Robert Wright, Edmund Wilson, Steven Pinker are featured in cover stories of Newsweek, Time, or The New Republic. "Why are their claims on the cultural map?" asks Ed and looks for the answer at the intersection of a traditional philosophical problem and contemporary conceptions of politics.
It is widely accepted that in questions of morality one cannot argue from what is to what ought to be. A (normative) conception of the good cannot be justified merely by pointing to our habits and customs. Whoever argues from "is" to "ought" commits the "naturalistic fallacy." On the other hand, many argue that "ought" must be imply "can": Our moral rules would make unreasonable demands and our conception of the good would forever remain unrealized if moral theorizing does not pay attention to what humans can accomplish.
Sociobiological theories tend to impose narrow constraints on what we can, they therefore narrow also the scope of moral deliberation and (self-)governance. Ed showed this in particular for Robert Wright's claims in The Moral Animal. According to Wright, our moral instincts developed for and are adjusted to a hunter-gatherer society; they are maladapted to the modern world. So far, this sounds familiar enough even to readers of Sigmund Freud or Erich Fromm. However, while they believed that the human mind has the power to civilize the human being, Wright suggests that we should readjust our social structure to our given hunter-gatherer moral instincts, it is only thus that the now maladapted moral animal can be readapted to its environment. In a striking article for the New Republic (November 28, 1994), Wright himself draws out the implication of his view of what we can do for the political and moral deliberations about what we ought to do: Radical feminists and Marxists are right in their description of human oppression, but they are wrong in their conception of human nature -- they do not realize that what they criticize is simply who we are, our biological nature.
Ed concluded by emphasizing that such sociobiological claims should be critized for what they
pretend to be: scientific claims. In the case of Wright, it is curious that he would refer to
contemporary human beings as "maladapted" -- while we might not all be happy, on any
biological criterion we would certainly be considered very well adapted indeed to our (largely
self-created) environment. On the other hand, Wright is too strict an adaptationist when he
considers every "moral instinct" as an adaptation, rather than, say, as a by-product ("spandrel")
of other adaptive processes (Ed referred us to the debate between Gould and Pinker in the pages
of the New York Review of Books on October 9, 1997).
Alfred Nordmann
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