John G. Messerly's Blog, page 7

Who Gets What

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Posted at 3 Quarks Daily on July 8, 2024 by TIM SOMMERS (Reprinted with Permission.)

Suppose a small group of people are stranded together on a desert island. They have no fresh water or food – until they come across a stash of coconuts. They can drink the milk and eat the coconut meat to survive. But how do they divide up the coconuts fairly between them

The coconuts are not the product of anyone’s hard work or ingenuity. They are manna-from-heaven. In such circumstances, in a sense, no one deserves anything. So, the question is how to distribute something valuable, even essential, but which no one has any prior claim upon, in an ethical way. In other words, what is the appropriate principle of distributive fairness in such a case?

The most obvious suggestion is that the coconuts should be distributed equally. And that may well be the right answer. Many people consider equality the presumptive fair distribution, especially in manna-from-heaven situations like this. Distributions that depart from strict equality, many believe, must be justified, but equality requires no justification. For example, suppose we also find buried treasure on the island. Various arguments could be made that one person made a decisive contribution to the discovery that others didn’t, but isn’t the starting place an equal distribution?

But suppose after most of the coconuts are distributed equally there is one coconut left. For the sake of argument, imagine single coconuts are not divisible or fungible for some reason and so one coconut cannot be shared. What do we do with the extra coconut?

Strict equality seems to imply that you should just throw it away to avoid making the distribution unequal. This is called the leveling-down problem. You can almost always increase the amount of equality in an unequal distribution by taking stuff from the better-off and simply throwing it away. If equality is valuable in and of itself, then any situation can be made fairer (at least in one way) by leveling down how much the better-off have so that there is less inequality – even if this makes no one better-off in absolute terms.

Maybe, for this reason, we shouldn’t care about equality in and of itself, after all. Why do we? Here’s one theory. What we really care about is not equality, but poverty and the suffering of the least well-off. “Prioritarianism” is a distributive view endorsed by John Rawls and Derek Parfit (with some qualifications) that gives priority to the worst-off in a distribution.

Perhaps, one or more of our islanders is injured or ill. They might need more coconuts than the rest of us. As prioritarians, we might think giving the suffering more has greater moral weight than whatever happens, distributively, among the comparatively well-off. Prioritarianism doesn’t have a leveling down problem because it only tracks the absolute level of welfare of the worst-off.

The problem with prioritarianism is that it only gives advice about helping the worst-off. And about the worst-off it only says they should get some kind of priority, but not exactly what kind.

Here’s a different view that also starts from the thought that maybe the point of caring about equality is caring about the worst-off. It’s called sufficientarianism. It says everyone should have the minimum number of coconuts to achieve, at least, some minimum level of welfare. Sufficientarians think we can define an objective, noncomparative level of sufficiency. Let’s come back to that. Here’s a different problem.

Sufficientarians say that the only thing that matters is that everyone has a sufficient amount. Imagine I distribute the coconuts such that everyone has a sufficient amount to survive for now, but that this is only half the number of coconuts on hand. I keep the other half. Maybe, that’s unfair for some other reason. For example, maybe equality jumps back in here and says ‘How do we justify any deviation from an equal distribution after we have met sufficiency?’ But on the sufficientarian view it doesn’t seem to be unfair for anyone to have so much as long as everyone has enough.

However, if one person has half the coconuts, they may have the means to rule over all of the others. Similarly, in a society where the top 10% controls almost 70% of the total resources, that 10% might rule over the other 90%. So, limitarianism says that there ought to be an upper-limit on the number of coconuts any one of us can have. No one should have more coconuts than they need to flourish. Like the view that everyone should have a sufficient amount, the view that there is an upper limit on what anyone should have is incomplete. It only addresses the very top of the distribution. But what if we combine limitarianism with sufficientarians? Sufficilimitarianism is the view that everyone should have a sufficient amount of coconuts and no one should have more than the number of coconuts they need to flourish.

There’s a problem that sufficientarians, limitarians, and (to a lesser extent) prioritarians share that is relevant here. In order to get around equality and the leveling down objection, all these views abandon comparing people to each other in favor of an objective, noncomparative standards. So, there’s a certain amount that sufficientarians say is needed by anyone to achieve a certain minimal level of well-being. But how much, exactly, is that? Limitarianism says there is a certain amount that is too much. How much is that?

Here are two reasons to doubt the possibility of noncomparative definitions of sufficiency – or too much.

(1) Variation. Would an ideal of sufficiency that I formulate now, for the United States in the 21st century, be the same as the ideal I would advocate for contemporary hunter/gather bands or for Medieval Europeans? More to the point, would sufficiency on this desert island be the same as sufficiency if we were on a crowded beach in Hawaii?

(2) Irrelevance. Even if there was such a thing as “objective noncomparative” sufficiency, it is not clear that that would not be the relevant social or political ideal. Suppose there is no hope of most people in a particular society crossing that sufficiency threshold. Everyone is still owed a distributive share of at least some socially feasible size. So, even if the size of that socially feasible share is insufficient according to some purportedly objective ideal, that ideal is simply not what is socially relevant. More to the point, what if there are not enough coconuts for anyone to have enough? I don’t know about you, but I still want my share!

If instead we take a comparative view and think of sufficiency as not too far from the average member of society, and “too much” as not so much compared to what others have as to disempower most people in society you arrive at a view I call range egalitarianism.

The best principle of distributive fairness says that no one should have too much or too little relative to the average amount that most people have. Or simply we should not pursue strict equality, but too much inequality is bad and/or unfair. This avoids the leveling down objection since it does not commit us to thinking that any reduction of inequality is always valuable in and of itself. To see that, think of it like this.

If you think that too much distributive inequality is bad, but that it is not always preferable to make things increasingly equal, that there is a point, for example, well short of strict equality, at which one should become indifferent to further decreases in inequality, then you are already a range egalitarian.

As far as I can tell, surprisingly, I am the first philosopher to explicitly take this view. Why? I don’t know. But many people are already range egalitarians. They just don’t use that label.

In surveys of Americans about wealth inequality most people say that what they care about, and what one should care about, is simply inequality not being too great. While people are willing to describe extreme inequality as morally wrong, most don’t conclude that strict equality is ideal. This makes them range egalitarians. They are against inequality that is too great, but indifferent from a moral or other normative point of view to decreases in inequality after a certain point – and on either end of the spectrum.

For example, a Pew survey from a few years ago showed that the majority of Americans believe that there is too much inequality, but 70% of that majority think that some level of inequality is morally acceptable. It might surprise prioritarians, but of the 42% of those surveyed who believe that “reducing inequality should be a top priority” were more worried about the wealthy having too much than about the plight of the worst-off.

I am not arguing that one should endorse range egalitarianism if some people, or even a majority, already hold the view. Nor am I arguing that respondents in these types of surveys are particularly insightful on these issues. Such surveys also show, for example, that Americans wildly underestimate the level of inequality they live with and how far the United States is from what they say they want equality-wise – as in the memorable phrase that when it comes to income inequality, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”

What I am arguing is that if range egalitarianism is a coherent position, and one that people already take, then it belongs on the menu of options as a normative distributive principle.

There are other possible interpretations of these responses, of course. For example, respondents may believe that one should allow for a certain amount of inequality to avoid inefficiencies or to incentivize work – though these surveys try to avoid conflating considerations. But, perhaps, people are not range egalitarians in these surveys, and instead what they value is strict equality, but they don’t value it enough to willingly suffer the cost of too egalitarian a regime.

I believe this is the wrong interpretation of at least some people’s attitudes. Some people do not accede lamentingly to less than that strict equality because of other factors. Me, for example. In these surveys and related interviews, many people seem genuinely not to care about differences that fall within a certain range. This need not involve any trade-off between strict equality and something else that is also valuable. It can be a rejection of the idea that strict equality is what one should value.

Who cares? The most important reason to care about range egalitarianism is this. Range egalitarianism may well be the morally correct, fair principle of distribution for certain things in certain contexts.

But there’s also this. Parfit said that distributive fairness has a subject matter as long as there are any cases where “No one deserves to be better off than anyone else; nor does anyone have entitlements, or special claims.” But admitted that his real view, “like Rawls and others,” is that at the fundamental level “most cases are of this kind.” So, if range egalitarianism is the correct principle of distributive fairness, and most cases are fundamentally distributive cases without prior entitlements, range egalitarianism is a widely-applicable, fundamental moral principle – if not simply the most basic principle of justice.

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Sources

I apologize for a longer list of sources than usual, but this one is an active research project of mine. I proposed range egalitarianism in How Equality Matter to Justice: Relational Egalitarianism, Distributive Justice, and the Concept of Equality, Sommers, Timothy, The University of Iowa, 2022. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=M0zF9IQAAAAJ&citation_for_view=M0zF9IQAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC and I defend it in “Range Egalitarianism: A Novel Principle of Distributive Fairness,” currently under submission.

G.A. Cohen was an arch defender of strict equality arguing that distributive egalitarians take it “for granted that there is something which justice requires people to have equal amounts of.” On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, edited by Michael Otsuka, Princeton and Oxford, 2011, pp. 3-43.

John Rawls and Derek Parfit are the most well-known prioritarians. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition, Harvard University Press, 1999; Parfit, Derek, Equality or Priority? The Lindley Lectures, Lawrence, KA: The University of Kansas, 1995.

Probably, the most well-known sufficientarian was the late, great Harry Frankfurt. Inequality, Princeton University Press, 2015.

I believe Ingrid Robeyns invented limitarianism in “Why Limitarianism?” Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (2): 249-270 (2022).

The kibbutz quote above is from Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats, The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, Penguin, 2012.

Why Academics Are Annoyed With Jonathan Haidt, Again

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POSTED at 3 Quarks Daily on July 8, 2024 by JEROEN VAN BAAR

Jonathan Haidt knows how to be a contrarian. In 2015, the NYU Stern social psychology professor founded Heterodox Academy, an organization that aims to bring viewpoint diversity to college campuses. He wrote an Atlantic article and book entitled The coddling of the American mind, in which he claimed that trigger warnings and safe spaces at colleges are making liberal students weaker rather than preparing them for the real world. With this work he gave words, authority, and attention to commonsense intuitions about oversensitive leftist youth that appeared to be widespread in the population. This was not his original expertise (he rose to fame studying moral psychology) but he skillfully took up the mantle.

When I was a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University, often considered the wokest Ivy, Haidt was kind enough to drop by and tell us what we were doing wrong. He gave a talk (to a full house, of course) about how universities had to choose between Truth and Social Justice as their ultimate goal. In Haidt’s view, universities cannot do both, as the two goals fundamentally contradict each other. And he was very happy to push the point that universities like Brown were, in fact, claiming to do both. (When I joined Haidt’s lunch group after the event, I found him amiable and brilliant, if aloof; a professor to look up to.)

All this made many in the academy very uncomfortable. Haidt publicly denounced the world he came from—he’s been a professor since the early 1990s—and scrutinized universities at a time when Truth and Expert Knowledge were already under attack. What’s more, Haidt actively exposed weaknesses that academics did not want to think about just yet. Haidt is like the friend who tells you you’re overreacting before you’re ready to hear it. And he fulfils that role with the glee of the kid who always wins in debate class.

This year, Haidt is back with a new tale, one of teenage mental health and the technological transformation of society. And again, though gaining widespread support in the public eye, he is eliciting criticism and annoyed glances from academics. I, too, felt an itch toward his new book The Anxious Generation even before reading it. Having studied population mental health in the Netherlands for the past three years, I was well aware of the uptick in psychiatric symptoms among teenagers, but I also knew how complicated the story was. So why would a social psychologist who works on moral psychology at a business school be the best person to understand and buck the trend?

Before I answer this question, let me briefly summarize Haidt’s point. The book argues that the last few decades have seen a shift from ‘play-based childhood’ to ‘phone-based childhood’. Generation Z (born after 1995) has experienced parental overprotection in the real world and a deluge of harmful information and connectivity online. This has led to phone addiction, loneliness, and a generally fearful demeanor that feeds anxiety and depression. And look, Haidt says, in 2012, just when smartphones with front-facing cameras became a thing, the lines of mental illness in teenagers started bending upwards! Moreover, in experiments where kids disable their social media apps for a few weeks, they end up feeling better. Ergo, social media have caused mental illness and need to be forbidden under 16 years of age.

This line of argumentation has raised fair criticism from experts. University of California, Irvine professor Candice Odgers, a developmental psychologist, wrote a stern review for the journal Nature. She argued that the evidence for mental health impacts of social media is mixed and blurry, for instance because distressed youth have distinct usage patterns on these sites. NYU statistics lecturer Aaron Brown wrote a piece for Reason.com in which he argues that most of the studies in Haidt’s lengthy reference list are unreliable. Of course, Haidt has struck back on his popular Substack blog After Babel, arguing that his evidence is, in fact, sound. There are other points of contention about the book, such as flaws in mental health measurement and the lumping together of video games with social media. There are, in fact, endless points for argument, as the entire scientific of developmental psychology is still chewing on the question why teens feel so bad these days. As I will show below, though, all this academic chatter is largely irrelevant for the impact this book has in the public eye.

Another issue with the book is that it is not, in fact, entirely written by Haidt. The early chapters on mental health are based on literature reviews coordinated by research assistant Zach Rausch, who describes himself as ‘Lead Researcher for The Anxious Generation’. The part on childrearing was co-written with Leonore Skenazy, author of the 2009 book Free-range kids. As Haidt admits in chapter 9, ‘some of the sections on rolling back overprotection and increasing play are in a voice different from [his]’. Throughout the book, Haidt draws on publications by him and his allies on After Babel, where he also logs his progress toward his next book, Life after Babel. This continues the trend he started with The coddling, which he co-wrote with lawyer and activist Greg Lukianoff.

To his credit, Haidt is very transparent about the origins of his texts. I like the idea of writing books collectively and testing out ideas online before publishing them. But it does change how the book appears to the reader. The cover just says ‘Jonathan Haidt’ and lists him as a professor, so people trust him. But while the public perceives this book as a tome from an expert professor ‘backed by heaps and heaps of research’ (as one Amazon reviewer wrote), it is actually written by a mix of people with various backgrounds, none of whom are field experts, and who do not always follow the principles of rigorous epidemiological research.

Putting together these puzzle pieces of criticism and mild misleading, it dawned on me. This book is not a careful study of psychiatric epidemiology, and we should not evaluate it as such. Instead, it is a social critique that emanates from a school of thought best described as Haidtism. Looking at it like this, I actually found a lot to like about the book.

According to Haidtism, society is suffering from a loss of structure. We are atomized individuals whose lack of connection and meaning leaves us living at a lower spiritual plane (see chapter 8, the best part of The anxious generation and likely a clue to Life after Babel). It’s a refrain that many writers have had great success with in recent years, from enfant terrible of French fiction Michel Houellebecq to conservative commentator David Brooks. Right-wing politicians like the Dutch electoral victor Geert Wilders are turning precisely this feeling of atomization into rage against newcomers, immigrants, who have unjustly come to symbolize the loss of connection. In truth, a lack of common purpose and shared destiny are tearing apart the fabric of society, even in the most ethnically homogeneous countries in the world (e.g. Japan).

When viewed in this light, social media simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As Haidt explains well, social contact online is characterized by being one-to-many and asynchronous, as opposed to the intimate and immediate interactions of the physical world. In this way, social media symbolize and effectuate, but did not cause, the loss of societal structure and connectedness. Haidt even invokes atomization by pulling from Emile Durkheim, the legendary sociologist who claimed that the loss of social integration led to rising suicide rates in early-twentieth-century France. (In an elegant mirroring of today’s debate, this claim was later undermined by findings that properly integrated Catholics were less likely to report suicide, which they considered a sin.)

So should we blame social media for the mental health crisis, or are they but a symptom of an underlying trend of atomization that may also cause mental health problems? We don’t know, but it also doesn’t really matter. Because since Haidt’s new argument hits home with so many commonsense intuitions about what’s wrong with society—it is hard to look at a train car full of phone-mesmerized zombies and not feel sad—you can’t help but agree with him. Do many teenagers suffer from psychiatric symptoms? Yes. Do social media make our lives worse, all told? Yes. The fact that the former does not necessarily follow from the latter is irrelevant: we are outraged at the phones and want things to change.

The strongest signal that Haidt’s data don’t matter that much is that there is one massive oversight in the book. At the end of the prologue, Haidt claims that ‘adults in Gen X and prior generations have not experienced much of a rise in clinical depression or anxiety disorders since 2010’. This notion—vaguely stated but central to the book’s argument about teenage-specific issues—is simply false. The Netherlands Institute of Mental Health, my former employer, runs a gold-standard representative survey of psychiatric disorders in the Dutch population every 12 years. Between 2007-2009 and 2019-2022, the share of adults over 35 years of age who had a psychiatric disorder in the twelve months before measurement rose by a whopping 34%. The fact that Haidt missed this was a big clue to my understanding of The anxious generation. This is not a humble study of mental illness; it is a social critique that harnesses an explosive cocktail of a badly understood health problem, concerns about ‘kids these days’, and widespread disappointment with the way our society functions.

With that, let’s return to our original question. Why is Haidt the right person to tell this tale? The answer is that what Haidt lacks in field expertise, he makes up in his ability to convince and unite people around shared goals. Academics often fail to act for fear of overstepping, and Haidt does not fall into that trap. But his bravado comes at a cost. Being a social critique that poses as an academic tome, the book manages to zigzag through lines of scrutiny. Critique it on its implications, and people will point to the scores of academic citations in the back. Critique it on its academic merit, and Haidt will say we should act anyway because it’s better to be safe than sorry.

For what it’s worth, I agree with some of the tenets of Haidtism. I believe society would be much better off if people hung out together and trusted each other more. I believe capitalism pushes us to see our neighbors as competitors and direct our energy toward work and consumption rather than communal connection. However, I do not believe that banning social media will make much of a dent. At the base of it, social integration requires a mutual need and the relinquishing of a modicum of freedom to the collective. As long as we are unwilling to do that, we will keep sliding into loneliness and depression for a little while longer. Perhaps Life after Babel, due for release in 2025, will present some solutions.

Is A Longer Life A Happier Life? Stoicism and Happiness

by John Danaher

I think I might be a bit of stoic. It’s not that I agree with stoic metaphysics or logic — I actually know very little about those things — but if asked about my general attitude toward life, I would describe it as being stoic. For me, that means that I try to live in the moment as much as possible, to constantly factor in the arbitrariness of the world around me, and to regularly practice negative visualizations. I never get too attached to my current state of being; I always imagine that things could get worse. For those closest to me, this is an infuriating habit. As a result, I sometimes find myself drawn away from the stoic habit of mind, and into more involved, avaricious modes of thought. Nevertheless, I always wander back to stoicism in the end.

My faltering commitment to stoicism was brought to the forefront of my mind quite recently when I read an article by Eyjolfur Emilsson entitled “On the length of a good life”. The article outlines and advocates the stoic (and Epicurean) view that “a life, once happy, does not become any happier by lasting longer”. That is to say: we don’t need long or indefinite lives in order to be truly happy and content.

Now, I tend to think this view is broadly correct, but I have no idea how to argue for it. Consequently, I was hoping that Emilsson’s article would provide me with some assistance. Unfortunately, the article leaves a lot to be desired in that regard, consisting as it does of a series of opaque, somewhat disjointed, reflections on ancient views about happiness and the length of the good life. Nevertheless, there is some wisdom to be found in its pages, and in reflecting on that wisdom I think I see more clearly the strengths and weaknesses of the stoic view.

In this post, I want to share some of those strengths and weaknesses. I’ll try to explain why I think the stoics have it right when it comes to what makes life contented and happy (from the perspective of the one who lives it), while at the same time missing certain other dimensions of value that are important when it comes to assessing the overall worth of a life.

1. The Stoics versus the Accumulationists
It will be helpful if we have a clearer sense of what the stoic view about longevity and happiness really is. As I read it, the stoic view can be defined as follows:

Stoic View: Happiness (or contentedness or satisfaction) is a present-indexed thing — it depends on how one feels and approaches life in the here and now. It is not a diachronic thing — one does not become happier or more contended by having more time in which to be happy and content.

In other words, how happy you are depends on your current mental attitude, nothing else. For stoics, this attitude ought to take a particular form. It is linked to the sole intrinsic good, which is virtue. Virtue is a skill in the art of living. This skill is characterized (in part) by resilience and implacability. The skill is its own reward, it does not depend on external goods or rewards. Thus, for the stoic, happiness is something that is cultivated internally, that is: within the psyche of the individual. It is not dependent on external fortunes or misfortunes.

The stoic view is difficult to implement. A common concern is that the true stoic will “give no thought to the ‘morrow”, will be unable to plan for the future, engage in ambitious goal-oriented living, or fully commit to and trust those with whom they live. Stoics usually dismiss this concern. They argue that the stoic can still live an engaged, goal-oriented life. They can have projects and plans and loves. They just won’t be disturbed or devastated if those things are thwarted.

I think the common concern is right, up to a point. Speaking from my own perspective, I’m certainly engaged by projects and goals in my day-to-day life — I wouldn’t have done the things I have done if I wasn’t — but I don’t think I’m quite as engaged as many of my colleagues and friends. My goals tend to be short-term; they tend to be based on things I believe are less vulnerable to external misfortune. I enjoy what I do, and I enjoy the things I work on, but I don’t count on having the resources to be able to do them in, say, one or years years time. I’ve never planned that far ahead. Indeed, I probably never fully commit myself to anything; I always include an implicit “get-out” or exception clause. I believe this is deeply frustrating for the people with whom I live.

The stoic view is to be contrasted with the more common, accumulationist view:

Accumulationist View: Happiness (or contentedness or satisfaction) is a diachronic thing, not a strictly present-indexed thing. One can live a happier and more contented life by having more time in which to be happy and contended. Happiness is thus something that accumulates over time.

I say this is more common because I think it chimes with how most people assess the worth of different lives. Imagine two people – Bob and Kevin. Bob was unhappy for the first 20 years of his life, but has been reasonably happy from then on. Kevin has been reasonably happy all his life. They are both the same age. Surely, we would say that Kevin’s life is the happier one? The amount of happiness he had in the past (and indeed can expect to have in the future) accumulates and makes his life happier, overall, than Bob’s.
Despite the commonsense appeal of the accumulationist view, I still prefer the stoic view. I can’t quite offer a defense of this. Not yet at least. But I think I can explain why the accumulationist view is appealing. As I point out below, there are dimensions along which we can assess the value of life that go beyond mere happiness. When we bring in those dimensions, something like the accumulationist view is probably correct. But when focusing purely on happiness, the stoic view seems more appropriate to me.

2. The Life Plan/Narrative Unity Objection
Let’s consider a couple of objections to the stoic view. The first is something we can call the “Life Plan” or “Narrative Unity” objection. It derives from a popular theory about what it takes to live a valuable life. According to this theory, one of the crucial ingredients in a happy life is either narrative unity or the fulfillment of a life plan. Philosophers such as Steven Luper, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor have defended this theory (if you are interested, I looked at Luper’s arguments a few weeks back).

Defenders of the life plan or narrative unity objection think that happiness cannot be reduced to a momentary or fleeting thing. It is, instead, a property of the whole of one’s life, i.e. from beginning to end. One’s life is happy (or happier) if it hangs together in some story-like fashion, or if one commits to and achieves some overarching plan.

Emilsson argues that there are several problems with such “whole life”-views. For starters, the concept of “narrative unity” is rather vague and imprecise. Must life follow the story arc of a traditional fairytale or myth in order to be happy? Or are more disjointed and unconventional narratives allowed? Must the story end well? Couldn’t a life filled with misery and tragedy have some narrative unity? Furthermore, who is it that must perceive the narrative unity? Must the person living the life perceive the unity or is it enough that others do? Questions like these, rhetorical though they may be, tend to undermine the credibility of the narrative unity view.

What about life plans? Here, Emilsson is perhaps less persuasive in his dismissal. He argues, simply, that very few people actually have life plans. He for example has never had one (nor have I). But he doesn’t think that this means his life or that of anyone else is unhappy. Furthermore, even if one has a life plan, it’s not clear that happiness is contingent upon its success. Indeed, this is perhaps the key clash between the stoic view and that of the accumulationist. For the stoic, the process or moment is what matters, not the effect or outcome.

I would add here that there is a curious relationship between these “whole life”-views and the value of an indefinitely extended life (something I also happen to be interested in). The stoic view is pretty indifferent to the prospect of indefinite life extension: it neither fully embraces nor fully dismisses it. This makes sense since the stoic doesn’t believe that longevity can increase happiness. Contrariwise, the whole life view seems pretty antagonistic to life extension. At least that’s how it looks to me. After all, indefinite life extension threatens to both (a) undermine the narrative unity of life by removing the ending; and (b) undermine the significance of life plans and achievements by reducing the value of achievement (I discussed the latter point, ad nauseum, in an earlier set of posts).

3. The Constitutive Relationship Objection
A more troubling critique of the stoic view is something I call the “constitutive relationship” objection. This objection holds that the stoic view is unsustainable because our present happiness is often constituted by events that occur in the past or the future. For example, as I sit here and type I occasionally reminisce about my youth. As I do this, I may remember my first kiss or the first time I fell in love and feel a joyful sense of nostalgia wash over me. In this case I am happy in the present moment, but my happiness is constituted by events from my past. This can occur by imagining future events too. But if this is what happens, then happiness isn’t a purely present-indexed thing.

Just to be clear, this objection isn’t simply a re-statement of the accumulationist view. In the example I have just given, it is not that my present happiness is a product of the accumulation of past instances of happiness — though this may also be true — it is that my present happiness refers back to past or future events. Given the way in which human life is embedded in time, it seems like this temporal referencing will be difficult to avoid. Indeed, it is the deprivation of hypothetical future experiences that renders death such a terrifying fate for so many people. But if all that’s right, then it’s difficult to see how the stoic, present-indexed view can be sustained.

As I say, I think this is a serious criticism of the stoic view. There are, however, a couple of strategies that the stoic can adopt in response, none of them particularly persuasive, but perhaps cumulatively serving to lessen the blow. The most obvious of these strategies is to try to purge ourselves of past-and-future referenced thoughts as much as possible. I mentioned above how I like my own future ambitions and projects to have a limited time horizon. I find this helps to reduce (though not completely eliminate) the future-referencing of my present happiness. I think something similar can be done for the past too by trying to purge oneself of wistful nostalgia. Indeed, “don’t romanticize your own past” is an imperative I think we could all do with heeding.

Some further philosophical reflection might serve to lessen the impact of past and future referencing too. For starters, future-referenced thoughts are essentially fictitious creations of the present. So any happiness associated with them could be viewed as present-indexed. Similarly, our recall of the past is highly imperfect and prone to all sorts of biases and reconstructions. I have no doubt that my memories of my first kiss or first love are largely mythical creations of my present psyche. Perhaps then even when I do remember these things my happiness is largely constructed from the present.

To be clear, I don’t think either of these strategies is fully successful, but that just underscores how practically difficult the stoic view is.

4. Conclusion and other Dimensions of Value
I will conclude with a couple of related observations. First, I want to reiterate that, despite its practical difficulties, I think the stoic view is, in some sense, the “right one”. I say in “some sense” because I appreciate the diversity of interests that might be at stake. For me, the sense in question has to do with the psychological health of the person whose life it is. In other words, I think the stoic view is the one that is most conducive to the psychological health and well-being of the individual. Thus, if it is possible to render one’s happiness a largely “present-indexed” thing, I think one should try to do it.

But this doesn’t mean that the stoic view is the right one in all senses. In any debate about happiness and well-being, there is room for confusion. People often mean very different things when employing terms like “happiness” and “well-being”, and consequently debates can often end with their participants talking past each other. That’s why I want to be clear and I say that I think there are many dimensions of value along which we can assess an individual’s life. Most of those will be missed by the stoic view.
Thus, for example, we might assess an individual’s life using various objective measures of excellence. Did they make any significant scientific discoveries? Did they create a great work of art? Did they do great moral work, e.g. alleviating poverty and suffering? If they did, then their life might be more worthwhile, more significant and more meaningful than a person who did none of these things. But that doesn’t mean that they will have lived happier lives, at least not in the stoic sense.

This is intuitive anyway since we can easily imagine someone doing these things while living lives of misery and suffering. For example, Vincent van Gogh produced great works of art during his lifetime, but that life was, by all accounts, pretty miserable. As I say, that is pretty intuitive. Nevertheless, it is important to see just how far the stoic view goes in this direction. It is not just that van Gogh’s life wasn’t any happier for all the great works of art he produced; it is that even if he had been happy while producing those works of art, he wasn’t any happier just because he produced objectively valuable works of art. For the stoic, happiness is not contingent on external achievements. It is something that is produced by the right habit of mind, irrespective of its external focus and achievements.

So a life can have many dimensions of value, the stoic view is only concerned with one of those dimensions: subjective contentment.

(If you are interested in this topic, you might also be interested in my earlier post: Should we thanatise our desires?

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This work by John Danaher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

A Trump Dictatorship?

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As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently told The Guardian, “Democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.” The reelection of Trump. she believes, will signal:

An end of American democracy. I have absolutely no doubt about that, and he’s made it very clear. You look at Project 2025, which is a thousand pages on how you dismantle the federal government that has protected civil rights, provided a basic social safety net, regulated business, and promoted infrastructure since 1933. The theme of his 2024 campaign is retribution.

I don’t think people understand now that, if Donald Trump wins again, what we’re going to put in power is those people who want to burn it all down.

Here are 3 op-eds about the issue. (And you can find dozens more by prescient political commentators):

“The Unimaginable Horror of a Trump Restoration”

“A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.”

“The Trump Dictatorship: How to Stop It”

And here are some sample Reddit comments discussing Project 2025:

“It was written by a bunch of Republican operatives, some of whom worked for the Trump administration. The idea is to reshape the nation under Trumpism using the unitary executive theory, which would essentially install Trump as dictator. It was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, who are hugely influential in GOP politics.”

“Anyone who thinks it’s just empty posturing is mistaken. This is going to become the direction of the party, writ large. Just an open call for authoritarian control.”

“But if I’ve learned anything since 2015, it’s that a majority of Americans will vote to make their own lives worse when they believe their vote will increase the suffering of those they don’t like. LBJ summed it up: they all want someone to look down on. Simply substitute race with another classification (religion, sexual orientation, locality, political ideology, etc.) and it still rings true:”

“I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

On Becoming A Grandfather Again

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Assuming all goes well I will become a grandfather for the 4th time later this year. By the time the baby is due, my wife will be 70 and I will be almost 70. The realization that I will be 80 when my new grandchild is 10 and 90 when s/he is 20 is a sobering thought. It brings your mortality to the forefront of your mind—the world will go on without you. I suppose I could say with Ms. Melanie in Gone With The Wind “Children are life renewing itself.”

I wish I could know all of my grandchildren as adults, but life doesn’t give you all you want.  But, as I’ve recently written, the past, present, and future are all equally real in relativity theory. So hopefully my grandchildren and their descendants will learn that the idea that my wife and I are out there in spacetime long after we’re gone is consistent with everything we know in modern physics.

Now while I’ve made my views about the undesirability of death clear on many occasions, I could very well be wrong about that. Perhaps we have to die for life to renew itself. One of my intellectual heroes, Will Durant certainly thought so. He describes this idea with one of the most poignant yet hopeful passages in world literature,

Here is an old man on the bed of death, harassed with helpless friends and wailing relatives. What a terrible sight it is – this thin frame with loosened and cracking flesh, this toothless mouth in a bloodless face, this tongue that cannot speak, these eyes that cannot see! To this pass youth has come, after all its hopes and trials; to this pass middle age, after all its torment and its toil. To this pass health and strength and joyous rivalry; this arm once struck great blows and fought for victory in virile games. To this pass knowledge, science, wisdom: for seventy years this man with pain and effort gathered knowledge; his brain became the storehouse of a varied experience, the center of a thousand subtleties of thought and deed; his heart through suffering learned gentleness as his mind learned understanding; seventy years he grew from an animal into a man capable of seeking truth and creating beauty. But death is upon him, poisoning him, choking him, congealing his blood, gripping his heart, bursting his brain, rattling in his throat. Death wins

Outside on the green boughs birds twitter, and Chantecler sings his hymn to the sun. Light streams across the fields; buds open and stalks confidently lift their heads; the sap mounts in the trees. Here are children: what is it that makes them so joyous, running madly over the dew-wet grass, laughing, calling, pursuing, eluding, panting for breath, inexhaustible? What energy, what spirit and happiness! What do they care about death? They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with children, with parental care that will make their offspring finer than themselves. There in the garden’s twilight lovers pass, thinking themselves unseen; their quiet words mingle with the murmur of insects calling to their mates; the ancient hunger speaks through eager and through lowered eyes, and a noble madness courses through clasped hands and touching lips. Life wins.[i]

Nonetheless, what’s wrong with loving life so much that you never want to let go? What’s wrong with loving others so much that you never want them to go? What’s wrong with loving others so much that you don’t want them to have let go either? Rage, rage against the dying of the light versus acceptance and resignation.

In the end, I’m heartily grateful for having had the chance to live and love and learn; to have had wonderful parents and children, great teachers, and a loving mate. I so wish everyone could say the same.

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[i] Will Durant, The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929) 407-08.

The Purpose of the Universe

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Here is a brief description of the philosopher Phillip Goff’s new book Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press) with criticisms of Goff’s main ideas in the book by the theoretical physicist Jochen Szanolies.

The book’s OUP description states:

Why are we here? What’s the point of existence? On the ‘big questions’ of meaning and purpose, Western thought has been dominated by the dichotomy of traditional religion and secular atheism. In this pioneering work, Philip Goff argues that it is time to move on from both God and atheism. Through an exploration of contemporary cosmology and cutting-edge philosophical research on consciousness, Goff argues for cosmic purpose: the idea that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life.

In contrast to religious thinkers, Goff argues that the traditional God is a bad explanation of cosmic purpose. Instead, he explores a range of alternative possibilities for accounting for cosmic purpose, from the speculation that we live in a computer simulation to the hypothesis that the universe itself is a conscious mind. Goff scrutinizes these options with analytical rigour, laying the foundations for a new paradigm of philosophical enquiry into the middle ground between God and atheism. Ultimately, Goff outlines a way of living in hope that cosmic purpose is still unfolding, involving political engagement and a non-literalist interpretation of traditional religion.

In a two-part detailed review of the book (Part 1, Part 2) Szanolies makes many detailed critiques. Here is a sampling.

I’m inherently suspicious of overt declarations of having arrived at a certain position only through the strength of the arguments in its favor, even against one’s own prior commitments. If that were typically how things happen, then either there ought to be much more agreement than there is, or the vast majority of people are just irredeemably irrational.

There are several junctures in Philip Goff’s most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe, at which we are treated to a description of the author’s intellectual journey, detailing how the force of argument necessitated course corrections. Now, changing your mind in the face of new information is generally a good thing: nobody gets it right on the first try, so everybody who’s held fast to their views probably just hasn’t examined them deeply. But still, very few people arrive at their position solely thanks to rational forces.

[I admit to being receptive to this argument. I know for example that despite my lifelong attempt to be rational and impartial the fact is that most if not all of what I believe emanates from all sorts of contingencies: what books I read, classes I took, genome I possess, family and era I was born into, etc.]

Summarizing Goff’s main arguments Szanolies writes:

Goff’s main contention is that the best available evidence, filtered through the understanding bestowed to us by our best current theories, does not paint a picture of a meaningless cosmos, as is usually claimed …

He marshals two main arguments in support of his conclusion. One is the fact that the universe seems implausibly fine-tuned: that is, the parameters that define its properties fall within a very narrow range that allow for the existence of complex structures, and hence, life. The other and, to me, more compelling one is sometimes known as the Darwinian argument against materialism: since natural selection is only sensitive to behaviors, there is nothing that compels our internal states to track the affective valence of our stimuli—that is, evolution doesn’t need pain to feel bad, it just needs us to avoid it. So where does this psycho-physical harmony, as Goff calls it, come from?

While skeptical of Goff’s arguments, Szanolies certainly understands the appeal of their ultimate conclusion that “the reality of conscious experience implies a larger purpose to, well, everything.” As he writes,

Goff’s ultimate conclusion should be attractive to many: rather than being thrown by mere random chance into the cold and uncaring void of the universe, to live out a brief, confused existence and then wink out into the nothingness whence we came, the existence of complex life in the world is due to a larger purpose, an overall arc that bends into the direction of greater objective value. Moreover, rather than going the traditional route and appealing to some omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent creator God that sees to it that everything unfolds according to His divine (and commonly, unfathomable) design, he proposes a way to reap those benefits without all the boring Sunday prayer sessions!

[Author’s note. I am in no position to comment intelligently on Goff’s book, which I haven’t yet read, but as I’ve written previously “If reflection reveals that our deepest wishes may come true, our skeptical alarm bell should go off. For we want to know, not just to believe.” So in this sense, I’m aligned with Szanolies.

Nevertheless, I am also receptive to Shakespeare “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”]

Moral Luck

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MORAL LUCK
by Larry Houlgate**

What is it and what would the classic philosophers have to say about it?

It would be best to start with an example of moral luck. Imagine two teenagers (Mark and Susan) who have challenged each other to a race in their new hot rods. The race is scheduled for midnight at a one mile two-lane strip of road outside of town. Hundreds of other teenagers hear about the race.

They line up on both sides of the road to witness the race.But what they witness is tragedy. Neither Mark nor Susan saw the oil slick 100 meters ahead of the starting place. While still accelerating, Mark lost control of his car. The car careened into the crowd, killing one person and injuring many more.

Susan also lost control but luckily her car crashed into a thicket of bushes on the other side of the road and hit no bystanders.

It is factors beyond their control that significantly influences how much blame Mark and Susan deserve that define the notion of moral luck. Although both Mark and Susan will both be blamed for reckless driving, Mark is likely to be judged much more harshly. The consequences of his loss of control were much greater than the consequences of Susan’s loss of control. Mark killed and injured people. Susan didn’t harm anyone.

Mark: “Hey dude. I admit that I was reckless but I didn’t intend to hurt anyone. I didn’t see the oil slick. I lost control of my car. All I wanted to do was show off my hot rod.”

Susan: “”Ditto, I admit that I was reckless but I didn’t hurt anyone.”

Mark was unlucky. Susan was lucky. Here are my questions. Although most of us are intuitively inclined to judge Mark more harshly than we would judge Susan, is this fair? Should luck influence how we judge Mark and Susan? Should Susan get off the hook of moral responsibility simply because her out of control car went into the bushes and not into a group of bystanders? If you think that she deserves a degree of responsibility, should it be more or less than that of Mark?

How would you respond to these questions if you were there that night?

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**Laurence (Larry) Houlgate is an emeritus professor of philosophy and former department chair at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. A California native, he received his B.A. at Cal State Los Angeles and an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy at UCLA.

His teaching and research specialties in philosophy include Philosophy of Law, Social Ethics, and the History of Philosophy.

Now in retirement after a 51-year teaching career, Larry is currently writing guidebooks for beginning philosophy students on the classics of philosophy. At this writing (2022), eight study guides have been published.

Larry recently published the  3rd Edition of Understanding Philosophy, a study guide for beginning students on philosophical methodology.

Another book project in the works is about the long history of belief in the existence of a life after death, and the futility of past attempts to provide philosophic, scientific or any rational proof to ground this belief.

He enjoys retirement, especially spending quality time with his wife (of 51 years), research and writing, going to the movies, beach walks, early morning swims, and occasionally competing in U.S. Masters and Senior Games swim meets.

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Further recommended reading:

Bernard Williams. “Moral Luck”. In Moral luck : philosophical papers, 1973-1980. Williams, Bernard, author 1981.

[Note: The phrase “moral luck” was first used by Bernard Williams in a lecture to the Aristotelian Society, originally published in The Aristotelian Society Supplementary, Volume 1, 1976.]

Thomas Nagel. “Luck and Ethics” Ed. by Statman, Daniel. Moral Luck. SUNY. 1993. (Williams’ essay and a response to Nagel is also in the Statman reader).

** You can read about Professor Houlgate’s many philosophical books here.

 

How To Research A Topic

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When I was an undergraduate more than 50 years ago I thought writing a 3 to 5-page paper was a monumental task. What could one possibly say for that many pages? As a senior, I wrote about a 7-page paper for an independent study class. The task seemed overwhelming.

In graduate school, I discovered that a 20-page paper (about the size of a journal article) was the typical lenght for a seminar essay. The first few were all I could manage. It was when researching a paper for a seminar in my first year of grad school—on the topic of why North and South America had such different economies—that I first began to understand the idea of research.

I’d go to the college library, find every book they had on the topic, read the relevant parts, and try to glean the basic ideas. Was it geography, climate, raw materials or people that made the difference in the economic development of different places? Was it the different social, political, and economic ideas of the countries that conquered the New World that mattered? Was it something else or partly all of the above? I quickly realized that there were many theories but that I had to do the research and come to a considered conclusion. That was research.

Next up was the master’s thesis and now the page range was 75 to 100 pages. It took many rewrites but somehow I managed. Then of course came the dissertation. I still remember going into Professor Blackwell‘s office after he accepted the unenviable job of directing it. We had previously discussed the topic and he took out a pen and wrote what he thought would be the six chapters. He then told me that 300 pages was a typical length.

I needed a drink. How can one write 300 pages? Sensing my anxiety he said something like “John, you’ve written 20-page papers before now you’re just going to write 15 of them.” This brought an immediate sense of relief. I would be building something piece by piece. In my case I’d research what motivated Piaget’s thinking, why he studied children to understand epistemology, what the nature of genetic epistemology was, how this related to the history of science, what his final position was, etc. Assimilate information, explain it to others, and then come to my own conclusions. Research.

Or, as Wikipedia puts it.

Research is “creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge”. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to controlling sources of bias and error.

In those days, research meant starting at St. Louis University’s library, and if they didn’t have what I needed I went down the street to Washington University’s library. If I were still often out of luck on such an esoteric topic usually interlibrary loan could get what I needed from the University of Chicago. Occasionally, I had to get something from the East Coast.

Today most students probably don’t know what interlibrary loan is. The problem for people today isn’t finding information but differentiating between good and bad information, between good and bad sources. For example, when considering a medical question there are legitimate sources like Harvard Health, The Mayo Clinic, The Cleveland Clinic, WebMD, the CDC, and the NIH. There also are multiple sources of disinformation and misinformation as anyone can put up anything on a website even if they have no idea what they’re talking about.

When you only had a university library the information was limited, but the books you found there had been affirmed by the gatekeepers—the university presses and their editors and reviewers. Back then you lacked information but what you had access to was almost always from knowledgable sources. (How much time I spent in libraries.) Today we have easy access to both good and bad information and need to discriminate between them.

Looking back I’m thankful that others helped me learn how to do research. And I’m glad that critical thinking skills help one to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Are Alpha Males Of Any Use?

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BY FRANS DE WAAL

Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

The typical chimpanzee alpha male is calculating, assertive, and sometimes violent in order to keep his position vis-à-vis male rivals. But he is also protective and generous towards others, keeping order and protecting the underdog. If he is good at guaranteeing group harmony, he becomes quite popular, loved even.

In my study of power among chimpanzees, I was inspired by Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” a book from half a millennium ago, which famously declared that “it’s better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both.”

But let’s not forget that for a leader it’s better to be respected than feared. Respect is easily combined with love. Fear is, in fact, for the untalented ruler, the one who needs to beat everyone over the head to get them to do what he wants. It’s for bullies and despots.

Nonetheless, visit any businessbook section and you’ll find a plethora of how-to books on alpha males that perpetuate the notion that they thrive on fear. Here two recent titles:

Dominic Mann (2017). “How to Be an Alpha Male, Dominate in Both the Boardroom and Bedroom, and Live the Life of a Complete Badass.”Jack Landry (2015). “Alpha Male Bible: Become Legendary, A Lion Amongst Sheep.”

These books glorify the alpha concept, borrowed from wolf and primate research, with little mention of the skills that set a good alpha apart, such as generosity, impartiality, and shielding of the underdog. We’re presented with a cardboard version of leadership.

I find this all the more galling given the role of my book “Chimpanzee Politics” (1982) has played in the alpha concept’s popularity. My book drew the attention of U.S. Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who put it on the reading list of Members of Congress. Since then, the “alpha male” label gained currency in Washington, DC, for politicians who dominate and intimidate.

When primatologists speak of alpha males and females, however, they’re not referencing any type of personality. The label simply indicates the individual at the top of the dominance hierarchy. Each group has one, and only one, alpha of each gender. Since there is far less competition between than within the genders, the alpha male and alpha female coexist. There’s no need to choose between them. In fact, they often form a team, reinforcing each other.

I know alpha males who have become extremely popular — loved even – since they brought security and unity to the group, and showed great empathy towards anyone defeated or injured. Their most conspicuous role was to step in when a fight occurred and restore order.

For example, a quarrel between two females spins out of control and ends with hair flying. Other apes rush up to join the fray. A knot of fighting, screaming apes rolls around, until the alpha male leaps in and beats them apart. He does not choose sides, like everybody else. Instead, anyone who continues to fight will receive a blow. Or he strides in between two screaming parties and stands there imposingly with all his hair on end, sometimes stretching out both arms in a beseeching gesture, making it clear that they will have to push him out of the way to continue.

In pigtail macaques, males perform a similar policing role. Once, at the Yerkes Field Station, my graduate student Jessica Flack and I kept three top males out of a large troop for one day at a time. During those days, we measured less play and more fights. The fights were also more serious and less often followed by reconciliation. The only way to restore stability was to return these males to the troop. Dominant males contribute to social harmony and are essential to keeping a troop together.

This doesn’t apply to every alpha male, though. As in humans, bullies may also reach the top. They are the leaders who need to follow Machiavelli’s rule. It’s a risky strategy, though. In both captive and wild chimpanzees, there are observations of bully alpha males ending badly. The community is waiting to throw its weight behind any viable challenge to their position in order to force them out, sometimes brutally killing them in the process.

In my experience, the typical alpha male is not like this. He is loved and respected so that when he loses his position to a younger male — which he always does at some point — he just steps down a few rungs on the social ladder without much drama. He lives out his life more relaxed, politicking in the background, grooming with his buddies and female friends, and gently roughhousing with the young like any good grandpa.

FURTHER READING

TED talk on primate alpha males: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPsSKKL8N0s

Gendered Ape Essay #2 on female dominance & power.

Flack et al. (2005). Robustness mechanisms in primate societies: A perturbation study. Proc. Royal Society London B 272: 1091-1099.

For further details and references to the literature, read “Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist” (Norton, 2022). A video about the book can be seen here: https://fb.watch/ffbauZBzNb/

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Originally posted at 3 Quarks Daily ON MONDAY, NOV 21,

**Professor de Wall died on March 20, 2024

Are Males Naturally Dominant?

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Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

Are Males Naturally Dominant?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Physical dominance is not the same as power and leadership.

A century ago, the London Zoo put about one hundred Hamadryas baboons together in the wrong sex ratio. Over 90% of the monkeys were male. They fought for years, and by the end the females had died as well as most of the males. The scientist in charge, Solly Zuckerman, who was quite prominent (Fellow of the Royal Society), popularized this unmitigated disaster. In the primates, he claimed, males rule brutally and supremely. Females have no say whatsoever. His observations hinted, he felt, at the origin of human society. Repeated over and over by others, this view became mainstream even though we, primatologists, wisely don’t mention Zuckerman much anymore. Too embarrassing!

The male supremacy view still holds in the public mind, though, such as in the 2002 book “King of the Mountain” by American psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig: “Most humans have been socially, psychologically, and biologically programmed with the need for a single dominant male figure to govern their communal lives. And this programming corresponds closely to how almost all anthropoid primate societies are run.”

This statement resembles Sigmund Freud’s reconstruction of the first human family as a “primal horde” around an overbearing father figure.

There is little support for the notion of the obligatory male overlord, however.

The baboon study at its origin concerned a species that is not particularly close to us. We belong to the same small family as the apes (large tail-less primates), not monkeys like baboons. Moreover, the hamadryas baboon has a huge size and weaponry difference between the sexes, and its males are exceptionally possessive.

Studying our next of kin, the great apes, offers a more nuanced, less patriarchal picture. Our two closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, show a moderate size difference between the sexes, more in the human range. They offer a study in contrast, with chimpanzees being male-dominated, territorial, and violent, and bonobos being female-dominated, erotic, and pacific. Until now, there are no confirmed observations of one bonobo killing another but many such observations for chimpanzees. The bonobos’ tight sisterhood ensures that the alpha individual is always female. This is true for all captive colonies as well as for bonobos in the wild.

Yet, not everyone is thrilled to have bonobos in the family tree. Once, after a lecture for a German audience about the power of bonobo females, an older male professor stood up and barked in an almost accusatory tone, “What’s wrong with those males?!” While chimpanzees are favored as ancestral models by many anthropologists, due to the traditional emphasis on brotherhood and warfare in human evolutionary scenarios, and while feminists admire the gynarchy of bonobos, it’s good to realize that in terms of DNA both apes are exactly equally close to us. There is really no need to choose: they are both relevant for the reconstruction of human evolution.

The idea that males are more hierarchical than females, commonly heard in relation to human society, surprises any biologist. All female animals compete over rank and privileges, establish social hierarchies, and have an alpha female at the top.* Remember, the term “pecking order” derives from hens, not roosters.

Mama, the impressive alpha female of the world’s largest zoo colony of chimpanzees, may not have physically dominated any grown males, she enjoyed considerable political power. Power is the ability to decide group processes. In this regard, Mama was absolutely central. She was alpha for forty years, respected in this position even when she was nearly blind and could barely walk anymore. Male alphas came and went during her long reign, but every one of them needed her support to have a chance at the top spot. Mama’s capacity to rally female allies made her an indispensable player. She was the most groomed individual of the colony, and no male would get it into his head to ignore or abuse her.

Confusion about gender relations in primates stems from the false notion that animals are ruled by the “law of the strongest.” We have been taught that everything boils down to combat, which advantages males. Physical prowess does offer benefits, but primate societies are characterized by coalitions. Bonobo females, for example, are smaller than males and cannot individually dominate them. Their actual dominance is a collective one thanks to sisterly solidarity.

My first book “Chimpanzee Politics” (1982) detailed how coalitions work. Who rules the community is decided by networking, kinship, friendships, and strategic partnerships. This means that the smallest male may become alpha provided he has the right buddies and/or female support. It also means that females exert real power and that female leadership is not hard to find. In many primates, I estimate the social influence of the typical alpha female to be on a par with that of the typical alpha male.

FURTHER READING

* Alpha indicates the top of the social pyramid, usually divided into one for males and one for females since status competition is overwhelmingly within-gender. The term “alpha” does not refer to a personality type. Each group has one alpha of each gender.

On bonobo society: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bonobo-sex-and-society-2006-06/

On the unfortunate baboon bloodbath: https://priceonomics.com/the-massacre-at-monkey-hill/

For further details and references to the literature, read “Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist” (Norton, 2022). A video about the book can be seen here: https://fb.watch/ffbauZBzNb/

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Originally posted at 3 Quarks Daily ON MONDAY, SEP 12, 2022 BY FRANS DE WAAL

**Professor de Wall died on March 20, 2024