Humanity and humans

From childhood, I remember the Polish Christmas carol “Amidst the Silence of Night” from around the beginning of the 19th century, and I remember being particularly impressed by the lines:

Ahh, welcome, Savior, longed for of old,
four thousand years awaited.
For you, kings, prophets waited,
and you this night to us appeared.

I have lately found troubling the question: Why did God wait over a hundred thousand years from the beginning of the human race to send us his Son and give us the Gospel?

The standard answer is that God needed to prepare humankind. The carol’s version of this answer suggests that this preparation intensified our longings for salvation through millenia of waiting. A variant is that we need a lot of time to fully realize our moral depravity in the absence of God. Or one might emphasize that moral teaching is a slow and gradual process, and millenia are needed to make us ready to receive the Gospel.

I think there is something to all the answers, but they do not fully satisfy as they stand. After all, a human child from 100,000 years ago is presumably roughly as capable of moral development as a modern child. If we had time travel, it seems plausible that missionaries would be just as effective 100,000 years ago as they were 1000 years ago. The intensification of longings and the realization of social moral depravity are, indeed, important considerations, but human memory, even aided by writing, only goes back a few thousand years. Thus, two thousand years of waiting and learning about moral depravity would likely have had basically the same result for the individuals in the time of the Incarnation as a hundred thousand years did.

I am starting to think that this problem cannot be fully resolved simply by considering individual goods. It is important, I think, to consider humankind as a whole, with goods attached to the human community as a whole. The good of moral development can be considered on an individual level, and that good needs a few decade rather than millenia. But the good of moral development can also be considered on the level of humankind as well, and there millenia are fitting for the development not to ride roughshod over nature. Similarly, the good of longing for and anticipation of a great good only needs at most a few decades in an individual, but there is a value in humankind as a whole longing for and anticipating on a species timescale rather an individual timescale.

In other words, reflection on the waiting for Christ pushes us away from an overly individualistic view. As do, of course, other aspects of Christian theology, such as reflection on the Fall, the Church, the atonement, etc.

Am I fully satisfied? Not quite. Is the value of humankind’s more organic development worth sacrificing the goods of thousands of generations of ordinary humans who did not hear the Gospel? God seems to think so, and I am willing to trust him. There is doubtless a lot more to be said. But it helps me to think that this is yet another one of those many things where one needs to view a community (broadly understood) as having a moral significance going beyond the provision of more individualistic goods.

Two more remarks. First, a graduate student pointed out to me (if I understood them right) that perhaps we should measure individual moral achievement relative to the state of social development. If so, then perhaps there was not so great a loss to individuals, since what might matter for their moral wellbeing is this relative moral achievement.

Second, the specifically Christian theological problem that this post addresses has an analogue to a subspecies of the problem of evil that somehow has particularly bothered me for a long time: the evils caused by lack of knowledge, and especially lack of medical knowledge. Think of the millenia of people suffering and dying of in ways that could have been averted had people only known more, say, about boiling water, washing hands or making vaccines. I think there is a value in humankind’s organic epistemic development. But to employ that as an answer one has to be willing to say that such global goods of humankind as a whole can trump individual goods.

(Note that all that I say is meant to be compatible with a metaphysics of value on which the loci of value are always individuals. For an individual’s well-being can include external facts about humankind. Thus the good of humankind as a whole might be metaphysically housed in the members. The important thing, however, is that these goods are goods the human has qua part of humanity.)

In-vitro fertilization and artificial intelligence

Catholics believe that:

1. The only permissible method of human reproduction is marital intercourse.

Supposing we accept (1), we are led to this interesting question:

2. Is it permissible for humans to produce non-human persons by means other than marital intercourse?

It seems to me that a positive answer to (2) would fit poorly with (1). First of all, it would be very strange if we could, say, clone Homo neanderthalensis, or produce them by IVF, but not so for Homo sapiens. But perhaps “human” in (1) and (2) is understood broadly enough to include Neanderthals. It still seems that a positive answer to (2) would be implausible given (1). Imagine that there were a separate evolutionary development starting with some ape and leading to an intelligent hominid definitely different from humans, but rather humanlike in behavior. It would be odd to say that we may clone them but can’t clone us.

This suggests to me that if we accept (1), we should probably answer (2) in the negative. Moreover, the best explanation of (1) leads to a negative answer to (2). For the best explanation of (1) is that human beings are something sacred, and sacred things should not be produced without fairly specific divine permission. It is plausible that we have such permission in the case human marital coital reproduction, but we have no evidence of such permission elsewhere. But all persons are sacred (that’s one of the great lessons of personalism). So, absent evidence of specific divine permission, we should assume that it is wrong for us to produce non-human persons by means other than marital intercourse. Moreover, it is dubious that we have been given permission to produce non-human persons by means of marital intercourse. So, we should just assume that:

3. It is wrong for us to produce non-human persons.

Moreover, if this is wrong, it’s probably pretty seriously wrong. So we also shouldn’t take significant risks of producing non-human persons. This means that unless we are pretty confident that a computer whose behavior was person-like still wouldn’t be a person, we ought to draw a line in our AI research and stop short of the production of computers with person-like behavior.

Do we have grounds for such confidence? I don’t know that we do. Even if dualism is true and even if the souls of persons are directly created by God, maybe God has a general policy of creating a soul whenever matter is arranged in a way that makes it capable of supporting person-like behavior.

But perhaps is reasonable to think that such a divine policy would only extend to living things?

Infima species

There is a classic controversy in interpreting Aristotle: Is there one form per individual or one form per species?

One of the main arguments for individual forms is that the form of the human being is the soul, and it would be crazy to think that you and I have the same soul.

But what if—though this is surely not what Aristotle thought—the truth were this: There is one form per species, but humans, unlike other organisms, are each their own species (much as Aquinas thought the angels were).

This creates a discontinuity between non-human and human animals. This discontinuity is in itself a disadvantage of the view—it makes things more complicated.

However, at the same time the discontinuity would correspond nicely with some ethical intuitions. It wouldn’t be reasonable for a human to sacrifice her life for a Komodo dragon. But it could be reasonable for her to sacrifice her life for the Komodo dragon species. The view also fits with the widespread, though far from universal, intuition that it is permissible to kill non-human animals for food, but that the killing of a human being is a morally far weightier thing. Moreover, the idea that humans are infima species seems to capture important things about human individuality (I am grateful to Richard Gale for this observation), including the idea that while there is a teleological commonality between human beings, it is also the case that individual humans have individual vocations, telè that are their own only.

The main disadvantage of the view is theological. In Athanasian soteriology, it is crucial that Christ is metaphysically same species as we are. But one might hope that a Christology could be modified where being of the same genus would play the same role as being of the same species does for St Athanasius—or perhaps one where what plays the role is just the fact of a shared rational animality (which we also share with any non-human rational animals outside of the Solar System).

I don’t think the view is true, because the radical discontinuity the view posits between non-human and human animals just seems wrong. But I think there is more to be said for this view than is generally thought. And for those who think that they are not animals—for instance, people who think that they are constituted by an animal—the view seems even better.

"Should know"

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “x should know that s”. (There is probably a literature on this, but blogging just wouldn’t be as much fun if one had to look up the literature!) We use this phrase—or its disjunctive variant “x knows or should know that s”—very readily, without its calling for much evidence about x.

• “As an engineer Alice should know that more redundancy was needed in this design.”

• “Bob knows or should know that his behavior is unprofessional for a librarian.”

• “Carl should have known that genocide is wrong.”

Here’s a sense of “x should know that s”: x has some relevant role R and it is normal for those in R to know that s under the relevant circumstances. In that sense, to say that x should know that s we don’t need to know anything specific about x’s history or mental state, other than that x has role R. Rather, we need to know about R: it is normal engineering practice to build in sufficient redundancy; librarians have an unwritten code of professional behavior; human beings normally have a moral law written in their hearts.

This role-based sense of “should know” is enough to justify treating x as a poor exemplar of the role R when x does not in fact know that s. When R is a contingent role, like engineer or librarian, it could be a sufficient for drumming x out of R.

But we sometimes seem use a “should know” claim to underwrite moral blame. And the normative story I just gave about “should know” isn’t strong enough for that. Alice might have had a really poor education as an engineer, and couldn’t have known better. If the education was sufficiently poor, we might kick her out of the profession, but we shouldn’t blame her morally.

Carl, of course, is a case apart. Carl’s ignorance makes him a defective human being, not just a defective engineer or librarian. Still a defective human being is not the same as a morally blameworthy human being. And in Carl’s case we can’t drum him out of the relevant role without being able to levy moral blame on him, as drumming him out of humanity is, presumably, capital punishment. However, we can lock him up for the protection of society.

On the other hand, we could take “x should know that s” as saying something about x’s state, like that it is x’s own fault if x doesn’t know. But in that case, I think people often use the phrase without sufficient justification. Yes, it’s normal to know that genocide is wrong. But we live in a fallen world where people can fall very far short of what is normal through no fault of their own, by virtue of physical and mental disease, the intellectual influence of others, and so on.

I worry that in common use the phrase “x should know that s” has two rationally incompatible features:

• Our evidence only fits with the role-based normative reading.

• The conclusions only fit with the personal fault reading.

The needs of the human community

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's bodily integrity. She concluded that until recent advances in medical technology, it was impossible for humans to permissibly reproduce. The antinatalists, on the other hand, continue to hold that it is impossible for humans to permissible reproduce. Such views lead to an incredulous stare. It is very tempting to levy against them an argument like this:

1. Coital reproduction is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions.
2. Whatever is necessary for the minimal flourishing of the human community under normal conditions is sometimes permissible.
3. Coital reproduction is sometimes permissible.

The condition "under normal conditions" is needed for (2) to be plausible. We can, after all, easily imagine science-fictional scenarios where something immoral would need to be done to ensure the minimal flourishing of the human community.

Reproduction is not the only case where issues like this come up. For instance, the destruction of non-human organisms, say plants, seems necessary for our flourishing. And I suspect that under normal conditions the killing of non-human animals is necessary, too (if only as a side-effect of plowing fields, say). Taxation may be another interesting example.

I have heard it argued that (2) is in itself a basic moral principle, so that killing non-human animals as a side-effect of vegan farming is permissible because it is permissible to ensure minimal human flourishing. But that seems mistaken. Rather, while (2) is true, it is not a moral principle, but a consequence of a correlation between (a) fundamental facts about what moral duties there are actually are and (b) facts about what is actually needed for minimal human flourishing under normal conditions.

This leads to an interesting and I think somewhat underexplored question: Why are the moral facts and the facts about actual human needs so correlated as to make (2) true?

Theists have an elegant answer to this question: God had very strong moral reason to make humans in such a way that, at least normally, minimal flourishing of the community doesn't require wrong action. Non-theists have other stories to tell. These stories, however, are likely to be piecemeal. For instance, one will give one evolutionary story about why we and our ecosystem evolved in such a way that eating persons wasn't needed for our species' survival, and another about why we evolved in such a way that morally non-degrading sex sufficed for reproduction. But a unified answer is to be preferred over piecemeal answers, especially when the unified answer is compatible with the piecemeal ones and capable of integrating them into a single story. We do, thus, get some evidence for theism here.

Lying, violence and dignity

I've argued that typically the person who is hiding Jews from Nazis and is asked by a Nazi if there are Jews in her house tells the truth, and does not lie, if she says: "No." That argument might be wrong, and even if it's right, it probably doesn't apply to all cases.

So, let's think about the case of the Nazi asking Helga if she is hiding Jews, when she is in fact hiding Jews, and when it would be a lie for her to say "No" (i.e., when there isn't the sort of disparity of languages that I argued is normally present). The Christian tradition has typically held lying to be always wrong, including thus in cases like this. I want to say some things to make it a bit more palatable that Helga does the right thing by refusing to lie.

The Nazi is a fellow human being. Language, and the trust that underwrites it (I was reading this morning that one of the most difficult questions in the origins of language is about the origination of the trust essential to language's usefulness), is central to our humanity. By refusing to betray the Nazi's trust in her through lying, Helga is affirming the dignity of all humans in the particular case of someone who needs it greatly--a human being who has been dehumanized by his own choices and the influence of an inhuman ideology. By attempting to dehumanize Jews, the Nazi dehumanized himself to a much greater extent. Refusing to lie, Helga gives her witness to a tattered child of God, a being created to know and live by the truth in a community of trust, and she he gives him a choice whether to embrace that community of trust or persevere on the road of self-destruction through alienation from what is centrally human. She does this by treating him as a trusting human rather than a machine to be manipulated. She does this in sadness, knowing that it is very likely that her gift of community will be refused, and will result in her own death and the deaths of those she is protecting. In so doing she upholds the dignity of everyone.

When I think about this in this way, I think of the sorts of things Christian pacifists say about their eschatological witness. But while I do embrace the idea that we should never lie, I do not embrace the pacifist rejection of violence. For I think that just violence can uphold the dignity of those we do violence to, in a way in which lying cannot. Just violence--even of an intentionally lethal sort--can accept the dignity of an evildoer as someone who has chosen a path that is wrong. We have failed to sway him by persuasion, but we treat him as a fellow member of the human community by violently preventing him from destroying the community that his own wellbeing is tied to, rather than by betraying with a lie the shattered remains of the trustful connection he has to that community.

I don't think the above is sufficient as an argument that lying is always wrong. But I think it gives some plausibility to that claim.

Value of species membership

We generally think that humans have a dignity that non-human animals like dogs lack, even when the humans are so disabled that their functioning is on the level of a dog. While Kant rightly insists that dignity does not reduce to value, nonetheless dignity seems to imply a value. Perhaps the point generalizes so that it is better to be a member of a spiffier species even if one personally lacks those features that make the species spiffier.

This isn’t clear, however. I wish I had the amazing mathematical abilities of a Vulcan like Spock. I don’t really wish to be a mathematically disabled Vulcan, whose mathematical abilities are no greater than mine. And if the choice were between being a deficient Vulcan with mathematical abilities slightly weaker than mine and being what I am, I would prefer to be what I am, at least bracketing non-mathematical features of the two species. Thus whatever value there is in being a member of a species with much greater normal mathematical abilities seems easily outweighed by the value of actual mathematical abilities.

But now consider a somewhat different choice: that between being a human like me and a highly deficient Vulcan whose mathematical skills are nonetheless somewhat better than mine. Suppose, too, that in my chosen way of life only the mathematical skills would matter: nobody would make fun of me for having pointy ears, I wouldn’t feel sad at being a deficient Vulcan, etc. It seems quite reasonable to want to be such a deficient Vulcan. This suggests that either the small improvement in actual mathematical skills is ample compensation for being highly disabled, or being a Vulcan counts for a lot.

Being a Vulcan doesn’t seem to me to count for a lot. When I reflect why I’d rather be the deficient Vulcan with mathematical skills somewhat better than mine, neither the deficiency as such nor the Vulcanness as such count for much.

It seems of much greater value to be a deficient human than to be a normal dog, keeping actual abilities the same. But it doesn’t seem to be of much greater value to be a deficient Vulcan than a human, even if normal Vulcans were equal or superior to humans in all respects. Maybe this is because only a dignity-relevant difference between species makes a value difference between species, and Vulcans, even if they are superior, do not have greater dignity.

Or it could even be that the dignity difference doesn’t imply a value difference.

Care and persons

To care about something that isn't a person to the degree that one cares about persons is wrong. It is a distortion of love to care in that way for a non-person, and it is a kind of disrespect to those who are persons when one cares for other things as much as persons deserve to cared about. (One thinks here of the implicit insult to children when someone loves a pet the way one loves a child.) But it is not wrong to care in this way about severely developmentally disabled humans. Hence these humans are persons.

Animal consciousness

Sometimes I come up with an argument such that I can't tell for sure if it's more a joke or a really interesting argument. The following is a case in point:

1. (Premise) If some non-human earthly animals are conscious, all normal mammals are conscious.
2. (Premise) There have ever been several orders of magnitude more non-human mammals than humans.
3. (Premise, plausibly a consequence of 2) If all normal mammals are conscious, I should very strongly expect not to experience reality as a human.
4. (Premise) I experience reality as a human.
5. So, probably, not all normal mammals are conscious. (By 3 and 4)
6. So, probably, no non-human earthly animals are conscious.

As for (1), if some non-human earthly animals are conscious, a line must be drawn as to where consciousness is found. There are two main plausible places to draw such a line: (a) humans versus other animals, and (b) animals with sophisticated brains versus other animals. If we draw the line in the second place, all normal mammals will be conscious. As for (2), I don't have data as to how many mammals there are on earth. I saw an unreferenced "400 million" online, and a referenced somewhat smaller estimate for the number of birds (and I could run the argument with birds, too, I think). There are apparently roughly as many rats and mice in the world as humans. And there have been non-human animals for millions of years before there were humans.

I think the difficult philosophical question is whether (3) is true and what sense can be made of it.

I am more inclined to see this argument as a joke, or maybe as a challenge to figure out how anthropic arguments work.

Trust and faith

Aquinas tells us that human sociality is partly, maybe even largely, exhibited in our common epistemic project. Now, I think trust is absolutely central to this project. Trust is the glue that binds the individual epistemic projects into a joint project, and more generally that binds us in non-epistemic contexts. In particular, it is natural to trust others, and we always have a pro tanto moral reason to trust another. A failure to take another person's assurance of something as a reason to trust in the assured thing (a claim, a commitment, etc.) is a failure to treat the other person as a co-participant in the joint project, and is a partial denial of our common sociality.

So we always have pro tanto moral reasons to trust others. There may, of course, be overriders or defeaters for these moral reasons. Still, a habit of appropriately taking into account the moral reason to trust others because of our common sociality is a virtue. This virtue is balanced between mistrust and credulity, and we can call it "proper trust."

This, I think, makes it intelligible how faith can be a virtue. Faith is a species of deep proper trust in God—a proper trust so deep that it cannot be a work of nature. Still, like other theological virtues it builds on a natural virtue, in this case proper trust.

Interestingly, though, the theological virtue, unlike the natural, may well cease to be a mean. For there is no such thing as trusting God too much, as he is perfectly trustworthy. This is a feature faith shares with charity, which is a supernatural love for God. For while one can idolatrously overestimate the object of love for a creature, one cannot overestimate the object of love for God. So there is a sense in which charity also is not a mean (not an original view). I do not, at this point, know exactly what I should say about hope.

Wild and domesticated animal pain

It seems to me that our attitudes to the pain of animals are three-fold:

1. It is important for humans not to cause severe pain to non-human animals.
2. It is not important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals not under human care.
3. It is important for humans to prevent severe pain to animals under human care.

The importance of not causing severe pain to animals, whether these animals are wild or pets or farm animals is manifested, for instance, in our laws against cruelty to animals and in our moral outcry against cruel hunting methods.

On the other hand, scientists routinely observe wild animals causing severe pain to other animals in the wild, and do not intervene in the process, and I have never heard anyone criticize them for this failure to intervene. Likewise, nobody makes it their life-work to legalize a special kind of safari where marksmen who have passed accuracy tests relatively painlessly shoot lions' prey in the head just before the lions reach the prey, as well as seeking out and killing animals that look like they are suffering from painful diseases. Yet such safaris would prevent instances of severe pain to wild animals.

Finally, the importance of preventing severe pain to animals under our care is exhibited by a whole host of practices such as the use of anesthesia in veterinary care or the euthanizing of elderly pets.

I think the best way to make sense of the data is to postulate us accepting a view on which (a) severe pain to animals is not a great evil in and of itself, but (b) to cause severe pain to animals is to behave in a particularly vicious and censure-worthy fashion, and (c) we have special duties of care towards some animals often in exchange for goods we receive from the animals (labor, milk, meat, entertainment, companionship, etc.)

Points (a)-(c) fit with the Kantian idea that what makes cruelty to animals wrong is not primarily the harm to the animals, but the dehumanization of the cruelly behaving person, though I don't want to endorse the Kantian idea.

Leviathan

I was once rather amused by an undergraduate in my Philosophy of Love and Sex class who complained that the sexual ethics material we were reading only applied to humans. On that topic, I rather enjoyed this story.

To thine own self be true?

We sometimes hear people justifying not doing an action by saying: "I am just not that sort of person." Taking this literally, and perhaps we shouldn't, the idea is that the speaker is a certain sort of person, and she should be true to that.

But why? Why be true to ourselves? How is the fact that I have a character that inclines me to act in a certain a good reason for acting in that way? There is, indeed, a danger of an is-ought slide here. I am a certain way, but ought I be that way? Yes, it may be easier to act in accordance with character, so there may be a reason of convenience there. But when people say "I am just not that sort of person", they do not mean that the action is inconvenient.

One might think that if we have a theistic picture on which we have vocations from God, the idea of acting in accordance with our character makes sense, since that is surely our vocation. But that seems an unjustified leap. If I am inclined to be a loner, is my vocation therefore more likely to be a solitary one? Or is it not more likely that God might pull me out of my solitude, give me the cross of having to interact with other people? If I am good at dealing with people, is it not unlikely that God might call me to solitude, to learn how to be without people given that I already know how to be with people? (One might think that God would want to use one's talents. But God is omnipotent--he does not need us.)

Perhaps, though, we have some picture of how we shape ourselves into a particular kind of character, and so we should act out of a conception not of what sort of character we have, but of what sort of a character we choose for ourselves. But that is a serious mistake. For it is not up to us to choose what we are called to. God is the potter and we are the clay. God is making a great work of art through the diversity of human character--he needs the ornery Jeromes, the passionate John of the Crosses, the scholarly Aquinases, the courageous Joans, the sensible and firm Thomas Mores, and so on. But just as we may not be much like what he wants us to be, so too we might not choose to be what he wants us to be. We may want to be like Thérèse de Lisieux, but be called to be like Dominic. Here I think of the Curé d'Ars, running away to join a monastery, but brought back by God (or his parishioners).

There is, however, one way in which the maxim to be true to oneself is correct. We are human, and thus need to be true to our humanity. There, there is no doubt--we not only are human, but are called to be human. It is our job to do that well, to be human well, to fulfill our human duties. And it is up to God to mould us into the kind of human he wishes.

This does not mean that self-knowledge is unimportant. Far from it: we need to know our weaknesses in order to come to be human well.