The Animal At Odds With Itself

Aristotle wrote two fundamental books about the human being: the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics.  I have long thought the two works are based on contrary assumptions.  The one proceeds on the assumption that the human thing is the action of an individual person.  The other proceeds on the assumption that the human thing is the action of a regime or a political community.  So which is it?  Is the human thing the individual or the group?

I think that the answer to that question emerges precisely from the fact that Aristotle found it necessary to take the two points of departure.  The human thing is the dynamic relationship between the moral person and the moral/political community.  It is in that dynamic relationship that one sees most clearly what the human being really is. 

The current issue of The New Atlantis has four pieces on “the evolution of human nature”.  I just finished two of them: “The Evolutionary Ethics of E. O. Wilson” by Whitley Kaufman and “Moderately Socially Conservative Darwinians” by Peter Augustine Lawler.  Both are well worth reading and both confirm at least this much of my view of the human thing: to say what we are is to describe a tension or even a conflict between two distinct modes of being. 

Kaufman takes issue with E. O. Wilson’s argument that

our best chance at understanding and advancing morality will come when we “explain the origin of religion and morality as special events in the evolutionary history of humanity driven by natural selection.

Kaufman presents the weakness of Wilson’s biophilia.  This is the idea that we should love the earth and all the beings who live on it.  I think that this is not a bad idea at all.  Gratitude might be the better part of piety.  I agree, however, that Wilson has not done the hard work necessary to turn biophilia into a coherent ethical position. 

The problem is that Wilson seeks to bring about a revolution in ethics without doing ethics — that is, without making any prescriptions, only predictions. He has painted himself into a corner: biophilia in his theory can only be a personal preference, not an objective value.

What interests me here is the tension that Kaufman identifies in Wilson’s work.  On the one hand, Wilson

celebrates the infinite capacities of man to increase knowledge, breathlessly predicting that “humanity will be positioned godlike to take control of its own ultimate fate.” In On Human Nature, he holds that our biological tendency for aggression and war will be “brought increasingly under the control of rational thought.”

That makes it sound like we are more or less in control of ourselves and capable of taking some measure of control over human nature and nature in general.  On the other hand

Wilson’s reductionist commitments lead him to insist that free will is only an illusion. Though “some philosophers still argue [it] sets us apart” — and one would have to include Wilson among these philosophers! —nonetheless free will is no more than a “product of the subconscious decision-making center of the brain that gives the cerebral cortex the illusion of independent action.” So Wilson is at once a moralist… and a moral determinist, holding that moral decisions are causal and impulse-driven rather than rational and free. He cannot resist trying to have it both ways: we are free and determined; rational and instinctual; autonomous and mechanistic…

Not surprisingly, Wilson is unable to reconcile these contradictory conceptions of free will and human nature, the humanistic and the scientific. But it is, in a way, a tribute to his breadth of mind that he recognizes and embraces both of them, in contrast to the prevailing trend in evolutionary ethics towards simple moral determinism and nihilism.

That seems to me to be right.  The human being is at once a physical being, composed of organs, cells, and molecules that obey physical laws, and a moral being capable of freedom.  No one has yet escaped from the problem that presents. 

Peter Lawler focuses on a tension that is closer to the one I pointed out in Aristotle.  On the one hand there is the position that seems to originate with Descartes. 

Sophisticated Americans these days think of themselves, or at least talk about themselves, as autonomous beings — free from old-fashioned social restraints, and free even from the limitations of nature. Men and women both feel free to define who they are for themselves, without being saddled by the imperatives of their biology, their bodies.

That is the position of radical individual autonomy, divorced from nature in general and biology in particular. 

Lawler presents a sympathetic account of the Darwinian alternative, as argued by Larry Arnhart, Jonathan Haidt, and E. O. Wilson.  Human beings are animals.  We are conditioned by our biological nature to be selfish but also to seek to belong to larger groups. 

Darwinians think of our cultural evolution as an extension of our natural evolution, and they see both as having an equally social and biological foundation.

Wilson sees members of our species as much more like bees and ants — the insects that he studied during his distinguished career as an entomologist — than even our fellow primates. These insects achieve their unrivaled social cooperation, which includes a complex division of labor and shared responsibility for taking care of the young, through robotically perfect obedience to social instinct; these instinctual traits define what Wilson and other entomologists have termed “eusociality.” We human beings much more consciously employ our intellects in the service of social instinct to reach our own heights of cooperation. The social intelligence of human beings — the self-aware animals with complex speech — leads to a tension between the selfish desires created by individual-level selection and the social impulses created by group-level selection, a tension that hardly exists for the instinctively self-sacrificial eusocial insects.

Lawler is wrong to say that the tension between individual interest and collective interest “hardly exists” for the eusocial insects.  In fact it is pervasive and must be managed in a variety of ways.  Honey bee workers can lay their own eggs and will tend them, unless the queen polices the system by eating them. 

The Darwinians, I am surely among them, think that human beings are by nature political animals, as did Aristotle. 

It is true that we are selfish and struggling by nature. But, as [Haidt] argues in The Happiness Hypothesis, we are also “hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger.” The only thing that gives us a sense of purpose worth dying for — that saves us from what would otherwise be our lonely and self-destructive personal obsessions — is the group, or our relations with members of the group. We cannot live well without knowing that there is something that makes self-sacrifice significant. We are unable to achieve what the bees and ants have — complete instinctual self-surrender. But our happiness is still fundamentally about having the “right relationships.”

Again, this seems to me to be right.  The individual human being presents itself as both autonomous and part of a larger whole.  We are selfish and selflessly committed to others.  We are persistently at odds with ourselves and that is what we are. 

I highly recommend Lawler’s essay.  He believes, I think, that human beings are more than animals.  He takes the possibility of the immortality of the human soul more seriously that I do or than Aristotle did.  I would only add that human beings are at least animals.  Our animal nature contains the fundamental tension that drives so much of moral and political philosophy. 

Genuine Morality & the Teleologists

I have spent some time now with Steven Forde’s conference paper “Darwin and Political Theory”.  As I said in an earlier post, this is a very good survey of Darwinian scholarship in moral research and political theory.  Forbes has done a good job of covering the relevant work with honest care and sympathy.  I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a quick idea of what Darwinists have to say about morality. 

It seems to me that there are two key ideas in the paper that lead logically to a very dismal conclusion.  One is that Darwinism is nihilism.  Evolutionary thought cannot support any genuine morality.  The other is that Darwinism is true.  Taken together, this means that genuine morality is, shall we say, history.  I gather that Forde is not happy with this conclusion and I am pretty sure that very few people will be. 

I will confine my comments to the last section of his paper, which addresses those he calls the teleologists. 

A completely different approach to the problem of reconstructing moral theory within the confines of Darwinism is found in thinkers we may dub the teleologists. This strain of thought is far from new; virtually from the moment Darwin’s theories became public, attempts were made to combine it with some form of teleology, to rescue Darwinism from its apparently amoral and nihilistic implications by finding some grand design or higher purpose at work in natural selection. In the late nineteenth century, this burgeoned into a veritable cottage industry.73 The approach has been revived in recent times, in different ways, by Hans Jonas, Leon Kass and Larry Arnhart.

That certainly includes yours truly as Jonas and Arnhart, and to a lesser degree Kass, have been my teachers on these matters. 

Forde makes two general arguments against the teleological (Aristotelian) approach toward a Darwinian account of morality.  The first is indicated in the passage above.  This strain of thought finds “some grand design or higher purpose at work in natural selection.”  In other words, evolution is goal directed, driving toward better and higher forms of being.  Forde thinks this is implausible and he is right.  The second argument is that the teleologists suppose that a coherent moral order is possible given the nature of human beings as it has emerged in the history of our species.  Forde thinks that Darwinism tells against this and he is wrong. 

To begin with the first argument, it is true that we teleologists recognize a distinction between higher and lower forms of life.  Hans Jonas is the best guide here.  He recognized that living organisms are fundamentally distinct from inorganic matter and he supposed that this told us something important about the Kosmos: it had within it, from the very beginning, the potential for producing life and consciousness.  He did not, however, argue that there was some progressive force in evolution driving toward the emergence of human souls.  It is rather something like this: just as the sun presents the nature of hydrogen in the context of solar history, so living organisms present the potential for life in the context of earthly history.  The evolution of life continues to present new and increasingly complex possibilities for organic and spiritual development.  I don’t think that his commits the teleologists to any progressive few of evolution.  Natural selection selects only for reproductive success.  That process has resulted both in viruses and virtuous heroes without favoring the one or the other. 

In order to explain the genuinely moral, we teleologists make a distinction between the natural forces that generate life and govern its evolution and the natural ends that various creatures and especially human beings pursue.  This is Aristotle’s distinction between reason the political community comes to be (mere life) and the reason its existence is justified (the good life). 

Allow me to employ an analogy.  How does the art of cooking come to be?  Human beings need to eat and they eventual discover in their environments which foods will nourish them.  Cooking makes it possible to digest many foods more efficiently, which may have been a driving force in human evolution.  If that is how the art of cooking comes to be, what makes it beautiful is that it was also guided by the desire to live well.  A good French meal (or Indian, Mexican, Chinese, etc.) aims not at what is merely nutritious but at what is exquisitely gratifying.  In doing so, it does not act against nature.  Nature has fashioned us to enjoy fat, spices, and protein.  A great cuisine fashions its table from the natural pallet, with an eye to satisfying natural appetites.  The grand meal is not a product of evolution.  There was no driving force in our evolutionary history that aimed at the Gumbo Ya Ya that you can get at Mr. B’s in New Orleans.  That perfect stew is the result of human chefs aiming to satisfy natural appetites. 

Likewise, politics and ethics are not products of natural selection.  They are the products of human beings creatively working to create a satisfying life.  Morality cannot work against natural selection, as Forde often says.  That would put us out of business in short order.  It aims to sustain the best human life. 

As for Forde’s argument that no coherent moral order is possible, given the chaotic mix of desires and inclinations that natural selection has bequeathed to us, that flies in the face of the most obvious facts.  If it were true, then no political communities would ever have arisen nor would any moral principles ever have been discovered or asserted.  That politics, religion, and moral codes exist is proof that moral coherence is good enough for government work.  The point of political theory and ethics is to figure out which kinds of regime and which kinds of moral orders best support human flourishing. 

I do not share Stephen Forde’s pessimism.  The Darwinian account of life’s history is doubtless true.  This cannot result in nihilism if it recognizes the value of genuine morality as human beings have always recognized it.  That it does. 

Arnhart & Forbes on Disappointed Platonism

Larry Arnhart engages Steven Forbes on the questions of “Darwinism vs. (Disappointed) Platonism” on his blog.  The two presented papers on a panel at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago.  I plan to explore this topic more fully after I have digested the two papers, but I have a few comments to offer now. 

Here are two paragraphs of Larry’s blog post:

Most Platonists today are disappointed Platonists--people with Platonic expectations that are unfulfilled, because they accept Darwinian evolution as true, and therefore since all living forms have evolved, they cannot be eternal as conforming to Plato's intelligible realm of eternal Ideas.  Moreover, if everything has evolved, this must include moral and political order, and thus there is no eternally unchanging Idea of the Good by which we can see absolute standards of right and wrong.  Consequently, there are no moral absolutes, and we must accept moral relativism or nihilism.  Darwinism is "true but deadly" (as Nietzsche said).  And thus these disappointed Platonists become nihilists.

But if you do not have Platonic expectations, you will not be disappointed by the Darwinian conclusion that everything has evolved, and therefore human beings have evolved.  Without the Platonic assumption that morality must be grounded in a moral cosmology, you will be satisfied with a Darwinian explanation of morality as grounded in a moral anthropology.  Even if morality has no eternal grounding in a cosmic God, a cosmic Nature, or a cosmic Reason, human morality can still have an evolutionary grounding in human nature, human culture, and human judgment.  And thus in contrast to the disappointed Platonists, the satisfied Darwinians are not nihilists.

I weigh in as a satisfied Platonist.  Plato’s Socrates advanced a very bold interpretation of the world as it appears to common sense.  To mention only two general ideas, we can know a tree is because, just as there is one tree behind the various images of any tree that we encounter (an oak looks small at a distance but big up close), so there must be an idea tree behind all the various trees that we encounter.  Likewise, we can know the general rules of geometry without having been taught them because we were born knowing them.  Socrates advances these arguments as tentative, however.  He only claims that it is something like this. 

I hold that modern science presents us with a Kosmos that is intelligible because it is ordered by a number of eternal ideas.  What is the periodic table of elements if not statement of basic Platonic forms?  Plato’s Socrates was right, I suggest, in holding that we are born knowing the basic principles of geometry.  Darwinism confirms this, if it presents a rather different interpretation of reincarnation that is suggested in Plato’s Meno. 

It may be true that the laws of cosmology writ large do not include moral principles.  Perhaps the sun doesn’t warm the earth because it is good that it does so.  However, moral principles may well arise from laws governing organic nature generally and human nature specifically.  Human beings are part of the cosmos and so human nature is part of a complete account of cosmology.  If it turns out that the idea of the good plays a much more restricted role in cosmology than Plato’s Socrates supposed, that does not mean that it plays no role. 

Arnhart has this on his blog post:

Socrates teaches us that to know what is truly good, we must transcend the visible realm of Becoming in ascending to the invisible realm of Being, and finally ascending to the Idea of the Good.  But it's not clear that this answer is fully convincing or satisfying.  Socrates concludes the Republic with the myth of Er--a mythic story about eternal rewards and punishment in the afterlife.  The problem with this myth is that it's only a myth, and so it's not clear why we should believe it.  But the earlier answer--the Idea of the Good--is so incomprehensible that it's not clear why we should believe it either.

I agree that the myth of Er is just a myth‑a noble lie suggested for folks who are not philosophically inclined.  I do not agree that the Platonic idea of the good is incomprehensible.   

Socrates became Socrates (as opposed to one more philosophical conventionalist) when he realized that the cosmos can be comprehensible if and only if the principles that characterize it are, at least roughly, commensurate with the principles of our own common sense understanding of things.  That is why Socrates returned to the city and (initially at least) abandoned direct investigations into natural phenomena.  The keys to understanding nature lie in the opinions and especially in the contradictions between the opinions of ordinary people. 

The idea of the good is central to ordinary human understanding of such things as justice, beauty, and truth.  Socrates supposed that the good has to be part of our understanding of the larger cosmos or else that cosmos is beyond our understanding altogether.  That looks like a mistake, although it is too soon to rule it out.  Some of the scholarship on the origin of life has dealt with the immense improbability of that emergence by chance alone by supposing some kind of “unintentional forcing” operating in the physics of the earth just before life emerged.  If that turns out to be a viable hypothesis, Plato’s idea of the good may have a new cosmological purchase. 

There are two ways in which morality may be said to have natural foundations.  One is that human beings are by nature moral creatures, endowed by their evolutionary origins with a pallet of moral passions.  Forde apparently acknowledges that this is true, but somehow supposes that this but somehow seems to think that it cannot be the basis of genuine morality.  Is it because we get no moral credit for our instincts but only for free choices we make?  The second way in which morality can be natural is that moral behavior makes for the natural human good.  Human beings who choose to do what is right live better lives and help their family and fellows to live better lives.  There is plenty of room for choice here and every reason to suppose that Darwinian biology allows for it.  The idea of the good is necessarily part of any account of human morality.  

This Platonist is not yet disappointed.