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The Importance of Being Human

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David McNaughton
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Extract

I wish from my Heart, I could avoid concluding, that since Morality, according to your Opinion as well as mine, is determin'd merely by Sentiment, it regards only human Nature & human Life. … If Morality were determin'd by Reason, that is the same to all rational Beings: But nothing but Experience can assure us, that the Sentiments are the same. What Experience have we with regard to superior Beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all? They have implanted those Sentiments in us for the Conduct of Life like our bodily Sensations, which they possess not themselves. (Letter from Hume to Hutcheson: March 16, 1740)

When we ask whether morality ‘regards only human nature and human life’ we might be concerned with one of two kinds of question. We may be asking what kinds of being could share our moral point of view. What is the potential scope of the community of moral agents and assessors? Is the moral point of view essentially a human point of view? Could we, or should we, adopt a wider standpoint (say that of rational agency as such) which would leave room for a significant moral dialogue with non-human moral agents, if there are any? Alternatively, we could be asking whether only human beings should be the objects of moral concern or whether we should widen the circle of concern to include other kinds of being. We may make the same point using a helpful device of Cora Diamond's. We may be concerned with what should replace x or with what should replace y in the formula: We xs assess together conduct and character in so far as it affects ourselves and our fellow ys.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 63 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 Greig, J. Y. T. (ed.), The Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), Vol. 1, 40.Google Scholar

2 It is clear from the context that, in his letter, Hume is raising the former question.

3 See Diamond, Cora, ‘The Importance of Being Human’Google Scholar in this volume, p. 37. All otherwise unattributed page references in brackets in the text will be to this paper.

4 Cora Diamond alludes, on p. 37 of her paper, to Annette Baier's Humean view which allows sympathetic feeling to extend to the inanimate. This may be the right position but, for reasons that I explore briefly in Part III, it seems to me to represent a considerable departure from Hume's own view.

5 The route here described is followed by McDowell, John, ‘Non-cognitivism and Rule-following’, in Holtzman, Steven H. and Leich, Christopher M. (eds.), Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 141–62Google Scholar. For an account of this version of moral realism and further references see McNaughton, David, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar. The line of thought in the text is developed in Moral Vision, ch. 3, section 6 (MV 3.6). All future references to this work will be in this abbreviated style.

6 In opposition to this view there are a number of moral realists who adopt an externalist account of moral motivation. For a clear account of this position see Brink, David, ‘Externalist Moral Realism’, Southern Journal of Philosophy 24, Supplement (1986), 23–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 We would not have a complete articulation of a moral position until we knew how that position dealt with conflicts of moral principles. If we accept Ross's claim that there is no computational method of settling moral conflicts then some part of our moral practice would remain opaque to the outsider (see MV 13.2).

8 For more on particularism see Dancy, Jonathan, ‘Ethical Particularism and Morally Relevant Properties’, Mind 92 (1983), 530–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and MV 13. I want to stress that the particularist sets no a priori limits on what kinds of feature may be morally relevant. Scientific, relational and cultural facts may all be relevant. The latter may include facts of the kind to which Cora Diamond draws our attention in her paper; facts about people and animals which stem from our cultural makings.

I use the term ‘fact’ deliberately. In ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy 53 (1978), 465–79Google Scholar, Cora Diamond talks of applying the notion of a fellow creature to an animal, of seeing it as company, of its having an independent life. She then says ‘it is not a fact that a titmouse has a life; if one speaks that way it expresses a particular relation within a broadly specifiable range to titmice. It is no more biological than it would be a biological point should you call another person a “traveller between life and death”’ (p. 475). I agree with her that such a remark is not intended biologically, but science has no monopoly on facts. Perhaps similar thoughts underlie her contrast in her present paper between the empirical and the imaginative, a distinction of which I have a profound distrust.

9 See the articles in Part I of Clarke, S. G. and Simpson, E. (eds.), Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989)Google Scholar especially the splendid piece by Martha Nussbaum.

10 I have in mind here, in particular, the work of Nelson Goodman.

11 MV 10.4.

12 See MV 10.5–7.

13 If Hume did think this, as Diamond suggests on p. 37 (following Baier's account) it was not as a result of the nature of his theory. But I think the evidence is that he did give animals some place as objects of moral concern. Baier says in Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 149Google Scholar, ‘Hume himself does not address the question of whether virtues and vices are shown in our treatment of animals.’ This is a mistake. See Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) 190–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Points which I owe to the work of Arthur Danto.

15 T. S. Eliot makes similar remarks about the literary canon in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, reprinted in Lodge, D. (ed.), Twentieth Century Literacy Criticism (London: Longman, 1972) 71–6.Google Scholar

16 There is not space to consider here the interesting question, touched on in this paper of Diamond's but discussed at greater length in other papers of hers, as to how we might extend to animals various notions that naturally find their place in human life, and what the effect of that extension might be.

17 In this paragraph, and elsewhere, I am relying heavily on a letter of Cora Diamond's, part of which is reproduced in the Appendix to her paper. She says ‘[O]n my view there is plenty of room for critical reflection, but it is not a matter of trying to tell whether the beings to whom we respond are, all or almost all or some of them, such as to merit … the treatment we do give or do think it is right to give to fellow human beings’ (p. 62, my emphasis).

18 Diamond, , ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, op. cit. (n. 8), 351.Google Scholar

19 When I originally wrote this paper I took myself, in my remarks about pets, to be expounding Diamond's position in her earlier paper. However, she assured me, at the conference, that the argument which I develop here (which we may call the circularity argument) is not one she intended to put forward. Fortunately, there is no need to consider whether my reading had any textual warrant (which I think it had); the argument of my paper is unaffected by the question of attribution. I develop the pet example firstly to try to make sense of the sentences from her letter that I quoted and, second, in order to bring out the contrast with the case of the severely retarded human, and thus to pose a challenge to Diamond's understanding of this latter case.

20 ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, op. cit. (n. 8), 469.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 54Google Scholar. I have Davidsonian doubts about this description of the Nuer's practice, but I leave those on one side.

23 At the conference, David Cockburn pointed out that this reason did not seem sufficient, on its own, to explain our reluctance to experiment (painlessly) on the retarded, though it might ground some other response, such as wanting to give them those comforts they could appreciate, as a sort of compensation. (A similar problem would afflict anyone who tried to explain, along parallel lines, our feeling that it is very wrong to make fun of the retarded, even where they are incapable of noticing it.)

Here is a tentative response. The thought that someone has been deprived, although she does not know it, of a normal life, might ground an unwillingness to do anything to make her life worse. This would rule out all experiments except ones where there was no possibility of any deleterious consequences. This might still leave some opening for totally harmless experimentation. But would such experiments, if they met this stringent condition, be wrong?

24 It might help to recall the aesthetic analogy; think of cases where one wishes to justify one's judgement of a work of art by offering a particular way of seeing (or reading, or hearing) it.

25 Holism about reasons will prevent particularists suppposing that, where reference to being human gets in as a moral reason, it always gets in in the same way. The above account would not do, for example, in the case of neonates. Here, perhaps, we appeal to the fact that they are potentially human, that they would have a human life to lead if they were nurtured rather than destroyed. (I owe this point to Jonathan Dancy.)

It is noteworthy that objections to the potentiality argument typically follow a pattern which the particularist rejects. We are reminded that there are many cases where the fact that something is potentially f does not justify us in acting as if it were actually f. The implication is that because an appeal to potentiality won't work in these cases it won't work anywhere. This is just the move the particularist resists.

26 I owe this point to Piers Rawlings.

27 I should perhaps stress that there are many parts of Diamond's rich paper that are unaffected by these remarks, such as her interesting treatment of Scrooge's awakening awareness of his own mortality.

28 I wish to thank Cora Diamond for giving most generously of her time in discussing her views with me and saving me from many errors. I also wish to thank Jonathan Dancy, Piers Rawling, Brad Hooker and David Cockburn who provided helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and the Philosophy Department of the University of Georgia for a generous financial contribution to my travelling costs.