An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  The point has been made in other terms by the Oxford philosopher, Sir Peter Strawson, who argues that reactions like resentment and anger are reasonable in part because they are effective. In normal cases, we have a far more effective way of influencing people’s behaviour, by responding to them in this way, than is made available by any ‘objective’ science. Strawson suggests that the conflict between freedom and causality is not a conflict in rem, but a conflict between two kinds of attitude: the interpersonal and the scientific. Interpersonal emotion gives us a far more effective handle on the world than we could ever obtain through a science of human behaviour. But there comes a point where the interpersonal approach ceases to bring rewards. It is then that we begin to look for causes; it is then that we demote the other from person to thing - or, to revert to the Kantian language, from subject to object.

  Now let us return to the idea of freedom. You can see at once that we don’t actually need this word. We can say what we want to say in terms of the more flexible notions of responsibility, accountability, and excuses. These are the ideas that we employ, in order to describe people as partners in the moral dialogue. They take their sense from the practices of giving and taking reasons for action, of ascribing rights and obligations, of assessing people in the constant and ongoing dialogue which is the norm of human society.

  We can now move a little further down the path towards the unsayable thing that Kant sought to say. When we ‘hold someone responsible’ for a state of affairs, we do not necessarily imply that his actions caused it. Nor do we hold someone responsible for everything that he deliberately does. (Excuses may erase responsibility.) The judgement of responsibility attaches an event, not to the actions of a person, but to the person himself. We are, so to speak, summoning him to judgement. And if we use the word ‘cause’ in such a case, it is usually in a special way - to say, not that your actions were the cause, but that you were the cause. In other words, the term ‘cause’ no longer links two events, but links an event to a person, so as to charge him with it.

  But how is this link established? Causation seems to be neither necessary, nor sufficient. Nor does the link exist only between a person and the present or past. You can take responsibility for the future, and this ‘assumption’ of responsibility entitles others to praise or blame you in the light of what transpires. Relations of responsibility, unlike causal relations, are also negotiable. We may, as a result of reasoned dialogue, reduce or increase your ‘accountability’ for an accident. The relation of the person to the event is not established at the time of the event, nor at any time in particular, but only when the case is ‘brought to judgement’. Judgements of responsibility are just that - judgements, making appeal to the impartial court of reason, in which we are equal suitors for our rights. Already we may be tempted to say that the judgement of responsibility does not link objects to objects, but objects to subjects, who stand judged by their fellow subjects in another sphere.

  I remarked on the fact that our attitudes to people may shift from the interpersonal to the scientific, when the first prove unrewarding. The same shift may occur in our attitude to ourselves. Consider the following dialogue:A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left?

  B: I shall take up mountaineering.

  A: Why?

  B: Because it is good, when life has lost its zest, to put yourself in danger.

  B has expressed a decision, and found reasons to justify it. His sincerity is proved hereafter by what he does. If he makes no effort to take up this dangerous occupation, then doubt is cast on whether he meant what he said.

  Suppose, however, that the dialogue proceeds as follows:A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left?

  B: I expect I shall take to drink.

  A: Why?

  B: I seem to be made that way.

  Here B has expressed no decision, but only a prediction. And he supports his prediction not with a justifying reason, but with evidence — i.e., with a reason for believing, rather than a reason for doing, something. Clearly B’s attitude towards his future, in this second example, is very different from the attitude expressed in the first. He is now looking on it from outside, as though it were the future of someone else, and as though he had no part in it. In making a decision I project myself into the future, make myself accountable for it, and look on it as part of myself. Furthermore, if you ask how B knows that he will take up mountaineering, when he has decided to do so, there is no answer other than ‘he has decided to do so’. His knowledge is based on nothing, since it is an immediate expression of his conscious self. If you ask, in the second case, how he knows that he will take to drink, then the answer is to be found in the evidence he uses. In the case of a prediction, he can make a mistake. In the case of a decision there is no room for mistakes, and non-performance must be explained in another way - either as insincerity, or a change of mind.

  This distinction touches on the very essence of rational agency. The person who only predicts the future, but never decides, has fallen out of dialogue with others. He is drifting in the world like an object, and sees himself in just that way. Only the person who decides can take a part in moral dialogue, and only he can relate to others as persons do - not drifting beside them, but engaging with them in his feelings, as one self-conscious being engages with another. And surely, there is nothing forced in the suggestion that the person who only predicts his behaviour sees himself as an object, whereas he who decides is seeing himself as a subject.

  We are closer still to the unsayable thing that Kant wanted to say: to the idea that I am both an object in nature, and a subject outside it, and that freedom is lost when the subject surrenders to the object.

  And perhaps we can stop here, without stepping over the threshold. Perhaps it is enough to say that we can see ourselves and others in two different ways: as parts of nature, obedient to the laws of causality, or as self-conscious agents, who take responsibility for the world in which they act. But these two ‘aspects’ are so very different, that there will always be a problem as to how they are related, and the problem will not be less intractable than that of the relation between the timeless and time. Moreover, we can now see just what is at stake in the confrontation between science and philosophy, and how there is indeed a ‘consolation of philosophy’, even in the disenchanted world we live in. By philosophizing we have lifted human action out of the web of causal reasoning in which it is ensnared by science. We have discovered concepts which are indispensable to our lives as rational beings, yet which have no place at all in the scientific view of the world: concepts like person, responsibility, freedom and the subject, which shape the world in readiness for action, and which describe the way in which we appear to one another, regardless of what, from the point of view of science, we are.

  It is with such concepts that the human world is formed. Our attitudes depend upon the way in which we conceptualize each other. You can feel resentment towards another only if you see him as responsible for what he does, and this means applying to him the concepts that I have been discussing in this chapter. Interpersonal attitudes like love, liking, admiration, disapproval and contempt, all depend upon this system of concepts, and to the extent that those attitudes are indispensable to us, and the foundation of happiness in this or any world, then these concepts cannot be replaced. Of course, I can adopt the scientific approach to human beings as to anything else: and, as I argued in the first chapter, it is in the nature of science to sweep away appearances in favour of the underlying reality which explains them. The explanation of the facts on which our interpersonal attitudes are based would describe a world very different from the world of appearances, and one that could no longer be conceptualized in the way that we require. If the fundamental facts about John are, for me, his biological constitution, his scientific essence, his neurological organization, then I shall find it difficult to respond to him with affection, anger, love, contempt or grief. So described, he becomes mysterious to me, since
those classifications do not capture the ‘intentional object’ of my interpersonal attitudes: the person as he is conceived.

  In the last chapter I described the concept of the sacred, and the feelings which depend on it. The sense of the sacred, I suggested, derives from the fact that the meaning which we find in the human person can be found also in objects - in places, times and artefacts, in a shrine, a gathering, a place of pilgrimage or prayer. This ‘encounter with the subject’ in a world of objects is our ‘homecoming’; it is the overcoming of the metaphysical isolation which is the lot of rational beings everywhere. Nothing in the scientific view of things forbids the experience of the sacred: science tells us only that this experience, like every other, has a natural and not a supernatural cause. Those who seek for meanings may be indifferent to causes, and those who communicate with God through prayer should be no more cut off from him by the knowledge that the world of objects does not contain him, than they are cut off from those they love by the knowledge that words, smiles and gestures are nothing but movements of the flesh. But the scientific worldview contains a fatal temptation: it invites us to regard the subject as a myth, and to see the world under one aspect alone, as a world of objects. And this disenchanted world is also a world of alienation.

  We should not forget that the attempt to re-create the human world through science has already been made. Marx’s theory of history, and the Nazi science of race are very bad examples of science. But they licensed forms of government in which the scientific view of our condition was for the first time in power. People were seen as objects, obedient to natural laws; and their happiness was to be secured by experts, acting as the theory prescribed. The theory informed the believer that God is dead, and that with him has been extinguished the divine spark in man. Human freedom is nothing but an appearance on the face of nature; beneath it rides the same implacable causality, the same sovereign indifference, which prepares death equally and unconcernedly for all of us, and which tells us that beyond death there is nothing. The sense of the sacred warns us that there are things which cannot be touched, since to meddle with them is to open a door in the world of objects, so as to stand in the I of God. The desacralized view of the world annihilates that sense, and therefore removes the most important of our prohibitions. In describing the Nazi death-camps Hannah Arendt wrote (Eichmann in Jerusalem) of a ‘banalization’ of evil. It would be better to speak of a ‘depersonalization’, a severance of evil from the network of personal responsibility. The totalitarian system, and the extermination camp which is its most sublime expression, embody the conviction that nothing is sacred. In such a system, human life is driven underground, and the ideas of freedom and responsibility - ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely - have no public recognition, and no place in the administrative process. If it is so easy to destroy people in such a system, it is because human life enters the public world already destroyed, appearing only as an object among others, to be dealt with by experts versed in the science of man.

  Even if we did not have before us the reality of the Nazi and Communist experiments, we have those works of fiction by Orwell, Huxley and Koestler, which warn us what the world must inevitably become, when humanity is surrendered to science. To see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons. It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction. In a very real sense, therefore, there cannot be a science of man: there cannot be a science which explores what we are for one another, when we respond to each other as persons. In what follows we will see in more detail why that is so.

  9

  MORALITY

  People are bound by moral laws, which articulate the idea of a community of rational beings, living in mutual respect, and resolving their disputes by negotiation and agreement.

  Kant tells us that we are to act ‘on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings’; we are to treat rational beings as ends, and never as means only; we are to act with a view to the ‘kingdom of ends’ in which all rational goals are reconciled. These highly abstract principles (which Kant calls ‘formal’) are less significant than the procedure which is implied in them. Persons have a unique and precious means to resolve their conflicts - a means denied to the rest of nature. For they are able to recognize each other as free beings, who take responsibility for their decisions, and who possess rights against, and duties towards, their kind. The ideas of freedom, responsibility, right and duty contain a tacit assumption that every player in the moral game counts for one, and no player for more than one. By thinking in these terms we acknowledge each person as an irreplaceable and self-sufficient member of the moral order. His rights, duties and responsibilities are his own personal possessions. Only he can renounce or fulfil them, and only he can be held to account should his duties go unfulfilled. If this were not so, the ‘moral law’, as Kant calls it, would cease to fulfil its purpose, of reconciling individuals in a society of strangers.

  As Kant himself pointed out, the moral law has an absolute character. Rights cannot be arbitrarily overridden, or weighed against the profit of ignoring them. Duties cannot be arbitrarily set aside, or cancelled by the bad results of due obedience. I must respect your right, regardless of conflicting interests, since you alone can renounce or cancel it. That is the point of the concept - to provide an absolute barrier against invasion. A right is an interest that is given special protection, and which cannot be overridden or cancelled without the consent of the person who possesses it. By describing an interest as a right we lift it from the account of cost and benefit, and place it in the sacred precinct of the self.

  Likewise duty, if it is to exist at all, must have an absolute character. A duty can be set aside only when it ceases to be a duty - only when it has been fulfilled or cancelled. There can be conflicts of rights and conflicts of duties: but these conflicts are painful precisely because they cannot be resolved. We weigh rights against each other, and give precedence to the one which we believe to be more serious - as when we take food that belongs to John in order to save the life of the starving Henry. Henry’s right to help takes precedence over John’s right to his property; nevertheless John’s right remains, and John is wronged by the act which succours Henry. The issues here are deep and complex. Suffice it to say that any attempt to deprive the concepts of right and duty of this absolute character would also deprive them of their utility. We should thereby rid ourself of the supreme instrument which reason provides, whereby to live with others while respecting their freedom, their individuality and their sovereignty over the life that is theirs. That is what it means, in the last analysis, to treat a person as an end in himself: namely, to acknowledge his rights against us, and our duties towards him, and to recognize that neither right nor duty can be cancelled by some other good. To put the moral law in a nutshell, it tells us that people must be treated as subjects, not as objects; and this means that rights must be respected, and duties fulfilled.

  But the prominence of the moral law in our daily negotiations should not lead us to suppose that morality is merely a system of rules. The moral community is shaped by negotiation, but depends upon many other factors for its life and vitality. In particular it depends upon the affections of those who compose it, and upon their ability to make spontaneous and self-sacrificing gestures for the good of others. A society ordered entirely by the moral law, in which rights, duties and justice take precedence over all interests and affections, would alienate the mere human beings who compose it, and soon fall apart. For it would make no distinction between neighbours and strangers, between the alien and the friend. People need the safety promised by the moral law, and by the habit of negotiation. But they also need something more: the nexus of affection and sympathy which binds them to their neighbour
s, which creates a common destiny, and which leads people to share one another’s sorrows and joys.

  While we esteem the punctilious person who performs all his duties, claims no more than he has a right to, and meticulously respects the rights of others, we cannot really love him, unless he is moved by affection too. But affection requires us to bend the rules, to set aside our rights in the interest of those we love, to do that which is beyond the call of duty, and sometimes to dispense our favours unjustly. And the same is true of sympathy - that generalized affection which spreads from the self in dwindling ripples across the world of others. Actions which spring from sympathy may resemble those commanded by the moral law; but they spring from another motive, and one that is just as necessary to the moral life. The moral being is not merely the rule-governed person who plays the game of rights and duties; he has a distinctive emotional character, which both fits him for the moral life and extends and modifies its edicts. He is a creature of extended sympathies, motivated by love, admiration, shame and a host of other social emotions.

  Hence we judge moral beings not only in terms of their actions, but also in terms of their motives and characters. For we recognize that the moral law is not a sufficient motive; we obey its precepts only when sufficiently prompted by our character and feelings. Guilt, remorse and shame arrest our weaknesses, just as praise, admiration and approval reinforce our obedience. We depend on these social emotions, since it is the web of sympathy that fortifies our moral resolve. We may not consciously acknowledge it, but we nevertheless know that social order is a precarious thing, which cannot be sustained by law alone. Internal and external threats to it can be deterred only if people have the mettle to resist them - the force of character, the emotional equilibrium and the live human sympathies that will prompt them to persist in a cause, to make sacrifices, and to commit themselves to others. This is the origin of the vital distinction that we make, between vice and virtue. In addition to the moral law, therefore, morality involves the pursuit of virtue, and the avoidance of vice.