As Arnhart acknowledges, the major intellectual challenge of the 20th century is to justify moral judgments rationally and to provide moral authority for political action when individuals meet as moral strangers who do not share common moral assumptions. This is the task of a secular morality that aspires to transcend particular religious or ideological commitments. The arguments for nihilism suggest that such a task cannot be successfully completed. There are three ways one might attempt to escape the threat of nihilism. First, one might endeavor to show that the Aristotelian project to read human moral goals and the lineaments of proper political structure from the characteristics of human biology can be successful, despite the skepticism of authors who have articulated the naturalistic fallacy: from what is the case, one cannot conclude what ought to be the case. A neo-Aristotelian approach would need to derive from the biological nature of humans a proper code for human conduct and morally justified guidelines for human political action. Second, one might attempt to discover, as Kant had hoped, content in the very nature of reason. Here the “nature” at stake is not an external biological nature, but the characteristics of reason or reasoning itself. A contemporary example of the Kantian undertaking is found in Rawls' Theory of Justice (1971). The Aristotelian and Kantian traditions provide two quite different senses of “natural,” from which Western thinkers have attempted (in different ways) to establish the content of natural law and to justify moral and political rules.

There is a happy irony in the fact that an essay on aggression—whether political or otherwise, violent or otherwise, and whether physical or verbal—should elicit comments that are in these ways not at all aggressive. In this rather scientific polylogue, you as reader and I as author are thus spared the need and even the temptation to respond with defensive verbal aggression.

As our title indicates, by almost every measure, 1986 was a good year for biopolitics. First, the total number of items which appeared, 116, set an all-time record (the previous high was 92 in 1985). Second, there continued to be an influx of new entrants, with 22 first-time contributors emerging from our literature search. Third, 15 percent of the items were written by non-American political scientists, up from last year's 10 percent and an indication, we believe, of the healthy growth in international interest. Fourth, and perhaps best of all, five biopolitical dissertations-in-progress, or actually completed, were listed in the annual PS compilation, a nice upturn from 1984's low.

Being neither a biologist nor an expert on biopolitics, it is with considerable reluctance that I venture into the vast and intimidating domain mapped out in Arnhart's learned article. My own knowledge of the field is limited to what an interested observer is likely to have absorbed, admittedly in more or less random fashion, by reading the popular journals and engaging in occasional debate with scientists, some of them sociobiologists. Here as elsewhere, one cannot help being struck by the enormous difficulties that the growth of scientific specialization and the revelation of hitherto unsuspected links between disciplines once thought to be relatively independent of each other have created, not only for the amateur but for scientists themselves. It says something about our present situation that many of the terms employed as a matter of course by Arnhart and others-sociobiology, bioethics, biopolitics, biomedics, and the like-are not to be found in any dictionary that is more than ten or fifteen years old.

Science-based biotechnology is now introducing fundamental changes in the status of life on earth which have major implications for human society, yet the social sciences are largely failing to address these changes. Biotechnology offers immense opportunities for advancing the quality of human life, holding promise for overcoming numerous and heretofore intractable causes of suffering and impoverishment. Moreover, it may enable mankind to enjoy the benefits of science without degradation of the biosphere. But to obtain these advantages biotechnology must be guided by wise and timely public policies. Even the most beneficent innovation may create problems that, unless anticipated and prevented, may offset or cancel out social gains.

“The philosophic attitude is a resolute attempt to enlarge the understanding of the scope of application of every notion which enters into our current thought” (Whitehead, 1938:233-34). There is probably no parallel in the history of thought either to Aristotle's breadth of scholarly attainment or to the historical reach of his intellectual influence. Sociobiologists, therefore, can only be enthusiastic about any attempt, such as Arnhart's, to bring such resources to bear on their still young endeavors.

In a development parallel to the emergence of the biobehavioral orientation in political science, the ethology of law has become a prominent endeavor in the past ten years. That it is indeed a biobehavioral approach is a fact that received a cogent reminder at the Fifth International Conference on Human Ethology in Tutzing, West Germany, in 1986. In a major address at the conference, Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt defined human ethology as the biology of human behavior. Correspondingly, Wolfgang Fikentscher and Hagen Hof, in their respective presentations at the session on the ethology of law at the conference, emphasized that law is a particular form of human behavior, making it clear that the biobehavioral context for the study of law is imperative.

I strongly agree with what I take to be Arnhart's basic claims: that Aristotle's teleological biology is plausible in the light of what we now think about good scientific practice, and that it provides a kind of basis or vocabulary for moral and practical deliberation that is lacking in nonteleological or reductionist biology. Arnhart's defense of these claims is important both because he suggests a more expansive notion of what counts as biological science and because he in effect challenges Macintyre's (1981) claim that Aristotle's biology is “metaphysical” and so cannot serve as a basis for theorizing about moral and political matters. Arnhart makes his case well, and I was especially instructed by his discussion of Sacks' work as an example of a teleological vocabulary applied to moral and psychiatric questions.

Arnhart's “Aristotle's Biopolitics: A Defense of Biological Teleology against Biological Nihilism” is both a valuable and yet at the same time a problematic study. Its value for political science lies in Arnhart's reminder that for many of the most important thinkers in the history of Western political thought their efforts to discover and articulate the principles of a political order necessarily presupposed a specific understanding of the order of nature itself. Given this, the fundamental political challenge of the modern scientific and industrial revolutions not only includes the new instruments and techniques of organization and manipulation made possible by the discoveries of modern science, but also those cultural and intellectual assumptions which create that very environment within which such instruments and techniques first became possible. In illustrating this intimate relationship between modern natural science and modern political science, Grant (1976:124) has written: “What calls out for recognition here is that the same apprehension of what it is to be ‘reasonable’ leads men to build computers and to conceive the universal and homogenous society as the highest political goal. The ways such machines can be used must be at one with certain conceptions of political purposes because the same kind of ‘reasoning’ made the machines and formulated the purposes. To put the matter extremely simply, the modern physical sciences and the modern political sciences have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we can only begin to understand that interpenetration in terms of some common source from which both forms of science found their sustenance.”

“In the theatre,” Giuseppe Verdi once explained, “long is synonymous with boring. And boring is the worst of all styles.” Those who read scholarly journals must be more patient than opera audiences, and this surely must be true of those who have just read my long article and the nine commentaries. I will not test the limits of that patience, however, by responding at length to all the comments. I am grateful to all the commentators for their instructive remarks, which I will be pondering for a long time. But now I can only answer briefly some of the most prominent objections.

If this study were designed merely to prove that part of the explanation for despotism and differential reproduction exists in the genetic propensity of men to compete, to use power to serve their own interests, and to express that interest by seeking a variety of sexual partners, there would be little need for comment. Such a book could have been written in half the pages used. An inordinate amount of space, however, is used by the author in (1) rejecting any basis except biology to explain despotism; (2) castigating any possible use of culture in explaining differentials in male reproduction; (3) apologizing for her findings that evolution has led to inequality in both production and reproduction, a condition the author deplores; and (4) insisting that equality can be effected if humans simply decide to satisfy genetic propensities differently (which surely is a cultural matter since only humans can perceive the concept of evolution and attempt to change society's use of it).