Shmigg, concur. Question for you, since you see the threat; Can you see our Hispanic influx one day battling Obama’s Muslim influx for control of the U.S., post-White-European society? Say, 50-80 years hence? Perhaps a new American civil war? It happened in South-Central L.A. Blacks hardly have a place to hang their hats anymore.

Obama’s people are the Syrians, the Muslims. He was happy to use Hispanics to his own ends, but is not the undertow of Africans from Libya, Syria, Iraq and the rest not Obama’s challenge to the Hispanics? My wonder is that Hispanics and Blacks in America are not protesting the Muslim undertow into the United States. Hispanics and Blacks will inherit the United States, yet they utter not one peep about the new competition being introduced.

Thoughts?

First of all, language is the most important topic and perception is absolutely EVERYTHING. If we teach children that the color red is the word blue and vice versa, then their perception will be the opposite of the generally accepted view of the truth about those colors and their names. Likewise, if we teach children that the word natural means anything man made and that the word law means choice then they think natural law is a man made choice. The point I am trying to make is that what natural law is to one person may be completely opposite of what it is to someone else. What is moral to you may not be moral to me. What is right to you, I may consider wrong. Whatever we are raised to believe and whatever we choose to keep believing once we reach an age where we can consciously understand it, then to us, that is “natural law”. There is no natural human law. Imo, even the idea of natural law was created as a form of control, just another intrinsic implanted additive to the matrix we were born into. To me the closest thing to natural law is honestly whatever feels right. Right before you act if you get a sense that it is wrong, don’t do it, if you get a sense that what you’re about to do is right, then do it. Maybe we all have our own natural laws constructed for each of our soul’s or for each of our own consciousnesses.

Dr. Frost’s articles AND replies are much appreciated – moreover, his comment/summation of co-evolution between culture & genes is the best & most succinct I’ve ever seen:

“1) Individuals adhere to a desired behavior through conscious effort, within an envelope of possibilities allowed by their genetic endowment;
2) These actions create a new cultural environment, which in turn selects for genotypes that more easily produce the desired behavior. A heritable predisposition increasingly takes over from conscious effort;
3) The result is a shift toward a new mean genotype and a new envelope of possible phenotypes.”

Maybe Eastern Orthodox Christianity was somewhat different from Catholicism (and later Protestantism). It’s also possible that other factors were different, e.g. higher rates of endogamy (cousin marriage etc.), which in turn led to high empathy towards kith and kin but less empathy towards outsiders. I think also there is some evidence that Russians differed from other Europeans even before the Revolution, for example far as I know many travelers described them as being brutish.

But it’s interesting to note that, while Russian crime rates were astronomical in the 1990s, they quickly dropped since then, for example the murder rate has reportedly dropped to a bit more than a quarter of what it had been in the nineties. It might be that Russians need something of a police state to achieve normal (if somewhat elevated) crime statistics, but probably some of the increase and decrease was due to a change in the economy and the onset and end of anarchy.

Society? Under the Normans killing a deer would get you blinded. Those unable to restrain themselves got killed off very quickly, generation after generation.

One constructed by humans, it turns out. Was that a loop?

OK, but I think Peter is putting the cart before the horse. He’s saying society bred itself to be non-violent, but why on earth would society do that if it had such radically different moral intuitions than we have today?

” I get the sense that you are basically Christian, but you also talk about different human “natures”, and it’s hard for me to see how this is different than simply denying that some groups of people are truly human. I shouldn’t have to point out the dangers that this kind of thinking can lead to.”

I think what Peter is was trying to say is that, though human natures differ, the specific human nature in one group is not any less natural than in the other groups. Failing to fight back will get you killed in some societies. But, turning the other cheek might be simple self preservation in a society where fighting is punished by death.

An individual can choose to behave as a saint, and get killed for it; that isn’t going to make that behaviour more common. But if the society enforces saintly behavior in the society, then the people who choose not to behave in a saintly way are going to become less common.

And the danger that ‘that kind on thinking can lead to’ is being called a racist, which is social death; though the person may be equivalent to a saint in a society where only the violent are respected (because he is going against norms that have a hereditary basis).

God fearing morality is the same thing as good behavior under tyrany. Therefore, it is not natural behavior without punishment. This is nothing to do with sense of guilt. It is not true morality either.

There’s a difference between saying there is no natural law and saying there is natural law but our knowledge of it is obscured by sin. I think the error you are trying to fight here is not the traditional doctrine of natural law, but the patently false liberal doctrine of human equality, and more importantly the denial of original sin and the concept of the “noble savage”. According to this doctrine, evil only exists because of oppressive institutions or unjust economic structures, and if we only remove these sources of oppression, humanity’s natural goodness will shine forth. I think we both agree this is absolutely false and dangerous.

The danger of the opposite extreme, however, essentially results in denying the humanity of those from different cultures, which is also incompatible with Christianity. I get the sense that you are basically Christian, but you also talk about different human “natures”, and it’s hard for me to see how this is different than simply denying that some groups of people are truly human. I shouldn’t have to point out the dangers that this kind of thinking can lead to.

Yes, humans differ in many measurable ways, but there are also universals. As someone pointed out, the Hindus believed it was right to burn widows on their husband’s pyres, but this custom was not wholly alien to us. While cruel, it was an attempt to exalt loyalty, which we all agree is a virtue. So it’s not quite true to say that their sense of morality is utterly different, but rather that it has been perverted.

I think you’d have a hard time arguing that every instance of conversion was either forced or done out of love for power. The main point is that, despite their different behavioral propensities, these pagans decided to try and change their behavior, which they could only have done if they believed that their current behavior was bad, which in turn they could only have done if their sense of morality is not entirely different from our own. What I see is not different human natures, but variations upon a single underlying nature.

Clarification: I think never abandoning grandparents would lead to a tribe losing out to ruthless rivals, but only in certain unforgiving environments, such as the extreme north. If the tribe was fortunately situated it would not be a problem, maybe beneficial. I saw a documentary about grizzly bears where they were catching samon and only eating the roe, which they squeezed out. Fish, efficiently exploited, could comfortably support a lot of people.

Peter, the Stoics made much of not being concerned with worldly success, but (according to Nassim Taleb) Zeno was an enthusiastic investor in comercial ventures. Seneca was the richest man in the Roman empire.

“WHY White should have failed to notice the formative influence of American religion on the Captain’s mission of fighting evil is an interesting question. Part of the explanation may be the professional deformation of academic philosophy. Especially in America, contemporary philosophy is obsessively secular; showing any unduly sympathetic interest in religion is a quick way of committing career suicide.”

There is little doubt that most of what passes as morality is culturally determined. To conclude however that this means that there is no natural law that humanity must abide by is a huge mistake. History is a story of failed societies who made that mistake.

I think I would still say natural law exists, but it is obscured by the corruption of the world and the corruption in our own natures. When people deny natural law, however, I fear that they deny the good in people entirely and only see the corruption. Yes, people are different, and some are born worse than others. But just as no one is totally free of corruption, so also no one is totally subject to it. If the pagans had no access to natural law, they could not have been persuaded to become Christian, since it would have been too foreign. Conversion is only possible if there is some grace already present that one can work with. The pagans must have had some inkling that their own system and culture were insufficient and that Christianity offered something better. If natural law did not exist, if the pagans had no instincts, however obscure, that matched what the Church taught more clearly, there is no reason to think they would have saw any benefit in Christianity at all.

It is easy to unmask any traditional morality as self interest, because a morality that was genuinely inefficient would have disappeared with the people who created it. For example, a tribe that was too moral for killing the old or useless would not be as efficient in converting food resources into hunters mothers ( and warriors). So it would inevitably fade away, or be crushed .

If nothing is totally good but a good will, the good man may not be successful in the world. Once you abandon the idea that the good will be crowned with worldly success, it is easy to have universal morality. And you can unmask all other morality. All you have to do is abandon the telos, and do whatever is right for its own sake.
————

The Stoics believed in natural law, but they also believed :-
“The standard to which a rightly acting will must conform is that of the law which is embodied in nature itself, of the cosmic order nature itself. Virtue is thus conformity to natural law both in internal disposition and external act. That law is one and the same for all human beings, it has nothing to do with local particularity or circumstance. The good man is a citizen of the universe, his relation to all other collectivities, to city, kingdom or empire is secondary and accidental. Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and political circumstance at the same time as it requires us to act in conformity with nature. There are symptoms of paradox here and they are not misleading. For on the one hand virtue finds purpose and point outside itself: to live well is to live the divine life, to live well is to serve not one’s private purposes. Yet in each individual case to do what is right is to act without any eye to any further purpose at all, it is do whatever is right for its own sake.” (After Virtue)

Is there evidence for low empathy among Russians before the Revolution? While genes certainly play a role, don’t forget that culture influences people’s behavior directly, as well as political and social institutions and the economy. There’s lots of good evidence that Communism affected people’s behavior and moral intuitions for the worse, but it didn’t last long enough to change the gene pool significantly; all these other genetic changes mentioned here took about a thousand years to work themselves out.

And if Russians turn out to have had low empathy even before the Revolution, how do we explain this? They had been Christian for a thousand years, so why didn’t they evolve to be like Englishmen?

The post caught my eye because I’m teaching a bit of this in my regulation class today. Here’s a good quote from David Friedman’s law and economics book:

“As we develop the economic analysis of law we will observe a surprising correspondence between justice and efficiency.justice and efficiency. In many cases, principles we think of as just correspond fairly closely to rules that we discover are efficient. Examples range from “thou shalt not steal” to “the punishment should fit the crime” to the requirement that criminal penalties be imposed only after proof beyond a reasonable doubt. This suggests a radical conjecture—that what we call principles of justice may actually be rules of thumb for producing an efficient outcome, rules we have somehow internalized. Whether that is a sufficient account of justice you will have to decide for yourself.”

Since even animals have innate motivators, shouldn’t humans? We have God’s special purposes for us, in addition, though you might not grant that. What you *would* grant is that unlike animals, we’re smart enough to rationalize making our self-interest suppress our natural morality. Everyone knows it’s wrong to murder an old lady and steal her money, but if the external penalty is low enough and you can get away with it, it’s worth persuading yourself that you’re a special case. In the case of certain Indian tribes, this became a custom. I bet they still felt guilty— but maybe those extra tent poles were worth a bit of guilt over old Auntie’s premature death, especially if all the others tell you it was an OK thing to do.

Eager to execute, maybe, but not effective. That’s the key. The Belgians did kill a lot of people, but you weren’t much safer being innocent than being a murderer– indeed, everyone’s horizon became very short-term.

A lot of people think empathy means blindly doing good to everybody. It doesn’t. Empathetic people are concerned about what is going on in other people’s minds. If they don’t like what they see and judge that person to be morally worthless, they will try to exclude him or her from the community. The witch hunters of New England were very empathetic.

Most sources describe empathy as “putting oneself in others’ shoes” and gaining greater ability to work toward the common good for mutual benefit.

One of the reasons Christian Europe was able to build the greatest societies is because of its high empathy. Iraq and ISIS are in last place for empathy. Shia and Sunni militants kill each other because they lack the self-awareness to put themselves in each others’ shoes. I’m sure both Shia and Sunni Islam are pretty good.

Same goes for Brazilian soccer players who behead the referee for a bad call. Was he really evil, or were his actions understandable from his perspective so that he can be reasoned with?

Russia’s also pretty low in empathy, with ultra-high crime rates and corruption, and their country thus loses many talented sons and daughters to the West.

(If only we could have high empathy + rational immigration policies…)

– thanks for reassuring me that I more or less knew what I was talking about, all this time, teaching ethical theory at a Jesuit University.

“The Byzantines, for example, went out of their way to avoid putting people to death.”

Yes it got so, but there was also an assertion of State authority over that of the Church (ie Byzantine Iconoclasm – “relics thrown into the sea … Monks were apparently forced to parade in the Hippodrome, each hand-in-hand with a woman, in violation of their vows”). Iconoclasm came after major reverses at the hands of Islam.

It is an open question if the west can see the need for a rethink of morality. All the indications are we will get what George Santayana wrote about in his novel The Last Puritan:- “So America’s contribution to the universal “democratic capitalism” of the future . . . will be just this: cheapness, the cheapest music and the cheapest comic books and the cheapest morality that can be provided. This indeed would be the revolution of revolutions, the Gehenna of universal monotony and mediocrity. This is Cyrus P. Whittle, telling himself that not only is America the biggest thing on earth, but America is soon going to wipe out everything else;…”

“About 0.5% to 1% of all men in each generation were being executed by 1500 in England and Flanders, see: Savey-Casart, P. (1968). La peine de mort. Geneva: Librairie Droz.
Taccoen, L. (1982). L’Occident est nu, Paris: Flammarion, p. 52.”

Thanks for coming up with the sources. However, Tudor England, using modern terminology, was a police state (the English had also just come through a civil war where being on the losing side at the time generally got you executed). Its not good to extrapolate from there to everywhere in medieval Western Europe. Its sort of looking at 1930s Russia and then drawing conclusions on how industrial societies are run generally.

The Byzantines, for example, went out of there way to avoid putting people to death. Maybe this isn’t a good example because they weren’t “Western”, but they were definitely Christian.

“How did pagan Anglo-Saxons who loved killing each other manage to change their behavior when they became Christian? They must have done so, since, as you argue, the later changes to less violent behavior could only come about as a response to the change in culture, which in turn must have happened while the English were still genetically predisposed to anti-Christian behavior. ”

If one of their kin was killed, Anglo Saxons had a obligation to avenge their kinsman by killing his killer, whose death would in turn require avenging by his own kin. So people may have wanted to kill but they knew that was very risky. Where your kinsman could get you involved in a vendetta, you didn’t wanted them to start something, and everyone was taught to be polite. Now we have no redress to being insulted.

“But the native kings and the Belgian administration seem to have been rather eager to execute”

Well the Norman Conquest was not that different to the what King Leopold did in the Congo. If the Congo had tight local control and punitive measures for law-breakers which lasted hundreds of years, it would surely be a less violent place. (Although political violence is quite a different thing to individual criminal violence.) Native chiefs are likely focused on killing those who are rival alpha male types.

To be fair to old Thomas, what he meant by “general precepts” was probably less expansive than one might imagine. If you want to know what he meant, you have to roll back from question 94 to question 1-5 of the Second Part, which tried to answer “why do we do what we do?”

That answer is: Our common human nature is to seek things we have identified as “good”. Things that are “good” complete or prefect us. There is a lot of intervening work trying to determine what completes or perfects us. Thomas based his conclusions on the biology and psychology of his day (questions 22-48). This information is now 700 years out of date. However, it tends to be surprisingly good when one sees what he meant.

If you continue to question 94 but then stop at article 4, you will note that Thomas stops to answer the question: Does everyone agree on what exactly we should do? The short answer is no. The longer answer is we all agree that we ought to do good and avoid evil, but all the complications in the preceding 93 questions make for a lot of disagreement on practical matters.

By the way, could we please compare England with other countries. For example, people in the Congo seem to be rather prone to kill each other even now. So, did the native kings – or did the Belgian colonial administration – do a bad job, insofar as they executed too little a number of men (in order to eliminate their dangerous genes)?

But the native kings and the Belgian administration seem to have been rather eager to execute.

Here’s one thing I don’t get. If culture follows from genes, how is it possible for people to switch cultures before their genes have had a chance to change? How did pagan Anglo-Saxons who loved killing each other manage to change their behavior when they became Christian? They must have done so, since, as you argue, the later changes to less violent behavior could only come about as a response to the change in culture, which in turn must have happened while the English were still genetically predisposed to anti-Christian behavior. Clearly they had the potential to become less violent, even if it was more difficult for them at first. And that, I think, is what natural law is really about: it refers to the potential of any human being to act morally. It’s not a statement about how they actually will behave, or even about how difficult it is for them, which may well vary from person to person (and almost certainly does so vary). Being strongly tempted to commit murder is not the same as being unable to stop oneself from doing so, and that I think is the crucial distinction we must make.

“[Christianity's] teachings on sexual restraint have catastrophically failed to persuade anybody.”

That is a ridiculous exaggeration. The stigma attached to prostitution (especially temple prostitution), concubinage, pederasty, and sex slavery in cultures inhabited or colonized by Christians are widely divergent in comparison with what came before (or what takes place in, say, the Islamic world). Being raised in a monogamous household is seen even by atheists as inversely correlated to future dysfunction. Strippers and prostitutes, even among their enthusiasts, are commonly regarded as products of poor fatherhood. Contraception is widely flouted, obviously, but the consequent reduction in fertility is itself regarded as a kind of pathology in the West, to the extent that conservative evangelical sects which were once carefree about contraception and abortion have in recent years converged to Catholic positions. In some ways, the culture has become far more sexually permissive, but in other ways, things are as puritanical as they ever were (even if only by way of hypocrisy).

Is there any valid law – natural or otherwise – if violations of it are possible?

If you believe that there are any legitimate instances of law, then neither can this argument be used against natural law.

gerontocide Now we have a name for our practice of abandoning our elderly to face the benefits of diversity all by themselves.

Again, I can’t edit the comment. Obviously, Aquinas doesn’t have a “c.”

Hmmm…I always associated “Natural Law” with Aristotle’s “functionalist” argument in Book I Chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, according to which man, like each type of man & each part of a man, has a natural telos, that the good for man is to fulfill his telos well, that a good man is a man who fulfills his telos well, &c.

You, St Thomas Acquinas, and practically every actually existing natural lawyer.

Morality is ultimately an argument from authority. As the essay shows, it is not valid to argue from the “is” to the “ought.” That is, you cannot derive any conclusions about what people ought to do by observing what they actually do.

No. The only thing we have to argue from is the “is,” so if it is wrong to argue from the “is” to the “ought,” then it is wrong to argue to the “ought,” period. Just as the claim “no correlation from causation” is a simple denial of the possiblity of science, the claim “no ought from is” is a simple denial of the possibility of morality. In practice, of course, we only use these nonsense phrases to argue against conclusions we don’t like on other grounds, so they are not so much nihilism as shielding skepticism.

“While certain notions of right and wrong can apply to all humans, much of what we call “morality” will always be population-dependent. What is moral in one population may not be in another..”

Not if you subtract teleology and traditional hierarchies. Morality since the Enlightenment is surely resting on logic divorced from any considerations that are particularistic (and thus not capable of being universal).

We moderns can’t justify doing things just because our natural instinct to flourish genetically and socially in a particular society impels us to. Anything moral in the modern west has to be justifiable on a plane of logic that is above and beyond any actual particularisms.

“…the argument of Natural Law [is that] All people are born with a natural sense of right and wrong, and it is only later, through vice or degeneration, that some can no longer correctly tell the two apart.

“The idea began with the Stoics of Ancient Greece. They believed that the universe is governed by laws and that everyone naturally wishes to live in harmony with them, thanks to the divine spark that exists in all of us.”

Hmmm…I always associated “Natural Law” with Aristotle’s “functionalist” argument in Book I Chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, according to which man, like each type of man & each part of a man, has a natural telos, that the good for man is to fulfill his telos well, that a good man is a man who fulfills his telos well, &c.

But, looking at the Wikipedia article on “Natural Law,” it seems that Peter Frost is right, and the phrase is more correctly reserved for this comparatively silly doctrine of the stoics.

Live & learn.

Folks that are ignorant of and therefore do not adapt physical laws will live impoverished lives. Likewise, to the extant that a culture has discovered and incorporated natural law will determine the ultimate success of that culture.

If I understand your question, I believe the issue is addressed in one of the links provided ( Clark2009b ) and in Mr. Frosts prior response. Empathy tends to discourage individual violence and the Church and State in Europe united about 1,000 years ago in a prolonged effort to inhibit personal violence via generous use of capital punishment. Anything that inhibited acting out in a violent manner ( such as empathy ) would increase the chances of handing down the trait in one’s genes to the descendant’s one was therefore allowed to reproduce as opposed to the empathy lacking hot heads who were hanged. Did I miss something ( always a possibility ) ?

Since “natural law” of ANY kind is decided by … drum roll … humans and since humans do the darndest things, I’d say run like heck from anybody who’s says that natural law exists and that he/she knows what these natural laws are.

I guess the founding fathers had the idea of natural rights or laws but they weren’t chiseled into the side of any New England mountain either.

Human sacrifice could be (actually, has been) proclaimed natural law … and the Muslims are still stoning women to death.

You can SAY that natural laws exist but WHO DECIDES.

Are the Bible thumpers big on natural law? If so, we can start citing verses from Leviticus.

Hello Dr. Frost,

I am a reader and admirer of your writing from iran, I was wondering if you had any advice on constructing itelligent society and selecting for intelligent population? What kind of incentive must be created?

I don’t think that Mr. Frost is trying to promote any form of Christianity, as such, at all. I found it very helpful to read the links provided, particularly “Clark2009b” in order to understand where Mr. Frost is coming from. As I understand him, he is definitely NOT positing an inborn universal moral code throughout all of Mankind but rather a set of traits and inclinations which are the product of an increased rate of Evolution beginning with the Agricultural Revolution ( see Cochran and Hapending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion and Clark’s A Farewell to Alms ). Human Nature is not static- the Nature of some Human Groups has changed.

I agree with Jay. This is one area where St. Thomas Acquinas was simply incorrect. There is no natural law, just societies learning through hard experience that some actions are usually really destructive and how to keep people from doing them.

The essay at one point positively refers putting “0.5% to 1″ of men in each generation (without citing a sources for this, um, fact), but of course punishment is not exempt from the process of experience. Over time societies learn which punishments effectively curb bad behavior and which throw gasoline on the fire. If your objective is to reduce killing, having the government go around killing lots of people is a bad start.

No, pacifism is not a tenet of Christianity, except for a few small sects. And no, only about 6% of wars are religious, so the stuff about shedding more blood in Jesus’s name is not even remotely correct. Wars get fought over real estate, power and loot, for the most part, then and now.

One of the most basic tenets of Christianity is pacifism yet it is probably true to say that more blood has been shed, more wickedness done, in Jesus’ name than any other – and this continues today. So if we talk about the “success” of Christianity we must accept that it could never have happened without the shedding of a whole lot of blood.

And, if such an overtly pacifist doctrine could become so perverted, what does that say about natural law? Fundamentally we are seeing a playing out of human psychology – of contending egos – and I very much doubt Christianity has done that much to shape the course of history – meaning to say that if Jesus had not been available for his name to be invoked, then some other bloke would have come along instead to do a similar job; with a similar number of dead people.

Of course there is a natural law, just look to physics. Whether such applies to human behavior is the question, however, and I am in the camp that believes it does only to the extent of bodily function, birth, death, aging, etc. As for the rest, that which is referred to as morality, well this old topic has engaged philosophers and those with a philosophical bent ever since ever. I suspect “morality” as an intrinsic condition is simply a human construct that is dependent upon time and place and tradition. Cui bono? In the US, the “instructed conscious” benefited an emerging WASP elite in the early days of the Republic, an elite that did not wish to waste what were believed to have been limited natural resources while simultaneously taming the s0-called natural instincts of the un- or under instructed. Some people could not be instructed, however, as they were not fully human in any meaningful way; such was similar to the “barboi” of ancient Greece. I suspect this pattern is repeated throughout the history of the human race, taking into account the uniqueness of any group’s social evolution. So no, there is no universal natural law as applied to human behavior. Thomas Aquinas was simply wrong, as was Aristotle. Education, tradition, and social evolution conspire to create a belief that natural law morality exists, yet this is but a human consensus predicated upon a desire to achieve human perfection in imitation of “the gods.” Old stuff, indeed!

Human will is a universal condition. All people understand what it means to act against another person’s will. Insofar everyone understands the difference between benevolence and malevolence.

If power structures are very stable, people can ignore the will of their underlings. If power structures are indefinite or flexible, people need a kind of agreement; that’s when the Golden Rule was invented – which is not universal, but much more widespread than Christianity.

There are degressive/pessistimist and progressive/optimist variants of the Golden Rule. The progressive variant formulated in the Gospel (be as nice, as you want the other to be) was not meant as a recipe for worldly success; it was never expected that every other would effectively react nicely.

Mr. Frost’s idea that Christianity and the State must be combined to a kind of enlightened tyranny is unspeakably ugly and definitely not Christian.

“The same “problem” will thus be solved in different ways in different places. Over time, each society will develop a “solution” that favors the survival and reproduction of certain people with a certain personality type and certain predispositions.”

Liberals’ starting point in reasoning is always predicated on a society with no such particular version of a problem. A morality that is useful for the genetic or other interests of those who promote it has what WEIRD liberal society sees as a fatal flaw, and the earmark of fake morality. Real rational morality is supposed by liberals to be independent of tradition and biology. Conversely, they see opponents as having arbitrarily selected a morality that lets them pursue their own interests.

The WEIRD see their morality as the only real morality, because they think following it tragically handicaps them in the struggles of life. Moreover, there is a great deal of resistance among intellectuals to the belief that self aware deliberative thought is actually useful in the struggle for life. That is how far they are from accepting Darwin.

Morality is ultimately an argument from authority. As the essay shows, it is not valid to argue from the “is” to the “ought.” That is, you cannot derive any conclusions about what people ought to do by observing what they actually do.

Neither is it logically valid to argue from our wishes to an imperative. Your neighbor is not morally bound to oblige your desires merely because you have desires. Perhaps the lamest argument for morality is the esteemed Dr. Fred’s argument that morality “just is.” Some may call that natural law, but it isn’t law at all since it’s just hanging there as one of the brute facts of the universe which we can ignore if we choose, just as I ignore the asteroid belt.

Once we recognize that law as law presupposes a moral authority, then we can get on to the next question: Since our most basic human instincts do feature an undeniable moral component, the question is whether this results from a real authority who has built it into human nature, or whether it’s just another genetic happenstance with no significance beyond the temporary arrangement of our genes.

If it’s the former, then we should dig into that and find out who this moral Author is. If it’s the latter, then there is no such thing as a moral law at all.

Humanity is a social construct.

Brilliant essay.

Yes, there is a “human nature.” Donald Brown list 200 traits we have in common in Human Universals. Don’t confuse customs with human nature. For example, let’s say admiration for loyalty to loved ones is part of human nature.

The practice of following a husband into the next world can be interpreted as demonstrating loyalty to loved ones. He’ll be lost in the next world without his wife. I disagree heartily with that interpretation, but the basic idea of loyalty is universal.

You can look at differences between peoples (like anthropologists tend to do) or look at similarities (like psychologists tend to do) and come up with completely different conclusions. We all have a piece of the puzzle-we will come closer when we combine those pieces.

I wouldn’t say Christianity has been entirely victorious. While its teachings on violence may be more or less taken for granted today, its teachings on sexual restraint have catastrophically failed to persuade anybody. Obviously, in our modern, technologically advanced culture, certain Christian teachings are better received than others, so we can’t explain current dogmas in social science as simply an artifact of social science’s origins in Christian or post-Christian cultures.

Also, saying that different cultures have different moral standards does not necessarily tell you that there are different human natures, i.e. different sets of innate moral intuitions; it also supports the mainstream anthropological belief that there is no human nature, i.e. there are no innate moral intuitions, but rather we are born as blank slates and acquire our moral intuitions from the culture we are raised in. I’m surprised that anthropologists seem so shocked to discover facts that support their premises, but perhaps you are right that they still take certain Christian moral precepts too much for granted.

Finally, none of this disproves natural law, because proponents of that theory point out that, along with our innate moral senses, we have innate sinful passions that work against our moral senses. To couch this in more secular terms, we have instincts to look out for ourselves and instincts to look out for others, but we can’t predict precisely when one instinct will win out over the other in any given situation. The competition between the two sets of intuitions results in behavioral variation both at the individual and group level: one culture may elevate our innate respect for human life to such an extent that abortion is seen as taboo, while other cultures may privilege our more selfish instincts and sanction not only abortion, but infanticide, gerontocide and even genocide against other tribes. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t all born with the same set of both instincts.

What happened to the “empathy” meme discussed in Frost’s “Dear Fred” essay? Is it dismissed as inapplicable? There was a moderate effort in that essay to assign some degree of evolutionary advantage to empathy. All gone?

“You’re speaking to what hbd’ers refer to as IQ Fetishism. That is, IQ is how we measure what is “good”. But this is not the basis of immigration policy alone.”

IQ is hardly the only thing that I take into account, dear boy. Besides their low IQs, Latin American Amerinds and Mestizos also bring with them an alien and pathetic culture.

“Work ethic is also a consideration, and Mexicans will work”

Work as what? Hewers of wood and drawers of water?

“, and assimilate.”

Assimilate to the lowest common denominator, dear boy.

” I disagree this is a low bar,”

It’s an extremely low bar, dear boy.

“and that only those with high educational credentials should be allowed to move here.”

Frankly, dear boy, I would prefer a complete moratorium for a while. However, barring that, I do think that the qualifications should be set quite high (e.g., graduate degree, multi-million dollar investment, etc)

” The fact remains that white people are in a period of stasis,”

MMM, last time I checked, Whites are still producing lots and lots of inventors, Nobel laureates, etc

” and Europe has become a museum.”

Better a museum than the rubbish heap that Mestizos and Amerinds are turning the USA into…

” We can’t replace ourselves.”

So we should invite in foreigners to replace us?

“So those should be considerations of an immigration policy.”

Sounds more like a national suicide policy.

“As for the great works that white people have accomplished, there is no denying it. But the Irish are also white, and as I mentioned earlier, it was common for other whites to consider them low IQ idiots. I see no reason for us to consider the Mexicans as idiots.”

Not idiots, dear fellow; they simply have IQs that are below the White American mean.

“They do have writers, artists and scientists. They are there, if one takes the time to study Mexico.”

Here is what a study of Mexico reveals:

Fields Prize Winners: 0

Nobel laureates : 3 ( as compared to 10 for Scotland, 15 for Australia, 23 for Canada, 74 for England, 306 for the USA).

Mexico’s cultural performance has been quite pathetic.

You’re speaking to what hbd’ers refer to as IQ Fetishism. That is, IQ is how we measure what is “good”. But this is not the basis of immigration policy alone. Work ethic is also a consideration, and Mexicans will work, and assimilate. I disagree this is a low bar, and that only those with high educational credentials should be allowed to move here. The fact remains that white people are in a period of stasis, and Europe has become a museum. We can’t replace ourselves. So those should be considerations of an immigration policy. As for the great works that white people have accomplished, there is no denying it. But the Irish are also white, and as I mentioned earlier, it was common for other whites to consider them low IQ idiots. I see no reason for us to consider the Mexicans as idiots. They do have writers, artists and scientists. They are there, if one takes the time to study Mexico.

Dear Mr. Frost,

What’s bugging me about this subject: What was the mechanism by which refraining from torture conferred enough survival advantage that the non-torturers started having more babies (and the torturers fewer) and the non-torturers’ point of view became dominant? Torturers being what they are, why wouldn’t they kidnap all the non-torturers’ kids and torture them?

And along that line, in societies where the non-torturers survived and bred more, how do we account for the occasional outbreaks of bloodlust? After all, something hard wired into the chromosomes would seem to be more resistant to that kind of thing. And it would seem to make repentance a physical impossibility, for it torturing comes from the genes, how could you ever get away from it? The only way to stop torture, ironically, would be to identify the responsible gene and wage a campaign of extermination against all the people who have it.

Yes Fred, if natural selection causes everyone to converge on a single optimum, there couldn’t be any traits left for which there is no evolutionary use. But even cloned fruit flies have differently wired brains. The variation is what allows natural selection. Also you are assuming that what you see as anomalies are not side effects of selection for something else. Say a virus is vertically transmitted from the mother (in the womb) and makes sons attracted to men, but daughters more sexually attractive to men (by affecting prenatal hormone levels). A virus that is transmitted in the female line doesn’t care about males.

“Why should I not indulge my hobby of torturing to death the severely genetically retarded?”

Assuming you would not be killed for behaving like that, there is no reason from the standpoint of the effect on your community. But there is every reason from the standpoint of your evolutionary prime directive of reproductive fitness which requires self preservation, if you are not in a society in where such behaviour was condoned. There probably were people doing that kind of evil stuff, if you go far enough back in European ancestry, but they became scarce due to punitive measures against acting like that.

I think people have argued that the most advanced and progressive values have altered the terms of gene selection, where they were enforced. Just explaining why something is wrong isn’t going to alter a natural inclination to do it.

“Personally, I think mass Hispanic immigration is good. Why? Because their Catholic and their traditions are western and they will assimilate just as the Italians did.”

Yes, the old Hispanics are the new Italians meme. Barone has been beating that drum for years. Crucial differences to bear in mind:

1. Proximity: Mexico shares a land border with the USA; Italy does not.

2. Human Capital: Amerinds and Mestizos have mean IQs that are below the White American mean. Plus, they have displayed little evidence for high achievement in the arts and the sciences in their home countries (cf Latin America’s dearth of Fields Medalists, low number of Nobel laureates, etc). Italy, in contrast, is one of Europe’s big 4 in Murray’s HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT (alongside Germany, France, and Italy) and can boast of an enviable array of talent: Dante, Virgil, Leonardo, Fermi, Galileo, etc.

” They will drive our trucks, cook our food and cut our lawns for us,”

The old dream of importing a servile race. It tends to end badly.

“Hector and Juan will be good for America; Mohammed and Achmed will reign down bloody murder on Europe.”

Low bar.

Peter,

You say, “Let me return to your initial question. What’s to stop you from torturing to death the severely retarded? First, your sense of empathy should. If it doesn’t, you’re the one with a severe mental defect. I wouldn’t want you as a fellow citizen, let alone as a neighbor. The law of the jungle may give you the right to torture defenceless people to death, but it also gives me the right to organize a lynch mob and hang you from the nearest tree.”

We agree perfectly. If I found myself doing such a thing, I would organize my own mob to lynch me. But we would lynch me for different reasons.

You would say, “Fred, you are transgressing an evolutionary prejudice that promotes social cohesion, and anyway unjustified killing tends to promote more killing, so you must die.” To which I would reply, “Well, gee, Peter, what if I do it in secret, so it doesn’t promote anything? Would that be ok? And if revulsion at torture is just a practical genetic instinct, like fear of heights, why should I not overcome it at will, as I do fear of heights when I go skydiving?”

My reason for lynching me would be that torturing children is Wrong. Period. No matter how craftily I arranged it so as to overcome evolutionary objections, I woujld still think it Wrong. You would say, “But Fred, how do you know it’s wrong?” I would say, “It just is.” Which is as dead-end an answer as genetic practicality, but to my mind less embarrassing. There are things we do not know, and cannot know.

But my broader point was that traits exist for which there seem to be no evolutionary explanation. There is of course male homosexuality, so puzzling that Cochran had to invent an undetectable virus to cause it. Sadism and, particularly, masochism do not make much evolutionary sense, yet are very much part of human behavior. You know better than I how this varies over societies, but any big American city has SM clubs for the controlled practice of such, and their memberships are not all that small. I can think of no evolutionary explanation for suicide, which remains with us.

Regards,
Fred

“Because they’re Catholic”

Poet Louis MacNeice: “If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . .”

First off, I thought Fred’s question was dumb. What he probably wants to ask is, how do we know mass Hispanic immigration is bad? That’s cutting to the chase of it.

If we don’t know who “we” are, and we don’t know what we want, and we don’t know where we’re going, we can’t answer the question.

Why can’t we ask this, rather than going the long winded curcuitous route of Evo-speak?

Personally, I think mass Hispanic immigration is good. Why? Because their Catholic and their traditions are western and they will assimilate just as the Italians did. They will drive our trucks, cook our food and cut our lawns for us, and their taxes will support our retirement.

We should be happy. I live in the real world and all I have to do is look at Europe to see how lucky we are. Mass Muslim immigration is a death wish. It will have bloody results. But we here in the USA are sitting pretty. Hector and Juan will be good for America; Mohammed and Achmed will reign down bloody murder on Europe.

I don’t know, some societies like the Chukchi may have literally killed unwanted children as population control (I’m not talking about things like child sacrifice here.) But historically exposure was more common and a difference seems innately reckoned. All those English pubs are called ‘eagle and child’ and ‘fox and child’ for a reason. It was the same in Rome, Japan etc. And this suggests to me a widespreas cognitive basis for the preference, even though people may have assumed the outcome to be effectively the same.

Talk about Frost completely missing the mark. Fred Reed isn’t favoring sadism; he’s asking how, in evolutionary terms, we can condemn torturing and killing defective children. If evolutionism is the be-all end-all explanation for what we are, why do we find some actions repugnant? Because we evolved to? And why would that be?

Help for Fred from an atheist.

From. Talkorigins.org. Claim CB010.2

“Nobody knows what the most primitive cells looked like. All the cells around today are the product of billions of years of evolution”

This begs the question, “What prevented/is preventing ongoing episodes of abiogenesis?” – and the corollary, “Why do we see virtually none of the intermediate forms of abiogenesis today?”

There should be parallel strands of evolution tracing from multiple abiogenic events. There should be a spectrum of cells from primitive to “the cells around today.” We should, if we look in the right place, or if we see what is there in the proper way, be able to see at least a few data points in the “evolution” of abiogenesis.

It has, after all, been billions of years and there has been a wide variety of environmental conditions.

Were the proper coditions so fleeting, and the event so improbable, that in a world of primordial soup this happened sucessfully only once? Ever? (This is so ridiculously improbable that it reduces to mere philosophy, i.e. Is it less likely that we are actors in a dream of some other consciousness?)

Or are we looking in the wrong places? Panspermia just shifts the question one step. I think there are places on earth right now where we could see more extensive evidence of abiogenesis – ocean vents, deep underground, the upper atmosphere, somewhere. Either that, or the perhaps we have to re-evaluate the theory.

The law of the jungle may give you the right to torture defenceless people to death, but it also gives me the right to organize a lynch mob and hang you from the nearest tree.

Peter seems to have buried the real answer to this as an aside at the end without even realizing it. After laying out a number of plausible sounding but relatively vague and not very rigorous hypotheses, Peter spills the real answer inadvertently out of exasperation, since he knows someone like Reed isn’t going to just accept vague hypotheses. It’s group selection. And group selection is war.

“The law of the jungle may give you the right to torture defenceless people to death, but it also gives me the right to organize a lynch mob and hang you from the nearest tree.”

Right, and people will feel they ought to join the lynch mob even if they don’t like the idea of killing. In the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101, where men were offered the chance to step out and leave the killing to their comrades, few did. They went ahead even though many were vomiting and disgusted with what they were doing.

Peer pressure is group selection. Guilt at not pulling your weight is internal peer pressure. And you don’t have to even do anything to other groups; just being extra nice within your group is in effect ensuring the extermination of the group with free rider genes. What about free riders within your group? Well, humans can monitor and enforce compliance, so free riders get a visit from Captain Lynch; or less dramatically, just cease to be accepted as group members, which is social and genetic death.

A hero doesn’t propose strategies, he suffers and sacrifices for the group. HBDers are seen as free riders.

You do not seem to understand the difference between empathy and altruism. Nor do you seem to understand the correlation between altruism and patriotism. And you certainly have no clue about the impact of the state and its public “services” on the shaping of mores, something that you misname “cultural evolution”. Your absurd claims that empathy is evolutionary (but somehow not genetic) ignore the growth in the intrusiveness of the nation state, the cost and extent of its administration, and the consequently institutionalized breadth of its propaganda since the industrial revolution. Such “evolution” exists only to the extent that academic and moral devolution has been better rewarded by an increasingly pervasive political environment.

PS: I didn’t bother to see how you’ve abused your references this time. But for others who may find sport in such things, I say give it a try! You’ll likely be rewarded by this sloth.

“No single citizen can declare war.”

How many of the millions of people killed in and and by the US military in the last 70 years have been under a declaration of war? Zero. They all “served” at the pleasure of the president. Any other claim is just Lincolnian propaganda.

we switch empathy on & off to some degree, & to some degree empathy (or lack of) sneaks up on us & is not within our control. amount of empathy may vary in different situations & with different people, animals, relatives, self. consult your physician to ask if this is the right amount of empathy™ for you.
in general females have a higher mean on a general empathy score, males have more variability (as usual). Adolph H. was very empathic to his woman & his dog & to children, etc. Perhaps males can compartmentalize it more. switch it off for battle, let it flow back on for family.

Your revise thingy cut me off in mid edit. So let me continue the comment.

Nietzsche’s and Chesterton’s analyses of the death of the Christian God in Europe are relevant here. When people lose belief in one God, as Europeans have abandoned Christianity, they transfer belief to another god or gods. The neopagan Green movement is the exemplar. Its numerous superstitions and irrationalities have been amply documented, their deleterious effects on European society are obvious. Note that the neopagan religion of modern Europeans nullifies much of Christian ethics, especially as regards fetuses, new borns, and the disabled and old. You now have legalized abortions everywhere and legalized involuntary euthanasia is spreading throughout the European Union.

Again, you cannot have the Christian ethics you (as in you, Peter) you want without Christianity. If you want your children to be good Christians (as you, Peter, evidently do) then take them to church, the One, True, Apostolic, Roman Catholic Church, of course.

It should not be necessary on a science blog, but apparently it is, to restate that evolution has no direction or goal. It is simply adaptation to local and current conditions. It is entirely possible for modern human to become stupid and violent if the environment rewards those characters with increased reproduction.

You might consider the claim that British (and by inference all WEIRD countries) IQ’s are falling and have declined by one full standard deviation (15 its) over the last hundred years or so. This is based on reaction time data, which go back that far, and their correlation with IQ. The supposed cause is the dysgenic condition of modern society that allows low IQ people a selective advantage.

Reread your Darwin. Evolution does not select for empathy or any other trait per se. Natural selection is all about differential reproduction. Any trait that allows its possessor to leave more children behind than it conspecifics becomes more common in the group and is thus “selected.” In a social animal, traits like empathy or altruism that lubricate social interactions become fairly common, but so do sociopathy and selfishness because they benefit the fraction of the population that is free-loaders. There is a large game-theoretic literature on this topic, and the conclusion is that Christian-like and anti-Christian-like ethics coexist in a variable equilibrium.

Basically, what you are trying to do as an atheist is to justify your culturally inherited Christian ethics. You cannot do this in any kind of coherent Darwinian theory. So give it up.

I don’t think evolution explains it all by any means. Ideology seems to turn off any kind of compassion, empathy, you name it.

TV and sports does a marvelous job as well. Sit down sometime and watch a MMA or football match on TV or better yet attend one. Watch how people get bloodlust so easily.

Good propaganda can turn a persons empathy on and off like light switch.

During the Cold War our scientists experimented on criminals and children with terminal cancer by giving them lethal dosages of X-rays. They made soldiers walk into nuclear fallout or made planes fly into radioactive clouds to see what happens to the men. Some scientists thought it was funny. Most didn’t care. If they did they would have walked away, evidently the chance of dousing people in radiation was just too attractive to these men of science.

Look at the massive bloodshed of post-enlightenment Europe(also Russia and China) after it generated two nightmarish secular ideologies – Communism and Fascism were introduced to various populations. It seems to have turned large segments of the population into psychopaths and mindless killing and torturing machines. Young or old it didn’t matter.

The end result of both was the deaths of more people than the last 2000 years of warfare. Pretty impressive results by the secular European intellectual class. Lets not forget the contributions of the Eugenicists who helped turn Nazism from just another form of tyranny into a mass murder machine based on ethnicity and looks.

Empathy is very, very selective and something you don’t want to depend on from people.

weak argument. people have tortured others for thousands of years, with great pleasure, as well as animals. That they felt glee at doing it does not mean they were deficient in empathy; they were only deficient in empathy as YOU define it. once again, the anti-theist argument comes down to self-righteousness and solipsims: “because I do not want certain things done, or want other things done, everyone else who is good wants the same. Anyone who doesn’t agree with me ideas isn’t good and is therefore deficient and must eb reeducated/removed.”