The Natural Origin of Moral Cultures

In ancient Greek philosophy the most important dichotomy involved phusis and nomos, nature and convention.  Phusis, which is the root of our word for physics, means growth.  A phuton, or “a growth” was the Greek word for a flower or tree or something else that grew out of the soil.  It is interesting that our word “plant” names such an organism by reference to the act of putting it in the ground whereas the Greek word points to the process that defines the organism.  I will leave it to the students of Martin Heidegger to run with that one.  It is enough to say that phusis is the inner nature of anything, what makes it present itself and behave as it does, prior to any human interpretation. 

Nomos originally meant an enclosed pasture, within which animals were allowed to roam free.  The Greeks used the word metaphorically to indicate the written and unwritten laws that govern human social intercourse.  Human beings corral themselves by drawing their wagons into a circle.  The corral is merely a set of agreements or conventions made by particular communities.  We bury our dead.  They burn theirs.  We drink alcohol.  They eat pork.  Just as the pasture is enclosed by an artificial barrier, so the nomoi are human-made.  The nomoi exist by agreement or convention. 

Phusis is the same everywhere and always.  Fire always reaches toward the sky, whether in ancient Athens or today in Aberdeen, South Dakota.  Nomoi vary both between communities and within the same community over time.  For the Greek philosophers, phusis was existentially superior to nomos.  Philosophy was the attempt to replace opinions about the whole of things with knowledge.  If you properly understand something that never changes, you will never be wrong about it.  This kind of understanding is possible (at least in principle) regarding the natural things.  It is not possible even in principle to know something that is valid only by convention.  What is true by convention is worth knowing for practical reasons but uninteresting for theoretical reasons. 

Two corrections regarding the classical view are necessary in light of the modern science of phusis, which today we call biology.  First, natural things are more subject to change than the ancients had supposed.  Both modern biology and even modern physics are evolutionary sciences.  Second, it is no longer possible to view nomos and phusis as mutually exclusive explanations for human behavior.  The creation of norms and other conventions is something that human beings do by nature.  Thus nomoi are as much an expression of human nature and as revealing as the fact that we huddle around a fire when it gets cold. 

One of the things that led me to rethink this is the marvelous article by Michael Tomasello and Amrisha Vaish: “Origins of Human Cooperation and Morality.”  (Annual Review of Psychology, 2013, 64: 231-255).  Tomasello and his large collection of partners work both with apes and young children in order to understand human nature and how it is both very similar and very different from our near Darwinian relatives.  This bit (p. 246-247) jumped out at me:

Further evidence for young children’s understanding of the basic workings of social norms is provided by their selective enforcement of different types of social norms depending on group membership. Thus, children not only distinguish moral from conventional norms on multiple levels (see, e.g., Turiel 2006), but they also enforce the two distinctly.

In particular, when 3-year-old children see a moral norm being broken by an in-group member and an out-group member (as determined by their accents), they protest equivalently. But when they see a conventional norm being broken by these same agents, they protest more against an in-group member than an out-group member (Schmidt et al. 2011).

In this way as well, then, 3-year-olds have a sense of the conventional nature of conventional norms, that is, that these norms have been decided on by, and thus apply only to, one’s own group but that members of other groups may not be aware of or need not follow the same conventions. The same is not true of moral norms involving harm, toward which they take a more universalist approach.

According to this research, 3-year-old children are capable of distinguishing between conventional right (rules of conduct that are valid only because our group has agreed to them) and natural right (rules of conduct that are valid across all human associations).  Assuming that the children in the study are not students of political theory and have not been carefully coached by grad student parents, they seem to have an instinct grasp of the difference between nomoi and phusis.  They instinctively understand the difference between rules that are valid because we agreed on them and thus valid only for those who are part of the agreement and rules that bind everyone. 

If this holds up, it is dynamite for political philosophy.  It means that culture and nature are not in opposition, as social and political theory have supposed since the early moderns.  Culture, or social construction, is not something that takes place in some realm isolated or at least insulated from nature.  Instead, culture is a subcategory of nature.  Fish swim, dogs pee on fire hydrants, and human beings make table manners.  This gives full weight to the conventional nature of conventional norms and at the same time allows us to recognize universal standards by which those norms may be judged.  It makes it possible to respect and tolerate culture differences but also satisfies an apparently natural human yearning to know that some things are simply right and others wrong. 

The Evolutionary Origins of Human Autonomy

I am working on a paper on autonomy.  Here are some preliminary reflections. 

This essay concerns the biological origins of human autonomy and thus involves the intersection of biology and political science.  My point of departure is the assumption that the two fields of inquiry are interdependent.  It is not possible to fully understand human autonomy, individual or collective, without understanding its biological origins.  Likewise, to recognize that genuine autonomy emerges from the evolutionary history of life on earth is to understand how metaphysically robust the phenomenon of life really is.  This approach avoids both reductionism and any hint of vitalism; it allows biology and the human things to reveal themselves for what they are in the context of the natural world as a whole. 

One thing that the Socratic philosophers understood better than their modern counterparts is that the possibility of science rests on the assumption that human intelligence (or Nous, as the Greeks called it) operates on the same principles by which nature is ordered; otherwise, nature is forever unintelligible.  Accordingly, I begin with a consideration of the intelligible meaning of the word autonomy. 

The philosopher Ernst Mayr famously argued that biology is an autonomous science.  He meant by that not that biology contradicts or is free from the principles of physics, but that biology has more principles than physics.  I take that as the first clue that autonomy emerges as a space between two realms of laws.  This turns out to reflect the history of the term. 

The term autonomy is a classical Greek word built on two important roots.  Auto means self, as in Socrates himself.  It is a very basic word that functions both as a pronoun (him or it) and as an adjective, as in autoagathos, which means “good in itself”. 

The second root word is nomos.  This word is usually translated as “law.”  Like a lot of Greek words, it is borrowed from an earlier use.  It originally meant an enclosed pasture.  A nomos was boundary imposed by human beings that confined the movement of herd animals but allowed them to move freely (according to their own natural laws) within that boundary.  It was adopted to indicate both explicit, codified law and the unwritten moral rules that bound the citizens together into a polis.  I am pretty sure that Nietzsche’s phrase “herd instinct” derives from this Greek root. 

Herodotus uses the term when he describes the history of the Medes.  When they threw off the rule of the Assyrians, they achieved autonomy.  They later lost it when they allowed a man known for his fair judgment to establish a tyranny over them. 

Herodotus 1.95 [2] Ἀσσυρίων ἀρχόντων τῆς ἄνω Ἀσίης ἐπ᾽ ἔτεα εἴκοσι καὶ πεντακόσια, πρῶτοι ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν Μῆδοι ἤρξαντο ἀπίστασθαι, καὶ κως οὗτοι περὶ τῆς ἐλευθερίης μαχεσάμενοι τοῖσι Ἀσσυρίοισι ἐγένοντο ἄνδρες ἀγαθοί, καὶ ἀπωσάμενοι τὴν δουλοσύνην ἐλευθερώθησαν. μετὰ δὲ τούτους καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ἔθνεα ἐποίεε τὠυτὸ τοῖσι Μήδοισι.   96. [1] ἐόντων δὲ αὐτονόμων πάντων ἀνὰ τὴν ἤπειρον, ὧδε αὖτις ἐς τυραννίδα περιῆλθον.

The Assyrians ruled Upper Asia for five hundred and twenty years, and from them the Medes were the first who made revolt. These having fought for their freedom with the Assyrians proved themselves good men, and thus they pushed off the yoke of slavery from themselves and were set free; and after them the other nations also did the same as the Medes: and when all on the continent were thus independent, they returned again to despotic rule as follows:--

Thucydides uses the same term to indicate the self-government of Greek cities and Xenophon follows suit when he continues the history of the war between the Athenians and the Spartans. 

Xenophon also uses the term in his Republic of the Lacedaimonians to indicate the practice in most Greek cities of emancipating children when they become adults.  They are then allowed to be autonomous, which means that they are self-governed with respect to their own families. 

Xenophon, The Republic of the Lacedaimonians, 3.1  Ὅταν γε μὴν ἐκ παίδων εἰς τὸ μειρακιοῦσθαι ἐκβαίνωσι,  τηνικαῦτα οἱ μὲν ἄλλοι παύουσι μὲν ἀπὸ παιδαγωγῶν, παύουσι δὲ ἀπὸ διδασκάλων, ἄρχουσι δὲ οὐδένες ἔτι αὐτῶν, ἀλλ’ αὐτονόμους ἀφιᾶσιν·

When a boy ceases to be a child, and begins to be a lad, others release him from his moral tutor and his schoolmaster: he is then no longer under a ruler and is allowed to go his own way.

This does not mean, of course, that the young adult is free from the laws of his city; it does mean that he is in some sense free within the bounds of those laws. 

Autonomy then literally means “self-law”.  It indicated both individual and communal independence: a person or a political community that lived under its own laws.  A political community is free when it is free from the authority of other communities and lords.  A man enjoyed autonomy when he could act of his own free will. 

However, and more revealing, a poet enjoys autonomy when he exercises poetic license and an animal enjoys autonomy to the extent that it can range freely.  Poetic license frees the poet from some convention but it frees him to institute boundaries of his own.  Without boundaries, his poetry cannot have meaning, as all meaning binds.  An animal that ranges freely will nonetheless range within a boundary set by its nature.  It will not go where there is likely to be neither food nor mates nor comfort, but it will turn aside on its own and not for any fence. 

The idea of autonomy extends along three dimensions.  One opens up a space between the natural laws of animal instinct and the artificial boundaries imposed by human husbandry.  The second opens a space between some human community and a larger community seeks authority over it.  The third opens between the individual human being and some larger human community of which he or she is a member. 

Autonomy means liberty rather than freedom.  Freedom is freedom from.  It is simple release.  Liberty is self-government, which is to say, self-legislation.  The topic of this essay is the biological origin of that space within which autonomy is possible.  I will argue that this space opens up with the emergence of human beings as moral and political animals. 

We were social animals before we became human animals.  Social animals must learn to live together.  In a harem species, this is achieved by the dominion of an alpha male whose rule, while he rules, is unchallenged.  In our own species, like our chimpanzee cousins, the position of the dominant individual was never so secure.  Our ancestors evolved into self-legislating creatures.  We were able to internalize rules that allowed us to live within the group but that also allowed the group to resist the domination of would-be tyrants.  We needed to cooperate, as cooperation was the key to social power.  At the same time, cooperation opens up the possibility of cheating and exploitation.  These tensions open the space for human autonomy.