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 Case For (and Against) Life After Death (5): Does Morality Require the Cosmic Justice of Heaven and Hell?

Does human morality necessarily presuppose the reality of Heaven and Hell?  That's the argument of Dinesh D'Souza, and that's the common assumption of those who believe in Heaven and Hell.  This is also implicit in the Kantian dualistic assumption that we live in "two worlds," as manifested in the is/ought dichotomy.

According to D'Souza, "the presupposition of an afterlife and the realization of the ideal of cosmic justice makes sense of our moral nature better than any competing hypothesis" (168).  He explains:

"Unlike material objects and all other living creatures, we humans inhabit two domains: the way things are, and the way things ought to be.  We are moral animals who recognize that just as there are natural laws that govern every object in the universe, there are also moral laws that govern the behavior of one special object in the universe, namely us.  While the universe is externally moved by 'facts,' we are internally moved also by 'values.'  Yet these values defy natural and scientific explanation because physical laws, as discovered by science, concern only the way things are and not the way they ought to be.  Moreover, the essence of morality is to curtail and contradict the powerful engine of human self-interest, giving morality an undeniable anti-evolutionary thrust.  So how do we explain the existence of moral values that stand athwart our animal nature?  The presupposition of cosmic justice, achieved not in this life but in another life beyond the grave, is by far the best and in some respects the only explanation.  The presupposition fully explains why humans continue to espouse goodness and justice even when the world is evil and unjust." (166-67)

There are at least four dubious claims here that I deny.  First, the claim that an ought cannot be derived from an is.  Second, that morality must contradict human self-interest.  Third, that evolutionary science cannot explain morality.  And, finally, that morality is impossible without the cosmic justice of heavenly rewards and hellish punishments in the afterlife.

HOW WE MOVE FROM IS TO OUGHT
In everything we do, we move from "is" to "ought" through some hypothetical imperative in which "ought" means a hypothetical relationship between desires and ends.  For example, "If you desire to be healthy, then you ought to eat nutritious food."  Or, "If you desire safe air travel, you ought to seek out air planes that are engineered for flying without crashing."  Or, "If you desire the love of friends, you ought to cultivate personal relationships based on mutual respect and affection and shared interests."

Such hypothetical imperatives are based on two kinds of objective facts.  First, human desires are objective facts.  We can empirically discover--through common experience or through scientific investigation--that human beings generally desire self-preservation, health, and friendship.  Second, the causal connection between behavior and result is an objective fact about the world.  We can empirically discover that through eating good food, flying on safe air planes, and cultivating close personal relationships, we can achieve the ends that we desire.  For studying these objective facts, the natural sciences of medicine, engineering, and psychology can be instructive.  It is false, therefore, for D'Souza to say that science cannot tell us anything about the way things ought to be.

D'Souza might respond by saying that even if science can tell us about the ought of a hypothetical imperative, it cannot tell us about the ought of a moral imperative, which must be categorical rather than hypothetical.  But this would ignore the fact that if a categorical imperative is to have any motivating truth, it must become a hypothetical imperative.  So when Kant or some other moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why?  And ultimately the only final answer to that question of motivation is that obeying this ought is what we most desire to do if we are rational and sufficiently informed.

Even Kant implicitly concedes this.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says 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 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.

On this point and others here, I am indebted to Richard Carrier, "Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them)," in John W. Loftus, ed., The End of Christianity (Prometheus Books, 2011), 333-64.

Similarly, D'Souza's categorical imperatives are reducible to a hypothetical imperative.  If you desire to attain the eternal rewards of Heaven and to avoid the eternal punishments of Hell, then you ought to obey D'Souza's categorical imperatives.  And, again, it becomes an empirical question as to whether this is what all human beings naturally desire and as to whether obeying those imperatives really will achieve those desired ends.

Some of my previous posts on hypothetical imperatives and the fallacy of the is/ought dichotomy can be found here, here, here, here., and here.

THE EVOLUTIONARY MORALITY OF SELF-INTEREST
D'Souza argues that evolutionary science cannot explain morality because morality requires selfless behavior that contradicts self-interest, and any evolutionary explanation of morality would have to reduce morality to self-interest.  Even when evolutionary psychologists try to explain the evolution of altruism, they assume that altruism is a form of extended or long-term selfishness.  For example, Robert Trivers' account of "reciprocal altruism" assumes that animals will be generous with others if they eventually get something beneficial in return.  But this is not really altruism if we understand altruism as utterly selfless benevolence.

But this ignores the fact that every choice to do one thing rather than another is a choice for one course of action as more desirable than another.  And thus all intentional action is motivated by self-interest or self-love.  We do what we do because we think it's better for us to do it.  Of course, we can often be mistaken about this.  What we most desire is not what we happen to desire at any moment, but what we would desire if we were rational and sufficiently informed.  All of this is open to scientific study because it's all a matter of empirical study.  We can empirically study what human beings desire through the psychological study of the proximate and ultimate motivations of human beings.  We can also empirically study the causal connections between behavior and outcomes.

These empirical studies--both through common sense experience and through natural science--show that human self-interest does not dictate selfishness, because being the naturally social animals that we are, we can see that the social virtues are necessary for our happiness.

D'Souza implicitly contradicts his claim that morality cannot be based on self-interest, because he assumes that a morality of cosmic justice in the afterlife appeals to our self-interest:  he assumes that our pursuit of happiness requires attaining the rewards of Heaven and avoiding the punishments of Hell.

Some posts on the problem of self-interest and altruism can be found here and here.

THE COSMIC JUSTICE OF HEAVEN AND HELL
If I am right that the good is the desirable, and that the natural good for human beings is determined by the natural desires of their evolved human nature, then the good is relative to the nature of the human species.  If we had evolved to be a radically different kind of species, with different natural desires, then our morality would have been different.  Thus, our morality is anthropological rather than cosmological.  There is no cosmic right or wrong beyond the right or wrong that we know as human beings.

D'Souza rejects this because he thinks that morality must necessarily be cosmic--there must be some cosmic right and wrong that is true independently of our human nature.  What's the source of that cosmic morality?  Apparently, it's God's command.  We know what is good only insofar as we know what God has commanded us to do, with the threat of eternal punishment in Hell for our disobedience.

It seems, therefore, that D'Souza embraces a divine command theory of morality--that the good is whatever God commands, and the bad is whatever he prohibits.  But D'Souza never explicitly defends this position or answers the objections to such a position.  How do we know that what God commands is always good if we don't already know what the good is for us?

And is eternal punishment in Hell really good?  How do people earn such punishment?  If we are all sinful, as Christianity teaches, do we all go to Hell?  Or do we avoid Hell by becoming Christians?  It's clear that many Christians have done some evil deeds.  And it's clear that some non-Christians have done some good deeds.  Does this influence their fate in the afterlife?  D'Souza is never very clear about this.  And he never responds to those Christians today who doubt the reality of eternal punishment in Hell, because they think a merciful God should allow all to enter Heaven.

D'Souza generally speaks favorably about all those people who believe in an afterlife.  But sometimes he suggests that some of those who have such a belief will be punished in Hell.  He indicates, for example, that "the Islamic suicide bombers are not being attended by beautiful virgins in paradise but rather by big hairy guys with tattoos" (187).  How does he know that?  Does he believe that some people who sincerely believe they are obeying God's commands are mistaken, and God will punish their mistake with eternal punishment?  Is D'Souza convinced that the intentional killing of innocent people must always be wrong?  If so, how does he explain those many places in the Bible where God commands killing innocent people?

Such questions point to the implausibility of any divine command theory of morality.

Some of my posts on the divine command theory can be found here, here., and here.

John Mizzoni's Defense of Kantian Ethics as Compatible with Darwinian Evolution

In May of last year, I read a book manuscript for Lexington Books--John Mizzoni's Evolution and the Foundations of Ethics.  I recommended that it be published, because no other book has done what this book does in surveying the application of evolutionary reasoning to all the major theories of ethics that have been developed by contemporary moral philosophers.

In my report, I did state some disagreements with Mizzoni's arguments.  My most fundamental disagreement was my denial of Mizzoni's claim that Kantian ethics was compatible with evolutionary science's account of human nature and human morality.  I argued that the general conclusion emerging from evolutionary moral psychology is that the Humean sentimentalists are right, and the Kantian rationalists are wrong.  This is clear, for example, in the studies of psychopaths that show that their moral poverty arises not from any deficiency in their capacity for rational judgment but from their lack of moral emotions.  I also argued that in order to defend Kantian ethics, Mazzoni simply assumed, without any supporting argumentation, the truth of Kant's dualistic separation of is and ought as belonging to two worlds--the phenomenal and the noumenal, the realm of nature and the realm of freedom.

I elaborated these points in a post.

Mizzoni's book has now been published.  The book shows some revisions in response to my suggestions and criticisms.  He responds to my major criticisms in two passages.  In the section of his book where he responds to "potential objections," he has added one of my objections.  He writes:

"PO5.  By premising my inquiry on the landscape of moral philosophy, I am making unwarranted assumptions.  It might be objected that by assuming the distinction between is and ought, the distinction between metaethics and normative ethics, and separating biological inquiry from normative inquiry, I am assuming a Kantian ethic and a Kantian metaphysics.  The objection implies that I have characterized all normative ethics as Kantian and thereby disallowed a Darwinian explanation of morality."

"I do not think that observing a gap between statements of fact (is) and statements of ethics (ought), or a distinction between metaethics and normative ethics, or separating biological inquiry from normative inquiry commits one to a Kantian ethics, much less a Kantian metaphysics."

 ". . . I take the is/ought dichotomy to be simply a logical distinction: Is-statements function differently than ought-statements.  Likewise, the distinction between normative ethics and metaethics is a logical one.  They are different types of inquiry that ask different questions.  A normative ethical theory must answer the question: What should I do?  A metaethical theory must answer the question: What is the status of ethics?  Normative ethics offers practical guidance about what constitutes ethical conduct."

"So further, since we are agents, we must decide how to act, and we do this from a first-person perspective.  Since metaethics engages with more general questions about the status and origins of ethics, it is a level of inquiry operating at more of a third-person perspective.  Biological science, also, provides a third-person perspective, thus it can be distinguished from a normative first-person perspective ethics."

 "These seem to me to be minimalist assumptions, not uniquely Kantian assumptions, so I do not think I am characterizing all normative ethics as Kantian ethics.  Kant may observe these distinctions, and attempt to shore them up with an extravagant metaphysics, but a Kantian metaphysics is not required to draw these logical distinctions.  As I have mentioned, all ethical theories have some kind of background metaphysical assumptions . . ., but those assumptions can usually be separated from the specifically ethical components.  I think contemporary Kantian deontologists have done this, for example, and sought only to develop and defend the ethical components of Kantian deontology" (238-39).

Mizzoni recognizes that there are many Darwinian critics of Kantian ethics--such as Edward Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Joshua Greene, and Michael Ruse--who say that Kant's categorical imperative does not conform to the world of human experience as studied by biological science.  But Mizzoni denies that this undermines Kantian ethics:  "The fact that a normative ethical principle advises what ought to be done, as opposed to advising to continue what is done in the natural world is not thereby a mark against that normative principle.  Normative principles are meant to do more than simply describe and align with the world as it is" (190).

Gould has defended an ethics of hypothetical imperatives--such as the Golden Rule as a principle based on enlightened self-interest--as being superior to a Kantian ethics of categorical imperatives.  Mizzoni responds: "His point against Kantian deontological ethics is that it doesn't fit with a complex and sloppy world.  Maybe so.  But should it?  Kant's point about ethics being about the realm of freedom is because ethics is meant to free us from the world around us" (187).

"The best case for supporting a Kantian ethic," Mizzoni observes, "is to emphasize it as a normative ethic, not as a description of how ordinary humans make moral judgments" (180).  In a footnote to this sentence, he writes: "There may be some passages in Kant, where, caught up in enthusiasm, he may blur the distinction between offering an account of how humans ordinarily make moral judgments, and how humans should make moral judgments" (192).

Is Kant "caught up in enthusiasm" when he tries to believe that acting according to categorical imperatives--acting by pure reason without any motivation by emotion or desire--is possible?  If ought implies can, then the idea of a categorical ought is indefensible in so far as it is impossible.

If the biological study of human nature shows that acting according to hypothetical imperatives is possible, but acting according to categorical imperatives is not, then hasn't biological science thus denied Kantian ethics? 

Mizzoni briefly recognizes the contrast between hypothetical and categorical imperatives in only two passages (187, 192 n. 4).  And he fails to see that the impossibility of acting according to categorical imperatives means that Kantian ethics is impossible, and therefore that the only possible form of ethics is an ethics of hypothetical imperatives that combine reason and desire.  (I have written about the ethics of hypothetical imperatives in a previous post.)

I can agree that Kant was at least partly right in recognizing the importance of general principles in moral judgment--principles like the Golden Rule.  The Humean and Smithian sentimentalists also recognize this: they have defended a natural morality of informed desire, in that the good is the desirable, and reason judges how best to satisfy the desires in the most harmonious way over a whole life.  What Kant says about the universality of moral reasoning is close to what Smith says about the reasoning of the impartial spectator.

But Kant was mostly wrong in assuming that moral judgment ought to be based on pure reason without any motivation by desire or emotion.  This cannot be correct because it's impossible.

In fact, Mizzoni implicitly concedes this when he speaks about the attempts by Mark Timmons and Michael Slote to save Kantian ethics by "joining a deontological normative ethics with an expressivist metaethic" to create a "sentimentalist deontology" (180-81).  But Mizzoni does not recognize that this saves Kantian ethics by destroying it!

This same problem comes up in Mizzoni's response to my argument about the moral poverty of psychopaths:

"Research done on psychopaths reveals that they have no trouble carrying out abstract reasoning, yet they do show deficits in experiencing moral emotions.  Some have taken this as a refutation of Kantian ethics, since if Kant's theory is correct, then supposedly one need not experience emotions to reach ethical conclusions, but only use one's reason in employing the categorical imperative.  But this argument assumes t hat merely because a person has t he capacity to engage in abstract reasoning, then the person will generate defensible ethical conclusions.  Why should we assume that?  As mentioned above, Kant does recommend that we should strive to be idealized rational agents, but he does not assume that people are ideal rational agents.  Also, are psychopaths familiar with the formal ethical principle that Kant calls the categorical imperative?  And even people who are familiar with the principle can still use the principle poorly, such as the Nazi Adolph Eichmann who famously stated that he was familiar with Kant's principle and used it on a daily basis throughout his life (Arendt 1963)" (180).

Mizzoni misses the point in my argument about how the moral poverty of psychopaths refutes Kant.  If Kant were right in claiming that normative moral judgments must be based on pure reason without emotional motivation, then we would assume not that a psychopath "will generate defensible ethical conclusions,"  but that a psychopath "can generate defensible ethical conclusions."  Unless Mizzoni shows us that it is possible for psychopaths to make defensible moral judgments and act on them, even though psychopaths do not feel moral sentiments, he has not refuted my argument for how the biological study of psychopaths denies Kantian ethics.

So if Kant were running for an elected office, I might endorse this political attack ad:

Olsen's Criticisms: The Naturalistic Fallacy and Emotivism

Olsen accuses me of committing the naturalistic fallacy (18-19, 154-55, 180-81,184-86, 190-91, 193-95).  I have written a long series of blog posts--a dozen or more--responding to this objection.  Olsen is totally silent about what I have said, so I have no way to know what he thinks is wrong with my response.  My most recent post on this was published a few months ago, and it contains links to the many previous posts published during the time that Olsen was writing his dissertation.

In everything we do, I have argued, we move from "is" to "ought" through some hypothetical imperative in which "ought" means a hypothetical relationship between desires and ends.  For example, "If you desire to be healthy, then you ought to eat nutritious food."  Or, "If you desire safe air travel, you ought to seek out air planes that are engineered for flying without crashing."  Or, "If you desire the love of friends, you ought to cultivate personal relationships based on mutual respect and affection and shared interests."

Such hypothetical imperatives are based on two kinds of objective facts.  First, human desires are objective facts.  We can empirically discover--through common experience or through scientific investigation--that human beings generally desire self-preservation, health, and friendship.  Second, the causal connection between behavior and result is an objective fact about the world.  We can empirically discover that through eating good food, flying on safe air planes, and cultivating close personal relationships, we can achieve the ends that we desire.  For studying these objective facts, the natural sciences of medicine, engineering, and psychology can be instructive.  It is false, therefore, to say that science cannot tell us anything about the way things ought to be.

We can restate this in Aristotelian terms--as suggested by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics:  If you want to live a happy or flourishing life, if you want to have a deep and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, then you need to cultivate the moral and intellectual virtues that are instrumental to achieving deep and lasting satisfactions in life.  A science of ethics can study the empirical claims of such a hypothetical imperative.

Olsen might respond by saying that even if science can tell us about the ought of a hypothetical imperative, it cannot tell us about the ought of a moral imperative, which must be categorical rather than hypothetical.  But this would ignore the fact that if a categorical imperative is to have any motivating truth, it must become a hypothetical imperative.  So when Kant or some other moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why?  And ultimately the only final answer to that question of motivation is that obeying this ought is what we most desire to do if we are rational and sufficiently informed.

Even Kant implicitly concedes this.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says 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 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.

Olsen's insistence on the is/ought dichotomy is closely connected to his criticism of my argument as being crudely emotivist (122, 160, 187-90, 193-94).  To show that I am an emotivist who believes that morality is merely a matter of following moral emotions, Olsen quotes from Darwinian Conservatism where I speak of Adam Smith as claiming that "our natural feelings often diverge from what purely rational principles might dictate" (160).  Olsen ignores the fact that on that same page of Darwinian Conservatism (43), I indicate that my point is that "the moral sense is not a product of pure reason alone but is rather a humanly unique capacity for moral judgment that combines social emotions and rational reflection."  Thus, as I indicate on the next page (44), "morality requires a combination of reason and emotion."  In our mental and moral life, the intellect is how, the emotions why.

In Darwinian Conservatism (35-45, 124-29) and in Darwinian Natural Right (17-21, 24-25, 46-49, 70-73,  223-30), I have argued against those like Peter Singer who make the Kantian claim that morality is based on an abstract logic of pure reason alone without emotion or desire.  Psychopaths prove that this cannot be true.  Psychopaths are often intelligent people with a high capacity for abstract reasoning.  But they are moral monsters because they do not feel moral emotions such as guilt, shame, pity, and love, and thus they can deceive, injure, and even brutally torture and murder their fellow human beings without any moral feelings.

Although he does not elaborate the point, Olsen seems to accept Singer's claim that morality is based purely on abstract reasoning free from moral emotion or desire (160).  As I have indicated in one of my posts on Singer, he has suggested doubts about this in the "Afterword" to a new edition of The Expanding Circle.  He notes "how ambivalent I was about the idea of ethics being objectively true and rationally based," and now "I no longer believe that this argument succeeds."

Olsen thinks that in grounding morality on 20 natural desires, I have no rational principle by which to rank those desires when they conflict, and thus I have no way to resolve moral disputes.  He makes this point with the example of slavery.  He writes:

"If we consider his example that slavery is naturally wrong because it violates the desire for justice as reciprocity, the question which it is most important that Arnhart answers is this:  If 'justice as reciprocity' is only one of our natural desires, why should it trump the others, such as the desires for wealth and social ranking, both of which are on Arnhart's list?  He refers favorably to Lincoln's comments about being 'consistent,' but the question is why the slave owner should care about consistency.  If morality can be based in full on our desires, Arnhart's argument must presumably be, at the very least, the (quite plausible) claim that we have a natural desire for logical consistency.  But, if this is the unstated premise, is Arnhart then saying that we are more motivated by this particular motivation than by other motivations, or that we ought to be?  If the latter: why?  Is it because satisfying our desires for reciprocity and logical consistency are more conducive of our own long-term happiness than satisfying the desire for selfish gain through exploitation of others--or because they are somehow morally superior?  Again, either Arnhart is sneaking morality in the back door, since he has nothing beyond desires to ground his ought, or he must assume that satisfying our desires for reciprocity, justice and logical consistency is more conducive of long-term happiness for the agent than satisfying other, competing desires.  Even if this latter assumption could be defended empirically, however, it might be asked whether neo-Darwinian natural right theory has produced a persuasive reason for why slavery is wrong if the reason is derived solely or primarily from a strong desire against it on the part of would-be slave owners?  Similarly, Arnhart finds it relevant to argue that female genital mutilation makes intercourse less pleasurable for men, and that it in part for this reason does not really serve men's interests either" (193).

Olsen here is referring to my account of Lincoln's five arguments for why slavery is wrong, which I identify as the historical argument, the Euclidean argument, the biblical argument, the intuitionist argument, and the biological argument (Darwinian Natural Right, 193-201).  Lincoln shows that any attempt to defend slavery as just either contradicts the American political tradition, or contradicts itself, or contradicts the Bible, or contradicts our natural sense of right and wrong, or contradicts our shared humanity as members of the same species.  The fifth argument--the biological argument for our shared humanity--is the most fundamental since the other arguments presuppose it.

Olsen is specifically pointing to what I call the Euclidean argument.  Lincoln reasons as follows:

"If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.--why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?

"You say A. is white, and B. is black.  It is color, then; the lighter, have the right to enslave the darker?  Take care.  By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.  You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them?  Take care again.  By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.

"But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another.  Very well.  And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you."

No rational person would argue for his own enslavement.  But any person who argues for the enslavement of others must appeal to some human difference that could be the basis for his own enslavement.  Therefore, no rational person can endorse slavery without contradicting himself.  Human beings differ in an infinite number of ways--color, intellect, interests, and so on--but each person believes that he has a right to liberty simply by virtue of his humanity--his human desire to be free from exploitation.  Yet if I affirm that I as a human being have a right to liberty, then to be consistent, I must also affirm that other human beings have a similar right.

In our natural human inclination to secure the benefits of social cooperation while protecting ourselves from being exploited by others, we appeal to reciprocity as the fundamental principle of fairness in social relationships, which makes it impossible for us to justify enslaving others without contradicting ourselves.  "This is a world of compensation," Lincoln declared, "and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave."  This is so because human social life is a world of reciprocal exchange in which exploiters are ultimately punished by the moral aggression of those they exploit.

But as long as slavery satisfies the slaveholder's natural desires for wealth and status, Olsen asks, why shouldn't he allow this to override his natural desire for justice as reciprocity?  I have a twofold answer.  First, as a fact of human psychology, while a psychopathic slaveholder would feel no desire for justice as reciprocity, normal slaveholders would; and indeed Southern slaveholders either elaborated moral justifications for slavery as beneficial for the slaves, or they admitted their moral guilt in being caught in a tragic conflict between self-interest and justice.

Second, the ultimate natural enforcement of justice as reciprocity is the natural inclination of the exploited to retaliate against their exploiters.  The deepest fear of the Southern slaveholders was slave insurrection, because they knew that their slaves were not naturally adapted to slavery, and, on the contrary, they were naturally adapted for resisting their enslavement by violence if necessary.  As classical liberals like John Locke have noted, the ultimate ground of natural rights is the natural human tendency to violent resistance to oppression.

Olsen seems to think that he has an alternative to this grounding of natural right in natural desires.  But he never explains what that alternative is.  He does imply that he thinks there is some Kantian cosmic normativity that is grasped by pure abstract reason without any grounding in human desires, but he never clearly explains or defends this idea.

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.

Is There a Culturally Evolved Prejudice against Atheists as Immoral?

Can we be good without God?  If not, should we fear atheism as promoting immorality?  Is atheism contrary to our evolved natural desire for religious belief? 

I have written about this in a previous post, which includes links to other posts.

Now we have new research by Will Gervais and his colleagues indicating that people around the world have a culturally evolved prejudice against atheists (Gervais et al., "Global Evidence of Extreme Intuitive Moral Prejudice against Atheists," Nature Human Behaviour 1 (2017): 1-5).

Here's the abstract:

"Mounting-evidence supports long-standing claims that religions can extend cooperative networks.  However, religious prosociality may have a strongly parochial component.  Moreover, aspects of religion may promote or exacerbate conflict with those outside a given religious group, promoting regional violence, intergroup conflict, and tacit prejudice against non-believers.  Anti-atheist prejudice--a growing concern in secular societies--affects employment, elections, family life, and broader social inclusion.  Preliminary work in the United States suggests that anti-atheist prejudice stems, in part, from deeply rooted intuitions about religion's putatively necessary role in morality.  However, the cross-cultural prevalence and magnitude--as well as intracultural demographic stability--of such intuitions, as manifested in intuitive associations of immorality with atheists, remain unclear.  Here, we quantify moral distrust of atheists by applying well-tested measures in a large global same (N = 3,256; 13 diverse countries). Consistent with cultural evolutionary theories of religion and morality, people in most--but not all--of these countries viewed extreme moral violations as representative of atheists.  Notably, anti-atheist prejudice was evident even among atheist participants around the world.  The results contrast with recent polls that do not find self-reported moral prejudice against atheists in highly secular countries, and imply that the recent rise in secularism in Western countries has not overwritten intuitive anti-atheist prejudice.  Entrenched moral suspicion of atheists suggests that religion's powerful influence on moral judgments persists, even among non-believers in secular societies."

Their sample was drawn from 13 countries on 5 continents, which included highly secular societies (for  example, Netherlands, Finland, and China) and highly religious societies (for example, United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, and India) with diverse religious histories (including countries with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and secular majorities).

Gervais, Ara Norenzayan, and their colleagues have defended a cultural evolutionary model of religion--arguing that the transition from small foraging bands to large agrarian states required extended cooperation of strangers that was made possible by the emergence of religions with moralistic Big Gods, who enforced social cooperation by rewarding the good and punishing the bad in an afterlife.  People who live in large cities need to have norms enforced among strangers by third party punishment, and God is the ultimate third party punisher.  This most recent research was to test one of the predictions from this theory--that human beings around the world should have an intuitive fear of atheists as immoral.

In this research, participants were asked about this scenario:

"When a man was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing stray cats and other animals in his neighborhood."

"As an adult, the man found that he did not get much thrill from harming animals, so he began hurting people instead.  He has killed 5 homeless people that he abducted from poor neighborhoods in his home city.  Their dismembered bodies ae currently buried in his basement."

"Which is more probable?

"1. The man is a teacher.

"2 (a). The man is a teacher and does not believe in any gods.

"2 (b). The man is a teacher and is a religious believer."

Half of the participants were given 2 (a), and the other half were given 2 (b).  They were also given other kinds of questions to distract them from noticing that this was an experiment to test for stereotyping and prejudice.

In asking the participants to judge probability, bias is indicated if they commit the "conjunction fallacy."  The conjunction rule for the qualitative law of probability states that the probability of a conjunction--the probability of 1 and 2--cannot exceed the probability of its constituents--the probability of 1 or 2.   (That so many people commit the conjunction fallacy was seen by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as an example of the illogical heuristics of the human mind.)  If the participanats cannot see that the man being a teacher is more probable than the conjunction, they are showing an illogical bias--a bias either against atheists or against religious believers.

The results showed a greater prejudice against atheists than against religious believers: there was an overall conjunction error rate probability of 0.58 for atheist targets, but only 0.30 for religious targets.  So, people were roughly twice as likely to view extreme immorality--being a murderous psychopath--as representative of atheists relative to believers.

The most surprising result was that even people who identified themselves as atheists showed this same prejudice against atheists as being inclined to extreme immorality!

There is one anomaly in this research, however, that is left unexplained.  Of the 13 countries represented in this study, Finland and New Zealand do not show any bias against atheists.  For Finland, the atheist error rate is .28, and the religious error rate is .26.  For New Zealand, the atheist error rate is .38, and the religious error rate is .29.  Finland shows no bias, and New Zealand very little.  So what goes here?  Are the people of Finland and New Zealand just better in understanding the logic of probability?  Or are they unusual in being free of the global prejudice against atheists?

So is it really unfair to assume that atheism promotes immorality?  The answer from Gervais and his colleagues is complicated.  On the one hand, their evolutionary theory of moralistic religion as necessary for securing large-scale cooperation beginning with the Neolithic transition to agrarian states assumes that religious belief does support morality.  On the other hand, they say that the intragroup cooperation secured by religious belief also promotes distrust of those outside the group, so that religious believers are thrown into conflict with those who do not share their religious beliefs, as shown by religious persecution and religious wars.

Moreover, they argue that as modern societies become ever more secularized, we can see the religious support for morality as a ladder that can be kicked away once we have climbed to the top.  (Friedrich Nietzsche uses this same metaphor of the history of religious cultures as a ladder that we can climb to the top and then kick away in Human, All Too Human [6-7, 292].)  We can see this in highly secularized societies like Denmark and the Scandinavian countries that are highly cooperative and peaceful, although fervent religious belief has almost completely disappeared.  We can explain this as showing how morality can evolve from natural moral sentiments without any necessity for religious belief in a moralistic God.

And yet their research suggests that even in many highly secularized societies, there is still some bias towards believing that morality requires religious belief; and so cultural evolution away from this might be slow.  Norenzayan has suggested an analogy to the cultural evolution of literacy.  For 99% of human evolutionary history, humans have had oral language, and so learning to speak is naturally easy for them.  But writing is a relatively recent invention, and for most of its history, writing and reading were restricted to a small educated elite.  Only in the past two centuries, has modern education spread literacy to the great majority of human beings around the world.  Similarly, he suggests, religious morality has been central to our cultural evolution for thousands of years, and it is only recently that secular morality has begun to prevail in some societies.  We might expect this evolutionary trend to eventually prevail.

As an example of this evolutionary trend, consider a point that came up in my posts on Tom West's book on the American Founding--the debate over religious tests for holding public offices.  One way for legally enforcing religious morality is to have a religious test for public office.  Originally, all of the state constitutions except for Virginia and New York had such tests.  For example, members of the Pennsylvania state legislature had to swear: "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration."

The argument for religious tests was that religion supports morality.  A speaker at the Massachusetts convention for ratifying the U.S. Constitution condemned the "no religious test" clause of the Constitution: he argued that no religious tests "would admit deists, atheists, etc., into the general government; and, people being apt to imitate the examples of the court, these principles would be disseminated, and, of course, a corruption of morals ensue."  So here we see the very prejudice against atheists detected by Gervais and his colleagues.

But why then did the founders at the Constitutional Convention vote unanimously and without any controversy for "no religious tests" in the Constitution?  And why did all of the states with religious tests abolish them during the founding period, thus following the example of the national constitution?

To explain this, West says that Chris Beneke "rightly notes" that in "founding America . . . libertarian principles . . . repeatedly triumphed over local prejudices and discriminatory laws."

So now it seems that the "founding consensus" turned to "libertarian principles" dictating that the legal enforcement of religious belief is not necessary to avoid a corruption of morals.  Is this an example of the cultural evolution towards secularized morality expected by Gervais and Norenzayan?

Do we lose anything in moving from religious morality to secular morality?  West thinks that the American founders thought that something would be lost.  In Kantian language, secular morality is a morality of hypothetical imperatives, while religious morality is a morality of categorical imperatives.  A religious morality allows us to see natural rights as sacred.  A secular morality allows us only to see those natural rights as conducive to the pursuit of happiness.  The sacredness of God-given rights is lost in the move to secularized natural rights as instrumental for human happiness (West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, 95).

Michael Egnor seems to be making the same point in his response (published by the Discovery Institute's "Evolution News") to the debate over Gervais' article. (Egnor is a neurosurgeon who teaches at Stony Brook University.)  Can you be good without God?  Egnor's answer is that you cannot be good if God doesn't exist; but if God does exist, you can be good even if you don't believe God exists.

If God exists, Egnor explains, then as Moral Lawgiver, He can provide the cosmic transcendent standards of good and evil.  And insofar as that Moral Law is a natural law "written in our hearts" (Romans 2:15), atheists can intuitively feel the transcendent weight of that Moral Law, even though they deny the divine source of that Law.

But if God does not exist, as the atheists say, then there can be no such thing as good and evil.  There are only human opinions about what serves human welfare, about what we happen to like.  But what we like or dislike gives us only hypothetical imperatives about what serves the needs of human nature, human culture, and human individuals.  This cannot give us the categorical imperatives woven into the cosmic order by the Moral Lawgiver.

I have defended the hypothetical imperatives of natural goodness here and here.  All natural law reasoning depends on hypothetical imperatives that have a "given/if/then" structure: Given what we know about the nature of human beings and the world in which they live, if we want to pursue happiness while living in society with each other, then we ought to adopt a social structure that conforms to human nature in promoting human happiness in society.  So, for example, given what we know about human vulnerability and human propensities to violent aggression, if we want to pursue happiness, peace, and prosperity in our society, then we ought to have laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft.  Consequently, the laws against murder, rape, assault, and theft are natural laws.

The biblical theist will say that this natural law has been "written in our hearts" by God.  The atheist will say that this natural law belongs to our evolved human nature.

Although Egnor criticizes the atheist for not recognizing the metaphysical ground of morality in God's command, Egnor seems to concede that as a practical matter, this intellectual mistake does not prevent the atheist from living a morally good life.

Of course, Egnor has to face up to all the problems that come with a divine command theory of morality.  For example, would Egnor say that murder is good whenever God commands it, as when God commanded Abraham to murder his son Isaac?

Looking Good: The Darwinian Ethics of Beauty in the Human Body as an Evolved Natural Desire

In Darwinian Natural Right, I said that if the good is the desirable, then human ethics is natural insofar as it satisfies natural human desires that naturally win social approval as useful or agreeable to oneself or to others.  There are at least twenty natural desires that are manifested in diverse ways in all human societies throughout history, because they belong to that universal human nature that evolved on Earth at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, from 250,000 to 11,000 years ago.

The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a natural standard for judging social and political life as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances.  Insofar as a liberal social order allows for the fullest satisfaction of the natural human desires for most people, it can be recognized as the best regime.

One of the twenty natural desires is the desire for beauty.  Human beings generally desire beauty in the human body.  Everywhere human beings distinguish beauty and ugliness in bodily appearance.  They esteem the bodily signs of health and vigor.  They adorn their bodies for pleasing display.  Men tend to find women physically attractive when their physical appearance shows signs of youthful nubility. Women tend to find men physically attractive when their physical appearance show signs of formidibility, muscularity, and high status.  Almost all human beings spend a substantial amount of time every day of their lives engaging in activities that will enhance their bodily attractiveness.

Being a beautiful human being has many benefits.  Beautiful people are perceived to be desirable as sexual mates.  They tend to have more friends.  They are judged to be more trustworthy than people who are not so beautiful.  Beautiful people are more likely to be hired for a job.  And they are more likely to be elected to public office.

In Darwinian Natural Right, I surveyed some of the evidence and arguments supporting this understanding of the natural human desire for beauty.  But in the 25 years since the publication of that book, there has been a lot of new empirical and theoretical research that has deepened the evolutionary account of this natural desire for beauty.  

The latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior has an article that surveys much of this research: Marta Kowal et al., "Predictors of Enhancing Human Physical Attractiveness: Data from 93 Countries," EHB 43 (2022): 455-474.  With over 200 references, it is a good bibliographic essay on the relevant research over the past 25 years, as well as a report of a new research project.  

THE HUMAN DESIRE TO ENHANCE ONE'S BEAUTY

This article reports online survey data (collected through the Qualtrics website) from 93,158 participants across 93 countries.  Participants were asked about their behaviors that might enhance their physical attractiveness--such as using cosmetics, grooming their hair, wearing clothing, caring for bodily hygiene, and exercising or following a diet that might improve their physical appearance.  Almost all of the participants (99%) reported spending over 10 minutes a day engaged in such activities.  Women spent on average almost 4 hours a day enhancing their beauty, while men spent on average about 3.6 hours a day.  Younger people (ages 18-30) and older people (over 50) spend more time in such beauty-enhancing activities than do middle-aged people (30-50).  People who are dating spend much more time in these activities than do people who are in a committed relationship, married, or single.

I have written about the pitfalls in online survey research, which can be seen in this article.  The most obvious problem is that survey research relies on the self-reporting of participants, which often is not completely accurate or honest.  But the survey for this article does avoid one of the common problems for online surveys in that most of the participants (about 95%) were not compensated for their participation.  Moreover, the participants were screened by an "attention check" to make sure they were careful in their reading and answering of the questions.  And unlike many other such survey research projects, this one is distinctive in two ways--the large scale of the cross-cultural data and the fact that it is not limited to just one theoretical framework.

Of course, the data for this research is historically limited to the contemporary world, but the article does begin with a one-paragraph survey of the deep historical and prehistorical evidence for the natural human desire for beauty and enhancement of one's bodily appearance.  There is archaeological evidence for the ornamental use of red ochre by Neanderthals and our hominid ancestors as early as 250,000 to 150,000 years ago.  There is evidence for marine shell bead ornaments from 120,000 years ago.  Later, burials from around 25,000 years ago show grave goods that were probably bodily ornaments--such as bone beads, bracelets, fox pendants, stone pendants, and shells.  Ancient Egyptian archaeology shows evidence for cosmetics, skin oils, and dyes for facial adornment.

Marta Kowal and her colleagues use their analysis of their survey data as a way of testing hypotheses about the desire for beauty suggested by five theoretical frameworks: the mating market perspective, the pathogen prevalence theory, the biosocial role theory, the cultural media perspective, and the individualism-collectivism continuum.  Although Kowal and her colleagues clearly favor the mating market perspective, they do indicate that these five frameworks are compatible with one another, and that there is some support in the data for all five.

The mating market perspective starts from the assumption that the desire for sexual mating is one of the primary drives of our evolved human nature.  (Sexual mating is on my list of the twenty natural desires.)  The desire for bodily beauty can then be explained as rooted in the desire for mating.  When people seek mates on the "mating market," physical attractiveness is one of the traits that is in high demand.  When David Buss and his colleagues surveyed the mating preferences of more than ten thousand people in thirty-seven countries on six continents and five islands, they found that, contrary to a common view that mating preferences vary arbitrarily across cultures, there was a universal pattern of mating desires that conforms to the Darwinian theory of human mating strategies.  And part of that universal pattern is that both men and women rank "good looks" as one of the top ten traits they value in a mating partner.  (Buss's research was prominent in my account of the mating desire in Darwinian Natural Right, 132-37.)

In all thirty-seven countries, Buss found that men prefer to mate with women who are young and physically attractive, while women prefer to mate with men who have economic resources and high social status.  Since the reproductive success of a man depends predominantly on the fertility of his mate, Darwinian theory correctly predicts that the physical cues to fertility in women--such as youth, smooth skin, regular facial features, and good body tone--are sexually attractive to men around the world.  Since the reproductive success of a woman depends predominantly on the ability and willingness of her mate to invest resources in her and her children, Darwinian theory correctly predicts that the social cues to such resources in men--such as wealth, status, older age, and ambition--are sexually attractive to women around the world; and women who appear young and physically attractive will be more successful in mating with men who have the most desirable traits.

The pathogen prevalence theory of the desire for beauty is also rooted in Darwinian theory.  Assuming that the need for protection from infectious diseases has been important in human evolution, as it has been for other mammals, we can imagine that natural selection has favored human preferences for cues of health and absence of pathogens; so that "good looks" or physical attractiveness could be a proxy or indicator of a healthy absence of pathogens.  And, indeed, some studies have shown that cues of pathogenic infection reduce attractiveness.  So, for example, this might explain why women with imperfections in their skin want to conceal them with cosmetics.

The biosocial role theory explains the desire for beauty as emerging from the interaction of the sexually dimorphic biological traits and the cultural norms for gender roles in a society.  Biological differences between women and men--such as women's childbearing and nursing of infants and men's greater strength and physical robustness--create a sexual division of labor.  But these biologically based gender differences can be either accentuated or moderated by culturally learned norms.  So that the more patriarchal cultures will promote stereotypical gender roles, while the more egalitarian cultures will soften the gender/sex differences.  So while the mating market perspective emphasizes the universality of the gender/sex differences, the biosocial role theory emphasizes the importance of culture in either promoting or downplaying those differences, although the differences can never be totally eliminated.

The cultural media perspective sees the desire for beauty as largely shaped by the influence of mass media.  Social media presents us with ideal images of male and female beauty, and we then try to conform to those feminine and masculine standards of beauty, even though they might be unattainable for most of us.

Finally, the individualism-collectivism continuum explains our conceptions of beauty as deeply influenced by whether our attitudes are more individualistic or more collectivist.  A collectivist attitude favors group interests over individual interests.  An individualist attitude elevates self-interest over group interests.  We might predict that individuals and countries with more individualist attitudes will promote the idea that individuals should spend a lot of time enhancing their beauty.

From these five intellectual frameworks, Kowal and her colleagues generated eleven hypotheses to be tested against the data from their survey.  Here is how they frame those hypotheses in Figure 1 of their article:

Mating Market Perspective:

H1:  Women spend more time enhancing their beauty than do men.

H2:  Individuals of reproductive age spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals not of a reproductive age.

H3:  Single individuals spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals in romantic relationships.

Pathogen Prevalence:

H4:  Individuals from countries with higher pathogen prevalence spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals from countries with lower pathogen prevalence.

H5:  Individuals with a more severe history of pathogenic diseases spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals with a less severe history of pathogens.

Biosocial Role Theory:

H6:  Women from countries with higher gender inequality spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women from countries with lower gender inequality.

H7:  Women conforming to traditional gender roles spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women who conform less to traditional gender roles.

Cultural Media Perspective:

H8:  Individuals who spend more time on social media spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals who spend less time on social media.

H9:  Individuals spend more time watching television spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals who spend less time watching television.

Individualism-Collectivism Continuum:

H10:  Individuals from more i8ndividualistic countries spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals from more collectivist countries.

H11:  Individuals with more individualistic attitudes spend more time enhancing their beauty than do individuals with more collectivist attitudes.

The survey data gathered by Kowal and her colleagues support Hypothesis 1, because on average women report that they do spend more time enhancing beauty than do men.  It's the difference between about 4 hours a day on average for women as compared with 3.6 hours a day for men.  Remarkably, however, the time is about equal on average for men and women at around age 30.

This data only partly confirms Hypothesis 2, because both the youngest and the oldest individuals spent more time enhancing their physical attractiveness than did middle-age individuals (30-50 years old), and because the oldest women spent more time enhancing their beauty than did the youngest women.  The most dramatic evidence here against the mating market perspective is that postmenopausal women engage in so much activity for enhancing their attractiveness, even though this cannot increase their reproductive fitness.  Could this be explained by the possibility that the average lifespan for women in the Pleistocene Epoch was so short that few women lived past menopause, and thus there was no evolutionary pressure for postmenopausal women to reduce their investment in beauty-enhancing behavior?  Moreover, we might think that older women have to work harder than do younger women in trying to preserve the appearance of youthful female beauty.

The data do not support Hypothesis 3--that single people spend more time enhancing beauty than do those who are not single--because people who were dating spent more time enhancing beauty than did single people (on average 24 minutes more a day), married people (26 minutes more), and people in committed relationships (29 minutes more).  This could be seen as consistent with the mating market perspective, if we say that some single individuals are people who are not pursuing a mate, and therefore they feel less need to look good for the sake of attracting a mate.

Thus, the survey by Kowal and her colleagues provides some confirmation for the mating market perspective. 

The survey data do not show that in countries with high pathogen stress, people spend more time enhancing beauty than do people in countries with low pathogen stress, which denies Hypothesis 4.  The survey data do show, however, that individuals with high pathogen stress spend more time enhancing beauty than individuals with low pathogen stress, which confirms Hypothesis 5.

In this way, this survey research provides only slight confirmation for the pathogen prevalence theory.

This research strongly confirms the biosocial role theory by showing that women in countries with higher gender inequality tend to spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women in countries with lower gender inequality (Hypothesis 6), and by also showing that women who conform to traditional gender roles tend to spend more time enhancing their beauty than do women less inclined to conform to traditional gender roles (Hypothesis 7).

This research also strongly confirms the cultural media perspective by showing that people who spend more time on social media and watching television tend to spend more time improving their appearance (Hypotheses 8 and 9).

By contrast, this research provides little support for the individualism-collectivism continuum, because highly individualistic countries do not show greater time spent on enhancing beauty than in highly collectivistic countries, and because highly individualistic individuals show only slightly more time spent on enhancing beauty than highly collectivist individuals.

THE DARWINIAN ETHICS OF BEAUTY: THE FALLACY OF THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

I see this research by Kowal and her colleagues as supporting my project in Darwinian Natural Right by showing empirical evidence that the desire for beauty is indeed one of the twenty natural desires that constitute the ethical life of evolved human nature.  But as is often characteristic of the evolutionary psychologists who want to be "value-free" in their research, Kowal and her colleagues do not recognize the implications of their work for the sort of Darwinian ethics that I defend.  As I have indicated in various posts, the evolutionary psychologists have been slow to accept the idea of evolutionary ethics, although in recent years, evolutionary explanations of ethics have become a vibrant field of study.

Evolutionary scientists often object to the idea of evolutionary ethics by saying that it commits the naturalistic fallacy by falsely inferring a moral ought from a factual is.  So, Kowal and her colleagues might say that from the fact that human beings do desire beauty, we cannot rightly infer that they ought to desire beauty.

But this ignores the fact that human ethics is ultimately based on hypothetical imperatives that are open to scientific study.  In everything we do, we move from "is" to "ought" through some hypothetical imperative in which "ought" means a hypothetical relationship between desires and ends.  For example, "If you desire to be healthy, then you ought to eat nutritious food."  Or, "If you desire safe air travel, you ought to seek out airplanes that are engineered for flying without crashing."  Or, "If you desire the love of friends, you ought to cultivate personal relationships based on mutual respect and affection and shared interests."  Or, "if you desire to look beautiful, you ought to engage in those activities that will enhance your beauty."

Such hypothetical imperatives are based on two kinds of objective facts.  First, human desires are objective facts.  We can empirically discover--through common experience or through scientific investigation--that human beings generally desire self-preservation, health, friendship, and beauty.  Second, the causal connection between behavior and result is an objective fact about the world.  We can empirically discover that through eating good food, flying on safe airplanes, cultivating close personal relationships, and enhancing our beauty, we can achieve the ends that we desire.  For studying these objective facts, the natural sciences of medicine, engineering, and psychology can be instructive.  It is false, therefore, for to say that science cannot tell us anything about the way things ought to be.

Some scientists might respond by saying that even if science can tell us about the ought of a hypothetical imperative, it cannot tell us about the ought of a moral imperative, which must be categorical rather than hypothetical.  But this would ignore the fact that if a categorical imperative is to have any motivating truth, it must become a hypothetical imperative.  So when Kant or some other moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why?  And ultimately the only final answer to that question of motivation is that obeying this ought is what we most desire to do if we are rational and sufficiently informed.

Even Kant implicitly concedes this.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he says 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 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.

Some of my previous posts on hypothetical imperatives and the fallacy of the is/ought dichotomy can be found here, here, here, here., and here.