We reflect on–and we argue about–the point at which human beings become persons with rights, how (if at all) gender relates to biological differences, the degree to which people are interdependent versus free, the rights of disabled persons, and the roles of mothers and other parents.

Meanwhile, we are surrounded and supported by tools and technologies that obtain data and information to guide decisions and judgments. Methods for obtaining and analyzing data have high prestige. But methods for reflecting on moral and metaphysical issues attract widespread skepticism, except among people who are deeply committed to particular moral/metaphysical views (often, religions).

In this context, we have a tool–fetal ultrasound imagining–that purports to peer into the womb and provide data about the developing organism, including its viability and its genitalia, as well as the prospective mother’s health. People may suspect that this scientific tool will shed light on personhood, sex, disability, and motherhood, not to mention such specifically contested questions as abortion and gender attribution.

The tool is used in specific, culturally resonant ways. Often prospective parents go into the medical facility together. The prospective mother is prepared and treated as a patient–in a blue gown, and so on. The room where the procedure is conducted is private, separated by a closed door from the waiting room. A large, precise, moving image appears on a screen. The parent or parents are asked whether they want to know whether the child is/will be a boy or a girl, which determines whether they are shown the genital area. At least some pregnant women report that the image compels everyone’s attention to the fetus and negates the woman, since she is literally made invisible (Barad 1998). Prospective parents of “normal” or “healthy” children are congratulated and offered good wishes. They can take still photos or even videos home with them.

If we ask “What is a fetal ultrasound session?” (as Clifford Geertz asked, “What is a Balinese cockfight?“) we might consider several answers:

1. “A fetal ultrasound (sonogram) is an imaging technique that uses sound waves to produce images of a fetus in the uterus. Fetal ultrasound images can help your health care provider evaluate your baby’s growth and development and monitor your pregnancy. In some cases, fetal ultrasound is used to evaluate possible problems or help confirm a diagnosis” (The Mayo Clinic). Note: “your baby” as a description of the object. Not “the baby,” not “the fetus,” not “you.”
2. An apparatus that uses a piezoelectric transducer, a crystal that both receives and produces ultrasound waves in complex interactions with the mother, the fetus, the computer, the video screen, and the viewers (Barad 1998).
3. A “bonding scan” also known as a “recreational” or keepsake” ultrasound, meant to produce pictures or videos to save and share with friends and family or even with the child later on (per LiveScience.com, which does not endorse such uses).
4. An application of SONAR technology, invented to detect and destroy enemy submarines (Barad 1998)
5. One of the events to expect when you are expecting. A moment to anticipate, celebrate, and share.
6. A ritual that encourages prospective parent(s) to: 1. bond as couples and begin bonding with their child, with whom they will form a nuclear family, 2. bring the fetus to term because is already moving and kicking, 3. avoid behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, that might harm the fetus, 4. encourage them to begin to begin thinking and talking about it as a “boy” or a “girl,” who will have an appropriate name, pronouns, etc., 5. allow them to announce the pregnancy to a larger audience, thus enhancing their social capital, 6. reinforce the authority of credentialed medical professionals in white coats, and 7. produce revenue for the clinic.

Karen Barad wrote a brilliant 1998 article* that explored much of this terrain. I would respectfully dissent from part of her analysis, only because I am trying to work out a view that better fits my sense of the problematic power of science.

Inter alia, Barad raises epistemological doubts about the image that we see on the screen. We are not “peer[ing] innocently at the fetus,” but using an elaborate apparatus that produces an image as a result of complex interactions that can be changed by altering the apparatus. It is a mistake to think that the referent, when we talk about this image, is “the fetus.” The referent is a “phenomenon that is constituted by the inter-action of the apparatus and the object.” Barad cites Niels Bohr’s epistemology in opposition to the older, “Newtonian framework” in which observation was the “benign facilitator of discovery, a transparent and undistorting lens passively gazing at the world.”

I completely agree that looking inside the torso of a pregnant woman is not innocent or automatically benign. Whether to do it, how to design the procedure and the larger event, and what conclusions to draw are moral and political choices that should be critically assessed. Fetal ultrasound could be banned, discouraged, publicly funded, or required. The image could be seen only by a professional who would give written results to the pregnant woman alone. Or it could be done only by the pregnant woman, who would decide whether to share any information with anyone, including a physician. It could be re-designed so that the woman was depicted in the image along with the fetus, or in many other ways.

A fetal ultrasound event is a social phenomenon that reflects and reproduces power. There is a risk that it will block critical deliberation about issues like abortion and gender by claiming to present natural facts just as they are. To quote Bruno Latour, science can “render ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature” (Latour, 2004, p. 10).

Yet I do believe that we are looking at the fetus. In fact, it is precisely because the technology allows us to actually peer into the woman’s body that it is invasive.

When you see a car coming down the road, you may not actually look at the object that matters. Your brain interprets a reflection on the back of your retina, which may reflect the image on a convex mirror, which distorts reality by showing objects smaller than they would appear if seen directly. But you’d better not pull out into the road if there’s a car coming. The mirror is an excellent device for looking around corners, which is why we use it.

We are in a world of tools that we use effectively for a variety of reasons. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein encourages us to see representations as tools that we can use for many purposes. A blueprint can provide instructions to a builder or ideas for a heist, or it can decorate a wall. There is nothing tricky about its metaphysical status. A picture does nothing mysterious inside us that needs analysis (Philosophical Investigations, 188). Whether the visual experience of an image is authentic is not an interesting question (190). The question is what uses we make of an object, including using it to represent a different object. For instance, to see a painting as a portrait of someone is to use it in a certain way. “Now when I say, ‘We consider a portrait to be human’ – when and for how long do we do this? Whenever we see it at all (and don’t see it as something else)” (199).

Likewise, when we are presented with a moving image from inside a pregnant woman, we can see it as a person, or as a boy, or as a fetus, or as a medical problem. Science has no legitimate right to tell us which way to see it. However, the ritual of a fetal sonogram event–conducted by people in white coats with scientific degrees–probably does determine how we will see it. The ultrasound technology really works; the question is whether and how we should use it.

Sources: Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (1998): 87-91; Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2004); Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, German text (1953), my translations.

See also: what does a Balinese cockfight have to do with public policy analysis?; issues in the philosophy of social science; science, democracy, and civic life; is science republican (with a little r)?; nature includes our inner lives; some thoughts on natural law; is all truth scientific truth?; decoding institutions; media literacy and the social discovery of reality

In my public policy course today, my students took a short opinion survey that I created for them, with questions about the justice or injustice of a variety of circumstances. For instance:

• Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, was paid about $45 million last year. A customer service representative at Disney starts at $10.43/hour. Is this unjust?
• A child raised in Lexington, MA can expect a much better education than a child raised in Lowell, MA, who can expect a much better education than a counterpart born in Jackson, MS, who (in turn) is likely to get much more schooling than a child born in Malawi. Are those gaps unjust?
• Who has the responsibility to fix the Lexington/Jackson gap? If the gap between Lexington and Lowell persists, does that imply that Massachusetts voters hold unjust values or attitudes?
• Most Amish or [Haredi] Orthodox Jewish children will grow up to have lower incomes and less advanced health-care than average Americans. Is this unjust? Are the Amish or Orthodox parents responsible for an injustice toward their children?
• Was this (below) a bad thing to express?

• Are people who object to David Geffen’s Tweet demonstrating the vice of envy?
• If David Geffen self-isolated on his yacht but didn’t Tweet about it, would it be OK?

Many of the examples in my survey are derived from Tim Scanlon’s very useful article, “When Does Equality Matter?” ?

The survey’s forced choices generated a range of responses. In discussion, students offered more nuance.

You can take the survey yourself and then look at the aggregate responses.

See also defining equity and equality; sorting out human welfare, equity and mobility; college and mobility.

In a course on policy analysis, we have been investigating these policy questions: Who should decide which kids attend which schools? (E.g., Should parents choose in a marketplace of schools? Should all kids be required to attend the nearest public school?) And on what basis should these decisions be made? My students have begun to investigate other policy issues of their own choice, using similar tools.

We have been applying a scientific paradigm, in this sense: We ask why questions, and the “why” is causal. What causes people to put their kids in certain schools? What causes schools to have certain outcomes? What might cause a government to choose a given policy for school assignment?

Answering these questions seems relevant to policy because we can decide what the state should want and then how to set up institutions so that those outcomes are more likely, given what individuals are likely to do in the situations that confront them.

Lots of factors can cause people to act in certain ways, including emotion, error, and instinct. But we have often assumed that people act in order to accomplish ends. Parents try to get their children into a given school so that their kids will be on a path to safety and wealth. Governments segregate schools to preserve white supremacy or else integrate them to promote a certain form of equity. These explanations assume purposive behavior toward ends. We could call them “functionalist” explanations. We are asking, “What is—and what should be—the function of public schools?”

In this context, I have assigned Clifford Geertz’ classic text, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Daedalus, vol. 101, no. 1, Myth, Symbol, and Culture (Winter, 1972), pp. 1-37.

Geertz and his unnamed spouse–both of them “malarial and diffident”—arrive in a village in Bali, Indonesia in the late 1950s to study it. They encounter many institutions and practices e.g., farming and Hindu temple festivals. Among these, cockfighting is prominent and also somewhat alien, since most Americans don’t participate in cockfights. It creates puzzlement for Geertz and his readers and seems to need an explanation.

Our puzzlement grows as we realize that cockfighting: 1) occupies a lot of energy and time; 2) persists even though it is illegal; 3) involves betting that is “irrational” in the sense that it is carefully contrived to cause a net loss of utility; and 4) conflicts with several pervasive Balinese norms. For instance, Balinese culture is integrated on sexual lines, but cockfighting is just for men. Balinese culture is very courtly, but cockfighting is violent and extremely competitive.

You could ask lots of “why” questions. Why do Balinese people engage in cockfighting? More specifically, why are the betting odds for the main event always set at 1:1 and why are there also side bets that are never 1:1? Or why do people from the same factions never compete in the main fight?

And you could pose functionalist explanations. The function of cockfighting in Bali is …?

But here is a different question. What is a Balinese cockfight? That question has many possible answers:

• “A chicken hacking another mindless to bits “(p. 84)
• An example of “deep play” (p. 71)
• “fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns” (p. 74)
• an “encompassing structure” that presents a coherent vision of “death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance” (p. 79)
• “a kind of sentimental education” from which a Balinese man “learns what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text” p. 83

These descriptions range from “thin” (chickens fighting) to “thick” (a vision of death and masculinity)

Gilbert Ryle originated the thin/thick distinction here:

Two boys fairly swiftly contract the eyelids of their right eyes. In the first boy this is only an involuntary twitch; but the other is winking conspiratorially to an accomplice. At the lowest or the thinnest level of description the two contractions of the eyelids may be exactly alike. From a cinematograph-film of the two faces there might be no telling which contraction, if either, was a wink, or which, if either, were a mere twitch. Yet there remains the immense but unphotographable difference between a twitch and a wink. For to wink is to try to signal to someone in particular, without the cognisance of others, a definite message according to an already understood code.

You could ask, “Why did the boy’s eyelid contract?” That helps you answer the question, “What was that?”

According to Berry Tholen (“Bridging the gap between research traditions: on what we can really learn from Clifford Geertz.” Critical Policy Studies 12.3 (2018): 335-349.),

Three aspects of Deep Play are most often cited as exemplary for interpretive research in the social sciences:
• trying to understand people as they understand themselves;
• offering understandings by presenting thick descriptions and
• using text-analysis as the paradigm for studying societal meanings.

What is the relevance of this kind of inquiry to policy?

1) It reminds us that “what?” is often as hard and important a question as “why?”

I was recently the principal investigator for a social science research project asking whether a new arts venue in Boston’s Chinatown—the Pao Arts Center—benefits community members, specifically by improving their mental health. This is a causal question, and we investigated it using surveys and interviews. Ideally, researchers would randomly assign people to get the “treatment” of the Pao Arts Center, or not, and measure its effects on hard outcomes, like stress hormones.

But there is also a question of “what.” On a given afternoon at Pao, the auditorium might be a venue for a classical Chinese opera or a spoken-word performance by a young Asian-American artist. What are those things? I have so little background in Chinese opera that I can only give the thinnest description (“Chinese opera”). I cannot thicken those words to say, “This is an excellent, if conventional, performance of an opera from the Beijing court tradition.” Or, “This is a subversive postmodern version of a well-known classic.” Or, “This is an incompetent effort to perform a classic.” I do not know how to thicken the description, but I could ask better-informed observers or learn more myself.

Only once we know what the art is can we know whether that kind of art helps with mental health. Hence our project deliberately combined humanities scholars from Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies with public health scholars from the Tufts Medical School.

2) It requires certain methods.

How can we know what a culturally complex object is? How does Geertz go about knowing? This is a moment to talk about ethnography, textual analysis, and other methods of interpretation. And it is a moment to ask whether interpretations are arbitrary and subjective, or whether they can be valid.

3) It recognizes that human beings do not always act for outcomes.

Geertz asserts (citing Weber, vaguely) that “the imposition of meaning on life is the major end and primary condition of human existence” (p. 16). We sometimes act not to do things but to “increase the meaningfulness” of things. If that is true, policy analysts and policymakers should take meaning into consideration.

To return to our original policy question: What is a school in modern America? What is a school within a given system of school assignment? What is a “no-excuses” charter school, or a de facto segregated neighborhood school, or a small-town school that serves everyone?

“In tribute to the thousands of Jews of the Rhone who were tortured and executed, deported and exterminated in 1942, 1943, and 1944.

Let the locations of their martyrdom be engraved in our memory:

Fort Montluc, The School of Military Medicine, the Hotel Terminus, Rue Sainte Catherine, Rue Sainte-Helene, the Catelin cul-de-sac, Venessieux Camp, Neyron, Rillieux, Dorieux Bridge, Bron, Saint Genis Laval.

Let those who helped them, at risk to their lives, be thanked forever.

The French Republic, in tribute to the victims of racist and antisemitic persecution and crimes against humanity committed under the de facto authority called the “Government of the State of France” (1940-44). Let us never forget.

This is a pair of plaques on the wall of the former School Military Medicine in Lyon, headquarters of Lyon’s Gestapo chief, Klaus Barbie. The building was used for frequent torture and executions until it was destroyed by Allied bombers; the site is now a small Museum of the the Resistance and Deportation.

What should we make of the French Republic denouncing the Government of the State of France?

One view might be that individual human beings are always the only responsible parties. In 1940-4 in France, human beings denounced Jews, or killed them, or saved them, or did nothing. They also actively supported, complicitly upheld, resentfully accepted, subtly undermined, or bravely resisted the government of France as it was constituted before, during, and after WWII. They should be judged on whether they hurt or helped people and whether they strove to make their governments just.

That view denies all moral agency to groups and institutions, which would have some problematic implications. It would mean, for one thing, that responsibility never survives a change of generations. If an individual didn’t denounce Jews in 1941, that person has nothing to be concerned about. We are born with a clean slate.

Yet an individual can inherit the advantages of an institution, such as the French Republic (or the USA). Not only does a state have has a treasury from which it pays benefits–and which represents the accumulated balance of all its past debts and credits–but it also shapes and realizes citizens’ rights. Insofar as our rights are important components of our identity, a state helps to constitute us.

Another view is that France (again, like the USA) is a morally responsible entity to which its citizens are tied, like it or not. The past belongs to the living. Today’s French inherit the responsibility for Vichy as much as for the Third or Fourth Republic that bracketed it, because they inherit France.

But surely we bear more responsibility for democratic governments than for authoritarian governments that rule us in our name. In that sense, the sins of the French republics should perhaps weigh more on modern French people than those of Vichy. Yet we know that Vichy was pretty popular, and the Third Republic was rickety. Public support is a sliding scale, not an on/off switch. So is any government’s responsiveness to the public.

Also, the laws and policies that result from a democratic process depend on precisely how the democracy is organized. Americans would have different laws if we elected one unicameral legislature with 10,000 members as our sole branch of government. We are constituted in one way; we (the same people) could be constituted differently. The US has not been re-constituted since 1789, although some of the changes have been pretty basic. France was definitely reconstituted in 1940 and again in 1945-.

I am inclined to think that the French Republic is an institution that is distinct from Vichy, as proven by the armed conflict between the two. The Republic can describe Vichy as an “it.” The Republic speaks just as it pays bills or forbids you from walking on the grass: as a corporate body.

However, the Republic has particular corporate responsibilities for the crimes of Vichy, not because the two states are the same thing, but because the Republic inherited the debts and assets of Vichy, like a business that buys a bankrupt firm. One of the Republic’s many assets is the address at which Klaus Barbie tortured his victims, and France is obligated to memorialize that space in the right way.

Meanwhile, French citizens have a particular obligation to assess whether the Republic is saying the right things. Reading those plaques on the wall, a French person should not ask, “Do I say that?” The speaker is the state, not the citizen. Instead, the citizen should ask, “Do I endorse the Republic’s saying that?” If not, the citizen should speak to the Republic by expressing a public criticism, because it is, after all, the citizens’ state (res publica).

By the way, I think the first plaque is the statement, and the second attributes it to the Republic as its author. Although the second plaque has no punctuation, I think the last three words form an imperative sentence in the third-person-plural: “Let us never forget.” The Republic expresses its view and then refers to a “we.” The metaphysics is odd here, but I this may be a way of capturing the particular relationship between a people and their state. The state is telling its own people to do something as individuals: read and remember.

In turn, the people may–and should–judge the state, including this declaration that they can read on the public plaques. However, the French people cannot unanimously and directly decide this position about the Deportation, or any different stance. Rather, they can act as individuals through the mechanisms of government to make a corporate change.

(Written on the way home from Lyon. See also: against methodological individualism; why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics; what constitutes coordination?; rebirth without metaphysics; is social science too anthropocentric?; how many foundings has the US had?); Social Ontology 2018: The 11th Biennial Collective Intentionality Conference; and system, organism, person, organization, institution: some definitions.

(posted in Montreal)

For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick up and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.

Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (1920), pp. 28-9

Here are three widely-held presumptions:

1. All truth is scientific truth. Any claim that isn’t scientific is an opinion.
2. Nature is everything that science investigates, including the human or social world.
3. Science means a suite of methods that strive to represent nature without influence from the observer. A scientific truth is one that would obtain even if there were no scientist. This is an aspiration; any given scientific claim is actually subject to bias. But the goal is to remove subjectivity to understand nature.

Whitehead disputes these assumptions (as have many since him). I came across the quoted sentence in an article by Bruno Latour entitled, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”* Latour’s provocative article sent me to Whitehead’s original text, which elaborates his argument. A little later in The Concept of Nature, Whitehead writes:

What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream.

Another way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature. The meeting point of these two natures is the mind, the causal nature being influent and the apparent nature being effluent

I acknowledge that we have often made progress in understanding specific phenomena (in the social world as well as what we call “nature”) by employing techniques that isolate the object from the perceiving human subject. An astronomer wants to know how the universe works regardless of how people perceive it, uncovering truths that would apply even if there were no sentient observers at all. Many methods that we label scientific aim for that kind of understanding. Quantification and blind experiments are two rather different examples.

Meanwhile, we have learned about human beings’ subjectivity. We have studied people’s experiences, their causes, and how they differ. Sometimes we treat subjectivity as another phenomenon that we can study objectively. And sometimes we express or convey our own subjectivity in first-person terms.

The problem that Whitehead decries is the bifurcation. When the earth rotates so that the line of sight between a human observer and the sun becomes partially obscured, molecules and waves are involved in the process. But you, the human observer, also truly see something that you call a “red sunset.” It has formal qualities and significance, even symbolism, for you as a human observer. It is not true that only the molecules and waves are “nature,” hence that only they can be understood using science. Your reaction to the sun’s setting is also part of reality, even if you phrase it as idiosyncratically as Edith Wharton did:

Leaguered in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets ...

-- Wharton, "An Autumn Sunset"

*Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 2004), pp. 225-248. See also introspect to reenchant the inner life and is all truth scientific truth?

Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodis’d;
Nature, like liberty, is but restrain’d
By the same laws which first herself ordain’d.

– Pope, An Essay on Criticism (writing here of aesthetic laws)

… the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God  …

— The Declaration of Independence

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

— Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

As I begin to teach a course on Martin Luther King–and while thinking about how to teach civics at all levels–I am giving renewed consideration to the idea of natural law. This is a matter for debate (and should be presented as such), but here are some personal thoughts:

A substantial part of any concept of natural law is a set of rights. Rights impose obligations. If I have a right to life, you have an obligation not to kill me. If I have a right to an education, someone has an obligation to pay for my schooling. These obligations fall on both individuals and institutions. For instance, my right to life implies not only that you may not kill me but that some kind of state must protect me.

To honor and protect others’ rights is obligatory. It is a moral and not merely a legal duty.

Governments do not create rights and obligations, because we can and must assess any given government by asking whether it protects the rights that people deserve.

Other animals have rights because people have obligations to treat them ethically. But non-human animals do not have rights in relation to each other. In that sense, rights are human, although they extend to humans’ treatment of other species.

Rights are linked to the organism’s characteristics as a natural species. For instance, we human beings are born helpless, remain interdependent, yet develop unique goals and desires that are rooted in our private mental lives. Our rights would be different if we had no need for each other, or no private lives at all–or if we differed in other fundamental ways from actual homo sapiens.

Rights are connected to happiness, which means–not the balance of pleasure over pain–but some deeper form of flourishing or self-realization. Flourishing for human beings is natural in the same way that a mouse or an apple tree has certain natural ways of flourishing.

At the same time, one of the unusual and fundamental features of human beings is our ability to flourish in many different ways, and so we have a right to choose our own paths or be the authors of our own lives. This right to choose is based on our ability and desire to choose, which is a natural characteristic.

I have suggested that fundamental interests, needs, and goods are rooted in nature. However, it is not a natural principle that anyone has an obligation to protect or provide for the needs of anyone else. An individual rabbit has a profound interest in not being eaten, yet a fox does not have an obligation to refrain from eating rabbits. Nature is red in tooth and claw.

We are obligated to honor everyone else’s rights, which are based in their natural interests, but this obligation is not natural. It comes from somewhere else. If you think it comes from God, that is fine, but the obligation is then divine and supra-natural, not (merely) natural.

Perhaps we have an instinct to universal beneficence that emerges from our everyday sympathy for other people and animals. That instinct could be seen as the natural (not divine) basis for our commitment to universal rights. Mengzi puts it very well:

Humans all have hearts that are not unfeeling toward others. Suppose someone suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well: everyone in such a situation would have a feeling of alarm and compassion—not because one sought to get in good with the child’s parents, not because one wanted fame among their neighbors and friends, and not because one would dislike the sounds of the child’s cries. [F]?rom this we can see that if one is without the heart of compassion, one is not a human. If one is without the heart of deference, one is not a human. The heart of compassion is the sprout of benevolence. The heart of disdain (shame/disgust) is the sprout of righteousness. The heart of deference is the sprout of propriety. The heart of approval and disapproval is the sprout of wisdom.” (2A6; see also 6A6)

Quoted in Owen Flanagan, The Geography of Morals (p. 57). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

However, we have many instincts, including warlike, competitive, and cruel ones. Universal beneficence seems a subtle and rare sprout in the wild garden of our instincts. To select and cultivate that particular sprout may be wise and right, but it is a choice that’s not itself directed by nature.

Nature can be understood as everything that science can explain (and science is any valid explanation of nature). So defined, “nature” offers no basis for obligations. A purely empirical study of nature would suggest that members of any species, including homo sapiens, are unequal in capacity, frequently selfish, and fully determined by physical processes rather than choice. We can broaden our understanding of nature to encompass things like obligations, purposes, and goods–for instance, happiness as the purpose of human beings, and non-domination is a good required for happiness. But then nature is not exhausted by positivist science.

Partly because positivist science does not comprehend things like rights, it is very hard for people to know the ideal list of rights and their correlative obligations. All of our ancestors were wrong about some rights–according to us–which means that we ought to be humble about our own ability to know the ideal list.

The best we can do is to decide, in reasonably fair and reflective forums, which rights and obligations ought to apply to whom. That means that although governments do not create rights, people must identify and determine rights through politics and in institutions such as governments. We should expect their outcomes to vary over time and space, not because rights are mere matters of opinion, but because the only way we can know real rights is to exchange and test our opinions.

In conclusion, I feel comfortable speaking of law that is importantly connected to nature, and especially to the nature of human beings. Understanding it requires reflection on our natural circumstances. But I wouldn’t call it “natural law” if that implies that it is part of, or determined by, nature, because it has sources other than nature itself.

See also: is science republican (with a little r)?; science, law, and microagressions; my self, your self, ourselves; the moral significance of instinct, with special reference to having a dog; is everyone religious?; is all truth scientific truth?; latest thoughts on animal rights and welfare; and Korsgaard on animals and ethics.

I. Buddhist arguments

A Buddhist argument for “no self” goes like this: Look inward–as hard as you want–for some unchanging “I” or “self.” You cannot find it. All you’ll find are physical sensations, feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness, coming one after another, free from your control, and constantly changing. The Buddha himself says, “mind, intellect, consciousness, keeps up an incessant round by day and by night of perishing as one thing and springing up as another” (quoted in Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, p. 41). This stream cannot be you if “you” means some durable, controlling thing. But since that is all that you can find within, there is no you.

The idea of a durable, independent, yet fragile self is evidently not “Western” or “modern,” because Buddhists have been working assiduously against it for more than two millennia. It seems to have been endemic in their various cultural contexts. Buddhagosa (a 5th-century thinker) implies that the sense of self arises automatically from having sensations.

When there is rupa [physical sensation], O monks, then through attachment to rupa, through engrossment in rupa, the persuasion arises, ‘This is mine; this am I; this is my self.’

When there is feeling … when there is perception … when there are volitions … when there is consciousness, O monks, then through attachment to consciousness, through engrossment in consciousness, the persuasion arises, ‘This is mine; this am I; this is my self.’

— Buddhagosa, in Siderits, p. 37.

Even if this is a universal human phenomenon, it is still bad and worth trying to combat, according to Buddhists. We should not think, “This is mine; this am I; this is my self.’” That thought has two ethical drawbacks (where “ethical” is defined very broadly, to mean anything concerned with thinking and acting well and living a good life).

First, a theory of the self as real but fragile encourages selfishness and love or regard of self at the expense of compassion and altruism.

Second, this theory causes avoidable discomfort or even suffering. For me, a common example is nostalgia. I remember an earlier stage of life–say, being a young parent with a toddler in my arms. I experience a desire to be that person again, or to have that experience directly instead of as a memory. As a result, my memory is infused with loss. But this is a mistake. The memory is an experience, just like any other impression. I can have the memory now, which is a blessing. There is no “I” that could possibly possess the object of the experience more directly, transcending time. The past doesn’t exist; all experience is current. Recognizing that truth spares me loss.

The same is true of fears of death or great old-age. I can imagine those states, but there is no reason to tie them to my present state. I am not old or dying. The idea that those states attach to me is based on a false sense of the self.

A third example is a kind of envy. I see a person who is a young parent now, with a child in arms. I want to have that experience instead of just observing it. Envy is not very virtuous in any circumstance. In this case, it also reflects a metaphysical error. The young parent’s experience is real, and I can see it. But, as a logical matter, it cannot attach to me. I should be glad for the existence of the experience and drop the nonsensical idea that the experience should (or could) somehow be mine. The root of that mistake is a false view of self.

The crucial point is that a spiritual or ethical failing derives from a metaphysical error. Truly believing the metaphysical truth of no-self would prevent or cure the spiritual and ethical fault.

II. Kant’s defense of the self

Kant was aware of the argument that the self is not real, because we cannot find it when we introspect. All we find is a set of specific experiences. He got this from David Hume.

But Kant argued that experiences are logically structured. Consciousness is not like a big screen with lots of disconnected pixels that change color randomly. I perceive three-dimensional objects moving through space, interacting with each other, and having sounds, weight, and smell as well as shape. The fact that I perceive such things implies that I (= my self) must have categories like space, time, and causality. These categories are built into what Kant calls “reason,” which we might more comfortably call human cognition.

Kant calls his conclusion the “transcendental unity of apperception.” That phrase is certainly a mouthful, but we can break it down. “Apperception” means perception with an element of understanding and self-awareness. You apperceive something as a 3-D object moving toward you. That can be a true belief about the world. “Unity” refers to the fact that our apperceptions are coherent across time and space. And “transcendental,” in Kant’s specialized vocabulary, refers to something that is a necessary explanation of something that we know from direct experience.

Could a creature inhabit our universe and have different categories from ours? God might, or Michael on “The Good Place.” But to say that such a creature has different categories is basically empty, because we have no inkling of what that is like. For us, our categories are logical necessities. The best way to think about metaphysics is to begin by understanding what we must believe, and then believe that. We must believe in space, time, and the self, which is tantamount to saying that these things are real. That is a transcendental argument.

III. Should we try to shake the idea of the self?

One aspect of the question is empirical/psychological. Is it possible–by means of concerted introspection, philosophical argument, sudden enlightenment, practice, or some other means–to rid ourselves of the idea of the self as a durable, independent agent? I am not sure, but I am open to the possibility that this happens.

A different aspect of the question is metaphysical. By ridding ourselves of the idea of the self, are we coming closer to the truth? That is a central point of disagreement between some Buddhist thinkers and Kant. But maybe it’s not a gap between the Buddha and Kant, since it’s possible that the Buddha is only interested in the good life. (“Buddhism in both its classical and contemporary forms is first and foremost a theory of personal flourishing.” – Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, p. 122. MIT Press.)

That brings us to the third aspect of the question: Is it virtuous or ethical or otherwise a good idea to strive to rid ourselves of the idea of the self? Here I am inclined to a Middle Way.

On the one hand, Kant is right that the concept of the self is logically prior to many ordinary thoughts. At a minimum, it would be an arduous task to escape from this concept. That would take a lot of time and effort and probably involve a lot of wavering and backsliding. I am not convinced that it’s likely to accomplish the ethical goals of reducing selfishness and improving equanimity. There is a risk that it might promote narcissism (excessive interest in moulding one’s own cognition) or even avoidance of ethical responsibility. It is an empirical question how trying to attain non-self affects the character. Even if its net impact is positive, maybe there are better paths to virtue.

However, we should try to shake certain theories of the self that are not only false but also ethically problematic. It is wrong (both logically and ethically) to feel nostalgia, existential dread, or envy. These feelings are not only harmful but also reflect a mistaken theory of the self.

The mistake is not to believe in anything called a self. The mistake is to imagine that the self could time-travel or jump from one body to another. Reminding oneself of these mistakes might help to prevent or address certain spiritual ailments.

Kant tells us that time is a necessary aspect or component of cognition. But we don’t jump from an awareness of time to a possessive attitude toward time. We don’t think, “Time is mine; I want to hold it forever.” We do make that jump in the case of the self, and that’s our mistake. We move from relying on the concept of a self to loving the self possessively. This is something we could teach ourselves not to do.

IV. The relationship between ethics and metaphysics

An underlying issue here is how metaphysics should connect to ethics. Owen Flanagan writes (p. 116), “Buddhists claim a connection between understanding one’s own self, paradoxically as anatman—as no-self—and an ethic of compassion and lovingkindness. …. Diminishing the grip of the illusion of metaphysical egoism is causally connected to being good. What sort of connection is there—might there be?”

One answer is that we are obliged to believe whatever happens to be true. The truth is independent of our good,; and perhaps it is a virtue to recognize the truth whatever it may be.

Kant begins the section on the Transcendental Deduction with a legal analogy. He says that law professors distinguish “the question of right (quid juris) from the question of fact (quid facti).” They call a demonstration of right a “deduction.” In a similar way, we go around making lots of “empirical conceptions” without checking whether we have a right to them. Some of these are fine, but some are “usurped conceptions, such as fortune, fate.” Although these words are used by almost everyone, they “are occasionally challenged by the question, ‘quid juris?’” Kant wants to ask whether the concepts of space, time, causality, and self are used by right or are more like “fortune” and “fate”–unjustified ideas. (Critique of Pure Reason, trans J. M. D. Meiklejohn, A84=B116.) He concludes that they are in fact obligatory.

A Buddhist might respond that it’s actually a choice whether to remain wedded to standard conceptions of time and the self, or else to devote energy to trying to shake these conceptions. Kant says we “must” use these categories, and that is the basis for his claim that they are true or right. A Buddhist might challenge the ethical sense of that “must.” If it is possible–through concerted effort–not to think with the category of self, then Kant’s argument fails. It is then not necessary to use this category; and if it’s not necessary, it doesn’t have a transcendental basis for being true.

In the following passage, the Buddha moves from making a metaphysical claim (there is no self), to offering an existence-proof (a person can avoid believing in the self), to actually liberating his followers (they lose faith in the self and become free):

“the correct view in the light of the highest knowledge is as follows: “This is not mine; this am I not; this is not my self.”

“Perceiving this, O monks, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for rupa, conceives an aversion for feeling, conceives an aversion for perception, conceives an aversion for volitions, conceives an aversion for consciousness.

“And in conceiving this aversion he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.’”

Thus spoke The Blessed One, and the delighted band of five sramanas applauded the speech of The Blessed One. Now while this exposition was being delivered, the minds of the five sramanas became free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.

[Samyutta Nikaya III.66–68], in Siderits, pp. 38-9

This is a different way from Kant’s to put metaphysics together with ethics. But it depends on an existence-proof: actual examples of people who have become “free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.” The question is whether that happens.

See also: nostalgia for now; the grammar of the four Noble Truths; you have a right and a responsibility to attend to your own happiness; on philosophy as a way of life