On Human Nature

by Roger Scruton

Once again, it seems that we are in the habit of telling ourselves stories that make no reference to the biological realities in which they are rooted.

Moreover, human societies are not just groups of cooperating primates: they are communities of persons, who live in mutual judgment, organizing their world in terms of moral concepts that arguably have no place in the thoughts of chimpanzees. It is possible that cognitive science will one day incorporate these moral concepts into a theory of the brain and its functions and that theory will be a biological theory. But its truth will be tested against the distinctively human capacities that, according to Wallace, seem “superfluous to evolutionary requirements,” and not against the features of our biological makeup that we share with other animals.

It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before

the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.

Matthew Arnold famously described culture as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”

science is not the only way to pursue knowledge. There is moral knowledge too, which is the province of practical reason; there is emotional knowledge, which is the province of art, literature, and music. And just possibly there is transcendental knowledge, which is the province of religion.

Why privilege science, just because it sets out to explain the world? Why not give weight to the disciplines that interpret the world and so help us to be at home in it?”

And it points to a fundamental weakness in “memetics.” Even if there are units of memetic information, propagated from brain to brain by some replicating process, it is not they that come before the mind in conscious thinking. Memes stand to ideas as genes stand to organisms: if they exist at all (and no evidence has been given by Dawkins or anyone else for thinking that they do), then their sempiternal and purposeless reproduction is no concern of ours. Ideas, by contrast, form part of the conscious network of critical thinking. We assess them for their truth, their validity, their moral propriety, their elegance, completeness, and charm. We take them up ...

The concept of the meme belongs with other subversive concepts—Marx’s “ideology,” Freud’s unconscious, Foucault’s “discourse”—in being aimed at discrediting common prejudice.

is a spell, with which the scientistic mind seeks to conjure away the things that pose a threat to it.

Functional explanations have a central place in biology.

If Kant is right about the categorical imperative, then there is an independent sufficient condition, namely, rationality, that tells us to act on that maxim that we can will as a universal law.

According to Kant, the kind to which we belong is that of person, and persons are by nature free, self-conscious, rational agents, obedient to reason and bound by the moral law. According to the theory of the selfish gene, the kind to which we belong is that of human animal, and humans are by nature complicated by-products of their DNA.

“Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate purpose than to keep human genetic material intact.”

laughter. No other animal laughs. What we call the laughter of the hyena is a species sound that happens to resemble human laughter.

One contention, however, might reasonably be advanced, which is that laughter expresses an ability to accept our all-too-human inadequacies: by laughing we may attract the community of sentiment that inoculates us against despair.

But when we talk of creatures like us, it seems that we do not necessarily refer to our species membership.

As I described it laughter seems to have a beneficial effect on human communities: those who laugh together also grow together and win through their laughter a mutual toleration of their all-too-human defects.

His genealogy of morals works only because he has read back into the cause all the unexplained features of the effect.

In other words, it is not a genealogy at all but a recognition that the human condition, in whatever primitive form you imagine it, is the condition of “creatures like us,” who laugh and cry, praise and blame, reward and punish—that is, who live as responsible beings, accountable for their actions.37

Personhood emerges when it is possible to relate to an organism in a new way—the

the way of personal relations.

But once we admit the existence of the intentional stance—the stance that interprets the behavior of other creatures in terms of the propositional attitudes expressed in it—we must recognize a higher (because more conceptually complex) level of intentionality.

if Kant is right, the motive toward these things is implicit in the very fact of self-consciousness.

To believe that incremental change is incompatible with radical divides is precisely to misunderstand what Hegel meant by the transition from quantity to quality.

We are the kind of thing that relates to members of its kind through interpersonal attitudes and through the self-predication of its own mental states.

it is one task of philosophy in our time to show this.

one of the problems for the religious believer is that of understanding the precise relation between the conclusions of philosophy and the premises of faith.

the heresy of believing that reason may justify one thing, and faith, another and incompatible thing.

that truths discoverable to reason may also be revealed—but in another, more imagistic, more metaphorical form—to the eye of faith. Those incapable of reasoning their way to the intricate truths of theology may nevertheless grasp them imaginatively in ritual and prayer, living by a form of knowledge that they lack the intellect to translate into rational arguments.

Take away religion, however, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this “living down,” which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind—and with it our kindness.

What Buber never made clear, however, was that the I-You relation enters essentially into every aspect of the moral life.

Darwall shows that emotions such as resentment, guilt, gratitude, and anger are not human versions of responses that we might observe in other animals but ways in which the demand for accountability, which arises spontaneously between creatures who can know themselves as “I,” translates into the language of feeling.3 At the heart of these emotions lies the belief in the freedom of the other, a belief that is irreducible, in that we cannot discard it without ceasing to be what we fundamentally are. For what we are is what we are for each other—relation is built into the very idea of the human person, who is a first person held within the second-person standpoint like a lodestone in a magnetic field.

I am I to myself because, and to the extent that, I am you to another.

It was Descartes’s mistake to look on the subject as a special kind of object and thereby to attribute to it a substantial and immortal nature of its own.

They involve the judgment that pleasure is arising in the wrong way, as a pollution of those who pursue

Our responses to others aim toward that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being that it incarnates. It is this feature of our interpersonal responses that gives such compelling force to the idea of the soul, of the true but hidden self that is veiled by the flesh.

We stand before each other as in a special way in charge of ourselves, our sincere first-person statements being uniquely authoritative in the revelation of what we think, feel, and do.

The real evil of porn lies not in its portrayal of other people as sexual objects but in the radical decentering that it effects in the sexual feelings of the observer. It prizes sexual excitement free from the I-You relation and directs it to a nameless scene of mutual arousal, in which arousal too is depersonalized, as though it were a physical condition and not an expression of the self. This decentering of arousal and desire makes them into things that happen to me, occurring under the harsh light of a voyeuristic torch instead of being part of what I am to you and you to me, in the moment of intimacy.

But we should recognize that if the feelings that serve most to attach us to each other—namely, sexual feelings—are decentered, and if children learn these feelings from their decentered versions, we are bound to experience a vast change in the nature of human communities and in the sentiments on which social reproduction depends.

“an individual substance of a rational nature.”

your being this person is what (or who) you essentially are. Hence you could not cease to be this person without ceasing to be.

Yet the person is anchored in the human being, in something like the way that the Tempest is fixed in the specific canvas.

Should we behave in that way, then we will be greeted by hostility and resentment and threatened with punishment. The habit of blaming people arises as a natural offshoot of our competitiveness, and we respond to blame with an excuse, an apology, or an act of repentance. If none of those are forthcoming, the social conditions change.

fault is seen as a pollution, by which others might be contaminated should it not be purged or purified; second, that the situations portrayed arouse the deepest feelings in us, without our really knowing why.

it is natural to human beings, whatever their political circumstances, to establish their relations by consent and to respect the sovereignty of the individual as the means for achieving this.

The picture that I have been developing of the moral community translates easily into an attendant system of law—the common law whereby disputes and grievances are brought before an impartial judge and resolved according to the ancient principles of natural justice, which advocate the avoidance of bias and the right to a fair hearing.

All of the following principles, for example, seem to be accepted by those who lay down their weapons and reason toward solutions instead: 1.Considerations that justify or impugn one person will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another. 2.Rights are to be respected. 3.Obligations are to be fulfilled. 4.Agreements are to be honored. 5.Disputes are to be settled by negotiation, not by force. 6.Those who do not respect the rights of others forfeit rights of their own. Those principles have been taken as defining the field of “natural law,” for the reason that their validity depends only on the idea of negotiation itself and not on the circumstances of the one who embarks on it.

“deontological”

That is to say, it presents personal obligation rather than some conception of the overall good as the basic notion of moral reasoning.