Throwing Stones to Kill from a Distance: The Evolutionary Origin of Lockean Liberalism?

We humans are unique among all animals in our ability to throw projectiles at high speeds and with amazing accuracy.  We must wonder how this is possible and why this has evolved as a trait of our human nature.

This image shows the differences in the position of the shoulder between chimpanzees (left) and humans (right).  These differences can be seen in both the muscular anatomy and in the bony anatomy of the scapula (shoulder blade).

This allows humans to store elastic energy (like a slingshot) in the tendons, ligaments, and muscles crossing the shoulder.  This energy is then used to catapult the arm forward in a fast motion, which allows very rapid throws.  This was made possible by changes in the upper body that appeared first almost 2 million years ago in the species Homo erectus.  This allows humans to throw projectile missiles (such as rocks and spears) with deadly speed and accuracy (Roach et al. 2013).  Today, we see that most clearly in professional baseball pitchers who can throw baseballs at 90 to 100 miles an hour, again and again.  By contrast, chimpanzees trained to throw can throw a ball only about 20 miles per hour, even though adult chimpanzees are physically stronger in some ways that adult humans. 

This helped our hominin ancestors to kill from a distance in hunting dangerous animals.  The archeological evidence for intensified hunting behavior among our hominin ancestors supports this conclusion.

This capacity for killing at a distance also helped our human ancestors to punish other humans in exercising what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature."  Locke recognized that punishment could be costly for the punisher, because "such resistance many times makes the punishment dangerous, and frequently destructive, to those who attempt it" (ST, sec. 126).  The costs of punishment come mostly from provoking violent attacks from those who are being punished.  So the power to punish could never be effectively executed until the risky costs of punishment could somehow be reduced, so that the immediate costs of coercive punishment could be less than its immediate benefits in enforcing social cooperation.

Locke never explains how this could have happened. One likely explanation is that human beings became the first animals capable of killing at a distance by throwing rocks at their victims.  Once this developed as a technique for hunting large animals, it could then be used to kill or threaten other humans who deserved punishment.  Many people could throw stones at a misbehaving individual, and the punishers could do this with little risk to themselves. Thus the evolved human power to punish violators of the law of nature through killing at a distance could be a crucial evolutionary adaptation for Lockean liberalism.  The expansion of social cooperation enforced by cheap punishment of cheaters has evolved from the expanding range of the weapons for remote killing--from rocks to bow-and-arrow to guns to nuclear bombs.

Anthropologists studying nomadic hunter-gatherers have recognized their remarkable egalitarianism--that all adult individuals are equally free in their autonomy and freedom from domination by others.  This looks like Locke's state of nature.  Anthropologists have seen that this egalitarianism requires "leveling mechanisms"--means by which individuals can prevent bullies from dominating them.

One of the critical leveling mechanisms is the equal access to weapons for remote killing.  Anthropologist James Woodburn (1982) noted that in hunter-gatherer bands, all males have equal access to weapons.  "Hunting weapons are lethal not just for game animals but also for people.  There are serious dangers in antagonizing someone: he might choose simply to move away, but if he feels a strong sense of grievance that his rights have been encroached upon he could respond with violence" (436).  Some men will try to dominate others by giving orders or by stealing wives and property, but this is punished by violent retaliation.  Woodburn observes:  "In normal circumstances, the possession by all men, however physically weak, cowardly, unskilled or social inept, of the means to kill secretly anyone perceived as a threat to their own well-being not only limits predation and exploitation; it also acts directly as a powerful levelling mechanism."  For Thomas Hobbes, this was the ground for equality in the state of nature: despite all the inequality in human traits, no one was so superior as to be free from the threat of being killed by those he might try to dominate.

Biologist Paul Bingham has developed this idea into a general theory of human social evolution (Bingham 1999, 2000; Bingham and Souza 2009; Okada and Bingham 2008).  Humans are unique because they are the first animals to be able to kill adult members of their species remotely.  Every other unique feature of humans--such as language, abstract reasoning, morality, and so on--is simply an effect of that one cause.

Bingham argues that the uniquely human capacity for killing at a distance explains the uniquely human capacity for kinship-independent social cooperation.  The evolution of all organisms creates the problem of conflicts of interest that impede social cooperation, because all organisms must compete for the resources necessary for survival and reproduction.  A common way to manage those conflicts of interest is to cooperate with close kin, because kinship creates overlapping interests.  So animals cooperate with close kin, and cooperation with non-kin is typically very limited.  So, for example, among mammals, mothers commonly care for their offspring.  Some animals--such as social insects--cooperate in huge colonies, but this depends on kinship: in ant and bee colonies, most of the (female) members of the colony work to rear their sisters (and a few brothers).

Like other animals, humans cooperate with their kin, but they also cooperate with non-kin much more expansively than is the case for other animals.  To do this, they must manage the problem of conflicts of interest.  And they do that by employing the cheap punishment made possible by remote killing to enforce cooperation: cheaters and free-riders are deterred from their misbehavior by the costs of punishment.

There is a lot of archaeological, anatomical, and ethnographic evidence to support this theory that the uniquely human capacity for throwing stones to kill from a distance initiated the uniquely human evolution of kin-independent social cooperation in a manner that sustains Lockean liberalism (Bingham and Souza 2009, 147-204; Isaac 1987; Marzke et al. 1988; Aiello and Dean 1990; Roach et al. 2013).

Beginning around 2.3 to 2.5 million years ago, there are archaeological deposits in East Africa of stone flakes and fossil prey bones indicating the evolution of hominid scavenging and hunting.  There is also evidence of the evolution of elite human throwing associated with this early scavenging/hunting.  There are piles of stones that archaeologists call "manuports" because the archaeological context suggests that they were moved across the landscape.  Some of these manuports are of the size and shape that would make them good ammunition for throwing at prey animals or at other humans.

There is also skeletal evidence that the first fully human ancestors emerging about 2 million years ago had evolved the anatomical traits--in the hands, arms, torso, pelvis, and feet--that make humans uniquely good throwers.  The hands and arms of our primate ancestors are adapted more for climbing than for throwing, because they were adapted for an arboreal life.

Darwin noticed how skillful hunter-gatherers in Tierra del Fuego were in throwing stones forcefully and accurately.  By contrast, he saw that monkeys and apes were clumsy throwers.  He thought this was one uniquely human trait arising from bipedality and the design of the human hand and arm, which might help to explain human dominance over the Earth (Darwin 2004, 68-72).

Other European explorers of the New World and the South Pacific discovered how deadly this rock throwing could be, because aboriginal people could attack European intruders with a bombardment of stones (Isaac 1987).

If Bingham is right, that evolved uniquely human capacity for elite throwing was the cause for the evolution of the big human brain that arises from a uniquely human life history that depends upon human kin-independent social breeding (Bingham and Souza 2009, 120-146).  "It takes a village to raise a human child," and unlike the social breeding of other animals, the human village that helps in the rearing of offspring includes many adults of both sexes who are not close kin.  It also includes many adult members who are armed for the projection of coercive threat that enforces the village's non-kin cooperation.

A newborn chimp has a very big and heavy brain.  But a newborn human has an even bigger and heavier brain.  Moreover, the human infant's brain will grow much faster and longer.  This growth will extend even into young adulthood.  And while a chimp mother can provide enough food and care for her offspring by herself, a human mother must provide so much more food and better food and so much more care for her offspring that she cannot do this without help from others.  A human mother needs to be a member of a large society--at least as large as a foraging band--that will help in the rearing and protection of her child.  And this society will extend beyond her kin to include unrelated adults.  That's why "it takes a village to raise a human child."

But then we might wonder why the help of her husband would not be enough for her.  Maybe, "it takes a couple to raise a child!"  That's Locke's solution to the mother's problem.  He argues that like many birds, human beings are pair-bonding animals because mothers need the help of fathers in providing food, rearing, and protection for the children, when mothers alone cannot do this.  Human beings are naturally cooperative breeders in families of mothers, fathers, and children (FT, secs. 86-89; ST, secs. 77-84).  Some evolutionary anthropologists today support this idea--that pair-bonding is the crucial evolutionary adaptation in human evolution.

But this doesn't explain why other pair-bonding animals like birds didn't follow the human evolutionary path towards large communities of non-kin members.  And it doesn't explain why human pair-bonded families depend on the support of that large community of both kin and non-kin members.

The proper explanation, Bingham suggests, is that humans are unique in their capacity for non-kin social cooperation, which supports the uniquely human life history for sustaining the growth and rearing of that big human brain.  Non-kin cooperation is impossible without some way to manage the conflicts of interest that necessarily arise among individuals who are unrelated to one another.  Humans are unique because they stumbled into a clever trick for managing such conflicts of interest by the low-cost punishment of cheaters and free-riders through killing or threatening to kill them from a distance.

In foraging bands, most or even all adult individuals have access to such coercive threat, which has a levelling effect in securing each individual's autonomy and freedom from domination.  Consequently, power is democratized in foraging societies, and social norms are formulated and enforced through a broad consensus.

But then, Bingham argues, with the emergence of archaic states, coercive power was concentrated in ruling elites that could enforce their will on the great multitude.  To restore or at least approximate the equal liberty of the hunter-gatherer society--what Locke called the state of nature--access to the weapons of coercive threat would have to be once again equalized.

Here Bingham has rediscovered an insight of some political philosophers--that the structure of political order depends on whether the access to weapons of coercive power is confined to a few or open to many.  In the Politics, Aristotle writes:

"Since there are four parts of the multitude, the farming, the working, the merchant, and the laboring elements, and four parts of the city are useful with a view to war, the horse-rearing, the heavy-armed, the light-armed, and the seafaring elements, wherever it happens that the country is suitable for horses, conditions are naturally apt for instituting a strong oligarchy (for the preservation of the inhabitants derives from a force of this sort, and horse-rearing is done by those possessing larger properties); where it is suitable for heavy arms, the next sort of oligarchy (for the heavy-armed element is made up of the well off more than the poor).  Light-armed and naval forces, on the other hand, are wholly popular.  At present, therefore, wherever this sort of multitude is numerous, and there is a factional split, the oligarchs often get the worst of the contest. . . . This is the way the people prevail over the well off in factional splits: being light-armed, they can easily contend against a force of cavalry and heavy-armed troops" (1321a5-21).

REFERENCES

Aiello, L., and C. Dean. 1990. An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy. San Diego: Academic Press.

Bingham, Paul. 1999. "Human Uniqueness: A General Theory." Quarterly Review of Biology 74: 133-69.

Bingham, Paul. 2000. "Human Evolution and Human History: A Complete Theory." Evolutionary Anthropology 9: 248-57.

Bingham, Paul, and Joanne Souza. 2009. Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe. Charleston, SC: BookSurge Publishing.

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

Isaac, Barbara. 1987. :"Throwing and Human Evolution." The African Archaeological Review 5: 3-17.

Marzke, M. W., et al. 1988. "Gluteus Maximus Muscle Function and the Origin of Hominid Bipedality." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 77: 519.

Okada, D., and Paul Bingham. 2008. "Human Uniqueness--Self-Interest and Social Cooperation." Journal of Theoretical Biology 253: 261.

Roach, Neil T., et al. 2013. "Elastic Energy Storage in the Shoulder and the Evolution of High-Speed Throwing in Homo." Nature 498: 483-86.

Woodburn, James. 1982. "Egalitarian Societies." Man 17: 431-51.

The Darwinian Lockean Liberalism of "the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms"

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  That's the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, and that's the constitutional statement of the Lockean natural right that has been exercised in black armed self-defense.

As I have said in a previous post on the decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court has correctly interpreted the Second Amendment as recognizing the right to keep and bear arms as an individual right, a natural right, and a limited right.  The "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is not only for service in a state militia, because it is also necessary for individual self-defense, and therefore it is an individual right.

It is also a natural right or what William Blackstone called "the natural right of resistance and self-preservation" through armed self-defense.  Similarly, St. George Tucker, in his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, spoke of the "right of self-preservation" as allowing a citizen to "repel force by force" when "the intervention of society in his behalf may be too late to prevent an injury."  This was what Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature" in the state of nature--the natural power and propensity of individuals to use force to repel and punish violence or the threat of violence against themselves.

Locke explained this right to punish threats to one's self-preservation as rooted in the biological psychology of self-ownership--that every human being senses or feels that he owns his own body and thus has the right to protect that body's existence and well-being.  We now know that this sense of each person’s self-ownership arises in the evolved neuroanatomy of the brain to serve the survival and well-being of the human animal.  We can understand this as expressing interoception—the neural perception of the state of the body--and the evolved propensity to guard that body from threats.

We can also explain now how this propensity to punish violent threats to our existence and well-being was made more effective by the Darwinian evolution of the human power for killing at a distance--first by throwing rocks, then by shooting arrows, and later by firing guns that shoot projectiles.  Paul Bingham has shown how much of human evolution can be explained by the evolution of killing at a distance.

Locke recognized that punishment could be costly for the punisher, because "such resistance many times makes the punishment dangerous, and frequently destructive, to those who attempt it" (ST, sec. 126).  The costs of punishment come mostly from provoking violent attacks from those who are being punished.  So, the power to punish could never be effectively executed until the risky costs of punishment could somehow be reduced, so that the immediate costs of coercive punishment could be less than its immediate benefits in enforcing social cooperation.

Locke never explains how this could have happened. One likely explanation is that human beings became the first animals capable of killing at a distance by throwing rocks at their victims.  Once this developed as a technique for hunting large animals, it could then be used to kill or threaten other humans who deserved punishment.  Many people could throw stones at a misbehaving individual, and the punishers could do this with little risk to themselves. Thus, the evolved human power to punish violators of the law of nature through killing at a distance could be a crucial evolutionary adaptation for Lockean liberalism.  The expansion of social cooperation enforced by cheap punishment of cheaters has evolved from the expanding range of the weapons for remote killing--from rocks to bow-and-arrow to guns and other weapons.

Moreover, Bingham has provided a Darwinian evolutionary explanation confirming the insight of those political philosophers (like Aristotle and Machiavelli) who claimed that the structure of political order depends on whether the access to weapons of coercive power is confined to a few or open to many.  Oligarchic regimes must ensure that the people are disarmed.  Democratic regimes need the people to be well-armed.  That explains why overturning the American Southern regime of white freedom to dominate blacks required black armed self-defense.

And yet this Lockean individual and natural "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is still a limited right because everyone has an equal right not to be harmed by gun violence, unless someone has committed some offense that justifies violent punishment.  For that reason, while people have a right to be armed for self-defense or for resistance to tyranny, they do not have a right to keep and bear the most dangerous weapons in circumstances that are likely to risk harming innocent people.  This allows for reasonable gun control laws.

In my next post, I will consider how this right of the people to keep and bear arms has been manifested in the history of black armed self-defense in America.

The Atlatl (Spear Thrower) in the Cultural Evolution of Lockean Liberalism

                                                 Weapon Masters Videos on the Atlatl

A Fragment of an Atlatl Dated between 15.2-15.9 Thousand Years Ago Made of Engraved Antler with the Hook Still Intact, from El Miron Cave, Cantabria, Spain (Morales and Straus 2008)

Beginning about 1.8 million years ago, our human ancestors could enforce social cooperation by threatening cheaters and free riders with killing from a distance through throwing rocks or javelins.  The effective lethal range of these weapons is about fifteen meters.  Paul Bingham estimates that with such weapons up to about ninety people could encircle a small group of free riders or cheaters while remaining in range.  In this way, Locke's executive power of the law of nature could coercively enforce social cooperation among no more than ninety individuals.  And so, for about 1.7 million years, that was the limit for human non-kin social cooperation, because the scale of their cooperation was limited by the range of their weapons for remote killing.

Then about 50,000 to 30,000 years ago, something happened to produce what paleoanthropologists call "behaviorally modern humans" (Bar-Yosef 2002; Hill et al. 2009; Klein 2009).  Their anatomy was the same as earlier humans, but their behavior showed a stunning increase in their mental complexity and abstraction.  They were able to migrate out of Africa, and by about 20,000 years ago, they had migrated throughout Eurasia, Australia, North America, and South America.  This began the human dominance of the whole planet. Their tools become more complex and sophisticated.  Their ornaments became more abstract and esthetically evocative.  Their art showed a distinctly human sense of beauty, as in this cave art:

There was also an expansion in the scale of social cooperation, as indicated by large "public works" such as huge earthen mounds and by evidence for long-distance trade networks.  If the scale of social cooperation depends on the range of weaponry for remote killing, then there must have been some new weapon with a range greater than that for thrown rocks or javelins.  And, indeed, there is evidence for the first appearance of atlatls (the Aztec word for spear throwers).

An atlatl amplifies the human throwing motion so that the bolt (or dart) is launched to greater distances, higher velocities, and more penetrating power than thrown stones or hand thrown spears.  Originally, the atlatl was invented by humans to be a weapon for hunting wild game, but then it could be used as a weapon against other humans in war or to punish cheaters and free riders, and thus to coercively enforce a larger scale of cooperation.  Bingham estimates that while thrown stones and javelins could enforce cooperation among up to 90 individuals, atlatls could expand this tenfold up to 900 individuals.

Bingham argues that this expanded the range of cooperation because this new weapon allowed law enforcement to encompass a larger group of people, which then increased the scale of information sharing.  This increase in cultural information sharing could then cause all of the other increases in inventiveness and complexity that characterize the behaviorally human revolution--including more complex tools, abstract art, and more intricate human artifacts.

Bingham's theory makes falsifiable predictions that can be tested against the archaeological evidence.  For example, it predicts that the appearance of atlatls in the archaeological record precedes the appearance of the many traits of behavioral modernity.

The throwing stick and the bolt shaft of the atlatl are normally made mostly of wood and therefore likely to perish over thousands of years.  But some apparently atlatl fragments made of bone, antler, or ivory have been dated to around 16-17 thousand years ago--such as the fragment from El Miron Cave pictured above (O'Driscoll and Thompson 2018; Morales and Straus 2008).

The oldest indirect evidence of atlatls come from the sharp stone points that have the shape and size that identify them as atlatl bolt points rather than thrusting spear points or arrow points.  Thrusting spear points are larger and heavier than bolt points, which are larger than arrow points.  Some of the oldest bolt points have been dated at 50 to 40 thousand years ago (O'Driscoll and Thompson 2018; Shea 2006; Shea and Sisk 2010).

John Shea--Bingham's colleague at Stony Brook University--sees some evidence of bolt points in sub-Saharan Africa as early as 100,000 years ago, although they become more common after 50,000 years ago.  Shea admits, however, that he is baffled by the fact that historic hunter-gatherers in Africa have not used the atlatl.  It's perplexing if atlatls were used in prehistoric Africa but not later.

Shea thinks Bingham has part of the puzzle for human evolution, but not all.  Shea thinks the technology of the atlatl is not enough to explain human complexity, and that spoken language is a crucial factor.  By contrast, Bingham thinks the evolution of human non-kin cooperation supported by coercive weaponry to manage the problem of conflicts of interest created the conditions for the evolution of language: non-kin cooperation was the cause, language was the effect (Bingham and Souza 2009, 240-76).  I am inclined to agree with Shea that while the technology of projectile weapons is one critical factor in shaping human evolution--for the reasons indicated by Bingham--it cannot be the only prime cause.

Here's a video of John Shea showing how ancient atlatls were made and used:

One of the most conspicuous signs of behaviorally modern humans is the construction of huge earthen mounds that apparently were used for local gatherings, perhaps seasonally.  Here is one of the Hopewell mounds in Ohio:

As many as one thousand people could have gathered on this mound.  Although archaeologists continue to debate the functions of these mounds, they seem to be designed for local gatherings.  And since Hopewell societies were connected by extensive trading networks, people were probably meeting at these spots for trade--looking for mates, goods, services, and information.  Such centers of commercial activity would have needed law enforcement to sustain peaceful exchange by punishing thieves and cheaters.  The Hopewell culture flourished from 100 BCE to 500 CE, prior to the arrival of the bow and arrow, so their best weapon for law enforcement would have been the atlatl, and the range of the atlatl was great enough to sustain a scale of cooperation up to one thousand people.

Hopewell burial mounds often have symbolic artifacts.

Hopewell Art

These symbolic artifacts were clearly traded over vast distances, and so they probably functioned as currency for exchange.  Symbolic objects can serve as a form of money because they are precious and difficult to counterfeit.  They can also be worn as ornaments or be signs of status, just as gold, silver, and diamonds can be both currency and valuable ornaments in our culture.

The economic trade in such valuable objects would have been impossible without some coercive law enforcement with weapons like the atlatl to punish thieves and cheaters and thus securing the rights of property and contract.

The evidence for such trade over 100,000 years or more refutes Friedrich Hayek's claim that market exchange is a recent invention in human history.  On the contrary, we might conclude that Adam Smith was right in seeing that human beings are economic animals who naturally strive to "truck, barter, and exchange."

Some of my posts responding to Hayek and defending the idea that the extended order of liberal capitalism appeals to our evolved human nature can be found here, here, and here.


REFERENCES

Bar-Yosef, Ofer. 2002. "The Upper Paleolithic Revolution." Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 363-93.

Bingham, Paul, and Joanne Souza. 2009. Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe. Charleston, SC: BookSurge.

Hill, Kim, Michael Barton, and A. Magdalena Hurtado. 2009. "The Emergence of Human Uniqueness: Characters Underlying Behavioral Modernity." Evolutionary Anthropology 18: 187-200.

Klein, Richard G. 2009. The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Morales, Manuel R. Gonzalez, and Lawrence Guy Strauss. 2009. "Extraordinary Early Magdalenian Finds from El Miron Cave, Cantabria (Spain)." Antiquity 83: 267-81.

O'Driscoll, Corey A., and Jessica C. Thompson. 2018. "The Origins and Early Elaboration of Projectile Technology." Evolutionary Anthropology 27: 30-45.

Shea, John J. 2006. "The Origins of Lithic Projectile Point Technology: Evidence from Africa, the Levant, and Europe." Journal of Archaeological Science 33: 823-46.

Shea, John J., and Matthew L. Sisk. 2010. "Complex Projectile Technology and Homo sapiens Dispersal into Western Eurasia." PaleoAnthropology 2010: 100-22.

The Evolution of Equal Liberty Through Capital Punishment: Boehm's Egalitarian Hierarchy in Locke's State of Nature

This is a tracing of a rock drawing from a cave at the stone age site of Remigia, Castellon, Spain, dated to sometime before 6500 BCE.  Christopher Boehm used this rock drawing at Remigia in an essay arguing for the importance of capital punishment in the evolution of morality and egalitarian hierarchy (Boehm 2017).  He observed that on the right we see ten men jubilantly holding their bows over their heads.  On the left, we see a man lying on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking in his body or on the ground.

It's hard to know for sure what has happened.  The victim could have been a prisoner of war who has been executed.  In fact, other drawings at Remigia show scenes of warfare.  But Boehm suggests that given what we know about hunter-gatherer foragers in the ethnographic record, it's more likely that the victim here was a deviant member of the band who had violated the moral rules of the band--perhaps by murdering someone--and he was becoming a bully who was trying to assert his dominance over the group.   

One study of the rock drawings in the inland regions of the Iberian Mediterranean basin identified 49 scenes of violent content (battles, ambushes, fights, and so on), which included 8 scenes of "execution squads" like the drawing above (Lopez-Montalvo 2015).

This also illustrated Boehm's "ambivalence model" of human nature in politics.  Human politics arises from the complex tension between three levels of our evolved political psychology: dominance, deference, and counter-dominance (Boehm 1999).  Some human beings want to have dominance over others.  Most human beings are inclined to defer to the rule of the dominant ones.  But when that dominance becomes despotic and exploitative, people will resist that dominance and punish the bullies by shunning them, ostracizing them, or--in the most dangerous cases--killing them.  (I have written a series of posts on the evolutionary theory of reverse dominance hierarchy.)

We can infer that this universal human nature was shaped in the environment of evolutionary adaptation of human foraging ancestors in the Late Pleistocene epoch.  We can make that inference through what Boehm calls the "ethnographic analogy".  Boehm has created a hunter-gatherer database of sixty-five foraging societies for which we have ethnographies, selected because they are most likely to resemble foragers in the Late Pleistocene.  If we find a practice like capital punishment for bullies in all six of the world regions where foragers have lived--North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Arctic--then we can infer that this has been widespread throughout hunter-gatherer history since the Late Pleistocene (Boehm 2012).

These ethnographies of foraging bands show that they form moral communities through agreement on moral rules and then enforce those rules through the forcible and reputational punishment of deviants.  Through gossip, ridicule, and shunning, those who violate the rules are punished with bad reputations, and people will refuse to cooperate with them.  Today, we might call this "nonviolent resistance"--people withdraw their consent to a bully's dominance.

If reputational punishment is not enough to enforce obedience to the rules, then the community can use coercive force, such as expelling deviants from the group, or, in the worst cases, killing them.  Nevertheless, foragers resort to capital punishment only rarely, and usually it's to punish a murderer.

Forcible punishment creates two possible problems.  The group can be torn apart by conflict.  Or an angry relative of a person killed can take vengeance on the executioner.  To avoid these problems, the group must reach a consensus on the punishment and even persuade the close relatives of the victim to cooperate.  In rare cases, the entire community might participate in the execution (as seems to have been the case in the Remigia drawing).  Or, more commonly, the group will delegate a close relative of the victim to do the killing.

Executing a bully is often dangerous for the executioner, however, because bullies are often formidable and aggressive enough to fight back and harm the executioner.  The solution to this problem, as I have indicated in previous posts, is killing at a distance.  There is plenty of evidence that human beings are evolved for throwing and shooting projectiles--rocks, spears, arrows, and bullets--that can kill even the strongest opponent from a safe distance.  In the Remigia drawing, we can see that it is easy for ten men armed with bow and arrow to bring down a bully without having to fight with him hand to hand. 

In this way, hunter-gatherers enforce the moral norm that Boehm calls "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, they see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally different, naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without one's consent.

The Bushmen (or San) people of Southern Africa are regarded by many evolutionary anthropologists as the descendants of the earliest human ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers.  Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has studied them, reports that "all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others.  There is a "strong egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do."  "All people as autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights," and so everyone has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who violate them (Wiessner 2005).

John Locke recognized this natural desire for equal liberty as emerging in the ancient hunter-gatherer state of nature in which human nature was originally shaped.  He inferred this from his own "ethnographic analogy," because he studied hundreds of books by Europeans who had observed foraging and tribal societies around the world, particularly in the New World.  In particular, he looked to the indigenous people of America as providing "a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe" (Second Treatise, 108).  "In the beginning, all the world was America" (ST, 49).

Locke saw that in this state of nature, societies enforced moral norms through the "executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all human beings to use forcible and reputational punishment to punish those who violated the law of nature, which included capital punishment.  Even after they entered civil society and formed a government to rule over them by their consent, human beings retained the natural right of self-defense, including defense against a despotic government that would deprive them of their freedom from exploitative dominance.  The people can resist a despotic government through an "appeal to Heaven"--that is, an appeal to the God of battles to settle their dispute through war.

All of this manifested the principle that "all men by nature are equal in their liberty."  Locke explained:

"I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality: Age or Virtue may give Men a just Precedency: Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level: Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an Observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude or other Respects may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the Equality, which all Men are in, respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another, which was the Equality I there spoke of, as proper to the Business at hand, being that equal Right that every Man hath, to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man" (ST, 54).

Thus, Locke saw in the state of nature the same egalitarian hierarchy that Boehm identified in the evolutionary state of nature that shaped the human nature of our foraging ancestors.  But Boehm does not recognize that his account of the evolved human nature of egalitarian hierarchy confirms Locke's view of the natural equality of liberty in the state of nature, because Boehm mistakenly identified Locke as a "blank slate" theorist who denied the reality of human nature (Boehm 1999, 128, 227).

Darrin McMahon makes the same mistake in his recent book Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea in seeing Locke as "famously conceiving of the mind as a tabula rasa at birth, shaped by education and experience, not hardwired by iniquity or innate ideas" (168).  McMahon also fails to see how Boehm's egalitarian hierarchy manifested in the execution scene at Remigia and in the ethnography of hunter-gatherers confirms Locke's conception of natural equal liberty in the state of nature (21-51).

McMahon does see that our foraging ancestors found a way to combine equality and liberty.  "The two went together.  Equality among members of the group prevented the domination of all save the would-be upstarts, forestalling severe constraints on the liberty of others.  Equality served as liberty's foundation and guarantee" (59).  

And yet McMahon does not see how Lockean liberalism achieves this by affirming the natural right to equal liberty.  McMahon passes over Locke's account of natural equality in a few pages without taking seriously Locke's concept of equality as equal liberty as the most intellectually defensible ground for justifying classical liberalism (163-166).

Nevertheless, since McMahon's book is the best history of the idea of equality, I will be writing a series of posts on the book, in which I will argue in defense of Lockean liberalism as showing the best understanding of human equality.

REFERENCES

Boehm, Christopher. 1999.  Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher.  2012.  Moral Origins: The Evolution of Altruism, Shame, and Virtue.  New York: Basic Books.

Boehm, Christopher.  2017.  "Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects."  Center for Humans and Nature, June 12.

Locke, John.  1988.  Two Treatises of Government.  Edited by Peter Laslett.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lopez-Montalvo, Esther.  2015.  "Violence in Neolithic Iberia: New Readings of Levantine Rock Art." Antiquity 89: 309-327.

McMahon, Darrin.  2023.  Equality: The History of An Elusive Idea.  New York: Basic Books.

Weissner, Polly.  2005.  "Norm Enforcement among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen: A Case of Strong Reciprocity?"  Human Nature 16: 117-135.

"Makers" and "Takers" in the Paleolithic

Libertarians and classical liberals have long argued for defending the makers who produce wealth from the takers who expropriate it (Contoski 1997; D'Amato 2018).  The makers need protection because for most of recorded human history over the past 5,000 years, most societies have been ruled by a few takers (kings, princes, nobles, and high priests) who coercively exploited the great multitude of people who were the makers of wealth that was stolen from them by the takers.  In these societies, there was little incentive for the makers to produce more than they could consume since most of what they produced would be taken from them, and consequently the general standard of living was low.  

But then, beginning about 300 years ago in northwestern Europe and North America, there was a shift in social conditions that made the life strategy of making--producing wealth for use and exchange--more successful than the life strategy of taking--extracting wealth from others.  That shift in favor of making over taking came with the establishment of modern liberal constitutionalism and free-market capitalism.  Over the past 100 years those institutions of liberal democratic capitalism have spread around the world.  As a consequence of that, most of the 8.3 billion people alive today live longer, healthier, safer, richer, and freer lives than human beings have ever lived previously.  Previously, I have written about this as the "evolution of human progress through the liberal enlightenment.

So how do we explain this pattern in human history--5,000 years of oppression by the ruling elites of takers and then the sudden emancipation of makers that has promoted unprecedented material and moral progress recently for most of humanity?  And if we can explain the causes of that modern progress, how might that help us to prevent any weakening or even reversal of that progress that would allow the takers to regain their dominance over the makers?  Does the recent rise of the "illiberal state"--like that of Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example--show the return of the illiberal "taker state"?

One of the best attempts to answer those questions is in the work of Stephen Balch (a scholar at Texas Tech University).  In an article (Balch 2014) and in a book that is soon to be published, he puts the history of the struggle between takers and makers within a Darwinian "big history" that integrates the history of life and the history of humanity into a universal evolutionary history of all life.  It is an exhilarating display of expansive multidisciplinary scholarship that weaves insights from the life sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities into a dazzling intellectual tapestry that will forever change the way you think about life.

I have not yet fully thought through everything he has written about what he calls his "naturalist interpretation of history."   But I understand enough of it to say that I find almost all of his arguments persuasive.  I do disagree with him, however, about four points. 

First, Balch fails to see that most of what he says about the universal history of politics--from Paleolithic stateless societies to Neolithic agrarian states to modern liberal constitutional states--confirms John Locke's account of the universal "history of mankind." 

Second, Balch also fails to see that the struggle between takers and makers arose first among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, although he is certainly right in saying that that struggle was dramatically intensified by the invention of agriculture, which created an economic surplus that allowed takers to accumulate great wealth in the form of expropriated crops.  

Third, in his account of the first agrarian states, such as those in Mesopotamia, Balch tends to exaggerate the invincible dominance of the ruling takers, while minimizing the power of the makers to resist or evade exploitative dominance.

Fourth, I don't agree with Balch's claim that classical liberals like Locke have been mistaken in understanding property rights as an outgrowth of the personal rights of self-owning individuals.  Balch wants to separate economic freedom from personal freedom because he worries that personal freedom can include maladaptive behavior such as pursuing sexual pleasure in ways that do not lead to reproduction, which lowers reproductive fitness.  But here he fails to see that a low birth rate can be an adaptive reproductive strategy for people in wealthy societies who want to make a large parental investment in a few children, so that those children will be more likely to succeed in a modern bourgeois society.

Here I will elaborate my second point of disagreement.  In my next post, I will take up the fourth point.

PALEOLITHIC MAKERS AND TAKERS

Among hunter-gatherers, the takers are people who take without giving.  They take what they want from the social resources of their group without contributing anything to those resources: they are free riders or social parasites.  The takers are either cheaters who take what they want by deception, or bullies who take what they want by force.  

The makers respond to this by consenting to moral rules against taking and enforcing those rules with reputational and forcible punishments of those who violate the rules.  Reputational punishment includes ridicule, ostracism, and shunning.  Forcible punishment--including execution--is directed against the worst bullies, particularly murderers (Boehm 2012, 64-74).

Balch does not see this conflict between makers and takers among hunter-gatherers because he thinks that conflict arose only after the invention of agriculture.

"Taking" only came fully into its own when there was some real "take" to be had, when there was a redistributable surplus over and above what was required for individual survival.  The invention of agriculture set the stage.  Paleolithic hunter-gatherers lived egalitarian lives.  There was marginal advantage to be had through superior hunting/gathering/fighting/nurturing/negotiating and seduction skills, but--with only so much to go around--rarely big genetic jackpots.  Once, however, there was a possibility of massive wealth accumulations in the form of expropriated crops, all this changed (2014, 12).

"Genetic jackpots" are important for Balch because he believes that the evolution of human nature by kin selection favors what biological theorists call "inclusive fitness": we are naturally inclined to behaviors that advance the reproductive fitness of ourselves, our offspring, and our collateral relatives.  Although we experience some genetic conflicts of interest with our relatives because they are not genetically identical to us, our conflicts of interest with non-kin are much deeper.  We fight with non-kin over scarce resources as we try to take as much as we can for ourselves and our relatives.  But prior to the invention of agriculture, there wasn't much to fight over, and so it was impossible for the takers to accumulate great wealth that they had taken from the makers.  Consequently, Balch argues, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands were egalitarian in that there was no dominant elite of a few takers ruling over a multitude of exploited makers.

But this ignores the fact that while hunter-gatherers have always been egalitarian, their societies have achieved not an absolute equality but rather--to use Christopher Boehm's term--an "egalitarian hierarchy."  As that term suggests, hunter-gatherers see that human beings are not naturally equal in all respects, because no two human beings are the same in all respects.  By virtue of being separate individuals, human beings are naturally unequal, in any number of respects.  But they are naturally equal in their natural desire for equal liberty--their natural freedom from being ruled by others without their consent.  

A few human beings have a natural desire for dominance--to be the alpha male who rules over others--and these are those whom Balch identifies as the takers.  And while human beings in subordinate positions are naturally inclined to defer to the dominant few, the subordinates are also naturally inclined to resist being exploited by those dominant few.  Thus, Boehm observes, the political nature of human beings is ambivalent in showing the tension between dominance, deference, and counter-dominance.  The natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates not to be dominated.

In an egalitarian hierarchy, the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience, ostracism, or even execution--to restrain politically ambitious individuals, those with special innate or learned propensities to dominate.  In every society, there will be leaders in some form.  But an egalitarian hierarchical society will allow only a moderate degree of leadership.  Here the power of the takers is checked by the resistance of the makers.

In a few passages of his book, Balch seems to recognize this.  In speaking about how Boehm and Richard Wrangham describe the hunter-gatherer "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), Balch sees “a strain of oligarchy” and “targeted conspiratorial killing," which points to egalitarian hierarchy and the conditions for some taker/maker conflict.  He suggests that when he says that the worst bullies had to be eliminated (59, 126-27), and “the tension between hierarchical power and leveling morality has been a constant of human history” (129).

Moreover, what Balch calls “primal morality” in the EEA corresponds to what Locke calls the “law of nature” in the hunter-gatherer state of nature (60, 126-29, 218-19).  Locke’s law of nature is enforced by the “executive power of the law of nature”—the right of everyone to punish transgressors through reputational and forcible punishment, which would be supported by Boehm and Wrangham.  What Boehm and Wrangham say about killing bullies in the EEA confirms Paul Bingham’s argument about the importance of “killing from a distance” in enforcing cooperation.

REFERENCES

Balch, Stephen H. 2014. "On the Fragility of the Western Achievement." Society 51:8-21.

Balch, Stephen H.  Naturalizing History: A Biocultural Theory of Progress.  Book manuscript.

Boehm, Christopher. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Boehm, Christopher. 2012. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Contoski, Edmund. 1997. Makers and Takers: How Wealth and Progress Are Made and How They Are Taken or Prevented. Minneapolis, MN: American Liberty Publishers.

D'Amato, David. 2018. "'Makers' and 'Takers' in Libertarian Thought."  https://www.libertarianism.org.

The Darwinian Evolution of the Natural Right to Keep and Bear Arms: District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)

 "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

That's the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  Remarkably, for over two hundred years since the ratification of that amendment in 1791, the U.S. Supreme Court said very little about the interpretation of that amendment.  Then, in 2008, the Court issued its landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) interpreting that amendment as protecting the individual's right to keep and bear arms, unconnected to service in a militia.

The District of Columbia had a law banning handgun possession and requiring that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns in homes be kept unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock.  Dick Heller was a D.C. special policeman with a license to carry a handgun during his work, but he was refused a license to keep a handgun at home for self-defense.  By a 5 to 4 decision, the Court ruled that this violated Heller's constitutional right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.  Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the majority, which included Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.  Associate Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer wrote dissenting opinions joined by Associate Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The first ten amendments to the Constitution ("The Bill of Rights") have been understood as originally applying only to the national government and not to the states.  Since the District of Columbia is a federal enclave under the authority of the U.S. Congress, the Court could apply the Second Amendment to the District.  Two years later, however, the Court in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) found that the Second Amendment was incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the states.

Interpreting the Heller decision has been a fundamental issue in the current debate over gun laws and gun violence in America.  Progressives who want stricter gun control laws criticize the Heller decision for mistakenly asserting an absolute individual right to gun ownership that has promoted horrific gun violence.  Conservatives who oppose stricter gun control praise the Heller decision for upholding the constitutional right to own guns.

In my reading of Heller, I will make three points.  First, I will argue that Scalia's opinion is a persuasive interpretation of the Second Amendment as protecting gun ownership as part of an individual right of self-defense rooted in Anglo-American legal traditions.

My second point is that the right to keep and bear arms can be understood as a natural right that has emerged from the Darwinian evolution of what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the individual's natural right to defend himself against those who use or threaten to use force to deny his life or liberty.

My third point is that the progressives and the conservatives are both mistaken in their reading of Scalia's opinion as declaring that stricter gun control laws would be unconstitutional.  This is mistaken because Scalia clearly indicates that the right protected by the Second Amendment is limited in ways that allow legislators to formulate gun control policies to manage the problem of gun violence.

AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT

According to Justice Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, the meaning of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" in the Second Amendment must be interpreted in the light of the opening language of the Amendment--"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State."  This must mean that the Amendment "protects the right to keep and bear arms for certain military purposes, but that it does not curtail the Legislature's power to regulate the nonmilitary use and ownership of weapons." Therefore, "there is no indication that the Framers of the Amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution" (Stevens, slip opinion, 2).

Against this reading, Scalia argues that while the "prefatory clause" announces a purpose ("a well regulated Militia"), this does not limit the scope of the "operative clause" ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms").  The terminology of the "right of the people" appears elsewhere in the Bill of Rights (the First, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments), and each time this means individual rights, not rights exercised only in some collective body.  The membership of state militias was limited to males of a certain age physically able to fight for the common defense.  But "the people" refers to all individuals who are citizens of the community.

Moreover, Scalia notes that nine state constitutional provisions written in the early years of the nation protected a right of citizens to "bear arms in defense of themselves and the state" or to "bear arms in defense of himself and the state" (Scalia, slip opinion, 11, 29-30).  Clearly, the right to "bear arms" was independent of military service.

During the constitutional ratification debates, the Antifederalists warned that the Congress's power over the state militias could be used to abolish the militias or to create a "select militia" and a standing army, so that the people could then be disarmed, which had been attempted by the Stuart monarchs in England.  The Federalists denied that the Congress had such power, but in the Bill of Rights, they codified the Second Amendment as a way of reassuring the Antifederalists.  That explains why they specified a "well regulated Militia" as a purpose for arming the people.  But the "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is not limited to this purpose.  It is also necessary for individual self-defense.

AN ANGLO-AMERICAN RIGHT

In the English Bill of Rights of 1689, it is declared "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law."  Scalia identifies this as the predecessor to the Second Amendment (19-20).  The Catholic King James II had ordered the disarming of his Protestant opponents.  When he was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Englishmen obtained an assurance from William and Mary, in the Declaration of Right in February of 1689, which was codified as statute in December of 1689, that Protestants would never be disarmed.  (When John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government for the first time in the fall of 1689, one motivation was probably to support the codification of the Bill of Rights.)

Even though this right to be armed is limited to Protestants, it is clearly an individual right that does not depend on serving in a militia.  And it was understood to be one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.

As Scalia indicates, George III had attempted to disarm the most rebellious colonists in the 1760's and 1770's.  Scalia quotes from a newspaper article in New York in April of 1769 asserting that "it is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defense" (21).

A NATURAL RIGHT

As in this newspaper article, it was common for the American colonists to assume that the English Bill of Rights was a legal codification of "natural rights" that included the natural right to be armed for self-defense.  Such rights existed prior to and independent of any governmental legislation.

Scalia quotes many cases of people identifying the individual right to be armed as a natural right.  This is notable because Scalia is a legal positivist who rejects the idea that judges should recognize natural rights or natural law (Scalia, slip opinion, 12, 20, 33, 39, 47).

A typical example of this is William Blackstone's affirmation of "the natural right of resistance and self-preservation," which includes "the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defence."  Similarly, St. George Tucker, in his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, speaks of the "right of self-preservation" as allowing a citizen to "repel force by force" when "the intervention of society in his behalf, may be too late to prevent an injury."

To explain how this natural right to self-defense and self-preservation might be part of our evolved human nature, we might consider Paul Bingham's theory of human social evolution as driven by the uniquely human capacity for using weapons to kill members of their species from a distance and thus enforce cooperation among non-kin.  Every other unique feature of humans--such as language, abstract reasoning, and morality--is simply an effect of this cause, Bingham argues.  Moreover, this theory can explain the emergence of modern liberal democracy as arising from the democratization of access to coercive violence that comes from the widespread availability of cheap gunpowder handguns.  Previously, I have written a series of posts on this here, here, and here.

Although Bingham says nothing about Locke or Lockean liberalism, I have argued that Bingham's theory of human evolution shows the evolutionary origin of Lockean liberalism:  the capacity for killing at a distance allowed our human ancestors to punish other humans who refused to be cooperative by exercising what Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural propensity to punish those who attack us with coercive violence or the threat of violence.

A LIMITED RIGHT

This Lockean right to punish is limited, however, in that everyone has an equal right not to be harmed by violence or the threat of violence, unless someone has committed some offense that justifies punishment.  For that reason, while people have a natural right to be armed for self-defense or for resistance to tyranny, they do not have a natural right to keep and bear the most dangerous weapons in circumstances that are likely to risk harming innocent people.

Scalia explicitly recognizes these limits:

"Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.  From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts routinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. . . . nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms" (54-55).

Scalia also recognizes "the problem of handgun violence in this country," and he insists that the Constitution leaves governments "a variety of tools for combatting that problem, including some measures regulating handguns," although the Second Amendment "takes certain policy choices off the table," including "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home" (64).

Shortly before he died, John Paul Stevens, in his autobiography, said that he persuaded Anthony Kennedy to insist on inserting this language into Scalia's opinion to clarify the limits of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

Scalia's opinion in Heller thus leaves open the possibility that lawmakers could require expanded background checks for the sale of all guns and perhaps prohibit the sale of assault-style weapons.  It is not clear how effective such laws would be.  There was a federal assault weapons ban for ten years--from 1994 to 2004.  Some scholars have said that the rate of mass shootings increased dramatically after the end of this ban.  President Biden recently pointed to this as evidence for renewing an assault weapons ban.  But some scholars say the evidence is not conclusive.

Sometime before the end of this month, the Supreme Court will issue a new decision in a case about the gun-control laws in New York State, which could either reaffirm or modify the decision in Heller.  

Churchill's Dilemma and the Neuroscience of Moral Judgment

In 1944, one week after the D-Day landing in Normandy, Winston Churchill faced a moral dilemma that philosophers today recognize as a "trolley problem."

During the evening of June 12/13, the Germans launched the first ten flying bombs or V1s towards London.  For the next few months, thousands would be launched, and over 2,000 reached London.  By the end of August, the British had become adept at shooting them down.  But then the Germans replaced the VI with the V2, a long-distance rocket with a warhead.

Scientists working for British Military Intelligence (MI5) had gathered information about the testing of the V1, and they concluded that the VI bombs often fell short of their targets.  This was confirmed when most of the V1s first launched fell on the neighborhoods of south London rather than on their intended targets in the center of London, which was densely populated and where the main offices of government were located.

Some people in MI5 realized that casualties and damage to the government could be reduced if the Germans could be deceived, so that they would not correct the targeting of the V1s.  The Germans had secret agents in England, but the Germans did not know that all of their agents had become double-agents for the British, and they had been supplying the Germans with misleading information.  The Germans asked their agents to report on the locations where the V1s were landing.  So if their agents reported that many of the V1s were overshooting their targets and landing north of London, the Germans would adjust their targeting so that the flying bombs would actually hit the south of London rather than the center.  People in MI5 recommended this plan to the government.  If it worked, thousands of people in south London would be killed, but many more people in central London would survive.

One of the scientists recommending this--R. V. Jones--knew that this would threaten his own family.  Years later, he explained: "I realized well that what I was doing was trying to keep the mean point of impact in the Dulwich area, where my own parents lived and where, of course, my old school was.  But I knew that neither my parents nor the school would have it otherwise" (Most Secret War, 1978, p. 421).

One member of Churchill's cabinet--Herbert Morrison--vehemently opposed this proposal as an "interference with Providence" that was immoral, because they would be responsible for killing some people who might otherwise have lived.  Churchill, however, accepted the argument that it was better to allow the foreseeable but not directly intended deaths of some people in the south of London if this prevented the deaths of many more people in the center of London.

As David Edmonds has pointed out in his new book--Would You Kill the Fat Man?--this dilemma resembles the trolley problem that I have written about previously.  In the Switch Case, we can prevent a runaway trolley from killing five people on the tracks by switching it onto a side track where it will kill one person.  When presented with this dilemma, most people around the world say they would pull the switch and thus sacrifice one life to save five lives.  That seems close to what Churchill chose in allowing thousands of innocent people to die so that many more could live.

In the Footbridge Case, by comparison, we can save the five people on the tracks by pushing a very fat man off a footbridge onto the tracks, and he's big enough to stop the train.  From a utilitarian point of view, we should decide this case the same way we decide the other case, because in both cases, the killing of one person is morally justified by the greater good of saving five people.  But most people around the world say they would not push the fat man.  And when they are asked to explain their reasoning, they often admit confusion about their motivation, and sometimes they'll say that pushing the fat man just feels wrong, even though the utilitarian principle of taking one life to save five apparently applies here.  (We might imagine Churchill having to decide whether he should personally push some people into the path of a flying bomb to save the lives of others.)

Edmonds and most philosophers today see this as a refutation of utilitarianism, or at least of pure utilitarianism.  Although our moral intuitions sometimes approve of utilitarian reasoning, as in the Switch Case, sometimes we reject utilitarianism, as in the Footbridge Case.

Fervent utilitarians like Peter Singer and Joshua Greene disagree with this.  They insist that maximizing happiness impartially is the fundamental principle of morality.  We all want to be happy, and we don't want to be miserable.  This universal pursuit of happiness becomes moral when we consider it from an impartial perspective.  I think I'm special in valuing my happiness and the happiness of those close to me.  But I can understand that you think you're special in the same way.  I can see, then, that if we are to achieve the benefits of social cooperation, we must recognize that each person's happiness is equal to the happiness of any other, and thus that the happiness of many might count for more than the happiness of few.  So if we are to maximize happiness impartially, we must push the fat man. 

The differences between the Switch Case and the Footbridge Case are not morally relevant, Singer and Greene claim, because all that counts morally are the consequences, which are the same: five lives are rightly saved at the expense of one.  The two cases might be different emotionally, but not rationally.  And morality requires that our rational comprehension of moral principles should prevail over any conflicting emotional responses.

How do we explain the fact that most people think the differences between these two cases really are morally relevant?  One explanation is that most people intuitively apply the doctrine of double effect, which was stated by Thomas Aquinas, and which has been associated with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.  To explain why we prohibit intentional killing but permit killing in self-defense, Aquinas explained: "One act may have two effects, only one of which is intended and the other outside of our intention."  When we kill in self-defense, the death of the person threatening us is foreseen but not directly intended.  Our direct intention is to defend our life.  Killing the assailant is an unintended side-effect of our action.  So if the assailant were to stop his attack, we would not kill him, and this would be our preference.  If we could remove his threat to our life without killing him that would be the morally preferable choice.

This principle has become a fundamental standard in both domestic law and international law.  Homicide can be justified if the death is a foreseen but not intended side-effect of defending our lives or the lives of others.  In war, it is unjust to directly target innocent people--civilians or soldiers who have surrendered.  But it is just for some innocent people to die as a side-effect of an attack on a military target, as long as there have been reasonable efforts to minimize the danger for innocent people.

A full statement of the principle of double effect has been suggested by John Mikhail: "an otherwise prohibited action, such as battery or homicide, which has both good and bad effects may be permissible if the prohibited act itself is not directly intended, the good but not the bad effects are directly intended, the good effects outweigh the bad effects, and no morally preferable alternative is available" (Elements of Moral Cognition, 149).

Mikhail explains that most people feel that they should not push the fat man off the footbridge, although they would switch the trolley onto the side track and thus kill the man on the track, because they have an instinctive knowledge of the norm of double effect, and they sense that pushing the fat man is intentional homicide, while pulling the switch results in foreseeable but unintentional homicide.

Utilitarians like Greene and Singer argue that this distinction between foreseeing and intending a death is irrelevant to moral judgment: if it is right to kill one person to save five, then it doesn't matter morally whether this killing was directly intended or only a foreseeable side-effect of directly intended action to save the five, because the consequences are the same.

Greene concedes, however, that the human brain has evolved to recognize the principle of double effect.  In Greene's own research, in scanning the brains of people while they pondered trolley problems, he has shown that when people are thinking about the Switch Case, there is increased neural activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); and when they are thinking about the Footbridge Case, there is increased neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and the amygdala.  The neural circuits in the DLPFC enable cognitive control in which the brain organizes thought and action in accordance with decision rules that might require overriding competing impulses.  The neural circuits in the VMPFC and the amygdala enable strong emotional responses.

So when we are making utilitarian judgments (such as sacrificing one life to save five), Greene infers, our DLPFC is active, and the emotional response in the VMPFC and the amygdala is weak, which is what happens to most people in deciding the Switch Case.  But in the Footbridge Case, the thought of pushing the fat man arouses such a strongly negative emotional response in the VMPFC and the amygdala in most people that the utilitarian judgment is overridden.  Those people who do accept the utilitarian judgment in the Footbridge Case are able to exercise cognitive control in applying the utilitarian decision rule ("Do whatever will produce the most good") while suppressing the emotional inhibition against directly killing someone (Moral Tribes, 116-131). 

Here, then, we can actually see the conflict in the brain between reason and emotion in deciding whether the rights of the individual should take precedence over the greater good.  Greene sees this as supporting his "dual process theory" of moral judgment as based on the interaction between automatic emotions and deliberate reasoning.

It is a mistake, however, to think of this "dual process" in the brain as a sharp dichotomy or conflict between reason and emotion, with utilitarianian judgment requiring reason to conquer emotion.  Green thinks that neuroscience confirms David Hume's argument that reason is the "slave of the passions" (134-37, 184-85, 190-92, 201, 291, 328, 352, 385).  Pure reason by itself cannot move us to action without some motivating emotion or desire.  After all, utilitarianism is rooted in the natural fact that our wanting to be happy, and wanting not be miserable is an evolved gut feeling. 

Greene notes that the DLPFC and the VMPFC are interconnected, and he also observes: "the DLPFC, the seat of abstract reasoning, is deeply interconnected with the dopamine system, which is responsible for placing values on objects and actions.  From a neural and evolutionary perspective, our reasoning systems are not independent logic machines.  They are outgrowths of more primitive mammalian systems for selecting rewarding behaviors--cognitive prostheses for enterprising mammals.  In other words, Hume seems to have gotten it right" (368).

The Footbridge Case sets off emotional alarm bells in our brains in a way that the Switch Case does not.  Why?  Greene explains this through a "modular myopia hypothesis": "First, our brains have a cognitive subsystem, a 'module,' that monitors our behavioral plans and sounds an emotional alarm bell when we contemplate harming other people.  Second, this alarm system is 'myopic,' because it is blind to side effects. . . . These limitations make us emotionally blind--but not cognitively blind--to certain kinds of harm" (224).

Our evolutionary ancestors had an enormous capacity for premeditated violence.  Hobbes was right that in the state of nature human beings were roughly equal in that any healthy adult could kill anyone else, even the strongest.  And Hobbes was also right that anyone who was violent would provoke retaliation from his victims or their relatives.  Therefore, there was a natural need for all to seek peace so that they could enjoy the benefits of living together in cooperative groups.  We can assume, Greene argues, that this would have created evolutionary pressures for the evolution of an emotional alarm system in the brain to inhibit premeditated acts of aggressive violence, which would be adaptive for both individuals and groups.

This emotional alarm system would require that we have the ability to mentally inspect our premeditated plans of action, Greene reasons, so that if we see our actions directly causing the killing of someone, this would trigger our emotional alarm bells.  But perhaps this system is so simple that it cannot keep track of multiple causal chains, so that it sees the primary causal chain but not any branching causal chain.  In the case of the Footbridge Case, we think about the personal force in pushing the fat man onto the tracks in front of the trolley, which sets off our emotional alarm bells.  But in the Switch Case, we think about diverting the trolley away from the five people on the tracks as our primary end, and we are rather blind emotionally to the secondary effect of killing the man on the side track, although we are cognitively aware of this.

If this is right, then the utilitarian is someone whose neural circuitry does not attach more emotional weight to the killing of someone as the primary effect of an action than to the killing of someone as the secondary effect of the action.  That's why the utilitarian, with the rule that five lives are worth more than one life, will both pull the switch and push the fat man to save five lives.

Greene's general conclusion about all this is that "our moral intuitions are generally sensible, but not infallible," and whenever those moral intuitions deviate from utilitarian reasoning, the intuitions are mistaken, and they must be overridden by deliberate reasoning that suppresses the moral emotions.

We might assume from this that Greene would push the fat man off the footbridge?  But no!  Greene explains:

"Now, you may be wondering--people often do--whether I'm really saying that it's right to push the man off the footbridge.  Here's what I'm saying: If you don't feel that it's wrong to push the man off the footbridge, there's something wrong with you.  I, too, feel that it's wrong, and I doubt that I could actually bring myself to push, and I'm glad that I'm like this.  What's more, in the real world, not pushing would almost certainly be the right decision.  But if someone with the best of intentions were to muster the will to push the man off the footbridge, knowing for sure that it would save five lives, and knowing for sure that there was no better alternative, I would approve of this action, although I might be suspicious of the person who chose to perform it" (251).

This is complicated.  First, Greene admits that it's not clear that pushing people off footbridges to save others is really going to promote the greater good in the long run, because such behavior is likely to have bad consequences.  Second, Greene warns that the sort of people who could push people off footbridges are suspicious characters.  And, finally, Greene assures us that he is not one of those suspicious characters, because he feels that it is wrong to push people off footbridges, and he is proud that he has such virtuous emotions.

In fact, Greene admits that he is a hypocrite, in that he professes to be a pure utilitarian, but he cannot live completely by utilitarian rules because he's a human being with human feelings (254-68).  So, for example, he knows that in buying expensive birthday presents for his children rather than spending more of his money to help starving children around the world, he is failing to maximize happiness impartially, because he is partial to his children.  But, after all, this is only human nature.

One might be reminded of Peter Singer's confession some years ago that he was spending too much money on the care of his mother with Alzheimer's disease.  By his utilitarian principles, this was immoral, because his mother was going to die soon, and if he had sent this money to Oxfam, it would have saved many lives and thus maximized global happiness.  Like Greene, he is a hypocrite.

Greene says that if he were God, he would replace the human species--or Homo justlikeus--with Homo utilitus: "The members of this species value the happiness of all members equally.  This species is as happy as it could possibly be, because its members care about one another as much as they care about themselves.  This species is infused with a spirit of universal love.  That is, the members of this species love one another with the same passionate intensity that members of Homo justlikeus love their family members and close friends.  Consequently, they're a very happy lot" (267).

So pure utilitarianism is literally inhuman, because it contradicts our evolved human nature.  Purely utilitarian animals would have to belong to a different kind of species.

But then one might wonder whether even Homo utilitus would be truly utilitarian.  After all, the "spirit of universal love" in Homo utilitus does not seem to be truly universal, because it's restricted to members of that species.  Isn't this what Singer calls "speciesism"?  Doesn't utilitarian impartiality require universal love for all sentient beings--all beings capable of the experience of happiness--and not just members of our own species?

Doesn't this show how pure utilitarianism becomes incoherent?  In Greene's case, this incoherence comes from his religious longing for transcendence that conflicts with his scientific naturalism.  He repeatedly makes a "case for transcendence" (15-16, 25-27, 55, 63, 102, 200, 204, 264-67, 344-46, 349, 353), which culminates in his vision of himself as the Divine Creator who would replace the human species with Homo utilitus so that human beings could show universal love.  This is Gnosticism--the idea that we were created by an evil God who designed us so that we would be imprisoned in bodies with evil desires, and that our salvation requires a transcendence of our human nature through an enlightenment that transports us to a new realm of perfect universal love.