Stephen Sanderson and the Twenty Natural Desires of Evolved Human Nature

If the good is the desirable, then human ethics is natural insofar as it satisfies natural human desires that naturally win social approval as useful or agreeable to oneself or to others.  The satisfaction of these natural desires constitutes a natural standard for judging social practice as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances. 

By this standard, the modern bourgeois liberal regime can be recognized as the best regime so far in human history, because no other regime has satisfied those natural desires so well for so many people.  Or, to put it another way, the liberal regime has been more successful than any other regime so far in securing for human beings their equal liberty for the pursuit of happiness.

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires: human beings generally desire (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identify, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social ranking, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) political rule, (10) war, (11) health, (12) beauty, (13) property, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, (18) aesthetic pleasure, (19) religious understanding, and (20) intellectual understanding.

I have argued that these twenty natural desires are universally found in all human societies, that they have evolved by natural selection over millions of years of human evolutionary history to become components of the species-specific nature of human beings, that they are rooted in the physiological mechanisms of the brain, that they direct and limit the social variability of human beings as adapted to diverse ecological circumstances, and that different individuals with different temperaments will rank these desires differently.

My selection of these twenty desires as natural and universal is supported by various kinds of evidence.  Social scientists who have surveyed the anthropological evidence have shown that there are hundreds of human universals, which are clustered around the twenty desires on my list.  Psychologists who study human motivation recognize these twenty desires as manifesting the basic motives for human action. Survey data from psychologists who ask people what is most important to them confirm the primacy of these twenty desires.  When Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric, reviews the common opinions of human beings about what is desirable in life, he includes the twenty desires on my list.  When an Aristotelian scholar like Martha Nussbaum describes the "basic human functions" that support universal norms of moral judgment, she includes the desires on my list.

There is evidence that this pattern of twenty desires developed in the Pleistocene environment of our hunting-gathering ancestors, from about 1.6 million years ago up to the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago.  This was the evolutionary environment in which human nature was shaped by natural selection.  The historical record of human civilization since the development of agriculture shows human beings as moved by these twenty desires.

My survey of the evidence is not as good as that provided by Stephen Sanderson in two of his books--The Evolution of Human Sociality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (Westview Press, 2014).  Sanderson is one of the few sociologists who has promoted a Darwinian science of sociology.  Of all the social sciences, sociology has been most resistant to Darwinian science, because so many sociologists believe that human society is a purely cultural construction unconstrained by human nature.  Like me, Sanderson argues that while society certainly is "socially constructed," these social constructions are not arbitrary products of an autonomous culture.  Social constructions are constrained by the natural desires and natural conditions of human existence.  Human biological nature constrains but does not determine human cultural history and the choices of human individuals.  Consequently, a Darwinian social science must explain the universality of human natural desires and the variability that comes from variable socioecological conditions and variable temperaments of individuals.  Sanderson shows how that can be done.

Identifying me as a "Darwinian political philosopher," Sanderson accepts my list of twenty natural desires as delineating the most important features of evolved human nature.  But he does offer his own slightly altered version of my list: (1) a complete and long life, (2) health, (3) reproduction and parental care, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) gender identity, (7) social ranking, (8) wealth, (9) political rule, (10) reciprocal exchange, (11) ethnic identity, (12) beauty, (13) aesthetic pleasure, and (14) religious understanding (2014, p. 382).

Comparing the lists, one can see that he has made some changes.  He has moved "health" from number 11 on my list to number 2. He has changed "justice as reciprocity" to "reciprocal exchange." He has added "ethnic identity" to the list. And he has omitted from his list seven of the desires on my list: (6) friendship, (10) war, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, and (20) intellectual understanding.

I do not see the justification for omitting these seven, especially since all of these seven desires appear in one way or another in his writing.  He says that friendship could rightly be added to his list (2014, pp. 12, 383).  He writes about the evolution of war (2001, pp. 318-330; 2014, pp. 287-312) and of language (2014, pp. 27-32).  He suggests that intellectual understanding should be added to his list (2014, p. 383).

Sanderson agrees with me that the natural desires cannot all be satisfied at the same time, or even over a whole life.  And so people must rank these desires, and since individuals differ in their natural temperaments and abilities, they will differ in how they rank these desires.  So, for example, as Sanderson observes, Albert Einstein said that he had no need for money, power, or fame to be happy; and so he was not much moved by the natural desires for social ranking, wealth, or political rule.  Einstein said all he needed were his sailboat, his violin, and physics.  And since he spent most of his time on physics, he was clearly ranking his natural desire for intellectual understanding over the other desires (2014, p. 383).  For me, this shows the need for practical habituation and practical reasoning in organizing a life for the fullest and most coherent satisfaction of one's desires over a whole life.

Sanderson has moved me to make two changes in my list.  I have combined a complete life and health into one category.  And I have added ethnic identity to the list.  So now my twenty natural desires are (1) a healthy life, (2) sexual identity, (3) sexual mating, (4) parental care, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social status, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) political rule, (10) war, (11) ethnic identity, (12) beauty, (13) property, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, (18) aesthetic arts, (19) religious understanding, and (20) intellectual understanding.

This begins a series of posts on how Sanderson's survey of the evidence for a Darwinian science of human nature supports my list of twenty natural desires.

The Meaning and Purpose of Life in Twenty Natural Desires

To the question of the meaning and purpose of human life, the best answer--the answer we all give by the way we live our lives--is that we find the meaning and purpose of our lives in striving for the fullest satisfaction of our natural desires.  Evolutionary science helps to explain why we are moved by the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature.  That scientific explanation is supported by lots of evidence.  One of the best general surveys of that evidence is Stephen Sanderson's Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (Westview Press, 2014).

Some of what Sanderson says, however, seems to deny that science can teach us anything about the meaning and purpose of life.  First of all, he warns against the naturalistic fallacy in inferring anything about moral values from natural facts.  And, secondly, he dismisses teleological thinking about the ultimate purpose of life as mistaken.  But implicit in Sanderson's writing is the recognition that we can rightly infer moral values from functional facts, and that even if we cannot find any cosmic purpose for life, we can find the immanent purpose of life inherent in our natural human desires.

After explaining the naturally evolved differences in the propensities and abilities of men and women, so that men on average are less inclined than are women to certain kinds of activities, Sanderson warns against the assumption that such natural tendencies tell us anything about what men and women should do.  This is the naturalistic fallacy:  deriving an "ought" from and "is."  One cannot infer a moral judgment from a purely descriptive statement about how human beings behave.  If men are naturally inclined towards careers such as firefighting, and women are naturally inclined towards careers such as nursing, it does not follow logically that men should be firefighters, or that women should be nurses (238).

And yet Sanderson seems to contradict himself in his writing about scientific research when he uses value-laden language--such as judging some behavior as "dysfunctional"--which seems to commit the naturalistic fallacy.  For example, when he reports Harry Harlow's famous experiments with young monkeys reared by artificial mothers made of wire rather than real mothers.  The monkeys exposed only to artificial mothers showed "severe emotional disturbance" and "dysfunctional" behavior, comparable to what happens to human children reared in orphanages without any maternal care (192-95, 210).

More generally, Sanderson concludes his book by arguing that evolutionary science can give an answer to the question of the meaning of life.  "The meaning of human existence is to achieve satisfaction with respect to the basic goals and desires that are part of human nature.  Since in real life these goals and desires are often in conflict, they must be harmonized or balanced in some way" (382).  He then offers a slightly modified version of my list of twenty natural desires.

And while Sanderson rejects any teleological belief in "some deep cosmic purpose embedded in the universe or, more likely, in the mind of God," he does see a purpose embedded in the desires of human nature: "If there is no ultimate purpose to our lives, life is emptied of all meaning.  Why then bother to live at all? The reason to bother is to fulfill the desires that emanate from our species-specific human nature.  This is sufficient.  There doesn't need to be anything else for life to be meaningful" (383, 386).

I agree.  Even if science cannot support a cosmic teleology of purposes set by a Cosmic God, Cosmic Nature, or Cosmic Reason, science can support an immanent teleology of purposes set by human nature, human culture, and human individuals, by which human nature and human culture constrain but do not determine the purposes set by human individuals in deciding how best to rank and harmonize their natural desires over a whole life well lived.

And so, for example, we can judge that children deprived of parental care are likely to show "dysfunctional" behavior because it is hard for children to become happy adults if their natural need for parental care has not been satisfied.

In this way, a natural science of human nature can support moral judgments through the hypothetical imperatives of given-if-then reasoning: given the evolved human nature of our desires, if we want to live desirable lives, then we must live in ways that are most likely to satisfy those desires.

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

Is Human Nature an Eternally Unchanging Essence?

In my previous post, I linked to Peter Lawler's post on Darwinian conservatism. There is now a comment on Lawler's post from Brendan Foht, which raises some good questions.

Foht suggests that I am promoting a Darwinian historicism that denies the eternity of human nature as an unchanging essence. He writes:

What bugs me about Arnhart's "Darwinian" philosophy is that it doesn't seem to come to grips with what is really unique in the Darwinian mode of explanation. He talks about this grab-bag list of twenty "natural" desires, and how we ought to use an empirically based understanding of nature as the standard for politics. That's all well and good, but why do you need Darwin to find these twenty natural desires? Ordinary social science (or for that matter, common sense) could tell you that human beings like to have families or practical arts or what-have-you. What makes Darwinian explanation special compared to old-fashioned empirical naturalism is that it stands nature on its head. According to an old-fashioned understanding of nature, nature is the force that makes us who we are, i.e. our essence. For Darwin, however, nature is itself made by an historical process of competition and selection. Our nature is no longer an essence; it is just another historical accident. So I'm not sure how much Darwinism really helps us argue against techno-liberationist policies like transhumanism. If we happen to dislike some aspect of our nature, and we happen to have the technical means to change it, why should it be evolutionary biology that gives us pause?

The real problem for a post-Darwinian political philosophy (conservative or otherwise) is not how to replace "metaphysical" values with "natural" values, but how to reconcile the project of "natural" morality with the historicism of Darwin's nature.

On the first point, I agree that recognizing the twenty natural desires is a matter of common-sense experience that does not require Darwinian science. The value of Darwinian science here is in providing scientific confirmation for this common-sense knowledge by showing the ultimate natural causes for these natural desires in the evolutionary history of the human species.

But that appeal to the evolutionary history of the human species leads to Foht's second point--his worry about Darwinian historicism.

Foht invokes "an old-fashioned understanding of nature" in which "nature is the force that makes us who we are, i.e. our essence," and he contrasts this to "the historicism of Darwin's nature." I assume that Foht is referring here to some kind of Platonic metaphysics of the Theory of Ideas in which human nature is an eternally unchanging Idea or Essence. Alternatively, Foht could be a Christian Platonist who sees God as the Creator of human nature as an everlasting essence.

As I have indicated in many previous posts, I regard Platonic metaphysics as implausible. In fact, it is so implausible that it is not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates ever clearly endorses it. (Here I am using some language from some previous posts.)

If Darwin's evolutionary science is correct, then all the species of life come into being and pass away. Species are not eternal or everlasting, but they are real for as long as they last. When Louis Agassiz wrote a critical assessment of Darwin's theory, Darwin wrote to Asa Gray, in a letter of August 11, 1860, that he was "surprised that Agassiz did not succeed in writing something better. How absurd that logical quibble: 'if species do not exist, how can they vary?' As if anyone doubted their temporary existence."

To affirm the "temporary existence" of species denies the Platonic/Socratic teaching that Being--what is really real and fully intelligible--must be eternal and unchanging, as distinguished from the temporal and ever-changing flux of the sensible world.

But as long as we adhere to this Parmenidean assumption that Being is eternally unchanging, we cannot bridge the gap between the unchanging ideas and changing sense experience. This absolute separation of unchanging intelligibles and changing sensibles cannot explain human knowledge, because human cognition is in motion. The intelligibility of being seems to require that it somehow be both in motion and at rest. But, still, we can understand the world by sorting things into classes according to the ways they are like or unlike one another.

We need to go beyond the Parmenidean and Platonic search for invariants and see that reality is a mixture of fixity and flux. We need to see that the history of the cosmos shows an evolutionary emergence of variance and novelty. We can sort things out according to their enduring patterns of similarity and difference. But these enduring patterns are not eternal or everlasting.

This is certainly true for our study of human nature. The human species is not absolutely invariant or eternal. Human beings did not exist before the evolutionary emergence of Homo sapiens, and we can expect that some day the human species will go extinct. But for as long as our species exists, there will be natural propensities and traits that characterize us--including the twenty natural desires.

And yet the present reality of the human species is not invariant, because each human being is unique in being a product of a unique natural history. Biological history depends upon the variation that comes from genetic mutation and from sexual mating, in which the random assortment of genes results in the production of unique individuals. So while we can identify the human species as a range of traits or propensities, we know that within that range, there is immense variation expressed in individual diversity. Human nature as we know it is neither absolutely fixed nor absolutely chaotic.

Without realizing it, Catherine Zuckert--in her Straussian interpretation of Plato--implicitly endorses this Darwinian understanding of the human species in her criticisms of Timaeus's cosmological explanation of the human species. As she indicates, Timaeus cannot account for the unpredictable variation in human beings that comes from human mating and reproduction, because he has to assume that the divine craftsman created human nature as absolutely unchanging. Consequently, Timaeus has to assume that all human beings are born absolutely the same in their natural abilities and traits, which denies the reality of natural individual differences. Thus, as Zuckert indicates, Timaeus's cosmology--in its search for eternal invariance--must deny the obvious facts of sexual reproduction and individual identity.

Some Straussian scholars try to avoid these problems associated with the Platonic Theory of the Ideas. They do that by claiming that this teaching is only a "noble lie" for Plato to satisfy the popular need for a cosmologically supported morality. But the Straussians also want to say that the Platonic teaching about the supremacy of the philosophic life is simply true, and they never explain how this can be sustained without a Platonic cosmology in which Mind rules over all, and philosophy somehow participates in the cosmological intelligibility of the eternal Mind.

My conclusion from all this is that Platonic conceptions of cosmic teleology and the eternity of species are implausible, because they contradict what we know by experience. More plausible, I suggest, is the Darwinian conceptions of immanent teleology and the evolution of species.

But what, then, should we say about Foht's third point--his worry about a transhumanist use of biotechnology to change human nature? First of all, I don't understand why this is a worry for him if he really believes that human nature is eternal and unchanging. If he really believes this, then he should believe that a tranhumanist transformation in human nature is impossible.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, my Darwinian response to transhumanist biotechnology is to argue that the technology for enhancing human powers will be limited both in its technical means and in its moral ends. It will be limited in its technical means, because complex behavioral traits arise from the intricate interplay of many genes interacting with developmental contingencies and unique life histories to form brains that constantly change as they respond flexibly to changing circumstances. Consequently, precise technological manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be difficult if not impossible.

The technology of human enhancement will also be limited in its moral ends. Human beings act to satisfy their natural desires. The use of technology to enhance human life will be driven by these natural desires. Transhumanists implicitly assume the enduring power of these desires--for example, the natural desire of parents to promote the happiness of their children. But if that is the case, then it is hard to see how human nature is going to be abolished if the natural desires endure.

Related posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

Peter Lawler has written an interesting response to this post.

The Freiburg Workshop (3): Does Evolved Human Nature Provide a Standard for Social Thought?

At the Freiburg workshop on "Liberalism and the Evolutionary Agenda," one of the best papers was Thomas Reydon's "The Evolution of Human Nature and Its Implications for Politics: A Critique."  Reydon is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy, the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science, and the Centre for Ethics and Law in the Life Sciences at the Leibnitz Universitat Hannover, in Hannover, Germany.

Reydon argues that the concept of human nature does not provide a good standard for social thought.  In my opening statement at the workshop, I explained my general disagreement with Reydon's arguments.  But then, later, when I reread his paper, just before his presentation at the workshop, I decided that we were mostly in agreement.  Here I will offer a brief summary of his reasoning.  Then I will give my opening statement of disagreement, followed by my subsequent statement of agreement.

Reydon asks whether the concept of human nature can function as a strong bridge from the domain of biology to the domains of social, economic, and political thought.  He gives two reasons for answering no.

First, at best, the bridge provided by the concept of human nature is very weak.  It can serve an "evaluative role" in providing a "compatibility check."  But if one considers those social orders that are compatible with human nature, then one must see that human nature cannot support one as better than the others.

Second, at worst, the bridge doesn't exist at all because we have no reliable knowledge of human nature.

What we see here, he suggests, are the two steps required for applying biological human nature to social thought.  First, we need an argument to human nature, in which we move from our biological knowledge to generalized claims about the typical behavioral and cognitive properties of human beings.  Then, we need an argument from human nature, in which we employ our claims about human nature to make claims about what constitutes the most desirable social order and against undesirable social orders.  He thinks both kinds of arguments are dubious.

Reydon observes that it is hard to define human nature based on humanly unique features that are innate and universal, or at least widespread.  He notes that philosophers of biology like David Hull have challenged the "essentialist" conception of human nature as a set of traits that are necessary and sufficient for defining membership in the human species.  He also argues that while we can have a good knowledge of many biological traits of human beings, we do not have a good grasp of "human behavioral and cognitive traits," because they are so highly variable across individuals and across societies.

Adopting arguments from Stephen Jay Gould, John Dupre, and Jesse Prinz, Reydon claims that while biological science can give us some knowledge of traits that many human beings have, it cannot give us "a generalized knowledge about behavioral and cognitive traits that are shared by most if not all humans and can be thought of as specifying human nature."  There are three reasons for this.  First, human beings are such "cognitively and behaviorally flexible creatures" that we cannot specify a set of innate behaviors that constitute human nature.  Second, human evolution is a continuing process, and so we can assume that contemporary human beings have evolved different behavioral and cognitive traits from those of their Paleolithic ancestors.  Third, we cannot clearly distinguish what is naturally innate from what is socially learned, because "all cognitive and behavioral traits to some extent have an innate aspect and a learned aspect."

Reydon also worries that the search for the human universals of human nature that constitute the "normal" state for humanity will create a dangerous bias against "deviant" individuals who vary from that universal nature.

To  identify the weaknesses in arguments from human nature to politics, Reydon considers the arguments made by four authors--Peter Kropotkin, Peter Singer, Richard Alexander, and me.

Kropotkin's argued (in Mutual Aid) that since human beings and other animals have evolved to be cooperative with members of their own species, this provides evolutionary support for the sort of socialist anarchy advocated by Kropotkin.  Reydon questions whether Kropotkin provided enough empirical evidence and rigorous reasoning to sustain his generalizations.  He also questions whether Kropotkin falls into the is/ought fallacy by inferring moral conclusions from natural facts.

Reydon thinks that Singer avoids the is/ought fallacy (in The Darwinian Left) in arguing that leftist thinking can be compatible with evolved human nature--because human beings have evolved to be cooperative--but without arguing that a leftist view can be derived from evolutionary science.  Reydon agrees with Singer that a science of evolved human nature can provide a "compatibility check" on social thought, but without providing any specifications as to exactly how society is to be organized.

While Kropotkin and Singer emphasize the cooperative nature of human beings, Richard Alexander (in Darwinism and Human Affairs) emphasizes their selfish nature as evolved for survival and the reproduction of their genes.  Reydon observes: "This by itself should clearly show the difficulty of achieving reliable knowledge about what human nature really is like:  are we primarily cooperators, or competitive individualists, or both to more or less equal degrees, or what?"

Alexander believes that an evolutionary view of human nature "can tell us much about our history and the existing systems of laws and norms, and also about how to achieve any goals deemed desirable," but "it has essentially nothing to say about what goals are desirable" (220).  Thus, like Singer, Alexander avoids the is/ought fallacy.  But while he says that evolutionary science can help us to achieve our goals, he does not say much about how exactly this would work.  So it is not clear whether biological knowledge of human nature can facilitate our pursuit of desirable goals.

Finally, Reydon turns to my Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, and to my claim that our evolved human nature includes at least twenty natural desires, which constitute "a universal standard for judging social practices as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature" (DNR, 13).  He is skeptical about this:

"On Arnhart's argument, it seems that views of society can be judged with respect to the extent to which they allow human nature to flourish.  The problem, though, is that it is not clear what this means and how we can assess to what extent a particular way of organizing society allows human nature to flourish.  Presumably, human nature has a number of different aspects to it, such that a society allowing one aspect to flourish may well frustrate another aspect.  Moreover, it remains far from clear which are the constituent aspects of human nature.  Arnhart lists a number of species-specific desires and capacities, but plenty of different characterizations of human nature can be found in the literature.  So, how are we to judge which kind of society is the best when it comes to human flourishing?"

Reydon concludes that while biological knowledge of human nature can provide "compatibility checks" that tell us whether a particular view of social order is totally contrary to human nature, such knowledge cannot provide any support for one view of social order as better than others if they are all broadly compatible with human nature.

In my response to Reydon, I would stress that while we commonly separate nature and nurture or nature and art, animal nature—including human moral and political nature—must be nurtured if it is to reach its natural completion, and this nurturing of our nature includes both cultural learning and individual judgment.  That’s why I say that Darwinian anthropology moves through three interacting levels.  Human nature constrains but does not determine human culture.  And human nature and human culture jointly constrain but do not determine human judgment.

Reydon misses this complex interaction of three levels when he embraces Stephen Jay Gould’s false dichotomy—biological potentiality versus biological determinism—which ignores the reality of biological propensity.  It is certainly true, as Reydon and Gould say, that we human beings are “cognitively and behaviorally flexible creatures,” and that this flexibility frees us from any biological determinism.  But I don’t know of any Darwinian theorist who believes in biological determinism, or who denies the cognitive and behavioral flexibility of human beings.

Gould and Reydon ignore the idea of biological predisposition or propensity as something more than a mere potentiality and yet something less than a rigid determinism. 

For example, in our natural desire for sexual mating, we human beings have a biological potentiality for a wide range of behaviors—including celibacy, promiscuity, monogamy, polygyny, and polyandry.  But while we have a potential for choosing complete celibacy, most human beings find this too difficult because it denies our strong propensity for sexual mating.  Promiscuity is easier for us because it caters to our sexual propensities.  Polyandrous marriage (one wife with several husbands) seems to be a very weak potentiality for human beings, because the intense sexual jealousy of males inclines them against sharing a wife.  In contrast to polyandry, monogamous mating has been universal to all human societies and polygynous mating (one husband with several wives) has been common, because they satisfy biological desires.  This pattern of social behavior reflects the biological nature of human mating.  An understanding of evolved biological propensities or desires can explain why celibacy is difficult, promiscuity is easy, polyandry is rare, monogamy is universal, and polygyny is common, although none of these behaviors is rigidly determined by specific genes.  Our nature predisposes us to favor some kinds of behavior over others, although the specific expression of our behavior will reflect the variable conditions of physical environment, social circumstances, and individual temperament. 

Our social norms for sexual mating—including marriage and family law—must respect these evolved natural propensities.  And so, for example, utopian socialist communities (like the kibbutzim in Israel) that tried to abolish familial bonding for the sake of communitarian unity failed, because they frustrated natural human desires.

Reydon criticizes me for making this kind of argument, because, he says, it is impossible “to assess whether a particular organization of society promotes the flourishing of human nature more than another way of organizing society." 

Well, then, let’s look at the history of utopian socialist communities that have tried to abolish family life.  I do this in my book Darwinian Natural Right, and I conclude that these communities exact such a high emotional price on their members that they eventually fail as people assert their natural desires.  I also survey the history of slavery as another form of social organization that is so contrary to human nature that it inevitably provokes resistance from slaves who are not naturally adapted to their enslavement. 

More generally, as I have indicated, I argue that a largely open society better promotes the flourishing of human nature than a largely closed society.  Whether this is true is ultimately, I think, an empirical question to be settled by the historical evidence.

Reydon might respond by pointing out that that he concedes that a biological science of human nature can provide "compatibility checks," so that he can concede that utopian socialism or chattel slavery can be condemned as incompatible with human nature.  But, still, he might say, there are many kinds of social order that are broadly compatible with human nature, and our scientific knowledge of human nature cannot support one as better than the others.  Even if I am right about the twenty natural desires of evolved human nature, he might argue, different social orders can rank those desires in different ways, and our knowledge of those twenty natural desires cannot determine that one social ranking is better than another, as long as they are broadly compatible with human nature.

Pondering this possible response from Reydon suggests to me that we are actually more in agreement with one another than I realized from my first reading of his paper.  Consider our answers to three questions.

Is there a human nature?  David Hull and David Buller say no, because the essentialist conception of human nature is a superstition.  Reydon says yes, because one can recognize general tendencies in human nature without being essentialist.  I agree.

Does this human nature provide some broad constraints on social order?  Reydon says yes, because he thinks that some extreme forms of social order are incompatible with human nature.  I agree.

Does the biological science of human nature prescribe precisely how society should be organized?  Reydon says no, because there is plenty of natural flexibility or variation in how our natural desires can be ranked, and thus there can be many different ways of organizing society that are all compatible with human nature.  I agree.

Reydon does not see, however, as I do, that this reasoning supports Darwinian liberalism.  Liberal pluralism prescribes a largely open society that allows for experiments in living, so that people are free to choose how to organize their social lives within the broad constraints of negative justice or the harm principle--that is, not using force or fraud against others.  By contrast, illiberal regimes refuse to allow the diverse variability in human nature to express itself in social experimentation.

In a liberal regime, one is even free to join socialist communities as long as they are voluntary and do not violate the standards of negative justice.  In Darwinian Natural Right, I provide a history of some of the many socialist communes that have been established in the United States and Israel.  Such utopian projects test the limits of evolved human nature, but in a largely open society, individuals are free to experiment in this way.  Such experiments show that some small groups of people in some circumstances can successfully live in such communities for some period of time.  But such communities tend to be short-lived, because their weighting of natural desires puts a painful strain on the central tendencies of human nature.  So, for example, the Israeli kibbutzim that have survived into the present have given up the original attempts to totally abolish parent-child bonding and private property.

Since classical liberalism rests on the fundamental idea that social order arises best as a largely spontaneous order emerging from individuals pursuing their individual ends, and thus social order is not coercively enforced by central planning, liberalism does not dictate any detailed specific organization of society, which allows for the fullest expression of evolved human nature in all of its variety and flexibility.  Consequently, we can judge that a liberal regime is the best social order as conforming best to human nature.

I have argued that we have at least twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature, and that a free and open society as promoted by classical liberalism gives individuals the fullest freedom to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the classically liberal society to be better than those societies that do not allow individuals the same freedom to satisfy their natural desires.

At the Freiburg workshop, Jan Schnellenbach (Walter Eucken Institute, Freiburg) said in his paper that I am wrong about this, because we must make trade-offs between these natural desires, and the trade-offs made by liberal policies are no more closer to human nature than the trade-offs made by illiberal policies.  “In general,” he said, “our many natural dispositions need not be mutually consistent, and the weights between them are likely to differ between individuals.”  He claims that “evolution likely endows individuals with a variety of heterogeneous traits and dispositions, which in turn implies a variety in policy preferences.” 

But here he misses my point that it’s precisely this heterogeneity in how individuals rank their natural desires that makes liberal policies superior to illiberal policies, because while illiberal policies impose coercively a single ranking of desires, liberal policies do not impose a single ranking of desires on all, because in a liberal, open society, individuals are free to choose how to rank their natural desires.  Thus, liberal policies respect the natural heterogeneity of individuals, while illiberal policies do not.

As indicated by Viktor Vanberg in his paper for the workshop, Hayek makes this same point when he distinguishes between two kinds of “social planning.”  Illiberal planning organizes society by “a system of specific orders and prohibitions,” while liberal planning establishes “a rational system of law, under the rule of which people are free to follow their preferences.”

Some of these points are developed in posts that can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

Transhumanism and the Future of Human Nature

"Transhumanism" has become a popular term for the idea that technological enhancements of humans, animals, and machines will create a superhuman species of beings. Transhumanists believe that advances in genetic engineering, robotics, computer science, pscyhopharmacology, and nanotechnology will improve the physical and mental capacities of human beings to produce a new stage of evolutionary history. A new species of beings far superior to Homo sapiens might evolve from such technologies. Some of the best statements of transhumanism come from Nick Bostrum, James Hughes, and others in the World Transhumanist Association.

As I indicated in my chapter on biotechnology in Darwinian Conservatism, I am skeptical about transhumanism for two reasons. (I am now working on a new book that will elaborate my case against transhumanism.) My first reason is that transhumanism suffers from a Nietzschean utopianism that lacks common sense, because it ignores the ways in which the technologies for altering human traits are limited in both their technical means and their moral ends. My second reason is that I favor a stance of libertarian conservatism in response to technological changes that would allow improvement in human life but without the transcendence of human nature expected by the transhumanists.

The technology for enhancing human powers will be limited in its technical means, because complex behavioral traits arise from the intricate interplay of many genes interacting with developmental contingencies and unique life histories to form brains that constantly change as they respond flexibly to changing circumstances. Consequently, precise technological manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible.

Consider, for example, the matter of human intelligence. One of the central assertions of the transhumanists is that we will soon create "superintelligent" beings that will be as intellectually superior to humans as humans are today to chimpanzees. Notice the extraordinary claims implicit in such an assertion--that we know what "intelligence" is in all of its complexity, that we can reduce intelligence to material causes that can be technically manipulated in precise ways, and that we can use this technical power to increase intelligence beyond anything ever achieved by living beings.

If we ask transhumanists to justify these claims, we get vague assertions about what might happen in the future. For instance, James Hughes, in his book Citizen Cyborg, says this about the future of computer intelligence: "Since computers powerful enough to model human brains should be common in thirty years, those computer models may then be able to run software simulations of our brains and bodies. Presumably these backups of our minds, if switched on, would be self-aware and have an independent existence. This is the scenario known as 'uploading.'"

No one knows how to fully model human brains or how to replicate such models in computers. No one knows how brains and bodies could be simulated in computer software. No one knows how computer software could become self-aware. And yet Hughes can imagine a "scenario" in which all of this ignorance is dispelled based on what he thinks "should" or "may" or "presumably" will happen in thirty years!

Now, of course, there are ways that we can use biomedical technology to protect against mental disabilities. For example, we could completely eliminate the mental retardation from Down syndrome through genetic screening of embryos or other means so that parents could be sure that they would not have children born with an extra 21st chromosome. But although this would be an improvement in human life, it would not transcend human nature by moving us towards "posthuman" beings with superhuman intelligence.

When transhumanists like Hughes predict the coming of "posthuman" humans as the fulfillment of what they think "should" happen, they are expressing not scientific or philosophic reasoning from observable experience but a religious longing for transcendence. Hughes is a Buddhist, and he foresees that the transhuman future will fulfill his Buddhist vision of a "society of enlightened beings as an infinite net, laced with pearls and gems, each enlightened mind a multicolored twinkle that is reflected in every other jewel." Like Friedrich Nietzsche, the transhumanists profess an atheistic materialism, and yet they still yearn for religious transcendence, which drives them to project fantasies of "overmen" and "posthumans" who have escaped the limitations of human nature to enter a heavenly realm of pure thought and immortal bliss.

The transhumanists also ignore how the technology of human enhancement will likely be limited in its moral ends. Human beings act to satisfy their natural desires. The use of technology to enhance human life will be driven by these natural desires. Transhumanists implicitly assume the enduring power of these desires. But if that is the case, then it is hard to see how human nature is going to be abolished if the natural desires endure.

For example, Hughes speaks about "the human needs and desires these technologies will be asked to serve," which include the desires for long, healthy lives, for intelligence and happiness, and the desires for parents to care for the physical and mental flourishing of their children. (All of these desires are included in my list of "twenty natural desires" in Darwinian Conservatism.) But if human beings are always going to be moved by the same natural desires, how does this take us into "posthuman" existence?

If we were really going to enter the "posthuman" realm, we would have to create beings who lacked the natural desires of human beings and who felt no concern for human life as moved by such desires. Such creatures might be superintelligent. But they would also be superpsychopathic predators who would feel no guilt or shame in enslaving or exterminating human beings.

The transhumanists respond to this prospect by explaining that we will have to be careful to instill in these posthuman beings what Nick Bostrum calls "human-friendly values." Hughes explains that we will have to instill by technological devices "sociability and empathy for all sentient beings." For example, we might require the installation of "morality chips." Hughes is not troubled by the naive expectation that we can develop "morality chips" to control the posthumans without any harmful side-effects.

Even if we could solve the technical problems in reducing morality to a mere matter of mechanical engineering, we might still wonder why Hughes and the other transhumanists want to preserve human morality if their goal is an absolutely posthuman life. If human morality as rooted in the natural human desires is at the core of human nature, then posthumanity would require the abolition of that morality. If the posthumans are going to be moved by the same natural desires and moral emotions that have always moved human beings, then it would seem that human nature has survived.

As an alternative to the transhumanist stance, I would defend a libertarian conservatism rooted in human nature. I would argue for leaving people free to exercise individual choice in developing and using new technologies to meet human needs and desires. This would allow people to learn by trial and error what is desirable and what is not in the use of such technologies.

Some legal regulation of choice might be required to promote the minimal safety and efficacy of the new technologies and to protect people against force and fraud. But within such a modest regulatory regime, people would have freedom of choice.

The moral standard here would be that a technology is good if it promotes the flourishing of our human nature by satisfying our natural desires. We can best conform to that standard by allowing people free choice in satisfying their desires. Although there will be great diversity in the choices people make, there will be some enduring patterns in their choices that reflect the universality of natural human desires. For example, we can assume that the natural desire for parental care will generally motivate parents to use technology in ways that promote the happiness of their children.

My stance is close to the position taken by Ron Baily in his book Liberation Biology. But I depart from Bailey when he moves towards a transhumanist libertarianism that assumes that somehow human nature will be superseded by a new, superior form of life.

I welcome the prospect of technological changes in the human condition that will improve the physical and mental functions of life. But rather than expecting the emergence of a transhuman form of life, I foresee that human nature will not only endure but prevail.

Darwinian Natural Right in Primitive Law

My conception of Darwinian natural right includes an account of law. A full account of social order requires a nested hierarchy of three kinds of order--natural order, customary order, and rational order--so that custom is constrained by nature, and reason is constrained both by custom and by nature. Law manifests these three levels of order. The proponents of natural law are correct in seeing that law presupposes the natural desires and capacities of human beings. The proponents of customary law are correct in seeing that law presupposes custom. And the proponents of positive law are correct in seeing that law in the strict sense is the stipulation of the lawmaker. In fact, law is the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation.

Darwinian natural right assumes that natural law reflects the twenty natural desires that constitute human nature as shaped by genetic evolution: human beings generally desire a complete life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship, social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, war, health, beauty, property, speech, practical habituation, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic pleasure, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding. These natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary evolution of law. Within the constraints of natural desires and customary traditions, there is some freedom for the exercise of prudential judgment in stipulating legal decisions and rules.

Opponents of the natural law position argue that there is no evidence for a universal human nature shaping the history of law. Cultural relativists say that law is purely a product of customary traditions that vary radically across societies and across time. Legal positivists say that law is ultimately a product of some lawmaking power unconstrained either by nature or by custom.

The study of primitive law helps to clarify this debate, and I think it provides support for Darwinian natural right. Perhaps the best single study of primitive law is E. Adamson Hoebel's The Law of Primitive Man (published first in 1954 and reprinted in 2006 by Harvard University Press). Hoebel was an anthropologist specializing in legal anthropology. He was best known for his work on the law of the Cheyenne Indians.

In the first part of this book, Hoebel lays out his general theoretical approach to the study of primitive law. He identifies himself as a "functional realist" who studies the behavioral reality of legal practice, as opposed to the conceptual abstractions of natural law or positive law theories.

In the second part of the book, he has five chapters on law in five primitive societies (ranging from the simplest to the most complex): the Eskimos, the Ifugao (in the northern Philippines), the American plains Indians (Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne), the Trobriand Islanders (of the northeast coast of New Guinea), and the Ashanti (on the Gold Coast of West Africa).

In the last part of the book, he offers some general conclusions about the relation of law to religion, the functions of law, and the evolution of law. Hoebel puts his study in the context of Darwinian evolution. "Man emerged from the subhuman, supersimian state a million and more years ago" (291). As compared with chimpanzees, who are intensely social animals, who even have some rudimentary capacity for cultural learning ("protoculture"), the earliest human ancestors used their uniquely human capacity for speech to develop cultural learning far beyond anything seen in other animals (7-8). Using comparative studies of primitive foraging societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, combined with archeological and fossil evidence of human evolution, allows Hoebel to infer what Paleolithic human societies were like (290-91).

Hoebel proposes a "postulation theory of law." Every group or society is organized around a set of fundamental postulates or values that represent "a limited selection from the total of human potentialities, individual and collective" (17). For each primitive society that he studies, Hoebel surveys the anthropological studies and formulates the set of postulated values that constitute the legal culture for that society.

I would say that what Hoebel calls "the total of human potentialities" corresponds to what I would call "human nature." What Hoebel calls the "limited selection" from within these potentialities corresponds to what I would describe as custom and stipulation selecting from within the potentialities of human nature those values that seem adapted to the particular needs and circumstances of a particular society.

So, for example, there is a natural desire for property expressed in every human society. But the specification of what counts as property and of the rights and duties of property varies across societies. Property in land is often not important for nomadic people. But it is very important for those like the Ifugao who get most of their food from growing rice.

I identify political rule as one of the twenty natural desires. But it might seem that primitive societies have no structure of political rule because they have no governments. "The Eskimo is what some would call an anarchist," Hoebel observes. "He has no government in the formal sense" (81). But this lack of "formal" government still leaves open the possibility of "informal" rule.

My claim is that human beings are by nature political animals, because they naturally live in social systems that require (at least occasionally) central coordination. In civilized human communities, such as bureaucratic states, this centralized coordination is formal and enduring. But in primitive human communities, such as hunter-gatherer bands, this centralized coordination of society is informal and episodic.

The Eskimos show this in their following the leadership of headmen. Hoebel explains: "The headman possesses no fixed authority; neither does he enter into formal office. He is not elected, nor is he chosen by any formal process. When other men accept his judgment and opinions, he is a headman. When they ignore him, he is not. Headmen are those who can hunt and 'who by their extended acquaintance with the traditions, customs, and rights connected with the festivals, as well as being possessed of an unusual degree of common sense, are deferred to and act as chief advisers of the community.' Such are the germs of political authority among the rude societies of mankind" (82).

This is what David Hume had in mind when he described in his essay "Of the Origin of Government" how the "love of dominion" as rooted in the "principles of human nature" would motivate leaders in savage societies who get prestige from acting as dominant individuals, although this dominance would depend on the voluntary consent, or at least acquiescence, of the other individuals in the society. In this way, the Lockean idea of "original contract" really does explain the primitive origins of law and government, although the later history of government has been decisively shaped by war and conquest.

I see in Hoebel's study confirmation of most if not all of the twenty natural desires rooted in evolved human nature, because one can see these natural desires expressed in some form in all of these primitive societies.

One can see, for instance, in all of these societies the desire for sexual mating and the need for social regulation to manage the conflicts created by sexual competition. The most common cause of homicide is men fighting over women. And this requires elaborate customary norms for marital bonding and resolving disputes over sexual partners.

Similarly, the prohibition of incest is universal in these primitive societies, although there is variation as to what counts as incest because kinship is sociologically defined. This variation is constrained by what the Darwinian would recognize as the "Westermarck effect." The incest taboo is strongest within the nuclear family, because of the tendency to feel a sexual aversion towards those with whom one has been reared from an early age. But this effect is not so strong outside the nuclear family--as with cousins. This pattern is clear in Hoebel's book, which also shows that even primitive people have some awareness of the deleterious effects of inbreeding, and thus some of their customary norms of incest avoidance could be deliberately formulated (109-10, 118-19, 131, 183-86, 191, 239, 254, 264, 291, 303).

My blog posts on the Westermarck theory of the incest taboo can be found here and here. Some of the comments on the first post offer some fascinating personal testimony.

There is some question, however, as to whether the natural desire for intellectual understanding can be found in these primitive societies. One Eskimo said this to an anthropologist: "Too much thought only leads to trouble . . . We Eskimos do not concern ourselves with solving all riddles. We repeat the old stories in the way they were told to us and with the words we ourselves remember . . . You always want these supernatural things to make sense, but we do not bother about that. We are content not to understand" (69).

Does this suggest that the desire to understand does not show itself in primitive societies? After all, as I have indicated in my post on George Anastaplo's study of non-Western cultures, there is a lot to be said for the claim that science or philosophy arose first in ancient Greece along with the discovery of the idea of nature.

At the end of Darwinian Natural Right, I argue that the desire to understand can be explained as a product of evolution, although this requires moving through the higher stages of cultural evolution. We can see in some other animals the tendency to curiosity or playful exploration that is the natural root of the human desire to understand. But the fullest development of the theoretical life as devoted to understanding for its own sake is manifested only after the cultural invention of writing. Only then was symbolic thought brought under the control of analytic reasoning through formal logic and systematic reflection. Preliterate primitive societies cannot show that search for understanding that arises in literate civilized societies, which eventually leads to philosophy and science.

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

Daniel Smail and the Neuroscience of History

At the end of August, I will be presenting a paper in Boston at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association on "Biopolitical Science: Darwin, Lincoln, and the Deep History of Politics." This paper will be part of a series of panels on "Evolution and Morality" sponsored by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. For my paper, there will be written responses from Daniel Lord Smail, a historian at Harvard, and Richard Richards, a philosopher at the University of Alabama.

The very idea of "deep history" is one that I have borrowed from Smail, particularly as he develops it in his recent book On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press, 2008). Smail points out that historians today assume that the true "history" of humanity began about 5,000 years ago with the invention of writing, and so everything else that happened to human beings prior to that is dismissed as "prehistory." Noting that there is plenty of evidence for human life prior to writing, Smail suggests there is no good reason why historians shouldn't develop a grand historical narrative that would encompass the whole of human experience from the Paleolithic era to the present.

That few historians today can even conceive of this reflects what Smail calls "the grip of sacred history." In the Western world, the influence of biblical religion led historians for many centuries to assume that history began about 6,000 years ago with the divine creation of Adam and Eve. Even when secular historians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries began to break away from the biblical creation story, they still held onto a secular version of this story: they assumed that history began about 6,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture and writing in Mesopotamia. Whatever happened to human beings prior to this was set aside as "prehistory."

In his new book, Smail argues for rejecting the chronological limits of sacred history and pursuing the study of deep history as including the entire genetic and cultural history of humanity. This would require interdisciplinary research combining traditional history and biological science. He offers an outline of how this could be done by concentrating on neurohistory--the history of humanity based on the evolution of the human brain. For this, historians would apply contemporary neuroscience to the study of human history. Historians must always employ psychological assumptions about human motivations in their historical explanations. Smail suggests that neuroscience would provide historians a psychological science rooted in modern biology.

One example of neurohistory for Smail is explaining the human dominance hierarchies that arose after the agricultural revolution allowed small groups of elite individuals to rule over large groups of subordinates. Dominant individuals must employ whatever devices they can to induce submissive dispositions in their subordinates. In matriarchal baboon societies, high-ranking females harass subordinate females in ways that create high levels of stress. Similarly, we might expect that in human dominance hierarchies, high-ranking individuals would intimidate their subordinates in ways that would generate stress hormones that make them feel submissive.

At one level, such an explanation might seem so obvious as to be trivial. After all, if subordinate individuals are submissive towards dominant individuals, one would assume that there must be some kind of biochemical state in the brains of the subordinates associated with a psychic state of submission. But at another level, such a explanation might seem dubious insofar as they are untestable. Because there is no way to gather neurophysiological data from the distant past to support the explanations. Smail admits this, but argues that even without direct tests of his neurophysiological hypotheses, we might find support in the historical sources for such neurohistorical reasoning. Knowledge of human neurophysiology offers an interpretive framework within which we might generate historical explanations that are heuristically powerful.

More generally, Smail argues for viewing cultural history as depending on "psychotropic mechanisms"--behavioral practices and institutional structures that have neurochemical effects that shape human moods. We might view each kind of social order as having a distinct psychotropic profile. For example, we might explain the medieval church as shaping the behavior of believers through ceremonial rituals and religious practices that modulate the chemical messengers in the brain in ways that sustain dependence on the church. But then in the eighteenth century, there was a clear decline in religious activities, which might be correlated with the popularity of new psychotropic commodities like coffee, tobacco, and alcoholic drinks like gin and rum. In fact, much of the public life of European cities in the eighteenth century was centered in coffeehouses and cafes.

To be persuaded of Smail's specific explanations, I would need more evidence and argumentation than he provides in his book. But I can accept his general idea--that every form of social order must appeal to the human nervous system by shaping the neurochemical activity of individuals to support the behavioral patterns of that society. I have argued that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biological nature, and these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral and political experience. These natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life. And within the constraints of natural desires and customary traditions, there is still some freedom for the exercise of prudential judgment by individuals. I would say that what Smail calls "psychotropic mechanisms" are the various means by which a social order modulates the neurochemistry corresponding to the twenty natural desires.

Although Smail's neurohistory has much in common with evolutionary psychology, he criticizes the evolutionary psychologists in the tradition of Cosmides and Tooby for being too ahistorical in their reasoning, because they jump from the "environment of evolutionary adaptation" as shaped in the Paleolithic era to the modern present without any account of the historical development from one to the other. Although Smail agrees with the evolutionary psychologists that the genetic evolution of the human species has shaped the human brain to manifest the predispositions of human nature, he thinks the evolutionary psychologists don't go far enough in recognizing the plasticity of that brain and how that neural plasticity makes possible cultural history. Like David Sloan Wilson, Smail emphasizes the need for explaining human behavior as shaped by gene-culture coevolution, and for that we need neurohistory.

I would say that what we need here is a theoretical framework of constrained plasticity that moves through three levels of social order--the natural history of the human species, the cultural history of human groups, and the individual history of the human beings in each group.

Smail has been influenced by David Buller's critique of evolutionary psychology in his book Adapting Minds. Stressing the diversity and contingency of human behavior and thought over evolutionary time, Buller concludes that "human nature is a superstition" (480). But I would say this is just as mistaken as concluding that since no two human beings have exactly the same anatomical structures, human anatomy is a superstition. While recognizing the anatomical diversity and contingency of human beings, the science of human anatomy presumes only that there is sufficient regularity in the patterns of human anatomical structure to warrant the generalizations of anatomy. Similarly, the science of human behavioral nature presumes that there is enough regularity in the patterns of human behavioral nature to warrant the study of human nature. In fact, Smail speaks about the need for broad categories of patterns or tendencies in studying human nature to support any deep history of human life. My account of the twenty natural desires specifies such patterns as manifesting a human nature grounded in the regularity of human neurophysiology.

The Hero with Twenty Faces: Darwinian Literary Studies

In teaching my graduate seminar on "American Political Novels," I have thought about how Darwinian science might illuminate the study of literature. Professional scholars in literary studies usually assume that literature belongs to the humanistic disciplines that must be radically separated from the natural sciences generally and from biological science in particular. But a small group of literary scholars have recently begun to apply Darwinian psychology to the study of literature. A couple of years ago, The New York Times Magazine published an article surveying the work of these folks--D. T. Max, "The Literary Darwinists" (November 6, 2005). One of the best of these scholars is Joseph Carroll, and he offers a good analysis of this research in his contribution ("Literature and Evolutionary Psychology") to The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005) edited by David Buss.

I would say that literature is an emotionally-charged imaginative simulation of human experience. Literature has a universal appeal in so far as it explores a universal human nature. A Darwinian science of human evolution would account for human nature as manifested in the twenty natural desires that I have sketched out in various places. Literature engages our interest because it depicts the conflicts that arise within and between individuals as they strive to satisfy those natural desires over the course of their lives.

Literature displays not only the universality of human desires but also the cultural and individual variability in the expression of those universal desires. This creates the interesting complexity in human experience in which natural desires constrain but do not rigidly determine the customary traditions of social life and the variable temperaments of unique individuals. Literature helps us to understand and manage this complex interaction of universal nature, customary traditions, and individual choices.

Joseph Campbell's famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces argues that literature around the world and throughout history portrays certain mythic archetypes that evoke a universal human psychology, which he thought was best explained by Carl Jung's psychoanalysis. I would see this as showing the universality of the twenty natural desires, which could be best explained as arising from the evolved nature of human beings.

In some ways, there is nothing new about this. Beginning with Aristotle's Poetics, students of literature have seen it as an artistic imitation of human nature. But the strength of Darwinian literary theory is that it offers a scientific explanation for the universal human nature that traditional literary scholarship has simply taken for granted.

Moreover, a Darwinian approach to literature can challenge those contemporary schools of literary study that deny human nature. Feminist theorists, for example, have argued that gender identity in European literature is an arbitrary social construction to enforce the patriarchal subordination of women to men. By contrast, Darwinian psychology would predict that although there will be great cultural and individual variation in the sexual differentiation of males and females, this variation will be constrained by the natural differences in the mental and behavioral propensities of men and women. This would predict that across all cultures, there should be certain regularities in the literary depiction of men and women. So even if there is much in the novels of Jane Austen that reflects the peculiarities of courtship and marriage in nineteenth-century Victorian England, her novels should also show some universal patterns of sexual mating that would be found in all cultures throughout history.

Moving from "Is" to "Ought"

In arguing for Darwinian conservatism, one of my fundamental claims is that there is a universal human nature shaped by natural selection that supports the natural desires that motivate moral judgment. More specifically, I argue that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are rooted in human biology, and these twenty natural desires provide a universal basis for moral experience.

I agree with Thomas Aquinas that "something is good insofar as it is desirable" (Summa Theologica, I, q. 5, a. 6). If the good is the desirable, then the satisfaction of our natural desires constitutes a universal standard for judging social practice as either fulfilling or frustrating human nature, although prudence is required in judging what is best for particular people in particular social circumstances.

Many contemporary philosophers would complain that I am overlooking the distinction between "facts" and "values" or "is" and "ought." They would say that we can not infer moral values from natural facts because what we ought to do is not the same as what we actually do. So from the fact that we desire something, we cannot infer that it is good for us to desire it.

But I would say that there is no merely factual desire separated from prescriptive desire, which would create the fact/value or is/ought dichotomy. Whatever we desire we do so because we judge that it is truly desirable for us. If we discover that we are mistaken--because what we desire is not truly desirable for us--then we are already motivated to correct our mistake. In Darwin's account of the moral sense, he explains how deliberation can lead us to regret our past behavior, and thus how we can learn to judge our present choices in the light of past experience and future expectations.

Whenever a moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, Why? And ultimately the only final answer to that question, Because it's desirable for you as something that will fulfill you or make you happy. And if I am right about my list of twenty desires as rooted in human nature, then this would constitute a universal standard for what is generally good for human beings, although the specification of what is good for particular individuals in particular circumstances will vary.

Contemporary philosophers often don't see that the move from facts to values is not logical but psychological. Because normal human beings have the human nature that they do, which includes propensities to moral emotions, they predictably react to certain facts with strong feelings of approval or disapproval, and the generalizations of these feelings across a society constitute their moral judgments.

Although contemporary philosophers commonly attribute the fact-value or is/ought dichotomy to David Hume, I believe that Hume belongs to a tradition of moral naturalism that I defend, and that the sharp separation of natural facts and moral values derives not from Hume but from Kant.

I have elaborated some of these points in Darwinian Natural Right, especially pages 69-83 and 158-160.

Other posts on the is/ought dichotomy can be found here, here, here, here., here, here., and here.

The Freiburg Workshop (6): The Evolutionary Science of Classical Liberalism

        At the Freiburg workshop, I restated my argument that we have at least twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature, and that a free and open society as promoted by classical liberalism gives individuals the fullest freedom to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires.  If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the classically liberal society to be better than those societies that do not allow individuals the same freedom to satisfy their natural desires.

        In his paper for the workshop, Jan Schnellenbach (Economics, Walter Eucken Institute, Freiburg) contended that I was wrong about this, because we must make trade-offs between these natural desires, and the trade-offs made by liberal policies are no more closer to human nature than the trade-offs made by illiberal policies.  “In general,” he wrote, “our many natural dispositions need not be mutually consistent, and the weights between them are likely to differ between individuals."  He claimed that “evolution likely endows individuals with a variety of heterogeneous traits and dispositions, which in turn implies a variety in policy preferences.” 

        But here he misses my point that it’s precisely this heterogeneity in how individuals rank their natural desires that makes liberal policies superior to illiberal policies, because while illiberal policies impose coercively a single ranking of desires, liberal policies do not impose a single ranking of desires on all.  In a liberal, largely open society, individuals are free to choose how to rank their natural desires, as long as this respects the equal liberty of others in their ranking.  Thus, liberal policies respect the natural heterogeneity of individuals, while illiberal policies do not.

         As indicated by Victor Vanberg at the workshop, Hayek makes this same point when he distinguishes between two kinds of “social planning.”  Illiberal planning organizes society by “a system of specific orders and prohibitions,” while liberal planning establishes “a rational system of law, under the rule of which people are free to follow their preferences.”

         I largely agreed with what Vanberg said about Hayek and the need for “evolution within constraints.”  I also agreed with him in criticizing Hayek’s suggestion that the market order requires a suppression of our natural human desires.  This is what I have identified as Hayek’s Freudian theory of human evolution, in which civilization requires the repression of our evolved human instincts.  Here is where Hayek’s argument for liberalism becomes incoherent. 

         If a liberal society is so painful because it requires the suppression of our deepest natural instincts, why does it succeed?  And if a socialist society satisfies our deepest natural instincts, why does it fail? 

         As I have indicated in some previous posts, I see the same incoherence in the “mismatch theory” of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.  Last June, at the meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in the Galapagos Islands, Cosmides and Tooby indicated their agreement with Hayek on this point.  At times, they seemed to say that Karl Marx was right about the “primitive communism” of hunter-gatherers, but at other times, they seemed to say that Marx was wrong, because even hunter-gatherers show only conditional sharing or reciprocation, and therefore their sharing is not indiscriminate.  Moreover, Tooby and Cosmides seemed to agree with John Locke and Adam Smith in seeing trading behavior in hunter-gatherers that would provide the natural basis for the modern commercial society.

         Understanding our evolution as moral animals requires that we understand the complex interaction between our moral nature, our moral culture, and our moral judgment.  This interaction of nature, culture, and judgment was a theme in the paper presented by Margaret Shabas (Philosophy, University of British Columbia).

         Schabas said that John Stuart Mill “believed that some of our traits are instinctive while others, our moral sense for example, are acquired.  But they emanate out of our intrinsic nature and in that sense are organic to our species.”   She then quoted from Mill’s Utilitarianism: “Like the other acquired capacities above referred to [speech and reason], the moral faculty, if not part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it; capable, like them, in a certain small degree, of springing up spontaneously; and susceptible of being brought by cultivation to a high degree of development.”

          In his Descent of Man, Darwin quotes from this same passage in Mill’s Utilitarianism, which Darwin finds contradictory.  Darwin argues that human morality is rooted in evolved social instincts.  He finds Mill confusing on this point, because Mill seems to say that morality both is and is not naturally instinctive. 

          Darwin and Mill are actually in agreement, I think, in seeing that natural moral instincts are necessary but not sufficient for the full development of moral life.  For Darwin, the first step in the evolution of morality is to have the social instincts that “lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”   But this is only the first step.  The other steps include the mental capacity for deliberation, language that expresses social praise and blame, and social habituation.

While we commonly separate nature and nurture or nature and art, animal nature—including human moral nature—must be nurtured if it is to reach its natural completion, and this nurturing of our nature includes both cultural learning and individual judgment.  That’s why I say that Darwinian anthropology moves through three interacting levels.  Human nature constrains but does not determine human culture.  And human nature and human culture jointly constrain but do not determine human judgment.

 

The issue of whether liberal democratic regimes conform better to the constraints of evolved human nature than do illiberal authoritarian regimes is an empirical question.  Albert Somit and Steven Peterson have argued that liberal democracies require an egalitarian social structure that is contrary to our evolved human inclination to a hierarchical social structure in which the submissive many defer to the dominant few. 

 

Gregory Levit (History of Science, King's College & Jena University) criticized this argument in his paper for the workshop.  I agree with him.  But he doesn’t see the fundamental problem with the position of Somit and Peterson.

They assume that liberal democracy must be completely egalitarian, with no hierarchy at all.  If this were true, then the record of history would show that there has never been a liberal democracy, because every society has some differences in social rank.  And, indeed, I have argued that there is a natural desire for social ranking.

Levit cites Christopher Boehm’s book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior.  But he doesn’t notice that Boehm argues against Somit and Peterson in claiming—rightly I think—that even in foraging societies, there is a hierarchy, but it’s an “egalitarian hierarchy,” in which subordinates use sanctions to restrain those with propensities to dominate.  Boehm then shows how modern liberal democracies can be interpreted as egalitarian hierarchies, with a formal or informal system of checks and balances that allows for “a moderate degree of leadership” without exploitative rule of dominants over subordinates.  Here, then, modern liberal democracies conform to the natural human dispositions shaped in the evolutionary history of hunter-gatherers.

In the evolution of hunter-gatherers, we can also see the evolution of social order as based on sympathy, which is rightly understood by Adam Smith as “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.”  Smith shows us how the moral order of society can be explained through our natural desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments. 

 

In his paper for the workshop, Alain Marciano (Economics, University of Montpellier) made a good argument for how Smith’s sentimentalist psychology of sympathy supports the liberal understanding of how social order can emerge as a largely spontaneous, self-regulatory order.  

Marciano also showed, however, that Smith recognized the limits of sympathy as extended to strangers or people outside one’s own group, and so he saw that economic exchange might need to depend mostly on self-interest rather than benevolence.

Modern evolutionary psychology has largely confirmed Smith’s understanding of how our nature as both self-regarding and other-regarding animals supports the social orders of moral and economic cooperation. 

 

And, thus, once again, we see , as I argued at the workshop, that Darwinian science supports classical liberalism by showing that Adam Smith was right about almost everything.