From eyal@smarts.com Tue Aug 29 12:18:26 1995 Received: from mail.smarts.com (root@able.smarts.com [198.49.114.129]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id MAA16185 for ; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:18:25 -0400 Received: from just.smarts.com by mail.smarts.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA02417; Tue, 29 Aug 95 12:18:12 EDT Organization: System Management ARTS - "Minds Over Networks" Received: by just.smarts.com (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA17469; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:18:11 -0400 Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:18:11 -0400 From: eyal@smarts.com (Eyal Mozes) Message-Id: <9508291618.AA17469@just.smarts.com> To: bdcaplan@phoenix.Princeton.EDU, objectivism@vix.com Subject: Re: Evolution and Cognition Cc: jdevries@ids.net Status: R Bryan Caplan writes: >What instincts do I think human beings possess? First, I suggest >that humans incline instinctively to a crude Hobbesian egoism >, modified only to include concern for blood relatives. Modern >humans rarely live exclusively by these instinctive drives, but >I find it interesting that no matter how altruistic an individual's >announced philosophy, his or her practical actions tend to focus >on personal and kin survival. I am puzzled as to what Bryan is referring to. I certainly don't see the empirical evidence for his claim, and I would ask him to be more specific. It may be true that many actions of people *in modern, western society* - holding productive jobs, saving money, buying a house, obtaining life insurance to provide for their children, etc. - can be seen as "tending to focus on personal and kin survival". But if this were the result of instincts, then you would expect such "tendency to focus on personal and kin survival" to be the *weakest* in modern western society, and the *strongest* in primitive societies; which seems to be the opposite of the truth. So I think this tendency is more plausibly explained as a result, not of instincts, but of ideas, i.e. of the remnants of the enlightenment philosophy still operating in our culture. >In >particular, it is interesting to note that all over the world >and throughout history, people have been killing, looting, and >enslaving one another; I find this statement confusing, since Bryan here is stating the strongest evidence against his statement in the previous paragraph. All over the world, and throughout history, people have been killing, looting and enslaving one another, even though doing so usually requires putting their lives at grave risk, or even throwing their lives away; this is the opposite of what you would expect if Bryan were correct about an instinctive "tendency to focus on personal and kin survival". >and this tendency [to kill, loot and enslave] seems to have little >relation to the presence or absence of altruistic ethical philosophy. >operating in this culture. I disagree. Throughout recorded history, most societies held some version of an altruistic ethics, ranging from the primitive tribal ethics held by most hunter-gatherer societies, to the sophisticated altruism of Christianity; and most of the killing, looting and enslaving can be directly traced to people acting on this ethics. The enlightenment period, up to the late 19th century, in the west, was the one period of history in which some ethical views centering on self-interest - including that of Hobbes - were partly accepted; and it was also the most peaceful period in history. I think the historical evidence completely supports Rand's view that altruism is a morality of death, and bears a direct relation to people killing, looting and enslaving one another. >I don't disagree with Rand's view that _sometimes_ our emotions >are determined by our moral values; but I don't think that moral >values are the _only_ source of emotions. That was not Rand's view. Rand held that moral values - or, more generally, ideas - are the source of an individual's emotions *to the extent that a person chooses to think*. To the extent that a person chooses to evade the effort of thinking, his emotions and actions will not be the result of his own thinking or moral values; they will be the result of unconscious absorption of the culture around him. Since such emotions have an unconscious source, not subject to conscious control, you might call them "instinctive"; but the individual has these "instincts" not necessarily, by his nature, but as a result of his own default. The most profound explanation I have seen for the nature of the tribal mentality, with all of the killing, looting and enslaving that it has brought about throughout history, was given by Rand, in her articles "The Anti-Conceptual Mentality" and "Global Balkanization". I think Rand demonstrated conclusively that this mentality is rooted, not in any inborn instincts, but in people's volitional avoidance of the effort of thinking. Eyal Mozes From bschwar@raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu Tue Aug 29 12:31:24 1995 Received: from raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu (bschwar@raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu [130.58.218.2]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA17636 for ; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:31:23 -0400 Received: (from bschwar@localhost) by raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu (8.6.12/8.6.6) id MAA29452; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:31:22 -0400 Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 12:31:21 -0400 (EDT) From: Brian Todd Schwartz To: "Bryan D. Caplan" cc: objectivism@vix.com Subject: Re: Evolution and Cognition In-Reply-To: <9508290209.AA19037@flagstaff.Princeton.EDU> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Status: R On Mon, 28 Aug 1995, Bryan D. Caplan wrote: > What instincts do I think human beings possess? First, I suggest > that humans incline instinctively to a crude Hobbesian egoism > , modified only to include concern for blood relatives. What is Hobbesian egoism, specifically? On the blood relative point: I interpret the above to say the people have an instinctive tendency to be more concerned with blood relatives than other people, all other things being equal. Now, if that is instinctive, would a person not have to know who his blood relatives are, consciously? Imaagine that we set up an experiment where we can test the hypothesis that a human has an instinctively greater concern for blood relatives. Would we find that our subject would act any differently to people who were related to him, or those not, if he did *not* know which people he interacted with were related to him, or not. The bottom line question is then, not whether people have, innately, a mentality of self-preservation, or kin preservation, but, more generally, same race preservation?? All other things being equal, will a human being tend to aid those with the most in common with him genetically? Gosh, I hope not. "Know fear, or be ruled by it." |Brian Schwartz \ From hardy@stat.umn.edu Tue Aug 29 17:53:25 1995 Received: from wirth.stat.umn.edu (wirth.stat.umn.edu [128.101.50.18]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id RAA27610 for ; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 17:53:24 -0400 Received: by wirth.stat.umn.edu (1.38.193.4/16.2) id AA28426; Tue, 29 Aug 1995 16:53:22 -0500 From: Michael Hardy Message-Id: <9508292153.AA28426@wirth.stat.umn.edu> Subject: Re: Evolution and Cognition To: bdcaplan@phoenix.Princeton.EDU, objectivism@vix.com Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 16:53:21 -0500 (CDT) Cc: hardy@wirth.stat.umn.edu (Michael Hardy) In-Reply-To: <9508290209.AA19037@flagstaff.Princeton.EDU> from "Bryan D. Caplan" at Aug 28, 95 10:09:56 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 907 Status: R Bryan D. Caplan wrote: > I have come more and more to doubt Rand's view that human beings > have no instincts, that we are _tabula rasa_ Is saying that we are born _tabula_rasa_ the same as saying we have no instincts? Why could one not hold that we have instincts _and_ we are born _tabala_rasa_? Besides, was it Rand who said we have no instincts? Nathaniel Branden wrote something to this effect, and she may perhaps be considered to have endorsed it to some extents by being his co-editor in a jointly journal, or at least not to have objected to it. Rand said we are born _tabula_rasa_ (I think this is in ITOE somewhere?) but I'm not convinced that is the same as saying we have no instincts. Rather it only means that we don't know anything when we are born. Mike Hardy -- Michael Hardy School of Statistics University of Minnesota hardy@stat.umn.edu From eyal@smarts.com Thu Aug 31 11:34:59 1995 Received: from mail.smarts.com (root@able.smarts.com [198.49.114.129]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id LAA10012 for ; Thu, 31 Aug 1995 11:34:57 -0400 Received: from just.smarts.com by mail.smarts.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA06327; Thu, 31 Aug 95 11:34:22 EDT Organization: System Management ARTS - "Minds Over Networks" Received: by just.smarts.com (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA28016; Thu, 31 Aug 1995 11:34:22 -0400 Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 11:34:22 -0400 From: eyal@smarts.com (Eyal Mozes) Message-Id: <9508311534.AA28016@just.smarts.com> To: bdcaplan@phoenix.Princeton.EDU, objectivism@vix.com Subject: Re: In Defense of Instinct Status: RO In contrasting "Hobbesian egoism" with "the egoism of Aristotle or Rand", Bryan goes into the survival-flourishing debate, on which much have been written in recent years by Objectivists and by neo-Aristotelians such as Douglass Rasmussen or Tibor Machan (for my own view on the application of this debate to the issue of respecting other people's rights, see my article "Deriving Rights from Egoism: Machan vs. Rand", Reason Papers no. 17, fall 1992). The key point where this debate is relevant to the current discusssion is in Bryan's statement: >What practical difference does this distinction make? >For one, the Hobbesian egoist would remorselessly >kill or enslave another person if the risks were low >and the gain were large. For the Randian egoist, >however, this predatory lifestyle would conflict with >our interest in being productive, independent, and >just individuals. The Hobbesian egoist, similarly, >would happily steal if the gain were large and the >punishment were small; but the Randian egoist would >refrain. I submit that this is an accurate description of Aristotelian or new-Aristotelian views, but not of the Objectivist view. The Objectivist view is that a rational egoist recognizes that it is not the case that "the risks are low" or "the punishment is small" for initiating force against others; even if in some concrete situation it seems possible to get away with such actions, a policy of living and dealing with others by means of force is likely to destroy one's chances for long-term survival. "Our interest in being productive, independent and just individuals" derives from the fact that such individuals are likely to survive for much longer; it is not an accident, but a necessary consequence of man's nature, that modern western culture, in which the values of productivity and justice are accepted to a large degree, has a far longer life expentancy than any other culture in history or any non-western culture in the world today. The actions of criminals may be explained as "Hobbesian egoism", i.e. as acting for range-of-the-moment gratification without considering the long-range consequences. But I don't think such an explanation can work for explaining wars. Bryan writes: >frequently the risks were very low and the gain was >very great. The Spanish conquered one-and-a-half >continents and got a lot of gold and slaves at very >little risk to themselves. This is a very strange reading of the facts. In order to conquer these continents, the Spanish had to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a long journey in cramped ships without adequate nutrition, with very serious risk of death from scurvy and other diseases; and then had to fight against natives whose weapons, however primitive, were still quite capable of killing. I don't know any precise statistics on this point, but my recollection from reading about the Spanish conquistadors was that casualties among their men, mostly during the journey and also while fighting, were very high. So, what made Spanish people willing to join the conquistadors? Certainly not "a tendency to focus on individual and kin survival". And you can't even explain it by failure to think about long-term consequences, since the dangers were actually *more* immediate and short-term than the gains. More generally, in order to support his thesis about a "Hobbesian instinct", Bryan would have to establish that most wars in history had few or no casualties for the aggressor side; i.e. that people generally only try to kill, loot or enslave others when this entails little or no immediate risk to their lives. My impression is that the historical record proves the opposite. So I think the evidence indicates that people throughout history were very willing to throw their lives away in the service of their tribe, nation or leader. People throughout history have also held an explicit morality of self-sacrifice, which puts the tribe, nation or leader above the individual; and their actions were completely consistent with this morality. Any form of self-interested behaviour, "Hobbesian" or Aristotelian, has always been rare. Eyal From objectivism-request@vix.com Fri Sep 1 12:49:47 1995 Received: from gw.home.vix.com (gw.home.vix.com [192.5.5.1]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA06218; Fri, 1 Sep 1995 12:49:46 -0400 Received: by gw.home.vix.com id AA06734; Fri, 1 Sep 95 08:35:09 -0700 X-Btw: vix.com is also gw.home.vix.com and vixie.sf.ca.us Delivery-Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 17:48:50 -0700 Received: by gw.home.vix.com id AA05359; Thu, 31 Aug 95 17:48:49 -0700 Received: from ponyexpress.Princeton.EDU by Princeton.EDU (5.65b/2.122/princeton) id AA14398; Thu, 31 Aug 95 20:47:51 -0400 Received: from flagstaff.Princeton.EDU (bdcaplan@flagstaff.Princeton.EDU [128.112.131.154]) by phoenix.Princeton.EDU (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id UAA17715 for ; Thu, 31 Aug 1995 20:47:42 -0400 From: "Bryan D. Caplan" Received: by flagstaff.Princeton.EDU (4.1/Phoenix_Cluster_Client) id AA22322; Thu, 31 Aug 95 20:47:41 EDT Date: Thu, 31 Aug 95 20:47:41 EDT Message-Id: <9509010047.AA22322@flagstaff.Princeton.EDU> To: objectivism@vix.com Subject: Re: In Defense of Instinct Reply-To: "Bryan D. Caplan" Status: RO I have to point out, in response to Eyal, that I _did_ mention that many wars were not in the participants interest. In particular, I mentioned wars motivated by ideology, such as Christian holy wars or Marxist revolutions. I don't have the kill ratios on the Spanish conquest available, but historians do agree that colonial powers were enormously superior to native forces, often subjugating entire nations with a handful of soldiers with muskets. (If I recall, Cortes won Mexico with about 500 conquistadors, plus a ton of native discontents who served as mercenaries.) But were any of these wars in the interests of the soldiers involved? You can't just look at the risks they endured; you have to look at the alternatives available to them at the time. Trying your luck as a soldier in the new world might not look good to us, but to a poor Spaniard farmer, it might look quite different. I might also mention that often throughout history the soldiers have had little or no choice about fighting; and given their position (i.e., death for desertion), their choice to murder and rob the innocent was still probably their best choice. -------------------------------------------------------- Now the underlying ethical position that Eyal takes puzzles me greatly. Is he saying that cases where the risks of punishment are low and the level of gain is high, that he would freely murder and rob innocent people? What makes you think that such cases are so incredibly rare? In the modern mixed economy, for example, it seems that people willing to "play ball " with the government do better financially than those who don't. And in any case, is Eyal saying that if we happen to be in e.g. Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany that the moral action is to do whatever it takes (such as murdering innocent people) to get a comfortable apartment, extra rations, and so on? In fact, on the egoist view that Eyal outlines, it would be foolish to accept any principle like "respect other people's rights." A far more general principle, applicable regardless of the sort of society one lives in, would be "obey the law (or at least laws that are seriously enforced)." In a relatively free society, this latter principle would accord with the former; but it has the added advantage of greater generality. --Bryan