On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

  Aristotle argued that courage requires the ability to pursue what honor requires despite the countervailing considerations of fear and rage. He also argued that this ability is a disposition—a hexis—not different in kind from the motives that conflict with it. Unlike Kant, Aristotle did not recognize reason as a metaphysically distinct motive; but he did think that the disposition to follow what reason commands is a real motive, one that depends on cultivating good habits and one that puts the agent in the very position that Kant sees as central to the moral life: the position of honoring obligations, despite the passions that oppose them.

  Aristotle also claimed that all the cardinal virtues share the structure of courage. Each such virtue involves a disposition to pursue what reason acknowledges to be honorable or right, in the face of countervailing temptations. This disposition is acquired through imitation and the awareness of being judged. Virtues are dispositions that we praise, and their absence is an object of shame. To put the matter in the terms that I have been using, it is through virtue that our actions and emotions remain centered in the self, and vice means the decentering of action and emotion, so that the I and its undertakings no longer have the central or controlling place in determining what one feels and does. Vice is, literally, a loss of self-control, and the vicious person is the one on whom we cannot rely in matters of obligation and commitment.

  MRS. JELLYBY AND THE GOOD SAMARITAN

  If we accept that broad picture of the moral life, then we can see how far from ordinary morality are the consequentialist prescriptions of Singer and Parfit. The point was made vividly by Dickens, in the character of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, whose self-congratulatory posture as a do-gooder, dedicated to improving the situation of the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, coexisted with her neglect of all those who directly depended on her and for whom she was responsible—her children in particular. Nor did the actual consequences of Mrs. Jellyby’s actions provide any vindication of them, since the despot of Borrioboola-Gha merely kidnapped her volunteers and sold them into slavery. And how was she to know that he wouldn’t do that?

  There is no evidence that a university professor who has thought long and hard about improving the world, as Singer has, will be any better at calculating the consequences of a given policy than Mrs. Jellyby. Consider some of the issues discussed by Singer: abortion, euthanasia, eating animals. How do we compare the long-term happiness of societies in which abortion is allowed with the long-term happiness of those in which it is forbidden? Only the feeblest first moves can be made, as in Parfit’s justification, above, for a morality that makes room for the love of children, a justification that would have cut no ice against Plato’s similarly consequentialist argument for making children the property of the state. Compared with our immediate obligations, founded in relations of accountability and dependence, consequentialist arguments have an arbitrary appearance and depend for their credibility on a hypothesis about consequences that is rarely more than wishful thinking.

  This does not mean that we are free to ignore the consequences of our actions, or that we should not strive for the best outcome of our moral choices, for in this respect too we are judged; nor does it mean that we must allow our duties, however minor, to outweigh the good that can be self-evidently achieved by ignoring or overriding them. It means, rather, that consequential reasoning must take second place in our worldview to the obligations that create the motivational heart of the moral life. If we do not acknowledge this, then we might end with a purely intellectual morality, one that permits us to excuse any action whatsoever as a “mistake” of reasoning and to recommend any course of action regardless of the claims that others have on our concern. Or if we do not take that route, and we become Jellybists instead, we might find ourselves floundering under impossible burdens, in the vain attempt to know what is the best way to use our energies and powers in the cause of “doing good” and then to devote our lives to doing it.18

  There is an interesting contrast here between two possible readings of Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan, given in answer to the question “Who is my neighbor?” The orthodox reading tells us that Christ was telling us to ignore distinctions of ethnicity and faith and to do good to others in an impartial and universal way. From this reading it is possible to derive a consequentialist morality, which advocates optimal solutions to our moral dilemmas and ignores those historically incurred obligations that cause us to distinguish between people and communities. But there is another and in my view more plausible reading, according to which the Samaritan finds himself confronted with a specific obligation to a specific person. His assistance is offered in response to an individual need; it is not a contribution to the sum of the good but an obligation to a fellow human being who is appealing immediately for help. Having undertaken this obligation the Samaritan then recognizes that it is not fulfilled merely by first aid. After transporting the victim to an inn and paying for his succor there, the Samaritan returns to see how he is getting on. He undertakes a concrete commitment and recognizes that he must see the matter through.

  On this second reading of the parable, the moral life is represented roughly as I have described it, as rooted in personal obligations. On the first reading it is quite possible to think that the Samaritan, having applied first aid, did wrong to spend so much of his money and time on the victim, instead of sending his money to the people of Borrioboola-Gha.

  RIGHTS, DESERTS, AND DUTIES

  There is a kind of “calculus of rights and duties” that we rational beings use in order to settle our disputes with each other and to reach agreement over matters of common or conflicting interest. The concept of justice belongs to this calculus, and its use enables people to claim a sphere of personal sovereignty in which their choice is law. This means that, in a deontological morality of the kind I have been advocating, concepts such as right and desert will have an important role. By determining our rights and deserts we define the fixed points, the places of security, from which people can negotiate and agree. Without those fixed points negotiation and free agreement are unlikely to occur, and if they occur, their outcome is unlikely to be stable. If I have no rights, then the agreement between us provides no guarantee of performance; my sphere of action is liable to constant invasion by others, and there is nothing that I can do to define my position in a way that compels you to acknowledge it. Likewise, without a concept of desert, settling the question of when punishment is appropriate or proportionate, a vital shield is removed from the individual, exposing him or her to every kind of coercion.

  Rights and deserts, then, enable us to establish a society in which consensual relations are the norm, and they do this by defining for each of us a sphere of personal sovereignty from which others can be excluded. And rights and deserts define duties too. My right is your duty, and if I do not deserve what you do to me, then you have no right to inflict it. When we refer to rights, deserts, and duties; what we owe to each other; and such fundamental ideas as freedom, justice, and the impartial spectator, we are making use (directly or indirectly) of the concept of the person, which provides the shared perspective from which we address virtually all such issues. Human communities are communities of persons, and this is the point of agreement from which our disagreements begin.

  For those and related reasons, getting clear about the concept of the person is, for us, an intellectual priority. Those who build a universal political doctrine on the foundation of human rights are in need of a theory that tells them which rights belong to our nature—our nature as persons—and which are the product of convention. That theory will be a theory of the person. Marxists who found their critique of bourgeois society on the idea of exploitation and the dignity of labor rely on the view that there is a fulfilled and free relation between people, which the capitalist system suppresses. That view demands a theory of the person. Theists see the goal of human life as the knowledge and love of a personal God, whose presence is revealed in the natural order. We can make sens
e of that view only if we have a theory of the person. Left-liberals see political order as a mechanism for reconciling individual freedom with “social justice.” That idea too depends on a theory of the person. The allegedly Kantian philosophy of the person assumed by John Rawls in his defense of the redistributive state is used by Robert Nozick to attack it. In every area of political conflict today we find the concept of the person at the center of the dispute yet treated as a mere abstraction, with little or no attention to its social and historical context.

  THE PERSON AND THE SELF

  If the defining feature of the human person is the freedom to make autonomous choices, then libertarians will argue that governments and civil associations have no right to interfere with those choices, save on the ground proposed by John Stuart Mill, of protecting others from harm.19 If the defining feature of the human person is, rather, life in a community of mutual aid, then communitarians will argue that we must constrain antisocial lifestyles and provide for a society in which caring is an institutional fact. These conflicting accounts of the person arise because thinkers have taken the concept out of context, seeking to define it in abstract terms and without reference to the way in which personhood is a way of becoming, not just a way of being. Libertarians emphasize freedom but give us no real account of the origins of freedom or its metaphysical basis. Communitarians emphasize social dependence but fail to explore the difference between the groupings of animals and those of free beings, whose associations are founded in contract and consent and whose social fulfillment comes only in the mutual recognition of their individual autonomy.

  It has been my contention that these conflicts can be understood and to a great measure resolved once we understand the root of the concept of the person in the I-You encounter and the priority of first-person knowledge both in creating the relations between us and in showing us exactly who and what we are. Personal relations are a calling to account. I am answerable to you for what I say and do, and you likewise to me. To put it in Hegel’s way, we are subjects for each other, not objects, and the subject-to-subject encounter is one of mutual recognition, in which each acknowledges the other’s autonomy and also holds others responsible for what they are and do. My freedom is not an uncaused eruption into the world of human events; it is a product of my social condition, and it brings with it the full burden of responsibility to the other and the recognition that the other’s voice has just as much authority as mine.

  If this is so, then we should conclude that the libertarian and the communitarian each give one-half of the truth. Freedom and accountability are coextensive in the human agent. And the dialogue through which we address each other involves a search for reasons that have weight for you as much as for me. There is, at the heart of the human community, the “common pursuit” of reasons that will be valid for all of us. Next time you have a quarrel with someone, you can test this out. You will find that you seek to justify yourself with reasons that the other will accept, whose validity does not depend on the particular desires that distinguish you but, rather, on matters that lie rooted in your shared human nature and shared social circumstances. Freedom and community are linked by their very nature, and the truly free being is always taking account of others in order to coordinate his or her presence with theirs.

  To develop fully as persons, I have argued, we need the virtues that transfer our motives from the animal to the personal center of our being—the virtues that put us in charge of our passions. These virtues are not available outside a tightly woven social context. Without socially endorsed forms of education, without families and spheres of mutual love, without the disciplined approach to erotic encounters, our social emotions will surely not be fully centered in the “I.” Human beings find their fulfillment in mutual love and self-giving, but they get to this point via a long path of self-development, in which imitation, obedience, and self-control are necessary moments. This is not a hard thing to understand once we see the development of personality in the terms suggested by Aristotle. But it is a hard thing to practice. Nevertheless, when we understand things rightly, we will be motivated to put virtue and good habits back where they belong, at the center of personal life.

  1Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Editions, 2010). More radically Sir Larry Siedentop has traced the emergence of the individual to the gospels and the letters of Saint Paul: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014).

  2Lorenz, On Aggression.

  3Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (London: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  4See J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds., Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

  5See, for a subtle account of the many complexities here, Charles Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  6See Pierre Legrand and Roderick Munday, eds., Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

  7Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  8Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759); reprint of the 1790 edition available from CreateSpace independent publishing platform via Amazon.

  9Peter Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: Ecco, 2000); Derek Parfit, On What Matters, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  10Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 1, p. 385.

  11As, for example, in John Broome, Weighing Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  12Interestingly, the revulsion against “mathematical” moral problems, which we find among anticonsequentialist thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe (G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 [1958]: pp. 1–19) and vehemently expressed by Allen Woods in his response to Parfit (included in vol. 2 of On What Matters), is shared by R. M. Hare, who thinks of trolley problems as the recourse of the anticonsequentialists in their last-ditch attempts to resist the inevitable triumph of utilitarianism. See R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 139.

  13Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 2, p. 223; format modified.

  14T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  15Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment.”

  16Hence, in Christine Korsgaard’s reconstruction of the Kantian moral philosophy, the authority of practical reasons derives ultimately from the agent’s conception of his or her identity. See Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  17Joseph Raz has argued that these “preemptive reasons” are fundamental to the very idea of law, as a distinct form of authority in practical reasoning. See his The Authority of Law, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  18For some fascinating cases of martyrs to Jellybism, see Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Voyages to the Brink of Moral Extremity (London: Allen Lane, 2015).

  19See the argument of John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (London, 1859).

  CHAPTER 4

  SACRED OBLIGATIONS

  Not all American moral philosophers are consequentialists in the mold of Singer. It is more common to be a “contractarian,” for whom morality is a system of interpersonal coordination among people with potentially competing “conceptions of the good.” The underlying justification for this position may indeed have a consequentialist element, holding that moral thinking inculcates habits of respect and benevolence that guarantee general safety. But in itself morality consists in the “side constraints,” to use Nozick’s expression, that make agreement rather than coercion into the foundation of our social conduct. These side constraints are embodied in a system of rights and duties: around each individual is a wall of rights that prot
ect him or her from unjust coercion, and on every individual is imposed a set of duties by which those rights are guaranteed.

  Current political philosophy begins from a similar picture but goes one stage further, exploring the virtues of a benevolent state and usually making social justice, sometimes liberty, into the overarching aim of government. For both moral philosophy and political philosophy, as these are taught in the modern academy, the critical instruments of social coordination are the system of rights and duties, the virtues that motivate us to obey it, and the political backing that makes obedience possible and which coordinates our many and diverse projects. The political order supplements morality with a positive law designed to guarantee our freedom and to rectify the systemic injustices that arise through its exercise. The moral law and the positive law are in turn justified by abstract theories, which are understood entirely in terms of individual autonomy and the freedoms and rights implied by it.

  That picture, with of course many subtle additions and qualifications, underlies Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, along with the vision of human beings assumed in the legal philosophy of Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz and in the moral philosophy of Tim Scanlon.1 From David Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement and Loren Lomasky’s Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community to Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint and Martha Nussbaum’s Frontiers of Justice,2 we find near-universal agreement among American moral philosophers that individual autonomy and respect for rights are the root conceptions of moral order, with the state conceived either as an instrument for safeguarding autonomy or—if given a larger role—as an instrument for rectifying disadvantage in the name of “social justice.” The arguments given for these positions are invariably secular, egalitarian, and founded in an abstract idea of rational choice. And they are attractive arguments, since they seem to justify both a public morality and a shared political order in ways that allow for the peaceful coexistence of people with different faiths, different commitments, and deep metaphysical disagreements. The picture of the moral life that I have presented is largely compatible with these arguments. But it also points to two important criticisms that might be made of them.