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Against Nature: on Robert Wright's the Moral Animal

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Against Nature: on Robert Wright's the Moral Animal University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law 1996 Against Nature: On Robert Wright's The Moral Animal Amy L. Wax University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Behavior and Ethology Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Evolution Commons, Law Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, and the Theory and Philosophy Commons Repository Citation Wax, Amy L., "Against Nature: On Robert Wright's The Moral Animal" (1996). Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 1353. https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/1353 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law by an authorized administrator of Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AmyL. VVaxt The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. Robert Wright. Pantheon 1994. Pp x, 467. We live in cities and suburbs and watch TV and drink beer, all the while being pushed and pulled by feelings designed to propagate our genes in a sn1all hunter-gatherer population. Robert vVright1 If sociobiology is the answer, "\vhat 1s the question? For one thing, economics. "Modern neoclassical economics has forsworn any attempt to study the source and rontent of preferences, that is, the goals that motivate men's actions. It has regarded itself as the logic of choice under conditions of 'given tastes."'2 Unlike t Associate Professor of Law, Uni';ersity of Virginia School of Law. B.S. 1975, Yale College; M.D. 1981, Harvard Medical School; J.D. 1987, Co lumbia Law SchooL 1 The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology unci Eueryday Life 191 (Pantheon 1994). Jack Hirshleifer, Economics from a Biological Viewpoint, 20 J L & Econ 1, 17 (1977). See also Robert C. Ellickson, Bringing Culture and Human Frailty to Rational Actors: A Critique of Classical Law and Economics, 65 Chi Kent L Rev 2:3, 4-1 (1989) ("In part because the origin of preferences is an inhe.rently murky topic, mainstream economic theory takes tastes as exogenous givens."); Jeffrey L. Harric;on, Egoism, Altruism, and 307 308 T he University of Chir;ago Law Review [63 :307 econom ics, sociobiology is not indifferent to the objects of h um a n a1 esrr• e, ' ouc' see1K s to we• l ntu. ('y 1-cn1 em ,o y exam mm• • g thL el. r 1ow . 1wgJ. ca1,. source and function. In pursuing this project, the bra nch of sociobiolog-j known as hu man evolutionary psychology is concer ned more with the social th a:n vv ith t he :rnatc;:cia1 v-1 orld . It s foc us is not on "tastes fo r nrdi- 1' · " 1 ·' '' ,.... : , • ·1 r ro , · nary co mlnoc~lt l ?S , 011c 011 preteren_ces caking ~ne rorrn or a-ctl- tudes towar d other htn:n ans. "·3 Evolutio:n ary theory po~' tul ates t111.-. at t 1ne proc.sss or,. 1ow • 1oI g1. ca1 evo1ul bo. n p:rocl,uce Ld a .nu, man o:rgan- ism 'Nj_t':1 e:m id-entifi able repertoire of desires, leanings, and re­ sponses to other people's action s. These psych ologi cal pattern s influence all human behavior under the vast r ange of conditions normally encountered by the h uman animal. The evolved psycho­ logical elernents are the indispen sable building blocks fo r social understandings and expectations about mor al worth, obligation, right , fairness, and duty, which repea tedly appear in diverse societies. Those expectations are th e fo undation for th e complex social norms that mark all h um a n cultures. Man's universal propensity to set and follow norms-in par­ ticular man's tendency to create an d fe el bound by codes of mo­ rality- is the central concern of Rober t Wright in his book, The Moral A nimal. A_n. amalgam of scientific reportage, philosophical speculation , and illustrative historical vignettes from th e life and times of Charles Darwin , The _Moral A nimal is primarily a \vor k of journalism an d popular science. Th e au thor presen t s a read­ able and accurate synthesis of a very t echnica l su b­ ject-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Darwinian science. One m easure of his success is that most of the incoh erences in th e book can be traced t o vveaknesses in the body of work he seeks to present, and not in ·w right's exposition. Vh ight aiso offers a pro­ vocative discu ssion of the practical and theor etical implica tion s of sociobiological theory which, because of its complexity and subtle­ ty, is prone to misapplication , error, and misu se at t he hands of inept thinkers and crude popularizers. Although n'l any of his conclusions are astute, Vlrigh t fails to develop fully sorne of the Marhet Illusions: The Lim its of Law and Economics , 33 UCLA L Rev 1309, 1310-14, 13 18- 25 (1986) (discussing t he diffi culty of giving content to the idea of "self-i nterested behav­ ior" without a substantive theory of human motivation); Ulrich Witt, Econ omics, Sociobiology, and Behavioral Psychology on Preferences, 12 J Econ Psych 557, 562 (1 99 1) (expla ining that "economics has fai led to develop a body of general, empirically meaningful, hypotheses about what people ha ve prefe rences for as well as about how they percei ve actions, outco mes, and constraints"). ' Hirshleifer, 20 J L & Econ at 18 (cited in note 2). 1996] 309 most important implications of the vision he presents. These impncanom; are the subject of Part III of thi3 }1eview. \'Vright accepts as fundamentally true the prO)OSition that 1 • l • ] 1 .J. • ; ' • • l h 1 ' 1 - ' ;) r ~ 010 og1c a .. evo UGlOn nas cteclSlve y s .. "apeG cne human mmu. r le makes the c:cucial distin ction bet-vveer:; scciobio1og-y's vie vv of evol-ved 10S)i c}&ofc;, :~ )~ ( tl~ts closel:y prog~ To.mrr~sci_ cog-:c?Liti -~i-s .a.·nd er110- tio11 al res:ponses trigg,2r·cd b ~l e={ ~peri e r1c 2 ) 3.1~1 ~:! bel-;__c} uit)r (tl-J.e 01Jt­ wa.rcl rn.an.ifes tatlo11 of a range of SO ITte tir:~e s corrfJ.ict i-r·--a,o- 1rn.uu- J. lses • 1 h ' - J - 1- h l . -0 .. 1 ' 1 and t nolJ.gLtS , 'fVlllcn 1s 1 n g~ .. !y 1n:uuenced oy custorn a_ n c: u .. tc~re). V/ith t ~J.a.t c1i stinction. in mind, tr1e s to show hov; sociobiology- is a t ts-efLl l l121..1ristic for a.ss essir1g vvl'"letl1eT certair1 cu stoms and institutions, by taking a realistic account of psy­ chological "na ture," can be expected to yield both n1 a te:rial and nonmaterial benefits and, u ltimately, to p:ror:note human happi­ ness. If ou r aims a:re health, wealth, peace, prospe:rity, security, and well cared for and well loved children, does sociobiology have anything to say about how we can achieve those ends? \'\!right clearly believes t hat it does, as evidenced by his pro­ vocative comments on t he most vexing social issues of t he day. 4 All his insights can be t raced to the defining idea at the heart of this book: that the process of evolution has equipped man to create morality and to abide by moral precepts (pp 342-44). Mo­ rality is one part of a larger phenomenon- man's abiiity to order his social life through the generation of com plex cultures. Wright's book is devoted to providing a biolog-ical account of how and why m an habitually adopts cultural conventions that f:cus ­ trate-indeed are designed to frustrate-important "natural" preferences and wishes. His explanation hinges on show·ing that Some of \'/right's ideas, which are outlined in The Moral Anim.ul, have been more fully developed in recent articles in The New Republic and The New Yo rker. See Robert Wright, The Biology of Violence, New Yorker 68 (Mar 13, l995l; Robert Wright, Feminists, Meet Mr. Darwin, New Republic 34 (Nov 28, 1994). Wright tries to make a case for the benefits of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family (pp 98-106), argues for the wisdom of traditional societies and forms of social control (pp 13, 358), never seriously doubts that there a re ingrained, nontrivial, far reaching differences in the psychology of the average male and female (pp 30-31, 35-39), and suggests that state cash we lfare programs are bound to weaken marriage as a viable institution among the poor (p 135)_ He also argues that improving the economic prospects and social status of poor men can be expected to increase the rate of marriage and decrease illegitimacy (p 105), that improving job prospects for inner city youth would ease underclass ,,iolence , Wright, Biology of Violence, New Yo-cker at 77, that there are good reasons for the law of sexual harassment to make use of a "reasonable woman" standard, Wright, Feminists, New Republic at 40, that people are programmed to engage in persistent and largely uncon­ scious bias against those outside their ethnic or status group (pp 281-85), and that radical feminist writers provide a fairly accurate vision of the relat ions between the sexes, Wright, Feminists, New Republic at 42.
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