Dawkins bases his position on the thesis that biological sex is a binary consisting of male and female. Although I agree with Dawkins’ thesis I do not subscribe to the gamete-size account of sex he offers, arguing instead in “Sex Is Not A Social Construct” (from 2015 I might add) that sex is a functional category. But this aside, the problem with Dawkins’ article is not his stance on biology, it is that he thinks the debate is biological at all. Dawkins naively thinks the debate is over a matter of fact, and can be resolved by a scientific explication of the nature of sexual reproduction, gametes, chromosomes, and the like, and that his adversary will have to concede based on these facts. Ironically, Dawkins here reminds me of conservatives who, during the gay marriage debate, would say “But marriage is defined as a union of a man and a woman, so victory is ours!” (See my article (from 2014, before the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage) “A Darwinian Look at Marriage” which does for marriage what Dawkins’ article attempts to do for “woman.”) He can be correct on every point of fact, and all his conclusions follow logically from his premises, and still lose because the leftist activists care nothing for definitions, no matter how factually true, and will just force the definitions to change as they see fit.

Words usually attain their referents through the establishment of a convention, and then by weight of precedence. I think it is safe to say that everyone understands that there is nothing superior about the letters and spoken phonemes we associate with “woman” that makes it inherently superior at referring to adult human females. If things had been different in the past the sounds and letters we associate with “banana” could have served equally well for communicating about adult human females. But the convention was established at some point and for whatever reason (studied by etymologists) it spread by weight of precedent. By adopting the convention speakers would benefit by being able to communicate to listeners their thoughts concerning adult human females, and listeners could benefit by acquiring knowledge concerning them. Philosopher Ruth Millikan writes “Consider, for example, a speaker whose purpose in using the word ‘dog’ will be achieved only through calling attention to dogs or to facts that concern dogs or through changing hearers’ behaviors toward dogs. Such a speaker will eventually stop trying to use the word ‘dog’ for these purposes if they are never achieved. Also, a hearer whose language-understanding faculties turn his mind to dogs whenever speakers use the word ‘dog’ will soon unlearn this response if speakers never use the word ‘dog’ such that it carries information or expresses intentions that concern dogs.” (Language: A Biological Model, p. 58 – 59.) Read this passage again but substitute “woman” whenever the word ‘dog’ is used, and substitute “adult human female” whenever dogs are referred to. This mutually reinforcing behavior between speakers and hearers is what Millikan calls the stabilizing function of a language item; it is the force that stabilizes and standardizes the convention of using a word to refer to the individuals, kinds, properties, and relations of the world.

She goes on: “A language consists in a tangled jungle of overlapping, crisscrossing traditional patterns, reproducing themselves whole or in part for a variety of reasons, and not uncommonly getting in each other’s way… There cannot be, for example, such things as absolute semantic markers in a language; that is, forms reserved merely by convention to serve always the same function” (18). Dawkins is acting as if “woman” is such an absolute, as if there is an adamantine bond between “woman” and “adult human female.” There isn’t, and the leftist activists know it.

Dawkins writes: “Their militantly vocal supporters do not have a right to commandeer our words and impose idiosyncratic redefinitions on the rest of us. You have a right to your private lexicon, but you are not entitled to insist that we change our language to suit your whim. And you absolutely have no right to bully and intimidate those who follow common usage and biological reality in their usage of “woman” as honoured descriptor for half the population.” Oh yes they do, yes they are, and yes they do. It is interesting to see how Dawkins here has switched from making a point about biology to discussing something like morality and/or power politics. And the phrase “honoured descriptor” is hilarious.

How telling that Dawkins did not go to battle to defend the honour of the honoured descriptor “marriage” from being wrenched from its historical mooring. This can only be interpreted as being because in the case of marriage he viewed the change as a weapon to be wielded and a wound to be inflicted in his hatred of Christianity. Dawkins is just as capable of ignoring time-honoured tradition and playing help your friends, harm your enemies as anyone when it serves his purposes.

There is another process besides convention and precedent whereby words come to attach to their referents, one not discussed by Millikan*, and that is the application of raw elite institutional power to rip a term by force from its historical denotation and through sheer political will apply it to some new desired referent. Get your people on the board of the Oxford English Dictionary or pressure the board to add a new definition. Get elite institutions such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies to change the paperwork and apply sanctions to violators of the new usage (for “misgendering”). NPR listeners will be the first to fall in line. They tune in every day to find out what they need to believe in order to continue in their self-conception as one of the elite, and are dying for new ways to distinguish themselves from the proles. If you have the same values, tastes, morals, etc., as the proles you thereby are a prole, and not elite. Thus there is a kind of Darwinian process of its own whereby elites over time become more and more extreme and detached from the common people and from reality.

Eventually the proles will cave and adopt the values of the elites. They always do as the rapid change in public opinions on gay marriage attest. And, voila!, “women” now has a new meaning and weight of precedent. (The meaning usually offered is “one who identifies as an adult human female.” What an absolutely amazing quirk of history that for centuries the English language had a word for those who identify as an adult human female, but not a word for the omnipresent kind “adult human female.” You’d think this would be something they would have come up with a word for.) As far as Dawkins goes, protest a few of his speaking engagements and soon his hosts will begin to cite security concerns and cancel his appearances. Dawkins loves the limelight and being respectable too much to hold out for long. Soon he will issue statements such as “I did not mean for my statements to cause harm” and “of course words can come to have multiple meanings” and “thank you for educating me on how these opinions can cause so much hurt to already suffering populations” and “it will not cause any harm and could prevent much by applying the word in new ways.”

Or maybe not. There is reason to believe that the leftist activists made some rare tactical mistakes that might doom this effort. Flush with victory from their incredible ability to seemingly transform American values at will through hegemonic media control, leftist activists rushed their push for transsexual normativity. For one they did not lay the groundwork with a decade of non-threatening wacky transsexual neighbors on sitcoms before moving on the for final push. Second, footage of their substitutions, “drag queen story hour” and “family friendly drag shows” got out and horrified instead of placating people. Third, they pushed for trans-women in women’s sports before victory was achieved. The reality of trans-women dominating women sports has made a mockery of the “trans-women are woman” mantra. Never allow the consequences of your revolution be felt before the revolution. Speaking of consequences, let’s check in on marriage since 2015. Conservatives had claimed, and were ruthlessly mocked for claiming, that changing the essentially procreative nature of marriage would eliminate a dominant motive in getting married in the first place. Here is the marriage rate in recent years.

https://hernorm.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/marriage-rate-1990-2020.webp

Marriage had been on the ropes due to decades of reform, but the Supreme Court pushed it right over the cliff. I guess it is time to change the rhetoric from “changing the meaning of marriage won’t remove a reason to get married” to “evil reactionaries want to return us to the dark ages.”

You may be lead to believe that all this proves post-modernism is correct; reality really is structured by power relations whereby the powerful create reality to serve their interests. Not quite since post-modernism requires that there be no actual reality other than the socially constructed one. On the contrary, the natural kind “adult human female” is still out there in need of a name, just as the institution of marriage is still out there like an exiled king stripped of his titles, usurped by a clown imposter, waiting for the people to realize their mistake and call for his return.

I had hoped that some conservative state would declare it the legislature’s, not the judiciary’s, prerogative to create institutions and state their purpose, and then create a “new” institution with the purpose to prevent the problems that result from the production of children. This institution would totally not be marriage since, as the Supreme Court has declared, marriage is simply an agreement to pool wealth and then divide it equally upon separation in exchange for acquiring certain rights to hospital visitation and the like. The “creation” of an institution whereby male/female pairs take on obligations to one another so as to prevent the problems that result from the production of children would, since we live in bizarro world, be called something other than marriage. I think the courts would have to concede that the legislature does have this power.

The leftist activists want the word “woman” for the same reason they wanted marriage–for the the status and norms it bestows. They weren’t mislead by some misunderstanding of the facts of biology. Just as Dawkins thinks the connection between the term and its real-world referent is sacred, the left thinks, like a cargo cult, that the connection between words and their status and norms is unbreakable; that changing janitors into maintenance engineers will increase the status of janitors, that changing the meaning of marriage will increase the status of homosexuals, or that changing the meaning of woman will increase the status of transsexuals. Usually what happens is that people no longer wish to be associated with the word and create a new one. Renaming janitors to maintenance engineers did not increase the status of janitors, but it tarnished the word “engineer.” I remember (and wish I could find) an article about how young people no longer wanted to seek a career as an engineer since it was now considered low-status. Fields were renaming the professions formally called engineers to something else since the status of “engineer” had been tarnished, just as making marriage just about uniting and dividing property removed its luster. And so activists have suggested terms like “birthing person,” “uterus-haver”, “front hole” and the like to make sure that the new term that denotes adult human females be as unwieldy, clinical, and unattractive as possible to keep people from just adopting a new term and letting “woman” wither.

*On page 38 of Beyond Concepts Millikan lists “shifts in dominant interests” as a reason for changes in word referents so she must have thought about it but doesn’t discuss it in detail.

Where Does Teleoformalism Fit In The Political Compass Meme?

One of my favorite memes is the political compass grid:

I especially like this one.

I would change the authoritarian right to think the left are godless communists and degenerates however.

I have recently produced a political theory I call teleoformalism (see “The Political Theory of Teleoformalism“) and I thought it would be a fun exercise to see where it would fit in the coordinates of this grid. First I’m going to have to take the fun out of it by examining the grid too closely. The grid is very funny and intuitively seems to capture the popular political positions, but often when you ask where something would fit I end up scratching my head. For example, the right-left axis seems to be a measure of state vs. private power. And so classically the authoritarian left wants to use the state ownership of industry to produce material equality; the libertarian left wants to use the state to finance, or clean up the mess left over from, individual, usually hedonist, pursuits: paying for abortions, birth control, needles for addicts, drug treatment, and the like. However, where would the “woke” left fit? They would seemingly fit in the authoritarian left box since they want a forced material equality of results. But the woke left has not really fought for state enforcement, they have put all their efforts into forcing private institutions—businesses, schools, even churches—to support equality of results. We all thought equality of results died with the fall of communism but the left re-branded all the old communist concepts, switched from class to race and sex, and used the ole’ communist subversion in placing their commissars in all private institutions. They completely caught the right flat-footed who never could imagine that American private industry—the great bulwark against communism– could be so subverted. The left is truly awe-inspiring in a horrifying way in that they can invent concepts like “diversity, equity, inclusion” and seemingly six months later they have thousands of commissars and consultants installed in every institution. So if the left-right axis on the grid indicates state vs. corporate power where does the woke left belong? Authoritarian right? This is just to show that the 2×2 grid is insufficient and needs a couple of additional dimensions to capture all the different positions.

And if the left-right axis denotes state vs. private power how does that accommodate the authoritarian right which is supposed to include those who which to use state power for moral ends? So perhaps it is the authoritarian-libertarian axis which measures the use of state vs. private power. But then that excludes the libertarian left which is supposed to use state power to fund its ends.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be fun so I am going to try to cram teleoformalism into this grid anyway. But where? For example, where does having state meat production facility inspectors fit? Or, say, laws against advertising fraud, or child-labor laws, or workplace safety? Teleoformalism is fine with regulating the private sphere in such ways to make sure business interactions are mutually beneficial and negotiations between employer and employee are fair. Of the four choices these moderate positions seem to fall under authoritarian left, so is that where teleoformalism belongs? On the other hand, teleoformalism is strictly against state ownership of industry, and using state power to produce material equality. So it does not belong here. Or perhaps it belongs here but close to the center and not out on the fringes.

Lets move on to libertarian left. Would teleoformalism support libertarian left positions such as the state providing clean needles for drug addicts? The way to look at these issues is ask which of the four teleoformalist principles of justice would entail such a policy? (See “The Political Theory of Teleoformalism” for an explanation of these four principles.) Providing clean needles to drug addicts may be a good idea, it may save many lives (or it may enable addicts to continue in their self-destructive behavior as critics attest). But the question is whether the state taking by force people’s property through taxation to meet these ends is just. The policy could be justified under utilitarian grounds, that harming some people through taking their property, would create a greater good of saving lives and so is justified. But teleoformalism is strongly against utilitarianism in that principles of justice must be based on the four principles of evolved human Norms, and utilitarianism ‘aint. Providing needles to addicts falls under none of the four principles of justice and so could not be justified under teleoformalism. It seems to be a case where private charities would be the ones to provide this service. So I guess teleoformalism doesn’t fall under the libertarian left. Or does it? The libertarian left principle “what I do in the privacy of my own home is none of your business” does fit in that teleoformalism is strongly against any state interference in the private sphere (outside of child protection laws). So maybe teleoformalism does belong here but close to the center and not on the fringes.

Moving on to libertarian right, again we see that teleoformalism both does and does not belong. Teleoformalism would support libertarian positions against, say, the state financing a network of left-wing radio station networks, single-payer healthcare, or even public schools (while being in favor of providing funds for the poor to pay for private schools). But teleoformalism is in favor of all sorts of business regulations libertarianism is against: workplace safety, food safety, nondiscrimination, anti-fraud, environmental protections, and so on

Finally we come to authoritarian right. This position is often seen as “state enforced morality” (which again calls into question the meaning of the left-right axis). To answer this we need to move into the wider bioformalism complex where we see that morality is rightly taught not by the state but through the church aka controlling source (See “Religion as Source of the Social Emotions” for details.) So, no, teleoformalism does not believe in state enforced morality. However, it does condone the legislature’s right to produce public cooperative conventions such as rules against public nudity, or other offensive, provocative, or disgusting expression in publics, and I can’t see where else these policies would fit.

To answer the question of this post, teleoformalism claims that there are different spheres of society each with their own governing principle of justice: private, commercial, public, state. So draw a box around the center of the grid which extends part-way into each of the four cells of the grid. Label the box in authoritarian left “commercial sphere,” label the box in libertarian left “private sphere,” the box in libertarian right “state sphere,” and the box in authoritarian right “public/social sphere” and you have the answer. Teleoformalism confines each domain to its proper place and keeps them from extending where they do not belong and causing trouble. So everyone is happy, right? Or is everyone mad?

The Political Theory Of Teleoformalism

For most of the history of Western philosophy the good of an item was understood to be determined by its designed nature or telos. When modern philosophy exiled teleology it set off a centuries long quest to find a new source of normativity since nature was seen as a mere collection of value-free particles in the void. The prime candidates have been individual desires, emotions, reason, the state, or society as a whole. Bioformalism marks the return from exile of nature as the source of an item’s good. Specifically, the bioformalist position is that for all living things their good is to live out their distinctive evolved form of life as excellently as they are capable. For example, human life has a form (thus the form in bioformalism): to develop our physical, intellectual, and social abilities as children, to attract the best mate possible, to have children, to work cooperatively with others, and to materially support and raise children in the best environment one is able to provide. This is the nature of the human good aka the good life or human flourishing. (See “Bioformalism and the Human Good,” “Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics for the 21^st Century,” and “Bioformalism vs. Liberalism and Stupid Freedom.”).

That is the bioformalist thesis, but there is also the wider bioformalist complex which consists of the thesis plus any moral or political consequences that follow from a realist view of the good. Part of the bioformalist complex is an understanding of the state’s contribution to achieving the human good. I will call the political theory teleoformalism to prevent confusion of the political theory with the theory of the good. Teleoformalism is a theory of political justice, the justice that follows from an account of the nature and end of the state.

All of the major political theories of the Western tradition dating back to Plato are teleological in nature (although their authors may deny it). They all hold that justice is a (and perhaps the) virtue–the feature whose presence makes an object a good instance of its kind–of the state; a good state is one which possesses justice. Furthermore they all believe that the administration of justice is a or the function of the state. Where they fundamentally differ is in their different positions on the end of the state. And so for Hobbes the end of the state is produce peace, and a state is just if it uses the instruments of the state to produce this end. For Locke the end of the state is to protect property rights, and it is just if it uses the instruments of the state to protect these rights. For Marx the end of the state is to produce material equality, and a just state uses its instruments to prevent all instances and causes of material inequality. For Mill and the utilitarians the end of the state is to produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and a just state is one which uses its instruments to produce this effect. Even Rawls, who claims to be against teleological theories (due to his specific and different meaning of “teleological”) holds that the end of the state is to ensure a fair distribution of primary goods.

In political philosophy it is commonly heard that the essence of liberalism is that the state must remain neutral on conceptions of the good. Rawls for instance insists that in the original position “the parties do not know their conception of the good” (TOJ, p. 142) when choosing rational rules of justice. Now, I don’t believe this is the essence of liberalism (I don’t generally believe in essences at all, especially for something as complex as “Western liberalism.”) and hold that the theory I will present is part of the liberal tradition, but this position marks a good point of departure from teleoformalism which does offer a concrete notion of the good, one that must feed in to the political process. Teleoformalism denies that the state must remain neutral on conceptions of the good, in fact enforcing the norms (or Norms) that facilitate attainment of the good understood bioformalisticallly is the function of the state. (This is not meant to imply that it is the function of the state to maximize the good, or be the efficient cause producing the good, as will be clear.) Teleoformalism is superior to the other political philosophies mentioned in that it alone is compatible with bioformalism (and, it goes without saying, bioformalism is the true account of the good for humans).

As a first draft we can say that teleoformalism is the view the the end of the state is to enforce biofunctional Norms of interpersonal behavior. Mutually beneficial interpersonal interactions fall under four such natural Norms: tit-for-tat non-interference, kin altruism, mutually beneficial exchange aka reciprocity, and cooperative conventions. The theory claims that these Norms of human behavior are principles of justice; justice is the formalization of these biological Norms. The state’s purpose is to ensure that these Norms of natural justice are enforced such that they provide their selected effect. (For an explanation of what is meant by “Norms” (with a capital N) see “A Primer on Biological Functions and Norms”.) I discuss these principles in more detail below but in short, in a just society tit-for-tat non-interference is the baseline principle that is then modified with state-enforced obligations as individuals move into different spheres of society. In the private sphere those with children take on the obligations of kin altruism, in the commercial sphere individuals take on the obligation of reciprocity, and in the public sphere people come under the principles of cooperative conventions.

I can see a critic claiming that I am guilty of a category error in that I conflate natural norms (or Norms) with rules of justice. Or that I commit the naturalistic fallacy by by moving from the “is” of natural norms to the “ought” of justice.” (I discuss the naturalistic fallacy in “Bioformalism and the Human Good.”) Human behavior, like the behavior of all living things, is designed by natural selection. I do take it that justice is a behavior of a specific living creature, and that it can be understood the way other behaviors can. This is the starting point of philosophical naturalism. I am therefore not deducing some conclusion a priori from self-evident premises. Neither do I expect that any account of justice will cause all rational beings on all possible worlds to, through a process of Socratic recollection, announce in unison that the Form of Justice has been revealed once and for all.

Teleoformalism is arrived at through three considerations. First is the inadequacy of the dominant theories of libertarianism, utilitarianism, and Rawlsian liberalism. Second is the question of how the modern evolutionary understanding of human nature affects our understanding of justice. Third is through considering how the state is related to the human good understood bioformalistically. These considerations were assembled into a puzzle piece that seemed to fit the justice-sized hole in the puzzle pretty well, at least better than the other dominant theories. It was arrived at by asking what justice could possibly be given these pieces of the puzzle, not through the traditional philosophical means of either conceptual analyses of “justice,” or through some a priori metaphysical argument. However, I do think that the average person would find teleoformalism preferable to libertarianism, utilitarianism, or Rawlsianism as it avoids the unpalatable consequences of these theories. In fact, I think teleoformalism provides a better description than these other theories of how justice actually functions today. Finally, I take it as a virtue that the theory does not conform to contemporary political disputes between right and left and that both would find things with which to agree and disagree.

One last point before discussing these four principles. Basic principles of justice are quite general while the specifics are, as always, full of complications. For example, the United States upholds principles of freedom of speech, religion, the press, and so on. But the details of how these are to apply in specific cases have been fought over in the myriad controversies that have raged ever since they were first formulated. This is always the case when general principles are applied to specific circumstances, so I can’t address every complication, application, and issue in this short introduction. This is just the introduction and the theory; I will probably spend the rest of my life working out the implications and applications.

The First Principle of Justice

As regards the first principle of justice, we adopt the common belief that the state’s primary function it to protect individuals from harm from other individuals, groups, or itself. Teleoformalism interprets harm bioformalistically: harm is any human behavior that reduces an individual’s ability to live out its form of life as excellently as he or she is willing and able. A poorly functioning or unjust state is one that is unable to protect an individual’s good or actively acts counter to it. Versions of this principle can be found in Locke’s claim that if people would be better off in the state of nature they would have no obligations to the state, in Rawls’ doctrine that the state must benefit the least well off, and in the traditional objection to utilitarianism that in sacrificing the happiness of some to promote the happiness of the greatest number utilitarianism runs counter to justice. Even uber-lefty Peter Singer in his book A Darwinian Left concedes that the state can not ask people to harm themselves to benefit others: “public policies should be based on ‘An unwavering adherence to the Cardinal Rule: Never ask a person to act against his own self-interest.’” (p. 41) A Rawlsian rendition of this is to take the individuals in Rawls’ original position but jettison his untenable “thin conception of the good” for the good understood bioformalistically. If the individuals in the original position were, instead of being ignorant of the good, given the task to live out the form of the human life as excellently as possible I contend that their first concern would be that no one interfered with their efforts, and would agree to a first principle of mutual non-interference, and institute the organs of the state to prevent any such interference.

The principle of non-interference protects against any reduction in one’s ability to pursue the good and so contains the traditional Lockean notions of life, health, liberty, and property. Is this merely another way of saying that the state must protect “the pursuit of happiness”? Yes, but happiness is understood in its Aristotelian sense as being the telos of mankind, and the telos of mankind is understood bioformalistically. This realist conception of the good runs counter to relativist and subjectivist notions of happiness as the human good.

I have called the first principle “tit-for-tat” as it contains the traditional contractual notion that if the principle of non-interference is violated one is no longer bound by the principle and may defend oneself against the violator. However, I am hesitant to call it so simply because so much has been written on the subject and I don’t want to be committed to any of the baggage. Another reason is that I do not think that the initial state of non-interference could be rightly called cooperation, where cooperation is often taken in evolutionary game theory to incur a cost on the player. Non-interference doesn’t impose a cost, unless you call the strong being forced to forego preying on the weak a cost. Secondly, I don’t think that “tit-for-tat” is the governing principle of human interaction in “the state of nature.” Tit-for-tat is usually presented as each side having the same rewards-and-penalties decision matrix, but in the state of nature the strong and the weak have different matrices. The purpose of the state is to impose penalties such that tit-for-tat becomes the best strategy by equalizing the matrix between all citizens.

The Second Principle of Justice: Kin Altruism and The Private Sphere

The next three principles of teleoformalism formalize the natural principles governing specific types of human relationships. Evolutionary theory posits three kinds of relationships which bear on a human individual’s ability to live out its good: those between genetically related family members (“kin altruism”), unrelated cooperators (“reciprocal altruism”), and unrelated non-cooperators (which will be the Norm of cooperative conventions). These principles govern the different spheres of society: the private sphere, the commercial sphere, and the public sphere respectively. (The principle of non-interference is the primary principle of justice and is the baseline rule throughout all political spheres.) Whereas libertarianism stops at the first principle of justice, which is why most people find it objectionable, teleoformalism recognizes that these areas of life are governed by their own distinct principles.

The principle of kin selection governs the private sphere and explains why parents sacrifice much energy and resources in the care of their children. As I discussed in “A Darwinian Look at Marriage” marriage is the dominate institution of the private sphere the purpose of which is to prevent the problems that result from the production of children. Locke states that “For children being by the course of Nature, born weak, and unable to provide for themselves, they have by the appointment of God himself, who hath thus ordered the course of nature, a Right to be nourished and maintained by their Parents” (First Treatise). I wonder what his position would be when these natural feelings fail and a parent becomes neglectful or abusive. For Locke also holds that “The great purpose for which men enter into society is to be safe and at peace in the use of their property”(134). Some long-defeated libertarians (are there any other kind?), trying to squeeze everything into the formulation “private sphere = property rights = no government ” claimed that children were property of their parents and so their care was outside the realm of state intrusion. Locke himself would probably state that an abusive parent has fallen under “the corruption and visciousness of degenerate men”(128) and are harming their children’s private property aka their bodies. But nowhere does he claim that a secondary purpose of the state is to force parents to conform to nature’s purposes (which is the thesis of teleoformalism). What about a parent who does not wish to provide an education for their children? I don’t see how this kind of neglect can be accounted for in a libertarian framework that sees the state entirely as an instrument to protect property rights. Under teleoformalism the private sphere is understood as the domain of enforced Norms of kin-selection in the form of child protection laws.

When an adult becomes a parent they are placed under the Norms of kin altruism and the state may penalize failure to live by these principles. There is no problem with the state forcing a parent to do what kin selection Normally would dictate. A state which is able to devote resources to the protection and care of children is more just than one that is unable to do so. What I mean by this is that some societies simply do not have the resources to dedicate to the protection of children and so leave it to the parents in the hope that nature will act so that the parents will care for their children. Where parents fail to do so and either abuse or neglect their children all that can be done is to shake ones head at the injustice of the world. A society which fortunately is able to address this injustice is better in that an injustice is remedied.

This raises the thorny difficulty on what exactly are the limits on state interference in the private sphere. Physical abuse, squalor, malnutrition, and education are deemed acceptable areas of state concern, forcing parents to feed their children broccoli is not. As of writing there are voices calling for parents to be forced under threat of having their children confiscated by the state to facilitate “gender affirming surgical transitions” which is truly an abomination and a violation of the parents’ rights. In such a case the state is not mandating care but harming the child as it runs counter to their good. The main conclusion however is that, against some libertarian thought, children aren’t the “property” of their parents; the same rules do not apply apply regarding a parent’s treatment of their children as to their material possessions. But this certainly does not entail that children are the property of the state. The relation between parents and their children is not analogous to any other relationship as it is at root a natural obligation to be sacrificing, caring, and nurturing.

Other than the rules of non-interference and kin altruism, the private sphere is the place of liberty to direct ones life as one sees fit: what books and media to consume, what sexual activity one wishes to partake, religious practice, hobbies, amusements and entertainment are completely free from state regulation. Even the wish to not pursue the human good is of no concern to justice. There is no need to list a finite set of rights as everything is rightfully permitted in the private sphere that does not violate the principle of non-interference or kin altruism. However, there are ways that what happens in the private sphere can violate the principle of non-interference. Drug use, for example, can exert costs on third parties which violates the principle of non-interference and interferes with their ability to pursue the good life. As soon as drug use incurs medical costs that might force other individuals to incur financial losses, either through increased insurance premiums or taxation, it becomes fair game for the legislature to ban a behavior which contributes to the good in no way–and in fact stupidly runs counter to it—and violates the principle of non-interference by reducing others’ ability to pursue the good to the greatest possible extent.

However, despite the private sphere being free from most state regulation, it is important to stress that the protection of liberty is not its purpose. The liberty that exists there is more like a spandrell, it is simply what is left over after the principles of non-interference and child welfare are protected. Teleoformalism enforces its governing Norms; everything that falls outside these Norms are of no concern to justice.

The Third Principle of Justice: Reciprocity And The Commercial Sphere

The next kind of biologically relevant relationship posited by evolutionary theory is reciprocity or mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges. Again, the also-long-vanquished old-time caveat emptor libertarians, trying to cram everything into the private vs. public boxes, held that trade was the voluntary exchange of private property and so outside the sphere of the state unless the exchange happened involuntarily (theft). From a teleoformalist perspective the commercial sphere, aka “the marketplace,” is its own domain separate from the traditional notion of the private sphere seeing as it is governed by a different principle. The commercial sphere is the domain of enforced Norms of reciprocity: contract enforcement between trade partners, and between businesses and their employees. Since the commercial sphere is not the private sphere–it is the place where multiple parties come out of their private spheres into the marketplace–teleoformalism disagrees with the libertarian attempt to place business activities outside the domain of state intervention. There is wide latitude for the state to ensure that exchanges proceed Normally, that is, that parties are willingly engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges and that no party has an abNormal advantage in negotiations. However, again, this does not mean that the commercial sphere is the public sphere where this would entail public ownership of commercial entities.

Locke held (and most subsequent libertarians have ignored) that in order for property acquisition to be just there must be as much and as good of the resource left over for others. Unfortunately, Locke didn’t discuss what should happen when this constraint is violated but I think the implication is clear–there must be state intervention limiting the liberty of some in order to protect the life of others. For example, in early American history an individual could reject an employer’s working conditions and work the land for a living because there was “as good and as much” ways of making a living available. When people could no longer reject an employer’s working conditions and make a living working an unclaimed parcel of land, because there was no longer unclaimed land available, the state needed to begin to regulate working conditions because the employer was now at an advantage; moderate scarcity no longer held, total scarcity did.

Locke’s conditions must apply beyond his example of wondering through the woods picking up apples to other scarce resources such as jobs. It is the purpose of the state in regulating the commercial sphere to make conditions Normal for negotiations between parties. All of the contemporary ways the state regulates business–contract enforcement, union rights, workplace conditions, environmental regulations, nondiscrimination, health regulations—are perfectly just under teleoformalism. In fact, teleoformalism sees further injustice in that the marketplace itself aka commercial real estate, should not be understood to be part of the private sphere and so outside public regulation. Again, people leave the private sphere when they enter the marketplace and bring themselves under the Norms of reciprocity. The people have an interest beyond mere zoning regulation in determining the nature of commercial space. Treating commercial real estate as part of the private sphere has had disastrous consequences for society as soulless corporations, even-more soulless real estate developers, and status-seeking modernist architects formed an unholy trinity which blocked the people from their rightful place in negotiations over what form commercial development may occur in their communities.

As an additional note I need to say a few words about the interaction of the commercial sphere and the private. When a business wishes to enter the private sphere, as it does when television and internet service enters the home, it agrees to be ruled by the governing principle of the private sphere–kin altruism, aka sacrifice for the benefit of children. For example, laws requiring age verification in order to access internet pornography are entirely justified and not an unjust restriction on a business’ free speech as has been declared in the United States. The home is not the marketplace or the public square and is not ruled by the same principles as those spaces.

The Fourth Principle of Justice: Cooperative Conventions And The Public Sphere

The final type of relationship is between individuals unrelated by either ties of kinship or cooperation: relationships between strangers. As I wrote in “Religion As Source of the Social Emotions,” classical Lockean contract theory held that individuals leave the state of nature and enter civil society because of the “inconveniences” of the state of nature: the lack of established law, impartial judges, or ways to enforce the law. But humans lived successfully in that state for hundreds of thousands of years and could have continued to do so for hundreds of thousands more. The problem of civil society only arises with the advent of a sedentary, agriculturally-based, high population, high-density environment (the actual list of conditions that produce civilization is still much debated). And this is the problem with classical contract theory, they missed that there is a state in-between the state of nature and civil society. I’ll call this “the abnormal state” (in homage to Millikan) because the environment has changed from the conditions under which hunter/gatherers functioned successfully. It is the problems with the abnormal state, not the state of nature, that require a state to prevent.

The problem of the abnormal state is that when people live in such an environment with only kin and clan loyalty as a guide (the forces that sufficed among hunter-gatherers in the state of nature to achieve the human good) you get the violent disasters of American inner cities or European no-go zones. Kin and clan alone restricting human behavior in the abnormal state is bad bad bad. A civilization is a large-scale teleofunctional institution designed to prevent the problems of the abnormal state where people need to dwell among those outside kin and clan networks.

Thus, something more is needed beyond the sentiments towards kin and the weight of ones reputation among cooperators. To this end is needed the establishment of local cooperative conventions (see Millikan’s “Language Conventions Made Simple” in Language, A Biological Model.) These are common rules that allow mutually beneficial cooperation to occur among strangers. The conventions are widely distributed so that even people who do not know each other can be on the same page and not have to create mutual understanding over and over again with each new interaction. Language conventions such as using the word “dog” to refer to dogs are the clearest example.

“Consider the right- (or left-) hand driving convention. The cooperative purpose requires that drivers approaching one another both either drive on the right or drive on the left. There is no secure way for leader-follower roles to be established, the time for decision is small, and it is hugely important that the coordination be achieved. The coordination thus behaves like a fully blind one. The only way to achieve it with complete reliability for every pair is to achieve it always the same way within some group that can easily identify its own members (people driving in America; people driving in England). Regular conformity to the same pattern is required among members of the entire larger group from which the various cooperating pairs emerge. (p. 12).

…conformity to a convention may be or become mandated and sanctioned… Crucially important blind conventional patterns, like driving on the right, are heavily sanctioned (indeed, often written into law), and it is not a mere matter of convention that they are sanctioned. Whenever it is desirable that some predictable social pattern or other be stabilized for some purpose in society, or that some convention or other be universally followed then it is not merely conventional that there are sanctions attached to conformity (p. 15).”

These cooperative conventions facilitate cooperation among strangers when they need to venture out into public spaces in pursuit of their needs and interests, and the public realm is the domain of such conventions where laws such as the drive-on-the-right convention reign. The advent of public law is the solution to the problem of living in the abnormal state, and the purpose of the public sphere is the establishment of mutually beneficial, universally applied conventions to facilitate pursuit of the good and reduce miscoordinations that impede attainment of the good. As a consequence is derived the right of democratic rule over the public space so as to enable people to pursue the good in the abnormal state, the purpose for which governments are instituted. Restricting the ability of the people to create such conventions through the democratic process is “destructive to the ends for which the state is instituted” and thus unjust. Teleoformalism thus returns regulation of the public sphere to its rightful place in the hands of the democratic legislature from its wrongful post-1960s usurpation by the judiciary.

To illustrate, I wish to provide some examples of contemporary issues over the nature of public space and how the teleoformalist right to democratic creation of coordinating conventions views them. A first example would justify the democratic legislature, were it felt that there are too many cases of miscoordination between language producers and consumers resulting in failures of communication and impeding the ability of people to further their ends in navigating public space, in establishing an official language for usage in signage and public communication. However, only a society cursed with diversity multiplies instances of such miscoordination and would require such a law; a society with shared conventions would have no need for one (see “Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital” for a fuller discussion of these coordinating conventions.)

The crux of the issue is that the liberty that exits in the public space is liberty to pursue one’s interests free from interference or impediment. It is the state’s role to remove any such impediments. You may have seen photos that make the rounds of social media of children present at rallies and demonstrations where they are exposed to people dressed in sexually perverse costumes or public nudity and felt a sense that something is very very wrong with this, to put it mildly. Or maybe you wanted to burn the whole fucking place to the ground to put it less mildly. It used to be said that what goes on in the privacy of ones home is nobody’s business. But, it is said, the public space is the place of civil rights, and civil rights includes freedom of speech, and freedom of speech includes freedom of expression, and freedom of expression includes sexual expression, and sexual expression means adults exposing themselves to children. Where are you going to draw the line bigot? I guess what goes on in public is none of your business either.

The place to draw the line is right at the beginning; the governing principle of the public sphere is the creation of cooperative conventions that facilitate the pursuit of the good, not freedom of expression. Public freedom of speech facilitates attainment of the good in that it leads to rational public debate which leads to truth which may serve as a guide in procuring the good. Truth, in turn can only be expressed in subject/predicate representations, that is, spoken or written propositions. Mere “expressions” including styles of attire, gestures, symbols, random sounds, icons (such as effigies), are not capable of conveying truth and are not conducive to the good of public freedom of speech. As such they can be regulated (or not) as the democratic process deems necessary.

An example would be the practice which has occurred in several European countries of banning the burka. Clothing, as mere expression, is not covered by public freedom of speech and if the democratic process determines something is disruptive to public conventions it is within its rightful powers to regulate it. However, under the current argument, expressions can not be banned for use in the private sphere which includes television, films, books, newspapers, art galleries, and internet discussions, although adequate controls for the protection of children may be mandated.

The establishment of conventions regarding public attire, such as forbidding public nudity, are within the rights of public democracy. Expressions that cause disgust violate the non-interference principle in that such depictions are obstacles or impediments that people would need to go out of their way to navigate around in traversing public space: removing any such obstacles and facilitating passage through public space being the purpose of the public sphere. Thus, prohibition of public displays of sexuality, or depictions of bodily mutilation are legitimate targets of restriction. For example, it would be legitimate to ban pro-life groups to fund billboards or march with banners showing aborted fetuses. Several years ago feminist groups in London attempted to ban depictions of scantily clad women on public billboards. If they can succeed in democratically enacting such a ban, teleoformalism has no objection (with the reminder that the private sphere remains outside such regulation).

Any such prohibitions must specify how a specific public behavior interferes with the public pursuit of citizens’ legitimate interests, the avoidance of disgust being such an impediment which may create an obstacle to movement through public space. Although a prohibition justified by an appeal to disgust may be enacted by a democratic majority, it may not be abused by the majority to arbitrarily restrict the legitimate pursuit of the good or public expressions of a minority as such. The common restraints on just law such as the Rawlsian principles of generality and universality apply (TOJ p. 131 – 132) in that laws must apply universally and not single out specific individuals or groups. For example, it would be illegitimate to ban wearing a yarmulke specifically, but in a society cursed with violent religious conflict, it could enact a (hopefully temporary) ban on any public religious symbols (but not on religious private property). A society without such violent conflicts would have no need for such a ban. However, I also hold it is the right of geographically concentrated groups to democratically secede and form their own political jurisdiction to live by their cultural conventions. What I have in mind is that the Puritan settlers of New England were mortified by Native American’s public nudity. They have a right to enact a ban on public nudity. But Native Americans also had a right to establish a political jurisdiction free from such regulation where their own standards could apply.

A Possible 4^th Sphere

There is a final relationship that requires an account, the relationship between the individual and the state known as citizenship. This relationship encompasses duties such as taxation, juries, and voting. This is best understood as a type of reciprocity between rulers and the ruled, which is a natural relationship such as the others I have discussed. Instead of material goods, which are exchanged in the commercial sphere, it is duties and obligations which are exchanged here. This is a topic that will have to await a future discussion but I will say here that humans are a social/tribal animal and these tribes are hierarchical for the same reason as anything else designed by natural selection, that this arrangement has proven advantageous. It goes without saying that the relationship between ruler and ruled needs to be mutually beneficial and not parasitic. Furthermore, I am not speaking of despotic rulers, democratic rulers are rulers as well. The various elites of the media, academia, Hollywood, and Wall Street are all rulers as well as they hand down laws, values, knowledge, and resources to the rest of us.

As Plato said the state has virtues other than justice: wisdom, moderation, and bravery are surely needed in a good state. Of these wisdom is by far the most important; whereas justice is blind, wisdom needs to have both its eyes peeled ala Clockwork Orange. And the most important thing wisdom should reveal is loyalty of the elites to the people. However our current elites treat the people as fungible: Wall Street happily replaces the populace with cheaper laborers, or offshores jobs seeking their own enrichment, political elites happily vote themselves a new people, academia is drunk on its own self-importance and power to indoctrinate, the cultural producers despise the philistines. Where there is no loyalty returned there should be no loyalty given and a new elite produced.

Conclusion

This post has been the culmination of a series of articles on the human good going back several years. The argument begins in “Bioformalism and the Human Good” which presents the account of the human good which underlies the series. The argument continues in “Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics For the 21^st Century” which explains how the human good may be achieved. The problems that result from the need for interpersonal cooperation in the light of our evolved selfish nature is spelled out in “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness Of The Human Soul” and “Bioformalism Vs. Liberalism and Stupid Freedom.”

The solution to this conflict is, unsurprisingly, civilization. As continued in “Religion As The Source Of The Social Emotions,” individuals are primarily members of a civilization–church and state being its twin arms–and only secondarily citizens of a state. It is the working of civilization as a whole which is designed to result in the good life. This account runs counter to our contemporary liberalism which offers a relativistic at best and nihilistic at worst view of the human good, no guide as to how it may be achieved other than a destructive characterization of happiness as the power to act on and never repress any and every ego imperative, a total absence of any understanding of virtue, and a society where Hollywood and The Media, in the service of political power, are the sources of our moral instruction. In the United States, stripped of any sense of civilization, we–but these days especially leftists–tend to see our primary identity as members of the state, with the head of the state as the head of the society, and the government as the repository and instrument of our aspirations and vision.

I am not the first to point out that there is a growing quasi-religious relationship between modern leftists and the state. They expect political leaders to be inspiring transformative figures, using the state to engage in great global moral crusades and proselytize to the people through the instruments of indoctrination. This is conjoined with the view that ties identity and loyalty to a passionate attachment to party membership. Leftists, stripped of religious affiliation, have come to see the party and the state as their church. If you claim your goals are secular you may use the weapons of the state to engage in any religious crusade you wish. I think that this was the inevitable result of the American view of separation of church and state: that religion would mutate, develop immunity to the imposed legal obstructions, and the state would re-absorb the features of church. In the United States many people tend to see the chief executive as the head or leader of the society, a moral exemplar, and the object of aspirations and inspiration. Yes, church and state ought to be separate, but in the way that the State Department and Defense Department are separate; they are separate yet branches of something larger, the United States government in this case. On the contrary, the leader of the state is not the leader of the civilization.* Under the teleoformalist understanding, the people, the head of the state, and the administrators of the state do not see it as the summum bonum of humanity charged with procuring the good. That job belongs to the civilization as a whole of which the state is but a part: it being the far more important job of the church to teach virtue and lead the people through the form of life, the job of the commercial sphere to produce the material goods that are needed and enhance the good life, the job of the family and private sphere to nurture children, and the state to administer justice. The head of state should be nothing more than an administrator, not a figure of HOPE, LOVE, or other spiritual passion. These impulses should be satisfied in an actual church whereas the state’s role should be its traditional conception as the cold instrument of impartial justice.

*I thus admire the UK for having a ceremonial figure which represents the civilization, not that it needs to be embodied in an actual person (and not that actually having a person in that position will do any good if the people abandon the civilization).)

Primer on Biological Functions and Norms

Almost every post on this blog refers to biological functions and/or norms. It becomes repetitive to explain the entire theory behind these ideas in every post so in order to keep posts short and not bore readers who have read previous explanations I usually put a quick and fast thumbnail sketch and move on. This post is intended to be a place where I can put a summary of the theoretical background to keep from having to explain it afresh each time.

Nothing written here is an original idea of mine, it is a summary of the philosophical background material. There is a large literature in philosophy of biology dedicated to this topic. Specifically, I will explain the theory of philosopher Ruth Millikan first presented in her 1984 Language, Thought, And Other Biological Categories.

In biology it is common to say things like that the function of the heart is to pump blood, the function of a mating display to attract mates, the function of a danger signal to alert others to the presence of a predator, the function of camouflage to make one invisible to predators, and so on. Hearts do lots of things besides pump blood: they make a “lub-dub” sound, they freeze when put in liquid nitrogen, squish when stepped on, etc. Of all the things hearts do what is special about pumping blood?

Intuitively, the reason pumping blood is special to hearts is because hearts were selected by natural selection for their ability to pump blood, not do those other things. This approach of using selection to understand function was pioneered by Wright (1973), but it was Millikan who opened the floodgates of interest in functions because Millikan revived interest in how the application of a theory of function could do serious work in addressing philosophical disputes.

In the philosophical literature, the effect that an item produces that causes it to be selected for reproduction is called its etiological function, or teleofunction, or proper function. According to Millikan, to have a proper function is not a matter of possessing a certain property or set of properties, but the possession of a certain history: there must be a history of 1. selection resulting in 2. reproduction or copying in order for an item to be considered to be in the possession of a function. A feature of an item is a reproduction in this sense if the presence of that feature is the result of the workings of natural law such that had a previous item (the ancestor) been different in that respect the other item (the descendant) would differ accordingly. Picture the way the color patterns of a chameleon’s skin match the surface upon which it sits. If the surface had been a different color, the chameleon’s skin would differ accordingly (assuming the chameleon’s pigment arrangers are working as designed). Further examples are the way that the characters on the paper that come out of a photocopier correspond in shape to the characters that are on the originals, or the way that children’s genes are copies of their parents’ genes.

The selection requirement for the possession of a function is the Darwinian process by which an item or feature is passed on because it has sufficiently often produced some effect that has contributed to the item’s successful reproduction as opposed to items lacking this feature. Those properties that are reproduced because in the past their ancestors have had a certain effect which lead to successful reproduction are called the reproductively established character of the item, and the effect in question is the function of the item.

And so in short, to understand an item’s proper function is to understand that which its ancestors did that accounts for the item’s reproduction as opposed to items lacking that feature. In the case of biological items such as organs or inherited behaviors such as mating displays, the function is that effect an item’s ancestors had that accounted for the proliferation of the genes responsible for its production. One’s genes are copies of one’s parents’ genes, and the genes that produce hearts have been selected by natural selection because they produce hearts. Hearts themselves contribute to the increased likelihood that an individual’s genes will be passed on due to that fact that they pump blood, not because they make “lub-dub” sounds, or squish when they are stepped on, or freeze when put into liquid nitrogen, or any of a million other things.

Items other than genes and their biological products may have proper functions as the theory merely requires that the reproductively established character to have been selected for reproduction because it has correlated with some effect more positively than items lacking this feature. Millikan, for example, claims that the imperative and indicative linguistic moods possess the functions to produce behavior and to produce true beliefs respectively (see LTOBC: ch. 3). Likewise, a learned behavior can have a function if it is reproduced because it has led to a reward; it being the function of the behavior to bring about this result, and a manufactured good such as a screwdriver can have turning screws as its function since it is this ability that has lead to the selection and reproduction of screwdrivers in manufacturing. It was its ability of previous hammers to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features in manufacture. The possession of a proper function is a purely natural fact of the matter as to whether an item possesses such a history, it is not a matter of human interests, practices, or conventions.

For each item that possesses a function in the sense described here there will be an explanation of how the item has historically managed to perform this function. This explanation will mention how the structure of the item in question has managed to “do its job” historically, what conditions were in effect, what the environment was like that allowed the item to successfully perform it function. Millikan calls such an explanation a “Normal” explanation and the conditions that have historically held in order for the item to succeed in performing its function “Normal” conditions (1984: 33). “Normal” is capitalized to prevent confusion that might occur if one was to think that Normal conditions are average or frequent since “normal” often has that connotation. Millikan’s “Normal” is a technical term with this specific meaning. For example, just think of how few sperm manage to perform their function of fertilizing an egg, or how infrequently the skull needs to perform its function of protecting the brain from impacts. It might be helpful to think of Normal conditions as “activation conditions” or “enabling conditions.” In abNormal conditions an item will fail to perform its function, or at least fail to accomplish it in accordance with a Normal explanation. Diseased hearts are in abNormal conditions, being underwater for extended periods is an abNormal condition for otherwise healthy lungs, and whatever it is that prevents a specific sperm from fertilizing an egg is also an abNormal condition.

And so as an intuitive shorthand we can think of “biologically normal” or Normal (for short) as working as designed by natural selection, or being in the condition it is supposed to be in, where “design” and “supposed to” means that the item is in the condition its ancestors were in on those occasions where they actually were selected for by natural selection.

For instance, take the nectar retrieval system of the honeybee. When a bee finds a source of nectar it flies back to the hive and does a squiggle dance. The turns and pace of the dance indicate to watching bees the location of the nectar relative to the sun and hive. The perceiving bees then fly off to the location indicated by the dance and retrieve the nectar. That is how the retrieval system is supposed to work, how it is designed to work. Lots can go wrong however. For one, perhaps the bee misidentifies something as a source of nectar that isn’t one. Maybe it is a plastic flower and not a real one. Or perhaps this bee has a brain parasite and its internal mapping system miscalculates the location of the nectar. Or perhaps the system that translates the bee’s inner directions into dance moves suffers from brain damage so that the bee does a malformed dance. Or perhaps the viewing bees have visual impairment and perceive the dance incorrectly and so fly off in the wrong direction. Or maybe environmental conditions are unfavorable and the bees are blown off course by a tornado. All of these are abnormalities that prevent the dance from performing its function as it was designed to. But none of this shows that the dance wasn’t supposed to map the location of nectar, or that a sperm which doesn’t fertilize an egg wasn’t supposed to, or a heart that can’t pump blood wasn’t supposed to, or camouflage that fails to make an animal invisible to predators wasn’t supposed to. This is how it can be said that camouflage might fail, or that a heart might be deformed, or that there is a right dance for the bee to do given the location of nectar, or that a thalidomide baby developed abNormally.

Teleological functions and Norms have some interesting characteristics.

A) Human intentions do not determine an object’s function. One may intend to use a toaster as a door jam, or a space heater, or to illuminate a room by the glow of its electric coils, but none of these things are its function (what Millikan calls a direct proper function). These uses are what Millikan would call “derived” proper functions; the sense in which we would say that the toaster is functioning as a heater is derived from the user’s intentions (Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, ch. 2). Prototypes of artifacts have only derived functions, when they begin to be replicated because they produce some effect they acquire a direct function as well.

B) An item may be able to perform its function only if external conditions are right, and yet because conditions are never right, the item may never perform its function. Millikan gives as an example an ice-cream machine. In order for an otherwise working ice-cream machine to perform its function, it needs to be hooked up to the appropriate environment and receive the appropriate ingredients as inputs. But because in this example the environment is never right and this particular ice-cream machine is never actually loaded with the correct ingredients, or plugged in and turned on, it never performs its function. And yet making ice cream remains its function (see “Existence Proof for a Viable Externalism,” The Externalist Challenge. New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality, p. 230).

C) An item with a teleofunction may be physically unable to perform it. A diseased heart may be unable to pump blood, yet that remains its function. It is because the possession of a teleofunction is a matter of what one’s ancestors did that the current item may lack these features and yet still have the performance of that action as its function.

D) The possession of a function is an objective fact. It is not a matter of opinion, or interpretation, or a matter of social agreement. It is a fact that the function of the heart is to pump blood. Anyone thinking otherwise is factually wrong. Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood; his proposition to that effect was false. Indeed, generations of biologists may be in agreement as to the function of some mechanism, and yet be wrong about it.

E) An item may fail in the performance of its function more often that it actually achieves it. For example, certain animal mating dances might fail more often than they succeed, yet they succeed often enough to make it worthwhile to keep them in use.

F) Saying that an item has a function is not to provide a conceptual analysis of the concept of that item. In describing an item’s function one is not giving a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for being that thing; having a function is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing the effect in question. Being a heart is a matter of possessing a certain history, and this history can not be revealed by conceptual analysis. In addition to possessing this history, in order to perform a function conditions must be what Millikan calls Normal conditions (LTOBC, p. 33). Even pumping blood can be missing from a heart, as is the case in deceased, diseased, or damaged hearts, and yet pumping blood remains the heart’s function.

Why I Am Not A Social Darwinist

Social Darwinism was a meta-ethical theory that the meaning of “good” is “that which survives a struggle for survival.” And so if a totalitarian society defeated a free society it would be good and right that the stronger triumphed. It basically amounted to “might makes right.” There were Social Darwinists who thought it was good that the rich exploit the poor, that the weak be culled, and so on. I don’t think this is the meaning of “good” and so I’m not a Social Darwinist.

Instead I accept the Aristotelian view that “good” means “possesses the distinctive virtues of the thing” with the caveat that moral goodness might be a separate case.

I discuss this is detail in “Restoring a Virtue-based Ethics for the 21^st Century” and “Biofomalism and the Human Good.”

Why Reactionary?

The official dictionary definition of reactionary is resistance to political change, but I don’t think that’s an accurate description of how the term is used, and it’s not what I had in mind when naming this blog. For me progressives are those who think that the present is bad in some way and we should stop doing things the way we do and instead do something new. A conservative attitude, on the other hand, thinks the present is good as is and we shouldn’t change the status quo. A reactionary agrees with the progressive in thinking the present is bad in some way but that we should go back to doing things the way we did in the past. Usually a reactionary thinks yesterday’s progressives destroyed something good and wish to revive or restore it. Reaction is born of the perception that things are bad in some way that they didn’t used to be. That is how I intend the term.

For example, if you think baseball was better before the designated hitter and wish to go back to the way baseball was played before, you have a reactionary attitude towards the designated hitter rule. Punk rock, strangely enough, was very reactionary. It felt rock music in the 1970s had become bloated, pretentious, and boring and thought it should go back when rock was fast, short, catchy, fun, and exciting. But, importantly, punk rock wasn’t Sha Na Na; it wasn’t an oldies act. As critics of reactionaries always say, you can’t go back to the past. True enough but you can take the good from the past that had been discarded and express it in new ways.

There is no reason one can’t be reactionary towards some things, and conservative or progressive towards others. For example, I think technological advancement is in general a good thing. I am certainly not conservative as I don’t think there is anything of value left to conserve in American society, the left has destroyed, or is in the process of destroying, everything of value. So what things do I think were better in the past? You can find the details in the individual posts on this blog, but here are a few examples.

Virtue Ethics: Virtue ethics was the reigning moral theory for the entirely of Western civilization from Plato down to the 19/20^th century where it was discarded and replaced by the Frankenstein monster of Freudianism, existentialism, post-structuralism, and nihilism we have today. I think virtue ethics were a superior ethical system to the reigning liberal order. See “Restoring a Virtue Based Ethics for the 21^st Century” for a primer on how virtue ethics should be understood and lived today.

Family and sexual relations: I think the relations between the sexes are worse today than in the past. The main reason I see for this is that feminism has foisted a defect/defect norm upon intersexual relationships instead of a cooperate/cooperate. It was traditionally understood that men and women should strive to be good for one another, to put in effort on each others behalf. It somehow came to be that expecting men and women to put in effort on each other’s behalf became a violation of ones autonomy, or a crime against their sacred individuality. This ended up a defect/defect situation resulting in mutual dissatisfaction. Of course this doesn’t hold for everyone, and I’ve been lucky enough to find a wonderful woman, and I make sure to put in effort on her behalf, but that is the sense I get from seeing the dissatisfaction I see throughout the culture, especially in the high divorce rate. Note to self: this paragraph is too mild and could have been much stronger. OK. The Tinder hook up culture is a state of barbaric depravity where far from mutual cooperation it is a state of mutual parasitism as though the sexes seek to feed on each other and the goal is to exploit the other to the greatest extent before discarding the husk and moving on. The past was better and ought to be restored.

Furthermore, the family has been badly, even fatally, wounded by decades of liberalism as seen in the high divorce rate, late-or-non-married rate, the children born out of wedlock rate, and low fertility rate. My series of articles “A Darwinian Look at Marriage” and “Bioformalism and the Human Good” touches on this.

Nihilism: There is a reigning ethos in the culture descended from existentialism that human life is meaningless and so all we can do is create our own meaning. This sense of the meaninglessness of existence has had awful consequences, especially among the many young people who either drift through life feeling it is all pointless, or that fame and fortune are the only marks of success (and lacking such come to feel that their life is a failure), or try to fill the void with sex and drugs. My posts “Bioformalism and the Human Good” and “Bioformalism vs. Liberalism and Stupid Freedom” are responses to this.

Other examples of problems in the present that were nor present in the past is the nightmare of modernist architecture, fashion, and suburban sprawl. I don’t have a specific post on these topics so I will just throw it out here. Somewhere along the line the art elites turned against beauty, probably as a way to signal their elite status (if you possess the views of the common people, such as what constitutes beauty, you are not elite, you are thereby common. Thus the elites of every age must evolve to have outlandish tastes to signal their elite status). This marriage of status-seeking architects and penny-pinching corporations decimated our built environment and created the horrifying dystopia of suburban sprawl and urban dehumanization.

Another issue is that there is, for a lack of a better term, a kind of corruption of the soul I see everywhere. In book I of The Republic Plato considers several theories of justice. One is that justice is harming your enemies and helping your friends, the other is that justice is interest of the stronger. Civilization is based on the rejection of these two theses and requires every citizen to commit to a higher conception of justice. Using the state to harm your enemies and help your friends is not justice but politics, and politics has seeped into the soul of every citizen and corrupted every decision and feeling. What car you drive, what you eat, where you live, who your friends are, you tastes in the arts, all of it has become politicized, all of it is in the service of helping the party and harming your enemies.

“The personal is political” quickly added that the personal is psychological and a political war was launched to manufacture the psychology to support political platforms. The parties, instead of looking to represent the people’s wishes, instead felt it their purpose through their propaganda and educational arms to create the people that had the wishes their politics demanded.

Everything is now in service of the party’s political goals. Every day people sign on to their social media accounts and their favored political sites seeking out what propaganda they ought to believe in order to further their political goals. Please, they beg, tell me what I am supposed to believe about current events so that I can further my party’s political power. Tell me how I may believe my political enemies are actually the bad guys in every instance, no matter the actual evidence, and how my side is always innocent of all wrongdoing. Tell me even what I should believe is the meaning of words so as to not have to accept the enemy’s arguments. Yes, the evil of deceiving oneself into believing you possess high political ideals, not merely disguised self-interest, is present in all ages, but not to this extent. Nothing is ever 100% but in the recent past there was a commitment to fair play and not win at all costs, even at the cost of molding what one must think and perceive. There is no sense of the honorable or dishonorable; the acquisition of power by any means is the only standard of right. Post-modernism, in seeing everything as structured by power relations, welcomed back in the twin anti-civilizational views of justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies, and justice as the rule of the stronger.

Religion: it is not a coincidence that the retreat of religion coincides with the advance of degenerate horror we see everywhere in the culture.

Diversity is not a strength: I don’t think anyone who evaluates the sentence “diversity is a strength” in good faith can believe it is true. Chanting diversity is our strength is like having to believe in fairies in order to keep Tinkerbell alive; it’s what we say to ourselves as a mantra to get by and keep the deception going. But it’s not literally true. Diversity produces alienation, mutual suspicion, destruction of social capital, and is a source of constant internal conflict that is not present in homogeneous countries. See “Alienation and Diversity,” and “Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital.”

All of these factors come together to form an oppressively ugly, alienating, meaningless society where all too many people turn to drugs and antidepressants to fill it up the void, or just endure it in quiet desperation or in a search for mindless distraction until the end. It works great for the rich deracinated globe-trotting elites who have had fulfilled their fondest wish where all limits of material wealth, loyalty, or restraint could be lifted. But many unsatisfied people look around and say “it stinks and it didn’t used to be like this.”

In conclusion, the Georgian era was a time of debauchery and indulgence which was followed by the restrained Victorian age. Our present Elizabethan era surpasses all others in the arts of vice and decadence. My hope is that as the Elizabethan age comes to its end it will be followed by, for lack of a better word, a more civilized age where the pursuit of the higher things is once again the standard of public mores. If you want a society that aims at virtue, family, meaning, beauty, justice, truth, honor, and community you have to be a reactionary. It is the purpose of this blog to lay the foundations of how such an age may come about.

Bioformalism vs. Liberalism and Stupid Freedom

It is traditional to distinguish between political freedom and personal freedom: the former being limits on what areas of life the state may regulate, the latter referring to an individual’s independence from non-state entities such as other individuals, family, institutions, or other social pressures. Throughout this post I will only be speaking of the latter type of freedom. It is the thesis of this post that personal freedom, when rightly understood, is stupid.

There have been two main traditions regarding the nature of individual freedom. The Plato/Kant view is that one is autonomous aka self-ruled, when one rules oneself and can resist acting on the urgings of our appetites/inclinations. The existentialist position, on the other hand, is that in order to be free our will must not be determined by the aforementioned heteronomous external social forces of traditions, church, family, or “social pressures.” Although existentialism was something of a philosophical flash in the pan, its main contention, that “existence precedes essence” has seeped into the very fiber and sinew of public understanding; the entire baby boomer generation was a project to dismantle these forces in the name of personal freedom. Existentialism’s contention was that if we are caused or influenced to act by any external forces other than our own free will we are not acting from authentic freedom; our will has been determined by outside influences and can not be said to be acting freely. And so we had psychologists (Piaget?) who urge parents and institutions to not unduly influence the development of their children so that their character may freely develop. Architects such as Walter Gropius would not teach architectural history out of fear that knowledge of the past would influence the individual unique creativity of the architect. Or parents trying to raise their children to be “gender-neutral” so as to not impose external gender norms on their children. Or feminists telling women to care not at all what men think, or to not care about socially imposed ideals or standards. Or fat-activists saying you should not care about fat-phobic social pressures. Or marriage being about respecting your spouse’s autonomy rather than there being any marital obligations. And on and on through every aspect of our culture.

However, if there were no outside forces shaping the individual’s character and every influence is removed what would produce or motivate behavior? Here the existentialist tradition invented the hilarious/disastrous fiction of self-creation: free from all outside influences individuals would create themselves! They would be able to freely create their own unique and individual values, morals, tastes, and standards. But alas, the age of self created existentialist heroes never materialized and indeed the ancient vices swept in to the vacuum to form sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll hedonism.

I think it is clear that biopsychology has made the premises of existentialism and its post-modern/post-structural descendants untenable. As I wrote in “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness of the Human Soul”:

“Psychological processes are not different in kind from other biological processes. That is to say, our psychological processes have been designed by natural selection and work according to the same principles as other biological processes. Like, say, the heart, lungs, or liver, psychological processes have been selected for their ability to produce some beneficial effect. In the case of psychological processes, they are all designed to ultimately contribute to some successful behavior. As Millikan writes: “The capacity to have desires is maintained in the species, then, only insofar as some desires become goals, then become intentions, and finally are fulfilled. Hence one of the functions of desires too is to guide the organism towards their own fulfillment” (White Queen Psychology, p. 166).

For example, the struggle for individual survival and reproduction has produced our self-interested psychological processes. The subjective feeling of hunger, for instance, is designed to get the organism to procure food, to actually produce food-seeking behavior; sexual attraction is designed to get the organism to pursue sex; fear is designed to get the organism to seek safety, and so on. I need a name for this self-interested aspect of psychology and am going to call it the ego. This should not be confused with any other uses of “ego” such as Freudian accounts, but the word does have the connotation of selfishness, and so it seemed a suitable choice. Hunger, thirst, the sex drive, and fear are mental states that result from the workings of the ego. In addition, there is the drive to procure the means to achieve these ends–power–which mostly takes the form of the desire for material goods, wealth, or status. Finally, there is the desire to achieve these things with the expenditure of as little energy as possible, which you might call efficiency (or laziness if you’re feeling less kind).

The brain gets the organism to act in distinctive ways by producing mental states with imperative content. This just means that certain mental states are designed to produce behavior as hunger is designed to get the organism to go and procure food. Other mental processes such as beliefs do not have imperative content; they are not designed to produce behavior themselves, but they are supposed to be invoked as guides to behavior. The imperative content is encoded in the qualitative nature of consciousness, what philosophers call “qualia.” Appetites and emotions are imperative mental states.

In addition to the ego-imperatives the forces of kin-selection have resulted in the emotions involved in familial care; evolutionary theory believes these have evolved in order to ensure the survival of our genes in our offspring. Finally, reciprocal altruism has developed the social emotions whereby an individual aids itself by cooperating with others. “

And so in removing all external motivations existentialism did not thereby free some inherently autonomous mind to create itself, it simply handed the will over to the ego-imperatives by removing the influences that serve to restrain them; religion, society, and family were prevented from doing their job of restraining the ego. With them gone all that was left to determine the will were the ego-imperatives whose rule was lauded as the greatest and most praiseworthy possibility of mankind. There is an inverted Kantianism at work among a strain of liberals where “society” or “social pressures” plays the role inclinations played for Kant, and the ego-imperatives play the role of reason. For these people resisting social pressures in order to act on the imperatives of the ego is the highest form of morality. And so we see liberals who praise some girl who bangs the entire football team as wonderfully acting on her autonomy to resist the Puritanical social norms, fat activists praising the resistance to social beauty standards to act on the ego-imperatives against moderation, degenerate weirdos urging us to resist social pressures to be attractive, and mutilating yourself instead, feminists praising women who destroy their marriage to “follow your bliss,” and so on. Many have been so indoctrinated in the cult of personal freedom they refuse to get married or have children as this will be entail a violation of their highest good in requiring a suppression of their ego imperatives in order to see to the good of another. To them liberty means being liberated to act as directed by the ego imperatives unimpeded by any other internal of external forces. . All are celebrated sacraments to this breed of liberals with the addition of an obscene cover story that anyone urging you to resist the imperatives of the ego is oppressing you.

In fact “personal freedom” does not deserve to be called freedom at all because it is so purely and directly causal. When the body tells the brain to produce a feeling of hunger whose biological function is to cause the organism to engage in food-procurement behavior, and the organism allows this electro-chemical causal path to work unimpeded, it is a joke to refer to this purely causal process as free will. The brain produces behavior the way the colon produces shit. The western tradition going back to Plato that regarded such action as being a “slave to the passions” is far more accurate. Being an ego-slave might be a good modern epithet.

The liberal account gets it exactly backwards. In “Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics for the 21st Century” I illustrated how resisting the urgings of the ego-imperatives in order to act on the imperatives of kin selection or reciprocal altruism is the nature of the social virtues.

“There is another class of emotions that we can call the social emotions. For example, does a solitary animal like a bear feel loneliness? I doubt it. They at least don’t display any behavior that would indicate they are distressed by their solitary life. But herd animals like sheep or goats become very agitated when isolated. Humans are similar in that we experience social emotions like loneliness, anxiety, and fear of exclusion. Our long evolutionary history as social creatures has built into our psychology a wide range of social emotions. These emotions are designed to benefit us in our relations with other people.

Take bravery, for example. Soldiers almost universally report that what motivates their bravery is their regard for the opinion of men in their unit. It is not some rational calculation as to whether they are in a situation that ought to be feared, as Plato says. They do not want to let down their squad-mates and bear the social consequences. This regard for the opinion of their squad-mates allows them to overcome the urging of their fear in acts of bravery. (Sometimes the fear proves to be too much and they neglect their duty. This is why the military always must punish deserters. If their fear of danger proves stronger than their fear of ostracism, then fear of the firing squad will have to be even stronger.)

So this is the function of the social emotions, to produce behavior that is beneficial in our relationships with other people. But what’s more is that the social emotions are designed to resist the appetites. In the soldier example above, the fear the individual felt was resisted by the concern for the good opinion of his squadmates. Our long history as social animals has shown that our relationships with others is often (though not always) more important than the immediate satisfaction of our appetites and emotions. Nature has given us the social emotions in order allow us to restrain the emotions and appetites in social situations where it is beneficial to do so.

Social virtues are the resistance to an appetite or emotion in favor of producing an advantageous effect on other people driven by the social emotions. So social bravery is the resistance to acting on ones fear driven by the desire to produce a favorable, or avoid an unfavorable, reaction in other people. Our concern for our reputation and fear of the harmful consequences of developing a negative reputation–ostracism, alienation, enemies, and the like–drive us to resist doing what fear is prodding us to do. “

This is not to say that acting on the social emotions is freedom and acting on the ego-imperatives is deterministic; the social emotions are equally designed to get the organism to act in a certain way. (Nor, being a Humean, is reason able to take the role for me it does for Plato and Kant and generate imperative content.) Nor do I mean to imply that it is always bad to act on an ego-imperative, it is only so when doing so harms oneself by harming ones mutually-beneficial relationships with others. So why prefer one to the other? Why not do what is easy and selfish? Resisting acting on the urgings of the ego in order to produce a beneficial effect on other people has two important differences. First, resisting the urgings of the ego earns respect in a way egotism never can because we know doing so is hard and can sympathize with the effort it takes. It takes effort to to resist our impulses to not expend energy and get your ass to the gym. This earns respect the way being a fat lazy couch potato never can. Resisting lust to remain faithful takes effort. Sticking to a diet takes effort. Working to earn a living rather than mooching off others requires work. Overcoming fear to help someone in danger is praiseworthy the way cowardliness never can be.

Secondly, virtue is superior to egotism because it is in accord with our good as human beings and egotism is contrary to it. To see why this is so we must now introduce bioformalism, the view that the good of a living thing involves living out its distinctive form of life as excellently as possible (see “Bioformalism and the Human Good”). For humans this is to develop our intellectual, physical, and moral abilities as children, to attract the best mate possible, to bear children and raise them in the best possible environment for their development, and to work cooperatively with others to achieve common ends. The reason we ought to resist our ego-imperatives is that doing so is necessary to achieve the good for humans: it requires industriousness to acquire resources to provide for a family, it requires sociability to work with others, it requires daily effort to raise children. To attract a mate might involve working to be a good mate choice, perhaps by fostering physical attractiveness, or, in our society, working in order to get a job that will allow you to support a family. Marriage and parenthood is perhaps the quintessential institution that requires us to suppress our ego-imperatives in order to constantly work for the good of others. And this is why personal freedom is stupid: it keeps you from the good, it harms your ability to live out the form of life as excellently as possible, is bad for you, it is foolish to desire it.

Instead, since what motivates the individual to resist the urgings of the ego are the social emotions, instead of seeking to be free from social pressures, we ought to welcome those that keeps us from acting on our vices/ego. We ought to desire to have friends and family, and belong to a society and institutions (such as churches where individuals help each other in resisting sin/ego) that generate the necessary social emotions to motivate us to live out the form of human life as excellently as possible (the Catholic sacraments are excellent at ushering us through the form of a human life (I say this not being a Catholic)). And this is another reason personal freedom does not deserve to be called freedom at all: whatever else it may be, freedom is a good, but “personal freedom” is bad for us, it keeps us from the good, people ought, and do, run from it back to the aid of family, friends, and supporting institutions.

In saying we ought to welcome social pressure all I have in mind is the way friends and family can influence us to resist the vices. Male friends for instance will tease, or “take the piss” out of each other as a way to motivate the overcoming of weaknesses. Growing up, my male friends always did this in a humorous way which would get the point across but not cause any hurt feelings. The last thing you should be as a friend is tolerant and non-judgemental. Yes, this is liable to abuse where it goes over the line and becomes bullying. I suppose gossip plays the same role in women (with the same potential to not aid a friend but to become cruel ostracism and picking on). And yes there is no guarantee that ones friends, family, or social institutions are always urging what is actually good for us. But healthy relationships, healthy institutions, and a healthy society just are those where the forces keep us on the path of the good life. This is especially a problem today where there are many online communities, almost entirely aligned with the left/liberals/progressives, that wield crushing social pressure, praise and validation, and threat of ostracism to urge members to harm themselves, to live counter to the good, often in the name of personal freedom or a political cause.

Defenders of personal freedom might counter that they are merely claiming that one ought to be free to choose whether to act on one motive or the other. If all they mean here is that the state or church does not have the right to force us to say, go on a diet, or get married, or have children, under threat of fine or imprisonment, then of course I have no objection. But this position is almost always either explicitly or implicitly urging the conclusion that all choices are equally valid. This is false. Harming your cooperative relationships with others is contrary to the good, it is a bad choice. If you betray your friends in an act of cowardice, and this ruined relationship ends up harming you, you have made a bad choice (of course, depending on the circumstances it might be a price worth paying). Choosing to remain childless is against the human good. Choosing to act on sexual attraction and harm your relationship with your spouse is a bad choice. Instead, understand our nature as human beings, understand how our selfish nature can run counter to our good, learn to recognize when it is the ego that is directing our (and others’) behavior, perhaps to our detriment, and take with deadly seriousness that what is at stake is nothing less than success in life as a human being.

Two final points. First, what about those who despite all this still do not wish to or can not live their life according to the human form. Nothing, they are free to do so if they wish but should rightly be regarded as a tragic figure the way old maids were traditionally seen, as someone who failed to fulfill their purpose or achieve their greatest good. Yes, nature’s purpose and an individual’s subjective purpose can diverge, and this is a tragic occurrence

Secondly, nothing in this post should be taken as implying I don’t believe in free will. Yes, when the body detects it is running low on energy and creates a feeling of hunger and this feeling serves its biological purpose to get the organism to engage in food-procurement behavior, this surely can not count as free will. But in complex decision making humans might have to weigh competing imperatives, invoke our concepts of many different relevant factors, and even figure out what counts as a relevant factor, then invoke the memory of each factor, and combine it in the imagination to predict multiple probabilities for success for each factor or possible plan of action, and all of this information needs to be fed into some central processor that can work on and synthesize all of these inputs. I think that such complex calculations might meet the criteria for free will.

Bioformalism and the Human Good

The position I call bioformalism is a theory of the good for living beings and otherwise designed beings. The lives of all living things have evolved to run according to a form (thus the “form” in bioformalism); for humans this is to develop our intellectual, physical, and moral abilities as children, to attract the best mate possible, to bear children and raise them in the best possible environment for their development, and to work cooperatively with others to achieve common ends. Bioformalism simply takes this empirical truth and adds the claim that to live out the form as excellently as possible is the good for that life-form. However, bioformalism only concerns the form; our individual and cultural distinctiveness provide the matter, as it were. Thus it leaves plenty of room for the arts and sciences and individual interests. A Thomistic bioformalism would hold that the form of human life would only be completed when we are reunited with God.

In order to live out the form of life as excellently as we are willing and able requires the cultivation of our distinctive excellences or virtues, and the goodness of a member of a kind is proportional to the degree of possession the distinctive virtues of that kind. Details of this process are given in “Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics for the 21st Century.”

Philippa Foote advocates for bioformalism in her must-read Natural Goodness when she writes:

“Nobody would, I think, take it as other than a plain matter of fact that there is something wrong with the hearing of a gull that cannot distinguish the cry of its own chick, as with the sight of an owl that cannot see in the dark. Similarly, it is obvious that there are objective, factual evaluations of such things as human sight, hearing, memory, and concentration, based on the life form of our species.” (P. 24)

“…goodness in respect of bodily health, of faculties such as intelligence and memory, and so on is precisely that which fits a living thing for the instantiation of the life form of its species, and that this counts as the good of a living thing, then in so far as this instantiation in humans can be identified with having a good life…” (P. 92)

“By contrast, ‘natural’ goodness, as I define it, which is attributable only to living things themselves and to their parts, characteristics, and operations, is intrinsic or ‘autonomous’ goodness in that it depends directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species.” (p. 26 – 27)

“I want to show moral evil as ‘a kind of natural defect’. Life will be at the centre of my discussion, and the fact that a human action or disposition is good of its kind will be taken to be simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing.” (P. 5)

Foote, however, forks down the wrong path by two mistakes. Firstly there is the curious footnote on page 40.

“We are not then interpreting it as a historical question, as ‘proper function’ is interpreted, for instance, by Ruth Millikan in Language, Thought, And Other Biological Categories, chapter 1, and as ‘function’ would generally be interpreted in evolutionary biology. As David Wiggins says in Postscript 4 in Needs, Values, Truth, 353, ‘we really need to describe what morality has become, a question on which evolutionary theory casts no particular light.’”

Foote here displays a woeful lack of understanding of Millikan. She seems to have heard that Millikan offers a “historical” account of functions rooted in the selection of ancestors but seems completely ignorant of how on Millikan’s account behaviors, customs, and institutions can have proper functions, or of her notion of derived proper functions which can explain how completely new and original items can be said to be the result of historical selection processes.

The second mistake Foote makes is on page 42 where she writes:

“Take reproduction, for instance. Lack of capacity to reproduce is a defect in a human being. But choice of childlessness and even celibacy is not thereby shown to be a defective choice, because human good is not the same as plant or animal good. The bearing and rearing of children is not an ultimate good in human life, because other elements of good such as the demands of work to be done may give a man or woman reason to renounce family life.”

I can only interpret this passage biographically as childless Philippa Foote, who chose career over family and children, could not accept that she herself would turn out to be sub-optimal on her own theory, having failed to live out the form of human life, perform the duties, and display many of the excellences of humans. And so having started with the correct notion that “goodness… depends directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species” she is lead off the trail down blind alleys.

I can hear people shouting “naturalistic fallacy! Even if the life of human beings does possess a natural form it is a fallacy to assert that natural equals good! You can not deduce from the fact that the lives of living things possess a form to the value that we ought to live it.” I am not going to spend much time on this, I recommend everyone interested in this question read John Post’s great little book From Nature to Norm. He handles all the versions of the naturalistic fallacy far better that I could here. But I do want to address a specific Is/Ought objection. One might object, even if I accept that the human life has a form, why ought I live it if I do not want to? What if I don’t want to have children, for instance? What if I am happier sitting on the couch and watching TV all my life? First of all, I am not trying to win an argument or convince anyone by deduction. I do not believe determined radical skeptics can be refuted, or that there are deductive arguments based on self-evident premises, so I am not trying to “win” against radical skepticism a priori. I do not believe you can convince by rational argumentation a salmon that is determined to not return to its river of origin to do so (even it it was capable of rationality). The good for a kind does not have to be universally achieved or desired. But I do believe in inference to the best explanation. That life has a form seems empirically true, and that the vast majority of humanity across the millennia and location seek to live it out makes this the best explanation of what the good entails.

Nor am I asserting that you have a moral obligation to live this life. Needless to say, it does not require that anyone should be forced by the state to, say, have children, or cultivate ones virtues, if you don’t want to. My concern is for those who would otherwise seek to live a good life and cultivate their virtues but are lead astray by the popular existentialist nihilism that there is no good for mankind, that existence precedes essence, that human life is meaningless, and that one creates their own good. Existentialism did not usher in a golden age of self-created ubermensch; those who most fully accepted the existentialist-derived nonsense simply fell into the ancient sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll hedonism; nihilism always falls into hedonism. Bioformalism especially hates the decadent post-modernism which encourages people to be spitefully make themselves worse: uglier, weaker, sexless, depraved, vicious, childless, purposeless. These destructive and corrupting views which have left many people rudderless and purposeless have run rampant because there has not been a realist alternative of offer. Bioformalism provides this long-overdue alternative so that the majority of people who do seek to live out the good human life, and feel there is something wrong or wasteful in a life of decadence, can know that they are right to feel so.

And so the answer as to why one ought to live out the form of a human life as excellently as possible is that we have been designed to do so, and to find satisfaction in doing so. Developing our excellences, finding a mate, having children, and reaping the fruits of successful labor are, as close as is possible for living beings, universally regarded as the greatest sources of life-satisfaction.

I will spell out the consequences of bioformalism in future posts:

Bioformalism and Stupid Freedom

Politics of Bioformalism

Bioformalism and Rawls

Cancel Ruth Millikan! Now!

We hereby call for philosopher Ruth Millikan to be expelled from the Academy of Arts and Sciences, to have her Rescher prize rescinded, her books and articles removed from publication, and all titles and honors stripped. We accuse her work of having sexist, transphobic, homophobic, and racist implications which have no place in any institution of higher learning or in civilized society as a whole.

Our case is as follows:

Sexist, Homophobic, and Transphobic

Millikan begins her “landmark” Language, Thought, and Other Biological Properties by defining what she calls “proper functions.” Millikan had noticed the occurrence of two natural processes. First, the phenomenon of items reproducing or copying, in the way genes are copies of ones parents’ genes, but also in the way that language items are copied from previous utterances through the process of learning and repetition, behaviors such as animal mating dances are copies of the form of previous dances, and manufactured items are copies of prototypes or blueprints. Second, she noticed that often things are copied because they produce a certain effect rather than those items that do not produce the effect. In other words, they are selected for reproduction because they produce an effect. For example, the form of a successful mating dance might be reproduced either through (a) the actions of genes (which build brains, which produce behaviors), or by (b) learning, because it produced a certain effect: successful mating in this case. She calls the distinctive selected effect of an item its “proper function.”

Next, and this is where we enter pure Nazi territory, she calls the explanation of how an item’s ancestors historically produced its selected effect a “Normal explanation,” and the conditions which historically held on those occasions “Normal conditions.” (LTOBC ch. 1 – 2.) Finally, she abbreviates “in accord with a Normal explanation” as “Normally,” and even worse, conditions that did not hold on these occasions as “abNormal.” For example, again take the inherited form of an animal mating display. Evolutionary theory holds that such displays have the form they do because historically this proved effective at attracting mates. Those who enacted the movements in that form were successful in passing on their genes, including the genes that produce this distinctive behavior. In Millikan’s terminology it is Normal for members of the species to perform the display with such a form. A display that does not follow the Normal form either because of genetic alterations, an injury or illness the creature has sustained (and so is physically unable), or because environmental conditions prevent it, are abNormal instances. Of course the animal may somehow succeed by pure luck, but this would not be in accord with a Normal explanation, which is an explanation of how the behaviors of their ancestors lead to reproductive success.

How do we determine which phenomenon are to be considered Normal? For example, why would we say that it is Normal for arteries to allow blood—and therefore oxygen–to flow from the heart to the cells of the body, and abNormal for them to be clogged and so prevent blood flow? First, there needs to be an presumption of functional universality. That is to say, absent extremely compelling evidence to the contrary, it is rational to believe all members of reproductively established groups share functional ascriptions: everyone’s heart is designed to pump blood, the lens of the eye is for focusing light on the retina, the intestines are for absorbing nutrients, the function of the feeling of hunger is to get us to engage in food procurement, and so on. If you do not assume functional universality it might be that, say, one group of people’s hearts are for pumping blood and another group’s might be for something entirely different and unknown (and unknowable?). Absent extremely compelling evidence to the contrary inference to the best explanation requires the rational presumption of functional universality. Secondly, it must be understandable how this item contributes to survival and reproductive fitness. In the case of clogged arteries we can see how an organism’s survival can be threatened by the inability to circulate blood.

This entire discussion is disgustingly offensive to queer activists who have struggled to destroy all sense that there exist natural norms and ostracize anyone who suggests anything might be normal or abnormal (including Normal and abNormal). Norms are oppressive power structures. The fact that Millikan’s Normal conditions are mere comparisons of one set of natural conditions to another set that held in the past should not stop us from the feeling of righteous anger. Millikan’s examples of abNormal conditions all seem benign such as diseased, damaged, or deformed hearts, chameleons whose pigment arrangers are malfunctioning and so do not produce a color pattern that matches the surface upon which they sit, or bee dances that do not correctly indicate the location of nectar. But it is a short step from labeling conditions as Normal or abNormal to labeling people as Normal or abNormal and then to the gas chamber!

Although she is careful to never discuss such cases we only need ask ourselves what would be considered the proper function of sexual reproduction and how should it be considered to occur Normally to see Millikan’s sexist, homophobic, and transphobic dog-whistles/rational implications. The currently dominant scientific view is that the genetic recombination that occurs in sexual reproduction evolved in order to keep a step ahead of parasites that would otherwise evolve to attack or exploit a genetically static organism. In Millikan’s terminology we would say that the proper function of sexual reproduction is the protection of the organism from parasites. (The exact scientific theory that is eventually adapted to explain sexual reproduction is not important for our case against Millikan.) If it has a proper function then it has a Normal explanation of how this has occurred historically. Inference to the best explanation would conclude that that reason 99%+ of individuals end up either XX or XY is that this is how sexual reproduction occurs Normally. That most cases of Klinefelter Syndrome, where a person is born XXY instead of XX or XY, results in infertility would just reinforce the conclusion that this is abNormal. The important point is that Millikan’s work supports a realist explanation of binary sexes, however we know that sex is a social construct and so a Millikan-inspired account both factually and morally wrong in that it results in the abhorrent conclusion that there are only two sexes, everyone else cast into the abNormal category. This erases the identity of non-binary individuals.

Let’s now ask how would post-conception sexual development be understood to proceed Normally. If we were to seek to understand why it is that in >95% of cases XY individuals go on to develop male genitalia, male bodies (greater upper body strength for example), and brains that identify as males and produce sexual attraction for females, the best explanation would be that this is how natural selection has designed things to go, that this is how things proceed Normally. Although Millikan is careful to never discuss such cases, in the case of transsexuals in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary it would be rational to conclude that it is Normal for sex and sexual identity to coincide. Furthermore, the principle of functional universality would hold that for everyone it is the proper function of metal tokenings of sexual attraction to produce behavior resulting in sexual reproduction; homosexuals would then be those whose sex and object of sexual attraction do not coincide as is Normal. Again, the result is that marginalized communities such as homosexuals and transsexuals—along with the deaf or blind, thalidomide babies, and colo-rectal cancer sufferers–are shunted to being abNormalities, a result about as homophobic and transphobic as possible.

To conclude this section of our indictment, Millikan’s work invites us to ask how have things been selected by natural selection to occur. If we are allowed to hold that the form of bee dances has been selected to correspond to the location of nectar, that chameleons’ pigment arrangers have been selected to match the item on which the animal sits, that hearts have been selected for their ability to pump blood (more accurately, the genes that produce hearts have been selected for their ability to produce items that pump blood), that animal danger signals are supposed to indicate the presence of predators, that mating displays are supposed to attract mates, that mitochondria are supposed to produce energy for the cell, it will inevitably lead one to ask how sexual development is supposed to occur. To all appearances same-sex attraction would be absolutely catastrophic from the view of natural selection, and absent extremely compelling evidence otherwise inference to the best explanation would demand that it not be considered to have been so selected. The conclusion would be that same sex attraction is an abNormality, a conclusion which must be resisted for moral and political reasons.

And so:

Evaluating matters of sexuality as Normal or abNormal would suggest that transsexualism or homosexuality are abNormal. So promoting the concept of Normal/abNormal must result in cancellation.
But Normal/abNormal is just an abbreviation for an explanation of what an item’s ancestors did that was selected for and how an item may fail to produce the effect its ancestors were selected for their ability to produce. So offering such explanations must result in cancellation.
But such explanations are just an expression that natural selection works by the survival of genes that produce a positive contribution to survival. And so such a view must result in cancellation.

Instead it must be held that sex, sexual attraction and sexual identity are, unlike every other biological phenomenon, infallible. That matters of sexuality are not capable of ever “failing” to do what their ancestors did, that there are no biological norms regarding sexuality. And since all biological processes are capable of failing to do what their ancestors were selected for their ability to do, it must be concluded that sexuality has not been the result of natural selection. See “Homosexuality Proves the Existence of God” for details.

In Part 2 we will continue our indictment by considering the racist implications of Millikan’s “New Grounds for [Race] Realism.”

Homosexuality Proves the Existence of God

It is with the greatest modesty that I reveal to the world the following argument which nevertheless has the greatest of implications: the first undeniable proof of the existence of a perfect infallible deity.

The argument starts with the following premise:

•(FALLIBLE): that for all biological processes created by natural selection it is possible for them to fail to produce the effect they were selected for their ability to produce. More accurately, they may fail to produce the effect their ancestors were selected by natural selection for their ability to produce. Either through internal factors such as disease, damage, or deformity, or an uncooperative external environment such as predators or other or environmental factors (the lungs are not designed to work when filled with water or in a vacuum) an item may fail to perform its biological function. Mating displays fail to attract mates, hearts fail to pump blood, the lens of the eye may fail to focus light on the retina, mitochondria may fail to produce energy for the cell, camouflage may fail to make an animal invisible to predators, cancer may cause the lungs to fail to take in oxygen, ducklings may imprint on tractors instead of their mothers, thousands of mental illnesses may make people hear voices that aren’t there, or mistake their wife for a hat, and on and on for every other conceivable biological process.

An infallible process is one that never fails to produce its selected effect, that is either logically or causally incapable of malfunctioning in the above sense.

However:

• (INF) sexual attraction is infallible and incapable of producing attraction in a biologically abnormal way. This is a priori.

•Therefore, sexual attraction is not a biological process and has not been produced by the forces of natural selection.

•A perfect, infallible, process could only have been caused by a perfect infallible cause.

•A perfect, infallible process exists (from INF).

•Therefore, a perfect infallible cause exists aka God.

Thus in the perfection and infallibility of sexual attraction we witness the perfection and infallibility of our creator, as written in Genesis’ claim that we were created in the image of the deity.

As a side argument, also of the greatest importance as it establishes the immortality of the soul, we may add:

•If a mental state is the result of biological processes it is fallible (since from FALLIBLE all biological processes are fallible).

•However, from INF, sexual attraction is infallible and incapable of failing to produce attraction to the selected object of attraction. This is indubitable by the most committed Cartesian. It is our cogito ergo sum–inherently and intrinsically true–our immovable fulcrum by which we may move the Earth.

•Therefore, sexual attraction is not a biological process.

•But sexual attraction is a mental state.

•Therefore, there exists at least one non-biological mental state aka dualism.

We must hereby declare that all physicalists in the academy publicly disavow their physicalism or be removed from their posts and have all academic honors stripped on charges of homophobia. Dualism is the only acceptable doctrine in the academy and polite society.

A critic may attempt to deny INF and claim that sexual attraction is just like any other biological process designed by natural selection and so is indeed capable of failing to work as it was selected for. This should immediately begin to set off homophobia alarm bells and raise our suspicions that such a critic is going to claim that homosexual attraction is just such a case. The proper response to such a proposal is to excommunicate the heretic! The denial of INF is immoral and therefore untrue.

However, the critic may merely claim that all she is proposing is that sexual attraction such as pedophilia or paraphilias are cases of sexual attraction not hooking up the subject with the biologically Normal object, and that heterosexuality and homosexuality are both cases of proper functioning. Suggesting this move must be result in excommunication for the following two reasons. First, the question would be raised as to how this grouping can be justified. Why are pedophilia and paraphilias on one side and homosexuality and heterosexuality on the other? If sexual attraction is treated like any other biological process the question might be raised what was sexual attraction selected to do. For heterosexuality the explanation of how it contributes to reproductive fitness is straightforward: sexual attraction is supposed to produce behavior resulting in sexual intercourse, just as is the case with other imperative mental states such as hunger which is supposed to get the organism to produce behavior resulting in the intake of nutrients. Sexual intercourse in turn was selected because it often enough results in the exchange and combination of genetic material in the process of sexual reproduction.

But then the question is since homosexual attraction can not result in reproduction what was it selected for? Whatever the answer, it must be other than its ability to bring male and female together in reproduction since it sets the object of sexual attraction to be the same sex. If this were so we would then have a case where the same biological process, sexual attraction in this case, would be for one thing in in one group of humans and something different in a second group. There are no other biological processes for which this is true in humans. It would be like saying that the heart could be for pumping blood in one group of people and for something else in others; or that arteries are for moving the nutrients in the blood to the cells in some people and for something else in others. Inference to the best explanation would demand, in the absence of very strong evidence to the contrary, the functional universality of mankind.

Second, if sexual attraction is just like any other biological process and so is fallible it would immediately raise the suspicion that homosexuality itself is a failure of a biological process to work Normally. (See “A Primer on Biological Functions and Norms” what I mean by “Normally”.) The claim that a biological phenomenon is an abNormality or malfunction rests on whether we have a clear case of what a proper functioning process looks like and how it contributes to reproductive success, and whether the phenomenon in question would decrease reproductive fitness. Being attracted to the same sex is about as bad as possible from the standpoint of reproductive success and, again inference to the best explanation would demand that, absent extremely strong evidence to the contrary, something that to all appearances would be disastrous to reproductive fitness not be inferred to have been selected by natural selection.

And so were we to evaluate INF by the methods of empirical biology we would be put in a position that: 1. Absent compelling evidence otherwise the best explanation is the biofunctional universality of mankind (this is a separate claim from the existence of certain biological mechanisms such as lactose tolerance which may be entirely absent in some individuals). And 2. absent compelling evidence otherwise, something that to all appearances ought be not have been selected for by natural selection should not be treated as if it has been so selected. Both of these would call in to question INF, but INF is true as a matter of faith, and as a matter of faith it is not evaluable by the methods of empirical science. And so we must rationally conclude that sexual attraction is perfect and infallible, that it never produces attraction to an abNormal object, that there are no biological abnormalities when it comes to sexual attraction, and that therefore God exists. The inescapable conclusion is that you must either be homophobic or accept the existence of God the Creator. I know where I stand–on the side of angels.

	Anonymous on The Tragedy Of Richard Dawkins…
	GJ on The Myth Of Sexual Orient…
	Arilando on The Political Theory Of T…
	The Dark Enlightenme… on The Dark Enlightenment for…
	vromstroen on Progress Report Regarding Our…