I have yet to publish the third installment of my argument challenging divine command theory. The tentative title of that essay is “Toward a Secular Moral Ontology: Natural History, Materialism, and the Grounding of Human Value.” The two essays that comprise the trilogy can be found here: Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights and Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument. In those essays, I explain what provoked me to wrestle with the problem of grounding ethics in an objective and universal moral ontology.
I promise that the third essay will be published soon. However, I can summarize the problem thusly: Since there is plainly more than one god, and no universally binding method exists for determining which divine authority is genuine, the god a man accepts as his ontological precondition is either inherited through birth into a religious system or selected based on prior ethical or ideological commitments.
I will argue in the pending essay that natural history, which, unlike religion, is material and universal, and therefore ascertainable by science, represents the only ontology that is universal, publicly verifiable, and independent of prior commitment, and therefore the only ontology in which ethics may be objectively and rationally grounded. Competing ontologies are either unfalsifiable (religion) or reducible to preference (ideology). Materialism is, by contrast, empirically verifiable. There, we find that human nature generates normative constraints, not just descriptions; flourishing is not arbitrary because organisms have functional conditions of existence.
So why the present essay? I realize that my last essay, The Bad-Smell Ant: Disordering a Nation’s Protective Instinct, may be perceived as reactionary and run contrary to things I have written in the past. On this last score, the perception would be correct. I noted this in the essay, and I want to expand on it today by providing an explanation. I feel an explanation is in order, since I have, for many years, resisted natural-historical explanations of human behavior, which entail recognizing humans as animals and therefore subject to the force of evolutionary pressure. This is the source of my past resistance to explanations of human behavior by resorting to analogies to other species. I have provided no justification for that resistance, and, having examined the matter, I can find no justification. I can suss out an explanation, however.
Why did I resist natural-historical analogies in the past? Honestly, I think it was because they pressed against ideological commitments associated with a socialist worldview. Working from this frame, they struck me as reductive, even dehumanizing—flattening the richness of human experience into reproductive imperatives or mere survival strategies. Natural history and the idea that humans were instinctual creatures sounded to my socialist ears pessimistic. True, I agreed, humans have drives (hunger, sex, thirst) and reflexes (fight, flight, and freeze), but I felt the claim that innate, genetically programmed patterns of behavior without prior learning may be provoked by specific stimuli allows for the rationalization of injustices.
At the same time, I rebelled against behaviorism and the idea of the blank slate, since technologies based on this logic have totalitarian ambitions (see B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity). I understood as a natural fact that nervous systems can be conditioned. I just did not like what followed. I was letting my political preferences warp my judgment of a basic scientific fact.
Looking back, I was, for ideological reasons, denying two basic natural facts: we do have instincts, and we are conditionable. If not for these facts, humans would be profoundly impoverished creatures. How could the species have survived for hundreds of years without them? What is more, could a moral ontology be found in the facts of human nature?
The reader, if interested, can find a good example of my prior thinking in a paper I presented at a regional sociology conference in Lafayette, LA, in November 2009, titled The Myth of Extraordinary Evil: A Challenge to Evolutionary Theories of Genocide and Xenophobia. My argument there reflected my thinking about this matter generally. To explain altruism as kin selection, love as pair-bonding, or morality as reciprocal advantage felt like an erosion of dignity rather than an illumination of truth.
I did not like arguments from nature, not because they were false, but because they were inconvenient. Rejecting socialism opened a vista through which I could see more clearly the natural-historical tendencies in human behavior and cognition. This is not because my arguments over the last several years don’t work without a national-historical premise; rather, my arguments of late work because I was already moving towards an acceptance of human beings as natural beings governed by the same rules governing all life on Earth.
Thus, this resistance stemmed less from a flaw in evolutionary reasoning, or from my changing positions on crucial matters, and more from the unresolved question I addressed in those two essays noted at the top of this one: what, in a secular framework, grounds moral value at all? I needed to solve the problem in a secularist manner, since my commitments to reason and science do not allow for belief in God.
It was thinking through this that I realized that my commitment to historical materialism, which holds that, to quote Karl Marx (1845), “human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual” but is in “its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations,” had smuggled into my thinking a quasitheistic conception of mankind that implicitly set Homo sapiens apart from other animals. It was as if human beings were not animals at all.
This realization does not invalidate the materialist conception of history, but it does force its elaboration. Moreover, the grounding of reality in social relations, which are, to be sure, objective in themselves, tends to obscure the reality that other animals are also social. What I came to see is that social relations are not an alternative to nature but a subset of it, continuous with the sociality observed across the animal kingdom. Rather than exclude human beings from nature, I realized the necessity of conceptualizing humans as natural beings.
As an atheist, I do not have recourse to divine command theory as a foundation for ethics. I cannot abandon this position because there is no objective way of demonstrating the existence of god. I cannot take matters on faith. Moreover, the plurality of religious traditions presents a profound epistemic problem. There is no singular, uncontested divine authority; rather, there are many, each embedded within particular cultures, histories, and interpretive traditions.
This is the premise of Ludwig Feuerbach’s irreligious criticism that founded materialist anthropology. It follows from Fuerbach’s critique that the choice of one god over another—whether inherited or deliberated—appears ultimately contingent, shaped by circumstance or preference. It was Feuerbach’s contention that religion is the projection of human social relations into a supernatural framework, with earthly power structures reflected and legitimized through divine imagery.
To illustrate, the kingship system was not handed down from the godship system, but the inverse of this. The godship system legitimized power as earthly authority. The necessary entailment is that, if morality rests on divine command, and divine authority itself is not universally accessible or verifiable, then moral claims collapse into cultural and theological relativisms.
This realization and prior commitment to logic pushed me toward secular alternatives, most prominently utilitarian and deontological liberalism, both of which are ever-present in Western civilization. Utilitarianism, in its classical and contemporary forms, offers one framework: ends that maximize well-being and minimize suffering—and evaluate actions based on their consequences—are used to justify the means that achieve them.
However, the foundation of consequentialist or utilitarian thinking is unmistakably preference-based. It presumes that well-being is desirable and suffering is undesirable. This framework does not explain why well-being ought to be maximized beyond the fact that it is preferred, or whether means developed to achieve this end are ethically justified, however rational they may be in their instrumentality. Without a deeper ontological grounding, the ends remain assertions about what we happen to value, for whatever reason, not what we must value.
Deontological liberalism, by contrast, attempts to anchor moral claims in principles such as duties, human dignity, and rights. Historically, these ideas have often been tied to notions of natural law—suggesting that moral truths are embedded in the structure of reality itself. The language of inalienable rights in the American Declaration of Independence, for example, carries an implicit metaphysical heft: these rights are not granted by governments or societies but discovered, only appearing as if written into the fabric of existence. They are given by a creator deistically conceived, or even less theistically by Jeffersonian references to “Nature’s God,” or the Laws of Nature.
However, stripped of its sectarian theological underpinnings, natural law theory also faces a challenge: What, in a purely secular universe, makes such laws binding? The answer is that nature itself provides the binding conditions: the ontology of human nature and necessary modes of social existence. God is not the author. Nature is. No metaphysics required.
It is here that I was compelled to turn to natural history—not merely as a descriptive science but as the prime candidate for a universal moral ontology. If we accept that reality is fundamentally material, which all evidence compels us to do, then human beings are products of evolutionary processes, shaped by the same forces that govern all life.
This does not diminish our humanity; rather, it situates it within a broader, intelligible context. Our capacities for cooperation, moral judgment, reason, and sympathetic judgment, all observable facts, are not arbitrary—they are emergent properties of biological evolution and social relations built upon that universal truth. To be sure, social relations are culturally and historically variable, but at the proper level of abstraction, general rules may be identified and confirmed. The grand theorists of sociology—Talcott Parsons and his ilk—were right all along.
From this perspective, morality can be understood as a natural phenomenon: a set of behavioral and cognitive adaptations that facilitate social living. Human beings are, by necessity, social animals. Our survival and flourishing depend on cooperation, mutual recognition, and trust. Traits such as altruism, fairness, and sympathy are not imposed from outside nature but arise from within it, selected for their contributions to group cohesion and individual well-being.
I accept that this view does not, by itself, yield a complete ethical system. The objection that evolution explains why we have moral intuitions, but it does not automatically justify them, is reasonable. However, the claim that evolved traits are therefore morally invalid confuses origin with function. The mere fact that traits have evolved does not mean they are inherently bad or limiting.
Human flourishing is not a subjective preference but the condition under which a human organism successfully functions within its natural and social environment. To be sure, ideological systems denying man’s evolved nature can suppress traits given by the natural history of the species, thus corrupting social relations. However, natural history provides something crucial: an objective framework within which moral reasoning can take place. It grounds human values in the realities of human nature and social existence, rather than in arbitrary preference or unverifiable metaphysics.
Working within this framework, we can reconstruct ethical principles in a way that is both empirically informed and normatively robust. For this reason, analogies to other animal species are not inherently reactionary.
Well-being, for instance, is no mere preference but a condition tied to the biological and psychological functioning of human organisms. Suffering is not just disliked; it is a measurable disruption of the functions natural history has bequeathed the species. Similarly, concepts like dignity and rights can be reinterpreted as protections of the conditions necessary for human flourishing within social environments.
My argument in my last essay, comparing the parasitic queen of Lasius orientalis to Islamization, shows how the problem of social parasitism extends to the human realm. It follows that multiculturalism functions to obviate the protective instinct. Defense of a given social order, one truer to human nature, is a good thing in the face of a colonizing force that suppresses the imperative of human freedom. The moral assessment of good and bad—the “ought” question—follows from answering the “is” question.
This synthesis does not eliminate philosophical tensions. The gap between “is” and “ought” remains a central challenge in the minds of many. Yet by rooting our moral ontology in natural history, we narrow that gap and escape the appeal to cultural relativism. The gap is addressed by grounding “ought” in functional requirements of a species; we move from abstract speculation to a grounded understanding of what humans are, what they need, and how they can live together. We resolve that gap in practical terms by grounding normative claims in the functional requirements of human life.
This is not a preference-based solution. Morality is neither a set of arbitrary rules nor those of divine command, but of a project: it is the ongoing effort to align behaviors, institutions, and understanding with the realities of human nature and the demands of social life.
With what method do we advance and evaluate the project? Science. To be sure, science can itself be corrupted by ideology, power, and profit, but science is the only universal method by which those natural conditions are ascertained and corrected over time through evidence and reasoning. Corruption does not invalidate science; deformation of knowledge (i.e., valid belief) demands that science be free of corruption.
In the end, what once seemed dehumanizing to me now appears clarifying. To see ourselves as part of nature is not to diminish our value but to locate it more precisely. Our moral capacities are evolved, real, and indispensable. They are not gifts from beyond the world but achievements within it. They are not arbitrary, but instead inherent in our nature. In that recognition, a secular humanist ethic can find not only coherence but conviction. What “is” entails what we “ought” to do.
At the beginning of this essay, I noted that the two essays I have already published on this subject explain what prompted me to take up this question. Before I conclude today’s essay, I will briefly tell the reader that it was Andrew Wilson, a bloodsport debater, and his relentless challenge to secular humanists to ground their ethical claims in a moral ontology, that compelled me to examine the matter.
For Wilson, the only moral ontology is divine command theory. Rights must be grounded in theology and secured by force God deems appropriate (force doctrine). Just social relations and roles are God-ordained. No secular humanist has met Wilson’s challenge to demonstrate a moral ontology underpinnning their claims to right. That they ever could is unlikely. Secular humanism in its utilitarian form cannot provide a sufficiently grounded account of moral ontology that escapes preference-based reasoning. Wilson is right about this.
However, Wilson’s interlocutors have also not challenged Wilson’s theory, which is itself preference-based, since, as shown above, divine command is selected from a theoretically unlimited set of unfalsifiable ontologies. In other words, divine command is as much the result of arbitrary selection as secular humanism based on utilitarian reasoning.
Unlike divine command theory, natural history is not unfalsifiable. Natural history is not a theory at all, but the ground of self-evident reality. Human traits found across animal species, such as the protective instinct, are not arbitrary outcomes but functional requirements for the persistence of a social species. Therefore, natural law grounded in evolutionary theory is the obvious candidate for a non-arbitrary moral ontology.
I address in greater detail anticipated criticisms of my view in the third essay. But briefly noting them here, they are moral anti-realism and the Nietzschean critique, the latter forming the basis of postmodernist thought, a philosophy that asserts that all knowledge arises from discursive formation shaped by social power. There is a third objection, but it requires rejecting natural history itself. I will not spend time problematizing a fact as fundamental as evolution. Rejecting evolution entails accepting an axiom already shown to be arbitrary: that a god created the world and determined its laws. There is no evidence for this claim. Really, the claim is not subject to empirical evaluation.
Moral anti-realism holds that there are no objective moral facts, only evolved preferences and socially constructed norms. From this perspective, my appeal to natural history does not ground morality but merely explains why humans tend to converge on certain behaviors. Evolution selects for traits that enhance survival and reproduction, not for moral validity. After all, do other animals have moral systems?
Cooperation, fairness, etc., persist because they are adaptive, not because they are objectively right. To move from “these traits promote flourishing in a social species” to “these traits are morally binding” is to commit a category error: it converts descriptive facts about human functioning into prescriptive obligations without justification. On this view, my framework does not escape preference—it redescribes preference in biological language. But how would objective right be determined any other way? Moreover, why can’t morality be defined as evolved preferences? These are not subjective.
In the end, moral anti-realism returns us to the problem I have identified. The critique fails because it ignores that human organisms have objective functional conditions. A heart that fails to circulate blood is defective, not merely “non-preferred.” If the defect is not corrected, the organism dies. In the same way, social behaviors that systematically undermine the stability and viability of human social systems are not simply disfavored—they are dysfunctional relative to the kind of organism humans are.
Moral claims arise from these functional constraints. They are not arbitrary preferences but judgments about what sustains or degrades forms of life. The move from description to normativity is not a leap but a recognition: for beings with a determinate nature, there are determinate conditions under which they succeed or fail. Moral realism, in this framework, is grounded in biological and social functionality, not metaphysical abstraction. It therefore cannot be effectively challenged from the standpoint of metaphysical abstraction.
Appeal to David Hume “is–ought problem,” which points out that statements about what is (facts about the world) cannot logically justify statements about what ought to be (moral claims) without an additional normative premise, ignores the fact that the normative premise is found in natural law.
Hume denies the very existence of law-like power in nature. For him, “causation” is not something we perceive as a necessary, that is, in the world itself. Instead, it arises from our observation of the constant conjunction of events in experience. When we repeatedly see one type of event follow another, we form a psychological habit of expecting that sequence, and we project this expectation as a “necessary connection.”
For Hume, causation is grounded in custom, not in any directly observable or rationally demonstrable force binding events together. Hume’s is an anti-scientific stance. His empiricism is a form of idealism suspicious of itself.
The Nietzschean critique denies that grounding morality in nature rescues objectivity; instead, it argues that all moral systems (for postmodernists, especially the one I am advocating, since it would obviate queer theory on surer grounds that any theism), are expressions of drives (which are highly variable) or power relations (this is the premise that lies at the heart of postmodernist thinking).
My elevation of cooperation, social stability, etc., reflects a historically contingent valuation—what Nietzsche dismisses as “herd morality.” By presenting these traits as “natural” and therefore binding, I am disguising a particular moral orientation as a universal necessity. Evolution itself does not privilege altruism over domination or flourishing over conquest. Any attempt to derive a universal moral law from natural history imposes order on a fundamentally conflict-driven process. Thus, by Nietzschean lights, my system is not objective but a rationalization of a preferred mode of life. I stand accused of the very thing I reject.
But is science a rationalization? Are logic and mathematics? To be sure, insects have no concept of mathematics; must we therefore say that two and two are four because humans are indoctrinated to accept the rules of addition as true? If there are four insects, might there be five?
Charitably grounded this view in some acceptance of scientific reality, the Nietzschean critique would correctly state that evolution produces a range of behavioral possibilities, including conflict and domination. However, it would fail to account for the constraints imposed by large-scale, complex social organization. As social animals, humans survive as members of highly interdependent systems that require cooperation, predictability, and stability at scale. Traits that systematically erode these conditions—breakdown of trust, chronic conflict, and unchecked domination—undermine the viability of the system itself. Putting this another way, the selection pressures operating on human societies favor not raw power alone but the regulation of power within stable structures.
For all the reasons given, the moral regulation of power is rooted in natural law. This is not an imposition of “herd morality” (at least not in the way Nietzsche defines it) but a recognition of the structural requirements of human social existence. The fact that multiple behavioral strategies exist does not make them equally viable at the level of sustained civilization, which itself may be determinable scientifically. Natural history, properly understood, does not sanctify all drives; it differentiates between those compatible with durable human life and those that are self-undermining.
Indeed, the evolutionary record does not present a choice between cooperation and conflict, as though one were natural and the other aberrant; both arise from the same underlying conditions of survival in a social species. Human beings evolved under pressures that selected simultaneously for in-group cohesion and out-group differentiation. The same capacities that make cooperation, sympathy, and trust possible within a group also generate suspicion and even defensive aggression toward perceived outsiders. Protective instincts, including the willingness to exclude others or enact violence, are not deviations from human nature but expressions of it under conditions of competition or threat.
The relevant distinction is therefore not between “natural cooperation” and “unnatural conflict,” but between forms of behavior that extend social organization and stabilize complex relations, and those that, when unchecked or misapplied, destabilize it.
Understanding the problem of Muslims in the West this way exposes tolerance of Muslims as objectively destructive to Western society. Multiculturalism is analogous to the tactic of the Lasius orientalis, in which the invader exploits the rival’s scent and turns its enemies into allies. True, neither Lasius orientalis nor the rivals it tricks grasp in thought the reality of the situation. But humans do. And the human capacity to grasp such things in thought is also the work of natural history.
The bottom line is not that moral reasoning grounded in natural history denies conflictual drives; it recognizes them and evaluates the conditions under which they are activated and directed, then regulated or resisted, distinguishing between their functional role in preserving social systems and their capacity to undermine the broader structures upon which human flourishing depends.
If only the victims of Lasius orientalis had the capacity to understand what the enemy was up to, then they could work out a way to better defend themselves against its deception. Over time, perhaps future generations of Lasius flavus will evolve some other capacity to prevent this. During this period, their colonies will surely suffer devastation. Worse, their species may go extinct before the problem is worked out. But humans have evolved complex brains that allow them to adapt rapidly to such threats. Man and ants are both animals, but man is not an ant.
In the final analysis, Burmawi’s analogy is not a reactionary one at all; the case of Lasius orientalis usefully illustrates for the thinking animal the necessity of confronting threats to its continued existence in its lifetime. Burmawi is not saying a group of humans is an ant colony. If he were, then it wouldn’t be an analogy but the thing itself.
freedom and reason 