Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 511 A Representational Account of Olfactory Experience 511 Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 511-538

A Representational Account of 1 Olfactory Experience CLARE BATTY University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40506-0027 USA

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath. — Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Much of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations.

1

Many people read earlier drafts of this paper and at various stages along its way. I must say a special thanks to Alex Byrne, Jason Decker, Ned Hall, Susanna Siegel and Stephen Yablo. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the penultimate draft. Their comments and advice helped me to improve the paper greatly.

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Although it rarely gets said explicitly, the representational view is taken to apply across sensory modalities — not simply to the case of visual experience. The notion of representational content is central to important metaphysical and epistemological projects in the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers of mind believe that a physico-functionalist account of mental representation is in the offing. If we can motivate the view that perceptual experiences have representational content, then we lay the groundwork for a purely naturalistic account of perceptual experience. Although much has been said about visual content, there has been very little discussion of content for the chemical senses — smell and taste. As it turns out, olfaction presents an important challenge for representational views to overcome. This is because, given its phenomenology, it is difficult to see what a representational view of olfactory experience would be like. A subjectivist view of it might seem inevitable. In this paper, I argue for a representational account of olfac2 tory experience that fits its phenomenology.

I

Representation and Unification

We can characterize the representational content of a perceptual experience as a proposition that specifies the way that the world appears to a subject when she has that experience.3 If the world is that way — if the representational content is true — then the experience is accurate or veridical. Otherwise — if the content is false — it is inaccurate or nonveridical. The content of an experience, then, is assessable for accuracy. For this reason, we can think of the representational content of a perceptual experience as giving that experience’s ‘accuracy conditions.’ Consider the experience you have when you look at a ripe tomato. A plausible candidate for its accuracy conditions is that a red, roundish, bulgy object be before you.4

2

Discussion of olfaction in the philosophical literature is scarce. Thomas Reid is one of the very few philosophers who has written extensively about smell. In his An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense ([1764] 2000), he devotes an entire chapter to it (‘Of Smelling’). Others who have substantial discussions of smell are Bhushan (2004), Lycan (1996, 2000) and Perkins (1983). Also notable are shorter discussions in Matthen (2005, 282-8) and Smith (2002, 138-45).

3

Notable among those who think that perceptual experiences have representational content are these: Davies (1991, 1992), Evans (1982), Harman (1990), Lycan (1996), McGinn (1996), Peacocke (1983), Searle (1983) and Tye (1992, 1995, 2000).

4

It is controversial whether visual experience can represent the property of being a tomato. Would your experience be inaccurate if the object before you was actually

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So conceived, the representational view is an intuitive position to uphold. Most of us would agree that, in the visual case at least, experience can misinform us about the way that things are in the world.5 Consider how your apparently black sock is revealed to be navy once you leave the house and get it out into the daylight. Similarly, we might suppose that, in the tomato case, what you are actually looking at is a cleverly lit albino tomato. Although the albino tomato looks red, roundish and bulgy, it is actually white, roundish and bulgy. What you suffer, in each case, is an illusion with respect to an object’s color. Your experience misattributes redness to a white object, blackness to a navy one. In both experiences, you succeed in perceiving an object but misperceive one of its properties. This is not the only way that you can misperceive, however. You might hallucinate a ripe tomato before you. Unlike the illusory case, there is no tomato there and you have no perceptual success. Visual experience, then, supports a representational view. But content theorists have assumed that it isn’t alone in this. Implicit in much of the contemporary perceptual literature is what I will call the Unification Thesis: the thesis that certain philosophical issues about perception should be settled in the same way for each of the sensory modalities. Recently, many philosophers have assumed the Unification Thesis with respect to representational content. I will take the Unification Thesis as a starting point for my discussion. But obviously I can’t do so without noting two important considerations in favor of the content version of the thesis. First, despite their difference in phenomenology, we still take it that our senses function as informational systems. Using the senses, we are able to gather information about the world. Although we may regard our olfactory capabilities as unremarkable, human olfactory experience still functions to guide behavior and action. The smell of smoke, for example, leads me to get up and flee the building. As guides of behavior and grounds of belief, the experiences of the sense modalities form a common kind. A shared metaphysical nature provides a way of accounting for this

an extremely realistic plastic facsimile? If so, then the accuracy conditions must appeal to tomatoes. If not, then the accuracy conditions can stay as above. I take it that it is less controversial to hold that the accuracy conditions of such an experience concern properties like redness, roundness and bulginess than metaphysically richer properties such as being a tomato. For the sake of clarity, I take the less controversial route. 5

This is not to say that the connection between accuracy conditions and representational content is uncontroversial. For example, Travis (2004) argues that perceptual experience is not representational but is still able to mislead.

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commonality. If we can plausibly claim that visual experience is representational, then we ought to account for olfactory experience in the same way. Second, we ought to admit that certain other creatures enjoy olfactory experiences that are world-directed. For example, the shark’s sense of smell is remarkable in that it is directional. Like the human sense of hearing, sharks can typically determine the direction that an odorant is coming from. (See, e.g., Hodgson and Mathewson 1971.) Consider the hammerhead shark as an extreme example of the physiology that makes this possible. The distance between the nasal cavities is large in most sharks but it is at its largest with the great hammerhead. An odorant coming from the extreme left of the shark’s head will arrive at the left nasal cavity before it does the right. The animal kingdom is rife with olfactory feats like these. But we do not typically count ourselves as remarkable in this way. Still, there is a similarity to be drawn here. Returning to the hammerhead, these animals rely on their ‘noses’ where we would, typically, use our eyes. We might reasonably say, then, that their olfactory experiences are for them as our visual experiences are for us. If we take it that our visual experiences are representational, then we ought to think that their olfactory experiences are as well. But, as we noted above, our olfactory experiences also serve to guide behavior and action — just perhaps not as exceptionally as they do for the hammerhead. Although our olfactory capabilities might pale in comparison to theirs, we can count ourselves as like the hammerhead in terms of the role that our olfactory experiences play for us. Again a shared metaphysical nature provides a way of accounting for this similarity. The Unification Thesis, then, tells us how we ought to proceed. But what we ought to do does not always align with what we are able to do. And, as I indicated in the introduction, olfaction presents a special challenge to content theorists who accept such a thesis. Olfaction is one of our senses, yet it seems initially questionable whether the phenomenology of our olfactory experience can support a representational view. We have seen that an assignment of content to a perceptual experience should be compatible with the way that things appear to a perceiver 6 when she enjoys that experience. In the case of visual experience, it

6

Due to the intuitiveness of this constraint, we find representational content also referred to as ‘phenomenological content’ (McGinn 1996, 52). And such a constraint is widely accepted. For example, it is put to serious work in the various debates about color and color experience. In those, we see various views accepted or rejected on the basis of how well they respect the phenomenology of color experience. Still, there are other notions of content — ones free of such a phe-

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should be compatible with the way that things (e.g., tomatoes) look to that perceiver; in the case of olfactory experience, it should be compatible with the ‘way that things smell.’ Part of addressing the question of whether olfactory experience is representational, then, involves considering whether things are ever presented in olfactory experience. That is, answering the question involves considering whether olfactory experience can support a view according to which it is predicative in 7 nature.

II

Does Olfactory Experience Present Objects?

We can start on this question by contrasting olfactory experience with the experiences of other modalities. Human visual experience easily supports a ‘predicative view.’8 It presents a world inhabited by individual objects like tomatoes, and ‘on’ or ‘in’ those objects it places properties like redness or roundness. For the most part these objects appear at determinate, and distinct, locations before you. Looking at the dinner ingredients on the counter, you might see a green pepper on a certain part of the counter, to the left of your tomato. You are able to distinguish them both, sitting there side by side on the counter. With that said, we must recognize that there are some visual experiences in which it does not seem to you as though you are presented with any particular thing — such as the experience of looking at a cloudless sky or some other undifferentiated colored expanse. This kind of case will be very important later in the paper. But, for now, it is enough to note that visual experience is able to achieve the kind of object differentiation illustrated in our vegetable examples, that what we might happily call the typical visual experience presents us with relatively bounded particulars and attributes properties to them. Audition and touch are like vision in significant ways. There is a spatial element to many auditory experiences. We hear sounds as coming

nomenological constraint. See, e,g., Dretske’s (1986, 1988a, 1988b, 1991, 1995) and Millikan’s (1984, 1989a, 1989b, 1990, 1991, 1993) teleological accounts of content. 7

By an ‘olfactory experience,’ I mean (among other things) a mental event that has phenomenal character.

8

Many take the feature-placing view of visual experience to be an alternative view to what I have called the predicative view. Clark (2000), for example, argues that the structure of visual experience is such that the properties presented in visual experience occupy places in the visual field. I will return to Clark’s view in sec. IV.

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from certain directions, as presented in relatively determinate locations in space external to us. We can also hear multiple sounds at different locations. I might hear a bird chirping on the window ledge to my left at the same time as I hear the coffee grinder in the kitchen to my right. Not all auditory experiences are directional or determinately spatial — for example, consider the familiar experience of hearing a cell phone ringing when you have no idea where the cell phone is. But, for purposes of drawing the comparison with olfactory experience, it is enough to see that some are. In touch, like vision, the surfaces of objects are presented as being external to the perceiver and we locate these surfaces relative to our bodies. Objects literally come into contact with the skin and exert pressure on our bodies. Any smoothness or roughness one feels, for example, appears to qualify those objects. Moreover, like vision and audition, it is possible to perceive multiple objects by touch. Consider a situation in which you hold a small object in each clenched hand. Like its visual counterpart, tactile experience can also present multiple objects in spatial relations to one another. Right now, I am touching the chair I sit in, the wall under my desk with my foot and the keyboard with my hands.9 Unlike vision and touch, it is questionable whether auditory experience ever presents us with objects like birds and dogs. To be sure, we say that we hear the bird when it chirps, or the dog when it barks. But we only ever hear the bird, or the dog, by hearing the sound that it produces. Consider a novel noise, one that you have no reason to suppose has been made by one object as opposed to another. It is only once we know what the source of the sound is that we are able to make remarks such as ‘I hear the dog.’10 It is questionable, then, whether auditory experiences present ordinary objects. Instead, they plausibly present other kinds of objects or particulars, namely, events — auditory happenings or occurrences.11 These events are presented as being located — as when I hear the bird chirping somewhere on my left. Visual and

9

One important, and interesting, difference between visual and tactile experience is that, although tactile experience presents objects as separate from our bodies, the distance at which we can feel them to be is constrained by the body’s limits. Visual presentation of distance is not constrained in this way, although it is constrained by the physiology of the sense organ.

10

We can read Berkeley’s famous ([1713] 1996) passage about the perception of a coach’s sound as making the same point.

11

O’Callaghan (2007, 2009b) argues that sounds are events and, thus, that auditory experience represents events. This view also appears to be what Urmson (1968) is suggesting when he claims that sounds are not physical objects but that ‘like physical objects, sounds are individuals and may be counted’ (119).

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tactile experiences can also present us with events as well as with birds and dogs. But, on the face of it, auditory experience only presents perceivers with events.12 We have seen, then, that visual, auditory and tactile experiences are predicative in nature. Each presents us with particulars and attributes properties to them. We might also say that each is representational in nature, as illusions are possible in all three of these modalities. As we have also seen, examples of illusory experiences are not hard to come by for vision. Although not as common, auditory and tactile illusions 13 can, and do, occur. Still, the kinds of illusions that there are suggest a representational account for the experiences of each. Can the experiences of the chemical senses follow suit? I leave discussion of gustatory experience to another paper and focus on olfactory experience alone. Like auditory experience, olfactory experience does not seem to present us with ordinary objects. But, unlike the auditory case, when I sniff around the brewing coffee, the smell does not even seem to occupy more or less determinate locations before me. Rather, the smell is simply present. And this, it would seem, applies to any typical human olfactory experience. There is some evidence that humans can localize odor sources in highly controlled circumstances (Porter et al. 2005; von Békésy 1964). But, unlike those of the hammerhead shark, these circumstances are the exception, not the rule, and do not represent the typical experiences of human subjects in their environment. For this reason, I will not consider them here. Moreover, the notion of an olfactory illusion is just not something that resonates with us. As we have seen, it makes sense to speak of accuracy conditions in the case of visual, auditory and tactile experiences. In the case of the typical visual experience and in the case of all tactile experiences, we can ask of the object of experience, o: For any property F that o appears to have, does o really have F?

12

There is a debate over spatial audition beginning with O’Shaughnessy (1957) and Strawson (1959). For more recent work on this issue, see Casati and Dokic (1994, 2005), Nudds (2001), and O’Callaghan (2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010). Nudds (2001) argues that audition differs from vision in that it does not present empty places. Martin (1992) has argued for a similar thesis for the case of touch.

13

In the auditory domain, there is the Deutsch Octave Illusion. See, e.g., Deutsch (1974, 1981) and Deutsch and Roll (1976). Tactile illusions appear to be less common than auditory ones. But an example is the Velvet Hand Illusion. See, e.g., Mochiyama et al. (2005).

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And in the case of those auditory experiences that are directional, we can ask of a certain event, e: For any auditory property F that e appears to have, does e really have F? If there were an olfactory analogue of these questions, we could ask of an object of olfactory experience, x: For any olfactory property F that x appears to have, does x really have F? But, unlike the experiences of these other modalities, the properties presented in olfactory experience seem disengaged from any particular object. It is tempting, then, to conclude that olfactory experience isn’t in the business of predication. This would explain why we are reluctant to speak of olfactory illusions. The idea that a smell is misattributed to something has no obvious purchase — unlike the case of visual, auditory and tactile experience.14 Compared to visual, auditory and tactile experience, then, it might seem overly ambitious to ask how things appear in olfactory experience — i.e., how things smell. To put it figuratively: compared to the intricately detailed scenes presented by visual experiences especially, olfactory experiences are mere smudges on our consciousness.

III

Are Olfactory Experiences Purely Sensational?

Given the smudginess of olfactory experience, it might very well seem that the answer to this question is ‘yes.’ It is hard not to feel drawn to the view that olfactory experience has no objective purport, that it is not world-directed. This places olfactory experience in contrast to visual experience, where such views are taken as an affront to its phenomenology.

14

It is interesting to note that we have little trouble with the notion of an olfactory hallucination — i.e., with the idea that we might have an olfactory experience without an external stimulus as opposed to an experience in which an olfactory property is misattributed. In another paper (Batty 2010b), I argue that, in the olfactory case, the traditional distinction between illusory and hallucinatory experience does not apply. Rather, the most we get in the olfactory domain is a kind of property hallucination. Much of my argument relies on conclusions made in the current paper.

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Christopher Peacocke (1983) suggests that olfactory experiences are not world-directed. In the opening chapter of Sense and Content, he suggests that ‘a sensation of…[smell] may have no representational content of any sort, though of course the sensation will be of a distinctive kind’ (5). Peacocke says no more about olfactory experience, but William Lycan agrees. He claims: ‘Phenomenally speaking, a smell is just a modification of our consciousness, a qualitative condition or event in us’ (2000, 281), ‘lingering uselessly in the mind without representing anything’ (1996, 145). Although Lycan goes on to argue that olfactory experience is representational after all, he thinks that there is an initial, phenomenological, motivation for thinking that it is not. Peacocke’s view, and the view that Lycan finds prima facie plausible, are what we might call Reidian views of olfactory experience. The backbone of Thomas Reid’s discussion of perception is his distinction between sensation and perception. According to Reid ([1764] 2000), ‘Sensation, and the perception of external objects by the senses, though very different in their nature, have commonly been considered as one and the same thing’ (167). Setting out the distinction in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man ([1785] 2002), Reid claims: Sensation, by itself, implies neither the conception nor belief in something external. It supposes a sentient being and a certain manner in which that being is affected; but it supposes no more. Perception implies a conviction and belief of something external — something different from both the mind that perceives and the act of perception. (199)

Although sensation does not imply ‘the conception…[or] belief in something external,’ a given sensation does give rise to ‘an immediate conviction and belief of something external’ ([1785] 2002, 199) — that is, to a perception. According to Reid, then, perception is the formation of non-inferential beliefs about the instantiation of external qualities. In the case of olfaction, Reid ([1764] 2000) tells us that sensations are caused by the ‘effluvia’ of ‘animal and vegetable bodies’ (25). Consider the act of sniffing a rose. According to Reid, effluvia given off by the rose cause a certain sensation in you. Let’s call it the rose sensation. The rose sensation, Reid tells us, gives rise to the immediate and irresistible belief in the existence of an external quality — a quality of the rose or of the effluvia proceeding from the rose. This perception, this belief, has an intentional object — namely, the rose or the effluvium. The rose sensation, on the other hand, does not. Let’s call the view that olfactory experiences are Reidian sensations the sensational view. Both Peacocke’s and Lycan’s remarks suggest the sensational view. According to the Reidian picture of olfaction, rose sensations do not represent anything. They are, as Reid put it, ‘mere affectations.’ Still, although Reid holds that sensations are not world-

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directed themselves, they cause other states — namely, beliefs about the instantiation of certain properties — that are. If we take it that Reidian sensations are one and the same as what we now think of as experiences, then Reid himself also held that olfactory experiences are purely sensational. Now, as I noted above, the sensational view may seem inevitable. It certainly seems to make prima facie sense. But it is not inevitable. To see why not, let’s now turn to a discussion of representational content.

IV

Are Olfactory Experiences Representational?

Most discussion of representational content centers on visual experience. As we saw in section II, the default view is that the properties presented in visual experience are properties of ordinary objects — ‘medium-sized dry goods,’ as some might put it. This view, it would seem, is grounded in the phenomenology of visual experience. There is significant disagreement, however, about how visual experience represents objects. One view is that visual content is abstract, or existentially quantified (Davies 1991, 1992, 1996; McGinn 1996; Tye 1995, 2000). This is the view that your experience of the ripe tomato has the following sort of content: (Abs.)

There is an object x at location L, and x is red, and round….

The motivation behind this view is the possibility that experiences of two qualitatively identical, yet distinct, tomatoes might be phenomenologically indistinguishable. Moreover, a perceiver might hallucinate a tomato before her and yet be unable to distinguish this hallucinatory experience from a corresponding veridical experience. All of these are visual experiences as of a red, round object at a certain location L. To preserve their indistinguishability, the abstract content theorist proposes that the content of each is content into which no particular tomato enters. Both a veridical experience of a red, round object at L and the hallucination of a red, round object at L have (Abs.). Opponents of this view claim that the abstract content view ignores the particularity of experience (McDowell 1993, 1994).15 According to

15

There are others who, while not proponents of the object-involving view of content per se, draw attention to the same considerations in forming views similar in spirit to the object-involving account. For example, Burge (1991) and Bach (2007) argue for the view that content is ‘gappy’ in structure; it has the form of an open

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the object-involving account of content, we cannot ignore this crucial phenomenological fact. Adapting an example from Martin (2003), when I look at the tomato placed before me on the cutting board, I am not presented with some tomato or other. I am presented with this tomato.16 According to the proponent of the object-involving account, the tomato itself is a constituent of the content of my experience. So, where t is the actual tomato before me on the cutting board, my experience has the following sort of content: (Obj.)

t is red, round…and at L.

The object-involving account allows that visual experience can be the basis of demonstrative thought about objects. It does so because particular objects are a part of the content of experience. The view, however, does this at the expense of providing a common account of hallucination and veridical visual experience. As we know, in the hallucinatory case there is no tomato before you. And so no particular tomato can 17 enter into the content of experience. There are many interesting questions about how we might go about upholding either the object-involving or abstract account. It would seem that either view must give up one of two attractive claims about the nature of visual experience: (a) that there is a common element to hallucination and veridical visual experience and (b) that there is a particularity about visual experience that allows for the possibility of demonstrative thought about objects. Recently, the debate about disjunctivism has featured attempts by the proponents of each to deal with this — in the form of both rejection and reconciliation. Disjunctivists reject (a) while upholding an object-involving account of content. At the same time, Byrne and Logue (2008) have argued for a moderate view according to which veridical and hallucinatory experiences share

sentence. When one sees an object, the particular object perceived occupies the gap at subject position. Similarly, although not content theorists at all, both Campbell (2002, Chap. 6) and Martin (2003) argue that visual experience is constituted, in part, by a relation to particular things in the world. 16

Martin states: ‘When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented with this thing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to me to be a duck’ (2003, 173).

17

I take it that the sense-datum view is suitably unattractive these days to admit that what enters into the content of experience in both the veridical and hallucinatory cases is a tomato sense-datum. As a result, I will not consider it as an option for dealing with this problem.

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a common abstract content. The view leaves open, however, the possibility that veridical experience might have an additional object-involving nature. Their view, then, is an attempt to reconcile (a) and (b).18 It is a good question whether this kind of conflict arises also for olfactory experience. As we shall see shortly, it is not saddled with it. But, before that, we must look more closely at our discriminatory abilities in the olfactory domain. 1. How Discriminating is Olfactory Experience? As I said earlier in section II, the properties presented in olfactory experience seem to be mere smudges on our consciousness. This is why the Reidian sensational view makes prima facie sense. So that we can understand this smudge point further, compare again olfactory experience with visual experience. In Seeing and Knowing (1988b), Fred Dretske argues for a view according to which we do not see an object unless we can differentiate it from its environment.19 I count as seeing the tomato on the table if I can differentiate it from the table, the wall behind the table and the other vegetables placed next to it. In the case of olfaction, we do not achieve this kind of differentiation. When I plug in the fancy air freshener and its smell drifts over to where I am sitting, I am simply presented with a distinctive property. I do not distinguish the place in the scene before my nose at which the property is instantiated from the place at which it is not. I simply smell that it is instantiated. And the circumstance is no different if I am up close to a source object, where the smell is likely to be the most intense. My experience does not, in such a circumstance, report that the source object is before me. I still merely smell that a property is instantiated — albeit in particularly large quantities. After all, if we had on hand enough of the odorant the object produces, it would be possible to replicate the same experience with no source object present at all. Why suppose that only the former presents objects? I will go on to argue that a lack of spatial differentiation is not limited to a circumstance in which merely a single olfactory property is

18

Theirs is not the only way to preserve both (a) and (b). Others who have mechanisms in place for reconciling (a) and (b) are Bach (1997), Burge (1991) and Matthen (2005). I mention Byrne and Logue (2008) here only because they engage with the disjunctivism debate directly.

19

Shoemaker (1996b) makes a similar claim, but states it in terms of perception in general: ‘[s]ense perception affords ‘identification information’ about the object of perception. When one perceives one is able to pick out one object from others, distinguishing it from the others by information, provided by the perception, about both its relational and its nonrelational properties’ (205).

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presented.20 Cases where, for example, the air freshener does not succeed in masking another (unpleasant) smell are equally lacking in spatial differentiation. Dretske acknowledges that there are cases in which this differentiation does not occur in visual experience and yet we still want to count a subject as seeing some object — the sky or the colored expanse of a wall up close.21 But he stresses that these are limiting cases. In the case of olfactory experience, the analogue of this circumstance is not the limiting case. It is the norm. The point is that it is always like this in olfactory experience; we never, on the basis of olfactory experience alone, differentiate where a certain olfactory property is instantiated and where it is not.22 Doing so involves the contribution of movement and, quite possibly, input from the other sensory modalities. For example, a sighted person will rely on visual experience to trace where the source of the smell is, to determine where the smell is strongest, weakest and where it simply is not. This kind of investigation occurs through time. We get up, move around, sniff, foot by foot, room by room. We navigate the

20

It is interesting to note that these cases are rarer than we might think. Most researchers hold that olfactory experience is largely synthetic — that is to say, the various properties of the presented olfactory object form an irreducible experience, one in which the relevant properties of the stimulus are not so distinguishable. (If we had a wholly analytic sense of smell, we would be would be capable of distinguishing the individual properties of the presented olfactory object.) Much of what we encounter with our noses are chemical mixtures. For example, although chocolate and lavender are experienced as irreducible olfactory objects, they are both composed of a variety of volatile molecules. Each type of molecule bears properties to which the olfactory receptors are sensitive. (It is controversial just what these properties are.) As we know, sniffing the lavender provides us with a unique kind of olfactory experience but not one where we can discriminate the individual component molecules. The same goes with chocolate. Similarly, even when odorants such as lavender and chocolate are combined with other such mixtures (cheese, e.g.) into complex mixtures, subjects are able to identify two components of the mixtures on 15% of occasions, three on 5% of occasions and four on 3% of occasions (Wilson and Stevenson 2003).

21

Dretske claims: Touch your nose to a large smooth wall and stare fixedly at the area of the wall in front of you. There is not much doubt about the fact that you see the wall, or at least a portion of it. It is also fairly clear that you do not differentiate it from its immediate surroundings. In this position it has no environment, and so one can hardly be expected to differentiate it from one. I call this a limiting case because, normally, we see things in an environment, against a background, or surrounded by other things (which we also see). (1988b, 26)

22

It is always like this outside of the laboratory. Those experiences in the laboratory that I referred to in section I might be more similar to the typical visual experience.

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olfactory terrain; we actively engage in figuring out where the smells are located in the space around us. If we bracket information gained from movement and any other sensory modality, and consider olfactory experience at-a-time, then we see that any locatedness of these properties — other than simply ‘here’ — goes as well.23 In this way, olfactory experience distinguishes itself from vision. Even at-a-time, visual experience achieves a robust form of differentiation that allows the presentation of properties at determinate locations in the scene before your eyes. The spatial presentation of olfactory experience at-a-time remains 24 wholly undifferentiated. What this suggests is that olfactory experience cannot solve the Many Properties Problem—namely, the problem of differentiating between scenes in which the same properties are instantiated although in different configurations.25 Vision can solve this problem. Consider the difference between (i) the experience of looking at a red circle to the left of a green triangle and (ii) that of looking at red triangle to the left of a green circle. To illustrate: (i)

R

G

R

G

(ii)

If visual experience simply reported on the properties instantiated (e.g., that green is instantiated, circularity is instantiated, etc.), it would be unable to distinguish between experiences of type (i) and type (ii). But it clearly can, and it does so by reporting on the arrangement of these properties. In particular, the visual system predicates properties to objects. On a representational view, experiences of type (i) and (ii) rep-

23

I adopt the use of ‘here’ from Matthen (2005). He states: ‘[smells] have, at best, a primitive — that is, an undifferentiating — feature-location structure — every smell of which I am aware is simply here’ (284). In other papers, e.g., Batty (2010a), I use the expressions ‘around me’ or ‘out there’ to denote the relevant location in the olfactory case. For reasons set out in Batty (2010b), I now reject each of these ways of speaking about that location.

24

In addition to my use of ‘here’ to denote the relevant location in the olfactory case, I also adopt ‘undifferentiated’ from Matthen (2005).

25

Jackson (1977) was the first to cite this problem in a criticism of adverbialism.

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resent that redness, greenness, circularity and triangularity are instantiated. The difference between them is that each experience attributes the properties in question to different objects at different locations in one’s visual field. As the air freshener example on the previous page suggests, olfactory experience does not present properties at determinate locations in our surroundings. Because of this, olfaction cannot solve the Many Properties Problem. When I spray lavender air freshener to try and mask the smell of cigarette smoke, I do not experience the lavender smell at one location and the smoke smell at another — for example, in the circumstance in which the locations are the same, as the lavender smell being right ‘on top of’ the smoke smell. Nor does it seem plausible to suggest that there might be a different circumstance in which my olfactory experience reports that the air freshener smell is on top of some of the smoke smell but that I missed a spot. As I sit in the room, I am unable to tell the difference between a circumstance in which I cover the whole room and a circumstance in which I miss a spot. 26 Each experience reports that the smoke smell and the air freshener smell are instantiated.27 But each experience is silent on where before me these properties are instantiated. Because of this, the experiences are equally silent on what object instantiates which property. If olfactory experience reports nothing more than ‘these properties instantiated here’ then we are forced to conclude that olfactory experience gives us only diminished object perception. This is what appears to be behind the following remark from Chalmers (1996): ‘Smell has little in the way of apparent structure and often floats free of any apparent object, remaining a primitive presence in our sensory manifold’ (8). Now, one might object that this is the wrong conclusion to take from this case. Olfactory experience may have limited spatial differentiation, but why suppose olfactory object perception presupposes spatial differentiation? Perhaps, that is, there are other dimensions along which property binding occurs and, as a result, along which objects are presented. To take another example, I might simultaneously bask in the smell of the coffee brewing and in the sweet smell of the lilies on the table before me. Some coffee smells are described as acidic; the lily smell is sweet. We might think of acidity and sweetness as further

26

In a footnote, Clark (2000, 79) suggests that the Many Properties Problem does not arise for olfactory experience. Smith (2002, 138) also appears to raise the same point.

27

To be sure, there might be a difference in the perceived intensity of the lavender smell in each case. But that would not amount to a difference in the experienced location of that smell.

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dimensions of those smells — and, in turn, dimensions that indicate certain non-spatial ways of olfactory feature binding. On this proposal, then, coffeeness and acidity combine together and lilyness and sweetness do the same to form two distinguishable odor objects. But this proposal doesn’t seem right. This is not to deny that olfactory properties can be acidic or sweet. What is questionable, though, is whether olfactory experience achieves a kind of property binding when such properties are presented. And there are reasons to think that it does not. We might come to believe that what we have around us are two objects — one that has an acidic coffee smell and another that has a sweet lily smell. That much is uncontroversial. But is there anything in the experience itself that suggests this is the case? There are two reasons to think not. First, we must accept that coffeeness, acidity, lilyness and sweetness are all separate olfactory elements. If they were, it would be possible for sweetness and acidity to combine to form one smell, leaving coffeeness and lilyness to combine to form another. While we may not have trouble envisioning the latter28, the former is extremely counter-intuitive. It is the olfactory analogue of the claim that the brightness and saturation of a given shade of blue might combine to form a further color property. If it isn’t an analogue, and acidity and sweetness are a kind of olfactory element that cannot bind with each other, then the proponent of this kind of view owes us an account of the various kinds of olfactory elements. That such an explanation is not forthcoming is indicated by olfactory psychophysical research. Although much work has been done towards mapping the olfactory quality space, there is very little consensus on the dimensions we need to accomplish such a task. Not only do the proposed dimensions differ in kind, the number of them varies from case to case. As Clark (1993) notes, many systems are seven-dimensional, but there are others that are four-, twelve-, and eighteen-dimensional.29 What many have taken this to indicate is that olfactory properties (what I have also been referring to as smells) do not have the kind of relational structure enjoyed by the colors. A better explanation of our tendency to believe that we are in the midst of two odor objects is not that something in the experience itself ‘tells’ us so, but because we have had previous experiences of things smelling so. To take our first example, I have awaken on many mornings and had the delicious coffee smell experience — and without hav-

28

As I drew attention to in n. 20, these cases are rarer than we might think.

29

Clark (1993) has a condensed discussion of the various systems that have been proposed. For a more thorough discussion, see Harper et al. (1968).

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ing the lily smell one. Similarly, I have encountered the smell of lilies in the florist’s without being subject to the coffee smell. This is to say, on the basis of experiences like these, I have the knowledge that the one smell can exist without the other. On the basis of my knowledge of these modal facts, I ‘bundle’ the properties into two ‘packages’ and come to believe that I have two odor objects before me. But, unlike the visual case, nothing about the experience itself dictates that I do so. Spatial representation helps vision achieve this; but other than a very weak form of spatial representation (i.e., ‘here’) olfaction lacks the spatial differentiation that vision has been awarded. In line with the Unification Thesis, then, the challenge is to provide a plausible view of how olfactory experience represents olfactory objects given this diminished perception. I turn now to this question. I argue that the right view of the content of olfactory experience is one according to which it has a very weak kind of abstract, or existentially quantified, content. 2. How Do Olfactory Experiences Represent? We have seen that olfactory experience gives us the ability to distinguish that properties are located at the undifferentiated location of ‘here,’ but that it does not allow us to refer to the particular objects that instantiate them. Our results at this point are suggestive of Austen Clark’s (2000) account of the content of visual experience. According to Clark, visual experience represents that properties are instantiated at place-times.30 As Siegel (2002) observes, there are two ways that we might interpret Clark’s claim that visual experience has this kind of structure. 31 The second of these interpretations directs our attention to the right view about how olfactory experience represents. The first interpretation of Clark is that he holds that visual experience attributes properties to places. Siegel notes that Clark tells us this on more than one occasion.32 But, as a view about how things visually appear, it doesn’t seem right. Intuitively, colors and shapes look to be properties of objects like tomatoes. As I look at the tomato before me

30

To be sure, Clark’s view of visual experience has it that properties are presented at much more determinate locations than simply ‘here’ and so, in this way, must be understood to depart from our results.

31

For simplicity, I set aside Clark’s comparison of his account with Strawson’s (1959) notion of feature-placing. According to Strawson, feature-placing languages fall short of predication. As we shall see momentarily, Clark does not seem to deny that visual experience is predicative.

32

For example, see Clark (2000, 77 & 147).

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on the table, my experience does not report that redness and roundness is instantiated by a certain location L. It reports that some object at L — namely, the tomato — is red and round. Another interpretation of Clark is that he takes it that visual experience has a certain kind of abstract content: that something or other that is present at a certain location L is red and round. The experience does not attribute redness and roundness to a place, and neither does it attribute redness and roundness to a particular object. Whether this is indeed Clark’s view is not important for present pur33 poses. What is important is what consideration of Clark has to tell us about the nature of olfactory experience. As I remarked in section IV, the abstract view for visual experience is controversial. Those in favor of an object-involving account argue that an abstract account cannot account for the particularity of visual experience and, as a result, ought to be rejected. But an analogous argument is not available in the case of olfactory experience. As it turns out, the abstract view is a remarkably good fit in the case of olfactory experience. As with visual experience, it is implausible to suppose that olfactory experience attributes properties to places. Although olfactory experience reports that properties are instantiated ‘here,’ there is no obvious reason to take it to report that these properties are instantiated by places. As we have seen, olfactory experience never reports that properties are instantiated by particular objects. Although we may commonly talk about that smell and appear to make demonstrative reference to the things that bear these properties, we have seen that there is nothing in the experience itself that allows us to do so. As a result of previous experience we make these claims, but nothing about our olfactory experience justifies them. For this reason, an object-involving account would not work for olfactory experience. But with the notion of abstract content, we can construct a view according to which olfactory experience reports that properties are instantiated by objects — albeit, not particular ones. Given that olfaction cannot solve the Many Properties Problem, it is a view according to which these properties are instantiated by some object — and just one such ‘some.’ Why objects at all? Because the alternative picture of olfactory experience is implausible. As I suggested at the beginning, we think of the senses as informational systems. And, if we grant that visual experience is representational on these grounds, we ought to grant that olfactory experience is representational as well. But if olfactory experience does not

33

In a later paper, Clark (2004) argues, in response to commentators, that his view is closer to Siegel’s first interpretation.

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present objects, then there we are left with two possible representational views to choose from: (1) olfactory experience represents bare properties, detached from an object or (2) it represents properties but remains agnostic about whether those properties are attached or detached from an object. Neither (1) nor (2) is plausible, however. They both would have us accept that natural selection preserved a sensory system that gives us no information about the states of objects in our environment. This is, at best, extremely hard to swallow. The plausible view, then, is one according to which olfactory experience predicates properties to objects. I turn now to what I call the abstract view of olfactory experience. Let me draw attention to the abstract view by again comparing olfactory experience to visual experience. Despite what I say above, assume that visual experience has abstract content. This is an innocuous assumption, intended for drawing the comparison with olfactory experience, which (in the human case, at least) can only have such content. The Many Properties Problem shows us that, for some visual experiences, we need more than one quantifier to capture their contents. Consider the following case: upon arriving home from the farmer’s market, I set my groceries down on the counter. The bag tips and some of my bounty escapes and rolls onto the counter — in particular, a tomato (ripe, of course) and a Granny Smith apple. I turn around and see the bag’s contents lying on the counter. Suppose that L1 and L2 are distinct locations in my visual field. Suppose also, for the sake of simplicity, that shape properties and color properties exhaust the visually salient properties. (So, although the objects on the counter will bear certain relations to one another such as relative size, I leave out any reference to them in setting out the content of my experience.) According to the view that visual content is abstract, the content of the visual experience I have when I look down at the produce on the counter is: x (x is red, round & at L1) & y (y is green, round & at L2). My visual experience presents redness and roundness at one location of the visual field, namely L1, and presents greenness and roundness at another, L2. Consideration of the Many Properties Problem has shown us that two things are presented. One, namely the tomato, binds redness and roundness while another, the apple, binds greenness and roundness. For this reason, a characterization of the content of my experience requires two quantifiers. This is not to say that characterizations of all visual experiences will require more than one quantifier. To take a previous example, the visual experience you have when you look at a single ripe tomato will require only one quantifier to characterize it. Similarly, returning to an example of section II, the experience I have when I look at the expanse of a cloud-

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less sky will require only one quantifier and no reference to a determinate location within the visual field. Defining the whole of the visual field as the location Lv, the content of such an experience would be: x (x is blue & at Lv). As I suggested earlier in my discussion of Dretske, it is this kind of visual experience that provides us with a model for olfactory experience and informs us of the inapplicability of the Many Properties Problem to it. It is the visual analogue of what it is always like in olfactory experience. Consider again the lavender smell/smoke smell example. As in the visual case above, we can define the whole of the olfactory field — i.e., the undifferentiated location ‘here’ — as the location Lo. Because olfactory experience cannot solve the Many Properties Problem, we know that a characterization of the content of my experience will require only one quantifier and no reference to determinate location — only a reference to Lo. Similar in form to the visual case above, it reads: x (x is smoky, lavendery & at Lo). Again, the need for only one quantifier and no reference to a location other than Lo arises from the fact that olfactory experience does not place properties at determinate locations. All olfactory properties are presented at a single undifferentiated location — namely, at Lo. Given this, we see that there is no need to index for any location other than Lo. Now, someone might be tempted to object to the abstract view by drawing attention to the existence of ‘expert smellers.’ It has long been thought that olfactory discrimination can improve with practice — consider, for example, the perfumer. Psychophysical research suggests that, below a certain threshold, so-called expert smellers are far better than normal smellers at analyzing odorant stimuli into their individual ‘components’ (Lawless 1997; Wilson and Stevenson 2006). Talk of individual components naturally leads to thought of parts; in turn, thought of parts naturally leads to the thought of spatial relations between particulars. Doesn’t the existence of expert smellers show us that olfactory experience can be more spatially discriminating than the abstract view allows? Although this objection draws attention to an interesting feature of human olfactory discrimination, it does not show that there is anything amiss with the abstract view. The abstract view does not place any constraints on the number of property-types that a perceiver can distinguish in a given olfactory experience.34 Rather, what it does constrain

34

As I drew attention to in n. 20, olfactory experience itself might place such constraints.

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is the determinacy of the location at which these properties can appear to be instantiated. According to the abstract view, the only location at which properties appear is the location that consists of the entirety of the olfactory field. Although research suggests that expert smellers have enhanced property discrimination, it does not suggest that they are capable of placing these properties at more determinate locations than normal smellers. But this kind of spatial discrimination is what the experts would have to be able to accomplish in order for their expertise to threaten the abstract view. For this reason, talk of ‘components’ should be taken loosely. It does not indicate that expert smellers enjoy added spatial discrimination. If humans were like other animals, then perhaps characterizations of olfactory content would require multiple quantifiers and reference to determinate locations within the olfactory field. Indeed, if we were like other animals, the idea of an olfactory field would be something we could get a firmer grip on by thinking about the phenomenology of our own experience. As it stands, it is a fuzzy notion. As should be clear by now, this is symptomatic of the fact that, unlike visual experience, olfactory experience fails to present properties at determinate locations. 3. Olfactory Objects: What Are They? Olfactory experience, I have argued, represents that something or other ‘here’ is, for example, smoky and lavendery. But what are ‘olfactory objects,’ the items that are smoky and lavendery? Up until this point, I have said nothing about this question. As I mentioned at the beginning of section IV, it just seems obvious that the properties presented in a typical visual experience are properties of dogs and cats, tables and chairs, and so on — ordinary objects, that is. In the case of olfactory experience, it is not as obvious what olfactory properties are in fact properties of. The natural impulse is to say that the qualities of which we are aware are qualities of regular old objects — roses, skunks and chunks of bad cheese — and that these are the external things that are represented in olfactory experience. I remove the lid from the container and it is the cheese that appears to have a bad smell. We certainly think of roses, skunks and bad cheese as the sources of smells. But we also think of them as having a good, or bad, smell — as bearing properties that we 35 ‘get at’ through olfaction.

35

This impulse is not restricted to the everyday folk. For example, in aid of making a similar point, Matthen (2005) draws attention to Shoemaker’s (1996a) claim

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However, the view that olfactory objects are source objects isn’t very plausible. Consider how we can have an olfactory experience — the experience of the smell of rotting garbage, say — even though the object that we think of as responsible for the smell is far away. In the summer heat with windows open wide, I might smell the garbage outside from my second floor apartment. Given that my olfactory experience represents that properties are instantiated by something or other ‘here,’ if olfactory objects are things like piles of garbage my experience must be nonveridical. The garbage is not even around me; it is downstairs and outside. As we know, this kind of circumstance is not rare. Given this, the view that olfactory objects are ordinary objects makes for an 36 implausible amount of olfactory misperception. What the garbage case suggests is that olfactory experience presents us with properties of something in the atmosphere — something in the air. The stinky garbage is merely the source of an olfactory object, not the olfactory object itself. Although we might say that the room now smells because of the garbage, the distinctive garbage smell property (or set of properties) is more plausibly a feature (or are features) of something in the air of the room.37 Here I am agreeing with Tye (2000, 2002), who tells us that olfactory experiences present us with the qualities of odors — those gaseous emanations given off by objects. What we call smelly objects are those

that secondary qualities are perceived as ‘belonging to objects in our external environment — the apple is experienced as red, the rose as fragrant, the lemon as sour’ (97). 36

One might worry that this commits me to the view that certain cases of perceiving objects at a distance are also, implausibly, cases of non-veridical experience. For example, for our distant vantage point on earth, we often have experiences as of stars that have long since exploded and gone out of existence, the light from that event not yet having reached Earth. Does this mean that our visual experience of the star is non-veridical? I am happy to say ‘yes.’ It may seem to us as if we see a star. But we do not; the star is not there. It is the realization that our experience is non-veridical that I take is behind our surprise when we discover the facts about the distance that light must travel to meet the Earth. Thanks to Jason Decker for drawing attention to this point.

37

This example is adapted from Smith (2002). His example: If a particularly malodorous cheese is carried through the room, the smell remains. If we attribute the smell to any physical object, it will be to the room: the room smells, we say. But really, of course, it is the air in the room that smells…. Hence, we speak of foul air, and the fragrance of the air. If I put a rose to my nose, I am coming into proximity with the source of the smell; and even then, I appreciate the smell only by drawing the odour into my nostrils — that is, the air that has been sweetened by the immediate presence of the rose. (143)

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whose molecules are volatile enough to evaporate from their surfaces and enter the air. (This explains why, at room temperature, we cannot smell iron and steel. At room temperature, their molecules are not volatile.) Reid made a related observation. Remember that, according to Reid, ‘all bodies are smelled by means of the effluvia they emit’ ([1764] 2000, 25). These effluvia are the ‘volatile parts’ of odorous bodies ([1764] 2000, 25). Odors themselves are clouds of Reidian effluvia, or modernday airborne molecules. Odors are particulars, then. Odor clouds can be more or less concentrated, depending on the rate of evaporation and the stillness of the air. Similarly, odor clouds can mix with one another. In any case, odorant molecules enter the nose when we sniff and ultimately trigger the olfactory receptors. Olfactory experience predicates properties of objects, but olfactory experience itself is otherwise silent on the nature of these olfactory objects. Interrogating olfactory experience will not tell us what olfactory objects are; other considerations suggest that they are odors. In one way, olfactory experience seems very much like auditory experience. As I drew attention to in section II, we are able to say things like ‘I hear the bird’ because we hear the sound that the bird makes. As the garbage case has shown us, we are able to say things like ‘I smell the garbage’ because we smell the odor that it gives off. But, as we saw earlier, there is an important difference between the two types of experience. In the case of audition, experience can present us with a particular thing — namely, an auditory event — that we can single out and think about — like a bird’s chirp or a clap of thunder. Visual and tactile experiences also allow us to single out particular things. But olfactory experiences never do. Although they attribute olfactory properties to things that are, in fact, odors, they never present us with the particular odors themselves.

V

Further Questions, Future Directions

Where does this leave us, then? I have argued that olfactory experience can take its place as representational and that, as a result, the sensational view is mistaken. But this doesn’t represent the end of interesting questions to ask about smell. Much of the discussion of content has focused on the content of an experience at a certain time t — on the ‘snapshot’ of our perceptual situation at t. And, as I have argued here with the case of olfaction, there is a lot to be said about the similarities and differences between the senses when we consider content-at-a-time. But, recently, philosophers have begun to address the fact that sensory perception occurs, and evolves, over time. Olfaction seems especially relevant to exploring what we might call content-over-time. As I mentioned earlier,

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a lot of our sensory experience occurs when we are engaging with the world, when we are walking around and doing things. This seems especially evident in the case of olfaction. And olfactory perception seems, in a distinctive way, to be investigative. We search for the source of a smell. When I suddenly smell a flowery scent, I have to find whatever is responsible for it. This might involve turning my head and looking, or getting up and moving about. Unlike content-at-a-time, content-overtime characterizes the way that the world appears to a subject from t1 to tn. The obvious next step is to explore this notion of content-overtime as it applies to olfactory experience This is related to another interesting issue that the case of olfaction serves to highlight. Philosophers of perception have typically talked about the experiences of the different modalities as if they occur in isolation from other, concurrent, sensory experiences. As I have argued in this paper, there are many questions, and things to say, about sensory experiences considered in this way. But, as I noted earlier, in the case of olfaction, we often rely on other modalities in determining odor sources, direction and location. We get up and trace the boundaries of an odor and we typically look for its source. Olfactory experience works in conjunction with movement and experiences of other modalities in providing information and grounding beliefs about our environment. Recently, it has been suggested that there is such a thing as the overall experience of one’s environment at a time t or between t1 and tn.38 This is the view that the experiences of the sense modalities combine in some sense to form an overall representation of the world, the content of which cannot simply be taken to be the ‘sum’ of the modality-individuated components. If there is such a thing, we must account for the ways in which, and the degrees to which, the experiences of the different modalities contribute to the content of overall experience in certain circumstances. What we have learned from the olfactory case is that these are particularly interesting, if not pressing, questions to ask. Received: August 2008 Revised: October 2009

38

See, e.g., Siegel (2005).

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______. 1988a. Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______. 1988b. Seeing and Knowing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ______. 1991. ‘Dretske’s replies.’ In Dretske and his Critics, ed. Brian McLaughlin, 180-221. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. New York: Oxford University Press. Harman, Gilbert. 1990. ‘The Intrinsic Quality of Experience.’ Philosophical Perspectives 4: 31-52. Harper, R., E. C. Bate-Smith and D. G. Lad. 1968. Odour Description and Odour Classification: A Multidisciplinary Examination. London: Churchill. Hodgson, E. S. and R. F. Mathewson. 1971. ‘Chemosensory Orientation in Sharks.’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 288: 175-82. Jackson, Frank. 1977. Perception: A Representative Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lawless, Harry T. 1997. ‘Olfactory Psychophysics.’ In Tasting and Smelling, ed. Gary K. Beauchamp and Linda Bartoshuk, 125-74. San Diego: Academic Press. Lycan, William. 1996. Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______. 2000. ‘The Slighting of Smell.’ In Of Minds and Molecules: New Philosophical Perspectives on Chemistry, ed. Nalini Bhushan and Stuart Rosenfeld, 273-90. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, M. G. F. 1992. ‘Sight and Touch.’ In The Contents of Experience: Essays on Perception, ed. Tim Crane, 196-215. New York: Cambridge University Press. ______. 2003. ‘Particular Thoughts & Singular Thought.’ In Logic, Thought and Language, ed. Anthony O’ Hear, 173-214. New York: Cambridge University Press. Matthen, Mohan. 2005. Seeing, Doing & Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception. New York: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1993. ‘De Re Senses.’ In Reality, Representation, and Projection, John Haldane and Crispin Wright, eds., 98–109. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1994. ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge.’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 68, 455–79. McGinn, Colin. 1996. The Character of Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Millikan, Ruth. 1984. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ______. 1989a. ‘Biosemantics.’ Journal of Philosophy 86: 281-97. ______. 1989b. ‘In Defense of Proper Functions.’ Philosophy of Science 56: 288-302. ______. 1990. ‘Truth, Rules, Hoverflies and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox.’ Philosophical Review 99: 232-53.

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______. 1991. ‘Speaking Up for Darwin.’ In Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Barry Loewer and Georges Rey, eds., 151-65. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. ______. 1993. White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mochiyama, Hiromi et al. 2005. ‘Haptic Illusions Induced by Moving Stimuli.’ Proceedings of the First Joint Eurohaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, 645-8. Nudds, Matthew. 2001. ‘Experiencing the Production of Sounds.’ European Journal of Philosophy 9: 210-29. O’Callaghan, Casey. 2007. Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 2008. ‘Object Perception: Vision and Audition.’ Philosophy Compass 3: 803-829. ______. 2009a. ‘Auditory Perception.’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), E.N. Zalta, ed. ______. 2009b. ‘Sounds and Events.’ In Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, Casey O’ Callaghan and Matthew Nudds, eds., 26-49. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 2010. ‘Perceiving the Locations of Sounds,’ Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 123-40. O’Shaughnessy, Brian. 1957. ‘The Location of Sound.’ Mind 66: 471-90. Peacocke, Christopher. 1983. Sense and Content: Experience, Thought and their Relations. New York: Oxford University Press. Perkins, Moreland. 1983. Sensing the World. Indianapolis: Hackett. Porter, Jess et al. 2005. ‘Brain Mechanisms for Extracting Spatial Information from Smell.’ Neuron 47: 581-92. Reid, Thomas. 2000 [1764]. An Inquiry into the Human Mind and the Principles of Common Sense. Derek R. Brookes, ed. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. ______. 2002 [1785]. Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Ed. Derek R. Brookes. University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press. Shoemaker, Sydney. 1996a. ‘Qualities and Qualia: What’s in the Mind?’ In his The First Person Perspective and Other Essays, 97-120. New York: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1996b. ‘Self-Knowledge and ‘Inner Sense,’ Lecture I: The Object Perception Model.’ In his The First Person Perspective and Other Essays, 201-23. New York: Cambridge University Press. Siegel, Susanna. 2002. ‘Review of A Theory of Sentience.’ Philosophical Review 111: 135-8. ______. 2005. ‘Which Properties are Represented in Perception?’ In Perceptual Experience, Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne, eds., 481-503. New York: Oxford University Press.

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 539-566

539 An Argument Against Cloning 539

An Argument Against 1 Cloning JAIME AHLBERG University of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611-8545 USA and HARRY BRIGHOUSE University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI 53706 USA

It is technically possible to clone a human being. The result of the procedure would be a human being in its own right. Given the current level of cloning technology concerning other animals there is every reason to believe that early human clones will have shorter-than-average life-spans, and will be unusually prone to disease. In addition, they would be unusually at risk of genetic defects, though they would still, probably, have lives worth living. But with experimentation and experience, seriously unequal prospects between cloned and noncloned people should erode. We shall ignore arguments about cloning that focus on the potential for harm to the fetus or resultant human

1

We are grateful to Brian Weatherson for prompting this paper with a series of posts we disagreed with at Crooked Timber (www.crookestimber.org). We are grateful to him, Norman Fost, Fred Harrington, Daniel Hausman, Rob Streiffer, Joel Velasco, to participants at the Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children conference in Cape Town, South Africa, in May 2008, and the editors of and referees for Canadian Journal of Philosophy for insightful and helpful comments on previous drafts.

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being, where harm is understood solely in terms of physical and mental health. Unless the resultant people would generally have lives worth living there is no positive case for cloning, or any other form of reproduction, for that matter. If the resultant beings will generally have lives worth living there is a prima facie case for allowing cloning. We imagine the case in which the resultant beings will have lives well worth living. Suppose, then, that we had already reached the stage at which human cloning was safe in this sense. Would there be any reason to disallow it? We share the dissatisfaction of defenders of legalizing cloning with 2 most of the standard arguments against cloning. But we believe that the pro-cloning arguments are also problematic, and fail to deal with a potentially important objection. In Section I of this paper we shall briefly explain our dissatisfaction with the standard anti-cloning arguments. In Section II we shall criticize the claim that there is a right to clone when that is either the only feasible, or simply the most efficient way, for someone to reproduce. In Section III we shall build on the critique developed in Section II to develop an anti-cloning argument that we think has more power than those surveyed in part one. We do not claim that cloning is wrong, but that making it available to people might lead to worse consequences than prohibiting it, and that since there is no right to clone it is appropriate to take these consequences into account when considering whether to prohibit it. We should emphasize that although our argument provides a powerful reason for prohibiting cloning even if cloning were completely safe, we are open to the possibility that other reasons in favor of allowing cloning might outweigh our reason against. In section 4, we consider two objections to our argument. Our concluding comments contain reflection on the methodological issues raised by the paper.

I

The Failed Case Against Cloning

Note that, in order to justify prohibition of cloning without having to take into account any possible benefits it might have, arguments have

2

See, for example, Brian Weatherson and Sarah McGrath, ‘Cloning and Harm’ in James Taylor, ed., Medical Ethics and Public Policy (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming); Mary Warnock, Making Babies: Is there a Right to Have Children? (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002); John Harris, On Cloning (London: Routledge 2005); Carson Strong, ‘Cloning and Infertility’ Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 7 (1998); D. McCarthy, ‘Persons and their Copies,’ Journal of Medical Ethics 25 (1999) 98-104.

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to establish that it is very seriously wrong. While some of the arguments we have seen against cloning may suggest that it constitutes, or would result in, something bad, none comes close to establishing a serious enough wrong to justify prohibition in all circumstances. First, consider the argument that because clones and their genetic predecessors lack unique genetic codes, cloning undermines individuality and thus, personal dignity. We doubt that this argument has any weight at all. The genetic essentialism on which this argument rests is false; it is unable to account for the vast influence that environmental factors have on individual development. For example, though most sets of monozygotic twins share much of their nurturing environment, no twin will have exactly the nurturing environment of her genetically identical sibling. Similarly, clones would be raised in a different nurturing environment from those who share their genotype and would normally have the added environmental variation of being raised a generation later than their genetic predecessors. Further, clones would have a different host egg and birth mother than their genetic predecessors. As Ronald Bailey notes, this ‘maternal factor’ ensures that the clone will not be a mere ‘carbon copy’ of its predecessor.3 The fact of a shared genetic code does not alone threaten individuality or dignity when there are such numerous environmental sources of personal identity.4 A second objection is that cloning would inhibit the genetic diversity sexual reproduction affords. Genetic diversity allows a species to survive the force of new and rapidly developing pathogens, and cloning would undermine the effectiveness of this line of defense.5 This argument assumes that the existence of cloning would entail the massive duplication of just one set of genes. But why think cloning would lead to a population where all individuals share a genetic code? More likely there would exist two or three copies of one genetic code at most, as when parents have children who are clones of themselves, or of other children who died prematurely. Anyway, if cloning were restricted to

3

Ronald Bailey, ‘What Exactly is Wrong with Cloning People?’ in The Human Cloning Debate, Glenn McGee, ed. (Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Hills Books 2002)

4

For an interesting argument that expands on this point, see Neil Levy and Mianna Lotz, ‘Reproductive Cloning and a (Kind of) Genetic Fallacy,’ Bioethics 19 (2005) 232-50.

5

For an expression of this worry, see Leon Eisenberg, ‘Would Cloned Humans Be Like Sheep?’ originally published in The New England Journal of Medicine 340 (1999) 471-5. Reprinted in The Human Cloning Debate, 170-83.

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couples who could not reproduce by any other means it is not clear how cloning would have the undesired outcome. The above objections just seem inert. Other objections, though, do succeed in identifying relevant value considerations to be weighed against others, even though they fall short of identifying a wrong. Consider first the claim that someone who clones himself or herself will be too overbearing as a parent. Knowing that her child’s DNA is identical to her own, a clone’s parent would form expectations for how the child ought to think and behave based on the previous course of her own life. Cloning is thus inherently despotic. Leon Kass: ‘In some cases, the despotism may be mild and benevolent. In other cases, it will be mischievous and downright tyrannical. But despotism — the control 6 of another through one’s will — it inevitably will be.’ Overbearingness is a parental vice, but it is far from unique to those who choose to clone themselves. We rarely scrutinize childbearing and child-rearing motives closely enough to cramp the narcissistic and overbearing tendencies of parents, and our impression is that most anti-cloners would be reluctant to endorse family policies directed at controlling the motives and behaviors of parents who are neither abusive nor neglectful, just non-ideal. Perhaps the availability of cloning would encourage overbearingness because cloning offers a more effective outlet for living one’s own life through one’s children.7 But it should be, in principle, possible to regulate cloning so that it is only available to couples that cannot reproduce by any other means. If infertile couples are no more overbearing on average than fertile couples, such regulation would do a great deal to prevent this danger arising. Michael Sandel offers a related argument; that the practice of cloning, like many other readily tolerated risk management practices parents engage in, undermines an important human virtue of ‘openness to the unbidden.’8 Openness to the unbidden, for Sandel, is valuable because it underpins the humility that facilitates social solidarity. Because parenthood is such a central experience through which people learn humility,

6

Leon Kass, ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance: Why We Should Ban the Cloning of Humans,’ The New Republic (June 2 1997) 17-26. Reprinted in The Human Cloning Debate; references are to the reprint. See 96.

7

Richard Lewontin considers and rejects a similar objection, that parents who clone would be treating their cloned children merely instrumentally. Richard Lewontin, ‘The Confusion Over Cloning,’ published originally in The New York Review of Books (1997).

8

Michael Sandel, ‘The Case Against Perfection,’ Atlantic Monthly (April 2004) 51-62

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extending to parents ever greater control (or the illusion of ever greater control) over the qualities of the child threatens both the humility and the sense of solidarity that emanates from it. Openness to the unbidden is, we think, a virtue that corresponds closely to the vice of overbearingness; and we have some sympathy with Sandel’s argument. But because genetic essentialism is false cloning gives parents less control over the qualities that matter than they might think, and therefore may do little to undermine humility in the long run. Finally, consider Leon Kass’s argument that cloning constitutes manufacture: In natural procreation human beings come together, complimentarily male and female, to give existence to another being who is formed, exactly as we were, by what we are: living, hence perishable, hence aspiringly erotic, human beings. In clonal reproduction, by contrast, and in the more advanced form of manufacture to which it leads, we give existence to a being not by what we are but by what we intend and design.9

We put aside the claim that separation of procreation from the sexual act leads to a loss of eroticism. The other argument here is that when parents reproduce the old-fashioned way they beget, but when they clone their actions are better characterized as making. The abandonment of begetting, Kass argues, constitutes ‘a step towards manufacture.’ Kass likens cloning parents to artisans, crafting their blueprint genes into technological products. But as artifacts, clones are not able to achieve equal status as persons to those who had the power to fashion them. Parents become analogous to craftspeople, fashioning their crafts as they please, and thus assume a sort of metaphysically dominant position over their clones. Again, because genetic essentialism is false, parents who clone lack full creative and productive control over the artifact created. Even if they contribute their genetic code and therefore have a certain extra degree of foreknowledge about the constitution of their child, their foreknowledge is probabilistic at best, and they cannot control those aspects most central to the character of the cloned child. They cannot fully control maternal pre-natal factors, the child’s nurturing environment, and cultural and historical position, for example. And this throws into doubt the status of clones as artifacts. Clones are not like pieces of pottery made according to specifications; to the extent that they would be moulded into individuals, it is by a combination of all of the factors just mentioned, not merely parental design. The relationship between

9

Kass, 93

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clones and their parents would, in fact, be very similar to the kind of relationship any child has with her parent.10 We respond similarly to Kass’s claim that cloning would force all humans into becoming technological objects. There is little reason to think that the presence of clones undermines the status of human beings as persons, since those features most essential to character — one’s outlook on life and personal values, for instance — are developed over time as a result of the various environmental circumstances mentioned above, in addition to one’s own choices throughout life. We have already suggested that environmental factors are responsible for personal identity much more than commonly assumed; they are at least as responsible as genetic factors. If what we take to be most essential to one’s character is not threatened by cloning, the view that doing so undermines everyone’s status as a person is on shaky ground. None of these arguments shows that cloning is wrong. Some seem just to be mistaken, grounded in a genetic essentialism that is unsustainable. Others do articulate values that cloning, like many other practices, may well undermine to an extent which will vary depending on other features of the social matrix (in particular, we suspect, prevailing norms concerning the relationships between parents and children) and its undermining those values does count against it, if not decisively.

II

Is there a right to clone?

So far we have argued that cloning does not appear to constitute or cause a serious wrong. In the next section we shall advance a reason for prohibiting it even if it is not wrong. But it is impermissible to prohibit a practice to which there is a right. So in this section we want to explore the question of whether there is a moral right to clone, given the existence of technology as effective as we assumed in our introduction: sufficiently good that cloned children have very good prospects of having lives well worth living. If so, then we should refrain from advancing a reason to prohibit it.. One way of arguing for a right to X is to claim that people have rights to freedom concerning their acts that have no negative consequences for non-consenting others. As we shall explain in the next section, we do not endorse this way of thinking about rights, but, even if we did, we think it is ill-suited to considering questions concerning the creation and rearing of children, who are by their nature non-consenting oth-

10

See our earlier argument against genetic essentialism.

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ers and whose lives are shaped for better or worse by the decisions of others. An alternative account of rights grounds them in fundamental human interests. The most influential defender of a fundamental right to clone, John Robertson, takes this approach.11 Robertson’s argument, rightly in our view, treats cloning as just another form of reproductive assistance, one that does not raise fundamentally new issues. It highlights an important ambiguity in the idea of a right to reproductive freedom, and it introduces the central theme of our main argument: the absence of an argument for the claim that there is a fundamental paren12 tal interest in rearing genetically descended children. Here is the argument: 1.

‘Reproductive freedom — the freedom to decide whether or not to have offspring — is…an important instance of personal liberty.’13

2.

‘Infertile couples have the same interests in reproducing as coitally fertile couples, and the same abilities to rear children. That they are coitally infertile should no more bar them from reproducing with technical assistance than visual blindness should bar a person from reading with Braille or the aid of a reader.’14

3.

A right to engage in genetic selection follows from the right to decide whether to procreate. ‘People make decisions about whether to reproduce or not because of the package of experiences that they think reproduction or its absence would bring. In many cases they would reproduce if it would lead to packet of experiences X but not if it led to packet (sic) of experiences Y.’15

11

John Robertson, ‘Cloning as a Reproductive Right,’ excerpted from ‘Liberty, Identity, and Human Cloning,’ published originally in Texas Law Review 76 (1998) 1371456. Reprinted in The Human Cloning Debate, 42-57.

12

For the purposes of this paper, we have characterized the relevant connection between a parent and child as ‘genetic’ and not ‘biological.’ The two types of connection often coincide, but they need not; a woman has a biological connection with any child she has gestated, even if she is not the child’s genetic mother. Here, we set aside the concern that there may be a fundamental interest in sharing a biological connection with one’s child, even if there is not a fundamental interest in sharing a genetic connection.

13

Robertson, 45

14

Ibid.

15

Robertson, 46

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4.

‘If most current forms of assisted reproduction and genetic selection fall within the prevailing notions of procreative freedom, then … some forms of cloning are aspects of procreative liberty as well.’16

5.

So there is a right to some forms of cloning.

Robertson goes on to elaborate the forms of cloning to which there is a right: a couple has the right to clone its existing embryos and its own existing (or no longer living) children; there is a right to clone third parties and oneself only if one intends to rear the resultant child oneself. 17 We concede premise 1 and accept premise 4 for the sake of argument. The argument we shall develop in the next section counts against other assisted reproductive technologies just as it does against cloning, and our conclusion from part 1 is that the moral issues concerning cloning are not unique to it. Consider premise 2. Robertson says that infertile couples have the same interests with respect to bearing and rearing children as fertile couples. But that interest in rearing children could be met by adopting children. Robertson might object, rightly, that rearing children who are not genetically one’s own is a different thing from rearing one’s genetic children. But then premise 2 turns on the claim that it is different in such a way that adoptive parents miss out on some interest that they have. Robertson, like other defenders of cloning, simply assumes this without argument. So the case rests on the interest in being able to conceive, gestate, and bear children. Again, we doubt that this interest is powerful enough to ground a right. Because child-bearing has normally been a necessary precondition of child-rearing for women the interest in rearing children has supported an interest in bearing children. But we see no reason to think that the interest in bearing children is, in itself, an, interest strong enough to outweigh the powerful interests of others in conflicts. Now consider premise 3. It is true that the choice we would make in situation A will depend on what we think the pay-offs are from the choices. But from saying we have a right to choose among the existing expected pay-offs it does not follow that we have a right to determine

16

Ibid.

17

See Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift, ‘Parents Rights and the Value of the Family,’ Ethics 117 (2006) 80-108 for an explanation of why the interest in rearing children supports a right. In Section III we will elaborate our more general understanding of interests and how very powerful interests can be right-supporting.

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what package of expected pay-offs we should face in the choice situation. Suppose Celia is offered three jobs: Job A) is in Manhattan with an annual salary of $200k, and the expectation that she will devote almost every waking hour to the job, say 70 hours a week Job B) is in London, with the more modest salary of $125k and more modest expectations of her devotion to the job, say 45 hours a week. Job C) is in Houston, a much less appealing city (ex hypothesi), but has, as compensation, a massive salary of $300K, combined with European work expectations, let us say 45 hours a week. We want to say, surely, that Celia has a right to choose among these packages. But none of them is really what she wants. She would, in fact, prefer a lower salaried, lower expectation, job in her home town of Swindon. Swindon contains jobs that meet that description, and she is qualified for them, but despite her extraordinary success in the metropolitan job market, she is always pipped at the post for Swindon jobs. It does not follow from the fact that she has a right to choose within the set of options available that she has a right to a different set of options, even if that alternative set is entirely feasible. Robertson’s argument fails to establish a right to clone because he makes the unwarranted assumption that our interest in rearing children involves both an interest in bearing them and in their being genetically connected to us in the relevant way. If he could show, independently, that we have a powerful interest in being the genetic parents of our children, that would repair his argument. In the next section we shall argue against the idea that this interest is powerful enough to sustain an objection to prohibition in some circumstances.

III

An Argument Against Cloning

Consider two different ways of fixing the limits on government coercion. Wide-scope liberty (NSL): the government should leave people free to act as they want to as long as, in doing so, they do not harm non-consenting others. Only when actions cause such harms are they subject to regulation.

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Narrow-scope liberty (NSL): the government should guarantee those liberties needed for people to fulfill certain crucial human interests. As long as those liberties are protected the government may act so as to promote human flourishing, broadly conceived. We shall consider NSL first and in detail, after which we shall briefly ask what implications WSL has for cloning. NSL is underwritten by the interest theory of rights: An interest is sufficient to base a right on if and only if there is a sound argument of which the conclusion is that a certain right exists and among its non-redundant premises is a statement of some interest of the right-holder, the other premises supplying grounds for attributing to it the required importance, or for holding it to be relevant to a particular person or class of persons so that they rather than others are obligated to the right-holder. These premises must be sufficient by themselves to entail that if there are no contrary considerations then the individuals concerned have the right. To these premises one needs to add others stating or establishing that these grounds are not altogether defeated by conflicting reasons. Together they establish the existence of the right.18 So the NSL approach asks us to establish what basic interests need to be protected by liberties, and figure out, for any given class of actions whether they are relevantly related to these interests. If so, the liberty to pursue them is protected, if not, then it is an open question whether the liberty to pursue them should be protected (and this in turn is usually settled by asking whether protecting such a liberty is likely to inhibit the ability of others to fulfill fundamental interests of their own). Obviously this method is perfectionist; establishing what constitutes a fundamental interest requires commenting on what makes for a flourishing human life. In this regard it is worth noting that the supposed anti-perfectionist John Rawls adopts the same approach to the establishment of the contents of the Liberty Principle.19 And this approach need not generate an illiberal theory (unless liberalism is identified with a very strong anti-perfectionism). If liberals are right that there is a powerful

18

See Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 181-2, but see also all of chapters 7, 8, and 10. See also Neil MacCormick, Legal Right and Social Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1982) for another version of the interests theory of rights.

19

John Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 104-15; 148-52

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interest in being able to reflect critically on one’s own values and to act on the results of those reflections, then a conventionally liberal array of rights is likely to be justified. As we have already said, we regard rearing children as a fundamental interest so important that it supports a right. This right is conditional, and its exact content is open to debate; most accounts at least make the right conditional on the parent refraining from abusing or neglecting 20 the child’s vital interests. But rearing children makes such an important contribution to many people’s ability to flourish that, as long as they do it well enough, they should not be prevented from doing it. Furthermore it is an extremely demanding task the successful pursuit of which requires such great commitment that nobody who is unwilling should be forced to do it except as a last resort in child protection (and perhaps not even then).21 People certainly have a powerful interest in not being prevented from having children or forced to have them. But this does not follow directly from a general interest in liberty: the freedom to rear children, after all, is a freedom to control someone else’s life, and is therefore not relevantly like our interest in being able to control our own life. We believe that the interest in being able to rear children is, nevertheless a fundamental, and right-supporting, interest, which does not imply or support a right-generating interest in being able to conceive and rear child who is genetically connected to one. This would not matter if there were no other fundamental interests at stake in the decision whether to permit cloning. But in some circumstances, the parameters of which we shall sketch, the practice of cloning may damage some people’s fundamental interests, without fulfilling any fundamental interests of the cloning parents. In other words in the relevant circumstances it is an activity no instance of which is necessary

20

For useful recent discussions of the value of rearing children see Ferdinand Schoeman, ‘Rights of Children, Rights of Parents, and the Moral Basis of the Family,’ Ethics 91 (1980) 6-19; Francis Schrag, ‘Justice and the Family,’ Inquiry 19 (1976) 193-208; James Rachels, Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1997), ch. 11; Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), ch. 6; Samantha Brennan and Robert Noggle, ‘The Moral Status of Children: Children’s Rights, Parents’ Rights and Family Justice,’ Social Theory and Practice 19 (1997) 1-23.

21

The exception we are imagining is basically catastrophic; suppose that 90% of the child population is orphaned, and there are nevertheless an ample number of childless adults who are unwilling to raise children; forcing them to do so may be better for the children than establishing large-scale orphanages. If so, it may be justified even though it intrudes deeply on the lives of the coerced adults. But even in this catastrophe it may not be justified.

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for fulfilling fundamental interests, and the practice of which severely damages other people’s fundamental interests. In such circumstances the case for prohibition is strong. Precisely, the people whose interests would be damaged by a regime in which reproductive cloning is allowed are potential adoptees. Any society contains newborns and young children who have no parents. Those children have a very powerful interest in acquiring parents, because, in modern industrial democracies, we have been unable to develop alternatives to families that serve children’s needs adequately. Children need both immediate provision of shelter, care, nutrition and affection, and the security of long-term relationships with responsible adults who will supervise their moral, cognitive, physical and emotional development. In other words, they need parents. So it is important, for the sake of orphaned or abandoned, or very severely abused children, that there be a pool of potential adoptive parents. The availability of cloning and other reproductive technologies may, in some circumstances, prolong the period in which infertile couples pursue non-adoptive avenues for the acquisition of children, and increase the success of those avenues. In those circumstances, children who would have been adopted in a regime of prohibition will not be adopted. Not all couples will adopt when non-adoptive avenues are closed to them, for sure; but some will. The class of people harmed by the availability of cloning and other reproductive technologies is just those children who would have been adopted under other arrangements. We shall canvass the alternative possibility — that availability of cloning and other reproductive technologies does not increase the chances that a couple will succeed in having children by non-adoptive routes — later. Let us assume for now that it does. One objection to our argument is that, in fact, the pool of potential adoptees is vanishingly small in wealthy societies. But numerous children born in developed countries are never adopted because the market in adoption favors children without disabilities. More significantly, most developed countries allow couples to adopt children from the developing world, in which there is a plentiful supply of potential adoptees. The size of the pool of potential adoptees available for couples within a particular country is not restricted by national boundaries, but by the arrangements other countries implement concerning adopting-out. Couples in the contemporary US thus face a very large pool of potential adoptees. The availability of successful reproductive assistance damages those children’s prospects for finding a family. Since economic growth above a certain threshold seems to trigger declines in fertility rates, it may be that the global supply of potential adoptees will decline as developing countries become wealthier and, especially, as women’s opportunities to participate in the labor markets in those countries become more equal to those of men. If those

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countries block reproductive assistance or develop adoption-friendly cultures and policies the supply may completely dry up. Our argument is general; it applies to each jurisdiction, putting forward the same reason to prohibit in each country, which reason will have different weight depending on contextual factors. There are many such factors, and they include the extent to which the interests of potential adoptees in other countries are harmed by a policy of permitting cloning within the country in question. Imagine a situation in which the supply of potential adoptees was vanishingly small. Then the class of people whose interests were damaged by permitting cloning would, in turn, be vanishingly small. But the supply of potential adoptees at any given time is not a perfect predictor of the future supply; changes in demographics, and in legal rules concerning and social attitudes toward abortion, will all have an impact 22 on the supply. Once the new technologies were permitted, they would be very hard to restrict in the light of an increase in the supply of potential adoptees. We have rejected the claim that there is a direct right to clone. But at this point the objector might invoke the idea that the couples in question do indeed have a right-supporting interest, which we have thus far neglected. This is the interest in being able to raise a child genetically related to at least one member of the couple. This interest, the objector might say, is so powerful that it does, indeed, support them having that option on the table, at least if the technological knowledge and resources are sufficient to make it available (which, by hypothesis, they are). Brian Weatherson and Sarah McGrath consider the case of Danni and Mia, a lesbian couple who seek to clone a child because they seek a child who is genetically related, however slightly, to both of them. Considering the objection that (by hypothesis) Danni and Mia could have a child by some other means, they say: Having a child by some other means would not be an appropriate alternative way of carrying out Mia and Danni’s project, for two reasons. First, Mia and Danni

22

For example, a regime that prohibits abortion will face a larger adoptive pool than one that allows it. There may be independent reasons for prohibiting abortion, say, if it is determined to be morally wrong. If so, there can be no practical response regarding the legal permissibility of abortion because doing so would reduce the size of the adoptive pool. We have no idea about what kinds of policy responses would make a difference to the supply of potential adoptees, and even if we did there may be independent reasons for thinking that policies that reduce the size of the adoptive pool would be impermissible on unrelated grounds. Anyway, a residual supply of potential adoptees would persist no matter what policies are enacted to reduce the number.

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could properly value having a child that is genetically related to both of them — two people who love each other. This won’t be the case if Mia or Danni have a child with a third party. Second, Mia and Danni could quite properly value having a child that was genetically related only to them (and their ancestors) and not to a third party. So the project of having a child through cloning has some important values that would be lost if they had a child any other way.23

As Mary Warnock says: As we become more aware of the role of inherited genes in the character of our children, so the bringing up of children in no way genetically connected to us has come to seem a quite different undertaking from that of bringing up a child who shares our own genes. It may be worthwhile, but it is not the same.24

For the claim that it is desirable to match up children and parents by genetic relationship to work in favor of cloning, the interest we focus on has to be adult-centered. Theorists (and non-theorists) commonly assume that children have an interest in being reared by their genetic parents, because they think that genetic parents will be better at serving the interests of the children.25 But the child-centered conjecture, even if true, will not help here, because potential adoptees will not be raised by their genetic parents under any regime. And, unlike the cloned children, they will exist regardless of the chosen regime.26 So the pro-cloners have to postulate a powerful parent-centered interest. Noting that raising a genetically related child is different is not the same as claiming that it is more worthy, more desirable, or more valuable than raising an adopted child. Each of these claims just seems false. Warnock simply emphasizes that it would be a different project, which it is, though the difference seems to be one of degree, not of kind. Carson Strong has argued that raising an adopted child differs from raising a genetically related child in such a way that couples would reasonably be deterred from pursuing it. It is useful to consider this argument in order to begin to illustrate why we take adoption to provide a satisfactory child-rearing alternative.27

23

Brian Weatherson and Sarah McGrath, cited above.

24

Mary Warnock, 40

25

For a skeptical look at these claims see Levy and Lotz. See also David Archard, Children, Family, and the State (Aldershot: Ashgate 2002).

26

See Velleman’s valuable discussion of the non-identity problem in relation to adoption in ‘Family History,’ 372-5.

27

See Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘To Clone or Not To Clone’ in Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein, eds., Clones and Clones (New York: Norton 1998) 181-9, esp. 187-9 for

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Strong argues that, as a form of ‘collaborative’ or third-party reproduction (like surrogacy or sperm donation), adoption carries with it a unique potential for interpersonal conflict within the family. 28 Parents might question whether, what, and when to tell their non-genetically related children about their origins. Children might feel a tension between loving the parents who have raised them and wanting to find their genetic parents. Consequently, the potential for strife within the family is great, and parents looking to have children might justifiably want to avoid that strife. This is too speculative a claim to have much weight. A counter-speculation would grant Strong’s conflict in some families with adopted children but doubt that that conflict is more serious than other interpersonal conflicts experienced by genetically connected families, to the extent that raising adopted children is sensibly avoided but raising genetically related children is not. Conflict within genetic families occurs for a variety of reasons, and may cause deep divisions within the family; so seem no less significant than the par29 ticular conflicts within adoptive families. Deciding not to adopt might eliminate one source of potential conflict, but it does not remove, or even significantly reduce, the possibility of familial strife. The adoptive project is surely sufficiently different that some couples will, when faced with the choice between raising a genetically unrelated child or none at all, choose none at all. But that does not indicate the inferiority of the adoptive project in meeting parents’ fundamental interests in rearing children, however. Assuming a plentiful supply of potential adoptees, even in a regime where cloning is prohibited, an equally valuable, desirable, and worthy project is available to parents. Strong assumes a certain kind of subjective welfarism; the fact that the projects are valued unequally by the agent is evidence that they are unequally valuable. The NSL approach, by contrast, asks whether

a more compact appeal for the moral desirability of adoption. For some insightful essays on the moral character of adoptive parenting see Sally Haslanger and Charlotte Witt, eds., Adoption Matters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2005). See especially, for our purposes, chapters 3, 6, and 13. 28

Carson Strong, ‘Cloning and Infertility,’ reprinted in The Human Cloning Debate, 184-211. See 202-4.

29

Indeed, the content of the conflicts may not always be different. Whatever the plans of parents at the time of conception, in some social environments (like that of the contemporary United States) most children will not be raised exclusively by both their original parents, but in part by genetically unrelated adults who become the sexual partners of one of their parents when their parents separate. To the extent that this occurs, numerous families without adopted children already deal with negotiating non-genetically connected parent-child relationships.

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a project is the kind that people have a fundamental interest in pursuing. Suppose that the relevant description under which people have an interest is ‘having secure permission to raise a child, being able to look after its welfare interests, and overseeing its moral, emotional, physical and intellectual development.’30 If the state is obliged to protect people’s fundamental interest in pursuing that sort of project, then it is obliged to enable people to acquire children by some means, and to facilitate their successful pursuit of rearing them, but not to facilitate their being genetically related to their children. When no fundamental interests of other people are at stake the state might, and perhaps should, permit or even facilitate people pursuing variations within that description. But when other people’s fundamental interests are at stake, it is obliged to make appropriate institutional arrangements for the sake of those interests prior to considering facilitating variations. And in the case we are describing, other people’s fundamental interests will be damaged by facilitating pursuit of one variation within this description. Should we regard people as having a fundamental interest in the narrower project of rearing a genetically related child? The way to address this question is by looking at the potential difference between the rearing of the genetically connected and genetically disconnected child. Here are some possible differences: 1.

It might be easier to rear a genetically connected child, because it is easier to understand her in both emotional and physical terms (insofar as she shares emotional tendencies, and proneness to certain diseases and physical abilities with one or the other parent).

2.

It might be easier to love her, if she shares traits or tendencies with one parent. This might be because the parent sharing the child’s traits recognizes himself in her, or because the parent who does not recognizes the other parent in her.

3.

It might give parents a greater sense that they are continuing themselves into the future, as they are passing on their own traits specifically; this is the sense some parents claim to have of finding a sort of immortality (or extended mortality) in 31 reproduction.

30

Brighouse and Swift, ‘Parents’ Rights and the Value of the Family’ and ‘Legitimate Parental Partiality,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 37 (2009) 43-80

31

In ‘Family History’ David Velleman elaborates a fourth reason for wanting children to be reared by their biological parents; that being reared by people with whom

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1) or 2), if true, might provide child-centered reasons for preferring that children are matched to genetically connected parents in families, where possible. And they may, sometimes, be true. Some parents may have a very difficult time rearing children temperamentally very different from themselves, and may also have great difficulty loving them. For example, nervous, shy or orderly people may have a great deal of difficulty rearing, and loving, extremely boisterous children. But others may marvel at the difference; and be delighted by the contrast between themselves and their child. Similarly, while some parents may love the traits in a child that they love in their spouse, others may despise traits the child shares with themselves or the other parent, especially if they are self-critical or do not love the other parent. These possibilities are simply too speculative to generate reasons for a policy, even from a child-centered point of view. And neither 1) nor 2) support a fundamental parental interest; parents have a right to be able to forge a certain kind of relationship with a child, and placing undue obstacles in the way of the establishment and development of that relationship would infringe on their right. But they do not have a right that this relationship made as easy as it possibly could be.32 If parents believe they achieve immortality of any sort through any mechanism they are wrong. Passing on one’s genes may give one a sense of playing a role in the future of the world. But one simply receives one’s genetic material from others; it represents no achievement of one’s own. One is merely a vessel participating in a random process. Actively participating in cloning oneself may give one a sense of control over the process, but this does not alter that one’s genes are given one by a process over which one has no control. By contrast, rearing a child to flourishing adulthood in challenging circumstances represents a genuine achievement and contribution to the future, in which one’s agency is directly and continuously engaged. Adults have a powerful

one has a fair amount in common genetically plays a vital role in healthy identity formation and maintenance. We are skeptical that the role is as important as his argument claims but, regardless, the interest he identifies is, again, child-centered and, as he points out, does not count in favor of encouraging parents to rear their own as-yet-non-existent biological children rather than existing potential adoptees who as yet lack families. See David Velleman, ‘Family History,’ Philosophical Papers (2005) 357-78. 32

As we noted in section I, Michael Sandel takes this argument further and suggests that the possibility of excessive risk management on the part of parents spoils the parent-child relationship. While there are reasons for supporting this strengthened suggestion, our point here is only that parents do not have a right to manipulate their relationships with their children, whether or not doing so is detrimental to their dispositions as parents. See Michael Sandel, ‘The Case Against Perfection.’

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interest in being able to face this challenge. But reproducing one’s own genetic material in another person is just not an interest of this kind.33 In the past thirty years artificial reproductive techniques have become widely available and the commercial success of the reproductive assistance industry is certainly evidence of very powerful consumer demand for genetically connected children. People go to great lengths to have genetically connected children and they clearly feel great disappointment when they fail. Is this evidence that there is a fundamental interest? We do not believe that it is. First, demand for something is never strong evidence for the existence of an interest (in the moral sense) because people can frequently pursue goals that do not serve their interests. Second, the rise of the reproductive assistance industry has coincided with a decline in the ready availability of non-disabled adoptive children because of the wide availability of abortion in Western European countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people seem to choose reproductive assistance because it is less intrusive than adoption, because adoption agencies place child-welfare-related restrictions on the behavior of adoptive parents, and scrutinize the quality of their family life, whereas parents may treat their genetic children as they will. We are open to the possibility that there really is a powerful parentcentered interest in being able to rear a genetically connected child. The more powerful this interest is, the more plausible it is that it can outweigh the interests of potential adoptees in entering families. Our claim here is not that there is no such interest, but that the burden of proof is on the pro-cloners to demonstrate there is such an interest, and to show that it outweighs the interests of other parties. We are unaware of successful attempts to meet that burden, in either the literature on cloning or that on parenting and the value of family life. We have argued that on NSL there is a reason to prohibit cloning, the force of which depends on circumstances. What about WSL? One thought is that on WSL, too, there is a reason to prohibit. Identifying a party that is harmed by the practice of cloning, we have identified a party that is harmed by instances of cloning; people who clone cannot claim that they should be free to clone on the grounds that no one is harmed by their action. It is not that simple. Certainly, some who clone harm the children that they would otherwise have adopted. But even in circumstances in which a substantial number of potential adoptees

33

Levy and Lotz argue for this extensively by saying, plausibly, that i) such parents are misguided about the real nature of genetic identity, and ii) that allowing cloning will reinforce such misguidedness.

An Argument Against Cloning 557

remain family-less, some, and maybe many, instances of cloning would not harm them. When cloning is legal people who clone but who would not have adopted had they not cloned, do no harm, in the sense that there is nobody who would be better off if they had decided not to clone. There are, of course, compelling reasons to have a single policy for everyone. The chosen policy, under WSL, would be sensitive to the numbers involved; if the numbers of people cloning who would have otherwise adopted are sufficiently large then that would count strongly in favor of prohibition. Our worry about this line of thought is that it ignores, as the WSL approach seems bound to, the dynamic effect of the practices in place under a policy. Suppose that cloning is legal, cloning the practice becomes normalized; that is, it becomes something that people consider a normal option and are uninhibited about pursuing. When a practice is normalized, its normalization influences the motivation of actors. Consider cosmetic plastic surgery. When cosmetic surgery is exotic and unusual, most people feel somewhat inhibited from having it. But once normalized, it appeals, and can even appear as a necessity, to people who would not have sought it when it was exotic. So people who would never have sought the legalization of cosmetic surgery when it was unavailable, because they had no desire for it, not only resist its prohibition but make use of it, when it is available and normalized. Suppose, then, that cloning is permitted, and becomes normalized, with the result that people who otherwise would have adopted had they not been allowed to clone, come to see cloning as the preferable option. It may be true that if they, and only they, could not clone they would not seek to adopt; so, under WSL they are people whose decision to clone does no harm, and therefore is not registered as a reason to prohibit cloning. It is true of them that they prefer cloning to not having children and not having children to adopting. But they would have preferred adoption to cloning, and cloning to not having children, if cloning had not become a normalized practice. Via their effects on norms, regimes of availability and prohibition have effects on preferences: the problem with WSL is that it is not sensitive to those effects. We are not claiming that this would happen. We are, rather, registering the possibility as a reason to think that the WSL approach may not give a reason to prohibit cloning but also for thinking that it is a problematic approach when it comes to moral questions that involve the 34 kinds of coordination problems that arise with cloning.

34

WSL is problematic for other reasons too. For example, it makes it difficult to give an account of the intuitive difference in worth between different liberties.

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Now let’s review the assumption that making cloning (and other reproductive technologies) available will increase the number of couples with genetically connected children. Whether it does depends on two factors: how reliable the processes involved are, and how assessments of their reliability influence choices to delay reproduction. As we have noted, declining fertility is a natural consequence of aging. Couples may make two epistemic errors when choosing how late to delay reproduction. They might underestimate the rapidity with which their fertility will decline. Or they may assume that the available reproductive technologies will be more effective than, in fact, they will, in correcting for the decline in fertility. Suppose they make the second error; they may delay reproduction for longer than the reliability of the technologies can effectively correct. In this case, the availability of the technology actually makes couples less likely to acquire genetically connected children. But, it may also make them less likely to acquire children altogether. If couples can only reproduce naturally or adopt, a couple who cannot reproduce naturally immediately faces the choice of adopting. If the options include a variety of unreliable fertility treatments, the couple may be encouraged to pursue the genetically related child through the various processes. They may become more invested in the project of acquiring a genetically related child than in simply having a child; by the time they admit defeat they are older, and may no longer be satisfied with a genetically unrelated child.35 We are not arguing that this happens systematically, just pointing out that a regime of availability might, in some circumstances, not be effective in delivering more genetically connected children to families than a regime of non-availability; and that even then it might still have costs for potential adoptees. Now consider two ways of influencing the weight of the reason we have offered for prohibiting cloning in given circumstances. A government might reduce the weight of the reason by reducing the pool of

As Ronald Dworkin observes, most people have wanted to drive the wrong way down a one-way street when no other cars are present in their own lives, but not the freedom to use racist speech against others; yet many think that racist speech should be protected as a right, but that the government legitimately prohibits driving the wrong way, even when doing so would place no-one at risk of harm. See A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986), ch. 8. 35

We should note that some proportion of couples who seek assisted reproduction do so not because having a genetically related child is their first preference, but in response to the barriers to, and intrusions into their personal lives involved in adopting children. This trigger for demand of assisted reproduction could be addressed by making adoption easier and less traumatic for potential adoptive parents.

An Argument Against Cloning 559

potential adoptees by, for example, embarking on a campaign of education about reproduction, making contraception readily available to those who do not want to reproduce, etc.36 Or the government might seek to decrease the level of natural, as well as assisted, reproduction by adults who desire to rear children, in order to prompt more of them to adopt existing potential adoptees. Suppose a plentiful supply of potential adoptees. Since they have a fundamental interest in finding a family within which to be raised, and since adults have no fundamental interest in rearing genetically connected offspring, it would be better if all were adopted than if couples naturally reproduced and refrained from adopting. If that is right, then the government could legitimately take appropriate steps to encourage adoption over reproduction. Our argument seems to imply that such policies are desirable, which, in turn, 37 might seem to constitute objections to our argument. Our argument does support both these kinds of policy, in that if they were successful our reason for objecting cloning would have much less power. Policies to reduce the supply of potential adoptees are desirable, as long as they deploy only permissible means and do not have undesirable collateral effects.38 Evaluating the second kind of policy is more difficult. We accept that our argument implies that, when adoptees are available, it is better to adopt than to reproduce naturally. We do not see this as a reason to abandon the argument. The argument also supports, other things being equal, policies of encouraging adoption over natural, as well as over assisted, reproduction, up to the point that all potential adoptees find good homes. Other things are not, however, always equal. With the best will in the world some, perhaps many, people who will be entirely adequate parents to children they regard as their ‘own’ may not be good enough adoptive parents; government policy should avoid prompting

36

Note that for this to be effective, the campaign would have to reach those parts of the world that produce large numbers of potential adoptees

37

For a slightly ironic discussion concerning this consequence, see the exchange between Lindsey Beyerstein and Matt Weiner, one of whom sees the consequence as objectionable, the other of whom sees it as welcome: and .

38

Permissible means would include those we have mentioned, whereas impermissible means would include forcible sterilization and other forms of prior restraint. We have deliberately remained agnostic about the morality of abortion, but emphasize here that if abortion were seriously immoral then a policy of permitting or encouraging abortion would be an impermissible means for the reduction of the pool of potential adoptees.

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them to adopt. Governments have a legitimate concern with population policy, in particular with ensuring that each cohort is sufficiently large to maintain the economic, social, and political health of the society, and to mitigate the inter-generational conflicts triggered by uneven generational size. They should therefore be cautious about adopting policies that might have a chilling effect on the fertility rate, when the fertility rate is already low (as it is in most developed countries). Finally, there is an adult-centered interest in maintaining the fertility rate; policies that discourage natural reproduction may reduce it to levels that, though consistent with the social interest in population maintenance, result in some people who would have flourished as parents remaining childless either from a sense of responsibility or through excessive delays in 39 attempting to become a parent. Our judgment is that in low-fertility countries discouraging natural reproduction among people who would be adequately good parents is a dangerous policy for governments to adopt, despite the truth that adoption is more virtuous than natural reproduction. Nevertheless, policies such as providing incentives for adoption, and removing some of the barriers to adoption, if they could be designed to minimize the risk that too many children would end up in families which failed them because they had adopted for the wrong reasons, seem legitimate. Similarly, a government might simply take steps to ‘normalize’ adoption: to try and shift the ethos concerning child-rearing so that adults were less likely to favor natural reproduction over adoption. Of course, it is reasonable to be skeptical that governments could achieve these ends without collateral harms, so we do not advocate specific action, we simply note the complexity of the considerations in play, and indicate that we do not see the observation in play as an objection to our argument.

IV

Objections

We have not found any reason for thinking that cloning is wrong. We have, however, found a reason for prohibiting it. The availability of the regime can be predicted, in some circumstances, to damage the funda-

39

Do these reasons for wanting to support the natural fertility rate extend to supporting allowing cloning? We doubt it, because we imagine that if cloning became legally available it would either be limited to a very small number of people who cannot reproduce using other forms of assistance, or almost all instances of it would replace other forms of reproduction. As we explain in the next section, it is possible, too, that its availability and that of other forms of assisted reproduction, may not affect fertility rates positively, or not very positively.

An Argument Against Cloning 561

mental interests of some third parties, without serving the fundamental interests of those who clone. Even if reproductive cloning were sufficiently safe that the resultant clones not only could expect to have lives worth living, but had prospects similar to non-cloned human beings, defenders of permitting the practice would have to show that parents had an interest in acquiring genetically connected children sufficiently strong as to outweigh the interests of potential adoptees in finding families. Showing that cloning is not wrong is not enough; they have to show that there is a right to clone, or that very powerful but non-rightgenerating considerations in favor of cloning outweigh the interest of potential adoptees We believe this will be difficult. One objection to our argument is that it provides a reason not only for prohibiting cloning, but also for prohibiting other forms of reproductive assistance, such as IVF and AID, as well as assistance that is less direct, such as the surgical repair of non-health threatening obstacles such as ovarian and testicular blockages, and the reversal of vasectomies. But surely, the objector might say, this is a reductio of the argument, because such practices obviously ought to be legal. There is currently high demand for IVF and AID. Many who are in the market for those services experience the difficulty of conceiving as a substantial, even in some cases tragic, obstacle to their ability to flourish in the way they want. Prohibiting those services would, surely, be cruel? We agree that the reason we give for prohibiting cloning is a reason for prohibiting other forms of reproductive assistance. IVF and AID, for example, help couples to have genetically related children. But those couples already had available to them the option of having non-genetically related children, children who would have existed regardless of what regime was in place with regard to assistance, and who have a fundamental interest in being raised within a family. That constitutes a reason for restricting, or possibly prohibiting, their availability. IVF and AID are now very widespread practices, and in practice a prohibition would probably drive them underground, even if it were feasible. That is an important practical consideration concerning cloning as well. But fundamentally cloning should be regarded as just another form of reproductive assistance. Two things, then, are worth stressing. First, we believe the argument that we have made constitutes a reason to prohibit, not a conclusive reason to prohibit. The suffering of the involuntarily childless is a countervailing reason that also has weight. We do not believe that they have a weighty interest in having genetically related children, at least not one weighty enough to trump the interests of existing potential adoptees in finding homes. But relief of suffering is a weighty consideration, and even if an instance of suffering is predicated on the pursuit of an interest which is not itself weighty it is suffering nevertheless, and as such

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should be taken into account. So, even in some circumstances where our reason should be given great weight, sufficient to justify banning cloning, the weightiness of the suffering that prohibiting AID and IVF would cause might justify permitting those practices. Second, the weight that the reason for prohibition has depends on several contingencies. One of these is the extent to which the availability of IVF and AID contribute to the suffering the relief of which counts in their favor. Their availability might contribute to the suffering by inducing women to delay childbearing, by inducing them to believe that artificial techniques will be more effective in restoring their fertility than is in fact the case. Their availability might entrench the belief that there is a legitimate interest in having genetically related children, and thus increase the sense of frustration when that goal is not achieved. Or it might induce women or their partners to blame themselves or their partners for the failure to conceive a genetically related child. It may be that the expectation of the chance to have a child who is a genetic descendent through assisted reproduction is very strongly entrenched, and that, at least in the short term, even if it were possible politically to reduce the availability of such assistance, doing so would cause great and real distress to people whose expectations have developed in a regime of availability. The former thoughts would provide reasons to prohibit it, and the latter would provide a reason not to prohibit it, which applies in the case of those forms of assistance, but not in the case of cloning (because, by hypothesis, people do not have the expectation that they should be able to clone). We do not know whether or to what extent it does any of this. We don’t even know for certain that women delay attempts to bear children at all (relative to before these technologies were available): the rising age of first birth could, in theory, simply reflect more success in an unchanged level of effort to avoid earlier childbirth, or a drastic reduction in the level of fertility due to environmental factors. If so then availability may play little or no role in causing the suffering that the technology alleviates. In this case, the reason to prohibit has less weight. But the facts matter for what weight the reasons have in the circumstances, and the facts (and consequent weights) are probably different for cloning which is not yet legal, than for assistance that is legal and widely available. In short, we are willing to bite the bullet; but we do not think the bullet is as distasteful as some might fear. A final objection to the prohibition of cloning, IVF and AID for the reason we have given is that it would be unfair to those who cannot reproduce without assistance. It would be unfair, because it would, in effect, impose on them the full responsibility for rearing children who otherwise would have no family. But they played no special role in creating the predicament of those children; they are no more implicated in

An Argument Against Cloning 563

it than couples who can reproduce without assistance or people who choose never to reproduce or to rear children. The responsibility for meeting the interests of those children is social, and it is unfair to impose the whole burden on those who just happen to fall into this group. We agree that it would be unfair, and also we think that the unfairness concerned is a social matter. We have three responses. First, unfairness is sometimes justified. For example, governments typically allow wealthy parents to purchase elite private schooling for their children, giving them an unfair advantage in competitions for the status, income, and other benefits attached to the better jobs in capitalist societies. This unfairness could be justified if elite private schooling played a role in raising the quality of schooling overall or if by enhancing the productive output of the unfairly advantaged wealthy children the practice leads to greater overall social wealth which redounds to the benefit of 40 the least advantaged in society. So it might be with finding families for adoptees; meeting their fundamental interests may be so important that it justifies some unfairness between those who are at some more abstract level equally and jointly responsible. Second, if there were a way of getting people to share the burden and still meet the challenge equally well that would be fairer and, therefore, more desirable. But, there are reasons to doubt that this burden can be shared truly equally while being met successfully. What adoptees need are parents; people who are unremittingly committed to meeting their individual interests and ready to provide them with unconditional love when young and intensive care as they grow. While this can be done well by people who are subsidized by government, there are real dangers in trying to share the burden equally by, for example, providing the kind of financial incentives that make some people willing to raise the children who otherwise wouldn’t be. Having children raised by people who are in it for the money is not ideal, and endangers some of those children.41 People who want children enough to be willing to seek

40

We assume that something like Rawls’s difference principle is more important than something like Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity. Rawls does not think so; but see Justice as Fairness, 163, n. 44.

41

This consideration also works against the suggestion that people who desire to clone ought to be permitted to do so once they have adopted a child. While money is not the incentive in this case, the prospect of having a genetically connected child is. We should emphasize that there are good reasons for trying to ensure that parents raise children in material conditions that are not excessively challenging, and government subsidies for child-rearing in inegalitarian societies play a very important role in facilitating the success of family life.

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assisted reproduction self-identify as people who are more likely than average to be committed to the task for parenting.42 The third response is an observation about how bad the unfairness is. A policy that deprived infertile couples of permission to rear children while permitting fertile couples to do so would be seriously unfair, in our opinion, because it would deprive infertile couples of access to what, for many of them, is a very important contribution to their own flourishing. Such a policy was long in effect in most countries for a segment of the infertile — same-sex couples — and still is in those states 43 that disallow same-sex couples from adopting children. Even such serious unfairness could conceivably be justified if there were very powerful reasons to believe that such couples were extremely unlikely to raise children well enough that children would have their interests well enough met in such families.44 But it is a serious unfairness because the interest in being able to rear children is a very important and powerful interest. We believe that the interest in being able to have, or rear, a genetic descendent is much less powerful, and is that the unfairness we are considering here is therefore much less serious. If we are wrong about that then the unfairness is much more serious than we think, but we also think that if we are wrong about it then there is a very powerful reason for allowing cloning, independently of the unfairness of disallowing it.

V

Concluding Comments

Whereas defenders of cloning have tended to dismiss the arguments against cloning, while elevating the desirability of allowing people to do what they want, several of the arguments against cloning, none of which shows that it is wrong, articulate values with which it is likely to conflict in practice. Against these values there are other values, including the desirability of allowing people to do what they want.

42

It is worth noting that in many countries where IVF and AID are legal an unfairness persists, in that potential parents are required to pay much, or all, of the cost of the treatment, whereas there is no tax on conceiving the natural way. We presume that the same would be true of cloning in many countries if it were legal. Of course, the objector could insist that this unfairness be eliminated too; but if not, he or she admits that unfairness is not a decisive objection to a policy arrangement.

43

Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Utah, at the time of this writing.

44

Just to be very clear, we believe that there are no powerful reasons for believing that.

An Argument Against Cloning 565

An all-things-considered judgment about whether cloning should be permitted or prohibited, and how it should be regulated if permitted, will consider all relevant values, giving them appropriate weight in the circumstances. The failure to do this explains why some early commentators on changes in medical technology often sound, in retrospect, hysterical. In an essay written more than a decade after the birth of Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby, James Rachels reflects on the foolishness of philosophers and other commentators who, at the time, predicted disastrous outcomes for her and other test-tube babies. In 1978 … . Louise Brown was the first baby to be born as a result of in vitro fertilization. This important event prompted alarmed and highly critical responses from physicians, theologians, and philosophers that are embarrassing to look upon today … terrible consequences were sure to follow for the parents, the child and society. But today Louise is a normal, happy, rambunctious child, and so are many others like her. The recent history of medical ethics is dotted with [similar] episodes in which ethicists have reacted with alarm to new developments, predicting dire consequences that never occurred. Review of these cases suggests caution, lest our quick and easy comments today look silly tomorrow.45

Rachels’s lesson is that we should be cautious when commenting on the morality of emerging technologies. We draw another lesson, which we are trying to apply here. Rather than seeking, immediately, for a decisive reason to permit (a right) or to prohibit (its wrong) a practice, moral philosophers should engage in a conversation in which they attempt, collectively, to elucidate all relevant values, and to imagine the ways in which a practice would have an impact on the realization of those values. We have attempted to contribute to the first part of such a conversation by identifying in some detail a cost to cloning that has not previously been highlighted (and which is also a cost to other, permitted and widespread practices). In some potential circumstances — say, those in which there is high demand for potential adoptees from high quality potential parents, and in which there is a low supply of children in need of a home — this value consideration would have little weight. In other circumstances it might have a great deal of weight. So we have tried, also, to contribute to the second part of that conversation by conjecturing about the possible effects of permitting cloning. Some readers will find this kind of conjectural thinking frustrating, especially

45

James Rachels, Can Ethics Provide Answers? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1997), 239

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given that cloning is as yet far from being sufficiently safe that it would even be ethical to experiment with it on human subjects. But we hope that readers will engage in further conjectural thinking, including by advancing counter-conjectures, so that a fuller picture of the possible effects of the practice in different circumstances and the likely impact on important values can emerge. As we see it the task of philosophers qua philosophers is not to specify exactly what weight a value has in any particular circumstances. It is, rather, to elaborate the value in an appropriate level of detail and to give some guidance concerning the circumstances in which it would have weight, alerting decision-makers to the range of precise value considerations they should take into account when acting. Received: November 2007 Revised: January 2009 Revised: November 2009

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 567 Rehabilitating Objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the New Pragmatism 567 Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 567-590

Rehabilitating Objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the New 1 Pragmatism STEVEN LEVINE University of Massachusetts, Boston Boston, MA 02125 USA

I In recent years, a renascent form of pragmatism has developed which argues that a satisfactory pragmatic position must integrate into itself the concepts of truth and objectivity. This New Pragmatism, as Cheryl Misak calls it, is directed primarily against Rorty’s neo-pragmatic dismissal of these concepts. For Rorty, the goal of our epistemic practices should not be to achieve an objective view, one that tries to represent things as they are ‘in themselves,’ but rather to attain a view of things that can gain as much inter-subjective agreement as possible. In Rorty’s language, we need to replace the aim of objectivity with that of solidarity. While the New Pragmatists agree with Rorty’s ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ notion that the world by itself cannot dictate to us what we should think about it, they demur from his suggestion that this requires us to give up

1

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for support in the writing of this paper. I would also like to thank Russell Goodman, Cheryl Misak, Alex Klein, Carl Sachs, and all of the participants in the NEH seminar on Pragmatism: A Living Tradition.

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the notions of truth and objectivity. The new pragmatic line of thought goes something like this: Implicit in the inter-subjective practice of giving and asking for reasons there are norms of correctness, of getting things objectively right, that go beyond the warrantedness that agents ascribe to each other’s justificatory speech acts. In being guided by such norms, we are not, as Rorty thinks, simply trying to convince a dialogical partner that our view of something is justified, we are also trying to make sure that our mutual beliefs about that something are right. Because the question of whether these beliefs are right cannot be answered by pointing to a social consensus — as we can always be wrong about any given question — their truth or falsity is an objective matter. Since the commitments to both warrantedness and objective truth are implicit in our discursive and inquiring practices, a pragmatic reconstruction of these practices, one that takes the point of view of the agent seriously, will show them both to be philosophically legitimate. Many of the New Pragmatists — most notably Bjorn Ramberg, Jeffry Stout, and Robert Brandom — argue that the aim of getting things objectively right is in fact consistent with Rorty’s own best insights. If Rorty only took seriously the lessons of his pragmatic radicalization of the linguistic turn, the argument goes, he would either be a New Pragmatist2 or, in Brandom’s story — the story we will be concerned with in this paper — he would recognize that his anti-authoritarianism is at least consistent with a pragmatically reconstructed notion of objectivity. In this paper I argue that Brandom’s attempted recruitment of Rorty for the new pragmatic cause fails because it misdiagnoses the source of his hostility to the concept of objectivity. Later in Rorty’s career, the reasons for this hostility are clear: The search for truth and objectivity as they have been construed in the philosophical tradition is not consistent with human dignity and freedom. Rorty often put this thought in terms of his prophetic desire to help institute a second Enlightenment.3 The great achievement of the first Enlightenment was the change that it effected in our moral view of ourselves. Instead of seeing ourselves as morally indebted to something outside of ourselves, i.e., God, we came to think that the ‘source of normativity’ was internal to our own moral being. The norms of moral action are not given but are something that we need to take responsi-

2

For this story, see Ramberg (2000) and Stout (2007). Ramberg and Stout take Rorty to be a New Pragmatist because in his response to Ramberg’s paper Rorty accepts — based upon a new reading of Davidson — a hygienic notion of objectivity (see Rorty 2000). In Levine (2008) I argue that there is less to this admission than meets the eye, and that Rorty, even in his later stages, rejects the new pragmatic project.

3

For more on this, see Rorty (1999), Brandom (2008), and McDowell (2000).

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bility for by deliberating together about what to do and what type of people we want to be. Rorty’s envisaged second Enlightenment transfers this train of thought from the practical to the theoretical sphere. Just as we threw off our tutelage to an outside moral authority in the first Enlightenment, in the second we would additionally unburden ourselves of the need to bow down before the epistemic authority of objective reality. For Rorty, objective reality cannot dictate to us how we should represent it because it is mute, i.e., it does not speak and offer reasons to us. This is something that only we do in the inter-subjective space of giving and asking for reasons. In a second Enlightenment we would realize this fact and accordingly shoot for solidarity rather than objectivity. The question is: Where does the original source of this hostility to objectivity lie? In his paper ‘An Arc of Thought: From Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to his Pragmatism,’ Brandom argues, I think correctly, that it stems from the constellation of ideas that informed Rorty’s eliminative materialism. However, I think Brandom stresses the wrong idea in this constellation. In his opinion, it is Rorty’s views concerning the incorrigibility of the mental that leads to his eschewal of the concept of objectivity, whereas I think that it is Rorty’s views concerning the eliminability of sensory experience. What I try to show in this paper is that it is Rorty’s views on the eliminability of sensory experience that open the way to his later hostility to objectivity, and that any attempt to pragmatically rehabilitate objectivity must address this thesis if it is to be successful.4 Let me say one more thing. I agree with the New Pragmatists that the rehabilitation of objectivity is necessary and important, but disagree about the theoretical direction that such a project must take. The paper’s focus on Rorty is meant to sharpen this disagreement. While this might seem a roundabout way to get at our divergence, this focus is necessary because Brandom and most of the New Pragmatists arrive at their positions in large measure by working through the perceived deficiencies of Rorty’s account of objectivity.5 While Brandom thinks that Rorty’s account of objectivity can be rehabilitated through communicative-theoretic means, I argue that this rehabilitation can only be achieved through a consideration of the objectivity that pertains to perceptual experience, and therefore through a much more thoroughgoing revision of the Rortyian picture than allowed for by the New Pragmatists.

4

I adopt the language of ‘rehabilitation’ from McDowell (2000).

5

See Brandom (2000a and 2008), Misak (2000 and 2007), Ramberg (2000), Stout (2007), and Price (2003).

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II In Brandom’s telling, Rorty’s hostility to objectivity can be traced back to his thesis that incorrigibility is the mark of the mental. Before explaining how for Brandom this thesis leads to Rorty’s later views of objectivity, we must first briefly explicate the thesis itself. In his early paper ‘Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,’ Rorty makes the argument that what distinguishes the mental from all other realms of existence is the fact that certain events, thoughts and sensations, and no other events, are subject to incorrigible first person reports. The innovation here is defining the mental in epistemic rather than ontological terms. Instead of worrying about the ontological status of thoughts and sensations — about whether they are physical events that admit of topic-neutral explanations, etc. — Rorty urges us to focus instead on the linguistic criteria that we use to characterize and demarcate the mental. If we do so we shall see that the only feature that thoughts and sensations have in common is that their avowal in sincere first-person reports cannot be rationally overridden by other agents. This incorrigibility is for Rorty the mark of the mental. The Cartesian tradition of course also took incorrigibility to be the mark of the mental. But unlike the Cartesian who accounts for incorrigibility by pointing to certain of the mind’s ontological characteristics, i.e., transparency and immediate self-acquaintance, Rorty argues that incorrigibility is a socially and linguistically instituted phenomena. The raw materials for this argument come from Sellars’s myth of Jones given at the end of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Very briefly, the myth of Jones attempts to show how a community of our ancestors — Sellars’s famous Ryleans — who begin with an inter-subjectively available language describing objects in space and time could develop, through ‘natural’ additions to the language, the ability to make direct non-inferential reports about their own ‘inner’ episodes, whether thoughts or sense-impressions. What Sellars wants to show is that this ability to make direct non-inferential reports about our inner episodes is not given, as a Cartesian would have it, but instituted through the acquisition of non-innate conceptual abilities. This institution occurs when the Ryleans introduce the concepts of thought and sensation into their language to explain certain anomalies that cannot be accounted for by their already available public concepts. In the case of thoughts, the Ryleans are puzzled by the fact that a line of rational behavior can go on without agents’ avowing their thoughts and intentions aloud, while in the case of sensations, they are puzzled by perceptual illusion, i.e., by the fact that they sometimes think that they are perceiving things that are not actually there. In response to these puzzles, the Rylean community (in the personification of the

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genius Jones) is pushed into making certain analogical extensions from concepts it already possesses. Predicates that apply to publicly available physical entities are now used as a model to form new concepts of theoretically posited inner episodes. In the case of thoughts Jones simply took the characteristics of public speech — intentional aboutness, truth-aptness, compositionality, etc. — and extended them to apply to a concept of certain inner episodes, thoughts. In the case of sense-impressions, Jones analogically extends ‘the predicates of physical objects’ by giving them a ‘new use in which they form sortal predicates pertaining to impressions, thus ‘‘an (of a red rectangle) impression’’’ (Sellars 1968, 69). Of course, while each episode is modeled on a publicly available physical entity (verbal speech and the predicates of physical objects respectively), they have their own intrinsic features, being a ‘thought about X’ and a ‘sensation of Y.’ When Jones initially teaches the Ryleans about these new concepts and the theory in which they are embedded, the episodes that these concepts refer to are inferentially posited theoretical episodes not available for immediate introspection. However, after a certain amount of training, the Ryleans learn to refer to these episodes directly by coming to use these concepts in direct non-inferential reports. Here, (to use the example of sensations) the Ryleans come to ‘directly know (not merely infer by using the theory) on particular occasions that [they] are having sense-impressions of such and such kind’ (Sellars 1991, 91). Although Sellars provides the raw materials for Rorty’s view, his account of the mental is ultimately found wanting. While his story is essential for explaining how mental terms enter the language, it fails to specify the mark of the mental correctly. The difficulty is that Sellars does not provide a single feature that characterizes both thoughts and sensations save the ‘one of being ‘inner’ states apt for the production of certain behavior’ (Rorty 1970, 412). But the notion of something going on inside our bodies that accounts for our overt behavior does not give us a robust enough notion of the mental to contrast with the physical. To establish the mental as ‘new category of existence’ what is needed is a publicly available linguistic practice that treats the authority of certain types of reports differently from that of others. ‘Only after the emergence of the convention, the linguistic practice, which dictates that first person contemporaneous reports of such states are the last word on their existence and features do we have a notion of the mental as incompatible with the physical’ (Rorty 1970, 414). Following Sellars’s example, Rorty gives a mythical and naturalistic account of the origin of this convention. When explaining the behavior of agents who use the concepts of thought and sensation to make direct first-person reports, the Ryleans note certain features of their use that are helpful for this explanatory task.

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They found that, when the behavioral evidence for what Smith was thinking about conflicted with Smith’s own report of what he was thinking about, a more adequate account of the sum of Smith’s behavior could be obtained by relying on Smith’s report than by relying on the behavioral evidence.... The growing conviction that the best explanation in terms of thoughts for Smith’s behavior would always be found by taking Smith’s word for what he was thinking found expression in the convention that what Smith said went. The same discovery occurred, mutatis mutandis, for sensations. (Rorty 1970, 416)

The upshot is that until a community took it that Smith’s first-person reports were more reliable than the behavioral evidence for his thoughts, incorrigibility did not exist. In this sense, incorrigibility is arrived at from the ‘outside-in’ insofar as it is first posited as a facet of our explanations of one another. In showing that incorrigibility is not an intrinsic feature of our mental events but a socially and linguistically instituted status, Rorty can then argue that the mental itself is an optional category of existence. This is because it is possible that the social and linguistic practices that institute incorrigibility, and therefore the mental, can change such that there would no longer be states about which we are incorrigible. How could these practices change? Rorty canvasses the empirical possibility that relying upon technological advances we could develop a new ‘practice of overriding reports about mental entities on the basis of knowledge of brain states’ (Rorty 1970, 421). In other words, it is possible that we could develop thirdperson ways of detecting a person’s mental states that are evidentially stronger than that person’s own reports. Here our evidentiary practices would change in such a way that our ‘mental states would lose their incorrigible status and, thus, their status as mental’ (Rorty 1970, 421).6 If this change in status is truly possible, then, as Brandom puts it, ‘The Cartesian mind is real, but it is a contingent, optional, product of our mutable social practices’ (Brandom 2008, 4).

III We are now in a position to understand Brandom’s story about the origin of Rorty’s hostility to objectivity. Brandom sums up Rorty’s position about the incorrigibility of the mental by pointing out that it is composed of two principle theses: 1) That incorrigibility is a normative phenomenon insofar as it concerns the incontestable authority of certain episodes, and 2) That incorrigibility is underlain by the social-prag-

6

Here we find the origin of the line of thought that will result in Rorty’s story about the Antipodeans in chapter two of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

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matic thesis that the normative status of authority is instituted by social and linguistic practices. How do these ideas lead to Rorty’s position on objectivity? Brandom points out that Rorty’s ‘post-ontological’ philosophy of mind follows from his meta-philosophical view that after the linguistic turn ontology can only be done by examining the normatively governed linguistic practices by which we detail our view of reality. In this regard Rorty remains, for all of his fulminations against Kant, a linguistic Kantian — just like his hero Sellars. Based upon this meta-philosophical view, Brandom thinks that a three-sorted ontology emerges. Subjective (Cartesian) things are those over which each individual knowing-andacting subject has incontestable authority. Social things are those over which communities have incontestable authority . . . Finally, objective things are those over which neither individuals nor communities have incontestable authority, but which themselves exercise authority over claims that in the normative sense that speakers and thinkers are responsible to them count as being about those things. (Brandom 2008, 5)

In this scheme the category of the social is privileged because each ontological realm is instituted on social-pragmatic grounds — i.e., upon the grounds of what social-linguistic practices are taken as authoritive in each sphere. There is no further court of appeals concerning authority than what a community, through the game of giving and asking for reasons, takes or treats as authoritative. But just as a community can change its linguistic practices so as to eliminate incorrigibility and hence the mental, it can also, through a change in linguistic practice, eliminate the category of the objective. And with this we come to Brandom’s thesis concerning the origin of Rorty’s hostility to objectivity: This hostility emerged when Rorty came to treat the authority of the objective in the same eliminativist way that he treated the authority of the subjective. Brandom thinks that two separable positions result from this treatment of the objective. The first position leads directly to the picture detailed by Rorty’s second Enlightenment. Since our ontology falls out from the normative structure of authority operative in any given sphere, the category of objectivity is incoherent insofar as authority can only be accredited to normatively structured items. We can’t grant ‘authority to something non-human, something that is merely there, to intrinsically normatively inert things’ (Brandom 2008, 6). While we can make sense of the idea of our entering into various theoretical consensuses concerning the nature of the ‘objective world,’ ‘the idea of something that cannot enter into a conversation with us, cannot give and ask for reasons, somehow dictating what we ought to say is not one we can make sense of. Reality as the modern philosophical tradition has construed it ... is

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the wrong kind of thing to exercise rational authority. That is what we do to each other’ (Brandom 2008, 6). The second position that results from the social-pragmatic treatment of objectivity asks us to remember one of the key lessons of Rorty’s thesis about incorrigibility, namely, that the structure of authority that instituted the mental, while eliminable, is fully intelligible as it stands. Brandom puts the point this way: [Rorty’s] claim was precisely not that the structure of individual subjective authority that instated mental events as incorrigible was unintelligible. On the contrary: we can understand exactly how we must take or treat each other in order to institute that structure and so the ontological category of things that exercises authority of that kind. The claim was rather that the structure is contingent and optional, and that it is accordingly possible, and under conceivable circumstances even advisable, to change our practices so as to institute a different structure of authority. (Brandom 2008, 7-8)

Brandom’s strategy for rehabilitating objectivity takes the form of applying this lesson, forged in a consideration of subjectivity, to objectivity itself. Here we do not deny that objectivity makes sense, but consider whether it is desirable to change our practices in such a way that this type of authority goes by the wayside. Rorty thinks that it must go by the wayside because reality is normatively inert. But as Brandom points out, Rorty’s social pragmatism about normative statuses ‘does not entail that only the humans who institute those statuses can exhibit or possess them’ (Brandom 2008, 8). For since it is we who take or treat things as authoritative, we can put this authority ‘where we like.’ In other words, we can and should, from within our practices, ‘invest authority in nonhuman things: take ourselves in practice to be responsible to them in a way that makes us responsible to them’ (Brandom 2008, 9). When this thought is put together with Brandom’s thesis that semantic content is pragmatically rendered through the game of giving and asking for reasons, a hygienic notion of objective representational content emerges that is consistent with Rorty’s normative social pragmatism. Rorty’s two principle theses [that incorrigibility is a normative phenomenon and instituted in a social-pragmatic fashion] are compatible with acknowledging the existence of an objective representational structure of semantic authority. For, first, the referential, representational, denotational dimension of intentionality is understood as a normative structure. What we are talking or thinking about, what we refer to or represent, is that to which we grant a characteristic sort of authority over the correctness of our commitments . . . And, second, we understand doing that, making ourselves responsible to non-human things, acknowledging their authority, as something we do — as conferring on them a distinctively semantic kind of normative status by our adopting of social practical-normative attitudes. The only question that remains is one of social engineering: what shape do our practices need to take in order to institute this kind of normative status? This is a Deweyian question that Rorty would have welcomed. (Brandom 2008, 10)

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For Brandom, the dimension of normative assessment that we institute by adopting certain practical attitudes is a non-optional ‘quasi-transcendental’ feature of our communicative practices insofar as agents sort and track these assessments (in their deontic scorekeeping) in light of an implicit distinction between the objective correctness of certain commitments and other lesser sorts of commitments. Brandom is not claiming that Rorty would endorse this strong view. His claim is more minimal, namely, that the structure of authority that underlies objectivity is consistent with the notion that it is we who grant authority by making and taking reasons. If Rorty had recognized this, he could have endorsed the new pragmatic way of seeing things without endangering his central commitment to epistemological anti-authoritarianism. IV Before we can understand why Brandom’s argument that Rorty’s views are consistent with a social-pragmatic conception of objectivity fails, we must provide our alternative genealogy of Rorty’s eschewal of objectivity. As we mentioned in the introduction, it is not Rorty’s social-pragmatic theory of subjective incorrigibility that is most responsible for his hostility to objectivity but rather his prior elimination of sensory experience. We can see this by examining Rorty’s early eliminativist paper, his 1965 paper ‘Mind-body Identity, Privacy, and Categories.’ There, Rorty’s goal is to ‘impugn the existence of sensations’ (Rorty 1965, 182) by comparing them to entities (demons, witches, etc.) that were once thought to refer but which, after improvements in our knowledge, are no longer discussed in polite company. As he says, ‘sensations may be to the future progress of psycho-physiology as demons are to modern science. Just as we now want to deny that there are demons, future science may want to deny that there are sensations’ (Rorty 1965, 179). The main obstacle to making this argument is that ‘sensation statements have a reporting role as well as an explanatory function’ (Rorty 1965, 179). In other words, the fact that science will be able to explain sensory phenomena in a more precise and comprehensive way than our folk psychology does nothing to undermine our intuition that sensory vocabulary plays a privileged role in our first person reports. It is this that makes it seem that sensation statements and the phenomena that they report cannot be eliminated. But, Rorty says, the demon case makes clear that the discovery of a new way of explaining the phenomena previously explained by reference to a certain sort of entity, combined with a new account of what is being reported by observation-statements about that sort of entity, may give good reason for saying that there is no entity of that sort. The absurdity

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of saying ‘Nobody has ever felt a pain’ is no greater than that of saying ‘Nobody has ever seen a demon,’ if we have a suitable answer to the question ‘What was I reporting when I said I felt a pain?’ To this question the science of the future may reply ‘You were reporting the occurrence of a certain brain-process, and it would make life simpler for us if you would, in the future, say ‘My C-fibers are firing’ instead of saying ‘I’m in pain.’ (Rorty 1965, 179-80) 7

This response is underlain by the Sellarsian argument, elaborated in the Myth of Jones given above, against the givenness of inner mental states. Just as the Ryleans integrated the concepts of thought and sensation into their conceptual repertoire and learned to use them in first person non-inferential reports, we in the future will be able to integrate neuro-physiological concepts into our first person reports.8 If we just focus on sensations, instead of reporting that we are in pain we will report that a certain C-fiber is firing. Here, terms like ‘‘sensation,’ ‘pain,’ ‘mental image,’ and the like will drop out of our vocabulary ... at no greater cost than an inconvenient linguistic reform’ (Rorty 1965, 185). The elimination of sensation does not just follow from the Sellarsian argument against the givenness of inner mental states, however. It also follows from ‘an appreciation of the internal difficulties engendered in traditional empiricisms and rationalisms by the notion of a pre-linguistic item of awareness to which language must be adequate’ (Rorty 1971, 231). In other words, it follows from Sellars’s attack on the myth of the perceptual given. Let us review this attack before coming back to the specifics of the eliminativist case. In many discussions the myth of the given is considered from an exclusively epistemological point of view.9 We, however, are interested in a more fundamental version of the given, one that takes place at the level of perceptual content rather than justification. Here is the picture that lends itself to this version of the given: While our perception is

7

Rorty recognizes the intuitive implausibility of this thesis. But he thinks this intuition is based upon the fact that dropping all sensation talk will be practically inconvenient. But philosophers must separate what is philosophically possible from what is convenient.

8

Here I say ‘will be able’ rather than ‘may be able’ because I think Rorty’s argument, like Sellars’s, is not based, as they think, on an empirical prediction about future science, but upon a rational reconstruction of our basic cognitive structure.

9

In epistemological discussions, the given is roughly considered to be an item of immediate awareness that has a positive epistemic status simply through its being entertained. What is special about the given is that it has a positive epistemic status independent of all other items in our system of knowledge, yet it is also epistemically efficacious with respect to these items insofar as it can pass on its positive epistemic status to non-basic episodes.

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the result of causal processes in which the properties of an object are impressed upon our perceiving apparatus, what is actually perceived is an internal state constructed from that sensory array or manifold. This sensory construction, insofar as it registers the objective properties of the object that is perceived, is the result of a purely causal mechanism. However, insofar as this content represents the object as something, it also has epistemic or intentional properties. Now we have a single sensory state or episode whose content 1) expresses itself as an awareness that something is the case, and 2) is pre-conceptual. For Sellars, this is the hallmark of the perceptual given. On this conception, the non-conceptual sensory items which are impressed upon the faculty of sense (outer or inner) intrinsically possess intentional purport — purport which can be abstracted out of the sensory manifold through careful attention to one’s own immediate states. So without any conceptual stage setting or linguistic acquisition, a sensation is itself a knowing that one is having that sensation rather than merely the causal antecedent to that knowing. For the eliminative materialist this view is obviously problematic because if sensations provide an agent with a ‘knowing that something is the case’ (e.g. that there is pain or a red triangle) prior to the acquisition of concepts or a language, then ‘there is a sort of pre-linguistic givenness about, e.g., pains [or sensations of red triangles, SL] which any language which is to be adequate must provide a means of expressing’ (Rorty 1971, 228). This, in turn, supports the ‘intuition we will have the same experiences no matter what words we use’ (Rorty 1971, 229). But with this intuition on the table how can we ‘impugn the existence of sensations’ as Sellars wants to do? For on this account the change in concepts that we use in our first person reports (for example, from ‘pain’ to ‘x C- fiber firing’) is merely a linguistic change that does not affect the underlying experience. The words that report the experience are different, but their reference remains the same. But then the eliminativist claim about sensations, which seemed so radical, becomes the trivial thesis that we can change the vocabulary that we use to report 10 our pre-existing experiences. The critique of the myth of the perceptual given is meant to ward off this criticism. For the ‘intuition that we will continue to have the same experiences no matter which words we use is in fact a remnant of ... the Myth of the Given’ (Rorty 1971, 229). Rorty counters this myth by questioning the notion that there is a pre-linguistic awareness to which language must be adequate.

10

For this argument see Bernstein 1971.

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The notion of a non-linguistic awareness is simply a version of the thing-in-itself — an unknowable whose only function is paradoxically enough, to be that which all knowledge is about. What does exist is the causal conditions of a non-inferential report being made. But there is no unique vocabulary for describing these causal conditions. There are as many vocabularies as there are ways of explaining human behavior. (Rorty 1971, 229)

There is no pre-linguistic sensory awareness because sense-impressions are causal intermediaries with the world that don’t provide us with a consciousness of anything. As Sellars puts it, the ‘‘of-ness’ of sensation simply isn’t the ‘of-ness’ of even the most rudimentary thought. Sense grasps no facts, not even such simple ones as something’s being red and triangular’ (Sellars 1975, 285). To be aware in the sense of having a conscious experience requires that one take up these causal conditions by using a concept in a perceptual judgment. Since Rorty follows Sellars in thinking that to possess a concept requires being able to use a word, for him conscious awareness is therefore bound up with the use of language. This is the Sellarsian doctrine of psychological nominalism, i.e., the doctrine that ‘all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc. ... is a linguistic affair. According to it, even the awareness of such sorts, resemblances, and facts as pertain to so-called immediate experience is presupposed by the process of acquiring the use of language’ (Sellars 1997, 63). Sellars qualifies his psychological nominalism in two ways. First, the myth of Jones demonstrates that there are inner thought-episodes (including perceptual episodes) that are not in any given instance linguistically articulated. Although thought-episodes presuppose the acquisition of a language insofar as they are semantically modeled on overt-verbal episodes, they need not be linguistic in any particular instance. Rorty is usually not so careful as to make this qualification, often identifying thought and language. Second, perceptual episodes for Sellars have a sensory aspect even after the critique of the notion that they can by themselves play a cognitive role in our experience. While sensations are not the object of our perceptual experience, as actobject accounts of perception posit, we can say retrospectively, after their Rylean ‘discovery,’ that they have qualitatively informed our perceptual experience all along. For Sellars this retrospective discovery of sensation is what makes the elimination of sense-impressions in the scientific image such a pressing and difficult problem for him. Once again, Rorty is not so careful. In a move that Brandom will take over, Rorty couches Sellars’s talk of sensation in terms of a creature’s causal response-dispositions to stimuli. On this account, sensory awareness is ‘awareness-as-discriminative behavior’ (Rorty 1979, 182). Here a creature’s sensing is construed in terms of what it can do and not in terms of what it lives through in experience. Sellars of course does use

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the language of discrimination, stimulus and response, for example in his paper ‘Some Reflections on Language Games.’11 But he does not use it in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind or Science and Metaphysics to detail his theory of sense-impressions. There, he consistently treats sense-impressions as episodes and not as modes of behavior. Because of his reductive interpretation of what Sellars’s psychological nominalism entails, Rorty takes it that the critique of the perceptual given results in the complete epistemic neutralization of sensation. By this we mean that the critique drains sense-impressions of the immediate qualitative and phenomenal aspects that were taken to be their hallmark by the classical tradition. Sensations are epistemically inert causal conditions that when ‘coded’ by a conceptual or linguistic system leave no sensory remainder over and above the conceptual episode that eventuates. So when we respond to certain of our own inner causal states by deploying a concept (one that is originally part of the Rylean’s informal theory of thoughts and sense-impressions) the character of our response is not determined by the ontological nature of the states themselves but by the vocabulary and the concepts that provide for the possibility of our giving a direct non-inferential report of these states. In this case, ‘what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language we use. To say that ‘X’s appear to us as F’ is merely to say that ‘We customarily use ‘‘F’’ in making non-inferential reports about X’s’ (Rorty 1971, 228). Since what we experience is a function of the language we use and the concepts we possess, when we exchange sensory concepts with neuro-physiological ones, our very experience changes. The change in vocabulary is therefore not merely a linguistic change, but a change in the very structure of our psychology. In ceasing to talk about sensations, we cease to have them.

V The question that we must now address is how the argument for the elimination of sensation and sensory experience leads to Rorty’s hostility to objectivity as a legitimate aim for our thought and inquiry. This connection comes out most clearly in Rorty’s seminal Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature when he uses the Sellarsian argument against the perceptual given to untangle ‘the basic confusion contained in the idea of a ‘‘theory of knowledge,”’ i.e., ‘Locke’s confusion between justification

11

This paper is included in Sellars (1991).

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and causal explanation’ (Rorty 1979, 161). This is germane to Rorty’s attack on the vocabulary of objectivity because he tries to demonstrate that the specifically modern conception of objectivity as the representation of how things are ‘in themselves’ is dependent upon the theory of knowledge having become, through the confusion of explanation and justification, first philosophy. Let us review this confusion and Rorty’s response to it before coming back to how it is related to the elimination of sensory experience. Rorty’s exposition of the confusion of explanation and justification is embedded in a complex historical account of the emergence and eventual decline of epistemology. There are three basic stages in this emergence, Descartes’ invention of the mind, Locke’s confusion of explanation and justification, and Kant’s confusion of predication with 12 synthesis. The move that sets the stage for Locke’s confusion is familiar enough: Descartes invented the mind when he misinterpreted Rylean incorrigibility (the social practice of taking each other to be incorrigible) to be an ontological relation of immediate self-acquaintance. In defining the mind as the realm of immediate certainty, Descartes sets the stage for the assimilation of the items immediately known in this realm, i.e., thoughts and sensations. This assimilation was complete when Locke posited a single genus of representation, ideas, which included whatever was self-intimating for the mind. This, according to Rorty, is the key to the emergence of epistemology as an autonomous discipline because it makes it seem as if there is an object, our representations of the world, which can be reflexively accessed and examined prior to the world itself. Now epistemology has its own object, one that is prior to the objects of the special sciences. Locke’s view fails, according to Rorty, because he never fixes on a stable strategy to study this new sphere of the mental. On the one hand, he wants to give a quasi-Newtonian mechanistic explanation of the understanding, breaking it down into the smallest units possible (sense-impressions) just as the corpuscular theory accounts for light in terms of the smallest particles possible. He wants this type of account not only to ape the most advanced forms of natural explanation but also to provide a plausible explanation of how the operations of the understanding are causally constrained by the sensory deliverances of the external world. On this score, naturalism and empiricism go hand

12

Although Kant is essential to Rorty’s story about the emergence of the theory of knowledge as a foundational discipline for the other areas of culture, the Lockean stage of this emergence is most important for our purposes. This is because for Rorty, Kant’s basic mistake is to repeat the Lockean confusion of explanation and justification. See Rorty (1979, 161).

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in hand. However, Locke does not give up the notion that the products of the understanding are rational and so potentially knowledge-bearing. For the whole goal of epistemology is to secure certain ‘privileged representations’ to ground the edifice of knowledge. To get around this problem, Locke construes representations in such a way that they can be the product of the causal impingements on our sensory apparatus while simultaneously standing in the rational relations characteristic of the judgments and propositions in the space of reasons. So instead of separating the causal antecedents to knowledge (sensations) from the rationally articulated judgments and propositions in which knowledge is expressed (thoughts), Locke takes it that a ‘causal account of how one comes to have a belief should be an indication of the justification one had for that belief’ (Rorty 1979, 141). In so doing, Locke confuses giving an explanation of our knowledge with giving a justification for it, and so commits himself to the myth of the given. It is this confusion that gives weight to the notion, central to epistemology as first philosophy, that we can be in touch with the ‘foundations of knowledge,’ i.e., with ‘privileged representations’ that ‘are automatically and intrinsically accurate’ (Rorty 1979, 170). Rorty gives a very complex historical genealogy for this idea, finding its origin in the Platonic notion that knowledge should be modeled on a direct (noetic) perception of objects (e.g. mathematical truths) that don’t allow themselves to be judged incorrectly. On this model, to be in touch with the foundations of knowledge is to be in touch with ‘truths which are certain because of their causes rather than because of the arguments given for them’ (Rorty 1979, 157). In knowing these truths, we get beyond reasons to causes, beyond argument to compulsion from the object known, to a situation in which argument would be not just silly but impossible.... To reach that point is to reach the foundations of knowledge. For Plato, that point was reached by escaping from the senses and opening up the faculty of reason — the Eye of the Soul — to the World of Being.… With Locke, it was a matter of … seeing ‘singular presentations to sense’ and what should ‘grip’ us — what we cannot and should not wish to escape from. (Rorty 1979, 159)

The Lockean story about the foundations of knowledge, in which knowledge is based on the certainty that pertains to certain immediate presentations to sense, is made plausible by the given because in ‘enchanting’ causality — i.e., smuggling into it epistemic properties — it allows the notion of cause to not be the one that would be at work in a purportedly mechanistic account of cognition. For if that notion of cause were operative, Locke would owe us a story about how a mechanistically construed state could dictate to us what we should believe. Here we would need a story about how to move from ‘is’ to ‘ought.’ But because for Locke ‘knowing a proposition to be true is to be identified

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with being caused to do something by an object’ (Rorty 1979, 157), i.e., because causation is rational justification, this story is not even conceived of as being necessary. To disentangle the given and cut the Platonic cord requires, once again, the epistemic neutralization of sensation. Through our sensory contact with the world we do directly confront the world causally, but the notion of causality at play here is not infected by the given and hence one not epistemically relevant to propositionally structured knowledge. Unlike Locke, who only pretends to give a mechanistic explanation, Rorty accepts this burden and thinks of the causal impacts on our sensory apparatus as merely causal. As Brandom is fond of pointing out against those who read Rorty as a postmodern thinker for whom anything goes, Rorty thus thinks that our thought and perception are 13 causally constrained. But while ‘there is such a thing as brute physical resistance — the pressure of light waves on Galileo’s eyeballs, or the stone on Dr. Johnson’s boot,’ because Rorty separates explanation and justification, there is ‘no way of transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to facts, to the truth of sentences’ (Rorty 1991, 81). There is no way of doing this because there are no rational relations between language (as well as linguistically structured mental states) and the physical world at all. While the relationship between our perception, thought, talk and the world is strictly causal, rational relations only pertain to items that are propositionally structured, i.e., items within the space of reasons. As such, the space of reasons is autonomous insofar as items within it can only be rationally constrained by other items in this self-same space. But how then does the causal constraint provided by the world relate to the rational constraint generated inside the space of reasons? For Rorty, this is a bad question, for he thinks that any answer to it necessarily reinstates the myth of the given. We know through higher-order philosophical reflection that there is causal constraint, but we can’t, on pain of reinstating the myth of the given, answer the question of how this constraint rationally affects our view of the world. It is this separation of the causal sphere from the rational sphere that underlies Rorty’s infamous view of knowledge. Since we cannot explain how rational constraint from the world gets into the justificatory process in the space of reasons, and only items in this space can justify other items in this space, in thinking about knowledge we must ignore the ‘vertical’ relation of mind to world and focus exclusively on the result of ‘horizontal’ conversational or justificatory processes. As Rorty puts it, ‘justification is not a matter of a special relation between

13

See Brandom 2000a, 160-1.

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ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice.... We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation’ (Rorty 1979, 170). The move from objectivity to solidarity, or the move from being concerned with how our representations correspond to mind-independent facts to how our beliefs hold up in an ever-widening inter-subjective process of justification, is therefore not a mere prejudice on Rorty’s part, but strictly follows from his underlying view about the relationship of reasons and causes. It is here that we find the link between Rorty’s attitude toward objectivity and the elimination of sensory experience. Simply put, they are linked because the argument for avoiding the confusion between justification and causation, which underlies his argument for overcoming objectivity in favor of solidarity, is based upon the same argument that Rorty previously used to eliminate sensory experience. This argument is his critique of the perceptual given. In the sixties, Rorty tracked the consequence of this critique in the philosophy of mind, leading to his eliminative materialism, while in the seventies he sought out its consequences in epistemology, leading to his social-linguistic holism. The move from eliminative materialism to the rejection of objectivity was thus the carrying forward of this single Sellarsian line of thought. In a passage from a later article on McDowell, but one that uses the language of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty demonstrates the interconnection of these moments: Adopting psychological nominalism, and thereby avoiding a confusion between justification and causation, entails claiming that only a belief can justify a belief. This means drawing a sharp line between experience as the cause of the occurrence of a justification, and the empiricist notion of experience as itself justificatory. It means reinterpreting ‘experience’ as the ability to acquire beliefs noninferentially as a result of neurologically describable causal transactions with the world. (Rorty 1998b, 141)

In other words, untangling the central confusion of the epistemological tradition between justification and causal explanation requires reinterpreting sensory experience in such a way that it is construed as a prepersonal causal transaction with the world rather than something that in being lived through is justificatory for our thinking. Sensory experience so interpreted cannot dictate to us what we should think because, depending upon the system of concepts one has, these causal transactions with the world can be taken up in different ways, leading to different sentences being taken to be true. This means that the world itself, which is only related to us via the causal deliverances that we are now calling experience, cannot offer us reasons to think one thing rather than another. Only other agents in the space of reasons can do

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that. But if the world and its experiential deliverances cannot offer us reasons, it cannot exercise authority over what vocabulary we should use to describe it. The aim of achieving an objective view of the world, one that only contains intrinsically accurate representations, is therefore nonsensical. And this, of course, is the ultimate lesson of Rorty’s second Enlightenment.

VI Now that we have our alternative story about the origin of Rorty’s hostility to objectivity on the table we can come back to why Brandom’s argument that Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism is consistent with a pragmatically rendered notion of objectivity is flawed. The first problem with Brandom’s interpretation of Rorty is that it is, as we have tried to show, predicated upon a false genealogy. Brandom takes it that Rorty’s rejection of objectivity is based on the social pragmatism that Rorty initially developed to eliminate subjective incorrigibility. Based upon this genealogy, Brandom can then argue that Rorty misinterprets the consequences of his own pragmatism insofar as a social pragmatism about objectivity, in contradistinction to Rorty’s avowed understanding, allows for a community to engineer its linguistic practice in such a way that it can grant non-human things authority over their discursive practices. Here is the basis for Brandom’s claim that it is within Rorty’s power to accept a hygienic notion of objectivity, one that is not given, but authorized by a linguistic community. But if, as shown above, Rorty’s elimination of the category of objectivity is not based on his social pragmatism but rather on his prior eliminativist thesis about sensory experience, then this argument does not pull through. Rorty rejects the vocabulary of objectivity because sensation, in being rendered a causal process through its elimination as an epistemic factor in our cognitive lives, cannot rationally mediate between the causal and conceptual orders. Because there is no mediation between these two orders, there is no way to account for how the world rationally constrains, via the deliverances of experience, our beliefs about it. But without an explanation of rational constraint one cannot have a working notion of objectivity. Of course, for Rorty this explanatory lacuna is a positive feature of his position insofar as he thinks it leads directly to his second Enlightenment. Why does Brandom’s interpretation of Rorty misidentify the origin of his hostility to objectivity? Brandom misses the real story because he is as invested in the strategy of eliminating experience as Rorty. In his aptly titled paper, ‘No Experience Necessary: Empiricism, Non-inferential Knowledge, and Secondary Qualities,’ Brandom states that we

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can make sense of perceptual knowledge ‘without postulating a layer of potentially evidentially significant (hence conceptually articulated) states in between purely causally occasioned and physiologically specifiable responses to environing stimuli and full-blown perceptual judgments’ (Brandom 2004, 2).14 In other words, to explain the possibility of perceptual intentionality and knowledge we don’t need a layer of experience that, in being lived through, is rationally relevant to our beliefs and judgments about the world. All we need are full-blown perceptual judgments that are causally occasioned by environmental stimuli. To think otherwise is to fall into the myth of the given. Brandom’s interpretation of Rorty is therefore redemptive: it is meant to show that Rorty’s social pragmatism can accommodate a hygienic notion of objectivity without utilizing the concept of experience. In other words, Brandom wishes to bring Rorty into the new pragmatic fold so as to create a genealogy for his thought that does not undermine his own central aim of rehabilitating objectivity in social-pragmatic terms; for if this rehabilitation could not be effected for Rorty, whose social-pragmatic transformation of Sellars sets the stage for Brandom’s social-normative pragmatism, it would cast doubt on the cogency of his own project. There is a second problem with Brandom’s interpretation of Rorty. Even when taken on its own terms it fails because it does not capture an essential feature of objectivity, namely, that what is objective constrains our thought and perception in a way that is beyond our control. If the category of objectivity is something we engineer can we really say that the world that is taken to be objective through the application of this concept really is objective? To argue, as Rorty and Brandom do, that we are constrained by the world through its causal impact upon us does not address this question because the category of objectivity is a normative structure of authority that cannot, by their own admission, be accounted for or reduced to these causal impacts. So one can either: 1) give an account of how the causal constraint provided by experience (understood in Rorty’s reductionist way) leads to or grounds a type of rational or normative constraint in such a way that this constraint can become part of the content of the concept of objectivity, or 2) provide a notion of objective constraint which is rendered solely at the normative or semantic level. Because of the way that they conceptualize the consequences of the critique of the myth of the given both Rorty and Brandom think that the first course is impossible; accordingly Brandom, on Rorty’s behalf, takes the second. But in accounting for the normative

14

This paper has circulated in mimeo, but it is essentially the same as Brandom (2002), which is published.

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category of objectivity in social-pragmatic terms Brandom makes the category of objectivity optional, thereby leaving out the seemingly essential ingredient that what is objective constrains our thought and perception in a way that is beyond our control. By staying within the terms of Rorty’s social-linguistic pragmatism, Brandom cannot genuinely rehabilitate objectivity.15 Of course, one might question whether the concept of objectivity has to capture the ingredient of constraint beyond our control. Indeed, Brandom might say that one of the consequences of pragmatism is that there simply is no such concept of objectivity, that it is a metaphysical illusion, and that his social-pragmatic account captures all that there is to the concept. How can we respond to this point? One of the aims of pragmatism, at least on my understanding, is to provide an elucidation of our concepts and a ‘reconstruction’ of our practices, rather than a complete revision of them. This follows from pragmatism’s suspicion of foundationalist positions that think that philosophical analysis can begin from a standpoint outside of our concept and practices. For the pragmatist, philosophical analysis must begin in medias res, i.e., with all of the presuppositions that it in fact has, and commence in a process of problem solving that progressively elucidates the meaning of our concepts and reconstructs the shape of our practices. In moving so far from how the ordinary concept of objectivity operates in our inquiries, by making objectivity something that we control, Brandom completely revises the concept rather than elucidates it. Of course this complete revision may be justified, but the burden is on Brandom to show that it is. I don’t think Brandom has met this burden, especially when we have on hand a pragmatic account of objectivity that can accommodate the fact that what is objective constrains our perception, thought, and action in a way that is beyond our control. To conclude, let us briefly review this account.

VII All pragmatists agree that the metaphysically realist notion of objectivity as that which is there anyway in complete abstraction from our perception, thought, and action is one that is beyond the bounds of sense. However, this by itself does not leave us in a situation where objective

15

I would argue that this result applies not only to the analysis Brandom gives in his paper ‘An Arc of Thought: From Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to his Pragmatism,’ but also to his full-fledged analysis of objectivity given in chapter 8 of Making it Explicit. This argument will have to wait for another occasion.

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constraint is absent, for the pragmatist can formulate a notion of ‘constraint from within.’ Indeed, most of the figures in the pragmatic tradition, including those who are taken to be the most Promethean (Dewey and James) put forward just such a view. They do so by elaborating a thick notion of experience in which the rational relations characteristic of the space of reasons are internal to our sensory and bodily responsiveness to the world. This means that our sensory and bodily states, are not bare states of the given, but are either habits, or when conscious, 16 shot through with rational relations. But these rational relations do not operate in an ‘frictionless void,’ as an idealist might posit, because the experiential states which they sediment are states of an active body that is always coping with world-generated problems that in their facticity cannot be circumvented.17 For the pragmatist the fact that our sensori-motor activity always encounters problems in the world provides a notion of objective constraint — one that is beyond our control — that in having to be dealt with in our perception, thought, and action registers itself ‘within.’ While pragmatism thereby has a notion of objective constraint, this constraint should not be thought of in authoritarian terms. In our contact with the world what is given is not the world as it is ‘in itself’ but the world as it is given to a being whose experience is structured by the concepts, skills, and capacities acquired through their previous world coping. These acquired concepts, skills, and capacities are plastic, meaning that they, to varying degrees, change over time due to the habituation and learning that results from dealing with a recalcitrant and independent world. The fact that these items make our experience of the world possible allows the pragmatist to avoid the myth of the given, the myth that we can perceive or think that something is thus-and-so without the benefit of prior habituation, learning, and concept formation. The key for avoiding the myth of the given is thus not accepting an absolute break between the sensory and the conceptual, as Rorty and Brandom think, but recognizing that there are acquired conditions of possibility for engaging the world, conditions that change due to learning and habituation. In shifting the criteria for avoiding the myth of the given in this way we allow into our theory a thick notion of experience without accepting the inference, necessary for Rorty’s position, that this notion of experience necessarily brings in its wake the authoritarian metaphysical view that the Second Enlightenment is meant to overcome.

16

See Dewey (1981, 61) for a classical exposition of this view.

17

For the phrase ‘frictionless void’ see McDowell (1994).

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Rorty, predictably, rejects this conclusion, thinking that this thick pragmatic notion of experience is just another version of the given. On his view, the pragmatist should have dropped ‘the term ‘experience,’ not redefined it .… He should have agreed ... that a great gulf divides sensation and cognition, [and] decided that cognition was possible only for language-users’ (Rorty 1998c, 297). In other words, what the pragmatist should have realized is that the intentionality of cognition can be accounted for exclusively by considering the aboutness that pertains to verbal behavior and that it can be separated entirely from experience — which now is understood as a pre-personal causal transaction with the world. But as we have seen, in redefining experience in this way, Rorty also undermines the possibility of explaining how the objective world can play a rational role in the formation of our world-directed beliefs. If Brandom and the New Pragmatists are to rehabilitate objectivity in a non-metaphysical fashion it is this deficiency in Rorty’s view that they must tackle. And until they do so by reintroducing a robust notion of experience back into the pragmatic tradition, they will just be spinning Rorty’s wheel. Received: June 2009

References Bernstein, R. J. 1971. ‘The Challenge of Scientific Materialism,’ in Materialism and the MindBody Problem, D. Rosenthal, ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Brandom, R. 2000a. ‘Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,’ in Brandom 2000b. ______, ed. 2000b. Rorty and his Critics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ______. 2002. ‘Non-inferential Knowledge, Perceptual Experience, and Secondary Qualities: Placing McDowell’s Empiricism,’ in Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, N.H. Smith, ed. London: Routledge. ______. 2004. ‘No Experience Necessary: Empiricism, Non-inferential Knowledge, and Secondary Qualities,’ unpublished manuscript. ______. 2008. ‘An Arc of Thought: From Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to his Pragmatism,’ unpublished manuscript, available at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/index.html Dewey, J. 1981. ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,’ in The Philosophy of John Dewey, J. McDermott, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, S. 2008. ‘Rorty, Davidson, and the New Pragmatists,’ Philosophical Topics 36: 16792.

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McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. ______. 2000. ‘Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,’ in Brandom 2000b. Misak, C. 2000. Truth, Politics, and Morality. London: Routledge. ______, ed. 2007. New Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, H. 2003. ‘Truth as Convenient Friction,’ Journal of Philosophy 100: 167-90. Ramberg, B. 2000. ‘Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson,’ in Brandom 2000b. Rorty, R. 1965. ‘Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,’ in Materialism and the MindBody Problem, D. Rosenthal, ed. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. ______. 1970. ‘Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,’ Journal of Philosophy 67: 399-424. ______. 1971. ‘In Defense of Eliminative Materialism,’ in Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem, D. Rosenthal, ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ______. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ______. 1991. ‘Texts and Lumps,’ in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1998a. ‘Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations,’ in Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1998b. ‘The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism,’ in Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1998c. ‘Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,’ in Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 1999. ‘Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,’ Revue Internationale de Philosophie 53: 7-20. ______. 2000. ‘Response to Ramberg,’ in Brandom 2000b. Sellars, W. 1968. Science and Metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ______. 1975. ‘Autobiographical Reflections,’ in Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars, Hector-Neri Castañeda, ed. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill. ______. 1991. Science, Perception and Reality. Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing. ______. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stout, J. 2007. ‘On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism,’ in Misak 2007.

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 591 How Understanding Makes Knowledge Valuable 591 Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 591-610

How Understanding Makes Knowledge Valuable AYCA BOYLU University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA

Many have suggested that understanding is a worthier goal for theoretical reflection than is propositional knowledge.1 Some have even

1

About two decades ago some prominent historians began to suggest that the Greek discussion of ‘episteme’ was in fact not a discussion of what we call ‘knowledge’ but of what we call ‘understanding,’ and hence that contemporary epistemology was not a faithful continuation of the theoretical inquiry into episteme found in Plato and Aristotle. These historians held that we uncover an independently interesting and unjustly ignored theoretical inquiry when we attain a proper understanding of the focus of these Ancient inquiries. See J.M.E. Moravcsik, ‘Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy,’ Neue Hefte Für Philosophie 15/16 (1979) 53-69; M.F. Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge,’ in Aristotle on Science: The ‘Posterior Analytics,’ E. Berti, ed. (Padova: Editrice Antenore 1981); Hugh H. Benson, Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato’s Early Dialogues (New York: Oxford University Press 2000). For discussions pertinent to the value of knowledge see Epistemic Value, Part One, A. Haddock, A. Millar & D.H. Pritchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009); Talbot Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009); Jonathan L. Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press 2003); J.L. Kvanvig, ‘Pointless Truth,’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy 32 (2008) 199-212; W. Riggs, ‘Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4 (2002) 79-96; W. Riggs, ‘Beyond Truth & Falsehood: The Real Value of Knowing that p,’ Philosophical Studies 107 (2002) 87-108; Robert C. Roberts and

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claimed that, unlike knowledge, understanding is always intrinsically valuable.2 In this essay, I aim only to show that there is a basic value in understanding and that when knowledge conduces to understanding, it gets this basic value extrinsically from understanding. After distinguishing two kinds of understanding, namely, teleological and non-teleological understanding, I will conclude that teleological understanding has more of this basic value than does non-teleological understanding.

I

The Value of Knowledge

Let me first turn to the most convincing arguments against the intrinsic value of knowledge. There are two ways in which ‘believing what is true is intrinsically valuable’ can be conceived. First, one might put the emphasis on ‘believing’ and claim that believing what is true is intrinsically valuable. That is, it is always intrinsically valuable to assent to true propositions. Some have observed that there are instances of knowledge that lack epistemic value and that these instances can gain extrinsic epistemic value only if they serve some important epistemic or practical pursuit.3 To borrow Robert Roberts and Jay Wood’s example, it is hard to see for instance why knowing that the third letter in the 41,365th listing in the 1977 Wichita telephone directory is a ‘d’ should have any epistemic value whatsoever.4 Surely, this piece of knowledge might gain some epistemic value if it is related to some important epistemic or practical goal. But then its value is extrinsic, not intrinsic. If we are told that the person possessing this piece of knowledge is getting paid to find the typos in this telephone directory since it will be updated and the ‘d’ is in fact a typo, then we can bring into view the extrinsic value of this instance of knowledge. But in the absence of some such story, the person in question cannot be credited with a piece of knowledge that has intrinsic value. Along the same lines, Talbot Brewer emphasizes that a person who keeps memorizing phone numbers out of a phone

Jay W. Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press 2007), Ch. 6; L. Zagzebski, ‘Recovering Understanding,’ in Knowledge, Truth and Obligation, M. Steup, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press 2001). 2

See, for instance, Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding; Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, Ch. 8.

3

Henceforth, ‘knowledge’ will be used to designate ‘propositional knowledge’ unless indicated otherwise.

4

Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 157

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book cannot really be in the business of accumulating intrinsic value.5 There is no loss, let alone loss of intrinsic value if the number memorizer remembers only a few of the numbers the next day. Robert Roberts and Jay Wood’s diagnosis of someone who loves to assent to true propositions without any discrimination is that this person is showing a kind of intellectual pathology not an intellectual virtue.6 The second way to read ‘believing what is true is intrinsically valuable’ is to put the emphasis on ‘true.’ On this conception believing what is true is intrinsically valuable. So what has value is not assenting to as many true propositions as possible. Rather, the contention is that it is always good that a proposition be true if one believes it. The problem here resembles the one above. If the proposition one believes captures a fact that it is not valuable to believe in isolation, why should whether it is true or not matter? Imagine someone who is bored at a piano concert counting how many times the note E will be repeated throughout the performance. It is hard to see why she would be going through a valuable epistemic change by changing her false belief that there were 142 repetitions of E to the true one that there were 143 of them. These ruminations seem to leave warrant as the last resource for establishing the intrinsic value of knowledge. But so long as a belief is not valuable, adding warrant to it cannot make it valuable, either. Take for instance Ernest Sosa’s account of externalist warrant. Sosa points out that the reliability of the ability through which an achievement is produced alters the value of the achievement.7 For instance, a song on a CD recording of a musician might sound very impressive after having been corrected many times in the recording studio. Yet this is not nearly as impressive an achievement as the singer’s skill giving the song the quality it has on the CD, live on stage. Analogously, it might be said that one’s true belief seems to have more epistemic value if it is a result of one’s ‘ability to distinguish reliably the true from the false.’8 This would be hard to resist only if we assume that the true belief in question has intrinsic value. But the fact that one’s belief that there were 142 repetitions of E during a concert is produced by such a reliable skill does not alter the valuelessness of that belief.9

5

Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, Ch. 8

6

Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 156

7

Ernest Sosa, Knowledge In Perspective: Selected Essays In Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), Part 4, Sec. 13

8

Ibid., 244

9

Following Zagzebski, Kvanvig points out that the fact that a true belief is produced

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The same problem emerges when we turn attention to internalist justification. It seems that the presence of an internal justification often does add value to the cognitive relation between the epistemic agent and the proposition. Someone who merely believes that one loses color perception as one goes deeper underwater bears an epistemically poorer relation to this proposition compared to an experienced scuba diver who believes the same proposition with internal justification. Without a doubt, taking a proposition to be true suffices to hold a belief but this does not mean that there are no criteria that can render certain ways of holding a belief better than others. For instance in Meno Socrates says that when one has knowledge, one will not easily be talked out of one’s true belief — one’s true belief will be ‘tied down’ (97e1- 98a2). Robert Roberts and Jay Wood make use of John Locke’s ‘strength of confidence’ (‘subject’s dispositional probability estimate concerning the truth of a proposition’) and Alvin Plantinga’s ‘depth of ingression’ (‘the degree to which giving up the belief would cause reverberations in the subject’s noetic structure’) criteria in their discussion of ‘holding’ a belief.10 When internal justification creates this kind of alteration in the way a belief is held, it does seem to affect the epistemic value of the true belief. But once again, if believing the true proposition that there were 142 repetitions of E during a concert does not matter when taken in isolation, why should for instance having a stronger confidence in this belief matter? Careful reflection leads one to join Roberts, Wood, and Brewer in dropping the commonly held assumption that true belief has intrinsic value and thereby in holding that knowledge is not intrinsically valuable. But this does not mean that knowledge is not as important as we thought it was. It only means that we need to see more of its relation to other epistemic or practical pursuits to apprehend various kinds of value it can extrinsically possess. Let us then focus on understanding with this goal in view.

by someone or some faculty or some process that is reliable does not add to the value that true belief already has. As Kvanvig claims, seeing such external reliability as adding any epistemic value would be similar to finding a piece of beautiful furniture aesthetically more valuable upon finding out that it has been produced by a factory that produces beautiful furniture most of the time. Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 49-50. This is a serious difficulty for most externalist accounts. 10

Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues, 208

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II

Structure among Objects of Understanding

The variety of things that are capable of being understood is head-spinning: one might come to understand any person one happens to meet, a past conversation that one keeps revisiting, a sonata one hears, a proof one sees in a book, a computer one is using, why group behavior is different from individual behavior, how currents move, that reading a certain story is exactly what one’s friend needs right now, etc. The sorts of things we ordinarily take ourselves to be understanding — at least to some extent — vary from facts, like that he was the only one to survive in this accident, or that a conditional is true when its consequence is true, to certain hows and whys, e.g. how certain things are related, or why certain things are the way they are.11 We also talk about understanding particulars, such as artworks, persons, other life forms, activities, relationships, theories, machines, etc. I hope to unearth an underlying structure of objects of understanding by providing an explanation of this variety. In depicting what sorts of objects admit of understanding, I have not restricted myself just to facts. This might seem disruptive for those whose initial reaction might be that a particular such as a system, an activity, a theory, a poem, or a person admits of understanding only because facts about the particular admit of understanding. On this approach, when I utter ‘I understand this old woman here,’ I mean ‘I understand all the facts about this old woman here.’ This approach rests on two assumptions that need to be scrutinized. The first is that understanding a fact as such is possible and the second is that understanding facts about particulars belonging to certain kinds can be explained without employing the notion of understanding those particulars. I will come back to the first of these assumptions, which has received serious challenge. Even if the first assumption is granted however, the thought that understanding a particular is nothing other than understanding all the facts about is still a flawed one. Take for instance Piotr Anderszewski`s performance of Chopin Ballade No.4 (op.47) at a concert hall on a specific date. It would be fair to assume on this view that every additional fact I understand about this performance contributes to my understanding of the performance. But obviously, understanding some of the facts, such as the fact that

11

Even though I shall refer to this category by ‘hows and whys,’ in fact it also involves objects such as when to exit pauses in playing a certain sonata or to whom to talk to when one needs advice or to which diving style resembles life more or to what one owes her unique voice or where a certain event might have taken place or whether this machine works, etc.

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Anderszewski sat exactly sixteen inches away from the piano or the fact that he wore a tuxedo of a certain size, is irrelevant to understanding this performance. By contrast, a music critic might cite the fact that silences were not breaks between musical sentences, but were themselves musical expressions, in an effort to convey to a novice a deeper understanding of Anderszewski’s performance. Similarly, if someone were to tell us that they understood Freud’s theory better now that they understand the fact that the sentences expressing his theory can form a square, we would take it as a joke. On the other hand, a psychotherapist who understands Freud’s theory might try to convey this understanding by citing, for example, the fact that depending on the circumstances, parapraxes and dreams provide the therapist with an insight into the unconscious of the patient. Evidently, understanding a particular does not consist in understanding all the facts about it but only the ‘right’ ones. When pressed to explicate what it is that makes certain facts about the particular the right ones for achieving understanding, one must turn to the particular itself. In more ample terms, it is Piotr Anderszewski`s performance of Chopin Ballade No.4 op.47 at a concert hall on a specific date itself that determines which of the hows and whys must be understood for the performance to be understood. While how he wiped his hands during the performance falls outside the bounds of his performance, how he entered the silences falls within these bounds. Each salient how or why determines facts salient to understanding the particular. Since how he entered silences is salient, whatever helps explain how he entered silences will be salient.12 For instance, if one understands the fact that he did not enter into such silences because the notes instructed him to do so but because their meaning reached out to him to be conveyed, this will contribute to one’s understanding of the performance. When viewed this way, objects of understanding cease to look messy. Instead, we begin to glimpse an underlying structure among the objects of understanding.

III

Understanding as categorically different from knowledge

At this point I might be reminded that even though orthodox contemporary epistemology is primarily interested in propositional knowledge, it does not totally neglect categories such as knowing how and object knowledge (i.e. knowledge by acquaintance). The motivation behind

12

Whether all the salient hows and whys can be captured by facts is worth investigating; however, I will not undertake that task here.

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bringing forward this reminder would be to draw one’s attention to an analogous variety of types of knowledge, so as to create a suspicion as to whether understanding really is different in kind. It is. The proposal at hand is this: (i)

Understanding a fact is knowing the proposition that captures the fact in question;

(ii)

understanding the hows and whys are simply knowing the hows and whys; and

(iii)

understanding a particular is knowing that particular by acquaintance. Let us consider these suggestions respectively.

If something is a fact then we can know it by knowing the proposi13 tion that captures it. However whether that fact also admits of understanding is an open question. I can know the fact that I just scratched my hand, but what does it mean to understand the fact that I just scratched my hand? The sentence ‘I just scratched my hand’ surely does admit of understanding; you understood that sentence as soon as you read it by understanding what it expresses. You might have also come to believe the proposition that I just scratched my hand. Further, in coming to believe it, you must have made use of some understanding, say, understanding of human action. Indeed, certain things that this fact is about are indeed proper objects of understanding: One can understand how a human hand works, what it is to move intentionally, etc. Yet this fact as such does not seem to be the sort of thing that can be understood. It can, however, become part of something that admits of understanding, namely, a coherent body of facts. If it is seen as part of, for instance, a story about a certain sickness of mine, then it can be understood as part of an important period in my life. The same is true for the proposition that captures this fact. It is an open question whether a single proposition can be a proper object of understanding when taken in isolation. This can be likened to musical phrases of a sonata. A minimal musical understanding is required to recognize a musical phrase as a musical phrase but a musical phrase of a certain sonata is not an apt object of understanding as such. It can only be understood within the context of something understandable such as the sonata it partly constitutes.

13

Some hold that a fact is a true proposition. I leave it up to my reader to pick a notion of fact since it has no bearing on the points of this essay.

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While most propositions are to be understood within coherent bodies, the same is not true for knowing propositions.14 Understanding a proposition within a coherent body of propositions differs significantly from what coherentists take warrant to be. In the case of understanding a proposition, the coherence is to be found within a body of propositions to which the proposition in question belongs. This is why a proposition (if it belongs to some such body or bodies) cannot be understood alone. The more one grasps the coherence, the more one understands the propositions and their place in this coherent body. Any departure from coherence is an impediment for understanding. By contrast, the coherence requirement of warrant and thereby of knowledge is not about grasping the coherence of a whole. What is known is not a body of propositions either. What is known is just the proposition in question and all one needs to do to know it is to ensure that this new belief 15 coheres with one’s held beliefs. Even if one insists that a proposition can always be understood as such by, for instance, conceptualizing understanding as ‘grasping’ or ‘cognizing,’ there would still be a gap that remains between knowing a proposition and understanding it. Indeed, one needs to understand the proposition that Ida is a sensitive person to some extent to know it. But while two people can know that Ida is a sensitive person, one can understand that Ida is a sensitive person more than the other. This is a thread that runs through between other kinds of knowledge and understanding as well. There is always a minimal understanding required by knowledge but one can understand better what one already knows.16

14

Catherine Elgin generalizes this point and argues that a proposition is never an apt object of understanding; it is always to be understood within a comprehensive body of propositions. I am not sure if this point can be generalized. It seems to me that there are certain cases where it is harder to deny that the proposition in question does not admit of understanding as such: e.g., Ida is a sensitive person. I suspect that the difference in a case like this is that the proposition in question is itself more like a summary of a coherent body of propositions. C. Elgin, ‘Understanding and the Facts,’ Philosophical Studies 132 (2007) 33-42.

15 In defining understanding a fact in terms of knowing a fact, there is another difficulty as well; we seem to be capable of understanding certain facts without having propositional knowledge of them. An adept rider might plausibly not have noticed that a bike is steered primarily by leaning rather than by turning the handlebars. In other words, the rider can understand this fact without knowing or even believing the proposition that captures it. The strength of this point turns on the question just how weak the criteria for having a concept or propositionalizing a fact can be. Since I cannot pursue that discussion here, I am relying on intuitive grounds here. 16

I thank an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to the fact that knowledge always requires a minimal understanding.

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Consider the difference between ‘understanding why’ and ‘knowing why.’ One can easily come to know why one’s friend is very upset by knowing the proposition that she was insulted. Imagine being told, ‘I was insulted.’ Again, a minimal understanding is required if one is to come to know this. One needs to see the relationship between being insulted and getting upset, for instance. So as one relates the utterance of her friend to her feeling upset, one is in the midst of understanding why she is upset. This is precisely the point. Though one has achieved knowledge, one is in the midst of understanding since her understanding can be, as Roberts and Wood emphasize, deeper, more insightful and more penetrating. Had one had a similar experience of insult herself, for instance, one would understand more deeply why her friend is so upset as a result of an insult. The analogue of this discrepancy can be traced all the way to the discrepancy between knowing something and understanding it. While we who teach philosophy might well have known hundreds of students in classrooms, such knowledge marks only the beginning of understanding them. This discloses the place of understanding in knowledge by acquaintance. One needs to have a minimal understanding of the person, to count as having been acquainted with her to begin with. One needs to recognize the person as a person, for example. This is a minimal understanding of her qua person. Nonetheless it is still a tincture of understanding. But again, this minimal understanding can grow in many ways. Among the hundreds of students we have known, we might have had the chance to have a deep understanding of only a few of them.

IV

Irreducibility of Understanding

We have seen earlier that there is a structure among objects of understanding. We noted that ultimate objects of understanding are certain kinds of particulars and that certain hows and whys are to be understood in reference to these particulars and finally, that certain propositions are to be understood in reference to these hows and whys. I now turn to the irreducibility of understanding and to the nature of its ultimate objects. One reductive route one might wish to take is to construe understanding as some constant way of cognitively approaching an object. Most of the candidates for this task turn out to be bad candidates since they turn out to be unnecessary for understanding. Consider ‘imagining’: understanding something always involves imagining it. However, the proposal at hand will not work for every case. One need not imagine anything to understand what makes a number irrational.

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There are of course more plausible candidates to capture the commonality across all cases of understanding. One proposal might be that understanding involves appreciating that which is understood. Also, following Brewer’s insightful suggestion, one might think that understanding involves manifesting certain intellectual and practical virtues (depending on the object of understanding) in one’s activities involving what one understands.17 It is plausible to see understanding as the appreciation or as involving the appreciation of what is understood. One would not believe someone who claims that she understands a sonata but does not appreciate it qua sonata at all. However, appreciating a sonata qua sonata cannot be explained without making any reference to understanding. Obviously, the main reason why one would lack such appreciation is precisely due to being far from understanding it. One needs to, for instance, be gripped by the story the sonata is telling. Not being able to hear the story in the sonata signals lack of understanding and explains why one cannot appreciate it. The appreciation that we expect from a person who claims to have some understanding of the sonata depends upon the very presence of that understanding. Nor may understanding a particular be reduced to manifesting intellectual or practical virtues in activities involving that particular. Although this proposal of Brewer’s was not intended as a reductive account of understanding, it is helpful to investigate whether understanding can be reduced to it. It is helpful in particular to see why it cannot be used in a reductive account of understanding. It is not that some cases of understanding would escape this reduction. Rather, it is because ‘ manifesting intellectual or practical virtues in activities involving what is understood’ requires understanding in its own account. On this route, one would get desperately stuck. For when one tries to give an account of why the virtues manifested by a person with understanding are intellectual virtues (e.g. not being inappropriately dismissive in understanding a theory), one is pressed to say something like, ‘’It is an intellectual virtue so long as and because it advances one’s understanding of the theory.’ Another reductive route to an account of understanding might be sought by shifting one’s gaze from what kind of a relation understanding might be, to what kind of objects admit of understanding. The focus now is some commonality among all objects of understanding. The hope, on this approach, is that one might succeed in picking out what makes for understanding by seeing what makes an object a possible

17

Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, ch. 8

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object of understanding. And again, this will open a reductive route to the understanding of understanding only if a commonality that can itself be characterized without reference to understanding is revealed. This method can easily mislead, unless one casts one’s net broadly enough and does not overlook the variety of proper objects of understanding. Though Moravscik does not explicitly endorse a reductive agenda, his brief list of the possible objects of understanding does suggest the contours of such an approach. He writes, ‘… only a very select group of entities can function as proper objects. We understand systems, languages, mathematics, proofs.… What we understand are systems of 18 various sorts … .’ He continues by explaining that only systems have defining rules and this is the essential feature of systems that makes them apt objects of understanding. From this observation, he concludes that understanding is internalizing defining rules. The problem that immediately strikes one about a reductive proposal along these lines is that the category of ‘system’ falls short of being a broad enough net to cast to capture all objects of understanding. We are perfectly capable of understanding objects other than systems: paintings, sonatas, persons, stories, concepts, questions, emotions, etc. Yet, if it is true that systems are also apt objects of understanding, one might wonder whether it is possible to find a feature that all these objects have in common with systems. Burnyeat states that understanding is related to intelligible systems of elements.19 The appeal to system here can be seen as too restrictive given that paintings are not systems, but we can revise the suggestion and consider only ‘being intelligible.’ That is, the new reductive proposal might be that understanding is a relation that takes all and only intelligibles as objects. To complete the reductive proposal, one needs to add also that being intelligible is conceptually independent of understanding. But the claim that intelligibility is conceptually independent of understanding is obviously not true; what else can the intelligibility of an object be other than its being an apt object of understanding? Another attempt might be to invoke ‘coherence’ rather than ‘intelligibility.’20 To draw attention to this coherence aspect of the objects of understanding Kvanvig writes,

18

Moravcsik, ‘Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy,’ 55-6

19

Burnyeat, ‘Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge,’ 134

20

The use of ‘coherence’ might not be the best choice here; ‘unity’ or the Aristotlean notion ‘eidos’ might be better proposals. I am employing ‘coherence’ mainly because its use is commonplace in the literature on understanding.

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What is distinctive about understanding…is internal to cognition. It is internal seeing or appreciating of explanatory and other coherence-inducing relationships in a body of information that is crucial for understanding.21

Kvanvig takes ‘coherence’ to be a relation that holds among propositions. I do not wish to restrict myself to a conception of coherence that holds only among propositions for it is questionable whether all objects of understanding can be captured by facts. If for instance, a sonata cannot be captured by a set of salient facts, it is safer to hold that its coherence is among its notes or its musical phrases rather than among salient facts about it. What the coherence will be among depends on what is going to be understood. A theory’s coherence will be among propositions, a person’s coherence will be among her character traits, a machine’s coherence will be among its parts, a dance performance’s coherence will be among its phrases, etc. If it can be shown that what we might call ‘coherence bearers’ such as character traits and dance phrases can be captured by facts, I am equally content with using Kvanvig’s narrower conception of ‘coherence.’ Now, it seems true that all the apt objects of understanding possess coherence or they can all be said to be coherent unities of some sort: theories are coherent (or they can be understood to the extent they are coherent); stories exemplify some kind of coherence; and so do paintings, certain machines, persons, etc. Nonetheless, coherence cannot be employed for the reduction project for a different reason — a reason we have seen before. It requires understanding in its own account. The difficulty begins to emerge once we see the dependence of the coherence of an object on the kind it belongs to. The coherence of a theory depends on what a theory is supposed to look like whereas the coherence of a sonata depends on what a sonata is supposed to be like. This is why just taking the standards that help establish the coherence of a theory to be the same as standards that help establish the coherence of a dance performance is not a viable option. The more one specifies what each sort of coherence consists in, the more one gets thrown off by the dissimilarities among various kinds of coherences. For instance, the coherence of a theory might partly consist in avoiding logical contradictions — though indeed it goes way beyond that since it is not enough to avoid logical contradictions to explain a certain phenomenon. The coherence of a dance performance on the other hand crucially depends on the unity of the story or the theme on which the performance unfolds.

21

Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, 198

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Yet, when one takes a step back to get a hold of that which weaves all these different kinds of coherences together, one finds herself needing the help of the notion of understanding. Coherence seems to gesture towards something more than simple relatedness. Consider the following facts that might be seen as related: She slammed the door as she left the room. The room was in a house that overlooks the sea. The sea had a tracing of moonlight.

These facts hardly carve out the reality in a way that manifests coherence. To spell out when and how they carve out a piece of reality that can be seen as coherent, one is pressed to refer back to understanding. Our primary reason to see certain facts as incoherent even if they are related with relations that are not trivial, is not to be able to understand them given the relations they stand to one another. Coherence goes beyond being non-trivially related. Facts (or other ‘coherence bearers’ — if there are such bearers that cannot be captured by facts) compose a coherent whole only when what they compose admits of understanding. This means that the last step of the reductive route cannot be taken. Coherence cannot be explained without referring back to understanding itself.

V

Towards a Non-Reductive Account of Understanding: Teleological and Non-Teleological Understanding

If one leaves the reductive ambition aside, the coherence proposal can lend itself to an illuminating account of understanding. We have just seen that what is involved in understanding is not merely grasping the relations among a bunch of facts (a life), propositions (a story), phrases (a dance performance), colors (a painting), notes (a sonata), or the like. These units can be related in many different ways without bringing about a coherent body that waits to be understood. What is special about the way in which these units come together when they do compose an object of understanding is that it satisfies the criteria that make something of a certain kind. When phrases do compose a dance performance, they are related in such a way that they satisfy the criteria for being a dance performance. When a group of words do form a sentence, the words are related so as to satisfy the criteria for being a sentence. Accordingly, understanding is the criteria-grasping epistemic pursuit. When we reflect on how one understands things such as poems, musical pieces, performances, artifacts and persons on the one hand, and how one understands things such as the solar system, currents or physical pain on the other, we observe an important difference.

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To understand whether a bunch of sounds is a musical performance, and if it is, to understand it as a musical performance, one needs to have some dim conception of the ideals that constitute a perfectly good musical performance. This is not a mere epistemic requirement we face to understand a particular musical performance. We need to have some dim conception of a perfectly good musical performance since a pianist’s striking the keys itself needs to have some goodness qua musical performance to be a musical performance. Going back to Anderszewski’s performance, if what Anderszewski did in striking the keys of the piano departs completely from such ideals and hence does not manifest any goodness qua musical performance, it cannot count 22 as a musical performance to begin with. So the very attempt to make sense of this noise is simultaneously the attempt to bring into view the ideals that constitute the telos of musical performance, namely, the ideals that constitute a perfectly good musical performance. To put it differently, understanding such teleological particulars involves grasping evaluative criteria. Understanding the telos of a musical performance, for example, involves seeing the aptness of, say, perfecting one’s expressive power as one of the ideals of musical performance. To see this, one need not have a perfect understanding of what perfecting one’s expressive power might consist in. But one does need a dim conception of it. Then, one is led to investigate further what perfecting one’s expressive power consists in. The more one grasps the contours of such ideals that constitute the telos of a musical performance, the more one understands and appreciates how and to what extent the particular musical performance before her manifests its telos.23 This is why a music critic who is in the

22

It is not only musical performances that are supposed to approximate being perfectly good qua their kind to be what they are. The coming together of two persons is supposed to approximate being perfectly good qua friendship to be a friendship at all, a string of sentences expressing philosophical thoughts must approximate being perfectly good qua philosophical theory to be a philosophical theory at all, and so on. Examples can be multiplied. Stories, knives, cars, mosques, dance performances, paintings, conversations and persons all seem to be particulars that are supposed to have some goodness qua their kind to be the kind of particulars they are. I follow Judith Jarvis Thomson in drawing the boundaries of these ‘teleological’ entities. See Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2001). For a more restrictive conception of this category, see Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001).

23

This is not to imply that one somehow first gets a grip on the ideals constituting the telos of a musical performance and then understands a particular performance. After all, one cannot understand the ideals of a musical performance without having begun understanding any particular performances. A better description seems

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midst of understanding Anderszewski’s performance would inevitably use a value-laden language in describing the performance to a novice. She would perhaps say, You hear a man who knew the piano deeply and almost wallowed in its sensual possibilities. Anderszewski played with all the qualities he needed: boldness, tenderness, grace. His dynamics were apt, and his phrasing was wise. The startling clarity of the sound was imbued with orchestral color — he called on strings, winds and percussion, and they were ubiquitously present as exquisitely characterized voices in the icy perfection of his keyboard technique. Anderszewski sat quietly and listened intensely, but his body rocked almost imperceptibly with rhythm, and his rhythmic patterns were so sharply defined and rigorously applied that an occasional alteration — a minute rubato — was tellingly dramatic. His expressive flexibility, exceptional left-hand mobility and eloquence were combined with a grasp of every musical detail. His absorption into the introspective world of the composer was judged to perfection. He often challenged my own notions of how this music should go, but every provocation arose from emotional currents welling up from fissured, subterranean depths. This was a feat of pianism and a feat 24 of musicianship.

By contrast, the criteria whose satisfaction brings about the coherence of a non-teleological particular are non-evaluative. In figuring out how to go about understanding currents, it does not make sense to try to bring into view what a perfectly good current is. This is because a current, unlike a musical performance, is not the sort of thing that has to manifest some goodness qua its kind to be what it is. Those things that need to come together to compose the coherence of a current come together in accordance with non-evaluative criteria. Thus this sort of understanding involves grasping things like what it is to move like a current or what causes a current, not, for instance, what it is to be a perfectly expressive qua current. Let me call this sort of understanding ‘non-teleological understanding.’

VI

How Understanding Makes Knowledge Valuable

The distinction between teleological understanding and non-teleological understanding is quite helpful in thinking about different sorts of

to be that one can understand a particular musical performance only if one has some understanding of the ideals that constitute its telos, and, one advances this understanding of the telos by understanding particular musical performances. The two are interdependent in experience. 24

This is a collage composed of some of Anderszewski’s reviews in The New York Times, The Guardian and The New York Sun.

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value understanding can have. Thus it is helpful in thinking about different ways in which understanding can make knowledge valuable. When we turn our attention to teleological understanding, we immediately find value due to the special particulars that teleological understanding can be directed at. Any theory we set out to understand must manifest some goodness qua its kind to be a theory, any poem we set out to understand must manifest some goodness qua its kind and so on. Hence, understanding such teleological particulars involves both understanding what it is for them to be perfectly good qua their kind, and also understanding their manner and degree of approximating being perfectly good qua their kind. In other words, teleological understanding involves appreciating the essential intrinsic value of its object. Consequently, this kind of understanding is always intrinsically valuable in this sense. This is one way in which understanding can make knowledge valuable. If one’s knowledge conduces to her teleological understanding, it possesses an extrinsic value that it would otherwise lack. If one’s knowledge of a mathematical truth for example, helps one get a better grip on the value of a mathematical theory qua mathematical theory then one’s knowledge gains a kind of extrinsic epistemic value it lacked before. It becomes valuable since it helps one appreciate the intrinsic value of a mathematical theory in light of appreciating (to some extent) the ideals that constitute a perfectly good mathematical theory. Excelling in placing the mathematical truth in its proper place by deepening one’s understanding of the theory provides one with growing internal justification for her assent to the mathematical truth. In fact, it is highly questionable whether a true belief can ever be part of teleological understanding unless it is internally justified. Once teleological understanding begins, internal justification of all the related true beliefs that form part of one’s understanding begins. If a true belief is not yet internally justified, it does not yet enter into one’s understanding of the salient web of facts. Some argue that understanding can involve false beliefs. At least with regard to teleological understanding, this does not seem right. It is obviously true that a person who understands, say, another person to some extent can have false beliefs about her. But this is not the proposed claim. Rather, it is that a false belief can be, to borrow Riggs’ words, ‘included in’ or ‘implicated by’ one’s proper understanding of another person. Riggs for example tells us that he believes that his wife had a traumatic boating accident when she was three that left her with great fear of traveling on water and that the accident had a significant impact on her character. He claims that if this belief of his turns out to be false, because, say, as a matter of fact, she fell of a pier into the ocean, his understanding of his wife would remain the same since her charac-

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ter would still carry the same traces.25 Riggs uses this example to show that one’s understanding can involve false beliefs. I do not think this is the right conclusion to draw however. The reason is that it is not the ocean event with all its details that enters into his understanding of his wife. What enters into his understanding instead seems to be that there was some traumatic ocean accident. The traumatic aspect of it, one might say, has to do with its unexpectedness and a period of feeling helpless in water. These are the aspects of the accident that are required by understanding his wife since these are the ones that have a bearing on how close she is to her telos qua person. I think it is clear that one’s experience of an unexpected ocean accident with the feeling of helplessness attached to it will have a significant bearing on how she is doing in aspiring to her telos. It might have a bearing on, for instance, how or to what extent she approximates being courageous — an ideal that partly constitutes being perfectly good qua person. Consequently, so long as she really did suffer an accident and really did experience a period of feeling helpless, it is hard to see why other details should enter Riggs’s understanding. The salient fact here is not that his wife had a boating accident. Instead it is something like ‘she found herself in the ocean unexpectedly and felt helpless for sometime that made the event a traumatic one for her.’ If his belief that the event was traumatic for her or if his belief that captured the kind of trauma it was turned out to be false, he should conclude that he has been misunderstanding his wife to some extent. Upon reflection, having a false belief lacks epistemic value in this case not simply because it is false but because it cannot partake in the teleological understanding that is under focus. One might think that knowledge can get extrinsic value from teleological understanding not just when it conduces to it but also when knowledge requires this sort of understanding. This is not right, however. Recall that we noted that a minimal musical understanding is required to have knowledge by acquaintance of a Chopin Ballade. In a case like this it seems plausible to assume that knowledge will always have extrinsic value due to requiring teleological understanding. Yet there are other cases that cast doubt on this supposition. One might need a minimal understanding of cars to know that a certain car is missing a wheel. But knowing that a certain car is missing a wheel does not seem to have any value except in connection with other epistemic or practical pursuits.

25

Riggs, ‘Understanding, Knowledge, and the Meno Requirement,’ in Epistemic Value, A Haddock, A. Millar & D. H. Pritchard, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), 335-6

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It might be pointed out that the conception of intrinsic value I have been portraying is mute on the value that non-teleological understanding can have. Clearly, understanding an episode of physical pain, for instance, is not valuable because it involves seeing its kind-relative value in light of appreciating to some extent what it is for pain to be perfectly good qua pain. One way to address this worry is to draw attention to the fact that non-teleological understanding shows up as valuable when we see its relation to teleological understanding. One sense in which an episode of physical pain can be understood is to understand what it is to suffer from it and thereby miss out on a life that would otherwise have been better. This sort of understanding of pain would seem to derive its extrinsic value from its role in understanding the life of the person suffering pain, and how it falls short of being a perfectly good human life qua human life. Likewise, understanding currents in an ocean can get extrinsic value from understanding the impact of currents on the lives of underwater creatures, or perhaps from understanding it as part of the setting in which a human life unfolds. Further, and more importantly, an episode or a stretch of understanding, regardless of whether it is directed at a teleological particular, itself has a telos. Unifying a series of beliefs would not count as a stretch of understanding unless it manifested a minimal goodness qua understanding. If it does not answer to the ideals that constitute being perfectly good understanding at all, for example, if it manifests no depth, no penetration, no insight and the like, it cannot be a stretch of understanding. This sort of intrinsic value then is embedded in every understanding whether it is directed at a teleological particular or a non-teleological one. Propositional knowledge, by contrast, does not essentially have a telos. There is nothing that would be aptly called ‘being perfect knowledge’ such that a piece of knowledge must approximate to, to be a piece of knowledge. Knowledge of a certain proposition is not construed as something that necessarily shows up somewhere on the continuum between bad knowledge and perfectly good knowledge. So long as knowledge receives non-teleological treatment, it is futile to try to show that it has intrinsic value. Considerations about teleological understanding reveal that its intrinsic value is twofold. Teleological understanding has some intrinsic value since it necessarily manifests some goodness qua understanding, and in addition, it has some intrinsic value since it necessarily involves appreciating the intrinsic value of its object. Non-teleological understanding, unlike teleological understanding, lacks the value that comes from appreciating the intrinsic value of its object since it is not directed at objects that necessarily possess some intrinsic value to be the kind of object they are.

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All in all, it is tempting to conclude that the best kind of understanding is teleological understanding. However, I think that that might be a premature conclusion for us to draw. Sometimes the extrinsic value (regardless of whether it is instrumental) of something can be drastically greater than its intrinsic value.26 The intrinsic value embedded in the teleological understanding of a cuttlefish for instance is not as significant as the extrinsic value it can have in relation to understanding how to cure a fatal disease that threatens human life. Nothing I have said so far illuminates why the value of the latter surpasses the former. The same void can be felt when one considers the value difference between understanding two different teleological particulars or the difference between the same understandings but carried out by two different people living two different lives. This signals the need to import further conceptions of value in bringing to the surface the various kinds of value that understanding can have and thus can confer on knowl27 edge. One such conception that virtue ethicists would find themselves at home with is that a good human life is intrinsically valuable, and that something is valuable if it is a constituent of a good human life. Consequently, the conclusion I think we should favor is not that teleological understanding always has the most important value to confer on knowledge, but that it has more of a kind of value we might call ‘basic’ that it can confer on knowledge.28 Received: July 2008 Revised: August 2009

26

Often ethicists mean to refer to non-instrumental value when they make use of ‘intrinsic value.’ Yet, as some have rightly argued, there are many ways in which something can have extrinsic value and having instrumental value is only one of them. For instance, Ben Bradley points out that something can have contributory value in virtue of being part of a valuable whole, or it can have signatory value because of what it signifies. See B. Bradley, ‘Extrinsic Value,’ Philosophical Studies 91 (1998) 109-26.

27

We see use of some of these conceptions in Brewer’s defense of the claim that understanding is an intrinsically valuable activity in the Aristotlean sense and that it is the telos of theoretical reflection (Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics, ch. 8).

28

I am greatly indebted to Talbot Brewer for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 611-642

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Hume’s Determinism PETER MILLICAN Hertford College Oxford OX1 3BW UK

David Hume has traditionally been assumed to be a soft determinist or compatibilist,1 at least in the ‘reconciling project’ that he presents in Section 8 of the first Enquiry, entitled ‘Of liberty and necessity.’2 Indeed, in encyclopedias and textbooks of Philosophy he is standardly taken to be one of the paradigm compatibilists, rivalled in significance only by Hobbes within the tradition passed down through Locke, Mill, Schlick and Ayer to recent writers such as Dennett and Frankfurt.3 Many Hume scholars also concur in viewing him as a determinist, for example (in date order) Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, A. J. Ayer, Paul Russell,

1

Here I shall follow the common practice of treating these terms as equivalent, though strictly a compatibilist need not be a determinist (e.g. one might well consider quantum indeterminacy to be irrelevant to human free will).

2

The position presented in the similarly titled sections of the Treatise (2.3.1-2) is — at least verbally — somewhat different, though the substance is broadly this same. In the Treatise, Hume understands ‘the doctrine of liberty’ to involve chance or indifference, and hence attacks it as incompatible with his ‘doctrine of necessity.’ But in the Enquiry, he understands ‘liberty’ as free will of the morally significant kind, and defends its compatibility with ‘necessity’ (which is why he describes his approach as a ‘reconciling project’). For illuminating discussion of Hume’s position as revealed in the two works and the relevant differences between them, see Botterill (2002).

3

See for example Taylor (1967, 368), Honderich (1993, 95-8), Strawson (2004, §1), and Kane (2005, 12-13).

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Don Garrett, Terence Penelhum, George Botterill, John Bricke, and John Wright.4 My main purpose in this paper will be to provide the evidence to substantiate this traditional interpretation, which has hitherto been widely assumed rather than defended. In the absence of such a defence, the consensus has been left open to challenge, most notably in a recent paper and a subsequent book by James Harris, who boldly claims that Hume ‘does not subscribe to determinism of any kind, whether 5 Hobbesian or merely nomological.’ His main arguments for this claim are drawn from his analysis of Hume’s treatment of the idea of necessity and its deployment in support of the ‘Doctrine of Necessity.’ But Harris also alludes to — and apparently puts significant weight on — a supposed tension between determinism and Hume’s famous ‘sceptical’ views about induction and causation. Since this latter issue raises fundamental questions regarding the interpretation of Humean determinism, it will be helpful to deal with it first, before turning to Harris’s more extensive arguments concerning Hume’s discussions of liberty and necessity. I

Determinism and Humean ‘Scepticism’

Harris does not fully spell out why he considers Hume’s famous argument concerning induction, and his equally famous discussion of causation, to be incompatible with a determinist perspective, though the following passage (from Harris 2003, 464-5) makes reasonably clear why he sees some tension between the two: Hume begins his examination of the doctrine of necessity by describing what is ‘universally allowed’ as regards material bodies … : It is universally allowed, that matter in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it. … (E 8.4) … there is no reason to think Hume here forgets all that he has previously established concerning our inability to prove the laws of nature to be immutable. Hume is merely reporting, and not endorsing, what is universally allowed. And in point of fact, there is no empirical basis for the belief that nothing in nature could be otherwise than it is. ‘Our idea … of necessity and causation,’ Hume points out, ‘arises

4

Amongst many possible citations are Kemp Smith (1941, 407-10); Stroud (1977, 141 & 144); Ayer (1980, 75); Russell (1995, 58-9 & 79); Garrett (1997, 127-9); Penelhum (2000, 165-9); Botterill (2002, 285-7); Bricke (2008, 201-2); and Wright (2009, 170-3).

5

Harris (2005, 69, n. 15), and the paper is Harris (2003). Though I shall be criticising both works on this particular issue, I would like to emphasise that they constitute valuable contributions to the literature, and the book especially provides an excellent account of eighteenth-century debates on liberty and necessity.

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entirely from [observed uniformity and customary inference]. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the constant inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.’ (E 8.5) What is universally allowed thus outstrips somewhat its evidential base, and is presumably derived in some way from what Hume in the Treatise describes as the mind’s ‘great propensity to spread itself on external objects …’

There are two main thoughts here. First, Hume’s argument concerning induction has shown that we are unable ‘to prove the laws of nature to be immutable.’6 Second, our understanding of necessity and causation is derived purely from observed uniformity and a consequent tendency to infer from ‘cause’ to ‘effect’: this is clearly inadequate as an evidential base from which to infer anything as strong as universal determinism. Now is not the time to debate the interpretation of Hume on induction and causation,7 so I shall confine myself here to some general comments that are, I hope, relatively uncontroversial. The famous argument concerning induction aims to show that the presupposition of such inference — namely ‘that the future will resemble the past’ (E 4.21) or ‘that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same’ (T 1.3.6.4) — is not founded on reason or the understanding (T 1.3.6.11; E 5.2).8 Most would agree with Harris that this indeed rules out the possibility of any rational argument that can ‘prove the laws of nature to be immutable.’ But why should this be thought incompatible with a belief in determinism? It is one thing for the world to be, in fact, subject to immutable laws of nature; quite another for us to believe that it is so subject; and yet another for us to be able to prove that this is the case. Notwithstanding our inability to prove that induction is rationally justified, Hume clearly thinks not only that human beings — including himself — natu-

6

I presume that this is Harris’s ground for claiming in his later book, as already partially quoted, that ‘Hume’s treatment of induction is, it seems to me, sufficient to show that he does not subscribe to determinism of any kind, whether Hobbesian or merely nomological’ (2005, 69 n. 15).

7

For my views on Hume on induction, see Millican (2002) and (Forthcoming); on causation, see Millican (2009).

8

There are subtle nuances here, because although Hume explicitly denies at T 1.3.6.5-7 that what is commonly called his Uniformity Principle (as partially quoted above from T 1.3.6.4) can be founded on either demonstration or reasoning from experience, he also states only two sections later that ‘we have many millions [of experiments] to convince us of this principle; that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects …’ (T 1.3.8.14). This suggests that his Uniformity Principle is to be understood as a principle of evidential relevance, rather than as a claim of universal causal uniformity; for a detailed discussion, see Millican (2002) §10.2, especially 154 n. 68.

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rally and irresistibly reason inductively (e.g. T 1.3.8.13, 1.4.1.7; E 5.8), but also that in some sense we should do so, basing our beliefs about the unobserved firmly on past experience (e.g. T 1.3.15; E 10.3-4). Thus Hume — as both common man and philosopher — shows himself to be a committed believer in the general uniformity of nature, even though he takes this belief to be founded on instinctive ‘custom’ rather than ‘reason.’ He could likewise be a believer in thoroughgoing determinism, even though this goes well beyond any rational ‘evidential base.’ Perhaps Harris has in mind not so much Hume’s ‘sceptical doubts’ about inductive extrapolation of causal laws from observed to unobserved, but rather, his theory about our understanding of causation itself. As quoted by Harris from E 8.5, Hume limits our notion of necessity to ‘the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the constant inference from one to the other.’ And this might seem somewhat at odds with the ‘universally allowed’ view ‘that matter in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is … precisely determined by the energy of its cause.’ But again the conflict is merely superficial, because any plausible interpretation of Hume must acknowledge two evident truths. First, that he takes causal laws seriously, is a keen advocate of empirical science based on the discovery of causal relations, and indeed sees such relations as the principal foundation of all factual inference beyond the bounds of our memory and senses (e.g. T 1.3.6.7; A 8; E 4.4, 7.29).9 Secondly, that he considers necessity to be an essential component of our idea of causation (T 1.3.2.11, 1.3.6.3, 2.3.1.18; E 8.25, 8.27). These together imply that in some sense Hume must be prepared to countenance the ascription of necessity to events in the objective world, and this applies whether or not he is to be interpreted in a ‘New Humean’ manner as a believer in ‘thick’ (or ‘upper case’) Causal powers. So even if we read Hume as a reductionist regularity theorist about causation, it will remain true that in the appropriate reductionist sense, there is no inconsistency in his believing in necessary connexions between events. This important point tends to be insufficiently emphasised in discussions of Hume on causation, which too often portray the interpretative debate as revolving around the question of whether or not he is a ‘causal realist.’ But there is no tension whatever between a reductionist theory and ‘realism’ in the appropriate sense. On the contrary, some of Hume’s key arguments for asserting the existence of causal relations are explic-

9

For more on this, see Millican (2009) especially §1. That paper as a whole gives my reasons for denying that this observation in any way supports the ‘New Hume’ interpretation, which I view as fundamentally mistaken.

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itly presented as following from his reductionist analysis.10 The most important of these occur in the sections on ‘liberty and necessity’ and will be discussed below, but there is another such argument, very similar in spirit, in the long Treatise section ‘Of the immateriality of the soul.’ This is an attack on those who claim that thinking matter is impossible (usually with a theological agenda), and it appeals directly to Hume’s analysis of causation.11 Having argued ‘that all objects, which are found to be constantly conjoin’d, are upon that account alone to be regarded as causes and effects,’ he draws the corollary ‘that for aught we can determine by the mere ideas, any thing may be the cause or effect of any thing’ (T 1.4.5.32). This then clears the way for concluding that ‘as the constant conjunction of objects constitutes the very essence of cause and effect, matter and motion may often be regarded as the causes of thought’ (T 1.4.5.33). Here Hume’s underlying project is much the same as in his discussion of liberty and necessity: to bring the mental realm within the reach of causal explanation and thus open the way for systematic inductive moral science, in opposition to aprioristic metaphysics or superstition. I conclude from all this that ‘Humean’ scepticism about induction and reductionism about causation are both perfectly compatible with some form of determinism, interpreted as the thesis that all physical and mental phenomena occur in conformity with universal causal laws. This thesis could be true whether or not we have any ‘reason’ (in whatever sense) to believe it. And if causation is to be interpreted in a reductionist fashion, then the truth of determinism will simply consist in the obtaining of the relevant universal correlations, and will not require that there be any underlying ‘thick’ metaphysical necessities.12 So despite initial appearances, even a very traditional interpretation of

10

I here use the term ‘reductionist’ very broadly, to cover any ‘Old Humean’ interpretation that takes causation in the objects to be nothing beyond Hume’s two definitions. As explained in Millican (2007b, §3.5), I am personally inclined to favour a quasi-realist reading, whereby assigning a causal relationship evinces commitment to potential inference from ‘cause’ to ‘effect’ (as opposed, for example, to merely asserting a constant conjunction).

11

For detail, see §7 of Millican (2009); §8 of that paper makes a similar case regarding liberty and necessity.

12

I here ignore a problem which Hume does not take notice of, namely, that if ‘laws’ of arbitrary complexity are permitted, then it might seem that any behaviour whatever could be subsumed under universal correlations. Full discussion of this point — which would require consideration of results from quantum mechanics — would take us a long way from my concern here, which is the interpretation of Hume’s own position.

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Hume, as an inductive sceptic and causal reductionist, is entirely consistent with determinism. A fortiori, a ‘non-sceptical’ or ‘New Humean’ interpretation — which will typically be more friendly to justified beliefs about the unobserved, or to the existence of unobservable ‘thick’ powers — is unlikely to pose any fundamental obstacle to seeing Hume as a determinist. For the remainder of this paper, the term ‘Determinism’ — thus capitalised — is always to be understood in the potentially Humean manner just explained, as requiring conformity of events with universal laws, and nothing more. But it is worth noting that Hume himself never uses th 13 the word, which was apparently coined in the 19 century.

II

Three Causal Theses, Clarke and Collins

Having clarified the thesis of Determinism as it will be understood here, let us now consider its relationship to two other theses which were much referred to in early modern philosophy, the one generally accepted and the other controversial: Determinism All physical and mental phenomena occur in conformity with universal causal laws. The Causal Maxim ‘Whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence’ (T 1.3.3.1). The Doctrine of Necessity All physical and mental phenomena are governed by necessity. The Causal Maxim is introduced by Hume as ‘a general maxim in philosophy’ which is ‘commonly taken for granted in all reasonings, without any proof given or demanded’ (T 1.3.3.1). And indeed it is easy to find numerous passages to back this up, in works from the period such as those of Clarke, Collins, Kames, Price, and Reid, as well as any

13

The Oxford English Dictionary cites various sources, the first of which is a note in Sir William Hamilton’s 1846 edition of Reid’s works which defines ‘rational Determinism’ as meaning ‘Necessitation by final causes’ (i.e. specifically by motives). The only unambiguous reference given to ‘universal determinism’ in the modern sense is from James Martineau’s Materialism of 1876.

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number of lesser figures.14 As stated, the Causal Maxim does not imply Determinism, even when interpreted — as it commonly was — to imply that every change or event must have a cause. For if causes can fail to be necessitating (e.g. by being ‘chancy’ or probabilistic), then an event could have a cause without being determined by any universal law. However we have already remarked that Hume himself sees necessity as essential to causation, which suggests that for him, at least, the Causal Maxim would be equivalent to Determinism. Harris, wishing to deny that he is a determinist, accordingly points out that ‘Hume, in the Treatise, argues that there is no good reason to believe … the principle that every event has a cause’ (2005, 68). Unlike the Causal Maxim, the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ was hotly 15 debated in the early modern period. And those who rejected it did so precisely by denying that all causes are necessitating. However such a denial was not taken to imply (as it probably would today) some element of genuine randomness or chance. On the contrary, Hume was echoing the standard view when saying that chance ‘is nothing real in itself’ (T 1.3.11.4, cf. E 8.25) and ‘is commonly thought to imply a contradiction’ (T 2.3.1.18).16 Ignorance of causes makes it appropriate for us to think and reason in terms of chances (e.g. T 2.3.1.12, E 6.1), but real chance would be inconsistent with causation, and hence contrary to the generally accepted Causal Maxim. Another reason for the unpopularity of the notion of genuine chance was that it carried dangerous atheistic connotations through its association with Epicureanism. Thus Collins (1717) makes reference to ‘the Epicurean System of chance’ with its suggestion that ‘this world might have been produced by a disorderly or fortuitous concourse of Atoms: or, which is all one, by no cause at all’ (58).

14

See, for example, Clarke (1705, 18-19 & 148-9); Collins (1717, 57); Clarke (1717, 28); Kames (1751, 189-90); Price (1758, 114 & 153-4); Reid (1764, 38); Reid (1790, vol. II, 306 & 311).

15

The term goes back at least to sixteenth-century debates about ‘Luthers doctrine of Necessitie’ (Haddon 1581, 165), but its most influential early use was in Hobbes (1656, 14, 77, 133-4, 346), to be followed amongst others by Collins (1717, 24), Clarke (1717, 18), and Butler (1736, 115) prior to Hume’s Treatise (T 2.3.2.3). ‘The doctrine of necessity’ is also referred to by many later authors, including Kames, Edwards, Beattie, Priestley, Hartley, and Reid; my impression is that they always understand it as either equivalent to, or implying, determinism.

16

The Nortons’ critical edition of the Treatise (Hume 1739-40, vol. 2, 753) cites supporting references from Bentley, Collins, Wollaston, Arbuthnot, Clarke, Chambers and Butler. Hume sometimes expresses similar thoughts in terms of indifference (e.g. T 2.3.1.3, 2.3.2.1; A 31; E 8.32), but his identification of indifference with chance was controversial. For a survey of eighteenth-century views on the liberty of indifference, see the index entries in Harris (2005, 260).

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In contrast to today, therefore, those in the early modern period who denied that all causes are necessitating were not typically advocating any element of chance or randomness. Rather, they were insisting on a distinction between causes that are genuinely (or ‘physically’) necessary, and those that are ‘moral’ (i.e. based on reasons and motives). The will and actions of rational agents they took to be caused by the agent, but not literally necessitated.17 Others, however, contested this understanding of ‘necessity,’ generating disputes in which the participants can give the impression of talking at cross-purposes. Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is the celebrated Clarke-Collins controversy, in which Collins argues at length for the Doctrine of Necessity, and rounds off his argument by quoting Clarke’s own words against him: Dr. CLARKE [1705, 100] … asserts, that the will is determin’d by moral motives, and calls the necessity, by which a Man chooses in virtue of those motives, moral necessity. … A Man, says he, intirely free from all pain of body and disorder of mind, judges it unreasonable for him to hurt or destroy himself; and, being under no temptation or external violence, he CANNOT POSSIBLY act contrary to this judgment; not because he wants a natural or physical power so to do, but because it is absurd and mischievous, and morally impossible for him to choose to do it. … In this he plainly allows the necessity, for which I have contended. For he assigns the same causes of human actions that I have done; and extends the necessity of human actions as far, when he asserts, that a Man cannot under those causes, possibly do the contrary to what he does … And as to a natural or physical power in Man to act contrary to that judgment … that is so far from being inconsistent with the doctrine of necessity, that the said natural power to do the contrary … is a consequence of the doctrine of necessity. For, if Man is necessarily determin’d by particular moral causes, and cannot then possibly act contrary to what he does; he must under opposite moral causes, have a power to do the contrary. (Collins 1717, 109-12)

Collins here apparently takes the Doctrine of Necessity to be equivalent to Determinism, but Clarke makes clear in his response that he interprets it somewhat differently: Moral Necessity, in true and Philosophical Strictness, is not indeed any Necessity at all; but ’tis merely a figurative Manner of Speaking … But now this Author makes Moral Necessity and Physical Necessity to be exactly and Philosophically the same Thing … In which Matter, the Author is guilty of a double Absurdity. First, in supposing Reasons or Motives … to make the same necessary Impulse upon Intelligent Subjects, as Matter in Motion does upon unintelligent Subjects; which is supposing

17

This issue is closely tied to the distinction, much insisted upon by such writers, between active spirits and passive or inert matter. In what follows I shall ignore this, but for more discussion of the distinction and its significance, see Yolton (1983), ch. 5, ‘Matter: Inert or Active,’ or for a brief summary, §6 of my Introduction to Hume (1748).

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Abstract Notions to be Substances. And Secondly, in endeavouring to impose it upon his Reader as a thing taken for granted, that Moral Necessity and Physical Necessity do not differ intrinsically in their own Nature … Thus if God has promised that the World shall continue another Year, ’tis a very natural and obvious Manner of Expression, to say that the World cannot possibly come to an End This Year; and yet no reasonable Person is by that Manner of speaking led to imagine, that God has not at this moment the very same physical Power of destroying the World, as he will have at any time hereafter. (Clarke 1717, 15-17)

Clarke’s paradigm of necessity is not mere conformity to a rule, however uniform that rule may be, but rather, mechanical impulse. So even the fulfilment of God’s promises — presumably as infallible an instance of a ‘morally necessary’ rule as one could wish for — is not strictly necessary in Clarke’s sense. For Clarke, therefore, the Doctrine of Necessity is a stronger thesis than Determinism, since it requires not only that everything happens in accordance with universal rules, but also, that the relevant rules reflect genuine physical necessities on the model of mechanical impulse. He accordingly rejects the Doctrine, though his attitude to Determinism is far less clear. He never explicitly rejects Collins’s claim that he ‘plainly allows’ that all events are strictly governed by either physical or moral necessity. And his discussion of divine prescience at least strongly suggests that God’s foreknowledge is best explained in terms of His knowledge of the relevant universal laws, rather than by any more exotic method (e.g. through literal seeing of the future, or apprehension of the course of events from a timeless perspective): The Manner how God can foresee Future things, without a Chain of Necessary Causes; is impossible for us to explain distinctly. Tho’ some sort of general Notion, we may conceive of it. For, as a Man who has no Influence over another Person’s Actions, can yet often perceive before-hand what That Other will do; and a Wiser and more experienced Man, will still with greater probability foresee what Another, whose Disposition he is perfectly acquainted with, will in certain Circumstances do; And an Angel, with still much Less degrees of Errour, may have a further Prospect into Mens future Actions: So ’tis very reasonable to apprehend, that God, without influencing Mens Wills by his Power, yet by his Foresight cannot but have as much Certainer a knowledge of future free Events, than either Men or Angels can possibly have; as the Perfection of His Nature is greater than that of Theirs. (Clarke 1705, 104-5)

Clearly this sort of explanation, if it is to account for perfect divine foreknowledge, presupposes that our actions are in principle fully predictable based on our characteristics, circumstances, and the appropriate laws. But Clarke seems also to be committed to the further view that the laws themselves are absolutely necessary in a sense, owing to God’s essential goodness and wisdom:

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The Supreme Cause … and Author of all Things … must of necessity, (meaning, not a Necessity of Fate, but such a Moral Necessity as I before said was consistent with the most perfect Liberty, ) Do always what he Knows to be Fittest to be done; That is, He must act always according to the strictest Rules of Infinite Goodness, Justice, and Truth, and all other Moral Perfections. … Though nothing, I say, is more certain, than that God acts, not necessarily, but voluntarily; yet ’tis nevertheless as truly and absolutely impossible for God not to do (or to do any thing contrary to) what his Moral Attributes require him to do; as if he was really, not a Free, but a Necessary Agent. And the Reason hereof, is plain: Because Infinite Knowledge, Power, and Goodness in Conjunction, may, notwithstanding the most perfect Freedom and Choice, act with altogether as much Certainty and Unalterable Steddiness; as even the Necessity of Fate can be supposed to do. Nay, these Perfections cannot possibly but so act … So that Free Choice, in Such a Being, may be as Certain and Steddy a Principle of Action, as the Necessity of Fate. … From hence it follows, that though God is a most perfectly free Agent, yet he cannot but do always what is Best and Wisest in the whole. (1705, 115-20)

Here Clarke — in viewing the entire world order as determined by God’s perfection — seems, perhaps surprisingly, to be more necessitarian in spirit than Hume, who sees the causal laws as being arbitrary from an a priori perspective (e.g. T 1.3.15.1; E 4.9-11). Collins’s position on this spectrum is less clear, since although his argument quoted above seems to treat the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ as equivalent to mere Determinism, elsewhere he goes much further in the necessitarian direction, equating necessity with inconceivability of the contrary (1717, pp. 104-6). Harris takes this to imply that Collins is being disingenuous when he claims that Clarke ‘plainly allows the necessity, for which I have contended.’18 But the offending passage occurs only near the end of Collins’s Inquiry, and in answer to the last of six objections that he considers. It is therefore far less prominent, and presumably far less significant, than the very clear declaration of his purpose that Collins presents in the third paragraph of his Preface: when I affirm necessity; I contend only for what is call’d moral necessity, meaning thereby, that man, who is an intelligent and sensible being, is determin’d by his reason and his senses; and I deny man to be subject to such necessity, as is in clocks, watches, and such other beings, which for want of sensation and intelligence are subject to an absolute, physical, or mechanical necessity. (Collins 1717, iii)

This is followed up in the first section after the Introduction, headed ‘The Question stated’:

18

Harris (2003, 460-1) and (2005, 58-60).

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Man is a necessary Agent, if all his actions are so determin’d by the causes preceding each action, that not one past action could possibly not have come to pass, or have been otherwise than it was; nor one future action can possibly not come to pass, or be otherwise than it shall be. (Collins 1717, 11)

If the core meaning of ‘necessity’ is indeed defined in terms of determination rather than mechanism, then Collins seems to be correct (if perhaps mischievous) in claiming the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ thus understood as common ground between himself and Clarke.19 Hence although Clarke might well be reluctant to acknowledge this, their dispute seems to be largely verbal, hinging on whether or not mere determination is deemed sufficient to satisfy the requirements of the Doctrine of Necessity. On Clarke’s interpretation — according to which the Doctrine would claim human actions to be as physically necessary as the motion of clocks — both he and Collins reject it. But on Collins’s interpretation of the Doctrine — according to which it seems to be more or less equivalent to Determinism — both of them appear to accept it.

III

Hume on the Idea of Necessity, and His Alleged Indeterminism

Hume sees that he can cut through this debate by applying his Lockean empiricist principle, that all ideas are derived from impressions.20 He accordingly pursues the origin of the idea of necessity, revealing the relevant impression to be drawn not from the perception of either ‘physical’ or ‘moral’ causes, but instead from reflection within an observer’s mind when induced by constant conjunctions to make customary inferences. Since both ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ causes are equally able to generate such inferences, [we can conclude that] … there is but one kind of necessity, as there is but one kind of cause, and that the common distinction between moral and physical necessity is

19

I take it to be entirely possible for adherents of the Doctrine of Necessity — which concerns the universal applicability of necessity — to differ amongst themselves regarding the basis or nature of necessity (e.g. its relationship to God, or to conceivability). Likewise it is possible for philosophers to agree that physical objects exist, even while disagreeing about their causes or nature.

20

In Millican (2009, §9), I speculate that precisely this insight could have had a profound influence on Hume’s philosophical development. Russell (2008, 235) remarks on the striking similarity between Hume’s and Collins’s views on the question of liberty and necessity, and it seems to me that Collins (e.g. 1717, 11-14, 106-7) is the most likely source for Hume’s tendency in the Treatise to use ‘liberty’ as synonymous with ‘chance.’

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without any foundation in nature. This clearly appears from the precedent explication of necessity. ’Tis the constant conjunction of objects, along with the determination of the mind, which constitutes a physical necessity: And the removal of these is the same thing with chance. As objects must either be conjoin’d or not, and as the mind must either be determin’d or not to pass from one object to another, ’tis impossible to admit of any medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity. In weakening this conjunction and determination you do not change the nature of the necessity; since even in the operation of bodies, these have different degrees of constancy and force, without producing different species of that relation. (T 1.3.14.33)

Hume proceeds in his discussions ‘Of liberty and necessity’ to argue at length in favour of the Doctrine of Necessity as he thus understands it, on the basis that constant conjunction and consequent inference are as characteristic of the human realm as they are of the physical (T 2.3.1.3-17; E 8.6-20).21 But he also has a quicker way of getting to the same conclusion, because his account of the idea of cause and effect includes necessity as an essential element, and implies that exactly the same necessity — the only necessity of which we can form an idea — is characteristic of all causation whatever. The widespread acknowledgement that causation applies to the moral realm is already, therefore, an implicit acceptance of the Doctrine of Necessity, which thus becomes a direct implication of the Causal Maxim: It is universally allowed, that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power, which has any where, a being in nature. But it is pretended, that some causes are necessary, some not necessary. Here then is the advantage of definitions. Let any one define a cause, without comprehending, as a part of the definition, a necessary connexion with its effect; and let him shew distinctly the origin of the idea, expressed by the definition; and I shall readily give up the whole controversy. But if the foregoing explication of the matter be received, this must be absolutely impracticable. Had not objects a regular conjunction with each other, we should never have entertained any notion of cause and effect; and this regular conjunction produces that inference of the understanding, which is the only connexion, that we can have any comprehension of. Whoever attempts a definition of cause, exclusive of these circumstances, will be obliged, either to employ unintelligible terms, or such as are synonimous to the term, which he endeavours to define. And if the definition above mentioned be admitted; liberty, when opposed to necessity, not to constraint, is the same thing with chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence. (E 8.25, cf. T 2.3.1.18)

21

For an overview of the argument of these sections, with extensive quotations from the Treatise and the Enquiry, see Millican (2009, §8). For a more structured version, citing parallel passages from the Abstract also, see (2007a, §VIII).

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So far Hume’s position — if not his way of reaching it — seems very similar to that of Collins, in treating ‘moral’ necessity as genuine necessity in virtue of its reliability, and therefore assimilating it with what Clarke calls ‘physical’ necessity despite its non-mechanistic nature. This would suggest that Hume himself, like Collins, is a Determinist, but Harris disagrees, pointing out that an assimilation between the two types of necessity can equally be understood as pushing in the reverse direction. Referring to the passage from Treatise 1.3.14.33 above, he comments: ‘when Hume says that ‘there is but one kind of necessity … and that the common distinction betwixt moral and physical necessity is without any foundation in nature,’ he is in effect saying that, for all we can tell, all necessity is of the moral kind.’ (2003, 464; cf. 2005, 73). Harris’s suggestion seems to be that as long as a conjunction of objects achieves sufficient constancy to generate a ‘determination of the mind’ — so that we naturally find ourselves inferring from one to the other — then that is enough to ascribe ‘an absolute necessity’ between them, even if the ‘degree of constancy’ in question falls short of a perfect association. Accordingly, on Hume’s view as he interprets it: All that we have reason to mean when we attribute necessity to the operations of matter is that we have experience of the regularity of the behaviour of material things, and that we find ourselves as a result disposed to make predictions about the future behaviour of those things. And … the libertarian denies neither of these things. … Hume does not intend or need to establish that there are exceptionless laws which govern human behaviour. Rather, his concern is merely to show that we generally regard human behaviour as no less reliable and predictable than, for example, the weather cycle …. (2003, 465; cf. 2005, 75-6)

Harris’s interpretation clearly has some basis in the text from Treatise 1.3.14.33 quoted above, particularly the final sentence: ‘In weakening this conjunction and determination you do not change the nature of the necessity; since even in the operation of bodies, these have different degrees of constancy and force, without producing different species of that relation.’ This indeed seems to suggest that for Hume, even an imperfect conjunction can count as genuinely ‘necessary,’ as long as it is sufficiently regular to generate inference.22 If Harris is right, then the interpretative implications are profound. As noted earlier, Hume has traditionally been considered a paradigm ‘soft determinist,’ whose ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ should be understood

22

Harris’s position here is anticipated by Garrett (1997, 126-7) who, however, takes Hume to be a determinist, and says very little about the historical context. For what I take to be a more consistent development of Garrett’s approach, see note 42 in §VIII below.

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accordingly. But on Harris’s reading, Hume’s prominent argument for that Doctrine based on his analysis of necessity, so far from being prodeterminist, is anti-determinist, and of a piece with his apparent undermining of the epistemological basis of the Causal Maxim (cf. the first paragraph of §II above). Previous philosophers had taken for granted that the operations of matter are entirely necessitated, and their controversies had focused on the question of whether the operations of mind are on a par in this respect. According to Harris, Hume indeed puts the two on a par, but only by downgrading the necessity of the operations of matter. As Harris himself recognises, this reading implies a reinterpretation of various passages in which Hume talks about views that are ‘universally allowed’ by philosophers, for example: It is universally allowed, that matter in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it. … (E 8.4)

Most previous interpreters have presumed that Hume is here expressing agreement with the position he describes, whereas Harris, as we saw in §I above, claims that ‘Hume is merely reporting, and not endorsing, what is universally allowed.’ So far from being a paradigm (soft) determinist, therefore, Hume becomes a revolutionary on the opposite side. Having thus acknowledged that Harris’s interpretation is both significant and textually grounded, I shall devote the remainder of this paper to arguing against it. I shall do so first (in §IV) by adducing evidence that Hume is himself committed to the Causal Maxim; secondly (in §V) by demonstrating his own support of the standard determinist views about the nature of matter which he describes as ‘universally allowed.’ Given the parity that Hume very explicitly claims between ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes, these together very strongly suggest that he is, after all, a Determinist. Then in §VI and §VII, I shall consider what Hume’s reasons might be for endorsing the Causal Maxim and Determinism, before rounding off the discussion with my conclusion (§VIII), in which I shall also endeavour to explain away the evidence that prompted Harris’s interpretation.

IV

Hume’s Endorsement of The Causal Maxim

Treatise 1.3.3 is devoted to a discussion of the ‘general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence’ (T 1.3.3.1), famously arguing that this Causal Maxim cannot be proved by intuition or demonstration. The section’s final paragraph then points the way towards an immediate, and surprising, change of subject:

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Since it is not from knowledge or any scientific reasoning, that we derive the opinion of the necessity of a cause to every new production, that opinion must necessarily arise from observation and experience. The next question, then, shou’d naturally be, how experience gives rise to such a principle? But as I find it will be more convenient to sink this question in the following, Why we conclude, that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects, and why we form an inference from one to another? we shall make that the subject of our future enquiry. ’Twill, perhaps, be found in the end, that the same answer will serve for both questions. (T 1.3.3.9)

Hume never returns explicitly to the deferred question, so it is not surprising that some of his readers (including Harris, apparently) have taken him to be uncommitted to the Causal Maxim. Fortunately, however, we know Hume’s reaction to this interpretation of his position, because he twice responded to published statements that he had denied the Maxim, first in 1745 and then again in 1754. In 1745, while under consideration for the Chair of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy at Edinburgh University, Hume was accused of having advanced various impious principles, these being drawn together in a ‘Sum of the Charge’ whose second point attacks the author of the Treatise for: Principles leading to downright Atheism, by denying the Doctrine of Causes and Effects, p. 321, 138, 298, 300, 301, 303, 430, 434, 284. where he maintains, that the Necessity of a Cause to every Beginning of Existence is not founded on any Arguments demonstrative or intuitive. (L 15)23

In the subsequent Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh, Hume answers this accusation as follows: II. The Author is charged with Opinions leading to downright Atheism, chiefly by denying this Principle, That whatever begins to exist must have a Cause of Existence. … Now, it being the Author’s Purpose, in the Pages cited in the Specimen, to examine the Grounds of that Proposition; he used the Freedom of disputing the common Opinion, that it was founded on demonstrative or intuitive Certainty; but asserts, that it is supported by moral Evidence, and is followed by a Conviction of the same Kind with these Truths, That all Men must die, and that the Sun will rise Tomorrow. Is this any Thing like denying the Truth of that Proposition, which indeed a Man must have lost all common Sense to doubt of? … Thus you may judge of the Candor of the whole Charge, when you see the assigning of one Kind of Evidence for a Proposition, instead of another, is called denying that Proposition; … (L 26-9)

23

Here I have quoted the original page references, to Treatise Book 1 as published in 1739, rather than the adjusted numbers in the Nortons’ edition (which refer to their own critical text).

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It should be noted that Hume wrote this response without having a copy of the Treatise to hand;24 in my view this makes the document particularly valuable for giving us a general overview, in words often quite different from those of the Treatise itself, of what Hume took himself to have maintained. In the present case, Hume apparently thought that he had returned to the question of the Causal Maxim’s truth, and had asserted ‘that it is supported by moral Evidence, and is followed by a Conviction of the same Kind with these Truths, That all Men must die, and that the Sun will rise To-morrow.’ So even if Hume never did actually say this explicitly in the Treatise, we have some ground for suppos25 ing it to have been his opinion. In the Letter from a Gentleman, Hume was responding to damaging accusations of impiety and atheism, in the context of his application for an academic post he strongly desired, so his reply might be suspected of being disingenuous. Fortunately, however, it is strongly corroborated by his response, nine years later, to John Stewart, who in an essay ‘Some Remarks on the Laws of Motion’ contributed to a volume issued in 1754 by the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh (of which Hume was then joint Secretary), remarked: That something may begin to exist, or start into being without a cause, hath indeed been advanced in a very ingenious and profound system of the sceptical philosophy*;

The asterisked footnote identified the Treatise as the work Stewart had in mind, prompting Hume to respond in a letter of February 1754 (HL i 186): … But allow me to tell you, that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source. That Caesar existed, that there is such an Island as Sicily; for these Propositions, I affirm, we have no demonstrative nor intuitive Proof. Woud you infer that I deny their Truth, or even their Certainty? There are many different kinds of Certainty; and some of them as satisfactory to the Mind, tho perhaps not so regular, as the demonstrative kind.

24

‘I am sorry I should be obliged to cite from my Memory, and cannot mention Page and Chapter so accurately as the Accuser. I came hither by Post, and brought no Books along with me, and cannot now provide myself in the Country with the Book referred to’ (L 40).

25

Moreover there are at least two corroborating hints in the Treatise text, as described at the beginning of §VI below (including note 34).

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Where a man of Sense mistakes my Meaning, I own I am angry: But it is only at myself: For having exprest my Meaning so ill as to have given Occasion to the Mistake.

The evidence of the Letter from a Gentleman by itself may appear to lack solidity because of its context, but here we have it forcefully backed up by a private letter to someone Hume knew personally and respected, with no apparent motive to be anything other than truthful. Taken together, these remove any basis for seeing the text of the Treatise as indicating doubt about the Causal Maxim. On the contrary, they provide substantial grounds for taking Hume to be sincerely committed to its truth.

V

What is ‘Universally Allowed’

Hume’s commitment to the Causal Maxim implies (as we saw in §III above) that he believes in the universality of ‘necessity’ as he understands it, since ‘According to my definitions, necessity makes an essential part of causation’ (T 2.3.1.18).26 But on Harris’s principles this is quite insufficient to show that Hume is a Determinist, since he takes Hume’s notion of necessity to be itself indeterministic. Identifying conclusive internal evidence against such a radical suggestion is tricky, because any appeal to Hume’s texts will be subject to consequent reinterpretation. For example, there are numerous occasions on which Hume — understandably enough — implicitly equates necessity with impossibility of the contrary, in causal as well as logical contexts (e.g. T 1.2.4.4, 1.3.14.13, 1.4.2.7, 2.3.3.4, 2.3.9.16; E 8.4). These seem to tell against Harris’s suggestion, but of course they can be explained away if we are prepared to countenance a correspondingly relaxed interpretation of ‘impossibility.’ Likewise necessity has links with other concepts such as infallibility (e.g. T 1.2.5.3, 2.3.1.3; E 7.1.6): are these to be relaxed also? Before such questions can be profitably pursued, there is at least some onus on Harris to develop his suggestion further, and to substantiate his claim that it is consistent with Hume’s philosophy. Fortunately there are less ambiguous texts available, in which Hume identifies and appears to endorse the deterministic views of other contemporary philosophers, whose interpretation of terms such as ‘necessary,’ ‘impossible’ and ‘infallible’ we can presume to be conventionally

26

Indeed it may be that Hume’s Determinism derives precisely from his understanding of causation as requiring necessity, together with the view that denial of the Causal Maxim would be ‘absurd’ (as in the letter to Stewart).

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rigorous. As we saw in §I above, Harris himself quotes one of the clearest of these: It is universally allowed, that matter in all its operations, is actuated by a necessary force, and that every natural effect is so precisely determined by the energy of its cause, that no other effect, in such particular circumstances, could possibly have resulted from it. … (E 8.4)

Harris attempts to undermine the force of this by maintaining that ‘Hume is merely reporting, and not endorsing, what is universally allowed’ (2003, 464). But the same thought is developed, more emphatically and at greater length, in the Treatise: ’Tis universally acknowledg’d, that the operations of external bodies are necessary, and that in the communication of their motion, in their attraction, and mutual cohesion, there are not the least traces of indifference or liberty. Every object is determin’d by an absolute fate to a certain degree and direction of its motion, and can no more depart from that precise line, in which it moves, than it can convert itself into an angel … The actions, therefore, of matter are to be regarded as instances of necessary actions; and whatever is in this respect on the same footing with matter, must be acknowledg’d to be necessary. That we may know whether this be the case with the actions of the mind, we shall begin with examining matter, and considering on what the idea of a necessity in its operations are founded … (T 2.3.1.3)

This passage is particularly significant, because it comes at the very beginning of Hume’s first discussion of liberty and necessity, setting the scene and laying out the main question that is to be addressed, namely, whether ‘this be the case with the actions of the mind,’ a question he aims to answer in the affirmative. ‘This’ here refers back to the same claims of necessity that he has just outlined in respect of the operations of matter, claims that are couched in totally explicit deterministic terms. So here we have a straightforward statement of Hume’s aim in the following section, namely, to argue that ‘the actions of the mind’ are ‘in this respect on the same footing with matter,’ and hence that the same deterministic claims that are ‘universally acknowledg’d’ to apply to ‘external bodies’ apply also to the mind. There is no hint whatever that he is distancing himself from what is ‘universally acknowledg’d’ — indeed his meaning seems to require that he is fully identifying with it — nor does he give any such hint when he quotes this passage verbatim in the Abstract of the Treatise (A 31), a reuse which adds still further to its authority.27

27

Perhaps significantly, this is by far the longest direct quotation from the Treatise reproduced in the Abstract.

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It seems unlikely that Hume would be endorsing this universal view in the Treatise, and then suspending judgement in the Enquiry. Nor should any significance be read into his change of idiom, from ‘universally acknowledg’d’ (which seems explicitly to imply acceptance) to ‘universally allowed’ (which can more plausibly be read in a noncommittal manner). Hume’s own usage suggests that he treats these entirely equivalently in this sort of context; moreover later in the same section of the Enquiry, he talks in similar terms of the Causal Maxim: It is universally allowed, that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly examined, is a mere negative word, and means not any real power, which has, any where, a being in nature. (E 8.25)

Given the conclusion of §IV above, that Hume himself endorses this Maxim, it is hard to argue that he intends the phrase ‘universally allowed’ to signify any personal distancing from the views expressed. The same point can be backed up by reference to the catalogue of Hume’s usage of similar phrases elsewhere: ’Tis universally allow’d, that the capacity of the mind is limited … And tho’ it were not allow’d, ’twould be sufficently evident from the plainest observation and experience. (T 1.2.1.2) ’tis universally allow’d by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever present with the mind but its perceptions … (T 1.2.6.7) Now necessity, in both these senses, has universally, tho’ tacitly, in the schools, in the pulpit, and in common life, been allow’d to belong to the will of man, and no one has pretended to deny, that we can draw inferences concerning human actions … (T 2.3.2.4, repeated verbatim at E 8.27) If these circumstances form, in reality, the whole of that necessity, which we conceive in matter, and if these circumstances be also universally acknowledged to take place in the operations of the mind, the dispute is at an end … (E 8.22) Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to belong to every one, who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here then is no subject of dispute. (E 8.23)

There is not a single case in his published writings where Hume describes an opinion as being ‘universally allowed’ or ‘universally acknowledged,’ but where he himself clearly disagrees with that opinion or goes on to challenge it.28 On the contrary, in most cases where he uses this language, it is very clear indeed that he shares precisely

28

Taken literally, of course, ‘universal’ acceptance straightforwardly implies acceptance by the reporter (as does acceptance ‘on all hands,’ an expression Hume uses at T 3.1.1.18 and E 4.16 when expressing a view he clearly shares). Such literal

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the opinion he reports, and describes it thus to forestall any debate rather than to raise one. Hence when he describes deterministic views as being ‘universally’ accepted, we have every reason to interpret him in the natural and straightforward manner, as endorsing those views rather than distancing himself from them. The same conclusion can be strengthened by examining more closely Hume’s own use of the terms in which he characterises the deterministic views that he takes to be ‘universally allowed.’ These amount, as we have seen above, to claiming ‘that in the communication of [external bodies’ motion] there are not the least traces of indifference or liberty’ (T 2.3.1.3), and ‘that chance … means not any real power, which has, any where, a being in nature’ (E 8.25). Yet Hume, at least in the Treatise, and speaking clearly in propria persona, is himself equally committed to 29 denying the reality of chance, indifference and liberty (thus construed): … this fantastical system of liberty … (T 2.3.1.15) According to my definitions … liberty … is the very same thing with chance. As chance is commonly thought to imply a contradiction, and is at least directly contrary to experience, there are always the same arguments against liberty or freewill. (T 2.3.1.18) … the doctrine of liberty, however absurd it may be in one sense, and unintelligible in any other. (T 2.3.2.1)

In the Enquiry, Hume’s terminology changes so as to enable his argument to be presented as a moderate ‘reconciling project’ (E 8.23) that clarifies the nature of, rather than rejecting, liberty. Hence he now no longer usually equates liberty with chance, and ceases to be hostile towards it. However there are clear indications that his essential theory remains unchanged beneath the guise of his modified terminology, and that he is still just as committed as in the Treatise to the absence of chance (e.g. ‘Though there be no such thing as Chance in the world …’ E 6.1).30 His Determinism is perhaps most explicit — and his language most like

understanding can be overruled by context (e.g. ‘my claim was met by universal disbelief’), but there is no obvious trace of this in Hume’s texts. 29

Hume explicitly equates liberty with chance at T 2.3.2.2 (‘As liberty or chance …’), T 2.3.2.6 (‘… the doctrine of liberty or chance,’), T 2.3.3.7 (‘… the doctrine of liberty or chance …’), and T 2.3.3.8 (‘… what I have advanc’d to prove that liberty and chance are synonimous;’). See note 16 above for his identification of indifference with chance.

30

Also E 8.25: ‘liberty, when opposed to necessity … is the same thing with chance; which is universally allowed to have no existence.’

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that of the Treatise — when at the end of Section 8 he moves on to discuss the theological relevance of ‘this theory, with regard to necessity and liberty,’ with its ‘continued chain of necessary causes, pre-ordained and pre-determined, reaching from the original cause of all, to every single volition of every human creature. No contingency any where in the universe; no indifference; no liberty’ (E 8.32).31 After this forthright explication, he considers the implications of such Determinism for the Problem of Evil, and the structure of his argument makes clear that he himself is committed to it. The same commitment is evident in the posthumously published essay ‘Of Suicide,’ probably written in the early 1750s, which largely takes for granted a deterministic position, and explicitly uses this as the basis for denying that killing oneself can transgress a duty to God. It seems, therefore, that Hume not only endorsed Determinism (and the denial of ‘chance’) throughout his philosophical career, but also took it to be sufficiently widely accepted that he could reasonably describe it as ‘universally allowed’ and use it as a relatively uncontroversial basis for arguments on such potentially inflammatory topics as the Problem of Evil and the morality of suicide. It is worth recalling at this point, however, that Hume’s Determinism is quite distinct from the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ as understood by philosophers such as Clarke. And in expressing this view in ‘Of Suicide,’ Hume is very careful to make room for both ‘physical’ and ‘moral’ necessity: In order to govern the material world, the almighty creator has established general and immutable laws, by which all bodies, from the greatest planet to the smallest particle of matter, are maintained in their proper sphere and function. To govern the animal world, he has endowed all living creatures with bodily and mental powers; with senses, passions, appetites, memory, and judgment; by which they are impelled or regulated.… (para. 5, Essays, 580)

Determinism in this sense was indeed relatively uncontroversial at the time, which provides a final objection to Harris’s indeterminist interpretation. He sees Hume’s strategy as being to redefine necessity as something weaker than determinists had supposed, so that the ‘libertarian’ (e.g. Clarke) is left with no reason for objecting to it.32 Such a

31 Similarly at E 8.22 n. 18, Hume treats ‘liberty’ and ‘indifference’ as equivalent to the absence of necessity, again reverting somewhat to the terminology of the Treatise. 32

Today a ‘libertarian’ is standardly understood as being an incompatibilist who believes in free will and rejects determinism. Harris appears to mean someone who denies the Doctrine of Necessity, though he explains his usage of the term somewhat differently, ‘as shorthand for the view that the influence of motives, however characterized, is not such as to eliminate freedom of choice’ (2005, 7).

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relaxed notion of necessity — by removing the element of inexorability and allowing that ‘it is possible for a cause to have two or more different effects in exactly the same set of circumstances’ — thus supposedly ‘redefine[s] it as something the libertarian has no reason to recoil from’ (Harris 2003, p. 468; 2005, p. 78). But this is a bit puzzling. For as we saw above, Clarke’s fundamental objection to identifying moral necessity with physical necessity had nothing to do with the latter’s supposed inexorability or reliability (i.e. the fact that physical laws are understood to be exceptionless), but rather, its supposed mechanism. Clarke is apparently quite happy with the idea that moral necessity can (in principle, at least) provide as much certainty as physical necessity; however he is insistent on a fundamental distinction between the nature of the behaviour of moral agents and that of physical objects. Moral agents are, he claims, genuinely active, initiating actions of their own based on rational motives, whereas physical objects are merely 33 passive or inert, being pushed around by blind mechanical necessities. And his most likely objection to Hume, therefore, would be not that the latter’s Determinism (as I have interpreted it) is too strong, but rather, that the necessity which he ascribes to matter is too weak. This, indeed, conforms exactly to Hume’s identification of the key point of debate: … the most zealous advocates for free-will must allow this union and inference with regard to human actions. They will only deny, that this makes the whole of necessity … in the actions of matter … (A 34, cf. T 2.3.2.4; E 8.21-2)

Harris’s interpretation of the strategy of Hume’s ‘reconciling project’ therefore seems to me to get things the wrong way round.

VI

The Causal Maxim as ‘Derived from Experience’

We have seen that, whether rightly or wrongly, and for good reasons or bad, Hume apparently did endorse the Causal Maxim, and also universal Determinism. Indeed given his interpretation of causes as necessary, and necessity as involving exceptionless conformity to universal laws, these seem for him to come to the same thing. But this naturally raises the question of why he was committed to these deterministic views, and on what grounds. Harris, as quoted in §I above, insists that such a commitment would have ‘no empirical basis’ (2003, 464), but in §IV we saw evidence from Hume’s letters that he himself took the Causal Maxim to

33

A distinction with significant theological implications — see the references in note 17 above.

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be empirically founded. I shall now substantiate this evidence from the text of the Treatise, before going on in §VII to consider in more detail the apparent nature of that empirical foundation. Although in the Treatise Hume never explicitly returns to discuss the Causal Maxim after having ‘sunk’ it in the question of our inductive inferences, we can conjecture with reasonable confidence some of what he had intended to say about it. First, at the point where the ‘sinking’ occurs, we have seen that he anticipates his intended conclusion: that opinion [i.e. the Causal Maxim] must necessarily arise from observation and experience.34 The next question, then, shou’d naturally be, how experience gives rise to such a principle? But as I find it will be more convenient to sink this question in the following, Why we conclude, that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects, and why we form an inference from one to another? we shall make that the subject of our future enquiry. ’Twill, perhaps, be found in the end, that the same answer will serve for both questions. (T 1.3.3.9)

In other cases where he anticipates in just this way, the expectation is indeed fulfilled: Perhaps ’twill appear in the end, that the necessary connexion depends on the inference, instead of the inference’s depending on the necessary connexion. (T 1.3.6.3) This will not, perhaps, in the end, be found foreign to our present purpose. (T 1.4.2.57)

So this would lead us to expect that Hume’s attitude to the Causal Maxim will be closely related to his account of induction, perhaps taking the view that, like the Uniformity Principle that underlies our inductive inferences, it is something that we cannot support by argument, but nevertheless cannot help believing or at least manifesting through our inferential behaviour.35 Certainly Hume does take ‘the nature of our understanding,’ employed inductively, as the basis for some ‘general rules’ which are somewhat related to the Causal Maxim, and ‘by which,’ he says, ‘we ought to regulate’ such inferences (T 1.3.13.11). These ‘Rules by which to judge of causes and effects,’ which are spelled out in Treatise 1.3.15, include:

34

Hume also implies as much at T 1.3.14.5, where he says that ‘reason, as distinguish’d from experience, can never make us conclude, that a cause or productive quality is absolutely requisite to every beginning of existence.’

35

See Millican (2002, 153-4 and note 67) for some nuances of interpretation between the Treatise and the Enquiry regarding how far Hume takes a Principle of Uniformity to be essentially involved in our inductive inferences.

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3. There must be a constant union betwixt the cause and effect. ’Tis chiefly this quality, that constitutes the relation. 4. The same cause always produces the same effect, and the same effect never arises but from the same cause. This principle we derive from experience, and is the source of most of our philosophical reasonings.

Interpreted strictly Hume’s fourth rule is simply false, because given that ‘the same effect’ is to cover event types rather than tokens (as it must do if the rule is to be non-trivial and potentially amenable to support ‘from experience’), it is clearly possible for the same effect (e.g. a fire, or the movement of a ball) to arise from different causes on different occasions. Interpreted more charitably, the rule can be taken as enjoining us to look for underlying uniformity in differing causes of similar effects (e.g. sources of heat as causes of fire, application of forces as causes of movement), but even thus interpreted, it is still far from clear that this rule is ‘derivable from experience,’ though Hume apparently supposed it to be so. The interpretation and basis of this fourth rule are also potentially dependent on whether Hume accepts the Causal Maxim, because the rule’s scope could be limited if he is prepared to countenance events that are neither causes nor effects.36 But given that he does endorse the Maxim, it seems to follow from his statement of the rule that he takes any event whatever to be the product of uniform causal processes, and moreover takes this very conclusion to be ‘derived from experience’ — which tallies exactly with his earlier insistence (T 1.3.3.9) that the Causal Maxim itself would turn out to be so derived. The alternative interpretation of the rule, as applying only to those things that are causes or effects (and therefore not implying Determinism if some things happen causelessly), would have even more serious problems accounting for the rule’s supposed empirical basis, because thus interpreted it is in danger of becoming a mere logical consequence of the third rule and the related definition of causation, which already imply that causal relations where they exist must be constant. The fourth rule becomes empirically empty if it implies no constraint whatever on what happens, but only clarifies the conditions under which we can legitimately call something a ‘cause’ or an ‘effect.’ To sum up this discussion, Harris may be right to question whether the Causal Maxim can legitimately be ‘derived from experience’ (an issue we shall move onto shortly), but even if so he is unwarranted in

36

Garrett (1997, 129) notes that T 1.3.12.5 (copied at E 8.13) says only that ‘a contrariety of effects always betrays a contrariety of causes’ (my emphasis), while T 1.3.8.14 makes a similar point about all objects.

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giving this as a reason to deny that Hume could be committed to such a claim. For it is at least equally dubious to assert that Hume’s fourth rule can be so derived, and yet this is a claim that he explicitly makes. Hence we have so far seen no good reason to doubt the most straightforward interpretation of Hume’s texts on the Causal Maxim: namely, that he did indeed accept it as true, and took it moreover to be founded on experience.

VII Philosophers and Hidden Causes Fortunately, Hume is fairly specific about what he takes to be the main empirical basis of his deterministic views, namely, the experience of ‘philosophers’ in searching for, and finding, hidden causes that success37 fully account for the superficial contrariety of events: The vulgar … attribute the uncertainty of events to such an uncertainty in the causes as makes the latter often fail of their usual influence … But philosophers, observing, that, almost in every part of nature, there is contained a vast variety of springs and principles, which are hid, by reason of their minuteness or remoteness, find, that it is at least possible the contrariety of events may not proceed from any contingency in the cause, but from the secret operation of contrary causes. This possibility is converted into certainty by farther observation; when they remark, that, upon an exact scrutiny, a contrariety of effects always betrays a contrariety of causes, and proceeds from their mutual opposition. … From the observation of several parallel instances, philosophers form a maxim, that the connexion between all causes and effects is equally necessary, and that its seeming uncertainty in some instances proceeds from the secret opposition of contrary causes. (T 1.3.12.5; E 8.13)

This paragraph is repeated verbatim in the Enquiry, though its context is changed significantly. Within the Treatise, it forms part of a discussion of ‘the probability of causes,’ whose main function appears to be psychological explanation of our inferential behaviour. In the Enquiry, it is moved into the discussion of liberty and necessity, where it follows a more obviously normative theme which is developed further over the following three paragraphs: … the philosopher and physician … know, that … the irregular events, which outwardly discover themselves, can be no proof, that the laws of nature are not observed with greatest regularity in its internal operations and government.

37

For more on this empirical basis, and an illuminating comparison with Kant, see Falkenstein (1998, esp. 338-41).

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The philosopher, if he be consistent, must apply the same reasoning to the actions and volitions of intelligent agents. … The internal principles and motives may operate in a uniform manner, notwithstanding these seeming irregularities; … Thus it appears … that the conjunction between motives and voluntary actions is as regular and uniform, as that between the cause and effect in any part of nature; … (E 8.14-16)

Here it is very clear that Hume is identifying his own position as that of the ‘philosopher.’ The rational and consistent scientist, faced with apparent irregularities in the phenomena, should not attribute these to unreliable or chancy causation, but should instead search for hidden factors that enable the phenomena to be explained as the consistent effects of absolutely necessary causes. Given the track record of scientists in achieving this, we can reasonably conclude that nature is indeed ultimately deterministic, and that all apparent chance is in fact to be explained away as due to hidden causes. Hume seems to be firmly committed to this overall account, for echoes of it feature strongly not only in the Enquiry, but also in three different sections of the Treatise, and even in one of his Essays: ’tis commonly allow’d by philosophers, that what the vulgar call chance is nothing but a secret and conceal’d cause. (T 1.3.12.1) supposing that the usual contrariety proceeds from the operation of contrary and conceal’d causes, we conclude, that the chance or indifference lies only in our judgment on account of our imperfect knowledge, not in the things themselves, which are in every case equally necessary, tho’ to appearance not equally constant or certain. (T 2.3.1.12) a spectator … concludes in general, that … he might [infer our actions] were he perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion and disposition. Now this is the very essence of necessity, … (T 2.3.2.2) What depends upon a few persons is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes … Chance, therefore, or secret and unknown causes … (‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,’ paras 2 & 7, Essays, 112 & 114)

Whether this account of the supposed empirical basis of determinism is adequate to the job is very debatable, but I have already suggested that whatever our contemporary verdict may be on this philosophical issue, there is clear evidence that Hume himself was sufficiently persuaded. Harris may understandably find this regrettable, but in historical perspective it is not in the least surprising, for Hume is in good company. Indeed it is striking just how many thinkers have been convinced by the progress of science that the world is deterministic, which is why the indeterminism of quantum mechanics was widely considered so

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shocking, even to such a revolutionary thinker as Albert Einstein.38 We are now used to the idea of such indeterminism, but comparable blind spots may still remain. Amongst contemporary philosophers of mind, for example, it is a common view that physicalism is securely founded on the causal closure of the physical realm,39 yet it is very unclear whether the modern evidence for such closure is any stronger than the evidence was for physical determinism at the dawn of the twenti40 eth century (prior to quantum mechanics). We philosophers seem to be strongly drawn towards assessments of the potential for scientific explanation whose optimism outruns the evidence, and the more we are inclined towards science and against what Hume calls ‘superstition’ (e.g. ‘spooky’ as opposed to physicalist accounts of consciousness), the more optimistic we become. Given Hume’s own inclinations in this regard, it is therefore not at all surprising if his optimism also outruns what Harris believes his principles would justify.

VIII Conclusion: Hume’s Lapse and His Ultimate Aim We have now seen ample evidence to confirm that Hume is a Determinist, as well as significant indications of his basis for this view. All this contradicts Harris’s indeterminist interpretation, but it does not explain away the main evidence that he adduces for it. Unless we can do this, therefore, a suspicion might remain that Hume is simply inconsistent. Disregarding the general points about Hume’s inductive and causal ‘scepticism’ dealt with in §1 above, Harris’s interpretation rests on two main pillars. First, there are those passages in which Hume appears to allow that even an imperfect conjunction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ can count as ‘necessary,’ of which by far the most explicit (already quoted in §III) is:

38

Hence the famous phrase ‘God does not play dice,’ though what he actually said in a letter to Max Born of December 4th 1926 was ‘I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing dice’ (Born 1971, 91).

39

See for example Papineau (2000).

40

In a system as complicated as the brain there is huge scope for hidden processes of all sorts, and it is hard to see how the existence of non-physical causes could be ruled out in principle by any amount of causal systematisation short of a complete account of the brain’s operation, an aspiration wildly beyond the scope of current science. Yet many contemporary philosophers of mind are as strongly wedded to physicalism as nineteenth century scientists were to physical determinism, presumably because they are attracted by its perceived theoretical virtues (notably, perhaps, the avoidance of ‘spooks’) rather than just by the current record of physical explanation.

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… In weakening this conjunction and determination you do not change the nature of the necessity; since even in the operation of bodies, these have different degrees of constancy and force, without producing different species of that relation. (T 1.3.14.33)

Secondly, there is Hume’s analysis of the idea of necessary connexion as derived from our human tendency to make inductive inferences, a tendency that is (notoriously) associated with such imperfect conjunctions. All too often we draw inferences from supposed ‘cause’ to supposed ‘effect,’ only to find after the event that the correlation was unreliable. But if the idea of necessity is simply derived from our inferential tendency, then it might seem that any such inference, however shaky its foundations, must count as ‘necessary.’ To start with this second point, the issue is complex, but it is very clear indeed that Hume cannot be committed to the view that all human causal inferences reflect genuine necessities. Indeed a great deal of Treatise Book 1 Part 3 is devoted to explaining how causal inferences can be misjudged in various ways, notably due to inappropriate supposition of ‘general rules’ and other forms of ‘unphilosophical probability.’ To guard against these dangers, Hume frames some ‘rules by which to judge of causes and effects,’ ‘by which we may know when [objects] really are … causes or effects to each other’ (1.3.15.2). How far all this is consistent with his own account of the ideas of necessity and causation may be debatable, but that is too big a subject to embark on here, involving difficult but familiar controversies over the interpretation and relationship between his two ‘definitions of cause.’41 Nevertheless, it is at least obvious that whatever the outcome of such debates, there is no question of Hume’s simplistically identifying instances of necessary connexion with correlations that are merely sufficient to provoke inductive inference.42 This is an issue that he recognised and explicitly addressed, so we can be entirely confident on this point.

41

For my own view, see Millican (2009, §4).

42

Garrett (1997, 120-1, 126-30), followed by Pitson (2006, 220), sketches an interpretation according to which ‘when [a] conjunction of event-types is constant enough to produce inference in the mind of an (idealized) observer, … the events are an example of causal ‘necessity’; where the conjunction is not constant enough to produce this inference, they instead exhibit ‘‘chance’’’ (126). However, he later hints at a refinement of this by stating that on Hume’s principles, deterministic and probabilistic laws ‘manifest, at most, different degrees of the same kind of necessity’ (135). Since Garrett nevertheless takes Hume to be a determinist (128), and bearing in mind the point in my next paragraph, I would suggest that the most consistent development of his view is to put less weight on the passage at 1.3.14.33, and to see

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Another important factor to take into account here is Hume’s treatment of ‘philosophical probability,’ which he acknowledges to be an entirely legitimate ground of inference, and as having exactly the same foundation as ‘necessary’ causal inference, namely custom. Suppose that I have been presented with 11 initially indistinguishable eggs, of which 9 have turned out to be good and 1 bad. Then if I have no other relevant information, it is perfectly reasonable of me to expect that the final egg will be good, with a confidence (as we would now express it) of 0.9. This is an inference founded on custom, and it is a case of Humean probability rather than necessity, but it manifestly poses no problem for Hume’s system, even if it might seem superficially inconsistent with the principle that ‘necessity … is nothing but a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant’ (T 2.3.1.4). Hume’s account of probability is explicitly derivative from his account of ‘necessary’ causal inference, and in this sense, he indeed sees probability as being of fundamentally the same species as Humean necessity. This, I suggest, explains why he sometimes writes misleadingly of all customary inference as involving necessity: it is a simplification in the context of a debate in which his target is quite elsewhere. This finally brings us to the passage quoted earlier from Treatise 1.3.14.33, which seems to assert directly that genuine necessities — of the very same nature — can ‘have different degrees of constancy and force.’ This passage is unique, never repeated, and is apparently a lapse on Hume’s part. His talk of necessities of different degrees is sloppy, and his point would be better made by explaining his account of probability, and how it shares the same basis as necessity. However, it is easy to see a plausible reason for Hume’s slip, because his focus in this paragraph is on a different point altogether. In denying a distinction between physical and moral necessity, he is not thinking primarily of any supposed difference in their relative strength, but rather, is denying the commonly but erroneously supposed difference in their nature. This, recall, is the key point on which he disagrees with Samuel Clarke and other ‘libertarians’ (cf. §V above), and it is in essence the same point that he would later emphasise pithily in both the Abstract and the Enquiry: the ... advocates for free-will ... must shew, that we have an idea of something else in the actions of matter; which, according to the foregoing reasoning, is impossible. (A 34)

Hume as generally intending to reserve the term ‘necessity’ for strict uniformities, taking the weaker ‘degrees of necessity’ to be probabilities.

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Let them first discuss a more simple question, namely, the operations of body ... and try whether they can there form any idea of causation and necessity, except that of a constant conjunction of objects, and subsequent inference of the mind ... If [not] ... the dispute is at an end. (E 8.22)

Hume’s intention here, in denying a distinction between moral and physical necessity, is to undermine the claim that the operations of matter involve a different kind of necessity from the operations of mind, a physical necessitation (paradigmatically supposed to be exemplified by such things as the collision of billiard balls) that goes beyond his two definitions and thus beyond anything apparent in the actions of people. This denial, indeed, is perhaps the most important upshot of his entire discussion of causation, because it forms the heart of his argument concerning liberty and necessity, and the crucial link between Enquiry 7 and Enquiry 8. It is therefore significant that when he repeated this central argument in Book 2 of the Treatise, the Abstract, and the Enquiry, he did so without any hint of the acceptance of inconstant ‘necessities’ that is admittedly present in the anomalous passage from Treatise 1.3.14.33. Hume’s treatment of liberty and necessity performs a crucial role within his philosophy, clearing the way for moral science (as exemplified in his Essays) by establishing that systematic causal explanations (in the consistent sense of efficient causation) are possible in the human sphere just as they are in the natural world.43 This is the ultimate payoff that Hume seeks, and central to it is his denial of the distinction between moral and physical necessity. The upshot of this denial is not, as Harris claims, to reduce all necessity to the weakness of mere moral associations, but on the contrary, to remove a potential obstacle to the claim that absolute necessity — of the very same kind that underlies deterministic physical science — is equally applicable to the moral realm. Hume’s Determinism is thus crucial to his entire project of moral science.44 Received: March 2007

43

This was argued very effectively by Tatsuya Sakamoto in a hitherto unpublished paper ‘Hume as a Social Scientist,’ delivered to the 2003 Las Vegas Hume Conference.

44

I am grateful to my audience at the 2005 Toronto Hume Society conference, where an earlier version of this paper was presented, and especially to James Harris, who formally responded to it. I am also grateful to Ted Morris, whose robust paper at the Tokyo conference in 2004 provoked me into writing on this topic, to Lorne Falkenstein for subsequent comments, and to an anonymous Canadian Journal of Philosophy referee for some helpful suggestions.

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References Ayer, A. J. 1980. Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Born, Max, ed. 1971. The Born-Einstein Letters. London: Macmillan. Botterill, George. 2002. ‘Hume on Liberty and Necessity,’ in Peter Millican, ed., Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 277-300. Bricke, John. 2008. ‘Hume on Liberty and Necessity,’ in Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, ed., A Companion to Hume. Oxford: Blackwell, 201-16. Butler, Joseph. 1736. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. Dublin. Clarke, Samuel. 1705. A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God. London. Quotations taken from the eighth edition, London: 1732. ______. 1717. Remarks upon a Book, Entituled, A Philosophical Enquiry concerning Human Liberty. London. Collins, Anthony. 1717. A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty. London. Falkenstein, Lorne. 1998. ‘Hume’s Answer to Kant,’ Noûs 32: 331-60. Garrett, Don. 1997. Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Haddon, Walter. 1581. Against Ierome Osorius, Byshoppe of Siluane in Portingall and against his slaunderous Inuectiues. London. (Haddon having died in 1572, this edition was ‘continued’ by John Foxe and ‘Englished’ by James Bell.) Harris, James A. 2003. ‘Hume’s Reconciling Project and ‘‘The Common Distinction betwixt Moral and Physical Necessity,’’’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11: 451-71. ______. 2005. Of Liberty and Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1656. The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance: Clearly stated and debated between Dr. Bramhall Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. London. Honderich, Ted. 1993. How Free are You? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hume, David. 1739-40. A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition, 2 vols., David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press 2007 (references indicated by ‘T’). ______. 1741-77. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Eugene F. Miller, ed.,Liberty Classics, second edition 1987 (‘Essays,’ references given to paragraph number and to page number). ______. 1745. A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend in Edinburgh, included in Hume (1739/40) as above (references indicated by ‘L,’ and given to paragraph number). ______. 1748. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Peter Millican, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007 (references indicated by ‘E’ and given to section and paragraph number, except when giving page references for additional material such as the editorial introduction). ______. 1932. The Letters of David Hume, J.Y.T. Greig, ed., 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press (references indicated by ‘HL’).

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Kames, Lord Henry Home. 1751. Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Edinburgh. The third edition (1779) provides the basis for the edition by Mary Catherine Moran (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 2005). Kane, Robert. 2005. A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Kemp Smith, Norman. 1941. The Philosophy of David Hume. London: Macmillan. Millican, Peter. 2002. ‘Hume’s Sceptical Doubts concerning Induction,’ in Peter Millican, ed., Reading Hume on Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 107-73. ______. 2007a. ‘Humes Old and New: Four Fashionable Falsehoods, and One Unfashionable Truth,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 81: 163-99. ______. 2007b. ‘Against the ‘‘New Hume,’’’ in Rupert Read and Kenneth A. Richman, eds., The New Hume Debate: Revised Edition, London: Routledge, 211-52. ______. 2009. ‘Hume, Causal Realism, and Causal Science,’ Mind 118: 647-712. ______. Forthcoming. ‘Hume’s ‘‘Scepticism’’ about Induction,’ in Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien, eds., The Continuum Companion to Hume. London: Continuum. Papineau, David. 2000. ‘The Rise of Physicalism,’ in B. Loewer, ed., Physicalism and its Discontents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Penelhum, Terence. 2000. ‘The Freedom of the Will,’ in Penelhum, Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 156-76. Pitson, Tony. 2006. ‘Liberty, Necessity, and the Will,’ in Saul Traiger, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise. Oxford: Blackwell. Price, Richard. 1758. A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals, London. Excerpts from the third edition (1787) are included in L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed., British Moralists. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1897, vol. ii, 103-84. Reid, Thomas. 1764. An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense, Edinburgh. The fourth edition (1785) provides the basis for the edition by Derek R. Brookes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1997). ______. 1790. Essays on the Intellectual and Active Powers of Man. Dublin, 3 vols. Russell, Paul. 1995. Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalising Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 2008. The Riddle of Hume’s Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion. New York: Oxford University Press. Strawson, Galen. 2004. ‘Free Will,’ in Edward Craig, ed., Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge, updated and revised February 29, 2004. Online version retrieved from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1. Stroud, Barry. 1977. Hume. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Taylor, Richard. 1967. ‘Determinism,’ in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan, vol. 2, 359-73. Yolton, John W. 1983. Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 643 Person, Substance, Mode and ‘the moral Man’ in Locke’s Philosophy 643 Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 643-668

Person, Substance, Mode and ‘the moral Man’ in Locke’s Philosophy ANTONIA LOLORDO University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA

I In 1769, the English bishop and theologian Edmund Law published a Defence of Mr. Locke’s Opinion concerning Personal Identity.1 In this work, Law attempted to ‘explain and vindicate Mr. Locke’s hypothesis’ (301) by offering a new account of Lockean persons. Law’s account centers around three key claims. First, persons are modes — very roughly, properties — rather than substances. Second, the relevant properties are those that make moral evaluation appropriate, thus taking seriously Locke’s insistence that ‘person’ is a forensic term. And third, the fact that persons are modes is what makes a demonstrative science of morality possible. I am not convinced that Law’s interpretation actually vindicates Locke, though it does make his theory come out rather better than is typically imagined. I am, however, convinced that Law’s interpretation provides the best available account of Lockean persons. I also think

1

In volume 2 of The Works of John Locke, 12th edition, 9 volumes. London, 1824.

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Law’s interpretation helps us understand how Locke’s account of persons fits into his philosophy as a whole. Thus in this paper I advance a mode interpretation of Lockean persons and offer three arguments in its favor.2 My argument proceeds as follows. In (II), I elucidate the nature of Lockean modes by contrasting ideas of modes with ideas of substances. In (III), I use these contrasts to show that the idea of a person is the idea of a mode rather than the idea of a substance. I defend the mode interpretation from some common objections in (IV). In (V), I argue that Locke cannot justify the methodology of 2.27 unless he holds that persons are modes. In (VI), I argue that the role the idea of a person plays in Locke’s ethical and political theory requires persons to be modes. Finally, in (VII), I argue that the mode interpretation provides a satisfactory way of responding to the common objection that Locke’s account of personal identity is incompatible with his anti-essentialist metaphysics.

II The term ‘mode’ had a precise definition for Descartes and his Aristotelian predecessors, but it is clear that Locke does not mean what they meant: he apologizes for using ‘the word Mode, in a somewhat different sense from its ordinary signification’ (2.12.4).3 Beyond this, things are rather murky. Examples of modes include things like an inch (2.13.4), a triangle (3.3.18) and a murder (2.12.4): mode is a motley category for Locke. In Locke’s taxonomy, all ideas are either simple or complex, and simple ideas represent qualities while complex ideas represent modes, substances or relations.4 Hence anything that is not a substance, rela-

2

The main contemporary proponent of the mode interpretation is William Uzgalis, ‘Relative Identity and Locke’s Principle of Individuation,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 7 (1990) 283-97. E.J. Lowe, Locke (New York: Routledge 2005), also suggests a mode interpretation. Vere Chappell, ‘Locke on the Ontology of Matter, Living Things and Persons,’ Philosophical Studies 60 (1990) 19-32 holds that consciousness is a mode but — from my point of view surprisingly — denies that persons are modes.

3

That is, Book 2, Chapter 12, section 4 of John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter H. Nidditch, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975).

4

Abstract ideas and their objects may fall outside this taxonomy, but we can safely leave them aside for current purposes. Whatever else persons are, they are not abstract.

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tion or quality must be a mode.5 Locke distinguishes simple modes (‘variations, or different combinations of the same simple idea’ [2.12.4]) from complex or ‘mixed’ modes that are ‘compounded of simple ideas of several kinds’ (2.12.5), but we can safely set this distinction aside for current purposes.6 Locke provides numerous examples of modes. The ideas of beauty (‘a certain composition of color and figure, causing delight to the beholder’) and theft (‘the concealed change of the possession of any thing, without the consent of the proprietor’ (2.12.5)) are modes. So are feelings like joy, sorrow, hope and fear (2.20), or more complex ones such as ‘pain from captious uninstructive wrangling, and the pleasure of rational conversation with a friend’ (2.20.18). A wide variety of processes and events are described as modes: fencing, wrestling, printing, etching (2.22.9); dueling (2.28.15); distilling, drilling and filtration (2.18.7). So are ‘remembering, imagining, reasoning, and other modes of thinking’ (2.1.20). Similarly, there are modes of motion: to slide, to

5

Martha Bolton points out that Locke never claims that his taxonomy of complex ideas is exhaustive. And — as Leibniz’s disease example shows — certain ideas do not fit the taxonomy well. (A disease is obviously not a relation or a substance, and it cannot be a mode because it has a real essence amenable to empirical investigation.) Nevertheless, I believe that the trivision is intended to be exhaustive. Book II of the Essay is meant to show that all ideas derive from sensation or reflection, and the way Locke tries to establish this is by showing that ideas of substances, modes and relations are composed of simple ideas and that simple ideas derive from sensation or reflection. Moreover, even if Locke would allow the possibility of a fourth sort of complex ideas not discussed in the Essay, it is not plausible that an idea discussed in as much detail as the idea of a person would fall into that fourth category.

6

Emily Carson, ‘Locke on Simple and Mixed Modes,’ Locke Studies 5 (2005) 19-38 argues that the distinction between simple and mixed modes is important, though problematic, for Locke: ‘geometrical modes are tied to the simple idea of space in a way that undermines their claim to ideality, and thus undermines Locke’s account of our knowledge of them’ (32). On her view, although Locke claims universal truth, reality, and adequacy for ideas of both simple and mixed modes, the reasons should be different in the two cases. Mixed mode ideas are adequate because they are their own archetypes; simple mode ideas are adequate for roughly the same reasons as simple ideas. However, Carson also grants that ‘Locke himself often attributes to the objects of mathematics features that are only appropriate to mixed modes’ (24). One example of this is the comparison between mathematical and moral ideas at 4.4.6-9, where moral knowledge can be as certain as mathematical knowledge because both their objects are ideas. (Cf. 2.31.3, 4.12.8.) Since I am interested in Locke’s views on mathematics only in so far as they help us understand his views on morality, I focus on precisely those passages. However, I agree that Locke ought not to assimilate mathematical and moral knowledge in the way he does.

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roll, and to tumble (2.18.2). Other examples include a tune (2.18.3) and a rainbow (2.18.4). However, the two most important sorts of modes for Locke are mathematical and moral ones. Locke writes that To enumerate all the mixed modes, which have been settled, with names to them … would be to make a dictionary of the greatest part of the words made use of in divinity, ethicks, law, and politicks, and several other sciences. (2.22.12)

He mentions examples such as murder (2.12.4) and justice (2.30.3). Mathematics also provides many examples of modes, although here they are simple modes: a triangle (2.12.4), the number two (2.13.1), and numbers in general (2.16.4). It is clear from these examples that Locke’s category mode does not map onto any metaphysical category in common use today. Though many modes are events, for instance, and Locke sometimes speaks as if all modes take place over time (2.22.8), not all his examples are events. And while many of the examples could be construed as abstract objects, not all can be. (Indeed, one might suspect that Locke counts mathematical entities as modes precisely to avoid having to countenance abstract objects.) Hence one way to gain some understanding of modes is to contrast them with something we understand better: substances. Six contrasts between substances and modes — or between ideas of substances and ideas of modes — are worth noting: (1)

Ideas of substances ‘represent distinct particular things subsisting by themselves’ (2.12.6). Ideas of modes, in contrast, ‘contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as Dependencies on, or Affections of, Substances’ (2.12.4).

This is what Locke’s modes do have in common with Descartes’s and, perhaps, why he chose the term ‘mode’ to begin with. A second contrast is related to the first: (2)

Mode ideas are intended ‘to denominate all things that should happen to agree’ with them (3.6.46), i.e. to represent whatever corresponds to them. Substance ideas, on the other hand, ‘carry with them a supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable’ (3.5.3). Mode ideas and substance ideas have opposite directions of fit.

The passage is worth quoting at more length. Contrasting mode ideas with substance ideas, Locke notes

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Nor does the mind, in these of mixed modes, as in the complex idea of substances, examine them by the real existence of things; or verify them by patterns containing such peculiar compositions in nature. To know whether his idea of adultery or incest be right, will a man seek it anywhere amongst things existing? Or is it true because any one has been witness to such an action? No.… (3.5.3)

The implicit contrast here is with substance ideas: to know whether my idea of, say, gold is right I must seek out pieces of gold and compare my idea of gold to them. Locke’s discussion of real and fantastical ideas helps clarify the contrast. Some substance ideas are real; others, like the idea of a centaur, are fantastical or chimerical — and I discover whether a substance idea is real or fantastical by seeking things corresponding to it in the world (2.30.5). In contrast, all mode ideas are real (2.30.4). For substance ideas, but not mode ideas, are ‘tacitly refer’d’ (2.30.1) to archetypes in the world. Consider ideas that correspond only partially to things in the world. Take a paradigmatic substance idea — the idea of gold. Suppose that at one point I had an idea of gold that included being yellow. Later I came to believe that not all gold is yellow, perhaps as a result of finding non-yellow things that were otherwise very much like the things I had originally counted as gold.7 I would revise my idea of gold to leave out the idea of being yellow. Now consider a paradigmatic mode idea — the idea of murder. Suppose that at one point I had an idea of murder that included premeditation. Later I came to believe that none of the crimes I had hitherto counted as murder had in fact been premeditated. As a result of this, I would not revise my idea of murder; rather, I would be glad to have learned that no such heinous crimes had ever been committed. (3)

7

The real and nominal essences of substances differ, and their real essences are unknown (3.6.3). The nominal essence of a substance such as gold is ‘that complex Idea the word Gold stands for, let it be, for instance, a Body yellow, of a certain

This example brings up a host of questions concerning Locke’s views on natural kinds. However, these questions and the scholarly debate they have occasioned can safely be bracketed out here. My example simply requires Locke to allow that we sometimes decide that our substance ideas include features they should not include. And although he is far more concerned with a second sort of case, where our substance ideas should include more features than they do — and although he may have trouble describing how the first sort of case works in his theoretical framework — I find it hard to believe Locke could deny that cases of the first sort ever occur.

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weight, malleable, fusible, and fixed.’ The real essence is ‘the constitution of the insensible parts of that Body, on which those Qualities, and all the other Properties of Gold depend’ (3.6.2). In contrast, the real and nominal essences of modes are necessarily the same (3.6.44). (4)

It follows from this that all ideas of modes are adequate and all ideas of substances inadequate (2.31.3). Ideas are adequate just in case they ‘perfectly represent those Archetypes, which the Mind supposes them taken for; which it intends them to stand for, and to which it refers them’ (2.31.1). Ideas of modes are ‘not … intended for Copies of Things really existing, but for Archetypes made by the Mind, to rank and denominate Things by’ (2.31.2). In other words, the archetypes that mode ideas are supposed to represent are creatures of our own minds, and hence mode ideas cannot help but be accurate.8 In contrast, ideas of substances are inadequate because the archetypes they are intended to correspond to are real essences, and we are ignorant of the real essences of substances.

(5)

Ideas of substance include the idea of a substratum (2.23.1). Ideas of modes, being simply collections of simple ideas (2.12.5), do not.

Finally, (6)

Individual substances have mind-independent unity, but ‘Every mixed mode … has its unity from an act of the mind combining those several simple ideas together, and considering them as one complex one, consisting of those parts’ (2.22.4).

There is some dispute in the secondary literature about the relation between substrata and substantial real essences. I do not want to take a position in that debate, so let me simply note that the unity of substances is provided by substrata or by real essences (or both). At 2.23.14, Locke speaks of ‘all the simple ideas, that [are] thus united in one common substratum.’ But a sort of unity is clearly also provided by the fact that all the properties of a substance flow from its real essence.9

8

Here I am bracketing out various complications that arise when we intend our mode ideas to correspond to those of other people.

9

A third potential source of unity may be worth noting as well. Perhaps substances are unified because all their qualities flow from their internal constitution. This,

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Now, modes also have some unity in virtue of their qualities flowing from their real essence. But since the real essences of modes are minddependent, the unity of modes is mind-dependent too. A mathematical example will help us see how qualities can flow from the real essences of modes: A figure including a space between three lines, is the real as well as nominal essence of a triangle; it being not only the abstract idea to which the general name is annexed, but the very essentia or being of the thing itself, that foundation from which all its properties flow, and to which they are all inseparably annexed (3.3.18).

This example helps us understand the unity of modes. But it also helps us see why Locke’s claim that mode ideas are all adequate does not imply that mode ideas tell their possessor all there is to know about the mode. We do not, for instance, know all the properties of even a fairly simple mode like a triangle (2.31.10). However, we could discover those properties just by considering our idea: as he says of an ellipse, ‘having in our plain Idea, the whole Essence of that Figure, we from thence discover those Properties, and demonstratively see how they flow, and are inseparable from it’ (2.32.11).10 The point that mode ideas imply all the properties of the thing they represent, without necessarily exhibiting those properties to us, is the ground on which the possibility of an informative, demonstrative science depends. Demonstrative sciences of morality and mathematics are possible because both disciplines rely on ideas of modes, and those ideas adequately represent real essences. And demonstrative sciences of morality and mathematics may be informative because the properties that flow from the real essences need not be exhibited in the idea. Although it is necessary that the internal angles of a three-sided closed plane figure add up to 180 degrees, one can have the idea of a three-sided

unlike the real essence suggestion, provides unity to individuals and not just to the idea of substances of a certain kind in general. 10

As Carson, ‘Locke on Simple and Mixed Modes,’ points out, we actually need to consider the nature of space as well. This complicates the situation somewhat. Carson suggests that simple modes are constrained by the nature of space and hence not entirely arbitrary in the way that mixed mode ideas are arbitrary. If so, the epistemology of simple and mixed modes is entirely different. However, I am inclined to think that Locke does not fully realize the extent to which he is appealing to the nature of space here. After all, the 3.3.18 passage just quoted says explicitly that all the properties of a triangle flow from its real essence.

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closed plane figure without seeing this. Since this point is important for understanding the role that the idea of a person plays for Locke, I will return to it later.

III Now that we have some grasp on the contrast between substances and modes, let us see how persons, as Locke understands them, fit in. Locke defines a person as A thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking. (2.27.9)

That is, a person is a conscious being.11 Now, there are two different ways of understanding modes and hence two different ways of understanding the mode interpretation of persons: (i)

Modes are properties.12

(ii)

Modes are the things resulting from the exemplification of properties.13

Fists, dents, and wrinkles, for instance, are neither properties nor substances but things resulting from the exemplification of properties. There is something adjectival about them that justifies Locke’s use of the term ‘mode.’ Nevertheless, they are things rather than properties: we do not predicate fists and dents of substances, but we can predicate properties of them.

11

It’s clear why Locke assumes that all rational or thinking beings are ipso facto conscious: recall the famous claim of 1.2.5 that it is ‘near a contradiction, to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands not.’ However, personhood requires more than momentary consciousness: it requires the ability to consider oneself as a being persisting through time. I am unsure whether Locke would accept the possibility of conscious beings that lacked this ability. If he does, then we should say that a person is a certain kind of conscious being. This possibility will make no difference for the following discussion.

12

In this section I use the word ‘property’ in its inclusive, 21st century sense.

13

I borrow this suggestion from James van Cleve, Problems from Kant (New York: Oxford University Press 1999), 212, who characterizes Spinoza’s modes in this way.

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Consider a paradigmatic Lockean example, a triangle. A triangle is a thing, not a property, but it is not a substance. Rather, it is what results from the exemplification of certain properties — by chalk-marks on a blackboard, perhaps, or lines on a piece of paper. The relevant properties will always be exemplified by something, but what they are exemplified by has no role to play in the identity of the mode. It is irrelevant to whether something counts as a triangle — or even as this particular triangle — whether the properties in question are exemplified by a blackboard or a piece of paper. Locke appears to think of modes in both these ways; at any rate, some of his examples fit (i) and others fit (ii). Beauty and justice, for instance, are properties; duels, rainbows and triangles are more plausibly thought of as things resulting from the exemplification of certain properties. We can predicate pointlessness of the duel, but we cannot predicate the duel of the duelers. Readers may object that fists and wrinkles are things only in the deflationary sense that we use substantives to pick them out: we could say all we wanted to say about a wrinkle by talking about the relative locations of various bits of substantial cloth.14 I reply that this is perfectly all right with me. When I say that modes can be properties or the things resulting from property exemplification, I do not intend to introduce a new ontological category for Locke. I am simply pointing out that Lockean modes include many examples that we normally think of as things rather than properties. Hence, the objection that it is a category mistake to say that persons are modes is misplaced. Let us now return to our six contrasts between substances and modes to see where persons best fit. (1)

Ideas of substance represent self-subsisting things, while ideas of modes represent things that depend on substances.

Locke gives numerous examples of a consciousness — and hence a person — shifting from one substance to another. However, he never suggests that it is possible or conceivable for a consciousness to float free without subsisting in some living human organism or immaterial thinking substance. If persons were thought of as substances rather than modes, there would be no need for Locke to restrict himself to examples where organism or soul is changed: he could also use examples where there was a consciousness without any organism or soul. The idea of a person, then, represents persons as depending for their existence on a

14

I owe this objection to an anonymous referee for this journal.

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substance, although the idea does not specify what sort of substance it is (any more than the idea of a triangle, say, specifies whether the figure is drawn on paper or on a blackboard). In this respect persons are more like modes than substances. (2)

Substance ideas are supposed to represent the distinct particulars they are tacitly referred to. Mode ideas are not; rather, they are intended to represent whatever things happen to fit them.

This criterion is somewhat more troublesome, for it seems that we do typically refer our idea of persons to existing things. In fact, we typically refer them to the living animal bodies that surround us — a mistake Locke is concerned to exorcise. But consider how I would react were it to turn out that none of these bodies possessed consciousness. Would I revise my idea of a person to better fit the things it is referred to, thus omitting consciousness from the idea of a person? I think not. Rather, I would conclude that there were no persons (save myself) and modify my behavior towards the living animal bodies around me accordingly. Two other points of contrast between mode ideas and substance ideas are related to this one: (3)

Real and nominal essences are the same for modes, different for substances. The real essences of modes are known while the real essences of substances are unknown.

(4)

Mode ideas are adequate, substance ideas inadequate.

Mode ideas are adequate because modal real essences are known (and modal real essences are known because they are the same as modal nominal essences). Substance ideas are inadequate for parallel reasons. In sections (V) and (VI), I will argue that both Locke’s methodology in 2.27 and the role persons play in his ethics and political theory presuppose that our ideas of persons are adequate. Hence persons must be modes. (5)

Substance ideas include a substratum. Mode ideas do not.

My reasons for thinking persons fit better with modes than with substances in respect to (5) are quite similar to those discussed in connection with (1). In Locke’s various examples of transfer of consciousness and body switching, we imagine consciousness persevering while what it inheres in — and hence, presumably, the relevant substratum — changes. We would not find this so easy to imagine if the idea of a substratum were essential to our idea of a person.

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(6)

Substantial unity is mind-independent, modal unity minddependent.

Substances are unified because their properties flow from a mind-independent internal constitution, substratum or real essence. Modes are unified because their properties flow from a mind-dependent essence. I argue, following Ken Winkler’s account of the subjective constitution 15 of the self in Locke, that Lockean persons are constituted by appropriative mental acts. Hence the unity of persons is mind-dependent in the same way the unity of modes in general is mind-dependent. I return to this point at the end of section (IV). I have argued that given how Locke contrasts modes and substances, persons fit better into the category of modes than of substances. Although I have made no attempt to give an ontology of modes, seeing how modes contrast with substances also helps us gain better traction on the category of a mode. Now I examine a number of objections to this interpretation of Lockean persons and expose weaknesses in each. This will further refine our grasp on the status of modes.

IV Ken Winkler has given four arguments against the mode interpretation that he takes to be jointly compelling: (1)

Locke says that ‘finite intelligences’ are substances (2.27.2) and defines a person as a kind of intelligence (2.27.9). Hence persons must be substances.

(2)

‘There is as much reason to count oak trees and horses as modes as there is to count persons as modes, and Locke takes trees and horses to be clear cases of substance’ (164).

(3)

In one passage ‘Locke makes it clear that what he calls ‘the moral Man’ is a substance’ (164), and the notions of moral man and person are the same, or at least very closely related.

(4)

Anything satisfying Locke’s definition of a person also satisfies the very undemanding conception of a substance articulated at, say, 2.23.1 and 2.23.14.

15

Kenneth Winkler, ‘Locke on Personal Identity,’ in Chappell, ed., Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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A fifth objection is due to Dan Kaufman:16 (5)

‘Locke’s own characterization of mixed modes states that they are mere inventions of the mind, arbitrarily created, to which nothing in the real world answers,’ and surely a person is not an arbitrary mental fiction.

Last is an objection that Bob Adams has mentioned: (6)

17

Since Lockean persons can survive changes in organism or immaterial thinking substance, the mode interpretation commits Locke to a version of the metaphysically distasteful doctrine of real accidents.

Each of these objections can be answered. Consider objection (1). In 2.27.2, finite intelligences, bodies and God are listed as the three types of substances. In 2.27.9 a person is said to be ‘a thinking intelligent Being.’ Winkler, supposing that Locke means the same thing by ‘finite intelligence’ and ‘thinking intelligent Being,’ concludes that Lockean persons are substances. But this supposition cannot be right. It implies that persons are ‘finite intelligences’ in the sense of 2.27.2 — thinking substances. But as 2.27.13 makes clear, Locke wants to distinguish the idea of a person from the idea of a thinking substance. Hence he cannot mean the same thing by ‘finite intelligence’ and ‘thinking intelligent Being’ in these two passages, and thus they do not jointly imply that persons are substances. Now for (2). Winkler says that the one reason to count oaks and persons as modes is that if they were substances, then there would be two substances of the same kind in the same place at the same — and Locke denies that this is possible.18 But since oak trees are paradigmatically substances for Locke, this cannot be a good reason for counting them as modes. And thus it cannot be a good reason for counting persons as modes either. Now, I am not sure it follows from the fact that oaks are

16

Dan Kaufman, ‘Locke on Individuation and the Corpuscular Basis of Kinds,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2007) 499-534. Kaufman’s objection is actually directed at the mode interpretation of organisms. But one might also direct this objection against the mode interpretation of persons.

17

In conversation.

18

The oak and the mass of matter constituting it, Winkler thinks, would be two bodily substances in the same place at the same time. Thus one could also reply that ‘body’ is not the relevant kind: organism and mass of matter are the two relevant kinds.

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paradigm substances that there are no good reasons to count them as modes. But in any case, in (V) and (VI) I offer reasons to count persons as modes that do not apply to organisms. Hence one can maintain a mode interpretation of Lockean persons without committing oneself to a mode interpretation of organisms. Answering (3) requires examining the passage Winkler reads as stating that ‘the moral Man’ is a substance: As to substances, when concerned in moral Discourses, their divers natures are not so much enquir’d into, as supposed; v.g. when we say that Man is subject to Law: We mean nothing by Man, but a corporeal rational Creature: What the real Essence or other Qualities of that Creature are in this Case, is no way considered. And therefore, whether a Child or Changeling be a Man in a physical Sense, may amongst the Naturalists be as disputable as it will, it concerns not at all the moral Man, as I may call him, which is this immoveable unchangeable Idea, a corporeal rational Being … The Names of Substances, if they be used in them, as they should, can no more disturb Moral, than they do Mathematical Discourses (3.11.16).

I grant that if the moral man is a substance then so is a person. But I find Winkler’s reading strained. Winkler thinks this passage counts against the mode interpretation because in it, Locke says that ‘Names of Substances’ are used in moral discourses and offers the expression ‘the ‘moral Man’’ as an example of such a name. Thus, Winkler concludes, ‘the ‘moral Man’ is the name of a substance — which is to say that a moral man, a person, is a substance.’19 But consider the sentence Winkler elides: … the moral Man, as I may call him, which is this immoveable unchangeable Idea, a corporeal rational Being. For were there a Monkey, or any other Creature to be found, that had the use of Reason, to such a degree, as to be able to understand general Signs, and to deduce Consequences about general Ideas, he would no doubt be subject to Law, and in that Sense, be a Man, how much soever he differ’d in Shape from others of that Name. The Names of Substances, if they be used in them, as they should, can no more disturb Moral, than they do Mathematical Discourses. (3.11.16)

A rational monkey could — in the relevant sense of the term ‘man’ — be a man. In the ordinary sense of the term ‘man,’ this is impossible: a monkey cannot be a living human animal. Though we may use the word ‘man’ in moral discourse, we do not mean ‘living human animal’; rather we mean ‘corporeal rational being’ — that is, ‘corporeal person.’ (And as Winkler himself notes, at 4.3.18 Locke makes it clear that the idea of the moral man need not include corporeality.) Locke’s claim, on my reading, is that in moral discourse we use a substance term — that

19

I owe this clarification to personal correspondence with Winkler.

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is, a word that is typically a name of a substance — to stand for the idea of a person.20 Thus Locke’s remark that ‘the ‘‘moral Man”’ is a substance name should not be taken to imply that the moral Man is a substance. Indeed, I think Locke’s claim that the idea of the moral man is an ‘immoveable unchangeable idea,’ unaffected by the naturalists’ discoveries concerning the real essence or other qualities of living human creatures, strongly suggests that the idea of the moral man is the idea of a mode. So does the comparison between using substance names in moral and mathematical discourse: it is clear that when we use substance names in mathematics, we are not using them to stand for substances. Mathematical entities just aren’t substances. Far from counting against the 21 mode interpretation, then, this passage actually supports it. Winkler’s last objection is that whatever satisfies Locke’s definition of a person also satisfies his very undemanding conception of a substance. For the idea of a substance is simply ‘a collection of a certain number of simple Ideas, considered as united in one thing’ (2.23.14), and a person is ‘a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection’ (2.27.9). I have two replies to this objection. First, if one reads ‘as united in one thing’ diachronically, then Locke does not think the idea of a person is a collection of simple ideas considered as united in one thing. This is the whole point of his substance-switching thought experiments.22 Second, I argued in (III) above that Locke’s conception of a substance is actually somewhat more demanding than 2.23.14 implies. Both substance ideas and mode ideas have some unity: the crucial difference is that in the case of modes, that unity is mind-dependent. Thus the fact that person ideas are unified does not show that they are substance ideas. It must still be shown that what unifies them is mind-independent. And we shall see below that Winkler himself has forcefully argued that the unity of persons is mind-dependent.

20

It is unsurprising that we do so, as we are often confused about what ideas the terms ‘man’ and ‘person’ stand for. One goal of 2.27 is to distinguish the ideas of man and person, after all, and it was not until the 2nd edition of the Essay that Locke wrote about identity and hence came to understand the relation between the ideas of persons and organisms.

21

I think my reading is far more natural than Winkler’s. But I also think that such judgments of naturalness tend to be conditioned by pre-existing commitments. Perhaps, then, the passage in itself is genuinely ambiguous. But recall where we are in the dialectic: Winkler advances this passage as an objection to the mode interpretation, so if the passage is actually ambiguous, this is enough to defeat his objection.

22

I owe this point to an anonymous referee.

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Let us now turn to Kaufman’s objection, that persons cannot be modes since Locke holds that modes are ‘arbitrary.’ Consider what Locke means by saying that modes are arbitrary, as he does in discussing the adequacy of ideas: Our complex ideas of modes, being voluntary collections of simple ideas, which the mind puts together without reference to any real archetypes or standing patterns existing any-where, are and cannot but be adequate ideas. Because they not being intended for copies of things really existing, but for archetypes made by the mind to rank and denominate things, cannot want any thing (2.31.3; cf. 3.5.3).

This is just our second contrast between substance ideas and mode ideas, expressed in somewhat different terms: modes are arbitrary because they are not designed to represent existing particulars but for some other purpose. What is that purpose? Locke remarks elsewhere that ‘though the killing of an old man be as fit in nature to be united into one complex idea, as the killing a man’s father; yet there being no name standing precisely for the one, as there is the name of parricide to mark the other’ (2.22.4; cf. 3.5.6), we have a more settled idea of parricide. The idea of parricide is not arbitrary in the sense of being capricious or random. Out of the multitude of possible collections of qualities that could be grouped together, we pick out those that are useful to us, given our needs and interests: Though these complex ideas, or essences of mixed modes, depend on the mind, and are made by it with great liberty; yet they are not made at random, and jumbled together without any reason at all. Though these complex ideas be not always copied from nature, yet they are always suited to the end for which abstract ideas are made (3.5.7).

Thus all Locke means by calling modes ‘arbitrary’ is that they are determined by us, rather than by independent features of the world. Since the idea of a person is fundamentally an ethical idea, it ought to be tailored to human needs and interests. Hence the arbitrariness of modes does not count against the mode interpretation of persons.23 The last objection is that the mode interpretation commits Locke to an unacceptable doctrine of real accidents. In cases of body switching and transfer of consciousness, numerically the same mode modifies two different substances in turn. And this seems bizarre: it makes no

23

Since Kaufman directs this objection against the mode interpretation of organisms, let me note that I do think the arbitrariness of modes counts against construing organisms as modes.

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sense to say, for instance, that numerically the same triangle modifies different pieces of paper in turn. I grant that in general, it is metaphysically unacceptable to hold that modes can be transferred from one substance to another.24 But given the nature of Lockean persons, it is perfectly acceptable for them to be transferred from one substance to another. Consider the transfer of consciousness discussion at 2.27.13. If ‘the consciousness of past actions’ is ‘a present representation of a past action,’ Locke says, then (even if the power of thought depends on an immaterial thinking substance) persons can survive change in thinking substance. What makes the person modifying the second thinking substance the same as the person modifying the first one is just that the later person appropriates the earlier person’s actions, that is, represents them to herself as her own. Transferring persons from one substance to another can be unproblematic because, as Locke notes later in the section, ‘consciousness … as has been shown, is quite a different thing from the same numerical figure or motion in body.’ Thus admitting the possibility of transfer of persons from one thinking substance (or organism) to another does not commit us to any unsavory metaphysical theses. This response to the real accident objection relies on accepting Ken Winkler’s characterization of how consciousness constitutes the self. On this reading, for instance, my appropriating the actions of a certain small girl is not just evidence that we are the same person — it is what makes us the same person.25 This is the point of Locke’s remark that ‘personality extends itself beyond present existence … only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions (2.27.6). And it is why Locke’s account, correctly understood, is not affected by Butler’s famous circularity objection.26

24

However, consider 2.23.28, where Locke seems to say that the transfer of motion from one body to another, though inconceivable, is actual.

25

On this reading, the present moment of consciousness is not all that counts in constituting the self. When I appropriate the little girl into myself, I appropriate all of her past — everything she has appropriated — whether or not I am now conscious of it. Thomas Reid objected in his 1785 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man that Locke’s account leads to contradictory results. If a general remembers being a young officer capturing a flag, the young officer remembers being a boy stealing fruit, and the general does not remember stealing the fruit, then the general both is and is not the boy. If Winkler and I are right, this just misunderstands how appropriation works. When the general appropriates the young officer into himself, he thereby appropriates the boy as well.

26

The objection, first proposed by Joseph Butler in his 1736 Analogy of Religion, is that Locke’s account is circular: what makes a the same person as b is that a remembers b, but a’s memory is only veridical if she is the same person as b.

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V In the preceding sections, I have elucidated the mode interpretation and defended it against some objections. In this section and the next two, I offer direct support for the mode interpretation. My first argument concerns the methodology of 2.27. Compare it with the methodology of the rest of the Essay — the ‘historical, plain method’ (Epistle) Locke claims to embrace — and the methodology of the Boylean science with which he was associated. In 2.27 Locke relies on fanciful examples without worrying about whether such examples are possible, let alone whether they actually occur.27 Indeed, at 2.27.13 he notes explicitly that given our ignorance of the nature of thinking substance, we cannot know whether these examples are possible. This ought to surprise Locke’s readers more than it does.28 For although the Essay is teeming with examples, in almost every case they concern situations or things we know are possible — in fact, actual.29 Consider some famous examples: the manna (2.8.18), the piece of porphyry (2.8.19), and the man in the locked room (2.21.10). Even bizarre reports, like those of monstrous births (3.6.23) and the Mingrelians who bury their children alive (1.3.9), are supposed to be true. And the examples used to motivate discussion of the identity of organisms, like the amputated finger (2.27.17) and the fat horse grown from a thin colt (2.27.3), are quotidian. Most of these examples, of course, are merely illustrative. But the rarity of fictional examples like those dominating 2.27 should still make

27

Locke thinks that body-switching, at least, has happened in the past and will happen again: Christ was resurrected and we will be resurrected. However, it is interesting to note that he does not invoke these examples in 2.27, preferring to stick with examples that he would consider fanciful.

28

There is surprisingly little discussion of Locke’s thought experiments. An exception is David Soles and Katherine Bradfield, ‘Some Remarks on Locke’s Use of Thought Experiments,’ Locke Studies 1 (2001) 31-62. Soles and Bradfield argue that the thought experiments of 2.27 ‘are designed to convince … readers that they do, in fact, employ identity of consciousness as their criterion of individuation of persons and doing so makes sense only if they already implicitly accept Locke’s analysis of what it is to be a person’ (53). I agree with this whole-heartedly. My goal is to determine why Locke thinks we can legitimately assume that our implicit criterion of personal identity is correct. Soles and Bradfield do not tie their discussion into issues about real essence. However, it’s worth noting that they distinguish two kinds of Lockean thought experiments: those intended to help with conceptual analysis, like the ones in 2.27, and those that rely on analogies between unobservables and observed objects.

29

The one exception I am aware of is the man with microscopical eyes at 2.23.12.

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us wonder. Why, on Locke’s view, should we expect such examples to yield genuine knowledge? They elicit our intuitions about which changes persons survive. Why would Locke expect this to yield trustworthy results about persons? Answering this question requires saying a bit more about the methodology of 2.27. Locke begins by telling us that problems about identity derive from ‘the little care and attention used in having precise notions of the things to which [identity] is attributed’ (2.27.1). His preliminary articulation of the idea of a person, in section 9, is ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself.’ The following sections are designed to make the idea clear and distinct. For our initial idea of a person is a confused idea — ‘such a one, as is not sufficiently distinguishable from another, from which it ought to be different’ (2.29.4). Locke distinguishes the idea of a person from the idea of an immaterial soul, on one hand, and the idea of a living human organism, on the other, by using a series of examples: transfer of consciousness, reincarnation, the man with Nestor’s soul, etc. He discovers that ‘personal identity consists; not in the identity of substance, but, as I have said, in the identity of consciousness’ (2.27.19). And he comes to see why consciousness is what constitutes personhood. It is, he says, Only by consciousness, whereby [a personality] becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present … which is founded in a concern for happiness, the unavoidable concomitant of consciousness. (2.27.26)

This process of conceptual analysis, and the various thought experiments Locke uses to assist it, has some interesting results. It shows us that the idea of a person is distinct from the idea of an organism or a Cartesian thinking substance, that the idea of a person is fundamentally the idea of a continuing consciousness, and that the reason continuing consciousness is fundamental to our idea of a person is that it is tightly bound up with our conceptions of responsibility and motivation. But since these results concern our idea of a person, not persons themselves, why are they significant? Locke asks and answers a more general form of this question in another context. After arguing that all knowledge consists in the perception of the agreement or disagreement of ideas, he considers an imaginary interlocutor who asks, ‘of what use is all this fine knowledge of men’s own imaginings, to a man that inquires after the reality of things?’ (4.4.1). Locke answers that ‘knowledge … is real, only so far as there is a conformity between our ideas and the reality of things’ (4.4.3). Hence, to know if knowledge is real, we must know whether the constituent ideas agree with things.

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In many cases it is guaranteed that our ideas agree with things. All simple ideas do so (4.4.4), as do all complex ideas that are not ideas of substances (4.4.5). Ideas of modes are guaranteed to agree with the reality of things for roughly the same reason they are guaranteed to be adequate: the archetypes they are intended to represent are simply ideas. Hence we can be certain that knowledge obtained by comparing ideas of modes is real. Locke gives mathematical and moral knowledge 30 as examples of real knowledge involving modes (4.4.6-7). However, knowledge about substances may fail to be real (4.4.11) and indeed, our real knowledge of substance ‘will not be found to reach very far’ because of the inadequacy of our ideas of substance (4.4.12). Indeed, knowledge of substance includes only such trifling propositions as gold is a metal (4.8.13). This gives us reason to think that if 2.27’s process of making our idea of persons distinct is supposed to yield real and informative knowledge, the idea of a person must be a mode idea.31 But knowledge is not the only desirable epistemic state for Locke. There is also probability, which, though it is not as certain as knowledge, is far more extensive. Thus, we should also consider whether the methodology of Locke’s discussion of personal identity could yield probability. From where do we derive probability? Locke holds that The grounds of [probability] are … First, the conformity of any thing with our own knowledge, observation, and experience. Second, the testimony of others, vouching their observation and experience (4.15.4). The various cases that help distinguish our idea of persons are fictional. So they are not ones we know, observe or experience. Nor do we accept them on the basis of testimony. They are mere suppositions. Hence the conclusions 2.27 reaches concerning persons cannot be probability and

30

Again, Carson shows that this account of the reality of mathematical knowledge is not really consistent with Locke’s claim that mathematical objects are simple rather than mixed modes. Given his explanation of the genesis of simple modes, he ought to allow that the reality of mathematical modes depends on their agreement with space as well.

31

This does not imply the unacceptable result that our ideas of organisms and souls must be mode ideas too. For Locke does not suggest that distinguishing our idea of a person from those other ideas yields interesting results about souls or organisms, only about persons.

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must instead be knowledge. And this means that the idea of a person must be the idea of a mode.32

VI My second argument for the mode interpretation is that the idea of a person cannot play the role it plays in Locke’s ethics and political theory unless persons are mixed modes. Locke makes clear that a demonstrative science of morality is possible only because moral ideas are ideas of modes and, as such, accurately depict real essences: The Relation of other Modes may certainly be perceived, as well as those of Number and Extension: and I cannot see, why they should not also be capable of Demonstration … Where there is no Property, there is no Injustice, is a Proposition as certain as any Demonstration in Euclid: For the Idea of Property, being a right to any thing; and the Idea to which the Name Injustice is given, being the Invasion or Violation of that right; it is evident, that these Ideas being thus established, and these Names annexed to them, I can as certainly know this Proposition to be true, as that a Triangle has three Angles equal to two right ones. (4.3.18; cf. 4.4.7)

And at 3.11.16, he states, rather more succinctly: ‘morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for may be perfectly known.’ The contrast Locke has in mind here is with ideas of substances, which do not — and, perhaps, cannot — depict real essences.33 We can demonstrate truths about substances with certainty, as in Locke’s example of the trifling proposition ‘every man is an animal’ (4.8.5). However,

32

The reader may worry that a parallel argument implies the false conclusion that ideas of organisms are mode ideas: don’t sections 4-8 use a similar procedure to arrive at the conclusion that ‘the same animal … is the same continued life communicated to different particles of matter, as they happen successively to be united to that organized living body’ (2.27.8)? I reply that the procedure of 2.27.4-8 is importantly different in that it proceeds by considering cases we have actually experienced and hence constitutes probability. (Recall that Locke goes to great lengths to defend the credentials of the author of the story of Prince Maurice and the parrot, in order to show that we can accept the story on the basis of testimony.)

33

I think that Locke should not be committed to even the possibility of knowledge of the real essences of substances, but nothing in my argument hangs on that. For even if you think that knowledge of substantial real essences is possible and that a demonstrative science of morality is merely possible and not actual, the text still makes it clear that the reason for the possibility of a demonstrative science of morality is that moral ideas are modes.

Person, Substance, Mode and ‘the moral Man’ in Locke’s Philosophy 663

‘general propositions … about substances, if they are certain, are for the most part but trifling; and if they are instructive, are uncertain, and such as we can have no knowledge of their real truth’ (4.8.9).34 For demonstrative knowledge can only go beyond the trifling if it begins with ideas of real essences.35 Morality is capable of demonstration, then, because we can know the real essences of the things moral terms denote. And one central moral term is ‘person.’ Locke is, I think, quite clear that the idea of a person is central to the demonstrative science of morality. In section (IV), we saw that he understands ‘the moral Man’ (3.11.16) as a rational being. And consider how he introduces the possibility of a science of morals: The idea of a supreme Being … and the Idea of our selves, as understanding, rational creatures … would … if duly considered and pursued, afford such foundations of our duty and rules of action as might place morality amongst the sciences capable of demonstration (4.3.18).36

The idea of ourselves ‘as understanding, rational creatures’: this is the idea of a person, not the idea of a man (a living human organism) or an immaterial soul. Recall that a person is ‘a thinking, intelligent

34

The distinction between trifling and informative propositions is, I think, closely related to the distinction drawn in section II between what is implied by an idea and what is exhibited in the idea. The proposition ‘man is an animal’ (like other trifling propositions such as ‘a fetiche is a fetiche’ (4.8.3) is trifling because anyone possessing the idea of a man ipso facto sees that a man is an animal. (Recall that Locke holds that the idea of a man is the idea of a living human organism.) In contrast, propositions like ‘the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees’ is instructive because adding up to 180 degrees is not a feature exhibited in the idea of a triangle.

35

Locke allows one exception to his claim that in our current state, demonstrative sciences must begin from ideas of modes. We have demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence and — as we shall see in a moment — the idea of God is central to the demonstrative science of morality. And surely God is a substance and not a mode! However, God differs from created substances in many ways, and one widely recognized difference helps us see why the idea of God should be able to enter into a demonstrative science when no other substance idea currently can. At 4.10.12 Locke tells us that God’s ‘omniscience, power, and providence will be established, and all his other attributes follow’ from ‘the necessary existence of an eternal mind’ — something he has just demonstrated. (I do not claim to understand how one derives providence from necessary existence.) Thus, although Locke does not put it in these words, we have at least partial knowledge of the real essence of God. This explains why the idea of God can enter into demonstrative science while our ideas of created substances cannot.

36

Ruth Mattern, ‘Moral Science and the Concept of Persons in Locke,’ in Chappell, ed., Locke points out the significance of this passage (273).

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Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self … by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking’ (2.27.9).37 Moreover, 2.27 itself makes clear that it is persons — rather than living human organisms or Cartesian thinking substances — who are the morally relevant entities: Locke tells us, famously, that ‘person’ is ‘a forensic term appropriating actions and their merit’ (2.27.26), and in the case of the drunk man he remarks that ‘punishment [is] annexed to personality.’ Moral agents are persons, not immaterial souls or living human organisms. The possibility of a demonstrative science of morality is enough for my argument. If such a science is possible and it centrally involves the idea of persons, then persons must be modes. On my view, Locke also thinks a demonstrative science of politics is possible; indeed, parts of 38 the Second Treatise provide such a science. And although Two Treatises uses the term ‘man’ and not the term ‘person’ — perhaps because it is intended to be read independently — it is pretty clear that it is ‘the moral Man’ that Locke is talking about. For he is talking about a rational, understanding being that is thereby capable of knowing and following the natural law, and which sees itself as extending over time so that it is motivated to avoid future ills and reap future benefits. Thus, the idea of a person is fundamental to politics as well as morality. However, since my argument does not require that political science can also be demonstrated, I shall not defend this line of thought further here.39 So: Locke thinks that the demonstrative science of morality is possible because moral ideas are modes and we know the real essences of modes. And one of the central moral ideas is the idea of a person. Hence Locke is committed to the idea of a person being a mixed mode idea.

37

This requires a bit of qualification. As noted earlier, all rational beings are ipso facto conscious for Locke. His argument for this claim does not establish that all rational, conscious beings can consider themselves as themselves in the appropriate way; perhaps he thinks there could be conscious, rational beings who thus do not amount to persons. However, we clearly are not such beings, nor do we conceive of ourselves as such.

38

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press 1988)

39

For an extended argument that a substantial portion of Locke’s political theory is intended to be a demonstrative science, see Ruth Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987), ch. 1.

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VII My final argument for the mode interpretation is that it helps us answer an objection commonly leveled against Locke’s account of personal identity: that it is straightforwardly incompatible with his anti-essentialism.40 Here is the problem. On Locke’s view, individuals have nominal essences only relative to a particular species. But since real essences depend on nominal essences, individuals only have real essences relative to a particular species. Thus they only have essential properties relative to a species. And since the persistence conditions of a thing must derive from its essential properties, individuals only have persistence conditions relative to a species. Now, since nominal essences are conventional and real essences depend on nominal essences, this seems to imply that the persistence conditions of individuals are (at least partially) conventional. However, 2.27 gives a realist account of the persistence conditions for persons and organisms. This is a problem both for Locke’s account of persons and for his account of organisms, but since my concern throughout has just been with persons, I will address it only as it pertains to persons. The mode interpretation by itself does not solve the problem. For although it renders Locke’s discussion of species irrelevant, modes are conventional through and through. However, the previous discussion of the arbitrariness of modes helps provide a response. Recall that our ideas of persons — like all ideas of mixed modes — are arbitrary in the sense that they are not designed to correspond to mindindependent features of the world but rather to serve human interests. In other words, our ideas of persons are conventional in precisely the sense in which real essences are conventional. That is, they depend on a set of human decisions that respond to our needs and interests. On the mode interpretation, the persistence conditions of persons articulated in 2.27 are like this too: our idea of a person is designed to ground moral responsibility. Thus on the mode interpretation, the alleged tension dissolves.41 Locke simply is not a realist, in the relevant sense, about the persistence conditions for persons. The term ‘person’ is not a natural kind term, and the identity conditions Locke offers are not an attempt to capture

40

See, for example, Michael Ayers, Locke (New York: Routledge 1993), vol. 2, 206. Kaufman argues that the tension is irresolvable.

41

That is, the tension between Locke’s anti-essentialism and his account of personal identity dissolves. A tension between his anti-essentialism and his account of the identity of living organisms remains.

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the way the world is apart from human actions and intentions. Rather, by offering an account of the persistence of persons in terms of acts of appropriation, Locke is trying to clarify and distinguish the idea of a person he takes to be implicit in human practice. 42 If our system of morality worked differently — if, that is, we conceived of what legitimate attributions of responsibility presuppose in a different way — we might have a different idea of persons. I do not, of course, want to suggest that it is just a matter of convention what persons consist in. Persons, for Locke, are accountable for their actions not only to society but also to God. And it is no accident that the same features of persons that make them responsible in terms of human justice are those that guarantee they fall under the natural law: possession of the rationality required to understand the natural law and the sense of a continuing self necessary to be motivated to follow it by fear of future punishment or hope of future reward. The fact that persons are modes does not imply that any ideas of a person would be equally good. Some mode ideas will help us get around in the world God created (and, in the case of moral ideas ensure our future salva43 tion), others will not.

VIII I have argued that Lockean persons should be understood as modes — as things resulting from the instantiation of certain complex properties. The relevant properties are the ones that make moral evalua-

42

I do not claim that Locke succeeds in doing this. His account of personal identity makes the individual self the sole legislator of its constitution: whether a certain consciousness is part of me depends on whether or not I have appropriated it. I am not sure that our actual practices of ascribing responsibility fit in with this, or whether they presuppose some further criterion of correct appropriation. Considering Locke’s account of why we punish the sober man for actions performed while drunk is relevant here. However, I think Locke would allow some back-andforth between the idea of a person and the practice of ascribing responsibility: a constraint on the idea is that it grounds the practice, but once we make the idea clear and distinct we could very well see reason for amending the practice somewhat.

43

A similar point can be made concerning the demonstrative science of morality. Since many consistent sets of mode ideas are possible, many demonstrative sciences — and hence many different sets of moral rules — are possible. However, this does not yield relativism because one such set is privileged: the set of rules that best conduces to the preservation of mankind or, to put it differently, the set that is handed down by God in the form of natural law.

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tion appropriate: rationality and consciousness, which make it possible for us to know the natural law and have concern for future reward or punishment. Three arguments support the mode interpretation. First, it allows us to see why Locke would think the methodology of 2.27 could yield real, informative knowledge. Second, it enables us to see how the concept of a person can legitimately enter into the demonstrative science of morality. Finally, it helps us respond to the objection that 2.27 is inconsistent with Locke’s anti-essentialism. None of these arguments is conclusive — although the second, I think, is especially strong — but taken together they ought to at least persuade the reader that the mode 44 interpretation is a serious contender. Received: November 2008 Revised: November 2009

44

Versions of this paper were presented at the July 2007 Atlantic Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy and the 4th Biennial Margaret Wilson Conference, at Cornell in August 2008. I would like to thank both audiences for helpful comments. Martha Bolton, Stewart Duncan, Paul Lodge, Walter Ott, and Kenneth Winkler read previous versions of this paper. The end result has benefited greatly from all their suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal, both of whom gave helpful and detailed comments that went well beyond the call of duty.

CANADIAN JOURNAL Critical OF PHILOSOPHY 669 Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 669 Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010, pp. 669-700

Critical Notice

G.A. COHEN. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2008. Pp. 430*.

The 2008 meltdown in global capital markets has led to a renewed interest in questions of economic distribution. Many people suggest that the motives, incentive structures, and institutions in place were inadequate and, for the first time in a generation, public debate is animated by arguments about the need for greater equality. G.A. Cohen’s new book resonates with many of the themes of these debates; he advocates a more thoroughgoing equality, even more thoroughgoing than that demanded by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice; he also advocates for a political philosophy organized around the ethos that shapes ordinary life, rather than one restricted to the coercive institutions of law and the state. Were ordinary citizens to live by the principles Cohen urges, it

*

Full disclosure: I was one of the readers of Cohen’s book for Harvard University Press. The dust jacket quotes the part of my report to the press characterizing the book as the deepest and most sophisticated critical work on Rawls’s theory of justice. Another part of that same report said that ‘almost every step of the way, I found myself objecting to particular claims, worrying that Cohen had misconstrued Rawls, and developing counter arguments of my own. Each of these responses would require at least an article of its own, and are a measure of the book’s depth and engagement.’ This critical notice is the first installment of that response. I am grateful to Peter Benson, Mohammad Fadel, Joseph Heath, Katrin Flikschuh, John Mandle, Christopher Morris, Sergio Tenenbaum, Helga Varden, and Jacob Weinrib for comments on an earlier draft, and to Paul Weithman and the members of his seminar at Notre Dame for discussing it and Cohen’s book with me. Just before he died, Jerry Cohen sent me a note in which he described my argument as ‘very challenging’ and said that he would respond to it. Sadly, that was not to be. I dedicate this essay to his memory.

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is unlikely that there ever would have been a housing bubble, because people would not have organized their productive activities around the pursuit of profits. Moreover, Cohen’s vision of an egalitarian society is animated by a thought that must have occurred to many observers of the economic downturn. When the credit bubble burst, billions of dollars in wealth disappeared, but none of the material objects that the wealth consisted in changed in any way. The houses and cars were still there; why were they now owned by banks, which had no interest in occupying them, and nobody to sell them to? It might be thought that a more humane system would allow all of the same things to be produced, but decouple questions about production and distribution from questions about material incentives. Cohen concedes that the hard facts of economics and human psychology might make such an alternative 1 system unworkable, but argues that those facts cannot serve to make current capitalist arrangements just. Developing this line of thought, Cohen argues that the same objection applies to Rawls’s program in political philosophy. Rawlsian justice demands far more equality than any capitalist democracy has instituted, but, Cohen contends, nonetheless represents a similar compromise of justice in light of unfortunate circumstances. Although Cohen’s book resonates with contemporary concerns in one way, it is removed from them in another. Even by the standards of a philosophy book, Cohen’s addresses the issues at an extremely abstract level. This ascent into abstraction is based on the book’s ambition. Cohen’s animating thought is that the Rawlsian approach to political philosophy is concerned with the wrong questions. He charges that it goes wrong in focusing exclusively on social institutions rather than individual actions as the site of justice, in supposing that rules are the appropriate objects of assessment for a theory of justice, and in contending that principles are sensitive to facts. For Cohen, justice is not, in the first instance, a property of social institutions and their rules. They should seek justice, but must inevitably do so in light of factors other than justice. A single-minded pursuit of justice, while sacrificing other values, or paying no attention to the circumstances in which people find themselves would be, as he puts it, ‘crazy.’ But the recognition, however regrettable, that justice must sometimes be compromised or limited must not be confused with the claim that justice itself demands those limits and compromises. Cohen thus rejects Rawls’s famous claim that ‘justice is the first virtue of social institutions,’ in favor of the con-

1

See G.A. Cohen, Self-ownership Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995), 5ff.

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 671

clusion that it is one virtue among several. So Cohen’s conception of justice is both more demanding than Rawls’s but also less paramount. Cohen’s book is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Rescuing Equality,’ is a sustained critique of Rawls’s views about distributive justice. In A Theory of Justice and his later works, Rawls argued in favor of what he called the ‘Difference Principle’ according to which shares in what he calls ‘primary goods’ such as income and wealth are to be equal except in those cases in which permitting unequal shares would increase the absolute size of shares of those receiving less than others. Cohen rejects the difference principle as a compromise with justice rather than a principle of it. Cohen begins his argument against the difference principle by drawing attention to the affinities between it and a familiar sort of political argument in which critics of redistribution argue that higher taxes will end up harming the poor. Cohen does not deny the factual truth of the claims in which such arguments depend, but rather points to the human choices that make them true, namely that talented people refuse to work harder for the benefit of others except in the expectation of material gain. Such an argument is inconsistent with the common interest that is supposedly the presupposition of debates about justice. Although it looks like a principled argument, Cohen contends that, because talented people could choose to work for the benefit of others without material reward, the argument is actually a form of bargaining, and so inconsistent with the value of fraternity and Rawls’s declared egalitarian commitments. A ‘strict’ version of the difference principle might limit inequalities to those that are necessary to ensure the physical productivity of talented people; the ‘lax’ version that Rawls defends permits inequalities even when those receiving more could have contributed just as much by willingly settling for less. Developing this line of thought, Cohen diagnoses what he takes to be a tension between Rawls’s argument for the difference principle and its content. The argument for the difference principle begins with ‘the moral arbitrariness claim, which conjoins post-medieval principle that none should fare worse than others through no fault of their own and modern sociological sophistication about the actual sources of how people fare: the moral arbitrariness claim puts accidentally 2 caused inequality under a cloud, as far as justice is concerned.’ (156) On Cohen’s reading, Rawls uses the moral arbitrariness claim first to undermine libertarianism, and then deploys it against the form of liberal equality that provides fair equality of opportunity only in starting

2

Parenthetical references are to Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality.

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points. The difference principle is then introduced as eliminating the effects not only of social contingencies but also of inequalities in talent which are, Rawls remarks ‘arbitrary from a moral point of view,’ because ‘there is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.’3 Cohen argues that the consistent application of this thought requires full equalization of unchosen benefits and burdens, and comparative assessments of the burdens different people face and the causes of those burdens. He suggests that Rawls backs off from this implication of his thought because of the independent pull of the very different idea of Pareto efficiency, according to which a scheme of production should improve the prospects of some whenever 4 this can be done without doing any worse for others. Cohen argues that equality and Pareto are conflicting values within liberal democratic political culture, and provides detailed arguments designed to show that they are inevitably in tension with each other. The aim of these arguments is to show that the difference principle is not a principle of justice at all, but rather a compromise between justice and efficiency. Because it allows inequalities to arise due to unequal talents whenever doing so advantages the worst off, the difference principle is ‘blind to comparisons between people,’ and so ‘permits unfairness without any ado,’(156) by making a person’s relative shares depend on factors that person cannot control. The first part of the book also criticizes Rawls’s restriction of the difference principle to the coercive structure of society, arguing that the demands of justice bind individuals no less than institutions. The concept of fraternity figures again here. Rawls talks about citizens being motivated by their ‘sense of justice,’ and Cohen argues that such a motivation is inconsistent with the sort of unconstrained self-seeking in private life that the lax version of the difference principle permits. He also rejects Rawls’s contention that the demands of justice apply only to the basic structure of society because of the ‘pervasive impact’ that that structure has on a person’s life prospects. Cohen notes that the society’s ethos also has at least as pervasive an impact on a person’s life prospects as the legal structure does, and concludes that Rawls’s restriction of justice to the latter is arbitrary. The second part of the book, ‘Rescuing Justice from Constructivism,’ targets Rawls’s understanding of the concept of justice. Rawls contends

3

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1971), 74. Abbreviated as TJ.

4

TJ, 67

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 673

that the principles of justice are to be identified with, because constituted by, the outcome of a certain kind of ‘constructive’ procedure through which principles are chosen in light of relevant facts. Rawls’s own development of this constructivist idea turns on his well-known thought experiment of an ‘original position’ in which representative persons are asked to choose principles of justice, knowing general facts about economics, human psychology and motivations, and so on, but prevented by a ‘veil of ignorance’ from knowing their own abilities or conception of the good. Cohen’s arguments are not directed at the specifics of the Rawlsian procedure, but at the general strategy of which he takes it to be an instance. He develops two lines of criticism against it. First, he seeks to show that it cannot be doing what it purports to be doing. He offers an abstract meta-ethical argument to show that facts cannot be sufficient to generate principles. Some higher-order, more abstract principle must be brought in to make those facts relevant to questions of normative principle. Thus the ultimate principles of justice cannot be a product of a procedure in this sense; they must instead be among the procedure’s inputs. His second line of criticism turns on the distinction between what he characterizes as the ultimate principles and what he describes as ‘rules of regulation.’ The thought here is that ultimate principles are abstract, perhaps even platonic by nature. Rules of regulation are different: quoting Nozick, Cohen characterizes a rule of regulation as a ‘device for having certain effects.’ If they are characterized in this way, then the question of whether to adopt some rule depends on ‘an evaluation, precisely of its likely effects, and therefore in light of an understanding of the facts’ (265).5 Rules of regulation are sensitive to facts, and involve compromises between different abstract principles, not all of which may be satisfied in a given situation. According to Cohen, at the level of rules of regulation, it is perfectly acceptable, and sometimes morally necessary, to compromise justice with other values such as efficiency. How such compromises are best made depends on the detailed factual situation in which the different values conflict with each other. Rules provide fact-sensitive solution to these topics, but for all that, they are not fundamental because ‘the question for political philosophy is not what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference’ (268).

5

In the example through which he introduces the regress argument, he endorses the suggestion that a particular facts can be relevant to a principle simply by instantiating it, citing the example of promise-keeping. However, instantiation does not figure prominently in his deployment of the argument against Rawls.

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The two parts of the book fit in to a single vision. Cohen’s arguments against constructivism underwrite his criticisms of the difference principle. The Pareto factors that Cohen believes Rawls to appeal to in his argument for the difference principle are competing values that enter into the restriction of a just demand, not grounds of justice. Again, as a rule of regulation, it may make sense to restrict the difference principle to institutions, depending on what can be expected to happen; Cohen’s claim is just that no ultimate principle, considered as such, could necessarily apply exclusively to institutions. If the argument about the distinction between principles and rules of regulation is successful, and if Cohen is also correct to characterize that distinction in terms of the contrast between factual and fact-free principles, then he is in a position to demonstrate that the only way in which facts could be relevant to the Rawlsian enterprise is at the level of rules of regulation. But if rules of regulation are themselves compromises between competing principles, or between principles and facts that get in the way of their realization, then Cohen is in a position to reconstruct the entire Rawlsian enterprise, distinguishing the part that is concerned with justice, properly so-called, from the parts that are concerned with other values. In so doing, he can then argue directly for the identification of justice with equality, and reject both the claim that justice is in the first instance institutional and the difference principle as compromises. Cohen endorses Sidgwick’s remark that such compromises may be ‘decisive from a political point of view’ but ‘the ethical question still remains for each individual … whether, in order to get himself to do his duty, he requires to bribe himself by a larger share of consumable wealth than falls to the common lot’ (13). For Cohen, as for Sidgwick, institutions and politics have only strategic importance. Cohen notes that in Rawls’s earliest published formulation of the difference principle, he characterized the role that that principle permitted to incentives as a ‘concession to human nature,’ with the implication that justice itself called for a stricter equality then can be achieved in this vale of tears. In later formulations of the argument for the difference principle, that characterization was dropped, and the difference principle itself was identified as an essential part of justice. Cohen’s argument about facts, principles, and rules of regulation is meant to show that the earlier formulation was the correct statement of the structure of the Rawlsian argument. Justice demands equality, even if tolerable social life demands compromise of all things, including justice. Sections of Cohen’s book have appeared before, and those parts have generated a significant secondary literature. Cohen responds to parts of it along the way, as well as including a general appendix in which he takes on further criticisms of his arguments. It is a tribute to the importance of Rawls’s thought about distributive justice that a political phi-

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 675

losopher of the first rank such as Cohen would devote an entire book to criticizing his arguments; it is a tribute to Cohen’s powers of argument and excellence of mind that so many others have sought to respond to his arguments. In doing so myself, I will consider Cohen’s arguments in the order suggested by the title, rather than in the order in which he presents them, since it is my contention that his understanding of constructivism shapes the way in which Cohen understands Rawls’s project. Cohen’s way of drawing the contrast between principles and rules of regulation leads him to regard the difference principle as a rule of regulation balancing competing principles; as he notes, ‘Part Two is dedicated to a defense of …the mode in which the argument of Part 6 One was conducted.’(20)

I

What is Justice?

The argument of ‘Rescuing Justice from Constructivism’ concerns the meta-ethical question of the relevance of facts to the concept of justice. The broad structure of the argument is simple: in order for any action or institution or procedure to be justified on normative grounds, the fundamental principles ordering it must be truly normative, and so not depend on particular facts. Cohen introduces the argument as part of an engagement with Rawls’s contention that the principles of justice are constructed on the basis of a choice situation that takes account of, and so incorporates, various factual premises about the nature of the interactions that the principle of justice is supposed to regulate. Cohen’s aim

6

Despite Cohen’s characterization of the mode of argument in the first part of the book, his initial argument about the difference between bargaining and community also engages the Rawlsian project more directly, by interrogating the grounds on which citizens can make claims against each other. Cohen’s point in that argument operates within Rawls’s idea that a basis for justification presupposes citizens capable of taking responsibility for their choices, and uses that idea to show that those who are unwilling to work without incentives are treating their own choices as natural facts about them, for which they bear no responsibility. As such, the earlier argument takes seriously Rawls’s claim to be seeking a regulative principle appropriate to the object in question, that is, society conceived as a fair system of cooperation, which is supposed to govern the claims that citizens can make against each other and their, institutions. Cohen’s argument is, in its simplest form, is that a fair system of cooperation cannot coherently allow citizens to bargain or threaten with respect to the terms on which they are required to contribute to their society and its institutions. The incentives argument also focuses on the basic structure, because it objects to those who, like Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, seek to change the tax code.

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is to show that the normative premises that are relevant do not themselves depend upon factual premises. Cohen’s detailed argument for this conclusion is complex, but the underlying idea is very simple: ‘we judge justice, and the normative in general, independently of factual possibility.’ (252) If ‘justice is, as Justinian said, each person getting her due, that justice is her due irrespective of the constraints that might make it impossible to give it to her.’ In order to determine what justice demands, we do not need to consult features of the factual situation in which we hope that justice will be done. Rawls’s appeal to facts in his constructivist procedure is a direct target of this argument, because the procedure for determining what justice demands incorporates information about such matters as what can be achieved within the constraints of human nature and material scarcity. Cohen contends that claims about what can or cannot be achieved necessarily presuppose the supplied and already completed concept of justice. He makes this point through a regressive argument, examining putative fact-laden principles of justice, and finding himself always able to ask about the grounds for those principles, leading, at each stage, to principle that ‘would survive the denial’ of the facts in question.. Finally, the regress ‘comes to rest with a principle that reflects no fact’ (237). Cohen concedes that ‘a perfectly ordinary poverty of imagination’ may make us ‘need factual information to provoke appropriate reflection, but the result of that reflection does not repose upon that information’ (262). The role of facts, then, is purely heuristic. Cohen’s second line of argument offers a diagnosis of just where Rawls has gone wrong, making the point that justice is not to be identified with rules of regulation. Instead, justice must be identified with a normative premise that makes no reference to rules of regulation, but is relevant to the design of rules of regulation which will, Cohen contends, be sensitive to values other than justice, though also of course to justice itself. Cohen sees in this an important lesson for the way in which normative controversy is carried out. Critics of proposed principles of justice (such as Cohen’s own luck egalitarianism) often present apparent counterexamples to proposed normative principles. These only count against the principle in question on the assumption that the principle is meant to be implemented without considering its impact on other values. Conversely, Rawlsians defend a package of rules of regulation without differentiating the multiple normative principles that go into framing them. A better way of doing political philosophy, according to Cohen, would separate out the pure questions of principle from those of their implementation. Only then can the correct ultimate principles be identified without any admixture of competing considerations. ‘Until we unearth the fact-free principle that governs our fact-loaded particular judgments about justice, we don’t know why we

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 677

think what we think just is just’ (291). Rules of regulation cannot be principles of justice because, as Cohen puts it, they ‘necessarily lack ultimacy: they cannot tell us how to evaluate the effects by reference to which they themselves are to be evaluated.’ He illustrates this point with the example of sociology which ‘tells us what the effects of various candidate rules would be, but a normative philosophy that lacks sociological input is needed to evaluate those effects and thereby to determine, jointly with sociology, what rules we should adopt.’ But although political philosophy is ‘consequential for practice,’ and its question ‘is not what we should do but what we should think, even when what we should think makes no practical difference’ (268). The abstract and formal character of Cohen’s argument makes room for an abstract and formal response. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that the argument shows only that some basic normative premises of an 7 argument must be independent of facts. Cohen concedes that a particular person might legitimately make his or her endorsement of the application of a principle depend on context, and so regard it, as Pogge puts, ‘externally’ fact sensitive. But, Pogge points out, any externally fact-sensitive principle can be converted into an internally sensitive through a simple logical trick.8 And so it may be that any proposed principle is of the form ‘if such and such circumstances obtain then do this,’ or even ‘if the following facts obtain, follow or implement this rule.’ Such premises are fact-free in the sense that they entertain their antecedent only problematically. They also can qualify as regress-stoppers in Cohen’s argument, because they can survive the denial of the factual claims that make up their antecedents. Pogge’s point, like Cohen’s, is not merely about inference, but about justification: in response to the sort of questioning Cohen proposes, any questions about why you endorse a fact-sensitive principle will often be answered in terms of a fact-insensitive but fact-conditional principle. Such fact-conditional principles often explain why particular facts would be important in deciding what to do. Pogge offers no positive argument to show that any such conditional principles are morally ultimate, only a negative one to show that Cohen’s argument about the logic of principles does nothing to rule them out. If Pogge is correct, then, conditionalized rules of regulation qualify as fact free principles, and the fact/principles argument lends no support to the distinction between principles of justice and rules of regulation. One might still wonder whether such rules

7

Thomas Pogge, ‘Cohen to the Rescue,’ Ratio (new series) 21 (2008), 454-75.

8

Pogge, 460

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could count as ultimate, unjustified justifiers. Pogge’s point is only that Cohen’s regress argument is silent on this issue. Rawls appears to assign a more constitutive role to facts than Pogge’s argument suggests. He explicitly rejects the Leibnizian ‘ethics of creation’ strategy of laying out possible principles of justice for various possible worlds, and then determining which world is actual in order to decide which principles apply.9 Instead, he thinks that the factual situation poses a problem to which justice is the solution. Rawls seeks ‘the most appropriate conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and as fully cooperating members of society over a complete life, from one generation to the next?’10 Standing in the background of this specific question about is Rawls’s more general claim that ‘the correct regulative principle for anything depends on the nature of that thing.’ Cohen concedes the importance of such a principle, but objects that it applies only to rules of regulation. He also objects to Rawls’s label ‘regulative principle’ on the grounds that it ‘puts one in mind of Kant’s ‘regulative idea’, with which rules (or principles) of regulation have nothing in common: if any principles belong with the concept of a regulative idea, it is basic principles and not what Rawls calls ‘regulative principles.’’ (265-6) Cohen’s regress argument is posed in perfectly general form, but in deploying it he supposes that facts could enter into practical thought in only two ways: they could either cause or constitute the satisfaction of a fact-free principle. The antecedents of Pogge’s conditionals all conform to this structure. Cohen does not consider a different structure, which seems to be central to Rawls’s thought, according to which facts partially constitute the object to which a principle applies. To understand this strategy, consider Rawls’s claim about regulative principles as an example of a fact-free principle, according to which an object is to be assessed in light of the standard that is internally appropriate to its nature. It is difficult to conceive of a more pristine and fact-free principle, since its validity does not depend on what sort of things there are, or for that matter, whether there are any things or beings capable

9

TJ Second edition 137. Cohen objects to Rawls’s further remark that such a strategy entails making up facts too (261). But Rawls’s point is that the principle appropriate to a thing depends on its nature.

10

Rawls, Political Liberalism, 4. In the preface to A Theory of Justice, Rawls characterizes his theory as the ‘most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society’ (TJ xviii). See also the discussion in Joshua Cohen, ‘For a Democratic Society’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999).

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 679

of assessing them.11 It is a genuine principle, since despite its abstract nature, it is far from trivial. Cohen concedes that this abstract principle applies to rules of regulation, but, by his own regress argument, it must either be a fact free principle, or apply because of some even more abstract principle. Whichever it is, Cohen offers no reason to restrict the application of this highly abstract fact-free principle to rules of regulation. Despite its fact-free status, Cohen does not consider this principle as a possible regress stopper for Rawlsian liberalism. The idea that the nature of a thing tells us about its proper regulative principle arguably has its roots in Aristotle, but also can be found in Kant, although only sometimes under the name ‘regulative princi12 ple.’ Kant appeals to such a principle in his argument for the categorical imperative, which (roughly) says that the standard appropriate to choosing must be the standard presupposed by the possibility of a free being choosing freely.13 The argument is complex, its details disputed, and it has failed to convince many of its readers. But whatever its suc-

11

It thus meets Cohen’s requirements better than Cohen’s own luck-egalitarianism. Pogge points out that although Cohen presents it as an example of a fact-free principle, it fails by his stated standards. Its directives ‘are not general enough to settle how they apply to animals, beings on distant planets or humans living in distant ages — let alone how they apply in very different possible universes’ (‘Cohen to the Rescue’ 469, n. 15). At various points in the book, Cohen also endorses the idea of an ‘agent centered prerogative’ and rejects the ‘moral rigoist’ position that denies people the right to pursue self-interest to some extent (61), in favor of a ‘properly prerogative-informed egalitarian principle.’ It appears to be an exception to, rather than a part of distributive justice (10, 387-9), but it is difficult to see what its moral basis is supposed to be in the absence of some defense of the factual premise that people have inclinations to pursue things other than justice. If so, it appears to violate Cohen’s declared methodological scruples.

12

Though sometimes under that name. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes ideas, which are pure rational concepts, from ideals, which include an empirical part but have practical power as regulative principles ‘and form the basis of perfection of certain types of actions. He gives the example of ‘The wise man (of the Stoics) is, however, an ideal, that is, a man existing in thought only, but in complete conformity with the idea of wisdom’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Paul Guyer and Alan Wood, trans. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998] A569/B597). The Stoic sage is an ideal of a perfectly wise human being, not a set of precepts adopted on empirical grounds about how one is most likely to succeed in achieving a type of wisdom that exceeds the human. On ideals as partial determination of principles in Kant, see Barbara Herman, ‘A Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends’ in her Moral Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2007).

13

This is the form of ‘Problems I and II’ in Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Mary Gregor, trans., in Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 162, AK 5:29.

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cess, failure, or prospects, no general argument about the necessary structure of normative principles can preclude it in advance. Kant’s own use of the idea that a principle for appraising a thing depends on the nature of the thing (at least in the case of the categorical imperative) famously rejects any appeal to facts, and so does not map directly onto Rawls’s preferred procedure.14 Although Rawls characterizes his constructivism as Kantian, part of his stated aspiration in developing his own position is to ‘overcome the many dualisms’ that 15 he finds in Kant. In discussing Kant’s moral philosophy, he introduces a ‘content condition’ requiring that a moral theory provide determinate guidance for moral deliberation.16 He suggests that without facts for the parties in the original position to consider, ‘the whole scheme would be pointless and empty.’17 A better model for Rawls’s deployment of the same general strategy can be found in Hegel, who was among the first to press the dualism charge against Kant, and whose conception of political philosophy in terms of reconciliation figures prominently in Rawls’s characterization of his own work.18 Hegel seeks regulative principles in the nature of the object in question, and makes facts relevant to the inquiry without restricting their significance to determining the likely effects of proposed rules of regulation. This way of making facts matter to norms figures in the implicit structure of his Philosophy of Right, and is developed more explicitly as a methodology in his discussion of the philosophy of biology in the Logic and Encyclopedia. Hegel contends that the a priori part of biology turns on the distinctive ‘logical’ category of

14

For a helpful discussion of some of the differences between Kant and Rawls, see Onora O’Neill, ‘Constructivism in Rawls and Kant,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls Sam Freeman, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003) 247-67.

15

‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’ in Collected Papers, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 304

16

Rawls’s treatment of Kant’s categorical imperative explicitly incorporates facts in a way that could be read as seeking to respond to Hegel’s charge that Kant’s ethics is merely an ‘empty formalism’ (Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Barbara Herman, ed. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000], 163).

17

A Theory of Justice 159/138, quoted at 262

18

See Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Brief Restatement, Erin Kelly, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2001), 3; Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Sam Freeman, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2007), 10. Neither Kant nor Hegel figures in Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, but Hegel’s critique of Kantian ethics is a central theme of his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy.

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 681

life.19 The logical category alone will not, however, specify the norm internal to any specific type of creature. If it is to generate a regulative principle for anything, it requires further specification. Each specific type of living thing has its own distinctive life form, which can only be studied through empirical observation. So to know what the appropriate regulative principle is for a horse, you need to know what it is for an animal to have an appropriate regulative principle, which Hegel iden20 tifies with its species-concept. You also need to know a lot of things about horses — how many legs they have, how they reproduce, what they eat, and so on. If you want to know if a horse is doing well by the standard of horses, you need this fact-laden normative principle. You do not have an abstract a priori concept of thriving, and then ask empirically what would be most likely to cause a horse to thrive in accordance with this platonic standard. Instead, you investigate horses under the idea of living thing; as the object of inquiry, the horse’s nature is partially constituted by the concept of a living thing, and partly by the discovered facts. You do not regard the horse’s success in life as a compromise between its achievements of a number of competing values, each of which is articulated and justified without any contaminating references to the equine facts. The concept of a flourishing horse is organized by the concept of a horse as a living thing with a distinctive life form. Cohen might concede that such facts constitute equine flourishing, but counter that they only matter in as much as a fact-free principle about things satisfying their own internal regulative principles is presupposed. The point, however, is that that fact-free principle cannot be consulted directly, either on its own or in conjunction with claims about causal relationships. Consider how this highest-order principle applies to Rawls’s conception of the subject of justice. The parties behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance are charged with choosing principles of social cooperation for

19

See the discussion of this point in Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practical Thought (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2008).

20

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant also talks about species concepts, through which the operation of the parts of a living thing are thought of as subordinated to a thing as a whole (A 316/B373). Section 65 if the Critique of The Power of Judgment makes it clear that he regards natural teleology as a regulative concept for reflective judgment ‘to guide our investigation of organized objects,’ which does not provide knowledge of the objects, but only a principle to guide study of them, so that in the case of a living thing, the species concept is imposed on material nature (Critique of the Power of Judgment, Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, trans. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001] 5:373). Kant’s approach differs from Hegel’s because he regards teleological judgments as rational constructs, so that their perfective aspect is not real in time.

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persons considered as free and equal. That part roughly corresponds to Hegel’s concept of a life form. The higher-order principle says that a system of social cooperation is to be judged in terms of the standard appropriate to social cooperation among free and equal persons. At this level of abstraction, it is little help in figuring out what to do, or what to think. It requires further specification of just what the problem of social cooperation is supposed to be. Rawls provides that specification in terms of the idea of free and equal persons, each of whom has a higher-order interest in exercising two moral powers, the power to set, pursue, and revise a conception of the good, and the sense of justice. This more specific normative premise enters neither as an observed fact (294) nor as a fact-free principle that is potentially in competition with the abstract principle that the regulative principle for a thing depends upon the thing’s nature; it enters as specification of the moral situation for which a regulative principle is sought. Even this ‘filled in’ characterization of the kind of interaction is not detailed enough to generate norms sufficient to judge whether particular arrangements satisfy them. Rawls’s response to this is to fill in details further, in particular, to introduce such factors as the ‘circumstances of justice,’ among which he includes moderate scarcity, limited benevolence, the fact that free institutions tend to generate disagreement about the good, and the fact that people who think of themselves as free and equal are unwilling to strive to achieve a conception of the good that they do not themselves accept. So the facts matter to determining the appropriate principles in a different way, not by pointing to the causal upshots of this or that proposed rule of regulation. This higher-order principle shapes the way in which Rawls distinguishes questions of justice for social institutions from questions of justice for associations such as churches, universities, and families.21 He does not deny that issues of justice arise for other forms of association. His claim instead seems to be that since they are different forms of interaction and association, different norms are appropriate to them. The same principle seems to underlie his claim, in the Law of Peoples, that the international order is a different form of association, and so has different regulative principles than those for a domestic society. It also explains his inclusion of a just savings principle and obligations to future generations among the principles of domestic justice, since he seeks a regulative principle for a society that continues to exist across generations.

21

TJ, 7

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 683

Indeed, Rawls appears to be working with the (Hegelian) assumption that the very possibility of persons conceiving of themselves as free and equal, and having appropriate concepts to so regard themselves is a historical achievement. Like Hegel, (and Kant) Rawls supposes that a social world combining individual freedom and equal citizenship is the fundamental post-medieval principle, rather than the idea that ‘none should fare worse than others through no fault of their own.’ To characterize social cooperation among free and equal persons in this way is to suppose that it only comes up for persons in particular kinds of circumstances who conceive of themselves in specifically modern way; that is perhaps why Rawls remarks on the role of philosophy within 22 the public culture of a liberal democracy. Highly general facts about the modern world pose the problem to which justice is the solution. Rawls’s claim that the appropriate norms are just the outputs of an appropriate procedure under which representatives of those persons might choose rules looks like an account of justice, rather than of regulation. The principles appropriate to social cooperation are internal to the activity they regulate. This broad strategy of finding principles that are inherent in an activity or practice is subject to a familiar line of objection, according to which it partakes of an illicit sort of essentialism, supposing that human life comes pre-packaged into discrete practices, each with its own internal set of criteria.23 Rawls’s method of ‘reflective equilibrium’ does not seem to rest on any such assumption. His emphasis in his later work on an ‘overlapping consensus’ which provides a ‘public basis of justification’ from ‘widely shared’ premises, can be read as attempting to defuse the charge of essentialism; Rawls’s thought appears to be that people can identify the problem of social cooperation among free and equal citizens without agreeing on any robust theses about its essence.24 I take no position here on whether Rawls manages to deflect the charge of essentialism, and some may wonder whether essentialism is too high a price to pay for avoiding Cohen’s criticisms. My claim is only that

22

See Joshua Cohen, ‘For a Democratic Society.’

23

Rawls’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction counts against attributing an essentialist position to him. Cohen’s embrace of that distinction makes the essentialism charge a difficult one for him to press. Cohen expresses misgivings about the role of biological metaphors in Hegel’s philosophy in Chapter 4 of If You’re an Egalitarian, How come You’re so Rich? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000). Perhaps some of these could be raised against the Hegelian elements in Rawls.

24

See Aaron James, ‘Constructing Justice for Existing Practice: Rawls and the Status Quo,’ Philosophy & Public Affairs 33 (2005) 281-316.

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Cohen’s criticisms fail to engage the Hegelian interpretation of Rawls’s constructivism. On this alternative reconstruction of Rawls’s argument, a ‘fact free’ norm directs you to find a thing’s regulative principle in its nature, and so determines which facts will be relevant. Further fact-free norms, in this case about the moral status of persons as free and equal, enter into framing the interactions these principles will regulate. So understood, the Rawlsian argument satisfies Cohen’s constraints, because the facts 25 matter only in light of fact-free principles. But the fact-free norms are insufficient to provide suitable regulative principles, even at a very high level of abstraction; they tell you only what it is to have an adequate solution to a practical problem. Facts further specify both the problem and its solution. At no point do they enter merely as claims about the likely consequences of adopting proposed rules. Although the procedure could be recast, following Pogge’s suggestion, into purely hypothetical terms, so that the principles always said ‘if these circumstances obtain, then the following principles are valid,’ or even ‘set up institutions for social cooperation on fair terms appropriate to the circumstances of the cooperating parties’ the facts would still not enter into the justification of the principles in the way that Cohen suggests. They would be neither merely heuristics to stimulate the imagination, nor information about the likelihood of achievement. In support of this as a reading of Rawls’s strategy, it could also be noted that the ‘general facts’ to which he appeals are always introduced in relation to the idea of social cooperation, not in relation to the prospects for achieving an already completed idea of justice. In A Theory of Justice the relevant facts include general features of economics, such as the nature of the production function, as well as what Rawls, following Hume, characterizes as the ‘circumstances of justice’ of moderate scarcity and limited benevolence. The thought here is that absent these factors, social cooperation would be different, and so would its regulative principle. More striking is Rawls’s later introduction of further circumstances. In Political Liberalism, he focuses on the ‘fact of reasonable pluralism’ according to which, under free institutions, people will tend to disagree in their conceptions of the good. He also mentions the ‘fact

25

As Christine Korsgaard puts it, ‘Practical philosophy, as conceived by Kant and Rawls, is not a matter of finding knowledge to apply in practice. It is it is rather the use of reason to solve practical problems. The concepts of moral and political philosophy are the names of those problems, or more precisely of their solutions.’ See ‘Realism and Constructivism in Twentieth Century Moral Philosophy’ in her The Constitution of Agency: Essays on Practical Reason and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 322.

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 685

of oppression,’ according to which social stability cannot be secured based on a single conception of the good, except through oppressive use of force. Rawls does not say that any of these delimit the circumstances in which justice can be achieved; each is introduced as characteristic of the social world for which principles of justice are sought. The same could be said of his later discussions of stability: a system of social cooperation across time cannot have an internal principle of regulation that systematically undermines it. Cohen’s argument does not focus on Rawls’s appeal to the fact of reasonable pluralism, but on his appeal to the fact that people ordinarily respond to economic incentives, and will do things to serve others on the condition that they themselves expect to gain by so doing. As we have seen, his allegation is that such a fact could only matter as a piece of information about the prospects of achieving justice. But if Rawls’s constructivism is understood in the way I have suggested, such facts play a different role. Cohen quotes Rawls’s remark that ‘One might think that ideally individuals would want to serve one another. But since the parties are assumed not to take an interest in one another’s interests, their acceptance of those inequalities is only acceptance of the relations in which men stand in the circumstances of justice.’26 Cohen regards this passage as irrelevant to his critique, on the grounds that it ‘attributes to people in the achieved, just society the mutual indifference that characterizes the specially tailored persons of Rawls’s original position, in which the principles that are to govern the just society are chosen.’(81) Yet the assumption of mutual indifference is built into the original position for a systematic reason reflecting the importance of the ‘moral power’ to set, pursue, and revise a conception of the good. Rawls’s takes this moral power to mean that no ends may be presumed, because the problem of fair social cooperation is the problem of people setting out their terms of interaction and association consistent with each of them having an entitlement to change their ends at any time. All of this can be stated without any reference to the likely effects of rules, because the fact enters into the characterization of the object that justice regulates, rather than a limitation that makes justice difficult or impossible to achieve. To say that Rawls integrates facts in this way is not to say that his use of them is successful. Both the facts he appeals to and his claim to need them, or all of them, to generate just terms of interaction might be

26

TJ 151/131, cited by Cohen at 81. Cohen offers an elaboration and defense of the idea that people should serve one another in his Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009).

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contested.27 It does, however, show that Cohen’s meta-ethical argument about facts requiring principles to make them relevant lends no support to his way of distinguishing between principles and rules of regulation or to his characterization of the way in which facts are relevant. The meta-ethical argument, like all meta- arguments in philosophy, takes the object-level discourse it examines at face value, and does not provide grounds for adjudicating between competing first-order positions, any more than the correct analysis of truth enables the philosopher to supplant ordinary methods of inquiry for determining which particular claims are true. Cohen emphasizes this aspect of his argument, but once the feature is acknowledged, it turns out that the argument for the distinction between principles and rules of regulation itself requires a further premise about the nature of principles themselves. If Rawls sees facts as relevant to principles by framing the problem to which a principle is the solution, then he can acknowledge that facts matter to rules of regulation in a different way. Rawls contends that the difference principle requires some form of market society in which people can enter into private arrangements, both about what jobs to take and what products to consume, but leaves open the question of whether this is best achieved through capitalism or some form of market socialism. His readiness to leave open what, at the time A Theory of Justice was published, must have seemed to most people in the world to be the main question of political life, shows that he does not suppose that justice is to be identified with optimal rules of regulation. Instead, his view appears to be that what sort of ownership arrangements are in place for capital goods depends upon the expected effects of various regimes. Thus he supposes that the choice between them is one of how to implement justice most effectively. The facts relevant to that choice are different from the facts that enter into framing the subject of justice. Cohen also charges that Rawlsian constructivism must ‘deny the possibility that certain facts, or other values, might make it inappropriate, or too difficult, or too costly to produce justice.’ (302) Once more, Rawls explicitly allows this possibility. He restricts the application of the basic liberties central to his first principle of justice to what he calls ‘reasonably favorable circumstances.’ Beyond that, he also has an extended discussion of what he calls ‘non-ideal theory.’ In an especially troubling

27

For such contestation, see Onora O’Neill, ‘Political Liberalism and Public Reason: A Critical Notice of John Rawls, Political Liberalism,’ The Philosophical Review 106 (1997) 411-28. I raise a different Kantian objection to Rawls’s focus on benefits of cooperation in the first chapter of Force and Freedom (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 2009).

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 687

statement of readiness to compromise justice, he says that in cases of threats to the social order, even the fundamental right to a presumption of innocence might be restricted.28 He has been rightly criticized for holding this view, but his fault seems to be in his readiness to restrict justice, not in his inability to conceive of doing so.

II

Methodological Differences

Cohen begins the book by noting what he regards as a fundamental methodological disagreement between his ‘Oxford’ approach and what he characterizes as the ‘Harvard’ approach followed by Rawls. On his approach, the analytic/synthetic distinction allows distinct moral concepts to be identified, and the principles governing them are discovered by investigating individual normative judgments about particular cases. There is no reason to suppose that the normative principles so discovered form a coherent set. They may make inconsistent demands either in general or in particular cases, presenting themselves in ‘competitive array’ (4). The contrasting approach, which Cohen attributes to Rawls, is said to seek to systematize normative requirements by bringing them under a theory that generates a lexically ordered structure. Cohen here draws attention to Rawls’s discussion of the ‘priority’ problem faced by intuitionist theories, and questions its importance, noting that ordinary people have no difficulty balancing conflicting claims elsewhere in life without supposing that any sort of rule is available to rank them definitively (4). There are real methodological differences between Cohen and Rawls, but I do not think that Cohen’s remarks capture them. I say this partly because, despite his remarks about intuitionism lacking priority rules, Rawls makes no claims about an overarching unity of value of the sort that Ronald Dworkin makes in his forthcoming book Justice for Hedge29 hogs. Indeed, his distinction between a political conception of justice

28

TJ, 242. Rawls appears to be deploying the distinction between the demands of justice and the acceptable rules of regulation in his characterization between justice and peace at ‘the legislative stage,’ suggesting that ‘citizens may affirm the law as the lesser of two evils.’ He concedes that the law is unjust, remarking that ‘Since bitter dissensions exist, there is no way to prevent some injustices, as we ordinarily think of them, from occurring. All that can be done is to limit these injustices in the least unjust way.’ In this example, the existence of bitter dissensions enters as a limit on the achievement of justice.

29

Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press forthcoming 2010)

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and comprehensive theories of value turns on the claim that justice can be isolated as a specific object of philosophical inquiry; his claim that different principles may be appropriate to families or universities opens the possibility of conflicts. His endorsement of Isaiah Berlin’s claim that there can be ‘no social world without loss,’ underscores this point. I think that a different dispute lies at the root of Cohen’s critique of Rawls, which turns on the moral status of rules. For Cohen, as for Sidgwick, rules are instruments for achieving results that make no essential reference to rules. Cohen says that ‘we perforce live by rules: we cannot engage in fundamental normative thought whenever we face a decision’ (270), suggesting, if not explicitly stating, that fundamental normative thought does not involve rules or anything like them, and that we depend on them in practical reasoning only because of moral and epistemic limitations. Perhaps saints or angels would require no rules. Indeed, Cohen’s non-Rawlsian example to illustrate his regress argument involves someone who justifies obligations of promise-keeping in light of their consequences, and Cohen has no difficulty showing that his interlocutor is really committed to some fact free principle about the desirability of those effects (234).30 A parallel line of thought appears to animate Cohen’s ideas about institutions: he regards them as responses to human limitations in the pursuit of principles that bear no relation to institutions as such, and so as neither just nor unjust in their own right, but merely conducive or otherwise to the achievement of justice and other values. This assumption about rules is never examined in detail, but it casts doubt on his claim that ‘Oxford people of my vintage do not think that philosophy can move as far away as Harvard people think it can from pertinent prephilosophical judgment’(3). Cohen’s position calls for a more radical departure from prephilosophical judgment than anything Rawls proposes. Ordinary moral thought is filled with rules about things like playing fair, doing your part, telling the truth, keeping your promises, minding your own business, and being careful around other people and their property. Sidgwick and Bentham famously regarded these familiar thoughts as a problem because the rules cannot be made precise, because they refer to actions that are identified in terms of them, rather than to consequences that can be identified apart from the actions that bring them about.31 They suggested that those rules

30

In the next paragraph, he does note, however, that someone might regard promissory fidelity as itself a fundamental principle.

31

Rawls himself points to two differences between Sidgwick’s view and constructivism: Sidgwick regards justification as ‘primarily an epistemological problem’

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 689

must really be imperfect approximations of something more pristine and less rule-like. This uneasiness about rules generated a reductive attitude towards justice, exemplified by Mill’s characterization of it as ‘a name for certain moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation than any others.’32 That is, for Mill, justice really is to be identified with rules of regulation, which pick out actions based on their general effects, because he thinks that the part of morality that has what Cohen calls ‘ultimacy’ lacks rules. Cohen rejects the monism inherent in the utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick, and his proposed method allows for a plurality of principles that they would 33 reject, but he shares their rejection of these familiar features of ordinary moral thought, and makes what seem to be most familiar in morality an unhappy compromise necessitated by human weakness and imperfect information. For Cohen, as for Bentham, Sidgwick, and Mill, the only dimension along which rules or institutions can be evaluated is on the basis of what they cause.34 In denying rules a fundamental place in practical thought, Cohen a fortiori rejects one of Rawls’s most prominent ideas, the priority of the right over the good. For Rawls, as for Kant, this priority entails that rules about what means can be used constrain the pursuit of any possi-

about an independent order of moral values, rather than as an issue for practical reason about working out the implications of a conception of the person, ‘Kantian Constructivism’ in Collected Papers (554), and in the role each assigns to human powers of reflection and judgment (560). These differences help to explain Sidgwick’s attitude towards rules, since the possibility of exceptions both makes them poorly suited to be objects of knowledge and demands too much scope for reflection and judgment. It is not clear whether Cohen shares Sidgwick’s views on these matters. Both his methodology of approaching principles separately and his claim that ‘political philosophy is concerned with what we should think rather than what we should do’ suggest some attachment to them. 32

Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 5 in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill Vol. 10, J.M. Robson, ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1969), 259. Mill had earlier characterized the broader distinction between right and wrong in terms of liability to some sort of sanction, whether coercive, social or in conscience (246).

33

Sidgwick characterizes a plurality of potentially conflicting ultimate principles as ‘absolute proof that at least one of the formulae needs qualification’ (Methods of Ethics [Indianapolis: Hackett 1981] Book III, Chapter XI, 341).

34

Cohen’s luck egalitarian conception of justice as a property of distributions and his pessimism about its achievement also echo Sidgwick, who writes ‘For in any case it does not seem possible to separate and practice that part of the man’s achievement which is due strictly to his free choice from that part which is due to the original gift of nature and of favoring circumstances’ (Methods of Ethics, Book III, Chapter V, 285).

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ble ends, including even obligatory ones. In Rawls’s own deployment it generates the idea that unjust social arrangements cannot be redeemed by their good consequences. The idea is hardly uncontroversial, but neither Cohen’s methodological distrust of claims to the unity of value, nor his argument to show that fact-laden principles must presuppose fact-free principles, so much as engages it. Cohen’s claim that normative thought can be coherent without priority rules does not show that 35 particular parts of morality cannot include them. The argument that principles must be fact-free does no better, as the priority of right can be stated in an abstract and fact-free form. Nor will the analytic/synthetic distinction assist Cohen here. His rejection of the priority of right requires an independent argument for supposing that justice does not consist of rules governing social cooperation. Cohen further suggests that the concept of justice must be at some remove from the concept of the right institutions to adopt, if it is to make sense to ask whether the institutions in question are adequately just. The thought here seems to be that in order for a principle to be a measure of institutions or rules, fulfillment of the principle cannot be identified with conformity with the rules (305). Against this, it can be said that the question of whether a given set of rules, as adopted in the positive law of the society (or the conduct of some individual member or members of that society) is just cannot be answered in terms of those rules alone. But it does not follow from this that the appropriate regulative principle for a society cannot be made up of rules. Conceiving of the ideal system of just institutions lets us ask of any particular institution whether it is adequately just by asking whether it is structured in accordance with the appropriate rules. They would not be rules at all if it were logically or conceptually impossible to violate them, but they could be rules for which it is possible, even if unachievable, for institutions to fully satisfy them.36 Rawls’s theory of justice is a theory of rules in exactly this sense: justice consists in the rules appropriate to social cooperation among free and equal moral persons. Social cooperation is impossible without rules, but the ideal

35

Although I cannot take this matter up in any detail here, it is difficult to see the basis, within his own view, for Cohen’s appeal to facts about the cognitive mechanisms thorough which people deal with competing claims, or about the way principles present themselves ‘in competitive array.’ The fact that people experience conflicts of value, or have no difficulty resolving them, may speak to what they do, but not to what they ought to do or think about such conflicts. Some fact-free principle would be required to make these facts relevant.

36

Douglas Lavin, ‘Practical Reason and the Possibility of Error,’ Ethics 114 (2004) 42457

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 691

set of rules for social cooperation depends on the type of cooperation at issue.37 Cohen briefly considers the possibility that Rawls’s focus on institutions should be taken to show that he is concerned with something other than justice. Cohen characterizes justice as ‘an elusive virtue discussed for a few thousand years by philosophers who did not conceive themselves to be (primary) legislators and who consequently had a different project … . Constructivism does not, or does not consistently, expressly propose to appropriate the label ‘justice’ to denote what it had not previously denoted’(304). Here it seems that it is Cohen, rather than Rawls, who is using a label differently than philosophers in the past. Although Cohen characterizes his position as a sort of Platonism, and says that he shares Plato’s view that ‘justice is the self-same thing, across, and independently of history’ (291), Plato’s investigation of justice for the polis in the Republic is closer to Rawls’s than to Cohen’s. To understand justice in the individual, Plato considers a larger scale version of the same virtue, which he finds in the ideal set of constitutive principles for a polis. That is, he identifies it with rules and regards it as essential to characterize it in light of familiar kinds of facts about human motivations. Justice would fail to be a virtue, or be a different one if not for the tripartite structure of the soul. At no point in his argument does he attempt to identify the fact-free demands of justice, and then worry about their implementation. When Plato does turn to questions of implementation, as he traces the decline from the just society to tyranny, a different set of facts enter into determining whether justice can be achieved or maintained, not the ones that figured in characterizing its nature. Aristotle’s characterization of justice as giving ‘each his due,’ assigns a similarly fundamental role to rules, and insists that their demands depend upon the nature of the thing being distributed. Again, the entire post-Aristotelian natural law tradition, running from Maimonides and Aquinas through (aspects of) Hobbes and Locke to Kant and Hegel looks for justice in the rules appropriate to the social

37

It must be conceded here that Rawls’s presentation of his view sometimes invites the suspicion that he shares the idea that rules are to be selected on the basis of factors that are not themselves rule-based. In A Theory of Justice his discussion of promissory obligation distinguishes what he calls the ‘constitutive convention’ of promise-keeping from its moral justification. In so doing he appears to commit himself to Bentham’s fundamental distinction between the existence of a rule and its merits or demerits, with the concomitant thought that the merits are not themselves a matter of rules. His appeal to H.L.A. Hart’s ‘principle of fair play’ might seem to underscore his attitude. However, Cohen’s attribution of the idea that rules are instruments for bringing about results that are not themselves rule-like does not draw on this passage.

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order. Rousseau’s project of finding ‘a form of association’ reconciling and preserving the freedom of everyone does the same. Even Hume, who Cohen suggests says what justice is and limits his discussion of the ‘circumstances of justice’ to the conditions in which it can be achieved (333) actually says that it is only a virtue, meriting approval, in those circumstances. With the notable exception of Kant, none of these writers hesitates to appeal to facts at a fundamental level, and even Kant introduces ‘postulates’ about rational beings occupying space, using things other than their bodies, and inevitably coming into contact with 38 each other. Those who, like Sidgwick, think that rules lack ultimacy conclude that justice it is not ultimate because it is made up of rules.39 To point to these similarities is not to argue from authority, or even to show that any of these arguments is successful on its own terms. It is only to suggest that is more likely that Cohen is the one appropriating a label ‘to denote what it had not previously denoted.’40

III

Equality and the Difference Principle

Cohen’s argument that Rawls himself is committed to the idea that justice requires removing the effects of natural contingency rests on a central passage in A Theory of Justice. After discussing what he calls ‘the liberal conception’ of fair equality of opportunity in terms of removing obstacles to people with the same abilities and aspirations achieving the same level of income, Rawls remarks that ‘it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents. Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery; this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective. There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune.’41

38

I explain the role of postulates in Kant’s Rechtslehre in Force and Freedom, Appendix.

39

See The Methods of Ethics Book III, Chapter V, 350, where Sidgwick concludes that the principles of justice, among which he explicitly includes what he calls the ‘socialistic principle of requiting Desert’ cannot be ultimate because it cannot be made suitably precise.

40

Cohen says that his focus is on ‘distributive justice, by which I uneccentrically mean justice (and its lack) in the distribution of benefits and burdens to individuals’ (126). I do not mean to deny that there is such a topic, only that it is a central topic in Rawls’s theory.

41

TJ, 74

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 693

Cohen follows a long line of interpreters in taking this passage to show that justice demands removing the effects of natural as well as social contingencies.42 Before suggesting an alternative reading of the passage, I should perhaps note that Rawls’s work has sometimes had a sort of Rorschach role in philosophy, with different readers finding very different claims central to his argument. The passage Cohen relies on has inspired a vast luck-egalitarian literature, but Rawls’s defenders point to other pas43 sages that explicitly reject luck-egalitarian arguments. I do not know if all of the tensions and apparent contradictions in Rawls’s text can be reconciled, but the specific passage on which Cohen rests his case looks decidedly less luck-egalitarian when set against the larger context of Rawls’s argument. His remarks in the pages immediately preceding and following the quoted passage suggest that his focus is not on inequalities in outcomes, considered as such, but rather on the conditions under which an outcome can be justified by the process through which it came about. In particular, shortly after the passage that Cohen points to, Rawls draws a distinction between what he calls ‘pure procedural justice,’ in which an outcome is justified solely in virtue of the fact that a procedure has been followed, and what he calls ‘perfect’ or ‘imperfect procedural justice,’ which achieves or approximates an outcome for which there is a standard that makes no reference to that procedure. One of Rawls’s

42

See, for example, Thomas Nagel, ‘Rawls and Liberalism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003); Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991). Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy present Rawls as endorsing the luck-egalitarian principle, but as skeptical about the ability of institutions to implement it. See The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press 2002), 55. Cohen himself credits David Lyons with first noticing that the argument for the difference principle was not one of justice in his ‘The Nature and Soundness of the Contract and Coherence Arguments,’ in Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books 1975), 152-3.

43

Samuel Freeman suggests that the luck-egalitarian reading originates in Robert Nozick’s discussion of Rawls in his Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books 1974) 213-31. See Freeman, ‘Rawls and Luck Egalitarianism’ in his Justice and the Social Contract: Essays on Rawls (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009), 114. Jon Mandle points out that Rawls explicitly says that ‘the natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.’ See Mandle, Rawls’s Theory of Justice: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), 49, quoting TJ 102/87. Mandle also points to Rawls’s explicit rejection of the claim that inequalities of birth and natural talent are to be redressed (24), citing TJ 102/87.

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examples of imperfect procedural justice involves dividing a cake equally by letting the person who cuts it choose the last piece. Imperfect procedural justice thus involves Cohen’s ‘rules of regulation,’ because a procedure is adopted in order to harness appropriate incentives to get as close as is feasible to a result the correctness of which makes no reference to the procedures used to achieve it. Rawls uses the idea of pure procedural justice both in his constructivist argument from the original position, and as a feature of fair social cooperation. In the latter case, it is identified with ‘the initially attractive idea that social circumstances and people’s relationships to one another should develop over time in 44 accordance with free agreements fairly arrived at and fully honored,’ which requires an appropriate institutional structure to specify free agreements and fair circumstances. Social cooperation sets up institutions to give effect to that ‘initially attractive idea.’ He rejects ‘the system of natural liberty’ as well as what he calls the ‘liberal conception’ as insufficient to give effect to it. His objection to them is that they are inadequately constrained, not because the constraints allow distributive shares to depend on things outside a person‘s control, but rather because they are not adequate to the idea of a system of social cooperation. As he puts it in a passage added to the second edition of A Theory of Justice, ‘to apply the notion of pure procedural justice to distributive shares it is necessary to set up and administer impartially a just system of institutions.’ Such institutions must satisfy the principle of fair equality of opportunity, for otherwise distributive justice ‘could not be left to take care of itself, even within a restricted range.’45 Rawls remarks that the difference principle differs from both the system of natural liberty and the liberal conception only in the ways in which it constrains the operation of pure procedural justice. Cohen’s reading of the remarks about the natural lottery, by contrast, make those remarks only possibly relevant to some idea of perfect or imperfect procedural justice.46 For Rawls, pure procedural justice is central to social cooperation. A system of social cooperation serves to reconcile the competing claims of separate people, each of whom is entitled to set and pursue his or her own conception of the good. Perhaps the most pervasive feature of a system of social cooperation as Rawls conceives it is its creation of an economic system through enforceable rights to property, contractual

44

Political Liberalism, 265

45

TJ, 76

46

Cohen mentions pure procedural justice in passing three times, at 126 n. 20, 220, and 332 n. 89. In each case, he rejects the idea that rules could be the subject matter of justice.

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 695

performances, and the like. It is against this background that the issue of distributive justice even arises within Rawls’s conception of social cooperation. Everyone cooperates in creating and maintaining the economic system, including property rights, so it could only be just if it works to everyone’s advantage. But it could also only be just if it allows people to make their own arrangements, while providing each with the assurance that others will honor their agreements. Thus it must contain an element of pure procedural justice — that is, there must be aspects of economic holdings that are just merely in virtue of having come about through voluntary transactions in the right way, because the just society is a system of social cooperation between free persons, each of whom is entitled to set and pursue his or her own ends. A system of pure procedural justice designed to advantage only some but not all would be contrary to this conception of social cooperation; Rawls’s objection to the natural lottery is confined to proposals to create binding arrangements that undermine the background conditions that make voluntary arrangements morally important. Cohen appears to interpret Rawls as he does because his conceptions of rules as instruments chosen on the basis of their expected effects leaves no conceptual space for any idea of pure procedural justice. Rawls suggests the idea is ‘initially attractive’ because it characterizes an idea of voluntariness and justice between free persons, not an idea of efficiency that is extraneous to it. This idea cannot even be stated without reference to rules because it is an idea of people making and honoring agreements with each other, not an idea of the joint pursuit of some purpose, whether by means of rules or in some other way. The ‘natural lottery’ argument figures within this larger argument about pure procedural justice, not as a characterization of a desirable state of affairs having nothing to do with it.47

IV

Institutions and Attitudes

The same instrumental conception of society that shapes Cohen’s conception of rules of regulation also appears to fund his argument against the basic structure, which incorporates a supposition that it could only matter in terms of its effects. That may be what leads him to regard Rawls’s claim that the basic structure profoundly shapes individual life

47

As early as his 1958 paper ‘Justice as Fairness,’ Rawls distinguishes the role of equality in justice from its role in a comprehensive conception. Collected papers, Samuel Freeman, ed. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 48.

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prospects as having no bearing on the question of the site of justice. As Cohen remarks, many things shape a person’s life prospects, so there is no obvious reason to suppose that the basic structure does so more than the ethos of society. (137) Factual features of institutions may matter to their morally appropriate design, but they do not thereby have any bearing on the requirements of justice. If facts enter Rawls’s account in a constitutive and non-instrumental way, then his emphasis on the basic structure is also different from the one that Cohen suggests. The pervasive impact of the basic structure is not a matter of it having effects on people’s comparative life prospects. If anything, Rawls’s argument goes the other way around: the basic structure creates the economic system; it is the subject of economic justice because it is the condition of people having distributive shares at all, since it creates and enforces their claims over things. Institutions are fundamental on this account because the question of justice is whether those institutions treat citizens as free and equal. As Rawls repeatedly notes, this does not mean that there are no issues of justice anywhere else, including families, churches, and universities. It only means that the basic structure of society conceived as a system of social cooperation has its own, distinctive standards of justice. If social institutions are the product of social cooperation and also shape each person’s life prospects,48 then people who cooperate in creating and sustaining a basic structure are subject to distributive justice. Social cooperation between free and equal persons to create such a structure will only be fair if the structure itself works to the advantage of all, that is, if it allows people to claim advantages from their natural assets when doing so works to the advantage of all. No such considerations apply as between persons considered as such, in the absence of a shared structure. That this is Rawls’s position is especially evident in the Law of Peoples, and versions of it have been put forward in the global justice literature by Thomas Nagel and Michael Blake. This is not the place to consider whether either Rawls’s own arguments or the Rawlsian arguments of others are successful. My point is only that the distributive aspect of Rawls’s theory is, within the theory itself, an immanent requirement of social cooperation, rather than a goal extrinsic to it. Moreover, understanding Rawls’s approach in this way also makes facts directly relevant to the demands of justice. In a world in which the

48

Compare Scheffler, ‘What is Basic About the Basic Structure?’ in The Egalitarian Conscience: Essays in Honour of G.A. Cohen, Christine Sypnowich, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008).

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basic terms of social cooperation did not make a difference to distributive shares — perhaps a world of material abundance — there would still be justice between persons, who would have to interact on terms consistent with their equal freedom, and presumably require just institutions and just procedures for resolving any questions which required common answers. So they would require freedom of expression and assembly, and various democratic institutions. But they would not require distributive justice, because legal institutions would not constitute distributive shares. Such a world is difficult to imagine, but if one were possible, there would be no issues of specifically distributive justice in it. Even Rawls’s appeal to fraternity looks more coherent than Cohen contends if facts have a constitutive role in posing the problem of justice. When Rawls writes in Political Liberalism that reasonable persons are ‘not moved by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept’ he is introducing a distinctive form of fraternity, specific to social cooperation. This motivation figures in the congruence of justice and the good, a theme that looms increasingly large as his work develops. So understood, fraternity is neither an unmediated connection with other persons or their good, nor a thin form of friendship linking everyone. Rawls sticks by his claim that people cannot be presumed to take an interest in the interests of others, and his related claim that justice as fairness ‘relies on the capacity of persons to assume responsibility for their ends and to moderate the claims they make on their social institutions in accordance with the use of primary goods.’49 Fraternity requires them to moderate their claims, not to give up on their own ends. Once more, there is no internal tension between Rawls’s account of fraternity and his embrace of the idea that each person is entitled to set, pursue, and revise his or her own conception of the good. The tension that Cohen identifies once more turns on the assumption that institutions are purely instrumental, so that just relations with others can only be an end if it is aimed at as a result, rather than governing terms of interaction and cooperation.50

49

Rawls, ‘Social Unity and Primary Goods,’ in Utilitarianism and Beyond, Amartya Sen & Bernard Williams eds., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982), 170

50

A parallel point could be made about publicity, a topic to which Cohen devotes an entire chapter. If justice is the organizing principle of a system of cooperation in light of which people make claims against their common social institutions, the principles will need to be broadly graspable by ordinary citizens making such claims. It does not follow from this that they must be public in the strong sense in which Cohen criticizes Andrew Williams for regarding as necessary or desirable

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Conclusion

The real disagreement between Cohen and Rawls seems to turn on two things. The first is whether the correct characterization of justice and other political values itself requires appeal to the concept of a rule of conduct, or whether instead is best characterized as a property of states of affairs. The second is whether distributive equality is a requirement imposed by the idea of a scheme of fair social cooperation, or whether instead it is a value, simply as such. No argument about the fact-independence of principles or the difference between justice and other values is actually relevant to these two disputes, and Cohen’s arguments against the difference principle and the basic structure presuppose the latter position in each of the disputes. Rawls wants to know what claims cooperating members of the society are entitled to press against each other solely in virtue of their status as cooperating members of that society. Cohen takes the fact that they are cooperating members of the society to be merely incidental to the basis of their claims, and so concludes that the claims of justice that persons have against each other to have nothing to do with social cooperation. He does not conceive of society as a system of social cooperation constituted by rules as having any independent normative significance; it has at most factual significance, in so far as it gives shape to the possible ways in which an equal distribution might be achieved or as a sort of parameter around which well-motivated agents organize their attempts to achieve non-institutional justice. As a result, political institutions are for Cohen at most an instrument for realizing one or several values that matter entirely apart from them, values that might, in more favorable circumstances, be achieved entirely without them. That is presumably why he insists that facts are only potentially relevant to justice in identifying the likely effects of the adoption of various rules. I have suggested that Cohen’s conceptions of principles as not being rule-like, and of rules as never being normatively basic, leads him to misinterpret Rawls’s approach to political philosophy, both in his

to justice, that is, providing exact prescriptions for particular actions. Instead, they only need to be capable of being given public institutional expression through, for example, tribunals and courts, so that there is a public procedure for ascertaining the merits of particular claims. This same need for publicly articulated standards underlies Rawls’s objection to intuitionism in political philosophy. Principles that present themselves ‘in competitive array’ do not provide a public basis of justification. Once again, the fundamental contrast is between Rawls’s practical conception of normative theory and the epistemological conception found in Sidgwick and Cohen.

Critical Notice of G.A. Cohen Rescuing Justice and Equality 699

specific arguments and in his readiness to make results depend upon facts. This is not to say that the Rawlsian project is a success on its own terms; I take no stand on that here. I have argued only that Cohen has misconstrued those terms, and so has failed to show that the project fails on them. Rawls is often credited with reinvigorating the study of political philosophy by restoring first-order normative argument to its proper place. Cohen’s failure to undermine Rawls’s claims with metaethical arguments about the conceptual structure of moral argument serves as a reminder of the importance of Rawls’s achievement. Received: January 2010 ARTHUR RIPSTEIN Faculty of Law University of Toronto Toronto, ON M5S 2C5 CANADA

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS — Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010

Notes on Contributors/ Sur les Collaborateurs

701

Jaime Ahlberg is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Her interests include political philosophy, ethics, and applied ethics. Clare Batty is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Her primary interests are in the philosophy of mind. Her current research is in the philosophy of perception and focuses on olfactory experience. Her recent publications include ‘What’s that Smell?’ (Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2009), ‘Scents and Sensibilia’ (American Philosophical Quarterly, 2010), ‘What the Nose Doesn’t Know: Non-Veridicality and Olfactory Experience’ (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2010), and ‘Smelling Lessons’ (Philosophical Studies, forthcoming). Ayca Boylu is pursuing her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Virginia. Her primary philosophical interests are ethical theory, moral psychology, virtue epistemology and free will & determinism. She is currently working on the relationship between ethical understanding and motivational internalism. Harry Brighouse is a Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author, with Adam Swift, of Family Values, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and is co-director of the Spencer Foundation’s Initiative on Philosophy in Educational Policy and Practice. Steven Levine is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His primary philosophical interests are in classical and contemporary Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Perception. He has published articles in these areas and is working on a book provisionally entitled Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience. Antonia LoLordo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. Her publications include Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy and papers on Descartes, Gassendi, Hume, Locke, and Malebranche.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS — Volume 40, Number 4, December 2010

Notes on Contributors/ Sur les Collaborateurs continued/suite

Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow in Philosophy and Reader in Early Modern Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His philosophical interests and publications cover a wide range, from epistemology, philosophy of language and computing, to ethics and philosophy of religion, but with a particular focus on David Hume and related topics. From 2005 until 2010 he was Co-Editor of the journal Hume Studies, and he is currently Illumni David Hume Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Arthur Ripstein is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author, most recently, of Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2009).