The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke

12 - The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue

tHe Darwinian sCienCe of aristoteLian Virtue Larry Arnhart aRIStoteLIANS NeeD ChARLeS DARWIN. They need him because Darwin’s evolutionary science of virtue supports the moral biology of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle was a biologist, and his biological science shapes his empirical science of ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics . In contrast to Plato’s attempt to ground ethics in a moral cosmology, Aristotle grounds ethics in a moral biology. Darwinian science deepens this Aristotelian project by showing how a natural moral sense arises from evolutionary history. In explaining my Darwinian understanding of Aristotelian virtue, I am dividing this chapter into five parts. In the first part, I identify the moral biology of Darwinian ethics as belonging to an empirical tradition of ethics rooted in the human sources of moral order (human desires, human cultures, and human judgments) rather than the transcendental tradition of ethics that looks to cosmic sources of moral order (cosmic God, cosmic Nature, or cosmic Reason). In the second part, I survey some of the debates between moral cosmology and moral biology—between Plato and Aristotle, between Kant and Darwin, and in the crisis faced by friedrich Nietzsche who had to choose between Darwinian science and Dionysian 12 The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue 209 religion. In the third part, I show how Aristotle’s moral psychology is rooted in a biological psychology of animal minds that has been largely confirmed by Darwinian science. In the fourth part, I show how Aris­totle’s moral biology supports his study of the virtues—particularly, courage, friendship, and contemplation. In each case, I indicate how Darwinian science sustains the Aristotelian understanding of these virtues. In the final part, I reply to the following four objections to my Darwinian defense of Aristotelian virtue: (1) that I ignore the importance of Aristotle’s theology in supporting his ethics; (2) that I ignore the importance of religion generally as the indispensable ground of all morality; (3) that Darwinian biology cannot adequately explain ethics, because Darwinism assumes the Cartesian reductionism that pervades all of modern science; and (4) that my Darwinian and Aristotelian view of ethics cannot properly understand the deepest human desires manifest in the yearning for love and the fear of death. Six Sources of Moral Order A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics supports an empiricist tradition of ethics that runs from Aristotle to David Hume and Adam Smith. This empiricist tradition of thought sees ethics as rooted in human experience—in human nature, human tradition, and human judgment. By contrast the transcendentalist tradition of ethics, from Plato to Immanuel Kant, looks to a transcendent conception of the Good as somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. A Darwinian science of ethics shows that the moral order of human life arises as a joint product of natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. The natural desires of our evolved human nature constrain but do not determine our cultural traditions . Our natural desires and cultural traditions constrain but do not determine our prudential judgments. There are at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies throughout history, because they are rooted in our biological nature. Human beings generally desire the following goods: (1) a complete life, (2) parental care, (3) sexual identity, (4) sexual mating, (5) familial bonding, (6) friendship, (7) social status, (8) justice as reciprocity, (9) political rule, (10) courage in war, (11) health, (12) beauty, (13) property, (14) speech, (15) practical habituation, (16) practical reasoning, (17) practical arts, (18) aesthetic pleasure, (19) religious understanding, and (20) intellectual understanding. 210 Larry Arnhart In some of my other writings, I have elaborated what I mean by each of these desires, and I have offered some anthropological, psychological, and biological evidence for their universality.1 We recognize the generic goods of life as truly desirable because they satisfy those natural desires that are either useful or agreeable to ourselves or to others. Hume saw this when he observed that personal merit “consists altogether in the possession of mental qualities, useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others.”2 Hume saw that virtues are mental qualities that produce pleasure in impartial observers, and this pleasure produces social esteem for those mental qualities. Qualities of mind that are useful or agreeable—either to those with those qualities or to others— induce a pleasure that leads to those qualities’ being esteemed as virtues. Hume could then catalogue...