I know many religious people hate Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and perhaps some of their opinions are over the top. Nevertheless, this talk on morality and science covers some difficult and fascinating problems that are relevant for any secular theory of ethics.
There is no doubt we have certain innate moral feelings, ideas and propensities: these are the result of evolution by natural selection. But trying to justify an ethical system by simply appealing to this nature is unsound. It commits the appeal to nature fallacy. One needs a rational justification for ethical ends and how to behave to achieve these ends.
I like the comments of Harris on how standard consequentialism needs to be revised and how notions of justice and fairness are not incompatible with a consequentialist theory of ethics.
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label morality. Show all posts
Monday, April 1, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
Patricia Churchland on Morality and the Mammalian Brain
This is an interesting talk by Patricia Churchland on ethics, evolution, and the brain.
What was particularly interesting are the comments (from 28.10) on the way in which the evolutionary expansion of the forebrain in mammals and in humans allows greater prediction and anticipation of future events and social problems. That is no doubt a cause of the successful ability of humans to be social and live in groups.
While it is vitally important to understand what science has to say about the evolution of human moral ideas, just because we can identify some innate senses of right and wrong (which humans have evolved through social life in communities during our evolutionary history), it does not mean that we have found an objective theory of morality, one which that can function as a consistent, logical and universal system for justifying our moral choices, both now and in the past. This is in fact committing the appeal to nature fallacy.
The well-known fact that there is a vast chasm between what can be regarded as moral in one society and immoral in another demonstrates that, like our language faculty (which also has a biological basis), our innate moral intuition can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times (just as our core language faculty leads to vastly different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax).
In the end, only an objective theory of morality (e.g., Kantian ethics, utilitarianism) can demonstrate that some things are immoral today and also immoral in the past or future. So it turns out the innate sense of right and wrong is not the same thing as an objective theory of morality.
What was particularly interesting are the comments (from 28.10) on the way in which the evolutionary expansion of the forebrain in mammals and in humans allows greater prediction and anticipation of future events and social problems. That is no doubt a cause of the successful ability of humans to be social and live in groups.
While it is vitally important to understand what science has to say about the evolution of human moral ideas, just because we can identify some innate senses of right and wrong (which humans have evolved through social life in communities during our evolutionary history), it does not mean that we have found an objective theory of morality, one which that can function as a consistent, logical and universal system for justifying our moral choices, both now and in the past. This is in fact committing the appeal to nature fallacy.
The well-known fact that there is a vast chasm between what can be regarded as moral in one society and immoral in another demonstrates that, like our language faculty (which also has a biological basis), our innate moral intuition can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times (just as our core language faculty leads to vastly different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax).
In the end, only an objective theory of morality (e.g., Kantian ethics, utilitarianism) can demonstrate that some things are immoral today and also immoral in the past or future. So it turns out the innate sense of right and wrong is not the same thing as an objective theory of morality.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
If Fractional Reserve Banking is Fraudulent, Why isn’t the Insurance Industry Fraud?
That is the question never properly answered by opponents of fractional reserve banking (FRB), and a blatant logical contradiction in their anti-FRB position.
The Rothbardians might argue as follows: an institution taking money from its clients and contractually obliged to return to them exactly what they are rightly entitled to is fraudulent when such an institution could never honour all the clients’ claims at one time, if all or even a large number required some or all of the money they are entitled to. If so, they have destroyed the basis of the insurance industry, as has been pointed out by Gene Callahan here (“The ‘Immorality’ of Fractional Reserve Banking Revisited,” May 23, 2009).
The argument that FRB is fraudulent merely because there are certain possible circumstances when the bank cannot fulfil its promise to pay all its clients on demand is utterly unconvincing.
First, virtually all business investment and insurance industries could be regarded as inherently unstable, like FRB, because the future is uncertain. But the insurance industry – just like FRB – can be operated profitably over long periods and is stable. When some unforeseen event happens like a massive natural disaster, the insurance companies could be overwhelmed by claims and collapse, because they cannot pay. If all or a very large number of the policy-holders of an insurance company suddenly needed insurance payments over a brief period, the company might not be able to honour all its claims or find a credit line to allow it to do so. But that is not an even remotely serious argument against insurance, because all business activity involves risk and uncertainty, and both clients of a business and the business itself can never escape uncertainty and the possibility that the business’s contracts might not be honoured.
In the same way, FRB might be stable over long periods. But, when some unforeseen event happens (a collapse in export demand, rumours about some bank, a change in subjective business expectations), the FRB bank might be overwhelmed by a bank run and collapse, because it cannot pay. The issue is whether it can meet demand from its depositors out of reserves, sale of financial assets and loans from other banks, without a liquidity crisis. Many FR banks are perfectly capable of doing that in a crisis, while others are not. That some banks cannot honour all their claims under certain unusual circumstances is not a serious moral argument against FRB. If it were, then all insurance industries would be unacceptable on moral grounds as well.
The anti-FRB libertarians will no doubt then fall back on the argument that insurance is not fraudulent because when you pay premiums that money becomes the property of the insurance company, and is not money retained as your property, whereas in FRB you do retain ownership of your demand deposit money. But that shows the most contemptible ignorance of the nature of FRB.
If you put your money into a mere holding warehouse, then the owners or managers of the warehouse have no property rights with respect to your money stored there (such money is legally known as a depositum, which means “something given or entrusted to another for safe-keeping”). The identical deposit must be returned to the owner or, in legal terms, it must be returned in specie (“in its own form”).
But, when a modern fractional reserve bank takes money for a new deposit, this is actually a personal loan to the bank, which is why the bank can pay interest for it. The money in the deposit becomes the property of the bank. The money is a loan, or legally a mutuum, which means “a contract under which a thing is lent which is to be consumed and therefore is to be returned in kind” (the modern sense of the English word “deposit” is thus misleading when it refers to money in fractional reserve banking). The depositor who lends the money gets a credit (or IOU) from the bank and a promise to pay interest: “the very essence of banking is to receive money as a [m]utuum” (MacLeod 1902: 318). The money has been “sold” to the bank as a mutuum and is to be returned in genere (“in general form”), which means you do not necessarily get the same money back, but just an equivalent amount with interest. In demand deposits, you have lost your absolute property rights to the money when you lent it to the bank, and instead have entered into a contract with the bank to allow them to use it, even though they are obliged to return to you on demand money to the same amount in whole or in part from their other reserves, other unused deposits, sale of financial assets or lending from other banks (MacLeod 1902: 324). This can also be expressed in this way:
The Rothbardians like to tout themselves as the most pure, heroic defenders of free markets. They are not. The anti-FRB Rothbardians are coercive, anti-freedom violators of private liberty and free contract in their opposition to FRB.
Appendix 1: Fractional Reserve Banking under Roman Law
I’ll quickly deal with the status of FRB in ancient Rome here, because when discussing the subject you frequently find anti-FRB libertarians invoking the work of Huerta de Soto (2006), and arguing that FRB was illegal or considered immoral at Rome.
In fact, Roman law appears to have allowed FRB under the mutuum contract, a real contract under which a fungible good like money was lent to a bank and ownership of the money passed to the bank. The bank was required to return an equivalent amount of money, after a certain time or on demand.
In Roman law, there were a number of types of real contract (contracts re), as follows:
In the time of the Roman jurists Ulpian/Gnaeus Domitius Annius Ulpianus (c. 170–223 AD) and Papinian/Aemilius Papinianus (142–212 AD), however, it appears that the depositum irregulare was merely considered to be a type of mutuum, and it may well be that the whole legal concept of depositum irregulare is a development of later legal theorists, unknown to jurists of the second or third century AD (Oudshoorn 2007: 135–136; cf. Adams 1962; for the specialist literature, see Seidl 1951; Geiger 1961; Litewski 1974; and Gordon 1982). Therefore the mutuum was the legal framework and concept under which fractional reserve banking was conducted in ancient Rome (Zimmermann 1990: 218). Whether the mutuum was a time deposit or a demand deposit depended on the type of contract between the two parties, and there is no reason to think that fractional reserve banking was held as either immoral or illegal (for how Roman law influenced Medieval law on banking, see Dotson 2004: 89–92).
The evidence for the existence of FRB in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is overwhelming (Harris 2006: 11; Harris 2011: 236). There is not one shred of evidence that it was regarded as immoral or prosecuted as a crime.
But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in fact the Romans did regard FRB as immoral. Even if correct, that would be a red herring and an informal fallacy called the appeal to tradition/argumentum ad antiquitatem, irrelevant to the question whether in the modern world FRB is immoral and fraudulent. The Romans, for example, had sumptuary laws to prohibit the consumption of certain luxury goods, supposedly to stop the spread of immoral luxury and preventing the moral and physical health of Romans from degenerating. Is that a remotely convincing argument by itself for prohibiting consumption of certain luxury goods today? Not in the least.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, B. 1962. “Haben die Römer depositum irregulare und Darlehen unterschieden,” Studia et documenta historiae et iuris 28: 360–371.
Dotson, John E. 2004. “Banks and Banking,” in C. Kleinhenz (ed.), Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1, A to K, Routledge, London. 89–92.
Geiger K. 1961. Das depositum irregulare als Kreditgeschäft, Freiburg.
Gordon W. M. 1982. “Observations on depositum irregulare, III,” in Studi in onore di Arnaldo Biscardi (vol. 3), Ed. Cisalpino-La Goliardica, Milan. 363–372.
Harris, W. V. 2006. “A Revisionist View of Roman Money,” Journal of Roman Studies 96: 1–24.
Harris, W. V. 2011. Rome’s Imperial Economy. Twelve Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Huerta de Soto, J. 2006. Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles (trans. M. A. Stroup), Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.
Johnson, J. F. 1911. Banking Principles, Alexander Hamilton Institute, New York.
Litewski W. 1974. “Le dépôt irrégulier,” Revue internationale des droits de l’Antiquité 21: 215–262.
MacLeod, H. D. 1902. Theory and Practice of Banking (6th edn), Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, London.
Seidl, E. 1951. “Der Eigentumsübergang beim Darlehen und Depositum irregular,” in Festschrift für F. Schulz, Böhlau, Weimar. 373–379.
Selgin, G. 2000. “Should We Let Banks Create Money?” Independent Review 5.1: 93–100.
Selgin, G. A., and White L. H. 1996. “In Defense of Fiduciary Media – or, We are Not Devo(lutionists), We are Misesians!,” Review of Austrian Economics 9.2: 83–107.
Oudshoorn, J. G. 2007. The Relationship Between Roman and Local Law in the Babatha and Salome Komaise Archives: General Analysis and Three Case Studies on Law of Succession, Guardianship and Marriage, Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Zimmermann, R. 1990. The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition, Juta & Co, Cape Town.
The Rothbardians might argue as follows: an institution taking money from its clients and contractually obliged to return to them exactly what they are rightly entitled to is fraudulent when such an institution could never honour all the clients’ claims at one time, if all or even a large number required some or all of the money they are entitled to. If so, they have destroyed the basis of the insurance industry, as has been pointed out by Gene Callahan here (“The ‘Immorality’ of Fractional Reserve Banking Revisited,” May 23, 2009).
The argument that FRB is fraudulent merely because there are certain possible circumstances when the bank cannot fulfil its promise to pay all its clients on demand is utterly unconvincing.
First, virtually all business investment and insurance industries could be regarded as inherently unstable, like FRB, because the future is uncertain. But the insurance industry – just like FRB – can be operated profitably over long periods and is stable. When some unforeseen event happens like a massive natural disaster, the insurance companies could be overwhelmed by claims and collapse, because they cannot pay. If all or a very large number of the policy-holders of an insurance company suddenly needed insurance payments over a brief period, the company might not be able to honour all its claims or find a credit line to allow it to do so. But that is not an even remotely serious argument against insurance, because all business activity involves risk and uncertainty, and both clients of a business and the business itself can never escape uncertainty and the possibility that the business’s contracts might not be honoured.
In the same way, FRB might be stable over long periods. But, when some unforeseen event happens (a collapse in export demand, rumours about some bank, a change in subjective business expectations), the FRB bank might be overwhelmed by a bank run and collapse, because it cannot pay. The issue is whether it can meet demand from its depositors out of reserves, sale of financial assets and loans from other banks, without a liquidity crisis. Many FR banks are perfectly capable of doing that in a crisis, while others are not. That some banks cannot honour all their claims under certain unusual circumstances is not a serious moral argument against FRB. If it were, then all insurance industries would be unacceptable on moral grounds as well.
The anti-FRB libertarians will no doubt then fall back on the argument that insurance is not fraudulent because when you pay premiums that money becomes the property of the insurance company, and is not money retained as your property, whereas in FRB you do retain ownership of your demand deposit money. But that shows the most contemptible ignorance of the nature of FRB.
If you put your money into a mere holding warehouse, then the owners or managers of the warehouse have no property rights with respect to your money stored there (such money is legally known as a depositum, which means “something given or entrusted to another for safe-keeping”). The identical deposit must be returned to the owner or, in legal terms, it must be returned in specie (“in its own form”).
But, when a modern fractional reserve bank takes money for a new deposit, this is actually a personal loan to the bank, which is why the bank can pay interest for it. The money in the deposit becomes the property of the bank. The money is a loan, or legally a mutuum, which means “a contract under which a thing is lent which is to be consumed and therefore is to be returned in kind” (the modern sense of the English word “deposit” is thus misleading when it refers to money in fractional reserve banking). The depositor who lends the money gets a credit (or IOU) from the bank and a promise to pay interest: “the very essence of banking is to receive money as a [m]utuum” (MacLeod 1902: 318). The money has been “sold” to the bank as a mutuum and is to be returned in genere (“in general form”), which means you do not necessarily get the same money back, but just an equivalent amount with interest. In demand deposits, you have lost your absolute property rights to the money when you lent it to the bank, and instead have entered into a contract with the bank to allow them to use it, even though they are obliged to return to you on demand money to the same amount in whole or in part from their other reserves, other unused deposits, sale of financial assets or lending from other banks (MacLeod 1902: 324). This can also be expressed in this way:
“General deposits are obligations of the bank to pay money. They may be payable on demand or at a stated time in the future. The great bulk of commercial bank deposits are payable on demand. They create between the bank and the customer the relation of debtor and creditor, the title to the deposit passing to the bank, while the depositor acquires a right to receive a stated sum of money” (Johnson 1911: 117).It is certainly true that many members of the public may be ignorant of these facts above. Yet if you have failed to read your fractional reserve bank contract, whose fault is that? As a client, you ought to understand the contract that you sign. The solution to the problem of modern people not understanding the nature of fractional reserve banking is simply legislation to make banks explicitly explain to potential customers how FRB works. Specifying to clients that the property rights to the money had passed to the bank and in return an IOU or credit had been granted to the depositor, that the bank lends your money out, and that it will return not the same money but other money from its reserves will solve the moral problem of clients not understanding the nature of FRB. Under these circumstances, FRB is not fraud. It is a free contract.
The Rothbardians like to tout themselves as the most pure, heroic defenders of free markets. They are not. The anti-FRB Rothbardians are coercive, anti-freedom violators of private liberty and free contract in their opposition to FRB.
Appendix 1: Fractional Reserve Banking under Roman Law
I’ll quickly deal with the status of FRB in ancient Rome here, because when discussing the subject you frequently find anti-FRB libertarians invoking the work of Huerta de Soto (2006), and arguing that FRB was illegal or considered immoral at Rome.
In fact, Roman law appears to have allowed FRB under the mutuum contract, a real contract under which a fungible good like money was lent to a bank and ownership of the money passed to the bank. The bank was required to return an equivalent amount of money, after a certain time or on demand.
In Roman law, there were a number of types of real contract (contracts re), as follows:
(1) mutuum (loan for consumption);In Roman law, there was also a type of contract called the depositum irregulare which, when involving money, allowed the transferral of ownership (dominium) of the money. Because money can be regarded as representing a certain value, what is deposited is a quantity of a thing (quantitas) and not an individual thing itself (corpus). The depositor thus receives back the same quantity (tantundem) of money, not the same money itself (Zimmermann 1990: 215–216).
(2) commodatum (loan for use);
(3) pignus (pledge), and
(4) depositum or depositum regulare (bailment for safe keeping).
In the time of the Roman jurists Ulpian/Gnaeus Domitius Annius Ulpianus (c. 170–223 AD) and Papinian/Aemilius Papinianus (142–212 AD), however, it appears that the depositum irregulare was merely considered to be a type of mutuum, and it may well be that the whole legal concept of depositum irregulare is a development of later legal theorists, unknown to jurists of the second or third century AD (Oudshoorn 2007: 135–136; cf. Adams 1962; for the specialist literature, see Seidl 1951; Geiger 1961; Litewski 1974; and Gordon 1982). Therefore the mutuum was the legal framework and concept under which fractional reserve banking was conducted in ancient Rome (Zimmermann 1990: 218). Whether the mutuum was a time deposit or a demand deposit depended on the type of contract between the two parties, and there is no reason to think that fractional reserve banking was held as either immoral or illegal (for how Roman law influenced Medieval law on banking, see Dotson 2004: 89–92).
The evidence for the existence of FRB in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire is overwhelming (Harris 2006: 11; Harris 2011: 236). There is not one shred of evidence that it was regarded as immoral or prosecuted as a crime.
But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in fact the Romans did regard FRB as immoral. Even if correct, that would be a red herring and an informal fallacy called the appeal to tradition/argumentum ad antiquitatem, irrelevant to the question whether in the modern world FRB is immoral and fraudulent. The Romans, for example, had sumptuary laws to prohibit the consumption of certain luxury goods, supposedly to stop the spread of immoral luxury and preventing the moral and physical health of Romans from degenerating. Is that a remotely convincing argument by itself for prohibiting consumption of certain luxury goods today? Not in the least.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, B. 1962. “Haben die Römer depositum irregulare und Darlehen unterschieden,” Studia et documenta historiae et iuris 28: 360–371.
Dotson, John E. 2004. “Banks and Banking,” in C. Kleinhenz (ed.), Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1, A to K, Routledge, London. 89–92.
Geiger K. 1961. Das depositum irregulare als Kreditgeschäft, Freiburg.
Gordon W. M. 1982. “Observations on depositum irregulare, III,” in Studi in onore di Arnaldo Biscardi (vol. 3), Ed. Cisalpino-La Goliardica, Milan. 363–372.
Harris, W. V. 2006. “A Revisionist View of Roman Money,” Journal of Roman Studies 96: 1–24.
Harris, W. V. 2011. Rome’s Imperial Economy. Twelve Essays, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Huerta de Soto, J. 2006. Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles (trans. M. A. Stroup), Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.
Johnson, J. F. 1911. Banking Principles, Alexander Hamilton Institute, New York.
Litewski W. 1974. “Le dépôt irrégulier,” Revue internationale des droits de l’Antiquité 21: 215–262.
MacLeod, H. D. 1902. Theory and Practice of Banking (6th edn), Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, London.
Seidl, E. 1951. “Der Eigentumsübergang beim Darlehen und Depositum irregular,” in Festschrift für F. Schulz, Böhlau, Weimar. 373–379.
Selgin, G. 2000. “Should We Let Banks Create Money?” Independent Review 5.1: 93–100.
Selgin, G. A., and White L. H. 1996. “In Defense of Fiduciary Media – or, We are Not Devo(lutionists), We are Misesians!,” Review of Austrian Economics 9.2: 83–107.
Oudshoorn, J. G. 2007. The Relationship Between Roman and Local Law in the Babatha and Salome Komaise Archives: General Analysis and Three Case Studies on Law of Succession, Guardianship and Marriage, Brill, Leiden and Boston.
Zimmermann, R. 1990. The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundations of the Civilian Tradition, Juta & Co, Cape Town.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Hunter Gatherer Ethics?
Ethics is a complex subject, but the origin of some innate human moral intuitions is no doubt explained to some extent by evolution. Our species is about 200,000 years ago, and agriculture only emerged about 10 000 years ago. For most of our history (probably over 88% of it), we were nomadic hunter gatherers. Modern human psychology (which is partly and significantly caused by the evolved structure of the human brain) remains fundamentally the product of that evolution.
Therefore our evolutionary psychology has been shaped by hunter gatherer societies. Because of genetic differences owing to sexual reproduction and environmental influences, of course there is variation in us as well, but some core traits do seem to be very prevalent.
Many people have a visceral fear of spiders and snakes and this seems to come from our brain’s limbic system (see also Isbell 2006), itself created by the interactions of many genes by the process of evolution by natural selection.
There is strong evidence that some of our core moral intuitions are also the result of evolution. It is even likely that the sense of “fairness” or even “entitlement” leading to the existence of common property (the ancient equivalent of public goods) or sharing the wealth (e.g., egalitarian food sharing practices amongst hunter gatherers) appears to be evolved in us as an advantage for survival. Thus one could say that the desire to “spread the wealth” is not some alien, wicked propensity caused by “evil” governments: it is in our psychology, the psychology of egalitarian, food sharing hunter gatherers.
Public goods, modern welfare and social security paid for by progressive taxes are the effective modern equivalent of communal food sharing and cooperation; public property and public land the equivalent of the tribe’s common property; the widespread feelings of anger and injustice humans feel at gross inequality of wealth the equivalent of ancient egalitarianism.
The particular form that morality takes in any society is of course influenced by culture and history to a significant extent, and I do not wish to ignore the role of culture here, or suggest some vulgar genetic determinism (which I personally find distasteful). Human nature and our traits are a very complex interaction of environment, culture and genes (indeed some human traits are clearly explained more by environment and culture, than by genes). There can be many differences between what is regarded as moral in one society and another, and the innate moral faculty is probably like our innate language faculty (which also has a biological basis), and can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times, just as our core language faculty leads to different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax, even though underlying that surface diversity is Chomsky’s universal grammar, with a biological basis (attempts to deny that our language faculty is the product of evolution are disposed of by Dennett 1996: 370–400).
Of course, none of this constitutes an adequate moral defence of modern taxes or public goods, since the argument from nature is a logical fallacy. Our moral intuitions provide no objective basis for morality, any more than the mere intuition or conviction that god exists can provide any rational basis for believing in god. We do in fact have many wrong ideas or irrational emotions about the world and objects in it, from
A proper defence of what is right and wrong must come from an objective theory of ethics, not from our psychology.
Quite convincing moral justifications for government and government intervention (such as progressive taxes, basic welfare and universal health care) can easily be given through act or rule utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, the non-absolutist ethics of W. D. Ross, Rawl’s human rights objectivism, or other liberal contractarian moral theories. They could still be given even if we had no innate sense of altruism towards other people.
For free market libertarians, about the only moral theory that can be used to justify absolute property rights is natural rights/natural law ethics, which has severe flaws and is untenable (itself committing the fallacy of the argument from nature too).
Free market libertarians and Austrians face the double blow of advocating (1) things immoral by most objective ethical theories and (2) things that our innate sense of morality itself finds objectionable.
Any libertarian/Austrian faces a hard upward battle trying to convince people of ideas that (1) seem naturally repulsive and (2) can be rejected by many knowledgeable people with a background in philosophy of ethics by using rule utilitarianism, Rawls’ ethics or other theories.
The mass “conversion” of people to libertarian or Austrian philosophy (and the elimination of all taxes or public goods) is about as likely as the disappearance of the widespread human fear of snakes, which also seems to have a deeply ingrained, evolutionary and psychological basis. This of course is not a defence, or justification, of social democracy, but is a realistic statement of how things actually are with respect to human nature. By a similar process, religion, whether it is rational or not, will probably exist for a long time, for better or worse (and for the worse in my view), even though there are strong arguments against it.
So our innate psychological nature, which is a legacy of our evolutionary past, cuts both ways: it has left us with some beliefs and propensities that can be justified independently and some beliefs that cannot (sometimes in ways that are pernicious).
Moreover, in the case of inductive reasoning, we have a surprising mental process which appears to have been successful in general and allowed us to survive, but which might not be capable of rational justification, because of the notorious problem of induction (see “Risk and Uncertainty in Post Keynesian Economics,” Appendix 1: The Paradox of Induction?, December 8, 2010).
APPENDIX 1: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT?
Some people claim that the modern state has no parallel in the environment of our ancient ancestors. But the most obvious figure would be the dominant male/males of the tribe (just as in monkey and great ape groups) whose position was established by force and ability to protect other members of the group from wild animals and hostile humans from other tribes. That of course provides no serious justification for modern government or patriarchy, however.
Further Reading
Borders, M. “The Stone Age Trinity,” March 6, 2006
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/03/the-stone-age-trinity.html
Dennett, D. C. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, London.
Fehr, E. and U. Fischbacher, 2003, “The Nature of Human Altruism,” Nature 425 (23 October): 785–791.
Henrich, J. et al., 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91.2: 73–78.
Isbell, L. A. 2006. “Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains,” Journal of Human Evolution 51.1: 1–35.
Megarry, T. 1995. Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human Culture, New York University Press, New York.
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Ridley, M. 1996. The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.
“Spiders, Snakes, and Evolved Fears,” January 11, 2008,
http://neuroscientificallychallenged.blogspot.com/2008/01/spiders-snakes-and-evolved-fears.html
Therefore our evolutionary psychology has been shaped by hunter gatherer societies. Because of genetic differences owing to sexual reproduction and environmental influences, of course there is variation in us as well, but some core traits do seem to be very prevalent.
Many people have a visceral fear of spiders and snakes and this seems to come from our brain’s limbic system (see also Isbell 2006), itself created by the interactions of many genes by the process of evolution by natural selection.
There is strong evidence that some of our core moral intuitions are also the result of evolution. It is even likely that the sense of “fairness” or even “entitlement” leading to the existence of common property (the ancient equivalent of public goods) or sharing the wealth (e.g., egalitarian food sharing practices amongst hunter gatherers) appears to be evolved in us as an advantage for survival. Thus one could say that the desire to “spread the wealth” is not some alien, wicked propensity caused by “evil” governments: it is in our psychology, the psychology of egalitarian, food sharing hunter gatherers.
Public goods, modern welfare and social security paid for by progressive taxes are the effective modern equivalent of communal food sharing and cooperation; public property and public land the equivalent of the tribe’s common property; the widespread feelings of anger and injustice humans feel at gross inequality of wealth the equivalent of ancient egalitarianism.
The particular form that morality takes in any society is of course influenced by culture and history to a significant extent, and I do not wish to ignore the role of culture here, or suggest some vulgar genetic determinism (which I personally find distasteful). Human nature and our traits are a very complex interaction of environment, culture and genes (indeed some human traits are clearly explained more by environment and culture, than by genes). There can be many differences between what is regarded as moral in one society and another, and the innate moral faculty is probably like our innate language faculty (which also has a biological basis), and can lead to quite different systems of morality in different cultures in different times, just as our core language faculty leads to different languages, with different words, grammar and syntax, even though underlying that surface diversity is Chomsky’s universal grammar, with a biological basis (attempts to deny that our language faculty is the product of evolution are disposed of by Dennett 1996: 370–400).
Of course, none of this constitutes an adequate moral defence of modern taxes or public goods, since the argument from nature is a logical fallacy. Our moral intuitions provide no objective basis for morality, any more than the mere intuition or conviction that god exists can provide any rational basis for believing in god. We do in fact have many wrong ideas or irrational emotions about the world and objects in it, from
(1) sheer superstition (e.g., religion),For example, belief in supernatural beings or supernatural phenomena – which is (1) above – might possibly have some psychological basis explained by human evolution (although religion is also deeply ingrained in many people by culture as well), but such belief is most probably completely wrong. Atheists can face a difficult task trying to convince people of the falsity of religion, because of widespread cultural belief in religion and the possibility of a biological and psychological basis for it. But while modern philosophy and the natural sciences can provide atheists with strong arguments in support of their position, libertarians by contrast find little support from philosophy of ethics for their natural rights-based anarcho-capitalism and the view that all taxation is theft.
(2) faulty or poor inductive reasoning (e.g., pre-modern science or medicine), or
(3) innate human psychological traits that are the product of evolution (e.g., a widespread and visceral fear of, or repulsion towards, snakes, even though most of us in industrialised nations never encounter snakes, and tobacco, sugar, alcohol or cars kill more of us today than snakes ever do).
A proper defence of what is right and wrong must come from an objective theory of ethics, not from our psychology.
Quite convincing moral justifications for government and government intervention (such as progressive taxes, basic welfare and universal health care) can easily be given through act or rule utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, the non-absolutist ethics of W. D. Ross, Rawl’s human rights objectivism, or other liberal contractarian moral theories. They could still be given even if we had no innate sense of altruism towards other people.
For free market libertarians, about the only moral theory that can be used to justify absolute property rights is natural rights/natural law ethics, which has severe flaws and is untenable (itself committing the fallacy of the argument from nature too).
Free market libertarians and Austrians face the double blow of advocating (1) things immoral by most objective ethical theories and (2) things that our innate sense of morality itself finds objectionable.
Any libertarian/Austrian faces a hard upward battle trying to convince people of ideas that (1) seem naturally repulsive and (2) can be rejected by many knowledgeable people with a background in philosophy of ethics by using rule utilitarianism, Rawls’ ethics or other theories.
The mass “conversion” of people to libertarian or Austrian philosophy (and the elimination of all taxes or public goods) is about as likely as the disappearance of the widespread human fear of snakes, which also seems to have a deeply ingrained, evolutionary and psychological basis. This of course is not a defence, or justification, of social democracy, but is a realistic statement of how things actually are with respect to human nature. By a similar process, religion, whether it is rational or not, will probably exist for a long time, for better or worse (and for the worse in my view), even though there are strong arguments against it.
So our innate psychological nature, which is a legacy of our evolutionary past, cuts both ways: it has left us with some beliefs and propensities that can be justified independently and some beliefs that cannot (sometimes in ways that are pernicious).
Moreover, in the case of inductive reasoning, we have a surprising mental process which appears to have been successful in general and allowed us to survive, but which might not be capable of rational justification, because of the notorious problem of induction (see “Risk and Uncertainty in Post Keynesian Economics,” Appendix 1: The Paradox of Induction?, December 8, 2010).
APPENDIX 1: EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT?
Some people claim that the modern state has no parallel in the environment of our ancient ancestors. But the most obvious figure would be the dominant male/males of the tribe (just as in monkey and great ape groups) whose position was established by force and ability to protect other members of the group from wild animals and hostile humans from other tribes. That of course provides no serious justification for modern government or patriarchy, however.
Further Reading
Borders, M. “The Stone Age Trinity,” March 6, 2006
http://www.ideasinactiontv.com/tcs_daily/2006/03/the-stone-age-trinity.html
Dennett, D. C. 1996. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Penguin Books, London.
Fehr, E. and U. Fischbacher, 2003, “The Nature of Human Altruism,” Nature 425 (23 October): 785–791.
Henrich, J. et al., 2001. “In Search of Homo Economicus: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies,” American Economic Review 91.2: 73–78.
Isbell, L. A. 2006. “Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains,” Journal of Human Evolution 51.1: 1–35.
Megarry, T. 1995. Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human Culture, New York University Press, New York.
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Ridley, M. 1996. The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.
“Spiders, Snakes, and Evolved Fears,” January 11, 2008,
http://neuroscientificallychallenged.blogspot.com/2008/01/spiders-snakes-and-evolved-fears.html
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