Philosophy

by Sharon Kaye

  Key ideas

  Buridan’s ass thought experiment: Would a hungry donkey placed between two equally appealing piles of hay starve to death for lack of free will to break the tie?

  Compatibilism: The idea that human freedom is compatible with determinism because it does not consist in free will but rather in the absence of external constraints

  Determinism: The view that everything has a cause – even human choices, and so there is no such thing as free will

  Divine right theory: The theory that God gives royal families the right to rule over a region

  Fatalism: The idea that it doesn’t matter what we do because everything is fixed in advance

  Free will: The ability to choose between two options in such a way that you are equally able to do either one

  Metaphysical libertarians: Those who believe in free will

  Social contract theory: Government is legitimate only when the people willingly agree to subject themselves to it

  State of nature thought experiment: What would happen if there were no government?

  Veil of ignorance thought experiment: What kind of a social contract would you make if you didn’t know anything about your personal identity?

  Fact-check

  1 Which of the following causes our choices, according to Hobbes?

  a Free will

  b The strongest desire

  c God

  d Nothing

  2 Metaphysical libertarians believe which of the following?

  a That human beings have the ability to do otherwise

  b That the sovereign should not be absolute

  c That everything has a cause

  d That we do not need to give up the freedom of the state of nature in exchange for peace

  3 Which of the following is true, according to compatibilists?

  a Human beings sometimes have free will

  b Human beings never have free will

  c Human beings are innately innocent

  d Human beings are innately violent

  4 Which of the following is a thought experiment that might lead to a justification of the state?

  a Fatalism

  b Change your life!

  c Buridan’s ass

  d State of nature

  5 How far does the people’s obligation to obey the sovereign extend, according to Hobbes?

  a It extends as far as it is consistent with God’s commands

  b It extends as far as the sovereign decides

  c It extends as far as the people decide

  d It extends as far as the sovereign is able to protect the people

  6 Rousseau disagreed with Hobbes about which of the following claims?

  a Human beings are animals

  b Government ennobles human beings

  c Human beings are born innocent

  d Government is justified by social contract

  7 For Hobbes, why are we human beings like rivers?

  a Because we can break the causal chain

  b Because we have to do what is in our nature

  c Because we move in unpredictable ways

  d Because we are all interconnected

  8 Which of the following best describes all of life, according to Hobbes?

  a Mysterious

  b Motion

  c Divine

  d Free

  9 Which of the following is Hobbes’s motivation for making a social contract?

  a Innocence

  b Freedom

  c Fear

  d Desire

  10 Free will requires which of the following?

  a The ability to do otherwise

  b The ability to disobey the sovereign

  c The ability to overcome external impediments

  d The ability to obey God

  Dig deeper

  Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford University Press, 2002)

  A.P. Martinich, Hobbes (Routledge, 2005)

  Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT Press, 1984)

  7

  Locke and knowledge

  ‘The mind is born a blank slate.’

  John Locke

  In this chapter you will learn:

  • about the problem of personal identity

  • why Locke thinks memory makes us who we are

  • the role of consciousness in personal responsibility

  • the roots of political liberalism and its connection to empiricism

  • why Locke introduces a distinction between objective and subjective qualities

  • how pure empiricism can lead to idealism

  • why Berkeley believes the world does not exist.

  Thought experiment: Thesean Shipese

  The bad news is that you have contracted a very serious disease. The good news is that, while there is no cure, it is treatable.

  The disease is called ‘Thesean Shipese’. You were diagnosed last year when you went to hospital, complaining of excruciating pain in your left little toe. A host of doctors examined you and initiated your course of treatment.

  First, your left little toe was removed.

  Fortunately, extraordinary advancements in prosthetics made it possible to install an artificial toe that works just as well as the old one. Once the scar healed, it was virtually impossible to discern the replacement.

  Unfortunately, this was just the beginning. Amputation of your left little toe did not stop the spread of the disease. By the time your scar healed, you had excruciating pain in the toe right next to your left little toe. And so it was removed and replaced by a new prosthetic toe.

  But by the time this scar healed, the same followed for the next toe, and so on down the line. Once all your left toes were replaced one by one in succession, the disease moved into your foot.

  What could you do? You had no choice but to let the doctors remove and replace your entire foot. This time they were hopeful that they had caught it before it moved into your leg.

  But they were wrong.

  As soon as the scar on your foot healed, you had excruciating pain in your left calf. The doctors decided to be more aggressive this time: they removed and replaced your entire left leg.

  After the scar healed and you were just getting back to your regular life, your right little toe started acting up. This time, you didn’t mess around. You asked the doctors to remove and replace your entire right leg. But then the disease moved first to your left arm and then to your right.

  It has now been a year since you first contracted Thesean Shipese. All four of your prosthetic limbs are working just like your old ones did and you are ready to put the entire ordeal behind you.

  But just this morning you began to feel that same excruciating pain again – this time, in your belly. In desperation, you hurry back to the hospital.

  The doctors examine you and announce that you have the strongest strain of Thesean Shipese. The only course of treatment is to remove and replace your entire torso. Hopefully, the disease will not be able to spread above your neck.

  If the disease does spread above your neck, however, the doctors are fully prepared to replace your head. They can transfer all the data from your brain into a prosthetic brain. They can also mould a replica of your face and match your hair (or give you a new look, if you like!). Once the scars heal, you should be able to return to your life with a completely new body, free from Thesean Shipese once and for all.

  Are you willing to proceed with the treatment? Without it, the pain in your belly will grow and you will be dead within a week. On the other hand, what if your head has to be replaced? Would you be the same person? It seems new arms and legs don’t affect your identity at all, and plenty of people have carried on with new organs. But with a new brain, who would you be after the surgery? Would you be the same person you were before the procedure or would you be someone new?

  Shipshape

  The foregoing scenario is based on an ancient thought experiment called the Ship of Thes
eus. Theseus was the legendary king of Athens, whose ship was reportedly preserved for many generations by replacing each one of its planks one by one, year by year.

  The Ship of Theseus raises an important question about the identity of objects. When one of the planks on the ship is replaced, it’s still essentially the same ship. But is it still the same ship after half of the planks are replaced? What about after they are all replaced?

  Thomas Hobbes, whom we met in the previous chapter, made the question even harder by supposing that, as the planks are removed, they are reassembled into another ship. Once all of Theseus’ planks are replaced, we have two ships: an old ship made of new planks and a new ship made of old planks! Which ship is the ship of Theseus?

  The problem of personal identity

  While this question can apply to any object, it becomes particularly disturbing applied to yourself. When you look at your baby pictures, you say ‘That’s me!’ and your relatives describe how you were as a baby. But was that little creature really you? You’ve changed so much in so many ways.

  How does a human being remain the same person throughout their life? This is known as the problem of personal identity.

  Speaking in purely physical terms, it’s hard to see how you can claim to be the same person as the baby in the pictures. The cells in your body don’t last. After an average of seven years, they are entirely replaced (with the exception of a handful of brain cells). Physically, you are not made of the same material as you were – and you certainly don’t look the same as you did.

  Of course, a dualist, like Descartes, whom we met in Chapter 5, claims that human beings have souls. Could your soul be what makes you the same as the baby in the picture?

  Once again, it’s hard to see how. The soul is the thinking and feeling part of the self. It’s absurd to suppose that a baby has the same kinds of thoughts and feelings as a grown adult. In fact, if you can remember some of the things you thought and felt as a small child, then you know how very different you were in those days. If there is such a thing as the soul, it seems that it changes just as much as the body does.

  Amid all of this change, what stays the same? Is there an enduring self?

  The memory criterion

  The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was worried about this problem because he wanted to believe in life after death. According to standard Christian theology, human beings receive a new body when they die and go to heaven. Locke was wondering whether and how his new heavenly self would be the same as his old earthly self.

  He began thought-experimenting. What if the soul of a prince were transplanted into the body of a cobbler? Would the result be a prince or a cobbler?

  Locke thinks the answer is clear: the result – let’s call him George – would still be a prince. Imagine being George. It would feel strange suddenly to find yourself in a new body so different from the one you were used to. And yet, in the end, it wouldn’t be very different from changing clothes. Would you go out and start cobbling? Of course not – you wouldn’t even know how! All you could do is try to carry on with the life you remembered.

  For Locke, this thought experiment reveals the source of personal identity: memory. Locke presents this view, which has come to be known as the memory criterion of personal identity, in the following passage.

  For as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come, and would be by distance of time, or change of substance, no more two persons, than a man be two men by wearing other clothes to-day than he did yesterday, with a long or a short sleep between: the same consciousness uniting those distant actions into the same person, whatever substances contributed to their production.

  John Locke, Of Identity and Diversity, ed. Jack Lynch (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/locke227.html)

  When you think about yourself you remember your past. The memory of what you have done is what makes those actions yours instead of someone else’s. It makes you the same person as you were then, despite all your physical and mental changes.

  Consciousness is self-aware mental activity. Dualists believe this activity occurs in the soul while materialists insist that there is no need for the soul because consciousness can occur in the brain. Locke’s point is that it doesn’t matter where consciousness occurs – it is the source of our enduring sense of self.

  Personal responsibility

  The advantage of linking personhood with consciousness is that consciousness can then be transferred to a new body or even to a new soul while preserving the person.

  In the opening thought experiment of this chapter, we considered a series of operations that would replace your entire body. Locke would allow this, and would even allow cases in which your consciousness is transferred into an animal, an alien life form, or an artificial life form such as a robot. While no longer being the same man or woman, you would still be the same person, in Locke’s view, insofar as you could remember your preceding life.

  Locke developed this solution in order to make sense of reward and punishment, both human and divine. He believed that, when you reach the afterlife, you will remember all that you did on earth, and so you will understand and deserve the reward or punishment you receive. The same goes for human justice. For example, you may not remember what you did while you were drunk, but you surely remember your decision to drink, and this is what you will be held responsible for.

  If consciousness is what gives us unity as persons, then what happens when we lose consciousness, such as during sleep or after a head injury?

  Locke is content to grant that we are not quite ourselves in such cases. Periods of unconsciousness are interruptions in our lives, not as human beings, but as persons. He is also content to grant that our lives as persons don’t exactly begin at birth – insofar as infants are neither self-aware nor do they remember the past. You become a person slowly, as you mature.

  And there’s no doubt that people mature at different rates. Take a moment right now to think about your earliest memories… This is when you became a person. You are now the same person as you were then, as long as you can access the same consciousness in the form of a memory.

  Locke’s memory criterion may help to explain our ambivalent attitude towards children. As human beings, they are legally protected. Nevertheless, we grant them limited rights and responsibilities because they are not fully persons until their consciousness matures. It is the same for the elderly: as our memories fade with the onset of senility, so too does our personhood, while leaving our humanity intact.

  Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.

  Thomas De Quincey, ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827)

  Empiricism

  Although Locke rejected Hobbes’s materialism in favour of Descartes’s dualism, he did not follow a rationalist epistemology. On the contrary, he explicitly argues against the doctrine of innate ideas, advancing one of the strongest statements of empiricism on record.

  Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer,
in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.

  John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Book2a.html#Chapter%20I)

  Aristotle, whom we met in Chapter 2, would agree, as would many philosophers today. The theory that human beings are born ‘white paper’ without any ideas has come to be known as the tabula rasa theory (from the Latin for ‘blank slate’). It carries many political and psychological implications and is not without controversy.

  Primary and secondary qualities

  The main challenge facing empiricists concerns reliability. Recall that Descartes and Plato were pushed to posit an internal source of knowledge because they felt they could not trust their senses.