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  • The Origins of Justice: The Evolution of Morality, Human Rights, and Law
  • Chris MacDonald (bio)
John O’Manique. The Origins of Justice: The Evolution of Morality, Human Rights, and Law University of Pennsylvania Press. xii, 206. US $36.50

The late John O'Manique's passionate final book, The Origins of Justice, is an extended defence of a set of hypotheses concerning the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness and how morality may have evolved out of human developmental drives. This is treacherous territory: the history of evolutionary perspectives on ethics is fraught with failed attempts to avoid illicit breaches of the fact/value distinction.

O'Manique bases his thesis on what he deems to be a more plausible and balanced characterization of human nature than the one underlying [End Page 312] mainstream Western moral thought, which he describes as hopelessly androcentric and Hobbesian in its characterization of human life as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.' O'Manique's general worry here is a fair one, and one that many others (especially feminist scholars) have dealt with at length. However, O'Manique's specific characterization of Western ethical theory borders on caricature. Even if Hobbes saw himself as describing how life really is (and Hobbes explicitly denies this), modern Hobbesians are certainly not committed to this view - much less are the general run of Western philosophers so committed. The Hobbesian 'state of nature' is a thought experiment designed to illustrate the role a normative system plays in making life better. It assumes that human nature is sufficiently egoistic (nasty) to cause problems (brutish, short lives), problems theorists think their normative frameworks can ameliorate. O'Manique's straw-man argument against the Western tradition constitutes a three-chapter-long distraction. It neither significantly advances O'Manique's own argument, nor sufficiently considers the intentions of the theorists he criticizes.

O'Manique likewise overstates his case when he accuses the entire Western tradition of focusing on rationality to the exclusion of emotion; he thereby ignores the enormous influence of philosophers like David Hume, who famously held that reason 'is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.' Further, O'Manique overlooks the fact that, for most theorists, the rationality of various moral systems lies not in the ratiocinative histories of those systems, but rather in the fact that they are rationally defensible. Surely the claim that a moral system is rationally defensible in no way denigrates the significance of emotion in our moral lives.

Having thus (mis)characterized mainstream moral philosophy, O'Manique proceeds to ask what the prehistorical development of human self-consciousness and normative frameworks might have looked like, given his 'alternative' assumption that human nature features at least as much altruism as egoism, and that humans are fundamentally 'relational,' rather than isolated. He concludes that if we are (or if our early ancestors were) primarily driven by altruism and the need for community, morality would have evolved not, as is typically assumed, as a way of limiting conflict, but as an expression of our altruistic drives. And, O'Manique tells us, since we're here now, it follows that our ancestors must have had the relevant survival-enhancing, pro-social attitudes. A just person, then, simply is one who seeks to support the 'developmental' needs of others. But notice that although O'Manique purports to sketch how humanity came to have a notion of justice, he concludes by telling us what it is to be just, and thus slides from the plainly descriptive to the implicitly normative.

Even more worrisome than O'Manique's blurring of the fact/value distinction, or his mischaracterization of Western ethics, is the book's neglect of significant literatures. O'Manique hypothesizes about the [End Page 313] psyches of early hominids, yet makes no reference to the literature on evolutionary psychology, and too little reference to relevant debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Similarly, O'Manique's discussion of the evolution of rights makes only passing reference to the extensive rights literature. Granted, O'Manique's project synthesizes an enormous range of topics, and such an effort warrants some charity if the result is sufficiently productive or thought...

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