WELFARE BUMS AMONG THE LIONS
by Frank Forman

1996 May 18

Will an animal do something that is costly to
itself and a benefit to others? The answer from
ethologists and sociobiologists has been no,
since animals carrying altruistic genes would
reproduce less as a result of their altruism.
Humans, it is said, are the only animals that
can practice genuine altruism. Animals can
cooperate with one another, however, and
biologists who have used game theory to model
repeated interaction among animals in situations
where there are incentives to cheat have
explained how such cooperation might emerge. The
strategy they often come up with for an animal
to adopt--it depends on the exact details of the
situation at hand--is the rule of "Tit-for-Tat":
I'll cooperate this time, but if you cheat, I'll
cheat and keep cheating until you once again
cooperate. But there is no altruism here: no
animal repeatedly plays the sucker.

All this is good theory, though real examples in
the field have been hard to actually document.
Comes along now a study by Robert Heinsohn and
Craig Packer of lions in the Serengeti National
Park in Tanzania which shows that, to the
contrary, lionhearts actually do play the sucker
to cowardly lions.^
  [^Robert Heinsohn and Craig Packer, "Complex
Cooperative Strategies in Group-Territorial
African Lions," _Science_, 1995 September 1, pp.
1260-2. A lay overview is provided by Virginia
Morell, "Cowardly Lions Confound Cooperation
Theory," ibid., p. 1216f. I'm cribbing from the
latter below.]

Here's the gist of the experiment: Lions band
together in order to protect their young from
the infanticidal attacks of strange male lions
and sometimes pair off to defend their territory
against strange females. Heinsohn and Packer
staged mock invasions of lion territory by
playing taped recordings of the roars of strange
females in experiments with eight resident
prides. The dilemma is very much like the oft-
cited Prisoners' dilemma and goes like this: the
cost of being the first lion of the pair to go
fight the invader is very high, as she is more
likely to be killed. But without protecting the
pride's territory from invaders, a female lion
has little chance of raising her cubs and so
loses the chance to pass her genes on to the
next generation--the bottom line of evolutionary
success.

But the researchers discovered that when it came
to interactions between the lionhearted leaders
and the cowardly laggards, the lionesses did not
bear those costs equally. Paired leaders
typically advanced boldly together, but the
showdown walk was longer and much more hesitant
when leaders were matched with laggards. The
leaders, advancing first, would constantly
glance back, as if to say, "Well, where the Hell
are you?" Nevertheless, the leaders never
punished the laggard by holding back herself
(invoking the Tit-for-Tat strategy), thus
confounding the theories biologists had been
holding.

The data in the articles were not such that I
could calculate how much genetic resources were
altruistically given by the brave lions to the
welfare bums, but I should not be surprised if
it were not far from the rule of Gordon Tullock
for humans, namely that people in either their
private capacity or through their
representatives in government will transfer
about five percent of their income to help the
poor. But whatever the percentage for lions,
humans are no longer an exception when it comes
to altruism. I wait impatiently for research on
other social mammals and social species in other
classes.

Biologists have a huge explaining job to do, and
this explanation is likely to take the form of 
revival of the idea of *group selection*, that
the genes for traits that boost the survival of
some groups relative to others in a population
can become more prevalent in the population. But
since genes are carried by individual organisms
and do not float around in some sort of liquid
gene "pool," there is the problem, mentioned in
the first paragraph, that there will be fewer
and fewer genes for altruism, since the
altruistic animals under-reproduce.^
  [^See two articles by Bruce Bower, "Return of
the Group" and "Ultrasocial Darwinism," in
_Science News_, 1995 November 18 and 25, resp.]

What is being proposed is that selection for
both genes and groups (and also individual
organisms as Darwin thought) can take place at
the same time, meaning that there is no "the"
unit of selection. Indeed, a section of an issue
of _Behavioral and Brain Sciences_ in 1994 was
given over, in the standard fashion of that
prestigious journal, to a major article on the
subject, together with dozens of comments by
other scientists. I have not seen that issue and
so cannot comment on it, though I presume much
arguing will be over the extent of group
selection. It may only take a small amount of it
to have large, long run effects. In fact,
molecular biologists are quite good at
explaining micro-evolution at the gene level but
are unable to account for what Darwin tried to
do, namely the origin (macro-evolution) of
species. Alas, the group selectionists never
really gave up, as you can read in John
Brockman's superb anthology of scientists he got
talking about one another, _The Third Culture_^.
  [^John Brockman, _The third Culture:
Scientists on the Edge: Beyond the Scientific
Revolution (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1995). The
book includes scientists from many fields and is
enthusiastically recommended.]

But the whole idea of "the" unit of selection
was in fact wrong from the beginning. And so is
the very widespread idea that "the survival of
the fittest" is but an empty tautology meaning
merely that "that which survives survives." The
error goes to the heart of the idea of what a
scientific theory is and thus shows how
philosophy can be of real help in not only
clearing up needless confusion but in avoiding
ideas like "selfish" genes are the sole units of
selection in the first place. I am taking on
some mighty big names here (Richard Dawkins and
Daniel Dennett are the best known), but I rush
in anyhow, armed with a little-known article by
Mary B. Williams.^
  [^Mary B. Williams, "The Logical Status of the
Theory of Natural Selection and Other
Evolutionary Controversies," pp. 84-102 of Mario
Bunge, ed., _The Methodological Unity of
Science_ (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1973).
Bunge is my great hero, and that's how I found
the article.]

She points out what we should all realize,
namely that a scientific theory, as a piece of
pure mathematics, needs to be hooked up by way
of semantic assumptions (sometimes called
"correspondence rules") with the parts of the
world the theory is supposed to be accounting
for. But, "the fundamental cause of the problems
associated with these attempts is the
acceptance, essentially by all biologists, of
the metaphysical doctrine that all words used in
a scientific theory should be defined" (p. 88).
So when the biologist I.M. Lerner in 1959, for
example, states that "fitness of an individual,
in the context of the natural selection
principle, can mean *only* that extent to which
the organism is represented by descendants in
succeeding generations," he "makes no reference
to the fact that fitness is a property of the
relationship between the organism and its
environment; it states by omission that the
environment is irrelevant to fitness. It is not
surprising that acceptance of this definition
has led to statements that the theory is
vacuous" (p. 90).

Mary Williams herself takes "fitness" as
*undefined* in the theory proper and gives a
bunch of derived definitions and axioms and
winds up with the grand axiom about the survival
of the fittest, which you need not study here
and now but instead "sit bolt upright in hard
chair," as my professor said, and study the
whole paper:

"In every generation m of a Darwinian subclan D
which is not on the verge of extinction, there
is a sub-subclan D1 such that: D1 is superior to
the rest of D for long enough to ensure that D1
will increase relative to D; and as long as D
contains biological entities that are not in D1,
D1 retains sufficient superiority to ensure
further increases relative to D" (p. 88).^
  ^[She says this axiom really means
differential reproduction or, as she puts it
"expansion of the fitter sub-subclan," which is
more accurate "survival of the fittest" per se.
Her statement is actually an *informal*
definition, as this article goes to the
philosophical implications, the full formal
presentation using the language of set theory
having been explicated in _Journal of
Theoretical Biology_ 29 (1970): 434-385.]

But biologists still need to put *something* on
display as the targets of selection, and she
drags out authorities who champion the organism,
the gene, the chromosome, and the population in
turn. She concludes that there is no good reason
to presuppose that only one level of operative
selection need take place. The grand axiom she
gave can, at least theoretically, operate on all
these levels. Let's hope that they in fact do,
even if selection at the level of the organism
or species is comparatively weak compared to
selection at the gene level. Recall that gravity
is an extremely weak force compared to the weak
atomic-electromagnetic force and the strong
atomic force but that it is gravity that
accounts for the large scale features of the
universe.

And so I suspect that it is weak selection
forces that account for the grand structure of
evolution we see when we admire the huge Column
of Life in National Museum of Natural History on
the Mall in Washington. The implication of all
this for the general subject at hand is that
altruism is indeed possible and that there is no
need to explain away the subsidization of
welfare bums among the lions in a Tanzanian park
or to make the second most trite form of human
wisdom, namely that everyone is out for power
for himself. Given the plausible assumption that
emotions in humans have coevolved with their
altruistic behavior, a certain amount of it--the
Tullock five percent rule, say--is indeed among
what the great David Hume called "natural
sentiments," and which form the foundation of
our actual, practiced morality (as opposed to
theoretical derivations on the part of
philosophers, who argue against one another
interminably anyhow).

Advice: follow your natural sentiments and
reject both the extreme forms of anti-altruism
as represented by the Objectivism of Ayn Rand
and the extremes in the other direction of
egalitarianism, which is a morality racket that
preys upon altruistic sentiments.

And so the ancient Hebrews may have had it
exactly right, when they said:

The earth from God we do but rent,
And all he asks is ten percent.

Half of it went to the poor, in accordance with
Tullock's rule, and the other half for
administration by priests.

-------------

This is being composed in WordPerfect. So the
chevrons (>) designate me last time, JIMBO is
Jimbo's reply, and FRANK NOW is just that. I
excised a fair amount of stuff to concentrate on
the real matters at hand.

Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 21:18:03 -0500 (CDT) 
From: Jimmy -Jimbo- Wales  
Subject: Re: Welfare Bums among the Lions 

Frank Forman wrote: 
> I am beginning to think that no one understands the Objectivist meaning 
> of altruism. One definition is to sacrifice a higher value for a lower 
> value. But we are also told that a value is "that which one ACTS to gain 
> and/or keep." But if our values are evidenced by our actions, then it is 
> not possible to sacrifice a higher value for a lower value. 

JIMBO:
It is frequently the case that one word will
have two or more related meanings. This *can* be
a problem, particularly for poor writers, but a
skilled writer is always careful to use words
_in context_ so as to alleviate any possibility
of confusion. In the hands of a skilled writer,
these words with multiple meanings can permit a
great expressive elegance. Fortunately, Ayn Rand
was not just a *good* writer, she was a *great*
writer. 

FRANK NOW:
We--seemingly everyone on this discussion
group!--spend an awfully large amount of time
wrangling over what Ayn Rand meant. I'll
illustrate below.

JIMBO:
The word 'value' can be used in two ways. First,
it can denote anything that happens to be
valued. If you value hot pokers in your eyes,
then in one sense, pokers are valuable to you...
meaning that you will act to gain and/or keep
them there. But in other sense, the sense of
'objective value', hot pokers in the eyes are an
extreme disvalue -- they hurt like hell, make
you blind, etc.! 
Altruism, qua *moral* theory (and therefore
quite different from the apparent 'biological
altruism' of some animals), is the theory that
you ought to, at least in some cases, sacrifice
something that is of a higher _objective_ value
to you (i.e. actually valuable, not just
something that you happen to value, perhaps
unwisely) for the sake of something that is of a
_lower_ _objective_ value to you. The vast
majority of ethical theories throughout history
have been _altruistic_ in precisely this sense. 

FRANK NOW:
More generally, *all* moral theories command you
to go against your inclinations. Rational egoism
is no exception: you should look after your
*long-term* interests. Ben Franklin's Poor
Richard was very much a rational egoist,
although I cannot say Poor Richard never
commanded that you give to the poor, even though
they are of lesser value to you. His maxims were
mostly about building good character: honesty,
frugality, diligence, and so on. He was
concerned mostly with these 'small' virtues and
not with the 'large' ones like courage. I don't
think Ayn Rand ever mentioned Poor Richard,
since his wisdom, in her day and still even in
mine, was taught mostly to youngsters. Miss
Rand, of course, did not come to the United
States until she was well past that age. 

[Stuff from Jimbo about my not getting good
responses because my style is too bombastic and
cocksure. He may be right, but I think another
reason is that my approach often comes from a
quite different perspective than that of
Objectivism and so sometimes makes absorbing
what I say difficult. I think a lot of readers
intend to get back to me but keep putting it
off. This is procrastination, not evasion. But
the biggest problem is that I often use my
writing to think things through myself,
following the adage of my dissertation
direction, "Don't get it right; get it written."
Jim is quite right that I am often confused! But
it is more with my own emergent thinking than
with Objectivism. When I know exactly what I am
going to say, I often turn out mellifluous
prose.]

JIMBO:
Here is the essential philosophical answer to
your query about benevolence, altruism, etc.: 

Frank said:
> Of course, I have an *intuitive* grasp of the difference between altruism 
> and benevolence. But I do not have a *philosophical* understanding. I 
> could give an *ostensive* definition of altruism by naming several of Miss 
> Rand's fictional characters, starting with Lilian Rearden, but this is
> not doing philosophy. 

JIMBO:
Altruistic moral theories posit, in some form or
another, that one *ought* to sacrifice some
higher value for some lower value. Two thousand
or more years of lies have attempted to lead
people to the view that the only alternative to
altruism is violent hatred of others, etc. But
that just isn't true. 

FRANK:
Recall that Ayn Rand asked the question, "Why
does man need a [moral] code of values?" Here's
the ambiguity: does is mean why does *Frank*
need a moral code or why do *men* need a moral
code? She seemed to have meant the first, but a
good part of "The Objectivist Ethics" is taken
up with what happens when *men* do not follow a
rational morality.

Consider first why *Frank* needs a moral code.
One answer is prudence, meaning exercising
reason and self-control (Webster's Third
International). But this can apply to criminal
as well as productive pursuits. The prudent
criminal avoids getting caught and does not give
into temptation when the chance of apprehension
is too great. 

Prudence requires character development, so
Frank's parents would have been well-advised to
have seen that he be punctual, complete projects
before starting on new ones, and so on. And
these good habits must be instilled long before
Frank is able to grasp abstract ethical
concepts. Observers, at least since Aristotle,
have witnesses that getting a child to do many
minor acts of courage, say, will enable him to
perform great acts of courage as an adult when
his character is sorely tested. It would, of
course, be very good if parents had access to
empirical research on when and how far to push
the moral education of particular virtues. Push
a virtue too early and at best the parents'
efforts are wasted; push too late and the virtue
may not take hold.

But note that a truly egoist ethics would
consider Frank as he is right now, at age 51,
with his present mix of good and bad habits.
What should he do--indeed, what *can* he do--
about his bad habits? He should be concerned
only with the rest of his life and not with what
his parents might have done and the bad choices-
-small ones repeatedly, usually--he made in
directing his own moral education. But when we
speak of morals, we ordinarily talk about how
children should be brought up. Note the plural
word, "children"! 

Before we go off speaking in terms of moral
absolutes, note that there are trade-offs among
the virtues: they cannot be simultaneously
maximized. When growing up, George Washington, I
have it on good authority though I cannot cite a
reference, would decide which virtue he would
work on that day. What is also the case is that
the relative mix of virtues in Washington's time
is not the same as it is in ours. Courage was
more useful then, applying oneself to academic
studies more valued now. Caution is wise in an
agricultural society, when continual hard and
boring work is a key to success, and also in an
age of bureaucracy and Cover Your Ass;
entrepreneurship and risk-taking was wise in the
heyday of the "Robber Barons" and in the
information age that is still emerging (as David
Kelley has been pointing out). But I don't want
to preach any *excessive* relativism. It may
very well be that the heroes in any society are
more alike in their character than those of the
common man who aims more at (and may be right to
so aim at) survival than as leading a life of
man *qua* man.

[I must add that genetic variability means that
Frank's optimal character (vector of virtues in
the MORALOCUBE, I might call it) will differ
from Jimbo's. Parents have noted this from a
"time whereof the memory of man runneth not to
the contrary" (Blackstone).]

The problem of the prudential crook remains. My
parents did not teach me to be such a crook,
indeed quite the contrary, but now I'm talking
about how *we* want to raise *our* children.
There is a subtle problem here, and that is that
both cooperation and competition have their
uses. A business firm is essentially an island
of cooperation in a sea of competition, and part
of the reason for this is that it is often
cheaper for a firm to manufacture its supplies
internally than to purchase them on the outside.
(This seeming truism had to wait for its
discovery to 1936 (approx.) when Ronald Coase
published his seminal paper, "The Nature of the
Firm.") This means that the individual must
exercise both the cooperative virtues and the
competitive virtues and know when the "us"
attitude is most appropriate and when the "them"
attitude is most appropriate. So far so good,
but this cooperation-competition mix can extend
to one group exploiting another. Slavery is an
example, but so also is the case of the Gypsies,
at least according to legend and actually
according to a book, _King of the Gypsies_, I
once read. Gypsies do not steal from each other,
so their parents insist, while they also
instruct them in the arts of stealing from
"them." Many economists are persuaded that
slavery is not a stable institution, meaning
that slaves would rationally opt to save enough
to purchase their own manumission, but I know of
no discussion regards the Gypsies. (Gordon
Tullock opined to me at a conference that the
whites in South Africa had in fact profited from
the exploitation of blacks.) I bring the problem
up and have no resolution.

Now recall that I first began asking why *Frank*
needs a moral code. The first answer is
prudence, but this does not say why he should
not be a prudential crook. The second answer is
psychological: it is in *Frank's* nature as a
member of homo sapiens that he will suffer
psychologically from being a prudential crook,
regardless of what moral education he had. This
is what Socrates said to Glaucon in _The
Republic_ and what, on my interpretation, is
what Ayn Rand thought but never fully
articulated. Articulating this would require
developing what I called the Objectivist
Psychology in an earlier article, "Patch Needed
for 'The Objectivist Ethics.'" (This is the
"hole" I keep talking about.)

Alas, to propound this thesis *universally*
requires a great deal of empirical work. I can
point out that Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, and
Vladimir Lenin were horribly unhappy people.
Pointing this out, again and again, to my
children will most likely have effects on their
eventual moral character, but critical adults
will want some better demonstration. The Gypsies
I read about in _King of the Gypsies_ did not
seem to be very happy to me. I must confess that
the whole question of the *aim* of a moral code
is an extremely difficult one and about whose
treatment by Ayn Rand I (and many others) am
sorely confused. It is not clear either that a
*hardened* criminal would be rationally advised
to *undertake* the horrific effort to mend his
ways: remarkable turn-arounds have been
achieved, but the failure rate is very great. An
egoist must take himself as he is, not as what
he might have been but can no longer be.

A pitch for studying biology here: Aristotle
noted that character gets harder to change with
age. This is an empirical fact and not one that
can be deduced from the concept of a rational
animal. But it can stand considerable fleshing
out: what is going on in the brain, how did our
species come to be this way, how important is
genetic variability? I am loathe to artificially
divide the study of reality into philosophical,
scientific, and other (whatever that is!): I
would insist that learning about the biological
underpinnings is very important and that,
moreover, it will inform us better about the
*constraints* we face in developing our
characters. Indeed, why is *Frank* docile (in
the sense of teachable and morally
indoctrinable) in the first place?

INTERLUDIUM, not nec. a comic one: Much of what
we think is universal may just be a European
provincialism, in which case evolutionary
studies of the emergence of man out of apes may
not always be helpful:

"Nobert Elias has suggested that under
conditions of chronic interstate conflict in
medieval and early modern Europe, particular
social changes occurred that transformed both
institutions and agents within the western
European region. The creation of court societies
involved the suppression of emotion and the
development of self-restraint and
internalization of one's emotions. This
internalization constituted a practical
imperative required for success in the court
societies of western Europe. Affective control
at the micro level was coupled with the
processes of pacification within a particular
state territory. The formation of modern
European states entailed the suppression of the
use of violence by agents not authorized by the
central government. The institutionalization of
'order' entailed societal transformation both at
the micro and macro levels. The consequence of
these long-term changes was the formation of a
modern self, an agent that has internalized
affective controls over his or her public
persona. Notions of rationality and interest
have emerged in the _longue duree_ of this
sociohistorical process.

"The novel character of this approach rests on
the connections established in the economic
network (European feudalism), political network
(interstate conflict), military network
(internal pacification via court societies), and
changes in the cultural-ideological network
(personality development and sociogenetic
processes involving detachment from 'passions'
and the promotion of interest and rationality).
The theory of the civilizing process, whatever
its weaknesses, explicitly suggests that
"civilization" is indeed a process involving the
growing detachment of an agent from his or her
own passions and the development of
perspectivism as a means of relating self and
others"
--Victor Roudometof and Roland Robertson,
"Globalization, World-System Theory, and the
Comparative Study of Civilizations: Issues of
Theoretical Logic in World-Historical
Sociology," pp. 280-81, in Stephen K. Sanderson,
ed., _Civilizations and World Systems: Studying
World-Historical Change_ (Walnut Creek, CA:
AltaMira Press, A Division of Sage Publications,
1995).

I devoted a chapter of my book, _The Metaphysics
of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer
Academic, 1985), to the treatment of the
separation of theory and fact, reason and
desire, and public rules and private values in
modern life as presented by Roberto Mangabiera
Unger in his _Knowledge and Politics_ (NY: Free
Press, 1975). Ayn Rand differs from other
writers on liberty, in that she reached back to
what Unger calls "intelligible essences" of the
ancient and medieval philosophers, such as
Aristotle and Aquinas, though not in exactly the
same way. What I came to realize (and put into
the book) is that she expounded primarily an
ethics of *aspiration*, rather than an ethics of
survival. Howard Roark is a character in a novel
who should inspire us, rather than someone we
should copy. Put this way, I have no quarrel
with her. But as having expounded an actually
true ethical philosophy of concrete *rules*, I
have many quarrels and, no doubt,
misunderstandings. Here's yet another quote:

"As we consider the whole range of moral issues,
we may conveniently imagine a kind of scale or
yardstick which begins at the bottom with the
most obvious demands of social living and
extends upward to the highest reaches of human
aspiration. Somewhere along this scale there is
an invisible pointer that marks the dividing lie
where the pressure of duty leaves off and the
challenge of excellence begins. The whole field
of moral argument is dominated by a great
undeclared war over the location of this
pointer. There are those who struggle to push it
upward; others work to pull it down. Those whom
we regard as being unpleasantly--or at least,
inconveniently--moralistic are forever trying to
inch the pointer upward as to expand the area of
duty. Instead of inviting us to join them in
realizing a pattern of life they consider worthy
of human nature, they try to bludgeon us into a
belief we are duty bound to embrace this
pattern. All of us have probably been subjected
to some variation of this technique at one time
or another. Too long an exposure to it may leave
in the victim a lifelong dislike for the whole
notion of moral duty.

"If the morality of duty reaches upward beyond
its proper sphere the iron hand of imposed
obligation may stifle experiment, inspiration,
and spontaneity. If the morality of aspiration
invades the province of duty, men may being to
weigh and qualify their obligations by standards
of their own and we may end with the poet
tossing his wife into the river in the belief--
quite justified--that he will be able to write
better poetry without her"
--Lon L. Fuller, _The Morality of Law_, 2nd ed.
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969),
conflated from pp. 9, 10, 27, and 28.

I hasten to add, since Miss Rand wrote scathing
about duty, that we might substitute the "duty"
not to initiate force, along with something not
wholly unlike a duty, namely to be rational. So
Fuller's "morality of duty" corresponds to Ayn
Rand's mere survival of man, while Fuller's
"morality of aspiration" corresponds to her
survival of man *qua* man. But here's what she
says: "The virtue of *Rationality* means ...
one's total commitment to a state of full,
conscious awareness, to the maintenance of a
full mental focus in all issues, in all of one's
waking hours" ("The Objectivist Ethics," p. 25
in _The Virtue of Selfishness_). (Focussing was
evidently very easy for her, and I invite the
readers to focus on the two long quotations
above, though this may entail stepping into
another world view.) Those who have been guilt-
tripped by their understanding of Ayn Rand--and
we've all read about them--have taken this
statement as a grave obligation and, not
surprisingly, fall short. And a good part of the
reason for this is that she herself was not
careful to distinguish Fuller's two moralities.
In a way, I would rather not have these
confusions that I (and many others) have with
her writings cleared up. To engage in such
exegetics can come far too close to treating her
corpus as a canon and to becoming what I call a
Randian Inerrantist.
FINIS INTERLUDIARUM

Finally, I turn to the question of the need of
*men* for a moral code, to constrain behavior to
meet at least Fuller's "most obvious demands of
social living." Prudent crooks are ruled out!
Until an Objectivist Psychology is actually
worked out, I would call this ruling out a form
of *moderate* altruism. Indeed, unless I do in
fact *know* that psychologically being a
*prudential* crook is against my long-term
happiness, thus making it imprudent after all,
my refraining from crookedness *is* an act of
altruism.

But what else? Should I assent to a government
that provides for the improvident, or at least
the deserving improvident, and does so through
compulsory taxation? Or indeed for any purpose?
Or submit to the judicial system for a crime I
did not commit? Ayn Rand says a rational man
would accept this (I can't find the quotation at
the moment), and of course the criminal justice
system could not work if suspects could not be
hauled in *before* they were found guilty. What
other agreements might rational men make, in a
world of externalities or just of things that
might be more cheaply produced jointly, i.e.,
collectively? There is a large literature on
this subject, and I certainly do not pretend to
have established the right answer. (I hope to
scan in my review of David Gauthier's _Morals by
Agreement_ that was published in _Public Choice_
and send it up. My computer was nearly totalled
during an electrical storm last July 8, and so I
lost the copy on my hard disc.)

My best *guess*, and I hope not a wholly-
uneducated one, is the scheme of *county
sovereignty*: counties may run welfare states
but--and this is a new addition to my thinking--
they may not run warfare states. I would phase
down the national government by increasing the
percentage required to get legislation passes by
one percent a year until it would take a
five/sixths supra-majority. I'll e-mail any or
all three issues of my e-zine, _County
Sovereignty_, to anyone who asks. I'm not sure
that much of it is appropriate for this group.
"Welfare Bums among the Lions," was part of the
third issue.) Perhaps all I can do is urge that
rarest of commodities, common sense, be
employed.

At any rate, I find a tension in Objectivism, or
at least Objectivism as I misconstrue, extend,
and interpret it, over *who* is the subject of a
code of ethics. Is it one man, an adult with
many habits set? Is it a child, whence the
question is to be asked of its parents? Or is it
"man" as in men.

Where do the lions come in? As background
speculation that another group of mammals,
namely us, are affectively predisposed to a
certain amount of sacrifice even when it goes to
no benefit except welfare bums. I think the
courageous lions' behavior would qualify as
altruistic under Ayn Rand's concept. It
certainly does under Jimbo's definition, which
reads "the theory that you ought to, at least in
some cases, sacrifice something that is of a
higher _objective_ value to you (i.e. actually
valuable, not just something that you happen to
value, perhaps unwisely) for the sake of
something that is of a _lower_ _objective_ value
to you." (Go look at the paper itself in
_Science_ last September 1 if you wish.) (I am
not sure Miss Rand and Jimbo are in complete
agreement, for he adds "at least in some cases,"
while for her, sometimes but not always I think,
altruism means whole-hog altruism.

And so, a system of ethics that tries to
suppress our mildly altruistic nature will not
be one for our optimal happiness. (Of course, no
one has done similar experiments on man, not
because we do not observe *objective* altruism,
but because the causes are confounded with moral
indoctrination.)

JIMBO:
In general, then, 

I take the subway to work everyday. Sometimes,
there are street musicians in the subway
performing. I make it a point to tip them a
dollar. The *music* isn't worth a dollar to me,
although I do enjoy it. What do I get out of it?
I get an emotional satisfaction from seeing
another human consciousness making their way in
the world in a positive and value-productive
way. I feel *warm inside* in a good benevolent
way when I give the buck. I don't give change to
sheer beggars, though. I've done it before --
when I first moved to the city (Chicago), I had
never dealt with such a thing -- and I felt
*bad* afterwards. I felt that I had contributed
to something basically bad. So I don't do it
anymore. And I feel good about it. 

FRANK NOW:
I've got to insult you now, Jimbo, for this
looks very much to me like you are using your
feelings as a basis for cognition. But I think
the tension is really in Ayn Rand's thinking and
that her idea of benevolence is something of a
deus ex machina. Oh, I think what she said is
true (that we have benevolent feelings, or at
least that some, if not most, people do), and
I'd like an evolutionary explanation, since such
explanations are deeper and hence more
satisfying than just casual empiricism.

JIMBO:
Is there some *evolutionary* source for these
emotional feelings. Well, I personally kinda
doubt it. But -- and this what I want to get
across in this letter -- *whether or not there
are evolutionary reasons for particular aspects
of our emotional makeup is not important
philosophically*. The point is, when I give a
buck to a musician offering values in the
subway, I feel good, I've contributed to
something productive, and that's all the
justification I need: my own personal happiness
is my own highest moral purpose. 

FRANK NOW:
You are expressing a mentality that I find
peculiar, although quite common, when you doubt
there is an evolutionary source for your
emotional feelings. Of course there is! We are
indeed evolved animals--at least I assume that
this is not in question here. To say otherwise
is to turn man in to black box or to make him a
product of a divine creation or to strip him of
all flesh by thinking of him as pure mentation.
Harsh charges, yes, but ones that are so common
that one should be ever vigilant against them.

Jimbo earlier:
> > As usual, your critique of Objectivism is grounded in confusion. 

Frank Forman wrote:
> Alas, I am far, far from being the only one who is confused. 

JIMBO:
Of course not. But most people are *respectful*
when they are confused! They approach people in
a benevolent way, seeking understanding. They
don't go on the attack claiming certain
knowledge that (for example) Leonard Peikoff is
*evading* because he agrees with Ayn Rand's
derivation of rights. 

FRANK NOW:
There seem to be two Franks, one who is indeed
respectful, as I hope this essay is, and another
one, who out of sheer frustration lets loose
satirical cannons at fundamentalists!

Frank

---------------

THE PROBLEM OF THE PRUDENT PREDATOR

I got a whole bunch of replies to the ongoing
discussion on my "Welfare Bums among the Lions"
piece. I was basically relaying a report in
_Science_ about how courageous lions do things
for their cowardly welfare-bum members of their
pride with no visible return to themselves. 

I concluded with these paragraphs:

"And so I suspect that it is weak selection
forces that account for the grand structure of
evolution we see when we admire the huge Column
of Life in National Museum of Natural History on
the Mall in Washington. The implication of all
this for the general subject at hand is that
altruism is indeed possible and that there is no
need to explain away the subsidization of
welfare bums among the lions in a Tanzanian park
or to make the second most trite form of human
wisdom, namely that everyone is out for power
for himself. Given the plausible assumption that
emotions in humans have coevolved with their
altruistic behavior, a certain amount of it--the
Tullock five percent rule, say--is indeed among
what the great David Hume called "natural
sentiments," and which form the foundation of
our actual, practiced morality (as opposed to
theoretical derivations on the part of
philosophers, who argue against one another
interminably anyhow).

"Advice: follow your natural sentiments and
reject both the extreme forms of anti-altruism
as represented by the Objectivism of Ayn Rand
and the extremes in the other direction of
egalitarianism, which is a morality racket that
preys upon altruistic sentiments.

"And so the ancient Hebrews may have had it
exactly right, when they said:

"The earth from God we do but rent,
And all he asks is ten percent.

"Half of it went to the poor, in accordance with
Tullock's rule, and the other half for
administration by priests."

end quotation

Naturally, it was the side remark about
Objectivism that generated the controversy. I've
downloaded several postings in this group, but
as we are now on to a different topic, I rename
the subject, "The Problem of the Prudent
Predator." But I have further remarks about the
concept of altruism as well.

Here's Paul Torelli replying to Jimbo Wales (who
earlier replied to me). Date is June 6.

Jim Wales wrote:
>>> It is a simple fact that benevolence towards other people is an important
>>> component of a healthy and happy human psyche; this has nothing at all
>>> to do with self-sacrifice.  If I give you a helping hand because it makes
>>> me happy to do so, then that is *not* altruism in the sense that the
>>> terms are used in ethical theory.

But why is benevolence an important part of our human psyche?  How are 
you so sure that benevolence has nothing to do with self-sacrifice?  I 
would agree that almost everyone gets a nice "warm" feeling when they 
give to street musicians, but why?  I am not at all sure that it has 
_nothing_ to do with self-sacrifice, and I do not know how harmless it is.

FRANK NOW:
I can't help but notice that Jimbo is taking a
decidedly *subjectivist* view of his actions!
Since when are feelings tools of cognition?
Jimbo does indeed try to explain *why* giving
money to musicians makes him feel good and why
giving money to patent bums does not, but the
fact is that many of those who do give to bums
*feel good* about it. I am not telling Jimbo how
he ought to feel, but I do feel [!] that what he
said is inconsistent with Objectivism.

Jim also wrote:
> Is there some *evolutionary* source for these emotional feelings.  Well, 
> I personally kinda doubt it.  But -- and this what I want to get across 
> in this letter -- *whether or not there are evolutionary reasons for 
> particular aspects of our emotional makeup is not important 
> philosophically*.
> The point is, when I give a buck to a musician offering values in the 
> subway, I feel good, I've contributed to something productive, and 
> that's all the justification I need: my own personal happiness is my own 
> highest moral purpose.

If there is some evolutionary, genetical, inborn source for these emotional 
feelings, then I would say that such benevolence does not have anything 
to do with self-sacrifice; after all, if it is natural to give a dollar 
to a street musician to fulfill a _natural_ emotional need, then it seems 
that the dollar is worth the nice, "warm" feeling that accompanies the 
donation.  However, if such benevolent impulses are _not_ inborn, then 
what else can we attribute them to besides altruistic, self-sacrificing 
impulses which we acquire from society, religion, etc?  If in fact the 
reason why we might sacrifice a dollar, while a small amount, is to 
satisfy our altruistic urges that we have learned from our culture, then 
isn't that just a product of the same evil urges that drive people to 
give all their belongings to charity and live at a missionary, miserable 
for the rest of their life (or any other Randian example, such as 
Toohey's niece, Katie)?  

FRANK NOW: My point precisely: if leonine
altruism carries over to men, then we do have an
explanation for these warm, "benevolent"
feelings. Denying or repressing these feelings
is *detrimental* to our happiness. But whether
there is an evolutionary carry-over into man, we
all observe humans carrying out these acts of
benevolence and/or altruism. I say Ayn Rand, the
novelist, understood this, since she was a keen
observer of mankind. But she had (with the help
of Nathaniel Branden, let us not forget) to
invoke something of a _deus ex machina_ in the
form of the concept of benevolence to explain
it.

Back to Paul:
I am not sure that, as you say, "whether or not there are evolutionary 
reasons for particular aspects of our emotional makeup is not important 
philosophically."  For someone who is trained (usually through religion) to 
derive greater pleasure by sacrificing oneself to others (via work or 
money) than by working directly for oneself, wouldn't it cause them the 
greatest happiness to spend their lives brainwashing some 
unsophisticated peasants in the middle of Africa?  Couldn't they be good 
Objectivists in this sense?  It just seems that most grand acts of 
benevolence Rand discounts as altruism (which makes people miserable), 
while most small, (seemingly) harmless acts of altruism she attributes to 
this nice, "warm" feeling which most of us have (which seems to be worth the 
damn dollar to the street musician).  Is the reason of her hatred for the 
missionary-type her own personal disbelief that someone could actually 
derive _greater_ pleasure from such acts?  

FRANK NOW:
I make the serious charge that anyone who says
he does not care about man's origins is not far
from invoking the doctrine of a Special Creation
of man. Neither Ayn Rand nor Jimbo, atheists
both, would explicitly do such a thing;
nevertheless Man is wholly different from the
rest of existence (Creation). 

EVOLUTION MUST NEVER BE IGNORED, FOR IT IS
UNSURPASSED AS A REALITY CHECK ON RUNAWAY
PHILOSOPHIZING!

Back to Paul:
[snip]
I am really not sure where I may disagree with Rand's philosophy, since I 
am very confused (just like Frank Forman), but all I know is this: the 
reasoning behind our benevolent impulses is _very, very_ important in the 
context of Objectivism, and I do believe our motivation for benevolence 
is philosophically important, since I think any actions which Rand might 
consider to be detrimental to one person's happiness (due to Rand's 
personality perhaps) may in fact be a great boon to their happiness.  

This aspect of Objectivism is the most confusing to me, and it just seems 
to me that you are over simplifying the problem.
Thanks
--------------------------------

Now here's from Lance Neustaeter, June 2, commenting on George Barota's post
of the previous day, who in turn was commenting on me:

> Frank Forman wrote:

>> Why I should not sacrifice others for my own benefit has never 
>> been shown. The closest that the Objectivist argument comes is the 
>> *claim* that sacrificing others to myself *somehow* harms me 
>> psychologically. This may indeed be true of me, but is it true of 
>> everyone absolutely?

It is true of any being that survives primarily via the use of concepts
(and therefore principles).

> I agree. It would harm me and, apparently, it would harm you. It wouldn't
> harm everyone. However, I think that there are at least _two_ good reasons
> not to sacrifice other people for ones own benefit:

> 1. It's not practical. If you want something done it's better to do it
> yourself than to force, or fool, someone else into doing it.

> 2. If you go around using people then they might just do the same to you. If
> you don't want something done to you, then you shouldn't do that to others.

FRANK NOW:
Here's where I name what I have brought up many
times before, the Problem of the Prudent
Predator. George is telling us that it is not
prudent to predate. I think that this is
generally true, and esp. so in a society where
the police are efficient or where reputation is
valued highly. But what of cases where prudent
predation is possible? This is the question, and
it goes back to Socrates, if not before.

Lance's reply to George:
While those reasons are true enough, they are not the most compelling 
reasons that there is to offer--if the above are the *only* reasons
you can offer for the non-initiation of force, than what you have is
pragmatism, not Objectivism.

Think of the virtues.  Should a person be honest because people will not
like him if he isn't?  Because they will stop dealing with him otherwise?

Those reasons are both true and do add weight to the more fundamental
reason that dishonesty is wrong, but they are not the fundamental 
reason.

FRANK NOW:
Lance has not explained why. But he does hint of
virtues. There's a lot of promise in that
approach.
------------------------------------

Here' Lance Neustaeter, later on June 2, replying to Mike Hardy's post of June
1, again taking issue with me:

>     Frank Forman wrote:

>> I am beginning to think that no one understands the Objectivist meaning
>> of altruism. One definition is to sacrifice a higher value for a lower
>> value.

>     I would say it's the doctrine that service to others than myself
> is the end-in-itself toward which all morality aims, rather than merely one
> end that a rational person might sometimes pursue as part of the means to
> happiness.

> [neat Heinlein reference snipped]

Frank is right to assert that there are various objectivist descriptions
of altruism floating about.  I don't know what his problem with that is,
however.  *All* concepts are like that.

Anyways, as long as we are throwing out definitions of "altruism", here's
my $0.02.

The most fundamental definition of altruism I have come up with is "the 
ethics with the self as the standard of evil".  Since most variants of 
ethics we are familiar with are defined by their standard of good, altruism 
appears to be a twisted anti-ethics (And it is.  And Rand agrees: it 
doesn't tell you how to live, only how to sacrifice and die).  However, 
even though most kinds of ethics are defined by their standard of good, I 
still think that altruism is most fundamentally captured only by reference 
to what it regards as evil.  *Whatever* you choose to be good, your ethics 
is still a variant of altruism if you regard the self as evil (cf: 
philosophical environmentalism).

FRANK NOW:
Jimbo elsewhere said we could roughly rank
ethical doctrines on a continuum from pure
egoism to pure altruism. What Lance is giving us
is whole-hog altruism. What *I* was doing was
using the case of the lions to talk about a five
percent altruism-95% egoism mix as perhaps the
optimum. Empirical research and further
knowledge of our evolution is needed to come up
with a better estimate, and of course it will
vary from individual to individual.
------------------------------

This time it's Will Wilkinson, also on June 2, replying to Jimbo Wales' reply
to me:

On Mon, 27 May 1996, frank forman wrote:

> > Jimbo: 
> > Frank, I believe you have a number of serious confusions about the
> > Objectivist ethics and the philosophical meaning of altruism.

> Frank: 
> I am beginning to think that no one understands the Objectivist meaning 
> of altruism. One definition is to sacrifice a higher value for a lower 
> value. But we are also told that a value is "that which one ACTS to gain 
> and/or keep." But if our values are evidenced by our actions, then it is 
> not possible to sacrifice a higher value for a lower value.

The last sentence above contains an error. There are two types of value: 
(1)objective (things that promote the life, or proper function, of the
organism), and (2) psychological (things that we want, or *seem* to us to
be what is good for us). Our *psychological* values are evidenced by our
actions, but these may not be *objective* values at all. If our
*objective* values were evidenced automatically by our actions then we
wouldn't need ethics at all. The meat of ethics lies in the identification
of what these objective values are, so that we can go about trying to make
them our psychological values too (so that we can come to want what is
really good for us and so be happy and best survive). It is the conflation
of these two concepts of value that makes the absurd notion that sacrifice
of a higher to lower value is impossible. 

Who doesn't understand what?

FRANK NOW:
Will is correct and I thank him for correcting
my error and clearing up the confusion. "All" we
need now is a fix on what those objective values
consist of. I have read Ayn Rand's presentation
of her ideas on the subject but am not
convinced. She did not handle the Problem of the
Prudent Predator adequately, and her assertions
about the existence of benevolence needs to
accounted for.
------------------------------

And, finally, this time around at least, from Joseph L. Campbell,
also on June 2 and again replying to me:

frank forman wrote:

> Recall that Ayn Rand asked the question, "Why
> does man need a [moral] code of values?" Here's
> the ambiguity: does is mean why does *Frank*
> need a moral code or why do *men* need a moral
> code? She seemed to have meant the first, but a
> good part of "The Objectivist Ethics" is taken
> up with what happens when *men* do not follow a
> rational morality.

I think she meant 'man' in a philosophical sense, which includes "men,"
women, Frank, Joe, and everybody else in a very general sense, not any
particular subset.

> But note that a truly egoist ethics would
> consider Frank as he is right now, at age 51,
> with his present mix of good and bad habits.

Why is that? Such a code would be egoist as far as *Frank* is concerned,
but would hardly constitute an objective ethical code. Objectivism is
concerned with _rational_ egoism, not egoism in the sense you seem to be
using.

FRANK NOW AND THEN HE'S FINISHED:

I maintain that a code of ethics is not just a
set of rules, rules, and more rules to live by,
but more fundamentally involves the successful
cultivation of certain virtues. *IF* we have
good knowledge of the virtues and how they
contribute to happiness (I won't argue about
happiness as the end of ethical systems now), we
might find out that predation is wrong, *not*
because it invades the rights of others--rights
are something that cannot be conceptualized at
this point--but because of the damage it does to
my character. *This* is what I was talking about
when I wrote "Patch Needed for 'The Objectivist
Ethics,'" and I called the patch the implicit
Objectivist Psychology.

So, a rational egoism on this account would mean
that I should apply this Objectivist Psychology
to my own life. I would mean that I should
oversee the growth of my character and set out
to cultivate various virtues. My point is that
I, Frank Forman, am a concrete being, with much
of my personality intact. I cannot go back into
the womb, live my life over again, and this time
get the cultivation of the virtues right. I can
only hope to make some improvements in my
character and, as Aristotle noted, these
improvements are more and more limited as one
gets older and require more and more effort.
Daydreaming about living my life over again may
not be a total waste of time, but trying to do
so would be most irrational, contrary to what
Joe seems to be saying.

Confession and concession: I'm mixing up the
economist's notion of rationality with the
Objectivist one. But I'm not able to proceed any
farther on my own.

Frank