Political Morality & Natural Right

I have been writing furiously in recent days, trying to complete my chapter in the Handbook of Biology and Ethics.  I am writing on political ethics, a branch of political science dealing with the ethics of process (what political actors may do in the conduct of their offices) and the ethics of policy (what ends political actors should pursue).  One might ask why political ethics is not a branch of ethics generally, which is under the umbrella of modern philosophy. 

As an unreconstructed Platonist, I won’t settle for the easy answer (we had to put it somewhere).  I look for some key idea that links it back to politics proper rather than to modern ethics which is concerned above all with how individuals should act.  I find that idea in the distinction between public and private morality.  Almost everyone acknowledges this distinction.  Acts that would be condemned as kidnapping or murder are considered legitimate cases of imprisonment and execution if they are done with political authority. 

This distinction is very old.  Plato’s noble lie is noble because it justifies the distribution of authority in the best regime by a lie about the distribution of virtuous souls.  Aristotle acknowledges (with neither endorsement nor condemnation) that the ostracism (or murder) of certain individuals may be necessary in certain regimes, if those individuals cannot be assimilated to the social arrangement.  Machiavelli elevates the distinction to the foundation of true virtue.  The virtue of princes is the genuine article.  It is the power to create and ruthlessly employ armed power.  Such power alone can create law and order, upon which the artificial, make believe virtue of ordinary citizens and subjects depends. 

The modern distinction between public and private morality follows Machiavelli in assuming that, prior to the establishment of civil society, human beings are free to do pretty much whatever they please (and is in their power to do).  When they enter into civil society, individuals surrender that power to the sovereign.  Hobbes and Spinoza think that this necessarily means that the sovereign power is under no moral constraints.  Since there is no natural or divine morality effective over men, absolute power has to reside somewhere.  Locke argued that a basic moral sense is present even in the state of nature and that it is precisely this moral sense (expressed as righteous indignation) that necessitates the establishment of governments.  I believe that, but I am not sure that Locke believed it.  At any rate, the idea that individuals cede their natural liberty to government is the foundation of the modern idea that government can do what private individuals are morally forbidden to do. 

The modern argument, resisting on the idea that government is representative of its subjects, is plausible.  However, since the ancients also drew such a distinction without relying on the notion of representation, I think that the basic idea must be deeper than that. 

The ancient philosophers supposed that human beings are moral and political animals by nature.  The family and small bands of families (hunter-gatherers?) are societies that human beings form as much by nature as animals gather in herds.  Early modern political thought began by viewing human beings as individuals and all social interaction, beyond the most explicitly biological and temporary ones, as artificial.  Both the ancients and the moderns agree on one thing: genuinely political societies, with laws and offices, are in some sense artificial.  Political communities may allow human excellence to be fully expressed, as Plato and Aristotle thought.  Or, they may merely supply the defects of the state of nature, as Hobbes and Spinoza thought.  Either way, political regimes are the result of human artifice.  If they are not founded deliberately, they emerge from the deliberate attempt to solve ever present problems. 

Here, biopolitics and the biosocial sciences generally, have something to say.  Human beings “were not adapted for large-scale, anonymous collaboration” as Emily Wyman and Michael Tomasello say in their contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.  Such societies emerged too recently for that, over the last ten thousand years.  To have laws and offices, someone has to have the leisure to make the one and fill the other.  The first cities depended on the material surpluses made possible by settled agriculture and animal husbandry and the cultural advances underwritten by the exchange of technologies and goods across great distances.  Once such communities arose, the history of human animals gave way to human history. 

As I happen to like living in the 21^st century, I am glad that all that happened in its course.  We are much more interesting animals than once we were.  It happened, however, at a terrible cost.  For most the last 10,000 years, a few people ate high on the hog while most people got barely enough to make it through another day of labor.  At any rate, political societies made human beings far more dependent on one another for both sustenance and security and the latter because they made human beings far more dangerous to one another. 

As Rousseau ruefully acknowledged, there is no going back.  Even if we would all be better off herding sheep and gathering roots, we ain’t gonna.  I am hopeful that human progress will continue and that the future will be better than we can yet imagine.  Meanwhile, some regimes are better than others, and almost any regime is better than a collapsing regime.  If you don’t believe me, ask someone in Benghazi. 

I suspect that the distinction between public and private morality is rooted in the fact that our natural moral emotions have been shaped by natural selection for pre-political communities.  Plato’s Socrates argues in the Republic that the truly natural human community is the city of pigs, a community devoted to the satisfaction of largely natural desires: food, shelter, basic comfort and social intercourse.  Political communities offer human beings much more than this: leisure, surplus, arts and sciences, etc.  To get such communities, however, we have to build artificial institutions out of the natural moral inclinations that we have to work with.  In natural communities morality is enforced by social sanction alone.  In political communities, morality requires a sovereign power with all the distinctions in status that that implies. 

The “problem of dirty hands,” which means the occasional necessity for doing morally reprehensible things for the sake of the regime, is a consequence of the awesome power of political regimes.  Yes, they give human beings much more than nature can provide.  They also create terrible possibilities.  No hunter-gatherer community could produce a Hitler, or Stalin, or Kim.  Winston Churchill had to refrain from warning a British town that it was about to be bombed or else risk the success of the D-Day invasion by tipping off the Germans that we had deciphered their coded communications.  I think he was right to do so, but what a burden! 

According to legend, a Jewish army was once wiped out because it refused to fight on the Sabbath.  A suspension of ordinary law was required.  Human beings are moral animals.  Any decent regime must respect and incorporate natural right.  When we must do things that offend natural right, the only justification can be that it is necessary to protect a regime where such natural justice is possible.  The Jews reached the same conclusion.  Sometimes the law must be put aside if only for the survival of the community that cherishes the law. 

Biology & Political Ethics

I am writing a chapter in a forthcoming Handbook of Biology & Politics.  My chapter will focus on Biology & Political Ethics.  Here are some first reflections on the topic.  

Political Ethics concerns the field of right and wrong behavior in a political context.  As is common with term ethics, it can indicate both ethical behavior in politics and the study of such behavior.  Modern political ethics as a field tends to focus on the distinction between public and private morality, with the former indicating the actions of any political officer from a chief executive down to a voter or jury member, and the moral evaluation of policies.  Classical political ethics (Plato and Aristotle) tended to gravitate between two perspectives that were presented as complete in themselves: the political community (or polis) as a whole, which consisted of classes, villages, families, and citizens, and the individual as a whole, whose life involved such roles as husband, father, friend, citizen, solider, etc. 

In the light of that distinction, a problematic becomes visible for anyone wanting to write about biology and political ethics.  The classical political philosophers understood human beings to be political animals.  Every actual polis was in some sense artificial‑the work of particular human beings acting at a particular time. Moreover, the life in a polis made affordable more pleasures and leisure than biological necessity required, and so and so taught human beings to desire such things.  Nonetheless, the tendency to form political communities is as much an expression of human nature as the formation of the pack is an expression of lupine nature. 

The early modern political philosophers, by contrast, understood man as a solitary animal by nature.  Political institutions are artificial, the result of human inventiveness applied to the inconveniences of nature.  They allow human beings to conquer both human and non-human nature, but have as much to do with biology as a bear taught to ride a bicycle.  This has been the dominant view of moral and political thought until very recently.

To argue that biology has something to offer political ethics is thus to side with the ancients against the moderns.  I am inclined to think that this is inevitable but it doesn’t mean that it is possible or necessary to reject the history of work in modern political ethics.  It does mean that we must reinterpret it. 

Ethics is about morality.  Morality is an existential dimension of the human being, along which possible choices are arrayed between those that are obligatory, those that are forbidden, and those that are neither.  Because it involves a choice between possible actions, the right is a subspecies of the good.  The good is the choice worthy.  Whenever something‑an objection or action, a state of mind or physical experience, is worth choosing, to that degree it is good.  Thus the healthy is good and the unhealthy bad.  When something is simply good, there is reason to choose it and no reason not to choose it, then morality is not involved.  There is no ethical weight.  Often, however, there are some reasons to choose something and some reasons to avoid choosing it and it is necessary to weigh the one against the other.  Often enough, one is tempted to do what one ought not to do, which is to say that what looks good is not the same as what is really good.  Whenever that happens, morality is involved.  That is what Ethics is about. 

Human beings may be more than animals but we are at least animals.  However marvelous our powers of conscious deliberation may be, they are elaborations of mental schema that are much older than our species.  The dilemmas that other animals face are the result of a tension between distinct evolved inclinations.  The coyote wants the bait but has learned to be wary of the trap.  Human beings are social animals and many of our moral emotions have been fashioned by natural selection to encourage cooperation.  Not all of our evolved psychological mechanisms encourage cooperation and some of them are designed precisely to avoid the costs of cooperation or to allow us to cut and run when cooperation collapses.  We are, as my sainted Grandmother put it, a piece of work. 

When we act politically at any level we are employing the capacities with which our evolutionary history has provided us.  No matter how artificial our political institutions and processes may be, we are still political animals making choices.  Political ethics cannot be understood without rooting it in human biology.