Political Morality & Natural Right

I have been writing furiously in recent days, trying to complete my chapter in the Handbook of Biology and Ethics.  I am writing on political ethics, a branch of political science dealing with the ethics of process (what political actors may do in the conduct of their offices) and the ethics of policy (what ends political actors should pursue).  One might ask why political ethics is not a branch of ethics generally, which is under the umbrella of modern philosophy. 

As an unreconstructed Platonist, I won’t settle for the easy answer (we had to put it somewhere).  I look for some key idea that links it back to politics proper rather than to modern ethics which is concerned above all with how individuals should act.  I find that idea in the distinction between public and private morality.  Almost everyone acknowledges this distinction.  Acts that would be condemned as kidnapping or murder are considered legitimate cases of imprisonment and execution if they are done with political authority. 

This distinction is very old.  Plato’s noble lie is noble because it justifies the distribution of authority in the best regime by a lie about the distribution of virtuous souls.  Aristotle acknowledges (with neither endorsement nor condemnation) that the ostracism (or murder) of certain individuals may be necessary in certain regimes, if those individuals cannot be assimilated to the social arrangement.  Machiavelli elevates the distinction to the foundation of true virtue.  The virtue of princes is the genuine article.  It is the power to create and ruthlessly employ armed power.  Such power alone can create law and order, upon which the artificial, make believe virtue of ordinary citizens and subjects depends. 

The modern distinction between public and private morality follows Machiavelli in assuming that, prior to the establishment of civil society, human beings are free to do pretty much whatever they please (and is in their power to do).  When they enter into civil society, individuals surrender that power to the sovereign.  Hobbes and Spinoza think that this necessarily means that the sovereign power is under no moral constraints.  Since there is no natural or divine morality effective over men, absolute power has to reside somewhere.  Locke argued that a basic moral sense is present even in the state of nature and that it is precisely this moral sense (expressed as righteous indignation) that necessitates the establishment of governments.  I believe that, but I am not sure that Locke believed it.  At any rate, the idea that individuals cede their natural liberty to government is the foundation of the modern idea that government can do what private individuals are morally forbidden to do. 

The modern argument, resisting on the idea that government is representative of its subjects, is plausible.  However, since the ancients also drew such a distinction without relying on the notion of representation, I think that the basic idea must be deeper than that. 

The ancient philosophers supposed that human beings are moral and political animals by nature.  The family and small bands of families (hunter-gatherers?) are societies that human beings form as much by nature as animals gather in herds.  Early modern political thought began by viewing human beings as individuals and all social interaction, beyond the most explicitly biological and temporary ones, as artificial.  Both the ancients and the moderns agree on one thing: genuinely political societies, with laws and offices, are in some sense artificial.  Political communities may allow human excellence to be fully expressed, as Plato and Aristotle thought.  Or, they may merely supply the defects of the state of nature, as Hobbes and Spinoza thought.  Either way, political regimes are the result of human artifice.  If they are not founded deliberately, they emerge from the deliberate attempt to solve ever present problems. 

Here, biopolitics and the biosocial sciences generally, have something to say.  Human beings “were not adapted for large-scale, anonymous collaboration” as Emily Wyman and Michael Tomasello say in their contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.  Such societies emerged too recently for that, over the last ten thousand years.  To have laws and offices, someone has to have the leisure to make the one and fill the other.  The first cities depended on the material surpluses made possible by settled agriculture and animal husbandry and the cultural advances underwritten by the exchange of technologies and goods across great distances.  Once such communities arose, the history of human animals gave way to human history. 

As I happen to like living in the 21^st century, I am glad that all that happened in its course.  We are much more interesting animals than once we were.  It happened, however, at a terrible cost.  For most the last 10,000 years, a few people ate high on the hog while most people got barely enough to make it through another day of labor.  At any rate, political societies made human beings far more dependent on one another for both sustenance and security and the latter because they made human beings far more dangerous to one another. 

As Rousseau ruefully acknowledged, there is no going back.  Even if we would all be better off herding sheep and gathering roots, we ain’t gonna.  I am hopeful that human progress will continue and that the future will be better than we can yet imagine.  Meanwhile, some regimes are better than others, and almost any regime is better than a collapsing regime.  If you don’t believe me, ask someone in Benghazi. 

I suspect that the distinction between public and private morality is rooted in the fact that our natural moral emotions have been shaped by natural selection for pre-political communities.  Plato’s Socrates argues in the Republic that the truly natural human community is the city of pigs, a community devoted to the satisfaction of largely natural desires: food, shelter, basic comfort and social intercourse.  Political communities offer human beings much more than this: leisure, surplus, arts and sciences, etc.  To get such communities, however, we have to build artificial institutions out of the natural moral inclinations that we have to work with.  In natural communities morality is enforced by social sanction alone.  In political communities, morality requires a sovereign power with all the distinctions in status that that implies. 

The “problem of dirty hands,” which means the occasional necessity for doing morally reprehensible things for the sake of the regime, is a consequence of the awesome power of political regimes.  Yes, they give human beings much more than nature can provide.  They also create terrible possibilities.  No hunter-gatherer community could produce a Hitler, or Stalin, or Kim.  Winston Churchill had to refrain from warning a British town that it was about to be bombed or else risk the success of the D-Day invasion by tipping off the Germans that we had deciphered their coded communications.  I think he was right to do so, but what a burden! 

According to legend, a Jewish army was once wiped out because it refused to fight on the Sabbath.  A suspension of ordinary law was required.  Human beings are moral animals.  Any decent regime must respect and incorporate natural right.  When we must do things that offend natural right, the only justification can be that it is necessary to protect a regime where such natural justice is possible.  The Jews reached the same conclusion.  Sometimes the law must be put aside if only for the survival of the community that cherishes the law. 

Natural Right & Natural Selection

Some years ago I was presenting on a panel during some conference or another and I was asked a simple question: why bother with all this Darwin stuff?  That is more or less how I remember the question, but I don’t remember it clearly enough to name the person.  Suffice it to say that he was a prominent figure among the Western Straussians.  If you don’t recognize that term, Leo Strauss was a very influential political philosopher.  In a nutshell he argued that all political regimes are grounded in cherished opinions whereas philosophy is the attempt to opinions with knowledge of the most important things.  For that reason, philosophy is always potentially destabilizing.  That is the essential meaning of the life and death of Socrates. 

The key word there is “potentially”.  The philosopher may conclude, as result of his investigations, that the cherished opinions on which our community is based are false.  Perhaps we believe that we are the best community and our ways are best because we worship the right god: Zog.  If the philosopher concludes that Zog does not exist, this obviously undermines the laws and the regime of his community. 

On the other hand, the philosopher might come to the opposite conclusion.  There is no way to tell in advance, since philosophy is the quest for wisdom and not the possession of wisdom.  It is possible, at least, that the philosopher will more or less confirm the cherished opinions of his own people. 

If I understand the Eastern Straussians correctly, they think that the cherished opinions of all political communities are false.  Since some political communities are better than others, at least from the point of view of the philosopher, the philosopher will take some care to support them.  However, philosophy is inconsistent with any genuine, as opposed to merely strategic, patriotism. 

The Western Straussians think that at least one political community cherishes opinions that are philosophically defensible.  The founding document of the American regime, the Declaration of Independence, speaks of the laws of nature and of nature’s God.  It goes on to say that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.  This language was adopted by Thomas Jefferson from the modern philosopher John Locke, but most Western Straussians follow Harry Jaffa to defend the principles of the regime in terms of the classical natural right doctrines of Plato and Aristotle.  Human beings are, by nature, self-governing creatures, both individually and collectively.  A regime is philosophically defensible if and only if it incorporates both kinds of self-government.  It must be both democratic and liberal. 

Here I lay my cards on the table.  I am a Western Straussian.  I think that Strauss’s reading of the classical and modern political was the right one.  I also think that Jaffa is right.  I can still remember the excitement I felt when I first read The Crisis of the House Divided, where Jaffa demonstrated that Lincoln was right and Stephen Douglas was wrong about slavery.  I think that Lincoln was right to argue that the people of Kansas had a right to govern themselves but that no man had a right to govern another without his consent. 

I noticed, however, that while my fellow WS’s talked incessantly about natural right, they didn’t seem to be interested much (or to know much) about nature.  Strauss himself suggested that classical natural right seemed to depend on a teleological view of the Kosmos as a whole, but that that view seems to have been refuted by modern natural science.  That much seems to be correct.  The movements in the heavens, not to mention the physical processes on the terrestrial plane, would seem to be mechanical rather than teleological, and so provide no support for human ideas of the just and the good. 

The life sciences are another story.  If the driving forces of evolutionary history are merely mechanical, they have given rise to possesses that are genuinely teleological  If the molecules of which all living cells are composed are as lifeless as grains of sand, yet the cells are busy maintaining themselves and thus succeeding or failing.  Here is a metaphysical ground for the principles of classical natural right. 

I will close with one example.  In the Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates argues that the good is self-government.  When the better part of the self governs the less better parts, then the person governs himself.  Modern biology can tell us a lot about this.  One of the basic transitions in evolutionary history occurred when the nervous system of some animals began to bifurcate.  One part of the nervous system specialized in governing process like breathing, circulation, and digestion.  Another part was dedicated to perception and the movement of the limbs.  The latter part became the seat of sentience and, at least in human beings, of reason. 

That is the evolutionary history behind the emergence of Plato’s soul.  If the metaphysics of physics and astronomy do not support classical natural right, the metaphysics of biology may well do so.  And that is the answer to the question I was asked.  That is why we should bother with this Darwin stuff. 

The Evolution of Marriage

Larry Arnhart discusses the biological roots of marriage in a recent post.  I am sorry to report that I agree with Larry on the basic issues.  I am happy to report some skepticism regarding a secondary issue. 

Larry is responding to Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert George, who argue that marriage should be restricted to a monogamous, heterosexual relationship.  He tells us that the authors make two points: one, that marriage is an institution rooted in human biology and two, that if homosexual marriage is legalized this will effectively destroy heterosexual marriage. 

Larry agrees with the first point but thinks that it is inconsistent with the second point.  If heterosexual marriage is indeed rooted in nature, then it should survive any changes in legal norms.  I am inclined to agree. 

Allow me to add some of my own reflections.  Marriage is rooted in a simple biological dimorphism: women know who their children are while men do not.  When an infant issues from her mother, the mother knows that the infant is hers.  The father must rely, let us say, on less direct evidence.  How confident can he be that he is the biological father?  This has Darwinian implications, in so far as his natural instincts move him to invest in his offspring. 

The problem is widely shared among animals and has had enormous consequences for their evolution.  Males of many species try to secure paternity by keeping other males away from their mates.  Some jealously guard their harems.  Canines have evolved a mechanism called a “copulatory lock”.  When the male enters the female, his organ expands and locks him in place.  He cannot engage until sometime after ejaculation, which makes it more likely that the female will be safely impregnated.  That is the tie that binds. 

Security for paternity encourages the male to invest his time and other resources in his offspring.  Of course there is a trade-off.  If the male is fooled, he will waste his resources on the offspring of some other male.  Likewise, he will be tempted to hedge his bets by siring offspring with other females, perhaps with false promises of support.  Such is the soap opera of mammalian biology.  If male parental investment is to be maintained against or supported by selection pressure, some means of securing paternity have to be available to the male. 

The human institution of marriage was built on these biological foundations.  Marriage offers the male some assurance of paternity in exchange for his promise of investment.  That contract is reinforced by the larger community, which recognizes his authority over his sons and daughters.  See Aristophanes Clouds.  It also puts a disproportionate weight on the fidelity of the wife. 

However, marriage is not a product of biology even if it rests on biological foundations.  It arises and is maintained because it is one of the conditions for human flourishing in social conditions.  The telos, or purpose of marriage, was not reproductive success in a Darwinian sense.  It was to promote societies that are more stable and satisfying, given our evolved inclinations.  Human institutions cannot for long act against natural selection; however, they exist to serve us and not our genes. 

Given that brief consideration of the biological foundations of marriage, what does it mean to extend the institution to include homosexual couples?  It means only that an institution that has been developed for one purpose has been employed for another.  This is a commonplace in both biological and cultural history.  In the ubiquitous beetles, a second set of wings evolved into a retractable coat of armor.  Clothing likely emerges as a remedy for discomfort in hostile climates; however, it comes to serve other purposes such as displaying wealth and status, inviting seduction, providing pockets, etc. 

While heterosexual marriage evolved to serve purposes connected with biological reproduction and familial stability, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot serve other purposes.  Some have argued that same sex marriage can promote monogamy among male homosexuals, which might well be a good thing.  Whether it can really do that remains to be seen.  I have my doubts.  

I am in favor of legal same sex marriage for a rather simple reason.  When two persons of the same sex form a stable relationship, analogous to heterosexual marriage, the two partners should enjoy the same privileges as a heterosexual couple who have chosen to marry.  When one goes to the hospital, the other should have the same medical access that I and my wife have.  This strikes me as the decent thing to do. 

I see no reason to suppose that this undermines the functions of heterosexual marriage any more than wearing cloths to make a fashion statement undermines the purpose of good winter gear in these Dakotas. 

That said, I am not at all certain that I agree with Larry Arnhart regarding the privatization of marriage.  Such a step would certainly render moot the political arguments over marriage, just as the privatization of religion dramatically reduced the tendencies toward armed conflicts between sects.  However, this step clearly weakened religion as a force in secularized societies.  As I noted above, marriage is an artificial institution and it can be stronger or weaker in its effects, depending on how it is managed. 

I think that marriage is one of the most important institutions in human history.  We want to encourage it and strengthen it, in so far as we can.  I suspect that privatizing it would weaken it by placing in the category of things that are not serious enough to have legal consequences.  Because I agree with Larry that marriage has deep foundations in human biology, I don’t expect that this would kill marriage.  I do think that it might weaken it further.  If I am right, that would be a step in the wrong direction.