On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  Reflecting on this, it seems clear to me that Wallace had a point in the emphasis that he put on the features that seem to place humanity in a world apart, though he was surely wrong to think of those features as “surplus to evolutionary requirements,” for if any of our attributes is adaptive, rationality surely is. But then, rationality is, in one sense of that difficult expression, “of our essence.” Wallace was therefore pointing to the fact that we human beings, even if we are animals, belong to a kind that does not occupy a place in the scheme of things comparable to that of the other animals. And the philosophical controversy here—a controversy adjacent to that among biologists and evolutionary psychologists concerning the significance of culture—is precisely a controversy about human nature: To what kind do we belong?

  Dawkins sets out to explain goals and rational choices in terms of genetic materials that make no choices. He describes these materials as “selfish” entities, motivated by a reproductive “goal,” but (at least in his less rhetorical moments) he recognizes that genes are not, and cannot be, selfish, since selfishness is a feature of people, to be characterized in terms of their dispositions and their rational projects.23 In a cogent biological theory all such teleological idioms must be replaced with functional explanations.24 And that is what the recourse to game theory and similar devices is supposed to authorize. A player wants to win and therefore adopts a winning strategy: that is a teleological explanation of this behavior. Natural selection tells us that winning strategies will be selected, even when they describe the behavior of genes that want nothing at all. That is a functional explanation, which says nothing about intentions, choices, or goals.

  Functional explanations have a central place in biology.25 The fact that birds have wings is explained by the function of wings, in enabling birds to fly. The process of random mutation at a certain point produces a winged creature: and in the competition for scarce resources, this creature has the decisive advantage over its rivals. Note, however, that this reference to function only amounts to a causal explanation because it is supplemented by the theory of random mutation—a theory that tells us how the existence of a trait is caused by its function. This point bears heavily on the “explanations” of altruism and morality advanced by Axelrod and Maynard Smith. A population genetically averse to cooperation, to parental affection, to self-sacrifice on behalf of children, and to sexual restraint and the control of violence is a population endowed with traits that are dysfunctional relative to reproduction. Hence it will disappear. From this trivial truth, however, we can deduce nothing about the causes of moral conduct or moral thought and nothing about their grounds. It does not follow that morality is the result of natural selection rather than group selection within the species; nor does it follow that morality originates in our biological makeup rather than in the workings of rational thought. In fact nothing follows that would serve either to bypass or to undermine the work of philosophy in exploring the foundations of moral judgment and its place in the life of a rational being.

  It is a trivial truth that dysfunctional attributes disappear; it is a substantial theoretical claim that functional attributes exist because of their function.26 And until the theory is produced, the claim is without intellectual weight. You may think that genetics provides the needed theory: for it implies that altruism is the “evolutionally stable” solution to genetic competition within our species. But that explanation only gives a sufficient condition for “altruism,” and only by redescribing altruism in terms that bypass the higher realms of moral thought. If Kant is right about the categorical imperative, then there is an independent sufficient condition, namely, rationality, that tells us to act on that maxim that we can will as a universal law.

  Moreover, practical reason explains not only altruism, in the minimalist description favored by geneticists, but also the superstructure of moral thought and emotion. It also suggests a theory of the kind to which we belong, and it is a theory at odds with that suggested by the game-theoretic account of genetic self-sacrifice. According to Kant, the kind to which we belong is that of person, and persons are by nature free, self-conscious, rational agents, obedient to reason and bound by the moral law. According to the theory of the selfish gene, the kind to which we belong is that of human animal, and humans are by nature complicated by-products of their DNA. Kant saw his theory as raising the human being “infinitely above all the other beings on earth.”27 But it is also true that his theory allows that nonhuman beings may nevertheless belong to the same kind as us: angels, for instance, and maybe dolphins too. The selfish gene theory would dismiss the suggestion as nonsense.

  In the hands of their popularizers, the biological sciences are used to reduce the human condition to some simpler archetype, on the assumption that what we are is what once we were and that the truth about mankind is contained in our genealogy. The previous wave of pop genetics, which called itself “sociobiology,” came up with deliberately disturbing conclusions, such as this one: “Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate purpose than to keep human genetic material intact.”28 Such conclusions depend upon using the language of common sense while at the same time canceling the presuppositions on which commonsense terms depend for their meaning. This trick can be played in almost any area of human thinking and is never more effective than when it is used to pour scorn on our moral and religious ideas. Ordinary people are in the unfortunate position of believing things that are true but which they cannot defend by any rational argument that will withstand the force of scientific reasoning, however flawed that reasoning may be. Hence, by targeting ordinary beliefs—beliefs that, if backed up at all, are backed up by religious faith and not by scientific argument—scientists score easy points and conceal the weakness of their case.29

  UNDERSTANDING LAUGHTER

  I do not deny that we are animals; nor do I dissent from the theological doctrine that our biological functions are an integral part of our nature as human persons and also the objects of fundamental moral choices.30 But I want to take seriously the suggestion that we must be understood through another order of explanation than that offered by genetics and that we belong to a kind that is not defined by the biological organization of its members. The “selfish gene” theory may be a good account of the origin of the human being: but what a thing is and how it came to be are two different questions, and the answer to the second may not be an answer to the first. It may be as impossible to understand the human person by exploring the evolution of the human animal as it is to discover the significance of a Beethoven symphony by tracing the process of its composition.

  Consider one of those features of people that set them apart from other species: laughter. No other animal laughs. What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter. To be real laughter it would have to be an expression of amusement—laughter at something, founded in a complex pattern of thought. True, there is also “laughter at what ceases to amuse,” as Eliot puts it. But we understand this “hollow” laughter as a deviation from the central case, which is the case of amusement. But what is amusement? No philosopher, it seems to me, has ever quite put a finger on it. Hobbes’s description of laughter as “sudden glory” has a certain magical quality; but “glory” suggests that all laughter is a form of triumph, which is surely far from the truth. Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Freud have attempted to identify the peculiar thought that lies at the heart of laughter: none, I think, with more than partial success.31 Helmuth Plessner has seen laughing and crying as keys to the human condition, features that typify our distinctiveness.32 But his phenomenological language is opaque and leads to no clear analysis of either laughter or tears.

  One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair. This fact about laughter—that it points to a community of sentiment—has been well brought out
by Frank Buckley.33 From that suggestion, however, another follows. Only a being who makes judgments can laugh. Typically we laugh at things that fall short or at witticisms that place our actions side by side with the aspirations that they ridicule. If the laughter of children seems not to conform to that suggestion, it is largely because the judgments of children, like the laughter that springs from them, are embryonic—stages on the way to that full readiness of social assessment that is the basis of adult life. Insofar as children are amused by things, it is because, in their own way, they are comparing those things with the norms that they challenge. Putative cases of amusement in chimpanzees should, it seems to me, be understood in a similar way.34 Creatures coaxed by their human masters to the verge of judgment are on the verge of amusement too. And by getting to the verge they reveal how wide for them is the chasm that human children will cross with a single stride.

  To explain laughter, therefore, we should have to explain the peculiar thought processes involved in our judgments of others; we should have to explain the pleasure that we feel when ideal and reality conflict and also the peculiar social intentionality of this pleasure. Of course, we can make a stab at this kind of explanation, postulating cognitive programs in the human brain and the biological “wetware” in which they are imprinted. But as yet the explanation will be a pure speculation, with little or no input from genetics.

  I envisage evolutionary psychologists offering the following account of laughter. By laughing together at our faults, they might say, we come to accept them, and this makes cooperation with our imperfect neighbors easier, since it neutralizes anger at our shared inadequacies. Hence a community of laughing people has a competitive advantage over a community of the humorless. A moment’s reflection will reveal the emptiness of that explanation. For it assumes what it needs to explain, namely, that laughter promotes cooperation. Admittedly my way of describing laughter suggests that this is so. But it suggests it by quite another route than that presented by biology or the theory of genetics.

  I was describing a thought process, involving concepts such as those of fault and ideal that can have no clear place in evolutionary biology, as we now know it. I was assuming that laughter is an expression of understanding and that this understanding may be shared. And at no point did I assume that the sharing of laughter benefits anybody’s genes in any of the ways that feature in the theory of genetics. Indeed, so far as my account was concerned, laughter might be an entirely redundant by-product of human life. It seems otherwise only because of my account, which is not a scientific account at all but an exercise in what Dilthey called Verstehen—the understanding of human action in terms of its social meaning rather than its biological cause.35

  Suppose a group of zoologists were to come across a species that sat around in groups, pointing and emitting laughter-like sounds. How would they set about explaining this behavior? They would first have to know whether what they observed was real laughter. In other words they would have to know whether these creatures were laughing at something and pointing at something. And this word at does not yield easily to scientific analysis. It is a marker of intentionality, the “mental direction upon an object,” as Brentano described it,36 and can be deciphered only if we are able to interpret the thought processes from which the behavior in question flows. All the work of explanation, therefore, depends upon a prior work of interpretation, the point of which is to settle the question whether these creatures are like us in being amused by things or whether, on the contrary, they are not like us at all, and their laughter-like behavior is something to be explained in another way. If we come to this second conclusion, the apparatus of ethology can indeed be imported into the case: we can begin to ask what function this laughter-like behavior might perform in securing an ecological niche for the genes of those who engage in it. If we come to the first conclusion, then we need to understand these creatures as we understand one another—in terms of the way they conceptualize the world and the values that motivate their response to it.

  I used the phrase “like us,” implying that amusement is one of our characteristics. And the question before us is how we should unpack that phrase. What do we mean when we refer to “creatures like us”? Do we mean to include only humans? Or do we have some wider, or perhaps narrower, category in mind? Homer tells us of the “laughter of the gods,” and Milton of laughter among the angels. Here is the beginning of a profound metaphysical problem. We belong to a natural kind, the kind Homo sapiens sapiens, which is a biological species. But when we talk of creatures like us, it seems that we do not necessarily refer to our species membership.

  One last point about laughter. As I described it laughter seems to have a beneficial effect on human communities: those who laugh together also grow together and win through their laughter a mutual toleration of their all-too-human defects. But not everything that confers a benefit has a function. Entirely redundant behavior—jumping for joy, listening to music, bird-watching, prayer—may yet confer enormous benefits. By calling it redundant I mean that those benefits are the effect of the behavior, not its cause. That is how it is with laughter. There are communities of the humorless in which laughter is perceived as a threat and severely punished. But the humorless community is not for that reason dysfunctional; in itself it is as well equipped for survival as a community of comedians. It is arguable indeed that the humorless Puritanism of the Massachusetts colonists was an important stimulus to their survival strategies during the early years. But the thing that they lacked would nevertheless have been a benefit to them, since laughter is something that rational beings enjoy.

  THE GENEALOGY OF BLAME

  I turn now to another feature of the human condition that divides us from our simian relatives: the feature of responsibility. We hold each other accountable for what we do, and as a result we understand the world in ways that have no parallel in the lives of other species. Our world, unlike the environment of an animal, contains rights, deserts, and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those that have reasons and those that are merely caused, those that stem from a rational subject and those that erupt into the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment, and envy; admiration, commitment, and praise—all of which involve the thought of others as accountable subjects, with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of their future and their past. Only responsible beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them, they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgment. From Plato to Sartre, philosophers have differed radically in their attempts to account for these peculiar features of the human condition: but almost all have agreed in searching for a philosophical rather than a scientific account.

  There is one interesting historical exception to that claim, however, and that is Nietzsche, who, in The Genealogy of Morals, tries to explain the origins of responsibility in a way that anticipates the more recent attempts of geneticists to account for the moral life in terms of survival strategies that benefit our genes. Nietzsche envisages a primeval human society, reduced to near-universal slavery by the “beasts of prey,” as he calls them—namely, the strong, self-affirming, healthy egoists who impose their desires on others by the force of their nature. The master race maintains its position by punishing all deviation on the part of the slaves—just as we punish a disobedient horse. The slaves, too timid and demoralized to rebel, receive this punishment as a retribution. Because they cannot exact revenge, the slaves expend their resentment on themselves, coming to think of their condition as in some way deserved, a just recompense for their inner transgressions. Thus is born the sense of guilt and the idea of sin. From the ressentiment, as he calls it, of the slave, Nietzsche goes on to derive an explanation of the entire theological and moral vision of Christianity.

  According to Nietzsc
he’s genealogy, the master race benefits from the subjection of the slaves—and you can see this as the premise of a protobiological, even protogenetic, explanation of its social strategy. The master race secures its position by a regime of punishment, and in due course the punishment is internalized by the slave to engender ideas of guilt, blame, desert, and justice. But why should the slave understand punishment in these elaborate and moralized terms? Why should the internalization of punishment lead to guilt rather than fear? A horse certainly fears the whip: But when has it felt guilty for provoking it? Why is the original exercise of force seen as a punishment rather than a mere need on the part of the one who inflicts it?

  What, after all, is the distinction between suffering inflicted as a means to securing one’s ends and suffering inflicted as a punishment? Surely the difference lies in the mind of the agent. The trainer thinks that the suffering he inflicts is needed; the one who punishes thinks that it is due. That is due which is deserved, and that is deserved which may be rightly and justly inflicted. In short, punishment is a moral idea, to be unpacked in terms of those concepts of justice, desert, and responsibility that Nietzsche was supposed to be explaining. His genealogy of morals works only because he has read back into the cause all the unexplained features of the effect. In other words, it is not a genealogy at all but a recognition that the human condition, in whatever primitive form you imagine it, is the condition of “creatures like us,” who laugh and cry, praise and blame, reward and punish—that is, who live as responsible beings, accountable for their actions.37

  There are other momentous truths about the human condition that, while often overlooked or downplayed by biologically minded thinkers, occupy a central place in the outlook of ordinary people: for example, there is the fact that we are persons, who regulate our communities through laws ascribing duties and rights. Some philosophers—Aquinas notably but also Locke and Kant—argue that it is “person,” not “human being,” that is the true name of our kind. And this prompts a metaphysical question brought to the fore by Locke and still disputed, which is that of personal identity. What is the relation between “same person” and “same human being” when both are said of Jill? Which description engages with the fundamental kind under which Jill is individuated and reidentified? I mention that question not so as to suggest an answer to it but in order to highlight the difficulties confronting the view that Jill is in some way reducible to the biological processes that explain her.38 Under what conditions do those processes reproduce the person who Jill is?