This is why I am always nattering away about the state here. I need the external state, as a woman, to achieve the class of “citizen,” which will rescue me from my role as “honor plaything” in culture, from the role of “husband's chattel” in the family, and from “second being” in religion.

Then once I am a citizen, I need capitalism – only capitalism values my labor correctly, so the family and civil society realize its worth more to them to educate me and give me access to a profession. Once I am a consumer, capitalism will continue to help me liberate myself in short order. The market is the best thing that ever happened to women. Seriously.

The real problem faced by most Middle Eastern women is the weakness of their external states. If they weren't actually so fragile, they wouldn't need prop themselves up with appeals to religion. Then they would begin to make citizenship demands on women, and the process for women's liberation there would go forward.

We can't rescue these states, so the best we can do is encourage capitalism. Only capitalism is a force disruptive enough to break the most pernicious oppressions, change people's lives, and hopefully creates space for the state to evolve.

In the first point, he admits that different cultures incentivize people to have different character traits, but that each such character trait (e.g. “honesty”) is actually morally neutral.

In the second point, he says that since humans are morally wired the same, people from different societies are not “better” or “worse” than each other (Implicitly, he is saying that “better” or “worse” comes down to a genetic question). Instead a human gets placed into a society that either helps him/her flourish or does not.

He never says that moral dispositions are exogenous to institutions. I read him as admitting that institutions, culture, and character traits all work together in a causal loop.

As Will points out, whether person A is “better” or “worse” than person B is not just a question of genetics. But the common ground here is that both agree that a human starts off “innocent” and then culture works its benign or malign magic, till the character traits are hardened. But actually we can go farther than that and say that some people (maybe even, conceivably, some big groups of co-located people) do have genetic disposition for the “good” traits. And a person with “good” traits is a good person.

Posner doesn't seem to agree that some character traits are good. I think that's a bit silly, but it is true that goodness is context-dependent. To call a trait “good” is a kind of average over all situations.

This is kind of complicated.

Everyday-language-wise I'm not too sure I agree with the last part, but semantics is of course the least interesting aspect.

I wonder if you may be pouncing on Posner's use of “better” which he uses without explanation. Maybe he would agree with you.

Maybe this really is just a semantic discussion (or a matter of political correctness) because we are all willing to say things like “that culture is unhealthy” which is more or less like saying “bad” but not as judgemental.

It's tricky with all our history of imperialism to advocate for a use of words which is prone to the wrong connotations. I want to say “you may be right, but we're not ready to talk that way yet.” And does that mean you are wrong today, if you are right only in the future? Is not pragmatics– what the other person hears — a part of defining a word?

you say “variations in institutions are themselves due in large part to variations in people.” so are you saying you don't think *any* of that variation is genetic? that seems like a seriously hardline stance on nature vs nurture.

Is this written by the same fellow who praises Haidt's work, and the connection between Openness to Experience (with its rather substantial within-culture heritability) and liberal cosmopolitanism?

Genes associated with nonconformism and restlessness are more common among populations founded by recent migrants (those who are more genetically disposed to 'rootless cosmopolitanism' are more likely to leave their native soil):

http://www.pnas.org/content/99/1/10.full
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/ps…

Bones for both the 'nation of immigrants' and 'national biological character' enthusiasts.