Roger Scruton: Human Nature

good well welcome everyone to this year's first the first of this year's charles ii test lectures we're very honored in the madison program to be presenting these lectures we have done so for every year I'm bringing in a very distinguished scholar of the Madison programs existence which is now 13 years perhaps it's now time for me to tell the story which I think I haven't done publicly before of how there came to be Charles II test lectures dr. test was a member of one of the 1930s classes at Princeton and he came to my attention in what I hope you will agree is somewhat amusing way back in 1998 an organization at Princeton decided to confer upon President Clinton a an award or medal of some sort this was in the thick of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and I arranged with the Daily Princetonian to write a little article that was somewhat critical of President Clinton to be published on the day of his visit to campus I had grown up in a university town in the 60s when Nixon was was president and I learned even as a middle school student how these things are done from the students at the University you know if Kissinger came to town or Nixon came to town you could count on there being some hostile peace in the campus newspaper so having learned how to do it I thought well that would be a good thing to do here with a different president and the arrangements were all made and the article was drafted and the day was swiftly arriving and I got to visit from an editor of The Daily Princetonian telling me that they had decided in fact not to print my essay as agreed on day of the visit but would postpone it for another time to which I responded bringing all the force of my legal training to bear that was not our agreement and the editor said well they decided to do that and I said why and I asked why and was told that well this way I could have more space to give a more developed argument and I said well no I had already had 900 words which is what I had been given was exactly the amount of space I needed and that was fine don't worry about me just run my run my peace but then it was admitted to me that it wasn't a matter of space it was something else that had involved as I was told pounding on the table during the preparation meeting for President Clinton's visit when members of the White House staff were present with the planning committee the planning committee including as it turned out the editor of The Daily Princetonian so when my op-ed was was pulled from the Daily Princetonian I took it to the Wall Street Journal who immediately and gleefully published it assigned which generated what I even then had already gotten more than used to which was a barrage of hate mail and Valentines so this was when the internet was very young and people not that many people were using it so they were they were coming into my office at corwin hall to the mailboxes there in Corwin Hall so for about a week I would show up at my office go down to the mailboxes and I would see that the mail boxes were my mail boxes were stuffed with letters and I would I wouldn't pull them out and one by one open them throw the envelope in the trash can read the letter throw the letter in a trash can so I opened this particular letter threw it in the envelope in the trash can and read the letter which was written in a very uneven hand obviously an elderly person and the article I'm sorry the letter said dear professor George I never thought I would see the day when such common sense was spoken by a professor at my alma mater please use the enclosed check for any good purpose you would assign I dove into the trashcan retrieve the envelope and sure enough there was a very large check larger than any I had ever seen in the envelope so I got back in touch with the person whose name was on the check and on the on the letter who was dr. Charles II test retired physician from Indiana and I wrote to him at the address on the envelope and thanked him for his generous gift and asked him whether it might be possible to use the the money for a lecture series in a new program that I had envisaged but wasn't yet up and running called the James Madison program in American ideals and institutions and he kindly got back in touch and said he thought that would just be a great way to use the money so we have ever since then used those funds for the Charles II tests lectures three lectures by a distinguished visitor on a theme and this year I am absolutely delighted to welcome back to Princeton one of the world's most eminent philosophers and my very dear friend and a great friend of the James Madison program professor Roger Scruton professor Scruton lives both in the United States in the Washington DC area and in rural England in Wiltshire he is currently a fellow at the ethics in Public Policy Center in Washington DC and a visiting professor both at the University of st. Andrews in Scotland and Oxford University he has taught in a variety of places including here at Princeton under the auspices of our department of philosophy and of the James Madison program a seminar a few years ago on conservative political thought he's also taught at Boston University here in the United States and in Birkbeck College in London he's wouldn't written on a remarkable a range of issues across the spectrum of subfields of philosophy from aesthetics to ethics and just about everything in between his books include the aesthetics of architecture the aesthetics of music and quite recently Green philosophy he is in addition to that a person of great skills in the fields of music his opera violet or violet was performed at the Guildhall London to widespread acclaim in 2004 he is the founding editor of the Salisbury review as well as founder and director of Claridge Press which is now part of the continuum international Publishing Group he earned his bachelor's master's and doctoral degrees at Cambridge University and his law degree from the Inner Temple Roger it really is a delight to have you back professor Roger Scruton well thank you Robbie for very kind introduction and thank you to the James Madison program for inviting me to give these lectures and I hope that what I have to say fits into the general aims of your program and also the general atmosphere of the politics department here I am of course yeah all right I'm a philosopher by training not a political scientist and I don't have the detailed knowledge of the American Constitution that Americans seem to expect others to have largely because I suspect cuz they don't have it themselves and I look forward to these kind of events in which in which to obtain an overview of the surrounding disorder but what I want to talk about instead is that very basic principles from which a view of the of our political existence stems and I'm going to give a a very large wide-ranging view starting from lasted as I indicate from a view of human nature what kind of thing we are what I'll do is I'll talk informally for about 45 minutes and then open the the talk to questions because I think only when I know what your questions are when I have a clear conception of what you're expecting me to say so my vision of the world very roughly is that that we human beings exist in communities and through that existence in communities we construct for ourselves a vision of the surrounding order but that vision of the surrounding order is not a unitary thing or a simple thing it does there's no one way in which we have of ordering our experience we order it I think in at least three perhaps four quite different ways and part one of the tasks of human life is bringing those different ways of ordering our experienced together so I talked initially about the the basic order that we perceive around us in which we cannot escape from the order of nature we are natural beings like plants and animals and everything else that we encounter we're part part of the physical world I take the word physical in in its old-fashioned Greek meaning just to eat it and to mean the same as nature and we're governed by natural laws which assign effects to causes and causes to effects and this is a not an unusual thing to think but of course has always been a problem for human beings to accept this truth about themselves that they are immersed in the natural order subjected to the the buffeting of natural forces and perhaps them in some way victim of those forces there has always been a question of the extent to which we are free if we are free at all and whether our being part of nature is incompatible with our freedom and that's something else a little bit about there is of course also the view that many philosophers have entertained that these natural laws are as they put it deterministic laws that is to say they are without exceptions and such that from any particular condition of the universe the laws will enable us to predict the ensuing conditions in which case what room is there the human choice and and free freely freely conceived projects whatever we think about those questions I'm going to leave them on one side I think it is true that and arguable that we do not enjoy any exemptions from the natural order we are simply creatures and who belong with the rest of the world in the great comprehensive scheme of physical reality hence there are sciences of human nature which can tell us a lot about what we are and of course in the modern world and the world in which we live two Sciences in particular have come to the fore as claiming some kind of authority in explaining us describing us and perhaps predicting what what we could achieve these two Sciences being evolutionary psychology and neuroscience and many of you here will have it will be used to the impact of those two Sciences on the study of not only of human beings as such but also of the political order and ethics and so on there are whole branches of evolutionary psychology which purport to describe and explain the emergence of the moral consciousness and to show us how it is that that creatures like us through moral of moral thinking have adapted to a social condition well I think that those Sciences tell us a lot about what we are but nevertheless they don't tell the whole story because in a sense we remain on the edge of nature although we are natural objects we are also on the edge of that nature which includes us where in the world but not of the world as st. John put it in the in the gospel and the reason why I say this it has to do with the presence in our thinking and in our way of experiencing the world of the this can't the concept of the first person each of us refers to himself not just as as this thing this organism but also as I I am I to myself and you to you when we encounter each other and in the use of this word I is included an extraordinary vision of not only of my own position but of your position too there is the first person class case brings with it a strange and only in many ways hard to understand grammar so for instance while you can assign to me sensations emotions and states of mind intentions by observing my behavior listening to my remarks and so on I can assign those states to myself on no basis immediately and in the large majority of cases without error I simply know that I'm in pain that I'm intending to get through this and to the end of this lecture with minimum disturbance and so on you are on however have to work that out for yourselves and this peculiarity of first person knowledge means that for myself I am not really an object to be observed I'm not something that is there in the order of nature whose properties and condition has to be worked out from its physical relations and so on I am as it were sitting on the edge of nature of the natural world a point of view upon it but not an item within it and the great question is how is this possible well let me just take a step back from that and talk about the general issues to do with with human freedom and my nature is a reason giving creature and here here I think there's a I find a useful analogy in music everybody every musical person knows that music is not just a sequence of sounds if I play a sequence of sounds to you which happens to be a melody you hear something other than the sequence of sounds you hear something begin rise to a climax perhaps and then work towards closure you hear a movement a movement between pitches and that movement goes on perhaps even well there is no sound you all know the theme of the last movement of bay heaven's Eroica symphony bom bom bom-bom which moves as moves through those notes even though most of it is silence right between you any of those two motor notes it is moving but what is moving not those sounds and anyway their sounds can't move a flat is a flat it doesn't it can't move to be flat without being something else there's a huge paradox about what musical movement is but when we hear music we organize it in that way as a system of movement which also contains actions the first efnet having risen to b-flat does seem to to want to fall to the b-flat below it's as it were it's got its got a plan of action and it's drawing it at a certain stage it draws towards closure and in that way we can see how we can conceptualize one on the same thing in two quite different ways that's a sequence of pitch sounds and there's a you know elaborate physics of sound which tells us how we conceptualize that we can explain all that we observe physically and without referring to movement around here at that but we can conceptualize it also in this other way in terms of the movement of a melody through musical space and that space at one dimensional space of music doesn't exist anywhere in the physical world and we couldn't enter it and yet we do enter it in a certain way because we hear what's going on in it and relate to it and this connects with a another distinction which is familiar to us but again we don't necessarily make it explicit the distinction between reasons and causes if I ask you why does the melody turn on a particular note on a particular discord say that's not really asking you've asked them for a cause no no science of acoustics could give you an answer to that question the answer to the question might be that having reached that discord the tension is so great that the melody must turn in another direction right as in they the top when the climax of Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto feather first theme which to go worse after discord and has to come down again and that's like you know it's like the kind of questions that we ask of each other you know why having said that rude thing did you have to turn your back you know couldn't you have just carried on being even more rude that that's a quick no question about reasons not about causes it wouldn't be adequate to answer but you know because my digestive system was just pushing me in that direction so we have these this these reasons searching questions about every aspect of the human condition that given the obvious example why did she look at him in that way you know that's us asking for an account of what it not just what she was trying to achieve she may be trying to achieve nothing but of the the structure of the human relation which made it reasonable or or understandable in some way that she was looking at him in that way she looked at him in that way because he had touched on the the secret that she is that he alone knew about her so obviously she was that that was what you could read in her face so reading something in the face is something that we do and again we have a distinction there between the physiognomy and the face we all of us have faces but our face is composed of little bits little parts nose eyes lips and so on but when we see the expression on her face or see the person in her face and this is not because we are plotting and making a map of those features we probably don't even notice the features it's as though the whole person comes forward to us is revealed in the face and we respond to it differently not as part of the physical world but as a revelation in the world of the first-person point of view of another and this is something which has been much commented upon especially by by French philosophers who actually if you read the literature of living us and sat and merleau-ponty and so on often you get the impression that they do nothing except sit in a cafe floor staring at each other's faces and this could be a reason for the lack of progress in philosophy in that part of world but it is also that they've hit on to an a very important truth that the face is as of living us puts it visitation and transcendence it's something that both lies behind the world in the way that you lie behind the reality that I perceive and also is a visitation from that other place this is you looking at me and as a result we respond and to the other in in in a way which is not the way that we respond to ordinary physical reality we don't just describe and others features and and others wear a frame of mind and so on we address other people we summon them in into their face and looking in the face we we can look at another face that accusingly or compassionately in interestedly and so always we're looking not at the at the eyes of lips of the nose whatever but what is revealed in those features which is you and many philosophers have have pointed out that that this word you is just as difficult to understand as the word eye it's not quite this it doesn't propose quite the same problems but in addressing you as you in the second person I'm not I'm taking up an attitude towards you which demands that you account for yourself and so what are you thinking now what what do you intend by that what do you want I'm as it were trying to summon into you into your behavior and language that thing which I know from my own case as the eye I want you to take responsibility for your city off state of mind and present it to me but once you've presented it to me you become accountable if you say you know I want to go home now you have immediately opened yourself to the question why and I'm asking you why I'm asking you to give an account of of the reasons that make it acceptable to me that you should be going home so there's a great question how it's possible for people to be in this position of summoning each other to account for each other someone the other to account for himself and vice versa offering yourself to to account and I think the simple answer is that there is again these distinctive conditions of the first person case that make it possible many philosophers have met distinguished predicting and deciding saying and pointing out that it's a very different thing to predict what you're going to do and to decide to do it if you say to me what are you going to do this evening at the party I are you going to behave properly or are you going to be and get drunk just like last time and you as I might respond well judging by my record it looks like I'm going to get drunk that's that's a prediction but if I say no I'm I'm coming home sober and and I shall tell you all about what went on that's a decision and decisions are different from predictions in one very important respect which is that they you actually know that that's what you're going to do right there they are certain and you know on no basis and you can give the reasons if asked if somebody asks you what you're going to do there's a decision then that your statement is authoritative if it's a prediction you your statement is not authoritative at all someone else may be better situated to predict the you know that you being the weak character you are will get drunk again so it this deciding is an expression of this first-person authority that we all have and others trust it they lean on it we are we're inviting them to trust it when I say I will come home sober and I'll give you an account of the party I'm inviting you to trust me of course I may not do so I may not come home sober and the whole thing made collapse but if it collapses it's because I have changed my mind and not because I was wrong about saying that that was my intention and people do change that in mind all the time and of course we have complex problems about weakness of will and how to explain that it is possible but anyway the net result of all this is that just as musical movement is embedded in sequences of sounds while not being identical with them so ah world a human world the world in which we relate to each other is in my view embedded in the natural order but not reducible to it the human world some has called the labels valtor's the word used by edmund husserl the world of life but it's just another way of saying that our world is one that we create between us through the complexity of human relations and it brings with it a completely different order of things what I call the order of the Covenant not the order of nature there that the force of human agreement and pushes us in a certain direction and this agreement agreements between us can be both tacit or explicit and some of our agreements are explicit agreements between us when we make contracts for example but most most of human agreements are not explicit their tacit as your agreement to remain silent when I'm talking in this room and my agreement am i consenting to obey the basic structures of the lecture hall and so on these agreements just emerge through our natural ability as as rational beings to coordinate with each other and this is an extremely important fact that human agreements bind us together even though we can't necessarily make them explicit that's something that needs bearing in mind when you consider the American Constitution and other such legal documents a constitution doesn't make sense just as a piece of paper it makes sense against the background of tacit agreements between people which made it possible for them to think of having a constitution in the first place and I think much legal philosophy is needed to make that clear but one analytical philosopher John Searle has has seized on this kind of point to point out that our world is filled full of what he calls deontic powers that whenever I promise you to do something I promise you to bring the bring the food with a dinner party this evening I'm actually creating for myself an obligation to do this I'm putting myself under an obligation and you're entitled to lean upon that obligation in other words I've brought into being an obligation which you are relying upon and we fill the world in that way with obligations and rights I'm giving you the right to expect that I'm coming with the food and these things exist not independently of the human order obviously but they exist because we all mutually recognized them and in a similar way institutions grow from our agreements all these agreements add up over time and they grow by an invisible hand as this idea which was introduced by Adam Smith and Ferguson and so on in the 18th century is a very fruitful idea you know that many of the things that that that surround us many human institutions that surround us were not explicitly agreed about we did they're not they don't exist for an explicit contract maybe but nevertheless they are the in or by product of our voluntary actions and our agreements the invisible hand brings them into being at any attempt to destroy them or to turn them in another direction might have to use force of a different completely different kind in order to achieve its goal so as a result of this we we navigate the human world using what I call a calculus of rights and duties that's to say we assign to each other various rights that like your right to expect me to expect me to bring the food this evening and the duties that that correspond to them and these rights and duties emerge through our constant agreements and are subject to certain a priori principles of practical reason which I will talk more detail about next time but just to mention a little bit now all of us recognize that practical reason is governed by certain principles without which we couldn't engage in an exchange of reasons for instance that the principle that agreements are to be honored which am the principle that pacta sunt serve under and natural law and indeed obviously if we didn't accept that principle there wouldn't be such a thing as promising and relying upon the obligation of promising so principles like that to come be accepted and will must be accepted by all rational beings if they are actually to engage in the toing and froing of reasons whereby we account to each other now through this process of accounting to each other we are in fact becoming free this order of the Covenant is an order of free choices there's a huge metaphysical question that philosophers worry about as to whether we are actually in some deep metaphysical metaphysical sense free whether we can as it were escape the chains of causality so to make choices which have no dependency upon the flow of natural events my view is that that that question is of no significance in describing the things that I'm describing my view is that we become free just as long as the order of the Covenant enables us to make decisions give each other reasons and take full responsibility for the result freedom means the ability to take responsibility for things some people don't have freedom in that sense you know some people are just not able to take responsibility for their decisions maybe because they've of some mental disorder or whatever but all of us in this room are able to take responsibility for our decisions and if we lead others to expect us to expect to rely upon us for some reason and let them down then we have abused our freedom and we are to blame so this whole activity of holding people to blame creating obligations and so on is what we ought to mean by freedom and I think the philosopher who said the best things about this is is Hegel in the phenomenology of mind fallen phenomenology of spirit in which he shows in a elaborate way how human beings emerge from the natural power relations whereby they dominate dominate each other and submit to each other through the conflicts that inevitably result from that to a kind of balance when they recognize that they are accountable to each other and must treat each other in some deep way as equals and that I will rely on that - it might come back to it later but I recommend you to to follow it so but this brings me to the next sort of order that we in impose upon reality the political order and then we all of us in our tradition recognize that there's some some great distinction between political order which relies upon the consent of the citizens from that which are lies upon force or on Terok Nor tyrannical pressure and we all want a consensual order because we all believe that in the end that is the only legitimate order at least I assume that is what we all believe it this is a very modern belief of course the in the ancient world people recognized legitimacy as an independent thing from consent but we believe and post enlightenment people that legitimacy is conferred by consent and if there isn't consent of some kind then the political order is either illegitimate or in some deep sense can incomplete or defective but there are two kinds of consensual order at least two kinds that which is produced by a contract and that which is the expression of consent and this goes back to what I was saying about the invisible hand if we all get together in a room all of us who want to be governed together as a single community and draw up a contract and say this is how we will be governed these are the rules that that we will all a bay and and we sign the contract we all have a veto but we all agree to it then we have a society based on a social contract such a contract may not be explicit it might be implicit in our behavior but a contract is still a contract even when it's not overtly expressed when you go into a shop pick up a bottle which says three dollars on at hand and hand three dollars though till to the person who's in charge and there is a moment where you were both of you bound by an implicit contract which you didn't formulate but you know much of our behavior is implicitly contractual in that way but much of our behavior is not contractual at all just involving the emergence of consent to this or that arrangement over time and a consensual order might deviate radically from anything that can be contracted in a in a contract no in our political tradition traditional political thought the social contract as I'm sure you know enjoys a huge prominence among political philosophers and political theorists the idea that that we get together and draw up a contract which will govern the operations of our political life henceforth and in endow those operations with legitimacy because of the contract which offered each of us the right to to and the right of veto our acceptance of it is the criterion of legitimacy and this has been a as you know a story from the beginning of tough political thinking in modern world which has had a great deal of followers and has a great deal of plausibility but the it is inadequate for a variety of reasons you just have to think what actually brings people together in the first place so they can think of their union in contractual terms they must already in some sense belong to each other they must already be some form of membership which enables people to actually say that we are deciding on our common future there must be a first person plural and that first person plural is not the result of the contract but the precondition of it it's what bring brought these people together in the first place and we recognize this as soon as we look at Burke's famous argument in the reflections on the French Revolution in opposition to Russo's social contract where he pointed out that so if you think that society is a contract then of course it's a contract not of one generation only but of the living the unborn and the dead in other words a contract which most members of which or most people bound by which are not in currently in existence in which case it's odd to talk think of it as a contract and the more you think of it in contractual terms as he pointed out the more you give the living a privilege over the unborn and the dead to which they're not entitled you give to the living the the right to rewrite the contract so as to deprive the unborn of their legacy for instance and in doing so deprive the dead of their intentions which is what he thought the French Revolution was doing and I want to come back to that in the third lecture because it's such a vital point to consider when worrying about the problems that confront us today in particular problems of the environment and so on but if you take Burke's thoughts seriously then you must recognize that there are obligations which are not obligations of contract and the obvious ones being obligations of the family in which we are come into existence already burdened by these obligations I'm obliged to my parents and my children obliged to me etc they didn't choose my term didn't choose to have me as a father they often point out that it was had they had the choice they would have chosen differently but nevertheless given the reality of the relationship they have an obligation and I have a reciprocal obligation to them this obligation is not a contractual one it belongs to what the Romans called Pierre Taos or piety they the realm of obligations which are lie upon you unchosen but but simply because of your social membership and ancient think has often made a distinction between our justice and piety on these grounds we can talk about justice when we are administering the obligations of contracts you know somebody who cheats on a contract is treating the other party unjustly but when somebody defies an obligation of piety this is a different kind of sin altogether this is some impiety is not just injustice it's an offense against the gods and people have tried to give it there for a different character it's something much more ontological than than a mere injustice and again I will come back to that in the next time tomorrow but thinking of political order in these terms we naturally make a distinction between civil society and the state the civil society is the realm in which we engage in those free associations as free contracts the building of institutions that bring coming together in separate attempts at being more than just more than just me and the state is the overarching system of law and government which protects civil society but is in some deep sense distinct from it the state is an independent agent is something which has its own ambitions its own intentions and so on we're a civil society is the byproduct of our social life and there's a great question in modern society very urgent for Americans and English people and the question of whence comes law our common law tradition tells us that law comes from civil society the state latches on to it but the state must be prevented from having exclusive possession of it and that's the common law tradition the common law tells us that that law emerges from the resolution of this of social conflicts through independent courts and the state should not be allowed to dictate from the top the solutions to our conflicts because if it did so it will merely cause more of them that is radically different from the continental view the Napoleonic tradition which says that law comes from the state and I will talk about that too but I just wanted before concluding I say something about another order of events that we that we discover as it were or impose with our on the surrounding reality the order of sacrifice all of us recognize I think that contract and market dealings these are not enough to understand the full complexity of human obligations we are of course creatures who freely choose our relations and make deals with each other but there are some things which are not a matter of contract not a matter of of deals there are things concerning which they must be gifts if there to be anything at all one very important example of this of course is sex and I'm going to say about that in my in the third lecture but the gift of life and so on and took and the gift of your own life in moments of emergency these gifts are not that repaid with any reciprocal gift neset necessarily they might be repaid only with gratitude but without in all their forms they transcend mere agreements they there's something that comes from another order of things than the order of what we owe and therefore in the art of Arc of our tradition a great deal of emphasis has been made upon being laid upon renunciation and the ability of human beings to renounce the the order of politics renounce their own life renounce everything that is that is precious to them for the sake of another person many argue that that's the only ultimate redemption that human beings have that's the story of arc nurse ring normally when I get to this stage in a lecture I give you the story of Magnus ring because it's a very good way of finding something more interesting than what I'm going to say but there isn't enough time left for that too nevertheless that for those of you who've Arden Aryans in the in the audience will recognize that the ultimate store of the ultimate meaning of the Ring is that is to point out that the order of the Covenant the order of agreements and law and and political order presupposes another order in which renunciation is the probably the ruling principle the order in which people actually lay down their lives for those that they love and we all have a hunger for this at least a desire to recognize its validity for our individual life because being individuals is very hard and we in our life and post-enlightenment culture or all born into this struggle to be individuals to manifest ourselves in the world to bring as much as possible into the sphere of personal choice and make our lives expressions of what we are for ourselves and this individualizing is built into our social order and into our end to all our ambitions and brings with it a great desire not to be me to be to receive my duties without contracting them so in other words simply to submit and I think this is something which is coming vividly to into people's consciousness consciousness through the rise of radical Islam Islam just means submission that word and it is it offers to especially to young people who've felt this pressure the pressure of individuality and and the labor of responding to it it offers them an alternative they alternative to offer themselves in a gesture of sacrifice and become immersed in something bigger and that this is corresponds to something in all of us which which is quite difficult to reflect upon this sense that there is that the reality is suspended between Being and Nothingness and that in nature there is no nothingness but in each of us there is it lies in the very idea of the eye because afterward just think about it that thing that you refer to as eye is already in some deep sense or nothing it's not there's not an object in the world it's a point of view upon it and at one at some point it will vanish so in your own experience you know your own sense of your identity you have a conception of something actually totally vanishing totally disappearing from the from the world but it doesn't nothing disappears from the order of nature your body disintegrates but only in the way that things do by becoming something else enough there is no coming to be in passing away in nature it's only in this in the self that in other words in consciousness that that this phenomenon can be found so we all of us believe that in some deep way we are caught up in another order of events the order of creation and destruction and then that shows itself in our personal experience in our sense of ourselves as conscious beings and this for us is a huge problem what are we to do about it do we need do we need this order of sacrifice which appeals to that well it's just to get to the end I'm afraid I've gone bit too long so I'll just rush through this I take altruism as aware of it illustrating how it is that that we human beings live in these four different orders there there are four different motives for being altruistic evolutionary psychologists of bored us rigid with their accounts of altruism in nature you know you're all familiar with these I'm sure the the ant that marches into the fire that's for that's flesh threatening the Antibes you know there or the bee that stings the intruder into the hive this and thereby loses its life what on earth explains why it is that organisms do that in other words reap lose their and the possibility of life for the sake of of the of the group or for the sake of another and if it's a case of parents and children and there's a lot of interesting stuff about this about the evolution of cooperation which shows that in fact in sufficiently communal forms of organic life altruism is an adaptation the the altruistic people who belong to an altruistic community in fact have a reproductive advantage over the merely selfish and so on so that's that we do cap we can produce a very clear account of the motive of altruism in nature likewise there's altruism in the covenant which is a completely different form of altruism we can make agreements to assist each other and we and we do it because we owe it to each other something that we all live by especially in America you have as you know volunteers who who love doing this or at least they think they ought to it who joined the local rescue team and the fire brigade and so on where this is part of the social order not it not to be explained as an adaptation but to explained by the tacit agreement that we all make to assist each other and in the political order we have another kind of altruism Wareham which is part of citizenship we do things because we belong to the collective order and that is what our citizenship requires but also the altruism does demand upon it from us sometimes the ultimate sacrifice and that's the most difficult thing to to explain when people renounce their interests and may have complete gifted themselves the the officer who throws himself under onto the live grenade that threatens his troops and so on this is clearly completely different motive our based upon the sense that not that he owes this to his troops but that doing this is the way of completing the PACU the particular person that he is right oh and I shall leave out my last comments on gr theory of sacrifice try and squeeze them in to the next two lectures so that's my very brief account of human nature and which from which the whole truth about humanity can be derived I assure you but but by long arguments that I haven't got time to present and tomorrow I'm going to talk about the the rights that we human beings are called to each other based on this this vision thank you very good so the floor is open yes now here sir speak up very loudly if you can so we can hear him do it follow we're gonna have a microphone excellent Jenelle has the microphone here and a previous viewgraph you said becoming free in the Hegelian the electric she said that which power the power relationships are replaced by moral relationships now if you look at our society today in America in the government you have for example a lot of influence of lobbies you have a K Street in Washington right yes there's a power relationship but not moral relationships right yes the issue of lobbying it is it's not quite what I intended by a power relation because what I meant by parish is the sort of relation that exists in the state of nature in what in which one person can threaten another person one person threatens another and says you know if you don't do this then I shall either kill you or in some sense deprive you of something that you want a lobbying is not like that but nor is it quite like a moral relation either but it nevertheless is based it's only moral beings that can lobby they and they give arguments to the to the government saint to advance their interests in the formation of the law that whether this is right or wrong is a there's another question whether it's an interference with the democratic process I think many people think that it is obviously because the the lobbyists who is able to to wield all kinds of independent social influence does have an advantage over the lobbyists who merely speaks for his own interest its but you know every human relation ISM is mixed every human relation is mixed there's elements of of intimidation elements of of corruption and also perhaps elements have just straightforward bargaining I see puzzlement on on your face but I think it's important understand that one professor Scruton was referring to a moral order he he isn't necessarily referring to morally good he means in a domain of reason and freedom where people make choices that are morally significant so you wouldn't have lobbying Roger for example in a herd of cattle because they're not only in the world but they are of the world yeah the moral order is an order of beings that are in the world but not of the world oh yeah yeah is that is that hell you know what I forgot - why don't you answer all the questions I just thought of a puzzlement and I could see there was just a misunderstanding of how you were using the world I forgot to mention that at the beginning we reserved questions for students so let me do that now and ask if any of the students undergrad graduate students any high school students who are here want to make sure that students do have a chance to ask their questions yes right here sure get the microphone thank you I'm a grad student here I was wondering how you reconcile the idea that the moral world of the human world is created through this face-to-face interaction with the later Burkean critique that we need to take it to account or ancestors and the unborn because you can't really look them in the face that's a very good question and and what I everyone hear it yeah the question is how do i reconcile my view that that the moral life is grounded in the face-to-face encounter with the Birks position that that most people are dead and or unborn and I think that's a very good question and what I would say is that that of course we wouldn't be able to relate to the dead and the unborn if they were the only people there were you know it's only because we as it were learn the art of of risk arts of responsibility and accountability from our encounters with each other that we can then see that of course the the other stretches the flock of the other stretches before and after into infinite space but if we don't see that we have as it were betrayed that those who've never have entrusted their will to us and those who depend upon what we do yes shall bring you the mic so I guess I'm just wondering to what extent does my belief or unbelief in an afterlife so the idea that I as a self will continue to exist after my physical self dies to what extent does that affect the idea of the order of sacrifice so that when I face the question of whether I'll give the gift of myself how much does my belief in the afterlife maybe affect that in your opinion yeah well of course it that's a very important question it's much easier to throw your life away if you think you're not actually doing so that it's going to be returned to you in in a purified form and obviously that the much of the of the behavior of modern Islamists is that explicable in these terms you know and the real sacrifice in a way is that that's made by somebody who doesn't believe this who recognizes that he he really is giving all that he has but but even without the belief in the afterlife people have this desire everybody it's been widely observed among troops in battle that when the crucial comes all kinds of impulses act upon them my shame and desire not to betray their friends and so on but now nevertheless they ready themselves for this gesture regardless of their belief and because it's rooted deeper than those beliefs other student questions if not we'll open the floor yeah right in the middle back there Janelle who's gonna get there first Betsy Betsy where's professor screen I'm wondering if you see any relation between the common-law tradition and the natural law tradition in terms of where positive law comes from yes I am the question of the relation between common law and natural law is one that I might I'll try and get round to if I have the time in the final lecture but just very briefly I think that common law emerges from the application of reasoning that is embedded in all of us in in the attempt to resolve specific conflicts or specific issues of of damage or claim and as such is an exercise of something that we've contained in our nature so in that sense it's it's like natural law but it isn't necessarily identical with any of those systems of natural law that people propose if there are any and a professor George is a an expert on this and he has his own system of natural law with which I find myself in in tentative conflict but nevertheless yes but nevertheless I will try and address this in the third lecture I saw a hand up there in the middle and as it gone down you don't know okay yeah right there thank you I'm a little uneasy with the language of altruism here you started with evolutionary psychology and neuroscience and a famous line from a biologist is that evolutionary theory takes the altruism out of altruism and yes there's a lot of discussion about group selected altruism now but it seems to me the most you can get for that from that theory is your willingness to make a gift of yourself to your group so it gives you in group altruism it doesn't give you out group altruism you know and it seems to me that the earlier question or there was implied a question about theism is whether it's necessary to have a theistic belief to generate a sufficiently out group motivated altruism to really have a good Samaritan that cares not just for the group members but it goes out and gives to those who can never reciprocate and the question last question part of this is in in theism usually it's seen that nature is wounded and self-centered and has to be liberated and freed by grace so I wondered if in a way you're not trying to naturalize grace here gosh it could be if that's a terrible sin I've committed it but nevertheless what I I agree with you that the evolutionary psychology version of altruism take I would put it in other way I would say it takes the other out of altruism you know and that's why I made the distinction between these four different motives I'm trying to argue that evolutionary psychologists they can explain things up to a point but they don't explain the particular motives that we have in particular the motive to sacrifice yourself for another because he is other than you that is a striking motive which only only we can have and only we only when we're thinking of ourselves in these radical sacrificial terms and it could well be that we can only think of ourselves back to the lady's question over there and think of ourselves in those terms consistently if some some at least some shadow of the theological worldview crosses our mind and I'm open to that suggestion but you know it's a very the metaphysics of it is something which I I don't think I have a clear view on it was down here thank you it's very interesting in the eye your relationship in natural law and in human law human relationships is there a is there a commitment and is there attention right not all IU relations involve a commitment although they all involve a presupposition of that you're taking responsibility for your uh turrents and for the states of mind that you express so that there are incipient obligations that come out that arise in every IU relation but when you talk about commitment what when people talk about commitment normally they have in mind some something more on the level of gift you know when I offer myself to you completely ORS you know that which is a much more existential way of relating to others rather than the the day-to-day you know market transactions could not exist without I to you encounters because they all involve deferred promises things that the taking on trust cetera and if you don't know who it is you're engaged with you and can't address him as a you then that transaction it becomes impossible and certainly becomes avoided of any moral sense some people might say that the transactions on the stock exchange today are really all third-person transactions and the I you encounter has dropped out of it but but that's one explanation of why people are so unhappy with it and why it goes so radically wrong just right here thank you I have a question on the are ye relation as well what do you think about the how this applies to cultures where there is not much emphasis on the idea of an individual because it's a bit of I don't know individualism is a vague idea sometimes and also altruism doesn't really apply to some cultures as well because it kind of merges into someone's self like doing something say a mother doing something for her child is like starts to lose its altruistic tendencies and it just becomes the norm for them so we don't feel like a sacrifice so what how do you think that that applies to cultures where sacrifice is just a normal part of the self this is a very important question I someone might say that I've been and I think this is implied in what you're saying that I've been concentrating on kind of post-enlightenment individualistic societies in which free the free freely choosing individual becomes the the basic social entity whereas there are other societies either proceeding there or elsewhere in the world we're the basic social entity is not the individual but the group or the tribe or something like that in which case very all these things had to be seen in a very different way now my response that is to say yes it could be so that that that there were other societies like this like the one I just described in which the the first person plural is more important than the first person singular so to speak but actually when we look at the facts they are quite hard to find the especially if you look at ancient societies where there was huge collective sacrifice you know the society described by homer in the Iliad in which everybody is just throwing themselves into the melee and giving themselves you know the I to you encounter is absolutely central to it - and the death of Hector the hands of Achilles is the most beautiful I - you encounter in literature in a way even though of course there both of them acting as parts of the collective so I think that probably what I'm saying what I'm describing is something that has a natural tendency to emerge in time in all communities but some perhaps sometimes in some communities it hasn't fully emerged Roger if I can ask a question and that's related to that I I'm actually wondering whether you gave up too much to the question even in these societies where you might say it hasn't emerged people still relate to other people with emotions like anger or pride or particular eyes forms of affection love and so forth so it's very clear that even where individualism hasn't emerged in anything like what we see in the post enlightenment West the I though or the I you relationship is no less there yeah no I knew you should be applying to yeah yeah I agree with that yeah right up here continuing on that particular line I think there's a I'd like to hear more about your understanding of how beliefs a particular cultural belief or context can affect and I think that's what the lady over there was speaking to as well because the particular culture or creation civilisation that comes out of a particular belief system obviously we are studying from our own context and so we're seeing other realities through our own eyes always understanding through you know thousands of years and when you talk about a Greek story we're still an extension of that mmm at some point so do you think a particular belief system can bring about different possibly a society that would be less likely to not make decisions that are going to extremely not benefit you know babies born a hundred years from now or 200 years from now in self-interest of the people living at the moment well I would say that these you're right that of course things can vary along a lot of parameters even according to what I have described I've said that that we we see ourselves as belonging not just to one order the order of nature but to the order of the Covenant as I call it you know I say ordinary human agreements the order of of politics and the order of sacrifice and different communities emphasize one different one of different aspects of those orders for instance it was quite clear traditional japanese society has greatly emphasized the order of sacrifice and required of people are kind of to act on behalf of the collective in times of emergency as in the last war in ways which we are not capable of and and likewise in modern American society the the order of the Covenant the idea that everything between us is Sat is is managed by agreement either explicit or explicit or implicit is taking precedence over the idea of citizenship in many ways you know we all creating our own little communities by our own little agreements and it could be that if you get the emphasis wrong you produce a society which is either a threat to its neighbors or a threat to itself you know a society in which agreement is everything which doesn't recognize sacrifice or the sacred is a it could be a society which is inherently fragile many people who say that the constant will be the VIU right yeah and all the in imperial japanese society yeah in all this that not just the I you but all that whole process whereby free and responsible choice emerges from the human encounters yes that's quite early on you caught me up a little short when you coupled so closely responsibility and freedom I might even have thought that they were in conflict rather than so coupled as you indicated could you just elaborate on that a little bit well I wish I could what I want to say I guess is is that the freedom should not be understood ontologically it shouldn't be understood as as it were some gaps in the causal order where the spirit steps in you know freedom for me belongs to a whole conceptual scheme a way in which we in which we understand the human condition according to a different logic in a different order in the way that's why I took the musical example the way in which we understand those four notes that I've sang to you differently when you hit when we hear them as a melody and here the movement that moves through the silence joining joining them together that they're we're bringing them under different concepts they're not we're not seeing not describing them as sounds but as actions in us you know in an imaginary space and these actions have reasons and that's a you know again with that that's the way we describe each other when we are relating to each other in this interpersonal way not in terms of the causes of error and behavior but in terms of the reasons for our action and and we hold each other account to account for those reasons we have imposed responsibilities on each other and elicits obligations in each other and that's what freedom really amounts to I want to say oh there yes right up here it has often been said that a a soldier has to have a sense of patriotism mmm to be able to sacrifice their life and I'm wondering if you could comment on what happens in a society where which becomes too critical of itself a hyper critical society that everything is wrong with it and how that impacts the society going forward well yes you're absolutely right that and I was going to talk about this again in the last lecture all sacrifice ultimately depends upon a first person plural or not all of it but all that the cutlet the kind that you're referring to you lay down your life not for for just for one person but for a community or a way of life which includes you and when people are ultimate critical of some particular way of life even if it does include them it becomes very difficult for them to do that and things fragment and it's very obvious from what is happening in the Middle East today that this is so I doubt that anybody is laid down his life for Libya but they might have done for some particular Islamic or Christian sect within Libya because it doesn't exist as a nation it's a fiction and it created by tribal organizations exploited by tyrants like Gaddafi and so on and it this is a sense of it as a coherent nation has not yet emerged to may never emerge same is true Syria and this is one of the big problems that we have through in the attempts people make to democratize them the Middle East you can't democratize a place if it doesn't exist in the minds of the people living there as a first-person plural to which they belong so it's not just about the sacrifice of soldiers but also about the loyalty of citizens the other question I see you pointing but I don't see a hand where's the hand oh yes over there I'm sorry I know this is my second question but um so how does the idea that I exist through time so the future me my future self how does that fit into this because when I think of my future self I have this discount rate for that so so is there some essence in which I my future self is not fully I and how does that fit into the the interactions between I and you well that's yeah that's The Economist's way of putting it that we do have a built-in discount rate for our future intra our own future interests and our own future desires and of course this applies also to our affections for future people and if it's very relevant with discussions over in about environmental ethics take this very seriously saying that you know we're bound to discount to a certain measure for people who who are yet to be and then there's a question of is that right you can discount for yourself after all you're the person you have the sole and exclusive right to do that but can you do it for others all I would say about this is that this is a proof of the fact that economic reasoning is not the same thing as moral reasoning and if you allow economists to to dictate to how these social problems should be addressed we've made a great mistake and that really in the end when we're thinking about how we should conduct ourselves towards others all discounting it's is wrong because that it involves actually giving assigning a a different value to it others according to how far they are from you down here she's gonna bring you a microphone here she is professor Scruton in locating the source of our moral obligations and the ability to call each other forth to accountability in locating our moral obligations in our ability to call each other forth to accountability and responsibility you seem to be locating the limits of the moral with the communicable and I wonder that what that implies for asymmetric sorts of relations the sort that we might have with a God or with which we might have to an environment and what that implies are about our obligations each way yes again I am gonna get around to talking about this I hope what I would want to say is that that the route from which the moral life grows is the I to you encounter but that's not all of it when you won't either as it were absorbed from that the sense of yourself is accountable to others then your sense of the of the other the realm of the other can be a can increase far beyond your own horizon and there's a the question is where does the horizon end where should it end if in order that decision should be coherent and this connects with the question about you know giving up your life for a for a particular society or whatever and and the question of of how you held can held yourself to account for something which is not even a a you like nature itself and now come to that yeah Brian thank you I was just surprised at your phrasing of saying that discounting anyone is not a forget exactly what you said not moral or not correct because it involves the distance that they are from you and that's basically repeating one of Peter singers most prominent arguments that it you should care exactly the same about a stranger halfway around the world as you do for your own child and I'm wondering if that's really what you meant yeah you're right as I said that I realized that I was committing a singer ISM I should have I should hastily withdraw of course it's if you think of the moral life as I'm thinking of it the whole utilitarian picture becomes completely alien to it it is something that grows from the immediate encounter with the other and it must of course dwindle in some way as it reaches out what I really meant was that the economists idea of discounting you know where you actually assign a diminishing value to things according to their distance in time that is not going to be relevant but it may be that even that is not entirely true well Roger let me ask the closing question I've been thinking as I've been listening in and reading and I wonder if you've thought about the relationship of your for orders to Aristotle's the first one looks like it's exactly the same the order of nature which we can investigate but in no way create or construct it's external to us you know it is what it is our intentions don't make it one thing rather than another but then the next three look like they would largely come under his order of practical reason or is order of reason in and freedom you know the the order in which responsibility is exercised and and so forth while perhaps incorporating elements of the other two orders the order of logic in the order of technique bringing of efficient means to bear to achieve predetermined and not maybe you haven't thought about but have you given any thought to the relationship of your scheme here to his no I haven't I always assumed that if anything I do coincides with Aristotle it Matt let's it's a good point for agree but on the other hand I'm not an Aristotelian and my my thinking is rooted much more in Kant and Hegel that sort of that area and I entertained the hope that that all seriously meant thinking properly developed in this by it by anybody will eventually coincide with that of that others are doing but I agree the issue the area is so difficult that it's impossible to to predict that that will be so well it looks to be pretty clearly from your what you've said about responsibilities for example it about freedom mmm that that you agree that there is such an order and as I say it looks like those third those latter three all belong in that order you've identified an order of nature as a distinct order of intelligibility you know and I am no doubt that you agree that there's an order of logic that we bring into our thinking and must observe for any thinking in any of the other domains to be sound and the perhaps the least controversial order of intelligibility is the order of technique which even the economists will understand so it looks pretty Aristotelians to be good [Music] okay well before I invite you to join me in thanking professor Scruton for this wonderful lecture and Q&A let me invite you back for more tomorrow at 4:30 right here professor Scruton will give his second lecture this one will be on human rights then on Thursday he'll be back to give his third Charles z-test lecture same time same place on human duties now that leaves Wednesday so what do we do about Wednesday well if you haven't heard I'm delighted to be able to report to you that immediately the day after Professor scrutiny on human rights we will have at 4:30 this coming Wednesday the great Chinese human rights activists the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng who will be giving a very important lecture on human rights in China that will be at 4:30 as I say the location though will be Micajah 50 so Wednesday October 16th 4:30 Chen Guangcheng China and the world of the 21st century the next Human Rights revolution as the title of his of his speech and again it's in macaque 50 so professor scrutiny lectures Tuesday and Thursday Chen Guangcheng's lecture on Wednesday now please do join me in thanking professor scrutiny first first [Applause]

Channel: Clovis Meroveus

Views: 84,009

Keywords: Scruton, Philosophy, Lecture

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Length: 87min 2sec (5222 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 01 2018