philosophy. These Kantians argued that while natural science could explain the origins of morality through evolutionary history, it could not explain the justifications of moral rules by reason. The Kantians insisted on this dichotomy between origins and justifications in order to preserve the Kantian separation between the natural realm of human moral sentiments and desires and the transcendent realm of human moral reasoning and freedom. The natural realm of human action is governed by hypothetical imperatives about what we have to do to be happy. The transcendent realm of human reason is governed by categorical imperatives of what we absolutely ought to do regardless of the practical consequences.

This set up the opposing sides in our discussion. I and the other naturalists were inclined to argue that morality is completely a matter of hypothetical imperatives, because the only ultimate answer to questions about why we "ought" to do something is that it will promote our human happiness or flourishing, and therefore evolutionary science helps us to understand the evolution of human morality as hypothetical imperatives that are constrained by our nature as social mammals. Against this position, the Kantian transcendentalists argued that morality strictly speaking--the morality of the moral "ought" rather than the calculation of the prudential "ought"--is a matter of pure reason separated from all natural experience.

But what I found most interesting in this discussion is how far the Kantians were willing to go in compromising by acknowledging that Kant's "pure ethics" of a priori reasoning had to be combined with his "impure ethics" of human nature and moral emotions. The pure a priori rationalism of Kantian ethics has been strongly challenged by research in moral psychology that shows that reason by itself cannot be the only ground of moral judgment. Consequently, the Kantians have had to argue that an expansive reading of all of Kant's writings shows that he allows for a naturalistic explanation of moral experience beyond pure reason. Kant is not simply a Kantian!

This reading of Kant has been elaborated by Robert Louden's Kant's Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Still, however, the Kantians could not compromise at all on one point. Darwin speculated that if bees had mental capacities comparable to those of human beings, bees would develop a moral sense. But the content of bee morality would be radically different from human morality. Moral bees might regard it as a "sacred duty" for sisters to kill their brothers, and for the queen mother to kill her fertile daughters. The thought here is that since morality is relative to the natural needs and desires of the species, each species would have a different morality. So there is no cosmic morality. The standards of right and wrong are not woven in the fabric of the cosmos, there to be discovered by any animal that evolves a moral sense. Rather, morality is species-specific in its content. This bothered the Kantians in our group (just as it bothered the original Kantian reviewers of Darwin's book--Mivart and Cobbe), because it denies the transcendentalist claim that morality manifests a truth about the cosmos--perhaps about God as the moral lawgiver of the cosmos.

These same basic positions and lines of reasoning continued in the other meetings. In the third meeting, we discussed a paper by Frans de Waal, with critical responses from Robert Wright, Philip Kitcher, Christine Korsgaard, and Peter Singer. De Waal stressed the continuity between the social behavior of other primates and the moral behavior of human beings as showing the evolutionary roots of morality. The critics insisted, however, that there was a gap between animal behavior and human morality created by the uniquely human capacities for language and abstract reasoning.

Although initially there seems to be a sharp separation between the sides in this debate, closer examination reveals that both sides eventually move close to one another. I saw the same thing happening in our group. On the one side, de Waal and the Darwinian naturalists say that even as they stress the continuity of human morality with the social behavior of others animals, they recognize that morality strictly speaking really is uniquely human because of the uniquely human mental capacities required for morality. On the other side, the Kantians can recognize that nonhuman animals can display some of the natural dispositions and capacities that go into human morality.

Everyone seems to agree here that morality requires an "impartial" or "disinterested" perspective that leads to something like the Golden Rule as a fundamental moral principle. But I agree with de Waal that this moral impartiality is not absolute, because it rests on an "abstract yet still egocentric concern about the quality of life in a community." This is evident in the "tension between loyalty and moral inclusion." Morality is an "in-group phenomenon" in that morality has evolved largely to promote cooperation within groups to compete with those outside the groups. We can extend our moral concern to ever wider groups--fellow kin, fellow citizens, all human beings, perhaps even all sentient creatures. Darwin speaks of moral progress reaching the point of "disinterested love of all living creatures." But I agree with de Waal that as we extend our moral sympathy farther out on the moral circle, our attachments to those far away is commonly weaker than our attachments to those close to us, and we are even morally obligated to feel a stronger concern for those close to us than for strangers.

The question of whether absolute impartiality is possible, or desirable, becomes evident in the debate over "animal rights." Peter Singer claims that the ultimate moral principle is impartial concern for the interests of all sentient creatures, which dictates that we might have to sacrifice human interests for the interests of nonhuman animals. Against Singer, de Waal argues that while we should show some sympathy for other animals, our moral obligations to our fellow human beings come first. So, for example, de Waal thinks using primates for scientific research where we would not want to use human beings is justifiable if the benefit for human beings outweighs the suffering of the animals.

In our reading for this seminar, some of the authors interpret the principle of moral impartiality as dictating universal love, like the teaching of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. As I said in the seminar, I am not persuaded by this, because it seems to me that universal love is contrary to human nature. A morality of universal love would dictate absolute pacifism and socialism in the pursuit of global peaceful cooperation free of any conflict. But we know that doesn't work. In fact, refusing to punish evildoers would make human morality impossible.

This point came up in our fourth meeting as we discussed my Darwinian Natural Right and John Hare's criticism of my book. Hare is a Kantian Christian. He agrees with me that complete moral impartiality as dictating universal love is unnatural for human beings. But then he says this only shows the "moral gap" between what morality demands of us and what we can do. To cross that moral gap--to satisfy the demands of morality--we need the assistance of God. This leads him into his divine command theory of morality. Against the secular Kantianism of people like Korsgaard, Hare defends a religious Kantianism based on the claim that Kant's categorical morality cannot be obeyed by human beings without some religious support.

Darwin intimates the religious character of Kant's moral philosophy when he quotes Kant's depiction of moral law as evoking "reverence." Moreover, in the passage from the Critique of Practical Reason from which Darwin quotes, Kant speaks of "man as belonging to two worlds"--the phenomenal world of natural causes and the noumenal world of human freedom. But then Darwin indicates that he will explain morality "exclusively from the side of natural history." So, implicitly, Darwin rejects Kant's "two worlds" in favor of one world--the empirical world of nature.

This points us again to the fundamental debate between Platonic transcendentalism and Humean naturalism. In the last meeting of our seminar, I began by suggesting that if we're laying out a typology of fundamental sources of moral principles invoked in moral philosophy, we might consider six possible sources:

1. Cosmic God
2. Cosmic Nature
3. Cosmic Reason
4. Human Nature
5. Human Culture
6. Human Individuals

The transcendentalists look to the first three--the cosmic sources of moral order--because they believe that morality cannot have "moral clout" (in Richard Joyce's phrase) unless it is believed to be part of the cosmic order of things as dictated by God, by the nature of the universe, or by universal rational structures. So just as we discover mathematical principles as somehow woven into the constitution of the world, we should be able to discover moral principles as part of the "wisdom of the world" (in Remi Brague's phrase).

The empiricists, however, look to the second three sources--the human sources of moral order. Human nature gives us the generic goods of life as rooted in the natural desires of the human species as shaped by evolutionary history--perhaps the 20 natural desires that I have sketched. But within the contraints of human nature, human culture specifies the moral traditions of human morality as shaped by cultural history. Then, within the constraints of both human nature and human culture, human individuals make choices that reflect the uniqueness of their individual temperaments, abilities, and circumstances as shaped by their individual history.

Kant's "pure ethics" corresponds to the transcendental order of the first three sources. His "impure ethics" corresponds to the human order of the last three sources.

Philosophers like Kant and Hare are satisfied Platonists because they believe that morality really does find its transcendent grounds in the cosmic sources. But philosophers like Richard Joyce and John Mackie are frustrated Platonists who agree that "moral clout" requires belief in "moral facts" as cosmic facts beyond the "natural facts," but they are convinced by natural science that this belief is false, because what appears to be a cosmic moral objectivity is actually a subjective projection of the human moral emotions onto the cosmos, and therefore morality is necessarily fictional.

By contrast, the satisfied Humeans--those like Darwin and Westermarck--see no need for morality conforming to a moral cosmology, and so the illusion of moral objectivity as founded on moral cosmology can be exposed for the illusion that it is, even as we accept the purely naturalistic grounds of morality in human experience--human nature, human culture, and human individuality.

The Humeans and Darwinians accept the historical contingency of morality as shaped by the genetic history of human nature, the social history of human culture, and the personal history of human individuality. The good is the desirable. But what is desirable varies according to the contingencies of human cultures and human individuals. Even so, the generic goods of human nature are stable and universal across all of human history for as long as the human species exists. And yet, there was a time when the human species did not exist, and there will be a time sometime in the future when the human species will be extinct. In the absence of the human species, morality would not exist. If some other species develops the capacities necessary for a moral sense, it will have a moral sense, but the content of that moral sense will be distinct to its specific nature.

On the last day of this seminar, we spent the afternoon touring some sites around Oxford associated with C. S. Lewis. It was fitting that we did this, because Lewis struggled his whole life with the consequences of the modern scientific rejection of the moral cosmology of the ancient and medieval world that Lewis loved.

Lewis was a student at Oxford, and then he taught for 30 years as a Fellow at Magdalen College at Oxford. He was a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. But he is best known as the author of some of the most popular works of Christian apologetics and literature, including science fiction and children's fantasy.

We toured his house ("The Kilns"), Magdalen College, and the graveyard where he is buried outside his parish church--Holy Trinity Church in Headington.  At the house, our tour was guided by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Oxford and the author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Ward argues in his book that Lewis's love of medieval cosmology provides the key to the symbolic coherence of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, which became one of the most popular series of children's fantasy novels of the twentieth century. Ward shows how the seven novels in the series correspond to the seven planets of medieval cosmology.

I have written an earlier post on Lewis' book The Discarded Image as his study of the geocentric cosmic model that combined Platonic and Christian teachings about the moral order of the universe as designed by God. This model shaped the human sense of cosmic moral order in the Western world for almost 2,000 years before it was discarded by modern science.

Lewis' transcendent longings were satisfied by that cosmic vision of the world as a creation of God's love that offered ultimate satisfaction to the human yearning for meaning and purpose in the universe. Lewis doubted that modern natural science could ever provide a proper substitute for that old cosmology. And yet Lewis was a theistic evolutionist who accepted the scientific truth of evolutionary science, even if he doubted that such a science could ever give us the moral truth that we seek. I suggest, however, that what Lewis in The Abolition of Man lays out as the "common morality" (or Tao) of humanity--universally found in all human societies throughout history--points to the sort of natural morality that is supported by evolutionary reasoning.

A few of my previous posts on pertinent themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

A Thousand Posts (2)

2009
In January, my post on "Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality" pointed to the most important turn in the recent history of evolutionary psychology--the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality in The Descent of Man. 

In his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893, Thomas Huxley adopted a Kantian transcendentalist view of ethics and invoked the is/ought dichotomy in rejecting Darwin's claim that the evolutionary explanation of morality was part of the evolutionary science of human nature.  For over a century after Huxley's lecture, most Darwinian biologists--including George Williams and Richard Dawkins--agreed with Huxley's rejection of Darwin's evolutionary ethics.  Therefore, they were disturbed by Ed Wilson's efforts--in Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998)--to revive Darwin's evolutionary study of morality.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I had argued in agreement with Darwin and Wilson, but my argument was scorned by the leaders of evolutionary psychology.  Remarkably, however, by 2009, the tide had turned as the growing research on the evolutionary psychology of morality confirmed that Darwin was right after all.  One of the leaders of this movement was Jonathan Haidt.  I wrote my first post on Haidt's research in November of 2009.  I returned to Haidt in September of 2012 and October of 2016.  In January of 2011, I wrote a post on how Sam Harris had persuaded Richard Dawkins to change his mind and accept Darwinian ethics.

An evolutionary moral psychology assumes the reality of an evolved human nature.  But my colleague at Northern Illinois University--David Buller--has dismissed the idea of human nature as a superstition in his book Adapting Minds, which is a general critique of evolutionary psychology.  In January, I wrote a post arguing that Buller's denial of human nature depends on a silly definition of human nature as consisting only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.  It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.  These regularities do not have to be uniquely human, invariably the same for all individuals, or eternal essences.  These regularities of human nature include what I have identified as the 20 natural desires.

I elaborated some of these points in April in posts on nature and human nature and on Marjorie Grene's account of natural teleology and the concept of species.  In September, I defended the Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of species.

In the spring, I taught a graduate seminar on David Hume. In May, I wrote a long post on "A Research Program for a Humean Science of Human Nature."  In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume laid out his grand vision of a comprehensive science grounded on a science of human nature.  Every topic that I have taken up on this blog could be understood as part of this Humean science of human nature rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science. This science could be sketched out according to at least ten broad themes running through my blog posts: (1) Darwinian liberal education, (2) deep history, (3) ethology, (4) behavioral game theory, (5) neuroscience, (6) social history, (7) moral psychology, (8) evolution of religion, (9) evolutionary aesthetics, and (10) the Darwinian future of human nature.

In May and June, I travelled around England and Scotland, and I wrote a series of posts on the natural history of Great Britain based on my travels.  During this trip, I visited Darwin's house in Down and wrote some posts on that.  As I indicated, some of my first reading of Darwin included the notebooks that he began writing after he returned to England from his trip on the Beagle.  I was impressed with those notebooks as showing Darwin's mind at work, and my writing of this blog is in some ways following the style of Darwin's writing in his notebooks.

My visit to Darwin's house and reading about his family life led me to write about how Darwin's pondering the suffering and death of his daughter Annie manifested his understanding of love and death.  I wrote this in response to Peter Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death.

From the end of June to the end of September, I wrote many posts on the history and philosophy of Platonic moral cosmology, in which I set up a debate between Remi Brague and C. S. Lewis, on one side, and Catherine Zuckert and Joseph Cropsey, on the other.  Brague and Lewis see Plato's dialogues (particularly the Timaeus and book 10 of The Laws) as defending a divinely designed teleological cosmology as setting the cosmic standards for the moral and political life of human beings, but they also see this Platonic moral cosmology as overturned by modern science (including Darwinism) in a way that promotes moral nihilism by teaching that the cosmos is indifferent or even hostile to human concerns.  By contrast, Zuckert and Cropsey see Plato's Socrates as denying, or at least questioning, that moral cosmology taught by Timaeus and the Athenian stranger, and suggesting that instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, humans need to look to their own human wants and desires.  Even if the cosmos does not care about or for us, we care about and for ourselves.  This Socrates identified by Zuckert and Cropsey belongs to a tradition of Socratic skepticism that includes Cicero, Hume, and Darwin.

If Zuckert and Cropsey have the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates is close to my position--that human morality and politics depend not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires.  If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether those ends or purposes have any cosmic reference.  Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

While some Straussians like Zuckert and Cropsey reject Platonic cosmic teleology as false, others insist that it needs to be supported as at least a "noble lie" that sustains popular conceptions of natural right, and that the Darwinian denial of cosmic teleology is (as Nietzsche put it) "true but deadly."

In September, I endorsed the "Midwest Straussianism" promoted by Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  The Straussians seem to have affirmed three propositions that are contradictory: 1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good.  To overcome the contradiction, the West-Coast Straussians have denied #1, the East-Coast Straussians have denied #3, and the Midwest Straussians have denied #2.  I agree with the Midwest Straussians that modernity is good, and for me this includes not only modern political thought, but also modern natural science.

From October to December, I wrote many posts on the evolutionary biology of human rights as rooted in evolved human nature, and in doing so, I argued that the idea of human rights does not depend on any religious belief in the creation of human beings in the image of God.  As part of this discussion, I wrote about the debate over female genital mutilation as a violation of human rights.

2010
In January, I travelled to England to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics."  The participants were mostly philosophy professors and students from China.  In October, we met again in China (Beijing) for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.  This led to a series of posts on the evolutionary psychology of ethics.

As I anticipated, much of the discussion at the seminar turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in various posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers today are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

Kantian philosophers like Richard Joyce worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism by teaching that morality is fictional. Joyce agrees with Kant that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

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

That a Kantian philosophical idealism does not necessarily support good moral judgment is indicated by the fact that most of the German philosophers who supported Nazism were Kantian idealists. For me, as I indicated in a post in January, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

My reasoning for rejecting Kantian categorical normativity is clarified in my post on "Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness" (March).

In 2010, I wrote a lot about the natural evolution of religious belief.  I have identified the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalistic account of religion.

One of the proponents of this research is Justin Barrett, whom I met at the Oxford seminar. He is an evolutionary psychologist who argues that the evolved propensity of the human mind to detect intelligent agents supports a natural tendency to believe in divine agents. Barrett is a Christian evolutionist.  His work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion. Barrett is a Christian who sees his evolutionary explanation of religious belief as compatible with his own Christian belief that God has created human beings so that they can discover him.  I have also written about Jesse Bering (in February of 2011), who explains the evolutionary psychology of religious belief in a way similar to Barrett's explanation, but Bering is an atheist.

Also in 2010, I wrote about Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel on the "36 arguments for the existence of God" (February), the evolution of Heaven and Hell (April-May), the evolutionary game theory of how religion supports cooperation (April), and Confucianism (June, August, October).  My writing on Confucianism was drawn from my paper on Darwinian and Confucian Ethics for the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" in Beijing in October, which included some of the same Chinese professors and students who were at the Oxford conference in January.

Religious belief is uniquely human because it arises from the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought and communication that allows human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  In February, I wrote about how Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have explained human symbolism as one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Recognizing these four levels of evolution helps to explain the "animal culture wars" (April): if "culture" is defined as inherited behavioral traditions, then some nonhuman animals have culture; but if "culture" is defined as inherited symbolic traditions (like religious belief), then this is uniquely human.

In 2010, I wrote a lot about Aristotelianism.  In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Aristotelian liberalism and showed how a Darwinian moral and political psychology supported this.  In the fall, I was teaching a graduate seminar on Aristotle, and I wrote some posts in September, October, and December, on "Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics," which went into my paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" for the conference on "Science and Virtue" organized by Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) in November.  In 2013, the papers for this conference were published in The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, edited by Lawler and Guerra (NIU Press).

In July, I pointed to my essay for "Cato Unbound" on "Darwinian Liberalism," which would lead to papers and lectures in later years on the Darwinian psychology of classical liberalism.

My list of 20 natural desires includes the natural desire for courage in war, because human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with outside groups.  The is the one desire that has provoked the most criticism from people who are uncomfortable with the idea that war might be rooted in evolved human nature.  In 2010, I began to write the evolutionary psychology of war in various posts (in February, June, and December).  I returned to this issue in 2011, in response to the publication of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Also, in 2010, I began writing about anarchism (June) and equality in the Lockean state of nature (July), and I would return to these topics in subsequent years.

To be continued . . .

Natural Law at Cambridge: Kantian Normativity, Catholic Antiliberalism, and Natural Human Law

On March 4th, I participated in a conference at the University of Cambridge.  I was in Cambridge for four days, where I had a room in Pembroke College, which was founded in 1347, making it the third oldest of the Cambridge colleges.  For me, this is a reminder that some of the oldest human institutions are universities.

One of the famous graduates of Pembroke was William Pitt the Younger, who in 1783, at the age of 24, became the youngest ever Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Other famous graduates include Roger Williams, the subject of some posts (here and here) on his defense of religious liberty and toleration.

                               Sculpture of William Pitt the Younger at Pembroke College

 

 

                                                                     Pembroke College

The conference was entitled "Law as a Guide to Justice: A Symposium on the Philosophical and Theological Foundations of Law and Justice in Honour of Amanda Perreau-Saussine Ezcurra (1971-2012)."

                                                 Amanda Perreau-Saussine de Ezcurra

Most of the participants were friends of Amanda.  Although I did not know her, I can tell by the testimony of her friends that she was a remarkable human being.  The last years of her life were shadowed by premature death--first, the death of her first husband, and then her own death 18 months later from cancer at the age of 41 in 2012.  At the time of her death, she was a Fellow of Queens College, and University Lecturer in Law, at the University of Cambridge.  Her primary academic intellectual interests were international law and the philosophy of law.  She was a devout Catholic who was an energetic and faithful member of the British Catholic community, particularly British Catholic professors.  Cambridge University has had some prominent Catholic philosophers--Elizabeth Anscombe, for example. 

There is some oddity here considering the history of Cambridge University as an integral part of the Anglican Communion initiated by Henry VIII's secession from the Catholic Church.  For a long time, degrees at Cambridge were granted only to those professing the Anglican faith, and every graduate had to declare belief in the Thirty-nine Articles.

Amanda wrote her thesis on John Finnis, another Catholic philosopher.  Although she admired his work in reviving interest in natural law among analytic philosophers through his book Natural Law and Natural Rights, she differed from him in her understanding of natural law.  One difference was that she thought Thomistic natural law could be rooted in some manner in the natural sociability of evolved human nature, while Finnis's Kantian interpretation of natural law rejected any such appeal to biological nature.  This explains why I was invited to present a paper at this conference: my argument for a Darwinian science of Thomistic natural law echoes some of her thinking.

It seemed fitting to me that I should be travelling to Cambridge to make my Darwinian arguments just one month after returning from my second trip to the Galapagos.  In 1827, after giving up his studies to become a medical doctor at the University of Edinburgh, Charles Darwin provoked the anger of his father who exploded: "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."  His father warned him that he needed some kind of respectable profession, and his father suggested that becoming an Anglican clergyman might be just what he needed.  So his father sent him to Cambridge for an Arts degree at Christ's College that would be the first step towards Holy Orders.  He arrived in Cambridge in January of 1828.  Although he had little interest in theology, Darwin did enjoy studying with the natural philosophers at Cambridge--particularly, John Henslow, professor of botany, and Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology.

                                     Darwin's College Room at Christ's College, Cambridge

                                                       
                                                                     Christ's College

But then, while away from school on a holiday in August of 1831, Darwin received a letter from Henslow telling him about Captain Robert FitzRoy, who was looking for someone who would be a companion for him and a naturalist on a voyage of the Beagle to do a coastal survey of South America for the British Navy.  That changed his life--instead of becoming a country clergyman, he would become a naturalist who would develop one of the biggest ideas of science.

Darwin's big idea has been elaborated in a tradition of evolutionary science that includes evolutionary explanations of morality and law that influenced some of Amanda's thinking about natural law.  In an unfinished book, entitled Law as a Guide to Justice: Old Questions for New Natural Lawyers, she wanted to show how the evolutionary biology of social animals--as set forth by people like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal--could show the evolved natural sociability manifest in human nature that might support natural law.  In contrast to Kantian philosophers like Finnis, who claim that natural law depends on pure reason alone, she wanted to show that prior to human reason there are natural needs and inclinations that provide the grounds for natural law.  She also wanted to show how this natural law could be seen as implicit in statutory law, customary law, and divine law. 

Her untimely death kept her from developing her ideas in a finished book.  The purpose of the Cambridge conference was to have the participants pursue the questions she wanted to raise and perhaps carry out some of the work she had wanted to do in her book.  Previously, I have written a post with my comments on the conference papers and a link to the Dropbox file that has all the papers.

My biggest surprise is that apparently at Cambridge University they rely on lecturing rather than on open discussion among participants who have read something beforehand and are prepared to discuss what they have read.  I distributed weeks ahead of time an extensive set of comments on all the papers for the conference to all the participants.  Except for James Murphy and James Stoner, no one responded to my comments.  No one else circulated any comments on the papers.  And at the conference, I heard no evidence that anyone had read all the papers and was prepared to talk about the papers.  Moreover, the organizers of the conference indicated that they had intentionally made it impossible for anyone attending the conference to read the papers for the conference.  This is very different from the academic culture that I know at the University of Chicago, St. John's College, and the Liberty Fund, where one assumes that everyone participating in some discussion has read the readings for the gathering and is prepared to discuss them.

As I listened to the discussions at the conference, I thought about three main questions:

Must normative nature transcend empirical nature? 

Must the Catholic tradition of philosophy be anti-liberal?

Is human law derived from natural law?

The conference began with comments by Onora O'Neill, The Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve.  She is a prominent moral philosopher at Cambridge, perhaps best known for her books interpreting Kant.  She spoke about her conversations with Amanda, who was interested in Kant's understanding of judgment and how that might apply to legal interpretation.

O'Neill related that Amanda once asked a Cambridge professor about whether there was any consistent theme in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, given the many shifting positions that he has taken over his life, and the answer was one word-- "Anti-liberalism!"

I noticed that many, maybe most, of the speakers at the conference were anti-liberal Catholics like MacIntyre.  I wondered about that.  Aren't they happy that liberal ideas like tolerance and religious liberty have prevailed at places like Cambridge, so that the tradition of Anglican intolerance has been overturned, and Catholics are free to profess their faith without persecution?  Don't Catholics like MacIntyre embrace such liberal ideas?  If so, then how can they be anti-liberal?

If they are anti-liberal Catholics, does that mean that they reject Vatican II and the Catholic Church's acceptance of religious liberty and the admission that the Church's tradition of persecuting heretics was wrong?  I assume not.

Anti-liberal Catholics like MacIntyre like to scorn what they see as the consumerism, materialism, and secularism of modern liberal culture and then insist that this cannot satisfy the human longing for transcendent spirituality expressed in religious communities.  But they do not consider how liberalism promotes the moral and religious liberty that allows people to pursue their spiritual quest in association with others who share their spiritual commitments.  Aren't British Catholics like Amanda and her friends better able to live their spiritual lives because of the triumph of liberal culture in Great Britain and elsewhere?

Anti-liberal Catholics like MacIntyre like to argue that Aristotle and Aquinas better understood the need for the moral and intellectual virtues for human flourishing than do modern liberal thinkers.  But they don't confront the argument of those like Deirdre McCloskey that modern liberalism promotes the bourgeois virtues, which include all the virtues recognized by Aristotle and Aquinas, and perhaps even the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

The second introductory speech was by Tobias Schaffner, who presented the four central questions of Amanda's book as the questions around which this conference was organized.

(1) Is there a benign law-like ordering of the world and especially of human nature?  Part of Amanda's answer to this question was to point to the chimpanzee behavior studied by Goodall and de Waal as showing an animal nature that is both selfish and social that might be manifest in human nature as well.

(2) How do we derive exceptionless natural laws from our sociable nature?  Amanda's answer to this question was to appeal to Aquinas's account of the precepts of natural law as corresponding to the order of the natural inclinations, which suggests that there are vital needs or desires that constrain legal and political reasoning.  Whether this gives us "exceptionless" natural laws, as Amanda thought, is not so clear, it seems to me.  After all, Aquinas stressed the variability in the circumstances of human social life that require prudential judgments about what is best for particular individuals in particular situations.  Amanda's interest in human judgment about the indeterminate circumstances of life points to this problem.

(3) Can positive law, customary law, and divine law be our guide to natural law?  If Aquinas is correct about human laws being derived from natural law, then we should be able to see human laws implicitly pointing to natural law, even when human laws do not explicitly invoke the idea of natural law.  This made me want to reexamine what Aquinas says about this (ST, I-II, q. 95, a. 2).  For example, the U.S. Constitution never explicitly speaks of "natural law" (unlike the Declaration of Indepedence).  Does that mean that there is no natural law reasoning in the Constitution?  Or is it possible that natural law reasoning is implicitly required for interpreting the Constitution?  For instance, does "due process of law" in the Fifth Amendment imply some standard of natural justice?  Does the Ninth Amendment's reference to unenumerated rights "retained by the people" imply natural rights?

(4) Is there a benign structure and providential ordering sustaining the natural order and representing the foundation of natural law?  Does natural law depend on the theological belief in "a benign structure and providential ordering" of the world, which Christians like Amanda can embrace?  If natural law is really natural, and separated from divine law, as Aquinas says, does this mean that people without such religious belief can recognize natural law through their natural experience of the world and of their human nature?

The four sessions of this conference corresponded to this four questions.

John Cottingham (University of Reading) answered the first question by arguing that natural law does indeed depend on "a benign law-like ordering of the world and human nature" by God.  (I first met John in 2010 in Beijing at a conference on evolution and ethics where he made a similar argument against grounding ethics in evolutionary science.)  He distinguished between two senses of the word "nature."  According to the traditional premodern "theistic worldview," he explained, nature is a normative reality as created by God.  According to the modern "secularist worldview," nature is an empirical reality studied by science.  Nature is normative if one agrees with Cottingham that human beings by nature have a divinely implanted light of conscience by which they can see what is objectively right and wrong as determined by God.  Nature is only empirical, however, if one believes that human moral judgment is rooted in human desires, inclinations, or emotions, and thus the moral standard is purely subjective.  I would say that Cottingham's distinction here corresponds to Ed Wilson's distinction (in Consilience) between transcendentalist ethics and empiricist ethics, except that Wilson, in contrast to Cottingham, takes the side of empiricist ethics as rooted in the evolved moral sentiments of human nature, without any necessity for invoking God or divinely implanted conscience.

In my written comments on Cottingham's paper, I asked him whether he thought human beings could recognize and follow natural law even if they had no theistic religious beliefs.  In his oral presentation, he answered yes.

This made me wonder in what way Cottingham sees the "theistic worldview" as superior to the "secularist worldview."  He seemed to say that theism is intellectually superior to secularism in that theism can give a more intellectually satisfying explanation of natural law as derived from God's eternal law.  But then he left it unclear as to whether theism is also practically superior to secularism in that theism is better in practically motivating good conduct.  If that is what he is saying, then this is an empirically falsifiable prediction: we should be able to find evidence that moral conduct on average was better in premodern Europe as dominated by theistic belief than in modern Europe as dominated by secularism.  So, for example, it would seem that Cottingham would have to challenge the evidence for declining violence in history as surveyed by Steven Pinker and others, because declining violence would seem to show moral improvement in European history.  (I raised these questions in my written comments.)

Cottingham did not answer my questions in my written comments about whether he agreed with me that natural law can correct the divine law of the Bible--for instance, with respect to the violence and the support for slavery in the Bible.  Nor did he answer my questions about whether he agreed with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI in asking forgiveness for the faults of the Catholic Church in promoting religious violence.

In the Bible and in human history generally, we often see theistic believers inflicting violence on innocent people.  If natural law allows us to condemn this as wrong, doesn't that show that we need an empiricist ethics to correct the mistakes of a theistic ethics?

In the next session of the conference, Nicholas Lombardo (The Catholic University of America) and I spoke in favor of the idea that natural law can arise from our sociable nature (the second question).  Lombardo argued that the Mosaic law presupposes natural law.

I then summarized some of my arguments for Darwinian science as supporting Thomistic natural law. Patrick Riordan (Heythrop College, London) responded to my paper with three points. 

He questioned my methodology in arguing that I selectively picked out only those kinds of animal behavior that might look good to us (like monogamous mating and parental care of offspring) and passed over the brutal violence of animal behavior that we would see as bad. 

For his second point, he quoted MacIntyre's observation (in Dependent Rational Animals) about my "illuminating argument, designed to show how Aquinas's theses about the natural law are compatible with a biological understanding of human nature" (125); and he suggested that it was better to say that human biological nature was "compatible" with Thomistic natural law than to make the stronger claim that human biological nature "supports" Thomistic natural law.

For his final point, he indicated that I had failed to properly distinguish human "goods" and the "precepts" of natural law.

I didn't respond to the last point, because I didn't understand exactly what he was saying, which is probably my fault.

To the first point, I answered by indicating that I had not in fact ignored the harsher side of animal behavior.  For example, in the section of my paper on monogamy among birds, I noted that while monogamous birds might be socially monogamous, they were not always sexually monogamous or genetically monogamous, because they showed many "extra-pair copulations," and thus they did not satisfy Aquinas's standards for monogamy.

To the second point, I answered that Aquinas's heavy reliance on animal biology did seem to indicate that he saw this as "support" for natural law as rooted in biological nature.

MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals is a fascinating recognition by MacIntyre that Aristotelian and Thomistic moral philosophy depends upon biological nature.  In After Virtue, MacIntyre had argued that he wanted his defense of Aristotelian virtue ethics to be independent of Aristotle's "metaphysical biology," which was not rationally defensible.  But then after reading my Darwinian Natural Right, MacIntyre changed his mind; and in Dependent Rational Animals, he declared: "I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible" (x).  He saw two reasons for this.  The first is that one must explain how human biology makes a moral life possible for human beings.  The second is that human biology explains the human vulnerability that makes us dependent on other human beings--particularly, the dependence of the young and the old.  Dependent Rational Animals lays out the biological basis of the moral life.

In the question period, James Bernard Murphy (Dartmouth College) made the argument that if our evolved natural desires were adaptive for the ancient environments of our evolutionary ancestors, they might not be adaptive for us today, and thus not normative for us.  So, for example, if our ancestors evolved a taste for sugar, that would not necessarily be good for us today, where the abundance of sugar allows us to ruin our health with too much sugar.  My response was to say that this illustrates the need for judgment in managing our desires.  Our desire for health can motivate us to see the need to moderate our  desire for sugar.  This was part of the general point that I made in my oral presentation that while the good is the desirable, the desirable is not necessarily whatever we happen to desire at any moment.  We often discover that we have been desiring something that is not truly desirable for us, and our practical judgment allows us to correct our mistake.  Moral judgment thus requires a combination of reason and desire, as Aristotle argued.

Cottingham also questioned me about whether Thomistic natural law requires a teleology that is denied by Darwinian biology.  I answered by pointing to the argument in my paper that Darwinian biology relies on immanent teleology, although it rejects cosmic teleology.  Cottingham and others at the conference argue that Thomistic natural law really does require a cosmic teleology--that is, the conception of the whole world as a benign order created by a providential God.

The next session of the conference was on Amanda's third question and entitled "Positive State Law as a Guide to (Natural) Justice."  Gerald Postema (University of North Carolina School of Law) spoke about his paper on Matthew Hale's "common-law naturalism."  The respondent was Judge James Crawford of the International Court of Justice.

Against the claim of some scholars that Hale was a legal positivist, Postema argued that Hale saw the common law as derived from natural law.  Postema did not respond to my questions in my written comments about whether Hale's endorsement of witchcraft trials and of the principle that husbands cannot be tried for raping their wives shows that Hale's judgment of natural law was distorted by his bias against women.  I can only assume that Postema believes that Hale's legal judgment in these cases of witchcraft and rape is irrelevant to any account and assessment of his jurisprudence.

Judge Crawford said that he was not a scholar of Hale's jurisprudence, and therefore he could not comment on Postema's interpretation of Hale.  Instead of that, he spoke about the failures of the "additive theory of international law" as proposed by legal positivists--the idea that international law can be explained as custom that has been recognized as law.  He questioned whether it as possible to rccognize custom as law without seeing the norm inherent in custom, suggesting that custom must manifest some natural standard of justice.  He also questioned how it was possible to do something for the first time and recognize this as custom.

The next speaker was James Stoner (Louisiana State University) summarizing his paper on how we can rightly distinguish the work of the legislator from the work of the judge in American constitutionalism by applying Aquinas's distinction between human law as a determination of natural law and human law as a deduction from natural law: the American legislator is concerned with determination, while the American judge is concerned with deduction.

In my written comments, I said that Stoner's paper is confusing, because he says that there is a "mixture of deduction and determination in legislative activity" (18), and he also says that "a mixture of deduction and determination appears as well in the reasoning of judges" (18).  In an email message to me, Stoner said that in claiming that determination ought to belong to the legislative power alone, he was not saying that determination alone ought to belong to the legislative power; and he said that the mixture for judges came from judges being bound by the determinations of others.

In his oral presentation, Stone did not explain what he meant in his paper by "the natural law moment in constitutionalism" (17).  But he seemed to say that even without any explicit reference to natural law in the Constitution, all law, including American constitutional law is either a determination of or a deduction from natural law.

What does this say, for example, about the antebellum debate over the constitutional status of slavery?  If slavery was contrary to natural law, does that mean that the constitutional protection for slavery should have been overturned by an appeal to natural law, because an unjust law is not really a law?  Or does natural law allow for some prudential compromise with slavery insofar as it is constitutionally protected? 

Nigel Simmonds (University of Cambridge) was the respondent for Stoner's paper.  But instead of responding to Stoner's paper, Simmonds briefly summarized the central idea of his book Law as a Moral Idea (2008).  In that book, he argued that "law is the set of conditions for jointly possible freedoms."  Although he presented this as a Kantian idea, it could just as easily be seen as a Lockean idea.  Oliver Wendell Holmes famously ridiculed the idea that law is "a brooding omnipresence in the sky."  But Simmonds argued that there is a sense in which this really is true.  Law is not just a heap of statutes and precedents, as Holmes seemed to claim, because law really is an ideal edifice, in that laws must be interpreted as a good faith attempt at doing justice, and adjudication is the working out of the law as an ideal edifice of justice.

The final session of the conference was on "When and Why are Positive Laws a Guide to Justice?"  James Murphy began by speaking about his paper on the modern idea of human rights as possibly a modern expression of the idea of natural law.  He spoke of two possible theological arguments and one possible philosophical argument justifying human rights.

The most commonly expressed theological argument, and the one that Murphy accepts as a Catholic, is the teaching of the Old Testament that all human beings are created in the image of God, which can be interpreted as declaring the equal moral dignity of human beings as endowed by their Creator with rights, which is affirmed in the famous language of the Declaration of Independence.

The second theological argument is attributed by Murphy to Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Calvinist who affirms total human depravity and thus denies that human beings deserve to be treated with equal dignity.  According to Wolterstorff, the moral dignity of human beings supporting human rights must be seen as an undeserved gift from God based on the New Testament teaching that all human beings will be redeemed on the Last Day for an eternal life in friendship with God.  This must mean that Wolterstorff is a Christian Universalist who denies the orthodox doctrine of eternal punishment in Hell.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 does not appeal to any such theological ideas, because such ideas will not be accepted by those many human beings who lack such religious beliefs.  There is, however, Murphy argues, a philosophical justification for human rights that does not require religious belief--"our genetic capacities for personhood" that are shared by all human beings as long as they retain the human genome. 

In fact, the Universal Declaration of the Human Genome and Human Rights, ratified by the United Nations in 1998, the 50th anniversary of the first Universal Declaration, affirms this: "The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity."

And yet, Murphy's respondent--Raffael Fasel (a graduate student at the University of Cambridge)--insisted that the only philosophical justification for human rights would have to based on normativity through and through without any reference to biological facts, because there will always be human beings with genetic disorders that deprive them of any potential for full personhood.  Fasel thus expressed the common assumption among many modern moral philosophers that the only proper grounding for ethics must be a transcendental normativity beyond the empirical nature of human life.  Oddly, Fasel did not identify any argument for the transcendental normativity of human rights, although he seemed to think there was such an argument somewhere.

I would argue that the Christian arguments for human rights based on Biblical theology fail, because the idea of the equal moral dignity of all human beings as endowed with equal human rights cannot be found in the Bible, in either the Old or the New Testaments.  For the Bible, human dignity is not equal and universal, it is hierarchical and comparative.  The Bible accepts the patriarchal household and social inequalities: wives are commanded to obey their husbands, and slaves are commanded to obey their masters.  Moreover, those who have been chosen by God as His people are superior to those He has rejected.

One Biblical verse that might be cited as supporting the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God's image is in Psalm 8: "For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor."  But then, in the immediately following Psalm 9, the psalmist thanks God for destroying his enemies: "the enemy is wiped out--mere ruins forever--you have annihilated their cities, their memory has perished" (9:6).  Of course, the Bible is full of such bloody violence as God annihilates Israel's enemies in the most brutal ways.  Speaking to Moses, God commands the "curse of destruction" in which every living being in a town must be killed--men, women, and children (Deuteronomy 20:10-20)--although the young women who are still virgins should be kept alive so that they can be raped by the Hebrew men (Numbers 31).  Enemies can also be enslaved.  And, indeed, the Bible generally supports slavery.

Moreover, the violence commanded by God is directed not just to external enemies but also to Hebrews who displease God.  A long list of crimes--including children cursing their parents, homosexuality, and blasphemy--are to be punished with death.

Some parts of the New Testament seem supportive of universal humanitarianism.  But even so, Jesus is clear that when he returns for the Day of Judgment, he will separate the sheep from the goats, the sheep being rewarded with eternal life, and the goats punished with eternal fire (Matthew 25:31-46).  Amazingly, Wolterstorff glosses over this, implying that all human beings will be redeemed, and none will go to Hell eternally.  Moreover, the final book of the New Testament--Revelation--conjures up bloody apocalyptic battles at the end of history, which has inspired fanatical religious violence for thousands of years, including the recent terrorism of the Islamic State.

Doesn't this show us that we need natural law here to correct the Bible?  Isn't that what many Christians and Jews today have done in reinterpreting the Bible as teaching love, tolerance, and liberty--in other words, liberalism?

Fasel's objection to Murphy--that biological facts cannot provide the normativity necessary for true morality--is the same objection that Frances Cobbe made to Darwin's evolutionary account of the moral sense as rooted in human nature.  Cobbe insisted that human morality cannot be fully explained without some belief in "the Kantian doctrine of a Pure Reason, giving us transcendental knowledge of necessary truths," or in the idea that "the voice of Conscience is the voice of God."  She warned that Darwin's rejection of the Kantian view of morality as transcending natural human experience would destroy morality.  Similarly, contemporary philosophers like Richard Joyce assume that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts.  If there are no such eternal moral facts, Joyce laments, then morality becomes fictional.

But as I have argued in a previous post, Joyce admits that a strong sense of transcendent moral duty can often support an authoritarian morality that leads to atrocities.  Fanatical religious believers have carried out their divinely commanded moral duty to kill infidels.  Many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantians who believed in "eternal values" and in Nazism as fulfilling that eternal moral order.  The Nazi regime was organized around a strict communitarian morality of sacrificing selfish interests for the good of the community.

Impicitly, Joyce and other Kantians must ultimately subordinate their categorical imperatives of moral duty to the hypothetical imperatives of prudential calculation, because they recognize that we don't know whether any "must-be-doneness" really must be done unless we have judged that the outcome will be desirable for us!  If so, then they end up agreeing with me that "the good is the desirable," and that as I have argued in a previous post, moral judgments are hypothetical imperatives that give us reasons for acting only insofar as they serve what is truly desirable for us.

Even Kant implicitly conceded this.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he said that everyone desires to obey his categorical imperatives, because everyone--"even the most hardened scoundrel"--desires the "greater inner worth of his own person" [einen grosseren inneren Wert seiner Person] that comes only from obeying the moral law and thus becoming a "better person" (Ak 4.454).  In this way, Kant's categorical imperatives are always implicitly reduced to a hypothetical imperative.  If you desire to be a better person with a sense of self-worth, then you ought to obey my categorical imperatives.  This, then, rests on two kinds of empirical claims--that human beings most desire personal self-worth and that obeying Kant's categorical imperatives will achieve that desired end.  So, contrary to what Fasel assumed, our sense of transcendental normativity is ultimately grounded in natural human desires as shaped by human evolution.

The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights clearly indicates that the inherent dignity of humanity supporting human rights arises not from divine creation, nor from some cosmic normativity, but from  natural human evolution.  One product of human evolution is sympathy and the moral emotions of approval and disapproval.  The behavior of human rights activists shows that defending human rights depends not on appealing to theological or metaphysical normativity, but on appealing to sympathy and the moral emotions.  Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch tell stories or show us pictures of human cruelty.  The more disturbing and vivid the stories and the pictures of cruelty, the more likely we are to feel some identification and thus sympathy with the victims.  We then feel outrage against the perpetrators of such cruelty, and we want them to be stopped and perhaps punished. 

William Schulz is the former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA.  In his book In Our Best Interest: How Defending Human Rights Benefits Us All, he dismisses appeals to God or Nature or Reason as insufficient to sustain the morality of human rights.  Instead, he agrees with David Hume's, Adam Smith's,  and Charles Darwin's argument that morality depends on sympathy and the moral emotions that incline us to care for our fellow human beings.  He concludes: "Robert Frost once observed that poems begin with a lump in the throat, and I think human rights do too. . . . far better than by appeals to God or Nature, is to point to the capacity to identify with others, the capacity for human empathy or solidarity" (24).

The history of the expansion of human rights is therefore to be understood as what Hume and Darwin called "a progress of sentiments" as human beings have been persuaded to extend their sympathetic concern to ever wider circles of humanity.

As I have said in previous posts (here and here), what we see here is a reflective sentimentalism.  Moral judgment combines reason and emotion.  Pure reason by itself cannot move us to action without the motivational power of emotion or desire.  That emotional motivation is not irrational, because we can reflect on our emotions and judge them as warranted or not.  So, for example, we might feel outrage against a government that we believe has violated human rights by attacking innocent people, but if we discover that those people were not really innocent, then our outrage might be allayed.  Human rights activists don't make Kantian arguments about the normativity of human rights.  Rather, they make factual arguments about how people are being treated designed to elicit our sympathy for the victims of cruelty and our outrage against the perpetrators of cruelty.

The failure to recognize how human rights depend on reflective sentimentalism was one weakness in the paper of the last speaker at the conference--Nicholas McBride (University of Cambridge).  He identified the prohibition against torture as the classic example of an "exceptionless norm."  But as I indicated in my written comments on his paper, McBride did not explain the legal history or moral psychology of this modern rule against torture. 

The condemnation of legal torture as a violation of human rights--as "cruel and unusual punishment"--is a clear illustration of how sympathy and the moral emotions generally have sustained the modern movement to human rights.  Historian Lynn Hunt has explained this: "Torture ended because the traditional framework of pain and personhood fell apart, to be replaced, bit by bit, by a new framework, in which individuals owned their bodies, had rights to their separateness and to bodily inviolability and recognized in other people the same passions, sentiments, and sympathies as themselves" (Inventing Human Rights, 112).  Notice that the appeal here is to the natural facts of human nature and human experience without any appeal to theological or metaphysical normativity.