Good News about Evolution and Classical Political Philosophy

I was a student of the late Harry V. Jaffa.  One of the seminal moments in my intellectual career took place over two days, when I read Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided.  Anyone who has read that amazing book will sympathize with my experience.  When I went to bed on the first night, I was convinced that Stephen Douglas was right in his argument with Lincoln.  When I finished the second half of the book the next day, I was persuaded that Lincoln was right: slavery is by nature always and everywhere unjust.  I have never revised that opinion, and I have been a natural right thinker ever since. 

Another seminal moment came many years later when I was reading a primer on evolutionary psychology.  It had occurred to me that, if we want to talk about natural right, we might want to know something about nature.  Sitting on my deck one grey afternoon, I realized that Darwinian evolution was not opposed to Aristotle and to the classical natural right that Jaffa championed.  On the contrary, evolutionary theory can provide powerful support for the thought of Aristotle.  I later concluded that the same was true for Plato. 

Most of those who take the writings of the classical philosophers seriously, not as mere historical artifacts but as guides to the truth about morality and politics, see evolutionary thought as utterly opposed to classical thought.  A good example of this is the first two paragraphs of a 2013 conference paper written by Steven Forde. 

As a political theorist by training, I avoided tackling the problem of Darwin for many years. I suspected that the theory of evolution would call into question the very enterprise of political theory, as traditionally understood. My fears have largely been borne out, as the following indicates. Yet it is impossible in this day and age to deny that evolution is the truth—that human beings, like all existing life forms, evolved out of prior, typically simpler life forms. Our organs, including our brains, are all descendants of organs found in earlier primates. Certain key intellectual capacities, such as the capacity for language, are “hard wired” into our neural makeup. Certain emotional responses appear to be so as well, including some closely tied to our sense of morality. These include such natural responses as empathy and indignation, emotions that have analogues in other primates today, and presumably in our evolutionary ancestors.

These facts, along with findings of neuropsychology concerning gratification received from cooperative and other putatively moral behavior, suggests that morality is hard wired into us. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that it seems we are destined to remain a moral, cooperative species regardless of intellectual or cultural trends. The bad news is that this morality has no grounding of the sort that ordinary human beings believe it does, and that traditional political philosophy sought. It is simply an artifact of our evolutionary heritage. This is the conclusion I dreaded all the years I avoided this topic of study.

This is an example of what I would call a pious dread.  It reminds one of the famous quote from the wife of the Bishop of Worcester who, when informed of Darwin’s theory, supposedly said:

My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.

The most significant passage in that quote is this one:

Morality has no grounding of the sort that ordinary human beings believe it does, and that traditional political philosophy sought. It is simply an artifact of our evolutionary heritage.

My question, which I do not think was addressed in Forde’s piece, is what kind of grounding do ordinary human beings think morality has?  What kind of grounding does traditional political philosophy seek?  Human beings, ordinary or otherwise, are moral animals.  We are endowed with moral emotions, including guilt, righteous indignation, and admiration.  Perhaps what we seek is an account of moral right that satisfies those emotions.  What sort of account might that be?

The most satisfying account is this: justice is what God demands and human beings must choose, or else.  Divine law provides powerful support for moral emotions; however, as such, it doesn’t provide much that the philosophically inclined can work with.  What does provide that material is the fact that a lot of moral rules seem to be socially functional.  Prohibitions against murder, theft, adultery, and incest, are all defensible by rational argument. 

The strongest defense of justice without direct appeal to divine law is found in Plato’s Republic.  In the first book Thrasymachus argues that justice is no more than a confidence game played by the strong in any political community in order to persuade the weak to accept their lot.  The weakness in that argument is that it can’t explain why the con job works.  If all of us want the same things, power, prosperity, revenge, why are moral admonitions useful to the strong? 

Socrates argues that even a gang of thieves must observe some rules of justice among themselves if they are to effectively exploit others.  In the second book, Glaucon and Adiemantus challenge that answer.  Glaucon presents a view of justice that he himself finds repulsive.  Most people would like to exploit everyone else but know that they are not powerful enough to do so.  Principles of justice are then a mere compromise: we agree not to exploit others so that others will not exploit us.  Adiemantus argues that people do genuinely value justice, but what they care about is not the thing itself but the reputation for it.  A man who appears just will attract good friends and arrange good marriages for his offspring. 

Why are the two brothers unsatisfied with their respective accounts of justice?  While these accounts provide objective grounds from justice, they are vulgar rather than noble or, what is the same thing, beautiful.  Apparently, only a beautiful account of justice will be genuinely satisfying. 

In the body of the Republic, Socrates presents an account of justice as an element in a well ordered soul.  In such a soul, intelligence rules the passions and the passions rule the appetites.  An ideal regime would reflect that order, with the philosopher (Socrates or someone like him) ruling, the exquisitely trained military class obeying his commands, and the producer class minding its own business by producing. 

This account provides a beautiful and coherent solution to the problem.  If an individual behaves unjustly, he feeds the worst part of himself and that means that he cannot have the kind of soul that makes for the best possible life.  The same is true of political communities.  Thucydides supplements this account.  Cities that behave unjustly toward other cities encouraged injustice among their own citizens, thus undermining the cooperation upon which their strength depends.  What is most beautiful is the human being who lives the most admirable life and the city that governs itself and its foreign policy in a way that makes for the most admirable civil life.  If justice contributes to that, then justice is indeed beautiful. 

Socrates takes the moral emotions of his interlocutors for granted.  He does not try to explain how we became such creatures for whom a beautifully ordered soul and a beautifully ordered regime might be possible.  He does suggest that the most natural political community is one that provides for the minimal physical needs of human animals with the least effort.  For justice to be genuinely beautiful, it has to provide for a life that includes more than that: noble deeds and, last but not least, the leisure for some to pursue philosophy. 

Evolutionary theory explains how we became the kind of animal that Socrates examines.  Our moral emotions were shaped by eons of natural selection.  They made it possible for us to cooperate on a level far beyond that of other animals.  At some point, they made it possible for us to satisfy our basic biological needs and then seek satisfactions beyond those needs.  The rise of civilization made it possible for some people (and eventually most people) to stop worrying about the next meal and look instead for something interesting to do. 

The best human lives are ones that are not merely physically and emotionally satisfying.  They are interesting.  What interests us is rooted in our evolutionary heritage but necessarily goes beyond that heritage.  We inherit preferences for color, symmetrical lines and objects, and landscapes including mountains and water.  That doesn’t mean we have genes for liking a J. M. W. Turner painting.  An appreciation for great art depends on evolved dispositions; however, it explores new existential space that cannot be reduced to those dispositions.  We inherit preferences for fat, sugar, texture, and color in foods.  That doesn’t mean that we have genes for liking a four star Michelin meal.  We inherit preferences for certain kinds of sounds and harmonies.  A William Parker jazz composition builds on those evolved dispositions to produce something that will not advance the interests of my genes but is simply beautiful. 

A house is an artificial product.  Houses do not grow as trees do.  It is nonetheless natural in so far as it satisfies natural inclinations for a safe, warm, and dry shelter.  Political communities are artificial.  As Aristotle recognized, we have to build them more or less deliberately.  They come to be, he said, for the sake of mere life.  That is Darwinian thinking.  Political communities emerged in a long history of human beings trying to survive in as comfortable a way as possible.  They exist, Aristotle said, for the sake of the good life.  Once a political community has achieved self-sufficiency, its citizens can turn to explore the benefits of existential freedom. 

This is the ground for morality that Forbes craves.  Cooperation based on reciprocity is central to every code of moral behavior.  It not only allows individual human beings to form communities that secure the most basic needs; it also allows for the production of surpluses that allow us to live beautiful lives.  His pious fear is unfounded.  

Facts and Values

I was educated in a hotbed of Western Straussians led by the hero of that school, Harry Jaffa.  No idea so roused our temper as the infamous “fact-value dichotomy.”  This is the idea that statements of fact (e.g., electricity can kill people) are fundamentally different from statements of value (e.g., it was wrong to electrocute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg).  The former are either true or false and one can attempt to tell which is which by means of argument and evidence.  The latter can be judged as true or false only in so far as they are logically consistent with other value judgments (e.g., it is wrong to kill as a punishment for a crime).  All such logical analysis, however, can only link one value judgment to another and must ultimately come to rest in some basic value (human life is sacred, etc.).  Such basic values can be held but they cannot be argued for nor is there any evidence that would tell for or against them.  The fact-value dichotomy seems to reduce moral judgements to irrational beliefs.  To believe in genuine justice is like believing in fairies. 

For Strauss, and especially for the Western Straussians, this amounted to offense against all moral and political philosophy.  Why think carefully about what justice is or what a just political order would be, as Plato and Aristotle did, if justice is just some idea that can never amount to anything more than an idea one is fond of without reason?  On the contrary, we argued, Socrates in Plato’s Republic and Gorgias offers profound arguments in favor of a coherent account of justice and his account is solidly based in evidence and logic.  Moreover, Socrates derives his logical proofs precisely from the testimony of those who argue against the existence or at least the worth of justice. 

The fact-value dichotomy is usually traced back to David Hume’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy.  One cannot derive an ought-statement, which describes what one should or should not do, from an is-statement, which describes some set of facts.  For example, one cannot derive the claim “Athens shouldn’t have made Socrates drink hemlock” from the claim that “hemlock is poisonous.”  One can only derive the former from some other ought-statement such as: “you shouldn’t execute good men who will later be both famous and popular”. 

For a long time I thought that Hume’s distinction was silly.  I thought one could easily derive the claim that “one ought not to stick one’s tongue in a light socket” from the claim that “the socket is turned on”.  I now regard that thought as naïve and apologize to Mr. Hume. 

This occurred to me as I have been teaching logic and yesterday began a section on moral logic.  I have also been (belatedly) revising my chapter for The Handbook of Biology and Politics.  Both of these activities directed my attention to this question.  Modern logic generally accepts the naturalistic fallacy as a fallacy and hence presents coherent moral arguments as resting on two sorts of claim.  At least one premise of the argument must state some set of facts and another premise must state some value judgement.  For example:

1. Current carbon emissions are causing global warming and global warming will have dangerous consequences for human beings and other creatures. 
2. One ought not to do things that are dangerous to human beings and other creatures. 
3. Therefore: we ought to reduce our carbon emissions. 

I think that the distinction between these two types of statements is logically correct, but I would point out two things that are frequently overlooked in discussion of facts and values.  

The first is that the category of values includes not only moral judgments but all judgments involving such concepts as right and wrong, better or worse, etc.  Thus “I shouldn’t eat what is unhealthy” is as much a value judgment as “I shouldn’t steal candy from a baby.”  What I and my Straussian friends and teachers objected to was the claim that moral judgments were in effect irrational.  Including value judgments about self-interest tells against that claim.  There is nothing irrational about ought-statements when they apply to matters of health.  For the same reason, there is nothing necessarily irrational about such statements when they apply to matters of right and wrong. 

My second point is more important.  The real distinction here is not between facts and values but facts about the living and the dead.  Recently I watched a NOVA feature on North America.  In the second segment we were presented with a line drawn along a hill side in the North Dakota Badlands, which I know well.  The line represented evidence of an asteroid strike.  Below the line (earlier in time) one finds dinosaur bones.  Above the line one finds fossils, but no dinosaurs.  Conclusion: the asteroid strike killed off the dinosaurs.  This kind of analysis is all facts and no values.  The reason for that is that, whatever killed the off, the dinosaurs are just plain dead.  Fossils are not more involved in values that volcanic rock. 

By contrast, living animals, including human beings, always have something at stake.  They are subject to flourishing and withering, surviving and perishing.  That includes all of them, from the giant popular tree I walked around in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, down to the littlest bacterium.  Some organisms are also subject to pain and pleasure.  That includes all (or perhaps almost all) of the animals.  One species is capable of happiness, defined as a self-conscious appreciation of a satisfying life.  Value judgments, far from being products of human culture, or “social construction”, or irrational emotive artifacts, are simple features of organic life.  Every time a slime mold amoeba decides to congregate with its fellows or a snow leopard turns down a trail to follow a scent, a value judgment is made.  Since such efforts can succeed for fail, value judgments can be objectively true or false. 

Aristotle that to understand simple things one must recognize a number of irreducible dimensions.  To understand how a table can be both wide and narrow, taller than a chair but shorter than the kitchen wall, one must recognize that width cannot be reduced to length nor to height.  The world exists in a three dimensional space.  To understand organic life, one must recognize the dimension of value.  Unlike rocks, house plants, horses, and human beings can succeed or fail.  The latter two have good days and bad. 

Moral arguments require value judgments as premises for the same reason that arguments about individual and collective interests do.  If you can’t reduce an is to an ought, that is because human beings are not rocks.  It is nonetheless true that slavery requires telling lies about the slaves and the masters and that tyranny is bad for human beings in general.  Moral and political philosophy is viable because it recognizes facts about human nature.