Naturalism as the source of ethics in the form of evolutionary conservatism

Burke said that state power on one side needs to be balanced with the self controlled individual on the other side. But how we define the ethics of the state and the ethics of the individual becomes important in the balancing.

Like most conservatives Babbitt ruled out naturalism as the source of ethics, but E.O. Wilson said regarding the biological origin of social behavior, “Human behavior . .is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function...The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution.” I would add to Wilson's ultimate function of morality the highest goal of material evolution to ascending levels of Godhood.

Regarding the origin of altruism, or being for others, which is so vital in all religions, Wilson said, "Within groups, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals...Hereditary altruists form groups so cooperative and well-organized as to out-compete non-altruists groups.”

Human nature has been affirmed throughout human history to this day as being universally kin-centered, gender defined, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, among other conservative things, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection followed by individual selection. This has to be taken into account when we try to balance the ethics of states and individuals. 

When real kin and ethnic-centered human nature is allowed to be what it is, it naturally leads to regionalism, localism, eventually ethnostates, general conservative values, and finally an ethnopluralism of ethnostates. For example, in the U. S. this could be accomplished not by way of radical revolution but through adapting---not overturning---the U.S. constitutional separation of powers and states, and then protecting the ethnostates from marauding imperialists, supremacists, and global money grubbers, by a defensive federalism.

So naturalism as the source of ethics in the form of evolutionary conservatism is the best way, the most rational and instinctive way, to balance the ethics of the state and the ethics of the individual, along with the sacred goal of material evolution to ascending levels of Godhood as the ultimate function of morality.