On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  TWO CRITICISMS

  The first criticism is that the contractarian position fails to take our situation as organisms seriously. We are embodied beings, and our relations are mediated by our bodily presence. All of our most important emotions are bound up with this: erotic love, the love of children and parents, the attachment to home, the fear of death and suffering, the sympathy for others in their pain or fear—none of these things would make sense if it were not for our situation as organisms. The love of beauty, too, has its roots in our embodied life and in the here and now of our joys. If we were disembodied rational agents—“noumenal selves” of the kind that would be at home in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends—then our moral burdens would be lightly worn and would amount only to the side constraints required to reconcile the freedom of each of us with the equal freedom of our neighbors. But we are embodied beings, who are drawn to each other as such, trapped into erotic and familial emotions that create radical distinctions, unequal claims, fatal attachments, and territorial needs, and much of moral life is concerned with the negotiation of these dark regions of the psyche.

  The second criticism is that our obligations are not and cannot be reduced to those that guarantee our mutual freedom. Noumenal selves come into a world unencumbered by ties and attachments for the very reason that they do not come into the world at all. They are without a situation, except insofar as they themselves create one, through their free activity among others who are in the same unanchored state. For us humans, who enter a world marked by the joys and sufferings of those who are making room for us, who enjoy protection in our early years and opportunities in our maturity, the field of obligation is wider than the field of choice. We are bound by ties that we never chose, and our world contains values and challenges that intrude from beyond the comfortable arena of our agreements. In the attempt to encompass these values and challenges, human beings have developed concepts that have little or no place in liberal theories of the social contract—concepts of the sacred and the sublime, of evil and redemption, that suggest a completely different orientation to the world than that assumed by modern moral philosophy.

  The most important challenge facing my account of the moral life is to answer those two objections. I must show how the embodied and situated nature of the human agent can be acknowledged in our moral thinking, how unchosen obligations are shaped and justified, and how the experiences of evil and the sacred contribute to our overall consciousness of what matters. In chapter 3 I remarked on the situations explored in Greek tragedy, which seem to present a rival concept of guilt and liability to that emerging from modern theories of the person. The ethic of pollution and taboo, or “shame and necessity,” which sees evil as a contamination and associates evil at every point with our bodily condition, seems better placed to deal with sexual transgression, with our duties toward the dead and the unborn, and with the experiences of the sacred, the sacrificial, and the desecrated that stir such powerful currents of emotion in us all. But that ethic is without any clear philosophical foundation and goes radically against my attempt to found morality in interpersonal relations.

  SEXUAL MORALITY

  In his pioneering study Sexual Ethics, first published in 1930, Aurel Kolnai argued that sexual morality can be derived neither from a study of costs and benefits, in the consequentialist manner, nor from the Kantian categorical imperative, with its emphasis on the self and the will.3 The core concept in any sexual ethic worth the name, Kolnai believed, is that of dirt or defilement (das Schmutzig). Kolnai did not express the matter in the anthropological terms that I have used. Nevertheless, he remained convinced that this feeling of defilement is an objective indicator of what is at stake in sexual desire and its expression. And it was, for Kolnai, the premise in an argument designed to vindicate the Roman Catholic view of chastity, priesthood, and marriage.

  Insofar as sexual morality is discussed by modern moral philosophers, the idea of defilement seems to have no clear place. The task of philosophy is often seen as one of “freeing up” the sexual impulse for guilt-free enjoyment, by debunking the superstitions that have been heaped across the path of our pleasures.4 The crucial matter, as in all contractarian approaches, is that of consent—informed consent between the partners being regarded as the necessary (and for many thinkers the sufficient) condition for legitimate sexual relations. If consensual sex is ever condemned on this view, it is because the consent of one party has been obtained by manipulation or by the abuse of power, as between teacher and pupil or doctor and patient. The suggestions that certain partners are forbidden (because they are of the wrong sex or in the wrong organic relation or wrongly situated in the social world), that sex within marriage is morally of a different kind than sex outside marriage, or that there are real temptations that should be resisted, even when the temptation is mutual—all such suggestions seem groundless, mere superstitions hanging over from an unenlightened age.

  That said, it is surely true that those who deny themselves concepts of defilement and desecration cannot begin to encompass the feelings of a woman who is a victim of rape. Forced against her will to experience her sex as a bodily function rather than a gift of herself, she feels assaulted and polluted in her very being. And how the victim perceives the act is internally connected to what the act is. The sense of pollution and desecration is not an illusion on the victim’s part: it is an accurate perception of what has been done to her, and deliberately done. If we are to follow the account of sexual interest and sexual pleasure purveyed by the standard literature, however, this perception must appear entirely irrational, and rape victims who make a fuss must be compared with people who try to sue those who bump into them in the street. (By standard literature I mean the well-known current of thinking that received such a sudden inflation with the Kinsey Report, the philosophy behind which is epitomized in the encyclopedia by Alan Soble entitled Sex from Plato to Paglia.)

  Likewise with incest. You can feel sympathy toward Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre because they recognize their consanguinity only in a state of mutual arousal—and then nobly endorse it as an act of defiance. They had not shared a home, and their siblinghood dawns on them in the course of their desire for each other. Such exceptional cases apart, incest gives rise to profound qualms in almost all of us. Freud gave an explanation of this, arguing that the revulsion against incest is a defense against a deep desire to do it. Evolutionary psychology gives another and conflicting explanation—namely, that this revulsion is an adaptation. Genes that do not produce it in their human avatars have all died out. But neither Freud nor evolutionary psychology puts us in touch with the moral heart of the matter—which is the experience of revulsion itself, the experience that we conceptualize in the way I have suggested, through notions of pollution and desecration. Those conceptions explain why Jocasta hanged herself and why Oedipus stabbed out his eyes. In comparison neither Freud nor evolutionary psychology makes sense of what is—from their rival points of view—highly eccentric behavior.

  Modern philosophy agrees that personhood is a central moral category—maybe the qualification for entry into the realm of moral subjects. And many philosophers acknowledge that personhood is a relational idea: you are a person to the extent that you can participate in the network of interpersonal relationships that I described in the second chapter. To be a person, therefore, you must have the capacities that make those relationships possible. These include self-awareness, accountability, and practical reason. Persons fall under the scope of Kant’s moral law: they must respect each other as persons. In other words, they should grant to each other a sphere of sovereignty. Within your sphere of sovereignty what is done, and what happens to you, insofar as it depends on human choices, depends on choices of yours. As I argued in chapter 3, this can be guaranteed only if people are shielded from each other by a wall of rights and protected from aggression by a concept of desert. Without rights and deserts individuals are not sovereigns but subjects. These rights and deserts are inherent in
the condition of personhood and not derived from any convention or agreement. In other words they are “natural.”

  But none of that explains the revulsion against rape. The concept of a natural right is too formal a notion: it tells us that a person has a right not to be raped, since rape casts aside consent, rides over the will, and treats the other person as a means to pleasure. All bad, of course. But the same offense is committed by the one who hugs a person against his or her will or who, unknown to another person and in a state of excitement, watches that person undress. Without the element of pollution we have not identified the real measure of the crime.

  This does not mean that the morality of interpersonal respect is irrelevant. On the contrary, it accounts for many of our moral intuitions. But the abstract liberal concept of persons as centers of free choice, whose will is sovereign and whose rights determine our duties toward them, delivers only a part of moral thinking. Persons can be polluted, desecrated, defiled. If we don’t see this, then not only will traditional sexual morality appear opaque to us and inexplicable; we will not be able to develop any alternative sexual morality more suitable (as we might suppose) to the age in which we live.

  DESIRE AND POLLUTION

  Many features of our present situation provide incidental confirmation of the point. For instance, there is the growing feeling of disgust toward pedophilia. What explains this? Just that the child has not yet reached the “age of consent”? Is child abuse like serving alcohol to a minor? And is that the only reason why we condemn child pornography or wish to keep pornography out of the reach of children (not to speak, though it is now pointless to speak, of everyone else)? Or consider the new sexual crimes, committed often on a campus, where young people believe for whatever reason that consent is what it is all about, the necessary and sufficient condition for “good sex.” Sometimes the result is “bad sex”—that sudden sense of violation that ensues when a person recognizes, too late, that consent is after all not what it is all about. The result is a charge of “date rape,” in itself an unjust assault on the seducer but a last-ditch attempt to make sense of the accuser’s own moral feelings. The mess in which many young people find themselves today is proof, it seems to me, that the desacralized morality of the liberal consensus is inadequate to deal with our sexual emotions.

  The importance of the idea of pollution can already be seen from the phenomenon of sexual arousal. This is not a state of the body, even though it involves certain bodily changes. It is an awakening of one person to another and a form of communication, in which I-thoughts and you-thoughts are fundamental to the intentionality of what is felt. People look at each other, as animals do. But they also look into each other and do this in particular when mutually aroused. The look of desire is like a summons, a call to the other self to show itself in the eyes, to weave its own freedom and selfhood into the beam that explores the other. In his incomparable description of the phenomenology of desire Sartre singles out this experience as distinctive of desire and a sign of its metaphysical character—of the fact that it is addressed to the other as a free subject, not as an object.5 For Sartre the look of desire (le regard) summons the freedom of the other, and he links this feature to the caress of desire, so unlike the caress of affection and yet so nearly indistinguishable, which conjures the other’s subjectivity into the surface of the body, there to be revealed and known. The caress and the touch of desire have an epistemic character: they are an exploration, not of a body but of a free being in his or her embodiment. But the subject so conjured is at risk. The look that looks into the other might switch to the look that looks at the other, so as to assess the body without acknowledging the subject whose body it is. The possibility of pollution and desecration is there in the very phenomenon.

  In some such way, it seems to me, we can use the philosophy of the person to reconstruct some of the truths made vivid in the ethic of pollution and taboo: it is what I have tried to do in my book Sexual Desire, in which I argue that the phenomena of desire can be understood as parts of a mutual negotiation between free and responsible beings who want each other as persons.6 As I pointed out in the second chapter, persons are individuals, not just in the weak sense of being substances that can be reidentified and which can undergo change but in the strong sense of being identified, both by themselves and by others, as unique, irreplaceable, not admitting of substitutes. This is something that Kant tried to capture in his theory of persons as “ends in themselves.” Somehow the free being is, in the eyes of all those who are in a personal relation with him or her, the being who he or she is and never replaceable by an equivalent other. In the relations that matter there are no equivalents. Hence there will always be more to sexual morality than the negotiations of free beings under the rule of consent. Their standing as embodied individuals, who cannot be substituted for each other, is what is principally at risk.

  PIETY

  This brings me to the second objection: that which begins from the situated character of the moral agent, bound by unchosen moral requirements. The concept anciently used in articulating these requirements was that of piety—pietas—which, for many Roman thinkers, identified the true core of religious practice and of the religious frame of mind. Piety is a posture of submission and obedience toward authorities that you have never chosen. The obligations of piety, unlike the obligations of contract, do not arise from the consent to be bound by them. They arise from the ontological predicament of the individual.

  Filial obligations provide a clear example. I did not consent to be born from and raised by this woman. I have not bound myself to her by a contract, and there is no knowing in advance what my obligation to her at any point might be or what might fulfill it. The Confucian philosophy places enormous weight on obligations of this kind—obligations of li—and regards a person’s virtue as measured almost entirely on the scale of piety. The ability to recognize and act upon unchosen obligations indicates a character more deeply imbued with trustworthy feeling than the ability to make deals and bide by them—such is the thought.

  Our academic political philosophy has its roots in the Enlightenment, in the conception of citizenship that emerged with the social contract, and in the desire to replace inherited authority with popular choice as the principle of political legitimacy. Not surprisingly it has had little time for piety, which—if acknowledged at all—is confined to the private sphere or to those “conceptions of the good” that Rawls puts to one side in his version of the social contract, since they are the proof that, in their hearts, ordinary people are nothing like the noumenal fictions imagined by Rawls. It would be fair to say, I think, that the main task of political conservatism, as represented by Burke, Maistre, and Hegel, was to put obligations of piety back where they belong, at the center of the picture. And they were right to undertake this task. One thing that is unacceptable in the political philosophies that compete for our endorsement today is their failure to recognize that most of what we are and owe has been acquired without our own consent to it.

  In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the family is defined as a sphere of pious obligations, and civil society, as a sphere of free choice and contract.7 And there is a dialectical opposition between them, with young people naturally struggling against the ties of family in order to launch themselves into the sphere of choice—only to be ensnared by love and the new unchosen bond that comes from it. This dialectical conflict reaches equilibrium for Hegel only because it is aufgehoben, transcended and preserved, in a higher form of unchosen obligation—that toward the state, which surrounds and protects all our arrangements, by offering the security and the permanence of law. The bond of allegiance that ties us to the state is again a bond of piety—not dissimilar to that quasi-contract between the living, the unborn, and the dead of which Burke writes so movingly in his answer to Rousseau.8

  Working out those suggestive ideas in a language that would suit them to the time and place in which we live is not easy. But if it is not done, we will never arrive a
t a view of political order that grants to it any status more secure than that of a provisional and undefended agreement. To work it out fully we must, I believe, accept the deep insight that Burke, Maistre, and Hegel all share, which is that the destiny of political order and the destiny of the family are connected. Families, and the relationships embraced by them, are nonaccidental features of interpersonal life, just like the experiences of pollution and violation that I described above.

  SACRED AND PROFANE

  In all societies rites of passage have a sacramental character. They are episodes in which the dead and the unborn are present. The gods take a consuming interest in these rites, sometimes attending in person. In these moments time stands still; or, rather, they are peculiarly timeless. The passage from one condition to another occurs outside time—as though the participants bathe themselves for a moment in eternity. Almost all religions treat rites of passage in such a way, as “the point of intersection of the timeless with time,” to borrow words from T. S. Eliot.

  Rituals of birth, marriage, and death are therefore prime examples of the sacred. Such events are “lifted out” of the run of everyday life and “offered up” to the realm of eternal things. Some anthropologists and sociologists have ventured to give explanations of this experience, the best known, perhaps, being René Girard, who traces the experience of the sacred to the sacrificial scapegoating whereby communities rid themselves of their endogenous resentment. Girard’s theory, like Nietzsche’s theory of morality, is expressed as a genealogy or, rather, a “creation myth”: a fanciful description of the origins of human society from which to derive an account of its present structure.9 And like Nietzsche, Girard sees the primeval condition of society as one of conflict. It is in the effort to resolve this conflict that the experience of the sacred is born.