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.  

Nature, Culture, and Action

Leo Strauss distinguished between statesman, legislators, and political philosophers in this way: the first are concerned with political decisions at a particular place and time; the second, with decisions for a political place but with a mind to the future and perhaps future generations.  The last are concerned with the nature of politics across all places and times.  I like that neat account and I think it is generally correct.  Here, doing a bit of political philosophy, I will add another trichotomy. 

We human beings live in regimes.  The regime was Strauss’s translation of the Greek term poleteia.  This term is sometimes translated as polity or republic.  It is the title of Plato’s most famous book.  It refers to a political community and includes its social structure, governing body and institutions, and its culture.  I suspect that Strauss chose it because of its famous use in the phrase “ancien regime,” which indicated the poleteia in France before the revolution.  The most fundamental kind of revolution, as Aristotle and Plato recognized, involves a change of regimes.  The people and the place are the same (mostly, as some may have lost their heads) but the social structure, political powers, and ethos have changed in a profound way. 

Where do regimes come from?  I propose three foundations: nature, culture, and deliberate action.  Modern social-political thought since the 19^th century has tended to focus on the second.  The most influential figures (I suggest Marx, Weber and Freud as examples) tended to reduce deliberate action to a largely derivative role.  Human beings act in strictly confined circumstances and when they are supposedly free to act they only express what their culture, class consciousness, etc., have taught them to express.  Nature was likewise diminished in most of modern social thought, though it at least appears in Marxism in the form of economic history.  Culture has been the dominant theme. 

The Nineteenth Century is, finally and blessedly, coming to an end in the Twenty-First.  At this point, only prejudice or ignorance or both would allow someone to believe that the biological nature of human beings is not the basic foundation of human minds and human lives, individually and collectively.  We are a social and political species because we inherited these traits from our ancestors.  Our political and social lives depend upon a pallet of emotions that were shaped by natural selection.  Culture can only work on the material that nature has provided.  As it is easy to domestic a horse but not a zebra, so it is easy to teach human beings to be nervous about sex but very difficult to teach them to stop doing it. 

No one argues that nature is everything but some do argue that culture is everything.  The latter have long been at war with those who argue that nature is at least something.  There are two ways to end a war: conquest or reconciliation.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Those who argue that nature is a major factor in human social and political behavior are going to win because they are obviously right.  However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the nature/nurture dichotomy was a false dichotomy. 

Human beings are by nature capable of language but they have to learn a particular language.  Infants can tell coherent speech, in whatever language, from incoherent babble and they listen hungrily for the former.  Linguistic culture is a part of human nature.  Children are born with a capacity to recognize moral obligations and a hunger to learn the local rules.  They instinctively grasp the difference between harm to an innocent (bad) and transgression of in-group conventions (bad only for us).  As we are primed for language, we are also primed for both universal moral principles and local law. 

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has demonstrated (to my satisfaction) that the most natural human societies, the ones that we lived in while we became human, were largely if not universally egalitarian.  Living in small groups, individuals formed coalitions in order to defend their personal autonomy against bullies and other free riders.  This required an egalitarian ethos, which is culture if anything is.  Etiquette compelled would be alpha males to suppress their predatory instincts or else they faced ridicule, ostracism, or death.  The emergence of egalitarian cultures among small band human communities was itself the result of deliberate actions on the part of many members of such groups.  They joined together to defend themselves because they wanted to protect their own autonomy. 

This went on for long enough that it shaped human evolution.  Our capacity for morality is largely a result of deliberately making social rules and then gradually, over long periods of time, internalizing those rules.  Those human beings who did this successfully were able to cooperate in a much more efficient way and so they came to dominate the species.  That is how evolution works. 

The relation between nature, culture, and deliberate action is not one of mutually independent spheres.  It is a dynamic.  Each shapes the other over time.  Trying to tease them apart is fruitful, sometimes, but always difficult.  This is analogous to those who try to determine the genes for any given behavioral trait.  At each stage of human development, our nature allowed certain possibilities.  Among these was the development of culture.  Over time, we became as dependent on culture as we were on language, because we were now dependent on one another.  Yet culture was nothing other than the accumulation of decisions made and repeated by individuals interacting with one another.  Occasionally, some powerful personality recognized the power of culture and deliberately set to change it, laying down the foundations for a new one.  Lycurgus’ founding of Sparta is the classical account.  The American founding is a modern one. 

Deliberate founding by one or a small set of individuals is rare; but all regimes are deliberately founded in another sense: they are the result of actions of human beings, responding to disparate circumstances, modifying the cultures that they had to work with.  Human nature changes slower than culture, yet it is shaped by culture and provides the foundation for culture in turn.  I do not hold with those who would abandon the nature/nurture distinction.  You can’t understand a dynamic without understand how forces interact with one another.  Adding deliberate action to the dichotomy can account for the existence and nature of regimes. 

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.