Yes, it’s much easier to get the outcome you want when you exclude the data that doesn’t fit. It’s especially convenient when you are creating a more-or-less-universal theory on the basis of a single observation.

Aztec sacrifice included children (their own, not prisoners of war), which at least from a biological standpoint is highly inefficient. Furthermore, while he claims the victims where “overwhelming [sic]… captured enemy soldiers and criminals,” the very statement indicates that exceptions exist, and those exceptions do in fact bear on the correctness of his hypothesis, yet he dismisses them. Claiming the practice to be “little more than capital punishment” again fails to address the economic inefficiencies involved — feeding an army that does little more than capture victims, sacrificing slaves who perform valuable labor, etc. Many human sacrifices have been taken from otherwise ordinary members of the society engaging in the practice, as his own citations suggest, yet he completely ignores this fact in developing his theory.

In other words, it is quite unclear that Leeson’s citations regarding human sacrifice show that human sacrifices outside the narrow (one might even say exceptional) circumstances he has chosen to address are economically irrelevant or else economically efficient and thus able to be ignored. His claim, remember, hinges upon his (possibly irrational) belief that all human behavior can be explained by economically rational choices, and yet he clearly appears to be dismissing any contrary evidence.

“In contrast, human sacri…ce as, for instance, the Aztecs famously practiced it is neither surprising nor mysterious. The Aztec’s sacri…cial victims were overwhelming one of two sorts: captured enemy soldiers and criminals. Here human sacri…ce was little more than capital punishment. This paper exclusively considers the puzzling practice of immolating innocent persons purchased only for that purpose.”

Furthermore, his description of the Kond society says that every community engaged in sacrifices at about the same time, yet his theory does not allow for that. Based on his theory, it would be irrational for all communities to perform sacrifices, since those communities with the most incentive to use war to increase their wealth would instead preemptively reduce their wealth when they are already, rationally speaking, an unattractive and dangerous target that will refuse to pay extortion and fight instead. It is also the case that these communities were warring with each other, in spite of this supposedly powerful, war-preventing institution of human sacrifice, so it’s not entirely clear that even his example, presumably the best he could locate, sufficiently supports his thesis.

He may be troubled by the existence of “puzzling human behaviors and practices are beyond the power of economics to illuminate,” but I am not. Economics doesn’t have to be a metanarrative.

For the god to truly be appeased, and not insulted, by the sacrifice, the victim often had to be considered impressive in some way–or uniquely valuable. In deep antiquity the sacrifice would usually be a royal personage–a king–who would live a privileged life until such a time as a general crisis demanded he hand himself over as a divine sacrifice to heal the greater community. This is the background of the Oedipus story, as well as (perhaps) Saul’s suicide. The practice went through mutations over time, whereby substitutes were found for the royal sacrifice; but these were still seen as being a proxy for something or someone of “value.” I suppose with the Aztecs, the sheer scale of slaughter was meant to signal to the god that the price of appeasement was a high one.

All of this may or may not have had more mundane sociological effects on ancient societies; but to see it as a rational (i.e. in some measure intentional) way of protecting property rights (an idea which would be truly foreign to most pagan cultures), seems to me very unlikely. What is telling to me, and more than a little provocative, is the fact that someone is trying to “rehabilitate” human sacrifice as an instrumental good. I guess it’s next on the list of behaviors receiving opprobrium in Biblical morality that we now need to re-think and approach wthout our moldy old biases.

And we must be ready for it, since we already practice it vicariously in so many ways today: from the scapegoats we find for a poor economy, to the glee with which we regard the endless rise-and-fall cycles of celebrity “heroes.”

Back to the subject at hand: It occurs to me that Nathan’s rebuke of King David on the matter of Uriah and Bathsheba might show how the idea of “property rights” was used early on to curtail and abolish human sacrifice.

But the vestiges of barbarism are ubiquitous. Take faculty meetings, for example.