Thank you for this rich and thought-provoking reflection. I deeply appreciate your careful engagement with Gaspar’s chapter and your openness to exploring the emotional underpinnings of morality. That said, I would like to offer a friendly but fundamental point of divergence.
The view that morality emerges from biologically rooted empathy — shared across individuals and cultures — is, in my reading, a well-intentioned but ultimately ideological construction. It assumes that emotional universals are the foundation of moral codes, when in fact what we observe — both in ethology and cultural history — suggests something quite different: morality is not the result of shared emotions, but of structural codes that regulate inclusion and exclusion.
A few examples may help. As you probably know, lions, rats, and chimpanzees show intense hostility toward outsiders of their own species — especially when those outsiders belong to a different group. Even highly social mammals do not exhibit empathy toward out-group members. Likewise, experiments cited by Amy Chua (in Political Tribes) show how preschool children, arbitrarily divided into teams by t-shirt color (green vs. blue), begin to form in-group biases almost immediately, showing preference and exclusion even in the absence of any meaningful difference.
These examples reveal that empathy, when it exists, is structurally selective, not universal. It is bound to the logic of group boundaries, not to species-wide identification. In this light, the idea of "hardwired empathy" becomes less a scientific insight than a liberal fantasy — one that replaces institutional structure with emotional comfort, and functional codes with affective legitimacy.
I say this not to dismiss the emotional dimension of human life, which is real and complex, but to insist that structural coherence, not emotional spontaneity, is what sustains functional morality — especially in the political domain. If we lose sight of this, we risk falling into the very cognitive blackout that our sentimental ideologies were meant to prevent.
Yes yes. Elsewhere I talk more about the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who I have been reading over 30 years, I guess I started with the processes you have illustrated so carefully. Sometimes she calls her cultural theorising grid/group, sometimes thought styles. The chapter does mention cultural evolution but these processes are not worked through, and I will have to get hold of the book to check the other writers efforts.
I sometimes criticise more structural efforts to understand ourselves as gnostic but this is more about the fervent belief or dogmatism in a particular structure rather than their interplay.
In this interplay I am more interested in the urge to engaging in worlding one self among others doing the same, which includes competition as well as cooperation. IE society as a lek.
Also a list of other reactions to these papers on evolution morality. Not yet updated on the self hosted crospostef site with more recent ones as I am travelling...
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate your long engagement with Mary Douglas and your openness to the structural perspective I proposed — especially regarding boundary enforcement and the conditionality of empathy.
When I argued that morality is not grounded in shared emotions but in structural codes of inclusion and exclusion, and illustrated this through both ethology and early childhood behavior, I meant to emphasize that empathy is not universal but selectively distributed according to group logic. While Douglas does not theorize empathy per se, her framework — especially her analysis of symbolic classification and group boundaries — helps illuminate how perceptions of legitimacy, purity, or threat are shaped structurally, not emotionally.
You raise a valuable caution about structural dogmatism. My position, however, is not prescriptive but functional: structure as a condition for systemic equilibrium, not as an ideal. Within universalist projects like liberalism or communism, emotional universals often emerge most forcefully when structural coherence begins to fail. These affective appeals aim to preserve legitimacy where institutional grounding erodes. Other regimes, by contrast, tend to fall back on mythic or hierarchical orders without such universals.
Your mention of worlding and the social lek is compelling. It aligns in some ways with what I call tectonic alignment — the idea that coherence emerges not from persuasion but from positional necessity. Perhaps our frameworks differ in emphasis more than in kind.
Thank you also for the generous references to your own work — I look forward to reading them more closely. It’s a rare pleasure to engage across converging structures.
Yeah, sure, I guess that I guess or feel that we have more input into the structures than we sometimes care to admit.
Especially as we often either assume the alignments of structures and routines in the world, are those we personally prefer (as either personal preferences or cultural constraints). When setting boundaries or internal relations this can be often done without empathic discernment,,, which a universalist empathy booster might assume gives rise to such worlds in the first place.
An urge to world does not require empathy, but it would surely when we met others doing the same, inside or outside the group.
How far can the expanding circle go, how far can it go in overcoming what you have raised?
In any case the urge to world does not care, it does not even care that it is up to us.
Yes — the impulse to world need not pass through empathy, nor ask permission. It inscribes itself, often blindly, through alignments we mistake for preference, or confuse with moral legitimacy. As you suggest, these alignments are not necessarily ethical in origin — they are structural necessities interpreted after the fact as choices, traditions, or ideals.
What interests me most in your reply is the quiet violence of that final line: “The urge to world does not care.”
It doesn’t. And that is precisely what makes it so tectonically real. Empathy may emerge in the encounter with others worlding, but structure precedes it — and often outlasts it.
The liberal fantasy would have us believe that coherence comes from negotiation. But the deeper order comes from pressure, from configuration, from resonance under constraint.
I've been thinking about this a bit more... Mary Douglas says we think with our institutions. ... This is lost enough, I find the word structure assumes too much.... Structure.
There is no coherence, merely the whiff of stability, with a hint of horror.
I still suspect, I am still biased to feel ... a fear of structure despite my dependence upon it, at least in routine, or expectation, and it is this I negotiate on the threshold of the self into world, yet still I grant structure no praise, I guess I fear that not granting praise is also a negotiation. And one best left alone?
So I've been thinking even more about this. 1) structures do not disappear but can be invaginated as time processes.
2) I been reading 'Battling the gods: atheism in the ancient world’ by Tim Whitmarsh, 2015, Knopf 978-0-307-95833-4, and after our conversation I've been struck by an analogy between the gods of the polis, versus the gods of the philosophers and various types of structuralism, dogmatic or not.
As a neo-Pyrrhonist I will maintain a certain discernment in suspension on the matter.
Thank you for this rich and thought-provoking reflection. I deeply appreciate your careful engagement with Gaspar’s chapter and your openness to exploring the emotional underpinnings of morality. That said, I would like to offer a friendly but fundamental point of divergence.
The view that morality emerges from biologically rooted empathy — shared across individuals and cultures — is, in my reading, a well-intentioned but ultimately ideological construction. It assumes that emotional universals are the foundation of moral codes, when in fact what we observe — both in ethology and cultural history — suggests something quite different: morality is not the result of shared emotions, but of structural codes that regulate inclusion and exclusion.
A few examples may help. As you probably know, lions, rats, and chimpanzees show intense hostility toward outsiders of their own species — especially when those outsiders belong to a different group. Even highly social mammals do not exhibit empathy toward out-group members. Likewise, experiments cited by Amy Chua (in Political Tribes) show how preschool children, arbitrarily divided into teams by t-shirt color (green vs. blue), begin to form in-group biases almost immediately, showing preference and exclusion even in the absence of any meaningful difference.
These examples reveal that empathy, when it exists, is structurally selective, not universal. It is bound to the logic of group boundaries, not to species-wide identification. In this light, the idea of "hardwired empathy" becomes less a scientific insight than a liberal fantasy — one that replaces institutional structure with emotional comfort, and functional codes with affective legitimacy.
I say this not to dismiss the emotional dimension of human life, which is real and complex, but to insist that structural coherence, not emotional spontaneity, is what sustains functional morality — especially in the political domain. If we lose sight of this, we risk falling into the very cognitive blackout that our sentimental ideologies were meant to prevent.
Warm regards,
The Postliberal Cyborg
Yes yes. Elsewhere I talk more about the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who I have been reading over 30 years, I guess I started with the processes you have illustrated so carefully. Sometimes she calls her cultural theorising grid/group, sometimes thought styles. The chapter does mention cultural evolution but these processes are not worked through, and I will have to get hold of the book to check the other writers efforts.
I sometimes criticise more structural efforts to understand ourselves as gnostic but this is more about the fervent belief or dogmatism in a particular structure rather than their interplay.
In this interplay I am more interested in the urge to engaging in worlding one self among others doing the same, which includes competition as well as cooperation. IE society as a lek.
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/reading-mary-douglas-linkpost/
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/figuring-out-the-grounds-beneath-the-world-noyau-lek-and-home/
Also a list of other reactions to these papers on evolution morality. Not yet updated on the self hosted crospostef site with more recent ones as I am travelling...
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/reactions-to-papers-on-evolution~morality/
Dear Meika,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I appreciate your long engagement with Mary Douglas and your openness to the structural perspective I proposed — especially regarding boundary enforcement and the conditionality of empathy.
When I argued that morality is not grounded in shared emotions but in structural codes of inclusion and exclusion, and illustrated this through both ethology and early childhood behavior, I meant to emphasize that empathy is not universal but selectively distributed according to group logic. While Douglas does not theorize empathy per se, her framework — especially her analysis of symbolic classification and group boundaries — helps illuminate how perceptions of legitimacy, purity, or threat are shaped structurally, not emotionally.
You raise a valuable caution about structural dogmatism. My position, however, is not prescriptive but functional: structure as a condition for systemic equilibrium, not as an ideal. Within universalist projects like liberalism or communism, emotional universals often emerge most forcefully when structural coherence begins to fail. These affective appeals aim to preserve legitimacy where institutional grounding erodes. Other regimes, by contrast, tend to fall back on mythic or hierarchical orders without such universals.
Your mention of worlding and the social lek is compelling. It aligns in some ways with what I call tectonic alignment — the idea that coherence emerges not from persuasion but from positional necessity. Perhaps our frameworks differ in emphasis more than in kind.
Thank you also for the generous references to your own work — I look forward to reading them more closely. It’s a rare pleasure to engage across converging structures.
Warm regards,
The Postliberal Cyborg
Yeah, sure, I guess that I guess or feel that we have more input into the structures than we sometimes care to admit.
Especially as we often either assume the alignments of structures and routines in the world, are those we personally prefer (as either personal preferences or cultural constraints). When setting boundaries or internal relations this can be often done without empathic discernment,,, which a universalist empathy booster might assume gives rise to such worlds in the first place.
An urge to world does not require empathy, but it would surely when we met others doing the same, inside or outside the group.
How far can the expanding circle go, how far can it go in overcoming what you have raised?
In any case the urge to world does not care, it does not even care that it is up to us.
Dear Meika,
Thank you for this further resonance.
Yes — the impulse to world need not pass through empathy, nor ask permission. It inscribes itself, often blindly, through alignments we mistake for preference, or confuse with moral legitimacy. As you suggest, these alignments are not necessarily ethical in origin — they are structural necessities interpreted after the fact as choices, traditions, or ideals.
What interests me most in your reply is the quiet violence of that final line: “The urge to world does not care.”
It doesn’t. And that is precisely what makes it so tectonically real. Empathy may emerge in the encounter with others worlding, but structure precedes it — and often outlasts it.
The liberal fantasy would have us believe that coherence comes from negotiation. But the deeper order comes from pressure, from configuration, from resonance under constraint.
That order may carry us — or crush us.
Warm regards from within the faults,
The Postliberal Cyborg
I've been thinking about this a bit more... Mary Douglas says we think with our institutions. ... This is lost enough, I find the word structure assumes too much.... Structure.
There is no coherence, merely the whiff of stability, with a hint of horror.
I still suspect, I am still biased to feel ... a fear of structure despite my dependence upon it, at least in routine, or expectation, and it is this I negotiate on the threshold of the self into world, yet still I grant structure no praise, I guess I fear that not granting praise is also a negotiation. And one best left alone?
So I've been thinking even more about this. 1) structures do not disappear but can be invaginated as time processes.
2) I been reading 'Battling the gods: atheism in the ancient world’ by Tim Whitmarsh, 2015, Knopf 978-0-307-95833-4, and after our conversation I've been struck by an analogy between the gods of the polis, versus the gods of the philosophers and various types of structuralism, dogmatic or not.
As a neo-Pyrrhonist I will maintain a certain discernment in suspension on the matter.