Value of Evolutionary Approaches
14/07/11 20:57
My recent posts on the evolution or responsibility (one, two, and three) might make it seem that I think evolutionary approaches to human nature lack any justification or philosophical insight. Quite the opposite, in fact I think Darwin's own insights about human nature and human morality are on target, and I've praised Mary Midgley's work in the philosophy of human nature (for example, here). Even if we limit ourselves to a discussion of the value of evolutionary psychology I am not sure I am willing simply to dismiss everything concerning EP. For one, how one understands EP remains an open question.
One of the more lucid critics of EP, David Buller, makes this point well. Buller notes that one of the more frustrating aspects of the debates concerning EP consists in the fact that supporters and critics often talk past one another because they fail to reach an agreement on exactly what they are talking about. Sometimes, for instance, the term "evolutionary psychology" is "used simply as a shorthand for 'the evolutionary study of mind and behavior' or as a shorthand for theories 'adapting an evolutionary perspective on human behavior and psychology'" (8). If we limit the term EP to mean one of these two things, then I find it irrational not to be an evolutionary psychologist in the modern period if one is seriously writing about human nature. In fact, one of the motivations I have for writing a book on human nature lies in the fact that people writing in science take no notice of what has been written by Aristotelians and Thomists about human nature, and, conversely, Aristotelians and Thomists take no notice of what is written from an evolutionary perspective. Something must be done to correct this lack of dialogue and bring the two paradigms into conversation with each other. Moreover, from my perspective, the Aristotelians and Thomists here prove more at fault, for it is essential to an Aristotelian approach (and Thomas was an Aristotelian, which is why his writings were condemned for some time after his death) to incorporate the findings of science because Aristotle was (a) an empiricist and (b) a scientist. We cannot, then, understand human nature -- what human beings are - without understanding that they are primarily animals -- animals of a specific nature - a rational nature - but still animals. Thomas states that human beings exist at the top of the ladder of animals and at the bottom of the ladder of spiritual beings because they are embodied spirits. The second reason for writing a book on human nature consists in the fact that modern Cartesian dualism has led us to a severe misunderstanding of the human being and, thus, to the modern reductionist materialism that characterizes much of the science today.
Which brings me to the second understanding of "evolutionary psychology." This more limited sense is that shared by Richard Dawkins, Leda Cosmides, John Toody, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Richard Wright. It includes research "conducted within a specific set of theoretical and methodological commitments" (8). Briefly, these theoretical commitments include the idea that psychological mechanisms (e.g., motivational mechanisms in the brain) formed through natural selection during the Pleistocene era (1.2 mya - 10 kya) when our ancestors (other hominids and cro-magnons) evovled on and spread out from the savannas of Africa. Further, these psychological mechanisms are ill-suited for modern living because the conditions of the African savannas differ considerably and present different adaptive problems than our current agricultural-cum-urban living environment. The methodological commitment concerns the reverse engineering that EP theorists engage in to determine the function of these psychological mechanisms. If they discover a psychological mechanism that appears culturally universal, they have reason to believe that such a psychological mechanism is part of human nature and, thus, arose during the Pleistocene period. In order to determine the function of that mechanism, EP theorists engage in conjectures about what adapted problems early hominids faced that would explain the adaptive value of the psychological mechanism in question. So, if one wanted ot understand why human males philander, one wonders what sort of conditions would make human male philandering a successful strategy for the spread of one's genes (for, essentially, human beings, like all other living organisms, are mere survival machines for the spread of genes).
Concerning this more limited understanding of EP, I have many qualms, some that Buller articulates quite well and others Paul R. Ehrlich articulates. Primarily though, reading a book like Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I find it difficult to stomach the sort of conjecturing to explain how such and such a psychological mechanism could have arisen, because in fact (1) we do not know the specific conditions within which those mechanisms developed, (b) nor do we know the "rival" mechanisms against which the ones that succeeded competed and proved more successful, (c) nor do we have a clear understanding of how the relationships between genes that give rise to the phenotypes that underly these psychological mechanisms make some mechanisms more successful, not because they are singularly more successful, but because, through an accident of nature, it just tends to be tied to some other structure that is overwhelmingly more successful. (If, for example, I have the two highest trump cards in Euchre, regardless of the rest of my hand, I am more likely to win than not ceteris paribus.)
Further, given our extended life-time relative to our ancestors, we may have many psychological mechanisms that evolved that did not increase reproductive success. Depression and manic-depression (bi-polar disorder), for instance, are disorders that arise sometime after menstruation and even in the early 20's that would have had little to no impact on reproductive success. If we can think of negative psychological mechanisms like these, we ought to be able to uncover positive ones that maybe had no impact on human reproductive success. Finally, EP theorists resist the claim that some of our psychological mechanisms could have evolved since the development of agriculture. They wish to explain everything in terms of differential reproductive success during the Pleistocene era. I think this too limited an approach.
Still, I do not want simply to dismiss this more limited understanding of EP. Certainly some of our psychological mechanisms can be understood well in this manner, though not all. The problem is that people like Dawkins and Pinker believe that all psychology can be reduced, one day, to this more limited approach. That comprises one form of reductivism that must be resisted in the more limited understanding of EP.
Still, the value of an evolutionary approach to human nature should not be undervalued. An understanding of our psychological/motivational structures can help us to understand the particular needs that define the lives of homo sapiens. It is specifically those needs that a critical philosophical anthropology seeks to uncover to make a better life for everyone. Thus, I share with Robert Wright the goal of making life better through an understanding of human nature. I reject, however, the idea that this understanding can come completely from evolution.
One of the more lucid critics of EP, David Buller, makes this point well. Buller notes that one of the more frustrating aspects of the debates concerning EP consists in the fact that supporters and critics often talk past one another because they fail to reach an agreement on exactly what they are talking about. Sometimes, for instance, the term "evolutionary psychology" is "used simply as a shorthand for 'the evolutionary study of mind and behavior' or as a shorthand for theories 'adapting an evolutionary perspective on human behavior and psychology'" (8). If we limit the term EP to mean one of these two things, then I find it irrational not to be an evolutionary psychologist in the modern period if one is seriously writing about human nature. In fact, one of the motivations I have for writing a book on human nature lies in the fact that people writing in science take no notice of what has been written by Aristotelians and Thomists about human nature, and, conversely, Aristotelians and Thomists take no notice of what is written from an evolutionary perspective. Something must be done to correct this lack of dialogue and bring the two paradigms into conversation with each other. Moreover, from my perspective, the Aristotelians and Thomists here prove more at fault, for it is essential to an Aristotelian approach (and Thomas was an Aristotelian, which is why his writings were condemned for some time after his death) to incorporate the findings of science because Aristotle was (a) an empiricist and (b) a scientist. We cannot, then, understand human nature -- what human beings are - without understanding that they are primarily animals -- animals of a specific nature - a rational nature - but still animals. Thomas states that human beings exist at the top of the ladder of animals and at the bottom of the ladder of spiritual beings because they are embodied spirits. The second reason for writing a book on human nature consists in the fact that modern Cartesian dualism has led us to a severe misunderstanding of the human being and, thus, to the modern reductionist materialism that characterizes much of the science today.
Which brings me to the second understanding of "evolutionary psychology." This more limited sense is that shared by Richard Dawkins, Leda Cosmides, John Toody, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Richard Wright. It includes research "conducted within a specific set of theoretical and methodological commitments" (8). Briefly, these theoretical commitments include the idea that psychological mechanisms (e.g., motivational mechanisms in the brain) formed through natural selection during the Pleistocene era (1.2 mya - 10 kya) when our ancestors (other hominids and cro-magnons) evovled on and spread out from the savannas of Africa. Further, these psychological mechanisms are ill-suited for modern living because the conditions of the African savannas differ considerably and present different adaptive problems than our current agricultural-cum-urban living environment. The methodological commitment concerns the reverse engineering that EP theorists engage in to determine the function of these psychological mechanisms. If they discover a psychological mechanism that appears culturally universal, they have reason to believe that such a psychological mechanism is part of human nature and, thus, arose during the Pleistocene period. In order to determine the function of that mechanism, EP theorists engage in conjectures about what adapted problems early hominids faced that would explain the adaptive value of the psychological mechanism in question. So, if one wanted ot understand why human males philander, one wonders what sort of conditions would make human male philandering a successful strategy for the spread of one's genes (for, essentially, human beings, like all other living organisms, are mere survival machines for the spread of genes).
Concerning this more limited understanding of EP, I have many qualms, some that Buller articulates quite well and others Paul R. Ehrlich articulates. Primarily though, reading a book like Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, I find it difficult to stomach the sort of conjecturing to explain how such and such a psychological mechanism could have arisen, because in fact (1) we do not know the specific conditions within which those mechanisms developed, (b) nor do we know the "rival" mechanisms against which the ones that succeeded competed and proved more successful, (c) nor do we have a clear understanding of how the relationships between genes that give rise to the phenotypes that underly these psychological mechanisms make some mechanisms more successful, not because they are singularly more successful, but because, through an accident of nature, it just tends to be tied to some other structure that is overwhelmingly more successful. (If, for example, I have the two highest trump cards in Euchre, regardless of the rest of my hand, I am more likely to win than not ceteris paribus.)
Further, given our extended life-time relative to our ancestors, we may have many psychological mechanisms that evolved that did not increase reproductive success. Depression and manic-depression (bi-polar disorder), for instance, are disorders that arise sometime after menstruation and even in the early 20's that would have had little to no impact on reproductive success. If we can think of negative psychological mechanisms like these, we ought to be able to uncover positive ones that maybe had no impact on human reproductive success. Finally, EP theorists resist the claim that some of our psychological mechanisms could have evolved since the development of agriculture. They wish to explain everything in terms of differential reproductive success during the Pleistocene era. I think this too limited an approach.
Still, I do not want simply to dismiss this more limited understanding of EP. Certainly some of our psychological mechanisms can be understood well in this manner, though not all. The problem is that people like Dawkins and Pinker believe that all psychology can be reduced, one day, to this more limited approach. That comprises one form of reductivism that must be resisted in the more limited understanding of EP.
Still, the value of an evolutionary approach to human nature should not be undervalued. An understanding of our psychological/motivational structures can help us to understand the particular needs that define the lives of homo sapiens. It is specifically those needs that a critical philosophical anthropology seeks to uncover to make a better life for everyone. Thus, I share with Robert Wright the goal of making life better through an understanding of human nature. I reject, however, the idea that this understanding can come completely from evolution.
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Evolution of Responsibility part 3
13/07/11 00:05
This is the third of three posts addressing the debate about free will and determinism from the perspective of evolutionary psychology (EP) in the works of Richard Dawkins, Robert Wright, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (M&M), and others. In the first post, I laid out what I took to be the overall confusion within the EP literature about exactly what was up for debate. In the second post, I examined what Wright called one of the clearest accounts of determinism and responsibility in chapter 11 of M&M's Homicide. In this post, I want to address one simple question: How is it that animals developed something like free will?
The primary philosophical task of any enterprise consists in being clear on what exactly one is seeking -- what are the terms of debate, what are the issues addressed, what are the answers proposed. I have shown in the first post that, primarily, EP theorists do not have a clear account of the terms of the debate. In the second post, I showed that, even if (as I believe) free will arose through evolution, EP theorists do not address the right issues. Here, I begin by explaining that one issue that should be addressed is exactly the nature of free will.
I would rather say that, instead of discussing free will -- a nebulous term used in many different ways by philosophers -- we ought to speak of free choice (or free choice of the will, if you insist). The reason I think that free choice comprises better terminology for the debate is three-fold: first, my understanding of free choice arises out of a tradition based in Aristotle who did not even have a conception of will though he did have a conception of voluntary action. Second, the term "will" or "free will" is too loaded for any practical clarity at this time. This point is exemplified in the various EP discussions concerning determinism. Finally, and most importantly, the notion of "choice" over "will" provides a better understanding of exactly how animal evolved to make free, undetermined (but caused) choices.
Animals are presented with choices all the time, particularly those animals that move. Yet, some of these animals experience the choice as determined. A favorite example in the EP lit is that of the dance of the honey bee. The honey bee flies out of its hive and seeks flowers in which to find nectar. It has a choice: fly straight, fly left, fly right. Yet, the choice here cannot be seen as undetermined. A bee's direction is given by the path that other bees in the hive have taken to find nectar or by the smell of nearby flowers. Even the dance that the bee flies when it returns to report the discovery of nectar is determined minutely and has been recorded and studied by scientists.
The choice of the bee differs significantly from the choice of wolf in a hunt. When a pack of wolves hunt, how they form up for the hunt is determined by hierarchy (which, itself, can be challenged at times). When a wolf spots prey, it howls and the chase is on. Yet, when the prey charges one way, why does the wolf charge another? Here, the choice cannot be determined ahead of time: there are simply too many variables for wolf brains to have evolved enough instructions in them to map out the exact hunting pattern of the wolf. Thus, sometimes wolves fail to catch their prey (but only in reality, not in the movies). Wolves learn through experience how to pursue and what works and does not work in the hunt, how to respond to particular moves by particular individuals of differing species (which individuals exhibit their own choices). Now, when I describe the wolf's choices as directed by learning, I live open the possibility that such learning could be more rather than less determinative. The wolf makes quick decisions in the chase as directed by how past chases have gone. Still, there are enough variations of chase that the wolf's learning could not determine in every situation when prey turns left than wolf turn slightly more left. The wolf decides between different options.
Just as you and I decide between differing options in a variety of situation. For example, when we run, we have to decide how to place our feet on the path. Every path is different though similarities exist. I know that running on a path with a lot of twists and turns to be more flexible or to place my foot more gently. These are not decisions I necessarily think about, but they are decisions brought about through learning and from which I learn.
What distinguishes the human choice from the choice of the wolf is that homo sapiens have evolved an ability to reflect on their choices. I can after a run reflect on how the run went, how well I ran, how I should have turned my foot this way rather than that way. The wolf cannot reflect on her hunt. She hunts. She learns, but she does not evaluate. Why? Because she lacks a language by which to make such evaluations. Human beings are the only animals which we know that have the capacity for symbolic representation. That capacity allows us to represent to ourselves our experiences in a way that the wolf lacks. And because we can make such representations, we can also evaluate those representations.
In my last post about M&M's account of responsibility, I ended by asking how a notion of responsibility could arise without language. Here we see that language becomes central to free choice in a way that makes our choices significantly undetermined and yet still caused. They are undetermined because, no matter how much learning I have had, no matter how much experience I've undergone, I can always over-ride the directives of those experiences -- because I can represent them symbolically to myself in different ways and present even other options for future action. Yet, my choices are caused. They are caused by my own reflections on the quality of choices I have made and the quality of choices in front of me. These reflections can suffer impairment or, in the words of EP, diminishment. To some extent, I may not be able to see any but one choice because my genes dictate that choice (e.g., drinking the alcohol). But human life, much like that of the wolf's, is too complex and too complicated to have all our choices determined -- even probabilistically -- by our genes or our genes and culture working together.
As such, free choice depends on our ability to symbolically represent experience and past and future choices and our ability to imagine alternatives. These abilities depend essentially on our culture and education. Primarily, we receive the virtues which allow us to make more, rather than less, free choices through our education in practices, which we learn from our culture.
In one sense, then, I am accepting much of what EP says: yes, our genes and environment in which those genes are expressed determine -- by limiting -- our behavior. Yet, I am denying that such limits set any significant boundaries on our ability to choose freely. Rather, they provide the conditions by which we are able to make free choices. Free choice rests on an ability to evaluate the choices before us in a way that may sometimes be determined but in many cases are not determined. Rather than seeing ourselves as either completely free or completely determined, I propose that we see ourselves existing at any one time on a continuum of more or less free choices.
To end, I could have named this post "Why doesn't anyone read Mary Midgley? Mary Midgley is a very accessible writer who has been engaged in these types of issues for forty years. Her best book is Beast and Man, and from it, I took the example of the bee's dance and the wolf's hunt. Unfortunately, Midgley is rarely cited in the EP literature, perhaps because her argument against Wilson's sociobiology proves so devastating. Significantly, as well, I see Midgley as a modern-day Aristotelian, for it was Aristotle who first formulated the ethology that informs her and my own work. I recommend her work highgly.
The primary philosophical task of any enterprise consists in being clear on what exactly one is seeking -- what are the terms of debate, what are the issues addressed, what are the answers proposed. I have shown in the first post that, primarily, EP theorists do not have a clear account of the terms of the debate. In the second post, I showed that, even if (as I believe) free will arose through evolution, EP theorists do not address the right issues. Here, I begin by explaining that one issue that should be addressed is exactly the nature of free will.
I would rather say that, instead of discussing free will -- a nebulous term used in many different ways by philosophers -- we ought to speak of free choice (or free choice of the will, if you insist). The reason I think that free choice comprises better terminology for the debate is three-fold: first, my understanding of free choice arises out of a tradition based in Aristotle who did not even have a conception of will though he did have a conception of voluntary action. Second, the term "will" or "free will" is too loaded for any practical clarity at this time. This point is exemplified in the various EP discussions concerning determinism. Finally, and most importantly, the notion of "choice" over "will" provides a better understanding of exactly how animal evolved to make free, undetermined (but caused) choices.
Animals are presented with choices all the time, particularly those animals that move. Yet, some of these animals experience the choice as determined. A favorite example in the EP lit is that of the dance of the honey bee. The honey bee flies out of its hive and seeks flowers in which to find nectar. It has a choice: fly straight, fly left, fly right. Yet, the choice here cannot be seen as undetermined. A bee's direction is given by the path that other bees in the hive have taken to find nectar or by the smell of nearby flowers. Even the dance that the bee flies when it returns to report the discovery of nectar is determined minutely and has been recorded and studied by scientists.
The choice of the bee differs significantly from the choice of wolf in a hunt. When a pack of wolves hunt, how they form up for the hunt is determined by hierarchy (which, itself, can be challenged at times). When a wolf spots prey, it howls and the chase is on. Yet, when the prey charges one way, why does the wolf charge another? Here, the choice cannot be determined ahead of time: there are simply too many variables for wolf brains to have evolved enough instructions in them to map out the exact hunting pattern of the wolf. Thus, sometimes wolves fail to catch their prey (but only in reality, not in the movies). Wolves learn through experience how to pursue and what works and does not work in the hunt, how to respond to particular moves by particular individuals of differing species (which individuals exhibit their own choices). Now, when I describe the wolf's choices as directed by learning, I live open the possibility that such learning could be more rather than less determinative. The wolf makes quick decisions in the chase as directed by how past chases have gone. Still, there are enough variations of chase that the wolf's learning could not determine in every situation when prey turns left than wolf turn slightly more left. The wolf decides between different options.
Just as you and I decide between differing options in a variety of situation. For example, when we run, we have to decide how to place our feet on the path. Every path is different though similarities exist. I know that running on a path with a lot of twists and turns to be more flexible or to place my foot more gently. These are not decisions I necessarily think about, but they are decisions brought about through learning and from which I learn.
What distinguishes the human choice from the choice of the wolf is that homo sapiens have evolved an ability to reflect on their choices. I can after a run reflect on how the run went, how well I ran, how I should have turned my foot this way rather than that way. The wolf cannot reflect on her hunt. She hunts. She learns, but she does not evaluate. Why? Because she lacks a language by which to make such evaluations. Human beings are the only animals which we know that have the capacity for symbolic representation. That capacity allows us to represent to ourselves our experiences in a way that the wolf lacks. And because we can make such representations, we can also evaluate those representations.
In my last post about M&M's account of responsibility, I ended by asking how a notion of responsibility could arise without language. Here we see that language becomes central to free choice in a way that makes our choices significantly undetermined and yet still caused. They are undetermined because, no matter how much learning I have had, no matter how much experience I've undergone, I can always over-ride the directives of those experiences -- because I can represent them symbolically to myself in different ways and present even other options for future action. Yet, my choices are caused. They are caused by my own reflections on the quality of choices I have made and the quality of choices in front of me. These reflections can suffer impairment or, in the words of EP, diminishment. To some extent, I may not be able to see any but one choice because my genes dictate that choice (e.g., drinking the alcohol). But human life, much like that of the wolf's, is too complex and too complicated to have all our choices determined -- even probabilistically -- by our genes or our genes and culture working together.
As such, free choice depends on our ability to symbolically represent experience and past and future choices and our ability to imagine alternatives. These abilities depend essentially on our culture and education. Primarily, we receive the virtues which allow us to make more, rather than less, free choices through our education in practices, which we learn from our culture.
In one sense, then, I am accepting much of what EP says: yes, our genes and environment in which those genes are expressed determine -- by limiting -- our behavior. Yet, I am denying that such limits set any significant boundaries on our ability to choose freely. Rather, they provide the conditions by which we are able to make free choices. Free choice rests on an ability to evaluate the choices before us in a way that may sometimes be determined but in many cases are not determined. Rather than seeing ourselves as either completely free or completely determined, I propose that we see ourselves existing at any one time on a continuum of more or less free choices.
To end, I could have named this post "Why doesn't anyone read Mary Midgley? Mary Midgley is a very accessible writer who has been engaged in these types of issues for forty years. Her best book is Beast and Man, and from it, I took the example of the bee's dance and the wolf's hunt. Unfortunately, Midgley is rarely cited in the EP literature, perhaps because her argument against Wilson's sociobiology proves so devastating. Significantly, as well, I see Midgley as a modern-day Aristotelian, for it was Aristotle who first formulated the ethology that informs her and my own work. I recommend her work highgly.
Evolution of Responsibility part 2
11/07/11 23:35
This post is the second of three on the evolution of responsibility and free will. In the first post, I discussed the difficulty in trying to find a conception or even agreement about determinism and free will among Evolutionary Psychologists. In short, however, it appears that EP embraces a determinism of genes-culture mix. In other words, materialists are determinists. Yet, despite being determinists, both Dawkins and Richards imply that, in some sense, human beings are “in control” of their actions. What this control entails or means remains mysterious.
In this post, I want to look more specifically at the issue of “culpability” as a product of evolution. I will examine M&M’s (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson) account of culpability as presented in chapter 11 of their oft-cited Homicide. The questions that arise include, How does culpability arise as a cultural practice without language? Has culpability been around long enough to become an ESS?
In their Homicide, M&M provide what Robert Wright calls one of the clearest discussions of determinism and free will. Every human culture and human being has a concept of right- and wrong-doing, which testifies that “moral sensibility is a cross-culturally universal aspect of human nature” (254). That is, moral sensibility is in our genes, not just our culture. We must, then, understand how moral sensibility comprises a “means to the end of fitness in the social environments in which we evolved.”
Now, if moral sensibility makes homo sapiens more fit over their evolutionary history, then moral sensibility must provide some benefit to the actors who express it. That is, generally speaking we should expect that what survives as a genetic trait does not cause the particular individual an early death and does, in some minor way, increase the reproductive success of individuals of a particular species. For M&M, this benefit “depends upon shared interests, as a result either of kinship or of cooperative reciprocity” (255). In short, denying one’s self at the present moment might prove beneficial to one’s future success, as, say, being honest now can “make one an attractive exchange partner.” Thus, feelings of “justice” or “wronged” result from evolved mechanisms that provide some advantage to individuals of the species for reproductive success.
M&M take this basic understanding of the EP approach to moral sensibility and turn it to a discussion of “paying a debt” by the wrongdoer. Someone who commits a crime must compensate for that crime. Culpability, then, “reflects the offender’s debt to the victim” (257). Culpability, however, links to issues of provocation. Groups of people must inquire into the extent to which the victim antagonized the victimizer or to what extent the victimizing act proves unintended. Provocation evolved as both a moral and psychological theory. “It proposed both that provocation justifies retaliatory action and that it causes such action” (257). Following this line of thought, we understand the most culpable persons to have acted willfully or with malicious choice in a free act (261). After a discussion of the insanity defense and other cultural issues, M&M write, “To both ordinary people and to jurists, ‘responsibility’ entails the choice of one’s actions and the capacity to have done otherwise” (264). Of course, according to M&M, everyone understands, despite the black and white pictures drawn by theorists and the courts, that blameworthiness or culpability occurs on a continuum with free will, and everyone faces “diminished responsibility” in most acts. Generally, however, they insist that people conflate causal and moral judgments. Regardless of whether people are scientifically understood to be determined, moral culpability may play some role in the direction of society or the modification of individual’s behavior (e.g. through the threat of punishment or the promise of rewards). Thus, M&M refuse to take a side in the free will debate. They end their discussion returning to the fact of the benefit of the notion of “culpability” to human reproductive success. They note, for instance, studies that show close relatives often receive lighter punishment for harm to family members because they’ve already suffered enough. In short, it is unfortunate and irrational for someone to harm another with whom s/he shares a significant amount of genes. Further, capital punishment, as opposed to reparations, can be seen as a feature of modern nation states that have replaced the more kinship account of justice with a rational, emotionless system of punishment.
In general, M&M provide an interesting account of “culpability” and moral sensibility from the perspective of evolution and EP. As animals, human beings evolved with certain needs and imperatives, just like other animals. The possibility for moral sensibility cannot be seen as something imposed from above by some “spiritual nature” whether our own or another’s (God, for instance). To make such a claim denies the role of emotions and motivations in human actions. Their resistance to taking a position on “free will,” however, proves baffling and limited, and a characteristic (as seen in the last post) of those associated with EP. One wonders if EP theorists are fearful of writing about the denial of free will, like Darwin before them who refused to write about human evolution in the Origin of Species due to what he knew would be a fierce backlash.
Given that, however, I think we can still ask intelligent questions about M&M’s account. Most importantly, how does the notion of “culpability” arise? Is it possible to have a notion of “culpability” without language? And what of this moral sensibility? We are, it is often said, the only animals with morality. Of course, we know relatively little about our nearest relatives, all of whom are extinct – homo neanderthalis, homo ergastor, homo habilis. What we do know suggests that even beings as advanced as Neanderthal lacked language ability. If Neanderthal did, in fact, bury their dead, it suggests they may have experienced some proto-moral sensibility.
Still, we do know that our living closest relatives – chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas – engage in social behavior just as we do. Does the behavior of two alpha males contending for dominance of a gorilla harem constitute a proto-moral sensibility? Could the sexual actions of female bonobos to reconcile or diffuse male malevolence constitute a form of moral action? Even if it did, it’s not clear how such minimalist moralities could have given rise to the notion of culpability.
If the notion of “culpability” is essential to the moral sensibility that M&M suggest increases human reproductive success, then we return once more to the issue of language. Could the notion play any role without language? If so, how? Where are our naturalistic models of this behavior/notion/sensibility? If not, then the EP is left with a more trying question. EP theorists are characterized by their thesis that human behavior evolved during our evolution in the Pleistocene era on the savannas of Africa. In particular, many of our behaviors are well suited for smaller hunter-gatherer communities of early hominid life than they are for city living or even for agricultural life. They insist, then, that homo sapiens have not been around long enough to evolve psychological mechanisms that would be better adapted to agricultural, close-community, larger population living. Yet, language appeared on the scene during this time period. It is too late, according to EP’s own arguments, for language to have led to the development of a notion of culpability that would prove evolutionarily significant or promote human reproductive success, particularly for all human beings (what they refer to as an ESS – evolutionary stable strategy).
So far, I’ve found no one who addresses these questions, much less attempts to answer them. I am convinced that we cannot explain our moral sensibility from primarily a purely theological or dualistic perspective. We are material beings who obey the laws of (non-reductive) physics. That means, we had to have bodies suited to the particular life-form we express, including our moral sensibilities. There is, then, something peculiarly odd about the EP approach to moral sensibility, culpability, and free will. Part of this lies in what I will address in my next post: a misunderstanding of what, exactly, free will is.
In this post, I want to look more specifically at the issue of “culpability” as a product of evolution. I will examine M&M’s (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson) account of culpability as presented in chapter 11 of their oft-cited Homicide. The questions that arise include, How does culpability arise as a cultural practice without language? Has culpability been around long enough to become an ESS?
In their Homicide, M&M provide what Robert Wright calls one of the clearest discussions of determinism and free will. Every human culture and human being has a concept of right- and wrong-doing, which testifies that “moral sensibility is a cross-culturally universal aspect of human nature” (254). That is, moral sensibility is in our genes, not just our culture. We must, then, understand how moral sensibility comprises a “means to the end of fitness in the social environments in which we evolved.”
Now, if moral sensibility makes homo sapiens more fit over their evolutionary history, then moral sensibility must provide some benefit to the actors who express it. That is, generally speaking we should expect that what survives as a genetic trait does not cause the particular individual an early death and does, in some minor way, increase the reproductive success of individuals of a particular species. For M&M, this benefit “depends upon shared interests, as a result either of kinship or of cooperative reciprocity” (255). In short, denying one’s self at the present moment might prove beneficial to one’s future success, as, say, being honest now can “make one an attractive exchange partner.” Thus, feelings of “justice” or “wronged” result from evolved mechanisms that provide some advantage to individuals of the species for reproductive success.
M&M take this basic understanding of the EP approach to moral sensibility and turn it to a discussion of “paying a debt” by the wrongdoer. Someone who commits a crime must compensate for that crime. Culpability, then, “reflects the offender’s debt to the victim” (257). Culpability, however, links to issues of provocation. Groups of people must inquire into the extent to which the victim antagonized the victimizer or to what extent the victimizing act proves unintended. Provocation evolved as both a moral and psychological theory. “It proposed both that provocation justifies retaliatory action and that it causes such action” (257). Following this line of thought, we understand the most culpable persons to have acted willfully or with malicious choice in a free act (261). After a discussion of the insanity defense and other cultural issues, M&M write, “To both ordinary people and to jurists, ‘responsibility’ entails the choice of one’s actions and the capacity to have done otherwise” (264). Of course, according to M&M, everyone understands, despite the black and white pictures drawn by theorists and the courts, that blameworthiness or culpability occurs on a continuum with free will, and everyone faces “diminished responsibility” in most acts. Generally, however, they insist that people conflate causal and moral judgments. Regardless of whether people are scientifically understood to be determined, moral culpability may play some role in the direction of society or the modification of individual’s behavior (e.g. through the threat of punishment or the promise of rewards). Thus, M&M refuse to take a side in the free will debate. They end their discussion returning to the fact of the benefit of the notion of “culpability” to human reproductive success. They note, for instance, studies that show close relatives often receive lighter punishment for harm to family members because they’ve already suffered enough. In short, it is unfortunate and irrational for someone to harm another with whom s/he shares a significant amount of genes. Further, capital punishment, as opposed to reparations, can be seen as a feature of modern nation states that have replaced the more kinship account of justice with a rational, emotionless system of punishment.
In general, M&M provide an interesting account of “culpability” and moral sensibility from the perspective of evolution and EP. As animals, human beings evolved with certain needs and imperatives, just like other animals. The possibility for moral sensibility cannot be seen as something imposed from above by some “spiritual nature” whether our own or another’s (God, for instance). To make such a claim denies the role of emotions and motivations in human actions. Their resistance to taking a position on “free will,” however, proves baffling and limited, and a characteristic (as seen in the last post) of those associated with EP. One wonders if EP theorists are fearful of writing about the denial of free will, like Darwin before them who refused to write about human evolution in the Origin of Species due to what he knew would be a fierce backlash.
Given that, however, I think we can still ask intelligent questions about M&M’s account. Most importantly, how does the notion of “culpability” arise? Is it possible to have a notion of “culpability” without language? And what of this moral sensibility? We are, it is often said, the only animals with morality. Of course, we know relatively little about our nearest relatives, all of whom are extinct – homo neanderthalis, homo ergastor, homo habilis. What we do know suggests that even beings as advanced as Neanderthal lacked language ability. If Neanderthal did, in fact, bury their dead, it suggests they may have experienced some proto-moral sensibility.
Still, we do know that our living closest relatives – chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas – engage in social behavior just as we do. Does the behavior of two alpha males contending for dominance of a gorilla harem constitute a proto-moral sensibility? Could the sexual actions of female bonobos to reconcile or diffuse male malevolence constitute a form of moral action? Even if it did, it’s not clear how such minimalist moralities could have given rise to the notion of culpability.
If the notion of “culpability” is essential to the moral sensibility that M&M suggest increases human reproductive success, then we return once more to the issue of language. Could the notion play any role without language? If so, how? Where are our naturalistic models of this behavior/notion/sensibility? If not, then the EP is left with a more trying question. EP theorists are characterized by their thesis that human behavior evolved during our evolution in the Pleistocene era on the savannas of Africa. In particular, many of our behaviors are well suited for smaller hunter-gatherer communities of early hominid life than they are for city living or even for agricultural life. They insist, then, that homo sapiens have not been around long enough to evolve psychological mechanisms that would be better adapted to agricultural, close-community, larger population living. Yet, language appeared on the scene during this time period. It is too late, according to EP’s own arguments, for language to have led to the development of a notion of culpability that would prove evolutionarily significant or promote human reproductive success, particularly for all human beings (what they refer to as an ESS – evolutionary stable strategy).
So far, I’ve found no one who addresses these questions, much less attempts to answer them. I am convinced that we cannot explain our moral sensibility from primarily a purely theological or dualistic perspective. We are material beings who obey the laws of (non-reductive) physics. That means, we had to have bodies suited to the particular life-form we express, including our moral sensibilities. There is, then, something peculiarly odd about the EP approach to moral sensibility, culpability, and free will. Part of this lies in what I will address in my next post: a misunderstanding of what, exactly, free will is.
Evolution of Responsibility part 1
09/07/11 22:22
I want to think a little bit about discussions among evolutionary psychologists about evolution, free will, and responsibility. I am presenting, first, my understanding of what the EP theorists say. Then I am going to ask some questions about this approach. I think, given my questions, EP cannot, on its own account, explain responsibility which means -- and this is the important point -- they cannot explain our feeling of free will. The question remains, then, How can animals experience free will?
Let's begin, then, with what I understand to be the approach of EP. I take this approach from reading Steven Pinker, Paul Ehrlich, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Richard Wright, as well as some articles by Cosmides and Toody as well as Buss. However, my reading of EP theorists began with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. In the selfish gene, Dawkins does not explicitly discuss human behavior. Rather, he discusses how certain traits or tendencies, such as altruistic behavior or female coyness and male philandeering among non-human animals, could have evolved. The implication, of course, is to take his discussions further and apply them to human behavior, but we shall leave that point aside. Rather, the thing that concerned me in Dawkins' book consisted in his constant denial of strict determinism. Rather, after discussing some genetic tendency of the large, rambling robots that we are, Dawkins would assert that "We effortlessly defy [our genes] every time we use contraception" (271), or "we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination" (200). Yet, he never explains exactly how "we" are able to "defy" our genes when he's made such an elaborate argument about how our genes determine us to be survival machines.
So, I went in search of understanding how we do this. Wright has an interesting discussion of free will and determinism in chapter 17 of The Moral Animal. Here, however, Wright seems less muddled than Dawkins. He writes
"all influences on human behavior, environmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment (including your genes, your early environment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence. So even though the term genetic determinism is confused, the term biological determinism isn't..." (349, emphasis his).
Now, to confuse issues even more, Radcliffe provides a thorough discussion of the issue of free will versus determinism in her Human Nature After Darwin. She cites several paragraphs from Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype. In short, Dawkins claims materialists are determinists, whether they are biologists or sociologists. He claims, however, that "human nervous systems are so complex that in practice we can forget about determinism and behave as if we have free will" (103) He asserts, though, that, because genes work the way they do because they exist in the environments they are in, we can "reverse" their influence (104).
I think it would be wise to ask, however, whether our attempt to reverse them would itself be determined. The only answer possible, given the EP framework, is "yes."
Despite that, Richards continues her discussion of free will and determinism in which several times she asserts that we are "in control." "If what is at issue is what might be called the capacity for ordinary responsibility -- the capacity to control our impulses, think through what to do, and judge between competing desires - the answer is that most of us have it and some of us do not" (134). Yet, what can she possibly mean by saying that we have a capacity to control our impulses? Is that capacity a result of genes or environment? Either way, we are determined in its use according to the EP approach.
So far, the discussion has been rather abstract. However, two other people associated with EP provide some more concrete considerations. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson are psychologists who wrote Homicide, a text cited by almost everyone writing on EP. Wright, for instance, contends that "one clear discussion of determinism and responsibility" is provided in chapter 11 of Homicide. In this chapter, M&M, as I shall refer to them, claim that the idea of responsibility comprises an evolutionary fiction that serves human survival. All cultures have some understanding of the difference between "responsible/culpable" and "not responsible/inculpable." One clear sign that something has a genetic origin, of course, is that all cultures share it. Thus, M&M contend that the notion of culpability has served as a means for homo sapiens to satisfy the needs of individuals who lost access to necessities due to harm to some individual. Thus, if a father is killed, then the person responsible must make some reparation to the remaining family which serves to help those family members survive and procreate into the next generation. (Thus, M&M might a big deal out of the fact that the death penalty is a rather new invention because it does not serve the genetic interests of people related within a clan to go killing members of the clan.)
We have, then an emerging picture. Free will is a myth of great proportions, but a useful myth because it allows us to assign responsibility to others for harm done to close relatives so that genes which we most likely share are not lost. Still, we are "in control" of our emotions and drives because we can "control our impulses and think through what to do."
Given this account, however, I think we can rightly ask, "Whence the origin of the concept of responsibility?" A better way of formulating my concern is this: "Does the assignation of 'responsibility' or 'culpability' require language and, if so, how could that notion evolve as a useful survival strategy (ESS in EP speak) after the arrival of language which has only been on the scene for 100,000 years?"
I will consider these questions in my next post.
Let's begin, then, with what I understand to be the approach of EP. I take this approach from reading Steven Pinker, Paul Ehrlich, Janet Radcliffe Richards, and Richard Wright, as well as some articles by Cosmides and Toody as well as Buss. However, my reading of EP theorists began with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. In the selfish gene, Dawkins does not explicitly discuss human behavior. Rather, he discusses how certain traits or tendencies, such as altruistic behavior or female coyness and male philandeering among non-human animals, could have evolved. The implication, of course, is to take his discussions further and apply them to human behavior, but we shall leave that point aside. Rather, the thing that concerned me in Dawkins' book consisted in his constant denial of strict determinism. Rather, after discussing some genetic tendency of the large, rambling robots that we are, Dawkins would assert that "We effortlessly defy [our genes] every time we use contraception" (271), or "we have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination" (200). Yet, he never explains exactly how "we" are able to "defy" our genes when he's made such an elaborate argument about how our genes determine us to be survival machines.
So, I went in search of understanding how we do this. Wright has an interesting discussion of free will and determinism in chapter 17 of The Moral Animal. Here, however, Wright seems less muddled than Dawkins. He writes
"all influences on human behavior, environmental as well as hereditary, are mediated biologically. Whatever combination of things has given your brain the exact physical organization it has at this moment (including your genes, your early environment, and your assimilation of the first half of this sentence), that physical organization is what determines how you will respond to the second half of this sentence. So even though the term genetic determinism is confused, the term biological determinism isn't..." (349, emphasis his).
Now, to confuse issues even more, Radcliffe provides a thorough discussion of the issue of free will versus determinism in her Human Nature After Darwin. She cites several paragraphs from Dawkins' The Extended Phenotype. In short, Dawkins claims materialists are determinists, whether they are biologists or sociologists. He claims, however, that "human nervous systems are so complex that in practice we can forget about determinism and behave as if we have free will" (103) He asserts, though, that, because genes work the way they do because they exist in the environments they are in, we can "reverse" their influence (104).
I think it would be wise to ask, however, whether our attempt to reverse them would itself be determined. The only answer possible, given the EP framework, is "yes."
Despite that, Richards continues her discussion of free will and determinism in which several times she asserts that we are "in control." "If what is at issue is what might be called the capacity for ordinary responsibility -- the capacity to control our impulses, think through what to do, and judge between competing desires - the answer is that most of us have it and some of us do not" (134). Yet, what can she possibly mean by saying that we have a capacity to control our impulses? Is that capacity a result of genes or environment? Either way, we are determined in its use according to the EP approach.
So far, the discussion has been rather abstract. However, two other people associated with EP provide some more concrete considerations. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson are psychologists who wrote Homicide, a text cited by almost everyone writing on EP. Wright, for instance, contends that "one clear discussion of determinism and responsibility" is provided in chapter 11 of Homicide. In this chapter, M&M, as I shall refer to them, claim that the idea of responsibility comprises an evolutionary fiction that serves human survival. All cultures have some understanding of the difference between "responsible/culpable" and "not responsible/inculpable." One clear sign that something has a genetic origin, of course, is that all cultures share it. Thus, M&M contend that the notion of culpability has served as a means for homo sapiens to satisfy the needs of individuals who lost access to necessities due to harm to some individual. Thus, if a father is killed, then the person responsible must make some reparation to the remaining family which serves to help those family members survive and procreate into the next generation. (Thus, M&M might a big deal out of the fact that the death penalty is a rather new invention because it does not serve the genetic interests of people related within a clan to go killing members of the clan.)
We have, then an emerging picture. Free will is a myth of great proportions, but a useful myth because it allows us to assign responsibility to others for harm done to close relatives so that genes which we most likely share are not lost. Still, we are "in control" of our emotions and drives because we can "control our impulses and think through what to do."
Given this account, however, I think we can rightly ask, "Whence the origin of the concept of responsibility?" A better way of formulating my concern is this: "Does the assignation of 'responsibility' or 'culpability' require language and, if so, how could that notion evolve as a useful survival strategy (ESS in EP speak) after the arrival of language which has only been on the scene for 100,000 years?"
I will consider these questions in my next post.
The Evolution and Sociality of Reason
01/07/11 00:13
Gary Gutting provides an interesting discussion of the social nature of reason based on an article much commented on over the web by Sperber and Mercier.
The basic argument from Sperber and Mercier is this: in reason, human beings show certain inadequacies: they tend to give credence to evidence that agrees with their position than that disagrees, our deductive logical ability proves weak, and our statistical reasoning proves even weaker. Because of these inadequacies, they argue that reason evolved, not so much to reach the truth, but in order to win arguments. In fact, what Sperber and Mercier find through empirical research is that human beings are much better at arguing than they are at individual uses of logic, and that human beings reasoning in social groups prove have better results than those reasoning alone.
Gutting goes on to say that various philosophers -- from Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas to pragmatists like Peirce, James, and Dewey -- have argued for a more social view of reason. Gutting says that they show that "justification is a matter of being able to convince other people that a claim is correct." Gutting denies that Sperber and Mercier's theory leads to relativism or sophism. Rather, he says, we need to rethink the relationship between truth and argumentation.
Truth involves, not my argument beating yours -- which is how many people understood Sperber and Mercier -- but in our argument defeating all others.
Interestingly enough, Gutting does not mention Alasdair MacIntyre in this pantheon of people on social reasoning. In fact, however, MacIntyre's conception of the "best argument so far" relies on the idea that we get closer to the truth by constantly having our arguments challenged and coming out better in dealing with the real world than other arguments. Of course, argumentation requires social engagement, and, tellingly, when traditions fail to challenge their shared agreements or do not allow arguments within them, these traditions stagnate and fail to advance toward what we recognize as truth.
A question remains, however: can reason evolve that make it not social? That is, Aristotle notes that we are social animals because we have logos -- speech and reason. Yet, we can wonder whether there are creatures much different than ourselves that have managed to reason without argumentation and without the correctives of social reasoning?
We can also look into some of the biases that attend the readings of Rorty -- who denied any truth -- and Habermas -- who insists that language is aimed at understanding. Sperber and Mercier's arguments seem to suggest that language and reasoning might not be about reaching understanding. In fact, a Nietzschean could come into the picture and play havoc with their argument, for they would have to show somehow that it was not evolutionarily feasible that the better arguments and deceivers were able to out-reproduce those who were honest or not good arguers. Only by keeping the notion of truth within the equation -- as Gutting does in the end -- can such Nietzschean moves be avoided.
The basic argument from Sperber and Mercier is this: in reason, human beings show certain inadequacies: they tend to give credence to evidence that agrees with their position than that disagrees, our deductive logical ability proves weak, and our statistical reasoning proves even weaker. Because of these inadequacies, they argue that reason evolved, not so much to reach the truth, but in order to win arguments. In fact, what Sperber and Mercier find through empirical research is that human beings are much better at arguing than they are at individual uses of logic, and that human beings reasoning in social groups prove have better results than those reasoning alone.
Gutting goes on to say that various philosophers -- from Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas to pragmatists like Peirce, James, and Dewey -- have argued for a more social view of reason. Gutting says that they show that "justification is a matter of being able to convince other people that a claim is correct." Gutting denies that Sperber and Mercier's theory leads to relativism or sophism. Rather, he says, we need to rethink the relationship between truth and argumentation.
Truth involves, not my argument beating yours -- which is how many people understood Sperber and Mercier -- but in our argument defeating all others.
Interestingly enough, Gutting does not mention Alasdair MacIntyre in this pantheon of people on social reasoning. In fact, however, MacIntyre's conception of the "best argument so far" relies on the idea that we get closer to the truth by constantly having our arguments challenged and coming out better in dealing with the real world than other arguments. Of course, argumentation requires social engagement, and, tellingly, when traditions fail to challenge their shared agreements or do not allow arguments within them, these traditions stagnate and fail to advance toward what we recognize as truth.
A question remains, however: can reason evolve that make it not social? That is, Aristotle notes that we are social animals because we have logos -- speech and reason. Yet, we can wonder whether there are creatures much different than ourselves that have managed to reason without argumentation and without the correctives of social reasoning?
We can also look into some of the biases that attend the readings of Rorty -- who denied any truth -- and Habermas -- who insists that language is aimed at understanding. Sperber and Mercier's arguments seem to suggest that language and reasoning might not be about reaching understanding. In fact, a Nietzschean could come into the picture and play havoc with their argument, for they would have to show somehow that it was not evolutionarily feasible that the better arguments and deceivers were able to out-reproduce those who were honest or not good arguers. Only by keeping the notion of truth within the equation -- as Gutting does in the end -- can such Nietzschean moves be avoided.
Rational Choice Theory is Wrong
22/06/11 23:36
John Mccumber wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times Opinionator section.
Here's my understanding of the article: Mccumber is against Rational Choice Philosophy, by which he means an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics. He believes that Quine, Carson, and Rawls put paid to the individual claims in each of those fields because, every theory is undetermined (which undermines the idea that we can choose between a distinct group of theories), we don't have certainty even in the short term, and every philosophy of choice, including rational choice philosophy, includes certain values. Mccumber further ASSERTS that Hegel made many of these observations and proposed an alternative to rational choice philosophy. In particular, Hegel showed the social character of reason (though, I must say, I stated that more clearly than Mccumber did). Mccumber is convinced that, even if Quine, Carson, and Rawls undermine individual aspects of rational choice philosophy, they tend, as does rational choice philosophy, to "absolutize choice," by which phrase I think Mccumber means that rational choice philosophy values choice as choice. (This, I take it, is why I think the video link I sent addresses rational choice philosophy's failure and why I thought it relevant to McCrumb, though, again, McCrumb has not been quite elegant in his discussion.) Mccumber finished with his conclusion "The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided."
Here are two possible objections: It seems to (1) lay the onus of proof on allusions to Hegel and (2) it seems to end with the idea that we must trust in our community rather than our own decision making. I think point 1 is true: Mccumber relies heavily on Hegel, which is surprising. It's surprising, not because Hegel is wrong, but because I would imagine most people reading the NY Times have not read Hegel, and so it makes Hegel a poor choice for reference. Aristotle would have been much better, or simply stating the alternative better still. As for point 2, I think that the article does tend to favor some sort of conclusion along the lines that our community ought to do our thinking for us. The last line smacks too much of a right-wing Hegelianism: "The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided." I say right-wing Hegelianism to contrast it with left-wing Marxist type hegelianism, which Mccumber seems also to reject. Also, because the problem with right-wing Hegelianism is exactly that Hegel's philosophy ends with the idea that the state is supreme. The state is the embodiment of the idea, which is worked out historically by Geist. Hegel might have meant that, or he might have meant something more subtle.
Okay, now to the most important point, Why do I think that rational choice philosophy is wrong? Part of the question centers on what one means by "rational choice philosophy”?
If it means simply "human beings make rational choices" then rational choice philosophy hardly deserves a name. This is true for Aristotle and Thomas as it is for Hegel and Kant, as it is for Rand and Rawls.
Then, is rational choice philosophy simply those three theses that Mccumber ascribes to it in his article: ontological clarity, epistemological certainty, and ethical egoism/wealth-mongering. If thisis what it means, then I think we've enough evidence to say Mccumber is right: rational choice philosophy has failed. We do not have certainty even short term. Think, for instance, of giving one's spouse flowers or some other present. We do it to be nice, but then the spouse might accuse one of cheating or doing something for which one needed to give flowers. At the every day level -- and certainly long term economic level -- rational choice philosophy does not pay out. Ontologically, there are not simple causal chains which we can pick up and choose between. This is the conceit behind the recent movie Limitless. The character has a 4-digit IQ which allows him to figure out how the market will move. But that is fiction. Too many things can cause the same phenomena which leads to indeterminacy between choices -- all could be equally rational. Finally, we are not people who seek only wealth and power to satisfy our needs. Sometimes, wealth and power can interfere with those needs. Here Limitless, the movie, gets close to pointing it out, but in the end it buys into this conceit as well. Now, if one buys into any of those three theses, then one might stil be a rational choice theorist. If we disagree on these points, then that gives us something more to discuss, but probably not on this thread.
Then, that leaves us with the question, could rational choice philosophy be something different or more? Mccumber is as obtuse here as Hegel. He writes at one point, though, the following: "Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices." So, I think by rational choice philosophy he means the three theses above plus the idea that "social reality consists simply in individuals freely making rational choices." Here, a long line of thinkers would disagree: Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, Joan Callahan, Carol Gilligan, Sara Ruddick, Kathleen Iannello (Decisions without hierarchy) among many others.
Why?
Simply put: we are not individual atoms bumping into each other on occasion. We are social beings -- social animals as Aristotle says -- which means that our identity (subjectivity in Foucault's philosophy) is shaped by and shapes our communities/society/traditions. Yes, I make rational decisions (I hope), but even my rationality is shaped by my culture: what I find more or less rational, what modes of reasoning are available to me, to what extent I’ve been trained to think reasonably, what forms of discourse I’ve been introduced to, etc. This fact does not make me any the less rational. Au contraire, it is the very conditions for being rational at all.
This, I take it, is the gist of MacIntyre’s theory in AV, and certainly the argument I bring to bear in Reason, Tradition, and the Good.
Here's my understanding of the article: Mccumber is against Rational Choice Philosophy, by which he means an ontology, an epistemology, and an ethics. He believes that Quine, Carson, and Rawls put paid to the individual claims in each of those fields because, every theory is undetermined (which undermines the idea that we can choose between a distinct group of theories), we don't have certainty even in the short term, and every philosophy of choice, including rational choice philosophy, includes certain values. Mccumber further ASSERTS that Hegel made many of these observations and proposed an alternative to rational choice philosophy. In particular, Hegel showed the social character of reason (though, I must say, I stated that more clearly than Mccumber did). Mccumber is convinced that, even if Quine, Carson, and Rawls undermine individual aspects of rational choice philosophy, they tend, as does rational choice philosophy, to "absolutize choice," by which phrase I think Mccumber means that rational choice philosophy values choice as choice. (This, I take it, is why I think the video link I sent addresses rational choice philosophy's failure and why I thought it relevant to McCrumb, though, again, McCrumb has not been quite elegant in his discussion.) Mccumber finished with his conclusion "The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided."
Here are two possible objections: It seems to (1) lay the onus of proof on allusions to Hegel and (2) it seems to end with the idea that we must trust in our community rather than our own decision making. I think point 1 is true: Mccumber relies heavily on Hegel, which is surprising. It's surprising, not because Hegel is wrong, but because I would imagine most people reading the NY Times have not read Hegel, and so it makes Hegel a poor choice for reference. Aristotle would have been much better, or simply stating the alternative better still. As for point 2, I think that the article does tend to favor some sort of conclusion along the lines that our community ought to do our thinking for us. The last line smacks too much of a right-wing Hegelianism: "The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual freedom is of value only when communally guided." I say right-wing Hegelianism to contrast it with left-wing Marxist type hegelianism, which Mccumber seems also to reject. Also, because the problem with right-wing Hegelianism is exactly that Hegel's philosophy ends with the idea that the state is supreme. The state is the embodiment of the idea, which is worked out historically by Geist. Hegel might have meant that, or he might have meant something more subtle.
Okay, now to the most important point, Why do I think that rational choice philosophy is wrong? Part of the question centers on what one means by "rational choice philosophy”?
If it means simply "human beings make rational choices" then rational choice philosophy hardly deserves a name. This is true for Aristotle and Thomas as it is for Hegel and Kant, as it is for Rand and Rawls.
Then, is rational choice philosophy simply those three theses that Mccumber ascribes to it in his article: ontological clarity, epistemological certainty, and ethical egoism/wealth-mongering. If thisis what it means, then I think we've enough evidence to say Mccumber is right: rational choice philosophy has failed. We do not have certainty even short term. Think, for instance, of giving one's spouse flowers or some other present. We do it to be nice, but then the spouse might accuse one of cheating or doing something for which one needed to give flowers. At the every day level -- and certainly long term economic level -- rational choice philosophy does not pay out. Ontologically, there are not simple causal chains which we can pick up and choose between. This is the conceit behind the recent movie Limitless. The character has a 4-digit IQ which allows him to figure out how the market will move. But that is fiction. Too many things can cause the same phenomena which leads to indeterminacy between choices -- all could be equally rational. Finally, we are not people who seek only wealth and power to satisfy our needs. Sometimes, wealth and power can interfere with those needs. Here Limitless, the movie, gets close to pointing it out, but in the end it buys into this conceit as well. Now, if one buys into any of those three theses, then one might stil be a rational choice theorist. If we disagree on these points, then that gives us something more to discuss, but probably not on this thread.
Then, that leaves us with the question, could rational choice philosophy be something different or more? Mccumber is as obtuse here as Hegel. He writes at one point, though, the following: "Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices." So, I think by rational choice philosophy he means the three theses above plus the idea that "social reality consists simply in individuals freely making rational choices." Here, a long line of thinkers would disagree: Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, Joan Callahan, Carol Gilligan, Sara Ruddick, Kathleen Iannello (Decisions without hierarchy) among many others.
Why?
Simply put: we are not individual atoms bumping into each other on occasion. We are social beings -- social animals as Aristotle says -- which means that our identity (subjectivity in Foucault's philosophy) is shaped by and shapes our communities/society/traditions. Yes, I make rational decisions (I hope), but even my rationality is shaped by my culture: what I find more or less rational, what modes of reasoning are available to me, to what extent I’ve been trained to think reasonably, what forms of discourse I’ve been introduced to, etc. This fact does not make me any the less rational. Au contraire, it is the very conditions for being rational at all.
This, I take it, is the gist of MacIntyre’s theory in AV, and certainly the argument I bring to bear in Reason, Tradition, and the Good.
Milgram Experiment
21/06/11 18:34
The Milgram experiment is a famous experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram to study obedience in the 1960's. The study involved three people: a "doctor" or person conducting the experiment, a "answerer" or someone who was supposed to answer questions, and the "questioner." The questioner was the real study of the subject, as both the doctor and the answerer were actors. The questioner watched as the doctor locked the questioner into restraining straps and hooked electrodes to the person. Then, the doctor took the questioner into a separate room. The questioner was instructed to apply increasing levels of shock to the answerer if the answerer failed to ask a question. The doctor gave stock replies to any question the questioner ask. The questioner could leave at any time but was told "the experiment must go on."
The question: to what extent would individuals, living in a modern industrial democracy, shock people at the directions of an authority figure?
You can see the experiment on youtube. As it turned out, 65% of people increased the shock to fatal levels even over the screams and protests of the person being shocked.
Why did some people obey the "doctor" and why did others resist?
What does the Milgram experiment tell us about human nature? Or does it say something instead about modern society?
What, exactly, can we expect to gain from studying ethics and moral theory?
NB: if you are a Marylhurst student, please make sure your name shows on the comments section so I can record the participation.
The question: to what extent would individuals, living in a modern industrial democracy, shock people at the directions of an authority figure?
You can see the experiment on youtube. As it turned out, 65% of people increased the shock to fatal levels even over the screams and protests of the person being shocked.
Why did some people obey the "doctor" and why did others resist?
What does the Milgram experiment tell us about human nature? Or does it say something instead about modern society?
What, exactly, can we expect to gain from studying ethics and moral theory?
NB: if you are a Marylhurst student, please make sure your name shows on the comments section so I can record the participation.
Agency and Needs
09/06/11 19:48
"A theory of human needs constitutes the foundation of a critical theory of society the end of which is the greatest expansion of the human person in a given concrete historical situation."
I wrote that sentence as part of a book proposal which I am working on. My book concerns human nature, particularly human nature as the foundation of a just society. It will be the backbone of a natural law theory and a critical politics based on that natural law theory. Human needs provides the contours for exploring those ethical and political issues. Any "right" we might have must be based, in some part, on how it satisfies or serves some human need.
The question that arises, that's been plaguing me, is, What is the relationship between these human needs and agency? I'm asking about agency because, in contemporary culture, both evolutionary psychology and social constructivism threaten agency. They threaten agency by either denying it and embracing some form of determinism (we are determined either by our biology or by our culture) or sharply curtail it. So one need that appears clear in the modern situation is a need for a better understanding of agency so that society can be more structured to enhance agency.
Thus, my original sentence points to the link between a theory of human needs and a theory of human agency. The greatest expansion of the human person in a given concrete historical situation concerns, essentially, the expansion of the person's agency in that historical situation. The needs and the agency mutually determine each other given the biological and sociological constraints that the individual finds herself in. That is, a theory of human needs presents the conditions for the exercise of agency, which means we must understand what kind of beings human beings are: biological-cultural beings.
I wrote that sentence as part of a book proposal which I am working on. My book concerns human nature, particularly human nature as the foundation of a just society. It will be the backbone of a natural law theory and a critical politics based on that natural law theory. Human needs provides the contours for exploring those ethical and political issues. Any "right" we might have must be based, in some part, on how it satisfies or serves some human need.
The question that arises, that's been plaguing me, is, What is the relationship between these human needs and agency? I'm asking about agency because, in contemporary culture, both evolutionary psychology and social constructivism threaten agency. They threaten agency by either denying it and embracing some form of determinism (we are determined either by our biology or by our culture) or sharply curtail it. So one need that appears clear in the modern situation is a need for a better understanding of agency so that society can be more structured to enhance agency.
Thus, my original sentence points to the link between a theory of human needs and a theory of human agency. The greatest expansion of the human person in a given concrete historical situation concerns, essentially, the expansion of the person's agency in that historical situation. The needs and the agency mutually determine each other given the biological and sociological constraints that the individual finds herself in. That is, a theory of human needs presents the conditions for the exercise of agency, which means we must understand what kind of beings human beings are: biological-cultural beings.
Dawkins' Fair Share
07/06/11 19:55
"But, as we have already seen, some individuals are better life insurance risks than others. An under-sized runt bears just as many of his mother's genes as his more thriving litter mates. But his life expectation is less. Another way to put this point is that he needs more than his fair share."
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 125
Dawkins claims in his book that he is not setting out to make moral or political claims. He is simply trying to explain the biology of selfishness and altruism. He claims that his argument shows that seemingly altruistic behavior arises as a way for selfish genes to propogate themselves, insuring the survival of the genes.
In reading his book, however, we comes across passages like the above. Note the last sentence: the individual runt needs more than his fair share. In the context of biology, what counts as a fair share here? Why even use the term "fair" which is laden with various moral and political meanings? Would it not be better to write something like, "He needs more than what would be evenly proportioned between him and his siblings"? By using the term "fair share" here, Dawkins has, intentionally or not, introduced moral claims into the science he is presenting.
This example does not stand alone in the book. The very use of the term "selfish" has a lot of moral and political meaning behind it, despite Dawkins' claims to the contrary.
The more general point, however, is that science cannot be separated from morality (nor vice versa), and that science occurs within a system of shared understandings that include moral choices. This point is exactly the one Thomas Kuhn made with his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The point does not mean that science is not an attempt to find the truth. Rather, it shows that our attempts to get at the truth may always be limited and will always have presumptions that we need to examine carefully so we know exactly what truth we are believing in. That is both a scientific and a moral point.
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 125
Dawkins claims in his book that he is not setting out to make moral or political claims. He is simply trying to explain the biology of selfishness and altruism. He claims that his argument shows that seemingly altruistic behavior arises as a way for selfish genes to propogate themselves, insuring the survival of the genes.
In reading his book, however, we comes across passages like the above. Note the last sentence: the individual runt needs more than his fair share. In the context of biology, what counts as a fair share here? Why even use the term "fair" which is laden with various moral and political meanings? Would it not be better to write something like, "He needs more than what would be evenly proportioned between him and his siblings"? By using the term "fair share" here, Dawkins has, intentionally or not, introduced moral claims into the science he is presenting.
This example does not stand alone in the book. The very use of the term "selfish" has a lot of moral and political meaning behind it, despite Dawkins' claims to the contrary.
The more general point, however, is that science cannot be separated from morality (nor vice versa), and that science occurs within a system of shared understandings that include moral choices. This point is exactly the one Thomas Kuhn made with his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The point does not mean that science is not an attempt to find the truth. Rather, it shows that our attempts to get at the truth may always be limited and will always have presumptions that we need to examine carefully so we know exactly what truth we are believing in. That is both a scientific and a moral point.
Selfish Gene Mythology
06/06/11 17:46
Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene back in 1976, and since then, over a million copies have been sold. Dawkins defends the idea that the unit of evolution, of natural selection, is, not the the group or the individual life-form, but the gene. Genes perpetuate themselves and do everything they can to secure their survival, and he calls such behavior selfish. The idea here is that genes compete against rivals and do what they can to make sure that they survive which often means that their rivals do not survive.
What I want to point out in this post is that Dawkins made a particular choice. He chose to use the word selfish to describe the activities of his genes, and that choice tells us two things. First, he tell us that Dawkins prioritized some types of behaviors over others in picking out his unit of natural selection and, second, that Dawkins thought it was "selfishness" is important for Dawkins.
We can easily question the first issue. For Dawkins, what is important is that some entities survive and some do not, that those two types of entities are rivals, or in competition, and that the ones who survive act to preserve themselves at all costs. This account presents what Mary Midgley rightly calls a mythology. The mythology of selfishness of genes, that nature is "red in tooth and claw" and that all of life is about "survival of the fittest" has proven very influential in the modern world, as evidenced both by the number of sales that Dawkins' book generated and also by the spin-off of Dawkins' work in the form of evolutionary psychology. What myths do is take facts and try to present an over-arching story about those facts.
Dawkins has done this for facts about evolution and about survival.
The thing about myths is that they often ignore experience that does not agree with the over-arching mythology and rests on points that it tries to sweep under the carpet. To wit, Dawkins divides the world into selfish entities and altruistic entities. Yet, he completely ignores cooperation. In fact, Dawkins' genes are able to create "survival machines" only because they cooperate with each other to produce such an entity. To explain this in terms of selfish acts/behaviors/choices masks something because cooperation need not be, and often is not, selfish in origin.
This point should give us a pause in how we understand, not only Dawkins' work and popularity, but how we understand evolution and science. We often think of science as "just the facts, ma'am." In fact, however, science, just like every other aspect of life, comes with a slant, which does not mean it isn't true. Just the opposite. But we need to be aware both of that slant and how the slant of science can skew our vision of the world and what we expect from it.
What I want to point out in this post is that Dawkins made a particular choice. He chose to use the word selfish to describe the activities of his genes, and that choice tells us two things. First, he tell us that Dawkins prioritized some types of behaviors over others in picking out his unit of natural selection and, second, that Dawkins thought it was "selfishness" is important for Dawkins.
We can easily question the first issue. For Dawkins, what is important is that some entities survive and some do not, that those two types of entities are rivals, or in competition, and that the ones who survive act to preserve themselves at all costs. This account presents what Mary Midgley rightly calls a mythology. The mythology of selfishness of genes, that nature is "red in tooth and claw" and that all of life is about "survival of the fittest" has proven very influential in the modern world, as evidenced both by the number of sales that Dawkins' book generated and also by the spin-off of Dawkins' work in the form of evolutionary psychology. What myths do is take facts and try to present an over-arching story about those facts.
Dawkins has done this for facts about evolution and about survival.
The thing about myths is that they often ignore experience that does not agree with the over-arching mythology and rests on points that it tries to sweep under the carpet. To wit, Dawkins divides the world into selfish entities and altruistic entities. Yet, he completely ignores cooperation. In fact, Dawkins' genes are able to create "survival machines" only because they cooperate with each other to produce such an entity. To explain this in terms of selfish acts/behaviors/choices masks something because cooperation need not be, and often is not, selfish in origin.
This point should give us a pause in how we understand, not only Dawkins' work and popularity, but how we understand evolution and science. We often think of science as "just the facts, ma'am." In fact, however, science, just like every other aspect of life, comes with a slant, which does not mean it isn't true. Just the opposite. But we need to be aware both of that slant and how the slant of science can skew our vision of the world and what we expect from it.
Questioning Our Computer Competence
24/05/11 23:03
Douglas Rushkoff, on Think out Loud today, defended his view that we need to program or be programmed when it comes to computer technology. He had lots of interesting things to say about agency. In particular, he wanted to point out that, the less we know about the technology we use, the more likely we are to be programmed by it -- that is, that it will shape the way we make decisions or even think about what kind of decisions we can make without our knowing.
Rushkoff is not defending some luddite thesis here. He's making a clear point that we should carefully consider. He gave the example of a person using facebook. The person thinks that she is a customer of facebook, and the facebook is there to serve her interests. In fact, however, the person does not pay facebook. Advertisers and companies pay facebook so that they can market to the person using facebook. Thus, if we don't really understand what facebook is -- a means for marketers to reach potential consumers -- then we will more easily be tricked into making decisions we might have more control over under false pretenses.
We should not, also, dismiss this too easily as a case of false consciousness. We can have false beliefs about different things we use. Often, marketers work by causing us to believe false things about the products they market. We may even see through the marketing ploy -- do we really believe that drinking a certain beer will make us favorable to the hot members of the sex to which we are attracted? Yet, marketing and advertising work, and it often works because we are not careful about what we understand about the product.
Rushkoff is extending this idea to computers, computer technology, and new media. I think rightly so. Our lives are often constrained in ways we don't even bother to recogize. Take, for instance, the now famous debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Because of the way that Kennedy knew how to use the media for presentation, he easily was seen to have won the debate. The more the technology changes so fast that we cannot keep up with it, the more likely we are to fall to the influence of those who know how to use it. Another more practical example is birth: how does living in a technological society make us think about pregnant bodies? About birth?
So, the warning is simple: beware how you use technology? Ask questions to open up moments of agency? Here, we are our best defenders: asking questions and teaching our children to ask questions. Without questions, we might as well live in a brave new world.
Rushkoff is not defending some luddite thesis here. He's making a clear point that we should carefully consider. He gave the example of a person using facebook. The person thinks that she is a customer of facebook, and the facebook is there to serve her interests. In fact, however, the person does not pay facebook. Advertisers and companies pay facebook so that they can market to the person using facebook. Thus, if we don't really understand what facebook is -- a means for marketers to reach potential consumers -- then we will more easily be tricked into making decisions we might have more control over under false pretenses.
We should not, also, dismiss this too easily as a case of false consciousness. We can have false beliefs about different things we use. Often, marketers work by causing us to believe false things about the products they market. We may even see through the marketing ploy -- do we really believe that drinking a certain beer will make us favorable to the hot members of the sex to which we are attracted? Yet, marketing and advertising work, and it often works because we are not careful about what we understand about the product.
Rushkoff is extending this idea to computers, computer technology, and new media. I think rightly so. Our lives are often constrained in ways we don't even bother to recogize. Take, for instance, the now famous debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Because of the way that Kennedy knew how to use the media for presentation, he easily was seen to have won the debate. The more the technology changes so fast that we cannot keep up with it, the more likely we are to fall to the influence of those who know how to use it. Another more practical example is birth: how does living in a technological society make us think about pregnant bodies? About birth?
So, the warning is simple: beware how you use technology? Ask questions to open up moments of agency? Here, we are our best defenders: asking questions and teaching our children to ask questions. Without questions, we might as well live in a brave new world.
Philosophy is Dead, Long Live Philosophy
23/05/11 19:03
The Telegraph reported that Stephen Hawking, the author of a Brief History of Time, told an audience that philosophy is dead. Hawking is quoted as saying
“Most of us don't worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead."
Why does Hawking make this claim? Because philosophers have not kept up with the findings of science, particularly of physics.
If we parse his comments, he seems to be confusing a few questions. He is confusing answers to "why are we here?" and "where do we come from?" with questions about "how are we here?" and "how did we come to here?" As Mary Midgley has said, most recently in The Solitary Self, he is confusing knowledge with wisdom and wonder.
Of course, Hawking's comments have stirred the bee's nest of philosophers. Most notably, Christopher Norris addresses Hawkings's views on the Philosophy Now website. Norris argues that scientists still need philosophers, particularly philosophers of science, because they provide clarity on terms like falsifiability and truth, and philosophers of science have rejected the Quinean-type relativism that marred 20th century philosophy of science.
Insofar as it goes, Norris' argument is fine. But notice that, despite warning against those philosophers who have given away too much by agreeing with some of Quine's theses, Norris also gives away too much. Where Hawking says that philosophy is dead, Norris focuses only on the philosophy of science and logic. Unfortunately, philosophers of the 20th century in the Anglo-speaking world have tended to focus on questions in epistemology and philosophy of science, thereby killing off almost any relevance philosophy as a whole has for the everyday person. But focusing on technical terminology and questions that pertain only to those doing science, philosophers have abandoned the root of the philosophical enterprise in the Ancient Greeks: trying to understand ourselves and learning how to live a good life.
If we take this broader picture of philosophy, then neither Hawking's comments nor Norris' rebuttal to Hawking have anything to say about philosophy. Or, insofar as they say anything about philosophy, they give a firm warning to those of us in the field to stop being so narrow in our discussions and to make philosophy more relevant. The more that people see philosophy as meaningless in their lives, the easier it will be for administrators to gut philosophy programs, as they have already done at London Metropolitan University.
Or perhaps I should say, if philosophy is dead, it's because philosophers have killed it themselves. It is up to us to resurrect it by giving it a much more meaningful role in human life. Hopefully this blog does that just a little.
“Most of us don't worry about these questions most of the time. But almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead."
Why does Hawking make this claim? Because philosophers have not kept up with the findings of science, particularly of physics.
If we parse his comments, he seems to be confusing a few questions. He is confusing answers to "why are we here?" and "where do we come from?" with questions about "how are we here?" and "how did we come to here?" As Mary Midgley has said, most recently in The Solitary Self, he is confusing knowledge with wisdom and wonder.
Of course, Hawking's comments have stirred the bee's nest of philosophers. Most notably, Christopher Norris addresses Hawkings's views on the Philosophy Now website. Norris argues that scientists still need philosophers, particularly philosophers of science, because they provide clarity on terms like falsifiability and truth, and philosophers of science have rejected the Quinean-type relativism that marred 20th century philosophy of science.
Insofar as it goes, Norris' argument is fine. But notice that, despite warning against those philosophers who have given away too much by agreeing with some of Quine's theses, Norris also gives away too much. Where Hawking says that philosophy is dead, Norris focuses only on the philosophy of science and logic. Unfortunately, philosophers of the 20th century in the Anglo-speaking world have tended to focus on questions in epistemology and philosophy of science, thereby killing off almost any relevance philosophy as a whole has for the everyday person. But focusing on technical terminology and questions that pertain only to those doing science, philosophers have abandoned the root of the philosophical enterprise in the Ancient Greeks: trying to understand ourselves and learning how to live a good life.
If we take this broader picture of philosophy, then neither Hawking's comments nor Norris' rebuttal to Hawking have anything to say about philosophy. Or, insofar as they say anything about philosophy, they give a firm warning to those of us in the field to stop being so narrow in our discussions and to make philosophy more relevant. The more that people see philosophy as meaningless in their lives, the easier it will be for administrators to gut philosophy programs, as they have already done at London Metropolitan University.
Or perhaps I should say, if philosophy is dead, it's because philosophers have killed it themselves. It is up to us to resurrect it by giving it a much more meaningful role in human life. Hopefully this blog does that just a little.
Faith and Darwin
18/05/11 20:23
Many people, especially of the religious persuasion, believe Darwin was an atheist. In fact, Darwin denied this. He wrote in a letter
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God.
In fact, Darwin gave some credence to the design argument for God's existence:
Another source of conviction in the existence of Do ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe ... as the result of blind chance.
We should be more careful, then, in what we attribute to Darwin as a belief. While he was not an atheist, Darwin was not a believer either. He called himself an agnostic, which, according to Thomas Huxley who coined the term, means that one asserts the "human inability to solve, by strictly rational argumentation, theistic or theological matters."
Of course, people of faith will say that faith begins just where rational argumentation ends. That is, the whole point of having faith is to believe in something we cannot determine by a rational means.
This attitude diverges from that of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others. For Thomas, we have inductive proof of God's existence through several means, one of which is Darwin's design argument. For Thomas, however, these arguments can only tell us that God exists; they cannot tell us who God is -- we need faith and revelation to do that. Moreover, because the arguments for God's existence are inductive, they do not lead to absolute certainty. There is, then, room for agnosticism within the Thomistic framework. Of course, Thomas would look at this askance and would go on to say that, even without reason, one should believe in God through faith.
Darwin was unwilling to make that leap. Yet, his unwillingness was not anti-religious or fanatical the way that many think. Indeed, his study of evolution opens up new possibilities of faith as well as new ways of understanding God's creativity.
It is faith and reason which helps us to understand how we fit into that evolved world as evolved creatures subject to God's design and grace.
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God.
In fact, Darwin gave some credence to the design argument for God's existence:
Another source of conviction in the existence of Do ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe ... as the result of blind chance.
We should be more careful, then, in what we attribute to Darwin as a belief. While he was not an atheist, Darwin was not a believer either. He called himself an agnostic, which, according to Thomas Huxley who coined the term, means that one asserts the "human inability to solve, by strictly rational argumentation, theistic or theological matters."
Of course, people of faith will say that faith begins just where rational argumentation ends. That is, the whole point of having faith is to believe in something we cannot determine by a rational means.
This attitude diverges from that of St. Thomas Aquinas, among others. For Thomas, we have inductive proof of God's existence through several means, one of which is Darwin's design argument. For Thomas, however, these arguments can only tell us that God exists; they cannot tell us who God is -- we need faith and revelation to do that. Moreover, because the arguments for God's existence are inductive, they do not lead to absolute certainty. There is, then, room for agnosticism within the Thomistic framework. Of course, Thomas would look at this askance and would go on to say that, even without reason, one should believe in God through faith.
Darwin was unwilling to make that leap. Yet, his unwillingness was not anti-religious or fanatical the way that many think. Indeed, his study of evolution opens up new possibilities of faith as well as new ways of understanding God's creativity.
It is faith and reason which helps us to understand how we fit into that evolved world as evolved creatures subject to God's design and grace.
Laziness
13/05/11 18:21
Laziness is learned behavior.
The other day, I was at the coffee shop when a grandmother and her 7 year old granddaughter came in. The grandmother was meeting a friend. The granddaughter picked out a decent puzzle and started working it. I watched her for a little bit because she was so entranced by what she was doing. It brought to mind the old Zen idea of mindfulness: wash the dishes when you're washing the dishes. Or, work the puzzle when you are working the puzzle.
Have you ever watched young children play. They are completely invested in their play. They may be making something from their imagination that will never work and involves saran wrap and aluminum foil and cardboard. But they are completely immersed in their activity -- in their work.
So, you see, we are born workers -- co-creators with God in the words of John Paul II.
So whence laziness?
We learn it.
Laziness is an outgrowth of a natural need ... the need for rest. In our contemporary, fast-paced, gratification culture, rest can take many forms, from watching television to doing puzzles. Our play can take many forms as well, and we can get caught up in entertainment -- from playing baseball to playing on the Wii.
The problem can be two-fold, then.
Either we get so addicted to our rest that we forget to work again or we get so destroyed in our creative capacities that we have nothing to take us away from our rest and play. The first problem is one that has been with people since the beginnings of civilization. When human beings first developed the capacity to rest, there was always the possibility -- as there is with any human activity -- to take it too far. And some few people who could did. But, for the most part, human beings are naturally industrious. We see this in children.
The second problem is a symptom of our modern lives. Capitalism destroys human creativity by denying us those activities which most engage our human capacities. Making money, as Aristotle noted, is not a human activity. Being engaged in the common good, raising families, and otherwise being in a practice are human activities because they exercise our most fundamental human powers. Capitalism must destroy this drive, for, given the real choice between doing something that increases the person I am or sitting around playing Wii, most human beings would, unless trained otherwise, choose the former.
A society like that of WALL-E is constructed from our basest nature. And it is one that results from corporate, consumer capitalism.
If this is true, and every time I see a child play I know it is, then we have to think about laziness in a way differently than we have. Yes, no one has a right to be lazy, and I am not justifying laziness. What I am saying is, laziness is a symptom of the system we have created. If we really want justice in the world, then the best thing to do is destroy the current system for one more human.
The other day, I was at the coffee shop when a grandmother and her 7 year old granddaughter came in. The grandmother was meeting a friend. The granddaughter picked out a decent puzzle and started working it. I watched her for a little bit because she was so entranced by what she was doing. It brought to mind the old Zen idea of mindfulness: wash the dishes when you're washing the dishes. Or, work the puzzle when you are working the puzzle.
Have you ever watched young children play. They are completely invested in their play. They may be making something from their imagination that will never work and involves saran wrap and aluminum foil and cardboard. But they are completely immersed in their activity -- in their work.
So, you see, we are born workers -- co-creators with God in the words of John Paul II.
So whence laziness?
We learn it.
Laziness is an outgrowth of a natural need ... the need for rest. In our contemporary, fast-paced, gratification culture, rest can take many forms, from watching television to doing puzzles. Our play can take many forms as well, and we can get caught up in entertainment -- from playing baseball to playing on the Wii.
The problem can be two-fold, then.
Either we get so addicted to our rest that we forget to work again or we get so destroyed in our creative capacities that we have nothing to take us away from our rest and play. The first problem is one that has been with people since the beginnings of civilization. When human beings first developed the capacity to rest, there was always the possibility -- as there is with any human activity -- to take it too far. And some few people who could did. But, for the most part, human beings are naturally industrious. We see this in children.
The second problem is a symptom of our modern lives. Capitalism destroys human creativity by denying us those activities which most engage our human capacities. Making money, as Aristotle noted, is not a human activity. Being engaged in the common good, raising families, and otherwise being in a practice are human activities because they exercise our most fundamental human powers. Capitalism must destroy this drive, for, given the real choice between doing something that increases the person I am or sitting around playing Wii, most human beings would, unless trained otherwise, choose the former.
A society like that of WALL-E is constructed from our basest nature. And it is one that results from corporate, consumer capitalism.
If this is true, and every time I see a child play I know it is, then we have to think about laziness in a way differently than we have. Yes, no one has a right to be lazy, and I am not justifying laziness. What I am saying is, laziness is a symptom of the system we have created. If we really want justice in the world, then the best thing to do is destroy the current system for one more human.
The Solitary Self
28/04/11 18:21
I’m reading through Mary Midgley’s latest, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene. I love Midgley’s work: it’s informed, it’s clearly written and accessible, and it’s trenchant in its commentary. What’s more, she takes the reductionists, like Dawkins, to task.
Midgley makes an interesting point on page 19: “‘Social Atomism’ is a combination of the deep individualism of our time -- something that will occupy us throughout the book -- and a prejudice about method: a general idea that it is always more scientific to consider separate components than the larger wholes to which they belong.” In other words, social atomism reflects both deep individualism and a prejudice about scientific method.
The point about scientific method makes some sense. It should be obvious, however, that we cannot understand human beings as isolated from their societies. Yet, this point is often rejected by political philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, and it often rejected by our culture. We think we can understand human beings as single entities whole unto themselves.
The point should be, however, that individualism makes everything the same; it actually opposes individuality. When we analyze one atom to see what gold is like; we understand all atoms. Trying to understand things in their separate components means that, on the one hand, we identify component parts as identical and, on the other, that we ignore what individualizes the individuals of the whole. On the one hand, studying Adam tells us everything we need to know about Peter and Paul. On the other hand, when we study Adam, we miss out on what makes Adam different from Peter and Paul, and vice versa. We also tend to misunderstand some of the most important elements of Adam: his social nature.
And, of course, because we focus on studying “man,” we miss out on the particular social nature of “women” which could provide us even more insight into “man.”
Different levels of science, then, should study different aspects of reality. Some science must study the human being as individual-in-the-whole.
Midgley makes an interesting point on page 19: “‘Social Atomism’ is a combination of the deep individualism of our time -- something that will occupy us throughout the book -- and a prejudice about method: a general idea that it is always more scientific to consider separate components than the larger wholes to which they belong.” In other words, social atomism reflects both deep individualism and a prejudice about scientific method.
The point about scientific method makes some sense. It should be obvious, however, that we cannot understand human beings as isolated from their societies. Yet, this point is often rejected by political philosophers, especially in the analytic tradition, and it often rejected by our culture. We think we can understand human beings as single entities whole unto themselves.
The point should be, however, that individualism makes everything the same; it actually opposes individuality. When we analyze one atom to see what gold is like; we understand all atoms. Trying to understand things in their separate components means that, on the one hand, we identify component parts as identical and, on the other, that we ignore what individualizes the individuals of the whole. On the one hand, studying Adam tells us everything we need to know about Peter and Paul. On the other hand, when we study Adam, we miss out on what makes Adam different from Peter and Paul, and vice versa. We also tend to misunderstand some of the most important elements of Adam: his social nature.
And, of course, because we focus on studying “man,” we miss out on the particular social nature of “women” which could provide us even more insight into “man.”
Different levels of science, then, should study different aspects of reality. Some science must study the human being as individual-in-the-whole.
Self Help: Myth or Virtue
07/04/11 21:54
Talk of the Nation aired a show discussing Manning Marable and Malcolm X. Marable died earlier this week. On the show, Eric Michael Dyson spoke. One of the questions centered on what African-Americans can do to help themselves. Dyson noted that Marable and Malcolm X, as well as MLK jr. and many other prominent African-Americans have insisted that African-Americans must work to improve their situations, including improving their neighborhoods and cities. Along with that call, however, many have pointed out the structures in society that prevent people from helping themselves.
First, I want to recognize that this issue of helping one’s self is very important, and that society does support structures which often make it difficult if not impossible for people to help themselves -- to practice virtues of independence like phronesis. Take, for instance, education: the way we’ve distributed money for education in this country means that children born or raised in poor school districts have less access to books and computers -- and even papers and pens -- that people born in wealthier neighborhoods have. Having an education is necessary for developing phronesis. More to the point: these schools are often over-crowded, and so, even if a student does show some promise, they often cannot make anything near like the headway that someone born in other circumstances could make. This constitutes structural injustice -- structural sin.
Second, however, I wonder if we are wise to talk about self-help in this way. It’s too easy to start talking about pulling one’s self up by one’s boot straps. But, of course, one has to have boot straps to begin with, and usually the rhetoric about self-help and boot-strapping is a mask for that fact.
Certainly we have to support structures --including community education -- that help individuals develop those virtues necessary for independence -- including phronesis and self-esteem. Yet, we have to recognize that those virtues develop only within contexts of acknowledged dependence. We are each, as individuals, dependent on someone at times in our lives -- whether that means only when we are newborns and children, or whether it means throughout our lives. Yet, trying to develop self-esteem without recognizing our dependence on others is to develop a deformity: a vice of self-importance or narcissism.
Individuals and communities grow hand in hand.
First, I want to recognize that this issue of helping one’s self is very important, and that society does support structures which often make it difficult if not impossible for people to help themselves -- to practice virtues of independence like phronesis. Take, for instance, education: the way we’ve distributed money for education in this country means that children born or raised in poor school districts have less access to books and computers -- and even papers and pens -- that people born in wealthier neighborhoods have. Having an education is necessary for developing phronesis. More to the point: these schools are often over-crowded, and so, even if a student does show some promise, they often cannot make anything near like the headway that someone born in other circumstances could make. This constitutes structural injustice -- structural sin.
Second, however, I wonder if we are wise to talk about self-help in this way. It’s too easy to start talking about pulling one’s self up by one’s boot straps. But, of course, one has to have boot straps to begin with, and usually the rhetoric about self-help and boot-strapping is a mask for that fact.
Certainly we have to support structures --including community education -- that help individuals develop those virtues necessary for independence -- including phronesis and self-esteem. Yet, we have to recognize that those virtues develop only within contexts of acknowledged dependence. We are each, as individuals, dependent on someone at times in our lives -- whether that means only when we are newborns and children, or whether it means throughout our lives. Yet, trying to develop self-esteem without recognizing our dependence on others is to develop a deformity: a vice of self-importance or narcissism.
Individuals and communities grow hand in hand.
Evolution Controversy -- What?
31/03/11 21:29
I’m afraid, I don’t get the evolution controversy. God created the earth and the whole universe, from the simplest superstring to the greatest nebula to the hottest galaxy. He may have even created an unlimited number of universes, as scientists seem to think today that multiple universes exist. In all of this creating, God made the human person -- homo sapiens sapiens. He gave homo sapiens some things they share with other creatures and some things they do particularly better or only by themselves: speech, advanced reasoning, art, philosophy and science. We are closer to God than any other created material being (except, perhaps, elves, as Peter Kreeft argues). The fact that we evolved from the same evolutionary line as the great apes cannot and does not lessen who we are.
I am not sure, then, why people are still fighting the evolution wars, as this post reports about schools in Tennessee. A bill was proposed that would allow an instructor to teach whatever her beliefs were about science or evolution despite the fact that it has no scientific backing -- as in the case of creationism or intelligent design. Why would we allow our children to be taught something that is not true or to be taught that what is true is not true?
It must be because we believe science threatens our dignity. What nonsense!
Imagine you are an artist and you paint, and you’ve created an oeuvre of hundreds of paintings. Do you love all of them equally? Did you invest more energy in some than you did in others? Do you not have one or two that, when a guest comes over, you say -- this is my favorite. They all came from the same pallet. They all came from the same colors. In fact, some painting evolved from other ones -- you modified lines, concentrated on particular themes, highlighted various elements. Does this make the painting any the less valuable?
Just the contrary.
But, as I said, I really don’t understand the hot air.
I am not sure, then, why people are still fighting the evolution wars, as this post reports about schools in Tennessee. A bill was proposed that would allow an instructor to teach whatever her beliefs were about science or evolution despite the fact that it has no scientific backing -- as in the case of creationism or intelligent design. Why would we allow our children to be taught something that is not true or to be taught that what is true is not true?
It must be because we believe science threatens our dignity. What nonsense!
Imagine you are an artist and you paint, and you’ve created an oeuvre of hundreds of paintings. Do you love all of them equally? Did you invest more energy in some than you did in others? Do you not have one or two that, when a guest comes over, you say -- this is my favorite. They all came from the same pallet. They all came from the same colors. In fact, some painting evolved from other ones -- you modified lines, concentrated on particular themes, highlighted various elements. Does this make the painting any the less valuable?
Just the contrary.
But, as I said, I really don’t understand the hot air.
Ruddick, Mothering and Nature
23/03/11 15:35
The NY Times reports that Sara Ruddick died on Sunday 20 March 2011. Ruddick wrote a book, “Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace.” In this book, she defended the idea that being a mother involved developing specific ways of seeing the world, of responding to the world, and specific virtues.
Her argument should come as no surprise to those who think from an Aristotelian perspective or who talk about practices. When we engage in practices, we are forming ourselves. As we play chess, for example, we develop more analytic and spatio-pattern recognition skills. Developing these skills can only affect the way we see the world. Ruddick’s argument is that, in mothering, the person develops ways of seeing the world that make them less likely to engage in violence.
Importantly, she notes that mother is not a gender-specific. As the NY Time quotes: ““Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother,””
I think this is important to keep in mind. Mothering -- relating to the world as a responding, caring parent -- is something we can all do. I write this in part because of rereading John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens -- On Human Labor -- yesterday. I’ve praised and defended Catholic Social Teaching often, and I teach a class on Catholic Social Teaching. One of the problems with the teaching, however, is its insistence, as stated by JP II, that “women have their own work” or that there is a “work specific to women.” Now, admittedly, JP II defends the idea that women are owed the same rights and respect as everyone else. Yet, he also contends that employment should be designed to allow women to perform those duties special to her.
Of course, JP II is saying that women have special work as mothers that is based on their gender. They were created to be mothers. Ruddick contends that is not so.
As a father, I have to side with Ruddick here. Women do, in fact, do biological things I cannot do, and we know scientifically that breast-feeding is much healthier for the baby. Yet, men have just as much right and duty to care for the child in the same way that women do. This duty includes feeding and changing children. It also included developing those ways of seeing the world that Ruddick identifies as “mothering.”
And perhaps, if we recognize mothering as something men have a responsibility for, we can develop in men the same aversion to violence that Ruddick believes female mothers gain from the practice of mothering.
Her argument should come as no surprise to those who think from an Aristotelian perspective or who talk about practices. When we engage in practices, we are forming ourselves. As we play chess, for example, we develop more analytic and spatio-pattern recognition skills. Developing these skills can only affect the way we see the world. Ruddick’s argument is that, in mothering, the person develops ways of seeing the world that make them less likely to engage in violence.
Importantly, she notes that mother is not a gender-specific. As the NY Time quotes: ““Anyone who commits her or himself to responding to children’s demands, and makes the work of response a considerable part of her or his life, is a mother,””
I think this is important to keep in mind. Mothering -- relating to the world as a responding, caring parent -- is something we can all do. I write this in part because of rereading John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens -- On Human Labor -- yesterday. I’ve praised and defended Catholic Social Teaching often, and I teach a class on Catholic Social Teaching. One of the problems with the teaching, however, is its insistence, as stated by JP II, that “women have their own work” or that there is a “work specific to women.” Now, admittedly, JP II defends the idea that women are owed the same rights and respect as everyone else. Yet, he also contends that employment should be designed to allow women to perform those duties special to her.
Of course, JP II is saying that women have special work as mothers that is based on their gender. They were created to be mothers. Ruddick contends that is not so.
As a father, I have to side with Ruddick here. Women do, in fact, do biological things I cannot do, and we know scientifically that breast-feeding is much healthier for the baby. Yet, men have just as much right and duty to care for the child in the same way that women do. This duty includes feeding and changing children. It also included developing those ways of seeing the world that Ruddick identifies as “mothering.”
And perhaps, if we recognize mothering as something men have a responsibility for, we can develop in men the same aversion to violence that Ruddick believes female mothers gain from the practice of mothering.
Time
14/03/11 22:23
What is time?
St. Augustine said of this topic, “If you don’t ask me, I know, but if you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is that fickle or slippery, or however you want to think of it.
In the United States, we must all think of it today. Over the weekend, we sprung forward, setting our clocks ahead for daylight savings time. That means, we lost an hour of sleep, unless we were smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier. Me? Well, not only was I not smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier, I took a one-night job working karaoke, which kept me up several hours later.
The loss of sleep is a physical experience.
But there’s also a mental experience as well. I’m well aware right now that the clock reports it being an hour later than at the same relative time last week. Yet, that remains at the surface level of our experience. We also experience time as part of living. We have the past that shaped us, and the future that holds promise for us. In our modern, fast-paced industrial lives, we struggle to hold on to the now. Ask lovers and parents or someone who has lost a loved one what “now” means.
Of the philosophers who’ve spoken about time, Augustine and Heidegger prove the most insightful. Augustine, after much speculation, concluded that time is a mental experience. His understanding would fit well with Einstein’s relativity theory. Our experience of time, while objective in many ways, proves relative to where we are in space. We cannot speak of “time” per se, but must speak of time-space.
Heidegger notes that we experience being-toward-time. For me, the best way to understand this concept is through Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Asimov tells the story of a thinking robot who undergoes a procedure that will make him die. The robot has search for a long time for what will make him human. He realizes, in the end, that it must be the experience that death comes; that he has only a short time to carry out his purpose on earth. That captures, I think, Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-time. Our lives, our experiences, are shaped by a notion of time that gives importance to time, in way that non-human animals and robots cannot understand time.
Even God cannot understand time. He has no being-toward-time. It’s a logical impossibility, for God is eternal, which Max Scheler points out, means He cannot experience a before and after. Augustine and St. Thomas understood this.
The other side of that coin, though, is that we -- human beings -- are beings of time. It’s part of our humanity. Which is why, when you finish reading this post, you might ask yourself: was that a waste of time?
St. Augustine said of this topic, “If you don’t ask me, I know, but if you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is that fickle or slippery, or however you want to think of it.
In the United States, we must all think of it today. Over the weekend, we sprung forward, setting our clocks ahead for daylight savings time. That means, we lost an hour of sleep, unless we were smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier. Me? Well, not only was I not smart enough to go to sleep an hour earlier, I took a one-night job working karaoke, which kept me up several hours later.
The loss of sleep is a physical experience.
But there’s also a mental experience as well. I’m well aware right now that the clock reports it being an hour later than at the same relative time last week. Yet, that remains at the surface level of our experience. We also experience time as part of living. We have the past that shaped us, and the future that holds promise for us. In our modern, fast-paced industrial lives, we struggle to hold on to the now. Ask lovers and parents or someone who has lost a loved one what “now” means.
Of the philosophers who’ve spoken about time, Augustine and Heidegger prove the most insightful. Augustine, after much speculation, concluded that time is a mental experience. His understanding would fit well with Einstein’s relativity theory. Our experience of time, while objective in many ways, proves relative to where we are in space. We cannot speak of “time” per se, but must speak of time-space.
Heidegger notes that we experience being-toward-time. For me, the best way to understand this concept is through Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. Asimov tells the story of a thinking robot who undergoes a procedure that will make him die. The robot has search for a long time for what will make him human. He realizes, in the end, that it must be the experience that death comes; that he has only a short time to carry out his purpose on earth. That captures, I think, Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-time. Our lives, our experiences, are shaped by a notion of time that gives importance to time, in way that non-human animals and robots cannot understand time.
Even God cannot understand time. He has no being-toward-time. It’s a logical impossibility, for God is eternal, which Max Scheler points out, means He cannot experience a before and after. Augustine and St. Thomas understood this.
The other side of that coin, though, is that we -- human beings -- are beings of time. It’s part of our humanity. Which is why, when you finish reading this post, you might ask yourself: was that a waste of time?
Lent and Human Nature
09/03/11 20:22
Today marks Ash Wednesday for most Christian denominations. In the Roman Catholic Church, parishioners attend a special mass in which the priest marks their foreheads with a cross made from ashes. Then, for the next forty days, Catholics sacrifice things they love and also attempt to change behaviors, moving from bad behaviors to good or incorporating more good behaviors into their lives.
The traditions and practices we engage in say something about our conceptions of human nature. Lent makes little sense if we don’t first believe that human beings are fallen creatures or, at least, that we fall occasionally. Nor does it makes sense if we aren’t redeemable in part through out actions. In many ways, the actions Catholics and Christians unertake during Lent recognize the truth of Aristotelian virtue theory -- that we can become more virtuous by consciously changing our behavior. Such an understanding of human behavior entails some modicum of free choice on our part.
The tradition of Lent, then, reveals a rather complex and sophisticated view of human nature. It recognizes our free choice in determining what kind of characters we have (virtuous or vicious) and the need for human beings to renew themselves occasionally. Such renewal begins with a recognition of our failings and our frailties. It cannot end there, though, and in many ways people corrupt Lent by forgetting that we can change and, moreover, that Easter represents, not only the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but our own resurrection. Fundamentally, Lent is hope. If we only sacrifice and do not actively pursue avenues of expansion of ourselves, we’ve really missed what Lent is about and, more importantly, what Easter is about. In recognizing that Easter is the most important Holy Day of the year, we can come to grasp that Hope rises up in our future because we allow God to form us as the best persons we can possibly be.
May your Lent be filled with hope and renewal and may God bless us with the Grace we need to change our lives for the better -- to change who we are for the better.
The traditions and practices we engage in say something about our conceptions of human nature. Lent makes little sense if we don’t first believe that human beings are fallen creatures or, at least, that we fall occasionally. Nor does it makes sense if we aren’t redeemable in part through out actions. In many ways, the actions Catholics and Christians unertake during Lent recognize the truth of Aristotelian virtue theory -- that we can become more virtuous by consciously changing our behavior. Such an understanding of human behavior entails some modicum of free choice on our part.
The tradition of Lent, then, reveals a rather complex and sophisticated view of human nature. It recognizes our free choice in determining what kind of characters we have (virtuous or vicious) and the need for human beings to renew themselves occasionally. Such renewal begins with a recognition of our failings and our frailties. It cannot end there, though, and in many ways people corrupt Lent by forgetting that we can change and, moreover, that Easter represents, not only the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but our own resurrection. Fundamentally, Lent is hope. If we only sacrifice and do not actively pursue avenues of expansion of ourselves, we’ve really missed what Lent is about and, more importantly, what Easter is about. In recognizing that Easter is the most important Holy Day of the year, we can come to grasp that Hope rises up in our future because we allow God to form us as the best persons we can possibly be.
May your Lent be filled with hope and renewal and may God bless us with the Grace we need to change our lives for the better -- to change who we are for the better.
Bodies: Somatic and Cultural
07/03/11 22:49
In the very interesting book, Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist at Brown University in Rhodes Island, examines how bodies are sexed, not just through physical aspects, but also through culture. She argues that “sexuality is a somatic fact created by a cultural effect. She intends this position to avoid the dualisms that plague modern societies and sciences, including biology. For example, some feminists and others have argued that the sex of a body is natural and the gender of a body is constructed by society. Fausto-Sterling is forging a path between these naturalism and social constructionism.
Her approach is clearly on the right track. Bodies exist, but they exist in cultural milieus that interpret them as these kinds of bodies and not those kinds of bodies. Yet, the very moment we begin to make distinctions between these and those, we also frame our discourse which means we exclude certain categories of bodies.
Let’s take something a little less controversial (for some of us, anyway): Pluto. Pluto is a rocky mass circling the sun. Once it was considered a planet, now it is not. My generation will probably always see Pluto as a planet, even if we try not to, while my daughter’s generation might see it as either a planet or not a planet, and the generation after that will never know it as a planet. Human bodies can be similar: we see them as one way or another, and that way of seeing the body can change.
Let’s not think about sexing, for a moment, and think simply about beauty. What makes a beautiful body? Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 which, by the standards of 2011, would be overweight. (See, for example, The Devil Wears Prada.) Yet, someone might contend, you’re talking about values there: beautiful or not. Science talks about facts.
This point is the key, though: facts do not exist in a vacuum for us human beings. They exist within a particular tradition or a particular culture. Most of us would consider the law of gravity a fact, but it’s not. The Newtonian understanding of gravity has been superseded by relativity theory. Fausto-Sterling’s book is trying to explain how human bodies exist in cultural milieus which give them their very identification as bodies, as particular types of bodies.
This point does not mean that there is no truth about the situation. If relativism were true, it wouldn’t matter what science said about gravity or about bodies. Yet, it does matter. We can have a whole discussion about relativism and the position laid out here, but that would extend far beyond this particular post. Relativism, however, is a red herring. The real issue centers around how culture (tradition) frames the way we see the world and what that means for human nature. We are interpretive creatures, which means, at a very basic level, our lives entail providing interpretations of the world and testing them out. It’s in the testing of them that we avoid relativism.
Her approach is clearly on the right track. Bodies exist, but they exist in cultural milieus that interpret them as these kinds of bodies and not those kinds of bodies. Yet, the very moment we begin to make distinctions between these and those, we also frame our discourse which means we exclude certain categories of bodies.
Let’s take something a little less controversial (for some of us, anyway): Pluto. Pluto is a rocky mass circling the sun. Once it was considered a planet, now it is not. My generation will probably always see Pluto as a planet, even if we try not to, while my daughter’s generation might see it as either a planet or not a planet, and the generation after that will never know it as a planet. Human bodies can be similar: we see them as one way or another, and that way of seeing the body can change.
Let’s not think about sexing, for a moment, and think simply about beauty. What makes a beautiful body? Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 which, by the standards of 2011, would be overweight. (See, for example, The Devil Wears Prada.) Yet, someone might contend, you’re talking about values there: beautiful or not. Science talks about facts.
This point is the key, though: facts do not exist in a vacuum for us human beings. They exist within a particular tradition or a particular culture. Most of us would consider the law of gravity a fact, but it’s not. The Newtonian understanding of gravity has been superseded by relativity theory. Fausto-Sterling’s book is trying to explain how human bodies exist in cultural milieus which give them their very identification as bodies, as particular types of bodies.
This point does not mean that there is no truth about the situation. If relativism were true, it wouldn’t matter what science said about gravity or about bodies. Yet, it does matter. We can have a whole discussion about relativism and the position laid out here, but that would extend far beyond this particular post. Relativism, however, is a red herring. The real issue centers around how culture (tradition) frames the way we see the world and what that means for human nature. We are interpretive creatures, which means, at a very basic level, our lives entail providing interpretations of the world and testing them out. It’s in the testing of them that we avoid relativism.
Unemployment and Wanting Jobs
04/03/11 21:10
In a recent conversation with someone I consider a long-time friend and whom I respect, the discussion turned to people expecting the system to give them what they need rather than working for what they need or want. We often hear, especially during times of crisis, that unemployment is due to people being lazy or not wanting to work. They expect the system to pay them for sitting around and watching TV or having babies. I can remember people decrying the welfare queens throughout the 80’s and early 90’s. What I never heard, though, was why someone would want to stay at home with a bunch of crying babies just to avoid work? Note well, I was a registered Republican back then. Something should be said here, of course, about the idea of work and whether work includes taking care of children and the household, but I shall leave that aside for now.
Rather, I want to turn to this set of charts at The Atlantic. They compare the number of people that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts being unemployed compared to those who want to work but do not count as being unemployed. Noticed that the number of marginalized has grown even when jobs have been added to economy. These are people who for whatever reason cannot find work. As a matter of fact, we know that if people are out of work for a long time, employers mistrust them and think that their lack of work is due to their own unwillingness rather than to the facts about the economy -- surely a poor judgment on the part of the employer.
The question these charts raise will most likely be hidden by the release of the new jobs created in February -- close to 200,000 jobs. Yet the question needs to be asked: why aren’t people who want to work working?
In On the Condition of Labor, Pope Leo XIII wrote that most people want to work. In On the Progress of Peoples, Paul VI wrote that people want “To do more, to learn more, to have more. The popes emphasize what I think is true: people want to work; they want to engage in those activities which they find meaningful and fulfilling. The problem is, as I’ve noted here before, that capitalism undermines those things which truly make us human -- the development of those truly human powers and abilities that define our species.
Which takes me back to that first question: does anyone prefer sitting around a house listening to babies cry? Maybe, but they do so because they find it meaningful work. Others, however, might prefer to get out of the house and pursue some other work but can’t find the work. Which, of course, returns us to the unemployment figures.
These figures are a disgrace to any human culture. They testify to a system or a structure of systems that denies human modes of being to a group of human people -- in this case, somewhere close to 15% of the American population, which does not include those who work part-time and would prefer full-time work.
Of course, some people would prefer to sit on the couch and watch television. I’ve met people like that. That raises other questions, however: why? Here I think we need turn no further than the system we live under. It’s a system that encourages the greatest pursuit of pleasure at the least cost. Sitting on the couch and watching television, if you can get away with it, is not a human way of life, but it is essentially a capitalist way of life.
Unemployment stands as a testament to our depraved way of life. A drop in the numbers only numbs us to that moral reality.
Rather, I want to turn to this set of charts at The Atlantic. They compare the number of people that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts being unemployed compared to those who want to work but do not count as being unemployed. Noticed that the number of marginalized has grown even when jobs have been added to economy. These are people who for whatever reason cannot find work. As a matter of fact, we know that if people are out of work for a long time, employers mistrust them and think that their lack of work is due to their own unwillingness rather than to the facts about the economy -- surely a poor judgment on the part of the employer.
The question these charts raise will most likely be hidden by the release of the new jobs created in February -- close to 200,000 jobs. Yet the question needs to be asked: why aren’t people who want to work working?
In On the Condition of Labor, Pope Leo XIII wrote that most people want to work. In On the Progress of Peoples, Paul VI wrote that people want “To do more, to learn more, to have more. The popes emphasize what I think is true: people want to work; they want to engage in those activities which they find meaningful and fulfilling. The problem is, as I’ve noted here before, that capitalism undermines those things which truly make us human -- the development of those truly human powers and abilities that define our species.
Which takes me back to that first question: does anyone prefer sitting around a house listening to babies cry? Maybe, but they do so because they find it meaningful work. Others, however, might prefer to get out of the house and pursue some other work but can’t find the work. Which, of course, returns us to the unemployment figures.
These figures are a disgrace to any human culture. They testify to a system or a structure of systems that denies human modes of being to a group of human people -- in this case, somewhere close to 15% of the American population, which does not include those who work part-time and would prefer full-time work.
Of course, some people would prefer to sit on the couch and watch television. I’ve met people like that. That raises other questions, however: why? Here I think we need turn no further than the system we live under. It’s a system that encourages the greatest pursuit of pleasure at the least cost. Sitting on the couch and watching television, if you can get away with it, is not a human way of life, but it is essentially a capitalist way of life.
Unemployment stands as a testament to our depraved way of life. A drop in the numbers only numbs us to that moral reality.
Deductive, My Dear Watson
28/02/11 21:32
Have you heard of the robot that beat the best Jeopardy player? You know, scientists are getting closer and closer to making thinking computers -- turning robots into humans. It’s all over the news, in the movies, in the science-fiction. Robots that can think, interact in the world, do everything we can do -- well, soon, anyway. In the next fifty years.
Yet, robots, no matter how advanced they get, will be unable really to do what human beings do. Stanley Fish summarizes some of the argument from the philosopher Hubert reyfus on this point:
What computers can’t do, we don’t have to do because the worlds we live in are already built; we don’t walk around putting discrete items together until they add up to a context; we walk around with a contextual sense — a sense of where we are and what’s at stake and what our resources are — already in place; we inhabit worldly spaces already organized by purposes, projects and expectations. The computer inhabits nothing and has no purposes and because it has no purposes it cannot alter its present (wholly predetermined) “behavior” when it fails to advance the purposes it doesn’t have. When as human beings we determine that “the data coming in make no sense” relative to what we want to do, we can, Dreyfus explains “try a new total hypothesis,” begin afresh. A computer, in contrast, “could at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.”
Human beings are born - thrust - into a world, but, more important, we come already experiencing the world. That experience is shaped by our drives, our interests, all the many things that go into shaping the kind of persons we are and the sort of motives that we have. We have context.
Context entails, as Dreyfus explains in his book What Computers Still Can’t Do, and what Fish gets at in his article, meaning and intention which are responsive to the changes in the context and in our understanding of the context. If I walk into my dark house and someone jumps out at me, my reaction depends on my context. Is it my birthday or am I a retired spy? Functioning without context leaves us seeking the context. Think of any movie you’ve watched with a plot-twist. The protagonist has one context in mind or mat be seeking the context for what happened -- The Bourne Identity is an example of the latter kind of film -- and then he finally settles on the right interpretation to make all the pieces fall into place.
Computers lack context partly because they lack drives, partly because they lack purpose, partly because they lack biology. All of these things are central to being human -- or being animal. What computers can show us is how important our animal nature is to our free will and the meaning of our lives.
Yet, robots, no matter how advanced they get, will be unable really to do what human beings do. Stanley Fish summarizes some of the argument from the philosopher Hubert reyfus on this point:
What computers can’t do, we don’t have to do because the worlds we live in are already built; we don’t walk around putting discrete items together until they add up to a context; we walk around with a contextual sense — a sense of where we are and what’s at stake and what our resources are — already in place; we inhabit worldly spaces already organized by purposes, projects and expectations. The computer inhabits nothing and has no purposes and because it has no purposes it cannot alter its present (wholly predetermined) “behavior” when it fails to advance the purposes it doesn’t have. When as human beings we determine that “the data coming in make no sense” relative to what we want to do, we can, Dreyfus explains “try a new total hypothesis,” begin afresh. A computer, in contrast, “could at best be programmed to try out a series of hypotheses to see which best fit the fixed data.”
Human beings are born - thrust - into a world, but, more important, we come already experiencing the world. That experience is shaped by our drives, our interests, all the many things that go into shaping the kind of persons we are and the sort of motives that we have. We have context.
Context entails, as Dreyfus explains in his book What Computers Still Can’t Do, and what Fish gets at in his article, meaning and intention which are responsive to the changes in the context and in our understanding of the context. If I walk into my dark house and someone jumps out at me, my reaction depends on my context. Is it my birthday or am I a retired spy? Functioning without context leaves us seeking the context. Think of any movie you’ve watched with a plot-twist. The protagonist has one context in mind or mat be seeking the context for what happened -- The Bourne Identity is an example of the latter kind of film -- and then he finally settles on the right interpretation to make all the pieces fall into place.
Computers lack context partly because they lack drives, partly because they lack purpose, partly because they lack biology. All of these things are central to being human -- or being animal. What computers can show us is how important our animal nature is to our free will and the meaning of our lives.
Individual or Society: The Chicken and Egg Question
08/02/11 19:31
Much of what I’ve been reading lately has focused on the common good and on the nature of society. Essential to these discussions is the question of the priority of the individual or the state. That is, is the individual anterior to -- logically at least -- society or the state so that the state must be limited in what it can demand or impose upon citizens; or is the state anterior to -- logically speaking -- the individual so that there are no limits on what it can demand of citizens.
The answer is both/and or neither/nor.
If we look at ourselves through the lens of evolution, we come to understand that human beings -- homo sapiens -- evolved as members of cohesive groups. We see the same pattern in all the great apes, except for the orangutans who forage for food in solitude and are much less aggressive than homo sapiens or other apes. If we want to understand our own nature, then, we have to put our species-specific nature in discussion with this evolutionary past. I do not mean this to follow the pattern of evolutionary psychology which tries to discover deep-seated genetic imperatives in our biology that we gained and haven’t lost since the emergence of homo sapiens on the African plains. Rather, I mean that we have to understand our biology -- which includes our evolution -- if we want to understand the kinds of creatures we are -- individuals with free choice.
If we speak of individuality, then, we must understand how individuality arises among a social creature like the great apes. It cannot be something divorced from that sociality, for it is the sociality that makes for individuals to develop identities. We cannot, of course, deny that these social groups are constituted by individuals.
Which brings us to the chicken and the egg. We cannot ask what came first, the individual or the society without leading us into the circular question of the chicken and the egg. Neither can be understood without the other; which means neither can exist without the other.
Individuals and societies are mutually constitutive elements.
Which means, at the political level, that societies can demand much of the individuals that belong to them and that individuals can place limits on what societies can demand. This position is the most realistic and the most liberating philosophies for it recognizes that we human beings determine our social existence through our free choices, and that we accept that society shapes the choices available to us.
When we speak of the common good, then, we can say both that the common good can be characterized independently and antecedently to individual interests and yet that the common good includes the full development of each and every member of society.
The answer is both/and or neither/nor.
If we look at ourselves through the lens of evolution, we come to understand that human beings -- homo sapiens -- evolved as members of cohesive groups. We see the same pattern in all the great apes, except for the orangutans who forage for food in solitude and are much less aggressive than homo sapiens or other apes. If we want to understand our own nature, then, we have to put our species-specific nature in discussion with this evolutionary past. I do not mean this to follow the pattern of evolutionary psychology which tries to discover deep-seated genetic imperatives in our biology that we gained and haven’t lost since the emergence of homo sapiens on the African plains. Rather, I mean that we have to understand our biology -- which includes our evolution -- if we want to understand the kinds of creatures we are -- individuals with free choice.
If we speak of individuality, then, we must understand how individuality arises among a social creature like the great apes. It cannot be something divorced from that sociality, for it is the sociality that makes for individuals to develop identities. We cannot, of course, deny that these social groups are constituted by individuals.
Which brings us to the chicken and the egg. We cannot ask what came first, the individual or the society without leading us into the circular question of the chicken and the egg. Neither can be understood without the other; which means neither can exist without the other.
Individuals and societies are mutually constitutive elements.
Which means, at the political level, that societies can demand much of the individuals that belong to them and that individuals can place limits on what societies can demand. This position is the most realistic and the most liberating philosophies for it recognizes that we human beings determine our social existence through our free choices, and that we accept that society shapes the choices available to us.
When we speak of the common good, then, we can say both that the common good can be characterized independently and antecedently to individual interests and yet that the common good includes the full development of each and every member of society.
Women, Evolution, and Rape: Rejoinder Part 2
25/01/11 21:43
This is a continuation of an earlier post.
4. Claim 2: “"When the costs of being sexually victimized are highest," reason these investigators, "women should shift their perceptions to decrease false negative errors at the expense of making more false positive errors. Thus, we predicted that women perceive men as more sexually coercive at fertile points of their cycle than at non-fertile points.”” Here, aside from the question about the definition of rape raised in point 1 above, we must also ask, Is this fact a result of evolving to avoid rape or is it, rather, a result of cultural interpretations of rape in our own society? Women might be told that men are likely to rape them because they are sexually attractive or because they are more fertile, but that does not mean that rapists are more likely to attack during those times. In other words, despite the historico-evolutionary aspects of rape, we must also consider how culture influences a person’s interpretation of the pictures of men shown. Here we have a question of data and interpretation.
5. Claim 3: “At least two studies have demonstrated that women at the peak of their fertility are less likely than their peers to have engaged in high-risk activities such as walking alone in a park or forest, letting a stranger into the house, or stopping their cars in a remote place over the preceding 24 hours. Importantly, as German investigators Arndt Bröder and Natalia Hohmann established, ovulating women are not less active in general—they're still busy shopping, going to church, visiting friends, and so on—but they avoid doing those things that make them sexually vulnerable.””
First, a question on the data. Do we also include in this “high-risk activities” being alone with a spouse? Presumably, if women are raped when they are fertile for penetration, then husbands would be the ones more likely to rape them. So being around a husband would also count as a risky behavior.
Second, here we have a question of how we define “high risk activities.” How are these high risk activities coordinated with being alone? Perhaps ovulating women are more social than non-ovulating women, and so the issue isn’t high risk activities, but solitude versus social engagement.
Third, the reader of my blog was right to suggest that “it doesn't seem too tough to imagine straying far from the center of a small social group (say a hunter-gatherer camp) would manifest as not walking through a park at night in a modern context.” Issues of interpretation of the date remain.
6. “Ovulating women are more racists.” In this case, the experimenters note that what has been selected against is engagement with out-group males, and race may be interpreted as a sign of an out-group male. Here, the theory asserts that women avoid those who may not have the same social values and controls as those of their in-group.
Given the question over the biological basis of rape, this conclusion becomes all the more difficult to defend. Biologists and social theorists have shown that skin color varies more within a “race” than between “races.” This means that skin coloration would be used to identify in-group members rather than out-group members.
The authors of this particular study, however, note that cultural associations may be as informative of behavior as evolutionary elements. If we accept this point, however, then we must also bring into play the element of cultural understandings of rape. Once we do that, though, it becomes unclear how rape and ovulation are tied together at the biologico-evolutionary level rather than at the cultural-sociological level. In other words, the interpretation of the data is too in question to make the claim that women have evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault.
4. Claim 2: “"When the costs of being sexually victimized are highest," reason these investigators, "women should shift their perceptions to decrease false negative errors at the expense of making more false positive errors. Thus, we predicted that women perceive men as more sexually coercive at fertile points of their cycle than at non-fertile points.”” Here, aside from the question about the definition of rape raised in point 1 above, we must also ask, Is this fact a result of evolving to avoid rape or is it, rather, a result of cultural interpretations of rape in our own society? Women might be told that men are likely to rape them because they are sexually attractive or because they are more fertile, but that does not mean that rapists are more likely to attack during those times. In other words, despite the historico-evolutionary aspects of rape, we must also consider how culture influences a person’s interpretation of the pictures of men shown. Here we have a question of data and interpretation.
5. Claim 3: “At least two studies have demonstrated that women at the peak of their fertility are less likely than their peers to have engaged in high-risk activities such as walking alone in a park or forest, letting a stranger into the house, or stopping their cars in a remote place over the preceding 24 hours. Importantly, as German investigators Arndt Bröder and Natalia Hohmann established, ovulating women are not less active in general—they're still busy shopping, going to church, visiting friends, and so on—but they avoid doing those things that make them sexually vulnerable.””
First, a question on the data. Do we also include in this “high-risk activities” being alone with a spouse? Presumably, if women are raped when they are fertile for penetration, then husbands would be the ones more likely to rape them. So being around a husband would also count as a risky behavior.
Second, here we have a question of how we define “high risk activities.” How are these high risk activities coordinated with being alone? Perhaps ovulating women are more social than non-ovulating women, and so the issue isn’t high risk activities, but solitude versus social engagement.
Third, the reader of my blog was right to suggest that “it doesn't seem too tough to imagine straying far from the center of a small social group (say a hunter-gatherer camp) would manifest as not walking through a park at night in a modern context.” Issues of interpretation of the date remain.
6. “Ovulating women are more racists.” In this case, the experimenters note that what has been selected against is engagement with out-group males, and race may be interpreted as a sign of an out-group male. Here, the theory asserts that women avoid those who may not have the same social values and controls as those of their in-group.
Given the question over the biological basis of rape, this conclusion becomes all the more difficult to defend. Biologists and social theorists have shown that skin color varies more within a “race” than between “races.” This means that skin coloration would be used to identify in-group members rather than out-group members.
The authors of this particular study, however, note that cultural associations may be as informative of behavior as evolutionary elements. If we accept this point, however, then we must also bring into play the element of cultural understandings of rape. Once we do that, though, it becomes unclear how rape and ovulation are tied together at the biologico-evolutionary level rather than at the cultural-sociological level. In other words, the interpretation of the data is too in question to make the claim that women have evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault.
Women, Evolution, and Rape: Rejoinder Part 1
24/01/11 20:58
A reader asked concerning an earlier post on rape what exactly I was objecting to in this article. I appreciate his (and your) reading my post and asking a question. He was right to challenge me to provide a more thorough analysis of the claims made in the original article. In my earlier post, I challenged mainly the definition of rape in the article: “rape will be defined throughout this article as the use of force, or threat of force, to achieve penile-vaginal penetration of a woman without her consent.” Clearly, if one does not accept this definition, and I see no good reason to do so, then one will question the more general facts collected and the interpretation of those facts. I will use this post to respond to the particular claims raised. To wit...
1. Consider, first off, the data collected. All of the date centers around the ovulation of the woman. Thus, claim one is that women are stronger during ovulation, because they are more likely to be raped at that time. But, if we do not accept the definition of rape, then why should we link female strength of ovulation with a evolved response to rape. The same question can be asked about estimating a man’s possibility as a rapist, avoiding safe place during ovulation, and “racism” during ovulation. So, to begin, I question the link of these facts -- assuming, of course, that these are indeed facts -- to an evolved response to rape.
2. Part of the explanation behind evolution and rape is that men who raped were more likely to impregnate women than men who did not rape. Therefore, we have more rapists in our male population now than in the past, because rapists have outproduced men. If this were true, then we would see a corollary in the female population. It would be women who were susceptible to rape who tended to reproduce -- thus producing more women who were similar susceptible to rape. So, it should be the case, following the logic about rapists in the male population, that women-susceptible to rape -- that is, women who are weaker not stronger, women who are not careful about classifying men as rapists, women who are more prone to visit “unsafe” places, and women who are less racists -- would be more prevalent in the general female population today. The way the article is written, however, is that either most or all women are just the opposite. The facts as presented in the article, then, contradict the idea that women have evolved to defend themselves against rape when rape is defined in any way.
3. Claim 1: Ovulating women show greater strength then non-ovulating women. The author writes: “Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.” Increased strength coordinated, then, when two events presented themselves: ovulation and exposure to a sexual assault scenario. I have no reason to question the data itself, but I would question the interpretation. Why should researchers link increased strength with fear of or defense against rape? Consider, for instance, that some studies show that men become more aroused when exposed to sexual assault material. Could not women who are ovulating show increased strength, not because they are afraid, but because they too would like to be in control? (NB: I am not claiming here, and never would claim, that women are turned on by the idea of being rape. Rather, I am suggesting that women might be turned on by the idea of being in control of the sexual encounter.) Would it not make more evolutionary sense to suggest that women have increased strength when they are ovulating so that they can beat other women at mating with the “prime” male of the species?
Further, it is not enough to show that ovulating women exposed to sexual assault scenarios are stronger than ovulating women shown neutral scenarios. Shouldn’t we also compare their strength to ovulating women who are exposed to violent scenarios without rape or sexual assault involved? And, what was the nature of the sexual assault material: male on female, male on male, female on male, or female on female? These questions must be answered and investigated before making the claim that women have evolved greater strength as a response to the threat of rape, especially given the questions raised in point 1 & 2 above.
I will continue this discussion in a separate post tomorrow looking at the other three claims the study makes....
1. Consider, first off, the data collected. All of the date centers around the ovulation of the woman. Thus, claim one is that women are stronger during ovulation, because they are more likely to be raped at that time. But, if we do not accept the definition of rape, then why should we link female strength of ovulation with a evolved response to rape. The same question can be asked about estimating a man’s possibility as a rapist, avoiding safe place during ovulation, and “racism” during ovulation. So, to begin, I question the link of these facts -- assuming, of course, that these are indeed facts -- to an evolved response to rape.
2. Part of the explanation behind evolution and rape is that men who raped were more likely to impregnate women than men who did not rape. Therefore, we have more rapists in our male population now than in the past, because rapists have outproduced men. If this were true, then we would see a corollary in the female population. It would be women who were susceptible to rape who tended to reproduce -- thus producing more women who were similar susceptible to rape. So, it should be the case, following the logic about rapists in the male population, that women-susceptible to rape -- that is, women who are weaker not stronger, women who are not careful about classifying men as rapists, women who are more prone to visit “unsafe” places, and women who are less racists -- would be more prevalent in the general female population today. The way the article is written, however, is that either most or all women are just the opposite. The facts as presented in the article, then, contradict the idea that women have evolved to defend themselves against rape when rape is defined in any way.
3. Claim 1: Ovulating women show greater strength then non-ovulating women. The author writes: “Only the ovulating women who read the sexual assault scenario exhibited an increase in handgrip strength. Ovulating women who read the control passage and nonovulatory women who read the sexual assault material grasped with the same intensity as before.” Increased strength coordinated, then, when two events presented themselves: ovulation and exposure to a sexual assault scenario. I have no reason to question the data itself, but I would question the interpretation. Why should researchers link increased strength with fear of or defense against rape? Consider, for instance, that some studies show that men become more aroused when exposed to sexual assault material. Could not women who are ovulating show increased strength, not because they are afraid, but because they too would like to be in control? (NB: I am not claiming here, and never would claim, that women are turned on by the idea of being rape. Rather, I am suggesting that women might be turned on by the idea of being in control of the sexual encounter.) Would it not make more evolutionary sense to suggest that women have increased strength when they are ovulating so that they can beat other women at mating with the “prime” male of the species?
Further, it is not enough to show that ovulating women exposed to sexual assault scenarios are stronger than ovulating women shown neutral scenarios. Shouldn’t we also compare their strength to ovulating women who are exposed to violent scenarios without rape or sexual assault involved? And, what was the nature of the sexual assault material: male on female, male on male, female on male, or female on female? These questions must be answered and investigated before making the claim that women have evolved greater strength as a response to the threat of rape, especially given the questions raised in point 1 & 2 above.
I will continue this discussion in a separate post tomorrow looking at the other three claims the study makes....
Evolution and Rape: Women's Defense
14/01/11 18:27
I’m not sure what to think about this article by Jesse Bering. Bering is an evolutionary psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast.
I suppose the first thing that struck me is the use of the word rape. The article deals with “scientifically verified” evidence that women have evolved to protect themselves against rape. Bering quickly dismisses the idea that science leads to moral justification of rape, because that conclusion relies on the naturalistic fallacy. Women, it seems, are stronger during ovulation, are more cautious in where they go, are more distrusting of men, oh, and on top of it all, are more racist.
Underlying this notion, however, is the idea that rape involves reproduction. This belief has been discounted over and over again: rape is about power, not reproduction. Men rape women to show they have power over them. This is why men rape older women who can no longer reproduce, or rape women who they then kill.
Further, the idea that women evolved to be more cautious about going out or letting men back into their apartments does not seem to me to be able to hold water. Evolution does not work over short periods, and women have only been able to do many of the “unsafe” things in the last few hundred years.
Moreover, the idea that women classify some things as safe or unsafe must have cultural context. Who defines what is safe or unsafe for women? This “scientific” research seems loaded with cultural and personal values that are purely sexist.
I’m sure we will hear much more about this in the future. What we should pay attention to is the underlying politically and culturally conservative agenda that much evolutionary biology supports. While Bering quickly dismisses the idea that showing men have evolved to rape and women have evolved to defend themselves against rape, his dismissal seem hollow. If claims like this were made in a court as “scientific” we know exactly what the result would be: the rapist would get off because he obeyed an evolutionary instinct and the woman failed to obey hers.
Bering also insists on his innocence because the evidence comes from a gay man who “wouldn't know what to do with an ovulating woman if she came with instructions.” This form of argument is the reverse of the ad hominem. Just because one is gay does not mean that one cannot be misogynist. Or simply mistaken about biology, politics, and ethics.
Or, as most evolutionary biologists are, wrong about human nature.
I suppose the first thing that struck me is the use of the word rape. The article deals with “scientifically verified” evidence that women have evolved to protect themselves against rape. Bering quickly dismisses the idea that science leads to moral justification of rape, because that conclusion relies on the naturalistic fallacy. Women, it seems, are stronger during ovulation, are more cautious in where they go, are more distrusting of men, oh, and on top of it all, are more racist.
Underlying this notion, however, is the idea that rape involves reproduction. This belief has been discounted over and over again: rape is about power, not reproduction. Men rape women to show they have power over them. This is why men rape older women who can no longer reproduce, or rape women who they then kill.
Further, the idea that women evolved to be more cautious about going out or letting men back into their apartments does not seem to me to be able to hold water. Evolution does not work over short periods, and women have only been able to do many of the “unsafe” things in the last few hundred years.
Moreover, the idea that women classify some things as safe or unsafe must have cultural context. Who defines what is safe or unsafe for women? This “scientific” research seems loaded with cultural and personal values that are purely sexist.
I’m sure we will hear much more about this in the future. What we should pay attention to is the underlying politically and culturally conservative agenda that much evolutionary biology supports. While Bering quickly dismisses the idea that showing men have evolved to rape and women have evolved to defend themselves against rape, his dismissal seem hollow. If claims like this were made in a court as “scientific” we know exactly what the result would be: the rapist would get off because he obeyed an evolutionary instinct and the woman failed to obey hers.
Bering also insists on his innocence because the evidence comes from a gay man who “wouldn't know what to do with an ovulating woman if she came with instructions.” This form of argument is the reverse of the ad hominem. Just because one is gay does not mean that one cannot be misogynist. Or simply mistaken about biology, politics, and ethics.
Or, as most evolutionary biologists are, wrong about human nature.
Giffords' Shooting and Politics
11/01/11 19:24
Much has already been written about the shooting in Arizona of Gabrielle Giffords and many others. I think, however, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has one of the more interesting and thoughtful pieces on this incident. Stewart, like the rest of us, I imagine, is disheartened. He is also thoughtful. One thing he points out, and I think he is correct, is that trying to find one direct line of cause from something Sarah Palin said or from some violent video game to Jared Loughner’s shooting spree is pointless. It cannot be done.
Human motivation, and this is what is at the center of this subject, is much too complex to pick out one cause and effect line for any event. We often ask, why do two people who were abused when they were younger end up being different -- one turning into an abuser and the other not? These sorts of questions rest on the premise that Stewart is questioning: that one cause leads to one effect or, more appropriately, one effect has one and only one cause.
My friend, Grant, pointed this out when he wrote, “Every time there's a shooting the left says ban guns & rhetoric & the right says ban video games & be less permissive. Yet there are more permissive 1st World countries with more guns per capita & the same games & divisions. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper?” Every time we try to find some concrete evidence for how something causes some other thing, we look for a direct cause. Perhaps we need to think more clearly about this and look more deeply. We are trying to use the methods of math and science and apply them to society and human action. This approach cannot work. It is an approach that is more and more accepted in our country and trumpeted by people working in evolutionary psychology who try to link human aggression to what human life was like 10,000 years ago in the Serengeti.
This fact is why it is wrong for political parties -- and the Left and the Right are both doing this -- are trying to lay the blame of the shooting at each other’s feet. Political parties are still playing politics in the face of this tragedy partly because, I suspect, they can’t help themselves and partly because of this underlying belief that every event has one and only one cause, when human motivation is much more complex. This point is why we need a much better account of human nature than has hitherto been provided.
We have to think more broadly, as well. Why there so many gun crimes and murders in the United States? We can see something about our culture, here. Something that might clue us in about why Loughner went on a shooting spree, how he was able to purchase a gun when he was known to be mentally unstable, and why he went after this particular group of people. But there won’t be an easy answer here.
And one thing that we -- you and I -- have to do is something that the political rhetoric refuses to do and won’t allow us to do -- question who and what we are as a society.
Human motivation, and this is what is at the center of this subject, is much too complex to pick out one cause and effect line for any event. We often ask, why do two people who were abused when they were younger end up being different -- one turning into an abuser and the other not? These sorts of questions rest on the premise that Stewart is questioning: that one cause leads to one effect or, more appropriately, one effect has one and only one cause.
My friend, Grant, pointed this out when he wrote, “Every time there's a shooting the left says ban guns & rhetoric & the right says ban video games & be less permissive. Yet there are more permissive 1st World countries with more guns per capita & the same games & divisions. Maybe we need to dig a little deeper?” Every time we try to find some concrete evidence for how something causes some other thing, we look for a direct cause. Perhaps we need to think more clearly about this and look more deeply. We are trying to use the methods of math and science and apply them to society and human action. This approach cannot work. It is an approach that is more and more accepted in our country and trumpeted by people working in evolutionary psychology who try to link human aggression to what human life was like 10,000 years ago in the Serengeti.
This fact is why it is wrong for political parties -- and the Left and the Right are both doing this -- are trying to lay the blame of the shooting at each other’s feet. Political parties are still playing politics in the face of this tragedy partly because, I suspect, they can’t help themselves and partly because of this underlying belief that every event has one and only one cause, when human motivation is much more complex. This point is why we need a much better account of human nature than has hitherto been provided.
We have to think more broadly, as well. Why there so many gun crimes and murders in the United States? We can see something about our culture, here. Something that might clue us in about why Loughner went on a shooting spree, how he was able to purchase a gun when he was known to be mentally unstable, and why he went after this particular group of people. But there won’t be an easy answer here.
And one thing that we -- you and I -- have to do is something that the political rhetoric refuses to do and won’t allow us to do -- question who and what we are as a society.
Careful of Deistic Proofs
07/01/11 18:43
A recent Colbert Report episode demonstrated why is so difficult for religious, even - or maybe especially - the pope, to talk about science. I found it amusing, as I am sure you will too, to watch Bill O’Reilly argue that he could not explain how tides come in and go out or how the sun “comes up and goes down.” As Colbert elegantly says, O’Reilly knows God exists because he can’t explain things.
If we Christians insist on trying to use God to explain the mechanical workings of things we will lose the debate and we will misunderstand God, ourselves, and nature. God is the cause of nature, but that does not make Him the efficient cause of everything in nature, except in the way I explained in a previous post on the big bang.
I also want to point out that proofs for God’s existence are generally inductive. The only deductive argument I know of is the Ontological Argument in its various formulations. As Thomas says, however, we cannot grasp the idea of God, so the Ontological Argument does not work for us. The proofs Thomas gives us are all inductive: which means that they lead to the conclusion that God exists but they do not demonstrate the way mathematics proofs demonstrate a conclusion. Inductive arguments are never definitive.
This point proves important if you are familiar with Dawkins’ The God Delusion. In there, Dawkins recounts Thomas’ proofs and says that Thomas asserted he proved God’s existence deductively, then Dawkins goes on to how that they are inductive arguments that prove nothing. First, as I’ve already said, Thomas admits that they are inductive arguments. Second, inductive arguments to prove conclusions. If they did not, we would know no science and we would never be able to convict someone of a crime.
In short, proof does not come in one flavor, and philosophers, theologians, and news pundits should be more careful when they argue for God’s existence or for anything else.
If we Christians insist on trying to use God to explain the mechanical workings of things we will lose the debate and we will misunderstand God, ourselves, and nature. God is the cause of nature, but that does not make Him the efficient cause of everything in nature, except in the way I explained in a previous post on the big bang.
I also want to point out that proofs for God’s existence are generally inductive. The only deductive argument I know of is the Ontological Argument in its various formulations. As Thomas says, however, we cannot grasp the idea of God, so the Ontological Argument does not work for us. The proofs Thomas gives us are all inductive: which means that they lead to the conclusion that God exists but they do not demonstrate the way mathematics proofs demonstrate a conclusion. Inductive arguments are never definitive.
This point proves important if you are familiar with Dawkins’ The God Delusion. In there, Dawkins recounts Thomas’ proofs and says that Thomas asserted he proved God’s existence deductively, then Dawkins goes on to how that they are inductive arguments that prove nothing. First, as I’ve already said, Thomas admits that they are inductive arguments. Second, inductive arguments to prove conclusions. If they did not, we would know no science and we would never be able to convict someone of a crime.
In short, proof does not come in one flavor, and philosophers, theologians, and news pundits should be more careful when they argue for God’s existence or for anything else.
God's Big Bang
06/01/11 19:39
A lot of people have begun commenting on Benedict XVI’s claim about God being behind the Big Bang.
First, it should be clear that the Catholic Church has accepted evolution since the 60’s. One of the key texts on this was written much later, with John Paul II’s “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth.” In this article, JP II repeated the Thomistic claim that truth from different areas -- especially science/natural philosophy and religion -- cannot contradict each other. They have to be reconciled in some way. Thus, Genesis, as we now know, does not tell the literal story of creation, but explains the meaning of creation. All Catholics must accept evolution as true or risk becoming irrational -- that is, not Catholic.
Second, how we explain God’s action in history must adhere to our understanding of God as unchanging. God is creator. Being a creator means that all of creation depends on God for its existence. Without God, there would be nothing. That truth, however, tells us nothing about “how” God created the universe. It would be mistaken to think of creation as a particular event. Creation is an unfolding of God’s creative power -- it is a sustaining act. Thus, Benedict is right to claim that "In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth.” Creation points to God -- in its beauty, design, and very existence.
This point, however, means that the watchmaker argument isn’t quite right. The watchmaker argument works by analogy. If you were to be walking in the desert and found a watch, its complexity would make you think that someone had created it. Things just don’t fall together randomly in such an organized fashion. On the one hand, this argument proves sensible: if we see the complexity of the universe as a whole, it’s more intelligible to think that it came together from some intelligence rather than randomly. However, we must resist the idea that because things in the world that are complex are created by an intelligence, then the universe as a whole must be created by an intelligence. This way of argument is known as the fallacy of composition. Just because every brick in a wall is six inches by four inches by three inches does not mean that the wall itself is six inches by four inches by three inches.
What we confront when we look at creation with the eyes of science - that is, with the eyes of a mind questioning the order and workings of all that there is -- is a fact that raises the question: why is there anything at all? Science cannot answer this question. Religion can. But neither should contradict the other. They should support each other in humanity’s quest for meaning.
First, it should be clear that the Catholic Church has accepted evolution since the 60’s. One of the key texts on this was written much later, with John Paul II’s “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth.” In this article, JP II repeated the Thomistic claim that truth from different areas -- especially science/natural philosophy and religion -- cannot contradict each other. They have to be reconciled in some way. Thus, Genesis, as we now know, does not tell the literal story of creation, but explains the meaning of creation. All Catholics must accept evolution as true or risk becoming irrational -- that is, not Catholic.
Second, how we explain God’s action in history must adhere to our understanding of God as unchanging. God is creator. Being a creator means that all of creation depends on God for its existence. Without God, there would be nothing. That truth, however, tells us nothing about “how” God created the universe. It would be mistaken to think of creation as a particular event. Creation is an unfolding of God’s creative power -- it is a sustaining act. Thus, Benedict is right to claim that "In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth.” Creation points to God -- in its beauty, design, and very existence.
This point, however, means that the watchmaker argument isn’t quite right. The watchmaker argument works by analogy. If you were to be walking in the desert and found a watch, its complexity would make you think that someone had created it. Things just don’t fall together randomly in such an organized fashion. On the one hand, this argument proves sensible: if we see the complexity of the universe as a whole, it’s more intelligible to think that it came together from some intelligence rather than randomly. However, we must resist the idea that because things in the world that are complex are created by an intelligence, then the universe as a whole must be created by an intelligence. This way of argument is known as the fallacy of composition. Just because every brick in a wall is six inches by four inches by three inches does not mean that the wall itself is six inches by four inches by three inches.
What we confront when we look at creation with the eyes of science - that is, with the eyes of a mind questioning the order and workings of all that there is -- is a fact that raises the question: why is there anything at all? Science cannot answer this question. Religion can. But neither should contradict the other. They should support each other in humanity’s quest for meaning.
Skills of Hand & Brain & Eye
22/12/10 22:26
“The essential failure of capitalism is that the kind of society which capitalism creates is one that can never fully employ the skills of hand and brain and eye, the exercise of which is part of man’s true being” (Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism, p. 6)
A recent report on NPR discussed the frustration parents have with their children playing violent video games. A recent study showed, they reported, that children who play video games have increased spatial recognition and other cognitive abilities over those who do. Supposedly, someone who plays a video game uses a different part of the brain to perceive space than do people who do not play video games. Thus, it takes those who do not play video games more time to process spatial reasoning abilities. This effect lasts for two years after someone has stopped playing the video game.
I think this finding is interesting on a number of levels.
On one level, it asks us what is the cost of improving our brains in this manner viz., playing violent video games? Also, it raises the question about whether the video games that are played must be violent?
On another level, it brings in the notion of skills versus virtues and those things “the exercise of which is part of [humanity’s] true being.” Those familiar with MacIntyre know that he later writes of skills within the context of practices. Practices are defined with respect to the internal goods that define the good and the way that a practice, as opposed to other human activities, human powers and the human conception of the good. This emphasis on practice over skills marks a qualitative change from MacIntyre’s position in the quote above: the issue is not just skills. But it remains those things which constitute part of humanity’s true being.
Which brings us to the third level: what is humanity’s true being?
This question constitutes the fundamental question of philosophy and religion. It also should be one we ask at certain times through the year: Christmas and Easter being one of those times, but also at our birthdays and anniversaries.
It comprises a question that every one ask or risk leading a worthless life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -- Socrates
A recent report on NPR discussed the frustration parents have with their children playing violent video games. A recent study showed, they reported, that children who play video games have increased spatial recognition and other cognitive abilities over those who do. Supposedly, someone who plays a video game uses a different part of the brain to perceive space than do people who do not play video games. Thus, it takes those who do not play video games more time to process spatial reasoning abilities. This effect lasts for two years after someone has stopped playing the video game.
I think this finding is interesting on a number of levels.
On one level, it asks us what is the cost of improving our brains in this manner viz., playing violent video games? Also, it raises the question about whether the video games that are played must be violent?
On another level, it brings in the notion of skills versus virtues and those things “the exercise of which is part of [humanity’s] true being.” Those familiar with MacIntyre know that he later writes of skills within the context of practices. Practices are defined with respect to the internal goods that define the good and the way that a practice, as opposed to other human activities, human powers and the human conception of the good. This emphasis on practice over skills marks a qualitative change from MacIntyre’s position in the quote above: the issue is not just skills. But it remains those things which constitute part of humanity’s true being.
Which brings us to the third level: what is humanity’s true being?
This question constitutes the fundamental question of philosophy and religion. It also should be one we ask at certain times through the year: Christmas and Easter being one of those times, but also at our birthdays and anniversaries.
It comprises a question that every one ask or risk leading a worthless life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -- Socrates
Anti-Dawkins by Dover
17/12/10 22:18
I just read an article by Gabrielle Dover called “Anti-Dawkins” which both points out the fallacies of Dawkins’ selfish-gene theory and proposes an alternative to the selfish-gene theory. The argument and the new proposal rest on something biologists have known for some time: genes interact with each other. The fact that they interact with each other tells against the idea that a gene acts selfishly only to reproduce itself. It cannot do this when interacting with other genes, and genes never act in isolation. Second, we can see, so Dover argues, that through modularity, the ways genes interact gene within individual genotypes -- within individual organisms. These changes can be neutral with respect to reproductivity. Yet, if passed on through a population they might later on become important in responding to new environmental stimuli. So a once-neutral trait might be become an exaptation in a new environment. Ian Tattersall suggests that language is such an exaptation.
Part of our problem as a culture, as Dover nicely points out, and as has been pointed out before by the likes of Mary Midgley and Stephen Jay Gould, among others, is that we believe that each gene selects for one particular trait. We would do well to rid ourselves of this false belief which acts, in the case of Dawkins’ selfish gene, on which evolutionary psychology rests, as an ideology.
Part of our problem as a culture, as Dover nicely points out, and as has been pointed out before by the likes of Mary Midgley and Stephen Jay Gould, among others, is that we believe that each gene selects for one particular trait. We would do well to rid ourselves of this false belief which acts, in the case of Dawkins’ selfish gene, on which evolutionary psychology rests, as an ideology.
Jencks on Genes, Cultures, Freedom
16/12/10 21:06
Jencks, in his article, EP, Phone Home, takes on the nature versus nurture, or gene versus culture, debate and, in particular, the claims of evolutionary psychology. In particular, for Jencks, evolutionary psychology claims that human behavior can be explained by reference to “epigenetic rules” programmed in our genes some half a million years ago, when hominids first walked the steppes of Africa. Jencks main complaint against evolutionary psychology is that EP is unable to account for human freedom.
We can look at, for instance, sneezing, sex, and art. Sneezing is more biological determined than is sex, but each allow a modicum of freedom. For example, how someone sneezes or what they say when they sneeze, or, with sex, the various positions or approaches to sex that vary from culture to culture. Art, however, seems to comprise an arena in which human beings actualize maximum freedom, because good art defies rules. Jencks attacks, in particular, E. O. Wilson’s account of beauty as an expression of epigenetic rules that map out how human beings respond to certain levels of complexity and repetition in a piece of art work or in nature.
While I think that Jencks article lacks a detailed argument, surely he is on the right track here. In particular, Jencks emphasizes what other theorists have said before, especially Mary Midgley and Alasdair MacIntyre, both of whom have, in my opinion, a fairly Aristotelian approach. We cannot reduce discussions of human nature to the either/or dichotomies that have framed the debate about human nature in the West for millennia. In fact, a frank look at culture and biology show that nature and nurture cannot be the only answer to human behavior, though they provide the foundation for human freedom. Or, I should say, that nature and nurture -- genes and culture -- provide the conditions within which human beings, and other pre-linguistic rational animals -- exercise what Thomas Aquinas calls free choice.
Understanding this relationship proves essential for addressing the claims of determinists, on the one side, social constructivists, on the other, and existentialist on the third.
We can look at, for instance, sneezing, sex, and art. Sneezing is more biological determined than is sex, but each allow a modicum of freedom. For example, how someone sneezes or what they say when they sneeze, or, with sex, the various positions or approaches to sex that vary from culture to culture. Art, however, seems to comprise an arena in which human beings actualize maximum freedom, because good art defies rules. Jencks attacks, in particular, E. O. Wilson’s account of beauty as an expression of epigenetic rules that map out how human beings respond to certain levels of complexity and repetition in a piece of art work or in nature.
While I think that Jencks article lacks a detailed argument, surely he is on the right track here. In particular, Jencks emphasizes what other theorists have said before, especially Mary Midgley and Alasdair MacIntyre, both of whom have, in my opinion, a fairly Aristotelian approach. We cannot reduce discussions of human nature to the either/or dichotomies that have framed the debate about human nature in the West for millennia. In fact, a frank look at culture and biology show that nature and nurture cannot be the only answer to human behavior, though they provide the foundation for human freedom. Or, I should say, that nature and nurture -- genes and culture -- provide the conditions within which human beings, and other pre-linguistic rational animals -- exercise what Thomas Aquinas calls free choice.
Understanding this relationship proves essential for addressing the claims of determinists, on the one side, social constructivists, on the other, and existentialist on the third.
Thesis
10/07/09 04:15
We are living bodies seeking the meaning of our lives through our everyday practices that are constituted by traditions.
Comment Away....
Comment Away....
Problems for Human Nature
10/07/09 04:13
Here are some problems I've decided a book on human nature needs to address. What do you think? Can you think of others?
Problem: What is the good life for human beings? What is human nature such that it provides a key for overcoming the modern loss of freedom, of ends, and of meaning, and provides a recipe for a just society for the expansion of humanity? What understanding of ourselves will return us to a balance between the drive for self-preservation and the pull of an objective reality?
Problem: What is the good life for human beings? What is human nature such that it provides a key for overcoming the modern loss of freedom, of ends, and of meaning, and provides a recipe for a just society for the expansion of humanity? What understanding of ourselves will return us to a balance between the drive for self-preservation and the pull of an objective reality?
McNamara and War
10/07/09 04:11
With the passing of Robert McNamara, we have a moment to reflect on a common understanding of human nature.
McNamara was the principle architect behind the Vietnam War. We know now that early on McNamara knew the US couldn't win. But he didn't recommend pulling out (thus violating one of the principles of just war theory handed down through the ages). What's more interesting for me is that McNamara that human nature was essentially and ultimately aggressive. He thought we would always be at war. How much, I wonder, did later presidents inherit his belief bout human nature.
This thought has been held by many. It even shows up in fiction. Elizabeth Haydon writes a wonderful fantasy series The Symphony of Ages. One of the main characters is Achmed the Snake. Achmed believes that peace is just an intermission between wars when the intelligent plan for the next war. It's just human -- or bolg - nature.
But to what extent does human history testify to this? And to what extent can we escape war? Obviously, war marks human history, highlighting many of the transitions in time. But we needn't believe that war is inescapable. What we need to do is look at how societies avoid war. Democracy isn't necessarily the answer. However, an article in Discover suggests some possibilities:
Empowering females
Control Population Growth
Find Alternatives to Fossil Fuels
Avoid Tribalism
Avoid Religious Fundamentalism
We should recognize that human nature is fluid. As fluid, we can change our fates. We can make the world the way we want. But this means taking progressive steps toward making that future real and taking steps which increase the likelihood of that future. It's just like losing weight and maintaining a healthy life-style -- plan ahead, work hard, and don't be pessimistic in the face of inevitable stumbles.
McNamara was the principle architect behind the Vietnam War. We know now that early on McNamara knew the US couldn't win. But he didn't recommend pulling out (thus violating one of the principles of just war theory handed down through the ages). What's more interesting for me is that McNamara that human nature was essentially and ultimately aggressive. He thought we would always be at war. How much, I wonder, did later presidents inherit his belief bout human nature.
This thought has been held by many. It even shows up in fiction. Elizabeth Haydon writes a wonderful fantasy series The Symphony of Ages. One of the main characters is Achmed the Snake. Achmed believes that peace is just an intermission between wars when the intelligent plan for the next war. It's just human -- or bolg - nature.
But to what extent does human history testify to this? And to what extent can we escape war? Obviously, war marks human history, highlighting many of the transitions in time. But we needn't believe that war is inescapable. What we need to do is look at how societies avoid war. Democracy isn't necessarily the answer. However, an article in Discover suggests some possibilities:
Empowering females
Control Population Growth
Find Alternatives to Fossil Fuels
Avoid Tribalism
Avoid Religious Fundamentalism
We should recognize that human nature is fluid. As fluid, we can change our fates. We can make the world the way we want. But this means taking progressive steps toward making that future real and taking steps which increase the likelihood of that future. It's just like losing weight and maintaining a healthy life-style -- plan ahead, work hard, and don't be pessimistic in the face of inevitable stumbles.
Philosophy, Morality, and Emotion
08/04/09 00:59
Discusses an article which says philosophy is dead since psychologists have determined that emotion, not reason, determines how we act morally. Links this to an ill-formed understanding of the human person. Read More...