The Undermining of Parental Love and Authority

Accelerating attacks on the heterosexual family by an intrusive state make it timely to examine the arguments being levelled against family bonds. Are parents committing the equivalent of racism when they direct most of their love and resources to their own children, even when others are more needy?

Traditional family and gender roles are being undermined by the growing radicalism of elite culture in the universities, school curricula, corporate sector and bureaucracies. Examples include feminism’s denigration of motherhood and homemaking and exaggeration of women’s grievances against men. More recently there have been criticism of “toxic masculinity” and tolerance of transgender intrusions into women’s spaces. Parental authority is bleeding from a thousand cuts. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s saw a shift in authority from home and church to corporatized mass culture. State education always had a role in teaching civics. That changed to teaching the morality of the new elite, often opposed to the majority’s traditional values. Since the 1970s school children receive sex education and more recently training in the propriety of transgenderism, as well as Aboriginal grievance history and Anglo culpability. There are calls to lower the voting age to sixteen. The Coercive Control Bill, introduced to the New South Wales Parliament in 2020, would criminalise domestic “monitoring”, “restricting”, and “limiting” that is “frightening”. In bureaucracies the ancient terms “husband” and “wife” have been replaced by “partner”, to make forms compatible with gender and sexual diversity. In the U.S. the new Biden administration has required the bureaucracy to cease using the terms “father”, “mother”, “son”, and “daughter”. The ANU’s Gender Institute Gender Inclusive Handbook recommends avoiding the terms “mother’s milk” and “breastfeeding” and when describing childbirth to avoid the terms “mother” and “father”. The stated goal is prevent offence to the approximately 0.005 percent of the population who are transmasculine or belong to non-heteronormative families.[1]

The Scottish parliament’s Justice Secretary has introduced a bill that would outlaw “hate speech” spoken by parents to their children within the family home.[2] A similar bill has been introduced to the British parliament.[3]

In a world where little is certain, where authorities cannot be trusted, and where reason itself is increasingly suspended, in such a world it would be comforting to believe that we can still be sure of our primary bonds, of which that between parent and child is elemental. Yet even these bonds are criticised. Are maternal and paternal favouritism intellectually secure? Are they bedrock? Is it morally defensible to love and shelter our children above others?

This essay places criticism of preferential family bonds in historical perspective before examining contemporary examples coming from Australian professors Peter Singer and Julian Savulescu. I argue the contrary, that parental love and other parochial ties serve human needs and should be protected against hegemonic modernism.

* * * * *

Criticism and undermining of family ties go back to the ancient Athenians. In his utopian Republic written around 375 BC, Plato argued that a justly ruled city state should be administered by a guardian class which shares wives and children. The rationale was that nothing should stand between a guardian and his or her loyalty to the state. In the ideal republic, citizens would have their reproduction regulated by the state, such that children would not know the identity of their parents. This insect-like society was alien to the ancient European tradition of favouring monogamous marriage and limiting aristocratic male reproduction. No Greek city state attempted such regimentation, not even the permanently mobilised Spartans. The Ancient Greek family is better represented by Solon’s Laws of Athens promulgated in the early sixth century B.C. than by Plato’s fantasy republic. Real Greek families were monogamous, somewhat extended, patriarchal, and patrilocal, with the husband’s parents and unmarried sisters often part of the household. The wife cared for the children and managed the household.

For five millennia, ending in the early modern period, agrarian empires sought to extract greater service from their administrators by imposing measures to break their nepotistic bonds. Ernest Gellner called these techniques “gelding”, though castration was only one such technique. Family loyalty was also curbed through celibacy (priests), physical separation by employing foreigners and kidnapping children, and use of disenfranchised or excluded groups who were reliant on state sponsorship.[4] An example was the Turkish Ottoman Janissaries, an elite force of soldiers and administrators kidnapped as boys from the empire’s European possessions.

A rare example of Christian opposition to the nuclear family came from John Woolman (1720-1772), an American Quaker and early opponent of slavery.[5] Woolman saw love of children as a source of violence and evil in the world. He rejected the view enunciated by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1631-1713) that affection between parents and offspring – “natural affection” – was the basis of all moral action because it laid the foundation of charitable relationships with larger society. Woolman thought the instinct to protect our children is an extension of self-love. Parenthood evokes tenderness and the capacity to love others, but unrestrained it is “productive of evil by exciting desires to promote some by means prejudicial to others”.[6] Woolman thought the Quaker emphasis on the family unit risked reducing love and responsibility for those beyond the family. He thought the proper goal is to love all creation equally, something that could only be achieved through love of God.

Woolman’s theology was tempered by common-sense observations. He shared some views on motherhood with the Quaker teacher Anthony Benezet who, in a letter to a female correspondent, opposed the separation of mothers and children:

Let people say what they will, none are so proper to watch over the wants and weaknesses of children as their own mother. We do not believe that any service, civil or religious, calls her to leave her tender children, and cross the seas.[7]

This raises practical objections to the notion that parenthood is too intense. Thus Woolman admitted that his critique of parental love did not apply when practicality was a factor. Generally, babies are best cared for by their own mothers. Biology adds to this common-sense view the knowledge that intense maternal investment is a key mammalian adaptation.

Since the late nineteenth century, idealisation of egalitarian community has been a source of anti-family ideas. Parochial ties are opposed because they are seen as sources of inequality. For example, experimental communes attempt to de-emphasise family ties in favour of the community. Some closed-off alternate lifestyle movements have attempted to equalise male and female roles and make the overall group resemble a family. This can involve measures such as babies babies sleep in creches apart from their parents. A well-known example is the kibbutz movement in Israel. Larger experiments of this type usually fail for a number of reasons, among which is parents wanting to care for their own children.

The Marxist ideal of community has the working class or some victim category as the only legitimate object of loyalty smaller than humanity as a whole. The early Bolsheviks were suspicious of the family, allowing easy divorce and abortion. Trotsky later advocated using eugenics to breed instinctive socialists. In the 1920s the Soviet eugenics movement had a Moscow research centre that cooperated with Weimar eugenicists. Some of these policies were revoked when Stalin came to power in the late 1920s, though indoctrination of children in compulsory state schools continued. Attempts were made to persuade children to inform on their parents. In the influential book The Authoritarian Personality (1950) the Frankfurt School of Freudian-Marxists ideologues criticised parental authority as proto fascist.

* * * * *

Australia has home-grown philosophers critical of exclusive family ties. Two of the most prominent are professors Peter Singer and Julian Savulescu.

The philosopher Peter Singer AC has received high credentials and honours. Born in 1946 in Melbourne, he began his academic career at Monash University, where he founded the Centre for Bio-Ethics. He gained worldwide acclaim for his 1975 work, Animal Liberation, a book length rationalisation of RSPCA intuitions. He later moved to Princeton University, where he is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics. He is also part-time Laureate Professor at Melbourne University. [8]

As we shall see, Professor Singer tends to generalise criticism of parochial loyalties. This tendency does not directly condemn the family but chips away at its reputation, legitimacy, and prerogatives.

Animal Liberation did not discuss family or kinship ties. Singer’s 1981 book, The Expanding Circle, did so, expressing views largely retained in the 2011 edition. The postscript only criticised the 1981 edition for exaggerating the certainty of utilitarianism as “metaphysically unproblematic”. Singer did not mention that the same unqualified criterion underlay Animal Liberation.[9] One position Singer emphatically retained was the view that moral guides are limited to subjective desires and preferences, and not at all to religion, tradition or other sources of authority.

Ignoring tradition, including religious tradition, is a radical step, because doing so wipes away millennia of ethical thinking, which was formulated in traditional and religious terms before the development of modern ethics. The Bible, for example, is full of injunctions to parents to protect and instruct their children, and to children to obey their parents. The fifth of the Ten Commandments states: “Honour thine father and mother.” In the New Testament, 1 Timothy 5:8 states: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” The primacy of the parental bond provides much of the narrative force of the story of Jesus, son of God, who gave his life to atone for man’s sins. But none of this is discussed by Singer. Apparently he considers tradition and religion irrelevant to understanding why parents have traditionally felt justified in caring for their own children first. For that he turns to biology.

In The Expanding Circle, Singer set about casting doubt on the morality of preference for “our own”, meaning kith and kin.[10] Much of the book is devoted to reviewing passages on biology and ethics in Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 masterwork, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

In kinship, Singer knew he was tackling a major component of human society. His section headed “Kin Altruism” agreed with anthropologists that kinship lies at the heart and origin of human sociality. Singer described kin selection (see below) among animals, implying that family ties are based on innate predispositions. He recognized a near universal intuition that it “is right and proper to give priority to those closer to us”. But he then expressed the hope that biological analysis would help break down that intuition.[11]

This was an odd thing for Singer to have left unamended from the first edition because, as already noted, in his 2011 postscript he stood by his view that intuitions are our only guides to moral conduct.[12] If obligation to the family feels like a “self-evident moral truth”, does that not settle the ethics of such obligation by Singer’s own standards? It would not seem to leave much wriggle room for intuitionists seeking to undermine the moral confidence of preferential family ties.

Singer’s wriggle was to re-interpret Wilson’s sociobiological theory. This was a brave undertaking for a layman, one that had already defeated prominent biologists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and others in the Marxist organization, the Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People [13] But by the 1970s Australia was a forgiving environment for radical academics. The anti-sociobiology movement reached Australia by the late 1970s, where the ABC Science Show under Robyn Williams made it the default position. Williams invited the Marxist neuroscientist Stephen Rose to review Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, a popularization of kin selection and other developments in evolutionary theory. ABC science broadcasting has continued an ideological  line on kinship and related themes.

One empirical criticism accused Wilson of “adaptationism”, the over-extension of natural selection theory to conclude that humans are constrained, like robots, to perform only adaptive behaviours. Wilson explicitly rejected this interpretation. Singer expressed some anti-adaptationism. Another empirical criticism was of Wilson’s (actual) view that human biology influences culture. His metaphor was culture being loosely held on a leash that is long but nevertheless real. This was labelled “biological determinism”, which actually meant “non-cultural determinism”, because those levelling the criticism were ideologically opposed to any cause of human social behaviour that is not “culturally constructed”. The slogan was in vogue during the 1980s and 1990s in the soft social sciences, helping legitimise their arbitrary rejection of biology.[14] The success of that project led to an outpouring of ideologies predicated on denial of human nature and the sciences that study it.

Singer began his ethical critique of Wilson by suggesting that the moral rightness of kinship loyalty only seems self-evident because that intuition is produced through natural selection in the special form of kin selection.

Knowing the biological origin of kinship ties, Singer thought, helps debunk their “lofty” moral status. This was a creative twist on the usual leftist blanket denial of human nature. Singer was saying, in effect, we should doubt human intuitions about the family because those intuitions are just facets of evolved human nature. Furthermore, his critique of sociobiology led him to discount these instincts as mere relics of our evolutionary past, which can be safely discarded. And they should be discarded because they are a type of discrimination. The resemblance to racial discrimination is a Big Gun that Singer also used in Animal Liberation to criticize the placing of care for human interests above the interests of other species.

Singer is trapped by his argument’s requirement that kin selection no longer operates. His project of undermining the moral status of the family collapses if he cannot show kin loyalty to be a vestige, performing no useful function. Because if the family is adaptive, it is an interest, something to hold onto. And Singer acknowledges that humans hold onto their families with righteous emotion. That is why he devotes so much space to debunking those emotions by critiquing Wilson, the person the left perceived as the champion of conservative human nature. Singer wants people, at least Westerners, to doubt the rightness of loving their families above all others. As we shall see, in attempting to discredit kin selection he is reduced to doubting core tenets of modern evolutionary theory, despite advocating that the left adopt Darwinian theory.

Singer makes a bad start in tackling kin selection by omitting Wilson’s explanation of the theory. Wilson was drawing on the foundational research by William Hamilton in 1964 when he formulated the theory of kin selection.[15] (Hamilton preferred the term “inclusive fitness”.) Singer does not describe or even note Hamilton’s theory, despite it being explained in Wilson’s book. Singer also missed the discussion of kin selection in another of Wilson’s books, On Human Nature (1978), which suggests ways it may have shaped culture.[16] The theory of kin selection concerns the origin of altruism, defined in biology as giving aid to another even though doing so reduces the giver’s individual reproductive fitness (number of offspring). This puzzled Darwin in his study of social insects such as bees and wasps. Hamilton’s theory states that under certain conditions aiding kin can spread an altruist’s genes because kin share many genes.

Kin selection, Singer explains, involves genes passed on to their offspring.[17] But in his treatment of the subject, Wilson provides a broader definition, as did Hamilton. This is important because the theory can be applied to pools of kinship outside the family. In subsequent papers Hamilton applied his theory to ethnic groups. Subsequent research found the genetic similarity between fellow ethnics to approximate that between first cousins, confirming Hamilton’s tentative extension of his theory.[18]

A salient feature of kin selection theory is that altruism can only be preserved down the generations if it is not promiscuous. For the genetic underpinnings of altruism not to be selected out of the gene pool – i.e. for altruism to be “evolutionarily stable” – it must be directed to kin who share the genes coding for that characteristic. Hamilton’s original 1964 exposition took care to define these conditions as necessary for altruism to be evolutionarily stable.

Also important is that almost all human evolution has been constrained by Malthusian limits to population. Human numbers did not change much until the advent of Neolithic farming, after which they rose to new stable levels. What changed during most of evolution was relative not absolute fitness, meaning that some characteristics or families or tribes grew more frequent and displaced other characteristics, families or tribes, while the overall population numbers remained unchanged.

These important aspects of Hamilton’s theory were omitted by Singer. The omissions wound but do not kill his argument because he includes enough of the theory to describe family ties. What is fatal is his inability to dent the theory that human family ties evolved because they increase fitness. The human family and its component bonds and interpersonal signals are variations on those found in primates and mammals in general. Sexual reproduction itself is an adaptation, as theorized mathematically and at length by Hamilton. [19] (He thought that sex evolved to help organisms defend against infectious disease.)

Singer’s failure to state kin selection theory led to multiple errors. He criticized Wilson and the ecologist Garrett Hardin for inferring from evolutionary theory that altruism is limited to kith and kin.[20] Singer thought evolution is compatible with people caring for random members of the species. In support he argued that: “As individuals, we do many things that make no evolutionary sense.” He meant that humans do many things liable to reduce their reproductive fitness, the main example of which was contraception. Singer maintained that people happily forgo having children. The basis for this is that family size in industrial countries typically declines to below-replacement levels.

For Singer, the lesson to be taken from the spread of contraception is that reasoning beings are not bound to do what makes evolutionary sense.” “Reason can master our genes.”[21] Humans can ignore the genetic consequences of their behaviour; all that matters is subjective values (well, certain ones). Wilson draws a different conclusion. Changing technology can create a novel social environment in which previously adaptive behaviours become maladaptive. Wilson discussed this in Sociobiology when he described the connections between culture and genes. Changing environments can cause culture to become maladaptive, but this sets up selection pressures on culture as well as genes that cause them to change in adaptive directions. “[G]enetic and cultural tracking systems operate on parallel tracks …”[22] Wilson’s idea has blossomed into a field of research known as “biocultural evolution” or “gene-culture co-evolution”. The genre has classic texts, including Genes, Mind, and Culture (1981) by Wilson and mathematician Charles Lumsden, and Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985) by anthropologist Robert Boyd and biologist Pete Richerson. These texts show that cultural change can guide genetic evolution.

These theoretical developments tell us that an evolutionary theory need not be falsified by examples of maladaptive culture, any more than extinction does. Falsification requires showing that, again taking the example of contraception, maladaptive culture has no countervailing effect on gene frequencies or culture, by reducing the fitness of those who use contraceptives. This is part of what Wilson meant by evolution constraining culture.

Singer accused Wilson of committing the naturalistic fallacy, of attempting to deduce from biology that there is a “cardinal value of the survival of human genes in the form of a common pool”.[23] But it is clear that, despite philosophical imprecision, Wilson was asserting a survival value, not deriving it logically. Yes, he leant heavily on biology, but Singer also conceded that biological analysis can inform ethics. Perhaps Singer was the one contravening logic, because a few years earlier he had declared: “Under certain conditions … it would be wrong … to continue the human race”.[24] He arrived at this judgment by adopting Sidgwick’s rather Olympian egalitarianism that took the point of view of the “Universe”, a non-sequitur in analytical philosophy.[25]

Incidentally, Wilson’s argument reveals his own progressivism. He assumes that all human genes will return to a species genetic pool. That is the basis for his survivalist ethic, that individuals have a stake in defence of the human gene pool. But neo-Darwinian theory, which Wilson accepts, shows that organisms are not selected to benefit the species as a whole. At most their evolution and associated adaptations reflect group selection, most likely selection operating among extended kinship groups such as clans and small ethnicities. It is also relevant that the human species carries many distinctive gene pools that have been separated for tens of millennia. It is Wilson’s assumption that the present mixing process will continue. But cultural change might lead some populations to return to their long-term pattern of slow inter-population gene flow. Singer did not notice or care about Wilson’s progressive assumption. Instead he criticised him for daring to suggest that humans have genetic interests at all.

To clarify his argument Singer advanced the hypothetical example of making a $500 donation. Should he give the money to poor Indian farmers (a class category) or to his own family (a kinship category)? He argued that biology does not help him decide, only intuitions and preferences: “Information about my genes does not settle the issue, because I, and not my genes, are making the decision.” This implies that family identity is independent of genes and descent, which is not a biologically informed view. Singer admitted special care for his children and grandchildren, but only “because I know them”.[26] He claimed to care little for kin he will never meet, beyond his care for humans (and other pain-feeling species) in general. What counts is alleviating suffering, which would be aided by helping the Indians, not his comfortable family. Once the family is provided for, the circle of care can expand. That is consistent with human nature and reproductive interests. But denying the relevance of genetic kinship is untenable. Do not most people care about siblings, children, or parents who, through some misfortune, they have never met?

Edward Wilson would not make this error because he is familiar with ethology, the biological discipline that studies, among other things, adaptive interpersonal signals. An ethologist analysing preference for “our own” would not have omitted such behaviours as humans’ perennial interest in family resemblances, male anxiety about being cuckolded, the wish of adoptees to reconnect with biological parents and the upset caused when babies are switched in hospital. Nor would he omit reference to the widespread aversion to incest. These intuitions and preferences cannot be reduced to hedonism.

Singer does not aim his critical faculties at deconstructing pain-avoidance and pleasure-attraction the way he dissects the preference for kin. Surely these are also products of evolution. Singer implies that guides to morality must come from a more hallowed, universal place, but offers nothing except other intuitions, his intuitions, while criticizing the preference to care for kith and kin, which he acknowledges is almost universal.

Kin selection is not a vestige because it continues to maintain the evolutionary stability of family bonds. Singer himself believes this to be the case, as revealed by his suggestion that mass eugenics be used to achieve his utopian communist society.

As part of its Future Forum series, in August 2011 ABC Television aired a discussion on the subject: “How will science shape what it is to be human?”[27] The discussion was chaired by ABC science correspondent Norman Swan, who is still with the ABC in 2021. The panel included physicist Paul Davies and Peter Singer.

Davies stated that genetic engineering – eugenics – is capable of changing human nature which, until now, has been shaped by evolution. Singer saw this as an opportunity and proposed that society should not aim to preserve human nature but shape it in accord with “our” values. For example, people should have their children genetically engineered to eliminate the original sin of racism, which he defined as “treating other groups differently”. His reasoning was that human nature contains the seeds of racism, a cause of suffering. As already noted, according to Singer’s type of utilitarianism morality is centrally concerned with reducing suffering, a goal he thinks would be advanced by editing racism out of the genome. Singer was not challenged on his very broad definition of racism, which referred loosely to “groups” and went beyond condemning discrimination against to indict preference for. This implies that xenophobia and ethnocentrism are moral equivalents. Singer did not explicitly call for the reduction of nepotistic motivation, but his racism brush was broad enough to tarnish all parochial attachments. (In his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, he went further by portraying humanism as too parochial; sentient animals feel pain too, he argued, and therefore should be given standing that can, in some circumstances, outweigh that of humans.)

Consistent with The Expanding Circle quoted earlier, Singer was asserting that universal altruism is a valuable goal. In his 2000 book, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, he described total altruism as a type of freedom.[28] In reality, enforcing universal altruism would lead to evolutionary death. W. D. Hamilton’s kin selection theory shows that any altruism not directed towards kin risks loss of fitness and is therefore self-extinguishing over generations. In the same book Singer again railed against racism, stating that it is easy to incite because of the inherited propensity to identify along ethnic lines. He was especially critical of Australians. “I know that racist feelings do exist among a significant number of Australians, and they can be stirred up by demagogues.”[29]

The proposal to breed-out the predisposition for racism is probably achievable to some degree based on research into authoritarianism, religiosity and conservatism.[30] About half of the individual differences in these psychological characteristics are caused by genetic difference. But one wonders who would take the lead in breeding “racism” out of Australians? Whose values would be bred into them? Obviously Singer distrusts the values of a significant number of ordinary Australians. He implies that his own communistic values are preferable because they would reduce suffering. A more palpable difficulty is that any tinkering with racism, as broadly defined by Singer, could reduce ethnocentrism, an aid in perceiving one’s group and defending its interests. The elitist drive against parochial loyalties would genetically disarm people facing everyday social challenges that Singer does seem to understand. The first people to undergo the Singer socialist eugenics would be the first to lose the hope of solidarity and thus risk being dominated by feral humans. Mass eugenics could cause social division and conflict. (See “Eugenics, Ready or Not”, parts 1 and 2, Quadrant 2015, May and June, by this writer.[31])

Unfortunately for Singer’s argument, humans find it most difficult to behave like social insects or naked mole rats. Communism is not (yet) in our genes. As philosopher Donald T. Campbell concluded, only religion has been able to elicit intense levels of disciplined egalitarian cooperation and sustained reduction of the private sphere.[32]

Also in the Future Forum, Singer maintained that social cohesion could be achieved in diverse societies and praised multiculturalism for marginalising racism. He claimed that even in the Balkans peoples lived together for decades until the 1990s. He did not observe that the peaceful diversity of Tito’s Yugoslavia was the product of a brutal communist dictatorship, or that Western multiculturalism is based on censorship and suppression of white identity. His redistributive economics is unreconstructed socialism, consistent with ignoring individual and family interests. Although ostensibly adopting an evolutionary analysis, Singer didnot state that sharing resources could boost the population growth of recipients and thus reduce the giver’s relative fitness. Surely an evolutionary analysis of parochialism, including tribal solidarity, should examined the possibility that it evolved to protect against competing groups.

These remarks about multiculturalism by a leading intellectual confirm the suspicion that the doctrine was erected on intellectual foundations primarily ideological, not empirical.

In this context Singer’s proposal to genetically engineer humans to feel no ethnic solidarity takes on a different complexion. In his book Practical Ethics he advocated redistributing wealth, mainly between countries, to combat poverty; and redistributing people in the form of refugees, mainly to Western societies. This is an argument for open borders immigration based on the view that Western wealth is immoral and should be equalised downwards using a policy that, coincidentally, displaces Western populations in their own nations.[33] From this perspective, special concern for one’s family and community are immoral. These are meant to be ethical arguments buttressed with biological knowledge. That is why Peter Singer is professor of bio-ethics. Despite this, his proposals lack any discussion of interests beyond freedom from pain. His largest blind spot is reproductive interests which, from the Darwinian perspective, are life’s most important. To miss reproductive interests is a remarkable achievement for a bio-ethicist, only possible by misunderstanding and contradicting established biological theory. The poor scholarship is not the fault of Wilson, on whom Singer relied. Wilson’s book has concise sections on kin selection and altruism.[34] The conclusion cannot be avoided that Singer’s ethics of family bonds expounded in The Expanding Circle is philosophical primitivism – utopian communism and anti-Western prejudice supported by an ideological parody of biology.

Singer’s case against the morality of family loyalty is incoherent as philosophy and indefensible as science. Speaking as a Darwinian, he states that morality comes only from our desires and intuitions, but that we should not sort these by their adaptiveness. To this evolutionist, survival of lineages has no greater weight than other preferences. Instead, we should focus on minimizing pain, at least that is Singer’s intuition; and only selected pain. Not the alienation, communal conflict, and authoritarian social controls caused by replacement-level immigration. But certainly pains with which Professor Singer empathises, such as the hunger of a Third World family or the discomfort of a factory-farmed animal.

* * * * *

Singer’s belief in the defectiveness of human nature has been taken up by his ex-doctoral student. Julian Savulescu was born in Melbourne in 1963, studied at Monash University and is now Oxford professor of bioethics. Like Singer, he argues that human morality is defective and needs to be improved through eugenics.

In trying to demonstrate human moral failing, Savulescu produced statistics showing that people care most about their families, friends, and nations. This parochialism, he contended, needs to be bred out so that we show appropriatesympathy to suffering multitudes overseas. The intensity of that sympathy should be proportional to that shown to someone suffering before our eyes, including one of our own children.

Savulescu argued that human morality falls short of the high standard demanded by multicultural societies and a borderless globalised world. The title of his book, co-authored with Ingmar Perrson, explains: Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement.[35] Among methods for improving human morality, the authors recommend positive eugenics using IVF with pre-implantation screening of embryos, to ensure that babies’ genes predispose them to higher morality. They justify this by asserting that without breeding a new type of human the species is likely to go extinct.

There is no doubt that Savulescu envisages an apocalyptic future. The title of his 2009 lecture at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney was: “Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction”. In that lecture he asserted that the world faces various cataclysms. Terrorists could make nuclear bombs, global warming could get out of control, but the most probable threat is from a genetically engineered virus or bacterium. Sometime this century, Savulescu thinks, it will be possible to create a deadly superbug in a backyard laboratory. A great many people will possess the means to call down this calamity, making it unpreventable by normal means. Savulescu’s point is that only a new morally-enhanced human nature can save the world. And he thinks that this new improved human nature will cause parents to love all the world’s children. [36]

Like Singer, Savulescu calls for voluntary eugenics. This is an advance on authoritarian breeding programs which were advanced by the Nazis, the early Soviets, and progressive states in Europe and the United States. The problem is that this voluntariness does not fit their grand schemes. For example, the following obvious chain of inquiry is not considered. How could the goal of universal genetic engineering be accomplished without authoritarian means? For example, if half of the global population were somehow persuaded to submit to genetic engineering, would that reduce the risk of catastrophe by half? Would that be sufficient? Or would the risk be adequately reduced only if 99 percent were genetically engineered? Could not the remaining one percent of ferals make backyard laboratories? And until the eugenics program was complete, might not those families that had been genetically pacified be victimised or out-competed by the ferals? Who would protect them?

What assurances would there be that the initial breeding was sufficient? Would mechanisms need to be put in place to allow world leaders to try repeatedly over generations until the desired level of docility was attained? Would they retain sufficient determination to complete the program if they themselves were subjected to it? Or would it be necessary to leave the political class equipped with feral human nature on the understanding that once humanity is subdued they would  voluntarily shut the gate behind them? These questions are also challenging because other conditions cause destructive behaviour, such as narcissism, sadism, paranoid schizophrenia, and run-away bureaucracy. Does Savulescu believe that all can be bred out of all humans? How would that be possible without global despotism? Savulescu did not mention difficulties such as this in his Dangerous Ideas speech.

Though the alleged moral failings come from people in general, Savulescu mostly accuses Westerners, especially Americans. Their moral weakness is clear, Savulescu thinks, from their lack of support for the Kyoto Protocol, their stinginess in giving foreign aid, and inconsiderateness in maintaining high consumption and pollution. People, especially Westerners, just aren’t globally minded enough, he thinks. Savulescu does not soften this judgment by granting that a degree of parochialism is reasonable given that our most vital interests – children and communities – are local. Humans are mortal beings whose bodies, perceptions, and cognitions are necessarily bounded by particular associations and cultures.[37] Nor, in his Sydney talk, did he mention the connection between kinship and altruism.

* * * * *

Misconceptions about family bonds are not limited to philosophers. Even some evolutionary biologists have denied the adaptive function of parental and other kinship ties and equated them with racism. An example is John Maynard Smith (1920-2004), who trained under J. B. S. Haldane in London and became renowned for applying game theory to understanding the evolution of social behaviour. Maynard Smith admitted to being blinkered by his communist beliefs. (Like Haldane he was a Communist Party member, resigning in protest at the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956; Haldane left the Party in 1950.) Maynard Smith thought that favouring kin could not be a human instinct; it had to be culturally derived. He blamed this prejudice for preventing him from discovering kin selection, and came to regret his ideological blindness after realising the power of Hamilton’s theory.[38] This is a nice example of the moralistic fallacy, the assumption that what should be, is. The theory of kin selection was invented by a more open-minded doctoral student, the aforementioned William B. Hamilton.

To his credit, Maynard Smith helped Hamilton publish his big idea in 1964, advising him to split the long article into two parts. Richard Dawkins is another evolutionist who, though not a Marxist, deflected attention from the implications of kin selection theory for kinship as a human interest.[39] During his second incarnation as a celebrity atheist he has never examined the adaptiveness of religion.

In contrast to some ideologically blinkered colleagues, Hamilton was open to the idea of innate kin solidarity, though in an original way. He was one of the first to advance the idea of a genetic predisposition to selectively learn some elements of culture. This was before Wilson suggested “culturgens” and Dawkins coined “memes”. In a 1975 paper he wrote:

[S]ome things which are often treated as purely cultural in man . . . have deep roots in our animal past and thus are quite likely to rest on direct genetic foundations. To be more specific, it is suggested that the ease and accuracy with which an idea . . . strikes the next replica of itself on the template of human memory may depend on the preparation made for it there by selection – selection acting, ultimately, at the level of replicating molecules.[40]

By the time Hamilton published his theory the militant left had already gained considerable influence in many academic disciplines and was suppressing knowledge of human nature in the humanities and social sciences. Though a biologist, Hamilton felt under pressure and no wonder, given that senior colleagues were Marxists. Decades later, he criticized his own indirectness in treating the evolution of discriminatory behaviour in his 1964 paper. His intensity of emotion at the time is indicated by the harsh judgement he imposed on himself: “The way of expressing the matter is also indirect and, probably, was cowardly (i.e. aiming to divert from the main point and to avoid sounding racist).”[41]

Likening nepotism to racism commits a category error, already remarked. Racism is hostility or aggression directed at a racial or ethnic group. By loving their own more than other children, parents are doing nothing comparable to hostility or aggression. To feel affection for one’s own is not the same thing as hating others, and neither does the former usually cause the latter. By the same logic, one confirmed by observations of human behaviour, it is not racist to identify with or care for an ethnic group. More fitting terms for these are ethnocentrism and ethnic nepotism. And neither do these necessarily lead to racism, according to anthropological evidence.[42] This is a well known distinction in ethnic studies and social psychology.

Professor Singer’s case sheds light on what is afflicting our academic culture. In the years of student radicalism and Vietnam War protests, when Singer and others of his generation received their tertiary education, activist scholarship helped drive the leftist take-over of the universities and the ABC. Activist philosophy is not primarily intended to advance knowledge; it advances a social or political cause, that is, power. Academic rewards were bestowed on individuals who pleased the rising element in the new cultural establishment, even when their scholarship was manifestly shoddy. Philosophical nonsense began winning promotion and acclaim if it pleased emerging radical elites. The result often did not qualify as professional philosophy according to the standard expected by the analytic Anglo-American tradition. One of Australia’s oldest departments of philosophy, at Sydney University, split before the process was complete. A group of professors, led by David Armstrong and David Stove, set up the Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy as a rear-guard. Students, such as this writer, who studied in both philosophy departments could observe the shocking difference in standards. It was easy to fail in the Armstrong-Stove department, but difficult to do so in the other, especially if one did not challenge the ideology being pushed. In the mid 1980s Stove identified the activist ideologies as consisting of “Marxism, semiotics, and feminism”.[43]

The new activist philosophy was sometimes classified “Continental” because it drew on ideas and procedures developed across the Channel. This has some truth. However, I suspect the classification is unfair to the Continent.

* * * * *

Conservatives need an explicit justification for preferential family ties. They should not feel guilty for loving their children. As Singer implies, family ties are analogous to other identity attachments – religious, ethnic, and national. Indeed, if it is reasonable and just for parents to preferentially invest in their children it is difficult to see how the same judgment does not apply to other parochial attachments that simultaneously elicit affection and bear collective cultural or genetic interests.

In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt observes that radicals seek unitary value systems while conservatives are more open to plural value systems.[44] Conservatives are more likely to acknowledge multi-faceted human nature. Human sociality and its evolutionary origins are a bundle of messy and stubborn facts that are slow to change. This supports Edmund Burke’s theory that societies stand better odds of improvement through incremental optimisation, rather than through sweeping maximisation of selected values proposed in radical doctrine.

Human sociality and the biology of reproduction generate pools of bonds of different strength that serve different functions. Bonds are precious but being parochial can indirectly generate conflict. Responsible tinkering is limited to encouraging, discouraging, and channelling those bonds to keep them compatible with each other and in line with broader social cohesion. How to accomplish that is a larger topic that extends beyond families to relations between ethnicities and nationalities. Chronic feuding between clans was resolved by the cultural evolution of rule-of-law and state authority without destroying precious family bonds. Something analogous might resolve ethnic and national conflict.

Cohesive groups sharing identity markers can be made larger or smaller by economic and cultural change. Ethnic groups range in size from thousands to millions. Change of scale has occurred repeatedly through history due to economic growth and improved communications. Change has also gone towards smaller size, as when empires break up. Some organic relationships can be substituted by contract and hierarchy. However, society depends on unpaid work of the heart to raise children, care for the elderly, show heroism in wartime and other emergencies, and maintain the warming glow of belonging and public altruism among anonymous citizens that defines a national community.

Pushing back against radical and globalist critics of parochial ties will entail reasserting the importance of human nature, which includes a set of predispositions to form bonds that protect kinship interests.

Respect for human nature recognises a plurality of ties – family, ethny, religion, nation, civic, and humanity as a whole. The strength of these vary, as they always have, from intense family bonds to looser religious, ethnic and national affiliations. Investment in the various types of association will continue to correspond to tie strength, and therefore relate inversely to population size. This contradicts utopian communism, which advocates investing most of our resources in the collective. It also contradicts the demand of totalitarian ideologies for maximal investment in one type of association, typically class, state or nation. Instead, free association results in a complex web of ties, each with its own strength, serving different types of social need.

 

[1] ANU Centre for Learning and Teaching (2021). Gender-inclusive handbook. Every voice project. Canberra, Australian National University, https://genderinstitute.anu.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/2021_docs/Gender_inclusive_handbook.pdf, p. 11.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2018). Sex and gender diversity in the 2016 census. https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Sex%20and%20Gender%20Diversity%20in%20the%202016%20Census~100, accessed 27.2.2021. The 2016 Census counted 1,260 sex and/or gender diverse people in Australia. This was probably an under-estimate.

[2] Scotland’s justice secretary Humza Yousaf defends his intention to legislatively override “home defence”, that hate expressed in the family home should be exempt from hate crime prosecution. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18834930.humza-yousafs-hate-crime-home-bill-deranged—opinon-kevin-mckenna/, accessed 19.11.2020.

The bill is criticised in this commentary: https://thecritic.co.uk/mind-your-language-even-in-your-own-home/, accessed 19.11.2020.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/04/uk-lawyers-uneasy-about-plan-to-prosecute-hate-speech-at-home, accessed 18.3.2021.

[4] Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. London, Cornell University Press, p. 15.

[5] Slaughter, T. P. (2008). The beautiful soul of John Woolman, apostle of abolition. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. p. 135.

[6] Slaughter, p. 136.

[7] Slaughter, p. 188.

[8] http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/bioethics/about/, accessed 9 September 2014.

[9] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 200.

[10] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 70.

[11] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 71.

[12] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 200.

[13] Caplan, A. L., Ed. (1978). The sociobiology debate. Readings on ethical and scientific issues. New York, Harper & Row.

[14] Sociobiology Study Group of Science for the People (1976/1978). Sociobiology—another biological determinism. The sociobiology debate: readings on ethical and scientific issues. A. L. Caplan. New York, Harper and Row: 280-290, pp. 289-290.

[15] Hamilton, W. D. (1964/1996). The genetic evolution of social behavior, parts 1 and 2. Narrow roads of gene land. Vol. 1: Evolution of social behaviour. W. D. Hamilton. Oxford, W. H. Freeman. 97: 11-82.

[16] Wilson, E. O. (1975/2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. 415-418.

Wilson, E. O. (1978). On human nature. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, pp. 33, 112-113.

[17] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 11.

[18] Harpending, H. (2002). “Kinship and population subdivision.” Population and Environment 24(2): 141-147.

Reprinted in: Salter, F. K. (2007/2003). On genetic interests. Family, ethnicity, and humanity in an age of mass migration. New York, Transaction.

[19] Hamilton, W. D., Ed. (2001). Narrow roads of gene land. Volume 2: Evolution of sex. New York, Oxford University Press.

[20] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 130.

[21] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 131.

[22] Wilson, E. O. (1975/2000). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. pp. 560, 569.

[23] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 74.

[24] Singer, P. (1976). A utilitarian population principle. Ethics and population. M. D. Bayles (ed.). Cambridge, Schenkman: 81-99.

[25] This was in a quote from Sidgwick in the 1995 edition of Animal Liberation, p. 5.

[26] Singer, Expanding circle, p. 79.

[27] ABC Future Forum: How will science shape what it means to be human? August 2011. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-01/how-will-science-shape-what-it-means-to-be-human/4005938, accessed 1 May 2014. By March 2021 the relevant exchange between Davies and Singer was no longer part of this video.

[28] Peter Singer (1999). A Darwinian left, Yale University Press, p. 63.

[29] Singer, A Darwinian left, p. 63.

[30] Bouchard, T. J. (2009). Authoritarianism, religiousness, and conservatism: Is ‘obedience to authority’ the explanation for their clustering, universality and evolution? The biological evolution of religious mind and behaviour. E. Voland and W. Schiefenhoevel (eds.). London, Springer: 165-80.

[31] Salter, F. K. (2015). “Eugenics, ready or not. Part I” Quadrant 59(5): 41-51. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/2005/eugenics-ready/

Salter, F. K. (2015). “Eugenics, ready or not. Part II: Can government eugenics be justified?” Quadrant 59(6): 56-62. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/2006/eugenics-ready-part-ii/

[32] Campbell, D. T. (1983). Legal and primary-group social controls. Law, Biology and Culture. The Evolution of Law. M. Gruter and P. Bohannon (eds.). Santa Barbara, Ca., Ross-Erikson: 159-171.

[33] Salter, F. K. (2010). “The misguided advocates of open borders.” Quadrant 54(6): http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2010/2016/the-misguided-advocates-of-open-borders

[34] Wilson, Sociobiology, pp. 117-120, 121-129.

[35] Co-authored with Ingmar Persson. Persson, I. and J. Savulescu (2014). Unfit for the future: The need for moral enhancement. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

[36] Savulescu, J. (2009). Genetically enhance humanity or face extinction. Sydney, Festival of Dangerous Ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pAMuFZRzyo, accessed 18.3.2021.

[37] Simon, H. (1990). “A mechanism for social selection and successful altruism.” Science 250(4988): 1665-8.

Gigerenzer, G. and D. G. Goldstein (1996). “Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality.” Psychological Review 103(4): 650-69.

[38] Maynard Smith, J. Web of stories – life of remarkable people. Hamilton: political and ideological commitment. https://webofstories.com/play/john.maynard.smith/39, accessed 29.10.2020. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9r46BJfFqo, accessed 29.10.2020.”

[39] Salter, F. K. (2008). “Misunderstandings of kin selection and the delay in quantifying ethnic kinship.” Mankind Quarterly 48(3): 311-344 http://www.mankindquarterly.org/samples/SalterMQXLVIII-313.pdf.

[40] Hamilton, W. D. (1975/1996). Innate social aptitudes of man: An approach from evolutionary genetics. Narrow roads of gene land. Vol. 1: Evolution of social behaviour. W. D. Hamilton. Oxford, W. H. Freeman. 97: 329-351, p. 330.

[41] Hamilton, W. D. (2001/1987). Discriminating nepotism: Expectable, common, overlooked. Kin recognition in animals, Ch. 13. D. J. C. Fletcher and C. D. Michener (eds.). New York, Wiley: 417-437, p. 348.

[42] Cashdan, E. (2001). “Ethnocentrism and xenophobia: A cross-cultural study.” Current Anthropology 42(5): 760 – 765.

[43] Stove, D. (1986). “A farewell to arts: Marxism, semiotics, and feminism.” Quadrant, May, reprinted in Cricket versus republicanism, Quakers Hill Press, 1995. https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/arts.html, accessed 18.5.2021.

[44] Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York, Pantheon.