12 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)simultaneously hostile to outsiders. Konrad Lorenz, the noted Austrian
ethologist, suggested that this moral dualism represents two sides of the
same biological coin. He contended that animals which are noted for their
mutual loyalty within their small groups are especially aggressive toward
outsiders. “Th e proverbially most aggressive of all animals,” he maintained,
“Dante’s bestia senza pace [i.e., the wolf] is the most faithful of friends.” In
a similar vein, the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has hypothe-
sized that parochial altruism is an innate biological feature of Homo sapi-
ens. “Our instincts,” he suggests, “still desire the tiny, united band- networks
that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of
history”— with the result that the human creature is, by nature, “an in-
tensely tribal animal” with a “hardwired propensity to downgrade other-
group members.”
Some biologists have suggested a ge ne tic explanation for altruistic behavior
toward relatives. Claims have even been made of a specifi c biochemical basis
for parochial altruism: a neuropeptide called oxytocin, which is produced in
the human brain and operates as both a neurotransmitter and a hormone.
Th is “love hormone” (as it has sometimes been dubbed) is thought to have
originally been associated with mother- infant bonding and later with various
other prosocial features such as trust and empathy— but only within a lim-
ited social range. Oxy tocin, it has been asserted, also “contributes to the devel-
opment of intergroup bias and preferential treatment of in- group over out-
group members.” It thereby “paves the way for... confl ict and violence.”
If it is true that sentiments of justice are, to a large extent, reserved for
those who are near and denied to those from afar, we need not (necessarily)
despair. Th ere are at least two ways in which the constraints of parochial al-
truism can be overcome. One is by taking an increasingly expansive view of
the social boundaries of the in- group. It is possible that the notions of “near-
ness” or “group” might be a good deal more elastic than is commonly sup-
posed. Even in a fragmented and diverse world, it is nonetheless the case that,
in various modest- size regions, there can be a signifi cant degree of relative
cultural similarity. Languages, for example, are sometimes shared across fairly
large areas, and religions too. Neighboring peoples might even have a sense
of some kind of common ancestry in the more or less distant past.
Th e other strategy for dealing with parochial altruism is a more radical
one: to suppress it by means of heroic intellectual endeavor. Even if our bio-