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. 

Nagel on Haidt 2: The Taste for Justice

A second issue raised in Nagel’s review of Haidt (see previous post) is involves the familiar tension between explaining the evolutionary origins of the moral mind and taking morality seriously. 

[Haidt] urges liberals to respect the varying parochial moralities and religions that they are accustomed to deride as backward or intolerant, and to acknowledge their genuine moral character. However, Haidt insists that he is not a relativist. He has moral views of his own, and presumably this means that he believes that they are true, or at least more likely to be true than the alternatives. But what does it mean, in the light of Haidt’s evolutionary perspective, to believe such a thing, and what grounds might he have for believing it?

What he says is that his descriptive theory of the six types of moral response and their group-preserving function works well “as an adjunct” to normative theories, “particularly those that have often had difficulty seeing groups and social facts.” He himself favors what he calls a “Durkheimian utilitarianism…

However,

Haidt’s Durkheimian utilitarianism reduces the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity to a purely instrumental role. Religion, patriotism, and sexual taboos, for example, have no validity or value in themselves, according to this view; they are merely useful in creating bonds that allow collective achievement of the greatest total good, which utilitarians identify with the satisfaction of individual interests. But can such values and practices as loyalty and authority serve this function if they are seen as purely instrumental? Can they even exist?

In practice, Nagel’s objection to “purely instrumental” interpretations of sanctions doesn’t amount to much.  The familiar practice of having a witness or an incoming officer swear an oath on a Bible (or a Koran) has an obviously instrumental role.  One hopes that the person taking the oath will be motivated by a fear of the invisible powers invested in the object and so will keep the oath.  A believing Muslim or Christian can understand the strategy and can recognize that it depends on mere belief and so would work even if the invisible powers are fictitious.  Does that make it more difficult, let alone impossible, for them to persevere in their beliefs?  No. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that Allah isn’t out to get you. 

“What does it mean, in the light of Haidt’s evolutionary perspective, to believe” that one’s moral views are true?  Whatever it means, it surely matters to the believer.  Moral consciousness involves a craving.  We want to believe that what is right is really right, in some fundamental sense.  What would satisfy that craving?

This question is evident in the second book of Plato’s Republic.  Glaucon challenges Socrates by presenting a merely instrumental account of justice, one which he ascribes to most people.  The ideal situation would be like this: I could do injustice to anyone as I please but no one could be unjust to me.  The worst situation would be if others could be unjust to me but I had to be just to them.  Law abiding citizens value justice only as an acceptable mean between the two situations.  They realize that in a dog eat dog world, they won’t be the top dog.  Adiemantus argues that people do not value justice but only the reputation for justice.  Both want Socrates to show them that justice is something more than that.  Their moral sense involves a deep craving for satisfaction that is not afforded by these instrumental accounts of justice. 

Socrates responds with a very lengthy defense of justice.  To be very brief, he argues that the soul is more important than the body and that justice is an essential ingredient in the healthy soul.  The soul is tripartite.  When the intelligence rules the passions and the passions rule the appetites, the soul is well ordered.  The man with the well-ordered soul lives the best possible life.  No fruit of injustice would be worth more than the justice upon which his psychological integrity depends. 

I happen to think that Socrates’ account of justice is correct.  However, the question is why does it satisfy the craving of his spirited interlocutors?  The answer is that the just man is triumphant.  Regardless of who wins the election or rakes in the cash, it is the just man who wins the contest.  Socrates is the hero of his own story because he cannot be defeated, not even if he is put on trial and executed.  It is that that satisfies the craving of his young interlocutors to see justice vindicated.  They want to see the just man win first prize and not merely second place.  Socrates gratifies their instinctual civic piety. 

Perhaps that is the standard that any account of justice must meet if indeed it is to satisfy the longing that Nagel articulates above.  Justice must be victorious or, at the very least, it must be more deserving of victory than injustice in a heroic sense.  It must be both beautiful and good. Contrary to what Nagel seems to think, an evolutionary account of the origins of morality points in that direction. 

Nagel on Haidt 1: Group Selection

Thomas Nagel reviews Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (along with Dignity: Its History and Meaning by Michael Rosen) in The New York Review of Books.  Here is Nagel’s summary of Haidt’s theory:

Haidt’s empirical theory, which he calls “moral foundations theory,” is an example of evolutionary psychology. It is the hypothesis that a set of innate “modules” of moral response were fixed in humans by natural selection, and that these responses, further shaped by cultural evolution in various more specific forms and combinations, underlie the widely divergent moralities that we observe not only across the globe but within pluralistic cultures like that of the United States…

Haidt distinguishes six basic types of moral response, which he likens to distinct taste receptors, so that different moralities are like different cuisines in the use they make of these responses. Each type manifests itself through intuitive emotional reactions, positive and negative, to a specific value or its violation, so he gives them double-barreled names: care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Haidt believes that all these responses developed in their basic innate form because they suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperation possible among people who are not close relatives.

I am cutting and pasting here to isolate the following topic. 

Specifically, Haidt argues that group selection—selection for genetic traits whose presence benefited social groups of early humans in competition with other groups, rather than individual selection for traits that enhanced the reproductive success of individuals in competition with other individuals—is responsible for the main moral dispositions. The existence of group selection is a highly contentious issue in evolutionary biology. Haidt defends it in this case on the ground that moral norms can include cheap enforcement mechanisms, such as forms of group pressure, that cancel the genetic advantage for any individual of trying to benefit from the group’s success while not following the norms—free riding, in other words.

Individual natural selection can explain psychological traits that benefit the individual and his close kin; but group selection, he argues, is needed to explain those traits that benefit individuals only by sustaining norms that preserve the cohesion of the group.

As Nagel observes, group selection is a very controversial issue in Darwinian Theory.  As the argument is frequently put, any altruistic trait that benefitted the growth of a group as a whole without conferring a reproductive benefit on the individual altruist against other members of the group would quickly go out of business.  As the group grows relative to other groups, the portion of altruists would shrink and disappear.  Thus group selection cannot work. 

One way to make group selection work would be for groups to continually break up and reform.  If the group-benefit trait works to increase the size of the group faster than individual selection within the group works against the altruists and groups break up and reassemble faster than the latter can complete its work, altruists might be sustained in the general population. 

Another way to make group selection work would be for the altruists to have a way of purging non-altruists from the group.  Haidt argues that group selection is necessary to explain the evolution of moral instincts.  I would point out that the obverse is equally true.  Moral instincts are necessary to make group selection possible. 

Whether group selection is a common feature of creatures other than human beings is to be sure difficult to demonstrate.  That natural selection favors human beings who can cooperate with one another much more effectively than other social animals because the moral instincts allow such persons to trust one another seems very likely.  The moral instincts are clearly not limited either to direct self-interest or to a preference for genetic relatives.  Young children will readily cooperate with individuals who they have just met, coming to their aid or engaging them in games.  Once cooperation has begun, the child will expect the partner to keep playing the game. 

I think Haidt is right to believe that group selection is necessary for the moral instincts to evolve.  I think also that something like moral instincts are necessary for group selection to work among social animals.