Three Views of Nature and Morality

Why Our Political Alliances Are So Confusing

In July of 2022, an interesting series of events took place. On July 5, the singer Macy Gray said in an TV interview that a “woman” is “a human being with boobs” and “a vagina.” “I will say this, and everybody’s going to hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts doesn’t make you a woman.” However, she walked back her comments days later after intense criticism from transgender activists. On July 9, Conservative commentator Matt Walsh criticized Gray in a tweet: “Sorry but women who publicly renounce the definition of ‘woman’ for fear of mean comments from trans activists deserve all the scorn they get. That kind of gutless cowardice is exactly what got us into this position in the first place.” Renowned author J.K. Rowling, who has openly criticized transgender ideology for harming women, took offense to Walsh’s words, tweeting back on July 10th that Walsh doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a woman who faces “[e]ndless death and rape threats, threats of loss of livelihood, employers targeted, physical harassment,” and more for criticizing transgenderism. Walsh responded that he had experienced death threats and harassment for his recent film, What is a Woman?, which criticizes transgender theory. Rowling replied that, while the “film did a good job exposing the incoherence of gender identity theory and some of the harms it's done,” Walsh should refrain from criticizing women since he wasn’t a woman. Rowling then faced a hostile backlash from transgender activists for expressing support for Walsh’s allegedly “transphobic” film.

This exchange illustrates the confused state of contemporary politics. It is a truism that politics makes strange bedfellows. This is especially true after the explosion of the far Left and a New Right in recent years. As new topics dominate the political agenda, alliances shift accordingly. One striking phenomenon is the transition of some secular liberals towards “conservative” positions on certain culture war issues.

Take James Lindsay, a mathematician and formerly a member of the “New Atheist” club who, as a young man, wrote anonymous books about “atheism and leftism in the predominantly conservative and Christian South.” Not exactly an ally of the Religious Right. Yet several years ago, he joined the anti-woke movement by publishing hoax articles purportedly based on meaningless leftist mantras. Since then, he has become something of a firebrand on Twitter and has published a book against woke ideologies. He now mocks transgenderism and advocates taking one’s children out of public schools.

Or consider Jordan Peterson. His religious views are ambiguous but clearly untraditional, and he describes himself as a liberal. Yet, Peterson has criticized compelled speech regarding transgenderism, downplayed the gender pay gap, and generally warned against creeping authoritarianism on the Left. He is regularly accused of aiding and abetting white supremacy.

Lindsay and Peterson are part of a larger confusion of the traditional battle lines in our culture. I could also have cited Tim Pool or Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin. What explains this trend? This post argues that there are three main “worldviews,” or ways of thinking, each of which propounds a distinctive view of the relationship between human nature and morality. (These are not the only worldviews, but they are the most prominent.) Yet America has a two-party system which channels political conflicts through the binary left-right paradigm. Three worldviews in a two-dimensional space inevitably causes confusion.

The Paradigm

I propose a typology of three dominant philosophical worldviews. They are:

1. Natural Law Theory

2. Evolutionary Rationalism (derived from evolutionary psychology)

3. Progressivism

Furthermore, each worldview stakes a position regarding human nature and morality and how they relate to one another. Each agrees with two of the three following propositions:

1. A stable human nature exists.

2. Human nature should mirror morality.

3. Nature is not a normative standard for moral behavior.

Below is a graph of the positions. Each worldview agrees with the two propositions whose arrows are pointing toward it.

Natural Law Theory

I am using the phrase “natural law theory” to encompass a broad range of thinkers in the “classical” worldview. Many traditional thinkers, such as Aristotle or Augustine, did not espouse a developed theory of “natural law,” while others, such as Cicero and Aquinas, did. Some believed in a personal God while others, such as the Deist/Pantheist Stoics, did not. However, since I consider natural law theory to be the clearest and more persuasive expression of the classical worldview, I will use natural law as a shorthand for this traditional way of thinking.

Classical natural law theory grounds morality in the “eternal law” of God, which is the blueprint for all of creation and directs everything to its true end. The law of gravity and the Golden Rule are equally part of the eternal law. On this view, the universe is a coherent and harmonious whole because all of it is subject to the divine blueprint. The natural law is simply that part of the eternal law in which rational creatures can participate, and it supplies a normative standard for human behavior. Humans were created to inhabit this universe, but being rational creatures, they were given a free will to choose whether or not to obey the natural law.

Yet humans are not spontaneously perfect. Aristotle, a major influence on Thomas Aquinas, argues that “none of the moral virtues arise in us by nature,” because if they did, then we would always act morally without effort. “[R]ather,” he says, “we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit” (Aristotle, Ethics, 2.1). Virtue is “natural” in the same way as painting or mathematics: we have the potentiality to practice it, but we must be trained. For the classical worldview, human passions or a bad upbringing make it difficult to regulate one’s life in accordance with the virtues. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions (Christians, Muslims, and Jews) further believe that God’s perfect creation has been marred by moral evil—sin—so that it does not operate as originally intended.

Despite the existence of moral evil, however, natural law theorists assert that the natural law aligns with unchangeable human inclinations. These inclinations provide guideposts to help humans perceive and follow the law. The classical worldview thus holds that human beings share a stable nature, which in non-defective cases ought to mirror or align with morality. Thus, there are rational reasons to observe the principles of the natural law, since they fulfill universal basic human goods and lead to individual and social flourishing. Rejecting morality is not only wrong but runs against the grain of our nature.

Natural law theory thus advocates embracing nature.

Evolutionary Rationalism

The second worldview, evolutionary rationalism, borrows heavily from evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary rationalists believe that humans have a stable human nature but insist that the source of human nature is unguided evolution rather than theistic design. (Modern natural lawyers generally admit the use of evolution as a tool but insist that God determined the direction that evolution would take.) On this view, human instincts and cognitive structures have been shaped by thousands of years of evolution, operating through natural selection to produce behavior that promotes survival and reproduction. This group prioritizes objective science, rather than speculative philosophy, as the best means to obtain truth.

Evolutionary rationalists generally reject the idea that human nature provides any insights into morality. Because they do not see humans as created yet corrupted, as Christians do, they are unable to distinguish between “good” and “bad” parts of human nature. Rape and altruism are equally evolved aspects of human nature, both of which presumably serve the Darwinian end of passing on one’s genes to the next generation. It seems irrational to suppose that one product of evolution (i.e. moral intuitions) should rule over all the others, guiding and setting limits on each. If so, nature cannot provide a normative standard for human behavior unless one endorses all evolved impulses, including rape, tribalism, and violence. Unsurprisingly, writers like Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind) and David Buss (The Evolution of Desire) take pains to reassure readers, almost ad naseum, that the fact that a propensity or behavior evolved doesn’t imply that it is moral or permissible.

Most atheistic evolutionists, perhaps surprisingly, still believe in a more-or-less traditional morality, but they regard it as unconnected to the causal chain produced by evolution. It might be transcendent—existing “out there” somewhere—or human-created. Either way, it supplies an objective reference point by which to judge evolved beliefs and behaviors. Tribalism is bad but cosmopolitanism is good. Polygamy is bad but monogamy is good—but polyamory is best! Most evolutionary rationalists are not relativists. For them, moral norms tell us which evolved impulses are good and which are bad.

It follows that rationalists are skeptical that human nature and morality should—or even can—cohere with one another. We will always have to fight certain evolved traits, such as tribalism or sexual jealousy, that impede the realization of moral goods such as globalism or sexual freedom. The disjunction between (evolved) human nature and (unevolved) morality is a tragedy derived from our evolutionary history which must be overcome through a process of cultural evolution and the crafting of better political institutions. This view is best expressed in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Evolutionary rationalism can be said to advocate overcoming nature.

Progressivism

The third position is “progressivism,” by which I mean the variety of ideologies that constitute the far left—radical feminism, critical race theory, LGBT theories, post-Marxism, etc. James Lindsay uses the umbrella term “critical social justice” to refer to these theories. While many Leftists do not go as far as the radicals, these groups are decisively influencing left-wing thinking.

Progressivism agrees with evolutionary rationalism that nature is not a normative standard for human behavior, but for different reasons. Progressives believe that nature does not exist apart from social construction. Everything we consider “natural” has—at least in part—been shaped and molded by the contingent forces of human society. If human nature is socially constructed, it follows that a stable human nature cannot exist, since what has been constructed can be re-constructed.

Progressives tend to be skeptical that there are universal principles of morality or behavior underlying the world’s diverse cultures. This is called “cultural relativism.” There may be certain universal biological phenomena, such as the need to eat or to gain respect, but these phenomena are so fully intertwined with socially constructed meanings that, in practice, progressives treat everything as social constructed. Each society end up with its own unique set of beliefs and institutions, which in turn mold human behavior.

Progressives generally believe that social construction is not a benign process. Rather—to simplify a little—human societies are divided into two groups: the powerful “oppressors” and the powerless “oppressed.” The powerful decisively shape the course of social construction, determining what human nature and social organizations will look like. “Nature” isn’t neutral; it’s one form of discourse that people in power use to justify current institutions, which benefit them. Whereas evolutionary rationalists view human nature as amoral, Progressives tend to decry social norms as oppressive products, not of impersonal natural selection, but of tyrannical elites.

A good example is the feminist perspective on sexuality. In response to the claim that pornography distorts a healthy and natural human eros, feminist legal theorist Catherine MacKinnon counters that “sexuality itself is a social construct, gendered to the ground. … Gender is what gender means. It has no basis in anything other than the social reality its hegemony constructs” (MacKinnon 2008, 411). In her view, social practices like pornography do not distort reality but rather create reality—in this case to subjugate women to men. Whatever “natural” elements of sexuality exist (such as, at a minimum, sex organs) are never presented to the human mind “cleanly,” i.e. unaccompanied by social and cultural influences that shape our view of them.

The progressive view of social construction would seem to imply that there is no ideal universal morality—or, rather, that all moral ideas would be infected with oppression. Yet progressives universally adopt radical egalitarianism, which advocates equalizing outcomes across all groups and eliminating imbalances in power between all people everywhere. In practice, they prioritize activism on behalf of a restricted number of “identity groups” that are seen as particularly oppressed, such as ethnic minorities, women, and LGBT persons.

In this effort, progressives are more hopeful than rationalists. If a stable human nature does not exist and humans are susceptible to social construction, then perhaps human nature may be reshaped to mirror morality. Thus, in common with natural law theory, progressivism hopes that, ideally, people and even entire societies can be made to have moral natures. Political activism should focus on subverting powerful groups and counteracting messages in the media or culture that serve to “reproduce” oppression.

In short, progressivism believes in transforming nature.

The Relationship between the Worldviews

While the three worldviews each agree with two of the three propositions listed above, they are not equidistant from each other. Natural law theory and progressivism are more opposed to one another than evolutionary rationalism is from either of the other two. This is because, while progressivism and natural law theory both believe that human nature should mirror morality, they have utterly opposed visions of what human nature and morality should be. The classical worldview theory wants human nature to submit to the constraints of nature, while progressivism wants to abandon nature in favor or autonomy and, in particular, a radical egalitarianism that breaks down all “natural” distinctions.

Witness, for instance, the debate over transgenderism. The pro-trans movement betrays a modern Gnosticism, positing a radical disjuncture between body and mind and elevating the latter at the expense of the former. They view the man/woman (and increasingly the male/female) distinction as socially constructed. Thus, the site of one’s identity, the mind, determines truth, and the body must be reshaped to correspond to one’s mental image of oneself. Natural law theory views the mind and body as integrated parts of a whole, such that a disjunction (or “dysphoria”) signals an error in nature, not an arbitrary social construction rubbing up against one’s authentic self. While reason ought to rule the passions, according to the classical tradition, its decisions should acknowledge the status of human beings as embodied rational organisms composed of both flesh and spirit. 

Consequently, natural law and progressivism rarely align with one another. Even when they support the same side of an issue, they do so for different reasons. Traditionalists oppose pornography in the name of a conservative sexual ethic that views sex as naturally appropriate within a long-term relationship. Second-wave feminists opposed pornography on the grounds that it degraded and objectified women and taught men to be domineering. (Traditionalists might agree that it is degrading, but this concern is connected to their larger rejection of the modern sexual ethic.) For second-wave feminists, the ultimate goal was not monogamous marriage but a liberated world in which women had sex on their own terms. (Modern, “third-wave” feminists generally accept mainstream porn, seeing it as liberating rather than degrading.)

Yet evolutionary rationalism is not somehow “between” progressivism and natural law theory. It is not “centrist.” Rather, rationalists agree with one side or the other for their own distinct reasons. Some (but not all) rationalists view biological sex as an objective fact and transgender identity as a psychological condition that—since human nature is not infinitely malleable—grates against nature. Yet they tend to view sexuality as natural but amoral, and thus endorse any consensual form of sexuality, including pornography and (often) prostitution. They are less apt to want to change the world or to see society as irredeemably oppressive, yet they generally share with progressives the goal of human autonomy. Rationalists are all over the place on economic issues: some are libertarian, while others embrace social democracy.

Conclusion

The Nature-Morality Schema, like any simplifying system, covers over a lot of nuances. Many people—rationally or not—embrace portions two or even three of the worldviews, and there are internal disagreements about the specifics of, say, how social construction works or how human nature evolved. Yet this schema arguably sheds light on contemporary American political discourse. Political positions arise from a deep structural worldview. Positions which converge on the specifics may be defended for incompatible reasons by people from different camps. The confusing nature of our current moral discourse stems from the fact that three worldviews are competing in a (dare I say) binary political spectrum (i.e. Left v. Right). As political parties move in either direction, adherents of different worldviews react in different ways.

Current shifts are causing a realignment among evolutionary rationalists in particular. Rationalism used to be more prominent in left-liberal discourse, and rationalists tended to vote for Democratic candidates. In recent years, progressivism has captured the Left and imposed its views of social construction, privilege/oppression, and radical egalitarianism on the Democratic Party. Simultaneously, the Republican Party has long been an unstable “fusionist” combination of socially conservative traditionalists and libertarian rationalists (many of whom thought traditional values benefitted society). As the party moves away from libertarian economics in the post-Trump era, conservative rhetoric on social issues is pushing some rationalists toward the Democrats.

In a future post, I hope to unpack how specific political conflicts implicate the Nature-Morality Schema. For now, I will warn that current realignments provide both an opportunity and a warning to conservatives. Naturally, the sight of many former liberals criticizing progressivism is a welcome one. Traditionalist conservatives should not refrain from seeking new alliances or pairing with rationalists to broaden our critique of the “woke” Left. Yet we must remember how different the natural law schema is from the evolutionary worldview, and thus how awkward is the resulting alliance—as the story of Matt Walsh and J.K. Rowling reveals.

Moral traditionalism ought not cede its central place within the conservative movement. Yet any attempt to assert its dominance will upset rationalists. Maintaining a balance is tricky. In the end, as I observed elsewhere, conservatives must concede their status as a “moral minority.” I don’t advocate compromise or disengagement, yet there is no substitute for rational persuading people to adopt traditionalism on its own terms.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. David Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Buss, David M. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Revised and Updated Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Miller, Geoffrey. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. New York: Anchor, 2000.

Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011.

Catherine A. MacKinnon. “Not a Moral Issue.” In Philosophy of Law, ed. Joel Feinberg and Jules Coleman (Belmont, CA: Thomson, 2008): 409-426.