Lockean Monkeys

Locke was closer to the truth than Hobbes.  That is not a surprising sentiment coming from an American; even less so coming from an American patriot.  The United States is a Lockean regime.  It was founded on principles derived explicitly from Locke’s political thought and more or less explicitly on a rejection of Hobbes’ account of politics.  I would argue, however, that modern biopolitical research is backing up John more than Thomas. 

Both Hobbes and Locke began with the early modern assumption that human beings are by nature individual animals and that human society is largely an historical artifact.  All our instincts, in so far as we have any, are those of a creature as naturally asocial as a bear.  Human social life is as artificial as umbrella: it is something we cobbled together to meet our needs.  This is a mistake.  We were social long before we were genuinely human. 

Hobbes supposed that we were and remain perfectly amoral and selfish in our motivations.  What makes us dangerous to one another, when we come together in social groups, is precisely that selfishness combined with a distrust of one another.  Government is necessary to force us to suppress these selfish mutually hostile inclinations and cooperate with one another.

Locke recognized that we also possessed a sense of justice.  When someone transgresses on my rights I am offended.  I am offended even when I observe some transgressing against a third party in a case where my own interests are not involved.  It is this sense of righteous indignation that makes us most dangerous to one another.  We may pursue retribution beyond any selfish interest and, if the perceived offender believes he is the one who has been wronged, we become locked in a cycle of retribution.  That is what necessitates the formation of governments.  Only by turning over such disputes to an arbitrator can we resolve them without perpetual war. 

This question, whether pure selfishness is the motivation or whether there is a moral or proto-moral motivation has been playing out in primate studies.  I have been digesting a lot of research on capuchin monkeys.  Brown capuchins are “known to engage in rich cooperative behaviors… and more consistently exhibit other-regarding tendencies in donation tasks than chimpanzees.”  That is, in experiments where one individual must cooperate with another to reap a reward (food), capuchins seem more concerned with what the other partner is getting or not getting. 

In experiments modeled on the ultimate game, the capuchin subject must decide whether to pull a lever that will distribute food to herself and a conspecific partner.  When the distribution is unequal-the subject receives less food or a lower value food, the subject will often refuse the distribution.  At first glance, the subject appears to be acting out of sense of fairness.  If I can’t get what’s coming to me, then no one gets anything.  But is this right?

The subject may be motivated by inequity aversion, a distaste for unfair distributions.  Let us call that the Lockean motive.  However, a lot of research indicates that the real motive may be simple frustration.  The subject wants the greater share or the better reward and rejects the distribution because of a frustrated desire.  Let us call that the Hobbesian motive. 

Capuchin researchers have parted along the Lockean/Hobbesian divide.  Franz de Waal and his associates began the argument with a series of studies that pushed the Lockean interpretation.  In response, other researchers made the case for the Hobbesian-frustration interpretation.  I thought that the balance was tilting against the Lockean side until today. 

Kristin L. Leimgruber et. al., have a report in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior [37 (2016) 236-244] that tells for the Lockean view: “Capuchin monkeys punish those who have more.”  Here is the abstract:

Punishment of non-cooperators is important for the maintenance of large-scale cooperation in humans, but relatively little is known about the relationship between punishment and cooperation across phylogeny. The current study examined second-party punishment behavior in a nonhuman primate species known for its cooperative tendencies—the brown capuchin monkey (Cebus apella). We found that capuchins consistently punished a conspecific partner who gained possession of a food resource, regardless of whether the unequal distribution of this resource was intentional on the part of the partner. A non-social comparison confirmed that punishment behavior was not due to frustration, nor did punishment stem from increased emotional arousal. Instead, punishment behavior in capuchins appears to be decidedly social in nature, as monkeys only pursued punitive actions when such actions directly decreased the welfare of a recently endowed conspecific. This pattern of results is consistent with two features central to human cooperation: spite and inequity aversion, suggesting that the evolutionary origins of some human-like punitive tendencies may extend even deeper than previously thought.

These findings present a decidedly Lockean monkey.  It isn’t just that I, capuchin that I am, am not getting what I want.  It’s that the other hairy fellow is getting more, dammit.  

Capuchin monkeys are more distantly related to John Locke than chimpanzees.  Spite and inequity aversion are part of our emotional pallet that go beyond self-interest.  A purely selfish individual doesn’t care what others get; she only cares what she gets.  An animal who is genuinely offended when a distribution is unfair is a moral animal.

I think it is clear that human beings are Lockean animals.  If capuchin monkeys are as well, that suggests that morality is older than we are.  As the trajectory of evolution pushed into primate design space, it opened up the dimension of genuine moral consciousness. 

The Problem of Myself

Three of the most basic problems in modern philosophy are different approaches to the same problematic: how can the human individual be part of the physical world around her and separate from that world at the same time.  This is most explicit in the mind/body problem (what is the relationship between consciousness and unconscious matter?).  It is just as fundamental to the problem of free will.  Is my consciousness of choosing and acting the cause of my actions (given the fact that it seems to depend on physical processes) and, if so, how is it the cause?  These two broad topics, difficult as they are, seem easy compared to the third.  What does it mean to say that I am the same person over time when both my physical and mental self are constantly changing? 

There are three general approaches to this question: illusion theory, substance theory, and continuity theory.  The spread is typical of modern philosophy.  You get a null answer (there is no persistent identity or self), a grounding in common sense (self is substantiated in the body or the soul), and an attempt to redefine the question (the self is a continuous series of memories). 

The most prominent defense of the illusion theory comes from two basic principles of Buddhist doctrine.  According to the principle of impermanence, all compounded things will eventually decompose.  This is true of mountains as it is true of human bodies and human minds.  It is true not only “eventually” but persistently.  Everything that exists now has emerged as something else fell the Hell apart.  This is true moment to moment; so my self then is constantly fallout apart into my self now. 

The second principle is interdependence.  There are in fact no individual objects or beings.  When we recognize a tree or some other person as an individual thing, we are abstracting from (which is to say, forgetting) a vast number of other things on which it depends.  The tree is only a tree because it is rooted in a ground that provides moisture and reaches up, through obliging space, to take in the sunlight and air.  Birch trees and Terry Bertrams are like waves on the ocean: temporary ripples riding on an ocean of causation. 

So there is really no persistent me to take responsibility for my actions or to be important enough to worry about.  There is a lot of truth to this view and I think that it is liberating in the way that my Zen teachers have said.  It is not, however, the whole picture.  I am saving for retirement.  At the present rate, I expect to stop working sometime in the next century (assuming that Social Security is intact).  I also expect that it will, in some important sense, be me who retires.  I think that I will be disappointed if I have not saved enough.  Illusion theory offers nothing to comfort me. 

Substance theory is based on Aristotle’s account of change.  For something to change it must become other that it is (or else here has been no change) and remain what it is (or else it has not changed but been replaced).  To account for this you need one substratum and two opposite qualities.  An iron bar becomes hot and red from being cold and black when it is heated.  It remains what it is (iron before and after) but becomes what it is not (hot when it was cold).  So I am the same person because there is something that is me that has not changed (my body or my soul) despite the fact that I changed in many ways. 

The two candidates for individual substance (body and soul) both seem to be lacking.  My body is not the same from moment to moment, let alone through my life.  It seems likely that all my material constituents are replaces once or twice during my lifetime.  Matter and energy flow in and out.  As for the soul, if it’s the same as my consciousness and memories, then it changes along with my body.  If it is something else, what is it?  See this previous post for the difficulties. 

The last approach, continuity of memory theory, is compelling enough that it seems to grab some of my students before I get to it in Introduction to Philosophy.  It was pioneered by John Locke.  I am the same person I was when I was 5 years old because I can remember things that happened to me when I was five.  In the live size photo of me on my mother’s wall I am wearing a sweater.  The photo is black and white but I remember that the sweater was red.  You can't remember what happens to someone else. 

That’s a pretty good answer, but there is a problem.  Suppose that my memories could be downloaded and uploaded by someone else.  Now that guy remembers wearing the red sweater.  Does that mean that he is me?  No.  Tomorrow, when he eats breakfast, he will enjoy it.  I will not. 

Biology offers something useful here.  I began life as a single, fertilized cell, half mommy, half daddy.  All of the specifically human cells in my body (a minority interest among a lot of bacteria, as I understand) trace back their lineage to that Ur cell.  When the cell multiplication formed a blastocyst, there was then established an existentially robust distinction between inside and outside, self and other.  That distinct remains as long as I live. 

Biological continuity is probably the best foundation for a theory of self.  Any philosophically coherent account of soul will have to be grounded in that, as Aristotle argued in his De Anima.  But I am not sure that it answers the most important question.  Tomorrow when I swing my legs out of bed, will that be me that contemplates the event tonight, or a newly regenerated me that only remembers typing this blog.  That is a haunting question.  

A History of Violence

Two perennial and obviously closely related questions in the biosocial sciences are whether human beings are violent by nature and whether our close relatives among the great apes are violent by nature.  It is obvious that human beings and chimpanzees display violent behavior in fact, both within groups (politics) and between groups (war).  For those inclined to believe that such violence is not the produce of evolution but instead a result of unnatural environmental factors (which is to say, factors that did not constitute substantial selection pressures during their evolution), there are a number of available arguments. 

One is that the last twelve thousand years have seen the rise of social conditions among human beings that are very different from those in which any primate ever lived before.  Large surpluses and the social stratification that was made possible by those surpluses gave human beings something to fight about.  That is the most plausible case for the thesis that violence is accidental rather than natural to our species.  It flies in the face of evidence that human beings were more violent in hunter-gatherer societies that approximate the environment of evolutionary adaptation. 

A second argument is that human beings are largely responsible for chimpanzee violence.  Humans have put enormous stress on chimpanzees (by restricting their foraging ranges, etc.) and this, not their nature, is to blame.  For a third argument, one may look to our other cousins, the bonobos.  These animals do not fight wars, organize hunts, or display much interpersonal violence in their groups. 

To make the bonobo argument plausible, one would have to explain why the same artificial pressures that make chimpanzees violent have not had the same effect on bonobos.  If it has, I have not seen it reported.  The absence of violence among bonobos is thought to result from the power of female coalitions.  These coalitions are built upon networks of sexual partnerships among the females and function to protect the sons of the coalition partners. 

The problem with using bonobos to argue that the three species are not inherently violent is that is raises the question of what the female coalitions arose to do in the first place.  Mothers collective protect their sons, which they would not have to do if their sons did not need protection.  That this has been going on for long enough to modify the bonobo’s evolution is evident from the fact that bonobo males are considerably smaller and less robust than chimpanzee males. 

Competition for status among males is less intense and largely nonviolent but it is not absent.  Males who have living mothers are apparently advantaged in status competition over motherless males.  Motherless males are also subject to much more aggression by other males, especially when they are young.  It appears that bonobos are the exception that proves the rule.  Their tendencies to interpersonal violence are not absent, they are merely suppressed by a special feature of pan paniscus evolution. 

As for chimpanzees, a study published in Nature does short work with the excuses for violence in this species.  From a summary in The Washington Post:

The paper, which analyzed data from 426 combined years of observation and 18 separate chimp sites, argues chimps are not driven to violence by their contacts with humans, which some scientists have previously contended. Chimps, rather, are natural born killers.

“Variation in killing rates was unrelated to measures of human impacts,” said the paper, which was researched by an international team of 30 scientists. “… The adaptive strategies hypothesis views killing as an evolved tactic by which killers tend to increase their fitness through increased access to territory, food, mates and other benefits.”

The research feeds into a lengthy debate over the nature of chimp violence, and what it means for humanity’s own propensity for murder. “We’re trying to make inferences about human evolution,” lead researcher Michael L. Wilson, an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota, told the New York Times. Even in areas where humanity’s hand and habitat loss were not discernible, the chimps conveyed the same bellicosity, the research found. It signified that competition over resources— even when abundant — drove the chimp wars.

So if chimpanzees are not less violent where human influences are not felt and resources are abundant and bonobos are not more violent where human influences cause stress, then it seems clear that pan troglodyte is in fact violent by nature and bonobos not.  If bonobos are less violent not because aggressive tendencies are absent but because they have been suppressed by another evolutionary adaptation, then it seems likely that the tendencies toward violent aggression have been inherited by both species from their common pan ancestors.  Finally, if human beings were more troglodyte in behavior than paniscus in their behavior before the rise of settled agriculture, then it seems likely that the history of violence stretches back to the common ancestors of all three species. 

This has significant implications for political philosophy.  Jean Jacques Rousseau argued precisely that human beings were asocial and therefore non-aggressive by nature.  It was only a terrible accident of history that drove human beings together and created the conditions for inequality and violence.  Rousseau was wrong. 

Thomas Hobbes argued not that human beings were violent by nature but that the logic of their situation when they meet drives them in the direction of violence.  I might get what I want by killing you and you, knowing this, have an incentive to kill me first.  Hobbes was closer to the truth, but failed to consider that such logic would have to be partially built-in to be effective.  The context works by triggering instincts.  If our instincts were not Hobbesian, neither would be our behavior. 

John Locke supposed that what really made us dangerous was our inherent sense of justice.  Our tendency to invoke the executive power that belongs to everyone by nature can make really enemies out of human parties, each of which thinks it has been wronged by the other.  Locke was pretty much dead spot on.  Our moral instincts are built upon the political and territorial instincts of our ape (or proto-ape) ancestors. 

All three of these early modern philosophers were, however, proceeding on the basis of a big mistake.  They supposed that man is by nature an isolated animal.  Not only political institutions but all human societies are largely accidental.  As the nature of a wall does not change much the nature of bricks, so what is natural to us is only what we bring to any society of which be become a part. 

Aristotle did not make that mistake.  Just as a biologist cannot recognize a gene except by recognizing the function it has in the cellular machinery, so we cannot understand the nature of a single human being except by recognizing how he or she shapes and is shaped by social and indeed moral and political communities.  It remains the fact that we do carry with us a nature that contains our evolutionary history within it.  The three homo species (to use a proposed and, I think, correct specification) carry with them a history of violence. 

Machiavelli & the State of Nature

Ms. Flint, as is her habit, asked a provocative question in reply to my last post on Machiavelli.  I suspect she already knows the answer, but it is worth commenting on here.  My post ended with this:

Machiavelli [in contrast to Aristotle]… does not believe in any order that emerges from nature.  He supposes that all order is imposed by human will.  That, ultimately, is what he means by virtue.  Whereas the ancients had supposed that virtue lay in the perfection of natural human propensities, Machiavelli supposes that it lies in certain human characters that enable their possessors to impose their will on their surroundings. 

There is then a state of nature theory implied here.  The state of nature is all disorder and chaos.  Order and hence justice and the common good can be achieved by conquering fortune. 

Ms. Flint then asks:

But is Machiavelli really proposing something different from the state of nature, then? As I understand it (and perhaps my understanding is wrong) in the state of nature, "might makes right". If that is what naturally happens, what is Machiavelli proposing that is different?

This is a very good question.  If the prince (or the republic) must act without any moral restraint in order to preserve law and order, can the state of civil society that results be said to be different from a state of nature?  I submit that Machiavelli would say “yes, and no”. 

What makes it possible for two human beings to genuinely trust one another?  Perhaps the only thing that can do that is fear of a higher power.  That would explain the ancient customs of swearing an oath before the gods, putting one’s hands on a Bible before testimony, or retreating into a temple for sanctuary. 

Interestingly, evolutionary psychology has done a lot of work on this.  Many ancient religions involve what are called signaling costs.  Sacrifices to the gods, painful rituals (circumcision comes to mind) have a profound social function: they demonstrate to others that you genuinely fear the invisible powers.  That makes you look like a trustworthy candidate for partnerships.  It is possible that one can only leave the state of nature by means of accepting a state of grace, or to put it less poetically but more precisely, if everyone believes that transgressions will be punished by divine sanction. 

Machiavelli does not believe in invisible powers and he does not believe that belief in such powers is enough to render men civil.  All law and order are imposed by the ruthless power of some prince and it is maintained in the same way.  Machiavellian virtú is the capacity, present in some human beings, to impose dominion on human beings.  So it is true to say that “might makes right” for Machiavelli, in the sense that human might alone can literally generate right or justice and so necessarily comes before and is not restrained by justice.  However, the virtue of princes is not the same as the virtue of subjects and citizens.  The prince must frequently act without faith, charity, pity, or religion, but he must seem to observe all of these things for he wants his subjects to observe them.  He wants to impose the king’s peace on the people, for a law abiding and prosperous society is a source of his wealth and power. 

Machiavelli’s disciple, Thomas Hobbes, set out to legalize Machiavelli’s thought.  Hobbes held that the state of nature and likewise the state of civil society are nothing more than relationships between two or more human beings.  If you and I have fear nothing of gods nor princes, we can get away with anything we might do to one another.  Thus we have to fear one another, and that is the state of nature.  If we can trust one another, it is only because there is a prince standing over us who can hurt either of us if we step out of line.  That is a state of civil society. 

It follows that whenever two human beings are under the authority of a prince, then they are in a state of civil society vis-à-vis one another.  That state of civil society is indeed different from the state of nature.  However, each of us remains in a state of nature vis-à-vis the prince.  There is no higher power keeping him in line.  Likewise, all princes are in a state of nature vis-à-vis one another.  They cannot but mistrust one another and are always in a state of war, hot or cold. 

Hobbes anticipates Miranda’s question and offers an answer.  He believed that all government was by definition absolute, since moral restraint was possible only by people under such a power.  Both Hobbes and Machiavelli believed that human beings are by nature amoral.  Morality and justice are necessarily artificial, imposed by a ruthless will. 

They got it wrong.  Locke got it right.  Human beings are moral animals.  Our sense of justice is just as much a part of our nature as our capacity for language.  We have a natural inclination to recognize and punish transgressions.  I think that modern biopolitical theory backs up Locke.  All human government requires violent power; however, that power works precisely because of human nature and not against it.  The origin of government lies not (or not merely) in mutual fear and desire for dominion; it lies in our capacity for righteous indignation. 

I think that this explains why Locke’s political thought is more decent, more productive of genuine civility, than that of his predecessors.  I will have more on this later.