A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 14]: SARTRE AND THE ANGUISH OF FREEDOM

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the  history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 15, which looks at existentialism, and primarily the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre. This extract is from the section that explores Sartre’s concept of freedom and his relationship to Marxism.

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‘Existence comes before essence’. So claimed Sartre in his celebrated 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. It is a phrase that gets to the heart (one might even say the essence) of his understanding of human nature and of human freedom. Humans do not possess a given nature, an unchanging essence, from which their capacities, personalities and values derive. Rather humans create themselves and their nature by acting upon the world.

This, for Sartre, was the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from a Godless world. ‘When we think of God as the creator’, Sartre observed, ‘we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan’. God ‘makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife’. But what if there is no God? Then there can be no God-created human nature. More, there can be no human nature at all. The only coherent way in which we can speak of a distinctive human nature is as a preconceived creative plan for human beings, just like the only way we can speak of a paper-knife is as a consciously manufactured artefact. Only God, in other words, could have created human nature. If we do not believe in God, we cannot believe in human nature. For Sartre the death of God provided also the last rites for human nature.

The idea that without God, there can be no human nature might seem a strange view, especially for an atheist, in the post-Darwinian world.

WHY YOU SHOULD KILL THE ONE TO SAVE THE TWENTY. AND WHY YOU SHOULDN’T.

Jim is a botanist doing research in a South American country led by a brutal dictator. One day he finds himself in the central square of a small town facing 20 Indians who have been randomly captured and tied up as an example of what will happen to rebels. The army captain tells Jim that if he agrees to kill one of the Indians, the others will be released in honour of Jim’s status as a guest. If, however, Jim refuses, then all the Indians will be shot. What should Jim do?

It is a question that philosopher Bernard Williams poses in his essay ‘A critique of utlitarianism’ in his 1973 book Utilitarianism: For and Against, which I am currently re-reading.  The book is a double-hander with JJC Smart, in which the two philosophers… well, unsurprisingly, argue for and against utilitarianism. Both essays in the book are worth reading. But my sympathies are clearly with Williams’ critique of utilitarianism, and more broadly of consequentialism.

Wiliams uses the story of Jim to illustrate his most profound criticism of conequentialism. The real problem with consequentialism, he observes, is not that it arrives at the wrong answers to moral questions (though often it does). It is that even when a consequentialist arrives at the right answer, he or she does so by the wrong means and for the wrong reasons, and in a way that is devastating for our moral lives.

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 10]: SPINOZA’S ETHICS

In the series of extracts I’m running from my still-being-written book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 11, which explores the ethical claims of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. The rise of the market economy and the growth of religious scepticism had, by the seventeenth century, corroded the ability of both God and community to warrant moral behaviour. Who or what could now authorize moral rules? This was the question now facing moral philosophers. One answer was revolutionary: humans could. Human nature, needs, desires, aspirations and possibilities would act as warrant for the moral good.  But how human nature would play this role remained perplexing.   After all, as Thomas Aquinas had pointed out, it was precisely the seeming  ‘uncertainty of human judgement’ and the fact that ‘different people’ formed ‘different judgements on human acts’ and created ‘different and contrary laws’ that seemed to necessitate Man having to ‘be directed in his proper acts by a law given by God’.

Hobbes and Spinoza gave very different answers to this challenge, answers that were both to be highly influential. Hobbes helped launch a British tradition of moral philosophy; in his wake come Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Bentham and Mill. Spinoza helped shape what is now often called the ‘Continental’ tradition. Thinkers as diverse as Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche were all in his debt.  The distinctions between the two traditions are often overplayed. Nevertheless, the ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza were to shape the way that the modern world came to look at the question of moral rules through the distinct answers they gave as to what should warrant moral behaviour. This extract is taken from the section on Spinoza’s Ethics.

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Spinoza’s stock is today not very high. In the pantheon of great seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers – Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, etc – Spinoza is usually seen as hovering in the back row. He is surprisingly little known, often regarded as a philosopher difficult to understand and possessed of little influence. Yet he is arguably the philosopher who more than most has shaped modern thinking about freedom and equality and the possibility of a secular morality. No one else, the historian Jonathan Israel suggests, ‘during the century 1650-1750 remotely rivalled Spinoza’s notoriety, as the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, tradition, morality and what was everywhere regarded… as divinely constituted political authority.’ Spinoza, Israel adds, ‘imparted order, cohesion and formal logic to what was in effect a fundamentally new view of man, God and the universe rooted in philosophy, nurtured by scientific thought and capable of producing a revolutionary ideology.’ Philosophically, Bertrand Russell wrote of Spinoza, ‘some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme’. As a ‘natural consequence’, Russell sardonically added, Spinoza ‘was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness.’

ALL ANIMALS HAVE AN EVOLUTIONARY PAST. ONLY HUMANS MAKE HISTORY

It has long been known that different groups of chimpanzees have different cultural habits. Now, new research has revealed the degree of behaviour plasticity among orangutans, plasticity that gives rise to cultural differences between different groups, each possessing behaviours specific to that group, and each passing on such behaviours from one generation to another.

For many, the empirical discoveries about ape cultures are important not just because of what they tell us about the mental abilities of the Great Apes, but also because of what they tell us, or potentially tell us, about humans and human cultures. (‘Great Ape’, I know, is often seen as synonymous with the family Hominidae, which includes humans; here I’m using the term to refer to non-human members of Hominidae.) In particular, many see such studies as shining significant light upon the common evolutionary roots of human and Great Ape culture.  ‘Now we know that the roots of human culture go much deeper than previously thought’, Michael Krützen, the lead author of the orangutan study suggests. ‘Human culture is built on a solid foundation that is many millions of years old and is shared with the other great apes.’

In one sense, of course, this has to be true. Humans are evolved beings and our propensity for culture must have evolved at some point in our evolutionary journey. If the Great Apes possess the same cultural propensities as humans do, then there are likely to be common evolutionary roots for those propensities. But do they possess the same cultural propensities?

FIVE BOOKS ON MORALITY WITHOUT GOD

I was asked by the The Browser, a wonderful, indispensable website that trawls the web  and fishes out some of the best writing, to choose, for its ‘Five books’ section, five books (naturally) on morality without God. Here’s my somewhat eclectic list and the interview that accompanies it.

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Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion   which teaches us morality.  How would you respond?

One of the great selling points of religions – in particular the monotheistic religions – throughout their history has been their importance as a bedrock of moral values. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. ‘To remove God’, as the theologian Alister McGrath has put it, ‘is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality.’

Looking back on history one might question just how successful God has been as ‘the final restraint on human brutality’. What really concerns me, however, is the way that religious concepts of morality degrade what it means to be human by diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework. From a religious perspective, it is the weakness of human nature that ensures that God has to establish and anchor moral rules.

In truth, morality, like God, is a human creation. Even believers have to decide which of the values found in the Torah or the Bible or the Qur’an they accept and which they reject. What God provides is not the source of moral values but, if you like, the ethical concrete in which those values are set. Rooting morality in religion is a means of putting certain values or practices beyond question by insisting they are God-given. The success of religious morality derives from its ability to combine extreme flexibility – just look at the degree to which religious morals have changed over the centuries – with the insistence that certain beliefs and values and practices are sacred and absolute because they are divinely sanctioned.

IN PRAISE OF RAY TALLIS

A reporter from the US Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me to see if I was willing to be interviewed about Ray Tallis. Apparently the Chronicle is running a big spread about Tallis to mark the American launch of his new book Aping Mankind.  I was more than happy to offer my views. I have long thought of Tallis as one of the hidden treasures of British culture, to set alongside the likes of the Horniman Museum, Little Atoms and Richard Overton’s forgotten masterpiece An Arrow Against All Tyrants.

Of course, anyone who has appeared on Desert Island Discs – and been chosen by Kirsty Young as her luxury to take to her desert island – could hardly be said any more to be hidden. After decades of burrowing away, writing poetry and philosophy at the crack of dawn before settling down to his day job as Professor of Gerontology and Project Director of Neurosciences in Greater Manchester hospitals, Tallis has, over the past few years, finally found an audience. He has also found a place on Prospect’s list of 100 top British intellectuals, been named as one of the Economist‘s top 20 polymaths in the world, become a fixture on the literary festival circuit, and pops up regularly on shows such as Start the Week, Night Waves, Late Review and A Good Read.

In a culture such as ours that rarely breeds public intellectuals, a figure such as Ray Tallis, who is as lucid talking about Parmenides as about potassium uptake, as eloquent discussing Heidegger as human evolution, while also getting his hands dirty running a large chunk of the NHS, is both unusual and exciting. ‘If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath’, the journalist Andrew Brown once observed, ‘it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder.’

REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE, MORALITY & THE MORAL MAZE

The Moral Maze is a show with its strengths and weaknesses, a format better suited to debating some issues than others. This week’s programme, on the relationship between science and morality, was somewhat messy, inevitably perhaps given the complexity of the issue, the subtlety of many of the arguments and the depth of knowledge required. Nevertheless, there were, I thought,  useful parts of the debate. I was particularly struck by Joshua Greene‘s skepticism about the ability of science to settle moral questions, given the general thrust of his academic research.

Greene is perhaps the world’s leading moral psychologist and his work has thrown much light on the character of our moral evaluations. There are, Greene argues, two modes of moral thinking. One is intuitive, the other consciously reasoned. The analogy he often uses is that of the distinction between automatic and manual modes in a digital camera.  The automatic mode is quick but inflexible. The manual mode is flexible but slow. Much the same is true, he suggests, of the two modes of moral thinking. He also famously suggests that Kantian notions of rights and duties emerge from our intuitions while conscious, reasoned moral evaluations are driven by utilitarian cost-benefit analyses.

MORALITY ON THE BRAIN

This week’s Moral Maze on Radio 4 explores the relationship between science and morality, and in particular the idea that science provides the means to establish moral norms.  It has an all-star cast of witnesses including Jerry Coyne, Joshua Greene, Ray Tallis and Giles Fraser.

I gave a talk last year to the ‘Talking Brains’ conference at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on ‘Science, Morality and the Euthyphro Dilemma’  that took a skeptical look at some of the arguments of those whom I call ‘neuromoralists’. It picks up and develops many of the themes I touched on in my review of Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape and examines a few of the issues that hopefully we will debate on The Moral Maze. Here is a shortened, edited version of the talk.

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SCIENCE, MORALITY AND THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA

Can science help define our moral framework? And if so how? The idea that science, and in particular neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, can throw light on moral choices has become conventional wisdom in recent years. How it can do so is, however, still a matter for fierce debate.

There is a wide spectrum of views about how science can illuminate our moral lives. At the soft end of this spectrum is the suggestion that our capacity for moral thought lies in our evolutionary history, the evidence for which derives primarily from primatology and evolutionary and developmental psychology. The degree to which our capacity for moral thought is the product of natural selection remains a matter of debate. In principle, however, the idea that our ability to think in terms of right and wrong may in part have evolutionary roots should not be controversial.

TEST TUBE TRUTHS

‘IF GOD DOES NOT EXIST, EVERYTHING   is permitted.‘ Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. It has become the almost reflexive response of believers when faced with an argument for a godless world. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism.

In recent years, the riposte of many to this challenge has been to argue that moral codes are not revealed by God but instantiated in nature, and in particular in the brain. Ethics is not a theological matter but a scientific one. Science is not simply means of making sense of facts about the world, but also about values, because values are in essence facts in another form.