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The Importance of Being Human

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Cora Diamond
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Extract

I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics.

A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument.

What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms which are not tied to biological classification, if (for example) we treat as the properties which make us human the capacities for reasoning or for self-consciousness, then indeed those capacities may be morally relevant, but if they are morally significant at all, they are significant whether they are the properties of a being who is a member of our species or not. And so it would be better to use a word like ‘person’ to mean a being that has these properties, to bring out the fact that not all human beings have them and that non-human beings conceivably might have them.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 29 , March 1991 , pp. 35 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1991

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References

1 My sample argument is made up; for an actual case very close to it, see Feinberg, Joel ‘Abortion’, in Regan, Tom (ed.) Matters of Life and Death (New York: Random House, 1986), 258–9.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Paton, H. J., The Categorical Imperative (London: Hutchinson, 1953), 165.Google Scholar

3 See Rorty, , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), especially ch. 9, ‘Solidarity’.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See Baier, , Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)Google Scholar. I draw especially on ‘Knowing Our Place in the Animal World’, ‘Frankena and Hume on Points of View’ and ‘Secular Faith’.

5 Rorty, , op. cit. (n. 3), 190.Google Scholar

6 Baier, , op. cit. (n. 4), 171–2.Google Scholar

7 Ibid. 149–50.

8 Ibid. 149.

9 Ibid. 147–8.

10 Rorty, , op. cit. (n. 3), 26.Google Scholar

11 Ibid. 17.

12 ‘Gifts of Fortune, by H. M. Tomlinson’, in Lawrence, D. H., Phoenix (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 342–4Google Scholar. (There is apparently no record of publication prior to earlier editions of Phoenix.)

13 Quoted by Lawrence, , 344.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. 344–5.

15 In The Mountain People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972).Google Scholar

16 See Berger, John, ‘Why Look At Animals?’ in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 1–26.Google Scholar

17 See, e.g., Midgley, Mary, Animals and Why They Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 7Google Scholar. For the relation between imaginative and naturalistic description of our relation to animals (taking the single example of the significance of the look another gives us), compare Midgley, Mary, Beast and Man (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), 6–13Google Scholar with Berger, John op. cit. (n. 16), 2–4Google Scholar, and Hobson, Robert, ‘The Curse in the Dead Man's Eye’, in Changes 2 (1984), 40–4.Google Scholar

18 I am not in this paper concerned with the question whether the contrasts that we make, prompted by our response to what is queer and striking in human life, involve grouping things in a way that is arbitrary, compared to the groupings of things inspired by scientific interests; I am concerned rather with the fact that it is no necessary feature of philosophy that it should think of its own interests as closely tied to those of science. There is something analogous to Scrooge in our philosophy: a closing off of oneself to the child in one, as having no significant place in the grown-up way we do philosophy. The sense of the world as remarkable, the live interest we have as children in the fact that the world has animals and us, is imaginatively dead or inaccessible to us, and we are then capable of writing as if there were something odd or prejudiced about people who, in the face of all we now know, go on using the word ‘animal’ as if it denoted only non-human animals.

19 Baier, , op. cit. (n. 4), 305.Google Scholar

20 See ibid. 137.

21 Ibid. 138.

22 The example is based on an anecdote recounted by Isaacs, Susan, Intellectual Growth in Young Children (London: Routledge, 1930), 163.Google Scholar

23 O'Connor, Flannery, Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 133Google Scholar; see also 44, 80, 104, 124, 176, 198.

24 Cf. also Singer, Peter, ‘Animals and the Value of Life’, in Matters of Life and Death, 338–80Google Scholar: he mentions the possibility of the term ‘human’ ‘Slopping around’ between the ‘person’-use and the biological use (355). Cf. also Warren, Mary Anne, ‘On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion’, in Feinberg, Joel (ed.), The Problem of Abortion (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1984), 102–19Google Scholar. She distinguishes in a different way the two senses of ‘human being’; but the point of the distinction is the same: to deny the existence of imaginative shaping of meaning, and to treat thought about morality as capable of going on without loss in a context emptied of all intimacy with such imaginative shapings.

25 Rorty, , op. cit. (n. 3), xviGoogle Scholar; see also 94.

26 See Rorty, ibid. 141.

27 Preface to ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).Google Scholar

28 See Joseph Gold's discussion of the tie to Hamlet, in Charles Dickens: Radical Moralist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972)Google Scholar. The whole of Gold's book is relevant to the themes of this paper, but see especially the Introduction.

29 See also Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 376.Google Scholar

30 Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review, 1975), 82.Google Scholar

31 Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 504–12.Google Scholar

32 Ibid. 512. It should be noted that the applicability of justice to a person is connected by Rawls to the ‘inviolability’ of the person (3).

33 See, e.g., Feinberg, Joel, ‘The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations’, in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis, Blackstone, W. T. (ed.) (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1974), 44Google Scholar; Murphy, Jeffrie ‘Rights and Borderline Cases’, in Murphy, , Retribution, Justice and Therapy (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 26–39.Google Scholar

34 See Feinberg, , op. cit. (n. 33), 44.Google Scholar

35 Murphy, , op. cit. (n. 33), 27.Google Scholar

36 Smith, J. C. and Hogan, Brian, Criminal Law (London: Butterworths, 1973), 326–7.Google Scholar

37 Cf. also the letter of Hélène Tassel-Smith, Le Figaro, 16 mai 1989, 2.

38 From a letter.

39 It should be pointed out that the sense of pain meant is not the capacity to sympathize with feelings of pain in others. See, e.g., Harold Brodkey's exclamation, ‘My God, how bitterly and deeply I want the world to go on’ (‘Reflections: Family’, The New Yorker, 11 23, 1987)Google Scholar; the pain felt has in it the sense of mystery at how webs of human relations reach through the world.

40 Dostoyevsky, , Brothers Karamazov, trans. Magarshack, David (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), Book III, chapter II.Google Scholar

41 Mare, Walter de la, ‘The Mourner’.Google Scholar

42 Rorty, , op. cit. (n. 3), 193.Google Scholar

43 For example, in the world of the Odyssey, in which those who deny Odysseus and his companions hospitality are monsters and giants; they do not share the human form, and refuse connection with us by treating us as casual munchies. Hospitality, as a central virtue in these cultures, shows the danger of generalizations about people's tendency to treat the needs of their families and neighbours as more important than those of strangers, who are ‘them’ in comparison to ‘us’. For it may be thought appropriate or obligatory to kill the sheep on which one's family depends to give a stranger a generous meal, to rescue, in case of fire, a stranger-guest's child before one's own, to risk one's life in avenging the death met by a stranger under one's roof or in one's tent. In these cultures, the very ‘them'ness of the stranger-guests is tied to the impossibility of setting aside their needs as one can set aside those of one's own family in the circumstances. The tie may actually be internal to the word expressive of their being ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’, as in Greek, where xenos has not just the meaning it has for us in ‘xenophobic’ but also the meaning guest. See D. H. Lawrence's use of the connections in ‘Snake’, and Alasdair MacIntyre's comments on them in After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 116–17.Google Scholar

44 A good example is Joel Feinberg's ‘Abortion’; see n. 1 above.

45 See the discussion by Jeffrie Murphy of the rights of the retarded in ‘Rights and Borderline Cases’, op. cit. (n. 33), especially 34.

46 For its connection with politics, see Weschler, Lawrence, ‘A Reporter at Large: The Great Exception’, The New Yorker, 04 3 and 04 10, 1989.Google Scholar

47 Rorty, , op. cit. (n. 3), 193.Google Scholar

48 I have been asked (by John Marshall) what it means to say of a severely retarded person that he or she has a human life to lead. I do not mean by ‘having a human life to lead’ having a life in which distinctively human capacities are exercised. Someone may be deprived, for part or all of his life, of distinctively human capacities like reason. A human life without the exercise of those capacities is his human life. The one human life he is given has that terrible deprivation; that, in his case, is what his having a human life to lead has been. We may perfectly well think of that as a particularly terrible human fate.

49 An earlier version of this paper was read at a meeting of the Sociedad Peruana de Filosofía. I have been greatly helped by comments from David McNaughton, James Conant, Richard Rorty, John Marshall, Ruth Anna Putnam, Mary Rorty, David Cockburn, Peter Winch, Marilyn Frye and Anthony Woozley.