What most people overlook is that free will does not even correspond to any subjective fact about us. Consequently, even rigorous introspection soon grows as hostile to the idea of free will as the equations of physics have, because apparent acts of volition merely arise, spontaneously (whether caused, uncaused, or probabilistically inclined, it makes no difference), and cannot be traced to a point of origin in the stream of consciousness. A moment or two of serious self-scrutiny and the reader might observe that he no more authors the next thought he thinks than the next thought I write.
8 We may have the ethical obligation to preserve certain rocks for future generations, but this is an obligation we would have with respect to other people, not with respect to the rocks themselves. The equation of a creature's being conscious with there being "something that it is like to be" said creature comes from T. Nagel, "What Is It like to Be a Bat," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979).
9 That is, they felt no pain, in the phenomenal sense; even Descartes could see that animals avoided certain stimuli-he just didn't think that there was "something that it was like" for them to do so. His error here is based on a kernel of truth: it is conceivable that something could seem to be conscious without being conscious (i.e., passing the Turing test says nothing about whether or not a physical system actually is conscious; it just leaves us feeling, from the outside, that it probably is). Behaviorism amounts to the doctrine that seeming to be conscious is all there is to being conscious. If even a kernel of truth is to be found lurking here, I have yet to find it.
10 Cited in J. M. Masson and S. McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), 18.
11 The stakes here should be obvious. What is it like to be a chimpanzee? If we knew more about the details of chimpanzee experience, even our most conservative use of them in research might begin to seem unconscionably cruel. Were it possible to trade places with one of these creatures, we might no longer think it ethical to so much as separate a pair of chimpanzee siblings, let alone perform invasive procedures on their bodies for curiosity's sake. It is important to reiterate that there are surely facts of the matter to be found here, whether or not we ever devise methods sufficient to find them. Do pigs led to slaughter feel something akin to terror? Do they feel a terror that no decent man or woman would ever knowingly impose upon another sentient creature? We have, at present, no idea at all. What we do know (or should) is that an answer to this question could have profound implications, given our current practices.
All of this is to say that our sense of compassion and ethical responsibility tracks our sense of a creature's likely phenomenology. Compassion, after all, is a response to suffering-and thus a creature's capacity to suffer is paramount. Whether or not a fly is "conscious" is not precisely the point. The question of ethical moment is, What could it possibly be conscious op.
Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether or not animals have conscious mental states at all. It is legitimate to ask how and to what degree a given animal's experience differs from our own (Does a chimpanzee attribute states of mind to others? Does a dog recognize himself in a mirror?), but is there really a question about whether any nonhuman animals have conscious experience? I would like to suggest that there is not. It is not that there is sufficient experimental evidence to overcome our doubts on this score; it is just that such doubts are unreasonable. Indeed, no experiment could prove that other human beings have conscious experience, were we to assume otherwise as our working hypothesis.
The question of scientific parsimony visits us here. A common mis-construal of parsimony regularly inspires deflationary accounts of animal minds. That we can explain the behavior of a dog without resort to notions of consciousness or mental states does not mean that it is easier or more elegant to do so. It isn't. In fact, it places a greater burden upon us to explain why a dog brain (cortex and all) is not sufficient for consciousness, while human brains are. Skepticism about chimpanzee consciousness seems an even greater liability in this respect. To be biased on the side of withholding attributions of consciousness to other mammals is not in the least parsimonious in the scientific sense. It actually entails a gratuitous proliferation of theory-in much the same way that solipsism would, if it were ever seriously entertained. How do I know that other human beings are conscious like myself? Philosophers call this the problem of "other minds," and it is generally acknowledged to be one of reason's many cul de sacs, for it has long been observed that this problem, once taken seriously, admits of no satisfactory exit. But need we take it seriously?
Solipsism appears, at first glance, to be as parsimonious a stance as there is, until I attempt to explain why all other people seem to have minds, why their behavior and physical structure are more or less identical to my own, and yet I am uniquely conscious-at which time it reveals itself to be the least parsimonious theory of all. There is no argument for the existence of other human minds apart from the fact that to assume otherwise (that is, to take solipsism as a serious hypothesis) is to impose upon oneself the very heavy burden of explaining the (apparently conscious) behavior of zombies. The devil is in the details for the solipsist; his solitude requires a very muscular and inelegant bit of theorizing to be made sense of. Whatever might be said in defense of such a view, it is not in the least "parsimonious."
The same criticism applies to any view that would make the human brain a unique island of mental life. If we withhold conscious emotional states from chimpanzees in the name of "parsimony," we must then explain not only how such states are uniquely realized in our own case but also why so much of what chimps do as an apparent expression of emotionality is not what it seems. The neuroscientist is suddenly faced with the task of finding the difference between human and chimpanzee brains that accounts for the respective existence and nonexistence of emotional states; and the ethologist is left to explain why a creature, as apparently angry as a chimp in a rage, will lash out at one of his rivals without feeling anything at all. If ever there was an example of a philosophical dogma creating empirical problems where none exist, surely this is one.
12 For a recent review of the cognitive neuroscience of moral cognition see W. D. Casebeer, "Moral Cognition and Its Neural Constituents," Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 840-46. It is clearly too early to draw any strong conclusions from this research.
13 There is a wide literature on morality and ethics-I use these words interchangeably-but like most writers who have pretensions to "first philosophy," I have not found much use for it here. In considering questions of ethics, I think we should exhaust the resources of common sense before we begin ransacking the armory of philosophies past. In this, my intuitions are vaguely Kantian and therefore lead me to steer as clear of Kant as of any other philosopher. Putting the matter this way-purporting to take "common sense" in hand, where others have gotten mired in technicalities-risks begging many of the questions that certain readers will want to ask. Indeed, one person's common sense is invariably another's candidate for original sin. The manner in which I have circumscribed the domain of ethics is also somewhat idiosyncratic, and consequently my account will fail to catch some of the concerns that people regularly consider to be integral to the subject. This, as far as I can see, is not so much a weakness of my approach as one of its strengths, because I believe that our map of the moral wilderness should be redrawn. The complex interrelationships between morality, law, and politics will also be set aside for the present. While these domains certainly overlap, an analysis of their mutual (and well contested) influence upon one another is beyond the scope of this book.
14 A circularity is surely lurking here, since only those who have demonstrated the requisite degree of convergence will be deemed "adequate." This circularity is not unique to ethics, however; nor is it a problem. That we generally require people to demonstrate an understanding of current theories before we take their views seriously does not mean that revolutions in our unders
tanding of the world are not possible.
15 C. Hitchens, "Mommie Dearest," Slate, Oct. 20, 2003, slate.msn.com.
16 R. Rorty, Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in
Philosophy (Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, 1999), 90-91.
17 William James is usually considered the father of pragmatism. Whether he should he viewed as having extended the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, or utterly debauched it, seems to be very much an open question-one that can be persuasively answered either way by consulting James in half his moods. There is no doubt that the great man contradicted himself greatly. As George Santayana said, "The general agreement in America to praise [James] as a marvelous person, and to pass on, is justified by delight at the way he started, without caring where he went." (See his Persons and Places [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1963], 401.) For the tenets of pragmatism, I have principally relied on the work of Richard Rorty, who articulates this philosophical position as clearly and consistently as any of its fans or critics could wish.
18 The emphasis on utility, rather than on truth, can be easily caricatured and misunderstood-and has been ever since William James first articulated the principles of pragmatism in a lecture before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in 1898. Far from being the absurdity of wishful thinking that Bertrand Russell lampooned in his History of Western Philosophy -where we encounter a wayward pragmatist finding it useful to believe that every man in sight is named Ebenezer Wilkes Smith-when presented in all its subtleties, pragmatism can be made to seem synonymous with every species of good sense. One can easily find oneself careening, in a single hour, through the stages that James sketched for the career of any successful theory: at first it appears ridiculous; then true but trivial; then so important that one is tempted to say that one knew it all along.
19 P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 171.
20 We should note that realism is an epistemological position, not an onto-logical one. This is a regular source of confusion in philosophy. It is often assumed, for instance, that realism is opposed to various forms of idealism and subjectivism and, indeed, to certain developments in the physical sciences (like Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics) that seem to grant the mind a remarkable role in the governance of creation. But if the moon does not exist unless someone is looking at it, this would still be a realistic truth (in that it would be true, whether or not anyone knew that this is the way the world works). To say that reality has a definite character is not to say that this character must be intelligible to us, or that it might not be perversely shifty-or, indeed, that consciousness and thought might not play some constitutive role in defining it. If reality changes its colors every time a physicist hlinks his eyes, this would still be a realistic truth.
21 There is a naive version of realism that has few defenders today. It is the view of the world that most of us inherit along with ten fingers and ten toes and maintain in innocence of philosophy. Such realism holds that the world is more or less as common sense would have it: tables and chairs really exist in a physical space of three dimensions; grass is green; the sky is blue; everything is made of atoms; and every atom is crammed with particles tinier still. The basic view is that our senses, along with their extensions-telescopes, microscopes, etc.-merely deliver us the facts of the universe as they are. While being an indispensable heuristic for making one's way in the world, this is not the stuff of which current scientific and philosophical theories are made. Nor is it the form of realism that any philosophical realist currently endorses.
Thomas Nagel, an eloquent opponent of pragmatism, offers us, in The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 30, three propositions that he feels can be adequately accounted for only by realism:
1. There are many truths about the world that we will never know and have no way of finding out.
2. Some of our beliefs are false and will never be discovered to be so.
3. If a belief is true, it would be true even if no one believed it.
While a pragmatist like Rorty will concede that this manner of speaking is intelligible, he will maintain that it is just that-a manner of speaking -and he will shuttle all statements of this kind into his pragmatism by reading words like "true" in a purely discursive sense and then pirouette to his basic thesis: "We can talk like this, of course, but to know the nature of anything is merely to know the history of the way it has been talked about." The pragmatist attempts to conserve our realistic intuitions by conceding that if one is going to play certain language games correctly and use words like "true" so as to be understood, one will, of course, grant one's assent to statements like "There were mountains around before there was anyone to talk about mountains"-but he will never hesitate to add that the "truth" of such a statement is just a matter of our common agreement.
22 J. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 35J.
23 To set all the relevant features of the pragmatic construal of knowledge before us, it will be useful to briefly consider the work of Donald Davidson. Davidson has been very influential in philosophical circles, and his views on mind and meaning now appear to underwrite Rorty's pragmatism. Davidson asserts, in an undated manuscript titled "The Myth of the Subjective," that any view of the world, along with its concepts and truth claims, must be translatable into any other:
Of course there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, and person to person of kinds we all recognize and struggle with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can explain and understand. Trouble comes when we try to embrace the idea that there might be more comprehensive differences, for this seems (absurdly) to ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways of thought.
In my opinion, we do not understand the idea of such a really foreign scheme. We know what states of mind are like, and how they are correctly identified; they are just those states whose contents can be discovered in well-known ways. If other people or creatures are in states not discoverable by these methods, it cannot be because our methods fail us, but because those states are not correctly called states of mind-they are not beliefs, desires, wishes, or intentions.
Perhaps the first thing a realist will want to say in response to these ideas is that we need not ("absurdly") take a stance outside our own to make sense of the claim that radically different views of the universe might exist. As T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), points out, a community of pragmatists with the mental age of nine would simply be wrong to think that "truth" is just a matter of justification among themselves, and they would be right to think that other human beings understand facts about the world that they will never be able to translate into their discourse. Who is to say that our own view of the world might not appear similarly delimited from some other vantage point?
Davidson's doctrine of translatability comes bundled with what he calls his "principle of charity": all language users must be endowed with mostly true beliefs, for beliefs can be recognized as beliefs only against a background of massive agreement. All interlocutors, therefore, must be deemed by us to be basically rational-for the moment we imagine confronting a mind stocked stem to stern with false beliefs, we realize that we would see no basis to call it a "mind" in the first place. Davidson's view here amounts to a curious inversion of Wittgenstein's famous line "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him." For Davidson, if we cannot understand him, he cannot be talking.
Davidson's conclusions here appear rather incredible. What if a speaker and an interpreter have mutually intelligible and false canons of belief? Whether or not a given community's beliefs about reality are mutually translatable need have nothing to do with whether or not they are true. Mutual intelligibility may signify nothing more than homology of error; my errors may be enough like your own to pass for "truth" in your discourse. We need only imagine the communities of gorillas and chi
mpanzees getting their most precocious, language-trained members together to test this: each might fail to recognize the utterances of the other (perhaps they were taught incompatible forms of sign language) and conclude that the other is not a language user at all. In this case, these ape translators would both be wrong. If, on the other hand, they were to successfully converse and agreed with Rorty that "truth" is just a matter of what prevails in their discourse, they would likewise be wrong-because the men and women watching their interaction would be acquainted with a variety of truths that they could not possibly be made to understand.