Rights from Wrongs: The Sense of Injustice

From its first publication in 1975, Edward O. Wilson's book Sociobiology has stirred disputes over his claim that ethics is rooted in human biology. Our deepest intuitions of right and wrong, he asserted on the first page of the book, are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved by natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural and social environment. In 1998, Wilson's book Consilience renewed the controversy as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments. Human nature is not a product of genes alone or of culture alone, Wilson insisted. Rather, human nature is constituted by "the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction rather than another, and thus connect the genes to culture" (164). The biology of the moral sentiments would be the study of the "epigenetic rules" of moral experience as shaped by the complex interaction of genetic propensities and cultural learning. Wilson has often used Edward Westermarck's theory of the incest taboo as a good example of this. (Westermarck's theory has been the subject of various posts on this blog.)

When I first read Wilson's Sociobiology in 1975, I initially rejected his biological explanation of ethics as being too crudely reductionistic in its appeal to mere emotion as the ultimate ground of ethical experience. At the time, I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago writing a dissertation on Aristotle's Rhetoric, and I noticed that Aristotle invoked a natural moral sense as expressed in moral emotions such as anger, indignation, shame, kindness, and pity, which made me think that Wilson's reliance on the moral emotions might be more defensible that I had at first believed. I also became interested in Aristotle's biological writing and in how his biological reasoning influenced his moral and political philosophy. Like Wilson, Aristotle explained the natural sociality of human beings by comparing them with other social animals such as the social insects. When Aristotle spoke of "natural right"--natural standards of right and wrong--he appealed to the biological propensities of human nature. Eventually, I changed my mind about Wilson's argument and concluded that his Darwinian explanation of ethics could be defended as a modern biological restatement of a tradition of ethical naturalism that began with Aristotle. Later, I began to see how the rhetorical tradition of studying the moral psychology of the emotions, which began in Book 2 of the Rhetoric, was renewed by David Hume and Adam Smith, in their moral philosophizing on the moral sentiments, which then shaped the moral philosophy of Darwin and Westermarck.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests that natural justice or natural law is enforced by moral passions such as anger and indignation. The fearful inclination of human beings to commit injustice is balanced by the fearful desire of the victims of injustice for retribution. Natural justice is expressed most clearly and powerfully not as a sense of justice, but as a sense of injustice.

This Aristotelian idea has been elaborated in two recent books--Edmond Cahn's The Sense of Injustice (1964) and Alan Dershowitz's Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origin of Rights (2004). Both are lawyers--and thus following in Aristotle's tradition of legal rhetoric--and both see the sense of injustice forcefully expressed in the revulsion against Nazism and the Holocaust. Both find the sense of justice unreliable because perfect justice is too abstract to be practically applicable and too vague to be generally comprehensible. Our direct conception of justice requires some contemplative or theoretical grasping of the mind that cannot move us to action. As Aristotle said, thought by itself moves nothing. But our response to some real or imagined act of injustice is passionate and active. Rather than philosophizing about justice, which requires a top-down deductive reasoning, our experience with injustice moves through a bottom-up inductive process of emotional engagement, in which justice becomes the active process of preventing or remedying whatever evokes moral emotions of disgust. As practicing lawyers, both Cahn and Dershowitz are dissatisfied by legal philosophizing about perfect justice abstracted from the realities of human experience. But both see a passionate sense of injustice in human beings that animates law. (Is this what Leon Kass means by the "wisdom of repugnance"?)

Although Cahn does not cite Westermarck, he follows a Westermarckian line of thought in suggesting that this sense of injustice could be rooted in a biological nature shaped by evolutionary history in which animals are naturally inclined to resist attack. In social animals, this natural resistance to attack can be extended by sympathy or empathy to one's fellow animals, so that one perceives an attack on others as an attack on oneself. The intellectual capacities of human beings allow them to extend this sympathetic concern to ever wider circles of human community and to formulate rules of justice as generalizations of our experience of retributive emotions directed against aggressors and cheaters.

Consequently, this sense of injustice requires a blending of reason and emotion. Marlene Sokolon develops this point well in her reading of Aristotle in Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion (2006). Marlene also shows how Aristotle's moral and political psychology of reason and emotion in combination as shaping political judgment has been confirmed by recent research in neuroscience and evolutionary theory. The human brain as a product of evolutionary history serves the needs of the human animal through a complex interaction of cognitive reasoning and affective responsiveness. (Marlene originally wrote her book as a dissertation under my direction at Northern Illinois University, where she combined the fields of political philosophy and biopolitics.)

Cahn captures this same point when he writes:

"The sense of injustice now appears as an indissociable blend of reason and empathy. It is evolutionary in is manifestations. Without reason, it could not serve the ends of social utility, which only observation, analysis, and science can discern. Without empathy, it would lose its warm sensibility and its cogent natural drive. It is compounded, indissolubly, of both and can subsist on neither alone. For sheer rationality without an empathic fundament would usually degenerate to extreme skepticism and doubt; while empathy, uninformed by reason, would serve up only the illiterate gropings of animal faith. Together reason and empathy support our juridic world. Through them men may learn to identify their own interests with those of an unlimited community, no longer doubting in philosophy what they do not doubt in their hearts" (26).

Like Cahn, Dershowitz argues that there is less agreement about perfect justice than there is about gross injustice. He conveys his thought through the snappy title of his book--"rights from wrongs." Rejecting both natural law theory and legal positivism as inadequate, he summarizes his position in this way:

"Rights do not come from God, because God does not speak to human beings in a single voice, and rights should exist even if there is no God.
"Rights do not come from nature, because nature is value-neutral.
"Rights do not come from logic, because there is little consensus about the a priori premises from which rights may be deduced.
"Rights do not come from the law alone, because if they did, there would be no basis on which to judge a given legal system.
"Rights come from human experience, particularly experience with injustice. We learn from the mistakes of history that a rights-based system and certain fundamental rights--such as freedom of expression, freedom of and from religion, equal protection of the laws, due process, and participatory democracy--are essential to avoid repetition of the grievous injustices of the past. Working from the bottom up, from a dystopian view of our experiences with injustice, rather than from the top down, from a utopian theory of perfect justice, we build rights on a foundation of trial, error, and our uniquely human ability to learn from our mistakes in order to avoid replicating them.
"In a word, rights come from wrongs" (8-9).

As distinguished from "natural rights" and "positive rights," Dershowitz is concerned with "nurtural rights," because he explains the need for moral rights as something that human beings have discovered by experience over history. Human beings have discovered by painful experience that they need to secure certain rights--life, liberty, property, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on--to protect themselves from the gross injustices that human beings have experienced when those rights are not secured. The very idea of "rights" is a historical invention. (The Straussians would say it was invented by the early modern political philosophers.) And for that reason, Dershowitz identifies himself as a historical relativist. Rights are not discovered as inherent within nature or as commands of God. There are no external sources of rights, because rights arise within human historical experience.

But still Dershowitz does not see these rights as capriciously arbitrary. Rights work to protect us against injustices only if they are stable over time. But they do change over time. And unlike most of his fellow liberals, Dershowitz notes that historical experience can lead not just to the expansion of rights but also to their contraction, because we can decide that excessive concern for rights has made us less secure. For example, the experience of facing great emergencies, such as terrorist attacks, might push us towards contracting some individual rights in order to make government more effective in capturing and punishing our enemies. The process of learning by trial and error the lessons of history as to resolving conflicts of rights and the balance between liberty and security is fallible. But there is no infallible alternative. And because learning from historical experience with rights is so fallible, there will always be some honest disagreement.

In effect, Dershowitz is restating what Aristotle recognized as the inescapable uncertainty and variability in practical affairs for which we need prudence or practical judgment where demonstrative proof is impossible. That's why rhetorical argumentation is so important. With its appeal to both reason and emotion and its reliance on historical experience and common opinions, rhetorical persuasion prevails where abstract logic would fail. That's why it's so hard to understand why political theorists and political scientists pay so little attention to rhetorical theory. By contrast, lawyers like Dershowitz and Cahn understand from their legal practice the primacy of rhetorical persuasion in practical life.

Dershowitz admits that there is no absolute line of separation between rights and preferences. Rights are just strong preferences, and the strength of those preferences can change over time. But still we can identify rights as "those fundamental preferences that experience and history--especially of great injustices--have taught are so essential that the citizenry should be persuaded to entrench them and not make them subject to easy change by shifting majorities" (81).

Slavery and the Holocaust are paradigms of injustice. And so the modern consensus that slavery and genocide violate human rights is strong. But this emerged only through historical experience. After all, for thousands of years, many people thought slavery was naturally rooted or divinely commanded or both. But eventually, the sense of the injustice of slavery evoked by empathy for the slaves and antipathy towards the slavemasters convinced most people that freedom from slavery should be a human right. Actually, the fight against slavery continues today, because while the open practice of chattel slavery has mostly disappeared, various kinds of disguised slavery continue.

In his effort to avoid the mistakes of both the absolutist natural law position and the absolutist positive law position, Dershowitz sometimes suggests a culturalist relativism that would provide no stable ground at all for justice or rights. If rights are nothing more than cultural preferences that arbitrarily change across time and across cultures, then it's hard to see that rights have any compelling force.

Dershowitz would benefit from adopting the three-leveled analysis that I have defended on this blog, by which moral and political order can be seen as requiring natural law, customary law, and positive law. From the position of Darwinian natural right, we could say that human moral experience arises from the complex interaction of moral instincts, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Contemporary scientific research on Darwinian moral psychology supports this. For example, neuroscience is uncovering the neural bases for these three levels of moral experience. As a product of evolutionary history, the human brain is instinctively endowed with natural propensities to moral emotions such as anger, indignation, love, and empathy. The human brain is also adapted for social learning in which our moral emotions are specified with social content reflecting our individual and cultural history. The human brain is also adapted for individual judgment by which we respond as unique individuals to unique circumstances constrained by our moral instincts and our moral traditions.

Moreover, the neuroscientific study of moral experience confirms the Darwinian and Westermarckian understanding of moral life as requiring a combination of cognitive reasoning and emotional response. Behavioral game theory provides experimental evidence for this biological moral pscyhology.

Actually, Dershowitz himself comes close to this Darwinian understanding when he concedes that although he wants to avoid the "naturalistic fallacy" of inferring a moral "ought" from a natural "is," he also wants to avoid the "nurturalistic fallacy" of assuming that nurture determines the content of morality without any influence from nature (35). He notes that moral experience requires the interaction of nature and nurture. After all, his general argument about "rights from wrongs" assumes a natural human propensity for moral emotions of disapproval or disgust in response to gross injustices (8-9, 17, 31-32, 35, 62-63, 79, 112, 121-25, 134-36).

Dershowitz is famous for being one of the most vigorous defenders of Israel. In books like The Case for Israel and The Case Against Israel's Enemies, he has argued that those who have turned the international human rights movement against Israel fail to see that the human rights record of Israel is far superior to that of its Islamic enemies.

I will be writing some future posts on this, because this illustrates how human rights become contested. Originally, the modern human rights movement was unanimous in its moral revulsion against the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, which favored the establishment of Israel. But now the enemies of Israel try to evoke a similar moral revulsion against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as a violation of human rights. The disagreement in this debate is both rational and emotional--rational in so far as it turns on a disagreement about the relevant facts and emotional in so far as it turns on differing emotional responses. Even if we cannot resolve such disagreement through demonstrative reasoning, we can arrive at some judgment through rhetorical debate between the advocates on both sides.

For a small sample of the many posts pertinent to this topic, go here, here, here, here, and here.

Did Darwin Naturalize Genocide?--Or Does Right Make Might?

The longest chapter in my book Darwinian Natural Right is on slavery, because the history of the debate over slavery illustrates how a Darwinian understanding of evolved human nature supports moral judgment. We can see that slavery is wrong because it violates a natural moral sense rooted in human biology.

Part of my argument in that chapter concerns Darwin's moral condemnation of slavery and how he saw his science of the biological unity of the human races as subverting scientific racism. The evidence for that interpretation of Darwin is now strengthened by a new book--Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (2009). Desmond and Moore show how Darwin's life-long opposition to slavery influenced his science, and in particular, how his evolutionary science of Homo sapiens as one species refuted the scientific racism of those who claimed that the human races were actually separate species, and that the inferior races were naturally adapted for slavery.

And yet there's an ambiguity in the message of the Desmond and Moore book. On the one hand, their dominant theme is how Darwin's opposition to slavery manifested his humanitarian morality. On the other hand, they occasionally suggest that Darwin's theory of evolution could be interpreted as a "biologizing of genocide" (147-55, 318, 326, 337, 344). The problem is indicated in the full title of Darwin's most famous book--The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Does this mean that the extinction of the "lower races" by the more "favoured races" must be accepted as part of nature's evolutionary "struggle for life"? If so, then was Adolf Hitler correct to see this as scientific support for his Nazi ideology as based on the the triumph of the Master Race in the struggle against inferior races? Would this confirm Richard Weikart's "Darwin-to-Hitler" thesis?

During his trip on the Beagle, Darwin saw the brutality of European colonists in enslaving others and extinguishing aboriginal peoples in warfare. Near the end of his Voyage of the Beagle (Doubleday, 1962), Darwin recounts that every time he hears a "distant scream," he is reminded of his painful feelings from hearing slaves being tortured in Brazil. He describes in vivid language some of the "heart-sickening atrocities" he observed, and he concludes:

"Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter;--what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children--those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own--being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendents, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty; but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin" (496-98).

Darwin's reference at the end--to British efforts "to expiate our sin"--is to the acts of the British Parliament in outlawing the slave trade in 1807 and abolishing slavery in the British colonies in 1833. Most importantly, the outlawing of the slave trade was enforced by the Royal Navy sailing the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas capturing slave ships and liberating their human cargo. This anti-slavery policy was induced through an extended campaign by anti-slavery societies that wrote up reports with detailed descriptions of the cruelty of slavery, reports that were widely published to provoke moral emotions of revulsion. Thus, these groups employed the same rhetorical tactics as are used today by human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Darwin's writings contributed to the moral rhetoric of abolitionism in three ways. The first way is by expressing his own moral outrage at the atrocities of slavery, which he did in his Voyage of the Beagle book and elsewhere. Desmond and Moore stress this.

But they don't recognize a second way in which he supported abolitionist morality. From the notebooks that he began after returning from his voyage, we can see that in explaining the evolution of morality, he relied on those theories of morality promoted by David Hume and Adam Smith that emphasized moral emotions or moral sentiments based on sympathy or fellow feeling. By extending ourselves imaginatively into the lives of others, we mirror their emotional experiences, and thus feel disapproval when they are unfairly harmed by others. In the Descent of Man, Darwin elaborated his theory of how this natural moral sense could have evolved. He thus supported the moral rhetoric of abolitionism by showing that the abolitionist appeal to moral emotions of repugnance towards slavery based on our sympathy for the slaves expresses the emotional roots of moral experience. Later, Edward Westermarck elaborated this theory of morality as founded on moral emotions. And, most recently, biological research on the emotional character of morality--including the neural bases of moral emotions--has deepened the science of Darwin's theory. Desmond and Moore don't see the importance of this Darwinian account of morality in sustaining the moral case against slavery.

Desmond and Moore stress the third way in which Darwin's writing supported abolitionism--his argument for the unity of the human races. Through much of the nineteenth century, there was an intense scientific debate between the polygenists who argued that the human races were actually separate species and the monogenists who argued that the races were varieties of the same human species. The polygenists provided scientific support for the proslavery claim that black slaves belonged to an inferior species, while the monogenists sustained a scientific basis for the unity of the human species as one human family. As Desmond and Moore show, the leaders of the Confederacy in the American Civil War understood the moral and political implications of this scientific debate, because they sent paid Confederate agents to England to support the Anthropological Society of London, founded in 1863, which sponsored the pro-slavery arguments for polygenism.

But then Desmond and Moore admit that their story of Darwin as the humanitarian opponent of slavery and racial bigotry is apparently undermined in two ways. First, in the Origin of Species, Darwin devotes a long passage to his study of the "slave-making instinct" in some ants, which was interpreted by some readers as suggesting that slavery could be justified as natural. In fact, as Desmond and Moore indicate, the discovery of ant slavery by Pierre Huber early in the nineteenth century was cited by pro-slavery authors as a clear example of natural slavery. Desmond and Moore worry that Darwin was "naturalizing the slave-making instinct" (302). But they are reassured that Darwin refers to this as "so extraordinary and odious an instinct." They don't acknowledge, however, that in later editions of the Origin, Darwin dropped the words "and odious." Did Darwin decide that it is not appropriate to morally condemn the behavior of animals that have no moral sense? Desmond and Moore suggest this when they argue that only humans are "reasoning moral beings" who can be held morally responsible for their behavior, and therefore there is no moral analogy between ant slavery and human slavery (303-304). They might have reinforced this point if they had referred to a passage in the Descent where Darwin speculates on how bees might have developed a different moral sense from that of humans if the bees had developed intellectual faculties comparable to those of humans, which suggests that without such intellectual capabilities, there is no moral experience.

In DARWINIAN NATURAL RIGHT, I have a long section on ant slavery. I argue that considering the similarities and differences between ant slavery and human slavery illuminates the biological nature of slavery. The similarities suggest that slavery among ants and humans is rooted in a natural inclination to exploitation. The differences suggest that the uniquely human opposition to slavery is rooted in a natural moral sense that resists exploitation.

There's a second, and more pervasive, way in which Darwin's writing seems to weaken the story of his humanitarianism. Although in his early notebooks, he wrote a note resolving never to use the words "higher" and "lower," he did often distinguish the "civilized races" from the "lower races." He also described the military success of the "civilized races" in extinguishing the "lower races," which he presented as crucial for moral evolution, because those groups that were more loyal and courageous in fighting for their group would be favored by natural selection in defeating those groups that were less loyal and courageous. Desmond and Moore attribute this to the influence on Darwin of Thomas Malthus's depiction of how human beings are driven to compete for scarce resources, and they worry that this pushed Darwin towards "rationalizing the darker side of tribal contacts" (147).

In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin writes:

"Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals--the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying, that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children" (433-34).

He describes in gruesome detail the war he observed in Argentina as General Juan Manual Rosas tried to exterminate the Indians.

". . . This is a dark picture; but how much more shocking is the unquestionable fact, that all the women who appear above twenty years old are massacred in cold blood! When I exclaimed that this appeared rather inhuman, he answered, 'Why, what can be done? they breed so!'

"Every one here is fully convinced that this is the most just war, because it is against barbarians. Who would believe in this age that such atrocities could be committed in a Christian civilized country?" (102-103).

In his Beagle Diary (ed. R. D. Keynes), Darwin wrote:

"If this warfare is successful, that is if all the Indians are butchered, a grand extent of country will be gained for the production of cattle: & the vallies of the R. Negro, Colorado, Sauce will be most productive in corn. The country will be in the hands of white Gaucho savages instead of copper-coloured Indians. The former being a little superior in civilization, as they are inferior in every moral virtue" (181).

Should we worry, as Desmond and Moore do, that this shows Darwin "biologizing colonial eradication" (149)? Is it immoral to teach that the natural history of humanity shows "the stronger always extirpating the weaker"?

But notice, first of all, how Darwin's language conveys a sense of moral tragedy and revulsion--"melancholy," "a dark picture," "shocking," "inhuman," "atrocities," "butchered." Because their advanced agrarian society based on farming and herding gives them economic superiority over aboriginal peoples, those "a little superior in civilization" are also superior in military power although "inferior in every moral virtue."

We might read Darwin as pointing to a problem clearly captured in Pascal's Pensees (fr. 192):

"It is just that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what is stronger should be followed. Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyrannical. . . . We must therefore combine justice and force; and to do this, what is just should be strong, or what is strong should be just."

We might be reminded of Thucydides' famous account of the Melian dialogue, where the Athenian envoys tell the Melian envoys: "you know as well as we do that justice in human arguments is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" (5.89). They go on to declare: "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature, they rule wherever they can" (5.105).

We miss the deep lesson in the Melian dialogue, however, if we see it simply as the triumph of the strong over the weak. The Athenians failed in their attempt to persuade the Melians to surrender without a fight. The Melians fought to the death, forcing the Athenians to suffer casualties during a long siege. So even though the Melians were defeated, their just resistance to unjust aggression inflicted great harm on the Athenians.

Nietzsche presents this lesson in his Darwinian account of morality in Human, All Too Human (92-93). Justice originates as reciprocity between approximately equal powers. But there can also be a "right of the weaker." "If one party, a city under siege, for example, submits under certain conditions to a greater power, its reciprocal condition is that this first party can destroy itself, burn the city, and thus make the power suffer a great loss. Thus there is a kind of equalization, on the basis of which rights can be established. Preservation is to the enemy's advantage."

The natural propensity to take vengeance against injustice through physical violence is a powerful check on injustice. This is conveyed in one of the first moral laws of the Bible: "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Genesis 9:6). The natural human propensity to murder is countered by the natural human propensity to kill murderers. The sense of justice is most clearly manifested in the sense of injustice--the desire to right a wrong by taking vengeance on the wrong doer.

It's an uncomfortable truth that moral history is often decided by acts of violence and war. That's particularly true in the modern history of the debate over moral rights. John Locke's teaching about natural rights begins with his assertion of the natural human right to use force and violence to protect one's life and property. A just government is to secure rights. But when justice is perverted, the people have "no appeal but to Heaven," as in the Old Testament case of Jephtha and the Ammonites, and that means war. The ultimate check on an unjust government is the threat of revolutionary violence.

Similarly, we think of the American Declaration of Independence as a noble expression of the moral principles of rights. But, of course, this was a declaration of war in which the moral and legal debate over rights would be settled by force of arms.

Likewise, when the debate over slavery in the United States reached an impasse, the Civil War resolved the issue by military force. Abraham Lincoln concluded his Cooper Union speech in 1860 by declaring: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Then, in 1863, in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the U.S. as "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." But then he immediately warned that "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." Lincoln must hope that the moral superiority of freedom over slavery can be expressed as military superiority--this is his "faith that right makes might."

Some religious believers say that the only conclusive way to resolve great moral disputes is by appealing to God's moral law as revealed in the Bible. But we should note that the Bible itself is a remarkably bloody book: from the Old Testament to the last book of the New Testament (Revelations), God leads His people in war. Moreover, the Bible didn't resolve the debate over slavery because biblical believers couldn't agree as to whether the Bible supported or condemned slavery. In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln observed that in the division between North and South: "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other."

In fact, as Mark Noll has observed, the Civil War became a theological crisis for biblical believers who could not find in the Bible clear resolution of the moral question of slavery. Noll writes:

". . . The country and the churches were both in trouble because the remedy that finally solved the question of how to interpret the Bible was recourse to arms. The supreme crisis over the Bible was there existed no apparent biblical resolution to the crisis. . . . it was left to those consummate theologians, the Reverend Doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant."

And, in fact, we now know, as a result of the Civil War, that the Bible must condemn slavery as immoral.

This combination of justice and force--so that "right makes might"--continues in the modern history of human rights. The brutal power of Nazism seemed to show the same dark power in human history that Darwin had seen--"the stronger always extirpating the weaker." But ultimately the Nazis were defeated not by force of moral argument but by force of military arms. And then, the moral revulsion against Nazism and the Holocaust led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which declared that "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." Here, then, are the instinctive moral emotions of repugnance against injustice that Darwin and Westermarck saw at the base of all moral experience. Our revulsion against great "wrongs" leads us to assert the "rights" that we want to defend.

The Universal Declaration also states: "it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law." There was a long discussion among the drafters of the Universal Declaration as to whether they should declare a human right to revolution. Some of them were nervous about openly endorsing such a right as encouraging anarchy and subversion of legal government. But they finally agreed that this statement should clearly acknowledge "rebellion against tyranny and opppression" as as "last resort." This statement also implies that we can identify human rights as those conditions for human life that cannot be tyrannically denied without eventually provoking violent rebellion.

We can say, then, that human rights are natural rights in so far as they are enforced by the natural human propensity to take vengeance against, and feel revulsion towards, great injustices.

If this is so, then right does make might.

A few of the many posts that take up related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Evolution for Everyone--Even Biologists?

Those defending the importance of teaching evolutionary science often like to quote a famous remark by Theodosius Dobzhansky (an evolutionary biologist): "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." Some of us would like to expand that claim to read: "Nothing in any of the academic disciplines--the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities--makes sense except in the light of evolution."

Opponents of evolution--including the proponents of creationism and intelligent design--like to challenge such claims. In fact, they argue, evolutionary ideas are not essential to biological research, and they certainly contribute nothing good to the social sciences and humanities.

Oddly enough, it really is true that many biologists have no great interest in evolution, and they certainly don't see evolution as a bridge across all of the intellectual disciplines.

This point comes up in the first issue of the EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium. One of the articles is by Neil Blackstone. Neil is a colleague of mine at Northern Illinois University. He's an evolutionary biologist in the biology department. We have team-taught a course on evolutionary topics that is cross-listed in the political science and biology departments. He has complained to me that his fellow biologists often show little interest in evolutionary reasoning. In this article, he illustrates his point by showing how molecular cell biologists fail to see how evolutionary thinking could help them in their research. In particular, he argues that research on the functioning of the STAT3 protein could be illuminated by considering the evolutionary history of mitochondria as originally bacteria that entered into a symbiotic relationship within eukaryotic cells.

Such thinking is rare, Neil indicates, because evolutionary theorists tend to study genetics and organisms without studying cell biology, while cell biologists often pay no attention to evolution. A similar kind of narrowness is indicated in another article in this same issue of EvoS. The article by Fisher et al. is a report by young evolutionary psychologists on how their careers have developed. One of them--Aaron Goetz--says that while he developed an early interest in evolution in high school, he was not so interested in other areas of biology. "I was (and still am) fascinated by whole organism biology and absorbed in macroevolution but turned off when zooming in to the cellular level. Golgi bodies and ATP transport systems (whatever those are) never excited me" (13). This is remarkable because ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is the primary source of energy for almost every process in the cell requiring energy. As Neil indicates, the STAT3 protein contributes to this vital generation of ATP. But evolutionary psychologists don't think this has any interest for their evolutionary studies, just as many cell biologists have no interest in evolution.

Similarly, another one of the evolutionary psychologists--Karol Osipowicz--reports that many neuroscientists don't apply the principles of evolution to cognition (20). And Steven Platek expresses shock that many biologists don't accept the reasoning of evolutionary psychology (25).

The fundamental problem is that career paths in higher education today often tend to be highly specialized, so much so that even within the same academic department, faculty can hardly talk to one another. Consequently, extending evolutionary reasoning across all areas of biology and then even across other disciplines in a university meets resistance.

But as the EvoS program at Binghamton University shows, the intellectual excitement generated by such expansion of evolutionary ideas will attract thoughtful students and faculty. After all, what can be more exciting than the prospect of that ultimate unification of all knowledge that has always been the seductive promise of liberal education?

For some of my posts on "Darwinian liberal education," go here, here, here, here, here, here, and .here.

The Darwinian Biology of Human Rights

A Darwinian analysis of the modern conception of human rights would turn on at least two main points. The first point would be the primacy of moral emotions in our grasp of human rights. The second would be the need for analyzing human rights as passing through three levels of human moral experience: generic human nature, specified human history, and individual human judgment.

The founding document for the modern human rights movement is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations established a Commission on Human Rights and mandated that it draw up an international bill of rights. The Commission worked on this for two years, from January 1947 to December 1948, when the Third General Assembly of the UN adopted the Universal Declaration.

A fascinating study of the drafting of the Declaration, based on the extensive records of the Commission, is Johannes Morsink's The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, & Intent (1999). Recently, Morsink has published a second book elaborating the philosophic grounds implicit in the document--Inherent Human Rights: Philosophical Roots of the Universal Declaration (2009). Morsink argues that the Declaration assumes a "doctrine of inherent human rights," which rests on two complementary theses about the universality of human rights--the metaphysical universality of human rights as inherent in the human person from birth and the epistemological universality of the outrage felt towards brutality like that of the Nazis as expressing the universal conscience of mankind. He defends "moral intuitionism" as the best philosophic position for understanding the Declaration.

Although I generally agree with Morsink, I think that his unreasonable fear of "essentialism" leads him to play down the importance of human biological nature and the evolved moral emotions as expressed in the Declaration. I also think he is not as critical as he should be in considering some of the dubious rights asserted in the Declaration.

There continues to be great debate over the effectiveness and wisdom of the Declaration and the international human rights movement that it has fostered. But in some respects, its massive influence in the global history of the past sixty years is evident. A large body of international law has been formed to implement the Declaration. Hundreds of human rights groups--like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch--have millions of members around the world. The governments of the world are under constant scrutiny for their human rights records.

The drafting of the Universal Declaration was in itself a remarkable event, because for the first time in human history, representatives of societies from around the world were able to agree on some universal principles of global morality. From the beginning, many people warned that it was impossible to formulate any universal principles of morality. For example, the American Anthropological Association sent a long statement to the Commission suggesting that the cultural relativism of morality would subvert any attempt to agree on any supposed universal morality; and they warned against the ethnocentrism of imposing Western cultural conceptions of rights on the rest of the world. The Universal Declaration and the human rights movement continue to be criticized today for failing to recognize the cultural relativity of all values and the dangers of asserting the universality of ethnocentric values.

Here is how the Declaration begins, with the first two recitals of the Preamble:

"(1) Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
"(2) Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people."

Article 1 declares: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

The reference to "barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind" reminds us, of course, that the Declaration was largely an expression of shared moral revulsion against the Holocaust and the other horrors of Nazism in World War II. Morsink is insightful in showing how the drafting of the document can only be explained as an expression of a universal repugnance towards the atrocities of Nazism. The phrase "conscience of mankind" generalizes from the feelings of outrage that people around the world felt in response to the radical evils of Nazism. Thus, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows us how we derive "rights from wrongs" (a phrase used as the title of a book by Alan Dershowitz). That is to say, we formulate "rights"--justified entitlements to special treatment--from our experience of shocking injustices. The Declaration shows how moral outrage against atrocities expresses a universal morality that can be formulated as human rights rooted in the inherent dignity of all human beings.

While the Commission on Human Rights was drafting the Declaration, UNESCO sponsored a survey of thinkers and writers who were asked to offer advice on the philosophic basis of human rights. Some of their responses were collected into a book with an Introduction by Jacques Maritain--Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (1949). Maritain described the book as "devoted to the rational interpretation and justification of those rights of the individual which society must respect and which it is desirable for our age to strive to enumerate more fully" (9). He reports: "at one of the meetings of a UNESCO National Organization where human rights were being discussed, someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. 'Yes,' they said, 'we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why.' That 'why' is where the argument begins."

Maritain observes that the philosophic debate among those surveyed by UNESCO seemed to come down to a disagreement between those who accepted the idea of "Natural Law" and those who rejected it:

"In the eyes of the first the requirements of his being endow man with certain fundamental and inalienable rights antecedent in nature, and superior, to society, and are the source whence social life itself, with the duties and rights which that implies, originates and develops. For the second school man's rights are relative to the historical development of society, and are themselves constantly variable and in a state of flux; they are a product of society itself as it advances with the forward march of history" (13).

Although Maritain sees no theoretical resolution to this debate, he suggests that the dispute might be moderated if the disputants could see the partial truth in the opposing position. Proponents of natural law should distinguish between rights that secure a "prime necessity" and those that secure a "secondary necessity," while conceding that our knowledge of both depends on the evolution of moral consciousness in history. On the other side, opponents of natural law should see that while many rights are historically conditioned, there are "more primitive rights" that are necessary for the good order of any human society whatsoever.

Catholic Thomists like Maritain see natural law as grounded in God and Nature--or, as the American Declaration of Independence says, "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." In the drafting of the Universal Declaration, Charles Malik of Lebanon was the leading spokesman for this Catholic Thomist position. Malik proposed an article on the family that read: "The family deriving from marriage is the natural and fundamental group unit of society. It is endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights antecedent to all positive law and as such shall be protected by the State and Society." The drafters rejected the second sentence, because they wanted to avoid any religious invocations of God as the source of rights. But they accepted the first sentence affirming the naturalness of the family as the fundamental unit of society, and this became Article 16 of the Declaration. At least implicitly, then, they accepted a purely secular version of natural law thinking, although this Article 16 is the only place where the Declaration refers explicitly to "nature."

At one point in the drafting process, there was another reference to nature. It was proposed that Article 1 should declare that all human beings "are endowed by nature with reason and conscience." As an alternative to this language, the Brazilian delegation proposed: "Created in the image and likeness of God, they are endowed with reason and conscience . . ." Similarly, the Dutch delegation proposed that the first recital of the Preamble should state: "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family, based on man's divine origin and immortal destiny, is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world."

These proposals for religious language about human beings as created in God's image provoked intense debate. Some of the drafters saw a stark opposition between God and nature as alternative sources for human reason and conscience. Bogomolov of the USSR attributed the phrase "by nature" to "French materialist philosophers." Finally, the Brazilians agreed to withdraw their religious language if the phrase "by nature" were dropped, and a consensus formed on this resolution of the dispute.

At one point, a proposed amendment would have changed "by nature" to "by their nature," which conformed to Malik's recollection that "the intention of the Commission on Human Rights had not been to imply that man was endowed with reason and conscience by an entity beyond himself" (UDHR, 287). It is regrettable, I think, that the drafters did not go with this phrase "by their nature," because this would have clearly suggested their understanding that the source of human rights is neither a transcendent God nor a transcendent Nature, but human nature.

But then how exactly does "human nature" give rise to "human rights"? It's easy to see how legal rights are created by legal enactment. But it's harder to see how moral rights can exist as standards for judging legal systems. Legal positivists would say that the only rights are legal rights, and that the idea of human rights as moral rights that exist independently of positive law is pure fiction.

How is it that all human beings are "born" with "inherent dignity" and equal human rights? How does a physical birth as a human being translate into a moral birth as a being endowed with rights? Moral philosophers have tried to find a rational proof for the existence of moral rights or of any standard of right and wrong. But philosophers have never reached any agreement on any such rational proof.

I agree with Morsink that this futile quest of philosophers to find a rational proof for moral standards indicates the fundamental mistake in assuming that morality is a product of pure reason. The shared moral outrage against Nazi atrocities that motivated the drafting of the Universal Declaration illustrates how our moral experience arises not from pure reason alone but from moral emotions, and particularly from emotions of disapproval and disgust.

Even as the memories of World War II and the Nazis fade into distant history, we can still see how the emotions of moral revulsion support the idea of human rights. Go to the websites of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and scan some of their reports. Mostly what these organizations do is simply prepare reports that describe cruelty around the world--torture, rape, murder, slavery, and so on. They don't offer any logical arguments to prove that such behavior is wrong, because they assume that a vivid description of cruel behavior will elicit powerful emotions of disapproval. Those they accuse of perpetrating the cruelty will respond by trying to persuade us that the reports from these human rights groups are factually inaccurate.

So reason does have a role to play here, because we need good rational judgment in gathering and assessing information about what is happening. But once we're confident about the facts of the case, our moral judgment of right or wrong depends on our emotional reaction of approval or disapproval. The Universal Declaration is right: to recognize human rights, we need both "reason and conscience"--reason for factual judgments of truth and falsity and conscience for emotional judgments of right and wrong. Reason also allows us to generalize our moral emotions into moral rules. So that, for example, we judge that as a rule human beings have a right to life because the killing of innocent people would elicit moral emotions of disapproval from any normal human being.

This view of moral judgments as ultimately based on emotions is best elaborated in the Darwinian ethics of Edward Westermarck, which best explains the human nature of human rights. As animals formed by natural selection for social life, Westermarck argues, we are inclined to feel resentment toward conduct that we perceive as painful, and kindly emotion toward conduct that we perceive as pleasurable. The mental dispositions to feel such emotions evolved in animals by natural selection because these emotions promote survival and reproductive fitness: resentment helps to remove dangers, and kindly emotion helps to secure benefits. For the more intelligent animals, these dispositions have become conscious desires to punish enemies and reward friends.

Moral disapproval, for Westermarck, is a form of resentment, and moral approval is a form of kindly emotion. In contrast to the non-moral emotions, however, the moral emotions show apparent impartiality. (Here one can see the influence of Adam Smith's idea of the "impartial spectator.") If I feel anger toward an enemy or gratitude toward a friend, these are private emotions that express my personal interests. In contrast, if I declare some conduct of a friend or enemy to be good or bad, I implicitly assume that the conduct is good or bad regardless of the fact that the person in question is my friend or my enemy. This is because it is assumed that when I call that conduct good or bad, I would apply the same judgment to other people acting the same way in similar circumstances, independently of how it would affect me. This apparent impartiality characterizes the moral emotions, Westermarck reasons, because social life gives birth to moral consciousness. Moral rules originated as tribal customs that expressed the emotions of an entire society rather than the personal emotions of particular individuals. Thus, moral rules arise as customary generalizations of emotional tendencies to feel approval for conduct that causes pleasure and disapproval for conduct that causes pain.

Although Westermarck stresses the moral emotions as the ultimate motivation for ethics, he also recognizes the importance of reason in ethical judgment. He follows Hume, Smith, and Darwin in arguing that ethical experience combines reason and emotion. Emotions, including the moral emotions, depend upon beliefs, and those beliefs can be either true or false. For example, I might feel the moral emotion of disapproval toward someone because I believe he has injured his friends, but if I discover my reflection that the injury was accidental and not intentional, or that his action did not actually cause any injury at all, my emotion of disapproval vanishes. Moreover, since our moral judgments are generalizations of emotional tendencies, these judgments depend upon the inductive use of human reason in reflecting on our emotional experience.

Westermarck's emphasis on the variability, relativity, and subjectivity of ethical experience has provoked some critics to complain that he does not recognize any enduring or universal standards of ethical conduct. It seems to these critics that Westermarck's Darwinian ethics is radically arbitrary. And so it might seem that Westermarck would be on the side of the historical or cultural relativists who deny the very possibility of universal human rights.

Yet Westermarck clearly relies on the uniformity of human nature as a ground for universal ethical principles. One can see this in his massive two-volume survey of the cross-cultural history of morality--The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas--which shows both the unity and diversity of human moral experience. (Don Brown's book Human Universals (1991) shows that some anthropologists are reviving Westermarck's work.) Despite radical differences in ethical judgments, Westermarck concludes, "the general uniformity of human nature accounts for the great similarities which characterize the moral ideas of mankind." Such uniformity must exist, he argues, because despite individual and social variation, human beings belong to the same animal species and therefore display similarities in their mental constitution. Thus, Westermarck's ethical theory does not promote nihilism or irrationalism, for he sees the moral emotions that constitute the basis for his ethics as manifesting the natural propensities of a universal human nature. This appeal to the natural human inclinations makes his account of ethics a restatement of natural law reasoning, but one rooted in an empirical Darwinian science of human nature.

Consider how Westermarck's reasoning would apply to the concept of human rights. A right, he would say, is rooted in the emotion of moral disapproval. To have a right to do something means that it is not wrong to do it. So, for example, that someone has a right to life means that it would be wrong for other people to prevent him from living, that it is their duty to refrain from killing him. Similarly, we could formulate a list of natural moral rights that correspond to those natural human capabilities that elicit sympathetic emotions of approval.

Morsink interprets human rights as corresponding to the "transcultural species-wide capabilities normally inherent in human beings" (IHR, 38). He relies on Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities approach" to justice. She identifies ten "central human capabilities" of which the fulfillment constitute full human flourishing: 1. life, 2. bodily health, 3. bodily integrity, 4. senses, imagination, thought, 5. emotions, 6. practical reason, 7. affiliation, 8. other species, 9. play, 10. control over one's environment. Morsink shows how the articles of the Universal Declaration correlate to Nussbaum's ten capabilities and argues that we should read the Universal Declaration as saying that all human beings have equal rights to develop the ten human functional capabilities.

There is a lot of overlap between Nussbaum's list of ten human capabilities and my list of twenty natural human desires. Both lists correspond to the moral regularities of evolved human nature that arise in Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas.

One problem with Morsink's argument, however, is that he fails to see the distinction between the generic propensities of human nature and the specific entitlements of human rights. Human rights can be humanly universal insofar as they satisfy the natural desires of evolved human nature. But these rights are also culturally contingent insofar as their specific entitlements depend on cultural conditions and individual judgments that are constrained but not determined by human nature.

So, for example, we can agree with the Universal Declaration that family life and marriage are natural and should be protected as human rights, because we can see that human beings as a species are familial animals. At birth, children depend on parental care, and we can agree with Darwin that natural selection has favored the social instincts of parent-child bonding as the primal root of all human sociality. We can see, then, that the physical birth of a child becomes a moral birth insofar as the parents (or other adults assuming parental roles) invest their child with the dignity that comes from their emotional attachment to the child. We know that there are complex neurophysiological mechanisms for reinforcing parental attachment to children, and these same mechanisms can be extended to other human beings.

And yet the Universal Declaration speaks of family life and marriage in generic terms without specifying any particular form of marriage or familial arrangements, which are left up to the cultural circumstances of particular societies. Whether we favor monogamous or polygamous marriages, for example, will depend upon variable cultural history.

As I have indicated in my posts on the incest taboo, Westermarck is most famous for his Darwinian account of the moral rules surround incest avoidance, which illustrates the natural universality and cultural variability of morality. We are naturally inclined to learn to avoid sex with those with whom we have been reared from an early age. So in all human societies, there is a strong tendency to prohibit the marriage of siblings or of parents and children, because this tends to arouse strong emotions of repugnance. But beyond the nuclear family, there is great variation in marriage rules. In some societies, the marriage of cousins is encouraged, while in others it is prohibited.

We should also note that not only is there variation accross societies, there is also variation across individuals. The tendency to learn incest avoidance is a natural propensity for most human beings. But some individuals will not show this propensity. We recognize such natural propensities as "normally" present in human beings. But the temperamental variability of human beings will always produce some people who lack these normal propensities. In extreme cases--psychopaths, for example--we might see human beings who have none of the normal moral emotions, and we must treat these people as moral strangers. The Nazis who carried out the Holocaust showed a "disregard and contempt for human rights" so that their natural human sympathy was somehow blunted or blinded by individual temperament or social circumstances.

One common way in which the moral sense is blunted or blinded is through xenophobia--the natural human disposition to care more for those close to us than for strangers, to distinguish friends and enemies, those in our group and those outside. In extreme cases--as with Nazi Germany--some human beings are dehumanized and thus treated as outside the circle of human sympathy.

The modern human rights movement is obviously an attempt to extend the circle of our moral emotions to embrace all of humanity, or as the Declaration says, "all members of the human family." A Darwinian ethics like that developed by Westermarck allows for such humanitarian or cosmopolitan ethics but within the realistic limits set by human nature.

Darwin saw a history of moral progress in which human sympathy has been gradually extended from the family to small tribes, then to large nations, and eventually to all of humanity. In the Descent of Man, he wrote: "As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." Robert Wright used this quotation as the epigram for his book Nonzero in which he surveyed the entire history of the world as an ever-expanding series of nonzero-sum games of cooperation that moves ultimately to a global community. Darwin believed that this advance of sympathy would eventually extend even beyond humanity to include the lower animals, so that we would see "the most noble attribute of man" in the "disinterested love for all living creatures."

Although this can appear to be a utopian view of morality, I think Darwin indicates that he is realistic in recognizing that our moral concern will always tend to favor those close to us. Westermarck indicates this clearly, and biologists like Frans de Waal have confirmed it. Morsink recognizes this when he speaks of how human rights and duties move outward through a series of concentric circles. We care first and most strongly for ourselves and those bound to us by ties of kinship and friendship. Our moral concern can expand to ever-wider circles to include our extend kin, our clan, our group, our nation, all of humanity, and perhaps even all life forms. But the expansion to the wider circles will occur only in those cases where our provisioning of the inner circles is secure.

Here is where the utopian cosmopolitanism of someone like Peter Singer fails (as I have indicated in chapter 9 of Darwinian Conservatism). Singer is a moral rationalist, who insists--against those like Westermarck who stress the primacy of moral emotions--that morality is ultimately based on pure reason. And the logic of moral reasoning, according to Singer, leads to one fundamental principle--the impartial consideration of the similar interests of all sentient creatures. So, for example, it is immoral to spend money caring for our dying parents that could have been better spent to save distant strangers from starvation. Singer himself admits that he acted immorally when he spent money to care for his dying mother who was suffering from Alzheimer's, because he should have given this money to Oxfam to save the lives of some strangers somewhere in the world. That almost everyone recognizes the absurdity in such positions testifies to the emotional reality of our moral concern as naturally constrained by love of one's own.

Similarly, the human rights movement becomes utopian when it strives for a new world order in which patriotism has been abolished for the sake of absolute cosmopolitanism. To some degree, and in some circumstances, our moral emotions can be extended to "all members of the human family." But that humanitarian morality will always be limited by our naturally predominant concern for ourselves and those close to us.

October 23--The Anniversary of Creation

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

That occurred on October 23, 4004 BC. So today is the 6013th anniversary of the Creation of the world.

At least, that is what we learn from Archbishop James Ussher's Annals of the World, published first in Latin in 1654, with an English translation published in 1658. Ussher used the Bible and secular works of ancient history to calculate a chronology of world history going back to the very beginning with God's Creation.

When I first began reading the Bible as a child, I noticed that the top of the first page of Genesis had 4004 BC as the date. It was a long time before I discovered that this date was not actually in the original text of the Bible, but was added later to some of the texts of the King James translation after Ussher's work.

Ussher was an Anglican Archbishop of Ireland who was a prodigious scholar of the Bible and ancient history. When he died in 1656, he was honored by Cromwell with a burial in Westminster Abbey.

A few years ago, Larry and Marion Pierce--a Canadian couple--spent over four years in editing a new English revision of the Annals, which was published in a beautifully printed leather-bound edition that is available at Amazon.com. The book is widely read by Christians who see it as the alternative to Darwin in laying out a chronology of the history of the world based on biblical revelation rather than the false science of evolution.

Whenever Ussher and his chronology are mentioned today, people are usually ridiculing his work, although it's clear that these people have never actually read Ussher's book. Anyone who reads the book will have to be impressed by the extraordinary range and depth of his thinking, even if one is not persuaded by his reasoning.

As I have indicated in some previous posts on Ussher, reading his book should expose the weakness in the assumption of the "scientific creationists" that the Bible was intended to be a work of divinely revealed scientific history. To derive his chronology, Ussher relies on assumptions and inferences that go well beyond anything in the text of the Bible. For example, the text of Genesis never identifies the exact day of Creation. Ussher assumes that since the Jews used to start their year in autumn, this must reflect some ancient memory of Creation. He then uses astronomical tables to determine that the first Sunday after the autumnal equinox would be October 23 in the Julian calendar. On the Gregorian calender, which we use today, the date would be September 21. So, I guess we're actually a month late in celebrating this anniversary!

To get the year 4004 BC, Ussher relies on dating and particularly genealogies in the Bible. But to fill in the gaps in the biblical dating, Ussher has to go to the texts of ancient historians like Herodotus and Xenophon. The Pierces report that Ussher's book "contains more than twelve thousand footnotes from secular sources and over two thousand quotes from the Bible or the Apocrypha." If the Bible were intended to be a scientific history, why is Ussher forced to rely on secular historical texts to fill in his chronology? Doesn't this suggest that the Bible is more concerned with salvational history rather than scientific history?

My earlier posts on Ussher can be found here.

The Genetic Basis of Human Rights

The modern human rights movement begins with The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The idea of human rights would seem to depend on the idea of human nature. Although the Declaration never speaks of "human nature," it does refer once to nature in declaring that the family "natural"(Article 16). Moreover, the references to the "inherent dignity" of "all members of the human family" and the declaration that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights" implies some shared human nature that is the source of human rights.

Originally, Charles Malik a Lebanese Christian and Thomist proposed the following language for Article 16: "The family deriving from marriage is the natural and fundamental group unit of society. It is endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights antecedent to all positive law." The drafters accepted the first sentence but rejected the second, because they wanted a purely secular statement that did not depend on religious belief. Similarly, proposals to refer in Article 1 of the Declaration to human beings as "created in the image and likeness of God" were not adopted. According to someone like Richard Weikart, in his warnings about the "Darwin to Hitler" connection, disregarding the traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine of human beings as created in God's image makes healthy morality impossible. But clearly, the drafters of the Declaration disagreed, because they thought that the shared repulsion towards Nazi barbarism and the determination to declare a universal morality of human rights that would condemn such barbarism manifested a natural morality that did not depend on religious belief.

This cosmopolitan morality of human rights must somehow be grounded in human biological nature. And yet many of the theorists of human rights are nervous about recognizing such an appeal to human nature because they fear that this would require an indefensible "essentialism." The problem here, as I suggested in a post from a few weeks ago, arises from a false story about "essentialism"--the story that beginning with Aristotle, biological species were regarded as absolutely eternal and invariable in their logically defined "essences."

This will be the first of a series of posts on how a Darwinian conception of human nature supports the modern conception of human rights.

In at least one of the recent documents on human rights, the biological basis of human rights is explicitly recognized. The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights was adopted by UNESCO in 1997 and then ratified by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1998. The text can be found here.

The first four articles are put under the title "Human dignity and the human genome":

Article 1
The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity. In a symbolic sense, it is the heritage of humanity.

Article 2
a. Everyone has a right to respect for their dignity and for their rights regardless of their genetic characteristics.
b. That dignity makes it imperative not to reduce individuals to their genetic characteristics and to respect their uniqueness and diversity.

Article 3
The human genome, which by its nature evolves, is subject to mutations. It contains potentialities that are expressed differently according to each individual's natural and social environment, including the individual's state of health, living conditions, nutrition and education.

Article 4
The human genome in its natural state shall not give rise to financial gains.

Here we can see much of the complexity and tension in appealing to human biology as a ground for human rights. Universal human rights assume a "fundamental unity of all members of the human family," which in turn assumes an underlying unity in the human genome, because membership in the human species requires some shared genetic basis. But the human genome brings about not only the unity of humanity but also its diversity. No two human beings are genetically identical. So even if human beings are roughly equal at birth in being identifiably human, they are not completely identical. Here we can see the implicit worry that some human beings might be excluded from the human family because of genetic differences that some people would consider abnormal or inferior.

We can also see here the fear of genetic reductionism. Although being genetically human is the precondition for being treated with the dignity that human beings deserve, human beings are not fully reducible to human genetics.

The human genome is recognized as a product of evolution and thus subject to evolutionary change through mutations. But there is enough genetic stability to sustain the reality of the human species.

That genetic humanity consists of potentialities that are diversely expressed in each individual through the interaction with the natural and social environment of the individual, which includes physical conditions, bodily functioning, and social learning.

Human genes by themselves do nothing. They shape human life only though genetic potentialities that work through complex interactions with the physical and social world. That's why human biology is much more than genetics. The biological nature of human beings depends on the coevolution of innate tendencies, social history, and individual judgment.

The universality of human genetic nature allows for universal human rights. But the moral history of human rights will reflect the complex contingencies of social and political history.

That we can treat human beings with "dignity" depends on certain natural moral sentiments and on practical judgments about how best to express those sentiments. That requires more thought about how Darwinian science might support the modern language of human rights as a language of cosmopolitan morality.

Incest, Again

Marlene Sokolon was a graduate student of mine who now teaches at Concordia University in Montreal. When she was my student, we had a standing joke between us whenever she would complain about how often in class I wanted to talk about incest.

And here I am bringing it up again! I do that because understanding our moral condemnation of incest touches in some way on almost all of the topics that come up on this blog.

The incest taboo is one of the clearest cases of a human universal, because every human society has some rules about prohibited incest. But there is also variation as to what counts as incest. Even within the same society, there can be great variation, as in the United States where state laws differ as to whether cousins can legally marry.

Our condemnation of incest as immoral illustrates how hard it is to rationally justify moral judgments that depend on deep moral emotions of repugnance.

The Darwinian explanation for the incest taboo--particularly as developed by Edward Westermarck--is the most fully developed example of how Darwinian ethics works. That's why Edward O. Wilson brings it up so often in his writing, and why some of the proponents of evolutionary psychology have devoted so much attention to it.

Three of my previous posts on the incest taboo can be found here, here, and here.

The 24 comments on the first post are fascinating in showing the range of responses that this provokes.