Roger Scruton on Human Nature

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 because they don't have it themselves and I I look forward to these kind of events in which to obtain an overview of the surrounding disorder but what I want to talk about instead is the very basic principles from which a a view of the of our political existence stems and I'm going to give a a very large wide-ranging view starting from as did 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 you 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 or 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 experience together so I talk initially about the the basic order that we perceive around us and 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 Parts part of the physical world I take the word physical in um in its old-fashioned Greek meaning just to mean the same as nature we are 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 it 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 of natural forces and perhaps them in some way victim of those forces there's always been a question of the extent to which we are free if we are free at all and whether being part of nature is incompatible with our freedom and that's something I'll say a little bit about uh there is of course also the view that many philosophers have entertained that these natural laws are as they put it deterministic laws that's 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 for human choice and uh and uh 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 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 in 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 it what we could achieve these two Sciences being evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience and many of you here will have will be used to the impact of those two Sciences on the study of not only of human beings as such but also 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 Moral thinking have adapted to a social condition well I I think that these scientists 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 we're in the world but not of the world as Saint 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 uh con 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 a vision of not only of my own position but of your position too there is the first person case brings with it a strange and and in many ways hard to understand grammar so for instance while you can assign to me a Sensations emotions and states of Mind intentions uh 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 to this and to the end of this lecture with minimum disturbance and so on you 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 uh let me just um take a step back from that and talk about uh the general issues to do with with human freedom and my nature as a reason giving creature and here here I think there's a I I find a useful analogy in music everybody every musical person knows that music is not just a sequence of sounds and 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 Beethoven's Iraq Symphony your bum boom boom boom which moves as moves through those notes even though most of it is silence right between any of those two notes it is moving but what is moving not those sounds uh and anyway their sounds can't move E flat is E flat it doesn't it can't move to B flat without being something else so it'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 the first ethernet having risen to B flat does seem to to want to fall to the B for that below it's as it were uh it's got a it's got a plan of action and it's drawing at a certain stage it draws towards closure and in that way we can see how we can conceptualize one and the same thing in two quite different ways as a sequence of 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 without referring to movement or anything like 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 that 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 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 um that's not really asking you asking for a cause that no no science of Acoustics could it give you an answer to that question the answer to the question might be that if having reached that Discord the tension is so great that the melody must turn in another direction right as in the top when the climax of Beethoven's Third piano concerto for the First theme which which was up to a Discord and has to come down again and that's like uh 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 um couldn't you have just carried on being even more rude that's a you know a 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 uh and we have these this these reason searching questions about every aspect of the Human Condition now given you know the obvious example why did she look at him in that way uh you know uh 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 um she that he alone knew about her so obviously she was that that was what you could read in her face reading something in the face is something that we do and um all right again we have a distinction there between the physionomy and the face we all of us have faces but our faces uh 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 this is not because we are plotting 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 um is something which has been much committed upon especially by by French philosophers who actually if you read the literature of Levy nurse and sat and Merlo Ponte and so on often you get the impression that they do nothing except sitting at a cafe floor staring at each other's faces and this could be a reason for the lack of progress in in first philosophy in that part of the world but it is also that they've hit onto a very important truth that the face is as living as puts it the visitation and Transcendence it's something that both lies behind the world in the way that you lie behind uh 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 a in a way which is not the way that we respond to ordinary physical reality we don't just describe another's features and others frame of mind and so on WE address other people we summon them in into their faces and looking in the face we we can look at another face accusingly or compassionately interestedly and so always we're looking not at the uh at the eyes the lips and the nose or whatever but what is revealed in those features which is you and many philosophers have pointed out that that this word you is just as difficult to understand as the word I 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 say you know what are you thinking now what what to intend by that what do you want I'm I'm as you were trying to summon into you into your behavior and language that thing which I know from my own case as the I I want you to take responsibility for your your state of mind and present it to me but once you presented it to me you become accountable if you say you know um I want to go home now you've immediately opened yourself to the question why and and 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 of how it's possible for people to be in this position of summoning each other to account for each other some on the other to account for himself and vice versa offering yourself to a to account and I think um the simple answer is it is again these distinctive conditions of the first person case that make it possible many philosophers have distinguished predicting and deciding saying 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 are you going to behave properly or um are you going to be and get drunk just like last time and use I might respond well charging 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 and one very important respect which is that that you actually know that that's what you're going to do right 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 if it's a decision then 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 that you know that you being the weak character you are will get drunk again so 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 the whole thing Mage 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 their 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 our world our 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 sometimes called the labensvelt the word used by Edmund hussell the world of life but it you know 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 it the order of the covenant not the order of nature um there that the force of human agreement um pushes us in a certain direction and this agreement the agreements between us can be both tacit or or explicit and uh some of our Agreements are explicit agreements between us when we make contracts for example but most most of human Agreements are not explicit they're tacit uh as your agreement to remain silent while I'm talking in this room at my agreement uh my um consenting to obey the basic structures of of the lecture hall and so on these agreements just emerged through our natural ability as as rational beings to coordinate with each other and so this is an extreme extremely important fact that human agreements bind us together even though we can't necessarily make them explicit that's um 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 Sell has has um seized on this kind of point to to uh point out that um our world is full full of what he calls deontic powers that whenever I promise you to do something I promise you to bring the um bring the food for the 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 recognize them and in a similar way institutions grow from agreements all these agreements add up over time and they grow by an invisible hand this this idea which are 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 uh that surround us many of the human institutions that surround us were not explicitly agreed about we did they're not they don't issue from an explicit contract may but nevertheless they are the inevitable byproduct of our voluntary actions and our agreements uh the Invisible Hand brings them into being and any attempt to destroy them or to turn them in another Direction might have to use force of a different a 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 not 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 uh all of us recognize that practical reason is governed by certain uh principles without which we couldn't engage in an exchange of reasons for instance that the principle that Agreements are to be honored which the principle that packed her son servando and natural law and the obviously if we didn't accept that principle there wouldn't be such a thing as promising and relying upon the the obligation of promising so principles like that can be accepted and will must be accepted by all rational beings if they are actually to engage in the touring and throwing 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 of free choices there's a huge metaphysical question that philosophers worry about as to whether we are actually in some deep metaphorical metaphysical sense free whether we can uh as it will escape the chains of causality sufficiently to make uh choices which have no dependency upon the flow of natural events my view is 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 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 phenomenology of spirit in which he shows in an 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 argument might come back to it later but I recommend you to to follow it so but this brings me to um the next sort of order that we impose upon reality the political order and um 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 relies upon force or um or 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 a very modern belief of course the in the ancient world people recognize legitimacy as an independent thing from consent but we believe a 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 um 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 just 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 uh that we will all obey and um 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 social contract might 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 um a bottle which says three dollars on it hand and hand three dollars at the um till to the person who's in charge there is a a moment where you were both of you Bound by an implicit contract which you didn't formulate but you know and much more behavior is implicitly contractual in that way the march 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 cons wrapped up in a in a contract now in our political tradition our 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 um we get together and draw up a contract which will govern the operations of our political life henceforth and um in in in endow those operations with legitimacy because of the contract which offered each of us the right to uh to um the writer veto our acceptance of it is the Criterion of legitimacy and this has been a as you know a story from the beginning of political thinking in the 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 know you just have to think what 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 there 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 the 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 down by which are not in currently in existence in which case it's odd to think of it as a contract and the more you think of it in contractual terms as he um pointed out the more you give the living a privilege Over The Unborn and the dead to which they are not entitled you give to the living the the right to win to rewrite the contract so as to deprive both 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 uh Burke's thought seriously then you must recognize that there are obligations which are not obligations of contract and um the obvious ones being obligations of the family in which we as who are come into existence already burdened by these obligations I'm I'm obliged to my parents and my children obliged to me Etc they didn't choose my children 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 who given the reality of the relationship they have an obligation and I have reciprocal obligation to them this um obligation is not a contractual one it belongs to what the Romans called pietas or piety the the the realm of obligations which lie upon you unchosen but but simply because of your social membership and um ancient thinkers often made a distinction between Justice and piety on these grounds we can talk about Justice when we're [Music] 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 say no together this is um impiety it's not just injustice it's an offense Against The Gods and people have tried to give it therefore a different character in something much more ontological than than a mere Injustice and again I will come back to that in the next time tomorrow 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 such as free contracts the building of Institutions that bring coming together in our 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 um is in some deep sense distinct from it the state is an independent agent it's something which has its own Ambitions its own intentions and so on where 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 want to before concluding say something about another order of events that we that we discover as it were or impose with on the the surrounding reality the order of sacrifice all of us recognize I think that um contract and Market dealings these are not enough to understand the full complexity of human obligations you know that 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 they're to be anything at all one very important example of this of course is sex and I'm going to say something about that in my in the third lecture but um The Gift of Life and so on and the and the gift of your own life in moments of emergency these gifts are not uh that repaid with any reciprocal gift necessarily they might be repaid only with gratitude but whatever in all their forms they they transcend mere agreements uh they they're something that comes from a another order of things than the order of what we owe and uh therefore in in the art of our of our tradition a great deal of emphasis has been made upon been 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 but many argue that that's the only ultimate Redemption that human beings have that's the story of Wagner's ring normally when I get to this stage in a lecture I give you the story of Wagner's 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 so nevertheless for those of you wagnerians in the in the audience will recognize that the ultimate story of the ultimate meaning of the ring is that it's 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 pr 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 to recognize its validity for our individual life because being individuals is very hard uh and we in our enlightened post-enlightenment culture are 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 uh expressions of what we are for ourselves and this individualizing is built into a social order and into into 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 is coming vividly to into people's um Consciousness Consciousness through the rise of 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 their alternative to offer themselves in a gesture of sacrifice and become immersed in something bigger and the this is corresponds to Something in all of us which um which is quite difficult to reflect upon that 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 that it lies in the very idea of the eye because after all just think about it that thing that that you refer to as I is already in some deep sense of nothing it's not it'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 in 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 no there is no coming to be and 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're caught up in another order of events the order of creation and destruction and then that shows itself in our personal experience and 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 to get to the end now I'm afraid I've gone a bit too long so I'll just rush through this I take altruism as a way of illustrating how it is that that we human beings live in these four different orders 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 the um the and that marches Into the Fire that's that's threatening the ant Heap you know the uh or the bee that stings the Intruder into the hive now this um and thereby loses its life what on Earth explains um why it is that organisms do that in other words lose their and their possibility of life for the sake of of the of the group or of the sake of another and if it's a case of parents and children and there's a lot of interesting uh stuff about this about the evolution of cooperation which shows that in fact in um sufficiently communal forms of 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 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 that's 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 do it uh who join the local rescue team and the fire brigade and so on uh where this is part of the social order not not to be explained as an adaptation but to explain why the tacit agreement that we all make to assist each other and in the political order we have another kind of altruism where um which is part of citizenship we do things because we belong to the collective order and that is what our citizenship requires but also altruism does demand upon from us sometimes the ultimate sacrifice and that's the most difficult thing to to explain when people renounce their interests and make a complete gift of themselves the the officer who throws himself under onto the live grenade that threatens his troops and so on this is clearly a completely different motive based upon the sense that not that he owes this to his troops but that doing this is the way of completing the the particular person that he is right so and I shall leave out my last comments on juha's theory of sacrifice try and squeeze them in to the next two lectures so that's my very brief account of human nature in which from which the whole truth about Humanity can be derived I assure you but by long arguments that I haven't got time to present and tomorrow I'm going to talk about uh the the rights that we human beings Accord to each other based on this this vision all right thank you very good so uh the floor is open uh yes now here sir speak up very loudly if you can so we can hear them we're going to have microphone excellent Chanel has the microphone here on a previous View graph you said becoming free in the hegelian the electric he said that which power 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 case between Washington right yes it does a power relationship but not moral relationships right so how do we replace such power relationships with moral relationships so decisions are not made based on power I'm all sorry about on power so that's an important issue yes um the issue of lobbying it is it's not quite what I intended by a power relation um because what I meant by power relation 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 and says you know if you don't do this then um I I shall either kill you or in some sense deprive you of something that you want lobbying is not like that but nor is it quite like a moral relation either but it nevertheless is based its only moral beings that can Lobby they and they give arguments to the to the government saying to to advance their interests in the formation of the law that whether this is right or wrong is a is another question whether it's an interference with the Democratic process I think many people think that it is obviously because the the lobbyist who is able to um to wield all kinds of independent social influence does have an advantage over the lobbyists to merely speaks for his own interest but uh you know um every human relation is is mixed every human relation is mixed there's elements of of intimidation elements of of corruption and also perhaps elements of just straightforward uh bargaining I I see puzzlement on your face but I I think it's important to understand that when Professor scrutin was referring to a moral order he he isn't necessarily referring to morally good he means in a domain of 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 right yeah is that does that help you know what I forgot to why don't you answer all the questions I could see that that there was a there was just a misunderstanding of how you were using the word form um I I forgot to mention that at the beginning we reserve questions for uh 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 yes I was wondering she'll bring you the microphone thank you I'm a grad student here I was wondering uh how you reconciled the idea that the moral world or the human world is created through this face-to-face interaction with the later working critique that we need to take into account our ancestors and The Unborn because you can't really look them in the face that's a very good question and 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 Burke's position that that most people are dead or unborn yeah and I think that's a very good question and what I would say is that uh 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 resp the Arts of responsibility and accountability from our encounters with each other that we can then see that of course the the other stretches the 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 the um those who've Le who've entrusted their will to us and those who depend upon what we do up here man she'll bring you the mic um 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 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 a purified form and obviously that the um much of the uh of the behavior of modern islamists is explicable in these terms uh you know and the real sacrifice in a way is that a that that's can 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 um when the crucial moment comes all kinds of impulses act upon them like shame and desire not to betray their friends and so on but now never 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 uh Chanel who's going to get their first Betsy win s uh Professor scrutin 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 um 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 I think that um 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 that is 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 Professor George is um 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 uh in the third lecture I I saw a hand up there in the middle and as it gone down you don't uh oh okay yeah right there uh thank you I'm a little uneasy with the language of altruism here uh 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 yeah and it seems to me that um the earlier question earlier 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 that 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 if it could be uh if that's a terrible sin I've committed it but nevertheless um what I I agree with you that the evolutionary psychology version of altruism take I would put it another way I'd say it takes the other out of altruism you know and that's why I made the distinction between these four different motives I 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 and in particular the motive to sacrifice yourself for another because he is other than you that is a 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 ladies question over there only 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 that you know it's a very the metaphysics of it is something which I I'm I don't think I have a clear view on it was down here hand up yeah thank you it's very interesting um in the I you relationship in natural law and in human law Human Relationships is there a is there a commitment and is there attention right um not all IU relations involve a commitment although they all involve a presupposition of that you're taking responsibility for your utterance 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 uh when you talk about commitment well when people talk about commitment normally they have in mind some something more on the level of gift you know when I offer myself just to you completely or 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 taking on trust Etc and if you don't know who it is you're engaged with and can't address him as a you then that transaction becomes impossible and certainly becomes avoided of any moral sense some people might say that that transactions on the stock exchange today are really all third person transactions and the IU encounter has dropped out of it but but that's one explanation of why uh people are so unhappy with it and why it goes so radically wrong thank you I have a question on the um are you life relation as well what do you think about the um how this applies to cultures where there is not much emphasis on the idea of an individual because it's a bit of a 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 it wouldn't feel like a sacrifice so what how do you think that that applies to cultures were um sacrifice is just a normal part of the self this is a very important question I I [Music] 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 preceding that or elsewhere in the world where the basic social entity is not the individual but the the group or the tribe or something like that in which case um very all these things had to be seen in a very different way now my response to that is to say yes it could be so that there that that there were other societies like this like the one I've just described in which the the first person plural is more important than the first person singular so to speak uh but actually um when we look at the facts they are quite hard to find um 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 up you know the itu encounter is absolutely Central to it too uh the death of Hector the hands of Achilles is the most beautiful eye to you encounter in in literature in a way um even though of course they're 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 that's related to that I I'm actually wondering whether you gave up too much to the question um 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 particularized forms of affection Love and so forth so it's very clear that even where individualism hasn't uh emerged in anything like what we see in the post-enlightenment West the I thou or the IU relationship is no less there yeah no I knew you should be replying to what would you agree with that yeah yeah I agree with that okay 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 end of the lady over there was speaking to as well because the particular culture or creation civilization that comes at 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 when you talk about a Greek story we're still an extension of that at some point so do you think a particular belief system can bring about different uh possibly a a society that would be less likely to not make decisions that are going to extremely not benefit you know babies born 100 years from now or 200 years from now and self-interest of the people living at the moment well um [Music] Robbie I I would say that these um 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 you know 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 that they say ordinary human agreements the order of of politics and the Order of sacrifice and different communities emphasize what uh different one different uh aspects of those orders for instance it was quite clear traditional Japanese Society has greatly emphasized the order of sacrifice and required of people a kind of to act on behalf of the collective in times of emergency as in the last war in ways which we we are not capable of and um and likewise in modern American society the the order of the Covenant the idea that everything between us is satis is it is um managed by agreement either explicit or explicit or implicit is taking precedence over the idea of citizenship in many ways you know we all are 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 it could be a society which is a inherently fragile many people say that but the constant will be the the IU right yeah Imperial Japanese Society yeah and all this that not just the IU but all that whole process whereby free and responsible choice emerges from the human encounters early on you caught me up a little short when you coupled so closely uh responsibility and freedom I 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 uh well I wish I could um what I want to say I guess is is that um that freedom should not be understood um 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 a whole conceptual scheme a way in which we in which we understand The Human Condition according to a different logic and 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'm saying to you differently when you hit when we hear them as a melody and hear the movement that moves through the silence joining joining them together that there we're bringing them under different concepts they're not we're not seeing not them describing them as sounds but as actions in a in an imaginary space and these actions have reasons and that's a you know again 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 our of our Behavior but in terms of the reasons for our action and and we hold each other account to account for those reasons uh we impose responsibilities on each other and elicit obligations in each other and that's what Freedom really amounts to I want to say yes right up here it has often been said that a uh a soldier has to have a sense of patriotism uh 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 um and I I was going to talk about this again in the last lecture oh sacrifice ultimately depends upon a first person plural or or not all of it but all that the 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 um 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 uh I I I doubt that anybody has 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 uh created by tribal organizations exploited by uh retirements like Gaddafi and so on the sense of it is a coherent nation has not yet emerged and 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 uh so it's not just about the the sacrifice of soldiers but also about the Loyalty of citizens [Music] any other questions I I see a 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 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 um yeah that's the economist's way of putting it um that we do have a built-in discount rate for our future inter our own future interests and our own um future desires and of course this applies also uh to our affections for future people and this is very relevant to 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 um 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 you'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 is is uh is wrong because it involves actually giving assigning a different value to to others according to how far they are from you she's going to bring you a microphone here she is Professor scrutin um 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 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 about our obligations each way yes um again I'm going to get around to talking about this I hope but um what I would want to say is that that the route from which the moral life grows is the eye to you encounter but that's not all of it when you've when you've as it were absorbed from that the sense of yourself is accountable to others then your sense of the the of the other the the realm of the other can be a can increase far beyond your own Horizon and so the question is where does the Horizon end where should it end if in order that our decision should be coherent and this connects with the question about uh you know um giving up your life for a for a particular society or whatever and um yeah and the question of of how you held can hold yourself to account for something which is not even a a you like nature itself and now come to that yeah uh Brian thank you I was just surprised at your phrasing of saying that discounting um anyone is uh not uh I 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 singer's most prominent arguments that uh it you should care exactly the same about a stranger Halfway Around the World as you do for your own child I'm wondering if that's really what you meant you know you're right as I said that I realized that I was committing a singerism and I should have I should hastily withdraw um 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 um what I really meant was that that the uh economists idea of discounting where you you actually assign a diminishing value to things according to their distance in time that is not going to be relevant but maybe that even that is not entirely true well Roger let me uh ask the closing question I I've been thinking as I've been listening and and reading and I wonder if you've thought about the relationship of your four orders to aristotles the first one looks like it's exactly the same uh the order of nature which we can investigate but in no way create or construct it's external to us uh 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 his order of reason and 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 and the Order of technique and the 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 um I I always assume that if anything I do coincides with Aristotle that's that that's a good point for it I agree but on the other hand I'm not a narratorian and my my thinking is rooted much more in Canton Hegel that sort of that that area uh and um I entertain the hope that that all seriously meant thinking uh properly developed in this by by anybody will eventually coincide with that of that others are doing but uh I agree the issue the the area is so difficult that it's um impossible to to predict that that will be so well it looks to me pretty clearly from your what you've said about responsibility for example about Freedom that that you agree that there is such an order and as I say it looks like those third uh those ladder three all belong in that order you've identified an order of nature as a distinct order of intelligibility yeah uh and I have 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 Aristotelian to me yeah it's good okay well before I invite you to join me in thanking Professor scrutin for this wonderful uh lecture and Q a let me invite you back for more uh tomorrow uh at 4 30 right here uh Professor scrutin will give his second lecture this one will be on human rights uh then on Thursday he'll be back to give his third Charles E test lecture same time same place on human duties now that leaves Wednesday so what do we do about Wednesday well if you have you haven't delighted to be able to report to you that immediately the day after Professor scrutin's lecture on human rights we will have at 4 30 this coming Wednesday the great Chinese human rights activist the blind lawyer Chang Wang Cheng 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 makash 50. so Wednesday October 16th 4 30 Chen Guang Chang China and the world of the 21st century the next human rights Revolution is the title of his of his speech and again it's in makash 50. so uh Professor scrutin's lectures Tuesday and Thursday chenguan Chang's lecture on Wednesday now please do join me in thanking Professor scrutin for his first question [Applause] thank you

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 16,276

Keywords: Philosophy, History of Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Western Philosophy, John Locke, Liberalism, Hobbes, Social Contract, Social Theory, Political Theory, Human Nature, Enlightenment, Libertarianism, Freedom, Liberty, Revolution, Individualism, Ethics, Egoism, Communitarianism, Relativism, Burke, Levinas, Roger Scruton, Phenomenology, Free Will, Hegel, Altruism, Evolutionary Psychology, Naturalism, Virtue, The Self, Subjectivity, Aristotle, Music, Perception

Id: L-21GgeAWfI

Length: 78min 43sec (4723 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023