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.

Understanding Psychopaths and the Problem of Moral Strangers

Mencius' famous teaching that "human nature is good" can be easily dismissed as naive in ignoring the reality of human depravity. In defense of Mencius, we might say that, of course, Mencius knows that many human beings are bad, because his point is only that all human beings are born with the propensities and capacities that can be cultivated into goodness, even though many people fail at this because of their bad circumstances or their bad choices. But even this modest claim that human beings are born with the natural potential for goodness seems to fail to account for those we identify as psychopaths, who from birth seem to lack the full potential for goodness that we take as normal for most human beings.

Similarly, some of my critics have argued that psychopaths contradict my claim that there is a natural moral sense rooted in human biology. To answer that objection, I wrote Chapter 8 of Darwinian Natural Right on "The Poverty of Psychopathic Desire." I survey the modern research on psychopathy and conclude that psychopaths suffer from an abnormal poverty of desire: they lack the social desires and moral emotions that support the moral sense in normal people. If morality depends upon a moral sense, and if the moral sense depends on moral emotions that typically arise in most human beings, then it would seem that those few people who happen not to share those moral emotions are not bound to obey that moral sense. Yet, although it is true that psychopaths are under no moral obligation to conform to the moral sense, because they lack the moral emotions that provide the only basis for moral obligation, it does not follow that we cannot protect our moral community against their attack. Since they lack the moral sentiments that make moral persuasion possible, our only appeal with such people is force and fear.

Some of my critics--for example, John Hare and Carson Holloway--insist that this shows the fundamental weakness in my argument--that my appeal to moral sentiments cannot work with those psychopaths who lack such sentiments, and so the only way we can constrain their behavior is through force or fear. But these critics haven't provided any good alternative. To me, our experience with psychopaths shows the tragic limits to moral persuasion. With those who lack the social emotions necessary for developing a conscience, we have no grounds for persuasion.

In my chapter on psychopathy, I rely heavily on Robert Hare, one of the leading psychologists in this area. So I have been interested to see the recent media coverage of a controversy involving Hare. In 2007, Jennifer Skeem and David Cooke wrote an article criticizing Hare's work on psychopathy. Their article was accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Assessment. When Hare saw a copy of their manuscript, he threatened to file a lawsuit for libel if the article were published. This brought a delay in publication. Eventually, Skeem and Cooke revised their article, and Hare was invited to write a reply to be published along with the article. Finally, three years later, this has all been published in the latest issue of the journal. The intensity of the controversy is suggested in a recent article in the New York Times. The latest issue of Science also has an article on this.

I have not been able to secure copies of these journal articles. But from my reading of the abstracts, it seems that this continues a controversy that has surfaced in some previous articles. In 2007, Cooke and Skeem published an article in the British Journal of Psychiatry that seems to state the same criticisms of Hare that are set forth in their latest article. Also, Hare has posted a statement on his website giving his side of this controversy.

Hare's great influence comes from his being the creator of the "Psychopathy Checklist," which is used by forensic psychologists to identify people with psychopathic personalities. The checklist consists of 20 traits and behaviors, with definitions for each. Using interviews and case-history information, evaluators rate subjects on a 3-point scale for each item. This is commonly used in legal systems to decide whether an offender is psychopathic and thus likely to be dangerous in the future.

Much of the controversy over Hare's checklist turns on arcane technical details. And if you're going to try to read the article by Cooke and Skeem, I warn you that they write in the turgid style favored by academic psychologists. For example, they use words like "parameterise."

But there is an important substantive point here beyond the technical issues of methodology. Cooke and Skeem argue that psychopathic personality should be distinguished from criminal behavior, and therefore criminal behavior should not be part of the "Psychopathy Checklist." They agree that psychopaths might be often inclined to criminal behavior. But this behavior is separate from the "construct" of psychopathy. Oddly enough, Hare seems to agree with this, because he claims that Cooke and Skeem distort his work to make it appear that he treats criminal behavior as essential to psychopathy, whereas in fact he does not.

In my chapter on psychopathy, I agree with this point, because although psychopaths are often inclined to criminal violence, and indeed to the worst kind of violence, as in the careers of serial killers, many psychopaths never commit such crimes, but pursue lives of deceitful and manipulative behavior that are harmful even if they are not guilty of criminal violence.

Although few of us will have any contact with serial killers (we hope!), many of us almost everyday deal with people who show a psychopathic lack of conscience. Consider the following character sketch from Cooke and Skeem. They identify "three highly correlated symptom factors: arrogant and deceitful interpersonal style, deficient affective experience, and impulsive and irresponsible behavioral style." They then correlate various traits to each of these three factors. Corresponding to the first factor are "glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, and conning/manipulative." Corresponding to the second factor are "lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy and failure to accept responsibility for own actions." Corresponding to the third factor are "need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, irresponsibility, impulsivity, parasitic life-style, and lack of realistic, long-term goals."

As I indicate in my chapter, many of the traits of psychopathy correlate closely with the "Machiavellian personality," a psychological construction derived from Machiavelli's writings. Success in politics might require a callous, manipulative temperament, which raises questions about the uneasy relationship between politics and morality.

A couple of related posts can be found here and here.

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

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

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

I elaborated these points in a post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Natural Desire for In-Group Loyalty Denies Animal Rights: Frans de Waal on the Biological Ethics of Animal Emotions

I have defended an evolutionary theory of morality as rooted in the moral emotions of evolved human nature.  In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, this evolutionary theory belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, Edward Wilson, and Frans de Waal--a tradition that is set against the Platonic and Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.

I have written previously about how de Waal's version of this evolutionary theory recognizes both the continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals (de Waal 2006).  According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships.  These moral sentiments can be seen in some form in many species of nonhuman animals.

De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality.  Through social praise and blame, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community.  These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation.  In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society.  Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals.  For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups engage in "policing behavior"--these males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded.  Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond the morality of other animals in that human beings can formulate social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.  Much of this abstract rulemaking depends on the human capacity for language.

Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human.  De Waal observes: "I know of no parallels in animals for moral reasoning" (2006, 174). We are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others.  But we can also use our distinctly human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an imagined "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith called it), so that we want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone.  We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation.  From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience, so that even when other people do not punish us for our bad conduct, we punish ourselves by feeling guilt or shame.  Those few human beings who never feel guilt or shame are psychopaths who have no conscience because they do not feel the moral emotions.  (I have written about psychopaths as "moral strangers.")  There is no evidence for anything like conscience or the impartial spectator in nonhuman animals.  (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator.")

And yet even if nonhuman animals do not show the full range of human morality, these animals do show some of the moral emotions; and therefore, de Waal argues, these nonhuman animals do deserve to be treated with some moral respect.  But then we might wonder whether these animals have equal rights.  Are we morally obligated to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings, as Peter Singer has argued?  Must we see the immorality not only in racism and sexism but also speciesism?

Recently, de Waal and Kristin Andrews have surveyed the evidence from affective neuroscience suggesting that many animals, even invertebrates, experience emotions of pleasure and pain that should give them some moral standing (de Waal and Andrews 2022).  Through emotions and felt experience (sentience), organisms judge experiences as attractive or aversive, and these physical and mental states of attraction or aversion prepare the organism for adaptive action.

So, for example, since there is increasing evidence that lobsters are sentient and experience emotions of pleasure and pain, de Waal claims, it is wrong for human beings to kill them by boiling them.  Either we shouldn't kill them at all, or there should find some ethical way to kill them.

But then de Waal recognizes that Singer's argument for equal animal rights fails because it's morally impossible for human beings to give equal consideration to the interests of all sentient beings.  This is impossible because there is an evolved natural desire for in-group loyalty.  This belongs to my list of the twenty natural desires.  

There is an expanding circle of human moral concern that begins with each individual being concerned for himself and then extends first to the individual's family and friends and beyond that to the community, tribe, or nation, and beyond that to some humanitarian feeling for distant strangers who might be brought to one's attention, and then finally to all life forms.  But typically, the moral emotions of sympathy become weaker as they are extended farther out on the expanding circle (de Waal 2006, 163-66).

Loyalty is a moral duty in that we expect people to care more for those close to them than to distant strangers or to nonhuman animals.  Inevitably, there are conflicts of interest within and between species.  So that moral systems are inherently biased towards the in-group.  For that reason, the moral sentimentalists like Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, and de Waal, who speak of the impartiality required for moral sentiments recognize that this cannot be an absolute impartiality but only an apparent impartiality.  After all, if human beings were absolutely impartial, they would not care for themselves, for other human beings, or for other animals, because nothing would really matter.

That we should feel some sympathy for other animals, particularly for those animals that are close to us or that elicit our parental care, is an expression of our morality.  We know that one sign that a child might grow up to be a psychopath is that he is unusually cruel in his treatment of animals.  And it is mostly a he, because most psychopaths are male.

But still most of us agree that it is right to kill animals for food and other products, and that it is right to use animals for painful medical experiments necessary for developing drugs and therapies for human beings and for the scientific understanding of mammalian physiology and neurology.  We should feel some concern for minimizing animal suffering.  But we feel much more concern for minimizing human suffering.

As Westermarck observed, "absolute impartiality . . . would concede to all sentient creatures equal rights," but "impartiality . . . is not absolute, only relative, that is, impartiality within certain limits" (1900, 185).  Our sympathy for nonhuman animals is limited by our partiality for human beings.  "Humanity to animals" does require "that we ought to pay some regard to their feelings," Westermarck suggested, but this does not mean "that they should be regarded equally with the feelings of men" (1932, 213).

Even our sympathy for other human beings is limited by our in-group loyalty.  In war, fighting for one's country against the enemy is a moral duty.  Betraying one's country is treason.  But still, it can be a moral duty to refuse to fight in an unjust war.

REFERENCES

de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

de Waal, Frans, and Kristin Andrews. 2022. "The Question of Animal Emotions." Science 375: 1351-52.

Westermarck, Edward. 1900. "Remarks on the Predicates of Moral Judgment." Mind 9: 184-204.

Westermarck, Edward. 1932. Ethical Relativity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company.

A Darwinian Left?--A Reply to Jiro Tanaka

Politics and Culture is an online journal that has just published a special issue on "Bioculture: Evolutionary Cultural Studies," edited by Joseph Carroll. One of the essays for this issue is Jiro Tanaka's "Notes Toward a Darwinian Left." Tanaka's article includes some strange comments on my argument for Darwinian natural right.

As the epigram for his essay, Tanaka quotes from Stephen Jay Gould: "Why should our nastiness be the baggage of an apish past and our kindness uniquely human? Why should we not seek continuity with other animals for our noble traits as well?" I would agree with this idea that even our noblest traits show some evolutionary continuity with other animals, and in fact this is a fundamental part of my argument for Darwinian natural right. But how exactly does this support a "Darwinian left"? Tanaka never gives a clear answer.

Tanaka indicates his agreement with Peter Singer's A Darwinian Left. But Tanaka never explains how he would respond to the many criticisms of Singer coming from me and from others.

As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, Darwin's biological science of human nature challenged the utopian vision of the left by denying human perfectibility and suggesting that social reform would always be constrained by the limitations of human nature. Unless they chose to totally reject Darwinian science, leftists were forced to look for some way of accommodating Darwinism while preserving their utopian vision. There were three strategies for doing this. One strategy was to embrace Francis Galton's eugenics, because this assumed that biological nature could be brought under human control and thus directed to utopian reform. But Galton's utopian eugenics was both scientifically false and morally repugnant.

Another strategy for the left was to follow Alfred Russel Wallace in asserting a dualism of nature and culture, so that human social life could be seen as a product of culture unconstrained by nature and thus subject to utopian improvement. Although Wallace formulated his own theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time that Darwin developed his, Wallace broke with Darwin in arguing that the moral and intellectual powers of human beings transcended natural selection. Natural selection shaped the "animal nature" of human beings but not their "spiritual nature," which must arise from "the unseen universe of Spirit." This led Wallace to attend seances where he could talk to dead people who lived as disembodied spirits in the spiritual afterlife. Although many leftists found it hard to accept Wallace's spiritualism, they did accept a dichotomy between animal nature and human culture, which implied that human culture belonged to some kind of transcendental or supernatural realm of experience, which denied Darwin's claim that human cultural history was part of the natural history of the human species. So it seemed that the leftist belief in human perfectibility must deny a Darwinian science of human nature that constrains the human freedom for utopian transformation.

Another strategy for a Darwinian left is to reject any radical dichotomy between animal nature and human history and to adopt a Darwinian view of human beings as embedded fully within the natural world. This is evident in the work of Peter Kropotkin, a socialist anarchist who saw human beings as shaped completely by Darwinian natural selection. In contrast to those Darwinians who stressed the competitive character of the struggle for existence, Kropotkin argued that Darwin himself saw that natural selection often favored the cooperation of animals within their species. Kropotkin emphasized the importance of sociality, mutual aid, and the moral sense in Darwin's account of human nature in The Descent of Man. For Kropotkin, this suggested that human beings could organize their societies as a socialist anarchy based on spontaneous cooperation without government.

But while a Darwinian view of human nature does show how social cooperation is rooted in biological nature, such cooperation is not totally selfless, because it depends on norms of kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity, so that individuals cooperate with those people whom they trust but not with those whom they distrust. This will not sustain pure anarchy without government. Moreover, by embracing Darwinian naturalism, Kropotkin rejects the leftist tradition of utopian reform unconstrained by human nature, and in doing so, he rejects the fundamental ground of leftist thought.

Kropotkin's strategy for a Darwinian left has been adopted by Peter Singer. But like Kropotkin, Singer in caught in a dilemma: his Darwinian view of human nature forces him to deny leftist utopianism, but in doing that, he denies the core of leftist thought. Singer concedes that a Darwinian left would have to realize that natural tendencies (such as social ranking, male dominance, sex roles, and attachment to one's kin) cannot be abolished. He is forced to conclude: "In some ways, this is a sharply deflated vision of the left, its utopian ideas replaced by a cooly realistic view of what can be achieved. That is, I think, the best we can do today." In fact, much of his "deflated" leftism would be acceptable to conservatives, who have long assumed that conformity to human nature is a fundamental standard for good social policy. For example, Singer agrees with Adam Smith about the benefits of a market economy in channeling the selfish motivations of human nature in ways that serve the common good. While Tanaka embraces Singer's Darwinian left, he never explains how he escapes Singer's dilemma.

As one might expect, Tanaka has to reject my arguments for Darwinian conservatism, but his reasoning is hard to understand. He writes: "Darwin himself was for the most part a progressive and liberal thinker, kind in his personal relations and hostile to all forms of social cruelty and exploitation. He hated slavery, which he had witnessed firsthand in Brazil." He doesn't indicate, however, that Darwin's liberalism was the classical liberalism of the Liberal Party of Great Britain. And he doesn't respond to my claim that the modern exponents of classical liberalism are people like Friedrich Hayek who belong to the modern tradition of libertarian conservatism.

Tanaka's analysis of my position is hard to follow. Here it is:

"It is not enough simply to invoke the naturalistic fallacy. The conservative scholar Larry Arnhart forces us to confront this inadequacy when he derives several 'oughts' from 'ises.' In direct opposition to the fact-value distinction, Arnhart argues for the ultimate compatibility of Darwinian evolution and Aristotelian natural right. The context of this endeavor is clear: Darwin has few advocates on the political right these days, due in large part to the coalition, forged in the Reagan era, between fiscal and social conservatives on the one hand, and Christian conservatives on the other. Arnhart therefore finds himself in a minority when he claims that 'conservatives need Charles Darwin.' To make this claim, he must argue that our evolved human nature is a source of moral--and specifically conservative--values.

"Like almost all modern evolutionists, Arnhart posits a panhuman, species-typical nature. On the basis of this human nature, he takes a moral stand on the issues of slavery and female circumcision. Both practices, he argues, violate the basic, evolved needs of human nature. Theoretically, this move puts us in the same place as Hauser puts us: it takes evolutionary biology as the source of factual knowledge, and then leaves us to decide about how to deploy that knowledge. But unlike most evolutionists, Arnhart goes on to invest 'human nature' with a kind of sacral authority that he feels is self-evidently wicked to contravene. But therein lies the false step: by choosing loaded examples, Arnhart makes the derivation seemingly self-evident. But one could also point to other historical examples in which what comes naturally is not self-evidently 'good.' Puritanism (and other belief systems that value chasteness) exhorts its followers to contravene our nature, and then identifies that contravention--that abstention or forbearance--as the Good.

"'Human nature' itself cannot stand in as a proxy for God. We're back to feeling, but not without having made some progress. Yes, it is possible for some to feel pleasure at the suffering of children, and for others to find our highest good in frustrating the natural impulses of human nature. Nonetheless, if we recognize the limits and potential in our common humanity, we shall at least know where we stand. We can put the norms implicit in the feelings of psychopaths and the ethos of Puritans--and the norms implicit in our judgment of them--into their appropriate biological context. It is probable that the brains of psychopaths exhibit irregularities in regions of the frontal lobe that mediate pro-social emotions like empathy and compassion. Belief systems that place a premium on chasteness, by contrast, may represent social constructs that tap into and amplify an evolved, but highly variable, instinct for 'purity.'"

Later, he observes: "Nothing prevents us from advancing a progressive version of Arnhart's argument, so long as we do not invest human nature with sacral authority!"

Unfortunately, Tanaka never explains specifically what he means by "a progressive version of Arnhart's argument."

Nor does he explain how he reaches the conclusion that I "invest human nature with sacral authority." Sacral authority? He even puts this phrase in italics, which suggests that I use this exact phrase in application to human nature. In fact, as far as I know, I have never used this phrase, and I have never identified human nature as having sacral authority. I am not even sure what this would mean. I do understand that some religious believers might believe that God as Creator has used the evolutionary process to create human beings in His image. But I have never said that a scientific understanding of evolved human nature requires believing that human nature is sacred or has sacred authority. Since Tanaka never provides any citation of my writings to support his claim that I invest human nature with sacral authority, I am left perplexed as to what he has in mind.

Maybe what he means by this is that I believe that human beings are naturally good, that every natural disposition is good. But it's hard for me to figure out how he pulls this out of my writing, especially since I stress human imperfection and the tragic situations that arise from conflicting natural desires. For example, I explain the tragic character of slavery as showing the conflict between the slavemaster's natural desire for exploitation and the slave's natural desire to be free from exploitation. I also explain female circumcision as showing the conflict between the natural desire of parents to make their daughters marriageable and the natural desire to avoid the pain and suffering from the customs of clitoridectomy and infibulation. As Tanaka indicates, the natural feelings of psychopaths deviate from the moral feelings typical for most human beings. But he doesn't indicate that I have a whole chapter on psychopaths as people with natural temperaments that render them "moral strangers" who cannot respond normally to moral persuasion.

How Tanaka infers from this that I regard human nature as having "sacral authority" is beyond my comprehension.

Some of my posts on why the "naturalistic fallacy" is not a fallacy can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Evolutionary Ethics of Beauty in Chinese Footbinding and Female Circumcision

 

      

                                                Chinese Footbinding: "Lotus Feet" and "Lotus Shoes"

Having written in my previous post about the Darwinian ethics of beauty as an evolved natural desire, I can imagine that many readers want to object that there is no universal moral standard of beauty, because there is no agreement across individuals or across cultures about what counts as beauty.  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then aren't judgments of beauty subjective, arbitrary, and culturally relative?  

Chinese footbinding and female circumcision are often mentioned as two examples of this.  For almost a thousand years, many Chinese women mutilated their feet by binding their toes under the soles of their feet, breaking bones and crippling themselves so badly that it was hard for them to walk.  They did this because they thought women with tiny feet were beautiful, and men would not marry them if their feet were unbound.  Most of us find this grotesquely ugly.

Similarly, hundreds of millions of women across central Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia have had their genitals mutilated by their mothers when they were children:  their clitorises were cut off (clitoridectomy), and sometimes the sides of the vulva were sewn together (infibulation), leaving only a tiny hole for the flow of urine and menstrual blood.  To make sexual intercourse possible, their husbands must rip them open.  These women believe that clitoridectomy and infibulation make their genitals beautiful, and that men will not marry women who have not gone through this.  Once again, most of us find this repulsive rather than beautiful.

I contend, however, that the mere fact of moral disagreement about beauty and other human goods does not prove that there are no natural, universal standards for moral debate.  I begin by identifying the four sources of moral disagreement and arguing that such moral controversy allows us to engage in moral deliberation in which we appeal to a universal pattern of natural human desires as the norm for settling our disputes.  I then turn to Chinese footbinding and female circumcision as illustrations of moral debates that can be resolved by moral persuasion.

MORAL DISAGREEMENT

There are four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.  Consequently, ethics is not a demonstrative science in which one properly seeks certainty and precision.  Because of its uncertainty and imprecision, ethics requires the sort of practical judgment rooted in experience--what Aristotle and the Greeks called prudence (phronesis)--that cannot be reduced to abstract rules.  But still, the ultimate standard for ethics is the pattern of natural desires that belongs to our evolved human nature.

Fallible beliefs about circumstances.  Moral judgment is often uncertain and imprecise because our knowledge of the circumstances of action is uncertain and imprecise.  We often disagree about moral questions, even when we agree in our principles, because we have differing views of the relevant circumstances.  In fact, much of our moral reasoning is devoted to gathering and assessing the facts pertinent to our practical decisions.

For example, if parents believe that the social circumstances of their life make it impossible for their daughters to marry well if they are not mutilated (by footbinding or female circumcision), then many parents will force their daughters to be mutilated.  But if parents believe there are ways to resist or change those social circumstances, so that their daughters can marry well without being mutilated, they will do so. 

Fallible beliefs about desires.  The good is the desirable.  But we are often unsure about what we truly desire, because we often desire what we discover is not truly desirable.  Even when we think we know what we desire at some particular moment, it is not always clear whether satisfying that momentary desire will impede the satisfaction of a more important desire in the future.  Much of our moral deliberation with ourselves and with others requires reasoning about the consistency or contradiction of diverse desires over a complete life.  Furthermore, we often disagree about whether individually or socially arbitrary desires properly specify our natural desires.  

For example, while some women in some societies have believed that to satisfy their natural desires for sexual mating, familial bonding, and having children, they must have their genitals or their feet mutilated, these customary desires for female genital mutilation and female footbinding are founded on mistaken beliefs that frustrate the natural desires of both men and women.

Variable circumstances.  The variability in the practical circumstances that distinguish one individual from another and one society from another requires variability in our moral judgments.  Although the pattern of natural human desires is universal, satisfying those desires in different individual and social circumstances requires different patterns of conduct appropriate to the circumstances.

For example, in societies with social conventions that make female footbinding or female circumcision a requirement for a woman attracting a good husband, women cannot violate those conventions without being punished, which makes these conventions self-enforcing.  Consequently, to succeed in gradually abolishing those conventions, women and men will have to join social movements in which many people agree that they will not impose footbinding or circumcision on their daughters, and they will not allow their sons to marry women with bound feet or mutilated genitals.

Variable desires.  There is both normal and abnormal variation in human desires.  By "normal," I mean the central tendency in the distribution of a trait.  By "abnormal," I mean a wide deviance from the central tendency.  The normal variation arises from age, sexual identity, and individual temperament.  Natural human diversity is such that on average the young do not have exactly the same desires as the old, men do not have exactly the same desires as women, and individuals with one temperament do not have exactly the same desires as those with another temperament.  (I have written about the importance of individuality, historicity, and animal personalities in biological nature.)

The abnormal variation in desires arises from abnormality in innate dispositions or in social circumstances.  For example, while human beings are normally social animals with social desires that incline them to sympathize with the pleasures and pains of those close to them, a few human beings are innately predisposed to become psychopaths who do not feel these sympathetic emotions.  Consequently, the most extreme psychopaths are moral strangers to the rest of us, because they do not share our moral sentiments; and to protect ourselves from them, we must either ostracize them (lock them up) or execute them.  (I have written about the biological psychology of psychopaths.)  And sometimes abnormal social circumstances such as the customs of female footbinding and female circumcision promote arbitrary desires that frustrate natural desires.

CHINESE FOOTBINDING

In China, from the Song dynasty (960-1279) to the Qing dynasty (1636-1912), many Han Chinese girls and women had their feet regularly wrapped tightly to keep their feet small.  Oten toes were broken as the feet were rolled into an morbidly tight ball.  The ideal was to compress the arch of the foot, even breaking it, so that the foot was no longer than about 4.5 inches long, although this ideal was rarely achieved.  Bound feet were thought to be beautiful and sexually attractive to men, so that men preferred to marry women with bound feet, and unbound natural feet were regarded as ugly and disgusting.  Footbinding caused many physiological and orthopedic maladies for these women throughout their lives, including difficulty in walking that reduced their physical activity (Levy 1966; Ko 2005).

This practice of footbinding was originally concentrated among elite Han Chinese, but over the years it spread to other classes.  Although there is little data about the number of women who had footbound feet, there were probably at least one or two hundred million footbound women.  And yet although this custom of footbinding was traditional for many centuries in China, it was largely abolished within a few decades around the beginning of the twentieth century.  

In the efforts of social scientists to explain the origin, maintenance, and cessation of Chinese female footbinding, there have been two prominent theories.  According to the Hypergamy Hypothesis, parents used footbinding to increase the likelihood that their daughters would marry up (to richer and higher status men) at higher rates in open marriage markets in competition with natural-footed girls.  It began with Midred Dickemann's papers on female claustration, female genital mutilation, and footbinding (1979, 1991, 1997).  

Dickemann's insight was that hypergamous marriage was rooted in evolved mate preferences.  Men (on average) want to mate with women who show the physical beauty of youthful fertility; and in long-term mating, men want women who will assure them of paternal certainty, so that the men are not cuckolded.  Women (on average) want to mate with men who have the wealth and status to provide for them and their offspring; and to persuade men to make a long-term investment in them and their children, women will provide cues of sexual fidelity, particularly for the most desirable men.  Hypergamy becomes especially important in societies that are highly stratified, that have high patriarchal inequality, and that practice polygyny (multiple wives).  High-status wealthy men have the resources to outcompete men with less resources in winning the most desirable young brides.  In such circumstances, young women will often prefer to be a second or third wife of a wealthy man rather than the only wife of a poor man.

Although all men have faced the problem of paternal uncertainty (especially before DNA testing)--not knowing for sure that they are the biological fathers of the children born to their wives--this problem becomes acute for polygynous men who have multiple wives to guard.  And, again, these men will want to mate with women who show the signs of sexual fidelity.

All of these conditions are true for traditional China.  And in ancient China, it was believed that binding the feet of women would reduce the chances of there being unfaithful to their husbands, because women with bound feet have less physical mobility, and thus they are less likely to wander away from home to have sexual trysts.  Bound feet were also perceived as beautiful because men prefer women with small feet.  Therefore, Chinese parents who wanted their daughters to marry well would bind their feet so that they could outcompete natural-footed women in the marital competition for high-ranking men.  Daughters often resisted being bound and complained about the pain and suffering it caused, but parents insisted that without this they could never marry well.

This is the Hypergamy Hypothesis that evolutionary social scientists have offered to explain the origin and maintenance of Chinese footbinding.  This hypothesis can also explain the cessation of footbinding in the early decades of the twentieth century, once the social circumstances changed so that natural-footed women could marry well.

Over the past thirty years, a few social scientists have offered an alternative to the Hypergamy Hypothesis in explaining Chinese footbinding--the Labor Market Hypothesis.  Melissa Brown, Laurel Bossen, and Hill Gates have been its leading proponents (Bossen and Gates 2017; Brown 2016; Brown et al. 2012; Brown and Satterthwaite-Hillips 2018).  The idea is that footbinding was a form of labor control by parents to use their daughters for handicraft work within the home--carding cotton, spinning thread, and twisting hemp that brought in cash or goods necessary for the survival of the family.  As Brown says: "five-year-olds like to run and play, not sit in one place for the hours required to produce such quantities of thread (or other products).  By making it hurt to walk, footbinding served as labor control to keep girls at their handwork" (Brown 2016, 517).  Brown and her colleagues can then explain the cessation of footbinding beginning at the end of the nineteenth century by saying that this was when the mechanized production of cloth and its distribution through railways eliminated the need for such handicraft work.  They also try to show the falsity of the Hypergamy Hypothesis by presenting evidence that there was no correlation between footbinding and marrying up.

It is difficult to test these two hypotheses against one another because there is so little quantifiable data about footbinding in Chinese history.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates have assembled a database based upon interviews with elderly Chinese women at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.  In the early 1990s, Gates interviewed women in Sichuan Province.  In 2006-2011, Brown and Bossen interviewed women in three other regions of China--the Central, North, and Southwest.  These were all inland and primarily rural areas, because it was only here that there were numbers of living women at the end of the 20th century who had experienced footbinding, since footbinding had been ended in coastal areas and urban centers before these living women had been born.  These elderly Chinese women were asked a series of questions about their experiences in growing up in China.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates built their database through a sample of these participants: 36 participants from the Central region was added to 261 from the North and 142 from the South, for a total of 439 participants; this was then added to the much larger total from Sichuan of 3,275.  Thus, they had a grand total of 3,714.

From their analysis of this data, Brown, Bossen, and Gates conclude: "for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects.  We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility" (Brown et al. 2012, 1035).  They also say: "For most women, throughout most of the 20th century, FB [footbinding] made no significant difference in their ability either to marry at all or their ability to marry 'up'" (Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips 2018, 2).  They also conclude that there was a correlation between the footbinding of daughters and their handicraft labor.  They claim that this refutes the Hypergamy Hypothesis and confirms the Labor Market Hypothesis for explaining footbinding.

But notice the contradiction in what they say here.  On the one hand, "for most women," there was no significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up.  On the other hand, they concede that there was a significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up among their Sichuan participants, who comprised 87% of their total number of participants!

Ryan Nichols has pointed to this contradiction as one of the many weaknesses in the reasoning of Brown, Bossen, and Gates.  They obfuscate this contradiction by saying that "for most regions," there was no correlation between footbinding and hypergamy, which obscures the fact that for most of their participants (particularly those in Sichuan), there was a correlation (Ryan 2021; Chowdhury, Zhang, and Nichols 2022).

By saying that "for most regions" (that is, three out of four regions), there was no significant correlation between footbinding and marrying up, Brown, Bossen, and Gates treat the Central region (with only 44 total participants, of whom only 6 were footbound) as evidentially equal to the Sichuan region (with 3,327 total participants, of whom 994 were footbound).  As Nichols points out, readers have to carefully study the actual numbers to see how the language of "for most regions" distorts the evidence.

Moreover, as Nichols suggests, the correlation between footboundness and hypergamy would probably have been even higher than it is if Brown, Bossen, and Gates had not reduced the data prior to testing by throwing out all data from cohorts of women in which a majority were not footbound.

Nichols has identified other flaws in their reasoning.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates speak about the Labor Market Hypothesis and the Hypergamy Hypothesis as if they were mutually exclusive.  But this ignores the possibility that once parents have decided that footbinding will improve the mating prospects of their daughters, they might use their daughter's labor in handicrafts as a strategy for mitigating their costs.  Consequently, the Labor Market Hypothesis and the Hypergamy Hypothesis are mutually compatible.  Brown, Bossen, and Gates say nothing about this possibility.

They also ignore the fact that to test the Hypergamy Hypothesis, there must be an open marriage market in which there is sufficient competition between footbound and natural-footed women.  If there is a largely closed market, in which almost all of the women are footbound, then there is no test for the Hypergamy Hypothesis.  Notably, in the Sichuan data, there is a slightly more open market, because footbound girls were less than 90% of birth cohorts.

This is a devastating critique of the attempt to refute the Hypergamy Hypothesis.  As far as I know, Brown, Bossen, and Gates have never responded to this critique.  I have sent messages to them asking for some reply to Nichols.  Brown and Gates answered my messages but offered no reply.  Brown indicated that she might write a reply sometime in the future.

THE MORAL DEBATE OVER FOOTBINDING

Consider now how our moral judgment about Chinese footbinding can be based on the four sources of moral disagreement: fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.

Parents naturally desire that their daughters should be mated with good husbands who will provide well for their daughters and their children.  So if parents believe that the circumstances in their society make it unlikely that their daughters can marry well if their feet are not bound, then many parents will force footbinding on their children.  But this belief can be mistaken.

Indeed, we know that across traditional China, there was great variability in the practice of footbinding across time, region, and class.  Most Chinese parents did not bind the feet of their daughters because they did not believe this was necessary for the daughters to marry well, and that it would impose unnecessary suffering on their daughters.  From the origins of the practice in the Song dynasty, there were scholars who criticized the practice as wrong.  

Other than the Han Chinese, most Chinese ethnic groups--such as the Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans--did not engage in footbinding.  Even among the Han, many Han Chinese (such as the Hakka Han) rejected footbinding.  Moreover, those Chinese parents who did practice footbinding provoked resistance from their daughters.  Many footbound daughters loosened their bindings or ceased binding after marriage.  Most bindings were not maintained over an entire life.  When Brown, Bossen, and Gates asked their interviewees about whether they found footbinding desirable, almost half of them said it was not, and only about a fifth of them said they accepted it in some manner.  So there was widespread disagreement among the Chinese as to whether footbinding was desirable, which allowed for a moral debate, in which the critics of footbinding could argue that it frustrated natural human desires.

A popular campaign against footbinding was based on the argument that footbinding was "unnatural," and that "natural feet" were desirable for both women and men.  The first Natural Foot Society was founded in 1895.  Then many natural foot societies began to appear.  This and similar groups engaged in three kinds of activity (Levy 1966; Mackie 1996).  They promoted an educational campaign on the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet.  They showed that the rest of the world did not practice footbinding, and that China was losing respect in the world because of it.  Finally, following the example of American temperance societies campaigning against alcohol, members of natural foot societies pledged neither to bind their daughters nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet.

As suggested by Gerry Mackie's evolutionary game-theoretic analysis, footbinding was an evolutionarily stable strategy for parents only when it was a self-enforcing social convention.  As long as this convention was generally accepted in a social group, parents who tried to violate it by refusing to bind their daughters' feet would be punished because their daughters could not be married to the most desirable men.  But once enough parents could be persuaded to join natural foot societies and pledge not to bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry footbound women, they created a new mating market in which natural-footed women could find good mates.

FEMALE CIRCUMCISION

There has been a similar moral debate over the desirability of female circumcision, in which parents mutilate the genitals of their daughters because they think this will make them more desirable for marriage.  Actually, the debate is even evident in the dispute over the proper terminology for this practice.  Calling it "female circumcision" suggests that it is no worse than "male circumcision."  But critics insist that clitoridectomy and infibulation are much more harmful to women than is cutting off the foreskin is for men.  Some people prefer the more neutral language of "female genital cutting."

Since I have already written a series of posts on female circumcision, I don't need to say much more about it here.  I will only point out that the moral debate over female circumcision shows the same character as the moral debate over footbinding: it's a dispute over fallible beliefs about circumstances, fallible beliefs about desires, variable circumstances, and variable desires.

For example, consider the debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Fuambai Ahmadi over the morality of female circumcision.  Ali was born in Somalia. She was raised as a Muslim, living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. As a child, her genitals were mutilated by family members practicing "female circumcision" as a way of ensuring female virginity by excising the clitoris and sewing up the vagina. In 1992, she fled to Holland as she ran away from a forced marriage to a cousin who was a Somali Canadian.  Now, Ali has become a fervent opponent of female genital mutilation and the Islamic beliefs that support it.  She also denounces those feminist multicultural relativists who argue that some African women have chosen to embrace the cultural tradition of female circumcision, and that any criticism of this by Westerners is cultural imperialism.  Ali rejects this multicultural relativism by appealing to universal human rights based on natural human desires that set a standard for condemning traditional practices like genital mutilation.

On the other side of this debate is Fuambai Ahmadu, who was born in Sierra Leone and reared in the United States, and became an anthropologist who has studied female circumcision among her native Kono ethnic group in Sierra Leone. At age 22, she decided to travel back to her native village so that she herself could be circumcised. She now provokes intense controversy by writing and lecturing in which she criticizes people like Ali for their campaign against female circumcision as Euroamerican cultural imperialism and ethnocentrism. She claims that she herself has not felt any impediment to her sexual life or any other harm from her circumcision, which was an excision of her clitoris. Moreover, she insists that most circumcised African women find deep satisfaction in their circumcision, which refutes all of the reports about the supposed harms from female circumcision.

The ultimate question in this debate is whether female circumcision is truly desirable for those African mothers and daughters who have practiced it.  Ali says it is not.  Ahmadu says it is.  This is a factual question.  For various reasons, I think Ali makes the better argument.

One reason for this is that Ahmadu's position becomes confusingly incoherent.  On the one hand, she says that the African mothers and daughters engaged in female circumcision find it desirable.  On the other hand, she admits that many African women have rejected it, and many have organized themselves into groups pledging to one another that they will not circumcize their daughters or allow their sons to marry a circumcized girl.  And there is evidence of a drastic drop in Africa in the rate of female genital mutilation, comparable to what happened in China with the cessation of footbinding.

Ahmadu even admits that forcing girls to be circumcized is wrong, and that women should remain uncircumcized until they are young adults and able to decide for themselves whether they want this.

Ahmadu is also confusing about her own decision as an adult to be circumcized in her African tribe.  She says that she has not lost the capacity for clitoral orgasm, which makes us suspect that she did not have her clitoris completely cut off.  She might have had only a ritual scratch or mark on her clitoris.  This is one way that African women have avoided the most harmful forms of female circumcision.

In all of this, we see that if the good is the desirable, then we can debate the goodness of practices like footbinding and female circumcision by judging whether they are truly desirable in satisfying the evolved natural desires of universal human nature.

REFERENCES

Bossen, Laurel, and Hill Gates. 2017. Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Brown, Melissa. 2016. "Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation: An Empirical Illustration of Niche Construction and Social Inheritance." Human Nature 27: 501-532.

Brown, Melissa, Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates, and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips. 2012. "Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconstruction of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation." The Journal of Asian Studies 71: 1035-1067.

Brown, Melissa, and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips. 2018. "Economic Correlates of Footbinding: Implications for the Importance of Chinese Daughters' Labor." PLoS ONE 13 (9): e0201337.

Chowdhury, Laura Smith, Yile Zhang, and Ryan Nichols. 2022. "Footbinding and Its Cessation: An Agent-Based Model Adjudication of the Labor Market and Evolutionary Sciences Hypotheses." Evolution and Human Behavior 43: 475-489.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1979. "The Ecology of Mating Systems in Hypergynous Dowry Societies." Social Science Information 18: 163-195.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1991. "Women, Class, and Dowry." American Anthropologist 93: 944-946.

Dickemann, Mildred. 1997. "Paternal Confidence and Dowry Competition: A Biocultural Analysis of Purdah." In Laura Betzig, ed., Human Nature: A Critical Reader, 311-328.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ko, Dorothy. 2005. Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Levy, Howard. 1966. Chinese Footbinding. New York: Walton Rawls.

Mackie, Gerald. 1996. "Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account." American 
Sociological Review 61: 999-1017.

Nichols, Ryan. 2021. "Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handcraft Labor: Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding." Evolutionary Psychological Science 7: 315-325.