Moral reasoning from Nature

The point of arguing, a couple of weeks ago, that there is a natural teleology for Man is that it makes possible a further argument that there is some kind of natural Good, so that ethics and morality are not just matters of opinion or blind commitment. But of course that, too, relies on argument and not mere assertion. How should the argument go?

I'm going to proceed in three parts. First, I talk a bit about what an answer to this question ought to look like, because it's easier to find an answer if we know what we are looking for. Second, I give two concrete examples of specific judgments about morality or how to live that I show can be derived from Nature and that also match the general description I gave in the first part. There's a third potential example which I won't discuss right now, and I explain why not. Finally, I come back to some of the very clear things my friends have said that they are looking for from this kind of account, to review whether and how far I have provided what they asked me for.

With your forbearance, in everything that I write below I shall refer to Nature as if She were a conscious and intentional agent. Please remember that, by the argument I gave before, I consider this kind of picturesque or metaphorical language to be bijectively, isomorphically mappable to a different kind of language that talks about autopoiesis and stable, self-replicating configurations of biological mechanisms and animal behavior. But the language that describes Nature as if She were a person is shorter, pithier, and prettier. Since the two kinds of language are isomorphic to each other, I may as well use the prettier one.

I.  So -- what should it look like when we reason from Nature to ethics or morality? In the first place, I want to ask for a slight softening of a distinction which you sometimes hear. The distinction is between approaching Nature descriptively and approaching Her prescriptively. The point is that some people will point to anything they like that happens somewhere in the animal or plant kingdom and say, "See? It happens in nature! That means it must be OK." Used as an excuse for bad behavior, an argument like that is plainly silly. On the other hand I do think one should have a pretty wide understanding of a phenomenon before trying to theorize about it. I keep using the example that cats are clearly intended by Nature to hunt mice; but if our experience of cats were so limited that nobody had ever seen a cat hunt a mouse, we wouldn't know that. So I suggest that any adequate theory has to be consistent with the data, or at any rate the vast majority of the non-pathological data. (Disease is also according to Nature, but I assume it is clear that we should not generalize unreflectively from diseased cases to arrive at general principles. I say "unreflectively" because reflection might show us that in this or that specific case, this or that particular disease does not distort the organism's behavior with respect to the question on our minds at the time.)

TL;DR: If we find a behavior that is widespread or universal for a certain critter, we should be cautious before saying that it is wrong for that critter. I hope that qualification is easy to accept.

There's a second point which may be less obvious, but I think it is absolutely critical. Where and how does Nature write Her laws? Nature doesn't speak English, and most of Her Creation doesn't know how to read, so She doesn't write books. She doesn't engrave tablets. But somehow Her creatures (humans, but also cats and all the others too) have to know their laws anyway, or She has legislated in vain. The only answer that makes any sense to me is this: Nature writes Her laws on our hearts, using the ink of our emotions.

It will be objected that people's emotions disagree -- this is why we created philosophy in the first place. But I think in reality this happens less often than we believe; and when it does, I think it is often easy to find extenuating conditions (such as interest or the potential for personal gain) that explain the disagreement. I will not give a complete theoretical argument at this time: instead, I would like to shore up my claim in two other ways.

The first is to reflect on all non-human animals. By the argument I gave before, each of them has a teleology -- a Good. Therefore certain things are right or wrong for them. How do they know right from wrong? How does a cat know it is supposed to hunt mice? Here I think it is obvious: they do it because it is their nature, or because they have an instinct for it. If you could speak to cats and asked one, the answer would probably be, "I don't know, I just felt like I had to." And if this is true for all non-human animals -- every single one -- then I think it is highly plausible that some version of it is true for us too (although translated into human words and concepts). And this is what I mean when I say that these laws are written on our hearts with our emotions.

The second way I would like to shore up my claim (since, again, I am not giving a full argument at the moment) is to move into Part Two of my argument and look at some examples. I hope that when you see how the examples work, the idea will make more sense.

II.  Very well, what can we say about how Men are designed to live, based on looking at Nature, and how do these match the description I just gave?

First, consider Leopold and Loeb. You remember the case, right? They were University of Chicago students who read too much Nietzsche and decided to prove they were supermen by kidnapping and killing a 14-year-old boy. And everyone was horrified. When you tell people about the story today, everyone is still horrified. I venture to suggest that in their hearts, Leopold and Loeb themselves were horrified at their own crime while they were doing it. That didn't stop them, and I will get to that point in a minute. But the universal horror people feel at this crime is part of why it's not a lot more common.

What's the law from Nature? Not to kill, obviously; but more than that, it is also to care for children. Human children are so helpless for so long that they have to be cared for by adults -- and not just their own parents (who might be elsewhere) but any adults. Bobby Franks (the victim) was a teenager, but he was young enough that the law of Nature requiring care for (and prohibiting harm to) children still applied.

As for the law not to kill -- consider that it is not just human children who are helpless. Alone in the wild, any one of us would be doomed. We can survive only by cooperating, and that means (among other things) not killing each other. Even in wartime, even in active combat, it is hard for soldiers to bring themselves to kill the enemy; this is why the enemy is regularly described as less than human in any number of ways ... to make him easier to kill.

Now, of course Leopold and Loeb actually did it. If I am right that all humans are born with an instinct to protect children and an aversion to killing each other, how is that possible? Well, remember all that time they spent reading Nietzsche. The point is not to blame Nietzsche, but to observe that human beings -- because we have the gift of reason -- are able to override our instincts and talk ourselves into all manner of crimes. People do it every day. That is one of the dangers of reason.

How does this fit the description I gave up in Part One? It fits because the universal reaction to the story of Leopold and Loeb is not to point out where they got their reasoning wrong -- it is to shudder with disgust. Except for genuinely pathological cases (who comprise only the tiniest fraction of the population) it is genuinely not possible to hear this story for the first time and not be appalled. That is the voice of Nature speaking directly to our hearts.

I have already alluded to my second example of a law by Nature, which is not nearly as exciting as the first one. It is that Man is a social animal, an animal designed by Nature to live with other men. (If you prefer, with Aristotle, to say "political" I won't argue but the point I make doesn't require it.) How can I prove that Man is a social animal? In three ways. First, as I have said already, men are nearly helpless in the wild by themselves. Second, we have language: all humans have (the natural capacity for) language, language is one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from all other life, and the capacity for language makes no sense unless we spend most of our lives around others. Third, adult women are always in estrus, or, more precisely, always have the capacity to be sexually receptive and do not display obvious external signs at ovulation. Again, this makes no sense unless we are intended to spend all our time in community with each other. Polar bears, by contrast, come together once a year to mate and otherwise live alone. (They don't have language, either.)

How is this written on our hearts? Every society in the world understands that solitary confinement is the most severe punishment short of torture or death. When an individual chooses solitude as, e.g., a spiritual practice, it is a big deal and very rare. (Note that most monastics are not actually hermits but simply leave one community to join another.) Again, these are things we all just know.

There's one topic that I will not discuss in this essay, namely sexual morality. The reason is that it is too difficult and too complex for me to tackle right now. When you first introduce a theory, stick to the easy examples or applications so that people can see what you are talking about. Save the really complex examples for later. And human sexual behavior -- especially if you count in all the other behaviors that go with it (flirtation, seduction, and the rest) -- is absolutely the most complex behavior we engage in. An adequate account of human sexual nature -- which, as noted way up in Part One, is a precondition for any adequate moral theory -- requires more time than I want to take right now. But please notice two subsidiary points in particular.

First, I do believe it can be done. That is, I am persuaded that sexual morality can be addressed according to the same general schema that I am proposing here for other things. I'm not completely sure that I am qualified to write such an account, however. Even if I were, it would double or triple or quintuple the length of this letter and it would add in so many trees that nobody could see the forest. If we want to discuss this particular subtopic in more detail, let's do it another time. (For a preliminary indication, though, check out this essay here, and maybe this one too.)

Second, one of my friends reminded me (in the conversations that preceded this essay) of Leo Strauss's remark in a letter to his friend Karl Löwith that no discussion of homosexuality should forget the connection between the sexual organs and the process of generation. (I may have the quote slightly wrong.) I'm pretty sure my friend seconded this opinion and hoped that my analysis of natural morality would back it up. Sorry, no such luck. When I say that sexual behavior is the most complex thing we do, one corollary is that -- with all due honor to Strauss's renowned wisdom -- nobody can give an adequate account of our sexual nature (and therefore morality) in half a sentence in an informal letter. I assume that Strauss himself would agree with this. As he pointed out in another context, nobody can study everything; and Strauss never pretended to be a philosopher of sex.

III.  So much for my examples, at least for now. Have I provided what was asked for?

Yes and no. In some ways, mostly no.

No, I do not provide any new, hitherto unknown intellectual tools that allow us to make the grammatical transition from "is" to "ought" in a logical argument. And if someone has talked himself into some course of action that is evil, I can't talk him out of it with pure logic.

But we already knew that, right? Think of any of the great monsters of history: Hitler, Stalin, Caligula ... take your pick. Do any of us think that there could ever possibly be a logical argument that would have dissuaded any of them? I mean, ... we all know from experience how weak a tool logical persuasion can be when we are facing much smaller stakes, like trying to convince a small child it's time to put away the toys, come inside, and take a bath. And we know that the great monsters of history have been implacably convinced of their own rightness. So in reality, I can make an argument that would persuade someone else that Hitler or Stalin or Caligula did terrible things. (And anyone else could already have done this too.) But I don't think I could have persuaded the men themselves, even if I could travel back in time and speak their languages (because nobody else could have, either).

But when my friend asks me, "Can we reason: 'Human beings have X as part of their nature, and therefore, in this situation, you ought to do Y, you are obliged to do Y, you are morally required to do Y, you should be ashamed of yourself and feel guilty if you don’t do Y'?" there I think my answer is a qualified Yes. "Qualified" because what is involved is not a process of ratiocination. But "Yes" because when it is truly a question of violating some law given by Nature, everyone agrees. The agreement isn't a logical deduction. It is an instinctive revulsion, disgust, or horror at the violation, one that everyone recognizes and understands. We may not be able to argue logically that the evildoer should be ashamed of himself and feel guilty. My point, though, is that he will anyway. The only way he won't is if he has blocked himself off from his true feelings with too many layers of words and reasoning and bullshit. But the true feelings will still be there anyway, even if he refuses to admit them.

My friend inquires, furthermore, what about the person who asks:

“Why should I be forced by law or social pressure to conform to the current views of the constraints of human nature?  Why can’t I experiment outside of law and custom with modes of conduct contrary to such “human nature”?  Even if such experiments might be self-destructive, why is it “wrong” for me to attempt them?  I concede it might be impractical, i.e., that I might not have much success in fighting against certain innate human realities, but why “morally wrong”?”

My answer is that he doesn't really have any choice. He asks, "Why should I be forced?" but really this means, "Why should I be forced to be a man and not an alligator?" Bad news, dude, you're not an alligator! "Why" is a meaningless question in this context. As long as you are a human being, your inner nature will reject with disgust any attempt to violate the Good for Man. You can talk yourself out of it -- Leopold and Loeb sure did! -- and if you do that then you probably won't listen to any of my arguments to the contrary. But some night, at 3:00 in the morning, you will find yourself huddled in a ball under your blankets keening softly to yourself, "Dear God what have I done?"

For what it is worth, I believe I am saying exactly the same thing here that Plato says in the Republic. (If I remember right, most of this part is in Books 8 and 9.) He argues, you recall, that the reason to perform just actions is that it is the only way to keep all the elements of your psyche in balance ... which means, it is the only way to live the way you are designed to live, as a human being ... which means that it is of your nature to live morally, or justly, and that any disruption of moral or just behavior makes you unhappy. Either it makes you feel remorse, or it means that you live a life perpetually out of balance and out of touch with your true self (like the tyrant) in which case you can't detect the remorse because everything else inside you is all wrong as well.

Maybe this is enough for now.

__________

Update (added 2022-08-21): A character in John Michael Greer's novel The Shoggoth Concerto summarizes the same point in different words. She is describing another character (who has expressed the desire to exploit others as slaves because "nothing matters"). And she says, "♪ I understand.♪ ♪He knows that the world has no eyes, but he does not know that he has eyes.♪" (p. 108) Yes, exactly.