Are Psychopaths Still Moral Strangers?

              Serial killer Brian Dugan in a June 3, 1985, DuPage County (Illinois) mug shot

                                           Jeanine Nicarico, 10, one of Dugan's victims

In Darwinian Natural Right (first published in 1998), I have a chapter on psychopathy ("The Poverty of Psychopathic Desire"), in which I identify psychopaths as moral strangers.  By that I mean that since they do not feel the moral emotions that support the evolved moral sense that most human beings have, we cannot engage in moral persuasion with them.  They demonstrate that Immanuel Kant was wrong in claiming that morality arises from a purely rational comprehension of moral principles free from any emotions or desires, because the lack of conscience in psychopaths comes not from any defect of rationality but from their failure to feel the moral emotions that motivate moral conduct.  Psychopaths know the difference between right and wrong, but they don't care.

We cannot properly blame psychopaths for lacking the moral sentiments natural to us, but neither must we pardon them when they threaten us.  Although they are not bound by our morality, they cannot rightly expect us to refrain from defending ourselves against their predatory behavior.  To sustain any social order at all, we must treat psychopaths as defective or dysfunctional deviations from human normalcy.  Criminal psychopaths must be either confined or executed to protect their potential victims.  When Ted Bundy was asked whether he deserved to die for raping, mutilating, and killing three dozen or more women, he answered: "Good question.  I think society deserves to be protected from me and from people like me."

Recently, I have been studying the research on psychopathy that has been conducted over the past twenty years, which I see as largely supporting my account of psychopaths as moral strangers, although it also suggests the possibility that young psychopaths could be rehabilitated by the right kind of therapeutic treatment, which would deny my assumption that there is no cure for psychopathy.

Morris Hoffman has provided a good framework for how our punishment of psychopaths fits into the evolved human nature of law and punishment.  Hoffman is a trial judge in Colorado who has sought to explain his experience as a judge through evolutionary neuroscience.  "Evolution built us to punish cheaters," he declares.  We have evolved instincts to cooperate because of the benefits of living in cooperative social groups.  But we also have evolved instincts to cheat, because cheating in the right circumstances can confer short-term survival benefits.  This choice between cheating and cooperating is what Hoffman calls The Social Problem.  To solve that problem--by promoting cooperation rather than cheating--we have evolved instincts for punishing cheaters. 

There are three levels of punishment, Hoffman argues.  In first-party punishment, we punish ourselves with conscience and guilt.  In second-party punishment, we punish our tormentors with retaliation and revenge.  In third-party punishment, we act as a group to punish wrongdoers within our group with retribution.  Our brains have evolved propensities for all three kinds of punishment.

The brains of psychopaths differ, however, from normal brains, because psychopaths do not feel conscience or guilt.  And so, since they don't punish themselves for cheating, they will become successful cheaters, unless they suffer the second-party punishment from retaliation and revenge or the third-party punishment from retribution.

Such punishment requires that our human brains have mental capacities for both moral reason and moral emotion.  We need moral reasoning to detect cheating, and we need moral emotions to motivate our punishment of them.  Psychopaths have the rational capacity for understanding the social norms against cheating, but they lack the emotional dispositions that enforce those norms.

The emotional poverty of psychopaths is manifested in a variety of traits that can be used to identify the psychopathic personality.  When I wrote my chapter on psychopathy in 1998, I used Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist, which was being adopted as the standard profile for the psychiatric assessment of psychopathy.  At that time, Hare's checklist had 12 items.  Now it has 20 items:

1.   Glibness/superficial charm
2.   Grandiose sense of self-worth
3.   Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
4.   Pathological lying
5.   Conning/manipulation
6.   Lack of remorse or guilt
7.   Shallow affect
8.   Callous/lack of empathy
9.   Parasitic lifestyle
10. Poor behavior controls
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior
12. Early behavior problems
13. Lack of realistic, long-term goals
14. Impulsivity
15. Irresponsibility
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17. Many short-term marital relationships
18. Juvenile delinquency
19. Revocation of conditional release
20. Criminal versatility

Those trained in the assessment of psychopathy study the record of a subject's life and conduct interviews so that they can rate how well the subject conforms to each trait.  For each trait, there is a score of 0 (the item does not apply to the individual), 1 (the item applies in some respects), or 2 (the item applies in most respects).  The highest possible total score is 40.  Anyone with a score of 30 or more is identified as a psychopath.

Almost everyone will have some of these traits, and some will have enough of them to be somewhat psychopathic.  But only a few people will score 30 or more.  It is estimated that as many as 1 out of every 250 people could be a psychopath.  Of violent criminals, 15% to 30% are probably psychopathic.  But most psychopaths are not violent criminals.

Hare has done most of his research with psychopaths in maximum security prisons in Canada, and his checklist emphasizes criminality (as indicated in the last three items on his list).  This has provoked criticism from scientists who argue that Hare has mistakenly made criminality central to his conception of psychopathic personality.  The critics argue that criminal behavior should be identified not as part of the psychopathic personality but as a possible consequence of that personality.

Like Hare, Kent Kiehl (one of Hare's most prominent students) has become an expert on psychopathy from studying criminal psychopaths (first in Canada, later in the United States).  Kiehl is responsible for the first brain scanning of psychopaths--first with an electroencephalogram (EEG) and then with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).  With structural MRI, Kiehl can map the enduring structural traits of the psychopathic brain.  With functional MRI, Kiehl can create images of the psychopathic brain as engaged in specific mental activities.

Kiehl has shown that while the intellectual intelligence of psychopaths can be high, as indicated by high IQ, their emotional intelligence is low; and he can show that this low emotional intelligence is correlated with low activity and low gray matter density in the paralimbic and limbic systems of the brain, which include bilateral parahippocampal, amygdala, and hippocampal regions, bilateral temporal pole, posterior cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex.  Deficits in these parts of the brain are associated with deficits in emotional processing, which could explain why psychopaths lack the moral emotions of guilt, shame, love, and empathy that sustain the moral sense of most people.  (Does this cast doubt on the argument of Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer for a "moral Flynn effect"--the idea that increases in IQ can bring moral improvement?)

One example of the testing that Kiehl conducts is the "moral picture task."  People in a fMRI machine are asked to rate pictures on the severity of the moral violation in the scene.  Some of the pictures have high immoral content (like a man yelling aggressively at a cowering child).  Others have low immoral content (like a picture of a surgical procedure).  Viewing pictures with high immoral content activates the amygdala in the brains of normal people but not in the brains of psychopaths.  Normally, the amygdala amplifies the emotional response to images of immoral activity; but this does not happen in the psychopathic brain.  Psychopaths can comprehend moral rules intellectually, but violations of those rules arouse no moral feelings in them.

Exaggerated claims for MRI brain scanning as if it were a way of photographing the mind at work have provoked justified criticisms.  MRI creates an image not of the thoughts and feelings of the mind but of the flow of oxygenated blood associated with increased neural firing.  We can never be sure what that means.  Neural firing can be excitatory or inhibitory.  The neural firing in one region of the brain is interconnected with the neural firing in other parts of the brain.  A neural correlation is not causation.  If there are neural correlates for psychopathic behavior, we can't be sure whether the neural activity caused the behavior, or whether the behavior caused the neural activity.  The brain is plastic in changing in response to experience.  So it could be that the experience of psychopaths in living a psychopathic life has shaped a psychopathic brain.  And if psychopaths could be persuaded to change how they live, this might change their brains to make them less inclined to psychopathic behavior.

Moreover, in all of this, we face the fundamental mystery of consciousness.  Each of us has a subjective awareness of our consciousness, but we have no direct access to anyone else's consciousness.  We must infer the internal thoughts and feelings of others from external evidence.  So we can ask them to look at moral pictures and rate the pictures for moral severity, and we can then study the neural firing in their brains.  But we cannot directly observe their conscious activity.  We can assume that the activity of consciousness depends on the activity of the brain.  But we cannot explain exactly how that brain-mind interaction works.

Part of this mystery of consciousness is the mystery of how our conscious decisions for action move our brains, which then move our bodies into action.  Holding people morally and legally responsible for their actions presupposes that their minds can make free choices that are then executed by their brains and bodies.  We don't hold children fully responsible for their behavior, because we judge that only adults have developed enough mental capacity to act voluntarily and deliberately.  We also judge that some adults who suffer from severe insanity, such as psychotic states that induce delusions and hallucinations, may lack the mental capacity for making rational decisions, and thus they cannot properly be held fully responsible for their behavior.  The puzzle of psychopaths is that, unlike psychotic people, they intellectually understand what they are doing when they violate moral and legal rules, and yet their lack of emotional understanding seems to impair their control over their behavior.

All of these problems were raised when Kiehl introduced into a courtroom for the first time MRI scanning images of psychopathic brains.  In the summer of 2009, Kiehl was asked by Brian Dugan's defense attorneys to assess his psychopathic personality, scan his brain, and testify in a sentencing trial that would determine whether he would be sentenced to die.

In 1983, Jeanine Nicarico, aged 10, was abducted from her house in Naperville, Illinois, then raped and killed by Dugan.  For several months, the police could find no suspect, and they were under great public pressure to solve the case.  Finally, they arrested three men; and two of the men were sentenced to death.

Then, Dugan abducted, raped, and killed two more people--Donna Schnorr, aged 27, in 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, aged 7, in 1985.  Dugan was arrested and then he confessed to killing Ackerman and Schnorr, for which he was sentenced to two life sentences.  He also offered to confess to Nicarico's murder, but prosecutors refused to accept this.  Later, it turned out that the prosecutors and police had framed the two men convicted for Nicarico's murder.

In 1995, after 10 years on death row, the two falsely convicted men were released.  In 2005, Dugan was indicted for Nicarico's murder.  In 2009, he pled guilty.  He then had to go to trial for sentencing by a jury.  Capital punishment would require a unanimous decision from the jury.  The prosecutor would argue that the aggravating factors in the murder justified a death penalty.  The defense lawyers would argue that Dugan's psychopathic brain should be considered a mitigating factor justifying a life sentence rather than execution.

After studying the files on Dugan's life of crime and interviewing him, Kiehl concluded that he scored high on the Psychopathy Checklist.  When Dugan read the list of traits for psychopath, he said, "I can see that I have almost all of them."  Kiehl observes: "This was the first time I'd ever had a psychopath recognize the symptoms in himself without any help."  Dugan remarked: "But I still don't feel any different.  I mean, I really wish I felt different about what I did, but I just don't."  (Last December, in a prison interview with a Chicago Tribune reporter, Dugan declared: "Yes, I am a psychopath.")

One Canadian prisoner objected when he saw Kiehl's Psychopathy Checklist for him.  He grabbed the scoresheet.  He crossed out the word psychopathy on the top of the page and wrote in big block letters SUPERMAN.  He said: "I'm no psychopath.  That's the wrong term for me.  I'm renaming this the Superman Checklist.  And now I'm Superman."  If a psychopath is "beyond good and evil," does that make him a Nietzschean Superman?

Kiehl's structural MRI scan of Dugan's brain showed atrophy of gray matter in every region of the paralimbic system.  And although the judge in the sentencing trial did not allow Kiehl to show his brain scans to the jury, he did allow Kiehl to show sketches of Dugan's psychopathic brain.

Although some of the jurors were swayed by Kiehl's testimony early in the jury deliberations, eventually the jurors unanimously agreed to a death sentence.  Some of the jurors said afterwards that since Dugan was not psychotic, he knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong, and thus that his psychopathic personality did not diminish his legal responsibility.

In 2011, the Illinois Legislature abolished capital punishment, and Governor Pat Quinn commuted Dugan's death sentence.  Dugan continues to serve out his two life sentences.

In Kiehl's testimony at the sentencing trial, he told the prosecutor: "In my ideal world, Brian would have received treatment as a youth and perhaps, just perhaps, we could have prevented his crimes from ever taking place." 

In his writing, Kiehl has pointed to the success of an unusual program for treating the most violent teenage boys in Wisconsin at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center.  Psychopathic people cannot learn from punishment, because they do not feel the emotional weight of punishment the way normal people do.  When psychopathic boys are punished, they respond with defiant violence.  The treatment program at Mendota turns away from punishment towards rewards for good behavior.  There is some evidence that the boys who have gone through the Mendota program are much less likely to return to violent crime than those who have not.

Kiehl has plans for scanning the brains of these boys before and after their treatment to see if the treatment changes their brains, so that they show less psychopathic traits.  If he can show this, this might illustrate how the mind can exert mental force to change the brain, which would show how the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain to support our human freedom of choice.

REFERENCES

Elsa Ermer, Lora M. Cope, Prashanth K. Nyalakanti, Vince D. Calhoun, and Kent Kiehl, "Aberrant Paralimbic Gray Matter in Criminal Psychopathy," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 121 (2012): 649-658.

Robert D. Hare and Craig S. Neumann, "The Role of Antisociality in the Psychopathy Construct: Comment on Skeem and Cooke (2010)," Psychological Assessment 22 (2010): 446-454.

C. L. Harenski, K. A. Harenski, M. S. Shane, K. A. Kiehl, "Aberrant Neural Processing of Moral Violations in Criminal Psychopaths," Journal of Abnormal Psychology 119 (2010): 863-874.

Morris B. Hoffman, The Punisher's Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Kent A. Kiehl, The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014).

Jennifer L. Skeem and David J. Cooke, "Is Criminal Behavior a Central Component of Psychopathy? Conceptual Directions for Resolving the Debate," Psychological Assessment 22 (2010): 433-445.


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

Hermann Goering's Natural Desire for Dominance: The Movie "Nuremberg"

 

                                                    The Trailer for the Movie "Nuremberg"

The movie "Nuremberg," based on Jack El-Hai's book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, is the story of how American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley studied the imprisoned Nazi leaders who were brought before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945-1946, and how Kelley became particularly fascinated by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who had been Hitler's designated successor until he fell from Hitler's grace near the end of the war.  The movie stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley.  All of the acting is superb, and it's a powerfully moving and intellectually stimulating movie.

The movie and the book have made me wonder how Goering would fit into the evolutionary psychology of political leadership that I have developed in this blog and in my books.  I have written about psychopaths in this blog and in Darwinian Natural Right.  And I can see that Goering and the other Nazi war leaders had some psychopathic traits.  But Goering was not a pure psychopath.  Goering was a grandiose narcissist who was driven by a natural desire for alpha-male dominance as described by Arnold Ludwig.  

Donald Trump shares those same traits, but his political situation differs from Goering's.  Goering pursued dominance in a totalitarian dictatorship that did not allow anyone to challenge Nazi Party rule.  Trump's desire for dominance has led him to establish a competitive authoritarianism in his second term, in which there is some weak countervailance to his dominance coming from the threat of electoral defeat.  If Trump were to cancel the midterm elections next year, that would turn America into a totalitarian dictatorship like Nazi Germany.

JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG

Just before the final collapse of Germany in the spring of 1945, Goering suggested that he should become the Fuhrer once Hitler was dead, which led to Hitler's order that he be killed.  Once it became clear that Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.  That left Goering as the highest ranking Nazi leader left alive.  On the day before Germany's surrender on May 7, Goering sent a letter to U.S. military command offering to help the Allies form a new government for Germany with Goering himself as the new leader.  When Goering was captured by U.S. troops, he asked to meet General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, so that he and Eisenhower could arrange for the new government of Germany.  But instead, Goering was taken to a prison camp in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where he joined fifty-two other high-ranking German leaders.

In early August, Captain Douglas Kelley arrived at Mondorf.  He had worked in the medical service of the U.S. army, and his new assignment was to maintain the mental fitness of Goering and the other Nazi inmates.  Kelley wanted to find out if there was a "Nazi mind" that would account for their heinous deeds.  His great ambition was to write a book on this based on his studies of the captive Nazis, knowing that this would make him famous.  If the psychic flaws of the Nazi personality could be understood, then this might prevent the future emergence of another Nazi-like regime.

On August 8, the four Allied powers (France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR) agreed on a charter for an International Tribunal that would try the Nazi war leaders for war crimes.  Nothing like this had ever been done.  The U.S. took the leading role, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson agreed to head the prosecution.  Jackson targeted Goering as the top-ranking Nazi who need to be convicted.  The International Tribunal would meet in Nuremburg, Germany.  On August 12, the Nazi prisoners were moved to a prison in Nuremberg to await their trial.  Kelley moved there with them.  

Kelley spent hundreds of hours with all of the prisoners, but he was most interested in Goering.  They developed a strange personal relationship, perhaps even a friendship, based on mutual respect.  Kelley's primary psychiatric methodology with all the prisoners was the Rorschach ink blot test.

On October 20, the Allied prosecutors delivered their indictments against the prisoners to the tribunal.  That same day, Gustave Mark Gilbert arrived at the Nuremberg prison.  He was charged with maintaining the mental welfare of the prisoners so that they would be fit to stand trial.  But Gilbert was a psychologist who had the same ambition as Kelley--he wanted to write a book that would explain the psychology of the Nazis.  He was also like Kelley in that he relied on the Rorschach ink blot test for studying the minds of the Nazi prisoners.

Goering liked to brag about his heroic achievements as a military and political leader.  He had been a flying ace in World War I.  He was once shot down. He was credited with shooting down twenty-two enemy planes.  At the end of the war, he flew the unit of planes he commanded into Germany while refusing to surrender to the Allies.  He received his country's highest military award for his exploits.

Goering told Kelley how he first heard Adolf Hitler give a speech.  In the early 1920s, he heard Hitler in Munich speech shout: "You've got to have bayonets to back up your threats."  Goering explained: "Well, that was what I wanted to hear.  He wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'that's the party for me! Down with the Treaty of Versailles, goddammit! That's my meat!" He saw that this young, small party was open to new members who could quickly rise to leadership positions--"that meant I could soon be a big man in it."  This desire for becoming a "big man" confirmed his mother's prediction: "Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!" (El-Hai, 11).

That he became a great man seemed clear by the long list of titles he had in World War II, which he was happy to rattle off to Kelley: President of the Reichstag, Hitler's deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the massive Hermann Goering Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, and Reich Forestry and Hunting Master.  Goering was most proud of the title Reichsmarschall--a rank similar to a six-star general--held only once before, two hundred years earlier, by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was the most distinguished field marshal in the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty.

Goering insisted to Kelley that he had become the supreme leader of Germany once Hitler died:

The people flocked to us, the old soldiers swore by us--and I became head of the nation. . . . Too late you would say?  But perhaps not.  Anyway, I made it. . . . You know I shall hang.  I am ready.  But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man.  If I cannot convince the court, I shall at least convince the German people that all I did was done for the Greater German Reich.  In fifty or sixty years, there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany.  Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home (El-Hai, 114).

On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136). 

By the end of December, Kelley decided that since he had not seen his wife in almost three years, it was time to go home.  When Goering learned that Kelley was leaving, he broke down and wept.  By late January of 1946, Kelley was reunited with his wife in Chattanooga.  This left Gilbert in Nuremberg to continue his psychological studies of the prisoners during the trial.  Here the movie changes the story.  In the movie, Kelley stays in Nuremberg for the whole trial.

And so, in the movie, Kelley was in the audience for Goering's dramatic jousting with prosecutor Robert Jackson in March of 1946.  When Jackson presented documents signed by Goering that referred to the "final solution" to the Jewish problem as evidence that Goering knew about the extermination of Jews in Germany, Goering responded by pointing out that these documents identified the "emigration" of Jews out of Germany as the "final solution," and nothing was said explicitly about exterminating millions of Jews.  

Goering argued that neither he nor Hitler himself knew anything about the deliberate killing of Jews in the camps.  If any Nazi leader was responsible for the Holocaust, Goering insisted, it was Heinrich Himmler, who had died by suicide at the end of the war.  Although most people in the audience probably did not find this persuasive, it did show that the Nazis had not left any documentary evidence that explicitly recognized mass killing of innocent Jews as a deliberate policy.

Goering used the witness chair as a stage for a powerfully assertive speech as if he were speaking at a Nazi Party Rally.  One series of speeches lasted twelve hours over two days.  Everyone saw that Goering was enjoying himself in his passionate display of mastery.  He declared: "The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, their fortunes, their freedoms, their life, and for this I call on the Almighty and the German people as my witness."

Janet Flanner of the New Yorker reported: "When the former Reichsmarschall strode from the witness stand to the prisoner's box after his last session with Mr. Jackson, he was congratulated and smiled upon by his fell-Nazis there, like a gladiator who had just won his fight" (El-Hai, 145).  Indeed, the movie suggested this by filming the scene of Russell Crowe entering the courtroom, with the camera focused on his back and the wide courtroom audience before him, which replicates a scene in Gladiator, when Crowe enters the Coliseum, knowing that he will fight to a glorious death. 

At the end of September in 1946, the judges of the Tribunal delivered their verdicts.  Of the 21 prisoners, 3 were acquitted, and 18 were found guilty.  11 (including Goering) were sentenced to death by hanging. 7 were given prison sentences.  

Goering admitted to Gilbert that his attempt to affirm the glory of the Nazi years and win the admiration of the German people had failed. "You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more.  When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial, it won't be necessary to condemn him.  He has condemned himself" (El-Hai, 150).

Wanting to escape the indignity of hanging, Goering asked that he be killed by a firing squad.  But his request was denied.  

The night before he was to be hanged, Goering bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide that he had somehow hidden from the guards.  His suicide was his final act of defiance.

Remarkably, as the movie indicates in its closing intertitles, Kelley also killed himself with cyanide in 1958.  This ended his own life-long struggle with his inner demons.

NAZIS INTERPRETING INKBLOTS

Both Kelley and Gilbert thought the only way to probe into the deepest recesses of the Nazi Mind was through the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which had been developed in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist.  Rorschach created a set of ten inkblots that were intentionally drawn to be ambiguous.  He thought that when patients were asked to describe what they saw in these inkblot drawings, they would reveal their mental disorders and personalities, even when this was beyond the patients' conscious awareness.  So, for example, if patients responded with lots of descriptions involving color, that indicated that they were emotional and impulsive.  Or if they described people engaged in cooperative activities, that indicated that the patients found social interactions to be pleasurable and helpful.

                                                      How the Rorschach Inkblot Test Works

Although the Rorschach test was popular among psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, there is now a general agreement that this test has very limited uses, and that for most purposes it is little more than a variation of astrology and palm reading (Wood, Nezworski, and Garb, 2023).  The test has some validity for detecting disorders such as schizophrenia that involve perceptual distortion and disorganized thinking.  And some of the Rorschach test scores are related to IQ.  But the Rorschach test scores have little validity for providing a general understanding of personality.  And it is certainly not a psychological x-ray that can detect mental realities of which the patient is unaware of.

The failure of the Rorschach test in evaluating the Nazi prisoners became evident when Kelley and Gilbert could not agree in their interpretations of their inkblot tests.  Kelley saw imagination, boldness, and even genius in Goering's responses.  Gilbert saw the mediocrity of Goering's intellect and a lack of originality.  Kelley thought the Rorschach tests of the Nazis revealed that there was no mentally disordered "Nazi mind," because they were ordinary mentally healthy people, which showed that many mentally healthy people could become Nazis in the right circumstances.  By contrast, Gilbert thought the Nazis were mentally disordered in having antisocial personalities with no sympathy for the suffering of others.  Gilbert identified Goering as an "amiable psychopath" with a sadistic aggressiveness (1948).

And yet Kelley and Gilbert could agree on one facet of Goering's personality--his restless desire for dominance and power (El-Hai, 10-11, 74, 113-14, 134, 140; Gilbert, 1948, 212, 220, 225).

DOMINANCE, DEFERENCE, AND RESISTANCE TO DOMINANCE

The political psychology of Nazi politics manifests the tense interaction of three natural propensities of our evolved human nature as political animals: dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance (or counter-dominance).  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  Deference is the natural propensity of many individuals to submit to those few who are dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of many individuals to resist being dominated.

The desire for dominance and the grandiose narcissism of a man like Goering are easily mistaken as signs of a psychopathic personality.  But as I said in Darwinian Natural Right, pure psychopaths--people who have all the psychopathic traits identified by Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare--cannot be successful in the pursuit of dominance and power, because the behavior of pure psychopaths will always be self-defeating in that they cannot act prudently for any long-term goal.  As Cleckley said: "The psychopath shows a striking inability to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be one regarded as good or evil.  He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all" (Arnhart, 1998, 222).  By contrast, Goering showed self-control and deliberate planning in his pursuit of dominance--in his quest to become the Big Man.

As Goering explained to Kelley and Gilbert, he and Hitler easily won the support of the German people because most people are easily persuaded to defer to the dominance of charismatic leaders.

Nazi Germany did not have a constitutional system of countervailing powers that would have allowed legal resistance to Nazi Party rule.  For example, the Nazi rulers could not be turned out of office through elections.  But Goering and Hitler did see illegal resistance--both armed and unarmed--to their dominance over Nazi Germany (Wikipedia, 2025a).  Over 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities.  Tens of thousands of Germans were executed by the Nazis.  And hundreds of thousands of Germans deserted from the Wehrmacht, and many defected to the Allies or to anti-Fascist resistance forces.  There were also at least 42 assassination plots to kill Hitler, and some of them came close to succeeding (Wikipedia, 2025b).  (Hitler would have benefited from reading the longest chapter in Machiavelli's Prince, which is about assassination plots as the greatest threat to the Prince who is hated by many of his people.)

All of these armed and unarmed ways of resisting the unjust dominance of rulers are expressions of what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all individuals to punish those who violated the natural law of individual liberty.

Of course, ultimately the most successful resistance movement was the military resistance of the Allied forces that defeated Germany.  As Leo Strauss (2007) observed in a lecture in New York in December of 1943, what really influenced the Germans who supported Nazi rule was not the silly Nazi doctrines like Aryan racial superiority but rather the Nazi promise that Nazi arms and diplomacy would bring "the solution of all German problems by a short and decisive war," which "convinced a substantial part of the German people that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays."  Strauss believed that "this doctrine is subject to the test of sense-experience."  First, that this was not going to be a short and decisive victory for Germany became clear as early as 1940 when the British Spitfires blunted the attack of Goering's Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (July to October of 1940).  By December of 1943, people had seen with their own eyes that the Allies were defeating Germany on the battlefield.  And Strauss foresaw that this "re-education of Germany" would be "consummated by a meeting of British-American and of Russian tanks" in Berlin, and "by the harmonious cooperation of the Western and Eastern occupying forces in bringing to trial the war criminals."  The Nuremberg Tribunal accomplished that.

LESSONS FOR AMERICA?

Many people who see "Nuremberg" will detect a subtext in the movie that suggests questions about America: Can a Nazi-like dictatorship arise in America?  And if so, can this American dictatorship be brought to trial for its crimes?  Can an American dictatorship be overthrown by a popular resistance movement? Is Trump driven by the same desire for dictatorial dominance that drove Hitler and Goering?

That the answer to this last question is yes should be evident once we remember some of Trump's most arrogant boasts about his power--such as "As president, I can do anything I want."

We can hope, however, that unlike Goering and Hitler, Trump will always face the limits on his power that come from a constitutional system of countervailing powers, in which, as Publius said in The Federalist: "Ambition counteracts ambition."  But Trump has been setting aside that constitutional system and replacing it with a competitive authoritarianism--a hybrid regime that combines elements of democracy and authoritarianism, which has emerged around the world over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War (Levitsky and Way, 2002, 2010, 2025).  A competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

A fully authoritarian regime (like Nazi Germany) allows little or no countervailing power.  A fully democratic regime (like the U.S. until recently) allows strong countervailance. A competitive authoritarian regime (like what Trump is establishing in his second term) allows weak countervailance.

Through various ways, the U.S. could become a fully authoritarian regime.  Trump could declare a state of national emergency that requires canceling the midterm elections next year.  Or the Supreme Court could adopt a version of the Unitary Executive Theory that means that there are no constitutional limits on the power of the President--and therefore Trump is right when he says that as President, he can do anything he wants.

If that were to happen, then we would have to hope that many Americans would join the resistance to dictatorial dominance that has started with the "No Kings" protests.  But these protestors will have to be willing to face imprisonment and violent suppression from the government.  We would also have to hope that military personnel and law enforcement officers would refuse to obey illegal orders from Trump.

It is a dark time in America.  But it could become much darker, perhaps even as dark as in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.

 

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

El-Hai, Jack. 2013. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and the Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. New York: MJF Books.

Gilbert, G. M. 1948. "Hermann Goerig, Amiable Psychopath." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43: 211-229.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs 104 (March/April): 36-51.

Strauss, Leo. 2007. "The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews." The Review of Politics 69: 530-38.

Wikipedia. 2025a. "German Resistance to Nazism."

Wikipedia. 2025b. "Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler."

Wood, James M., M. Teresa Nezworski, and Howard N. Garb. 2023. "The Rorschach Inkblot Test: We See an Unsinkable Rubber Ducky." Skeptical Inquirer 47 (6): 39-45.

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:

Is Chimpanzee Politics Machiavelli's Politics?

                             The Picture on the Book Cover of Machiavellian Intelligence II

In 1967, Antony Jay published Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life.  He argued that the pursuit of power in a modern corporation was just like the Renaissance politics described by Niccolo Machiavelli in The Prince, and that Machiavelli's principles for gaining and holding political power were also the best principles for successfully advancing one's position in a corporation.  His book is considered a classic of management science that was followed by dozens of other books on "Machiavellian management." 

Jay was also interested in how human behavior in organizations was like a lot of animal behavior.  In a 2005 interview, he said: "During my own experiences, I saw how an awful lot of animal behavior, particularly primate behavior, comes up in the modern corporation."  He also wrote the popular BBC television series "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" that were comic depictions of British civil servants and government ministers fighting for dominance.

In 1970, Richard Christie and Florence Geis published Studies in Machiavellianism, in which they developed a procedure for identifying  the "Machiavellian personality" of people who unscrupulously pursue their selfish interests by manipulating and deceiving others.  They developed a "Mach Scale" based on whether people agree with a series of statements that are identified with Machiavelli.  In its most extreme form, the purest Machiavellian personality might be a psychopath, who manipulates and exploits other human beings unrestrained by any moral emotions of shame, guilt, or love.  The "Mach Scale" has been used extensively by social psychologists.

In 1982, Frans de Waal published Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes.  The book was based on de Waal's study of the chimpanzees in the Burgers' Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands.  At that time, this was the largest group of chimpanzees in a zoo (23 individuals).  During the warmer half of the year, they were free to move over a two-acre outdoor island area surrounded by a moat, which allowed for careful observations of their social behavior by de Waal and his students.

De Waal says that he couldn't understand what these chimpanzees were doing until he read Machiavelli: "The biological literature proved to be of no help understanding the social maneuvering that I observed, so I turned to Niccolo Machiavelli. During quiet moments of observation, I read from a book that had been published more than four centuries earlier.  The Prince put me in the right frame of mind to interpret what I was seeing on the chimpanzees' forested island, though I'm pretty sure the Florentine philosopher never envisioned this particular application" (de Waal 2016, 168).  He found that "whole passages of Machiavelli seem to be directly applicable to chimpanzee behavior" in explaining "the struggle for power and the resultant opportunism" (1982, 19).

In 1988, Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten published their edited book Machiavellian Intelligence: The Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans, which explored the "Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis"--the idea that the evolutionary growth in the size of primate and human brains could be explained as an adaptation for the cognitive challenges of navigating through the social complexity of primate communities in which individuals must figure out how best to both compete and cooperate with other members of their species.  This has been a popular topic of research for primatologists and for cognitive scientists generally, although the term "Machiavellian intelligence" is sometimes replaced by "social intelligence" or "social brain" by people like Robin Dunbar.

Michael Jackson and Damian Grace--social science scholars at the University of Sydney (Australia)--have complained that all of these applications of "Machiavellian" thinking to management, social psychology, and primatology show a crude distortion of what Machiavelli actually taught, and that those historians and political theorists who have studied Machiavelli should feel obligated to correct these false views of Machiavelli and his teaching (Jackson and Grace 2012, 2015).

They say that when they examined many of the textbooks on the history of political thought, "we found in them not one single reference to Machiavelli's afterlife in management, social psychology, or primatology" (2015, 68).  They did not look at my textbook on the history of political philosophy--Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.  If they had, they would have seen that my chapter on Machiavelli has passages on de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics, Byrne and Whiten's Machiavellian Intelligence, and Christie and Geis's Studies in Machiavellianism (see Arnhart 2015, 145-46, 151).  I also refer to Edward O. Wilson and Jane Goodall as biologists who study the power-seeking personality among chimpanzees and other animals.  I bring all of this up as I ask the question, Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian?  In other words, does Machiavelli's teaching correspond to the popular use of the term "Machiavellian" as denoting the ruthless pursuit of power over others through immoral force and fraud?  Jackson and Grace answer no to this question.

I am particularly interested in raising this question as it bears on primatology.  Is chimpanzee politics Machiavellian?  If it is, does this Machiavellian chimpanzee politics conform to what Machiavelli himself taught?  Or does this chimpanzee Machiavellianism depart from Machiavelli's teaching about politics?  Although Jackson and Grace are a little obscure on these points, they seem to say that while chimpanzee politics might be "Machiavellian" in the popular sense of that term, this contradicts what Machiavelli himself taught.

I will survey some of what de Waal says about chimpanzee politics.  Then I will consider the arguments of Jackson and Grace for denying that chimpanzee politics conforms to what Machiavelli teaches. Finally, I will suggest some ways in which the political life of chimpanzees really does manifest some of what Machiavelli teaches about politics.

When de Waal arrived at the Arnhem zoo in 1975 to study the chimpanzees, Yeroen was the alpha male.  Yeroen was dominant over three other adult males--Luit, Nikkie, and Dandy.  The social hierarchy is indicated by a special form of greeting.  Chimpanzees show a submissive greeting that is a sequence of short panting grunts by the subordinate individual as he looks up at the superior individual, which is usually accompanied by a series of deep bobbing bows by the subordinate.  Sometimes the subordinate will stretch out a hand to the superior or kiss the superior's feet, neck, or chest.  The superior reacts to this by rising up and making his hair stand on end, so that he looks very large in contrast to the groveling subordinate.  The alpha male is the male who is "greeted" by the other males.  Generally, the alpha male is also "greeted" by the females and the children in a group.

The male on the left is dominant.  The male on the right is subordinate.  Although they are actually the same size, the dominant male makes himself look bigger.

People often assume that among animals the dominance hierarchy must be determined by fighting in which the biggest and strongest animal wins and becomes the alpha.  But de Waal insists that this is false.  Among chimpanzees and other animals, physical strength is only one of many traits required for becoming the dominant alpha leader.  To become the alpha, one needs supporters.  So one must form coalitions with partners, and to win the support of the females and the children, one needs to act as a mediator in intervening in disputes to enforce peace and unity either through impartial intervention or by supporting the weaker party against the stronger.  One must know how to reconcile after disputes.  And one must know how to achieve mutual cooperation through reciprocity by returning favors and by punishing those who are not cooperative.  So a chimpanzee community is not governed by "the law of the jungle" or the "rule of the stronger."

There is a female hierarchy as well as a male hierarchy.  In fact, before de Waal arrived at the Arnhem Zoo, the alpha female--Mama--was the dominant chimp over the whole group beginning in 1972.  Then, on November 5th of 1973, three adult males--Yeroen, Luit, and Nikkie--were added to the group.  Mama refused to accept them.  With her friend, Gorilla, she attacked the males--biting their feet and pulling their hair.  Their fear of her was expressed in their screaming, diarrhea, and vomiting.  After two weeks of this, the zoo managers decided to remove Mama and Gorilla from the group, because these females were inflicting too many injuries through their uncontrolled aggression.  Males seem to be better at controlling their aggression.  And since it is known that in the wild adult males are dominant, it was thought that they should have a chance to become dominant without the interference of Mama.

After three months, Yeroen was dominant over the group.  Mama and Gorilla were brought back.  Mama attacked the three adult males.  But she had no support from the other females, not even Gorilla.  Without the solidarity of the females, Mama could not alone intimidate the males.  Within a few weeks, Yeroen was dominant again, and he remained dominant from the spring of 1974 to the spring of 1976.

In 1976, de Waal saw the first of two power take-overs, which he understood with the help of Machiavelli, and this is what became the central focus of his book Chimpanzee Politics.  In the spring of 1976, Luit stopped "greeting" Yeroen, which initiated months of tense conflict between them as they fought over which would be dominant.  Luit formed a coalition with Nikkie, so that Nikkie would help Luit against Yeroen. On June 21st, Yeroen bared his teeth for the first time, which is a sign of fear in chimps.  On September 1, Yeroen "greeted" Luit for the first time.  Luit began to take on the control role of the alpha male in mediating fights to restore peace in the group.  On October 31, Yeroen "greeted" Nikkie for the first time.  So, now, Luit was the alpha male, Nikkie was second in command, and Yeroen was ranked third.

But then, in the spring of 1977, Nikkie formed a coalition with Yeroen to challenge Luit, and by December of 1977, Luit was "greeting" Nikkie as his superior. Nikkie had become the alpha male, with Yeroen second in command.  The chimpanzees' keeper at the zoo worried, however, that Nikkie was too young and immature to properly control his aggression.  De Waal responded by arguing that Nikkie was so dependent on the support of Yeroen, the oldest male, that there was no need to fear "an absolute dictatorship by a snotty-nosed upstart" (1982, 136).

But now that winter had come, and the chimps were confined to their indoor housing, Nikkie's violence did become excessive.  Whenever Luit and Yeroen were sitting together, Nikkie fought to separate them and to be close to Yeroen.  Nikkie became so violent that de Waal and the keeper agreed that he needed to be removed from the group for the rest of the winter.  Once Nikkie was gone, Luit resumed his dominant position.  In the spring of 1978, the chimps were released to their outdoor island, Nikkie was reintroduced, and Nikkie soon reclaimed his dominance.

De Waal noticed something strange about Nikkie's alpha male dominance.  When Yeroen was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other adult males, and he also received almost all of the "greetings" from the females and children.  When Luit was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other adult males, and he also received over 50% of the "greetings" from the females and children.  But when Nikkie was the alpha male, he was "greeted" by the other alpha males, but he received a lower proportion of the "greetings" from the females and children than did Yeroen.  Moreover, Yeroen exercised the control role--mediating disputes and restoring peace--that would normally be exercised by the alpha male, and this increased the popular respect for Yeroen as opposed to Nikkie.  Echoing Machiavelli's famous remark that "it is better to be feared than loved," de Waal observed that Nikkie was "feared rather than respected" (1982, 149).  But de Waal suggests that this lack of popularity made Nikkie weak.

There was another strange feature of Nikkie's alpha male status. Generally, alpha male chimps have the highest number of sexual matings with the females, and they actively disrupt the attempted matings of other males.  This makes sense in evolutionary terms, because we assume that the drive for male dominance evolved as an adaptive trait because alpha males have higher reproductive fitness.  But during the period of Nikkie's dominance, Yeroen had the highest proportion of matings, and Nikkie was forced to tolerate this in order to keep Yeroen's support.

To explain this, de Waal quotes a passage from Chapter 9 of The Prince entitled "Of the Civil Principate."  A civil principate, Machiavelli explains, is when "a private citizen neither by wickedness nor other intolerable violence, but with the favor of his fellow citizens, becomes prince of his fatherland." 

"One ascends to this principate either with the favor of the people [populo] or with that of the great [grandi].  For in every city, these two different humors are to be found. Thus it is that the people desire not to be commanded or oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and to oppress the people. . . ."

 "The principate is established either by the people or by the great, according to whether one of the other of these parties has the occasion.  For the great, when they see they are not able to resist the people, begin turning to the reputation of one of their own, making him prince, so they may, under his shadow, give vent to their appetite.  The people also, when they see that they are not able to resist the great, turn to the reputation of one, and make him a prince, so that he may with authority be their defense.  He who comes to the principate with the aid of the great maintains himself with more difficulty than the one who attains to it with the aid of the people--for he finds himself prince with many around him who opine themselves his equals, and because of this he cannot command or manage them in his own mode."

De Waal quotes the last sentence above, and he explains:

"Nikkie's position was not an easy one.  Compared to him Yeroen and Luit were almost all-powerful, thanks to the collaboration of the females.  The important difference between Nikkie's leadership and the old order was that Nikkie stood on the shoulders of someone who was himself very ambitious.  The ensuing problems are familiar enough in the human world.  Machiavelli wrote about the relative powerlessness of this kind of leader.  In in the following quotation from The Prince, we translate 'nobility' [the 'great'] by 'males of high rank' and 'common people' by 'females and children,' then we see that Nikkie's 'principality' is indeed very different from the 'principality' of his two predecessors" (1982, 153).

De Waal observes:

"Sometimes it seemed that Nikkie was being used as a figurehead, and that Yeroen--experienced as he was and extremely cunning--had him in the palm of his hand.  The broad basis for leadership rested not under Nikkie but under Yeroen.  The older male had a coalition with the females to pressurize Nikkie and a coalition with Nikkie to keep Luit in check.  Seen in these terms the situation appeared to represent a comeback for Yeroen.  Luit had deprived him of the support and respect he had hitherto enjoyed, but by pushing a youngster forward, Yeroen seemed to have succeeded in reacquiring both" (1982, 152).

But then, from 1978 to 1980, the proportion of the "greetings" directed from the females and the children towards Nikkie increased until he had the level of respect that normally goes to the alpha male.

In Chimpanzee Politics, de Waal ended the story here. But years later, he admitted that he had left out a brutal act in 1980 of what he called "political murder," because he didn't want to end his book on a "dark note" (de Waal 1986; 1998, 211).  In the summer of 1980, Nikkie refused to tolerate Yeroen's copulations with estrus females, and consequently Yeroen withdrew his support of Nikkie.  Without the coalition with Yeroen, Nikkie lost his dominance, and Luit became alpha male again for ten weeks.

But then Nikkie and Yeroen renewed their coalition and challenged Luit.  One night, while the chimps were in their night cages, Nikkie and Yeroen jointly attacked Luit--bitting off fingers and toes and then ripping out Luit's testicles.  Luit died from loss of blood.

The powerful jaws and teeth of adult males are deadly weapons.  Their incisors are like knives that can easily kill their victims.  But male chimps almost never use these weapons in lethal attacks.  There seems to be a rule against lethal fighting.  And yet the underlying threat of fighting to kill always creates tension in any severe conflict.  On rare occasions, killing does occur.  It's more likely to occur in war--in conflicts between chimpanzee groups rather than within a group.  Jane Goodall has seen this in Gombe.  De Waal could not see this because he was observing only one group.

De Waal's silence about the killing of Luit in the first edition of Chimpanzee Politics was not just to avoid ending the book on a "dark note," I suspect, but to avoid confirming the fears of those who had warned that establishing such a large community of chimps, including adult males, in a zoo without separating them in cages would lead to explosive and even lethal violence.  Since it was known that feeding chimps together created violence in fighting over the food, the Arnhem chimps were fed every morning and evening in separate cages so as to eliminate fighting over food.  But then being enclosed indoors every night during the warm months and throughout the day in the cold months created tension, because chimps in conflict could not separate.  Mama had to be removed in the winter of 1973, and Nikkie was removed in the winter of 1977, because their aggression was leading to serious injuries.  The killing of Luit in 1980 was during a night when Luit, Yeroen, and Nikkie were all caged together, and so Luit had no room to escape the attack.

The longest chapter in Machiavelli's The Prince--Chapter 19 on "Of Avoiding Contempt and Hatred"--is about how princes who become hated open themselves up to conspiracies leading to their assassination.  The killing of Luit seems to show that political assassination is also part of the Machiavellian politics of chimpanzees.

So why exactly do Jackson and Grace object to identifying chimpanzee politics as Machiavellian?  They suggest at least five arguments.  First, they object that what is called "Machiavellian" is based on "the more flamboyant passages" in The Prince--such as "it is better to be feared than loved"--without seeing how less flamboyant passages in The Prince moderate what Machiavelli is saying.  They write: "The Prince, like his other books, also offers moral judgments, recommendations of caution, emphasis on the importance of stability, advice on treating the populace with respect, and much else that surprises those whose stereotype of Machiavellianism is transposed to Niccolo Machiavelli" (Jackson and Grace 2012).

Second, they object that primatologists like de Waal have read only The Prince, and so they don't see Machiavelli's support for republicanism in The Discourses and other writings.

Third, they object that the popular view of Machiavellianism fails to see how Machiavelli was simply responding to his historical circumstances in Renaissance Italy in which political life was disrupted by domestic violence, warfare, brutality, and deceit.  The apparent cynicism of what Machiavelli says is a response to those harsh conditions.  They write: "The best analogy for the circumstances in which Machiavelli lived are to be found today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico, or the remoter regions of Pakistan, where power does grow out of the barrel of a gun" (Jackson and Grace 2012).

Fourth, they argue that much of Machiavelli's writing is a factual description of what princes and politically ambitious people do without any endorsement of that behavior.

Fifth, they argue that Machiavelli is clear that the political class of people who strive for dominance over others is very small, and that most human beings do not have such a dominance drive, and they wish only to live their private lives in peace without being exploited by those who wish to dominate them.  In a republic, Machiavelli indicates, the desire to be free is for most people a desire to be free to live a secure life; and it is only for a few people--perhaps no more than 40 or 50--that the desire to be free is a desire to be free so as to command others `(Discourses, I, ch. 16).

Oddly, however, Jackson and Grace don't reflect on the fact that much of what de Waal says about Machiavelli and the chimps agrees with some of their arguments.  De Waal indicates that he does not like the term "Machiavellian intelligence" insofar as it assumes the crudely distorted popular meaning of "Machiavellian":

"The term Machiavellian implies a cynical, the-ends-justify-the-means exploitation of others.  Social cognition covers much more than this.  A mother resolving a weaning conflict by cleverly distracting her offspring, or an adult male waiting for the right moment to reconcile with his rival, both intelligently use their experience but are not exactly acting 'Machiavellian' in the usual sense.  Sensitivity to others, conflict resolution, and reciprocal exchange all demand a great deal of intelligence but are left out if our terminology one-sidedly emphasizes one-upmanship" (1998, 218).

Thus, de Waal agrees with Jackson and Grace in rejecting the popular sense of "Machiavellian."  He also agrees that this Machiavellian idea of "a cynical, the-ends-justify-the-means exploitation of others" cannot explain chimpanzee social life, which requires "sensitivity to others, conflict resolution, and reciprocal exchange."  In Chimpanzee Politics, De Waal sees in chimpanzee life the evolutionary roots of morality--a "sense of moral rightness and justice" (1982, 105, 111-12, 176, 200, 204-205, 207, 212-13).

In his writing published after Chimpanzee Politics, which Jackson and Grace ignore, de Waal argues that chimpanzees show the evolutionary foundations of morality--including reciprocity, fairness, empathy, and social cooperation.  De Waal has summarized some of the evidence for this in a TED talk:

And while Jackson and Grace accuse the Machiavellian primatologists of ignoring Machiavelli's teaching about the importance of a republican politics that respects the needs of the populace, De Waal sees in chimpanzee politics a democratic or republican structure like that recommended by Machiavelli with a balance of three orders--the one, the few, and the many.

Machiavelli analyzed politics as competition for power and glory organized around three orders of human beings--the "prince," who is number one; the "great ones," who are high-ranking individuals with ambition to rule; and the "people," who are the great majority of individuals in a society with no ambition to rule, but who do not want to be oppressed by the "prince" or the "great ones," because they want to live their private lives in security and peace.  A stable and peaceful regime would have to balance these three orders in a manner that would satisfy the ambitions and appetites of all three without anyone having the power to tyrannize over others (The Prince, ch. 9, 57-60; The Discourses, I.2, 10-14).

De Waal saw a similar social structure among the chimpanzees: the alpha male chimp is the "prince"; the high-ranking males are the "great ones"; and the females and children are the "people."  The similarities between chimpanzee politics and human politics were so close that Newt Gingrich, when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives of the U.S. Congress, recommended de Waal's book to all freshmen congressmen who might want to understand Washington politics.

Just as Machiavelli saw the balance of three orders in a republic as the fundamental mechanism for maintaining a stable and free political regime that would not be despotic, de Waal saw the same mechanism at work among chimps.  Noticing how the alpha male often had to rely on the support of an ally to keep challengers down, de Waal explained this as a "balance of power: the superiority of one party over another depends on the support of a third, so that each party affects the position of the others."  De Waal observed that the leader "cannot impose his leadership on the group single-handed. His position is granted him, in part, by the other chimpanzees.  The leader, or alpha male, is just as much ensnared in the web as the rest" (1982, 23).  So, among chimps, there is something like government by the consent of the governed. 

De Waal sees here what some political scientists have called government by the "minimal winning coalition" (de Waal 1982, 187; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2011). No one individual can rule without supporters, and so there must always be a ruling coalition supporting the leader, who must satisfy his supporters.  A dictatorship is rule by a small coalition.  Democracy is rule by a large coalition.  The leader must serve the interests of his coalition, and so the larger the coalition, the closer this approximates to serving the common interests of society.

Consequently, there was something like a "democratic structure" in this order of chimpanzee society:

"All parties search for social significance and continue to do so until a temporary balance is achieved.  This balance determines the new hierarchical positions. Changing relationships reach a point where they become 'frozen' in more or less fixed ranks.  When we see how this formalization takes place during reconciliations, we understand that the hierarchy is a cohesive factor, which puts limits on competition and conflict. Child care, playing, sex and cooperation depend on the resultant stability.  But underneath the surface, the situation is constantly in a state of flux. The balance of power is tested daily, and if it proves too weak, it is challenged, and a new balance is established" (1982, 176, 212-13; 1998, 172, 208-209).

Although every human society shows an order of dominance like that of a chimpanzee society, a well-balanced society can achieve egalitarian dominance rather than despotic dominance.  De Waal has observed that rhesus monkeys manifest despotic dominance, because a dominant rhesus monkey instills unremitting fear in subordinates.  But among chimpanzees, the dominant chimp often acts to protect subordinates, and if he becomes a bully, he can provoke an alliance of subordinates to throw him out of power (de Waal 1996, 125-32).

This seems to be what happens in egalitarian human communities.  Among hunter-gatherers, leaders who become too proud are attacked with social ridicule, and in extreme cases, leaders can be deposed or even executed by their followers.  With the establishment of centralized, bureaucratic states, it became possible for despots to concentrate their power.  And yet the natural human desire to be free from despotic exploitation has provoked alliances among subordinates to check the power of dominants, which has promoted political systems for balancing power.  In their style of political dominance, human beings are more like chimpanzees than rhesus monkeys (Boehm 1999, 2012; Rubin 2002; Turner and Maryanski 2008).

John Adams agreed with Machiavelli that every society shows three social orders rooted in human nature--the one, the few, and the many--and that a stable and free republic requires a balance of these three orders.  Adams saw this balance in the American and British constitutions (Arnhart 2009, 73-84; Ryerson 2016).

Adams believed that human nature is such that every human society must decide the question, Who is the first man?  "It is a question that must be decided, in every species of gregarious animals, as well as men."  In a savage state, this question is decided by physical combat between contenders.  But even in the most civilized societies, "the same nature remains," and the contest for first rank must be decided, whether by peaceful or by violent rivalry.  The balance of powers answers this question by providing for a supreme executive office to be filled by one with sufficient ambition to strive for it, while still checking the power of this executive officer with the powers of other offices.

At the top of every society, Adams thought, there will be competition among the "first men" for the highest rank.  The people of a society will fix their attention on these men at the top.  And if there is division over who should fill the dominant position, the society will be thrown into turmoil and eventually civil war.  For this reason, societies should select a single person with executive authority separated from the rest of society and from the legislative body.  This chief executive unifies a society and directs its management.  This executive can then mediate between the passions of the ambitious few who want to rule and the passions of the deferential many who want to be free from oppression by the ambitious few.

Machiavelli and Adams saw this balance of three orders as a republican form of government best designed in conformity to human nature.  De Waal and other primatologists can see the evolutionary precursors of this human nature in the political life of chimpanzees.

And, after all, as de Waal has observed, can't we see a lot of chimpanzee politics in Donald Trump?  Trump once told People magazine: "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.  You just can't let people make a sucker out of you."


REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. Ed. Kenneth Blanchard. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.

Arnhart, Larry. 2015. Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker. 4th edition. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

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 Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and Alastair Smith. 2011. The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics. New York: Public Affairs.

Byrne, Richard, and Andrew Whiten, eds. 1988. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Michael, and Damian Grace. 2012. "Machiavellian Monkey Business: Machiavellian Intelligence in Primates and Machiavelli." The Montreal Review, December. Available online.

Jackson, Michael, and Damian Grace. 2015. "Machiavelli's Shadows in Management, Social Psychology, and Primatology." Theoria 62: 67-84. Available online.

Jay, Antony. 1967. Management and Machiavelli: An Inquiry into the Politics of Corporate Life. New York: Bantam Books.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1989. The Prince. Trans. Leo Paul de Alvarez. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1996. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rubin, Paul H. 2002. Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origins of Freedom. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Ryerson, Richard Alan. 2016. John Adams's Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Turner, Jonathan H., and Alexandra Maryanski. 2008. On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

de Waal, Frans. 1982. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. New York: Harper & Row.

de Waal, Frans. 1986. "The Brutal Elimination of a Rival Among Captive Male Chimpanzees." Ethology and Sociobiology 7: 89104.

de Waal, Frans. 1996. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 1998. Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

de Waal, Frans. 2016. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: W. W. Norton & Company.


Some of my other posts on these themes can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here., here., here, and here.