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.  

The Evolution of Fairness

I have been very interested of late in the logic of justice.  Plato’s Socrates assumed that justice was an idea, which is to say a logically coherent form.  Just as you know that a triangle has three angles and that the angles add up to 180 degrees, regardless of the dimensions of the plane figure,  if you understand what a triangle is, so you will know what the right thing to do in any context if you understand the logically idea of justice. 

My field of research involves the historical dimension of this idea.  How is that the dimension of justice emerged in the evolution of the human soul?  That it did emerge is not in doubt.  Even if you think that claims of justice are always or almost always confidence games, you might want to know why they work.  What are human beings charmed by the idea of justice?  To put that question in a more useful form: how did human beings become the kind of creatures that could be so charmed? 

Game theory, paired with evolutionary psychology, has come a long way toward answering that question.  The ultimatum game presents justice in a simple, logical dilemma.  In this game, two individuals (the Proposer and the Responder) must come to an agreement over the division of a benefit.  The one proposes a distribution: 90% me, 10% you, 50/50, etc.  The other must accept the distribution, or neither of them gets anything. 

Simple economic theory predicts that the responder will accept any distribution above 100/0, for something is better than nothing.  However, when the game is played with real persons, the proposer usually offers considerably more than the minimum and the responder usually rejects any offer that is not close to parity.  This is evidence that the human mind is robustly aware of the logic of fairness. 

So why does the partner at an advantage offer more than the minimum and why does the partner at a disadvantage refuse to accept an unfair distribution at the price of nothing?  It might make perfect sense to do so if the tables might be turned next time.  If I am generous to the responder now, he may be generous to me when he gets to be the proposer.  If he screws me now, just wait until next year.  I’ll get that bastard. 

That makes sense if proposers and responders are randomly assigned their roles with each turn.  Stéphane Debove, Nicholas Baumard, and Jean-Baptiste André move this logic one essential step forward in their essay “Evolution of equal division among unequal partners.”  Find it in Evolution 69-2: 561-569. 

Debove et. al. point out that a random assignment of roles in natural encounters is not plausible.  In nature, stronger individuals will find themselves in the role of proposer again and again, and vice versa.  If the stronger individual doesn’t have to fear that he will end up in the responder role, what incentive does he have to be generous? 

The answer is that the stronger individual is not competing only with the weaker ones for prizes; he is competing also with stronger individuals for partners.  If weaker partners are readily available, the cost of choosing any one partner is low.  It is in the advantage of the stronger individual to make as many partnerships as fast and as often as possible.  The easiest way to close those deals is to be generous. 

Our authors calculate that the generosity of the stronger proposers will decline as the supply of weaker responders goes down.  When fewer deals are possible, it pays to be choosy.  But even when weaker responders are few, and the cost of choosing is greatest, generosity will increase over time. 

This piece of research is not based on empirical evidence.  It is based on simple logic.  It makes the case that nice guys finish first, eventually, regardless of the particular situations.  Plato was right.  I note that the authors opened with a mention of Plato and Rousseau. 

In the Beginning was the Word

My apology for the long hiatus.  I like to blog on my deck with a small glass of scotch and a cigar.  Two of those three items are for all practical purposes unavailable from September until... today.  

I am teaching "Human Nature and Human Values" again and that always means consuming a lot of recent research.  One study I just digested into PowerPoint slides concerned the development of language by infants.  Back when I was (briefly) a psychology major (late 1970's), I was taught that language is acquired by mere power of association.  When an infant is exposed to one auditory stimulus (a word) in frequent conjunction with another (an object), then the infant learns that word for that object.  That is the Standard Social Science Model.  All social behavior is explained by reference to other social behavior.  

For that model to be confirmed, it should be the case that any sufficiently recognizable auditory stimulus would do.  For example, a buzz or buzz and click should be learned as a word for nose, if that is what the infant is taught.  

A recent study indicates that only certain kinds of auditory stimuli trigger the learning of words and that these stimuli in conjunction with visual examples triggers categorization in infants as young as three months old.  I find that very exciting.  

The study is "Nonhuman primate vocalizations support categorization in very young human infants" by Alissa L. Ferry, Susan J. Hespos, and Sandra R. Waxman (PNAS | September 17, 2013 | vol. 110 | no. 38 | 15231–15235).  Ferry et. al. exposed infants to images of dinosaurs in conjunction with a range of auditory signals, including tones and backward human speech.  Then they showed the subject two images, one of which was a new dinosaur and the other a fish.  They measured learning by whether the infant gazed at the dinosaur rather than the extra-categorical image.  

It turns out that tones and backward speech had no effect.  The infants did not associate these auditory stimuli with categories of objects.  Nor did they respond to the visual stimuli alone, in the absence of any auditory stimulus.  However, when the infants were exposed to coherent human speech or nonhuman primate vocalizations along with the images in the first stage of the test, then they recognized the novel dinosaur in the second stage of the test.  

That the infants responded to human vocalization in the first stage but not to tones or backward speech suggests that they are primed to tune in to certain stimuli but not others.  This indicates an evolved psychological mechanism for learning language.  That they recognized a new member of a previously presented category after only a very brief exposure indicates that this mechanism, far from being a mere power of association,  includes a power of forming mental categories.  At three months of age.  That their power of categorization was triggered both by human speech and nonhuman vocalization indicates that this mechanism has deep evolutionary roots, going back well before the emergence of human beings on this planet.  

The Socratic philosophers were onto this more than two thousand years ago.  Plato knew that human beings could form altogether artificial categories, such as "all numbers except 17".  That capacity exists, however, because it reflects and exemplifies something essential about the world we live in.  The world sorts itself into categories: rocks and living creatures, plants and animals, dinosaurs and mammals, horses and cows.  

Evolutionary theory wonderfully enriches the Socratic idea.  The ability to recognize categories of things is not only a consequence of evolution is part of the dynamic of evolution.  One theory of what a biological species is turns precisely on species recognition.  Horses are horses and not cows because they recognize horses as potential mates.  That horses can breed with donkeys indicates that the two species have split but remain just close enough to produce mules.  

The Greek word logos was pregnant with meaning.  It meant first the human power of speech.  It was extended to include human reason and the truths that reason could reveal.  Later, it came to mean the coherence of the intelligible kosmos.  Philology recapitulates metaphysics, in Greek philosophy and evolutionary psychology.  In the beginning was the word.  

Justice is beautiful because it is good and good because it is beautiful

The following is the beginning of the essay I will present next week at the annual meeting of the Association of Politics and Life Sciences.  We are meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.  

In Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates silences the sophist Thrasymachus with his famous “honor among thieves” argument.  Thrasymachus argued that justice is merely the interest of the stronger, i.e., that right actions are what subordinates must do in the service of their superiors.  Socrates responded that the “stronger” are so because they are able to cooperate with one another in their drive toward dominion; and so, they must be just at least toward one another.  Justice is then superior injustice even if you accept the view that all human actions are motivated by selfish desire. 

At the beginning of Book 2, the spirited brothers Glaucon and Adiemantus announce their dissatisfaction with this argument and each issues a challenge to Socrates.  These challenges come in the form of claims about what “the many” believe about justice and injustice.  The former argues that, in the view of the many, justice is a mean between the greatest evil and the greatest good.  The greatest evil is to be exploited by someone else.  The greatest good is to be able to exploit others.  The many realize that without restraints on human behavior, they would be the victims rather than the perpetrators of injustice.  They value justice only as a lesser evil.  Glaucon wants Socrates to show him that this view of justice is not correct, that justice is something good in itself.

Adiemantus’ view is more sophisticated.  He grants that the many do speak and act as if justice really were something good in itself; however, what they genuinely desire is the appearance and not the substance of justice.  Justice is like paper money.  It is valuable only because it is valued.  Righteous men value their reputation because it wins them partnerships and good marriages for their children.  Were it not for such commerce, they would not bother about it.  Adiemantus too wants Socrates to show him that justice is something good in itself and not something that is merely instrumental to some selfish end. 

The remainder of the Republic is devoted to Socrates’ efforts to satisfy the two brothers.  I believe that Socrates’ account of justice is convincing.  Socrates argues that justice is in fact the order in a well-ordered soul.  When intelligence governs the passions and the passions govern the appetites, each part of the tripartite soul doing its own proper business, that is justice.  This account succeeds because it presents justice as something not merely good, but beautiful; or more precisely, it is good because it is beautiful.  That is what the brothers crave. 

In this paper I will be making something of a defense on his behalf; however, I will do so by focusing on the simple fact that Glaucon and Adiemantus make their challenges in the first place.  Were Socrates wrong, neither brother would bother to seek an argument in support of justice.  Were Socrates wrong, the popular explanations of justice that the brothers articulate would not make sense, even in their apparently diminished forms. 

This is important because modern political theory and philosophical ethics largely accepts the popular views of justice much as they are articulated by Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adiemantus.  Justice is indeed valuable in so far as it advances the interests of a population strong enough to defend it.  Even then, it is valued only as a token.  He who carries the token advertises himself as a good partner in cooperative ventures. 

This view has received important support in recent years from evolutionary accounts of morality.  In the work of Christopher Boehm, Michael Tomasello, and David Sloan Wilson, morality emerges in the history of human evolution because it protects the weaker members against the stronger, encourages mutual obligations, and thus allows small groups of humans to effectively compete with other, equally rapacious bands of brothers.  All of human history over the last twelve thousand years or so represents a innovation built out of evolutionary components.  When one group assimilated another rather than annihilating it, bending the assimilated group to its service, much as one organism occasionally assimilates and exploits another, civilization was born.  For this to work, the dominate group must effectively cooperate and to do that competitive behavior within the dominate group must be controlled.  We are back to honor among thieves. 

I will argue that the moral (or the just) could only have functioned in that way because human beings are naturally inclined to see it as beautiful.  The beautiful thing is good because it is noble, beautiful to behold.  In turn, Socrates argues on many occasions in both Plato’s works and the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon, that the good is beautiful.  Socrates admires a beautiful set of armor because he can see that it was exquisitely tailored to some individual other than himself.  It was good for the armorer’s client in so far as it fit him.  It was good for Socrates only in so far as it was beautiful.  Beauty transcends the good which gives it birth.

To take another example from evolutionary psychology, imagine a beautiful house.  Now imagine that there is a verdant forest just behind it, and beyond that a range of hills.  Large picture windows at the front give views of a plain dotted with trees.  Not too far in the distance is a river or lake.  That is a valuable piece of real estate.  Why?  Our ancestors needed access to water and to the occasional prey that gathered there.  They also had to fear predators and other human beings.  They liked to be able to see what was coming and to have somewhere to retreat to.  Our notion of what is a beautiful home was forged as our ancestors moved about and succeeded in finding places that allowed them to flourish and thus become our ancestors.  A Montana ranch house I once visited has all of these elements but none of them were necessary for survival.  It was good because it was beautiful. 

We like to tell stories in which the wicked are defeated and the just triumph.  These stories are beautiful to us because we have a taste for justice.  That taste was a product of evolution because it promoted the successful reproduction of our great great… grandmothers and grandfathers.  That the taste for justice was selected for in our evolution doesn’t change the fact that the object of the taste often has nothing to do with our own reproductive success.  We admire justice even when it has nothing to do with us just as we admire a beautiful painting of a beautiful house that we can never live in.  In that way the taste for the noble transcends the good from which it was born. 

In this essay I will show that inequity aversion, the human distaste for injustice in both two party exchanges and in observations of third party exchanges, show that Socrates was right.  

Are Darwinian Explanations Ugly?

At this blog I have argued persistently and I hope convincingly that Darwinian thought can be neither reductionist nor materialist.  The same is true, I suppose, for specifically biosocial thought.  One of the advantages of the latter, espec

ially when combined with classical philosophy, is that it not only confirms what I just submitted but helps explain the rhetorical force of the contrary claim.  Critics of biosocial explanations on both the left and the right deploy the reductionist and materialist interpretations of Darwinism in order to make the latter appear as ugly as possible.  It is this claim, that Darwinian social/political thought is ugly, that I intend to explore and refute here. 

Before we can decide whether Darwinism is ugly or why reductionism and materialism are ugly, we need to have an account of beauty and ugliness.  These concepts are frequently assumed to be entirely cultural in origin or socially constructed, which assumption turns out to be self-contradictory.  For example, if my people say that dark eyes are beautiful and your people say that blue eyes are beautiful, this would count as a distinction between our two cultures only if we have some common notion of beauty to disagree about.  To employ an analogy, we can whether it is right to feed a cold and starve a fever or vice verse only if we agree that the point is to relieve the one and the other. 

Disagreements about where beauty and ugliness are found, like disagreements over medical cures, take place in the context of universal agreements about what we are looking for.  As is usually the case, the Socratic philosophers laid out the basic logical structure of the business with both precision and depth.  In Plato’s Gorgias, the orator Polus concedes that getting away with murder is an ugly thing (or shameful in the context) but insists, nonetheless, that it is a very good thing.  Socrates points out that something that is ugly is so for one of two reasons.  Either it is unpleasant or it is harmful.  Since getting away with murder is not unpleasant, it therefore must be harmful. 

Socrates’ distinction seems to me to be both accurate and exhaustive.  According to his students Plato and Xenophon, Socrates was rather ugly in one sense but not the other.  He was painful to look at, but did you a lot of good if you hung around him long enough.  Other lovers, by contrast, can be very pleasing to eye but ruinous to the heart.  Perhaps a better example, and one beloved by evolutionary psychologists, is the black widow spider.  This creature can be intensely ugly, I can attest, if you find one crawling on your arm.  Yet it is not painful to look at.  On the contrary, it is a shiny jet black, with a beautiful red hour glass on its tear-shaped abdomen.  There is nothing ugly about any of that.  Its ugliness, when it does emerge, is a result of our inherited recognition.  We recognize it as venomous. 

This kind of ugliness holds for a wide range of creatures, from yellow jackets to rattlesnakes, which display warning colors.  These creatures are the opposite of unpleasant to look at if you can view them in safety.  In other contexts they are intensely ugly, so much so that human beings develop phobias about such things.  It is one of the remarkable observations of evolutionary psychology that we have phobias about spiders and snakes but not about automobiles or tobacco.  The reason is that the former killed our ancestors over very long periods of time whereas the latter kill us, but only very recently. 

Our capacity for distinguishing the beautiful from the ugly and the two senses of each from one another, depends on a set of evolved psychological mechanisms.  The same orange that is alarming on a snake is inviting on the skin of a piece of fruit, even the one held by the child in Van Gogh’s painting. 

Just as beautiful colors can be transformed into ugly warnings, they can also be employed as lures.  One kind of firefly uses its fire to attract males of another species looking for mates.  The unlucky suitors are devoured.  Likewise, human cooperators looking for honest partners can be fooled by conmen who have the knack of appearing honest.  Most human beings are bad liars.  We give ourselves away all too easily.  That makes us good cooperators.  Some human beings are very good liars.  Accordingly, most of us have built in bullshit detectors.  We instinctively look for signs of genuine virtue and deceit.  We esteem those who help without demanding a reward over those who always look for a payoff. 

I submit that the interpretation of Darwinian Theory (and especially Darwinian biosocial theory) as reductionist and materialist is rhetorically powerful because it arouses our fraud detection mechanisms.  If a woman nurtures her infant because such behavior was selected for over evolutionary history, that looks to a lot of us like an ulterior motive.  She doesn’t really love her baby; she really loves her selfish genes.  Reductionism and materialism arouse our suspicion all the apparently beautiful sentiments are mere pretenses.  My parents were only serving their genetic interests.  Darwinism is ugly because it paints all of us as devious con artists, painting ourselves in morally fraudulent colors. 

The interpretation of Darwinian moral/political thought as ugly gets the cart before the horse.  Conmen are effective because most of us are basically honest and that can only be because honesty was selected for.  Cooperation is beautiful because it is good.  It makes for a better life for all of us.  The fact that effective cooperative communities flourished whereas less effective cooperators did not underwrites the evolution of human language, morality, and indeed all higher culture.  Those who are good fathers, mothers, friends and citizens, out of genuine inclination made better cooperators than those who merely pretended to be so.  Indeed, the conmen could only come later, as parasites on the successful superorganism.  Before you can have free riders, you have to have something to free ride upon. 

What is ugly is either unpleasant to look at and/or harmful.  What is beautiful is either pleasant to look at and/or beneficial.  Darwinian Theory recognizes these distinctions.  It is therefore Socratic in its logical structure.  It is not ugly, unless it is wrong. 

Consciousness, Free Will, and Evolution

One of the great problems with contemporary debates over free will is that two distinct and fundamental philosophical questions are frequently (almost always) confused.  One is the question whether the ubiquitous human intuition of an open future is metaphysically viable.  Do I really have choices that are not already made yet, in the sense of being predetermined by the state of the Kosmos before I make the choice?  The second is whether human consciousness is part of the chain of causation leading to human actions.  Did I drop the hot object because it hurt?  Or was my conscious pain merely an epiphenomenon, generated by the underlying physical processes but having no consequences of its own? 

This has been a persistent concern of mine for some years.  Tonight I have been reading Eckart Voland’s interesting article: “We Recognize Ourselves as Being Similar to Others: Implications of the “Social Brain Hypothesis” for the Biological Evolution of the Intuition of Freedom.”  Voland clearly regards our intuition of freedom as an illusion and sets out to explain how we came by it.  His thesis is that it is a byproduct of modeling the intentions of other persons.  Here is a bit from the abstract:

If, as the “social brain hypothesis” alleges, the main selective pressure among primates is on generating social knowledge about one’s cooperators and competitors, then it is the knowledge about others and not the knowledge about oneself that is the scarce cognitive resource. It is beneficial to make the others predictable and to form hypotheses about their probable behavioral tendencies. This is done by behavior reading and mind reading and by classifying the recurring stochastic patterns in everyday language as the “will.” Thus, the idea of free will emerged first as a social attribution and not as an introspectively gained insight.

I strongly suspect that Voland is right on the specific question.  It seems to me more than likely that the human sense of self and of deliberation (and particularly moral deliberation) emerged in tandem with a “theory of mind,” which is to say, a recognition that other persons have minds like “mine”.  However, I do not see how this thesis is required, let alone advanced, either by determinism or epiphenomenalism. 

Here is how Voland begins his essay:

The human psyche, with its ability to feel, think, and act, is a deterministic system. In the current discussion, this thesis is primarily supported by arguments informed by neurobiology.

I have long regarded determinism as one of the myths of modern science.  The problem with all myths is not that they are false but that they cannot be verified and that the reason for believing in them has nothing to do with their veracity.  It may well be that the state of the Kosmos at any moment, T¹, rigidly determines the state of K at T².  How one could know that is beyond me, and it is not a necessary assumption for any science.  All the scientist needs to suppose is that T¹ determines some part of T² within some specified margin of error. 

I will pass here on the question of why so many want to believe in something that is unverifiable and unnecessary.  I will point out that when Voland speaks of neurobiology, he has in mind certain findings that indicate that the brain makes up its mind before the mind becomes conscious of making a decision.  Again, this may be true; however, it is an argument not for determinism but for epiphenomenalism. 

Voland makes a pitch for the proposition that genuine freedom cannot have evolved. 

Contrary to other claims: Freedom does not evolve, and what is more: Freedom could not evolve, because if we assume that organisms which could make use of the freedom to not obey the biological imperative were created by a whim of nature, then natural selection would disfavor these genotypes to the degree that they were to make use of this freedom, and the endless game of evolution would proceed without them. Freedom here is understood in the sense of the indeterministic libertarian intuition of being able to behave in other ways, if one only wanted to do so.

To prevent a widespread misunderstanding: The antithesis of determination is indetermination and not flexibility. Humans, perhaps like no other species, are capable of special behavioral flexibility, which in turn is carried by special cognitive abilities designed for this purpose. This allows humans, more than other organisms, to adequately deal with situations that are new to them and to cope with unusual requirements (Kanazawa, 2004). This changes nothing, however, with regard to the fact that all of the knowledge of how requirements are to be mastered already must exist in the form of certain strategies of perception and thinking in the organism, completely within the meaning of Kant’s a priori (Heschl, 2001). There is no room in this system for a libertarian freedom of the will, i. e. the capacity to act differently under identical conditions and to cause behavior while oneself being uncaused.

This strike me as altogether wrong.  “Flexibility” means precisely not obeying “the biological imperative.”  It means this in two ways.  One is that the biological, preprogrammed imperative must be responsive to different situations.  The organism must be able to zig and zag in ways that cannot be fixed ahead of time. 

The other is that organisms that disobey “the biological imperative” may be the ones that flourish when the environmental niche has changed.  Evolution has engineered a vast number of modes of flexibility.  The most pervasive is genetic diversity, of which, the most interesting is sexual reproduction.  Is it not obvious that consciousness is precisely the most sophisticated form of flexibility?  Let us suppose that all conscious creatures are capable of some measure of freedom, in the sense of making choices that are not governed by deterministic rules.  That would allow such creatures to be very flexible in their responses to the environment. 

How then to keep such creatures honest in a Darwinian sense?  The obvious answer is to bribe them.  This is the function of pain and pleasure, discontent and happiness.  Rather than giving precise instructions to sentient animals, evolution was content to give them parameters.  Do whatever you want so long as you survive long enough to reproduce. 

This is the only account, as it seems to me, that explains why it hurts when I pick up something that is very hot.  If consciousness is really an epiphenomenon, produced by but not effecting biological processes, then it is a very odd phenomenon.  It is analogous to the occasionalism that you find in dualistic theories.  It doesn’t seem like a winner.