Burke's Two Kinds of Conservatism

In some previous posts, I have indicated how the debate over Darwinian conservatism reveals the conflict between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism. Metaphysical conservatism is transcendentalist in viewing social order as grounded in a transcendent realm of cosmic design. Evolutionary conservatism is empiricist in viewing human social order as grounded in common human experience as shaped by human nature, human custom, and human judgment.

In the history of modern conservatism, this split was manifested in the metaphysical conservatism of Russell Kirk and the evolutionary conservatism of Friedrich Hayek. For Kirk, the first canon of conservative thought was belief in "a transcendent moral order" set by divine design, and thus Darwinian science was scorned insofar as it seemed to subvert belief in this transcendent order. Since Hayek was a religious and metaphysical skeptic, he disagreed with Kirk about this. In fact, this was one of the reasons why Hayek did not even want to be called a "conservative" rather than a "liberal" in the classical sense.

Hayek elaborated his view of Burkean liberalism as belonging to a British empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design tradition. In the evolutionary tradition of Hume, Smith, and Burke, Hayek explained, "it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility--the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution." He then suggested that Darwin's theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.

That both Kirk and Hayek saw themselves in the intellectual tradition of Burke suggests that the tension between them might be found in Burke. In fact, Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution--the founding text of modern conservatism--shows this tension between the metaphysical conservatism of religious belief and the evolutionary conservatism of skeptical naturalism. Burke does seem to have a metaphysical conception of transcendent moral order in which human society is bound up with the order of the universe. Burke writes of "the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place." Here we see the metaphysics of Burke--a religious metaphysics in which the moral and political order of human society is situated within a cosmic order designed by God to conform to His eternal purposes.

But much of the argument of Burke's Reflections works against such a metaphysical view of morality as dependent on the cosmic structure of the universe. Burke wrote his Reflections as a reply to the Reverend Richard Price, who was a Christian Platonist. Arguing against the moral naturalism of Hume and the Scottish moral sense philosophers, Price rejected the idea that morality was rooted in moral sentiments, and he contended instead that moral knowledge was a rational activity of the mind grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's nature.

Burke rejected Price's appeal to the metaphysical abstractions of the "rights of man." "In proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false." Earlier in his life, Burke had expressed his skepticism about metaphysical causes in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. He had explained that in looking for the "efficient cause" of sublimity and beauty, he did not pretend to explain the "ultimate cause," because he was pursuing a purely empirical inquiry into sense experience. "That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours. When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depths. All we do after, is but a faint struggle, that shows we are in an element which does not belong to us."

This reliance on sense experience rather than metaphysical causes is also evident in Burke's understanding of morality. Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke in the Reflections evoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience. In doing so, Burke indicated his agreement with Hume and Smith in their account of morality as grounded in the moral sentiments of human nature. In fact, Burke had praised Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments as "one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory that has perhaps ever appeared."

When Darwin developed his evolutionary theory of morality, he was guided by the moral philosophy of Smith and the other Scottish moral sense philosophers. Darwin showed how this moral sense could have evolved from social instincts and human reason.

Much of the reasoning for Darwinian conservatism turns on the intellectual links between Smith, Burke, and Darwin. While libertarian conservatives look to Smith as their intellectual founder, traditionalist conservatives look to Burke. The intellectual friendship between Smith and Burke shows the fundamental compatibility of libertarian and traditionalist thought. (Some folks--Timothy Sandefur, for example--disagree with this because they see libertarianism as fundamentally opposed to traditionalist conservative thought.) Darwin explained how the moral thought of Smith and Burke could be confirmed by an evolutionary science of morality. This continuity between Smith, Burke, and Darwin manifests the moral philosophy of conservatism as rooted in the evolved nature of human beings as moral animals.

"Government Sachs" & the Corruption of Power in the Financial Bailout

In Darwinian Conservatism, I have a chapter on limited government. I suggest that the realist conception of human nature as imperfect supports the need for limited government with a balance of powers under the rule of law. Some of my readers have told me that they don't see the need to make such an argument because, after all, this hardly seems very controversial.

But notice what is happening in the American financial bailout. The U.S. Congress was persuaded that in a time of economic crisis, they should trust Henry Paulson and others from Wall Street firms to exercise virtually unlimited discretion in managing the $700 billion bailout. Now, in an article by Julie Creswell and Ben White in The New York Times, there's a report on what Paulson has done so far--he has given most of the major positions of power over the bailout to his friends from Goldman Sachs. The title of the article--"The Guys from 'Government Sachs'"--comes from the fact that people have coined the nickname "Government Sachs" to describe what has happened. One of the main people appointed by Paulson to direct the bailout is Neel T. Kashkari, who is a 35-year-old protege of Paulson who has no special experience for such a job.

Needless to say, the decisions made by these Goldman Sachs people will directly influence the economic fortunes of Goldman Sachs.

Of course, this is exactly what one should expect to happen when ambitious people are given unlimited power. One observer is quoted in the article as saying:

"Paulson put Goldman people into these positions at Treasury because these are the people he knows and there are no constraints on him not to do so. The appearance of conflict of interest is everywhere, and that used to be enough. However, we've decided to dispense with the basic principles of checks and balances and our ethical standards in times of crisis."

In recent weeks, many people have been saying that the financial crisis shows the need for more intense government regulation of the economy. But isn't it strange to use this argument to support a bailout program that gives unregulated power over the spending of taxpayer money to Wall Street financial managers who created the very crisis that they now say they should be trusted to resolve?

The Emergent Freedom of the Mind in the Brain: A Reply to Stephen Craig Dilley

In the 2008 issue of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Stephen Craig Dilley--a philosopher at St. Edward's University--has an article on "Enlightenment Science and Globalization." He attacks my Darwinian conservatism because of its "Enlightenment claim that the laws of nature and material causes are sufficient to produce 'emergent' human minds capable of the kind of free will consistent with moral responsibility." The problem, he warns, is that this "implies determinism of the mind and the disintegration of morality."

In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have argued that the human mind or soul can be explained as a product of the emergent evolution of the brain. The evolution of the primate brain shows a trend towards increasing size and complexity of the neocortex, which allows for greater behavioral flexibility in these animals. This trend reaches its peak in the human brain. Larger and more complex frontal lobes give animals the capacity for voluntary action, in the sense that they can learn to alter their behavior in adaptive ways. In human evolution, the growth in the size and complexity of the frontal lobes passed over a critical threshold allowing human beings to use words and images to compare alternative courses of action through mental trial and error. Consequently, human beings are capable not just of voluntary action but of deliberate choice, by which they self-consciously choose present courses of action in the light of past experiences and future expectations to conform to some general plan of life.

Against this, Dilley develops two kinds of criticism. First, he complains that my account of the emergent evolution of the mind in the brain is too vague, because it does not explain the specific details of how exactly the evolution of the primate brain gives rise to the human mind. Second, he argues that since I never explain "how mental events and properties can transcend the limits of physical causation," but rather assume "the sufficiency of purely natural causes to account for all things in heaven and on earth," I must implicitly accept that all human actions are causally determined by material causes and natural laws. This assumption that all mental activity has natural causes leads to the "disintegration of morality," Dilley insists, because it denies the possibility of free will and thus denies that people can be held morally responsible for their actions.

To the first charge, I plead guilty. I don't provide a detailed explanation for exactly how the human mind arises from the evolution of the brain, because as far as I know, no one has yet worked out such an explanation. Lots of evidence points to the evolutionary history of the primate brain as passing over some kind of critical threshold at which fully human mental capacities appear. But it's hard to say how exactly that happens. Our situation is comparable to our ignorance prior to the 1950s of how exactly genes work. We knew a lot about the outcomes of these genetic mechanisms. But we didn't know exactly how these mechanisms worked. In fact, even today, genetics is still shrouded in great mystery. The same is true for explaining how human self-conscious thinking and willing arises in the brain as shaped by a history of genetic evolution. But even so, we can say that the evidence supports the general conclusion that the mind arises in the brain by some kind of natural causality.

Does Dilley have his own detailed explanation of how exactly the human mind originated? If he does, he does not lay it out it in this article. It's hard to know how to respond to his criticism of my account of the evolutionary emergence of mind, because he offers no alternative explanation of his own.

Similarly, it's hard to respond to his criticism of my account of human mental freedom, because he never explains his alternative. At one point, he complains that in my reasoning, "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes are out of the picture." But then he never explains exactly how "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes" create human mental freedom.

Against the Kantian account of moral freedom as freedom from nature, I argue that our moral experience requires a notion of moral freedom as freedom within nature. The uniqueness of human beings as moral agents requires not a free will that transcends nature--as Dilley seems to believe--but a natural capacity to deliberate about one's desires.

We hold people responsible for their actions when they act voluntarily and deliberately. They act voluntarily when they act knowingly and without external force to satisfy their desires. They act with deliberate choice when, having weighed one desire against another in the light of past experience and future expectations, they choose that course of action likely to satisfy their desires harmoniously over a complete life. Such deliberation is required for virtue in the strict sense, although most human beings most of the time act by impulse and habit with little or no deliberation.

Children and other animals are capable of voluntary action. But only mature human adults have the cognitive capacity for deliberate choice. Being morally responsible is not being free of one's natural desires. Rather, to be responsible one must organize and manage one's desires through habituation and reflection to conform to some conception of a whole life well lived. One must do this to attain the happiness of a flourishing life, which is the ultimate end of all human action.

I reject any contrast between free will and determinism as a false dichotomy. Moral freedom should be identified not as the absence of determinism but as a certain kind of determinism. We are free when our actions are determined by our deliberate choices. I doubt that we ever have any real experience of people acting outside the laws of nature. Moral judgment assumes a regular and predictable connection between what people desire and what they do. To hold people responsible for their actions, we must assume that their beliefs and desires causally determine their actions.

I reject the idea of free will as uncaused cause. I agree with Jonathan Edwards that whatever comes into existence must have a cause. Only what is self-existent from eternity--God--could be uncaused or self-determined. In fact, the very idea of free will as uncaused cause comes from the biblical conception of God, and so, as Martin Luther observed, "free will is a divine term and signifies a divine power." Against the absurd idea that human beings could have such a divine power of free will as uncaused cause, I would say--like Edwards--that the common-sense notion of liberty is the power to act as one chooses regardless of the cause of the choice.

So what is Dilley's alternative? It's not clear. He refers to "agent causes." He never explains what that means. But since he rejects my idea that in human choices, our beliefs and desires causally determine our actions, I can only infer that he is implicitly appealing to free will as uncaused cause.

If that's what he is doing, then I would respond to him as I have to Denyse O'Leary. Like O'Leary, Dilley seems to adhere to a Gnostic dualism that insists on an absolute separation of mind and body. This Gnostic scorn for the natural world as incapable of embodying spiritual freedom denies both Christian orthodoxy and common sense.

Is Dilley implying that we cannot explain the emergence of the human mind without invoking "God, spiritual beings, or non-material causes"? If so, could he explain how exactly this works? And could he explain why God was either unable or unwilling to create the human soul through natural evolution?

Economics and the Sociobiology of the Social Sciences

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article by Vernon Smith on Bush's financial bailout plan. At one point, he wrote:

"During a bubble buyers are everywhere. Then suddenly, they disappear, waiting, watching, delaying, reluctant to buy assets that others might not. That buyers will disappear in a bubble is predictable, what is never predictable is the timing. In his 1933 Inaugural Address, President Franklin Roosevelt said 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' Yes, but the return of fearful buyers is just as unpredictable as the timing of their disappearance. And only the most arrogant will pretend to know what public policies will restore buyer 'confidence.'"

Vernon Smith is a Nobel-Prize-winning economist. And yet he says that his science of economics has little predictive power. It can predict only broad patterns of human behavior, such as the disappearance of buyers when a housing price bubble bursts. It cannot predict the precise movement of economic events, and it cannot predict which public policies will work best in times of crisis.

This is not what I was told in graduate school. In my first graduate course in political science at the University of Chicago, I was told by my professor (David Easton) that economics was the "Queen of the Social Sciences," and that our job as political scientists was to make political science as much like economics as possible. The reason for this, the professor told us, was that economics was becoming a rigorous and predictive science comparable to physics and chemistry. And, after all, economics was the only social science to have its own Nobel Prize.

But a few years after I heard that, Friedrich Hayek received the Nobel Prize in economics, and his Nobel lecture was entitled "The Pretence of Knowledge." Hayek pointed out that the econometric models so prized by mathematical economists were not working well in predicting economic behavior. In fact, he argued, economic science has very little predictive power, because while we can predict general patterns of human social behavior, we cannot predict the events of human history in any precise way.

Hayek saw economics as a historical and evolutionary science that studied unique and contingent events, in contrast to the ahistorical sciences of physics and chemistry. Hayek--and the other Austrian School Economists--rejected the tendency of neoclassical economics to seek the mathematical precision of the physical sciences. Historical sciences like economics can formulate probabilistic regularities of human behavior, but not deterministic laws.

That's why I believe that economics and all the other social sciences need to be understood as branches of biology. As Ernst Mayr argued, biology can be divided into mechanistic biology and historical biology. Mechanistic biology deals with the physiology of living organisms, and much of this can be understood mechanistically in terms of physics and chemistry. But historical biology--including animal behavior and evolutionary biology--depends on historical narratives and probabilistic regularities that cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry.

Historical biology is much closer to the social sciences than anything in physics and chemistry. Social sciences rooted in the historical biology of human nature would generalize about natural propensities of human social behavior as shaped by genetic evolution. But they would also study the highly variable behavior of human beings as shaped by cultural traditions and individual judgments.

Vernon Smith is one of my favorite economists because he recognizes the potential contribution that human biology can make to economics and the social sciences. In particular, he sees the importance of evolutionary game theory in confirming Adam Smith's account of morality and economics. Like the work of Smith, an evolutionary social science would allow us to understand and predict the generic patterns of human behavior while recognizing the inescapable contingency and uncertainty of that behavior as it evolves in history.

George Bush as Herbert Hoover--The Coming Depression

The experts in the Department of Treasury have changed their minds over the last few days about how to save the U.S. financial system. Now, the idea is to partially nationalize the biggest American banks. The front page story on this in the New York Times is about how this has a "basis in history." The clearest historical precedent for this is the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the 1930s, which made loans to troubled banks and bought stock in thousands of banks. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was chartered in 1932 during the administration of Herbert Hoover. As we know, this and other actions initiated by Hoover and continued by Franklin Roosevelt turned an economic crisis into a prolonged depression that lasted for 10 years or more. So, at least now, we know where we're headed.

The alternative--allowing free markets to adjust over a year or two with great pain for many of us--is politically unacceptable. Because of the federal government promoting artificially low interest rates and encouraging home mortgages for people who could not pay for them, housing prices were inflated into a bubble that had to burst. As a consequence of human imperfectibility--that human beings are imperfect in their knowledge and their virtue--one can predict that human beings are inclined to go deeply into debt to cover their luxuries with the hope that in the future they will be able to repay their debts. Free markets reflect these human imperfections, and that's why markets tend to produce cycles of boom and bust. In the bust, people are punished for their imperfections, and eventually readjustments are made, but only with great pain.

Another manifestation of human imperfection is that political leaders believe that people need not suffer the consequences of their mistakes, if only central planners take control to manage the economy. And so it is, in the present Presidential election, both of the two major candidates agree with Bush's bailout plans. Except for a few sentences in Sarah Palin's comments in her first debate with Joe Biden, no political leader is willing to say that the present economic crisis is the consequence of our human failing in taking on more debt that we can realistically handle, and that the only solution is for us to suffer the consequences of our bad financial decisions until the economy corrects itself. Most politicians cannot say that because that would require holding people morally responsible for their mistakes.

Instead, the government will intervene. But those in government are just as imperfect in knowledge and virtue as the rest of us. After all, no one really knows how to plan out a modern economy into the future. Yet the attempt to do this will prolong what otherwise would be a short period of painful adjustment.

Moreover, with Henry Paulson and others in the Treasury Department having almost unlimited discretion in the spending of almost a trillion dollars, we can assume that there will be massive corruption. Again, given the imperfect virtue of these people, it would be silly to think these people will not be corrupted by their power.

We can also expect that these people are intoxicated with their feelings of glory as they think of themselves exercising such extraordinary power in remaking the global financial system during a historic crisis. Even more than greed, their love of glory is dangerous in its corrupting effects.

If Bush, Obama, and McCain continue in supporting the bailout and following the path blazed by Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, we can anticipate a very deep and very long depression.

Have a nice day, everybody!

E. O. Wilson's Darwinian Ethics of Natural Law

In Consilience, Edward O. Wilson recognizes that crucial for his unification of all knowledge is a biological account of ethics as rooted in evolved human nature. He rightly notes that in doing this, he is following in the tradition of naturalistic ethics that stretches from Aristotle to David Hume to Adam Smith and, finally, to Charles Darwin. He is also right to see this naturalistic tradition of ethics as being "empiricist" in contrast to the "transcendentalist" ethics of those thinkers like Immanuel Kant who look to a transcendent realm of moral freedom beyond the natural world of human inclinations and experience. But in rejecting Thomas Aquinas's natural law ethics as transcendentalist, Wilson fails to see the common ground shared by Thomistic natural law and Aristotelian natural right.

Wilson shares with Aquinas--and Aquinas's teacher Albert the Great--the belief that nature is a rational order of causal regularities that can be understood by human observation and reasoning. This scientific study of nature includes biology--as manifested in Albert's zoology, which continued Aristotle's biology and passed it on to Aquinas. Just as Albert and Aquinas sought to explain the natural moral law as rooted in human biological nature, Wilson wants to explain the natural moral sentiments as part of a comprehensive science of nature. Wilson's quest for "consilience" shows how the tradition of natural law reasoning can be extended and deepened through a modern science of human nature.

Human nature, Wilson insists, is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone. Rather, human nature is constituted by "the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture" (164) For example, the rules of human language are not strictly determined by either genes alone or culture alone, but instead arise from the interaction of genetic mechanisms and cultural learning. Genes initiate a process of development that endows the human brain with neural mechanisms for acquiring language, so that in normal circumstances, a normal human child is prepared to learn whatever language in spoken in the social environment. Despite the diversity of human languages as shaped by diverse cultural traditions, there is a natural pattern of regularities: all normal human beings are prepared to learn a language, and the languages that they learn have universal traits that reflect the human brain's adaptation for learning language (132-33, 161-63). Such regularities of gene-culture interaction are what Wilson means by "epigenetic rules."

The gene-culture coevolution of morality is similar to that of language. The genetic evolution of the human species has endowed human beings with an instinctive propensity to learn morality. Human morality shows universal patterns shaped by the natural desires that constitute human nature. But the specification of those patterns will be shaped by human cultural traditions and by individual judgments as constrained by both the natural desires and the cultural traditions. This similarity between morality and language as based on instinctive capacities for social learning is a fundamental theme in Marc Hauser's recent book--Moral Minds--surveying the evidence for the biology of morality. My blog post on Hauser can be found here.

Wilson argues that since morality is ultimately rooted in the moral sentiments of human nature, a natural science of morality requires a biology of the moral sentiments. Although Wilson concedes that we are a long way from achieving such a biology, he has repeatedly throughout his writings used Edward Westermarck's Darwinian theory of the incest taboo as the prime example of how biology can explain the moral sentiments. My blog post on Westermarck's theory can be found here.

All moral rules might ultimately be explained in the same way that Westermarck explains the incest taboo. Morality, at the deepest level, depends on gut feelings that some things are right and others are wrong. The precise content of these feelings depends on what human beings learn through social experience, and this experience varies greatly across different cultural traditions. Yet the regularities in these moral feelings manifest the natural inclinations of a universal human nature that is prepared to learn some things more easily than others.

Wilson argues that social cooperation was advantageous for survival and reproduction during the evolutionary history of intelligent social animals like human beings. Natural selection favored those genetically heritable dispositions that promoted cooperative behavior, which included innate propensities to social emotions such as sympathy, love, guilt, shame, and indignation. Eventually, the highly developed intellectual faculties of human beings allowed them to formulate customary norms of conduct that expressed these social emotions of approval and disapproval. For example, the natural dependence of children on adults favored the emotional attachment of parent-child bonding. This dependence came to be expressed as social rules approving of parental care and disapproving of parental neglect. Similarly, the benefits of cooperating for mutual advantage in evolutionary history favored dispositions that enforce reciprocity--emotional approval of fairness and emotional disapproval of cheating. The innate disposition to learn such emotions would then be expressed as social rules that rewarded cooperators and punished cheaters.

Citing the research of neurologists like Antonio Damasio, Wilson infers that the innate propensity to experience moral emotions, which has been shaped by natural selection, is etched into the neural circuitry of the human brain (112-15). To live successfully as social animals, human beings must make practical decisions guided by the emotional control centers of their brains. Our brains incline us to feel sympathy and concern for the pleasures and pains of others, to feel love and gratitutde toward those who help us, to feel anger and indignation toward those who harm us, to feel guilt and shame when we have betrayed our family and friends, and to feel pride and honor when others recognize our good deeds. Insofar as these moral emotions are felt generally across a society, they support seocial rules of love, loyalty, honesty, and justice.

It might be, however, that a few human beings suffer from abnormal circuitry in their brains that prevents them from feeling, or feeling very strongly, the moral emotions that sustain morality. This seems to be the case for psychopaths, who feel no obligation to obey moral rules because they apparently do not feel the moral emotions that support such rules. If so, we must treat them as moral strangers (as I suggest in my chapter on psychopaths in Darwinian Natural Right).

If we saw Wilson's biology of moral sentiments as part of the natural law tradition, we might see that much (if not all) of what Aquinas said about the natural inclinations supporting natural law would be confirmed by modern biological research. For example, we might conclude taht the biological study of the social bonding between male and female and between parents and children provides a modern, scientific way of understanding what Aquinas identifies as the natural inclinations towards conjugal bonding and parental care. Aquinas's reasoning about marriage--that monogamy is completely natural, polygyny only partly natural, and polyandry completely unnatural--makes sense in the light of modern biological theories of human mating and parenting. Aquinas explained the natural inclinations by appealing to Aristotle's biological account of human nature compared to the natures of other animals. Wilson's biology of the moral sentiments continues in that same tradition of Aristotelian biological naturalism.

Wilson is certainly right in thinking that Aquinas regards the natural law as ultimately an expression of God's will, because he believes in God as the Creator of nature. But Wilson is wrong in thinking that Aquinas must therefore be an ethical "transcendentalist" who believes that moral knowledge comes only from some supernatural source beyond the natural experience of human beings. After all, Aquinas distinguishes the natural law, as known by the human mind's grasp of the natural inclinations, from the divine law, as known by God's revelation of His will through the Bible. Natural law conforms to the natural ends of human beigns as directed toward earthly happiness. Divine law, by contrast, conforms to their supernatural ends as directed toward eternal happiness.

Aquinas contends that the "moral precepts" of the Mosaic law--such as the rules against murder, theft, and adultery--belong to natural law, and, consequently, that they can be known by natural experience even without being revealed as divine commandments. These precepts belong to natural law, Aquinas says, because they derive their force from "natural instinct." The Mosaic law incorporates natural law insofar as it secures the conditions for satisfying the natural human desires for life, sexuality, familial bonding, and social order generally. Unlike the moral precepts, the "judicial" and "ceremonial" precepts of Mosaic law--such as the Jewish dietary restrictions and procedures of worship--could not have been known if they had not been revealed as divine law. These precepts derive their force from being instituted for the people of Israel. Before they were instituted, it was arbitrary whether the matters covered by these precepts were arranged in one way rather than another.

The contrast between Aquinas's "empiricist" view of natural law and his "transcendentalist" view of divine law is clear in his account of marriage. Aquinas believes that marriage belongs to natural law insofar as it serves two natural ends--the parental care of children and conjugal bonding. A Darwinian scientist like Wilson can accept this moral claim because it depends upon the observable nature of human beings. Aquinas believes, however, that marriage also serves a supernatural end that goes beyond natural experience. As a sacrament of the Catholic Church, marriage symbolizes the supernatural mystery of Christ's union with the Church. If this religious doctrine strenthens the marital commitment of those who believe it, then it reinforces the natural moral sense associated with marital bonding and thereby promotes the earthly happiness of human beings. Yet the sacred meaning of the doctrine points beyond nature to the eternal happiness that Aquinas believes to be the final end of human longing. This sacred meaning of marriage comes from a divine law that transcends human understanding and is beyond the realm of natural science. Yet the secular meaning of marriage comes from a natural law that can be known by natural experience and is open to scientific study. This secular meaning is compatible with Wilson's "empiricist" view of morality.

This should allow proponents of Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics to see Darwinian science as providing a scientific foundation for their ethics. One can see this, for example, in the writing of Alasdair MacIntyre. In his After Virtue (1981), he defended an Aristotelian and Thomistic account of morality as rooted in the moral and intellectual virtues, but he rejected any appeal to Aristotle's biology. Some years later, however, he indicated in Dependent Rational Animals (1999), that he had changed his mind--partly through reading my Darwinian Natural Right--because he had concluded that his Aristotelian/Thomistic ethics could be rooted in a Darwinian account of evolved human nature.

Revising POLITICAL QUESTIONS

Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls is my textbook on the history of political philosophy. It is now in its third edition. Over the next year, I will be revising it for a fourth edition. I would be pleased to hear from anyone familiar with the book who might have suggestions about revisions.

The book is designed to stimulate thought and discussion among undergraduate and graduate students reading the classic texts of political philosophy for the first time. Each chapter is organized around a series of questions linked to specific texts.

Another feature of the book is that I tie many of these political questions to scientific research in biology, psychology, anthropology, and behavioral game theory.

I open the book with a chapter on the Declaration of Independence suggesting that the questions raised in that document come up throughout political history and the history of political philosophy.

In the present edition, I have chapters on 13 political philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Rawls. Should I add new chapters on others?

I would be particularly interested in hearing from people who have used this as a textbook.

E. O. Wilson's Religion of Consilience

I am now re-reading Edward O. Wilson's Consilience in preparation for leading a discussion of it at a Liberty Fund conference. It's good to look back at the book now that 10 years have passed since its publication.

Wilson argues that the final aim of all science is the complete unification of knowledge, which he calls "consilience," based on the idea that everything in the universe is governed by laws of nature that can be known by science. The problem, of course, is overcoming the divisions between the fragmented disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Wilson lays out a program for using the biology of human nature to unify those disciplines. Obviously, this vision has influenced my arguments for a "Darwinian liberal education."

But while I generally agree with Wilson, his book raises questions that he does not resolve to my satisfaction. I see six big questions.

1. Does consilience rest on strong reductionism or emergent complexity?

2. Does consilience rest on religious belief?

3. Can there be a science of historical contingency, including the historical contingencies of human culture?

4. Can the natural sciences fully explain human self-consciousness?

5. Can the natural sciences fully explain human deliberate choice?

6. Can science explain human life without relying on the common-sense human experience embodied in "folk psychology"? Or does a science of human nature arise from a refinement of common sense?

As I have written in Darwinian Conservatism and in some previous blogs--here and here--I think Wilson should look to emergent complexity rather than strong reductionism as the ground for consilience.

In the future, I might have something to say about the last four questions. But here I will comment briefly on the second question, which concerns the place of religion in Wilson's work. (In my references to the book, I will give the page numbers from both the hardbound and the paperback editions.)

At the beginning of his book, Wilson indicates that as a young man, he turned away from his Southern Baptist rearing when he turned towards evolutionary science. Throughout this book--as well as many of his other writings--he seems to reject any kind of religious belief as contrary to science. But he also repeatedly speaks of science as either founded on religious beliefs or satisfying religious longings. Consequently, he leaves the reader with a sense of ambivalence about whether science and religion are compatible or not. To some extent, this looks like his own personal struggle. But it also seems to point to a fundamental question about the relationship between modern science and religion--particularly, biblical religion.

Wilson speaks of the belief in the unity of knowledge as "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws" (4). He also speaks of the belief in consilience as a "trust" or "faith" or "metaphysical world view" (9-10, 45/49). But then he also denies that science is a "belief system" (45/49).

He also speaks of science as "religion liberated and writ large," as "another way of satisfying religious hunger," because it "aims to save the spirit" by allowing us to "understand who we are and why we are here" (6).

More specifically, Wilson endorses Joseph Needham's conclusion that the Chinese did not experience a scientific revolution like that of the Western world because they did not have a biblical religious belief that the universe was created by a Divine Mind, and thus that the universe was governed by general laws that could be known by reason (31/33).

Wilson also agrees with Eugene Wigner that the mathematical order in the universe is mysterious, miraculous, and beyond any rational explanation (48-49/52-53).

We wonder, then, whether modern science rests on a biblical faith that the universe is intelligible because it is the product of a rational Creator.

In a dialogue between a transcendentalist and an empiricist, the transcendentalist asks, Where do the laws of nature come from if not from the Creator? Why is there something, why not nothing? Wilson seems to concede this point as indicating the need for at least a "cosmological God" who would be the First Cause. But Wilson still rejects any "biological God" who would intervene in evolutionary history or in human life (241/263).

This would explain why Wilson identifies himself as a deist, but not as a theist Questions about ultimate causes push us back to some first uncaused cause. We cannot comprehend or test the character of that First Cause. But it seems to be presupposed in our scientific assumption of the intelligibility of the universe as governed by natural laws.

Wilson also insists on the importance of maintaining sacred ceremonies and sacred phrases (like "under God" and "so help me God") because of their emotional power (247/270-71).

In fact, Wilson seems to believe that religious belief is instilled in human nature by evolutionary history. "The idea of the mystical union is an authentic part of the human spirit" (261/285). "The human mind evolved to believe in the gods" (262/286). Because of that, Wilson wants to appeal to those religious instincts through his evolutionary science--"the true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic" (265/289).

At the end of his On Human Nature, Wilson wrote that the science of the future should construct "the mythology of scientific materialism, guided by the corrective devices of the scientific method, addressed with precise and deliberately affective appeal to the deepest needs of human nature, and kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed."

Contrary to those like Richard Dawkins, who scorn religion as opposed to science, Wilson suggests that at some fundamental level science and religion come together. First, questions of ultimate explanation point to at least some deistic conception of God as First Cause. Second, evolved human nature shows a religious hunger that is satisfied by the scientific desire for understanding the order and meaning of the whole.

I am on Wilson's side rather than that of Dawkins. That's why I have argued for the desire for religious understanding as one of the 20 natural human desires.

I have written many posts on issues of science and religion. Two can be found here and .here.

Why the Bailout Won't Work

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel-Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. In the October, 2008 issue of The Economists' Voice, he has a short article--"We Aren't Done Yet: Comments on the Financial Crises and Bailout"--that summarizes some of the reasons why the bailout of Wall Street won't work. Other articles in this journal are helpful in providing clear analysis of the situation. Unfortunately, I doubt that anyone in Congress is reading such articles.

Stiglitz makes a number of points. The bad housing loans made in recent years were based on rising house prices. Those prices are going to continue to fall, and throwing money at Wall Street is not going to fill that hole. The American economy is contracting, and the economic slowdown will continue to create more financial problems. The bailout does noting to stop this contraction.

It is likely that the banks will want to pass on their lousiest loans to the American taxpayers. Henry Paulson says he will hire the best people from Wall Street to make sure this doesn't happen. But this assumes that these Wall Street people hired by the government will work for the public good and not for the good of Wall Street. How realistic is that? Moreover, we should keep in mind that the whole logic of this bailout is based on trust--we are being told we should trust the same people from Wall Street who got us into this mess to get us out of it!

Stiglitz concludes that it is highly unlikely that this bailout will work. And he remarks: "In environmental economics, there is a basic principle, called the polluter principle. It is a matter of both equity and efficiency. Wall Street has polluted our economy with toxic mortgages. It should now pay for the cleanup. How can Paulson oppose such a proposal?"

Three Cheers for the U.S. House of Representatives

On this blog, I have often complained about the loss of balanced and limited government in the United States because of the failure of the U.S. Congress to challenge the President. But today, I can cheer the House of Representatives for rejecting the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, and thus standing against the pressure from the White House to pass this without serious scrutiny.

Notice how this vindicates the institutional design of the constitutional framers. The design of the House of Representatives--particularly with a short term of two years--was meant to make the House closer to public opinion, while the Senate--with a six-year term--was expected to be more independent of public opinion. And, indeed, here we see that the House has been much more responsive than the Senate to public anger about the bailout, because all the House members have to face the voters in a few weeks.

There are many reasons why this bailout would be disastrous for the United States. But the most obvious is the foolish--and unconstitutional--delegation of virtually unlimited power to the Secretary of the Treasury.

In the original proposal a week ago, section 8 declared: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Read that sentence carefully and think about what it means that an American President would propose such absolute power vested in the hands of an unelected bureaucrat.

The proposal that was debated today has some checks on the Treasury Secretary's discretion. But he still has unlimited authority in deciding what he would buy and how much he would pay. He is not even required to seek the lowest possible price. Under some conditions, he would even have the power to bail out foreign central banks.

The Darwinian conservative accepts Lord Acton's famous maxim--"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"--because this follows from the imperfectibility of evolved human nature as driven by avarice and ambition. Anyone who takes this position could not support anything like the Bush bailout proposal.

We could be seeing here the first move towards a major political realignment in the United States. After all, the majority of the House has just voted against the leadership of the two major parties--including John McCain and Barack Obama. And they have voted on the side of Bob Barr (the Libertarian presidential candidate) and Ralph Nader. Barr has said: "We need to make Wall Street take the hit for its irresponsible investment decisions." Nader has denounced Bush's proposal as "a bailout for Wall Street crooks."

The Invisible Hand of Regulation in the Evolution of Language

In a blog post at The Huffington Post, David Sloan Wilson has argued that Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand is dead. In a second post, he has repeated his claim in response to objections from me and from Massimo Pigliucci.

In contrast to Wilson, I think the invisible hand is very much alive. In fact, it is the fundamental idea behind the Darwinian theory of evolution to which Wilson has contributed so much. A good illustration of how the invisible hand works is the evolution of language.

To refute the idea of the invisible hand, Wilson makes two assumptions. First, he assumes that the invisible hand presupposes that all human behavior is motivated by a narrow pursuit of self-interest. Second, he assumes that the invisible hand denies the need for any regulation. He then goes on to argue that scientific research has shown that human beings are motivated not just by narrowly selfish interests but also by a moral regard for others. He also argues that we should reject the idea of "no regulation," because social cooperation requires regulation. So he concludes: "The invisible hand is morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably, and reliably dead."

I disagree with his conclusion, because I disagree with his two assumptions. Both in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith recognizes the complex mixture in human nature of selfish and social motives. And far from denying the need for regulation, the whole point of Smith's writing is to show how the invisible hand regulates morality and economics. If "regulation" means "rule-governed," then both morality and economics are regulated, because they are rule-governed. But the point here is to explain how those moral and economic rules are originated and revised. Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand explains this as an evolutionary process.

Smith speaks of how a man might be "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." Thus, the idea of an invisible hand is the idea of an unintended order. Smith's general argument is that all human institutions arise and change as systems of unintended order. It was this idea that Darwin picked up from Smith and the other Scottish philosophers as the basis for his insight into evolution as an unintended order in which apparent design could arise in the living world without the need for an intelligent designer.

Consider the case of language. In fact, Smith's idea of the invisible hand as an unintended order was first stated in his essay on language--"Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages." Language is an unintended order. Language is a highly regulated instrument for communication that has emerged from the verbal activity of millions of people over thousands of years without anyone having intended the outcome by deliberate design. So, for instance, those of us who speak English have inherited our language as a customary legacy of a long history of linguistic practices, and each of us contributes to the evolution of the English language by every utterance we make, without being able to predict or to intend the outcome. Our language has been enriched by a few great minds like William Shakespeare and the translators of the King James Bible and by the many small minds of ordinary people in ordinary speech.

Some people might think that our English language would be better if we had a committee of English linguists who could reform our language from the top down. But those that see the importance of unintended order doubt that this is either possible or desirable. People who compile dictionaries, people who write textbooks of English grammar, and people like William Saphire who criticize contemporary English usage can have some influence on the future of English. But their influence will be only a small part of a complex cultural evolution in which every speaker of the language contributes something. I don't think "dis" is an English verb. But lots of other people disagree with me, and they seem to be prevailing in the common English usage in my neighborhood of the world.

Language is regulated in the sense of rule-governed, but the rules arise through the unintended order of the invisible hand.

Language is motivated by a complex mixture of selfish and social desires. I need to reach some mutual understanding with others to satisfy my needs, and language is a powerful tool to do that.

Darwin saw fundamental links between the evolution of species and the evolution of languages. The evolution of language was especially important for Darwin's account of human evolution, because language seemed to be a crucial trait for the uniqueness of the human mind.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin argued that "all classification is genealogical," and he thought this was true both for species and for languages. "It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct languages, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one."

The evolution of new species from varieties is just as fuzzy as the evolution of new languages from dialects. But if we can explain the evolution of languages genealogically without supposing some miraculous intervention by an intelligent designer, we can do the same for the evolution of species. And in both cases, it's evolution by the invisible hand of unintended order.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote: "The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel."

Darwin's ideas about the evolution of language have been largely confirmed by contemporary genetic, archaeological, and linguistic studies--as surveyed, for example, by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. There are remarkable similarities in the historical patterns of genetic evolution and linguistic evolution that apparently reflect the history of human migrations. So, for example, the isolation of the Basques in Spain and France is reflected both in their genetics and their language.

So when we look at this history of genetic and linguistic evolution, we should cheer: Long live the invisible hand!

The New Evolutionary Enlightenment

"The New Evolutionary Enlightenment" is a Spanish blog devoted to evolutionary studies of human nature. Recently, they have been posting interviews with various people in evolutionary studies--such as Howard Gardner, Robert Plomin, Robin Dunbar, and Steven Mithen. The interviews have English translations. This series now includes an interview with me.

Clarifying the Debate with Wilson

I need to apologize to David Sloan Wilson, because I now agree with his complaint that I misread his blog post for the Huffington Post. Coming as it did in the context of the federal bailout proposal, Wilson's argument that more federal regulation of markets was required to resolve the present financial crisis seemed to me to endorse the bailout, which I have argued against. But now I can see that this is not a necessary implication of his post.

The critical point is in the last sentence of Wilson's post: "We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation, but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest." I agree with Wilson that the "concept of no regulation" is silly. I am not sure, however, that anyone other than a few anarchists has ever argued for "no regulation." At the very least, free markets require legally defined property rights, the enforcement of contracts, and punishment of force and fraud. And as I have indicated, Adam Smith's WEALTH OF NATIONS ends with a long section on the institutional structures that government must provide to promote commercial activity.

But then the really interesting question is "smart vs. dumb regulation." Wilson has nothing to say about that. But it seems to me--for the reasons I have indicated--that the bailout would be not just dumb but disastrous.

Wilson's Response

I have received the following email message from David Sloan Wilson.

"I enjoyed your recent response to my blog, but I must protest.

"1) My blog presented a general argument and said nothing whatsoever about bailouts, which is a specific course of action. Everything that you attributed to me about bailouts represents you filling in the details, including this passage: 'Wilson says that free markets suffer from a 'lack of regulation' [I did say this] and that the governmental bailout of financial institutions illustrates the need for regulation that will reward cooperation and punish cheaters [this comes from entirely from you]." One reason that the public resents the bailouts is because they reward the cheaters.

"(2) I acknowledged that Smith's views are more nuanced and quickly focused on two less nuanced views; formal rational choice theory and the widespread portrayal of unfettered competition as a moral virtue and regulation as a sin. You miss the point when you return to Smith's nuanced view.

"(3) As you know, Hayek was an early proponent of group selection, which made him an oddball among economists at the time. My own views are also based on group selection, which I review for an economic audience in my essay title 'The New Fable of the Bees.' My work therefore partially supports Hayek's position. According to Hayek, the virtues that work well for small-scale society must be supplemented to remain adaptive in large-scale society, a point that I also make in my blog. Whether Hayek's specific vision regulation appropriate for large-scale society is 'smart' or 'dumb' remains to be seen, but his view does not follow from formal rational choice theory, which is the target of my blog.

"(4) In your blog, you suggest that our current economic crisis is based on too much regulation, not lack of regulation. These seem like perfectly testable hypotheses, and I hope tht you or other experts will flip into scientific mode and appropriately test them, rather than merely countering one possibility with another.

"(5) You ask the following question: 'But how exactly do we get 'smart regulation' in complex, self-organizing systems where no one has perfect knowledge?' Since when was perfect knowledge required to get serviceable answers? That's what science is supposed to do in the face of imperfect knowledge. You leap to the conclusion that solutions must come from the 'regulators who manage our bailouts.' How about folks such as you and me who are trying to function in scientific mode? You leap to the conclusion that solutions require centralization. How about fine-tuning the parameters of a decentralized process?

"(6) In my opinion, we don't want to rely on the raw process of cultural evolution to evolve our solutions. We need to manage the process of cultural evolution so that it leads to benign outcomes at large spatial and long temporal scales. Hopefully, my essay will inform readers that the field of economics has moved beyond rational choice theory and will help move public discourse beyond the mantra that regulation is categorically bad.

"Respectfully,

"David."

I am glad to receive this message from David Sloan Wilson. I read his blog post as endorsing the bailout proposals. If I understand him correctly in this message, he's saying that's a misinterpretation.

He writes: "One reason that the public resents the bailouts is because they seem to reward the cheaters."

"Seem"? Is Wilson agreeing with the public on this, as I would?

But I am still confused. In Wilson's original post, he complained that people don't see the need for regulation such as the proposed bailouts. But now he says that he doesn't think the bailouts are a good idea. Am I missing something?

Is There a Darwinian Case for Bailouts? A Response to David Sloan Wilson

Yesterday, I posted my "Darwinian Conservative Case Against Bailouts." I argued that a Darwinian view of human nature supports private property and free markets under the rule of law with limited government, and I argued against the current mania for bailing out financial institutions as a foolish manifestation of market-socialism that will promote economic crisis while rewarding imprudent behavior.

Today, at the Huffington Post, David Sloan Wilson has posted an article entitled "The Invisible Hand is Dead. Long Live (Smart) Regulation". Wilson argues against my position, because he claims that Darwinian science actually shows that the bailout of financial firms is necessary to promote cooperation and punish cheaters. Although I have the greatest admiration for Wilson's contributions to evolutionary theory, I must say that his reasoning here is incoherent.

Wilson says that the guiding metaphor of capitalist economics is "the invisible hand," which assumes that "the narrow pursuit of self-interest miraculously results in a well-functioning society." According to Wilson, Adam Smith was wrong to offer this defense of narrow self-interest in his Wealth of Nations, although Wilson notes that Smith presented "a more nuanced view of human nature" in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Rational choice theory took the invisible hand metaphor literally in trying to explain all human behavior by narrow self-interest. But, Wilson explains, "the collapse of our economy for lack of regulation was preceded by the collapse of rational choice theory," because research in experimental game theory has shown that cooperation arises through moral sentiments that reward cooperators and punish cheaters. Wilson identifies this enforcement of moral norms through moral emotions as "regulation," and he implies that government bailouts of financial firms is an example of such moral "regulation" to secure cooperation.

Wilson then speaks of beehives as examples of "self-organization" that is more than "self-interest." "Beehives and other social insect colonies are indeed self-organized. There is no single bee commanding the troops, certainly not the queen."

For an elaboration of his argument, Wilson recommends reading the book Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, edited by Herbert Gintis et al.

Wilson then concludes: "We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest."

This is a very confusing essay. First, Wilson attributes the idea of completely unregulated markets based on narrow self-interest to Adam Smith. But he doesn't tell his readers that at the end of the Wealth of Nations, Smith has a long section on the public works and institutional structures that government must provide to facilitate commerce. Smith recognizes the need for regulation. But he worries that governmental schemes for central planning of the economy are often harmful because of the "folly and presumption" of politicians who think they have the knowledge and the virtue to direct an economy in all of its details. Does Wilson disagree with this?

Wilson points to Smith's "more nuanced view of human nature" in the Theory of Moral Sentiments. But he doesn't explain that Smith in that book defends a view of morality based on natural moral sentiments that was taken up by Charles Darwin in his theory of the evolution of the moral sense. Smith saw human beings as social beings who combined self-interest and moral sentiments. In fact, the title of the Gintis book to which Wilson refers captures Smith's view of human nature as moved both by "moral sentiments and material interests." In my book Darwinian Conservatism, I show how Darwinian science supports morality as rooted in moral sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments, and how such a morality sustains private property, free markets, the rule of law, and limited government.

Wilson implies that Smith's "more nuanced view of human nature" has been lost because "modern economic and political discourse is not about nuance." But, in fact, leading proponents of free market economics like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek have emphasized the importance of cooperation in sustaining capitalist economics. Mises wrote: "It is the social spirit, the spirit of cooperation, which forms, develops, and upholds societies. Once it is lost, the society falls apart again. The death of a nation is a social retrogression, the decline from the division of labor to self-sufficiency. The social organism disintegrates into the cells from which it began." People like Mises and Hayek have stressed the importance of capitalist free markets in promoting extended cooperation through a division of labor. In recent years, a growing number of economists have looked to evolutionary theory to explain how cooperation and "moral markets" emerge from the moral dispositions of evolved human nature.

Wilson says that free markets suffer from a "lack of regulation," and that the governmental bailout of financial institutions illustrates the need for regulation that will reward cooperators and punish cheaters. Really?

Free markets with private property under the rule of law regulate economic behavior by providing incentives to prudence. Individuals and firms with a stake in the outcome make decisions based on their processing of information. The rewards and losses from their decisions are concentrated on them rather than on taxpayers. When individuals and firms take on too much debt and too much risk, they bear the costs of their imprudent behavior.

When the federal government uses taxpayer money to bailout individuals and firms that have made bad decisions because of their greedy imprudence, this rewards such imprudence and punishes taxpayers. We thus create what economists call "moral hazard." When people do not bear the costs of their imprudent behavior, because their losses are insured by the taxpayers, we are rewarding and thus promoting imprudence. How exactly does Wilson think that federal bailouts avoid this problem of moral hazard?

Wilson assumes without argument that our present financial crisis has been produced by a lack of government regulation. Is that true? Or is it possible that this crisis has a lot to do with the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates artificially below market rates to promote more and more borrowing? Is it possible that this crisis has a lot to do with the regulations of the Security and Exchange Commission in raising debt-to-capital ratios for financial firms?

Wilson might respond by saying that he is advocating "smart regulation," but not "dumb regulation." But how exactly do we get "smart regulation" in complex, self-organizing systems where no one has perfect knowledge? Is Wilson assuming that the regulators who will manage our bailouts will have enough knowledge of the economy to know exactly what they are doing? Economists like Hayek have argued that a large, complex economy cannot be centrally planned because the central planners will never have enough knowledge or virtue to be trusted to do such planning. Does Wilson disagree? If so, he needs to explain how a beehive could be centrally planned by a queen and her economic advisers. He also needs to explain why a prudent queen's regulation of her beehive would include bailouts for those bees who consume more than they produce and save.

In today's New York Times (September 21), the front-page article by David Herszenhorn on the bailout proposal opens with these two paragraphs:

"The Bush Administration on Saturday formally proposed to Congress what could become the largest financial bailout in United States history, requesting virtually unfettered authority for the Treasury to buy up to $700 billion in mortgage-related assets from financial institutions based in the United States.

"The proposal was stunning for its stark simplicity: less than three pages, it would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion. And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, allowing the Treasury to buy and resell mortgage debt as it sees fit."

Read over those sentences very carefully. "Virtually unfettered authority." A proposal of "less than three pages." "No restrictions" other than semiannual reports. "As it sees fit." David Sloan Wilson says that we should be cheering this as wise and moral "regulation." But from my Darwinian conservative perspective, I see no reason to cheer such naive faith in the perfect knowledge and perfect virtue of a few bureaucrats in the Treasury Department.

The Darwinian Conservative Case Against Bailouts

The US Government's moves towards bailing out financial firms that have made bad economic decisions shows that the United States has adopted a market-socialist economy. Early in the 20th century, critics of socialism like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek argued that pure socialism could not work because there would be no way to calculate value in a large, complex economy without market prices. Eventually, most socialist thinkers admitted the accuracy of this argument. But then many socialists responded by defending the possibility of market-socialism that would combine market pricing based on private property with central economic planning by government.

The creation in the United States of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac illustrates market-socialism in action. Backed by a government that wanted to provide affordable housing, Fannie and Freddie could act as private firms seeking profits in mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, but when the bad decisions of these corporations led to turmoil in financial markets, the government could step in with taxpayer money to cover the losses in the hope of stabilizing markets. Now, it seems an even bigger bailout will be designed to use taxpayer money to cover the bad mortgage debt in financial markets.

From the perspective of Darwinian conservatism, it is easy to see that such market-socialism must fail, because it ignores the human nature of private property, free markets, and political ambition. For conservatives, property is rooted in human nature and thus universal, although the specific forms of property reflect the customary traditions and formal laws of particular societies. For socialists and liberals, property is not natural but a purely social construction that can be deliberately changed, or even abolished, to secure social equality. A Darwinian view of human nature sustains the conservative commitment to property as a natural propensity that is diversely expressed in custom and law.

A system of private property and free markets under the rule of law channels the natural desire for wealth to allocate resources productively in a manner that recognizes the imperfectibility of human beings in their limited knowledge and limited virtue. In such a system, human beings gather economic information and make economic decisions based on their expectation that they will reap the rewards of their good decisions and bear the costs of their bad decisions. This gives them the incentive to be prudent, because they know that their imprudence--such as being foolish in undertaking too much debt and risky investments--will be punished by financial failure.

By contrast, in a market-socialist system, losses are socialized. Business managers and shareholders can reap great profits through foolish risk-taking, while assuming that they will not be punished for their imprudence because any losses will be covered by governmental intervention. This creates distortions in the economy as resources are directed to bad investments, creating financial bubbles that inevitably must burst.

Like all other human beings, political leaders are imperfect in their knowledge and their virtue. Moreover, they are moved primarily by the ambition for power. In a system of free enterprise and limited government under the rule of law, political leaders are not given broad powers to manipulate the economy, because their economic ignorance and their political ambition will lead them to create harmful distortions in the economy. Because of their ignorance, they will not know what decisions would be best for the economy. Because of their ambition, they will respond to political pressures in advancing their political careers rather than working for sound economic outcomes. In a market-socialist economy, those with great political influence can benefit from their access to power, but the economy as a whole suffers from the misallocation of resources coming from the ignorance and ambition of central planners. To deny this conclusion, we would have to assume that government planners can have perfect knowledge and perfect virtue, but such an assumption is implausibly utopian.

Such reasoning from Darwinian conservatism does not allow us to predict specific events that are determined by the contingencies of history. But it does allow us to predict the broad tendencies of economic and political life as shaped by human nature. So we can predict that if the federal government of the U.S. continues its market-socialist strategy of bailing out financial businesses with taxpayer money, the financial crisis will be prolonged, which will create an even greater demand for more bailouts, and the vicious circle will eventually bring a massive economic collapse. If such market-socialism spreads around the world, as seems likely, then the collapse will become global.

Some of the logic of this economic analysis can be found in two recent articles found at the Cato Institute website--one by James Dorn and another by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters.

Today's New York Times (September 20) has an article by Joe Nocera with the title "A Hail Mary Pass, But No Receiver in the End Zone." His conclusion is that the people proposing the new bailout plan have no idea how it will work or whether it will work. But political pressures force them to "do something." His final sentence is that "as much as we might hope that the government finally has the answer, it probably doesn't." The fundamental problem is ignorance. "Nobody understands who owes what to whom--or whether they have the ability to pay. Counterparties have become afraid to trade with each other. Sovereign wealth funds are no longer willing to supply badly needed capital because they no longer know what they are investing in. The crisis continues because nobody knows what anything is worth. You simply cannot have a functioning market under such circumstances."

In a state of such ignorance, the only reasonable thing for the government to do is to do nothing and let the market go through a painful period of adjustment. But instead, government planners will offer rescue plans that only make matters worse, at a cost of over a trillion taxpayer dollars. That's market-socialism.

Ron Paul Was Right

When Ron Paul was running in the Republican presidential primaries, he was ridiculed for his warnings that the U.S. financial system as managed by the Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury was on the way to collapse. Actually, he and others whose thinking has been shaped by Austrian School of Economics have been predicting this for many years.

Now, we see federal bureaucrats desperately spending hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money in nationalizing financial institutions to avoid a collapse that has building for many years. (We used to call this "socialism.") They do this in violation of the Constitution of the United States, which explicitly states that no spending can occur without congressional authorization. Of course, the Congress has no interest in intervening.

And what do Obama and McCain say? We need more federal regulation.

Wouldn't it be more sensible to say that the federal government should do nothing? Shouldn't we see this as an imbalance in the economy--too much consumption and too little saving and production--created by federal efforts to stimulate the economy? And isn't the only way to work out of this imbalance to endure the pain of a year or so of drastic economic readjustments? Can't we anticipate that federal bailouts with taxpayer money will only prolong the pain?

For an example of the Austrian economics analysis of this crisis, go to an article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute website by Antony Mueller.

Metaphysical Conservatism Versus Evolutionary Conservatism

In thinking about why many conservatives resist Darwinian conservatism, I have begun to suspect that there is a fundamental conflict here between metaphysical conservatism and evolutionary conservatism. (Reading Donald Livingston's HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON LIFE has helped me to think about this.)

Beginning with David Hume's criticism of the English Puritan Revolution and Edmund Burke's criticism of the French Revolution, conservatives have rejected the rationalistic metaphysics of political revolutionaries as a dangerous attack on social and political order as rooted in historical tradition. Conservatives like Hume and Burke have recognized the need for reforming the traditional orders of society. But they have argued that such reform is best understood as a gradual, evolutionary process within concrete traditions. By contrast, the metaphysical rebellion of revolutionaries attempts a total restructuring of society to conform to some abstract blueprint of rational perfection. The ideological fanaticism of the past two centuries--Marxism, socialism, fascism, Nazism, and so on--manifests the danger coming from such total revolutions of common life by metaphysical thinking.

Darwinian conservatism continues in the tradition of Hume and Burke by explaining the history of moral and political order as arising from a complex interaction of natural evolution, cultural evolution, and prudential judgments. The Darwinian science of morality and politics is a historical science of human social order in all of its concrete historicity. Any presumed total transformation of social life by reference to some abstract, metaphysical conception of perfect order is rejected as an incoherent and destructive form of utopian perfectibility, which disregards the imperfectibility of human life in its evolving historical contingency and particularity.

But there has been a tendency for some conservatives to challenge the metaphysical revolutionaries by appealing to a conservative metaphysics of sacred order. For example, Richard Weaver contended in his Ideas Have Consequences that any healthy cultural order requires a "metaphysical dream"--a set of transcendent standards for moral order. In his VISIONS OF ORDER, Weaver criticized the Darwinian idea of human evolution for promoting moral degradation by subverting the metaphysical image of human beings as standing at the peak of the divine cosmic order.

In THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, Russell Kirk showed this same metaphysical conservatism when he affirmed "belief in a transcendent order" as the first canon of conservative thought and warned against Darwinian science as undermining conservative principles of transcendent order. By contrast, Frederick Hayek criticized conservatives like Kirk for rejecting the theory of evolution: "I have little patience with those who oppose . . . the theory of evolution or what are called 'mechanistic' explanations of the phenomena of life simply because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irreverent or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his position." This was one reason that Hayek was reluctant to call himself a "conservative." And yet he identified himself as a Burkean Whig. He might rightly be called an evolutionary conservative.

In the recent collection of articles from the
Intercollegiate Review--Arguing Conservatism--published by ISI Books, the lead article serving as a Prologue is Will Herberg's "What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?" According to Herberg, our moral crisis is not the failure to live up to our shared moral standards but rather our loss of any moral standards at all. This "loss of a moral sense" is "a metaphysical and religious crisis." To restore our moral standards, we need some transcendent, metaphysical law that is "binding on man because it is grounded in what is beyond man," and that requires the transcendent standards of religion.

In the same collection, Robert Kraynak has an article warning that although Darwinian evolution is supported by lots of evidence, conservatives should look to "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinism, because Darwinian science provides no account of "the ultimate purpose of the universe." Like Herberg, Kraynak assumes that moral order is impossible without invoking a metaphysical standard of cosmic purposefulness.

Carson Holloway, John West, and other critics of my Darwinian conservatism show the same appeal to metaphysical standards of moral order. Holloway says that my Darwinian account of the moral sense as rooted in natural moral sentiments, customary moral traditions, and deliberate moral judgments cannot provide the proper ground for morality, because morality is impossible without some "religiously-informed cosmic teleology." Similarly, West insists that moral order requires some "transcendent standard of morality," a "permanent foundation for ethics," or some source for morality in "irreducible and unchanging truths." West never explains exactly what these "unchanging truths" are. He does often refer to "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But he never specifies precisely what he has in mind. Both Holloway and West speak of the biblical doctrine of human beings as created in the image of God as supporting a universal, transcendent standard of the equal moral dignity of all human beings.

I cannot see how the metaphysical equality of all human beings could be applied in practice as the transcendent standard for all social order. I understand, of course, the importance of the "self-evident truth" of human equality and liberty in the Declaration of Independence. But even Abraham Lincoln conceded that "perfect social and political equality" was impossible, and that Americans needed to translate this into a "practical equality" compatible with American legal and political traditions. Strictly speaking, universal human equality and liberty would dictate socialist pacifism. And that's why Lincoln and others have had to reformulate the idea of equality to make it consistent with the concrete conditions of particular moral orders.

Did the resolution of the slavery debate in the United States depend on biblical metaphysics? As I have often noted on this blog, many Christians thought the Bible supported slavery and that abolitionism was atheism. How does biblical metaphysics resolve moral debates if we can't agree on the practical moral teaching of the Bible? While Lincoln thought slavery was morally wrong, he also thought it would be imprudent to abolish slavery immediately if that meant violating the Constitution. How do we weigh moral right against the rule of law? Should we say, as some abolitionists did, that the "higher law" must prevail against human law, no matter what the consequences? Shouldn't we worry about the fanaticism of people like John Brown who think they are acting by divine command in cleansing society of evil?

Religious conservatives like Holloway and West believe that morality is impossible without the cosmic purposefulness of "the Judeo-Christian tradition." But which "tradition" is this--Judaism, Catholic Christianity, Protestant Christianity, Islam, Mormonism? Are they referring specifically to the Bible as the source of moral and political order? The English Puritan revolutionaries of the 17th century invoked biblical law in their attempt to establish the "kingdom of the saints," and their metaphysical fanaticism had disastrous consequences. I assume that Holloway and West would reject this. But why? Doesn't this show how dangerous it is to look to religious metaphysics for cosmic standards to revolutionize society?

If we want moral and political order guided by "religiously-informed cosmic teleology," how do we avoid theocratic extremism? Not long ago, the Intercollegiate Review published an article by Remi Brague with the title "Are Non-Theocratic Regimes Possible?" His answer to the question was, No. His reasoning was that in the history of the West, the ultimate standard for order was the law of God, and even in modern liberal democracies, the appeal to individual "conscience" implies that this is somehow the voice of God implanted in human beings. He suggests that moral and political order is impossible without the theocratic appeal to the law of God as the cosmic standard for all human behavior.

For such conservatives who invoke the metaphysics of theocracy as the only ground of moral order, a Darwinian conservatism that roots moral order in natural sentiments, cultural traditions, and deliberate judgments must be rejected as insufficient. But shouldn't conservatives be suspicious of such theocratic metaphysics as fostering a dangerous fanaticism?

And if we were to rely on a theocratic metaphysics as the source of order, how exactly would we determine the moral content of that metaphysics? Conservatives like West say that we should look to intelligent design theory. But how do we know that the intelligent designer is a reliable source of moral law? And how to we discern that moral law of the intelligent designer? Actually, West and other proponents of intelligent design insist that, in fact, we cannot know anything about the moral character of the intelligent designer. Certainly, intelligent design theory cannot tell us whether the intelligent designer is the God of the Bible who gives a moral law. So it seems that access to the moral law of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" requires faith in certain traditions of revelation rather than reasoning from common human experience. Does this mean that moral and political order is possible only within religious communities that share the same faith tradition? Is this what Brague means by arguing for the necessity for theocracy?

I agree that religious belief is often important for morality. But this does not require that we appeal to theocratic metaphysics as the only source of moral order. We can see religious morality as emerging through the evolved moral order of human life as shaped by the moral sentiments of human nature, the moral traditions of human culture, and the moral judgments of human deliberation. Evolutionary conservatism can support such a moral order, while avoiding the confusion and fanaticism that come from the "metaphysical dreams" of theocratic conservatism.

This post is related to my post from a few weeks ago on "Religious Transcendence and Natural Evolution."

David Brooks, "The Social Animal"

In today's New York Times (September 12), David Brooks has a column on "The Social Animal". In arguing that conservatives need to recognize the natural sociality of human beings as rooted in their biological nature, Brooks manifests Darwinian conservatism. (Thanks to Andy Schott for bringing this article to my attention.)

Sarah Palin on Teaching Evolution and Creationism

The controversy over the teaching of evolution in public school science classes has been revived by Sarah Palin's addition to the Republican presidential ticket. In her campaign for Governor of Alaska, she was the only candidate who said that if Darwin's theory of evolution is taught in a science class, the students should also learn about alternative ideas from creation science and intelligent design theory. The story in the Anchorage Daily News about this can be found here.

As I have argued in Darwinian Conservatism, on this blog, and elsewhere, I agree with the idea of "teaching the controversy." If students raise questions about criticisms of Darwinian evolution coming from proponents of intelligent design proponents or creationists, why shouldn't they be permitted to study the debate and decide for themselves? My proposal is that students should actually read Darwin himself and see that Darwin recognized the "theory of creation" as the alternative to his theory. If students were to read Darwin along with contemporary statements of evolutionary science and criticisms coming from creationists and ID proponents, students could see that the weight of the evidence and arguments favors Darwinian science. For some of my thinking on this, you can go here and here.

If students were permitted to study this debate, they might see how it opens up some of the deepest questions in the human attempt to understand the natural order of the universe. For example, they might see the ultimate problem of explanation as based on an unexplained first cause. As indicated in the Alaskan newspaper report, the libertarian candidate for Governor pointed to this problem when he asked, "Who intelligently designed the intelligent designer?"