If natural compassion
Lynn Hunt asks a pertinent question in Inventing Human Rights:
Voltaire railed against the miscarriage of justice in the Calas case, but he did not originally object to the fact that the old man had been tortured or broken on the wheel. If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, as Voltaire said later, then why was this not obvious before the 1760s, even to him? Evidently some kind of blinders had operated to inhibit the operation of empathy before then.
The facts aren’t enough. Science isn’t enough. There has to be emotion too. People have to care. It’s that simple. If people don’t care, the facts are just facts, they’re inert.
This is also why relief organizations use one person (and animal welfare organizations use one animal) on fund-raising appeals: we’re wired so that we empathize with one person much more strongly than we empathize with a million. If facts were enough for morality, we ought to respond a million times more strongly to reports of a million people in desperate straits, but in fact we respond much less strongly to a million people than we do to one.
So Stalin was right after all.
I think Harris is wrong about the contribution of science to morality, but it can’t be as simple – can it? – as saying that facts are just inert. Of course, if one is not motivated by any feelings (Hume’s passions), then reason is not going to accomplish very much in the way of inducement to action. But if one does not have reasons, then all the motivation in the world will not succeed, except contingently, in producing moral action.
So there are really two questions here: one, as to the reasons (motivations) one has for doing one thing rather than another; and, two, as to the reasons (justifications) one has for doing this rather than that, assuming that we have a motivational system up and running. Morality certainly needs motivational systems, but that only gets us part of the way, as Voltaire’s experience shows. We may not feel the horror of something simply because we do not have the moral categories in terms of which we can classify something as horrible.
People watched, with apparent unconcern, even perhaps with a sense of thrill and excitement in some deep primitive centre, as fellow human beings were tortured and tormented. It is only as we come to see the other as ‘like us’ in relevant respects that these torments become (morally) horrible. Think of the fact that, under the ancien regime, punishments were, largely, governed by class. Aristocrats were not tortured to death, as a rule, but killed quickly. The lower classes had to undergo the torments of almost unbelievably grotesque forms of torture.
If we begin, however, where Sam Harris wants to begin, with the sheer ability to feel pains and pleasures, well-being and flourishing or suffering, and relate our moral judgements to positives and negatives, then the cultural distinctions which allowed Voltaire to regard, with equanimity, torments that later revolted him, will no longer have moral space to operate. Most moral theories start with the moral project up and running, and justifications are often, as in the ancien regime, based upon pre-moral considerations as to social standing and dessert. But if we start at the other end, as, for instance, Rawls tries to do with his idea of the original position, then no one’s pleasures or pains or flourishing gets to be counted more than once.
As I see the disagreements between Harris and his critics, most of them, it seems to me, may be confusing ‘You can’t get an ought from an is’ with ‘You can’t get motivation from a list of facts.’ Yet both of those things may be true yet irrelevant, because human beings are motivational/teleological systems already, and the question is about the best way to regulate the interactions of such systems.
Take the idea that human flourishing might be best ordered by making women subordinate to, and dependent upon the decisions of men. I think this is a misunderstanding even of classical utilitarianism, which, while seeming to require a simple ledger balance of pleasures and pains, Gradgrindism taken to its logical extreme, did not forget that they were talking about moral questions, in which individuals could not be simply submerged in some super-individual total.
But even if that were a mistaken interpretation of classical utilitarianism, there is no reason to think that this kind of profit and loss bookkeeping can reasonably be taken as normative for morality, which is concerned, at its base, with individuals, and their flourishing, and which, no matter how high you take your principles, cannot lose touch with that foundation without losing the reason for starting out on the venture in the first place.
None of this means, however, that science can provide the basis for moral thinking, but it can, as Harris suggests, give us reasons for extending our moral concern more widely than it has traditionally been construed; for, recognising that we are animals amongst animals, we have good reason to seek flourishing for other animals besides ourselves. However, there is a danger in Harris’s way of doing this. If human flourishing trumps animal flourishing, then it is only a short step to the idea that the flourishing of some humans trumps the flourishing of other humans. And it is a short step indeed from that to the ancien regime. And this is a simple reason why Harris’s project can’t work, because he can’t sort out the trumps scientifically.
There is a museum in Prague entirely devoted to medaieval torture instruments; at once a testament to the ingenuity of some people at devising ways to make others feel pain, and also to the compulsion some powerful people have felt to force information out of others. The forced-out information was usually seen as critical to those power-holders’ continued grasp on it.
In 1605 there was an inadequate electoral system in England; just a touch worse than the one that operates there today. A small party of men led by one Robert Catesby decided that the best place for the members of the House of Lords was Heaven, and they decided to assist them all to rise there, using 36 barrels of gunpowder planted in the basement of the Lords’ building to do the trick. But the plot was betrayed before a single barrel exploded. The plotters were tracked down and arrested, and to encourage others in the populace not to follow their example, King James 1 had eight of them hung, drawn and quartered , including one Guy Fawkes. The normal procedure for this was to publicly hang the victim by the neck, but not until he was dead; then bring him down off the gallows and cut off his genitals; then to cut his abdominal cavity open and drag his intestines out and burn them before his dying eyes in a fire.
Democracy is a marvellous invention. Its main virtue lies in the power it gives to ordinary people to change their government without having to resort to murder or civil war, and the corresponding opening it gives those found electorally wanting to depart the scene with some dignity, and without blood on their hands either.
The numerous failed attempts by many Germans to get rid of Hitler are additional testament to the importance of this, though Stalin – the other great dictator of the 20th C – seems to have managed to cower the Soviet populace so thoroughly that not one assasination attempt was made.
The main biological lesson I draw from my reading of history is that neither the long course of human evolution nor the short course of civilisation has equipped any member of our species well for the holding of power. Hence Lord Acton’s famous dictum about the power of power itself to corrupt. As a general rule, power should never be given to those who seek it.
But it happens all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot
Perhaps Voltaire followed the same line of expanding sympathy as one sees in the evolution of non-vegans to vegans today.
Right, that’s Hunt’s point, and that’s why it’s pertinent to Harris’s project. Facts by themselves don’t make sympathy expand. They can and do help, but they’re not sufficient.