The Myth of "Natural Law"
Josh Dougherty
by Iain MacSaorsa
http://www.spunk.org/texts/otherpol/critique/sp001283.txt
Natural Law, and the related Natural Rights, play
an important part in Libertarian Capitalist
idealogy. They are not alone in claiming that
their particular idealogy meets the law of nature,
Hitler (for one) also did so. So do numerous other
demagogues, religious fanatics and political
philosophers. However, they like to claim that only
*their* "natural law" is the "real" one, all the
others are subjective impositions. But, then again,
so do all the others. We will ignore these
assertions (they are not arguments) and concentrate
on explaining why natural law (in all its many
forms) is a myth. In addition, we will indicate
its authoritarian implications.
Firstly, Murray Rothbard claims that "Natural Law
theory rests on the insight... that each entity
has distinct and specific properties, a distinct
"nature", which can be investigated by man's reason"
[For a New Liberty, p25]. To put it bluntly, this
form of "analysis" was originated by Aristotle and
has not been used by science for over 300 years.
Science investigates by experiment, creating
theories to explain the facts experienced. Rothbard
*invents* definitions ("distinct 'natures'") and
then draws conclusions from them. Such a method was
last used by the medieval Church and is
innocent of any scientific method.
After defining certain "natures", Rothbard starts
to draw "Natural Rights and Laws" from them.
However, these are strange "Natural Laws" as they
can be violated in nature! Natural laws (like
the law of gravity) *cannot* be violated and therefore
do not need enforcing. The "Natural Laws"
the "Libertarian" desires to enforce upon you have no
such powers. They need to be enforced by
humans and the institutions they create. Hence
Libertarian "Natural Laws" are more akin to moral
or legal laws. So why do Libertarians use the
terminology of Natural Law?
Simply, it gives them the means by which to elevate
their opinions, dogma and prejudices to some
metaphysical level where nobody will dare to criticize
it, or even think about it. It smacks of religion,
where "Natural Law" has replaced God's Law.
In the latter case, it gives the priest power
over the believers. In the later, the ideologist over
the people he or she wants to rule.
How can you be against a "Natural Law"? Its impossible.
How can you argue against Gravity? If private property,
for example, is elevated to such a level,
who dare argue against it?
Ayn Rand listed having landlords and employers with "the laws of nature".
They are *not* similar: the first two are social
relationships which have to be enforced by the
state; the "laws of nature" (like gravity, needing food, etc)
are *facts* which do not need to be enforced. The use of
"Natural Law" is an attempt to *stop* thinking, to restrict
analysis, to force certain aspects of society off of
the political agenda by giving them a divine, ever
lasting quality.
Of course, in order to support "Natural Law" the
cultists *must* ignore reality. Ayn Rand claims
that "the source of man's rights is... the law
of identity. A is A - and Man is Man". But Rand (like
Rothbard) *defines* "Man" as an "entity of a
specific kind - a rational being". Therefore she
*cannot* account for *irrational* human behaviour
(such as those which violate "Natural Laws")
which are also products of our "nature". To assert
that they are not human, means to assert A can
be not-A, thus attempting to deny the law of
identity. Her idealogy cannot even meet its own test.
* But "Natural Law" provides protection for individual
rights from violation by the State. Those
against Natural Law desire total rule by the state.
The second part is a common Libertarian attack.
Instead addressing the issues, they accuse you of
being a "totalitarian" (or the less sinister "statist").
In this way, they hope to avoid discussing the
issues raised. We can ignore the second part.
"Natural Law" has *never* stopped the rights of
individuals from being violated by the state. They
are as much use as a chocolate fire-guard. If
"Natural Rights" can protect you from the power of
the state, the Nazi's would not have been able
to murder six million jews. The only thing that stops
the state from attacking individuals rights is
individual (and social) power - the ability and desire
to protect yourself and what you consider to be
right and fair. As the anarchist Rudolf Rocker
noted, "Political [or individual] rights do not
exist because they have been legally set down on a
piece of paper, but only when they have become
the ingrown habit of a people, and when any
attempt to impair them will be meet with the violent
resistance of the populace... One compels
respect from others when he knows how to defend
his dignity as a human being... The people owe
all the political rights and privileges which we
enjoy today, in greater or lesser measure, not to the
good will of their governments, but to their own
strength" [Anarcho-Syndicalism, page 64]
Of course, if is there are no "Natural Rights",
then the state has no "right" to take away your rights
or murder you. You can object to state power
without believing in "Natural Law".
* Why is "Natural Law" authoritarian?
Rights, far from being fixed, are the product
of social evolution and human action, thought and
emotions. What is acceptable now may become
unacceptable in the future. Slavery, for example,
was long considered "natural". In fact, John Locke,
the "father" of "Natural Rights" was heavily
involved in the slave trade. He made
a fortune in violating a "natural law". Many
claimed slavery was a "Natural Law". Few would say so now.
The "Natural Law" cult desires to stop this evolutionary
process and fix social life into what *they* think is good
and right and use a form of argument which tries
to raise their idealogy above critique or thought.
This denies the fundamental nature of liberty,
the ability to think for yourself. Michael Bakunin
writes "the liberty of man consists solely in this:
that he obeys natural laws because he has
*himself* recognised them as such, and not because
they have been externally imposed upon him
by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human,
collective or individual" [Bakunin on Anarchism,
page 227].
The case for liberty and a free society is that
every individual is unique, that all can contribute
something which no other individual has noticed
or thought about. It is this interaction of
individuals which allows individuals, society, social
customs and rights to evolve, change and develop.
"Natural Law", like the state, tries to arrest
this evolution. It replaces individuality with cold
dogma, placing the individual under yet another
god, destroying critical thought with a new rule
book.
In addition, as these "Natural Laws" are the
product of human as humans, they *must* be
applicable to *all* humanity. Hence the "Natural
Law" cult desires to see *one* moral code
dominate society, all other codes *must be* (by
definition) "against nature". That the Dogma of
Natural Law was only invented a few hundred years
ago, in one part of the planet, does not seem
to bother them. Nor the fact that for the vast
majority of human existence people have lived in
societies which violated almost *all* aspects of
their "Natural Law".
If "Natural Law" did exist, then all people would have
discovered this "true" law years ago. As it is, the
debate is still going on, with (for example) fascists
and "Libertarians" each claiming "the laws of nature"
(and sociobiology) as their own.
* But Natural Law was discovered, not invented!
This truly shows the religious nature of the
Natural Law cult. Let us take the Law of Gravity, for
example. Newton did not "discover" the law
of gravity, he invented a theory which explained the
physical events experienced. Later Einstein updated
his theories into new theories, which again try to
explain physical reality.
Unlike "Natural Law", scientific laws are seen
to be the products of human thought and can be
updated and changed as our knowledge changes and
grows. The "Natural Law" cult prides itself
in that it is unchanging, being "discovered"
centuries ago. No wonder that many "Natural Law"
cultists support sociobiology, placing their
"laws" into the genetic structure of humanity. As
Murray Bookchin notes, sociobiology is "suffocatingly
rigid; it not only impedes action with the
autocracy of a genic tyrant but it closes the door
to any action that is not biochemically defined by
its own configuration. When freedom is nothing
more than the recognition of necessity... we
discover the gene's tyranny over the greater
totality of life... when knowledge becomes dogma (and
few movements are more dogmatic than sociobiology)
freedom is ultimately denied".
Natural Law, far from the being the supporter
of individual freedom, is one of its greatest enemies.
By placing individual rights within "Man's"
"Nature", it creates an unchanging set of dogmas. Do
we really know enough about humanity to dictate
"Natural" and universal Laws, applicable forever?
Is this not a denial of critical thinking
and so individual freedom?
James A. Donald
On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 04:05:33 GMT, "Josh Dougherty"
> Firstly, Murray Rothbard claims that "Natural Law theory
> rests on the insight... that each entity has distinct and
> specific properties, a distinct "nature", which can be
> investigated by man's reason" [For a New Liberty, p25]. To
> put it bluntly, this form of "analysis" was originated by
> Aristotle and has not been used by science for over 300
> years.
The rage of socialists at certain scientists shows us that
this approach is still very much in use.
Sociobiology is very much a continuation of this approach, and
sociobiologists often make references to natural law theorists,
Conversely, Natural law arguments can be expressed, and often
are expressed, as sociobiological arguments, as for example in
my essay: Natural Law and Natural Rights"
http://www.jim.com/rights.html
Hence socialists routinely demonize scientists who take a
sociobiological approach, even if their position is not in any
way political, for example Chagnon. Chagnon probably did not
care that his approach was logically connected to the natural
law approach, but his opponents very much cared. They were
horrified and enraged when he interpreted the activities of the
Yanomamo not as a unique and all powerful culture that
arbitrarily remakes human nature, but as acting out of a
universal human nature under particular circumstances, because
the same arguments that he was using to show that the Yanomamo
mostly fight over women, rather than hunting grounds, could
equally be used to show that capitalism is more natural than
socialism, and that the Yanomamo economic order is proto
capitalism, rather than proto socialism/ It would probably
never have occurred to Chagnon to so apply the argument, but it
occurred to his enemies.
> After defining certain "natures", Rothbard starts to draw
> "Natural Rights and Laws" from them. However, these are
> strange "Natural Laws" as they can be violated in nature!
> Natural laws (like the law of gravity) *cannot* be violated
> and therefore do not need enforcing.
Terminological irrelevance. These are two different usages of
"natural law", and Rothbard's usage is older than Newton's.
We do not use the same word because they are the same thing,
but because of history.
"Natural law" in sense of Thomas Aquinas is that law which is
rightly enforceable in a state of nature, an answer to the
question of when violence may be justly used. It is "natural
law" as distinct from "man made law", not "natural law" in the
sense of those laws that nature itself obeys.
> The "Natural Laws" the "Libertarian" desires to enforce upon
> you have no such powers. They need to be enforced by humans
> and the institutions they create. Hence Libertarian "Natural
> Laws" are more akin to moral or legal laws. So why do
> Libertarians use the terminology of Natural Law?
Several thousand years of tradition. We need laws that are not
merely the will of some central lawmaking authority, because
such bodies tend to eventually escape whatever restraints they
were created under, and swiftly set about generating ever
increasing amounts of law, ever more rapidly.
Hence the need for laws that are natural, not merely the will
of particular men.
> Ayn Rand listed having landlords and employers with "the laws
> of nature". They are *not* similar: the first two are social
> relationships which have to be enforced by the state; the
> "laws of nature" (like gravity, needing food, etc)
She did not claim they were similar, but in fact they are
similar, in that any attempt to do away with landlords and
employers, creates one great landlord, one great employer, with
powers vastly greater than those possessed by individual
employers and landlords.
Property rights in the means of production are the boundaries
between one man's plan and another man's plan. Abolish those
boundaries, and one plan must be imposed on all. Terror
follows.
> "Natural Law" has *never* stopped the rights of individuals
> from being violated by the state.
Actually it has, in that societies whose legal systems
distinguished between positive and natural law where strikingly
and obviously more free than other societies.
Western capitalism rests on the institutions of instuted in
England in the Glorious Revolution, which led to the industrial
revolution. These institutions in turn rested on the practice
of Golden Age Holland, whose legal system was based on natural
law, and on the ideology of John Locke, whose ideology was
based on natural law.
Capitalism was possible because of freedom, and freedom arose,
not from natural law, but from the theory of natural law, which
enabled men to distinguish between proper and improper state
actions.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
TUWEcGIYsQfQj2I6V1CI3MBF5idKrh0MkBB/yT4K
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G*rd*n
> ...
> sociobiological approach, even if their position is not in any
> way political, for example Chagnon. Chagnon probably did not
> care that his approach was logically connected to the natural
> law approach, but his opponents very much cared. They were
> horrified and enraged when he interpreted the activities of the
> Yanomamo not as a unique and all powerful culture that
> arbitrarily remakes human nature, but as acting out of a
> universal human nature under particular circumstances, because
> the same arguments that he was using to show that the Yanomamo
> mostly fight over women, rather than hunting grounds, could
> equally be used to show that capitalism is more natural than
> socialism, and that the Yanomamo economic order is proto
> capitalism, rather than proto socialism/ It would probably
> never have occurred to Chagnon to so apply the argument, but it
> occurred to his enemies.
Chagnon seems to have postulated that desire for and
engagement in war, violence, domination and the like were
inherent, primary and inescapable components of all human
beings and human societies. Naturally, the fans of peace,
freedom and equality -- "socialists" as you seem to be
designating them -- are not going to like that sort of thing
and are going to go see if they can't get something on the
author, which apparently one or more of them did. It seems
a bit naive to say that Chagnon's ideas don't have obvious
political implications and if Chagnon was unaware of that one
would have to conclude that he was pretty disconnected.
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 1/19/03 <-adv't
Russell
Unfortunately, too many ideologues amend it beyond recognition
or comprehension in order to support their own peculiar
philosophical points of view. It is sometimes difficult to
recognise when self-deception leads one to extrapolate from
Natural Law to a hypothetical universe that has no anchor in
reality.
Successful human social orders are founded in Natural Law. For
various reasons, the Law can be bent a little to meet some
perceived need. However, flagrant attempts to violate or
substantially supplant the Law with unnatural artifices
invariably leads to chaos and disintegration of the social order.
It doesn't pay to fool with Mother Nature; she's a real bitch
when upset.
G*rd*n wrote:
> James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
> -----------------------CUT-----------------
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
Sociobiology is not a continuation of Aristotelian "science". There
is tremendous potential for generalizations, which when hurriedly
explained (such as in James' paragraph above) often result in an
Aristotelian fallacy -- an appeal to simplicity rather than true
science. But the work of sociobiologists can be (and is) put to the
test. Chagnon's adversaries were sociobiologists themselves -- not
hordes of socialists.
A socialist, scientist, or anybody interested in a critical analysis
of Chagnon's work would not acknowledge that the Yanomamo's behaviors
are due to universal human nature. That is Chagnon's theory. Put
that theory through the process of peer review and any talk of
"universal nature" goes right out the window.
The idea that the behaviors of the Yanomamo can be used as a
pro-capitalist argument is mostly without merit. It is weak and
easily attacked. Chagnon himself wrote of food sharing and other acts
of pro-social, cooperative behavior. Patrick Tierney, Chagnon's
harshest critic, pointed out that with two violent deaths a year in a
population of 15,000 the Yanomamo are hardly the world's most violent
people.
Furthermore, consider that mating rituals represent, at best, an
approximation of anything that could be called "universal human
nature". Whether we're talking about marriage or rape it isn't a
perfect formula for the perfect mate (and especially so in a
capitalist society where affluence partly determines a mate's
desirability). And because these mating rituals represent a social
construct Chagnon's testimonies of violence cannot be attributed to
natural scarcity. In other words, finding women to mate with is only
a problem when they are all married (or "attached").
The violence of Yanomamo is not a response to natural scarcity and
therefore a poor argument for either capitalism or natural law.
Here is a link to a paper by Michael Gurven who hails from the same
Department as Chagnon. Gurvin argues that cooperation is perhaps more
"natural" to human behavior than competition:
http://www.allmanlab.caltech.edu/classes/bi216home/gurven_transfers.pdf
James A. Donald
> > Hence socialists routinely demonize scientists who take a
> > sociobiological approach, even if their position is not in any
> > way political, for example Chagnon.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n)
> Chagnon seems to have postulated that desire for and
> engagement in war, violence, domination and the like were
> inherent, primary and inescapable components of all human
> beings and human societies.
The fact that you have such a distorted account of Chagnon illustrates
the demonization I described, which in turn is evidence that an the
sociobiological approach has enough in common with the natural law
approach to really piss off socialists.
G*rd*n
> > > Hence socialists routinely demonize scientists who take a
> > > sociobiological approach, even if their position is not in any
> > > way political, for example Chagnon.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n)
> > Chagnon seems to have postulated that desire for and
> > engagement in war, violence, domination and the like were
> > inherent, primary and inescapable components of all human
> > beings and human societies.
jam...@echeque.com (James A. Donald):
> The fact that you have such a distorted account of Chagnon illustrates
> the demonization I described, which in turn is evidence that an the
> sociobiological approach has enough in common with the natural law
> approach to really piss off socialists.
My account is third-hand and is at least partly based on
things said by people who seemed to be defending Chagnon.
As I recall, someone came out with a book or article which
accused Chagnon of putting the natives up to Bad Things in
order to prove some (sociobiological?) point. Of course
for fans of sociobiology and, I guess, of Natural Law,
this couldn't be true, so the accusers were accused of
falsely representing the situation because the natives got
up to Bad Things all on their own, and the falsity of the
false accusers seemed to be attributed to the fact that they
were all dirty hippie communists who wanted natives to be
always groovy and nice. I think I left the movie at that
point -- I thought I'd seen it before.
michael price
> The Myth of "Natural Law"
> by Iain MacSaorsa
> http://www.spunk.org/texts/otherpol/critique/sp001283.txt
>
> Natural Law, and the related Natural Rights, play
> an important part in Libertarian Capitalist
> idealogy. They are not alone in claiming that
> their particular idealogy meets the law of nature,
> Hitler (for one) also did so. So do numerous other
> demagogues, religious fanatics and political
> philosophers. However, they like to claim that only
> *their* "natural law" is the "real" one, all the
> others are subjective impositions. But, then again,
> so do all the others. We will ignore these
> assertions (they are not arguments) and concentrate
> on explaining why natural law (in all its many
> forms) is a myth. In addition, we will indicate
> its authoritarian implications.
>
> Firstly, Murray Rothbard claims that "Natural Law
> theory rests on the insight... that each entity
> has distinct and specific properties, a distinct
> "nature", which can be investigated by man's reason"
> [For a New Liberty, p25]. To put it bluntly, this
> form of "analysis" was originated by Aristotle and
> has not been used by science for over 300 years.
Really? So what does science now deny? That each entity
has distinct and specific properties a.k.a. a nature or
that such properties can be investigated by man's reason?
I can't see much science being conducted without reference
to the properties and nature of that being investigated but
I see even less being done without the use of reason.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > The fact that you have such a distorted account of Chagnon
> > illustrates the demonization I described, which in turn is
> > evidence that an the sociobiological approach has enough in
> > common with the natural law approach to really piss off
> > socialists.
G*rd*n
> My account is third-hand and is at least partly based on
> things said by people who seemed to be defending Chagnon.
I recollect your account of things supposedly said by me. I
oscillate between believing you to be a habitual liar, and
believing you to be seriouslyt deranged.
> As I recall, someone came out with a book or article which
> accused Chagnon of putting the natives up to Bad Things in
> order to prove some (sociobiological?) point.
The book's primary accusation was that Chagnon was lying about
the institutions and behavior of the Yanomamo, and that he was
conducting germ warfare against the Yanomamo in order to
annihilate them so that gold mining companies could take their
land.
No one disputed that the Yanomamo tended to kill each other
with disturbing frequency. The question in dispute was whether
this was primarily over women or hunting grounds, the political
significance of this (a political significance of which it
seems Chagnon was innocently unaware) being that if they fought
over hunting grounds, they would be fighting primarily for the
good of the tribe, whereas if they fought over women, each
would be primarily seeking his own particular good. Secondly,
if they were fighting for hunting grounds this would be because
"culture" made them do it, whereas if they were fighting over
women, this would be because of universal and unchanging human
nature. As Chagnon said, no one writes a country and western
song called "Ruby, don't take your cow to town".
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
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James A. Donald
On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 12:35:53 -0700, Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> Sociobiology is not a continuation of Aristotelian "science".
Neither is natural law theory.
Sociobiology *is* a continuation of natural law theory, and
vice versa, with a result that sociobiologists often are
libertarians, for example Tooby and Cosmides, or if, like
Chagnon, they are not libertarians, they frequently find
themselves under attack from similar enemies and facing similar
accusations from those who see a political significance in
their work that the authors of that work would prefer to
ignore.
> Chagnon's adversaries were sociobiologists themselves
For the most part they claimed that sociobiology was a fascist
plot, and that Chagnon's ideas were a reflection of class
interests.
> -- not hordes of socialists.
They were hordes of socialists.
> A socialist, scientist, or anybody interested in a critical
> analysis of Chagnon's work would not acknowledge that the
> Yanomamo's behaviors are due to universal human nature. That
> is Chagnon's theory. Put that theory through the process of
> peer review and any talk of "universal nature" goes right out
> the window.
It is a most unusual type of peer review that accuses the peer
of conducting germ warfare in the service of internatonal
capitalism. The accusation was not so much that his theories
were false, but that they reflected white imperialist race and
class interests.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
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4XQ1f/uFYDZr4AoyHJVCmA+QEMBV/RdK8QNqnl0Fs
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
What's unusual about it? Germ warfare has indeed been used on many
native populations in the service of international capitalism.
Fascists themselves have called their "plots" sociobiology. Nazis
practiced sociobiology on Jews. Cortez practiced sociobiology on
Incas, describing Incan behavior as predispositioned -- 400 years
before genetics was even scientifically validated. You act as if
genocide in the name of sociobiology has never happened before. It's
happened too many times and it deserves all the scrutiny it can get.
Chagnon's work was less politicized by Tierney than it was by
Brazilian gold miners and loggers who needed an excuse to kill the
Yanomamo. Sociobiology was politicized first by colonialists, then by
capitalists, then, perhaps a murmur of retort by the folks you like to
call socialist.
You are saying that anyone who opposes capitalism is socialist? Well
then the Yanomamo themselves are socialist. You and I both know that
the Yanomamo are incompatible with capitalism and are a doomed
culture, destined for poverty and displacement -- just like any other
indigenous population standing in the way of "efficiency" and
"progress".
Sociobiology can be a valid and important science, but it will never
give you an excuse for genocide, James. Neither will Natural Law -- a
psuedo-scientific term which conveys nothing but excuses.
G*rd*n
Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net>:
> Sociobiology can be a valid and important science....
That some social behavior is genetically programmed seems
very likely, but the study of it is going to have to recover
from the grandiose claims for it made by its recent fans and
practitioners, which have come to resemble astrology and
psychoanalysis. And "Natural Law".
Matt
I suspect he means that normal peer review would involve addressing the
substance of the argument, rather than making some kind of ideological
attack on whomever might be perceived to benefit from the argument.
Roughly speaking, it's like calling the objections of creationists "peer
review" of evolutionary theory.
> Germ warfare has indeed been used on many
> native populations in the service of international capitalism.
> Fascists themselves have called their "plots" sociobiology.
Would you mind providing some evidence for that assertion?
> Nazis
> practiced sociobiology on Jews. Cortez practiced sociobiology on
> Incas, describing Incan behavior as predispositioned -- 400 years
> before genetics was even scientifically validated. You act as if
> genocide in the name of sociobiology has never happened before. It's
> happened too many times and it deserves all the scrutiny it can get.
Sociobiology is a study, not a practice or doctrine. I don't think
sociobiology even existed at the time of your examples, so sociobiology
could not have been the theoretical grounding for them.
Indeed, evolutionary theory is central to sociobiology, but even
evolutionary theory did not exist at the time of Cortez's atrocities--as
you note yourself. So your argument refutes itself. You seem to be
confusing sociobiology, a specific study that developed in the last few
decades, with the more generalized philosophy of social Darwinism.
In short, it is important to distinguish a study from doctrines
that may have some vaguely similar ideas. Accordingly, if someone
does something objectionable justifying it with some vaguely similar
ideas as those involved in the study, that does not affect the
truth or falsity of the ideas; you would not, for example, attack
the physics professsion by saying the US "practiced physics" on
Hiroshima.
> Chagnon's work was less politicized by Tierney than it was by
> Brazilian gold miners and loggers who needed an excuse to kill the
> Yanomamo. Sociobiology was politicized first by colonialists, then by
> capitalists, then, perhaps a murmur of retort by the folks you like to
> call socialist.
>
> You are saying that anyone who opposes capitalism is socialist? Well
> then the Yanomamo themselves are socialist. You and I both know that
> the Yanomamo are incompatible with capitalism and are a doomed
> culture, destined for poverty and displacement -- just like any other
> indigenous population standing in the way of "efficiency" and
> "progress".
>
> Sociobiology can be a valid and important science, but it will never
> give you an excuse for genocide, James.
Wow, that should keep the crows away.
--
Matt
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta wrote:
Perhaps Tierney & Co.'s critique of Chagnon is better thought of as a
peer review of the several thousand Libertarians and closet-Fascists
who rushed out to make "Yanomamo: The Fierce People" the best-selling
anthropology book to date.
The books written by sociobiologists don't rely on sound science to
sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They rely on the implications
the reader will form. There are people who want to hear that
biological behavior is genetically predetermined. There are people
who want to hear that it isn't. These are the people who make
sociobiologists famous (or notorious).
It was Edward Wilson's book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", the
bible of sociobiology, which originally prompted critique from the
"hordes of socialists" (as James says). The critique focused almost
entirely on the last chapter in which Wilson drafted what appeared to
be fascist implications. It was Wilson who offered the world a
politicized branch of science in the first place. Given the ugly
history of eugenics you'd think he would have let his research speak
for itself. I guess not...
That's why I say once you subject a sociobiological study to a
"normal" peer review all talk of Universal Law goes out the window.
It has no place in modern science -- which is one of the points made
in the original post.
Don't get me wrong: I believe sociobiology can and should be sound
science. Unfortunately the spectators have bum rushed the show.
>> Germ warfare has indeed been used on many
>> native populations in the service of international capitalism.
>> Fascists themselves have called their "plots" sociobiology.
>
>Would you mind providing some evidence for that assertion?
Which one? That a capitalist has used germ warfare or that a fascist
has used the word sociobiology?
I'll admit it's a rather biased comment and hard to prove since no
fascist will openly call themselves fascist anymore than a capitalist
will openly accept responsibility for his actions. But it is not
untrue -- there is a sort of subculture which has followed this
"science" seamlessly through its various stages: Social Darwinism,
Eugenics, Sociobiology.
It's not like everyone who called themselves a eugenicist prior to
WWII simply dropped off the earth when the war ended. In fact, they
were hired en masse by various academic institutions around the world
which now refer to their research as "sociobiology" -- a kinder,
gentler term.
You might look at as a "behavioral predisposition towards fascism
based on their cultural history and genetic heredity."
>> Nazis
>> practiced sociobiology on Jews. Cortez practiced sociobiology on
>> Incas, describing Incan behavior as predispositioned -- 400 years
>> before genetics was even scientifically validated. You act as if
>> genocide in the name of sociobiology has never happened before. It's
>> happened too many times and it deserves all the scrutiny it can get.
>
>Sociobiology is a study, not a practice or doctrine. I don't think
>sociobiology even existed at the time of your examples, so sociobiology
>could not have been the theoretical grounding for them.
>Indeed, evolutionary theory is central to sociobiology, but even
>evolutionary theory did not exist at the time of Cortez's atrocities--as
>you note yourself. So your argument refutes itself. You seem to be
>confusing sociobiology, a specific study that developed in the last few
>decades, with the more generalized philosophy of social Darwinism.
Quite true. Me and probably a few million other people, including
some of the researchers.
>In short, it is important to distinguish a study from doctrines
>that may have some vaguely similar ideas. Accordingly, if someone
>does something objectionable justifying it with some vaguely similar
>ideas as those involved in the study, that does not affect the
>truth or falsity of the ideas; you would not, for example, attack
>the physics professsion by saying the US "practiced physics" on
>Hiroshima.
Actually yeah -- I would. The U.S. did, in fact, practice physics on
Hiroshima. That was a scientific opportunity of a life-time for a lot
of people. It's unfortunate to think of anything that be called
scientific "progress" in the midst of mass murder, but that is exactly
what happened. Science, especially physics, advanced leaps and bounds
when those bombs dropped.
And that example is actually far more relevant than you realize.
Chagnon was originally commissioned to go into the Amazon rainforest
to collect blood samples from the Yanomamo who were the control group
for a study on radiation sickness among the survivors of Hiroshima.
So not only did the U.S. "practice physics" on Hiroshima -- it
practiced sociobiology as well. But like I said, I am not attacking
sociobiology. I am attacking the bystanders who believe it holds the
implications they have been waiting to hear. The bystanders should be
using their time discussing the implications of genocide and leave the
peer reviews to the actual researchers. In this regard I side with
Tierney who, although he seems to be somewhat of a maniac, has done a
lot to force the issue of genocide into the limelight.
In this case the doctrine is just as important as the study. And,
yes, I agree with you -- we need to distinguish the two.
>> Chagnon's work was less politicized by Tierney than it was by
>> Brazilian gold miners and loggers who needed an excuse to kill the
>> Yanomamo. Sociobiology was politicized first by colonialists, then by
>> capitalists, then, perhaps a murmur of retort by the folks you like to
>> call socialist.
>>
>> You are saying that anyone who opposes capitalism is socialist? Well
>> then the Yanomamo themselves are socialist. You and I both know that
>> the Yanomamo are incompatible with capitalism and are a doomed
>> culture, destined for poverty and displacement -- just like any other
>> indigenous population standing in the way of "efficiency" and
>> "progress".
>>
>> Sociobiology can be a valid and important science, but it will never
>> give you an excuse for genocide, James.
>
>Wow, that should keep the crows away.
Well whaddya expect? Eugenics was an excuse. Social Darwinism was an
excuse. Sociobiology? Hopefully not, but that remains to be seen.
Dan Clore
Scientists ignore talk of the "properties" or "nature" of
things as useless and meaningless, instead making
operational statements--if you do such and such in such and
such conditions, such and such results. They perform
investigations through empirical observation, not through
the use of "reason" (not that theorizing and so on have no
place in scientific methodology).
To make the difference clearer, think of the guy in the
Molière who explains that opium makes you drowsy because it
has a "soporific property". That exemplifies the
Aristotelian, natural-law method of investigation. Cf. with
scientific study based on chemical analysis and
neuropsychopharmacology.
For further extensive details, read Robert Anton Wilson's
_Natural Law; or, Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy_.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
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http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
"It's a political statement -- or, rather, an
*anti*-political statement. The symbol for *anarchy*!"
-- Batman, explaining the circle-A graffiti, in
_Detective Comics_ #608
James A. Donald
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> Perhaps Tierney & Co.'s critique of Chagnon is better thought
> of as a peer review of the several thousand Libertarians and
> closet-Fascists who rushed out to make "Yanomamo: The Fierce
> People" the best-selling anthropology book to date.
There is nothing libertarian or even political in Chagnon's
book, so it is unlikely that thousands of libertarians rushed
out to buy it.
What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
*can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man is
not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a definite
nature.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
89S8y5yiFESFTk3gytkcFPzFGydXU3Z0OvhUmWFs
4m0Fu2PbQ+GVSoAJriI1BCqjlyfTzlOukTRnwkHbb
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> --
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> Perhaps Tierney & Co.'s critique of Chagnon is better thought
>> of as a peer review of the several thousand Libertarians and
>> closet-Fascists who rushed out to make "Yanomamo: The Fierce
>> People" the best-selling anthropology book to date.
>
>There is nothing libertarian or even political in Chagnon's
>book, so it is unlikely that thousands of libertarians rushed
>out to buy it.
>
>What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
>granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
>*can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man is
>not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a definite
>nature.
Well, James, I think I'll concede defeat on this one.
You are correct -- there was a large movement from the academic left
to discredit sociobiology. Although I wont go as far as to say that
sociobiology has ever provided any evidence for Natural Law I will
acknowledge that it is hypocritical of me to keep up this debate and
at the same time claim that the field of sociobiology should be
depoliticized.
It is unfortunate that E.O. Wilson included that final, controversial
chapter in what would have otherwise been very solid research.
It is unfortunate that the academic left did not take the effort to
discern the research from the rhetoric.
It is also unfortunate that there no alternative forums to discuss the
negative impact Western activities has had upon indigenous cultures or
the historical mistakes made by the eugenicists. Perhaps sociobiology
is in a political quagmire. I hope not.
G*rd*n
> > Perhaps Tierney & Co.'s critique of Chagnon is better thought
> > of as a peer review of the several thousand Libertarians and
> > closet-Fascists who rushed out to make "Yanomamo: The Fierce
> > People" the best-selling anthropology book to date.
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
> There is nothing libertarian or even political in Chagnon's
> book, so it is unlikely that thousands of libertarians rushed
> out to buy it.
>
> What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
> granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
> *can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man is
> not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a definite
> nature.
A libertarian conclusion is available only if one has
previously determined that this "nature" fills the liberal
bill somehow. The fans of slavery and terror could just
as easily claim that slavery and terror, and not liberalism,
were man's true nature. In fact, I believe this is exactly
the argument put forward by the Nazis, and no doubt many
others before them.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald
> > What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
> > granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
> > *can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man
> > is not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a
> > definite nature.
G*rd*n:
> A libertarian conclusion is available only if one has
> previously determined that this "nature" fills the liberal
> bill somehow.
The socialist dream of "new socialist man", and the
extravagantly hostile reaction of socialists to science that
supposes that there is a definitie human nature, shows us that
socialists know full well that nature does fill the classic
liberal bill.
> The fans of slavery and terror could just as easily claim
> that slavery and terror, and not liberalism, were man's true
> nature.
No they cannot, for man's nature is readily observable.
> In fact, I believe this is exactly the argument put forward
> by the Nazis,
The Nazis claimed that man had no definite nature -- that each
race and culture was so different as to incapable of
meaningfully communicating -- which is what the critics of
Chagnon also claim, though doubtless with more emphasis on
culture and less on race.. The Nazis would perhaps argue that
Jews had a definite nature, and Germans a definite nature --
but these natures were supposedly so alien to each other as to
be largely incomprehensible to each other, as in the infamous
phrase "It's a black thing. You would not understand"
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
w/TpnSrjGgaki6TyKGzW41qmJjr5R8wXu8h+aq7F
4YWpjJbUVKHz71PRqtCNNJ4HRbioJzHLq2FC02Nhy
G*rd*n
> --
> James A. Donald
> > > What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
> > > granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
> > > *can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man
> > > is not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a
> > > definite nature.
>
> G*rd*n:
> > A libertarian conclusion is available only if one has
> > previously determined that this "nature" fills the liberal
> > bill somehow.
>
> The socialist dream of "new socialist man", and the
> extravagantly hostile reaction of socialists to science that
> supposes that there is a definitie human nature, shows us that
> socialists know full well that nature does fill the classic
> liberal bill.
>
> > The fans of slavery and terror could just as easily claim
> > that slavery and terror, and not liberalism, were man's true
> > nature.
>
> No they cannot, for man's nature is readily observable.
Because one observes something does not mean one understands
it. Animals, including humans, observed the planets for
many millions of years, but did not understand their movements
until a few hundred years ago. The forces behind those
movements are still not thoroughly understood. But even
one human being is far more complex than planetary celestial
mechanics, to say nothing of six billion of them. Correspondingly,
humans are much less wll understood. To jump over this
difficulty or hand- wave it is an abuse of science.
> > In fact, I believe this is exactly the argument put forward
> > by the Nazis,
>
> The Nazis claimed that man had no definite nature -- that each
> race and culture was so different as to incapable of
> meaningfully communicating -- which is what the critics of
> Chagnon also claim, though doubtless with more emphasis on
> culture and less on race.. The Nazis would perhaps argue that
> Jews had a definite nature, and Germans a definite nature --
> but these natures were supposedly so alien to each other as to
> be largely incomprehensible to each other, as in the infamous
> phrase "It's a black thing. You would not understand"
On the contrary, the Nazis said precisely that the nature of
each human being was determined by characteristics physically
inherited from his ancestors, and that the desire to fight,
dominate, and subjugate was primary among these characteristics.
In any case, there is no formal difference between the theory
that "human nature" makes liberalism appropriate for human
beings and the theory that it makes Naziism, or monarchy, or
slavery appropriate for human beings. All such propositions
jump over the inconvenient fact that human beings are not well
understood, so that "human nature" is largely unknown, pretend
it is understood and known, pretend also that, in spite of
the evidence, it is rigid and narrow, and then claim one
particular political or social order follows from it. Needless
to say, the order is going to be conservative or reactionary,
because its form is attributed to mystical, irrational powers,
the gods, so to speak, rather than to human reason and will.
When liberalism first appeared, it had to fight against
precisely this sort of mumbo-jumbo, generated in favor of
monarchy and feudalism. It is sad to see it decline into
the errors of the opponents it defeated.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> >for man's nature is readily observable.
G*rd*n
> Because one observes something does not mean one understands
If it was not obvious you lot whould not have hysterics about
the likes of Chagnon, who merely suggest that man has a
definite nature without stating that that nature is pretty
much as depicted by classical liberals.
If the statement was needed, if the matter was in any real
doubt, why the extragant hostility towards the likes of Chagnon
and Wilson?
> On the contrary, the Nazis said precisely that the nature of
> each human being was determined by characteristics physically
> inherited from his ancestors, and that the desire to fight,
> dominate, and subjugate was primary among these
> characteristics.
When I read Hitler, he sounds like you. He does not sound like
your depiction of Hitler. Perhaps you have read more of him
than I have. If so, let us hear the parts where he argues from
a supposedly socialist human nature.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
oLwzDsM7y9IVje8pu8MsvFy4IBt1TpemxTZfmxiM
4BpbHtxsqDDABU5pWRfJeWUwMrDHAvLv1qrGZ+ZTZ
Constantinople
news:bncv0s$vn8s4$1...@ID-105889.news.uni-berlin.de:
Nonsense. They employ such talk regularly and interchangeably with what
you call "operational" talk. Your own example below demonstrates the
fundamental interchangeability of the two kinds of talk. Property talk
is essential because it is a way of encapsulating behavior in language
without having to re-describe the sum total of behavior. For example,
"is heavy" is a property, and the phrase "is heavy" encapsulates a whole
set of "what if" sorts of questions. Weight is a property. Electrical
charge is a property. And at the same time, knowing a thing's weight, or
knowing its charge, is to know what it would do under certain
circumstances (what you call "operational" what-ifs).
> instead making operational statements--if you
> do such and such in such and such conditions, such and such results.
> They perform investigations through empirical observation, not through
> the use of "reason" (not that theorizing and so on have no place in
> scientific methodology).
>
> To make the difference clearer, think of the guy in the Molière who
> explains that opium makes you drowsy because it has a "soporific
> property".
That is a straightforward circularity; it merely says the same thing in
two ways. And in fact it illustrates the emptiness of the philosophical
dispute. "Has a soporific property" is the supposedly bad thing to say,
since it's talk of "properties" and "nature". "Makes you drowsy" is the
supposedly good thing to say, since it is operational. But they are
merely different ways of saying the same thing. You even see this
yourself. You see intuitively that there is no real difference here
between talk of "properties" and "nature" on the one hand and what you
call "operational statements" on the other hand. You see intuitively
that they are merely different ways of wording the same thing. That is
why the circularity is so clear to you. If you interpreted operational
talk as fundamentally different from property talk you would not so
immediately and so clearly see that the explanation of opium you repeat
above is circular.
Of course physicists talk about properties! And of course they talk
about what-happpens-when. They switch back and forth easily. Don't
believe me? Here's a Britannica entry on the electron, just the starting
part:
lightest stable subatomic particle known. It carries a negative
charge which is considered the basic charge of electricity.
An electron is nearly massless. It has a rest mass of 9.1 ´ 10 -28
gram, which is only 0.0005 the mass of a proton. The electron is a
fermion , a type of particle named after the Fermi-Dirac statistics
that describe its behaviour. It has a half-integral spin -- spin
constitutes the property of intrinsic angular momentum in
quantum-mechanical terms. Moreover, the electron reacts only by the
electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces; it does not
respond to the short-range strong nuclear force that acts between
quarks and binds protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.
Now let's go statement by statement:
lightest stable subatomic particle known.
Properties (light, stable)
It carries a negative
charge which is considered the basic charge of electricity.
Property (carries a negative charge)
An electron is nearly massless.
Property (nearly massless)
It has a rest mass of 9.1 ´ 10 -28
gram, which is only 0.0005 the mass of a proton.
Property (rest mass of...)
The electron is a
fermion , a type of particle named after the Fermi-Dirac statistics
that describe its behaviour.
Reference to behavior ("its behaviour").
It has a half-integral spin -- spin
constitutes the property of intrinsic angular momentum in
quantum-mechanical terms.
Explicit use of the word "property".
Moreover, the electron reacts only by the
electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces; it does not
respond to the short-range strong nuclear force that acts between
quarks and binds protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.
Description of behavior (partially, anyway; requires further unwrapping
of terms like "strong nuclear force").
As you can see, the author has no difficulty moving back and forth
between property-talk and behavior-talk. There just isn't an issue.
There's no conflict. Sometimes one way of speaking is more useful;
sometimes another. When people say that humans have a human nature,
their statement is as philosophically unproblematic as a physicist's
statement that the electron has a half-integral spin (a property).
Alex Russell
news:bn97ao$3jp$1...@newslocal.mitre.org...
And what are these "Natural Laws"?
--
Alex Russell
alexande...@telus.net
Alex Russell
news:hsIlb.14698$Uz6....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> by Iain MacSaorsa
> http://www.spunk.org/texts/otherpol/critique/sp001283.txt
>
> Natural Law, and the related Natural Rights, play
> an important part in Libertarian Capitalist
> idealogy. They are not alone in claiming that
> their particular idealogy meets the law of nature,
> Hitler (for one) also did so. So do numerous other
> demagogues, religious fanatics and political
> philosophers. However, they like to claim that only
> *their* "natural law" is the "real" one, all the
> others are subjective impositions. But, then again,
> so do all the others. We will ignore these
> assertions (they are not arguments) and concentrate
> on explaining why natural law (in all its many
> forms) is a myth. In addition, we will indicate
> its authoritarian implications.
>
I hate to admit it, but I agree with Josh. The idea that "Natural Laws" or
"natural rights" can be used to support a given social order are ill
founded. Alll "natural laws" as pertaining to human behaviour and rights are
artificial contructs of human inteligence.
When we discuss what is "good" or "right" in an attempt to construct a
better society I think it is more honest to simply state what you believe
are the axioms you are basing your arguments on, and that all the attempts
to build up a certain point of view via "natural law" have been no more than
hand waving. The law of gravity is a natural law. No matter what I believe
it is true. I can't say the same for any system of "natural laws" for
ethical or moral systems I have read to date.
--
Alex Russell
alexande...@telus.net
Constantinople
$EO3.18603@clgrps13:
> The law of gravity is a natural law.
James already responded to this point. Here we have the exchange:
[somebody making your point days ago]
> After defining certain "natures", Rothbard starts to draw
> "Natural Rights and Laws" from them. However, these are strange
> "Natural Laws" as they can be violated in nature! Natural laws
> (like the law of gravity) *cannot* be violated and therefore do
> not need enforcing.
[James's reply]
Terminological irrelevance. These are two different usages of
"natural law", and Rothbard's usage is older than Newton's. We do
not use the same word because they are the same thing, but because
of history.
"Natural law" in sense of Thomas Aquinas is that law which is
rightly enforceable in a state of nature, an answer to the
question of when violence may be justly used. It is "natural
law" as distinct from "man made law", not "natural law" in the
sense of those laws that nature itself obeys.
If you want to respond to that, go ahead, but it's pointless to just keep
restating the very same really silly things that were already shown days
ago to be really silly.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
I'll respond to that. James poses an interesting perversion of
Aquinas' theory which originally stated that Natural Law superseded
State Law, or Positive Law. It is an argument for civil disobedience
in favor of the Catholic God.
It is revealing that James interprets Aquinas' theory as the right to
use violence. It could just as well be argued that it gives one the
right to pacifism, or to simply cooperate for the good of the
community as a whole.
But the theory appears to be a sham and James hits the nail on the
head when he speaks of violence. Violence is exactly what has become
of Natural Law. We have over 700 years evidence of violence committed
under the name of Natural Law. Or two thousand years evidence if you
want to consider the Gospel of Thomas to be the first Western argument
for Natural Law.
In Aquinas' day if you dared admit that maybe you didn't actually know
the difference between Good and Evil you would quickly find your head
upon a stake. Today, most people are unaware of how the water flows
out of their shower, how their food was prepared, what the bank does
with their money, how their TV works, how their car works, where their
clothes are made, and on and on -- nearly every aspect of their waking
day is shrouded in some mystery.
In 2003 it is not unreasonable to suggest you don't know the
difference between Good and Evil. Is it evil to sacrifice a chicken
yet good to eat Chicken McNuggets? Who the hell knows? We can,
however, look back at history and count the vast number of times where
somebody acting in the name of God, or Good, committed an act that
surely would be considered Evil by his victims. Has 700 years of
violent atrocities been the work of God manifested in man's Reason?
Yep. It seems so.
So around the late 17th century Western culture began to ditch the God
part of the equation, and fall back on some healthy pragmatism. How
do you tell if an act is Good or Evil? You cant, but you can ask the
people involved and see what they think. Hence democracy, a pragmatic
rejection of Natural Law which has resulted in peace for those who
dared participate in it.
You'll also notice that science progressed leaps and bounds once it
ditched the arrogance of Reason. Clearly most of the Good things in
my life are due to the rejection of Natural Law. [paradox intended]
michael price
And empirical observation is only the observation of how an
entity acts. The empirical observation is then used as a
guide to construct non-contradictory explanations through
reason.
>
> To make the difference clearer, think of the guy in the
> Molière who explains that opium makes you drowsy because it
> has a "soporific property". That exemplifies the
> Aristotelian, natural-law method of investigation. Cf. with
> scientific study based on chemical analysis and
> neuropsychopharmacology.
Which is based on the observed nature of substances deduced
through reason.
James A. Donald
On Sun, 26 Oct 2003 16:59:47 -0800, Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> I'll respond to that. James poses an interesting perversion
> of Aquinas' theory which originally stated that Natural Law
> superseded State Law, or Positive Law. It is an argument for
> civil disobedience in favor of the Catholic God.
The concept of civil disobedience would have been strange to
Aquinas, since at the time that he wrote, the Westphalian state
was still four hundred years in the future. In his time there
was no monopoly of force. Rather the right to use force was
reserved to an elite -- a cartel of force, an oligopoly of
force, but not a monopoly of force, hence no one to civilly
disobey, at least not if you were a member of that fairly
numerous elite. See for example, the career of William the
Marshal, who could reasonably regard himself as loyal to his
King, and be regarded by everyone as loyal, while
simultaneously at war with the King, and requesting the King to
engage him in single combat, a combat that the King would
surely lose.
The problem that Aquinas faced is that Christ had seemingly
commanded strict pacifism, which was not a practical solution
in Aquinas's time, when men had to defend themselves, for the
state would not do it for them. So he had to argue a more
practical morality, and also argue it was consistent with
Christianity -- the second argument being considerably weaker
than the the first.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Hu5ThPW0sbhlGbKU7DQd8QIKAUDWDBkOhYjC4wga
4PRlkRE4t2WVFXDL0UYU7hShLQ/Qb9UM9BXreQKU2
G*rd*n
> > >for man's nature is readily observable.
>
> G*rd*n
> > Because one observes something does not mean one understands
James A. Donald:
> If it was not obvious you lot whould not have hysterics about
> the likes of Chagnon, who merely suggest that man has a
> definite nature without stating that that nature is pretty
> much as depicted by classical liberals.
>
> If the statement was needed, if the matter was in any real
> doubt, why the extragant hostility towards the likes of Chagnon
> and Wilson?
That's a possibly soap-operatic question which I couldn't
answer without having detailed knowledge of their careers
and those of their antagonists. It might be a very
interesting story, but I don't have the time or means to run
it down.
As for my "lot's" "hyterics", you'll have to point them out.
My seemingly unhysterical articles can be seen on Google at
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=98inff%246ee%241%40news.panix.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=98jeg4%24eb1%241%40news.panix.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=aa4091%248pk%241%40panix3.panix.com
There are two reviews mentioned in these messages; the one
by David Graeber is still on line; the other, by Clifford
Geertz, has been moved and sequestered, but I might be able
to get it if anyone is really interested.
(http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=14054)
> > On the contrary, the Nazis said precisely that the nature of
> > each human being was determined by characteristics physically
> > inherited from his ancestors, and that the desire to fight,
> > dominate, and subjugate was primary among these
> > characteristics.
>
> When I read Hitler, he sounds like you. He does not sound like
> your depiction of Hitler. Perhaps you have read more of him
> than I have. If so, let us hear the parts where he argues from
> a supposedly socialist human nature.
I don't know what you mean by "socialist" human nauture;
evidently it isn't anything socialists usually mean by it.
Ever since human beings began to think about the sources of
their behaviors and potentialities, they've been arguing about
whether they are determined by nature, nurture, reason,
environment, will, accident and so on. Clearly, since they
emphasized racial characteristics, the Nazis believed that
what human beings are and can and will do is determined by
their ancestry. Additionally, the Nazis believed that humans
are fighting and dominating animals and properly submit
themselves to warrior-leaders in order to carry on those
practices. All of that seems to me to run athwart "the
ownership and control of the means of production by the workers,
or the people generally." One would have to deform that idea
pretty thoroughly to get it into Nazi form. But I suppose it
can be done, just as capitalism can be so deformed.
As to your being unable to distinguish my ideas from
Hitler's, I think this problem arises from your religious
attachment to liberalism and capitalism. To the faithful,
all infidels are pretty much alike. If you approached the
question in a more rationalistic way you'd probably notice
quite a few differences.
James A. Donald
G*rd*n
> > > On the contrary, the Nazis said precisely that the nature
> > > of each human being was determined by characteristics
> > > physically inherited from his ancestors, and that the
> > > desire to fight, dominate, and subjugate was primary
> > > among these characteristics.
James A. Donald:
> > When I read Hitler, he sounds like you. He does not sound
> > like your depiction of Hitler. Perhaps you have read more
> > of him than I have. If so, let us hear the parts where he
> > argues from a supposedly socialist human nature.
G*rd*n
> I don't know what you mean by "socialist" human nauture;
S&M with real deaths.
> evidently it isn't anything socialists usually mean by it.
Because of the socialist propensity for double talk and double
think, it is far from clear what socialists mean by it.
In any case, I asked for some Nazi quotes, links, or citations,
to support your claims about Nazi ideology, and you are not
giving them.
Lets not call it socialist human nature then, let us call it
your claimsabout nazi claims concerning human nature. You
still are making this stuff up.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
eot5XgLsuj+m14QW9LyfvyWpabEmPm9Zvu5rlXW6
4X6Yhh5teOUuqoe74bstN4RrdDG9niuHdcDZZkUZJ
Constantinople
> I'll respond to that. James poses an interesting perversion of
> Aquinas' theory which originally stated that Natural Law superseded
> State Law, or Positive Law. It is an argument for civil disobedience
> in favor of the Catholic God.
Just a note about James (and, for example, you): in this
case James's point is so obvious as to hardly have required
stating, (i.e. that the legal concept of natural law is not
to be confused with the scientific concept of laws of
nature). However in general you have half a point: James
frequently makes statements that at first glance seem so far
removed from the conventional wisdom (of which I am an
unthinking slave as much as anyone) that many people, rather
than engage him in serious dispute, would simply reject the
claims as being so obviously wrong that they're not even
worth arguing against. And yet, when he is challenged, and
as a group we go further into the arguments pro and con, the
picture changes until at the end his reasons for believing
as he does, fully exposed, are surprisingly strong. And so
my worldview shifts.
Like James, you also say things which initially seem far
from conventional ideas. However, as we dig into your views,
we discover that your underlying reasons are even more
absurd and unbelievable than the initial claims. It's the
reverse of James.
One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
the ground up, gradually producing conclusions which are
likely to be surprising even to him, while others typically
have certain things they want to believe, and then produce
arguments for them only as an afterthought.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
> > granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
> > *can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man
> > is not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a
> > definite nature.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
> Well, James, I think I'll concede defeat on this one.
Thanks. That is mighty big of you.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
TB44DYwWkRMxmhXMhSvsQBM9Xlxh4pEH4maj+okw
48m4xKnnc1OGFpyslsF77tYaQg4PLrNx6ZOcRSMQ6
G*rd*n
> One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
Or in the case of Natural Law, from mid-air up.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>James A. Donald:
>> > What upsets the fans of slavery and terror is it takes for
>> > granted the validity of a scientic approach to reality that
>> > *can* be used to support libertarian conclusions: that man
>> > is not clay to be molded by the potter but rather has a
>> > definite nature.
>
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>> Well, James, I think I'll concede defeat on this one.
>
>Thanks. That is mighty big of you.
Nice [snip]. I'm certain you did that on purpose to misconstrue my
point. That's the last time I concede anything to you.
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
>the ground up, gradually producing conclusions which are
>likely to be surprising even to him, while others typically
>have certain things they want to believe, and then produce
>arguments for them only as an afterthought.
Building ideas? Conclusions?
Get real. He's a propagandist. So are you, apparently, and I don't
believe you for one second when you claim that your "worldview" has
ever shifted even one little bit.
Thanks for the out-of-the-blue personal attack, though. You make me
feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Constantinople
> Constantinople wrote:
>
> >One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
> >the ground up, gradually producing conclusions which are
> >likely to be surprising even to him, while others typically
> >have certain things they want to believe, and then produce
> >arguments for them only as an afterthought.
>
> Building ideas? Conclusions?
Yes.
> Get real. He's a propagandist.
Meaning what? That he tries to persuade people? What's bad about that?
The only thing that would be a recognizable criticism, would be if his
arguments were no good.
> So are you, apparently, and I don't
> believe you for one second when you claim that your "worldview" has
> ever shifted even one little bit.
That's a remarkably stupid thing to say.
> Thanks for the out-of-the-blue personal attack, though. You make me
> feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
I criticized you but it wasn't out of the blue. Why shouldn't I
occasionally express my impressions of the various participants in
discussion?
Constantinople
> > ...
> > One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
> > the ground up ....
>
>
> Or in the case of Natural Law, from mid-air up.
Your comment would be more biting if you had at any point in the past
displayed a grasp of James's arguments. But you display no such grasp;
rather, like seemingly everyone else critical of natural law, you
succumb to the temptation to talk about it without having bothered to
so much as try to understand what it is, what the proponents are
saying. Rather than address the real arguments as given by real
proponents, you (as you so often do on many issues) state some silly
arguments for it that you made up, then rip these straw men of yours
to shreds.
Matt
>>I suspect he means that normal peer review would involve addressing the
>>substance of the argument, rather than making some kind of ideological
>>attack on whomever might be perceived to benefit from the argument.
>>Roughly speaking, it's like calling the objections of creationists "peer
>>review" of evolutionary theory.
>
> Perhaps Tierney & Co.'s critique of Chagnon is better thought of as a
> peer review of the several thousand Libertarians and closet-Fascists
> who rushed out to make "Yanomamo: The Fierce People" the best-selling
> anthropology book to date.
That isn't peer review. Some people criticizing other people with whom
they disagree ideologically is not peer review.
> The books written by sociobiologists don't rely on sound science to
> sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They rely on the implications
> the reader will form. There are people who want to hear that
> biological behavior is genetically predetermined. There are people
> who want to hear that it isn't. These are the people who make
> sociobiologists famous (or notorious).
What sociobiologists "rely on" to sell more books is not relevant to the
truth or falisty of their ideas; in other words, one should judge the
merits of the field by the substance of the work they do, and not by any
political implications people draw from their conclusions.
> It was Edward Wilson's book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", the
> bible of sociobiology, which originally prompted critique from the
> "hordes of socialists" (as James says). The critique focused almost
> entirely on the last chapter in which Wilson drafted what appeared to
> be fascist implications. It was Wilson who offered the world a
> politicized branch of science in the first place. Given the ugly
> history of eugenics you'd think he would have let his research speak
> for itself. I guess not...
I fail to see the relevance.
>>> Germ warfare has indeed been used on many
>>> native populations in the service of international capitalism.
>>> Fascists themselves have called their "plots" sociobiology.
>>
>>Would you mind providing some evidence for that assertion?
>
> Which one? That a capitalist has used germ warfare or that a fascist
> has used the word sociobiology?
Either assertion would do, but I was particularly interested in the
second one, that fascists called their plots sociobiology.
> I'll admit it's a rather biased comment and hard to prove
All of your comments appear to be biased, but this particular biased
comment was a statement of fact, so I wanted to see if you were just
making it up.
> since no
> fascist will openly call themselves fascist
You need not find someone who calls himself a fascist--just someone whom
a neutral person would agree is a fascist (someone like Hitler,
Mussolini, modern day skinheads and Holocaust deniers, for example).
And it won't do to just use "fascist" as a generic leftist insult
against anyone you don't like.
> anymore than a capitalist
> will openly accept responsibility for his actions. But it is not
> untrue -- there is a sort of subculture which has followed this
> "science" seamlessly through its various stages: Social Darwinism,
> Eugenics, Sociobiology.
What makes you think so? And again, supposing you are correct, that
would still not affect the truth or falsity of sociolbiological
arguments, nor could you accuse anyone who believes these arguments
of having nazi leanings or whatnot.
> It's not like everyone who called themselves a eugenicist prior to
> WWII simply dropped off the earth when the war ended. In fact, they
> were hired en masse by various academic institutions around the world
> which now refer to their research as "sociobiology" -- a kinder,
> gentler term.
This is another extraordinary claim in need of evidence. I don't see
any material similarity between sociobiology and eugenics. What strikes
me most is that sociobiology has much stronger implications with regard
to human nature, but not to any kind of "racial" nature, which is
probably because natural selection applies more strongly within groups
than between groups (races or nations). My understanding is eugenics
was a kind of pseudo-science used to justify privileging one group and
murdering or subjugating others, but I see no such implications coming
from sociobiology.
You also need to provide some evidence of a continuity between
eugencists and sociobiologists; simply asserting eugenicists didn't
"drop off the earth" does not suffice to prove such a continuity.
>>In short, it is important to distinguish a study from doctrines
>>that may have some vaguely similar ideas. Accordingly, if someone
>>does something objectionable justifying it with some vaguely similar
>>ideas as those involved in the study, that does not affect the
>>truth or falsity of the ideas; you would not, for example, attack
>>the physics professsion by saying the US "practiced physics" on
>>Hiroshima.
>
> Actually yeah -- I would. The U.S. did, in fact, practice physics on
> Hiroshima. That was a scientific opportunity of a life-time for a lot
> of people. It's unfortunate to think of anything that be called
> scientific "progress" in the midst of mass murder, but that is exactly
> what happened. Science, especially physics, advanced leaps and bounds
> when those bombs dropped.
You are very confused. You have a fondness for latching on to vague
rhetorical bludgeons at the expense of thinking clearly. For one,
"science" is not a moral agent capable of doing right or wrong, so
you would not hold science in disregard for things people do with
knowledge of science. While you might disapprove of physicists who
participated in the Manhattan project, you have offered no reason
to blame the study of physics itself for Hiroshima, as if nuclear
physicists today, and their work, are somehow tainted by something
other people did decades ago.
> And that example is actually far more relevant than you realize.
> Chagnon was originally commissioned to go into the Amazon rainforest
> to collect blood samples from the Yanomamo who were the control group
> for a study on radiation sickness among the survivors of Hiroshima.
>
> So not only did the U.S. "practice physics" on Hiroshima -- it
> practiced sociobiology as well. But like I said, I am not attacking
> sociobiology.
Of course you are attacking sociobiology--or you were, and are not
backpedaling as I point out the extremism of your claims (which were
originally to blame sociobiology for atrocities committed hundreds of
years before it existed).
> I am attacking the bystanders who believe it holds the
> implications they have been waiting to hear.
Which bystanders? James Donald? With all the ranting and raving I'm a
little unclear as to what you are trying to say, if anything. I did not
see James or anyone else intrepeting sociobiology as being in favor of
eugenics.
> The bystanders should be
> using their time discussing the implications of genocide and leave the
> peer reviews to the actual researchers.
What "implications of genocide." What are you even talking about?
> In this case the doctrine is just as important as the study. And,
> yes, I agree with you -- we need to distinguish the two.
Yet you have difficulty with this. It might help to start making more
concrete claims backed by evidence, rather than blaming "sociobiology"
for all the problems of the last 400 years as you seemed to be doing.
To start with, find a sociobiologist who used to be in eugenics and used
eugenics as a rationalization for murder, and who is now a
sociobiologist coming up with similar rationalizations.
--
Matt
Russell
1) the basics: chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc.
2) the more complex: biological processes, respiration,
ingestion, digestion, excretion, reproduction, etc.
3) the essentials: food production, water, protection from the
elements (clothing, shelter), self-defense, etc.
The Social Laws, e.g.
1) Ethics, "Do not unto others, that which you would not have
done unto you."
2) Traffic laws, commerce, exchange, etc.
The Unnatural Amendments, e.g.
1) Aryan supremacy, apartheid, slavery, etc.
2) Cultural taboos, dress codes, zoning restrictions, etc.
3) Religious bigotry, morals, xenophobia, etc.
4) Victimless crimes, suppression of individual liberties, etc.
5) Censorship, book-burning, thought control, etc.
6) Pseudo-ethics (increasing one's wealth, status, power to the
detriment of others), etc.
The problem with extrapolation:
Given two points A and B.
Extrapolate to external points C, D, and E in a linear fashion.
The form of the line from A to B is not known.
If A and B are points on a straight line, then E is on the same
line.
If the line containing A and B is a curve, then E is not on the
curve.
In a social sense, how can one extrapolate from Adam's fig leaf
to de rigueur white tie evening attire and harsh punishment for
simple nudity or partial nudity.
G*rd*n
> > > One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
> > > the ground up ....
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
> > Or in the case of Natural Law, from mid-air up.
constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
> Your comment would be more biting if you had at any point in the past
> displayed a grasp of James's arguments. But you display no such grasp;
> rather, like seemingly everyone else critical of natural law, you
> succumb to the temptation to talk about it without having bothered to
> so much as try to understand what it is, what the proponents are
> saying. Rather than address the real arguments as given by real
> proponents, you (as you so often do on many issues) state some silly
> arguments for it that you made up, then rip these straw men of yours
> to shreds.
What I wrote attacks the notion that Natural Law is scientific;
by "scientific" I mean derived from observation of phenomena
logically in such a manner than others can follow the logic,
observe the evidence for themselves, and understand why accords
with the observations. It seemed to me that that claim was
being made for Natural Law: that its truth can be observed or
derived unequivocally from observation, like gravitation.
But maybe it is not; maybe the proponents of Natural Law, in
spite of what they seem to be saying, don't see it that way:
they know it isn't science, but rather a hypothesis largely
based on faith. If so, then I have indeed busied myself with
knocking down a straw man. But the straw man had more substance
than that of which he was a simulacrum.
G*rd*n
Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net>:
> > So are you, apparently, and I don't
> > believe you for one second when you claim that your "worldview" has
> > ever shifted even one little bit.
constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
> That's a remarkably stupid thing to say.
Why don't you persuade us an example of your "shifting worldview"?
> ...
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Gabrielle Rapagnetta wrote:
>
>> The books written by sociobiologists don't rely on sound science to
>> sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They rely on the implications
>> the reader will form. There are people who want to hear that
>> biological behavior is genetically predetermined. There are people
>> who want to hear that it isn't. These are the people who make
>> sociobiologists famous (or notorious).
>
>What sociobiologists "rely on" to sell more books is not relevant to the
>truth or falisty of their ideas; in other words, one should judge the
>merits of the field by the substance of the work they do, and not by any
>political implications people draw from their conclusions.
>
>> It was Edward Wilson's book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", the
>> bible of sociobiology, which originally prompted critique from the
>> "hordes of socialists" (as James says). The critique focused almost
>> entirely on the last chapter in which Wilson drafted what appeared to
>> be fascist implications. It was Wilson who offered the world a
>> politicized branch of science in the first place. Given the ugly
>> history of eugenics you'd think he would have let his research speak
>> for itself. I guess not...
>
>I fail to see the relevance.
That is because you are unaware of the thread's topic. I suggest you
go back and read some of the original points that were made.
>> It's not like everyone who called themselves a eugenicist prior to
>> WWII simply dropped off the earth when the war ended. In fact, they
>> were hired en masse by various academic institutions around the world
>> which now refer to their research as "sociobiology" -- a kinder,
>> gentler term.
>
>This is another extraordinary claim in need of evidence. I don't see
>any material similarity between sociobiology and eugenics. What strikes
>me most is that sociobiology has much stronger implications with regard
>to human nature, but not to any kind of "racial" nature, which is
>probably because natural selection applies more strongly within groups
>than between groups (races or nations). My understanding is eugenics
>was a kind of pseudo-science used to justify privileging one group and
>murdering or subjugating others, but I see no such implications coming
>from sociobiology.
>
>You also need to provide some evidence of a continuity between
>eugencists and sociobiologists; simply asserting eugenicists didn't
>"drop off the earth" does not suffice to prove such a continuity.
Eugenics was not a "pseudo-science". The first eugenics organization
in the U.S. was chaired by the president of Stanford. Eugenics became
politicized and people began to act upon its implications rather than
its actual science. Many states carried sterilization programs well
into the mid '70s.
Social Darwinism was politicized and you find white supremacist
movements all over the country who continue to act upon the
implications rather than the science. (The word "eugenics" was coined
by Darwin's first cousin).
Sociobiology is politicized. It is wise to question the motives of
particular scientists who, in addition to their research, state
implications for the human race as well.
If you are really interested in finding continuity between eugenics
and sociobiology try looking up the following terms: "American
Eugenics Society", "Operation Paperclip", "Forced Sterilization",
"Mankind Quarterly", and the "Pioneer Fund".
That will take you on a whirlwind tour of racism in the 1900's right
up to present day. And all in the name of Science!
Or take this class at the Oslo University:
http://www.matnat.uio.no/forskning/utdanning/forskerkurs/Gamle%20sider/darwinism.html
>It might help to start making more
>concrete claims backed by evidence, rather than blaming "sociobiology"
>for all the problems of the last 400 years as you seemed to be doing.
And yet...I'm not. Try reading the rest of the thread.
>To start with, find a sociobiologist who used to be in eugenics and used
>eugenics as a rationalization for murder, and who is now a
>sociobiologist coming up with similar rationalizations.
How about a modern biologist who believed that only eugenics could
save the human race? Bill Hamilton.
Hamilton wasn't racist, though. But these scientists are:
Professor R. Gayre
Donald Swan
Robert Kuttner
J. Hofmeyer
J. Philippe Rushton
Matt
>>> It was Edward Wilson's book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis", the
>>> bible of sociobiology, which originally prompted critique from the
>>> "hordes of socialists" (as James says). The critique focused almost
>>> entirely on the last chapter in which Wilson drafted what appeared to
>>> be fascist implications. It was Wilson who offered the world a
>>> politicized branch of science in the first place. Given the ugly
>>> history of eugenics you'd think he would have let his research speak
>>> for itself. I guess not...
>>
>>I fail to see the relevance.
>
> That is because you are unaware of the thread's topic. I suggest you
> go back and read some of the original points that were made.
On Usenet the thread's topic is essentially meaningless; there have been
threads going on for years that have no relation to the original topic
of discussion. I read several posts on this thread before responding to
yours, so am aware of the immediate context, but if I missed something
why not just point it out.
>>> It's not like everyone who called themselves a eugenicist prior to
>>> WWII simply dropped off the earth when the war ended. In fact, they
>>> were hired en masse by various academic institutions around the world
>>> which now refer to their research as "sociobiology" -- a kinder,
>>> gentler term.
>>
>>This is another extraordinary claim in need of evidence. I don't see
>>any material similarity between sociobiology and eugenics. What strikes
>>me most is that sociobiology has much stronger implications with regard
>>to human nature, but not to any kind of "racial" nature, which is
>>probably because natural selection applies more strongly within groups
>>than between groups (races or nations). My understanding is eugenics
>>was a kind of pseudo-science used to justify privileging one group and
>>murdering or subjugating others, but I see no such implications coming
>>from sociobiology.
>>
>>You also need to provide some evidence of a continuity between
>>eugencists and sociobiologists; simply asserting eugenicists didn't
>>"drop off the earth" does not suffice to prove such a continuity.
>
> Eugenics was not a "pseudo-science".
At best it sounds to me more like a sort of engineering. The reason I
doubt it is a science is that it seems to intrinsically require
parameters for "fitness" or good "stock" that are subjective in nature.
By comparison, a scientist could tell you all sorts of things in
designing an automobile, such as the effect of increased weight on
acceleration, but he could not scientifically tell you what a "superior"
car would be like. Someone would need to provide inherently subjective
inputs, such as a preference for power over fuel efficiency, or size
over agility, etc.
> The first eugenics organization
> in the U.S. was chaired by the president of Stanford.
That doesn't tell me anything.
> Eugenics became
> politicized and people began to act upon its implications rather than
> its actual science. Many states carried sterilization programs well
> into the mid '70s.
I'm not clear on what the scientific value of eugenics was (as distinct
from continuing scientific inquiry into genetics). My impression is
that is that it was unscientific or any actual eugenic science has since
been discredited. Again, I stress that eugenics seems to be
_intrinsically_ politicized; that is, one has to define the parameters
of the research with subjective and unscientific parameters. The
"research methods" section of the following page details some of the
unscientific aspects to eugenics, providing some evidence to confirm my
impression.
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/
> Social Darwinism was politicized and you find white supremacist
> movements all over the country who continue to act upon the
> implications rather than the science. (The word "eugenics" was coined
> by Darwin's first cousin).
>
> Sociobiology is politicized. It is wise to question the motives of
> particular scientists who, in addition to their research, state
> implications for the human race as well.
Scientists are entitled to political opinions just as anyone else. If
their science shapes some of their political views, so what? What's
important is that their political views are coming from their scientific
conclusions, and not the other way around.
> If you are really interested in finding continuity between eugenics
> and sociobiology try looking up the following terms: "American
> Eugenics Society", "Operation Paperclip", "Forced Sterilization",
> "Mankind Quarterly", and the "Pioneer Fund".
>
> That will take you on a whirlwind tour of racism in the 1900's right
> up to present day. And all in the name of Science!
Since you presumably perfomed the search in order to know that it is
instructive, maybe you could provide a link directly. I didn't see
anything particularly enlightening.
> Or take this class at the Oslo University:
> http://www.matnat.uio.no/forskning/utdanning/forskerkurs/Gamle%20sider/darwinism.html
This one also seems to do nothing to support your claim, although it was
an interesting read.
--
Matt
Constantinople
>> ...
>
> Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net>:
>> > So are you, apparently, and I don't
>> > believe you for one second when you claim that your "worldview" has
>> > ever shifted even one little bit.
>
> constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
>> That's a remarkably stupid thing to say.
>
>
> Why don't you persuade us an example of your "shifting worldview"?
Before encountering James, I didn't think much of the concept of Natural
Law, having much the same ill-informed and poorly-thought-out objections
to it that so many people still seem to have, until James's posts and
essay persuaded me that it was entirely defensible. James also convinced
me that good and evil are real and not, as I had previously thought,
myths created by priests. James hasn't been the only influence on me.
David Friedman convinced me that anarcho-capitalism is possible.
In their rejection of the state (and organized religion), many have
rejected things which they believe come from the state (and from
organized religion). An example of this is the rejection of money. But
money, I already knew, didn't come from the state, but arose from the
non-state economy. Similarly, right and wrong don't come from religion,
but (rather) have been appropriated by religion, just as money has (many
times) been appropriated by the state.
G*rd*n
> >> ...
Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net>:
>>>> So are you, apparently, and I don't
>>>> believe you for one second when you claim that your "worldview" has
>>>> ever shifted even one little bit.
constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
>>> That's a remarkably stupid thing to say.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>> Why don't you persuade us [with] an example of your "shifting
>> worldview"?
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> Before encountering James, I didn't think much of the concept of Natural
> Law, having much the same ill-informed and poorly-thought-out objections
> to it that so many people still seem to have, until James's posts and
> essay persuaded me that it was entirely defensible. James also convinced
> me that good and evil are real and not, as I had previously thought,
> myths created by priests. James hasn't been the only influence on me.
> David Friedman convinced me that anarcho-capitalism is possible.
>
> In their rejection of the state (and organized religion), many have
> rejected things which they believe come from the state (and from
> organized religion). An example of this is the rejection of money. But
> money, I already knew, didn't come from the state, but arose from the
> non-state economy. Similarly, right and wrong don't come from religion,
> but (rather) have been appropriated by religion, just as money has (many
> times) been appropriated by the state.
When did all this happen? It seems to me you have been
James's most faithful fan. No?
Constantinople
>> > > ...
>> > > One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
>> > > the ground up ....
>
> g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>> > Or in the case of Natural Law, from mid-air up.
>
> constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
>> Your comment would be more biting if you had at any point in the past
>> displayed a grasp of James's arguments. But you display no such
grasp;
>> rather, like seemingly everyone else critical of natural law, you
>> succumb to the temptation to talk about it without having bothered to
>> so much as try to understand what it is, what the proponents are
>> saying. Rather than address the real arguments as given by real
>> proponents, you (as you so often do on many issues) state some silly
>> arguments for it that you made up, then rip these straw men of yours
>> to shreds.
>
>
> What I wrote attacks the notion that Natural Law is scientific;
> by "scientific" I mean derived from observation of phenomena
> logically in such a manner than others can follow the logic,
> observe the evidence for themselves, and understand why accords
> with the observations. It seemed to me that that claim was
> being made for Natural Law: that its truth can be observed or
> derived unequivocally from observation, like gravitation.
Well, not quite, though you may be speaking loosely: natural law isn't a
claim about the world, and therefore is not the sort of thing that can
be either true or false. It isn't a description of how things happen.
It's something in the world, and only the assertion that there is a
natural law is the claim about the world. It's this assertion that is
true or false, not natural law itself.
For example, consider the description of natural law as an ESS
(evolutionarily stable strategy). The claim that there is an ESS on the
use of violence is an assertion that can be true or false; but natural
law itself is the ESS itself. The ESS isn't a statement about the world.
The statement that there is an ESS is a statement about the world. The
statement that the ESS prohibits killing or maiming of others outside of
special circumstances - i.e., prohibits it in almost all situations - is
a statement about the world. But the prohibition itself is not a
statement about the world.
This makes a natural law very different from a physical law. If
something violates what we had previously claimed to be a physical law,
then our claim is thereby invalidated, since the statement of the
physical law is a statement about what happens. But if a person violates
a claimed natural law, (1) that does not invalidate the natural law,
because the natural law is not a statement that can be invalidated, and
(2) nor does it invalidate the assertion that the claimed natural law is
indeed a natural law, because the violation of a natural law is simply a
departure from an ESS, and a departure from a strategy doesn't by itself
say anything about the strategy, anything about how good it is or about
whether it is an evolutionarily stable strategy. Similarly, a mutation
away from a certain phenotype does not say anything about the phenotype,
about how good the phenotype is, about how well the phenotype is adapted
to the creature's environment, about how stable that phenotype is given
the current environment. Rather, the ultimate fate of the mutation is
what matters; similarly, the ultimate fate of the violating behavior is
what matters. If the mutation dies out then that reinforces the
hypothesis that the original, pre-mutation phenotype is stable, since
departures from it are dying out. And if the claimed ESS re-asserts
itself after a violation, such as by the punishment of a murderer and
the subsequent discouragement of would-be copycats, then that reinforces
the hypothesis that the claimed ESS is really the ESS, and the more
general claim that there is an ESS.
Constantinople
About 4 years ago, about 1999 I think. I'm not 4 or 14 or 24 years old;
the influence didn't happen in childhood, it happened after I'd been
politically opinionated for almost two decades. Therefore it counts as a
shift in worldview and not merely the creation, at childhood, of the
first worldview. Naturally the main, most pronounced influence from a
person happens when I initially encounter the person, and I encountered
James and David Friedman both about that time.
Of course the main, transformative influence over my politics occurred
much earlier; I've been mostly a libertarian since about the mid or
early eighties, having been gradually persuaded, over a period of I
guess years, to abandon the beginnings of communism, by someone who did
a lot more for me intellectually than just set me on the path of
libertarian politics. (I don't mean Reagan.)
Paul Gallagher
>What I wrote attacks the notion that Natural Law is scientific;
>by "scientific" I mean derived from observation of phenomena
>logically in such a manner than others can follow the logic,
>observe the evidence for themselves, and understand why accords
>with the observations. It seemed to me that that claim was
>being made for Natural Law: that its truth can be observed or
>derived unequivocally from observation, like gravitation.
>But maybe it is not; maybe the proponents of Natural Law, in
>spite of what they seem to be saying, don't see it that way:
>they know it isn't science, but rather a hypothesis largely
>based on faith. If so, then I have indeed busied myself with
>knocking down a straw man. But the straw man had more substance
>than that of which he was a simulacrum.
Does Chomsky make the same error as the sociobiologists?
Obviously he's far more sophisticated: "I think there is
some sort of absolute basis -- if you press me too hard I'll
be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out -- ultimately
residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a
"real" notion of justice is grounded." But he makes the same
errors.
(I object in particular to the vague definitions offered
of "nature." It seems to be a category error to apply the term
"nature" to humans, as if humans were a natural class. It makes
sense to state that it is the nature of gold to have 79 protons.
If an atom doesn't have 79 protons, it isn't gold. I recommend
Michael Ghiselin's "Species are Individuals: Therefore
Human-Nature is a Metaphysical Delusion." (Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (March 1987), 10(1):77-78.) With regard to politics:
even if the psychological statement, "99% of human individuals
would be happier in polity A than polity B," is true, this is
no way implies that polity A is humanity's nature. The mere fact
that some humans exist in polity B shows it is not contrary to nature,
since it exists in nature.)
Dan Clore
>>>"Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
>>>news:<hsIlb.14698$Uz6....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net>...
>>> Really? So what does science now deny? That each entity
>>>has distinct and specific properties a.k.a. a nature or that such
>>>properties can be investigated by man's reason? I can't see much
>>>science being conducted without reference to the properties and
>>>nature of that being investigated but I see even less being done
>>>without the use of reason.
>>
>>Scientists ignore talk of the "properties" or "nature" of things as
>>useless and meaningless,
>
> Nonsense. They employ such talk regularly and interchangeably with what
> you call "operational" talk. Your own example below demonstrates the
> fundamental interchangeability of the two kinds of talk. Property talk
> is essential because it is a way of encapsulating behavior in language
> without having to re-describe the sum total of behavior. For example,
> "is heavy" is a property, and the phrase "is heavy" encapsulates a whole
> set of "what if" sorts of questions. Weight is a property. Electrical
> charge is a property. And at the same time, knowing a thing's weight, or
> knowing its charge, is to know what it would do under certain
> circumstances (what you call "operational" what-ifs).
[big snip]
Okay, my bad--I worded that very poorly. Of course you can
re-phrase an operational statement that way, and of course
this is often done for convenience or other reasons. That,
however, entirely misses the point I wanted to make. The two
sorts of statements have an entirely different underlying
metaphysics, and frequently statements *cannot* translate
from one to another. To see the difference, simply try to
state everything in operational terms when writing or
speaking (or thinking).
G*rd*n
>>>>> One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
>>>>> the ground up ....
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>>>> Or in the case of Natural Law, from mid-air up.
constan...@yahoo.com (Constantinople):
>>> Your comment would be more biting if you had at any point in the past
>>> displayed a grasp of James's arguments. But you display no such grasp;
>>> rather, like seemingly everyone else critical of natural law, you
>>> succumb to the temptation to talk about it without having bothered to
>>> so much as try to understand what it is, what the proponents are
>>> saying. Rather than address the real arguments as given by real
>>> proponents, you (as you so often do on many issues) state some silly
>>> arguments for it that you made up, then rip these straw men of yours
>>> to shreds.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>> What I wrote attacks the notion that Natural Law is scientific;
>> by "scientific" I mean derived from observation of phenomena
>> logically in such a manner than others can follow the logic,
>> observe the evidence for themselves, and understand why accords
>> with the observations. It seemed to me that that claim was
>> being made for Natural Law: that its truth can be observed or
>> derived unequivocally from observation, like gravitation.
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
I understand the difference between physical "laws" and
Natural Law very well, I think. Physical laws are not
violated; they are simply the way nature, the physis, is
thought to behave. Natural Law is some set of rules that
humans might observe if they chose to, or not. The question
then arises as to its basis. For Aquinas, its basis is God,
who is also the Good; because God created the world, his
Goodness is implicit in it, and all creatures seek it. A
similar idea appears in Aristotle, who goes from observing
that some beings find one thing better than others, to the
(gratuitous) notion of a universal thing called _The_Good_,
which of course Aquinas identified with the one Christian god.
For most people this kind of metaphysical or religious source
is reasonable, because most people believe in some sort of
god or gods (or at least they say they do).
However, it is not science. Those who claim to be scientists
and want to profess Natural Law have a serious problem: there
is no _The_Good_, no God, in the realm of science (except
perhaps the rules of practicing science), because it is and
must be materialistic. Hence the prospective materialist
Natural Lawyer must cast about for some substitute. Above
you have "evolutionarily stable strategy". But this ESS has
no value for the individual whatever -- evolution is not a
value, not an object to be desired, it's simply an observation
of something that seems to have happened in the past.
One might argue that certain social behaviors have been
selected for and thus performing them will make people happier,
but what if there are a lot of people who don't feel that way?
Evidently this "law" doesn't apply to them. You mention a
prohibition against killing and maiming, and yet humans have
routinely practiced an enormous amount of killing and maining,
as even a cursory reading of history will show, often in accord
with very strong social pressure from their communities to do
so. The same kind of observation can be made about property,
marriage, sex, diet, dress, and many other areas of life in
which humans enjoy prescribing rules for one another's behavior.
Absent some kind of religion or metaphysics taken on faith,
there is no basis for Natural Law of any sort, much less
Natural Law which specifies liberalism and capitalism, which
is what James seems to propose.
G*rd*n
> >What I wrote attacks the notion that Natural Law is scientific;
> >by "scientific" I mean derived from observation of phenomena
> >logically in such a manner than others can follow the logic,
> >observe the evidence for themselves, and understand why accords
> >with the observations. It seemed to me that that claim was
> >being made for Natural Law: that its truth can be observed or
> >derived unequivocally from observation, like gravitation.
> >But maybe it is not; maybe the proponents of Natural Law, in
> >spite of what they seem to be saying, don't see it that way:
> >they know it isn't science, but rather a hypothesis largely
> >based on faith. If so, then I have indeed busied myself with
> >knocking down a straw man. But the straw man had more substance
> >than that of which he was a simulacrum.
Paul Gallagher <p...@panix.com>:
> Does Chomsky make the same error as the sociobiologists?
> Obviously he's far more sophisticated: "I think there is
> some sort of absolute basis -- if you press me too hard I'll
> be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out -- ultimately
> residing in fundamental human qualities, in terms of which a
> "real" notion of justice is grounded." But he makes the same
> errors.
>
> (I object in particular to the vague definitions offered
> of "nature." It seems to be a category error to apply the term
> "nature" to humans, as if humans were a natural class. It makes
> sense to state that it is the nature of gold to have 79 protons.
> If an atom doesn't have 79 protons, it isn't gold. I recommend
> Michael Ghiselin's "Species are Individuals: Therefore
> Human-Nature is a Metaphysical Delusion." (Behavioral and Brain
> Sciences (March 1987), 10(1):77-78.) With regard to politics:
> even if the psychological statement, "99% of human individuals
> would be happier in polity A than polity B," is true, this is
> no way implies that polity A is humanity's nature. The mere fact
> that some humans exist in polity B shows it is not contrary to nature,
> since it exists in nature.)
In one discussion, Chomsky pointed out (in response to the
proposition that human nature didn't exist at all) that whereas
some humans post things in forums, kittens don't. According
to Chomsky, if humans and kittens did not have discernibly
different natures, then we could expect some kittens to take
part in the forums. But, being a clever, cagey academic, he
is very, very cautious about extending that point to judgements
about politics, social forms, and so on. He'd _like_ to, I
guess, but he knows better; so he presents it as a vague
thought which he can't elaborate. Our fellow Usenettists
are, of course, under no such restraint. Everyone wants God
to be on their side, I guess -- even good ol' Uncle Noam.
Constantinople
Sounds like you're attacking motivation there; we can therefore ignore
that part of your argument.
> Above you have "evolutionarily stable strategy". But
> this ESS has no value for the individual whatever
I see - so you don't even deny the claims made. You just deny that
anyone should care.
Well, the question is not really whether anyone should care. The raw
fact of it is that people do care. The term "ESS" of course seems
innocuous, and someone reading it might think, "that doesn't seem like
something to care about". But translated into ordinary language the
importance of ESS becomes clear. One specific, close-to-home way to put
it is to list the various ways in which a society can depart from the
ESS and ask a person whether he prefers such a society to one where the
ESS is obeyed. The USSR departed from the ESS (i.e., more strongly than
the US). North Korea departs from the ESS. China departed from the ESS.
The more the USSR and China departed from the ESS, the greater were the
famines.
Now you can argue that these facts are mere facts, and not values. But
we can ask a person, would you rather starve to death in the Chinese
Great Leap Forward, or would you rather eat well in the US during the
same period. This difference between living in China and living in the
US is merely a factual difference; there is no value intrinsically
attached. A person might conceivably want to die, and some people do.
However, the fact is that most of us want to live.
> -- evolution is not
> a value, not an object to be desired, it's simply an observation of
> something that seems to have happened in the past.
As you say, eating well as opposed to dying of starvation is not a
value, not an object to be desired, it is merely something that has
happened. Some people - in societies following the ESS - have eaten well
and others - in societies violating the ESS - have died of starvation.
These are mere facts, which you say have no value for the individual
whatsoever. Nevertheless, most individuals, would choose living over
dying, and therefore they would choose - naturally, retrospectively,
using 20/20 hindsight - to live in a society following the ESS as
opposed to a society not following the ESS. Of course, we do make
mistakes. But the fact that people had high hopes for an ESS-violating
strategy doesn't mean that they would not in the end have chosen an ESS-
obeying strategy had they known what would happen and had they had the
power to make the choice.
James A. Donald
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 04:49:23 GMT, Constantinople
Analogously, there is no physical law that men have two eyes,
no natural law in the sense of Newton requiring two eyes,it is
nonetheless a fact about nature, not human institutions that
men have two eyes. The existence of people with one eye, or
zero eyes, does not falsify the claim that two eyes are normal
and natural for humans, and provides a decisive argument
against any political program that requires people to have half
a dozen eyes arrayed pointing in all directions.
Natural law in the sense of Aquinas is not a natural law in the
sense of Newton, but it is a fact about nature. If John acts
in certain ways, any reasonable man will use force to against
John, thus when Jack acts to use force against John, people
will not react to Jack's force in the way that we react to
criminal force, whereas Jack is reacting to John in the way
that we react to criminals. This is a fact of nature, like
having two eyes. It is sensible to describe John's action as
criminal, regardless of what some state authority may declare,
and unreasonable to describe Jack's action as criminal,
regardless of some state authority may declare.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Fb1aZtadNphmDlRkYR9gdxEnlfy0kv7k4mRVCboJ
4GViS147qNL/tgyApgLAb4cbBP60wf3UNZCXGY1Hv
Paul Gallagher
>In one discussion, Chomsky pointed out (in response to the
>proposition that human nature didn't exist at all) that whereas
>some humans post things in forums, kittens don't. According
>to Chomsky, if humans and kittens did not have discernibly
>different natures, then we could expect some kittens to take
>part in the forums. But, being a clever, cagey academic, he
>is very, very cautious about extending that point to judgements
>about politics, social forms, and so on. He'd _like_ to, I
>guess, but he knows better; so he presents it as a vague
>thought which he can't elaborate. Our fellow Usenettists
>are, of course, under no such restraint. Everyone wants God
>to be on their side, I guess -- even good ol' Uncle Noam.
I saw a reference to a debate between Chomsky and Richard Lewontin
at the Sociobiology Study Group. I don't know if that was
ever published, or even recorded. It would be interesting to read.
I've seen the Chomsky/ Foucault debate, but that, I think,
gives the impression of a false dichotomy between two extreme
positions.
Paul
James A. Donald
Paul Gallagher
> (I object in particular to the vague definitions offered of
> "nature." It seems to be a category error to apply the term
> "nature" to humans, as if humans were a natural class. It
> makes sense to state that it is the nature of gold to have 79
> protons. If an atom doesn't have 79 protons, it isn't gold. I
> recommend Michael Ghiselin's "Species are Individuals:
> Therefore Human-Nature is a Metaphysical Delusion."
Yet no one doubts that any non human species has some definite
nature. To suppose that humans are different is absurd.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Gr41lV444ebK1S8FZYvFaw9EEAOaqHLJljoL3mWX
4ZFVZuTJ8xTJmE/R8mtzQDaq3Mf9rpsLw0v2F8xkU
Josh Dougherty
news:bnldoi$quj$1...@reader1.panix.com...
The term "nature" itself is vague, hence half this thread has been people
going back and forth over what exactly the term is supposed to mean in this
context. Furthermore, when you get past very generalized views of natures,
like being able to acknowledge that kittens have discernably different
"natures" than humans, and into trying to apply theories of "nature"
determining complex social behavior patterns, and worse, political society
or economy, you start to go way out on a limb. This "science" just seems to
beg the observer to read his own moral, social, political...etc. programs
into "nature" and then...lo and behold...discover them in "nature".
Even if there is some "nature" that can be scientifically understood and
translated to a judgement of social life, i'm skeptical about how much that
"nature" is determinate as opposed to environmental determinates, or the
individual as a moral, ethical or reasoning agent of his own destiny.
Possibly all of these things play a role, and perhaps the latter two are
even more important. Thus, even if there is a distinct "nature" which all
humans share, and even if this "nature" could be understood by humans in a
determinate relationship to societal interaction (which I'm skeptical
about), it could very well be a disservice to place more than minor emphasis
on this factor.
Josh
G*rd*n
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>> I understand the difference between physical "laws" and Natural Law
>> very well, I think. Physical laws are not violated; they are simply
>> the way nature, the physis, is thought to behave. Natural Law is some
>> set of rules that humans might observe if they chose to, or not. The
>> question then arises as to its basis. For Aquinas, its basis is God,
>> who is also the Good; because God created the world, his Goodness is
>> implicit in it, and all creatures seek it. A similar idea appears in
>> Aristotle, who goes from observing that some beings find one thing
>> better than others, to the (gratuitous) notion of a universal thing
>> called _The_Good_, which of course Aquinas identified with the one
>> Christian god. For most people this kind of metaphysical or religious
>> source is reasonable, because most people believe in some sort of god
>> or gods (or at least they say they do).
>>
>> However, it is not science. Those who claim to be scientists and want
>> to profess Natural Law have a serious problem: there is no _The_Good_,
>> no God, in the realm of science (except perhaps the rules of
>> practicing science), because it is and must be materialistic. Hence
>> the prospective materialist Natural Lawyer must cast about for some
>> substitute.
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> Sounds like you're attacking motivation there; we can therefore ignore
> that part of your argument.
I'm not talking about motivation at all. I'm talking about the
difficulty of relating Natural Law to the world without some sort
of god to provide the connection.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>> Above you have "evolutionarily stable strategy". But
>> this ESS has no value for the individual whatever
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> I see - so you don't even deny the claims made. You just deny that
> anyone should care.
The purpose of law (of the sort we are talking about) is to
achieve some state of affairs which is held to me more valuable
than that which would occur if the law didn't exist. To
Aquinas, the law (Natural Law) reflects the purpose of God,
that is, The Good; hence actions in accordance with Natural
Law bring one closer to Good/God and are therefore desirable.
But Evolution is not God. It is not good or bad -- it just
happens to be the way certain things appear to happen. There
is no self-interested reason for anyone to be concerned with
its course, nor does Evolution care what we do about it or
anything else.
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> Well, the question is not really whether anyone should care. The raw
> fact of it is that people do care. The term "ESS" of course seems
> innocuous, and someone reading it might think, "that doesn't seem like
> something to care about". But translated into ordinary language the
> importance of ESS becomes clear. One specific, close-to-home way to put
> it is to list the various ways in which a society can depart from the
> ESS and ask a person whether he prefers such a society to one where the
> ESS is obeyed. The USSR departed from the ESS (i.e., more strongly than
> the US). North Korea departs from the ESS. China departed from the ESS.
> The more the USSR and China departed from the ESS, the greater were the
> famines.
I suppose I must tediously point out, yet once again, that
whole countries and peoples can't be used very well as scientific
evidence for the validity of their beliefs, because of the
special circumstances which surround any given instance of
such objects. Take the United States for example: if one
popped up around 1900 and observed the U.S. with respect to
its ideologies, behaviors, and their outcomes,, one would have
to say that this evidently successful society based its success
on racism, invasion, aggression, slavery, genocide and civil
war. According to you, however, the US -- whose present place
in the world derives, in part, from the US of 1900 -- accords
with the ESS, which you previously stated deprecated murder.
Moreover, it is irrelevant where people want to live. If one
had the choice of living in Nazi Germany or Poland in late
1939, one would have been well advised to choose Germany. This
does not indicate that Germany had a society which was superior
or preferable to Poland's.
It would make about as much sense to say that the populations
of countries were evidence of the goodness of their cultures
and political systems. China, with 1.2 billion people, would
clearly be superior to all the others. After all, more Chinese
have evolved than Americans or Tuvans. Therefore....
Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> Now you can argue that these facts are mere facts, and not values. But
> we can ask a person, would you rather starve to death in the Chinese
> Great Leap Forward, or would you rather eat well in the US during the
> same period. This difference between living in China and living in the
> US is merely a factual difference; there is no value intrinsically
> attached. A person might conceivably want to die, and some people do.
> However, the fact is that most of us want to live.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
A person might be Black, and not want to be in jail; therefore,
that person might not want to live in the U.S., and so on. As
I've just pointed out, such "facts" are irrelevant to your theory.
By the way, I'm not completely opposed to the idea that there
might be some set of rules which would make communities of
humans happier or more prosperous than others. However, what
I've seen so far fails to get off the ground, scientifically
speaking. Much of it reads like the ancient Greek fellow who
decided that it was Natural Law for men to cut their hair and
for women to let it grow: that was the custom in his community;
therfore, as anyone could see, it was what was right and good
for everyone in the world.
You and other fans of Natural Law might make some progress if
you would take the trouble to try to derive it from actual
anthropological data instead of your political and religious
prejudices. But then you might come up with some surprising
and quite possibly uncomfortable results, which is what very
often happens when people engage the actual world. The main
function of Natural Law at this stage seems to be to serve
your ideological passions and hence it advances our thought
about as much as any other sausage machine: what comes out
is exactly what went in.
Paul Gallagher
> --
>Paul Gallagher
>> (I object in particular to the vague definitions offered of
>> "nature." It seems to be a category error to apply the term
>> "nature" to humans, as if humans were a natural class. It
>> makes sense to state that it is the nature of gold to have 79
>> protons. If an atom doesn't have 79 protons, it isn't gold. I
>> recommend Michael Ghiselin's "Species are Individuals:
>> Therefore Human-Nature is a Metaphysical Delusion."
>Yet no one doubts that any non human species has some definite
>nature. To suppose that humans are different is absurd.
No, Ghiselin argues that no species has a nature. Species are
metaphysical individuals, not natural classes: "Individuals are
concrete (while classes admit abstraction); they lack defining
properties and their proper names are defined ostensively; they are
spatio-temporally restricted (while classes are not); they have no
instances, but enter into part-whole relationships with other
individuals; they participate in processes (which classes can not);
they are ontologically autonomous; and they don't appear in laws of
nature." A common definition of species is "groups of actually or
potentially interbreeding natural populations which are
reproductively isolated from other such groups." They are not
defined in terms of similar phenotypes.
But even if one were to replace "nature" with something like
"inheritable phenotypic invariants," why should these invariants
have more moral significance than the variation in the population?
Why should it have any moral significance at all? If all tapeworms
parasitize intestines, does that make a parasitic infection a good
thing, the tapeworm's moral duty?
And I add, that while the plasticity of human behavior should be
obvious, organisms other than humans also exhibit some level of
behavioral plasticity, and there is variation within species.
I like this quote from Doug Yanega:
Even in insect sociobiology, where it has been implicitly
"understood" that all behavior is under genetic control (e.g.
"altruism" alleles, etc.), there is plenty of empirical data
that suggests that many of the complex behaviors and interactions
seen in social species are facultative, plastic, and modified (if
not determined outright) by the environment. I might even
go so far as to suggest we may find that as a general rule, the
behavioral complexity required to actually make a social system
work - in any taxon - is only achievable when the underlying
traits *are* highly responsive to the environment rather than
when the expression is largely determined genetically.
Josh Dougherty
news:bnoife$a7i$1...@panix2.panix.com...
>
> Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
> > Well, the question is not really whether anyone should care. The raw
> > fact of it is that people do care. The term "ESS" of course seems
> > innocuous, and someone reading it might think, "that doesn't seem like
> > something to care about". But translated into ordinary language the
> > importance of ESS becomes clear. One specific, close-to-home way to put
> > it is to list the various ways in which a society can depart from the
> > ESS and ask a person whether he prefers such a society to one where the
> > ESS is obeyed. The USSR departed from the ESS (i.e., more strongly than
> > the US). North Korea departs from the ESS. China departed from the ESS.
> > The more the USSR and China departed from the ESS, the greater were the
> > famines.
>
>
> I suppose I must tediously point out, yet once again, that
> whole countries and peoples can't be used very well as scientific
> evidence for the validity of their beliefs, because of the
> special circumstances which surround any given instance of
> such objects.
Indeed. Of course, the same experiment would tell us that the USSR was more
in line with "ESS" during the 70s and 80s than the Russia of the 90s to
present, given the excess death rate. By the same token, the China of the
70s and 80s was more in line with the ESS than was the China before the
Communist revolution, given the expanded life-spans and reduced death rates.
Josh
Constantinople
You wrote "who want to". Motivation. Essentially you're saying we're a
bunch of religious nuts thrashing around for some way, any way, to
justify natural law. That's an attack on motivation. The reality is that
I didn't think natural law was a viable concept, nor was I especially
interested in it, until James's comments made it seem reasonable.
> g...@panix.com (G*rd*n):
>>> Above you have "evolutionarily stable strategy". But this ESS has
>>> no value for the individual whatever
>
> Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
>> I see - so you don't even deny the claims made. You just deny that
>> anyone should care.
>
>
> The purpose of law (of the sort we are talking about) is to achieve
> some state of affairs which is held to me more valuable than that
> which would occur if the law didn't exist.
Yes, yes, I know that values and facts are different things, and that
there is nothing physically preventing people from preferring starving
to death under communist dictatorship. But the fact is that people
prefer to live.
You say that evolution has no value to people whatsoever, but the face
that evolution presents to the individual person is life and death. To
say that some strategy is an ESS is, on the individual level, to say
that individuals departing from ESS risk life and limb. Moreover, we're
talking about a particular ESS, ESS for violence. Essentially what the
ESS does is prohibit people from harming each other except in special
circumstances. So we're talking about a constraint on harm.
Unsurprisingly, then, societies where the ESS is violated on a massive
scale are going to experience massive amounts of harm. Violation of the
ESS directly threatens nonparticipants in the violation (innocent
victims) but it also threatens the violators themselves. Revolutions
that violate the ESS often end up killing vast numbers of the
revolutionaries themselves, such as in purges.
You talk about the ESS as if it didn't matter, as if it has no value.
But first of all, ESS means evolutionarily stable, and evolutionarily
stable means that individuals who depart from it are in danger.
Similarly, an evolutionarily stable structure of the heart is something
you probably hope you don't depart from; too-great departures from the
evolutionarily stable heart structure are abnormal hearts, and abnormal
hearts are usually not merely "different", not merely "special", but
deadly. So, physical departures from a norm - if that norm is
evolutionarily stable - tend to mean trouble for the abnormal individual
(rather than, say, evolutionarily advancement, e.g., a superior heart -
since by assumption we're talking about something evolutionarily stable,
i.e., departures from it tend to die out). And, similarly, departures
from the ESS are also dangerous to the individuals doing the departing.
Moreover the particular ESS here is an ESS on violence, and therefore
departures will tend to have an immediate detrimental effect to the
immediate neighbors of the individual departing from the ESS. Most
people care about whether they live long, and therefore most people
care, intuitively, instinctively, about whether they, and others, are
following natural law. Whether they are doing the right thing.
The question of whether people are doing the right thing is a question
constantly on people's minds. I experience this regularly when talking
with anyone agonizing over choices. It's only a small number, a very
small number of intellectual types who have convinced themselves that
right and wrong are myths. The belief that right and wrong are myths is
an intellectual fad, and it's as insupportable as the belief that good
health and bad health are myths.
Some claims about good and bad health are, of course, myths; similarly,
some claims about right and wrong are myths. For example, some supposed
mental health issues are not really mental health issues at all; they
are merely personality differences, merely variation within the species
between different mental types. That doesn't mean that there isn't any
such thing as good health. There is, and not only is there, people are
naturally concerned about their own health - except, of course, for some
very small suicidal minority.
> To Aquinas, the law
> (Natural Law) reflects the purpose of God, that is,
And no doubt people have in the past defined "good health" in terms that
nowadays we would reject (e.g., as the proper balance of "humours" or
whatever). But your constant reference to past theories about what
constitutes the good does not make your case, any more than constant
reference to incorrect past theories about human health would make the
case of someone who's trying to argue that there's no such thing as
health, no such thing as illness, that catching the Bubonic plague is
merely a different way of being, not an illness.
> The Good; hence
> actions in accordance with Natural Law bring one closer to Good/God
> and are therefore desirable. But Evolution is not God.
No duh. And bacteria aren't witches. People in the past have sometimes
blamed illness on witches; compare this with Aquinas claiming that the
good is what pleases God (or whatever). We atheists and nonbelievers in
the supernatural differ. The good is not, after all, that which pleases
God, nor is illness caused by witches; it is often caused by bacteria,
or viruses, or genetic defects.
> It is not good
> or bad -- it just happens to be the way certain things appear to
> happen.
You are accepting what you claim is Aquinas's definition of good. That's
like accepting the idea that witches cause illness. You are arguing that
evolution is not God and therefore is not good or bad, since good or bad
are determined by God. But that's like arguing that the flu virus is not
a witch, and therefore does not cause illness, since illness is caused
by witches.
> There is no self-interested reason for anyone to be concerned
> with its course, nor does Evolution care what we do about it or
> anything else.
Remember what evolution is! Evolution is about survival and death.
People care about survival and death.
Moreover, and you seem to have entirely missed this, the ESS is part of
our constitution, defines what we are, and defines what our interests
are. We are entirely, from toe to hair, the product of evolution. The
ESS is in us already. We are programmed with it whether or not we care.
A person may in some sense not care about dying, but that doesn't shut
off his instincts. If somebody wants to commit suicide, he will probably
still cringe if he sees something coming at him quickly - it's an
instinctual reaction. The instincts we have are in us, whether not we
"care". But of course, we do care, since the instincts force us to care.
> Constantinople <constan...@yahoo.com>:
>> Well, the question is not really whether anyone should care. The raw
>> fact of it is that people do care. The term "ESS" of course seems
>> innocuous, and someone reading it might think, "that doesn't seem
>> like something to care about". But translated into ordinary language
>> the importance of ESS becomes clear. One specific, close-to-home way
>> to put it is to list the various ways in which a society can depart
>> from the ESS and ask a person whether he prefers such a society to
>> one where the ESS is obeyed. The USSR departed from the ESS (i.e.,
>> more strongly than the US). North Korea departs from the ESS. China
>> departed from the ESS. The more the USSR and China departed from the
>> ESS, the greater were the famines.
>
>
> I suppose I must tediously point out, yet once again, that whole
> countries and peoples can't be used very well as scientific evidence
> for the validity of their beliefs, because of the special
> circumstances which surround any given instance of such objects. Take
> the United States for example: if one popped up around 1900 and
> observed the U.S. with respect to its ideologies, behaviors, and their
> outcomes,, one would have to say that this evidently successful
> society based its success on racism, invasion, aggression, slavery,
> genocide and civil war. According to you, however, the US -- whose
> present place in the world derives, in part, from the US of 1900 --
> accords with the ESS, which you previously stated deprecated murder.
The US does not entirely accord with the ESS, a point I thought I made
clear.
The many violations of the ESS no more speak against it than the many
sick people in the world speak against the claim that there is such a
thing as health and sickness. Applying your argument to illness, then
the fact that many people catch the flu proves that the flu, rather than
being an illness, is simply another way of being.
James A. Donald
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:54:45 +0000 (UTC),
> > Yet no one doubts that any non human species has some
> > definite nature. To suppose that humans are different is
> > absurd.
Paul Gallagher
> No, Ghiselin argues that no species has a nature.
Those who deny humans have any definite nature attribute almost
everything non human animals do to instinct. To use older
words such as we are using, attribute it to their nature.
Do cats behave differently to dogs? Then their nature is
different. Do bees act differently to butterflies?
> Species are metaphysical individuals, not natural classes:
So cats are only different from dogs because humans choose to
name them so? :-)
The category "cat" is a natural category, a word corresponding
to a real likeness and relationship that exists out there in
the external world. The word human no more and no less, and
the different nature of men and cats, physically and mentally,
is what makes them different species. The dictionary does not
make them different species, rather it is a fact of the
external world.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
nV3ObyfAXCKQ3DqgNNud999ZfiFxw3J8TOkTgwNA
4E9oY0LFaiJj5awEhWhlAiCFoilZISVL8TTE7mzwK
mikel
This argument doesn't work because you cannot show individuals to be
less classes than are species. Taking you as an example of an
individual, what are you exactly? How exactly do you distinguish you
from not-you? You must do it the same way anyone identifies a species:
ostensively, and you identify any other individual the same way. Nor are
such identifications without problems: do you cease to be you and become
someone else if you suffer an amputation? A new experience? The passage
of a certain amount of time? Are your endogenous bacteria part of 'you'
or are they something other?
Despite knotty problems with defining the precise boundary of any given
individual in terms of properties or predicates, we do not normally
became confused about whether we are someone else, or whether someone
else is a human being. Indeed, it's easy for us to make such
distinctions; yet it is not intrinsically easy to do. It is very
difficult, for example, to make a machine that can perform well this way.
This discrepancy between the intrinsic difficulty of the task and the
ease with which we do it dozens of times a day without thinking much
about it suggests in two ways that there is in fact a human nature:
first because those of us who are humans can do this difficult thing
easily (and the ease with which we do it seems to be a distinguishing
feature of human nature), and second because there must be something in
the nature of other human beings that enables us to identify them as
such, and as particular distinct individuals.
If there is no human nature, how can you tell so easily whom to talk to?
Why don't you find yourself every day talking to bridge abutments or
search algorithms or slime molds?
> But even if one were to replace "nature" with something like
> "inheritable phenotypic invariants," why should these invariants
> have more moral significance than the variation in the population?
Because moral significance is (held to be) a feature of the set of
invariants in question--that is, one of the heritable traits is
purportedly a moral calculus. Moral discrimination is held to be a
feature of human nature in the same way that color vision and facility
with language are.
> Why should it have any moral significance at all? If all tapeworms
> parasitize intestines, does that make a parasitic infection a good
> thing, the tapeworm's moral duty?
No, because those parasites do not have the same moral calculus and do
not figure into its calculations. Natural law presupposes that making
moral calculations is in our nature, and that there is some relatively
large overlap in the evaluators involved in the calculation fro one
individual to thee next. It is a reasonable and parsimonious explanation
of certain common features of human behavior commonly held to have moral
significance.
If you object that such a putative moral calculus cannot be shown to be
a proper a priori morality, that may well be true--in fact, I think it
is true. I don't think that fact very important, though. By contrast,
ordinary day-to-day moral calculation (whether it's really 'moral' or
not) is important.
Josh Dougherty
news:Xns94236A18...@140.99.99.130...
(snip)
> ...until James's comments made it seem reasonable.
Wow. I never thought I'd ever see a phrase like that, unless "it" was
replaced with something like "ignoring James".
Josh
Josh Dougherty
news:fupvpvknds3v2s572...@4ax.com...
> --
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:54:45 +0000 (UTC),
> > > Yet no one doubts that any non human species has some
> > > definite nature. To suppose that humans are different is
> > > absurd.
>
> Paul Gallagher
> > No, Ghiselin argues that no species has a nature.
>
> Those who deny humans have any definite nature attribute almost
> everything non human animals do to instinct. To use older
> words such as we are using, attribute it to their nature.
>
> Do cats behave differently to dogs? Then their nature is
> different. Do bees act differently to butterflies?
By this token, humans behave differently than other humans. Then their
nature is different.
Constantinople
$X22...@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
You're useful to me too, as a litmus test of reasonableness. If you object
to something, and previously I had also been objecting to it, then I should
probably reassess my position.
Josh Dougherty
Josh Dougherty
news:lbSnb.314$gP3...@newssvr14.news.prodigy.com...
(snip)
> Because moral significance is (held to be) a feature of the set of
> invariants in question--that is, one of the heritable traits is
> purportedly a moral calculus. Moral discrimination is held to be a
> feature of human nature in the same way that color vision and facility
> with language are.
So "morality" is a trait in the genes? On what basis is this belief held?
Josh
mikel
On the same basis that facility with language 'is a trait in the genes'.
James A. Donald
On 29 Oct 2003 09:22:38 -0500, g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
> I'm not talking about motivation at all. I'm talking about
> the difficulty of relating Natural Law to the world without
> some sort of god to provide the connection.
Neither Aquinas's argument, nor other similar arguments require
a god to provide the connection, since Aquinas's argument was
that god created nature, and nature created natural law.
Medieval thinkers such as Aquinas categorized laws into three
categories: man made laws, decrees by some authority, divine
law, as when that authority is god, as for example forbidding
Eve to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and natural
law, which results from the supposedly god created nature of
men and the world.
God's law, as depicted by Christ, was not very practical in the
world of the thirteenth century, therefore Aquinas needed an
argument as to why men were justified in doing what they had to
do. The answer, of course, was that god supposedly created
them that way. Man got his living by making things, so he had
to defend what is his. If God really intended men to turn the
other cheek, he would have made them starvation proof.
> The purpose of law (of the sort we are talking about) is to
> achieve some state of affairs which is held to me more
> valuable than that which would occur if the law didn't exist.
But natural law always exists -- always known, and for the most
part emotionally felt, though not always acted upon.
Those destroying the kulaks knew they were criminals, though
the government had passed laws that aid otherwise.
> To Aquinas, the law (Natural Law) reflects the purpose of
> God,
According to Aquinas, the *world* reflects the purpose of God,
and we know natural law from the world.
> I suppose I must tediously point out, yet once again, that
> whole countries and peoples can't be used very well as
> scientific evidence for the validity of their beliefs,
> because of the special circumstances which surround any given
> instance of such objects.
Oh come on. Those excuses have gotten a bit worn.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
iGDzz/UAERmAA1qQWq8qUNRvS2EsXDr+BbiYUxNG
4cXXyzDs0QMJqrlUjsutLbm6uYZuP132FztewVZpK
James A. Donald
G*rd*n:
> In one discussion, Chomsky pointed out (in response to the
> proposition that human nature didn't exist at all) that
> whereas some humans post things in forums, kittens don't.
> According to Chomsky, if humans and kittens did not have
> discernibly different natures, then we could expect some
> kittens to take part in the forums. But, being a clever,
> cagey academic, he is very, very cautious about extending
> that point to judgements about politics, social forms, and so
> on.
Or perhaps he merely is aware of what conclusions follow from
applying that point to politics and social forms.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
xWk5esijVwL2NPLERGIgQoMDOr8t2HhBtMOYLFYK
4X+DEYrdtjstd/RRVpk0LiNszndt/1RjGgwx830MT
Dan Clore
Perhaps you find this easy, but it seems to present more
difficulty for many others. I suggest you do some reading on
subjects like slavery, colonialism, and (especially)
genocide, and you will discover that many individuals whom
you (presumably) consider human have died (or suffered other
negative consequences) because someone else did not consider
them human.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
James A. Donald
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:12:25 GMT, "Josh Dougherty"
> The term "nature" itself is vague, hence half this thread has
> been people going back and forth over what exactly the term
> is supposed to mean in this context.
I know what I mean, and where necessary I have explained.
Does not seem to me that vagueness is the problem.
The only genuine terminological confusion that I see is the
confusion between "natural law" in the sense of Newton, the
laws that nature herself obeys, and "natural law" in the sense
of Aquinas -- the laws rightly enforceable in a state of
nature.
The word "nature" is not causing confusion. The phrase
"natural law" is.
> Furthermore, when you get past very generalized views of
> natures, like being able to acknowledge that kittens have
> discernably different "natures" than humans, and into trying
> to apply theories of "nature" determining complex social
> behavior patterns, and worse, political society or economy,
> you start to go way out on a limb.
If it was really such a limb, we would not see so many among
you lot trying to argue that men have no fixed nature at all.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
7MwYU4EtdoUX6iWXeWhPkC6JFEW8IQinNXcXMtUZ
49ImR8ciu4ggPBBYzFzIQH9DwrAb5F0jPfJjR+Cme
Josh Dougherty
btw, isn't that Chomsky's theory?
Josh Dougherty
> --
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:12:25 GMT, "Josh Dougherty"
> > The term "nature" itself is vague, hence half this thread has
> > been people going back and forth over what exactly the term
> > is supposed to mean in this context.
>
> I know what I mean, and where necessary I have explained.
> Does not seem to me that vagueness is the problem.
>
> The only genuine terminological confusion that I see is the
> confusion between "natural law" in the sense of Newton, the
> laws that nature herself obeys, and "natural law" in the sense
> of Aquinas -- the laws rightly enforceable in a state of
> nature.
>
> The word "nature" is not causing confusion. The phrase
> "natural law" is.
>
> > Furthermore, when you get past very generalized views of
> > natures, like being able to acknowledge that kittens have
> > discernably different "natures" than humans, and into trying
> > to apply theories of "nature" determining complex social
> > behavior patterns, and worse, political society or economy,
> > you start to go way out on a limb.
>
> If it was really such a limb, we would not see so many among
> you lot trying to argue that men have no fixed nature at all.
I haven't as yet made such an argument. But clearly since the sweeping
conclusions you draw from your concept of "natural law" seem very ...well,
"unnatural", we must have different natures.
Josh
G*rd*n
> ...
> you lot trying to argue that men have no fixed nature at all.
Merely saying that people you disagree with are against
something is not much of an argument in its favor. Furthermore,
I don't think anyone in this discussion has argued that humans
have "no fixed nature at all", if I'm making the right assumption
about what you mean by that. Natural Law fans do not claim
that humans have some fixed nature and some not so fixed, but
profess to be sure that human nature is very much fixed, and
to know pretty much what it is, too. And -- big surprise --
among Natural Law advocates of the classical liberal persuasion,
this turns out to be that Natural Law accords with classical
liberal ideas. In other words, in advocating Natural Law you
appear to be grinding an ideological axe, and you have to
expect that sort of thing will get people excited about
grinding _their_ axes.
G*rd*n
>>>> invariants in question--that is, one of the heritable traits is
>>>> purportedly a moral calculus. Moral discrimination is held to be a
>>>> feature of human nature in the same way that color vision and facility
>>>> with language are.
Josh Dougherty:
>>> So "morality" is a trait in the genes? On what basis is this belief
> held?
"mikel" <mi...@evins.net> :
>> On the same basis that facility with language 'is a trait in the genes'.
"Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> :
> well, thank you so much for the help!
>
> btw, isn't that Chomsky's theory?
Chomsky argues in favor of an innate, and therefore presumably
genetic, basis to both language capability and moral judgement.
However, in both cases his argument is highly intuitive, at
least in anything I've read, and might not really come up to
the rank of _theory_. The argument about language is
that humans could not learn language as fast as they do if
they did not have some sort of ur-grammar already set up in
their brains which becomes bound to a specific language in
very early childhood. However, as far as I know no one has
observed this ur-grammar. Some people have hypothesized that
the commands given by the brain to the voluntary muscles must
follow a sort of address-command-parameter form, which could
obviously be the model for the subject, verb, and object
elements we observe in natural languages. That would
be, of course, at least partially set up genetically.
Possibly there has been some more recent research on this
which I don't know about, but as soon as one begins to tread
on political territory any sort of science or search for
truth seems to go out the window, and there is no doubt that
morality, justice and so forth are political territory.
Paul Gallagher
>> Species are
>> metaphysical individuals, not natural classes: "Individuals are
>
> less classes than are species.
I don't think you understand. The argument that Ghiselin and others
present is that species are individuals. Particular organisms
are individuals, and those that sexually reproduce are part of
individuals called species, and all organisms are part of individuals
called lineages, defined by common descent. Ghiselin, following
Aristotle and Mill, asserts that all entities are either individuals
or classes, never both, even though there are difficulties in
identifying and demarcating individuals (such as the "ship of Theseus"
problem). Species are not classes, and only natural classes have natures.
It's a fairly simple argument: take away a proton from a gold atom (an
instance of a natural class), and it's no longer gold. An instance
of a class is defined by its possesion of specific properties.
In contrast no matter how different from the norm an
individual organism acts or looks, it is still a part or member
of its species because of its participation in a process (potential
genetic exchange).
Paul
Constantinople
> Indeed. Of course, the same experiment would tell us that the USSR
> was more in line with "ESS" during the 70s and 80s than the Russia of
> the 90s to present, given the excess death rate. By the same token,
> the China of the 70s and 80s was more in line with the ESS than was
> the China before the Communist revolution, given the expanded
> life-spans and reduced death rates.
Obviously not, since departures from the ESS aren't the only things that
kill people (e.g., the bubonic plague isn't a violator of natural law), and
moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by killing; they
may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
Constantinople
news:Xns94236A18...@140.99.99.130:
> Yes, yes, I know that values and facts are different things, and that
> there is nothing physically preventing people from preferring starving
> to death under communist dictatorship.
That's actually incorrect. People's instincts do physically prevent them
from preferring starvation. And that is another reason for caution about
drawing far-reaching conclusions from the fact/value dichotomy, as you like
to do.
Constantinople
>>mikel wrote:
>>> Species are metaphysical individuals, not natural classes:
>>> "Individuals are
>>
>> This argument doesn't work because you cannot show individuals to be
>> less classes than are species.
>
> I don't think you understand. The argument that Ghiselin and others
> present is that species are individuals. Particular organisms are
> individuals, and those that sexually reproduce are part of individuals
> called species, and all organisms are part of individuals called
> lineages, defined by common descent. Ghiselin, following Aristotle and
> Mill, asserts that all entities are either individuals or classes,
> never both, even though there are difficulties in identifying and
> demarcating individuals (such as the "ship of Theseus" problem).
> Species are not classes, and only natural classes have natures.
But that is mere wordplay. If we're going to treat species as individuals
and we're not going to treat individuals as classes and we're going to
prohibit the use of the word "nature" for individuals, then that merely
changes the terminology without changing the substantial claims. The word
"nature" is simply replaced by the word "character". Even if you want to
claim that an individual person has no individual nature, the fact
remains that he has a character. You can get to know him. You can get to
know the sorts of things he is likely to do, the sorts of reactions he is
likely to display.
All you've done is replaced the statement that "the human animal has a
nature that distinguishes him from cats", with the statement that "the
human animal has a character that is distinctly different from that of
cats". And the observation that natural law flows from human nature is
simply replaced with the observation that natural law flows from the
human character.
The facts are out there, they are easily seen, and your games with
language, your little philosophical prohibitions on using this or that
term, merely cause the same facts to be expressed in other ways. The
facts are not easily suppressed by philosophical games like yours.
> It's a fairly simple argument: take away a proton from a gold atom (an
> instance of a natural class), and it's no longer gold. An instance of
> a class is defined by its possesion of specific properties. In
> contrast no matter how different from the norm an individual organism
> acts or looks, it is still a part or member of its species because of
> its participation in a process (potential genetic exchange).
All you're saying is that the nature of humanity can change over millions
of years of evolution. Excuse me, the character of humanity can change.
Yeah. But it is what it is right now.
Josh Dougherty
> Gabrielle Rapagnetta <n0spam....@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:<p5popvcqda00ck23e...@4ax.com>...
>
> > I'll respond to that. James poses an interesting perversion of
> > Aquinas' theory which originally stated that Natural Law superseded
> > State Law, or Positive Law. It is an argument for civil disobedience
> > in favor of the Catholic God.
>
> Just a note about James (and, for example, you): in this
> case James's point is so obvious as to hardly have required
> stating, (i.e. that the legal concept of natural law is not
> to be confused with the scientific concept of laws of
> nature). However in general you have half a point: James
> frequently makes statements that at first glance seem so far
> removed from the conventional wisdom (of which I am an
> unthinking slave as much as anyone) that many people, rather
> than engage him in serious dispute, would simply reject the
> claims as being so obviously wrong that they're not even
> worth arguing against. And yet, when he is challenged, and
> as a group we go further into the arguments pro and con, the
> picture changes until at the end his reasons for believing
> as he does, fully exposed, are surprisingly strong. And so
> my worldview shifts.
>
> Like James, you also say things which initially seem far
> from conventional ideas. However, as we dig into your views,
> we discover that your underlying reasons are even more
> absurd and unbelievable than the initial claims. It's the
> reverse of James.
>
> One explanation of this is that James builds his ideas from
> likely to be surprising even to him, while others typically
> have certain things they want to believe, and then produce
> arguments for them only as an afterthought.
One other explanation is that you and James have shared identical
ideological underpinnings from the start, both having developed an intensely
reactionary worldview built primarily upon the fundamental organizing
principle of "anti-communism". The resultant worldview is then, the shared
anti-thesis.
Both you and he also find the pretense of science or "nature" compelling as
a legitimizing or objectifying mechanism for this anti-thesis, rejecting
"environmental" factors, like intensely ideological Cold War upbringings or
maladjusted relationships to parental figures, which are probably the more
likely basis. Also, James seems to have been around the block quite a few
times and has developed, through experience, a vast circular
self-reinforcing archive from which all events of history or present can be
explained and accounted for through the worldview, or at least, all events
of history can be adapted, or an angle can be found to make each historical
event fit the worldview. This surely is a skill which far exceeds your
own...at least until you encountered James, and is therefore quite
impressive and appealing to someone with the exact same fundamental
anti-thesis.
As such, Donald's evangelics go down like a cool glass of lemonade on a warm
summers day, reinforcing and strengthening the strongly shared pre-existing
worldview, while G*rd*n's ideas crash into its wall like a battering ram,
seeming to share some characteristics with the source of the organizing
principle, and therefore creating a strong cognitive dissonance, and a swift
reflexive rejection akin to the reflex of someone who's just touched a hot
stove.
But that's just one explanation.
Josh
Josh Dougherty
> "Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in
> news:cCQnb.8673$X22....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
>
> > Indeed. Of course, the same experiment would tell us that the USSR
> > was more in line with "ESS" during the 70s and 80s than the Russia of
> > the 90s to present, given the excess death rate. By the same token,
> > the China of the 70s and 80s was more in line with the ESS than was
> > the China before the Communist revolution, given the expanded
> > life-spans and reduced death rates.
>
> Obviously not, since departures from the ESS aren't the only things that
> kill people (e.g., the bubonic plague isn't a violator of natural law),
Apparently departures from the ESS are whatever you say they are.
Ok, so what was killing more people in 90's Russia than in 80's USSR, and is
more in line with natural law and ESS?
And, what was killing more people in China before the communist revolution
that is more in line with NL and ESS, than during the 80's?
> and moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by killing;
they
> may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
Ok, so now "evolution" doesn't mean "life or death", it means situations you
don't like.
Fine.
Josh
mikel
>>mikel wrote:
>>
>>>Species are
>>>metaphysical individuals, not natural classes: "Individuals are
>>
>>This argument doesn't work because you cannot show individuals to be
>>less classes than are species.
>
>
> I don't think you understand. The argument that Ghiselin and others
> present is that species are individuals. Particular organisms
> are individuals, and those that sexually reproduce are part of
> individuals called species, and all organisms are part of individuals
> called lineages, defined by common descent. Ghiselin, following
> Aristotle and Mill, asserts that all entities are either individuals
> or classes, never both, even though there are difficulties in
> identifying and demarcating individuals (such as the "ship of Theseus"
> problem). Species are not classes, and only natural classes have natures.
What is an individual?
We might also productively ask, what is a species? (There seems to be no
good answer to this question--the test you suggest below doesn't work,
since it gives self-contradictory answers in some well-known cases).
If we want to treat nature and species and class in a rigorous way then
we run into serious problems of definition and logic. On the other hand,
we don't run into any very serious problems in a pragmatic sense if we
use species in the way people ordinarily use it day-to-day, as a fuzzy
categorization of phenomena. In ordinary usage no one cares whether
'species' has a tractable rigorous definition; what they care about is
whether saying the word 'dog' evokes in a listener an understanding that
is close enough for acceptable mutual understanding.
Natural law relies on similarly fuzzy categorizations, and on the
observation that moral outrage is predictable. Claims for the existence
of natural law presupose that there iis something human beings have in
common that makes moral outrage predictable (not necessarily perfectly
or rigorously predictable, but predictable enough that the predictions
are usable and useful).
Suppose that's not true: then no useful predictions about moral outrage
can be made. Do you argue that this is so?
Imagine a group of people watching a performance. A person at the back
begins systematically killing those who stand between him and the
performance, presumably in order to get a better view. Presumably those
between him and the stage will quickly deduce that they are in danger;
we can make some predictions about their reaction with reference to any
sort of moral calculus. How about those people who are not in his way?
If we can make no useful predictions about moral outrage, then it should
be just as plausible that they will approve of his actions, or that they
will regard them indifferently, as that they will find them objectionable.
Do you think that is so?
mikel
It's not only how quickly people learn language (which is indeed
suggestive), but also other matters, like how all known human langyuages
exhibit certain common features, like predictable phoneme drift and the
same set of parts of speech.
Actually, the latter quality is not actually universal in human
language, but even the exceptions are suggestive that he might have
something, because they are languages invented on purpose to replace the
normal parts of speech with another representation of meaning
(specifically, the predicate calculus).
Constantinople
> "Constantinople" <constan...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:Xns94238D4F...@140.99.99.130...
>> "Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in
>> news:cCQnb.8673$X22....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
>>
>> > Indeed. Of course, the same experiment would tell us that the USSR
>> > was more in line with "ESS" during the 70s and 80s than the Russia
>> > of the 90s to present, given the excess death rate. By the same
>> > token, the China of the 70s and 80s was more in line with the ESS
>> > than was the China before the Communist revolution, given the
>> > expanded life-spans and reduced death rates.
>>
>> Obviously not, since departures from the ESS aren't the only things
>> that kill people (e.g., the bubonic plague isn't a violator of
>> natural law),
>
> Apparently departures from the ESS are whatever you say they are.
>
> Ok, so what was killing more people in 90's Russia than in 80's USSR,
> and is more in line with natural law and ESS?
I don't know much about 90s Russia, so I couldn't say.
> And, what was killing more people in China before the communist
> revolution that is more in line with NL and ESS, than during the 80's?
War, I think. Again, I don't know much about it. History's not a strong
point of mine, as I've admitted many times. You are more than welcome to
inform me about history; however, your mentions here do not constitute
compelling evidence pro or con ESS.
>> and moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by
>> killing;
> they
>> may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
>
> Ok, so now "evolution" doesn't mean "life or death", it means
> situations you don't like.
Being a slave isn't just a situation I personally don't like; it's a
situation people generally find not to their liking, to the point of
wanting to kill their masters. And that dislike is universal, and
therefore instinctive. Which brings us back to evolution.
And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death struggle.
We have the instincts that we have because people without those instincts
died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of life-and-death
struggle.
Constantinople
We're both libertarians. That doesn't mean very much. There
are a lot of libertarians posting on Usenet.
> Both you and he also find the pretense of science or "nature"
> compelling as a legitimizing or objectifying mechanism for this
> anti-thesis,
Restated in a less unfriendly way, we care about reality, and
we are sensitive to reality. For example, we are both aware of,
and sensitive, to the reality that power corrupts, and we are
sensitive to the political implications of this reality, one
of which being that statist solutions to social problems are
likely to go awry.
So we share a certain common ground. That is unsurprising.
Obviously persuasion requires common ground, so, obviously,
James can only persuade me if we share common ground.
> rejecting "environmental" factors, like intensely
> ideological Cold War upbringings or maladjusted relationships to
> parental figures, which are probably the more likely basis.
Yes, it might be that I only believe what I do because of my
environment, rather than because I have good reasons for
believing the things I do. That is one thing that my
participation in discussion tests. And you haven't really
described me here; you've made a general statement about all
of us, i.e., that we might not have good reasons for
believing as we do.
> Also,
> James seems to have been around the block quite a few times and has
> developed, through experience, a vast circular self-reinforcing
> archive from which all events of history or present can be explained
> and accounted for through the worldview, or at least, all events of
> history can be adapted, or an angle can be found to make each
> historical event fit the worldview.
I should not be too surprising that it can take a long time
and a lot of meditation for a person to develop arguments
are are likely to persuade me of something novel to me.
I don't see any need to respond to your accusations that
James's arguments are "circular" and that he forces events
to "fit" his worldview. Obviously I disagree with you on
this; not much more needs to be said.
> This surely is a skill which far
> exceeds your own...at least until you encountered James, and is
> therefore quite impressive and appealing to someone with the exact
> same fundamental anti-thesis.
Or in other words, his arguments are well-developed, long
and carefully thought out. You admit this, though of course
you try to spin it in a negative way. Obviously I disagree
with your negative spin.
> As such, Donald's evangelics go down like a cool glass of lemonade on
> a warm summers day, reinforcing and strengthening the strongly shared
> pre-existing worldview, while G*rd*n's ideas crash into its wall like
> a battering ram,
Gordon does not argue from common ground. That's the
beginning and the end of it. He does not persuade me much of
the time simply because I do not share his assumptions.
However, Gordon does persuade me some of the time.
> seeming to share some characteristics with the source
> of the organizing principle, and therefore creating a strong cognitive
> dissonance, and a swift reflexive rejection akin to the reflex of
> someone who's just touched a hot stove.
>
> But that's just one explanation.
Gordon's reasoning often fails to engage my mind because he
doesn't start from ground that I share. James's reasoning
engages my mind because he does start from ground that I
share.
Nor should it be surprising that I tend to disagree on many
things from Gordon. Since he starts somewhere else from me,
he ends up somewhere else from me.
Josh Dougherty
Ok, fine, so your initial answer here was a non-answer....just to assert
"obviously not"...and then ramble on to unrelated points.
> >> and moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by
> >> killing;
> > they
> >> may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
> >
> > Ok, so now "evolution" doesn't mean "life or death", it means
> > situations you don't like.
>
> Being a slave isn't just a situation I personally don't like;
Fine, but what does this have to do with your response to my question about
80's China to pre-revolution China, or to 80s vs. 90s Russia?
Well, that topic has been abandoned apparently so, I'll just move on.
> it's a situation people generally find not to their liking, to the point
of
> wanting to kill their masters. And that dislike is universal, and
> therefore instinctive. Which brings us back to evolution.
>
> And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death struggle.
What does that mean?
> We have the instincts that we have because people without those instincts
> died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of life-and-death
> struggle.
Why? It seems to me that slave owners in, for instance pre-Civil War US,
had a very strong desire to keep their slaves alive for as long as possible,
and to keep them reproducing, so that the slave-owner could continue to own
"all their increase" as was common on legal contracts of slave property.
And if this is so against our "nature" and we instinctively hate it
universally, why did such systems last for thousands of years, probably with
the vast majority of those years being without violent uprisings?
Josh
Constantinople
No, I refuted your inference by clarifying that I had never claimed
departure from the ESS was the only thing that kills people. Your
argument was based on the assumption that I had meant that, and I
corrected your mistaken asumption.
>> >> and moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by
>> >> killing;
>> > they
>> >> may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
>> >
>> > Ok, so now "evolution" doesn't mean "life or death", it means
>> > situations you don't like.
>>
>> Being a slave isn't just a situation I personally don't like;
>
> Fine, but what does this have to do with your response to my question
> about 80's China to pre-revolution China, or to 80s vs. 90s Russia?
>
> Well, that topic has been abandoned apparently so, I'll just move on.
I said I cannot answer your question because I do not know enough about
those times.
>> it's a situation people generally find not to their liking, to the
>> point
> of
>> wanting to kill their masters. And that dislike is universal, and
>> therefore instinctive. Which brings us back to evolution.
>>
>> And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death
>> struggle.
>
> What does that mean?
Evolution occurs by a process of natural selection. Natural selection
involves individuals dying.
>> We have the instincts that we have because people without those
>> instincts died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of
>> life-and-death struggle.
>
> Why?
Because it's instinctive. Everything that's part of us this way got that
way because people who did not share it died out.
> It seems to me that slave owners in, for instance pre-Civil War
> US, had a very strong desire to keep their slaves alive for as long as
> possible,
In some instances it is possible that slaves might live longer than non-
slaves. But our instincts are formed by the *general case* over millenia.
That's not saying I agree with you about the supposed longevity and
reproductive success of slaves in the old South. I think it is absurd to
think that slave owners took care of their slaves better than those
slaves would have taken care of themselves had they been free, though if
you want to show statistics, go ahead. I'm aware of at least one way in
which becoming enslaved drastically shortened a person's life
expectation: many slaves died on the way over to the US from Africa.
> and to keep them reproducing, so that the slave-owner could
> continue to own "all their increase" as was common on legal contracts
> of slave property.
>
> And if this is so against our "nature" and we instinctively hate it
> universally, why did such systems last for thousands of years,
> probably with the vast majority of those years being without violent
> uprisings?
But there were violent uprisings. The South was boiling with slave
revolts. That these uprisings were suppressed only with tremendous
brutality demonstrates the ferocity of the hatred that slaves felt for
their condition and for their masters. Moreover the constant corporal
punishment of slaves that was practiced in the old South demonstrates
that people did not spontaneously make good slaves, but had to be forced
on a daily basis by the regular application of pain and fear. In
contrast, neighbors who obey the ESS with respect to each other can get
along just fine all their lives, neither one ever so much as laying a
finger, or threatening to lay a finger, on the other. The relationship of
good neighbors is obviously one that we *do not* instinctively hate, in
contrast to the relationship of the master with the slave, with the
whipping, with the fear, with the escapes and capture of escaped slaves,
with the bodily mutilation, with the frequent slave revolts and killing
of masters.
The difference between these two kinds of relationships (between typical
neighbors, versus, between typical master and slave) could hardly be more
stark.
Josh Dougherty
But this doesn't refute my inference, because that wasn't my inference.
...unless you're claiming that some mysterious disease ravaged Russia during
the 90s that wasn't there during the 80s. You were talking about social
systems. What happened was there was a human choice to change from one
social system to another, and this change increased deaths on the order of
millions. Apparently by your theory, that would be a departure from the
ESS.
> Your argument was based on the assumption that I had meant that,
No, it wasn't.
> >> >> and moreover departures from the ESS don't necessarily harm by
> >> >> killing;
> >> > they
> >> >> may enslave many more people than they kill, for example.
> >> >
> >> > Ok, so now "evolution" doesn't mean "life or death", it means
> >> > situations you don't like.
> >>
> >> Being a slave isn't just a situation I personally don't like;
> >
> > Fine, but what does this have to do with your response to my question
> > about 80's China to pre-revolution China, or to 80s vs. 90s Russia?
> >
> > Well, that topic has been abandoned apparently so, I'll just move on.
>
> I said I cannot answer your question because I do not know enough about
> those times.
>
> >> it's a situation people generally find not to their liking, to the
> >> point
> > of
> >> wanting to kill their masters. And that dislike is universal, and
> >> therefore instinctive. Which brings us back to evolution.
> >>
> >> And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death
> >> struggle.
> >
> > What does that mean?
>
> Evolution occurs by a process of natural selection. Natural selection
> involves individuals dying.
I can see that reasoning being part, but I see no reason why "evolution" is
limited to that.
> >> We have the instincts that we have because people without those
> >> instincts died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of
> >> life-and-death struggle.
> >
> > Why?
>
> Because it's instinctive. Everything that's part of us this way got that
> way because people who did not share it died out.
That's nothing but an assertion.
> > It seems to me that slave owners in, for instance pre-Civil War
> > US, had a very strong desire to keep their slaves alive for as long as
> > possible,
>
> In some instances it is possible that slaves might live longer than non-
> slaves. But our instincts are formed by the *general case* over millenia.
>
> That's not saying I agree with you about the supposed longevity and
> reproductive success of slaves in the old South. I think it is absurd to
> think that slave owners took care of their slaves better than those
> slaves would have taken care of themselves had they been free,
That would depend on their environment under "freedom". If they were
suddenly "free", but had no land, they might be a few days away from death,
while before they had a basically assured means of survival. In any case,
slave-owners routinely argued that this was a mutually beneficial
relationship, and many slaves even believed this, some even after seeing the
particular environment of freedom they were left in upon their liberation.
> though if you want to show statistics, go ahead. I'm aware of at least one
way in
> which becoming enslaved drastically shortened a person's life
> expectation: many slaves died on the way over to the US from Africa.
But someone who's a slave in the US doesn't make decisions about his
"evolution" based on what might have happened to him in the past when he
made the journey. If he's in the US he made it, and the journey is no
longer a risk to his evolution. So that should play no part in his survival
strategy.
> > and to keep them reproducing, so that the slave-owner could
> > continue to own "all their increase" as was common on legal contracts
> > of slave property.
> >
> > And if this is so against our "nature" and we instinctively hate it
> > universally, why did such systems last for thousands of years,
> > probably with the vast majority of those years being without violent
> > uprisings?
>
> But there were violent uprisings.
I'm not totally familiar with the history, but I assume there were long
periods where there were not. Unless you're not paying attention, there
"were violent uprisings" against the capitalist system too (something called
the Cold War and falling "dominoes", with "violent uprisings" everywhere)
and they continue today, like Bolivia and other places, some violent, some
not. Apparently all that needs to happen is for these uprisings to succeed
and put in its place something better, and then future ESS fans will look
back and say "see, capitalism was a divergence from ESS all along".
> The South was boiling with slave revolts. That these uprisings were
suppressed only with tremendous
> brutality demonstrates the ferocity of the hatred that slaves felt for
> their condition and for their masters. Moreover the constant corporal
> punishment of slaves that was practiced in the old South demonstrates
> that people did not spontaneously make good slaves, but had to be forced
> on a daily basis by the regular application of pain and fear.
But this is only the US South, and I don't necessarily believe this was the
case all or most of the time, up until the end. Slavery existed for
hundreds or thousands of years all over the place. I highly doubt there
were "boiling slave revolts" everywhere all or most of the time. I'd assume
that most slaves accepted their socially assigned roles the vast majority of
the time. Were there constant "boiling slave revolts" all over Egypt during
the Pharoahs? I expect there were probably some, but I highly doubt that
was the status quo...kinda like contemporary world capitalism.
> In contrast, neighbors who obey the ESS with respect to each other can get
> along just fine all their lives, neither one ever so much as laying a
> finger, or threatening to lay a finger, on the other. The relationship of
> good neighbors is obviously one that we *do not* instinctively hate, in
> contrast to the relationship of the master with the slave, with the
> whipping, with the fear, with the escapes and capture of escaped slaves,
> with the bodily mutilation, with the frequent slave revolts and killing
> of masters.
>
> The difference between these two kinds of relationships (between typical
> neighbors, versus, between typical master and slave) could hardly be more
> stark.
Of course, but the master slave relationship implies an economic
relationship and an economic system of power and powerless. A "good
neighbor" relationship could exist in any place in the world under virtually
any political or economic system.
Josh
Paul Gallagher
>What is an individual?
I already provided definitions of "individual" and "species." There
are several points that could be argued, but you indicate you don't
care about precise definitions.
>We might also productively ask, what is a species? (There seems to be no
>good answer to this question--the test you suggest below doesn't work,
>since it gives self-contradictory answers in some well-known cases).
There are problems with the biological species concept, but I don't
know what you're referring to here.
>categorization of phenomena. In ordinary usage no one cares whether
>'species' has a tractable rigorous definition; what they care about is
>whether saying the word 'dog' evokes in a listener an understanding that
>is close enough for acceptable mutual understanding.
>Natural law relies on similarly fuzzy categorizations, and on the
>observation that moral outrage is predictable.
There have been many ethical theories proposed throughout the
centuries. They all take into account that there are some shared,
or at least widespread, ethical beliefs. I don't know which theory to
favor, but the existence of ethical agreements is not in itself
evidence of an ethics module in the brain. And why should this
module provide true ethical knowledge? Many sociobiologists don't
make that claim. For example, E.O. Wilson and Ruse write:
Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely
an adaptation put into place to further our reproductive ends...
In an important sense, morality is merely an illusion fobbed
off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without
external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but not
justified by it, because .. it serves a powerful purpose without
existing in substance.
Paul
Josh Dougherty
http://itest.slu.edu/articles/90s/blackwell2.html
Dr. Richard J. Blackwell Department of Philosophy St. Louis University
[This paper was presented at the ITEST Conference on The State of the Art in
March, 1980. Dr. Blackwell is well versed in the philosophy of science and
has written many papers on various aspects of that field.]
In 1971 E.O. Wilson, a prominent entomologist at Harvard, published a book
entitled The Insect Societies. In the last chapter of that book Wilson
suggested that it may be fruitful to attempt to extend to the world of
vertebrate animals the set of principles which he had found to be operative
in the intricate behaviors of social insects. Following his own advice, he
published four years later his enormous study entitled Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis. The twenty-seventh and last chapter of that book recommended the
fur- ther extension of these same principles to the human species. The
result was a third book, On Human Nature, which appeared in 1978.
The last two books in this trilogy1 have caused a storm of controversy of an
extent rarely seen in scientific circles. There is a special reason for
this, which we wish to explore in this paper. Briefly, in the pursuit of his
scientific investigations Wilson gradually came to confront the bed- rock
questions of what is the meaning of human life and what values should govern
it, which, to say the least, are delicate issues. Moreover, Wilson's efforts
to answer these questions touched an extremely raw nerve which has been
implicit in the fabric of scientific culture since its inception in the
Seventeenth Century. In short, Wilson has argued that, if we relentlessly
pursue science as the only avenue to the understanding of reality, then man
must be reduced in significance to a point for below what most of us,
including most scientists, would like to see. To make matters more
challenging, Wilson writes with an engaging style and with an over-abundance
of fascinating accounts of aspects of animal and human life-styles which
seem to make his analysis compelling. How should we evaluate his view of
human nature?
The first and most strident wave of criticism came from the academic
political left. Wilson was accused of elitism, racism, sexism,
anti-feminism, a denigration of the powers of institutional and social
change, and in general of being a reactionary advocate of the social and
political status quo.2 Wilson's reply to these critics is that they have not
under- stood his message, and also that they in turn are wrong in thinking
that environmental factors alone, independently of genetics, determine
social behavior. There are limitations imposed by our genetic inheritance
outside of which manipulation of the social and political environment is
really useless as a lasting tool for social betterment. Wilson clearly
rejects a purely environmental model of the causes of human behavior, in
which category he places his political opposition.
It might be mentioned in passing that this exchange is the most recent
instance of a long history of using extra-scientific political, social, or
religious norms to judge the correctness of a scientific theory. It also
seems from this exchange that the present American academic climate is much
more tolerant of external, environmental determinism for man (e.g., Skinner)
than of internal, genetic determinism (e.g., Wilson). In neither case is
there any genuine human freedom; Wilson is closer to some of his critics on
this point than appears on first sight.
A second, and more technical, criticism of Wilson has come from various
scientists and philosophers of science who charge that his argumentation is
frequently subject to the fallacy of equivocations.3 The reason for this is
that the primary tool of investigation in sociobiology is detailed
comparison of social behaviors in a wide range of animal species, including
man.
In the process the same term is often used by Wilson to refer to behaviors
which are at least as different as they are similar. To mention only the
most famous case, altruism or self-sacrifice in the behavior of termites or
ants is quite different in basic ways from altruism or self-sacrifice in
human relations. Lacking a developed theory of analogous predication,
Wilson's version of sociobiology is fatally flawed in its most basic methods
of comparison and inference patterns between highly diverse animal species.
Another version of this same objection applies to Wilson's program for the
unity of the sciences. The ideal to be approached here is an absorption by
biology of the social sciences and eventually the humanities, including
religion, as the ultimate goal. The name `sociobiology' was coined to
reflect the first stage of this reduction. During the past generation
philosophers of science have shown4 rather conclusively that, for one
discipline B to be reduced to a more basic discipline A, two requirements
are necessary. First the descriptive terms used in the laws and theories of
B must be translated without remainder into the descriptive terms used in
the laws and theories of A. Secondly the laws and theories of B must be
deducible from those of A. Translatability and deducibility, in that order,
are the necessary conditions. For sociobiology this would mean the
translation of terms referring to social behavior in animals into terms
referring to the basic microbiological categories of genes, DNA, proteins,
enzymes, etc. It is clear from reading Wilson's books that he is a very long
way away from such a translation, and as a result his remarks about the
reductive unity of the various sciences and humanities are at present very
premature and at best state only an abstract and hoped-for goal.
Considering Wilson's reply, mentioned above, to his critics on the left,
should one conclude that he is arguing for the notion that human behavior is
determined solely by our genes? Certainly not; although there are some stray
passages which give this impression. For example, Wilson states:
The central idea of the philosophy of behaviorism, that behavior and the
mind have an entirely materialist basis subject to experimental analysis, is
fundamentally sound. . . The learning potential of each species appears to
be fully programmed by the structure of its brain, the sequence of release
of its hormones, and, ultimately, its genes.5 (emphasis added)
However the overwhelming majority of comments in Wilson's writings make it
quite clear that his view is that human behavior is the joint product of
both internal genetic causes and external environmental influences. He
offers neither a purely genetic nor a purely environmental model of
behavior. Rather he argues quite reasonably that human genetic structure
imposes constraints on our behavior. Outside of these constraints we either
cannot act at all (e.g., we cannot fly like the birds on our own) or we
cannot sustain an action successfully (e.g., a human slavery system modeled
after insect societies must ultimately fail of its own weight). Within these
constraints our genes determine various genuine capacities or potentialities
for behavior, and which of these possibilities become actuated is determined
by the added influence of the physical and social environment. Thus the
biological evolution of our genetic make-up, which occurs according to
Darwinian principles, is complemented by the cultural evolution in our
social environment, which is governed by Lamarckian principles. The former
is much slower, lasting over millions of years up through the present, while
the latter is much faster and has occurred primarily over only the latest
phases of the history of the human species. To quote Wilson:
I do not for a moment ascribe the relative performances of modern societies
to genetic differences, but the point must be made: there is a limit,
perhaps closer to the practices of contemporary societies than we have had
the wit to grasp, beyond which biological evolution will begin to pull
cultural evolution back to itself.6
In short, human social behavior is the shared product of both genetic and
environmental causes. This seems quite reasonable in itself, and there is an
enormous amount of scientific evidence, gathered by Wilson, to support this
view. So if we leave aside the political and methodological objections to
sociobiology and focus on its conceptual context, why should this view of
human nature and human behavior have caused so much controversy? This brings
us to the crux of the problem, the raw nerve mentioned earlier.
Sociobiology unequivocally claims to be a scientific study of human
behavior. As such it is destined to conclude that man is a machine. Rightly
or wrongly, when modern science came into existence in the Seventeenth
Century, it consciously adopted the machine model for its fundamental mode
of understanding. This has been pursued relentlessly and successfully ever
since through a wide range of physical and chemical phenomena. But as time
passed, it became more and more feasible to extend the methods of scientific
investigation to human behavior, to the social sciences, and ultimately the
humanities. Sociobiology is the latest and most sophisticated version of
this thrust, which extends back through Comte and the French Encyclopedists
to Hobbes and to Cartesian biology. The scientific image of man, to use a
helpful phrase from Sellars, is that man is a machine, a physical, chemical,
genetic mechanism. If we add the further restriction that only scientific
knowledge is genuine knowledge, the claim of scientism, then man is no more
than a machine.
This is where the most basic controversy over sociobiology lies. As a
machine, man is determined and his behavior is predictable in principle, it
making little difference in the last analysis whether the causal
determination is all external (environmentalism) or internal (geneticism) or
some combination of the two (Wilson's version of sociobiology). In all these
cases human freedom and the conscious self are unreal; they are vestigial
notions from our pre-scientific days. If Wilson were to pursue the logic of
his position to its full limits, he should advocate sociophysics, not
sociobiology. For why should we carry the analysis of our behavior only down
to the level of human genes when we know that they in turn are complexes of
more basic chemical and physical units? To focus so sharply on human genes
is to be guilty of anthropocentrism in science, a charge which Wilson
frequently brings against the social sciences and the humanities.
Now of course there are images of man other than the machine model. Of
primary interest here as an alternative is what we will call the "active
agent" model of man. This view agrees with sociobiology that causal
influences are exerted on human behavior by both genetic and environmental
factors. That point is not in dispute. But the active agent model goes
further to add a third irreducible factor in the analysis, namely, an
assertive and self-initiating agent acting within the constraints of the
genetics and the environment in which it finds itself. This raises the
critical question of the status to be assigned to the human mind and the
human will. It is worth quoting Wilson on this at length.
The great paradox of determinism and free will which has held the
attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations,
can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: if our genes are
inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion
before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the
brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the
environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self-delusion. In
fact, this may be so.7
Of course, if the agent is an effect produced by the interaction of genes
and environment, then it has no independent status, and the "active agent"
model has been rejected. "The mind will be more precisely explained as an
epiphenomenon of the neuronal machinery of the brain," as Wilson says later.
In Chapter IV of On Human Nature Wilson is noticeably hesitant to affirm the
machine model of mind unequivocally. We read such phrases as "this may be
so," "schemata within the brain could serve as the physical basis of will,"
"the mind could be a republic of such schemata," "will might be the outcome
of the competition, requiring the action of neither a `little man' nor any
other external agent. There is no proof that the mind works in just this
way."9 (emphases added)
Why this hesitation? The last phrase explains why. "There is no proof." The
limits of scientific decidability have been reached. In many places Wilson
makes it quite clear that he considers an hypothesis to be scientific only
if it has competitors and if each member of the set is verifiable or at
least falsifiable by empirical testing.10 Does the machine model of mind fit
these requirements? According to Wilson apparently it does not. If we add to
this the doctrine of scientism, i.e., that science is the only genuine mode
of knowing, then we have passed beyond knowledge into faith. As a result
Wilson's advocacy of and commitment to what he calls the "mythology of
scientific materialism" is in the last analysis an act of faith. Why this
belief rather than belief in the "active agent" hypothesis which apparently
is equally beyond scientific decidability? Of course, no reason can be given
to conclusively settle this issue, but the machine model of mind is clearly
more congenial to the scientific frame of reference. So at the critical
juncture of dealing with the presence of mind and will in human behavior,
sociobiology must abandon reason for faith. It has evolved into a belief
system, into a form of religion, the religion of scientism, the religion of
reductionistic scientific materialism.
Wilson even formulates the credo of the new religion for us as follows:
The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic. Let me
repeat its minimum claims: that the laws of the physical sciences are
consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be
linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical
basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient
to the same laws: and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject
to these materialist explanations. The epic can be indefinitely strengthened
up and down the line, but its most sweeping assertions cannot be proved with
finality.
What I am suggesting, in the end, is that the evolutionary epic is
probably the best myth we will ever have. It can be adjusted until it comes
as close to truth as the human mind is constructed to judge the truth.11
The characterization of sociobiology as a form of religion can be made more
specific by looking at Wilson's comments about traditional religions.12 He
begins by remarking that religions constitute a critical challenge to
sociobiology because human religious behavior has no analogue in the animal
kingdom. Nevertheless a biological account of religion is still in order.
According to Wilson human beings have a strong susceptibility for
indoctrination which has become genetically ingrained in us because of its
clear adaptational advantage for both the individual and the group. The
reason for this is that stability of social structures is greatly enhanced
if individuals are selected who tend to act in traditional, uniform ways.
The specification of this tendency for indoctrination takes on a myriad of
actual forms as various mythologies are culturally evolved to deal with the
fundamental human concerns of the meaning of creation and life, of human
suffering, of death, of personal identity and survival. At any rate various
religions originate from the interaction of a genetically selected
indoctrinability and culturally evolving mythological traditions. For
example, the Judeo-Christian tradition shows all the characteristics of its
origins in our Ice Age ancestors of the middle East who lived in a
hunter-gatherer social structure. Such societies are "highly mobile, tightly
organized, and often militant, all features that tip the balance toward male
authority."13 So God is male, the pastoral imagery of the Bible is
derivative from the herding habits of these ancient people, etc.
But what is more important for our concerns is that if Wilson's argument be
granted, then the net effect is a naturalistic account of traditional
religions, and the consequent installation of sociobiology as a sort of
meta-religion since it can explain, and thus explain away, traditional
religious behavior. As Wilson puts it:
If this interpretation is correct, the final decisive edge enjoyed by
scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional
religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon. Theology is
not likely to survive as an independent intellectual discipline. But
religion itself will endure for a long time as a vital force in society.14
Wilson's concession in this last sentence is significant. It is not based
only on the biological claim that the religious tendency is deeply ingrained
in our genetic baggage. More importantly he sees traditional religion as
more energetic than the belief system of scientific materialism since the
latter has nothing to compare to the power of the idea of a creating and
caring God and the idea of personal immortality. For the near future at
least he sees sociobiology as parasitic on this vitality.
Like other religions sociobiology also has a distinctive moral code. In
analogy to traditional natural law ethics, Wilson enunciates three primary
moral precepts.15 The first ethical imperative is "the survival of human
genes in the form of a common pool over generations."16 The second is the
maintenance of diversity in the gene pool to ensure adaptability to changes
in the environment. The third imperative is universal human rights, not
because of its intrinsic worthiness, but because of its long range genetic
advantage. All other values are classified as secondary and instrumental to
the attainment of these primary moral standards. The ethics of sociobiology,
in short, is a utilitarian calculus of genetic advantage. If Wilson follows
his recent pattern of writing his next book on themes suggested at the end
of the last one, the next topic for research should be the fleshing out of
this ethics to prepare man to take over the direction of his own biological
evolution through a program of eugenics.17
In characterizing sociobiology as a form of religion, we in no way mean to
belittle its significance. Actually, just the opposite is the case.
Religions have always been prominent and powerful elements in human culture.
Sociobiology as a religion has many faithful followers and converts; it
cannot be ignored. Moreover Wilson has performed an important service in
carrying the implications of reductionistic scientific materialism and
scientism far beyond the point where many of its adherents are content to
leave it. What are the consequences for the meaning of human life if one
makes a serious commitment to the belief system of scientific naturalism?
Wilson has spelled them out in uncomfortable detail. The individual human
person is reduced to, and is not more than, a temporary and ultimately
insignificant way station serving merely as a transitory conduit for a
portion of the gene pool. It is a stark picture. The individual human person
has only an instrumental value and is ultimately insignificant. Only the
genes really count. Sociobiology as a religion involves an enormous act of
faith, little room for charity, and no personal hope for survival. It is not
accidental that Wilson's major book begins and ends with foreboding
quotations from Camus on suicide and human alienation. In the very first
paragraph of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis he states his view of life in
quite unequivocally reductionistic terms as follows:
In a Darwinian sense the organism does not live for itself. Its primary
function is not even to reproduce other organisms; it reproduces genes, and
it serves as their temporary carrier... Samuel Butler's famous aphorism,
that the chicken is only an egg's way of making another egg, has been
modernized: The organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA.18
To conclude on a more positive note, we should point out that, whatever the
ultimate fate of sociobiology as a science or as a religion, its primary
thrust is a redrawing of the lines between genetics and culture, between
emotion and reason, between the various sciences, between science and
religion, between man and the other animals. Its constant message is that
there is a much larger biological component in these divisions than we have
allowed ourselves to admit in the past. And this is probably quite true. It
is certainly a point worthy of careful thought and reflection.
ENDNOTES
1. All three of these volumes were published by Harvard University Press.
2. For a convenient anthology containing these political objections and
Wilson's reply to them, cf. Arthur L. Caplan (ed.), The Sociobiology Debate
(New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1978), Part V.
3. For example, cf. Richard Lowentin, "Sociobiology -A Caricature of
Darwinism," in P. Asquith and F. Suppe (eds.), PSA 1976 (East Lansing,
Michigan: The Philosophy of Science Association, 1977), Vol. 2, pp. 22-31.
4. For an introduction to this literature, cf. Ernest Nagel, The Structure
of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), Chapter 11; Robert
L. Causey, Unity of Science (Dordrecht, Holland Boston, U.S.A.: D. Reidel
Publishing Co., 1977); David Hull, Philosophy of Biological Science
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974), Chapter 1. Hull argues
that even within biology the attempt to reduce Mendelian genetics to
molecular genetics is so massively complex as to be unworthy of the effort;
it is a case of replacement rather than reduction (p. 44).
5. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1978), p. 65.
6. Ibid., p. 80.
7. Ibid., p. 71.
8. Ibid., p. 195.
9. Ibid., p. 71; pp. 76-77.
10. For Wilson's most direct statement on this, cf. Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 27-31.
11. On Human Nature, p. 201.
12. Ibid., Chapter 8.
13. Ibid., p. 190.
14. Ibid., p. 192.
15. Ibid., Chapter 9.
16. Ibid., pp. 196-197.
17. cf. Ibid., p. 208.
18. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, p. 3.
Josh Dougherty
news:bnpd2k$21c$1...@reader2.panix.com...
Sociobiology, a critique actually, which asserts that such ideas are
religious and not scientific in character, or rather a kind of religious
scientism based fundamentally on basic assumptions of faith not scientific
method. It's pretty interesting. I'll post it to a new thread.
Josh Dougherty
Matt
> James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com>:
>> ...
>> If it was really such a limb, we would not see so many among
>> you lot trying to argue that men have no fixed nature at all.
>
> Merely saying that people you disagree with are against
> something is not much of an argument in its favor. Furthermore,
> I don't think anyone in this discussion has argued that humans
> have "no fixed nature at all", if I'm making the right assumption
> about what you mean by that. Natural Law fans do not claim
> that humans have some fixed nature and some not so fixed, but
> profess to be sure that human nature is very much fixed, and
> to know pretty much what it is, too. And -- big surprise --
> among Natural Law advocates of the classical liberal persuasion,
> this turns out to be that Natural Law accords with classical
> liberal ideas. In other words, in advocating Natural Law you
> appear to be grinding an ideological axe, and you have to
> expect that sort of thing will get people excited about
> grinding _their_ axes.
I think you may have it backwards. I suspect most classical liberals
believe, implicitly or explictly, in natural rights, and that belief
shaped their belief in classical liberalism, and not the other way
around. Saying that people came up with their philosophy in order to
justify their politics may be a nice rhetorical jibe, but I don't think
it holds true in this case.
Exceptions might include classical liberals who arrived at liberalism
from a utilitarian philosophy, but, unsurprisingly, you don't often see
these people advocating natural rights theory.
--
Matt
Constantinople
> But this doesn't refute my inference, because that wasn't my
> inference. ...unless you're claiming that some mysterious disease
> ravaged Russia during the 90s that wasn't there during the 80s. You
> were talking about social systems. What happened was there was a
> human choice to change from one social system to another, and this
> change increased deaths on the order of millions. Apparently by your
> theory, that would be a departure from the ESS.
Fine, whatever. I don't know what you're talking about, as I stated
repeatedly, and repeatedly you have failed to clarify. What millions, dying
how, where, when, under what circumstances. Murdered by the Russian mob?
What?
>> >> And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death
>> >> struggle.
>> >
>> > What does that mean?
>>
>> Evolution occurs by a process of natural selection. Natural selection
>> involves individuals dying.
>
> I can see that reasoning being part, but I see no reason why
> "evolution" is limited to that.
I'm not talking about evolution-in-quotes. I'm talking about actual
biological evolution.
>> >> We have the instincts that we have because people without those
>> >> instincts died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of
>> >> life-and-death struggle.
>> >
>> > Why?
>>
>> Because it's instinctive. Everything that's part of us this way got
>> that way because people who did not share it died out.
>
> That's nothing but an assertion.
If you want to argue with the Darwinian theory of natural selection, you
need to do more than to call it "an assertion".
>> > It seems to me that slave owners in, for instance pre-Civil War
>> > US, had a very strong desire to keep their slaves alive for as long
>> > as possible,
>>
>> In some instances it is possible that slaves might live longer than
>> non- slaves. But our instincts are formed by the *general case* over
>> millenia.
>>
>> That's not saying I agree with you about the supposed longevity and
>> reproductive success of slaves in the old South. I think it is absurd
>> to think that slave owners took care of their slaves better than
>> those slaves would have taken care of themselves had they been free,
>
> That would depend on their environment under "freedom". If they were
> suddenly "free", but had no land, they might be a few days away from
> death, while before they had a basically assured means of survival.
> In any case, slave-owners routinely argued that this was a mutually
> beneficial relationship, and many slaves even believed this, some even
> after seeing the particular environment of freedom they were left in
> upon their liberation.
I see, so you believe the argument of slave owners, using as your
justification for the truth of their argument, your claim that "many"
slaves fell for it. That's a pretty weak argument.
>> though if you want to show statistics, go ahead. I'm aware of at
>> least one
> way in
>> which becoming enslaved drastically shortened a person's life
>> expectation: many slaves died on the way over to the US from Africa.
>
> But someone who's a slave in the US doesn't make decisions about his
> "evolution" based on what might have happened to him in the past when
> he made the journey. If he's in the US he made it, and the journey is
> no longer a risk to his evolution. So that should play no part in his
> survival strategy.
The death of slaves on the way over is merely an example of the low value
that slave-owners placed on the slaves. If slaves were so valuable to the
owners, they would not have died. It's obvious that the condition of a
slaves is almost always condition of grave personal danger, and I would be
surprised to discover that slaves actually were safer than free men in the
South. Even if they were, which I doubt, they generally are not, and it's
the general case that determines the instincts that evolve.
>> > and to keep them reproducing, so that the slave-owner could
>> > continue to own "all their increase" as was common on legal
>> > contracts of slave property.
>> >
>> > And if this is so against our "nature" and we instinctively hate it
>> > universally, why did such systems last for thousands of years,
>> > probably with the vast majority of those years being without
>> > violent uprisings?
>>
>> But there were violent uprisings.
>
> I'm not totally familiar with the history, but I assume there were
> long periods where there were not. Unless you're not paying
> attention, there "were violent uprisings" against the capitalist
> system too (something called the Cold War and falling "dominoes", with
> "violent uprisings" everywhere) and they continue today, like Bolivia
> and other places, some violent, some not. Apparently all that needs
> to happen is for these uprisings to succeed and put in its place
> something better, and then future ESS fans will look back and say
> "see, capitalism was a divergence from ESS all along".
I notice the change of subject. We have established that slaves do
instinctively hate their situation of slavery, as evidenced by the violent
uprisings and the tremendous brutality required to crush them, and as
evidenced by the necessity of a constant application of pain and fear to
keep the slaves down, and as evidenced by slave escapes.
Now you are switching the subject away from the question of slavery. You
note that the USSR expanded its empire to many places all over the world,
conquering nation after nation. We can conclude from this that the Soviets
hated their situation of not being the masters of a world empire. Indeed,
we can. But the tremendous aggression of the Soviet state is not generally
shared by humanity. Most people are not so aggressive; most people are
mainly concerned with getting along, minding their own business,
maintaining good relations with their neighbors. So the aggressiveness of
the Soviet empire is exceptional; it is not the rule.
>> The South was boiling with slave revolts. That these uprisings were
> suppressed only with tremendous
>> brutality demonstrates the ferocity of the hatred that slaves felt
>> for their condition and for their masters. Moreover the constant
>> corporal punishment of slaves that was practiced in the old South
>> demonstrates that people did not spontaneously make good slaves, but
>> had to be forced on a daily basis by the regular application of pain
>> and fear.
>
> But this is only the US South, and I don't necessarily believe this
> was the case all or most of the time, up until the end. Slavery
> existed for hundreds or thousands of years all over the place. I
> highly doubt there were "boiling slave revolts" everywhere all or most
> of the time. I'd assume that most slaves accepted their socially
> assigned roles the vast majority of the time. Were there constant
> "boiling slave revolts" all over Egypt during the Pharoahs? I expect
> there were probably some, but I highly doubt that was the status
> quo...kinda like contemporary world capitalism.
I find your impression of slavery throughout history to be untenable. We
have the story of Spartacus. We have the story of the Jewish slaves in
Egypt. My general impression of slaves throughout history is that they were
generally made up of conquered people. That demonstrates pretty definitely
that people hated being slaves.
>> In contrast, neighbors who obey the ESS with respect to each other
>> can get along just fine all their lives, neither one ever so much as
>> laying a finger, or threatening to lay a finger, on the other. The
>> relationship of good neighbors is obviously one that we *do not*
>> instinctively hate, in contrast to the relationship of the master
>> with the slave, with the whipping, with the fear, with the escapes
>> and capture of escaped slaves, with the bodily mutilation, with the
>> frequent slave revolts and killing of masters.
>>
>> The difference between these two kinds of relationships (between
>> typical neighbors, versus, between typical master and slave) could
>> hardly be more stark.
>
> Of course, but the master slave relationship implies an economic
> relationship and an economic system of power and powerless. A "good
> neighbor" relationship could exist in any place in the world under
> virtually any political or economic system.
Yes, under any political or economic system, two particular individuals can
choose to follow the ESS with each other, e.g., respect each other's person
and property, and the result is that they don't need to . However, if all
or almost all individuals are respecting most other individuals in this way
then the economic system can't be a command economy, since a command
economy requires the violation of ESS by the state. So (1) the ESS can be
followed anywhere by individual people, but (2) where it is generally
followed, then the kinds of political and economic systems are constrained.
Employer/employee and business/business and business/customer
relationships, in a market, generally are like the good neighbor
relationship described above, i.e., nobody takes the whip to anybody else,
nobody needs to. Master/slave is different from all these.
Constantinople
@nwrdny02.gnilink.net:
I've been a libertarian longer that I've seriously subscribed to an
explicit natural law theory. It may be that I intuited such a theory. The
best I can recall, at one time I believed that the error of communists
and others was factual, concerning the economic outcome of socialist
arrangements. I guess that would have made me a utilitarian advocate. My
arguments were economic, not moral. However, my underlying motivation was
not economic calculation; it was a personal hostility to slavery and
victimization in all its degrees. If I had thought about it seriously,
even then I might have realized I subscribed to a theory of natural law,
because obviously I believed that there was such a thing as
victimization, and that this was not a mere arbitrary category. I must
simply not have thought about it systematically.
Josh Dougherty
The claim in this one explanation is not the simple fact that you're both
libertarians.
> > Both you and he also find the pretense of science or "nature"
> > compelling as a legitimizing or objectifying mechanism for this
> > anti-thesis,
>
> Restated in a less unfriendly way, we care about reality, and
> we are sensitive to reality.
Yet another explanation.
(snip)
> > rejecting "environmental" factors, like intensely
> > ideological Cold War upbringings or maladjusted relationships to
> > parental figures, which are probably the more likely basis.
>
> Yes, it might be that I only believe what I do because of my
> environment, rather than because I have good reasons for
> believing the things I do. That is one thing that my
> participation in discussion tests. And you haven't really
> described me here; you've made a general statement about all
> of us, i.e., that we might not have good reasons for
> believing as we do.
I wasn't making claims about "all of you".
> > Also,
> > James seems to have been around the block quite a few times and has
> > developed, through experience, a vast circular self-reinforcing
> > archive from which all events of history or present can be explained
> > and accounted for through the worldview, or at least, all events of
> > history can be adapted, or an angle can be found to make each
> > historical event fit the worldview.
>
> I should not be too surprising that it can take a long time
> and a lot of meditation for a person to develop arguments
> are are likely to persuade me of something novel to me.
>
> I don't see any need to respond to your accusations that
> James's arguments are "circular" and that he forces events
> to "fit" his worldview. Obviously I disagree with you on
> this; not much more needs to be said.
Agreed.
> > This surely is a skill which far
> > exceeds your own...at least until you encountered James, and is
> > therefore quite impressive and appealing to someone with the exact
> > same fundamental anti-thesis.
>
> Or in other words, his arguments are well-developed, long
> and carefully thought out. You admit this, though of course
> you try to spin it in a negative way. Obviously I disagree
> with your negative spin.
Sure. But my 'admitting' that his arguments (or many of them at least) are
"well-developed" or "carefully thought out" within their own framework
doesn't at all make them right, nor necessarily convincing to many others
that aren't predisposed to want to accept them. Very good gibberish and
deceptions are usually well-developed and carefully thought out.
> > As such, Donald's evangelics go down like a cool glass of lemonade on
> > a warm summers day, reinforcing and strengthening the strongly shared
> > pre-existing worldview, while G*rd*n's ideas crash into its wall like
> > a battering ram,
>
> Gordon does not argue from common ground. That's the
> beginning and the end of it. He does not persuade me much of
> the time simply because I do not share his assumptions.
That's the way it seems to work around here.
> However, Gordon does persuade me some of the time.
>
> > seeming to share some characteristics with the source
> > of the organizing principle, and therefore creating a strong cognitive
> > dissonance, and a swift reflexive rejection akin to the reflex of
> > someone who's just touched a hot stove.
> >
> > But that's just one explanation.
>
> Gordon's reasoning often fails to engage my mind because he
> doesn't start from ground that I share. James's reasoning
> engages my mind because he does start from ground that I
> share.
>
> Nor should it be surprising that I tend to disagree on many
> things from Gordon. Since he starts somewhere else from me,
> he ends up somewhere else from me.
Ok. It was just one explanation.
Josh
Gabrielle Rapagnetta
>Matt wrote:
[snipped a little bit]
>> I suspect most classical liberals
>> believe, implicitly or explictly, in natural rights, and that belief
>> shaped their belief in classical liberalism, and not the other way
>> around. Saying that people came up with their philosophy in order to
>> justify their politics may be a nice rhetorical jibe, but I don't think
>> it holds true in this case.
>>
>> Exceptions might include classical liberals who arrived at liberalism
>> from a utilitarian philosophy, but, unsurprisingly, you don't often see
>> these people advocating natural rights theory.
>
>I've been a libertarian longer that I've seriously subscribed to an
>explicit natural law theory. It may be that I intuited such a theory. The
>best I can recall, at one time I believed that the error of communists
>and others was factual, concerning the economic outcome of socialist
>arrangements. I guess that would have made me a utilitarian advocate.
I don't think looking for faults in socialist systems is enough to
qualify you as utilitarian -- especially given your absolute refusal
to acknowledge any shortcomings or dangers of capitalism.
You strike me as particularly non-utilitarian as your ideology is
driven by faith and reactionism rather than honest analysis.
Dan Clore
> "Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in
> news:zDWnb.9894$X22....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
> The death of slaves on the way over is merely an example of the low value
> that slave-owners placed on the slaves. If slaves were so valuable to the
> owners, they would not have died. It's obvious that the condition of a
> slaves is almost always condition of grave personal danger, and I would be
> surprised to discover that slaves actually were safer than free men in the
> South. Even if they were, which I doubt, they generally are not, and it's
> the general case that determines the instincts that evolve.
I'd bet that the condition of slaves who accepted their
enslavement was considerably safer than that of those who
did not.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
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Josh Dougherty
> "Josh Dougherty" <jdoc1...@earthlink.net> wrote in
> news:zDWnb.9894$X22....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
>
>
> > But this doesn't refute my inference, because that wasn't my
> > inference. ...unless you're claiming that some mysterious disease
> > ravaged Russia during the 90s that wasn't there during the 80s. You
> > were talking about social systems. What happened was there was a
> > human choice to change from one social system to another, and this
> > change increased deaths on the order of millions. Apparently by your
> > theory, that would be a departure from the ESS.
>
> Fine, whatever. I don't know what you're talking about, as I stated
> repeatedly, and repeatedly you have failed to clarify. What millions,
dying
> how, where, when, under what circumstances. Murdered by the Russian mob?
> What?
There was a big increase in death rates since 1989 in Russia, I don't have
any particular source on hand for this at the moment, but I've read about it
a number of times before. Others might have a link or source on hand, or
I'll try to find one.
> >> >> And yes, our instincts *are* formed through the life and death
> >> >> struggle.
> >> >
> >> > What does that mean?
> >>
> >> Evolution occurs by a process of natural selection. Natural selection
> >> involves individuals dying.
> >
> > I can see that reasoning being part, but I see no reason why
> > "evolution" is limited to that.
>
> I'm not talking about evolution-in-quotes. I'm talking about actual
> biological evolution.
>
> >> >> We have the instincts that we have because people without those
> >> >> instincts died. Hatred of being enslaved is therefore a matter of
> >> >> life-and-death struggle.
> >> >
> >> > Why?
> >>
> >> Because it's instinctive. Everything that's part of us this way got
> >> that way because people who did not share it died out.
> >
> > That's nothing but an assertion.
>
> If you want to argue with the Darwinian theory of natural selection, you
> need to do more than to call it "an assertion".
I think plenty of people have argued the flaws of Darwinian theory before
me, and surely have done a much better job. But I've seen evolution in
social patterns that appear to have nothing to do with "people dying" and
have occurred in short time spans. I've seen changes in the type of
war-waging people will accept, the types of casualties they will accept in
war, and I've seen changes in the way people choose to rebel against
behavior they find abhorrent by war makers. This apparently has had nothing
to do with Darwinian "natural selection", since these changes have occurred
in time spans which would rule out Darwism, but it does seem to be a
discernable social behavioral difference than just a few decades ago.
> >> > It seems to me that slave owners in, for instance pre-Civil War
> >> > US, had a very strong desire to keep their slaves alive for as long
> >> > as possible,
> >>
> >> In some instances it is possible that slaves might live longer than
> >> non- slaves. But our instincts are formed by the *general case* over
> >> millenia.
> >>
> >> That's not saying I agree with you about the supposed longevity and
> >> reproductive success of slaves in the old South. I think it is absurd
> >> to think that slave owners took care of their slaves better than
> >> those slaves would have taken care of themselves had they been free,
> >
> > That would depend on their environment under "freedom". If they were
> > suddenly "free", but had no land, they might be a few days away from
> > death, while before they had a basically assured means of survival.
> > In any case, slave-owners routinely argued that this was a mutually
> > beneficial relationship, and many slaves even believed this, some even
> > after seeing the particular environment of freedom they were left in
> > upon their liberation.
>
> I see, so you believe the argument of slave owners, using as your
> justification for the truth of their argument, your claim that "many"
> slaves fell for it. That's a pretty weak argument.
I don't "believe" any of it. But it doesn't seem any less tenable than your
argument.
We haven't established this "instinct", or even that this "hatred" was
present in past centuries or millenia any more than it's present in low wage
workers today, or the mass of people on the bottom of the pyramid of global
capitalism.
> as evidenced by the violent uprisings and the tremendous brutality
required to crush them, and as
> evidenced by the necessity of a constant application of pain and fear to
> keep the slaves down, and as evidenced by slave escapes.
>
> Now you are switching the subject away from the question of slavery. You
> note that the USSR expanded its empire to many places all over the world,
No i don't, I said nothing resembling this.
> conquering nation after nation. We can conclude from this that the Soviets
> hated their situation of not being the masters of a world empire. Indeed,
> we can. But the tremendous aggression of the Soviet state is not generally
> shared by humanity. Most people are not so aggressive; most people are
> mainly concerned with getting along, minding their own business,
> maintaining good relations with their neighbors. So the aggressiveness of
> the Soviet empire is exceptional; it is not the rule.
The agent of violent uprisings of peoples in China, Vietnam, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Guatemala, Bolivia...etc. etc. was not the "USSR expanding its
empire". It was, according to this theory, the establishment that "slaves",
or their equivalent under capitalism, whatever term you'd like,
"*instinctively* hate their situation", "as evidenced by the violent
uprisings and tremendous brutality required to crush them".
It seems to me that if I adopt this theory, and use slavery as a guide,
that -- even if the particular ideology guiding these revolts in this
particular historical case was not successful in replacing it with a
manifestly better outcome -- that we have "established" that there is an
"instinct" against capitalism and its depradations found in human nature.
If you want to say that all these violent uprisings were merely the
dastardly deeds of the USSR, then we might as well say that the agent of
slave uprisings in the US or Egypt was nothing more that the work of
abolitionist agitators putting funny ideas into happy slaves' heads, and not
any "instinct" or "human nature".
> >> The South was boiling with slave revolts. That these uprisings were
> > suppressed only with tremendous
> >> brutality demonstrates the ferocity of the hatred that slaves felt
> >> for their condition and for their masters. Moreover the constant
> >> corporal punishment of slaves that was practiced in the old South
> >> demonstrates that people did not spontaneously make good slaves, but
> >> had to be forced on a daily basis by the regular application of pain
> >> and fear.
> >
> > But this is only the US South, and I don't necessarily believe this
> > was the case all or most of the time, up until the end. Slavery
> > existed for hundreds or thousands of years all over the place. I
> > highly doubt there were "boiling slave revolts" everywhere all or most
> > of the time. I'd assume that most slaves accepted their socially
> > assigned roles the vast majority of the time. Were there constant
> > "boiling slave revolts" all over Egypt during the Pharoahs? I expect
> > there were probably some, but I highly doubt that was the status
> > quo...kinda like contemporary world capitalism.
>
> I find your impression of slavery throughout history to be untenable. We
> have the story of Spartacus. We have the story of the Jewish slaves in
> Egypt. My general impression of slaves throughout history is that they
were
> generally made up of conquered people. That demonstrates pretty definitely
> that people hated being slaves.
Over a couple thousand years of slave society history, you cite TWO examples
of slave revolt. Where's all the rest of this time? I've already cited
half a dozen for about 50 years.
(snip restatement of assumptions)