and
PAST PRESENT philosophy for everyone
the best transcripts of 2014
Edited by Stephen Law The Royal Institute of Philosophy 14 Gordon Square London WC1H 0AR United Kingdom T. 020 7387 4130 www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org Published by: Cambridge University Press Design: Beth Luscombe
PAST AND PRESENT philosophy for everyone
“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.� VOLTAIRE
CONTENTS Where to find everything Introduction
Stephen Law
Meet the Lectures Biographies
Humility and History Ian James Kidd
Personhood, Animals and The Law Christine Korsgaard
Conceiving the Impossible Thomas Nagel
Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline Bernard Williams
Simple Truths, Hard Choices Noam Chomsky
Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency Alasdair MacIntyre
Freedom of The Will as a Problem in Neurobiology John Searle 6
118 134 146 160 172 188 200 212 228 242
Religious Tolerance J端rgen Habermas
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Intention in Action
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Reassessing Reasons
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The Revenge of the Given
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Knowledge, Belief and Faith
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The Sovereignty of Reason
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What is Natural and Should we Care About It?
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Attention and Mentalism
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Is Personal Identity What Matters?
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Perception: Where Mind Begins
John McDowell
T. M. Scanlon
Jerry Fodor
Sir Anthony Kenny
Simon Blackburn
Mary Warnock
Ned Block
Derek Parfit
Tyler Burge
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“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless” PLATO
INTRODUCTION
Sometimes it seems like you need a PhD just to open a book of philosophy. We leave philosophical matters to the philosophers in the same way that we leave science to scientists. Stephen Law thinks this is tragic, for our lives as well as for philosophy. In Past and Present he takes philosophy back from the specialists and restores it to its proper place at the center of our humanity, rediscovering it as our most profound effort toward understanding, as a way of life that anyone can live. Exploring transcripts from some of the most important thinkers of our day in the context of the everyday struggles, he guides us through the most vexing quandaries of our existence—and shows just how enriching the examined life can be.
Stephen Law
“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” ITALO CALVINO
MEET THE LECTURERS A brief biography of the everyone in the book
IAN JAMES KIDD
CHRISTINE KORSGAARD
THOMAS NAGEL
SIR BERNARD WILLIAMS
NOAM CHOMSKY
Postdoctoral researcher at Durham University. Works in epistemology, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of religion, history and philosophy of science, and the philosophical traditions of Asia and Continental Europe.
American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history. since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she is now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy.
American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.
English moral philosopher, described as the “most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. Known for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and the Greeks
Iconic American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and anarcho-syndicalist activist. Often described as the “father of modern linguistics”. Has spent most of career at MIT
JERRY FODOR
SIR ANTHONY KENNY
SIMON BLACKBURN
MARY WARNOCK
NED BLOCK
An American philosopher and cognitive scientist. Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He is known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation.
An English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. Former President of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy
British academic philosopher known for his work in quasi-realism and his efforts to popularise philosophy. He retired as professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy
A British philosopher of morality, education and mind, and writer on existentialism. A long career including teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, being a member of the Independent Broadcasting Authority and being a patron of The Iris Project
An American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mind who has made important contributions to matters of consciousness and cognitive science. Since 1996, he has been a professor at New York University
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ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
JOHN SEARLE
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
JOHN MCDOWELL
T. M. SCANLON
Scottish philosopher known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy. Senior Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Notre Dame
An American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959.
A German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. Best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. Recognized as one of the world’s leading intellectuals
South African philosopher, Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, most influential work the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language
Professor at Harvard University, his first papers were in mathematical logic, where his main concern was in proof theory, but he made his name in ethics and political philosophy and foundational questions in moral theory.
DEREK PARFIT
TYLER BURGE
A British philosopher who specialises in problems of personal identity, rationality, ethics, and the relations among them. He has worked at Oxford University for all of his academic career and is also an experienced photographer and a retired poet
Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to several areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. His work has appeared in the The Philosopher’s Annual, a collection of the year’s best published articles in philosophy.
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“ There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” ALBERT CAMUS
HUMILITY AND HISTORY Ian James Kidd
Philosophy is an ancient subject, but what is the value of an
Pedagogical
the art or science of teaching
understanding of its history for its practice? What can contemporary philosophers draw from an historical understanding of their subject? I argue that amongst its many benefits, the history of philosophy is an excellent resource for the cultivation of certain intellectual virtues, most notably gratitude, humility, and justice. Acquaintance with the history of philosophy can, therefore, be edifying, in the sense of being conducive to the cultivation and exercise of virtues. These virtues can be cultivated in many ways, but the history of philosophy offers unique means for securing those virtues just mentioned — or so I will argue. In what follows, I hope to show that some familiar pedagogical and intellectual uses of the history of philosophy in fact reflect its edifying functions. The origins of philosophy are unclear, but certainly there were, in Greece, India, and China, vigorous philosophical traditions by the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. Indeed, it is possible that Confucius, the Buddha, Thales and the authors of the Upanisads may have been contemporaries. The last six thousand years have, of course, seen philosophy, both ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, go on to sustain vigorous, dynamic traditions. Indeed, one striking fact evidenced by history is the ubiquity of philosophical reflection. Across the scope of human cultures, in different times and climes, one finds sustained philosophical reflection, on topics ranging from knowledge and justice, to society and education, to reality and meaning. Although philosophy, like any subject, has its ‘boom and bust’ periods, recent scholarship indicates that even periods previously considered to be rather barren — such as the ‘Dark Ages’ of medieval Europe — were, in fact, philosophically dynamic, even if their questions and problems reflected concerns rather different from ours. The fact of the historical ubiquity of philosophy of course pleases those engaged in the ‘business’ of philosophy today. Certainly
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philosophers, whether professional or lay, should find a legitimate sense of pride in their participation in a venerable tradition of thought. This should include an appreciation of the sincere and sustained efforts, by men and women historically and culturally distant from us, to articulate ideas about their place in the ‘order of things’, which we may, today, profitably draw upon. And there isn’t, one hopes, too much vainglory in the optimistic sentiment that philosophy has been, and continues to be, an ennobling feature of human life.
Ennobling
to make noble
Although such sentiments have their place, the history of philosophy surely offers us more than just a sense of pride of one’s place within a venerable tradition. Those things matter, if only to motivate, but the value of the history of philosophy should not be narrowly construed as a capacity to encourage young philosophers — those sitting through hard going undergraduate lectures on Kant, say — to ‘keep at it’ and work hard. A sense of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, to borrow Newton’s handy phrase, is useful. But so, too, is one’s knowing something about those ‘giants’ and about how, and why, they worked and wondered as they did. In the history of philosophy, these ‘giants’ would be all those earlier thinkers whose work is now part of our shared history. Some of the giants are obvious and familiar, such as Plato or the Buddha, whereas others, like Nāgārjuna or Josiah Royce, remain reliably obscure, at least within certain areas of academic philosophy. Both familiarity and obscurity can be fickle things, of course. Some philosophical giants are prominent for their notoriety, like Nietzsche, and others for their accessibility, like Russell. But what does it mean to say that these figures, and others more like them, are part of a ‘shared history’, and how and why does that history matter? The significance of the history of philosophy turns on the answer to that question. Certainly there are many reasons why one might not want to teach philosophy in a historical manner. One might prefer,
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for instance, to teach or write about philosophy in terms of ‘problems’ or discrete ‘areas’, like ‘Metaphysics’, ‘Consciousness’, or ‘Topics in Philosophy of Science’. This way of philosophising focuses on topics, issues, and themes, like the nature of time, mental causation, or scientific methodology. And that can be a valuable and effective way of ‘doing’ philosophy, especially within the context of the structure of modern universities. Yet a focus on abstract argument divorced from concrete context does, at least sometimes, compromise one’s understanding and appreciation of the ideas and problems being discussed. One could, for instance, take a course on ‘Knowledge and Scepticism’, covering Pyrrho, Descartes, Kant and others, without ever detailing why, for each of those figures, questions about knowledge and scepticism mattered. An appeal to the inherent fascination or trickiness of their questions usually suffices, at least for those who opt to take such courses, but often those questions are presented without a clear account of why those philosophers were troubled by them. Most philosophers, at least in the past, were troubled by philosophical questions not simply out of mere curiosity, but rather because they perceived that those questions, even the most abstract ones, had implications for aspects of life which mattered to them. Such concerns are easily to neglect. A philosopher’s ‘position’ can be summarised as an argument, or a series of bullet-points on a PowerPoint slide, but this format is apt to neglect the vital concerns that animated them. For instance, it often tends to obscure the biographical and historical context of a philosopher’s life, reducing them to names and dates, of the form ‘Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)’. Where, after all, is the contextual richness of a biography such as that which Heidegger offered for Aristotle: ‘he was born . . . he worked, and . . . he died’. Heidegger may have been right that, for certain purposes, Aristotle’s biography is not ‘of interest’, but that fact is only true at a certain level of analysis. Certainly it is not a general axiom of philosophizing.
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Context is not only pedagogically or interpretively valuable. There are entertaining anecdotes in the history of philosophy, for sure — and not solely in the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein — but the value of historical context goes further than that. Showing the wider social and political conditions within which philosophers worked, worried and wondered can help us to appreciate their ‘practical’ objectives. The Presocratics offer interesting arguments against traditional Greek religion, but they were, ultimately, intended to facilitate social and political reform. Or to take a slightly later example, the Pyrrhonian sceptics did not engage in abstract epistemology, asking abstruse questions about the nature of knowledge, just because they were interested. Rather, it was because they perceived that a person who is to be happy must understand, first, what things are like and, second, how one should be disposed towards them. Put another way, they thought that knowledge of things was essential if we are to act properly regarding them, therefore interlinking epistemology and ethics in a way that will, one worries, remain invisible if one concentrated simply on the arguments themselves. Many derisive assessments of the value of philosophy arise because, in many cases, those critics do not see how the ‘abstract’ issues raised by the philosophically-minded bear on ‘practical’ issues. The fault may be shared, but it can, I think, be partially resolved by an historical perspective upon philosophy. Once one becomes accustomed to a historical articulation of philosophy, the task of providing accounts of the ‘practical’ import of ‘abstract’ philosophising should become much easier. By being able to explain how earlier philosophers came to their ideas, or what provoked their questions, it should become easier for us to do the same for our own inquiries. And this should be understood, not as ‘accounting for ourselves’, but, rather, as explaining ourselves, for our benefit, and for that of our critics.
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Perennial
lasting for an indefinitly long time
Certainly a knowledge and appreciation of the history of philosophy can be a valuable feature of the actual practice of philosophy. An understanding of philosophy as an historical discipline shows how it is bound up with social and political change, religious controversy, scientific innovation, and so on. Those sorts of issues are, of course, features of our world today; indeed, many philosophical questions are perennial in the sense that they return, each generation, often in evolving forms. Questions about beauty and art, justice and goodness, knowledge and certainty, and the like have featured within the public and private lives of human beings across all times and cultures. An historical understanding of the philosophers that responded to them can help us, today, in our own efforts to address them. The history of philosophy is, therefore, a feature of philosophising itself. To ask and address philosophical questions is to enter into a longstanding tradition of inquiry. The specific content and form of philosophical questions changes over time, of course, in response to changing social and intellectual conditions. Questions about the certainty of knowledge, say, were changed by the development of the modern sciences. But appreciating this involves an historical sensitivity. It requires us to look not only at earlier philosophers who asked similar questions, but also at the context within which those questions were asked. After all, it is often context which lends our questions urgency, vitality, and significance. There are many philosophical questions and puzzles, but which ones matter to us, and why, is as much a matter of history as it is of curiosity and inquiry. The role of history in shaping our own ideas points to another role for the history of philosophy. Many questions face us, but not all of them matter to us. Certain questions move us, either by disturbing or fascinating us (or, indeed, both). Other questions are curiosities — interesting, but deemed neither urgent nor essential. Understanding the distribution of significance across the philosophical landscape will, again, require a historical perspective. After all, we
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are ourselves subjects of a history. To ape Nietzsche’s famous remark, when we stare into history, history also stares back into us, insofar as the concerns and issues of contemporary society are products, at least in part, of that society’s history — that is, of our history. Such a reflexive historical stance is, of course, only useful beyond a certain point. We can get on much of the business of philosophising, debating and arguing without ever engaging in the historical project of tracing what Nietzsche called the ‘genealogy’ of our questions and methods. But that point at which history becomes essential is, I think, reached far sooner than is often imagined. Beyond a certain point, philosophical understanding must, if it is to satisfy us, become historically sensitive. This would include an understanding of how and why those questions came down to us, what presuppositions must be in place to enable our inquiries, and of why those questions and their answers matter to us. A great deal of valuable philosophical work can proceed without the sort of historical understanding just described. A philosopher would be foolish to pursue a historical perspective where that would neither aid nor complement their concerns. Analytic philosophy, for instance, is often said to be largely ‘ahistorical’, but that is most often, I think, because its questions and concerns are not usually of the sort of invite historical input. The salience of history depends upon the questions being asked and the kind of answers one is seeking.
Genealogy
A line of decent traced continously from an ancestor
Ahistorical
Lacking historical perspective or context
Salience
Prominent or conpicuous
My emphasis on the role of the history of philosophy is directed at those with more vital, ‘practical’ concerns. The refinement of a complex argument about logical relations might not invite historical reflection; but questions about the nature of ‘the good life’, for instance, surely are, for the reason that it is questions of this sort that are perennial, which appear across different cultures and generations. And it is, I suspect, such ‘big questions’ which command the interest and attention of most of those drawn to philosophy. It is these questions,
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and the richer conception of philosophy they reflect, which Kant had in mind when he wrote of the ‘cosmopolitan sense’ in philosophy, which issues in four questions: ‘What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? What is man?’
Flux
The constant change, where things are rarely in the same state of affairs
Haecceities
Denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing
Mind Body Dualism The idea that the mind and body are not identical
Cynic Iconoclasm A person who criticises or opposes beliefs and practices that are widely accepted
Cartesian Dualism The dual existence of man; to be composed of two fundamentally different components
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The history of philosophy, then, is an essential feature of a certain broad conception of philosophy. It may be called cosmopolitan, after Kant, or ‘humanistic’, after Bernard Williams, or it may be judged, following Pierre Hadot, as a series of ‘spiritual exercises’ manifesting in a certain ‘way of life’. Whatever its name, it is a conception of philosophy focused upon questions and concerns of vital importance to thinking, reflective human beings: questions of beauty, meaning, goodness, and the like, where these questions are understood, not as exercises in conceptual ingenuity, but as essential components of one’s practical activities within the world. These questions are certainly not absent from ahistorical philosophising, but arguably they may be better served by an historical approach. Abstract reflection has a part to play in articulating and addressing these questions, but often they cannot be fully appreciated, or answered, without an historical appreciation of those earlier generations of philosophers who, troubled by similar worries, offered their own responses. Sensitivity to the history of philosophy therefore offers resources for understanding that may be unavailable to those who forsake context for raw argument. By neglecting the context of philosophical inquiry, one deprives many problems of their urgency and salience. Earlier philosophers, stripped of context, may seem peculiar, even perverse, for persisting in abstruse intellectual inquiries — about flux, haeccities, mind-body dualism, and the like. However to accuse them thus does them an injustice, and indicates, at the same time, our own ignorance. Once Cynic iconoclasm, say, or Cartesian dualism is located within its proper intellectual and historical context, their urgency and salience may be clarified and amplified. The result is, argue two recent writers, ‘the maturing of a kind of modesty or
humility’, an ‘increased perception’ not only of the ‘presuppositions and prejudices of earlier eras’, but also an increased capacity, on our own part, to ‘expose similar presuppositions and prejudices that may be shaping beliefs and commitments today’. Such a historical conception should also help protect philosophy from certain persistent and ill-informed challenges to it. Those who object that philosophy is ‘abstract’ and ‘detached’ often, I suspect, have certain caricatures of contemporary academic philosophy in mind. Certainly successive British Governments since Thatcher seem to have shared that view, the present one included. Other philosophers have also expressed worries about the deleterious impact of certain features of academic philosophy upon the genuine pursuit of philosophical inquiry. However, the objection that philosophy is detached is invalid because it relies upon a false conception of philosophy. That image of philosophy — as detached, abstract speculation, isolated from a practical context — would certainly make it difficult to see what, if anything, those speculations had to do with the world. However that conception of philosophy is dependent upon an ahistorical approach to the subject, one which strips it of context and isolates it from those ‘real-world’ concerns which animate it. Reaffirming the contextual and historical nature of philosophy should also help to insure us against various vices. The awareness that our problems are not new and that earlier generations also encountered them should encourage a certain humility on our own part. Only presentist hubris could persuade us that our predilections — our anxieties and insights — are privileged guides to the nature of reality. An appreciation of context should, one hopes, indicate that our anxieties and insights arise from ideas and developments which are not wholly of our making. Our achievements are, therefore, not ours alone. At the least, we owe a debt to both the errors and the insights of earlier generations, a debt which an
Presentist
an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences
Hubris
Excessive pride or self confidence
Predilection
A preference or special liking for something, a bid in favour of something
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understanding of the history of philosophy can help to make apparent. There is ignorance, injustice and also ingratitude in the attitudes of those who deride the value of philosophy whilst living within a society so shaped by it. Voltaire urged us, when considering our history, to admire those who ‘first brought us to the path of truth’ as much as those ‘who afterwards conducted us through it’. To cherry-pick from the history of philosophy those figures whose views prefigure ours smacks of what historians of science call ‘Whig history’: a neglect of the role of critics, rival schools and the like in shaping the ideas that, from a parochial perspective, ‘won’ in the end. Failure to acknowledge those who brought us to our current path reflects badly upon us, especially if, as d’Alembert reminds us, we are but a ‘passing generation’, our concerns being, perhaps, ‘nothing for the next one, still less for distant posterity’. Once a historical approach to philosophy is in place, that impoverished view of philosophy — and the stereotypes it sponsors, of philosophers as intellectual narcissists preoccupied with their own uncertainties, say — should dissolve. There is a place for abstract reflection, for sure, but philosophy is, for many, necessarily rooted in the practical concerns of human beings who are, themselves, subjects of a history. Understanding that history will not only illuminate our contemporary concerns, but, one hopes, also renew our appreciation of philosophy. Our participation in that history will, at the least, enable us to do justice to those who came before, and hopefully enable us to endow future generations, as best we can, with ideas which, in time, may be of use to those who follow us. At the very least, such historical philosophising brings with it a set of intellectual virtues — gratitude, humility, and justice — which lend it a moral as well as an intellectual significance.
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IAN JAMES KIDD Full biography BIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Ian James Kidd is a British philosopher who is a currently a Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Durham University who mainly works in epistemology, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of religion, history and philosophy of science, and the philosophical traditions of Asia and Continental Europe.
Science and the Self: Animals, Evolution, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Mary Midgley co-edited with Elizabeth McKinnell London: Routledge
He is especially interested in bringing the resources of disciplines and traditions of philosophy that are, artificially and detrimentally, generally kept apart - our thinking needs to be as wide as the topics with which we engage. In the philosophy of religion, he is broadly interested in the nature of a religious life, construed phenomenologically and cross-culturally. Epistemic virtues and vices (especially epistemic injustice and epistemic humility); the experience and value of illness; the nature of a religious life; contingency and pluralism in science; scientism and anti-scientism; the practice and nature of philosophy; and the life and thought of Paul Feyerabend. Founded the Durham Philosophy Department’s Gender Action Group and is committed to improving the representation of women in philosophy, and is also involved with the Leeds University chapter of Minorities in Philosophy (MAP).
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The Routledge Handbook to Epistemic Injustice co-edited with JosĂŠ Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus London: Routledge Historiography and the Philosophy of the Sciences co-edited with Robin Hendry Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Reappraising Feyerabend co-edited with Matthew Brown Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Mystery and Humility co-edited with Guy Bennett-Hunter European Journal for the Philosophy of Religion
PAPERS
TALKS
Doing Science An Injustice: Midgley on Scientism Educating for Intellectual Humility Nature, Mystery, and Morality: A Daoist View Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare: A Philosophical Analysis Doing Away With Scientism Feyerabend on Politics, Education, and Scientific Culture Phenomenology, Psychiatric Illness, and Religious Commitment Feyerabend on Science and Education Was Sir William Crookes Epistemically Virtuous? Reappraising Feyerabend Transformative Suffering and the Cultivation of Virtue History and Humility Emotion, Religious Practice, and Cosmopolitan Secularism
Illness, Virtue, and Exemplarist Ethics Leeds University Centre for Ethics Learning from the Best: Ethical Exemplarism in Confucius’ ‘Analects’ Durham University Durham University Philosophical Society ‘World Philosophies’ series Epistemic Injustice and Religious Experience Durham University Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Religion Religious Beauties Leeds University Centre for the Philosophy of Religion Anthropogenic Climate Change, Humility, and ‘Epistemic Activism’ Durham University Philosophy and Public Policy: Philosophical Activism III Confidence, Humility, and Philosophy Durham University Buddhism and Virtue Ethics Experiences of Illness and Narratives of Edification Bristol University Illness, Narrative, Phenomenology
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“ Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.” ALBERT SCHWEITZER
PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW Christine M. Korsgaard
The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and
Bifurcation To divide or seperate into two branches or part; fork
Personhood
The cultural and legal recognition of the equal and unalienable rights of human beings
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moral purposes, divided into the two categories of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law. In the law, a ‘person’ is essentially the subject of rights and obligations, while a thing may be owned as property. In ethics, a person is an object of respect, to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative value, and may be used as a means to some person’s ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category. For various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus, a non-human animal, the environment, or an object of great beauty, as a person, but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they are to be valued only as means. In the law, the bifurcation between persons and things or persons and property leaves non-human animals in an especially awkward position. Animals, or at least many of them, are sentient beings with lives of their own and capacities for enjoyment and suffering that seem to make some sort of claim on us. Some have very sophisticated cognitive capacities, including some sense of self. But because animals are classified as property, efforts to secure them some legal protections have been of mixed success and have introduced a certain level of incoherence into the laws. In the face of this, some animal rights advocates have suggested that all cognitively sophisticated animals, or all animals generally, ought to be re-categorized as legal persons. But it may be argued that those who make this proposal are ignoring something important about the concept of a person. It has generally been assumed that ‘personhood’, whatever it is, is, or is based on, an attribute that is characteristic of human beings, and not of the other
animals. In the philosophical tradition, the most common candidate for the attribute that establishes ‘personhood’ is rationality, but understood in a specific sense. Rationality is sometimes loosely identified with the ability to choose intelligently between options or to solve problems by taking thought, but those are attributes that human beings arguably share with many other animals. The more specific sense of ‘rationality’ refers to a normative capacity, a capacity to assess the grounds of our beliefs and actions, and to adjust them accordingly. On the side of action, for instance, it is the capacity to ask whether something that would potentially motivate you to perform a certain action is really a reason for doing that action — and then to be motivated to act in accordance with the answer that you get. Rationality, in this sense, is normative self-government, the capacity to be governed by thoughts about what you ought to do or to believe. In fact, even some thinkers who would deny that rationality is the distinctive characteristic of humanity would still agree that normative self-government is both definitive of personhood and distinctive of humanity. In the empiricist tradition, the tradition of Locke, Hume, and Hutcheson, it has been common to attribute to human beings, and human beings alone, a capacity to form so-called ‘secondorder’ attitudes — for instance, attitudes towards our own desires — that make them liable to normative assessment. Though I may desire to do something, I may also disapprove of that desire, and reject its influence over me. According to empiricists, second-order attitudes are what make human beings subject to an ‘ought’. So many philosophers have agreed that it is in virtue of normative self-government that human beings count as persons in the legal and moral sense.
Normative
Of or pertaining to a norm or standard
Empiricist
The view that experience is the only source of knowledge. Based on experience rather than theory or pure logic
Certainly, if something along these lines is correct, it is natural to think that only human beings can have obligations. In order to have obligations, you need to be able to think about whether what you are doing is right, and to adjust your conduct accordingly. This requires
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Ethologists
Scientists who study animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions objectively
a highly developed ‘theory of mind’, as ethologists call it. An animal has a theory of mind when the animal knows that animals (herself included) have mental attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. But in order to be rational in the sense I just described, an animal must not only know that she and other animals have mental attitudes. She must also know that her attitudes are connected in certain ways — for instance, that she is inclined to perform a certain action because she has a certain desire. To ask whether you have a good reason for doing what you propose to do, or whether it is right, is to think about and evaluate that connection, and it seems likely that only human beings can do that. But it is a much harder question whether being rational in this sense is necessary for having rights, and that is the question most pressing from the point of view of those who seek legal protections for animals. The traditional distinction between persons and things groups the ability to have rights and the liability to having obligations together. One common view about why that should be so is that rights are grounded in some sort of agreement that is reciprocal: I agree to respect certain claims of yours, provided that you respect certain similar claims of mine. The view of society as based on a kind of social contract supports such a conception of rights. But in fact our laws do not merely protect those who as citizens are involved in making its laws: rather, they protect anyone who shares the interests that the laws were made to protect. So for instance, foreigners on our soil have rights not to be robbed or murdered, regardless of the fact that they are not parties to our own social contract. The laws that we make against murder and robbery are intended to protect certain human interests that foreigners share with citizens, and that is sufficient to give them the relevant rights. Of course, foreigners on our soil can also be made to conform to our laws — reciprocity can be required of them. But when we speak
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of universal human rights, we speak of interests that are shared by every human being and that we think ought to be protected, not merely of the interests protected under some actual social contract. So it makes sense to raise the question whether the other animals share the kinds of interests that our laws — either legal or moral — are meant to protect. Animal rights advocates urge that the other animals, like human beings, do have interests. Let me do a little philosophizing about why this is so. Animals have interests because of the way in which things can be good or bad for them. Generally speaking, we use the concepts of good-for and bad-for when we regard objects functionally. Something is good for an object when it enables the object to function well, and bad for it when it interferes with its ability to function. So we might say that riding the brakes is bad for your car, while a regular oil change is good for it. Organisms may be regarded as functional objects, ‘designed’ by the evolutionary process to survive and reproduce. We are thinking of things that way when we say that plenty of water and sunshine are good for the plants. Because a car is an artifact made for human purposes, the ways in which things are good or bad for the car are derivative from human interests. But the way in which things are good or bad for organisms is non-derivative: things are good or bad for the organisms themselves. What is distinctive of animal life is the way that it functions, which is by means of perception and action. Through perception, an animal forms some sort of representation of her environment. As a result of instinct, learning, and in the case of some animals, intelligent thought, objects in the animal’s environment are represented as desirable or aversive in specific ways: as something to eat, or to flee from, or to mate with, or to take care of. Or some sort of practical representation may arise from within, as when you get hungry and find yourself irresistibly thinking about a sandwich. The animal then acts in accordance with these practical representations. The
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practical representations serve, though very imperfectly of course, to enable an animal to get what is good for her and avoid what is bad for her. In other words, when animals evolved, a kind of entity came into existence which actually experiences the goodness or badness of its own condition, or at least of some aspects of its own condition, in a positive or negative way — as something desirable or aversive. An animal experiences its own good or ill. So the way in which things are good or bad for animals is distinctive in that it is both non-derivative and capable of being experienced. We can describe these things by saying that animals have interests, or that there are facts about their welfare. Although our own welfare is more complex than that of the other animals, it is because we are animals, not because we are human beings or persons, that we ourselves have interests or a welfare. Animal rights advocates argue that having a welfare or interests is sufficient to ground rights. We should ask on what basis we claim rights for ourselves, and demand respect for them from each other, if it is not that we ourselves are beings with interests or a welfare? Well, here is one possible answer. Immanuel Kant, who made the concept of a person central to his ethics, argued that a person is an end in himself, to be valued and respected for his own sake, and never to be used merely as a means. Kant claimed that the basis of that value is the capacity for rational choice, or autonomy. He also claimed that it is because of our autonomy that human beings have rights. Because human beings are rational beings, Kant argued, human beings, unlike the other animals, are able to choose our own way of life. We reflect about what counts as a good life, decide the question for ourselves, and live accordingly. In the liberal tradition, with its strong emphasis on toleration, and its antagonism to paternalism, this kind of autonomy has often been regarded as the basis of rights. We have the basic rights of personal liberty, liberty of conscience, and freedom of speech and association, because each of us has the
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right to determine for himself or herself what counts as a worthwhile life, and to live that life, so long as the way we act is consistent with a like right for everyone else. Because the other animals do not choose their own way of life, they do not have rights grounded in this kind of autonomy. But this response is not wholly satisfactory. I think we do have specifically human rights grounded in our autonomy. But the trouble with leaving it at that, is that what makes it important to us that our rights should be respected is not just that we value our autonomy. It is also that we value, to speak almost circularly, our welfare, our interests, or our good. Rights grounded in autonomy may often give us an indirect way to protect what we regard as our good. If someone cannot interfere with your freedom of speech, for example, he cannot interfere with your saying your prayers. It is in part because you care about saying your prayers, and not just because you care about your autonomy, that you care about your right to say them. This is where it becomes clear that there is a problem with dividing the world into persons and things. The other animals, who do not have autonomy, are left with no legal means of protecting their interests or their welfare. If they have no rights, they are not persons, and that leaves them to be things. But animals are not mere things, since they are beings with interests and lives of their own. Insofar as they come within the purview of human laws at all, it is because they are a subject population, and the only way to afford any effective protection for their welfare is through human laws. It is worth emphasizing that last thought. The idea of animal rights sounds silly to some people, because it seems to suggest an insane desire to moralize nature: to imply that we should declare predation to be murder and to make it illegal, or perhaps to turn battles over territory into property disputes that get settled in court. But an advocate of animal rights need not be in favor of our trying to protect non-human animals from each
Predation
Biological interaction where predator feeds on its prey
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other. Rather, the point is to protect them from us, from human beings. The reason only the law can do that effectively is because in a sense, the law is the reason why many of the other animals are so completely at our mercy. What I mean is this: it is not just because we are individually smarter than the other animals that human beings are able to do as we will with them. It is because human beings are so cooperative and therefore so organized. And the way that we organize ourselves is by making laws, which set the terms of our interactions and so unite us into an effective whole. If the law says it is permissible for a person to inflict torments on an animal in order to test a product, for instance, then there is nothing anyone can do to protect that animal. So it is one of those cases — and there are certainly others — in which the only thing that can afford protection against the power of the law is the law itself. The fact that we have any anticruelty laws at all embodies the idea that the welfare of any being who has a welfare — a non-derivative and experienced good — is worthy of regard for its own sake. It should be protected unless there is some good reason why not. It is a further step to say that all animals are ends in themselves, never to be used as mere means to someone else’s ends. But once we agree that their welfare is to be regarded, then we do need a good reason for disregarding it. And what is that reason supposed to be? Why should our interests prevail over theirs? The reason most frequently offered is that human beings just are more valuable and important than the other animals. Some theological traditions have claimed this: human beings are supremely valuable, and the world and all its contents, including the other animals, were made for our use. But in the absence of such a context, importance must be importance to or for someone or something. Perhaps we are more important to ourselves. But, then, each of us has some small circle of loved ones who are the most important people in the world to him, and we do not take that as a reason to do experiments on
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strangers, or eat them, or steal their organs. Something more must be said to explain the precedence that we give to ourselves. But mainly I think we should ask ourselves, on what grounds do we ourselves claim to be valuable in the way that we claim to be — ends in ourselves, never to be used as a mere means to someone else’s ends? Is it really because we have the capacity for rational choice, or is it also more simply because we have a welfare of our own? If it is the latter, simple consistency demands that, as far as we possibly can, we should treat the other animals as ends in themselves. The other animals lack normative self-government, and in that sense they are not persons; but we need not accept the idea that the world is divided into persons and property, or persons and things. Without reclassifying them as persons, we may still regard all animals as ends in themselves, and, as such, the proper subjects of rights against human mistreatment.
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CHRISTINE M. KORSGAARD Full biography BIOGRAPHY
BOOKS
Christine M. Korsgaard is a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University, where she has taught since 1991. From July 1996 through June 2002, she was Chair of the Department of Philosophy. (The current chair is Sean Kelly.) From 2004-2012, she was Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy. (The current DGS is Mark Richard.) Before moving to Harvard University, she held positions at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, as well as visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA.
Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity Oxford University Press
Her notable achievements including her time served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2008-2009, and holding the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from 2006-2009.
Creating the Kingdom of Ends Cambridge University Press
Her work is centred around moral philosophy and its history, practical reason, the nature of agency, personal identity, normativity, and the ethical relations between human beings and the other animals.
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The Constitution of Agency Oxford University Press The Sources of Normativity Cambridge University Press
PAPERS
TALKS
How to be an Aristotelian Kantian Constitutivist The Claims of Animals and the Needs of Strangers Kantian Ethics, Animals, and the Law On Having a Good A Kantian Case for Animal Rights The Relational Nature of the Good The Origin of the Good and Our Animal Nature The Normative Constitution of Agency Valuing Our Humanity Interacting with Animals: A Kantian Account Reflections on the Evolution of Morality The Activity of Reason Natural Motives and the Motive of Duty Just Like All the Other Animals of the Earth Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals
How to be an Aristotelian Kantian Constitutivist Being and Goodness Workshop at Leipzig Learning from the Best: Ethical Exemplarism in Confucius’ ‘Analects’ Human Beings as the Source of Value The Claims of Animals and the Needs of Strangers Rice University Ethics, Politics, and Society The Pufendorf Lectures Groningen University Roundtable Discussion The Unity of the Right and the Good in John Rawls’s Thought Eastern Division APA session on The Legacy of John Rawls Reflections on the Evolution of Morality Northwestern Ethics Conference
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“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason.� IMMANUEL KANT
CONCEIVING THE IMPOSSIBLE AND THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM Thomas Nagel
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“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” MARTIN HEIDEGGER
PHILOSOPHY AS A HUMANIST DISCIPLINE Bernard Williams
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“Don’t bite off more than you can chew because nobody looks attractive spitting it back out.” CARROLL BRYANT
SIMPLE TRUTHS, HARD CHOICES: SOME THOUGHTS ON TERROR, JUSTICE AND SELF-DEFENCE Noam Chomsky
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“Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.� C. S. LEWIS
SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND THEIR THREATS TO MORAL AGENCY Thomas Nagel
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“The same principles which at first view lead to skepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.� GEORGE BERKELEY
FREEDOM OF THE WILL AS A PROBLEM IN NEUROBIOLOGY John Searle
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“History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.” JULIEN BENDA
RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE? THE PACEMAKER FOR CULTURAL RIGHTS J端rgen Habermas
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“We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.” EMILE M. CIORAN
INTENTIONS IN ACTION John McDowell
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“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
REASSESSING REASONS T. M. Scanlon
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“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” CONFUCIUS
THE REVENGE OF THE GIVEN: MENTAL REPRESENTATION WITHOUT CONCEPTUALIZATION Jerry Fodor
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“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.” ARISTOTLE
KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF AND FAITH: IS RELIGION REALLY THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL? Sir Anthony Kenny
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“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” DAVID HUME
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF REASON Simon Blackburn
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“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.� VOLTAIRE
WHAT IS NATURAL AND SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT IT? Mary Warnock
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“No man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” JOHN LOCKE
ATTENTION AND MENTALISM Ned Block
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“Life is a constant process of dying.” ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
IS PERSONAL IDENTITY WHAT MATTERS? Derek Parfit
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“If we would have new knowledge, we must get a whole world of new questions.” SUSANNE LANGER
PERCEPTION: WHERE MIND BEGINS Tyler Burge
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and
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