On the human thing

I am about to propose a paper for the IPSA next year in Istanbul.  What follows are some reflections that I will distil into that proposal.  

Aristotle reflected that the various branches of philosophy often took their essential subject matter for granted.  A mathematician might never bother to ask what a number is and someone investigating physics (all motion and change, as the philosopher understood it) might never address the question whether motion and change are real.  Modern philosophy, having divorced itself from science, is almost exclusively devoted to topics which other fields take for granted. 

In the case of political science, someone studying voting behavior, for example, will probably feel little need to explain what government is and what politics is, let alone what human beings are.  Political philosophy, my racket, can and must address these questions. 

Politics in its full expression is an exclusively human activity and if the human being is the political animal, as Aristotle says, we cannot understand either the human or the political apart from one another. 

I have long thought the beginnings of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics offer a clue to this puzzle.  Here is how the former opens:

πᾶσα τέχνη καὶ πᾶσα μέθοδος, ὁμοίως δὲ πρᾶξίς τε καὶ προαίρεσις, ἀγαθοῦ τινὸς ἐφίεσθαι δοκεῖ: διὸ καλῶς ἀπεφήναντο τἀγαθόν, οὗ πάντ᾽ ἐφίεται.

Every technology and every methodical inquiry, and similarly both practice and deliberate action, are regarded as aiming at some good; wherefore the good beautifully presents as that at which everything aims. 

I often ask my students in ancient political philosophy to tell me what “the good” is.  They are always stumped.  Aristotle makes it clear.  The good is some goal that explains some deliberate human activity. 

It is important to note that these activities‑technique, method, practice, and action‑are activities of individual persons.  In the most primary sense, politicians politic and deliberate; regimes do so only in a secondary if not a metaphorical sense.  If we take the Nicomachean Ethics to be an account of the human being, and it is certainly at least that, then it would seem that the human being is the natural person, the individual. 

Here is how the Politics begins:

ἐπειδὴ πᾶσαν πόλιν ὁρῶμεν κοινωνίαν τινὰ οὖσαν καὶ πᾶσαν κοινωνίαν ἀγαθοῦ τινος ἕνεκεν συνεστηκυῖαν （τοῦ γὰρ εἶναι δοκοῦντος ἀγαθοῦ χάριν πάντα πράττουσι πάντες）, δῆλον ὡς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγαθοῦ τινος στοχάζονται, μάλιστα δὲ [5] καὶ τοῦ κυριωτάτου πάντων ἡ πασῶν κυριωτάτη καὶ πάσας περιέχουσα τὰς ἄλλας.  αὕτη δ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡ καλουμένη πόλις καὶ ἡ κοινωνία ἡ πολιτική.

Since we see every polis to be some community and every community is established for the sake of some good (for the good is regarded to be that for the sake of which everyone does everything) as it is clear that as all communities aim at some good, the one that aims especially at the most authoritative good is the most authoritative of all of them and embraces all the others.  This is called the polis, is the political community. 

If the Politics is an account of the human being, and it is surely at least that, then it would seem that the human being is the assembly of natural persons, self-organized in a political way. 

The two points of departure point to one idea.  The human being is not the individual nor is it the social group; it is instead the dynamic that involves both of them.  A person can live apart from other persons, as do hermits; however, to the extent that he lives off the culture baggage that he carries (does he take books with him into the woods?) he is not really alone and to the extent that he does not the life he lives is more animal than human.  If you don’t believe me, read Rousseau’s Second Discourse. 

Likewise, human beings can attempt to integrate themselves and others into a social whole so completely that their individuality disappears.  This latter trajectory is more limited than the former.  It is possible for one human being to become completely feral; it is not possible (at least not yet) for two or more human animals to become one human being.  Only the most awesome force can suppress human individuality and that only so long and so thoroughly as the force is applied.

Biopolitical theory, based on Darwinian evolution, can turn the two dimensional spectrum defined by the poles of human persons and human communities into a three dimensional and very real structure reaching backward into time.  Evolution is not goal-directed.  In so far as it has a direction, it teleomatic rather than teleonomic.  It is a mechanical force, pushing organic forms into new environmental niches.  It is not trying to do anything anymore than a balloon is trying to get high.  At any one point in time a biological lineage can branch toward simpler organisms or more complex ones or both.  That one or more branches moved into new niches by the emergence of more and more complex organisms is the reason that human beings (and bovine beings and canine beings, etc.) exist on this planet. 

Single celled organisms can combine into multicellular organisms and eventually their individuality can be entirely (or almost entirely) submerged into the whole.  Multicellular organisms can go the other way or parts of them can go their own way (viruses?).  Some, as the scarecrow says, do go both ways, as in the case of slime molds.  Multicellular individual organisms can also coalesce with other individuals into larger social wholes, though here complete assimilation is more challenging.  Eusocial insects combine into colonies and hives that act more or less like biological individuals.  A sterile cast of ant workers is a sign that individuality has been reproductively submerged in a social whole.  For the most part, social animals are more individual than social.  Sociobiology is all about the ways that individual interests are managed in a way that maintains social integration. 

Human beings are capable of a degree of social integration that is greater than anything other than the eusocial insects and is much deeper than that.  We are almost certainly the only animal that can try to submerge its individual self in a larger whole, only to fail.  I propose that this is the temporal dimension of Aristotle’s great dichotomy.  I also suspect that group selection is the key to understanding this existential dimension of the human being.  That is what I will present in Istanbul, if my paper is accepted.  

Inequity Aversion and the Limits to Human Social Integration

My friend Ron White raises the following question on the International Political Science Association Research Committee #12 Facebook page:

Ronald F. White Ken Blanchard Jr.....why not get back to Book 5 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics? Why not explore the evolution of retribution and distribution based on MERIT, NEED, EQUALITY, and UTILITY? And of course the conflicts that arise at different, times, places and degrees. I've always found this "cooperation research" to be a bit left-leaning....overly focused on need and equality. Don't you?

I reply: no.  I think cooperation research captures the tension between Aristotle’s two moral/political books.  The Nicomachean Ethics begins with the assumption that the human thing is the deliberate action of some individual human being:

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good. 

The Politics begins with the assumption that the human thing is the cooperative association

Every polis is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for human beings always act in order to obtain that which they think good.

As usual, I think Aristotle’s approach is perfect.  You can’t understand human beings without looking at us from both points of view.  Having digested de Waal and Brosnan’s article in Science, I think it supports Aristotle’s approach. 

“The Evolution of Responses to (Un)fairness” distinguishes two forms of inequity aversion.  First Order IA presents when a partner in some cooperative activity objects to a distribution of the fruits of the partnership that weighs to the objector’s disadvantage.  This form of inequity aversion has been found among a range of species that routinely cooperate. 

Second order IA presents when a partner responds negatively to an inequitable distribution of the fruits of cooperation that benefits the objector.  If I read the article correctly, this form has been found only in chimpanzees and human beings. 

What I make of this is that selfish reciprocity (I cooperate only in so far as I benefit) has much deeper evolutionary roots than conscientious reciprocity (I am concerned both for me and my partner).  Human beings are capable of cooperation on a level that leaves all the other primates far behind.  The emergence of human moral and political is a result, in large part, of the runaway selection for second order IA.  That indeed points toward a “socialist” view of man.  Nonetheless, second order IA is dependent upon first order IA, and the latter has deeper roots.  Anthropoi are not, and will not be in any practical timeframe, hymenoptera.  Human beings remain individuals, each with his or her own interests.  Any cooperative community can flourish only if the interests of each of the members is implicit in the interest of the whole.  The human community that is most in accord with human nature is one in which the rights of individuals are fundamental. 

The Evolution of Virtue 4

Here is the next section of my paper.  It will be followed by a concluding section that will (I hope!) tie the whole thing together.  

Aristotle’s biology as I have described it is quite compatible with contemporary evolutionary accounts of human psychology.  Indeed one might suspect that modern biology is only now getting around to the point that Aristotle arrived at more than two thousand years ago.  Fortunately, modern biology brings to the table a wider array of theories and evidence than Aristotle could have dreamed of.  Does this mean that we can now propose an evolutionary account of the virtues?

Here we must take care to avoid a mistake that is especially common among those who reject evolutionary accounts of human behavior.  The fact that a psychological or physical trait is a product of natural selection does not, in itself, have any moral significance.  Natural selection is a force, an example of efficient causation as Aristotle described it.  It pushes the evolution of organisms in a certain direction just as the hot air in a balloon pushes (or more accurately, is pushed by cooler air), thus causing the balloon to rise.  However, just as the balloon doesn’t rise because the hot air wants to get high, so evolution is not trying to get anywhere.  Evolution is not a teleological process.  It doesn’t aim at any end and so does not endorse or validate any purpose or condition. 

Natural selection has, however, shaped creatures that develop and act in ways that can only be understood as teleological.  The development of the infant toward adulthood, the process of metabolism, and the predator pursuing its prey, are all “end-directed processes”.  These organic motions are constantly being redirected according to a preexisting program.  The philosopher of biology Ernst Mayr preferred to call such processes “teleonomic,” to distinguish them from teleomatic processes.  An example of the latter would be a rock sinking toward the bottom of the well.  The rock is not programmed to do anything; the end of its journey is not in any way present in its beginning, except as a range of possibilities. 

Aristotle’s teleology is entirely sound.  He does not presuppose any active intelligence in the ontogeny of organisms.  An organism does not come to have traits that are adapted to its environment because some supernatural mind is intentionally shaping them to that purpose.  It simply the case that the adaptive trait is part of the animal’s nature.  Aristotle understood adaptation very well and he also understood that one could make sense of ontogeny only by assuming that the expressed form of the organism (what we would call its phenotype) had to be present in some unexpressed form at the very beginning of the organism’s existence (what we would call its genotype).  For that reason, Aristotle deserves to be called the father of genetics. 

However, while Aristotle recognized that the perfectly obvious fact that teeth cause chewing is fundamental to explaining what teeth are (which is to say, an adaptation), it took Darwin to explain how chewing causes teeth.  Natural selection completes Aristotelian teleology by understanding the two as a dynamic: that teeth cause chewing and that chewing causes teeth come to explain one another.  Only this dynamic makes it possible to explain either. 

The capacities that are expressed in the human palette of moral emotions are mental schema, features of the architecture of the mind.  They are dependent on underlying neurological phenomena and they exist because they were selected for.  Such is the soul as it is viewed by evolutionary biology.  It is unlikely that this view can be false unless the entire edifice of modern biology is founded on error.  Virtues are possible because the disposition of persons to feel certain emotions and act in certain ways in certain situations is subject to modification both by culture and by individual intention.  We are no in a position to ask whether or in what way the virtues are products of natural selection and whether they are natural at all. 

Aristotle says famously in his Politics that while the polis comes to be for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of the good life.  This comment expresses the two ways in which some institution or behavior or some artifice may be said to be natural.  It can be natural because it was produced by natural forces.  The red of the red, red rose is natural in this first sense.  It can also be natural even it is entirely artificial because it satisfies natural inclinations.  An arranged bouquet of a dozen red roses is natural in this second sense. 

The political community was, in Aristotle’s view, natural in both senses.  Human associations emerge because they offer practical solutions to persistent problems.  The marital and parental associations emerge because the family is necessary for procreation and the survival of offspring.  The village emerges to solve longer range problems and finally the polis emerges because it supplies a complete package or self-sufficiency, as Aristotle calls it.  The natural drive for survival and a minimal level of comfort push the political community into existence.  However, as that complete community emerges, it makes possible more than a merely comfortable life.  The good life for human beings is not a direct product of the evolutionary forces that make it possible.  It is a by-product.  Yet it is the most valuable thing that human beings can achieve for themselves. 

We are now in a position to account for the evolution of the virtues.  Natural selection for animal behaviors works by directing animals towards ends that promote successful reproduction.  Animal motives are, however, shaped on a need to know basis.  All the animal needs to know in a given situation is what to do.  He or she emphatically doesn’t need to know how the action drives the Darwinian dynamic.  Thus a bull elk doesn’t waste time trying to reproduce his genetic inheritance.  He has no idea about that.  He spends his time trying to mate.  A woman who takes her newborn daughter into her arms for the first time loves her baby, not the genes that the baby shares with her.  Whether the bull or the woman have a satisfying life is irrelevant to their selfish genes. 

To be sure, the good life for most creatures will map closely, in most cases, onto the life that results in successful reproduction.  That doesn’t mean that they are the same thing.  A neutered beagle may have a much better life than a wild dog who sires many pups.  The motives that are natural to animals, including human animals, are the products of natural selection; however, the interests of animals and their genes are nonetheless distinct. 

The human good, Aristotle argues in his Nicomachean Ethics, is eudaimonia.  This word is often translated as happiness.  It literally means “good demoned” or blessedness.  It indicates the human life that is satisfying as a whole.  He analyses each virtue by reference to that end.  The person who is just, courageous, generous, etc. will be mostly likely, in any set of circumstances, to live the best human life.  He will also make a good partner in cooperative associations.  Such associations will tend to be successful in Darwinian terms: they will provide for their offspring.  However, for the virtuous person, successful reproduction is a means rather than an end.  What she wants is the good life for herself, her family, her friends, and her fellow citizens.  Whereas our selfish genes bribe us with the elements of happiness so that we will advance their interests (metaphorically speaking), we are interested in genetic proliferation only in so far as it will make us happy.