On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  The picture that I have been developing of the moral community translates easily into an attendant system of law—the common law whereby disputes and grievances are brought before an impartial judge and resolved according to the ancient principles of natural justice, which advocate the avoidance of bias and the right to a fair hearing. The habit of settling our disputes in that way therefore seems to be a natural adjunct to the moral order. Just those principles that underlie common-law justice in the English-speaking tradition emerge from our spontaneous ways of negotiating solutions to our conflicts. All of the following principles, for example, seem to be accepted by those who lay down their weapons and reason toward solutions instead:

  1.Considerations that justify or impugn one person will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another.

  2.Rights are to be respected.

  3.Obligations are to be fulfilled.

  4.Agreements are to be honored.

  5.Disputes are to be settled by negotiation, not by force.

  6.Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own.

  Those principles have been taken as defining the field of “natural law,” for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.

  Something like this was surely at the back of Adam Smith’s mind when, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued for the “impartial spectator” as the true judge of our moral duties.8 When asking myself what I should do, I entertain the thought of what another would think of my action when observing it with a disinterested eye. If, as I suggest, morality is rooted in the practice of accountability between self-conscious agents, this is exactly what we should expect. The impartial other sets the standard that we all must meet.

  MORAL ARITHMETIC

  The conception of the moral life that emerges from the argument that I have been sketching would be called “deontological” by a certain kind of philosopher. That is to say, it presents personal obligation rather than some conception of the overall good as the basic notion of moral reasoning. In this it differs from currently fashionable ways of thinking, such as those advocated by Peter Singer and (somewhat more subtly) Derek Parfit in their recent writings.9 For Parfit morality is concerned with our duties, but our duties all reduce, in the end, to one, which is the duty to do good—in other words, to obey those “optimific” principles that promise the best outcome in the long run.

  For such consequentialist thinkers, all moral problems are, in the end, arithmetical. The entanglements that bind us to each other in specific and historical bonds of right and duty have no secure place in their calculations. Of course others do not matter to us equally, and the many claims on us may be more or less demanding, more or less rewarding, more or less strong. But when it comes to considering what matters in itself—in other words, what morality demands of us—such facts, for the consequentialist mind-set, sink into the background, to reappear only as a qualification to other and more abstractly grounded features of our condition. For Singer, Parfit, and many others who speak for our times, the good person is the one who strives for the best outcome in all the moral dilemmas that he or she confronts. And by way of begging the question in favor of their position, they discuss these dilemmas in the form of “trolley problems” and “lifeboat problems.” Morality is what guides us in directing a runaway railway trolley from one track to another, when on both tracks a certain number of people are working, or in directing a lifeboat to one group of drowning people or another, in a situation when they cannot all be saved. These “dilemmas” have the useful character of eliminating from the situation just about every morally relevant relationship and reducing the problem to one of arithmetic alone.

  Consider the love for our children, which, among normal people, fuses all the circuits in the utilitarian calculator. For Parfit this is just another input into a lifeboat problem. He writes that “the optimific principles would not . . . require you to save the strangers rather than your child. If everyone accepted and many people followed such a requirement, things would go in one way better, since more people’s lives would be saved. But these good effects would be massively outweighed by the ways in which it would be worse if we all had the motive that such acts would need. For it to be true that we would save several strangers rather than one of our own children, our love for our children would have to be much weaker.”10 And that, Parfit goes on to argue, would have many bad effects in the long run.

  What is remarkable about this line of reasoning is that, even if it upholds common sense, it does so on grounds that entirely undermine the obligations on which common sense is founded. It ignores the fact that our children have a claim on us that others do not have and that this claim is already a reason to rescue them in their hour of need and requires no further argument. It ignores, one might say, the human reality of the situation that Parfit claims to be imagining, in favor of the spectral mathematics that provides the measure for all his comparative judgments.

  COMPARATIVE JUDGMENTS

  On the other hand, it is true that we make comparative judgments, and it is a powerful argument for consequentialism that it makes sense of this. Deontological accounts of morality, such as Kant’s, seem, at times, to take little account of our comparative ways of thinking and also to have great difficulty in explaining them. In our most urgent moral dilemmas we ask ourselves which of two courses of action would be better or which among a number of actions would be best. This fact is easily dealt with on a consequentialist view—too easily, some would say. Consequentialists treat moral reasoning like economic reasoning and sometimes spell out their thoughts in terms of preference orderings and their aggregation.11 The temptation then is to graft as much mathematics as we can onto our moral discourse and to rewrite morality as “moral arithmetic,” to use an expression put to a related use by Buffon. The trolley problems do this for Parfit. As the examples unfold, and the mathematics takes over, the relation to ordinary moral thought becomes more and more strained.12

  Here is one of the cases that Parfit invokes: “If we choose A Tom will live for 70 years, Dick will live for 50 years, and Harry will never exist. If we choose B Tom will live for 50 years, Dick will never exist, and Harry will live for 70 years.”13 So should we choose A or B? With relentless determination Parfit conducts the reader through case after case of this kind, arguing that Scanlon’s view, that reasons are inherently personal, will not account for all the many instances in which we might be called upon to make a moral choice.14 But the importation of precision does not hide the fact that the examples considered are entirely unlike real moral dilemmas and entirely shaped by the arithmetical obsession of their author. Real dilemmas come about in the way that Scanlon says they do, from what we owe to each other or, to use the terms I have adopted, from the ways in which we hold ourselves and others to account. A spectral version of moral reasoning can survive in the world of the trolley problems; but it exists there detached from its roots in the person-to-person encounter, lending itself to mathematical treatment partly because the deskbound philosopher has thought the normal sources of moral sentiment away.

  That is not to deny that moral reasoning makes comparisons. When Anna Karenina asks herself whether it is right to leave Karenin and to set up house with Vronsky, she is asking herself which of two courses of action would be better. But although she is making a comparative judgment, it is not one that can be resolved by a calculation. She is torn between her obligations to her husband and child and her love for Vronsky. Her dilemma is not detachable from its peculiar circumstances—her husband’s vindictiveness and coldness of heart, her son’s sweet devotion, Vronsky’s Leichtsinn, and Anna’s knowledge of his faults. Dilemmas of this kind exist because we are bound to each other by obligations and attachments, and one way of being a bad person is to think they can be resolved by moral arithmetic. Suppose Anna were to reason that it is better to satisfy two healthy young people and frust
rate one old one than to satisfy one old person and frustrate two young ones, by a factor of 2.5 to 1: ergo I am leaving. What would we think, then, of her moral seriousness?

  CONSEQUENTIALISM AND THE MORAL SENSE

  That is but one reason for thinking that the idea of an “optimific principle” is both obscure in itself and unable to do the work that consequentialists require of it. Take away the trolleys and the lifeboats and we rarely know how to calculate “the best,” either in the particular case or when considering the application of principles. The consequences of our actions stretch infinitely outward in both space and time. The best of intentions can lead to the worst of results. And values are many and in tension with each other. What place should we accord to beauty, grace, and dignity—or do these all creep into our deliberations as parts of human happiness? There is no knowing how either Parfit or Singer would answer such a question, for their writings are devoid of moral psychology and have little or nothing to say about what happiness consists in, by what scale it should be measured, or what human beings gain from their aesthetic and spiritual values.

  Moreover both philosophers overlook the actual record of consequentialist reasoning. Modern history presents case after case of inspired people led by visions of “the best,” believing that all rational beings would adopt those visions if only they would think about them clearly. The Communist Manifesto is one such vision. It gives a picture of “the best” and argues that all would work for it, the bourgeoisie included, if only they understood the impeccable arguments for its implementation. Those who stand in the way of revolution are self-interested; but they are also irrational and would change sides if they thought seriously about principles that everyone could will to be laws. Since their interests prevent them from thinking in that way, violent revolution is both necessary and inevitable.

  Lenin and Mao, who put this document into practice, were adept at trolley problems. The moral arithmetic always came out in their favor, as they switched the trolley of history from one set of possible victims to another. And when the fat man had to be pushed from the bridge, there was always someone ready to do the job for them, who could be pushed from the bridge in turn. The result was the total destruction of two great societies and irreversible damage to the rest of us. Why suppose that we, applying our minds to the question of what might be best in the long run, would make a better job of it? Moreover, is not this possibility—indeed probability—of error at the root of what is so objectionable in consequentialism, which turns wrongdoing into an intellectual mistake, thereby excusing it? When the Kaiser, looking back on the calamity of World War I, said, “Ich hab’ es nicht gewollt,” he spoke as a consequentialist, as did all those apologists who regretted the “mistakes” of Lenin and Mao.

  Which brings me back to the question of motives. The fundamental intuition behind my argument in this essay is that morality exists in part because it enables us to live on negotiated terms with others. We can do this because we act for reasons and respond to reasons too. When we incur the displeasure of those around us, we attempt to justify our actions, and it is part of our accountability that we should reach for principles that others too can accept and which are perforce impartial, universal, and lawlike. When the fault is ours we blame ourselves, and good people blame themselves more severely than others would. We recognize obligations to those who depend on us and on whom we depend, and we exist at the center of a sphere of accountability, which stretches out from us with dwindling force across the world of other people. Our moral principles are the precipitate of personal relations, in which we are face-to-face with those who have a claim on us and who are more interested in our virtues and vices than in our ability to derive output from input on our pocket moral calculators. Hence what Strawson calls “reactive attitudes”—including guilt, admiration, and blame—form the core of our moral sentiments, bearing the indelible mark of the I-You relations in which they are ultimately rooted.15

  To give a full account of what this involves we must go beyond the emphasis on advocacy and the resolution of conflict. Morality governs each personal encounter, and its force radiates from the other. In seeking the motive of our moral behavior, therefore, we must understand what is involved in the relation between beings who identify themselves in the first person and who address the first person of the other: the relation based on the overreaching intentionality that I described in the second chapter. Contracts arise as a special case of this “transcendental” encounter. But they are not the only case: people come to depend on each other in many ways, and from the point of view of morality it is often the noncontractual forms of dependence that are the most significant—family relations, warfare, duties of charity, and justice toward strangers.

  VIRTUE AND VICE

  Light is shed on this matter if we return to a conception of the moral life that is associated with Aristotle, since he defended it in his own terms in the Nicomachean Ethics. According to this conception the key to the moral life is virtue, and for Aristotle virtue consists in the ability to pursue what reason recommends, despite the motives that strive against it. The point can be put in the language that I have been using thus: virtue consists in the ability to take full responsibility for one’s acts, intentions, and avowals, in the face of all the motives for renouncing or denouncing them. It is the ability to retain and sustain the first-personal center of one’s life and emotions, in face of the decentering temptations with which we are surrounded and which reflect the fact that we are human beings, with animal fears and appetites, and not transcendental subjects, motivated by reason alone.

  Ancient thinkers distinguished four cardinal virtues—courage, prudence, temperance, and justice—and with adjustments and refinements, their account of the matter has stood the test of time. Courage provides the simplest and clearest example. The soldier fighting beside his companions is afraid, as they are, of injury and death. In the worst moments of battle he may be sorely tempted to run for safety. But his duty forbids this. His duty is to stand and fight, to protect his companions, and to commit himself to the cause of honor. This duty is something that he owes, and as many observers have confirmed, even if the obligation is rationalized as something owed to a country, a cause, or an ideal, it is experienced first and foremost as something owed to his companions, to those who share the risk of fighting, to whom he is semper fidelis, as expressed in the motto (“Semper fi”) of the American marines. It is not a contractual duty, and there is no “deal” that could summarize its terms. It arises as the lived sense of commitment to others, in whose eyes the soldier is judged.

  In these circumstances the soldier must silence his fear, so that only the call of duty can be heard. Acceptable reasons for action are centered in the “I.” They are reasons that can become my reasons, the reasons that would both explain what I do and justify it in the eyes of anyone to whom I consider myself accountable. These reasons stem from “what I truly am to myself” rather than from “the forces that act on me.”16 Fear, for the soldier, is therefore something to be overcome, which does not mean that he should blithely court danger or ignore the fact that he is afraid and with good reason; it means, rather, that the considerations that justify his fear should not be allowed to prevail over what he must do in his own eyes and in the eyes of the world.

  HONOR AND AUTONOMY

  Kantians would argue that, in such a case, the soldier should be motivated by reason, acting out of “autonomy of the will.” It is what the soldier sees to be right that provides both his justification and his motive. Rival motives, which owe their force to emotions that operate outside the will, are discounted: to give way to them is tantamount to “heteronomy of the will,” the great sin against the self that points the way to the decentering that I described in the second chapter. The autonomous motive has a lawlike character: that, for Kant, is what the word ought means—namely, that the action is being prescribed as necessary. Through our passions we are subject to the “causality of nature”; but there is also, for
Kant, a “causality of reason” that acts on us in another way and from another and, as it were, transcendental perspective.

  Kant’s tight knot of argument is difficult to untie, but it seems to capture many of our intuitions about the peculiar force of morality and about the way in which the sense of duty sets us outside and against the order of nature. We are law-governed creatures, and even when we defy the law, we act on the assumption that we are subject to nonnegotiable demands—reasons that have the power to silence countervailing considerations, however closely they represent our empirical interests.

  In fact we do not need to suppose a “causality of reason” in order to make sense of the soldier’s predicament. We need only recognize that the soldier, like every person, has a sense of obligation—a sense of promises given and received, of relations to others that depend on his loyalty, of responsibilities undertaken, all of which are stored in his thinking in a place apart. These things are stored in the I, as commitments “to be honored,” and have a distinct status in defining the soldier’s sense of who he is. To dishonor them is possible; but the price of doing so is guilt, remorse, and adverse judgment of the self by the self, such as blighted the life of Conrad’s Lord Jim.17