An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  3. Animals relate to one another, but not as we do. They growl and feint, until their territories are certain; but they recognize no right of property, no sovereignty, no duty to give way. They do not criticize one another, nor do they engage in the give and take of practical reasoning. If a lion kills an antelope, the other antelopes have no consciousness of an injustice done to the victim, and no thoughts of revenge. In general, there is a pattern of moral judgement and dialogue which is second nature to humans, but which is foreign to a great many — perhaps all — other animals. If sometimes we think we discern this pattern, as in the social behaviour of baboons and chimpanzees, our attitude radically changes: and for very good reasons.

  4. Animals lack imagination. They can think about the actual, and be anxious as to what the actual implies. (What is moving in that hedge?) But they cannot speculate about the possible, still less about the impossible.

  5. Animals lack the aesthetic sense: they enjoy the world, but not as an object of disinterested contemplation.

  6. In all sorts of ways, the passions of animals are circumscribed. They feel no indignation but only rage; they feel no remorse, but only fear of the whip; they feel neither erotic love nor true sexual desire, but only a mute attachment and a need for coupling. To a great extent their emotional limitations are explained by their intellectual limitations. They are incapable of the thoughts on which the higher feelings depend.

  7. Animals are humourless and unmusical. Hyenas do not laugh, nor do birds truly sing; it is we who hear laughter in the hyena’s cackle, and music in the song of the thrush.

  8. Underlying all those, and many other, ways in which the animals fail to match our mental repertoire, there is the thing which, according to some philosophers, explains them all: namely, the fact that animals lack speech, and are therefore deprived of all those thoughts, feelings and attitudes which depend upon speech for their expression. This is consonant with the view of Aristotle, whose word for reason — logos - also means speech. (An animal, Aristotle says, is alogon, which means both non-rational and without language.) Of course, animals often emit noises and make gestures which seem like language. But these noises and gestures lack the kind of organization which makes language into the remarkable and mind-transforming thing that it is.

  When it is argued that animals are like us in one of the above respects — animals like the higher apes, who seem to have a sense of humour, or dolphins, who seem to communicate their desires and to act in concert - the arguments tend to imply that these animals are like us in the other respects as well. It seems impossible to mount an argument for the view that the higher apes can laugh, which does not also attribute to them reasoning powers, and maybe even language (or at least, the power to represent the world through symbols). It is an empirical question, whether apes are like this, or can be trained to be like this; but it is a philosophical question, whether the capacities that I have described belong together, or whether on the contrary they can be exemplified one by one. It is my considered view that they do indeed belong together, and define a new and higher level of consciousness, for which ‘reason’ is a convenient shorthand.

  But what exactly should we mean by consciousness? To many people consciousness is the essence of the mental, the feature which makes the mind so important to us, and the extinction of which is inherently regrettable, in a way in which the extinction of life (the life of a plant, say) is not. Descartes denied that animals are conscious, since consciousness, for him, was entirely bound up with the process of self-conscious reflection. But surely it is obvious that animals are conscious. This is proved by the fact that they are sometimes, but not all the time, unconscious. When asleep, anaesthetized or knocked out a dog is not conscious, as he is when alertly running about the garden. To describe a dog as conscious is to imply that he is aware of his environment, responds to it, learns from it, and is sentient. There is consciousness, in the sense of awareness, whenever behaviour must be explained in terms of mental activity. The dog has the kind of consciousness exhibited by his mental repertoire - which means that he is conscious as dogs are conscious, but not as bees or humans are conscious.

  We should be careful, therefore, to distinguish consciousness from self-consciousness. Human beings are aware of themselves and their own states of mind; they distinguish self from other, and identify themselves in the first person. They knowingly refer to themselves as ‘I’, and are able to describe their own mental states for the benefit of others as well as themselves. This is what we should mean by self-consciousness, and it is a feature of our mental life which seems not to be shared by the lower animals.

  Someone might ask how you could possibly know such a thing? Who am I, to decide that my dog has no conception of himself, no consciousness of himself as distinct from his desires, beliefs and appetites? The answer is that it is redundant to assume otherwise. We can explain the dog’s behaviour without recourse to such an hypothesis, and therefore we have no grounds to affirm it. We can justifiably attribute to animals only the mental repertoire which is needed to explain how they behave. The situation never arises which will compel us to describe a dog’s behaviour in terms of a conscious distinction between self and other, or between the world from my point of view, and the world from yours. Always we can make do with simpler assumptions — assumptions about beliefs and desires, in which the ‘I’ concept has no role.

  We should reflect at this juncture on the way in which a creature’s mental horizon is broadened by language - by the ability to represent the world through signs.

  1. Language expresses thoughts about absent things, about past and future things, about generalities, probabilities, possibilities and impossibilities. It emancipates thinking from the here and now, and causes it to range freely over the actual, the possible and the impossible. We attribute beliefs to the lower animals; but without language, these beliefs seem to be confined to the here and now of perception.

  2. Language permits the construction of abstract arguments. It is the primary vehicle of reasoning, and the means to justify and criticize both beliefs and attitudes.

  3. Hence language permits new kinds of social relation, based in dialogue and conversation. It enables people to criticize each other’s conduct, to provide reasons to each other, and to change each other’s behaviour by persuasion. Thus arises the practice of reason-giving, immediate offshoots of which are interpersonal morality and the common law.

  4. Language expands the horizon of knowledge, and contains the seeds of scientific inference. But it also expands the emotional horizons. The emotions of animals, like their beliefs, concern present circumstances. A dog may pine away in its master’s absence, and many of the higher animals form deep attachments. But even these endearing emotions are founded in familiarity, recognition and day-to-day habit. No animal is able to fear some hypothetical event; to envy, esteem or cherish an individual whom he has never met; to feel jealous over his mate’s past or apprehensive for her future.

  There are also emotions which are outside the repertoire of animals, for the reason that only a language-using creature could formulate the thoughts on which they depend. Thus indignation, remorse, gratitude, shame, pride and self-esteem all depend upon thoughts which are unavailable to creatures who cannot engage in reason-giving dialogue. Indignation is a response to injustice, and injustice in turn a concept which only language-users have. To cut a long story short, the higher emotions — those on which our lives as moral beings most critically depend — are available only to those who can live and think in symbols.

  Much in philosophy is controversial. But I doubt that any philosopher who has studied the argument of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, or that of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, would dissent from the view that self-consciousness and language emerge together, that both are social phenomena, and that the Cartesian project, of discovering the essence of the mental in that which is private, inner and hidden from external view, is doomed to failure. Moreover, most phi
losophers would agree that language requires an elaborate social stage-setting - if Wittgenstein is right, nothing less than a shared form of life, based in a deep consensus, will suffice. It is possible that animals could be granted honorary membership of this form of life — like the unfortunate chimpanzee called Washoe, lifted from her natural innocence in order to compete with humans on terms which humans alone define. But there is no evidence that the animals, left to their own devices, can achieve the particular form of social interaction required by language. And the efforts of Washoe have never satisfied the sceptics. Crucial elements of symbolic behaviour - syntactic categories, logical connectives, the distinction between asserted and unasserted sentences, between the passive and the active voice, the logic of modality and tense - fail to emerge, and in their absence it can reasonably be doubted that the ape has achieved true linguistic competence. Maybe she has. But the missing components are precisely those which endow language with its infinite elasticity, its ability to express thoughts beyond the present perception, to embed one thought within another, to entertain a thought without asserting it, to link thoughts in chains of hypothesis and argument, and to multiply thoughts indefinitely, so as to present a comprehensive picture of reality, as something independent of my own interests and desires.

  The facts to which I have been pointing could be described in another and more pregnant way, by saying that human beings are persons. The concept of the person, which we derive from Roman law, is fundamental to all our legal and moral thinking. It bears the meaning of Christian civilization and of the ethic that has governed it, as well as the seeds of the Enlightenment vision which put Christianity in doubt. The masterly way in which this concept was lifted by Kant from the stream of social life and set upon a metaphysical pedestal should not distract us from its everyday employment, as the concept through which human relations are brokered. Our relations to one another are not animal but personal, and our rights and duties are those which only a person could have.

  Human beings are social animals; but not in the way in which dogs, horses and sheep are social animals. They have intentions, plans and schemes; they identify themselves as individuals, with a unique relation to the surrounding world. They are, or believe themselves to be, free, and their choices issue from rational decision-making in accordance with both long-term and short-term interests. Although other animals are individuals, with thoughts, desires and characters that distinguish them, human beings are individuals in another and stronger sense, in that they are self-created beings. They realize themselves, through freely chosen projects, and through an understanding of what they are and ought to be.

  At the same time, human beings live in communities, upon which they depend not only for their specific ambitions and goals, but also for the very language with which to describe and intend them. Hence there is a permanent and immovable possibility of conflict, of a kind that does not occur in the animal kingdom. People depend on others, and also need to be free from them. Freedom means conflict; community requires that conflict be peacefully resolved. Hence negotiation, compromise and agreement form the basis of all successful human communities.

  The concept of the person should be seen in the light of this. It denotes potential members of a free community - a community in which the individual members can lead a life of their own. Persons live by negotiation, and create through rational dialogue the space which their projects require. Such dialogue can proceed only on certain assumptions, and these assumptions show us what persons really are:

  1. Both parties to the dialogue must be rational - that is, able to give and accept reasons for action, and to recognize the distinction between good and bad reasons, between valid and invalid arguments, between justifications and mere excuses.

  2. Both parties must be free - that is, able to make choices, to act intentionally in pursuit of their goals, and to take responsibility for the outcome.

  3. Each party must desire the other’s consent and be prepared to make concessions in order to obtain it.

  4. Each party must be accepted as sovereign over matters which concern his very existence as a freely choosing agent. His life, safety and freedom must therefore be treated as inviolable, and to threaten them is to change from dialogue to war.

  5. Each party must understand and accept obligations - for example, the obligation to honour an agreement.

  Those assumptions can be expressed in another way, by saying that human communities are composed of persons, who have rights, responsibilities and duties, and who endeavour to live by agreement with their fellows. If we do not recognize another’s rights, then our relation to him is one of antagonism or war. If we do not feel bound by obligations, then we exist outside society and cannot rely on its protection. And in all negotiation, we must recognize the freedom, rationality and sovereignty of the other, if the outcome is to be acceptable to him and binding on both of us. All this is neatly summarized in the categorical imperative of Kant, which in its second formulation tells us that human beings are to be treated as ends, and never as means only: in other words, their freedom and rights are to be respected, and their agreement to be sought in any conflict. We can see the Kantian ‘moral law’ as consisting precisely in those rules which rational beings would accept, when attempting to live by agreement. These rules compose the quasi-legal part of moral thinking, and the concepts of right, obligation and personality gain their sense from them, just as the concepts of goal, foul and player gain their sense from the rules of football.

  I shall return to the questions of morality. Before addressing them, however, we must face an awkward question. It seems that I am both an animal and a person. Moreover, I am the same animal today that I was yesterday; and also the same person. But could not these two ideas of identity diverge? Could not one and the same person migrate from body to body, and one and the same body incarnate now one person and now another? This, roughly speaking, is the problem of ‘personal identity’, and philosophers are no nearer to a solution to it than they were when it was first posed in its modern form by Aquinas. The modern question connects with a more ancient one: what happens to us at death? Granted that death is the end of the animal, is it also the end of the person who ‘inhabits’ him?

  This is how I believe we should consider such questions. Questions about identity are of two kinds: the real and the conventional. The question whether this is the same horse as George, whom I saw in this stable yesterday, is a real question: it is not for me, nor for us collectively, to decide that he is the same horse, and therefore to call him George. For the identity of a horse is determined by his nature: his being one and the same horse is the result of law-governed processes which do not depend upon us for their operation. In such a case we can make mistakes about identity, and the result may be disastrous. Someone who mistook this horse for George could end up in serious trouble, having been told that George is a safe horse to ride. The question whether this fence that I have just restored is the same as the one that stood here yesterday, is not a real question. I can settle it as I wish. Or, if something hangs on the answer - a question of legal ownership, for example, or of landlord’s and tenant’s responsibilities — we can collectively settle it by convention. There are many puzzles about identity which arises because we do not know whether it would matter, if we settled them by a decision. For example: is the Quarto version of Hamlet the same play as the Folio version? Is a car, all of whose parts have been replaced over the years, the same car as the one we started with?

  At least one philosopher (Derek Parfit) has argued that the question of personal identity is not real, but conventional. It does not matter how we settle it, since it is not identity that interests us, in our relations with other persons and with our past and future selves. This seems to me to be quite wrong. The concept of the person exists because we relate to each other as individuals, and because the individuality of self and other is sacred in our dealings. Interpersonal relations depend upon rights and responsibilities which only in
dividuals can have, and which extend over time. If we could not identify a person as one and the same at different times, then the practice of ascribing rights and duties would collapse; there would be no room for praise or blame, no basis for our moral emotions, and no point to moral dialogue. Emotions such as love, anger, admiration, envy and remorse, which posit personal identity as an immovable fact, would vanish, and with them would vanish the purpose of our life on earth.

  Real questions of identity, however, must be dealt with in the same way as other real questions: from the third-person point of view. You cannot settle them by looking inwards, in search of the ‘self’ which remains one and the same in all its dealings, revealing itself to itself alone. For you could imagine this Fichtean self changing from moment to moment, being now one self, now another, and yet nobody (including itself) being any the wiser. It makes no conceivable difference whether you describe the self at one time as the same as, or different from, the self at another. The concept of identity loses its point, when applied to such a thing.

  The point of the concept is in regulating our personal relations. Through our dealings with each other we lift one another into a higher realm, where the individual is seen as unique and irreplaceable, as the bearer of rights and duties which are his alone, and as the object of affections and judgements which single him out from all conceivable competitors, and focus exclusively on him. It is not convention which has determined the criteria of personal identity, but necessity. We determine the identity of a person by the very same procedures that we use to assign rights and liabilities — by asking who did this thing, who intended that, who is responsible for this and who allowed that. These are questions about reasoning, deliberating beings, and are settled by appeal to their memories, intentions, and undertakings, and not just by observing their bodily life. There is nothing in the nature of things to forbid the divergence of personal from animal identity: but if it happened often, we should have a different conception of human life.