Nature, Nurture and Liberal Values

Roger Scruton, Prospect, January 25, 2012











We find ourselves, therefore, in the middle of another tense debate, in which it is not religion, but liberal values, which seem to be challenged by the theory of evolution. It is against this background that the philosopher Jesse Prinz has entered the fray, with a big book arguing that there is “little reason to think that biology has a major impact in accounting for human differences.” He patiently examines the arguments given for attributing this or that trait to genetic inheritance, and tries to show either that the research is methodologically flawed, or that the conclusion is not supported by it. I say “patiently,” though I should also add that, when it comes to discussing IQ and sexual differentiation, Prinz intemperately dismisses those like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein and Larry Summers who have not been persuaded by the liberal consensus.

Prinz believes that our cognitive powers are awakened only when they have experience on which to get to work. Infants learn to divide the world into kinds by extrapolating from what they feel, hear and see. There are no innate classifications, and no roles or relationships that are not in some sense and to some measure socially constructed. Prinz attacks Chomsky’s claim that there is a universal grammar and dismisses the theory held by Jerry Fodor and others that our mental processes are conducted in a shared “language of thought.” Silent thinking, for Prinz, involves the use of images, which have their source in individual experience, while language is picked up by a spontaneous statistical analysis from which a child derives the rules of grammar. Prinz even goes a little way towards resuscitating the notorious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which the structure of a person’s language determines the contours of his world. “Language,” he writes, “is an invention, not an instinct… If language teaches us about who we are, the lesson is that we are fundamentally flexible.” Prinz goes on to argue that gender difference is to a great extent acquired, that the distinction between individualists and collectivists is cultural rather than biological, and that emotions are socially constructed from raw material that is innate only because it belongs to basic bodily processes and gut reactions.

All that is argued boldly and with much support from the literature of experimental psychology. But I could not help feeling that it falls short of its target. In The Blank Slate(2002) Steven Pinker assembled the evidence for the conclusion that our fundamental capacities are implanted by evolution and malleable only in those matters in which malleability would confer a reproductive advantage. His argument was meticulous and serious, and the weight of scientific evidence impossible to deny. In this or that particular the science might be faulted or revised, but the broad case is surely compelling. Consider, for example, the division of roles everywhere to be observed between men and women. There is a powerful reason to think that this is rooted in a deeper division of biological labour, selected in the harsh conditions that threatened our ancestors with extinction. For human beings manifest neoteny, the trait of giving birth to helpless large-brained offspring, who can look after themselves only after ten years of nurture and nowadays not even then. Neoteny is a huge evolutionary advantage; but it is purchased at an equally huge biological cost. A species whose young are as vulnerable as human children needs both organised defence and serious home building if it is to reproduce itself. And on those granite foundations has been built the romantic castle of sexual difference.

But there is another reason for being dissatisfied with Prinz’s approach. When the idea of cultural diversity first took root in the German Enlightenment it was associated with the study of the myths, customs and artworks of antiquity, with the exploration of the religions of the east and with visits to the tribal cultures of Africa and America. A kind of imperial reverence for those things animated the minds of those who studied them, and it was with a hint of regret that the early anthropologists recorded the rapid collapse of local cultures under the withering eye of their researches. Prinz belongs to another mindset—one that can be observed in some of the disciples of Boas. He does not have much sympathy for any culture other than the one in which he is immersed—the liberal egalitarian culture of the American academy, which holds that sexual roles are socially constructed, that sexual morality is exhausted by the requirement of consent, and that all “disadvantage” is down to environmental factors which we can collaborate to overcome. He would perhaps deny that this is a culture, rather than a set of rationally held beliefs. But the whole tendency of his argument is to suggest that we can and should live in the way that he lives, not endowing our differences with the status of natural barriers or God-given paths, but opening ourselves to a kind of “soft diversity,” in which human possibilities flourish in a condition of mutual acceptance.

It may be that this is the direction in which we are moving. But for all he says to the contrary it could be that there are obstacles to progress that are fixed in our nature and not to be changed by social adjustment. We are familiar with the feminist charge that women come out worse in math tests because of unconscious discrimination, stereotyping and other factors that allegedly sap their confidence—an argument that, in the eyes of its proponents, was further proved by Larry Summers’s foolhardy attempt to question it. But does anyone believe that men are ten times as likely to end up in prison as women because of unconscious discrimination or stereotyping? Of course not. We recognise that men are by nature more aggressive and more inclined to settle disputes by violence. And no educated person is likely to dispute the fact that this difference between men and women is genetic. The real question is how far does this kind of genetic influence extend? Susan Greenfield refers to recent brain-imaging research by Ryota Kanai and others at UCL which purportedly suggests that students with conservative political attitudes tend to have larger than normal amygdalae, while among those of liberal persuasion it is the anterior cingulate cortex that stands out. Could this be the proof of WS Gilbert’s proposition, that “Every child who is born alive / Is either a little liberal / Or a little conservative”?

Those speculations bring us to another and far more serious obstacle to the humane understanding of our condition than the one that troubles Prinz. Advances in neuroscience are beginning to suggest that, while the brain is malleable and adaptable, it comes with its own inherent restraints, and with connections that have been wired without our knowledge and definitely without our consent. Hence processes in the brain can affect our decision-making without our being able to counter them. When in 1966 Charles Whitman, a man of previously good character, killed 13 people and wounded 32 more, shooting from the top of the University Tower in Austin Texas, he had already indicated that he felt something was not quite right in his head. After he was shot by a police marksman, an autopsy revealed a small tumour pressing on the amygdala, which neuroscience regards as the seat of the gut reactions through which we protect our space. So was Whitman to blame for what he did? And if not, does this provide me, after decades of reproach for my conservative opinions, with the “amygdala excuse,” just like Whitman?

Taking off from the Whitman case David Eagleman argues that we should revise our sense of legal and moral responsibility, so as to recognise that most of what we do and feel arises from processes over which we have no control. The brain moves incognito beneath our conscious deliberations, like a great ocean liner on the deck of which we walk up and down, imagining that we move it with our feet. Offering his own version of the Freudian story, in the luminous prose for which he is rightly esteemed, Eagleman argues that most of what we do is more influenced by unconscious than by conscious processes, and that concepts like responsibility and freedom cannot survive intact from the advances of neuroscience. Whether it is nature or nurture that wired up the brain, the wiring is for the most part none of our doing, and nothing for which we can be praised or blamed.

Eagleman is too subtle a thinker, and too responsible a person, to draw quite that conclusion. He wants to revise our concept of responsibility so that his kind of responsibility is still contained in it. My brief response, however, is to suggest that he has misdescribed the problem. The picture that he gives, of the fragile “I” riding the elephant of grey matter while pretending to be in charge of it, misrepresents the nature of self-reference. The word “I” does not refer to some conscious “part” of the person, the rest of which is a passive and hidden “it.” The “I” is one term of the I-You relation, which is a relation of accountability in which the whole person is involved. To use the first-person pronoun is to present myself for judgment. It is to take responsibility for a host of changes in the world, and in particular for those for which you can reasonably call me to account by asking “why?” This question is the foundation of a co-operative enterprise, in which we elicit from each other the reasons, meanings and choices that make us intelligible. Understanding the logic of the question “why?” is a task that has been addressed by several recent philosophers—Elizabeth Anscombe, Stephen Darwall, Sebastian Rödl and others. It is the question that underlies the concept of responsibility in the common law. And philosophers have done much to show that the dialogue through which we establish and broker our responsibilities is well founded and not necessarily vulnerable to disruption by our newfound knowledge of the brain.

This point suggests how Prinz might have put philosophy to work on behalf of his conclusions. The real question raised by evolutionary biology and neuroscience is not whether those sciences can be refuted, but whether we can accept what they have to say, while still holding on to the beliefs that morality demands of us. From Kant and Hegel to Wittgenstein and Husserl there have been attempts to give a philosophy of the human condition that stands apart from biological science without opposing it. But those attempts are either not noticed or given short shrift in Prinz’s argument which, by attempting to fight the biological sciences on their own ground, is condemned to a losing wicket.


This does not mean that we should ignore what goes on in the brain. In her lively monograph Susan Greenfield emphasises that our brains are plastic and can be influenced in ways that pose a risk to our moral development. Prinz’s defence of nurture against nature may look like a defence of human freedom. But nurture can as easily destroy freedom as enhance it. We can bring up children on passive and addictive entertainments that stultify their engagement with the real world and rewire the neural networks on which their moral development depends. The short-term pursuit of gratification can drive out the long-term sense of responsible agency. Moreover, if children learn to store their memory in computers and their social life in portable gadgets, then gradually both memory and friendship will wither, to linger on only as futile ghosts haunting the digital archives.

I sympathise with those worries. But it does not change the position that a philosopher should adopt. Greenfield’s argument suggests that there is a kind of human development that prepares us, at the neurological level, for the exercise of responsible choice. If we bring up our children correctly, not spoiling them or rewiring their brains through roomfuls of digital gadgetry, the sense of responsibility will emerge. They will enter fully into the world of I and You, become free agents and moral beings, and learn to live as they should, not as animals, but as persons.


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  • Dan

    I think this snip came from the post modernist thesis generator.

    • Prima_Morte

      I suspect you’re right. I’ve bookmarked the page, so I can help my kids with their sociology homework.

  • JohnEngelman

    Secular liberals use the theory of evolution as a stick to beat Protestant fundamentalists with. Nevertheless, the implications of evolutionary theory are that innate characteristics are more important than acquired characteristics, that some individuals are superior to others in genetic characteristics that matter, and that some races are superior to others. Secular liberals ignore these implications, and punish those who direct attention to them. 
    The Nazi vulgarization and misuse of racial theories does not mean that racial theories are invalid. A preposterous argument on one side of a dispute does not mean that the other side is right.