On Human Nature Read online

  Are such paradoxes soluble? In the case of persons we certainly hope so, because the concept of identity over time is vital to our interpersonal relations. In holding each other to account we suppose that we can each affirm identity with a past person, take responsibility for that person’s deeds and promises, and also make intentions for the future. Identity across time seems to be fundamental to the concept of the person as we understand it, and indeed all self-attribution presupposes it.22 Yet the person is anchored in the human being, in something like the way that the Tempest is fixed in the specific canvas. And at the same time we can imagine ways in which memory, intention, and accountability flit from body to body or survive the loss of the body entirely, just as we can envisage the survival of the body as a self-maintaining organism even when intention, memory, and all other personal faculties have been erased.

  Should we be worried by this? My answer is no. The possibility of divergence between our two ways of counting people—as human organisms and as persons—does not subvert the practices that have been built on those rival schemes. We conceptualize the world in two contrasting ways, according to whether our intention is to explain it or to understand it as we understand each other. We cannot live without our interpersonal responses, since they are what we are and all our plans and projects depend on them. But the concepts that they employ have no firm place in the science of our behavior and vanish from the biological theory of the human being, just as the concepts required by the understanding of a painting vanish from the science of pictorial canvases. It remains, therefore, to examine just what our life as persons demands of us.

  1Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  2Martin Buber, Ich und Du (1923), English translation, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 1937).

  3Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment.”

  4I have expounded both arguments at greater length in Modern Philosophy (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994; reissued, London: Bloomsbury, 2010), chapters 5, 20, and 28. Hegel’s argument is expanded, adapted, and varied in Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

  5See G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, introduction, part A, chapter 4.

  6Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, part 2, chapter 1.

  7I have adapted the argument of Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 44–45. See the many online discussions of “the experience machine.” For Joseph Butler, see his Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London, 1729), Sermons 1 and 9.

  8See the discussion in Thomas Nagel, “Sexual Perversion,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 39–52.

  9Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

  10Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  11See the imaginative argument in J. J. Valberg, Dream, Death, and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  12G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957).

  13See Brie Gertler’s entry “Self-Knowledge” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for an up-to-date (2015) survey: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge/.

  14There is a third possibility, namely, weakness of will, topic of a debate that I am here avoiding. See Donald Davidson, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 21–42. When I express an intention to do x but do not do it, this cannot be because I made a mistake about my own intentions. It is for this reason that weakness of will is a philosophical problem: Exactly what goes wrong when it happens?

  15J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  16P.M.S. Hacker, Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (London: Wiley and Sons, 2007).

  17Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  18See, for example, the discussions of cultural fetishism in Theodor Adorno’s writings, notably “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938), reprinted widely, e.g., in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), pp. 270–299.

  19Boethius, Liber de Persona et Duabus Naturis, chapter 3; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1, q. 19.

  20Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963).

  21See the discussion of the identity conditions for works of art in Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

  22This has been denied by Derek Parfit, in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Parfit’s approach is rebutted by David Wiggins, in Sameness and Substance Renewed.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MORAL LIFE

  Persons are moral beings, conscious of right and wrong, who judge their fellows and who are judged in their turn. They are also individuals, and any account of the moral life must begin from the apparent tension that exists between our nature as free individuals and our membership of the communities on which our fulfillment depends.

  It is sometimes said that the concept of the free individual is a recent invention, a by-product of cultural transformations that might not have occurred and which indeed have not occurred in every part of the world. Jacob Burckhardt argued the point in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the book that founded the discipline of art history as it has been taught in our universities and which fed into the theory of the Zeitgeist, inherited from Hegel’s philosophy of history.1 There is truth in Burckhardt’s theory, which describes a culture in which individuals were, perhaps for the first time in Christian civilization, defining their purposes in terms of individual achievement rather than social norms. However, there is also an element of exaggeration. If what I have written in the first two chapters is at all plausible, the habit of self-definition as an individual is part of the human condition itself.

  No doubt, in certain circumstances, people come to put a greater emphasis on what distinguishes them from their neighbors than on what they share; no doubt the idea of human life as a single narrative, to be understood as whole in itself, comes to the fore in some epochs and not in others; no doubt the art of some cultures celebrates individuals and their way of “standing out” from the community, while the art of other cultures looks on this posture with indifference or hostility. But in all cases we must distinguish “individualism”—the emphasis on individuals as the creators of their life and its value—from deep individuality—a metaphysical condition that, as persons, we share, whether or not we are also individualists.

  DEEP INDIVIDUALITY

  We distinguish stuffs from things. Water is a stuff; so too is gold. A ring made of gold is a thing; but it is, as it were, only accidentally so—it could be melted down to become a link in a chain, or a statuette, or just a lump of gold. Its essence lies in the stuff from which it is composed, and its being this thing rather than that is simply an accident of its history. Other items in our world are things essentially: the paradigm being the animals. My horse Desmond is a particular horse; although he is composed of various stuffs—water, flesh, blood—he is essentially this thing, and on ceasing to be this thing he ceases to be. Desmond will one day vanish from the scheme of things. He is identical with himself through time, the enduring substrate of his many changes. And for this reason he would have been described, by Boethius or Aquinas, as an individual substance. Desmond is more of an individual than a stone, since if you divide a stone in two, you still have the same components of the universe—only the arrangement has changed: two bits of stone, rather than one bit. But if you divide Desmond in two, you don’t just replace one bit of horse wit
h two bits. You lose the horse. The world after the division is ontologically the poorer, since Desmond the horse has gone.

  At the same time, however, Desmond’s individuality is, compared with mine, a shallow thing. I am not merely an individual animal, in the way that Desmond is. I identify myself as an individual across time. I take responsibility for my past and make promises for the future: I lay claim to the world as a sphere of my own agency. And my doing this is an expression of the deep individuality that is part of the human condition—which is the condition of a creature that can say “I.” This deep individuality is expressed as much in the laws of Hammurabi as in the sonnets of Petrarch, can be read as clearly on an Attic tomb inscription as on a Victorian gravestone, and is a constant of the human condition—the premise of all our hopes and fears and the thing that defines our happiness.

  This does not mean that we are unattached atoms, striving for our satisfactions without regard for others. Clearly, if the argument of the last chapter is right, this deep individuality is itself a social condition, something that comes about only because individuals are in binding relationships, acknowledging responsibilities, and adopting the second-person standpoint to others as an integral part of adopting the first-person standpoint to themselves. Clearly, therefore, we have the unavoidable question of how to live with others and how to mold our own emotions and habits so as to enjoy their cooperation.

  PRAISE, BLAME, AND FORGIVENESS

  We do not, when people stand in the way of our appetites, simply sweep them aside, lay hold of the prize, and ignore all rival claims to it. Should we behave in that way, then we will be greeted by hostility and resentment and threatened with punishment. The habit of blaming people arises as a natural offshoot of our competitiveness, and we respond to blame with an excuse, an apology, or an act of repentance. If none of those are forthcoming, the social conditions change. The person who has given offense is now understood in another way, as at war with his or her neighbors. The moral dialogue gives way to a direct confrontation of wills. In the animal kingdom this direct confrontation is the norm, as when rivals dispute over territory or over mates: the conflict continues until the weaker capitulates and gives a sign of defeat.

  However, if our first response to injury is not violence but blame, the other is given the opportunity to make amends. Violence is forestalled or postponed, and a process can then begin—the process that is well described in the Roman Catholic theology of repentance—whereby guilty parties are first marginalized and then, through atonement and contrition, reincluded, their fault duly forgiven. It is obvious that communities that have the ability to resolve their conflicts in this way have a competitive advantage over those whose only response to injury is violence. Hence we have here the beginnings of another “adaptation” story of the moral life—though again a story that leaves out the intentionality of our moral responses and the kind of reasoning on which they depend.

  Animal communities also have ways of avoiding and overcoming conflict, which to a certain measure mimic the process I have just described. The habit of presenting threats—the pinned-back ears of the horse, the snarl of the dog—prevents violence by warning its potential target. The habit of capitulation rather than fighting to the end over territory and mates likewise has a life-preserving and therefore gene-preserving function. The very fact, made central by Konrad Lorenz, that aggression is by and large toward conspecifics, whose conduct matters in a way that the conduct of other species does not, mimics the forms of human discipline.2 And many near equivalents of punishment, appeasement, and reconciliation have been observed in our relatives among the apes.3

  But while these forms of behavior are adaptations (whether of the group or the gene is not important for our purposes), they do not exhibit the kind of reasoning that is exhibited by the moral emotions. When you rightly accuse me of injuring you, I may look for excuses, and there is an elaborate dialogue here through which we express our intuitions concerning the avoidable and the unavoidable.4 These intuitions are not arbitrary but are based upon a kind of calculus that assesses the extent to which the fault issued from the will of the culprit—the extent to which it was the natural result of his or her desires, intentions, and plans, whether or not it was also directly intended. And if I have no excuse, my response to your accusation will be either to break off relations (which is not a response but an avoidance) or to work for your forgiveness.

  Forgiveness cannot be offered arbitrarily and to all comers—so offered it becomes a kind of indifference, a refusal to recognize the distinction between right and wrong. Forgiveness is only sincerely offered by a person who is aware of having been wronged, to another who is aware of having committed a wrong. If the person who has injured you makes no effort to obtain forgiveness and merely laughs at your first moves toward offering it, the impulse to forgive is frozen.5 If, however, the person apologizes, and if the contrition is proportionate to the offense, a process begins that might have forgiveness as its outcome. The idea of proportionality is important. The person who runs over your child and who then says, “Frightfully sorry,” before driving off has not earned your forgiveness. People who take on the full burden of contrition in a case like this must not only try to make amends but also show, through their distress, a full consciousness of the extent to which they have wronged the other, so that their restoration as members of the community must depend on the other’s goodwill.

  We all have strong intuitions in these matters, and people incapable of the reasoning involved would be handicapped in their social relations, perhaps even incapable of entering fully into the life of society. It is true that procedures for assigning responsibility have differed in the many legal systems of which we retain a record.6 Nevertheless the systems share an emphasis on the will of the perpetrator and the excuses that he or she can offer. People are seldom held liable for a result that they did nothing to cause—for example, an injury to another against whom they were pushed against their will. And all legal systems have a developed account of liability and of the factors that enhance and diminish it.

  POLLUTION AND TABOO

  There is an interesting exception to this rule, however, vividly apparent in Greek tragedy. Here the offense is one that the victim cannot avoid, since the gods themselves impose it. It is nevertheless the object of shame on the part of the one who commits it. The fault of Oedipus shows him to be an intruder in the community. He is polluted and therefore a fit object of sacrifice. He bears the burden from which the citizens of Thebes can be released when he is cast out from the city and the norms of moral order are restored. He is shamed before the Thebans and accepts his punishment as rightly inflicted, even inflicts it himself, despite the fact that, to our modern understanding, the punishment is not in any clear sense deserved. Studying such cases, Bernard Williams argues that they convey another conception of liability than the one that weighs with us today.7 And this might seem to cast doubt upon the thought that there is a natural form of reasoning that guides our allocation of responsibility and our reactions of praise and blame.

  When considering Greek tragedy we observe two striking facts: first, that the tragic fault is seen as a pollution, by which others might be contaminated should it not be purged or purified; second, that the situations portrayed arouse the deepest feelings in us, without our really knowing why. Those facts did not escape the notice of Freud, of course, and he gave a contentious explanation of them. In the Greek tragedy we witness the residue of an older form of moral thinking, an archaeological stratum beneath the realm of personal choice. This older form of thinking, which anthropologists, following Mary Douglas, have called the “ethic of pollution and taboo,” sees moral faults as arising as much by contagion as by deed. It emphasizes purity and purification in sexual and familial relations; and it punishes people not by holding them liable for their actions and opening a path to contrition and forgiveness but by casting them out from the community and readmitting them only if some act of purification has changed thei
r status. One might say that the tragic theater takes us into the hunter-gatherer cave, where things long hidden in darkness are briefly revealed, as though by a flash of lightning. The play is an exorcism, arousing fearful spirits, making them briefly visible, and then expelling them in a mystic act of purification. This revisiting of ancient terrors is a part of overcoming them, and it has its equivalent in our own tragic art, as well as our religious rituals.

  It is of course reasonable to suppose, with Williams, that our interpersonal morality, in which the will of the individual takes center stage, is simply one possible manifestation of the moral sense. We must be cautious when it comes to generalizing from this instance to claims about other places and times. Nevertheless, even if we admit a measure of historical variation in the way people stand judged before their fellows, the habit of imputing faults, offering excuses, and arguing for the rightness or wrongness of a penalty is universally to be observed, and the difference between an ethic of pollution and taboo and an ethic of accountability is more a matter of emphasis than an absolute divide. In the everyday order of a moral community, assignments of responsibility match diagnoses of the will, the will being understood as the aspect of our activity that issues from the self and which therefore responds to reason. Only when fate or the gods intervene is that order disturbed.

  THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL

  AND THE COMMON LAW

  In a modern individualistic community, disputes are not settled by dictatorship from some point outside them, and cooperation rather than command is the first principle of collective action. This may not have been the historical norm in human communities, but it is the situation to which our own social impulses direct us, and its emergence as a legally recognized standard of legitimacy is one of the many treasured legacies of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment idea of the sovereign individual, who confers legitimacy on government by his or her own consent to it, is a generalization of our everyday practice as moral beings. Even under a despotic government, people try to settle their disputes by agreement, upholding promises, making bargains, and imposing penalties on those who default. The bargains may be dangerous, and the law may be inflexible in upholding them, as in The Merchant of Venice. But as that play illustrates in so many ways, it is natural to human beings, whatever their political circumstances, to establish their relations by consent and to respect the sovereignty of the individual as the means for achieving this.