what does it all mean? - mrs. thomas...

What Does It All Mean?

NAGEL

What Zto It AllMean?

A Very Short Introductionto Philosophy

New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS1987

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*.Oxford University Press

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Copyright © 1987 by Thomas Nagel

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

electroníc, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNagel, Thomas.

What does it all mean?1. Philosophy—Introductions. I. Title.

BD21.N24 1987 100 87-14316ISBN 0-19-505292-7

ISBN 0-19-505216-1 (pbk.)

3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of Americaon acid-free paper

|0st¡tuto deinvesíigac.ü ,es Filosófica!B I B u i O T . C A

, BBBABDO GARCÍA MAYNEZ"CIUDAD UMVERSITARIA

MÉXICO SO, O, F

TITUTO

Contents

1. Introduction 32. How Do We Know Anything? 83. OtherMinds 194. The Mind-Body Problem 275. The Meaning of Words 386. FreeWill 477. Right and Wrong 598. Justice 769. Death 87

10. The Meaning of Life 95

Introduction

This book is a brief introduction to philosophyfor people who don't know the first thing aboutthe subject. People ordinarily study philosophyonly when they go to college, and I suppose thatmost readers will be of college age or older. Butthat has nothing to do with the nature of thesubject, and I would be very glad if the bookwere also of interest to intelligent high schoolstudents with a taste for abstract ideas and the-oretical arguments—should any of them read it.

Our analytical capacities are often highly de-veloped before we have learned a great dealabout the world, and around the age of fourteenmany people start to think about philosophicalproblems on their own—about what really ex-ists, whether we can know anything, whether

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II


anything is really right or wrong, whether lifehas any meaning, whether death is the end.These problems have been written about forthousands of years, but the philosophical rawmaterial comes directly from the world and ourrelation to it, not from writings of the past. Thatis why they come up again and again, in theheads of people who haven't read about them.

This is a direct introduction to nine philo-sophical problems, each of which can be under-stood in itself, without reference to the historyof thought. I shall not discuss the great philo-sophical writings of the past or the cultural back-ground of those writings. The center of philos-ophy lies in certain questions which thereflective human mind finds naturally puzzling,and the best way to begin the study of philoso-phy is to think about them directly. Once you'vedone that, you are in a better position to appre-ciate the work of others who have tried to solvethe same problems.

Philosophy is different from science and frommathematics. Unlike science it doesn't rely onexperiments or observation, but only onthought. And unlike mathematics it has no for-mal methods of proof. It is done just by askingquestions, arguing, trying out ideas and thinkingof possible arguments against them, and won-dering how our concepts really work.

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Introduction

The main concern of philosophy is to questionand understand very common ideas that all of ususe every day without thinking about them. Ahistorian may ask what happened at some timein the past, but a philosopher will ask, "What istime?" A mathematician may investigate the re-lations among numbers, but a philosopher willask, "What is a number?" A physicist will askwhat atoms are made of or what explains gravity,but a philosopher will ask how we can knowthere is anything outside of our own minds. Apsychologist may investigate how children learna language, but a philosopher will ask, "Whatmakes a word mean anything?" Anyone can askwhether it's wrong to sneak into a movie withoutpaying, but a philosopher will ask, "What makesan action right or wrong?"

We couldn't get along in life without takingthe ideas of time, number, knowledge, language,right and wrong for granted most of the time;but in philosophy we investigate those thingsthemselves. The aim is to push our understand-ing of the world and ourselves a bit deeper. Ob-viously it isn't easy. The more basic the ideas youare trying to investigate, the fewer tools youhave to work with. There isn't much you can as-sume or take for granted. So philosophy is asomewhat dizzying activity, and few of its resultsgo unchallenged for long.

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Since I believe the best way to learn about phi-losophy is to think about particular questions, Iwon't try to say more about its general nature.The nine problems we'll consider are these:

Knowledge of the world beyond our mindsKnowledge of minds other than our ownThe relation between mind and brainHow language is possibleWhether we have free willThe basis of moralityWhat inequalities are unjustThe nature of deathThe meaning of life

They are only a selection: there are many, manyothers.

What I say will reflect my own view of theseproblems and will not necessarily represent whatmost philosophers think. There probably isn'tanything that most philosophers think aboutthese questions anyway: philosophers disagree,and there are more than two sides to every phil-osophical question. My personal opinión is thatmost of these problems have not beensolved, and that perhaps some of them never willbe. But the object here is not to give answers—not even answers that I myself may think areright—but to introduce you to the problems ina very preliminary way so that you can worry

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Introduction

about them yourself. Before learning a lot ofphilosophical theories it is better to get puzzledabout the philosophical questions which thosetheories try to answer. And the best way to dothat is to look at some possible solutions and seewhat is wrong with them. I'11 try to leave theproblems open, but even if I say what I think,you have no reason to believe it unless you findit convincing.

There are many excellent introductory textsthat include selections from the great philoso-phers of the past and from more recent writings.This short book is not a substitute for that ap-proach, but I hope it provides a first look at thesubject that is as clear and direct as possible. Ifafter reading it you decide to take a second look,you'll see how much more there is to say aboutthese problems than I say here.

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2

How Do We KnowAnything?

If you think about it, the inside of your ownmind is the only thing you can be sure of.

Whatever you believe—whether it's about thesun, moon, and stars, the house and neighbor-hood in which you live, history, science, otherpeople, even the existence of your own body—is based on your experiences and thoughts, feel-ings and sense impressions. That's all you haveto go on directly, whether you see the book inyour hands, or feel the floor under your feet, orremember that George Washington was the firstpresident of the United States, or that water isH2O. Everything else is farther away from youthan your inner experiences and thoughts, andreaches you only through them.

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How Do We Know Anything?

Ordinarily you have no doubts about the ex-istence of the floor under your feet, or the treeoutside the window, or your own teeth. In factmost of the time you don't even think about themental states that make you aware of thosethings: you seem to be aware of them directly.But how do you know they really exist? Wouldthings seem any different to you if in fact allthese things existed only in your mind—if every-thing you took to be the real world outside wasjust a giant dream or hallucination, from whichyou will never wake up?

If it were like that, then of course you couldn'twake up, as you can from a dream, because itwould mean there was no "real" world to wakeup into. So it wouldn't be exactly like a normaldream or hallucination. As we usually think ofdreams, they go on in the minds of people whoare actually lying in a real bed in a real house,even if in the dream they are running away froma homicidal lawnmower through the streets ofKansas City. We also assume that normal dreamsdepend on what is happening in the dreamer'sbrain while he sleeps.

But couldn't all your experiences be like agiant dream with no external world outside it?How can you know that isn't what's going on? Ifall your experience were a dream with nothingoutside, then any evidence you tried to use to

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prove to yourself that there was an outsideworld would just be part of the dream. If youknocked on the table or pinched yourself, youwould hear the knock and feel the pinch, butthat would be just one more thing going on in-side your mind like everything else. It's no use: Ifyou want to find out whether what's inside yourmind is any guide to what's outside your mind,you can't depend on how things seem—from in-side your mind—to give you the answer.

But what else is there to depend on? All yourevidence about anything has to come throughyour mind—whether in the form of perception,the testimony of books and other people, ormemory—and it is entirely consistent witheverything you're aware of that nothing at all ex-ists except the inside of your mind.

It's even possible that you don't have a bodyor a brain—since your beliefs about that comeonly through the evidence of your senses.You've never seen your brain—you just assumethat everybody has one—but even if you hadseen it, or thought you had, that would havebeen just another visual experience. Maybe you,the subject of experience, are the only thing thatexists, and there is no physical world at all—nostars, no earth, no human bodies. Maybe thereisn't even any space.

If you try to argüe that there must be an ex-ternal physical world, because you wouldn't see

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buildings, people, or stars unless there werethings out there that reflected or shed light intoyour eyes and caused your visual experiences,the reply is obvious: How do you know that? It'sjust another claim about the external world andyour relation to it, and it has to be based on theevidence of your senses. But you can rely on thatspecific evidence about how visual experiences arecaused only ifyou can already rely in general on thecontents of your mind to tell you about the externalworld. And that is exactly what has been callea intoquestion. If you try to prove the reliability of yourimpressions by appealing to your impressions,you're arguing in a circle and won't getanywhere.

The most radical conclusión to draw from thiswould be that your mind is the only thing thatexists. This view is called solipsism. It is a verylonely view, and not too many people have heldit. As you can tell from that remark, I don't holdit myself. If I were a solipsist I probablywouldn't be writing this book, since I wouldn'tbelieve there was anybody else to read it. On theother hand, perhaps I would write it to make myinner life more interesting, by including theimpression of the appearance of the book inprint, of other people reading it and telling metheir reactions, and so forth. I might even getthe impression of royalties, if I'm lucky.

Perhaps you are a solipsist: in that case you

What Does It All Mean'?

will regard this book as a product of your ownmind, coming into existence in your experienceas you read it. Obviously nothing I can say canprove to you that I really exist, or that the bookas a physical object exists.

On the other hand, to conclude that you arethe only thing that exists is more than the evi-dence warrants. You can't know on the basis ofwhat's in your mind that there's no world out-side it. Perhaps the right conclusión is the moremodest one that you don't know anything be-yond your impressions and experiences. Theremay or may not be an external world, and ifthere is it may or may not be completely differ-ent from how it seems to you—there's no wayfor you to tell. This view is called skepticismabout the external world.

An even stronger form of skepticism is possi-ble. Similar arguments seem to show that youdon't know anything even about your own pastexistence and experiences, since all you have togo on are the present contents of your mind, in-cluding memory impressions. If you can't besure that the world outside your mind existsnow, how can you be sure that you yourself ex-isted befare now? How do you know you didn'tjust come into existence a few minutes ago, com-plete with all your present memories? The onlyevidence that you couldn't have come into exis-

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tence a few minutes ago depends on beliefsabout how people and their memories are pro-duced, which rely in turn on beliefs about whathas happened in the past. But to rely on thosebeliefs to prove that you existed in the pastwould again be to argüe in a circle. You wouldbe assuming the reality of the past to prove thereality of the past.

It seems that you are stuck with nothing youcan be sure of except the contents of your ownmind at the present moment. And it seems thatanything you try to do to argüe your way out ofthis predicament will fail, because the argumentwill have to assume what you are trying toprove—the existence of the external world be-yond your mind.

Suppose, for instance, you argüe that theremust be an external world, because it is incred-ible that you should be having all these experi-ences without there being some explanation interms of external causes. The skeptic can maketwo replies. First, even if there are externalcauses, how can you tell from the contents ofyour experience what those causes are like?You've never observed any of them directly. Sec-ond, what is the basis of your idea that every-thing has to have an explanation? It's true thatin your normal, nonphilosophical conception ofthe world, processes like those which go on in

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your mind are caused, at least in part, by otherthings outside them. But you can't assume thatthis is true if what you're trying to figure out ishow you know anything about the world outsideyour mind. And there is no way to pro ve such aprincipie just by looking at what's inside yourmind. However plausible the principie may seemto you, what reason do you have to believe thatit applies to the world?

Science won't help us with this problemeither, though it might seem to. In ordinary sci-entific thinking, we rely on general principies ofexplanation to pass from the way the world firstseems to us to a different conception of what itis really like. We try to explain the appearancesin terms of a theory that describes the reality be-hind them, a reality that we can't observe di-rectly. That is how physics and chemistry con-clude that all the things we see around us arecomposed of invisibly small atoms. Could weargüe that the general belief in the externalworld has the same kind of scientific backing asthe belief in atoms?

The skeptic's answer is that the process of sci-entific reasoning raises the same skeptical prob-lem we have been considering all along: Scienceis just as vulnerable as perception. How can weknow that the world outside our minds corre-sponds to our ideas of what would be a good

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theoretical explanation of our observations? Ifwe can't establish the reliability of our sense ex-periences in relation to the external world,there's no reason to think we can rely on our sci-entific theories either.

There is another very different response tothe problem. Some would argüe that radicalskepticism of the kind I have been talking aboutis meaningless, because the idea of an externalreality that no one could ever discover is mean-ingless. The argument is that a dream, for in-stance, has to be something from which you canwake up to discover that you have been asleep;a hallucination has to be something which others(or you later) can see is not really there. Impres-sions and appearances that do not correspondto reality must be contrasted with others that docorrespond to reality, or else the contrást be-tween appearance and reality is meaningless.

According to this view, the idea of a dreamfrom which you can never wake up is not theidea of a dream at all: it is the idea of reality—the real world in which you Uve. Our idea of thethings that exist is just our idea of what we canobserve. (This view is some times called verifica-tionism.) Sometimes our observations are mis-taken, but that means they can be corrected byother observations— as when you wake up froma dream or discover that what you thought was

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iWhat Does It All Mean?

a snake was just a shadow on the grass. But with-out some possibility of a correct view of howthings are (either yours or someone else's), thethought that your impressions of the world arenot true is meaningless.

If this is right, then the skeptic is kidding him-self if he thinks he can imagine that the onlything that exists is his own mind. He is kiddinghimself, because it couldn't be true that thephysical world doesn't really exist, unless some-body could observe that it doesn't exist. And whatthe skeptic is trying to imagine is precisely thatthere is no one to observe that or anythingelse—except of course the skeptic himself, andall he can observe is the inside of his own mind.So solipsism is meaningless. It tries to subtractthe external world from the totality of myimpressions; but it fails, because if the externalworld is subtracted, they stop being mereimpressions, and become instead perceptions ofreality.

Is this argument against solipsism and skepti-cism any good? Not unless reality can be definedas what we can observe. But are we really unableto understand the idea of a real world, or a factabout reality, that can't be observed by anyone,human or otherwise?

The skeptic will claim that if there is an exter-nal world, the things in it are observable because

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they exist, and not the other way around: thatexistence isn't the same thing as observability.And although we get the idea of dreams and hal-lucinations from cases where we think we can ob-serve the contrast between our experiences andreality, it certainly seems as if the same idea canbe extended to cases where the reality is notobservable.

If that is right, it seems to follow that it is notmeaningless to think that the world might con-sist of nothing but the inside of your mind,though neither you ñor anyone else could findout that this was true. And if this is not mean-ingless, but is a possibility you must consider,there seems no way to prove that it is false, with-out arguing in a circle. So there may be no wayout of the cage of your own mind. This is some-times called the egocentric predicament.

And yet, after all this has been said, I have toadmit it is practically impossible to believe seri-ously that all the things in the world around youmight not really exist. Our acceptance of the ex-ternal world is instinctive and powerful: we can-notjust get rid of it by philosophical arguments.Not only do we go on acting as if other peopleand things exist: we believe that they do, evenafter we've gone through the arguments whichappear to show we have no grounds for this be-lief. (We may have grounds, within the overall

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wtMil


system of our beliefs about the world, for moreparticular beliefs about the existence of partic-ular things: like a mouse in the breadbox, for ex-ample. But that is different. It assumes the ex-istence of the external world.)

If a belief in the world outside our mindscomes so naturally to us, perhaps we don't needgrounds for it. We can just let it be and hopethat we're right. And that in fact is what mostpeople do after giving up the attempt to proveit: even if they can't give reasons against skepti-cism, they can't Uve with it either. But this meansthat we hold on to most of our ordinary beliefsabout the world in face of the fact that (a) theymight be completely false, and (b) we have nobasis for ruling out that possibility.

We are left then with three questions:

1. Is it a meaningful possibility that theinside of your mind is the only thingthat exists—or that even if there is aworld outside your mind, it is totallyunlike what you believe it to be?

2. If these things are possible, do youhave any way of proving to yourselfthat they are not actually true?

3. If you can't prove that anything existsoutside your own mind, is it all rightto go on believing in the externalworld anyway?

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3

Other Minds

There is one special kind of skepticism whichcontinúes to be a problem even if you assumethat your mind is not the only thing there is—that the physical world you seem to see and feelaround you, including your own body, really ex-ists. That is skepticism about the nature or evenexistence of minds or experiences other thanyour own.

How much do you really know about whatgoes on in anyone else's mind? Clearly you ob-serve only the bodies of other creatures, includ-ing people. You watch what they do, listen towhat they say and to the other sounds theymake, and see how they respond to their envi-ronment—what things attract them and whatthings repel them, what they eat, and so forth.You can also cut open other creatures and look

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at their physical insides, and perhaps comparetheir anatomy with yours.

But none of this will give you direct access totheir experiences, thoughts, and feelings. Theonly experiences you can actually have are yourown: if you believe anything about the mentalUves of others, it is on the basis of observingtheir physical construction and behavior.

To take a simple example, how do you know,when you and a friend are eating chocolate icecream, whether it tastes the same to him as ittastes to you? You can try a taste of his icecream, but if it tastes the same as yours, thatonly means it tastes the same to you: you haven'texperienced the way it tastes to him. There seemsto be no way to compare the two fiavor experi-ences directly.

Well, you might say that since you're bothhuman beings, and you can both distinguishamong flavors of ice cream—for example youcan both tell the difference between chocolateand vanilla with your eyes closed—it's likely thatyour fiavor experiences are similar. But how doyou know that? The only connection you've everobserved between a type of ice cream and a fia-vor is in your own case; so what reason do youhave to think that similar correlations hold forother human beings? Why isn't it just as consis-tent with all the evidence that chocolate tastes tohim the way vanilla tastes to you, and vice versa?

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Other Minds

The same question could be asked about otherkinds of experience. How do you know that redthings don't look to your friend the way yellowthings look to you? Of course if you ask him howa fire engine looks, he'll say it looks red, likeblood, and not yellow, like a dandelion; butthat's because he, like you, uses the word "red"for the color that blood and fire engines look tohim, whatever it is. Maybe it's what you cali yel-low, or what you cali blue, or maybe it's a colorexperience you've never had, and can't evenimagine.

To deny this, you have to appeal to an as-sumption that fiavor and color experiences areuniformly correlated with certain physical stim-ulations of the sense organs, whoever undergoesthem. But the skeptic would say you have no ev-idence for that assumption, and because of thekind of assumption it is, you couldn't have anyevidence for it. All you can observe is the cor-relation in your own case.

Faced with this argument, you might first con-cede that there is some uncertainty here. Thecorrelation between stimulus and experiencemay not be exactly the same from one person toanother: there may be slight shades of differencebetween two people's color or fiavor experienceof the same type of ice cream. In fact, since peo-ple are physically different from one another,this wouldn't be surprising. But, you might say,

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the difference in experience can't be too radical,or else we'd be able to tell. For instance, choc-olate ice cream couldn't taste to your friend theway a lemon tastes to you, otherwise his mouthwould pucker up when he ate it.

But notice that this claim assumes anothercorrelation from one person to another: a cor-relation between inner experience and certainkinds of observable reaction. And the samequestion arises about that. You've observed theconnection between puckering of the mouthand the taste you cali sour only in your own case:how do you know it exists in other people?Maybe what makes your friend's mouth puckerup is an experience like the one you get fromeating oatmeal.

If we go on pressing these kinds of questionsrelentlessly enough, we will move from a mildand harmíess skepticism about whether choco-late ice cream tastes exactly the same to you andto your friend, to a much more radical skepti-cism about whether there is any similarity be-tween your experiences and his. How do youknow that when he puts something in his mouthhe even has an experience of the kind that youwould cali a/lavar? For all you know, it could besomething you would cali a sound—or maybeit's unlike anything you've ever experienced, orcould imagine.

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Other Minas

If we continué on this path, it leads finally tothe most radical skepticism of all about otherminds. How do you even know that your friendis conscious? How do you know that there areany minds at all besides your own?

The only example you've ever directly ob-served of a correlation between mind, behavior,anatomy, and physical circumstances is yourself.Even if other people and animáis had no expe-riences whatever, no mental inner Ufe of anykind, but were just elabórate biological ma-chines, they would look just the same to you. Sohow do you know that's not what they are? Howdo you know that the beings around you aren'tall mindless robots? You've never seen into theirminds—you couldn't—and their physical be-havior could all be produced by purely physicalcauses. Maybe your relatives, your neighbors,your cat and your dog have no inner experienceswhatever. If they don't, there is no way you couldever find it out.

You can't even appeal to the evidence of theirbehavior, including what they say—because thatassumes that in them outer behavior is con-nected with inner experience as it is in you; andthat's just what you don't know.

To consider the possibility that none of thepeople around you may be conscious producesan uncanny feeling. On the one hand it seems

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conceivable, and no evidence you could possiblyhave can rule it out decisively. On the otherhand it is something you can't really believe ispossible: your conviction that there are minds inthose bodies, sight behind those eyes, hearing inthose ears, etc., is instinctive. But if its powercomes from instinct, is it really knowledge? Onceyou admit the possibility that the belief in otherminds is mistaken, don't you need somethingmore reliable to justify holding on to it?

There is another side to this question, whichgoes completely in the opposite direction.

Ordinarily we believe that other humanbeings are conscious, and almost everyone be-lieves that other mammals and birds are con-scious too. But people differ over whether fishare conscious, or insects, worms, and jellyfish.They are still more doubtful about whether one-celled animáis like amoebae and paramecia haveconscious experiences, even though such crea-tures react conspicuously to stimuli of variouskinds. Most people believe that plants aren'tconscious; and almost no one believes that rocksare conscious, or kleenex, or automobiles, ormountain lakes, or cigarettes. And to take an-other biological example, most of us would say,if we thought about it, that the individual cellsof which our bodies are composed do not haveany conscious experiences.

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Other Minds

How do we know all these things? How do youknow that when you cut a branch off a tree itdoesn't hurt the tree—only it can't express itspain because it can't move? (Or maybe it loveshaving its branches pruned.) How do you knowthat the muscle cells in your heart don't feelpain or excitement when you run up a flight ofstairs? How do you know that a kleenex doesn'tfeel anything when you blow your nose into it?

And what about computers? Suppose com-puters are developed to the point where theycan be used to control robots that look on theoutside like dogs, respond in complicated waysto the environment, and behave in many waysjust like dogs, though they are just a mass of cir-cuitry and silicon chips on the inside? Would wehave any way of knowing whether such machineswere conscious?

These cases are different from one another, ofcourse. If a thing is incapable of movement, itcan't give any behavioral evidence of feeling orperception. And if it isn't a natural organism, itis radically different from us in internal consti-tution. But what grounds do we have for think-ing that only things that behave like us to somedegree and that have an observable physicalstructure roughly like ours are capable of havingexperiences of any kind? Perhaps trees feelthings in a way totally different from us, but we

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have no way of finding out about it, because wehave no way of discovering the correlations be-tween experience and observable manifestationsor physical conditions in their case. We coulddiscover such correlations only if we could ob-serve both the experiences and the externalmanifestations together: but there is no way wecan observe the experiences directly, except inour own case. And for the same reason there isno way we could observe the absence of any ex-periences, and consequently the absence of anysuch correlations, in any other case. You can'ttell that a tree has no experience, by looking in-side it, any more than you can tell that a wormhas experience, by looking inside it.

So the question is: what can you really knowabout the conscious Ufe in this world beyond thefact that you yourself have a conscious mind? Isit possible that there might be much less con-scious Ufe than you assume (none except yours),or much more (even in things you assume to beunconscious)?

4

The Mmd-BodyProblem

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Let's forget about skepticism, and assume thephysical world exists, including your body andyour brain; and let's put aside our skepticismabout other minds. FU assume you're consciousif you assume I am. Now what might be the re-lation between consciousness and the brain?

Everybody knows that what happens in con-sciousness depends on what happens to thebody. If you stub your toe it hurts. If you cióseyour eyes you can't see what's in front of you. Ifyou bite into a Hershey bar you taste chocolate.If someone conks you on the head you pass out.

The evidence shows that for anything to hap-pen in your mind or consciousness, somethinghas to happen in your brain. (You wouldn't feelany pain from stubbing your toe if the nerves inyour leg and spine didn't carry impulses from

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W,


the toe to your brain.) We don't know what hap-pens in the brain when you think, "I wonderwhether I have time to get a haircut this after-noon." But we're pretty sure something does—something involving chemical and electricalchanges in the billions of nerve cells that yourbrain is made of.

In some cases, we know how the brain affectsthe mind and how the mind affects the brain. Weknow, for instance, that the stimulation of cer-tain brain cells near the back of the head pro-duces visual experiences. And we know thatwhen you decide to help yourself to anotherpiece of cake, certain other brain cells send outimpulses to the muscles in your arm. We don'tknow many of the details, but it is clear thatthere are complex relations between what hap-pens in your mind and the physical processesthat go on in your brain. So far, all of this be-longs to science, not philosophy.

But there is also a philosophical questionabout the relation between mind and brain, andit is this: Is your mind something different fromyour brain, though connected to it, or is it yourbrain? Are your thoughts, feelings, perceptions,sensations, and wishes things that happen in ad-dition to all the physical processes in your brain,or are they themselves some of those physicalprocesses?

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The Mind-Body Problem

What happens, for instance, when you biteinto a chocolate bar? The chocolate melts onyour tongue and causes chemical changes inyour taste buds; the taste buds send some elec-trical impulses along the nerves leading fromyour tongue to your brain, and when those im-pulses reach the brain they produce furtherphysical changes there; finally, you taste the tasteof chocolate. What is that!! Could it just be a phys-ical event in some of your brain cells, or does ithave to be something of a completely differentkind?

If a scientist took off the top of your skull andlooked into your brain while you were eating thechocolate bar, all he would see is a grey mass ofneurons. If he used instruments to measurewhat was happening inside, he would detectcomplicated physical processes of many differ-ent kinds. But would he find the taste ofchocolate?

It seems as if he couldn't find it in your brain,because your experience of tasting chocolate islocked inside your mind in a way that makes itunobservable by anyone else—even if he opensup your skull and looks inside your brain. Yourexperiences are inside your mind with a kind ofinsideness that is different from the way that yourbrain is inside your head. Someone else canopen up your head and see what's inside, but

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they can't cut open your mind and look into it—at least not in the same way.

It's not just that the taste of chocolate is a fla-vor and therefore can't be seen. Suppose a sci-entist were crazy enough to try to observe yourexperience of tasting chocolate by licking yourbrain while you ate a chocolate bar. First of all,your brain probably wouldn't taste like choco-late to him at all. But even if it did, he wouldn'thave succeeded in getting into your mind andobserving your experience of tasting chocolate.He would just have discovered, oddly enough,that when you taste chocolate, your brainchanges so that it tastes like chocolate to otherpeople. He would have his taste of chocolateand you would have yours.

If what happens in your experience is insideyour mind in a way in which what happens inyour brain is not, it looks as though your expe-riences and other mental states can't just bephysical states of your brain. There has to bemore to you than your body with its hummingnervous system.

One possible conclusión is that there has to bea soul, attached to your body in some way whichallows them to interact. If that's true, then youare made up of two very different things: a com-plex physical organism, and a soul which ispurely mental. (This view is called dualism, forobvious reasons.)

[ 3 0 ]


But many people think that belief in a soul isold-fashioned and unscientific. Everything elsein the world is made of physical matter—differ-ent combinations of the same chemical ele-ments. Why shouldn't we be? Our bodies growby a complex physical process from the singlecell produced by the joining of sperm and eggat conception. Ordinary matter is added gradu-ally in such a way that the cell turns into a baby,with arms, legs, eyes, ears, and a brain, able tomove and feel and see, and eventually to talk andthink. Some people believe that this complexphysical system is sufficient by itself to give riseto mental life. Why shouldn't it be? Anyway, howcan mere philosophical argument show that itisn't? Philosophy can't tell us what stars or dia-monds are made of, so how can it tell us whatpeople are or aren't made of?

The view that people consist of nothing butphysical matter, and that their mental states arephysical states of their brains, is called physical-ism (or some times materialism). Physicalistsdon't have a specific theory of what process inthe brain can be identified as the experience oftasting chocolate, for instance. But they believethat mental states are just states of the brain, andthat there's no philosophical reason to thinkthey can't be. The details will have to be discov-ered by science.

The idea is that we might discover that expe-[31]

íV

mu

What Does It All Mean1?

riences are really brain processes just as we havediscovered that other familiar things have a realnature that we couldn't have guessed un til it wasrevealed by scientific investigation. For instance,it turns out that diamonds are composed of car-bón, the same material as coal: trie atoms arejust differently arranged. And water, as we allknow, is composed of hydrogen and oxygen,even though those two elements are nothing likewater when taken by themselves.

So while it might seem surprising that the ex-perience of tasting chocolate could be nothingbut a complicated physical event in your brain,it would be no stranger than lots of things thathave been discovered about the real nature ofordinary objects and processes. Scientists havediscovered what light is, how plants grow, howmuscles move—it is only a matter of time beforethey discover the biological nature of the mind.That's what physicalists think.

A dualist would reply that those other thingsare different. When we discover the chemicalcomposition of water, for instance, we are deal-ing with something that is clearly out there inthe physical world—something we can all seeand touch. When we find out that it's made upof hydrogen and oxygen atoms, we're just break-ing down an external physical substance intosmaller physical parts. It is an essential feature

[32 ]


of this kind of analysis that we are not giving achemical breakdown of the way water looks,feels,and tastes to us. Those things go on in our innerexperience, not in the water that we have brokendown into atoms. The physical or chemical anal-ysis of water leaves them aside.

But to discover that tasting chocolate wasreally just a brain process, we would have to ana-lyze something mental—not an externally ob-served physical substance but an inner taste sen-sation—in terms of parts that are physical. Andthere is no way that a large number of physicalevents in the brain, however complicated, couldbe the parts out of which a taste sensation wascomposed. A physical whole can be analyzedinto smaller physical parts, but a mental processcan't be. Physical parts just can't add up to amental whole.

There is another possible view which is differ-ent from both dualism and physicalism. Dualismis the view that you consist of a body plus a soul,and that your mental Ufe goes on in your soul.Physicalism is the view that your mental Ufe con-sists of physical processes in your brain. But an-other possibility is that your mental life goes onin your brain, yet that all those experiences, feel-ings, thoughts, and desires are not physical pro-cesses in your brain. This would mean that thegrey mass of billions of nerve cells in your skull

[ 3 3 ]

TU uSííSi.


is not just a physical object. It has lots of physicalproperties—great quantities of chemical andelectrical activity go on in it—but it has mentalprocesses going on in it as well.

The view that the brain is the seat of con-sciousness, but that its conscious states are notjust physical states, is called dual aspect theory.It is called that because it means that when youbite into a chocolate bar, this produces in yourbrain a state or process with two aspects: a phys-ical aspect involving various chemical and elec-trical changes, and a mental aspect—the flavorexperience of chocolate. When this process oc-curs, a scientist looking into your brain will beable to observe the physical aspect, but youyourself will undergo, from the inside, the men-tal aspect: you will have the sensation of tastingchocolate. If this were true, your brain itselfwould have an inside that could not be reachedby an outside observer even if he cut it open. Itwould feel, or taste, a certain way to you to havethat process going on in your brain.

We could express this view by saying that youare not a body plus a soul—that you are just abody, but your body, or at least your brain, isnot just a physical system. It is an object withboth physical and mental aspects: it can be dis-sected, but it also has the kind of inside thatcan't be exposed by dissection. There's some-

[ 34 ]


thing it's like from the inside to taste chocolatebecause there's something it's like from the in-side to have your brain in the condition that isproduced when you eat a chocolate bar.

Physicalists believe that nothing exists but thephysical world that can be studied by science:the world of objective reality. But then they haveto find room somehow for feelings, desires,thoughts, and experiences—for you and me—in such a world.

One theory offered in defense of physicalismis that the mental nature of your mental statesconsists in their relations to things that causethem and things they cause. For instance, whenyou stub your toe and feel pain, the pain issomething going on in your brain. But its pain-fulness is not just the sum of its physical char-acteristics, and it is not some mysterious non-physical property either. Rather, what makes ita pain is that it is the kind of state of your brainthat is usually caused by injury, and that usuallycauses you to yell and hop around and avoid thething that caused the injury. And that could bea purely physical state of your brain.

But that doesn't seem enough to make some-thing a pain. It's true that pains are caused byinjury, and they do make you hop and yell. Butthey also feel a certain way, and that seems to besomething different from all their relations to

[35]

51

C:3.

i


causes and effects, as well as all the physicalproperties they may have—if they are in factevents in your brain. I myself believe that thisinner aspect of pain and other conscious expe-riences cannot be adequately analyzed in termsof any system of causal relations to physical stim-uli and behavior, however complicated.

There seem to be two very different kinds ofthings going on in the world: the things that be-long to physical reality, which many differentpeople can observe from the outside, and thoseother things that belong to mental reality, whicheach of us experiences from the inside in hisown case. This isn't true only of human beings:dogs and cats and horses and birds seem to beconscious, and fish and ants and beetles proba-bly are too. Who knows where it stops?

We won't have an adequate general concep-tion of the world until we can explain how, whena lot of physical elements are put together in theright way, they form not just a functioning bio-logical organism but a conscious being. If con-sciousness itself could be identified with somekind of physical state, the way would be open fora unified physical theory of mind and body, andtherefore perhaps for a unified physical theoryof the universe. But the reasons against a purelyphysical theory of consciousness are strongenough to make it seem likely that a physical the-

[ 3 6 ]


ory of the whole of reality is impossible. Physicalscience has progressed by leaving the mind outof what it tries to explain, but there may be moreto the world than can be understood by physicalscience.

II'ilí

"JÍ̂Er'J.

[ 3 7 ]

5

The Meaning ofWords

How can a word—a noise or a set of marks onpaper—mean something? There are somewords, like "bang" or "whisper," which sound abit like what they refer to, but usually there is noresemblance between a ñame and the thing it isthe ñame of. The relation in general must besomething entirely different.

There are many types of words: some of themñame people or things, others ñame qualities oractivities, others refer to relations betweenthings or events, others ñame numbers, places,or times, and some, like "and" and "of," havemeaning only because they contribute to themeaning of larger statements or questions inwhich they appear as parts. In fact all words dotheir real work in this way: their meaning is

[38]

The Meaning of Words

really something they contribute to the meaningof sentences or statements. Words are mostlyused in talking and writing, rather than just aslabels.

However, taking that as understood, let us askhow a word can have a meaning. Some wordscan be defined in terms of other words:"square" for example means "four-sided equi-lateral equiangular plañe figure." And most ofthe terms in that definition can also be defined.But definitions can't be the basis of meaning forall words, or we'd go fore ver in a circle. Even-tually we must get to some words which havemeaning directly.

Take the word "tobáceo," which may seemlike an easy example. It refers to a kind of plantwhose Latin ñame most of us don't know, andwhose leaves are used to make cigars and ciga-rettes. All of us have seen and smelled tobáceo,but the word as you use it refers not just to thesamples of the stuff that you have seen, or thatis around you when you use the word, but to allexamples of it, whether or not you know of theirexistence. You may have learned the word bybeing shown some samples, but you won't un-derstand it if you think it is just the ñame ofthose samples.

So if you say, "I wonder if more tobáceo wassmoked in China last year than in the entire

[39]

il


Western hemisphere," you have asked a mean-ingful question, and it has an answer, even if youcan't find it out. But the meaning of the ques-tion, and its answer, depend on the fact thatwhen you use the word "tobáceo," it refers toevery example of the substance in the world—throughout all past and future time, in fact—toevery cigarette smoked in China last year, toevery cigar smoked in Cuba, and so fórth. Theother words in the sentence limit the referenceto particular times and places, but the word "to-báceo" can be used to ask such a question onlybecause it has this enormous but special reach,beyond all your experience to every sample of acertain kind of stuff.

How does the word do that? How can a merenoise or scribble reach that far? Not, obviously,because of its sound or look. And not because ofthe relatively small number of examples of to-báceo that you've encountered, and that havebeen in the same room when you have utteredor heard or read the word. There's somethingelse going on, and it is something general, whichapplies to everyone's use of the word. You andI, who have never met and have encountered dif-ferent samples of tobáceo, use the word with thesame meaning. If we both use the word to askthe question about China and the Western hemi-sphere, it is the same question, and the answer

[ 4 0 ]


is the same. Further, a speaker of Chínese canask the same question, using the Chínese wordwith the same meaning. Whatever relation theword "tobáceo" has to the stuff itself, otherwords can have as well.

This very naturally suggests that the relationof the word "tobáceo" to all those plants, ciga-rettes, and cigars in the past, present, and fu-ture, is indirect. The word as you use it hassomething else behind it—a concept or idea orthought—which somehow reaches out to all thetobáceo in the universe. This, however, raisesnew problems.

First, what kind of thing is this middleman? Isit in your mind, or is it something outside yourmind that you somehow latch onto? It wouldseem to have to be something that you and I anda speaker of Chínese can all latch onto, in orderto mean the same thing by our words for to-báceo. But how, with our very different experi-ences of the word and the plant, do we do that?Isn't this just as hard to explain as our all beingable to refer to the same enormous and wide-spread amount of stuff by our different uses ofthe word or words? Isn't there just as much of aproblem about how the word means the idea orconcept (whatever that is) as there was beforeabout how the word means the plant orsubstance?

[ 4 1 ]

Iii

3FJ;


Not only that, but there's also a problemabout how this idea or concept is related to allthe samples of actual tobáceo. What kind ofthing is it that it can have this exclusive connec-tion with tobáceo and nothing else? It looks asthough we've just added to the problem. Intrying to explain the relation between the word"tobáceo" and tobáceo by interposing betweenthem the idea or concept of tobáceo, we've justcreated the further need to explain the relationsbetween the word and the idea, and between theidea and the stuff.

With or without the concept or idea, the prob-lem seems to be that very particular sounds,marks, and examples are involved in each per-son's use of a word, but the word applies tosomething universal, which other particularspeakers can also mean by that word or otherwords in other languages. How can anything asparticular as the noise I make when I say "to-báceo" mean something so general that I canuse it to say, "I bet people will be smoking to-báceo on Mars 200 years from now."

You might think that the universal element isprovided by something we all have in our mindswhen we use the word. But what do we all havein our minds? Consciously, at least, I don't needanything more than the word itself in my mindto think, "Tobacco is getting more expensive

[ 4 2 ]


every year." Still, I certainly may have an imageof some sort in my mind when I use the word:perhaps of a plant, or of some dried leaves, orof the inside of a cigarette. Still, this will not helpto explain the generality of the meaning of theword, because any such image will be a particularimage. It will be an image of the appearance orsmell of a particular sample of tobáceo; and howis that supposed to encompass all actual and pos-sible examples of tobáceo? Also, even if you havea certain picture in your mind when you hear oruse the word "tobáceo," every other person willprobably have a different picture; yet that doesnot prevent us all from using the word with thesame meaning.

The mystery of meaning is that it doesn't seemto be located anywhere—not in the word, not inthe mind, not in a sepárate concept or idea hov-ering between the word, the mind, and thethings we are talking about. And yet we use lan-guage all the time, and it enables us to thinkcomplicated thoughts which span great reachesof time and space. You can talk about how manypeople in Okinawa are over five feet tall, orwhether there is Ufe in other galaxies, and thelittle noises you make will be sentences which aretruc or false in virtue of complicated facts aboutfar away things that you will probably never en-counter directly.

[ 4 3 ]

"J.11!


You may think I have been making too muchof the universal reach of language. In ordinarylife, most of the statements and thoughts we uselanguage for are much more local and particu-lar. If I say "Pass the salt," and you pass me thesalt, this doesn't have to involve any universalmeaning of the word "salt," of the kind that'spresent when we ask, "How long ago in the his-tory of our galaxy was salt first formed out ofsodium and chlorine?" Words are often usedsimply as tools in the relations between people.On a sign in a bus station you see the little figurewith the skirt, and an arrow, and you know that'sthe way to the ladies' room. Isn't most of lan-guage just a system of signáis and responses likethat?

Well, perhaps some of it is, and perhaps that'show we start to learn to use words: "Daddy,""Mommy," "No," "All gone." But it doesn'tstop there, and it's not clear how the simpletransactions possible using one or two words ata time can help us to understand the use of lan-guage to describe and misdescribe the world farbeyond our present neighborhood It seemsmore likely, in fact, that the use of language formuch larger purposes shows us something aboutwhat is going on when we use it on a smallerscale.

A statement like, "There's salt on the table,"[ 4 4 ]


means the same whether it's said for practicalreasons during lunch, or as part of the descrip-tion of a situation distant in space and time, ormerely as a hypothetical description of an imag-inary possibility. It means the same whether it istruc or false, and whether or not the speaker orhearer know if it's true or false. Whatever isgoing on in the ordinary, practical case must besomething general enough also to explain theseother, quite different cases where it means thesame thing.

It is of course important that language is a so-cial phenomenon. Each person doesn't make itup for himself. When as children we learn a lan-guage, we get plugged into an already existingsystem, in which millions of people have beenusing the same words to talk to one another forcenturies. My use of the word "tobáceo" doesn'thave a meaning just on its own, but rather aspart of the much wider use of that word inEnglish. (Even if I were to adopt a prívate code,in which I used the word "blibble" to mean to-báceo, I'd do it by defining "blibble" to myselfin terms of the common word "tobáceo.") Westill have to explain how my use of the word getsits contení from all those other uses, most ofwhich I don't know about—but putting mywords into this larger context may seem to helpexplain their universal meaning.

[ 4 5 ]

\

II!ffÜ

What Does It All Mean"?

But this doesn't solve the problem. When Iuse the word, it may have its meaning as part ofthe English language, but how does the use ofthe word by all those other speakers of Englishgive it its universal range, well beyond all the sit-uations in which it is actually used? The problemof the relation of language to the world is not sodifferent whether we are talking about one sen-tence or billions. The meaning of a word con-tains all its possible uses, true and false, not onlyits actual ones, and the actual uses are only a tinyfraction of the possible ones.

We are small finite creatures, but meaning en-ables us with the help of sounds or marks onpaper to grasp the whole world and many thingsin it, and even to invent things that do not existand perhaps never will. The problem is to ex-plain how this is possible: How does anything wesay or write mean anything—including all thewords in this book?

6

Free Will

[ 4 6 ]

Suppose you're going through a cafetería Uneand when you come to the desserts, you hesitatebetween a peach and a big wedge of chocolatecake with creamy icing. The cake looks good, butyou know it's fattening. Still, you take it and eatit with pleasure. The next day you look in themirror or get on the scale and think, "I wish Ihadn't caten that chocolate cake. I could havehad a peach instead."

"I could have had a peach instead." Whatdoes that mean, and is it true?

Peaches were available when you wentthrough the cafeteria line: you had the opportu-nity to take a peach instead. But that isn't all youmean. You mean you could have taken the peachinstead of the cake. You could have done some-

[ 4 7 ]


thing different from what you actually did. Be-fore you made up your mind, it was openwhether you would take fruit or cake, and it wasonly your choice that decided which it would be.

Is that it? When you say, "I could have had apeach instead," do you mean that it dependedonly on your choice? You chose chocolate cake,so that's what you had, but z/you had chosen thepeach, you would have had that.

This still doesn't seem to be enough. Youdon't mean only that if you had chosen thepeach, you would have had it. When you say, "Icould have had a peach instead," you also meanthat you could have chosen it—no "ifs" about it.But what does that mean?

It can't be explained by pointing out other oc-casions when you have chosen fruit. And it can'tbe explained by saying that if you had thoughtabout it harder, or if a friend had been with youwho eats like a bird, you would have chosen it.What you are saying is that you could have cho-sen a peach instead of chocolate cake just then,as things actually were. You think you could havechosen a peach even if everything else had beenexactly the same as it was up to the point whenyou in fact chose chocolate cake. The only dif-ference would have been that instead of think-ing, "Oh well," and reaching for the cake, youwould have thought, "Better not," and reachedfor the peach.

[48]

Free Will

This is an idea of "can" or "could have"which we apply only to people (and maybe someanimáis). When we say, "The car could haveclimbed to the top of the hill," we mean the carhad enough power to reach the top of the hill ifsomeone drove it there. We don't mean that onan occasion when it was parked at the bottom ofthe hill, the car could have just taken off andclimbed to the top, instead of continuing to sitthere. Some thing else would have had to happendifferently first, like a person getting in andstarting the motor. But when it comes to people,we seem to think that they can do various thingsthey don't actually do, just like that, without any-thing else happening differently first. What doesthis mean?

Part of what it means may be this: Nothing upto the point at which you choose determines ir-revocably what your choice will be. It remains anopen possibility that you will choose a peach untilthe moment when you actually choose chocolatecake. It isn't determined in advance.

Some things that happen are determined inadvance. For instance, it seems to be determinedin advance that the sun will rise tomorrow at acertain hour. It is not an open possibility thattomorrow the sun won't rise and night will justcontinué. That is not possible because it couldhappen only if the earth stopped rotating, or thesun stopped existing, and there is nothing going

[ 49 ]

it

31


on in our galaxy which might make either ofthose things happen. The earth will continué ro-tating unless it is stopped, and tomorrow morn-ing its rotation will bring us back around to faceinward in the solar system, toward the sun, in-stead of outward, away from it. If there is nopossibility that the earth will stop or that the sunwon't be there, there is no possibility that thesun won't rise tomorrow.

When you say you could have had a peach in-stead of chocolate cake, part of what you meanmay be that it wasn't determined in advancewhat you would do, as it is determined in ad-vance that the sun will rise tomorrow. Therewere no processes or forces at work before youmade your choice that made it inevitable thatyou would choose chocolate cake.

That may not be all you mean, but it seems tobe at least part of what you mean. For if it wasreally determined in advance that you wouldchoose cake, how could it also be true that youcould have chosen fruit? It would be true thatnothing would have prevented you from havinga peach if you had chosen it instead of cake. Butthese ifs are not the same as saying you couldhave chosen a peach, period. You couldn't havechosen it unless the possibility remained openuntil you closed it off by choosing cake.

Some people have thought that it is never pos-[50]

Free Will

sible for us to do anything different from whatwe actually do, in this absolute sense. They ac-knowledge that what we do depends on ourchoices, decisions, and wants, and that we makedifferent choices in different circumstances:we're not like the earth rotating on its axis withmonotonous regularity. But the claim is that, ineach case, the circumstances that exist before weact determine our actions and make them inev-itable. The sum total of a person's experiences,desires and knowledge, his hereditary constitu-tion, the social circumstances and the nature ofthe choice facing him, together with other fac-tors that we may not know about, all combine tomake a particular action in the circumstancesinevitable.

This view is called determinism. The idea isnot that we can know all the laws of the universeand use them to predict what will happen. Firstof all, we can't know all the complex circum-stances that affect a human choice. Secondly,even when we do learn something about the cir-cumstances, and try to make a prediction, that isitself a change in the circumstances, which maychange the predicted result. But predictabilityisn't the point. The hypothesis is that there arelaws of nature, like those that govern the move-ment of the planets, which govern everythingthat happens in the world—and that in accor-

[51]

'\¡


dance with those laws, the circumstances beforean action determine that it will happen, and ruleout any other possibility.

If that is truc, then even while you were mak-ing up your mind about dessert, it was alreadydetermined by the many factors working on youand in you that you would choose cake. Youcouldn't have chosen the peach, even though youthought you could: the process of decisión is justthe working out of the determined result insideyour mind.

If determinism is truc for everything that hap-pens, it was already determined before you wereborn that you would choose cake. Your choicewas determined by the situation immediately be-fore, and that situation was determined by thesituation before it, and so on as far back as youwant to go.

Even if determinism isn't true for everythingthat happens—even if some things just happenwithout being determined by causes that werethere in advance—it would still be very signifi-can! if everything we did were determined beforewe did it. However free you might feel whenchoosing between fruit and cake, or betweentwo candidates in an election, you would reallybe able to make only one choice in those circum-stances—though if the circumstances or yourdesires had been different, you would have cho-sen differently.

[ 5 2 ]

Free Will

If you believed that about yourself and otherpeople, it would probably change the way youfelt about things. For instance, could you blameyourself for giving in to temptation and havingthe cake? Would it make sense to say, "I reallyshould have had a peach instead," if you couldn'thave chosen a peach instead? It certainlywouldn't make sense to say it if there was nofruit. So how can it make sense if there was fruit,but you couldn't have chosen it because it wasdetermined in advance that you would choosecake?

This seems to have serious consequences. Be-sides not being able sensibly to blame yourselffor having had cake, you probably wouldn't beable sensibly to blame anyone at all for doingsomething bad, or praise them for doing some-thing good. If it was determined in advance thatthey would do it, it was inevitable: they couldn'thave done anything else, given the circum-stances as they were. So how can we hold themresponsible?

You may be very mad at someone who comesto a party at your house and steals all your GlennGould records, but suppose you believed thathis action was determined in advance by his na-ture and the situation. Suppose you believedthat everything he did, including the earlier ac-tions that had contributed to the formation ofhis character, was determined in advance by ear-

[53]


lier circumstances. Could you still hold him re-sponsible for such low-grade behavior? Orwould it be more reasonable to regard him as akind of natural disaster—as if your records hadbeen caten by termites?

People disagree about this. Some think that ifdeterminism is truc, no one can reasonably bepraised or blamed for anything, any more thanthe rain can be praised or blamed for falling.Others think that it still makes sense to praisegood actions and condemn bad ones, even ifthey were inevitable. After all, the fact thatsomeone was determined in advance to behavebadly doesn't mean that he didn't behave badly.If he steals your records, that shows inconsider-ateness and dishonesty, whether it was deter-mined or not. Furthermore, if we don't blamehim, or perhaps even punish him, he'll probablydo it again.

On the other hand, if we think that what hedid was determined in advance, this seems morelike punishing a dog for chewing on the rug. Itdoesn't mean we hold him responsible for whathe did: we're just trying to influence his behav-ior in the future. I myself don't think it makessense to blame someone for doing what it wasimpossible for him not to do. (Though of coursedeterminism implies that it was determined inadvance that I would think this.)

[54]

Free Wül

These are the problems we must face if deter-minism is true. But perhaps it isn't true. Manyscientists now believe that it isn't true for thebasic particles of matter—that in a given situa-tion, there's more than one thing that an elec-trón may do. Perhaps if determinism isn't truefor human actions, either, this leaves room forfree will and responsibility. What if human ac-tions, or at least some of them, are not deter-mined in advance? What if, up to the momentwhen you choose, it's an open possibility thatyou will choose either chocolate cake or apeach? Then, so far as what has happened be-fore is concerned, you could choose either one.Even if you actually choose cake, you could havechosen a peach.

But is even this enough for free will? Is this allyou mean when you say, "I could have chosenfruit instead?"—that the choice wasn't deter-mined in advance? No, you believe somethingmore. You believe thatyou determined what youwould do, by doing it. It wasn't determined inadvance, but it didn't just happen, either. You didit, and you could have done the opposite. Butwhat does that mean?

This is a funny question: we all know what itmeans to do something. But the problem is, ifthe act wasn't determined in advance, by yourdesires, beliefs, and personality, among other

[55]

What Does It All Mean1? Free Will

things, it seems to be something that just hap-pened, without any explanation. And in thatcase, how was it your doing?

One possible reply would be that there is noanswer to that question. Free action is just abasic feature of the world, and it can't be ana-lyzed. There's a difference between somethingjust happening without a cause and an actionjust being done without a cause. It's a differencewe all understand, even if we can't explain it.

Some people would leave it at that. But othersfind it suspicious that we must appeal to thisunexplained idea to explain the sense in whichyou could have chosen fruit instead of cake. Upto now it has seemed that determinism is the bigthreat to responsibility. But now it seems thateven if our choices are not determined in ad-vance, it is still hard to understand in what waywe can do what we don't do. Either of twochoices may be possible in advance, but unless Idetermine which of them occurs, it is no moremy responsibility than if it was determined bycauses beyond my control. And how can / deter-mine it if nothing determines it?

This raises the alarming possibility that we'renot responsible for our actions whether deter-minism is truc or whether it's false. If determin-ism is true, antecedent circumstances are re-

sponsible. If determinism is false, nothing isresponsible. That would really be a dead end.

There is another possible view, completely op-posite to most of what we've been saying. Somepeople think responsibility for our actions re-quires that our actions be determined, ratherthan requiring that they not be. The claim is thatfor an action to be something you have done, ithas to be produced by certain kinds of causes inyou. For instance, when you chose the chocolatecake, that was something you did, rather thansomething that just happened, because youwanted chocolate cake more than you wanted apeach. Because your appetite for cake wasstronger at the time than your desire to avoidgaining weight, it resulted in your choosing thecake. In other cases of action, the psychologicalexplanation will be more complex, but there willalways be one—otherwise the action wouldn'tbe yours. This explanation seems to mean thatwhat you did was determined in advance afterall. If it wasn't determined by anything, it wasjust an unexplained event, something that hap-pened out of the blue rather than somethingthat you did.

According to this position, causal determina-tion by itself does not threaten freedom—only acertain kind of cause does that. If you grabbed

[ 5 6 ] 57]


the cake because someone else pushed you intoit, then it wouldn't be a free choice. But free ac-tion doesn't require that there be no determin-ing cause at all: it means that the cause has to beof a familiar psychological type.

I myself can't accept this solution. If I thoughtthat everything I did was determined by my cir-cumstances and my psychological condition, Iwould feel trapped. And if I thought the sameabout everybody else, I would feel that they werelike a lot of puppets. It wouldn't make sense tohold them responsible for their actions anymore than you hold a dog or a cat or even anelevator responsible.

On the other hand, I'm not sure I understandhow responsibility for our choices makes sense ifthey are not determined. It's not clear what itmeans to say / determine the choice, if nothingabout me determines it. So perhaps the feelingthat you could have chosen a peach instead of apiece of cake is a philosophical illusion, andcouldn't be right whatever was the case.

To avoid this conclusión, you would have toexplain (a) what you mean if you say you couldhave done something other than what you did,and (b) what you and the world would have to belike for this to be true.

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7

Right and Wrong

Suppose you work in a library, checking people'sbooks as they leave, and a friend asks you to lethim smuggle out a hard-to-find reference workthat he wants to own.

You might hesitate to agree for various rea-sons. You might be afraid that he'll be caught,and that both you and he will then get into trou-ble. You might want the book to stay in the li-brary so that you can consult it yourself.

But you may also think that what he proposesis wrong—that he shouldn't do it and youshouldn't help him. If you think that, what doesit mean, and what, if anything, makes it true?

To say it's wrong is not just to say it's againstthe rules. There can be bad rules which prohibitwhat isn't wrong—like a law against criticizing

[59]


the government. A rule can also be bad becauseit requires something that is wrong—like a lawthat requires racial segregation in botéis and res-taurants. The ideas of wrong and right are dif-ferent from the ideas of what is and is notagainst the rules. Otherwise they couldn't beused in the evaluation of rules as well as ofactions.

If you think it would be wrong to help yourfriend steal the book, then you will feel uncom-fortable about doing it: in some way you won'twant to do it, even if you are also reluctant torefuse help to a friend. Where does the desirenot to do it come from; what is its motive, thereason behind it?

There are various ways in which somethingcan be wrong, but in this case, if you had to ex-plain it, you'd probably say that it would be un-fair to other users of the library who may be justas interested in the book as your friend is, butwho consult it in the reference room, where any-one who needs it can find it. You may also feelthat to let him take it would betray your employ-ers, who are paying you precisely to keep thissort of thing from happening.

These thoughts have to do with effects on oth-ers—not necessarily effects on their feelings,since they may never find out about it, but somekind of damage nevertheless. In general, the

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Right and Wrong

thought that something is wrong depends on itsimpact not just on the person who does it but onother people. They wouldn't like it, and they'dobject if they found out.

But suppose you try to explain all this to yourfriend, and he says, "I know the head libraríanwouldn't like it if he found out, and probablysome of the other users of the library would beunhappy to find the book gone, but who cares?I want the book; why should I care about them?"

The argument that it would be wrong is sup-posed to give him a reason not to do it. But ifsomeone just doesn't care about other people,what reason does he have to refrain from doingany of the things usually thought to be wrong, ifhe can get away with it: what reason does hehave not to kill, steal, lie, or hurt others? If hecan get what he wants by doing such things, whyshouldn't he? And if there's no reason why heshouldn't, in what sense is it wrong?

Of course most people do care about othersto some extent. But if someone doesn't care,most of us wouldn't conclude that he's exemptfrom morality. A person who kills someone justto steal his wallet, without caring about the vic-tim, is not automatically excused. The fact thathe doesn't care doesn't make it all right: Heshould care. But why should he care?

There have been many attempts to answer this[61 ]


question. One type of answer tries to identifysomething else that the person already caresabout, and then connect morality to it.

For example, some people believe that even ifyou can get away with awful crimes on this earth,and are not punished by the law or your fellowmen, such acts are forbidden by God, who willpunish you after death (and reward you if youdidn't do wrong when you were tempted to). Soeven when it seems to be in your interest to dosuch a thing, it really isn't. Some people haveeven believed that if there is no God to back upmoral requirements with the threat of punish-ment and the promise of reward, morality is anillusion: "If God does not exist, everything ispermitted."

This is a rather crude versión of the religiousfoundation for morality. A more appealing ver-sión might be that the motive for obeying God'scommands is not fear but love. He loves you,and you should love Him, and should wish toobey His commands in order not to offend Him.

But however we interpret the religious moti-vation, there are three objections to this type ofanswer. First, plenty of people who don't believein God still make judgments of right and wrong,and think no one should kill another for his wal-let even if he can be sure to get away with it. Sec-ond, if God exists, and forbids what's wrong,

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Right and Wrong

that still isn't what makes it wrong. Murder iswrong in itself, and that's why God forbids it (ifHe does.) God couldn't make just any oíd thingwrong—like putting on your left sock beforeyour right—simply by prohibiting it. If Godwould punish you for doing that it would be in-advisable to do it, but it wouldn't be wrong.Third, fear of punishment and hope of reward,and even love of God, seem not to be the rightmotives for morality. If you think it's wrong tokill, cheat, or steal, you should want to avoiddoing such things because they are bad things todo to the victims, not just because you fear theconsequences for yourself, or because you don'twant to offend your Creator.

This third objection also applies to other ex-planations of the forcé of morality which appealto the interests of the person who must act. Forexample, it may be said that you should treatothers with consideration so that they'll do thesame for you. This may be sound advice, but itis valid only so far as you think what you do willaffect how others treat you. It's not a reason fordoing the right thing if others won't find outabout it, or against doing the wrong thing if youcan get away with it (like being a hit and rundriver).

There is no substitute for a direct concern forother people as the basis of morality. But mo-

[ 6 3 ]

; s


rality is supposed to apply to everyone: and canwe assume that everyone has such a concern forothers? Obviously not: some people are very self-ish, and even those who are not selfish may careonly about the people they know, and not abouteveryone. So where will we find a reason that ev-eryone has not to hurt other people, even thosethey don't know?

Well, there's one general argument againsthurting other people which can be given to any-body who understands English (or any other lan-guage), and which seems to show that he hassome reason to care about others, even if in theend his selfish motives are so strong that he per-sists in treating other people badly anyway. It'san argument that I'm sure you've heard, and itgoes like this: "How would you like it if someonedid that to you?"

It's not easy to explain how this argument issupposed to work. Suppose you're about to stealsomeone else's umbrella as you leave a restau-rant in a rainstorm, and a bystander says, "Howwould you like it if someone did that to you?"Why is it supposed to make you hesitate, or feelguilty?

Obviously the direct answer to the question issupposed to be, "I wouldn't like it at all!" Butwhat's the next step? Suppose you were to say,"I wouldn't like it if someone did that to me. But

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Right and Wrong

luckily no one is doing it to me. Fm doing it tosomeone else, and I don't mind that at all!"

This answer misses the point of the question.When you are asked how you would like it ifsomeone did that to you, you are supposed tothink about all the feelings you would have ifsomeone stole your umbrella. And that includesmore than just "not liking it"—as you wouldn't"like it" if you stubbed your toe on a rock. Ifsomeone stole your umbrella you'd resent it.You'd have feelings about the umbrella thief,not just about the loss of the umbrella. You'dthink, "Where does he get off, taking my um-brella that I bought with my hard-earned moneyand that I had the foresight to bring after read-ing the weather report? Why didn't he bring hisown umbrella?" and so forth.

When our own interests are threatened by theinconsiderate behavior of others, most of us findit easy to appreciate that those others have a rea-son to be more considérate. When you are hurt,you probably feel that other people should careabout it: you don't think it's no concern oftheirs, and that they have no reason to avoidhurting you. That is the feeling that the "Howwould you like it?" argument is supposed toarouse.

Because if you admit that you would resent itif someone else did to you what you are now

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doing to him, you are admitting that you thinkhe would have a reason not to do it to you. Andif you admit that, you have to consider what thatreason is. It couldn't be just that it's you that he'shurting, of all the people in the world. There'sno special reason for him not to steal your um-brella, as opposed to anyone else's. There'snothing so special about you. Whatever the rea-son is, it's a reason he would have against hurt-ing anyone else in the same way. And it's a rea-son anyone else would have too, in a similarsituation, against hurting you or anyone else.

But if it's a reason anyone would have not tohurt anyone else in this way, then it's a reasonyou have not to hurt someone else in this way(since anyone means everyone). Therefore it's areason not to steal the other person's umbrellanow.

This is a matter of simple consistency. Onceyou admit that another person would have a rea-son not to harm you in similar circumstances,and once you admit that the reason he wouldhave is very general and doesn't apply only toyou, or to him, then to be consistent you have toadmit that the same reason applies to you now.You shouldn't steal the umbrella, and you oughtto feel guilty if you do.

Someone could escape from this argument if,when he was asked, "How would you like it ifsomeone did that to you?" he answered, "I

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Right and Wrong

wouldn't resent it at all. I wouldn't like it ifsomeone stole my umbrella in a rainstorm, but Iwouldn't think there was any reason for him toconsider my feelings about it." But how manypeople could honestly give that answer? I thinkmost people, unless they're crazy, would thinkthat their own interests and harms matter, notonly to themselves, but in a way that gives otherpeople a reason to care about them too. We allthink that when we suffer it is not just bad^br us,but bad, period.

The basis of morality is a belief that good andharm to particular people (or animáis) is good orbad not just from their point of view, but froma more general point of view, which every think-ing person can understand. That means thateach person has a reason to consider not onlyhis own interests but the interests of others indeciding what to do. And it isn't enough if he isconsidérate only of some others—his family andfriends, those he specially cares about. Ofcourse he will care more about certain people,and also about himself. But he has some reasonto consider the effect of what he does on thegood or harm of everyone. If he's like most ofus, that is what he thinks others should do withregard to him, even if they aren't friends of his.

» «Even if this is right, it is only a bare outline ofthe source of morality. It doesn't tell us in detail

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how we should consider the interests of others,or how we should weigh them against the specialinterest we all have in ourselves and the partic-ular people cióse to us. It doesn't even tell ushow much we should care about people in othercountries in comparison with our fellow citizens.There are many disagreements among thosewho accept morality in general, about what inparticular is right and what is wrong.

For instance: should you care about everyother person as much as you care about your-self? Should you in other words love your neigh-bor as yourself (even if he isn't your neighbor)?Should you ask yourself, every time you go to amovie, whether the cost of the ticket could pro-vide more happiness if you gave it to someoneelse, or donated the money to famine relief?

Very few people are so unselfish. And if some-one were that impartial between himself andothers, he would probably also feel that heshould be just as impartial among other people.That would rule out caring more about hisfriends and relatives than he does about strang-ers. He might have special feelings about certainpeople who are cióse to him, but complete im-partiality would mean that he won't favorthem—if for example he has to choose betweenhelping a friend or a stranger to avoid suífering,or between taking his children to a movie anddonating the money to famine relief.

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Right and Wrong

This degree of impartiality seems too much toask of most people: someone who had it wouldbe a kind of terrifying saint. But it's an impor-tant question in moral thought, how much im-partiality we should try for. You are a particularperson, but you are also able to recognize thatyou're just one person among many others, andno more important than they are, when lookedat from outside. How much should that point ofview influence you? You do matter somewhatfrom outside—otherwise you wouldn't thinkother people had any reason to care about whatthey did to you. But you don't matter as muchfrom the outside as you matter to yourself, fromthe inside—since from the outside you don'tmatter any more than anybody else.

Not only is it unclear how impartial we shouldbe; it's unclear what would make an answer tothis question the right one. Is there a single cor-rect way for everyone to strike the balance be-tween what he cares about personally and whatmatters impartially? Or will the answer varyfrom person to person depending on thestrength of their different motives?

This brings us to another big issue: Are rightand wrong the same for everyone?

Morality is often thought to be universal. Ifsomething is wrong, it's supposed to be wrongfor everybody; for instance if it's wrong to killsomeone because you want to steal his wallet,

[ 6 9 ]


then it's wrong whether you care about him ornot. But if something's being wrong is supposedto be a reason against doing it, and if your rea-sons for doing things depend on your motivesand people's motives can vary greatly, then itlooks as though there won't be a single right andwrong for everybody. There won't be a singleright and wrong, because if people's basic mo-tives differ, there won't be one basic standard ofbehavior that everyone has a reason to follow.

There are three ways of dealing with thisproblem, none of them very satisfactory.

First, we could say that the same things areright and wrong for everybody, but that not ev-eryone has a reason to do what's right and avoidwhat's wrong: only people with the right sort of"moral" motives—particularly a concern forothers—have any reason to do what's right, forits own sake. This makes morality universal, butat the cost of draining it of its forcé. It's notclear what it amounts to to say that it would bewrong for someone to commit murder, but hehas no reason not to do it.

Second, we could say that everyone has a rea-son to do what's right and avoid what's wrong,but that these reasons don't depend on people'sactual motives. Rather they are reasons tochange our motives if they aren't the right ones.This connects morality with reasons for action,

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Right and Wrong

but leaves it unclear what these universal rea-sons are which do not depend on motives thateveryone actually has. What does it mean to saythat a murderer had a reason not to do it, eventhough none of his actual motives or desiresgave him such a reason?

Third, we could say that morality is not uni-versal, and that what a person is morally re-quired to do goes only as far as what he has acertain kind of reason to do, where the reasondepends on how much he actually cares aboutother people in general. If he has strong moralmotives, they will yield strong reasons andstrong moral requirements. If his moral motivesare weak or nonexistent, the moral require-ments on him will likewise be weak or nonexis-tent. This may seem psychologically realistic, butit goes against the idea that the same moral rulesapply to all of us, and not only to good people.

The question whether moral requirements areuniversal comes up not only when we comparethe motives of different individuáis, but alsowhen we compare the moral standards that areaccepted in different societies and at differenttimes. Many things that you probably think arewrong have been accepted as morally correct bylarge groups of people in the past: slavery, serf-dom, human sacrifice, racial segregation, denialof religious and political freedom, hereditary

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caste systems. And probably some things younow think are right will be thought wrong by fu-ture societies. Is it reasonable to believe thatthere is some single truth about all this, eventhough we can't be sure what it is? Or is it morereasonable to believe that right and wrong arerelative to a particular time and place and socialbackground?

There is one way in which right and wrong areobviously relative to circumstances. It is usuallyright to return a knife you have borrowed to itsowner if he asks for it back. But if he has gonecrazy in the meantime, and wants the knife tomurder someone with, then you shouldn't re-turn it. This isn't the kind of relativity I am talk-ing about, because it doesn't mean morality isrelative at the basic level. It means only that thesame basic moral principies will require differ-ent actions in different circumstances.

The deeper kind of relativity, which some peo-ple believe in, would mean that the most basicstandards of right and wrong—like when it isand is not all right to kill, or what sacrificesyou're required to make for others—depend en-tirely on what standards are generally acceptedin the society in which you Uve.

This I find very hard to believe, mainly be-cause it always seems possible to criticize the ac-cepted standards of your own society and say

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Right and Wrong

that they are morally mistaken. But if you dothat, you must be appealing to some more ob-jective standard, an idea of what is really rightand wrong, as opposed to what most peoplethink. It is hard to say what this is, but it is anidea most of us understand, unless we are slavishfollowers of what the community says.

There are many philosophical problems aboutthe content of morality—how a moral concernor respect for others should express itself;whether we should help them get what they wantor mainly refrain from harming and hinderingthem; how impartial we should be, and in whatways. I have left most of these questions asidebecause my concern here is with the foundationof morality in general—how universal and ob-jective it is.

I should answer one possible objection to thewhole idea of morality. You've probably heard itsaid that the only reason anybody ever does any-thing is that it makes him feel good, or that notdoing it will make him feel bad. If we are reallymotivated only by our own comfort, it is hope-less for morality to try to appeal to a concern forothers. On this view, even apparently moral con-duct in which one person seems to sacrifice hisown interests for the sake of others is really mo-tivated by his concern for himself: he wants toavoid the guilt he'll feel if he doesn't do the

[ 7 3 ]


"right" thing, or to experience the warm glowof self-congratulation he'll get if he does. Butthose who don't have these feelings have no mo-tive to be "moral."

Now it's true that when people do what theythink they ought to do, they often feel goodabout it: similarly if they do what they think iswrong, they often feel bad. But that doesn'tmean that these feelings are their motives foracting. In many cases the feelings result frommotives which also produce the action. Youwouldn't feel good about doing the right thingunless you thought there was some other reasonto do it, besides the fact that it would make youfeel good. And you wouldn't feel guilty aboutdoing the wrong thing unless you thought thatthere was some other reason not to do it, besidesthe fact that it made you feel guilty: somethingwhich made it right to feel guilty. At least that'show things should be. It's true that some peoplefeel irrational guilt about things they don't haveany independen! reason to think are wrong—but that's not the way morality is supposed towork.

In a sense, people do what they want to do.But their reasons and motives for wanting to dothings vary enormously. I may "want" to givesomeone my wallet only because he has a gunpointed at my head and threatens to kill me if I

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Right and Wrong

don't. And I may want to jump into an icy riverto save a drowning stranger not because it willmake me feel good, but because I recognize thathis Ufe is important, just as mine is, and I rec-ognize that I have a reason to save his Ufe just ashe would have a reason to save mine if our po-sitions were reversed.

Moral argument tries to appeal to a capacityfor impartial motivation which is supposed to bepresent in all of us. Unfortunately it may bedeeply buried, and in some cases it may notbe present at all. In any case it has to competewith powerful selfish motives, and other per-sonal motives that may not be so selfish, in its bidfor control of our behavior. The difficulty of jus-tifying morality is not that there is only onehuman motive, but that there are so many.

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8

Justice

Is it unfair that some people are born rich andsome are born poor? If it's unfair, should any-thing be done about it?

The world is full of inequalities—within coun-tries, and from one country to another. Somechildren are born into comfortable, prosperoushomes, and grow up well fed and well educated.Others are born poor, don't get enough to eat,and never have access to much education ormedical care. Clearly, this is a matter of luck: weare not responsible for the social or economicclass or country into which we are born. Thequestion is, how bad are inequalities which arenot the fault of the people who suffer fromthem? Should governments use their power to

[ 7 6 ]

Justice

try to reduce inequalities of this kind, for whichthe victims are not responsible?

Some inequalities are deliberately imposed.Racial discrimination, for example, deliberatelyexcludes people of one race fromjobs, housing,and education which are available to people ofanother race. Or women may be kept out of Jobsor denied privileges available only to men. Thisis not merely a matter of bad luck. Racial andsexual discrimination are clearly unfair: they areforms of inequality caused by factors that shouldnot be allowed to influence people's basic wel-fare. Fairness requires that opportunities shouldbe opeíl to those who are qualified, and it isclearly a good thing when governments try toenforce such equality of opportunity.

But it is harder to know what to say about in-equalities that arise in the ordináry course ofevents, without delibérate racial or sexual dis-crimination. Because even if there is equality ofopportunity, and any qualified person can go toa university or get a job or buy a house or runfor office—regardless of race, religión, sex, ornational origin—there will still be plenty of in-equalities left. People from wealthier back-grounds will usually have better training andmore resources, and they will tend to be betterable to compete for good Jobs. Even in a system

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of equality of opportunity, some people willhave a head start and will end up with greaterbenefits than others whose native talents are thesame.

Not only that, but differences in native talentwill produce big differences in the resulting ben-efits, in a competitive system. Those who haveabilities that are in high demand will be able toearn rnuch more than those without any specialskills or talents. These differences too are partlya matter oí luck. Though people have to developand use their abilities, no amount of effortvvould enable most people to act like MerylStreep, paint like Picasso, or manufacture auto-mobiles like Henry Ford. Something similar isl rué of lesser accomplishments. The luck of bothnatural talent and family and class backgroundare important factors in determining one's in-come and position in a competitive society.Equal opportunity produces unequal results.

These inequalities, unlike the results of racialand sexual discrimination, are produced bychoices and actions that don't seem wrong inihemselves. People try to provide for their chil-dren and give them a good education, and somehave more money to use for this purpose thanothers. People pay for the producís, services,;md performances they want, and some per-¡ ( inn r r s or manuía í lurers get richer than others

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J ns ticeINSTITUTO DE.

INVESTIGACIONESFILOSÓFICAS

because what they have to offer is wanted bymore people. Businesses and organizations of allkinds try to hire employees who will do the jobwell, and pay higher salaries for those with un-usual skills. If one restauran! is full of peopleand another next door is empty because the firsthas a talented chef and the second doesn't, thecustomers who choose the first restauran! andavoid the second haven't done anything wrong,even though their choices have an unhappy ef-fect on the owner and employees of the secondrestaurant, and on their families.

Such effects are most disturbing when theyleave some people in a very bad way. In somecountries large segments of the population livein poverty from generation to generation. Buteven in a wealthy country like the United States,lots of people start Ufe with two strikes againstthem, from economic and educational disadvan-tages. Some can overeóme those disadvantages,but it's much harder than making good from ahigher starting point.

Most disturbing of all are the enormous in-equalities in wealth, health, education, and de-velopment between rich and poor countries.Most people in the world have no chance of everbeing as well off economically as the poorestpeople in Europe, Japan, or the United States.These large differences in good and bad luck

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jlStituto de Investigaciones FilosóficasB I B L I O T E C A

"Dfl, EDUARDO GARCÍA MAYNEZ"CIUDAD UNiyBRWTARIA

MÉXICO M, D. F.


certainly seem unfair; but what, if anything,should be done about them?

We have to think about both the inequality it-self, and the remedy that would be needed to re-duce or get rid of it. The main question aboutthe inequalities themselves is: What kinds ofcauses of inequality are wrong? The main ques-tion about remedies is: What methods of interfer-ing with the inequality are right?

In the case of delibérate racial or sexual dis-crimination, the answers are easy. The cause ofthe inequality is wrong because the discrimina-tor is doing something wrong. And the remedy issimply to prevent him from doing it. If a land-lord refuses to rent to blacks, he should beprosecuted.

But the questions are more difficult in othercases. The problem is that inequalities whichseem wrong can arise from causes which don'tinvolve people doing anything wrong. It seemsunfair that people born much poorer than oth-ers should suffer disadvantages through no faultof their own. But such inequalities exist becausesome people have been more successful thanothers at earning money and have tried to helptheir children as much as possible; and becausepeople tend to marry members of their own eco-nomic and social class, wealth and position ac-cumulate and are passed on from generation to

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Justice

generation. The actions which combine to formthese causes—employment decisions, pur-chases, marriages, bequests, and efforts to pro-vide for and edúcate children, don't seem wrongin themselves. What's wrong, if anything, is theresult: that some people start life with unde-served disadvantages.

If we object to this kind of bad luck as unfair,it must be because we object to people's suffer-ing disadvantages through no fault of their own,merely as a result of the ordinary operation ofthe socioeconomic system into which they areborn. Some of us may also believe that all badluck that is not a person's fault, such as that ofbeing born with a physical handicap, should becompensated if possible. But let us leave thosecases aside in this discussion. I want to concén-trate on the undeserved inequalities that arisethrough the working of society and the econ-omy, particularly a competitive economy.

The two main sources of these undeserved in-equalities, as I have said, are differences in thesocioeconomic classes into which people areborn, and differences in their natural abilities ortalents for tasks which are in demand. You maynot think there is anything wrong with inequalitycaused in these ways. But if you think there issomething wrong with it, and if you think a so-ciety should try to reduce it, then you must pro-

[81]


pose a remedy which either interferes with thecauses themselves, or interferes with the un-equal effects directly.

Now the causes themselves, as we have seen,include relatively innocent choices by many peo-ple about how to spend their time and moneyand how to lead their Uves. To interfere withpeople's choices about what producís to buy,how to help their children, or how much to paytheir employees, is very different from interfer-ing with them when they want to rob banks ordiscriminate against blacks or women. A moreindirect interference in the economic life of in-dividuáis is taxation, particularly taxation of in-come and inheritance, and some taxes on con-sumption, which can be designed to take morefrom the rich than from the poor. This is oneway a government can try to reduce the devel-opment of great inequalities in wealth over gen-erations—by not letting people keep all of theirmoney.

More important, however, would be to use thepublic resources obtained through taxes to pro-vide some of the missing advantages of educa-tion and support to the children of those fami-lies that can't afford to do it themselves. Publicsocial welfare programs try to do this, by usingtax revenues to provide basic benefits of healthcare, food, housing, and education. This attacksthe inequalities directly.

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]ustice

When it comes to the inequalities that resultfrom differences in ability, there isn't much onecan do to interfere with the causes short of abol-ishing the competitive economy. So long asthere is competition to hire people for jobs,competition between people to get jobs, andcompetition between firms for customers, somepeople are going to make more money than oth-ers. The only alternative would be a centrally di-rected economy in which everyone was paidroughly the same and people were assigned totheir jobs by some kind of centralized authority.Though it has been tried, this system has heavycosts in both freedom and efficiency—far tooheavy, in my opinión, to be acceptable, thoughothers would disagree.

If one wants to reduce the inequalities result-ing from different abilities without getting rid ofthe competitive economy, it will be necessary toattack the inequalities themselves. This can bedone through higher taxation of higher in-comes, and some free provisión of public serv-ices to everyone, or to people with lower in-comes. It could include cash payments to thosewhose earning power is lowest, in the form of aso-called "negative income tax." None of theseprograms would get rid of undeserved inequali-ties completely, and any system of taxation willhave other effects on the economy, including ef-fects on employment and the poor, which may

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be hard to predict; so the issue of a remedy isalways complicated.

But to concéntrate on the philosophical point:the measures needed to reduce undeserved in-equalities arising from differences in class back-ground and natural talent will involve interfer-ence with people's economic activities, mainlythrough taxation: the government takes moneyfrom some people and uses it to help others.This is not the only use of taxation, or even themain use: many laxes are spent on things whichbenefit the well-off more than the poor. But re-distributive taxation, as it is called, is the type rel-evant to our problem. It does involve the use ofgovernment power to interfere with what peopledo, not because what they do is wrong in itself,like trien or discrimination, but because it con-tributes to an effect which seems unfair.

There are those who don't think redistributivetaxation is right, because the governmentshouldn't interfere with people unless they aredoing something wrong, and the economictransactions that produce all these inequalitiesaren't wrong, but perfectly innocent. They mayalso hold that there's nothing wrong with the re-sulting inequalities themselves: that even thoughthey're undeserved and not the fault of the vic-tims, society is not obliged to fix them. That'sjust life, they will say: some people are more for-

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Justice

túnate than others. The only time we have to doanything about it is when the misfortune is theresult of someone's doing a wrong to someoneelse.

This is a controversial political issue, andthere are many different opinions about it.Some people object more to the inequalities thatcome from the socioeconomic class a person isborn into, than to the inequalities resulting fromdifferences in talent or ability. They don't likethe effects of one person being born rich andanother in a slum, but feel that a person de-serves what he can earn with his own efforts—so that there's nothing unfair about one personearning a lot and another very little because thefirst has a marketable talent or capacity forlearning sophisticated skills while the second canonly do unskilled labor.

I myself think that inequalities resulting fromeither of these causes are unfair, and that it isclearly unjust when a socioeconomic system re-sults in some people living under significant ma-terial and social disadvantages through no faultof their own, if this could be prevented througha system of redistributive taxation and socialwelfare programs. But to make up your ownmind about the issue, you have to consider bothwhat causes of inequality you find unfair, andwhat remedies you find legitímate.

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We've been talking mainly about the problemof social justice within one society. The problemis much more difficult on a world scale, both be-cause the inequalities are so great and becauseit's not clear what remedies are possible in theabsence of a world government that could levyworld laxes and see that they are used effec-tively. There is no prospect of a world govern-ment, which is just as well, since it would prob-ably be a horrible government in many ways.However there is still a problem of global jus-tice, though it's hard to know what to do aboutit in the system of sepárate sovereign states wehave now.

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9

Death

Everybody dies, but not everybody agrees aboutwhat death is. Some believe they will surviveafter the death of their bodies, going to Heavenor Hell or somewhere else, becoming a ghost, orreturning to Earth in a different body, perhapsnot even as a human being. Others believe theywill cease to exist—that the self is sriuffed outwhen the body dies. And among those who be-lieve they will cease to exist, some think this is aterrible fact, and others clon't.

It is sometimes said that no one can COIK civeof his own nonexistence, and that therefoi e wecan't really believe that our exislence wi l l come-to an end with our deaths. Bul th i s dot-sn'i seeintrue. Of course you can't conceive oí yout ownnonexistence from the inside. You can't conceive

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of what it would be like to be totally annihilated,because there's nothing it would be like, fromthe inside. But in that sense, you can't conceiveof what it would be like to be completely uncon-scious, even temporarily. The fact that you can'tconceive of that from the inside doesn't meanyou can't conceive of it at all: you just have tothink of yourself from the outside, having beenknocked out, or in a deep sleep. And eventhough you have to be conscious to think that, itdoesn't mean that you're thinking of yourself asconscious.

It's the same with death. To imagine your ownannihilation you have to think of it from the out-side—think about the body of the person youare, with all the Ufe and experience gone fromit. To imagine something it is not necessary toimagine how it would feel for you to experienceit. When you imagine your own funeral, you arenot imagining the impossible situation of beingpresent at your own funeral: you're imagininghow it would look through someone else's eyes.Of course you are alive while you think of yourown death, but that is no more of a problemthan being conscious while imagining yourselfunconscious.

The question of survival after death is relatedto the mind-body problem, which we discussedearlier. If dualism is truc, and each person con-

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Death

sists of a soul and a body connected together, wecan understand how Ufe after death might bepossible. The soul would have to be able to existon its own and have a mental life without thehelp of the body: then it might leave the bodywhen the body dies, instead of being destroyed.It wouldn't be able to have the kind of mentallife of action and sensory perception that de-pends on being attached to the body (unless itgot attached to a new body), but it might have adifferent sort of inner life, perhaps dependingon different causes and influences—direct com-munication with other souls, for instance.

I say life after death might be possible if dual-ism were true. It also might not be possible, be-cause the survival of the soul, and its continuedconsciousness, might depend entirely on .thesupport and stimulation it gets from the body inwhich it is housed—and it might not be able toswitch bodies.

But if dualism is not true, and mental pro-cesses go on in the brain and are entirely depen-dent on the biological functioning of the brainand the rest of the organism, then life afterdeath of the body is not possible. Or to put itmore exactly, mental life after death would re-quire the restoration of biological, physical life:it would require that the body come to life again.This might become technically possible some

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day: It may become possible to freeze people'sbodies when they die, and then later on by ad-vanced medical procedures to fix whatever wasthe matter with them, and bring them back tolife.

Even if this became possible, there would stillbe a question whether the person who wasbrought to life several centuries later would beyou or somebody else. Maybe if you were frozenafter death and your body was later revived, youwouldn't wake up, but only someone very likeyou, with memories of your past life. But even ifrevival after death of the same you in the samebody should become possible, that's not what'sordinarily meant by life after death. Life afterdeath usually means life without your oíd body.

It's hard to know how we could decidewhether we have separable souls. All the evi-dence is that befare death, conscious life dependsentirely on what happens in the nervous system.If we go only by ordinary observation, ratherthan religious doctrines or spiritualist claims tocommunicate with the dead, there is no reasonto believe in an afterlife. Is that, however, a rea-son to believe that there is not an afterlife? Ithink so, but others may prefer to remainneutral.

Still others may believe in an afterlife on thebasis of faith, in the absence of evidence. I my-

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Death

self don't fully understand how this kind offaith-inspired belief is possible, but evidentlysome people can manage it, and even find itnatural.

Let me turn to the other part of the problem:how we ought to feel about death. Is it a goodthing, a bad thing, or neutral? I am talking abouthow it's reasonable to feel about your owndeath—not so much about other people's.Should you look forward to the prospect ofdeath with terror, sorrow, indifference, orrelief?

Obviously it depends on what death is. Ifthere is life after death, the prospect will be grimor happy depending on where your soul will endup. But the difficult and most philosophically in-teresting question is how we should feel aboutdeath if it's the end. Is it a terrible thing to goout of existence?

People differ about this. Some say that non-existence, being nothing at all, can't possibly beeither good or bad for the dead person. Otherssay that to be annihilated, to have the possiblefuture course of your life cut off completely, isthe ultimate evil, even if we all have to face it.Still others say death is a blessing—not of courseif it comes too early, but eventually—because itwould be unbearably boring to Uve forever.

If death without anything after it is either a

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good or a bad thing for the person who dies, itmust be a negative good or evil. Since in itself itis nothing, it can't be either pleasant or unpleas-ant. If it's good, that must be because it is theabsence of something bad (like boredom orpain); if it's bad, that must be because it is theabsence of something good (like interesting orpleasant experiences).

Now it might seem that death can't have anyvalué, positive or negative, because someonewho doesn't exist can't be either benefited orharmed: after all, even a negative good or evilhas to happen to somebody. But on reflection, thisis not really a problem. We can say that the per-son who used to exist has been benefited orharmed by death. For instance, suppose he istrapped in a burning building, and a beam fallson his head, killing him instantly. As a result, hedoesn't suffer the agony of being burned todeath. It seems that in that case we can say hewas lucky to be killed painlessly, because itavoided something worse. Death at that time wasa negative good, because it saved him from thepositive evil he would otherwise have sufferedfor the next five minutes. And the fact that he'snot around to enjoy that negative good doesn'tmean it's not a good for him at all. "Him" meansthe person who was alive, and who would havesuffered if he hadn't died.

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Death

The same kind of thing could be said aboutdeath as a negative evil. When you die, all thegood things in your Ufe come to a stop: no moremeáis, movies, travel, conversation, love, work,books, music, or anything else. If those thingswould be good, their absence is bad. Of courseyou won't miss them: death is not like beinglocked up in solitary confinement. But the end-ing of everything good in Ufe, because of thestopping of life itself, seems clearly to be a neg-ative evil for the person who was alive and is nowdead. When someone we know dies, we feelsorry not only for ourselves but for him, becausehe can't see the sun shine today, or smell thebread in the toaster.

When you think of your own death, the factthat all the good things in life will come to anend is certainly a reason for regret. But thatdoesn't seem to be the whole story. Most peoplewant there to be more of what they enjoy in life,but for some people, the prospect of nonexis-tence is itself frightening, in a way that isn't ad-equately explained by what has been said so far.The thought that the world will go on withoutyou, that you will become nothing, is very hardto take in.

It's not clear why. We all accept the fact thatthere was a time before we were born, when wedidn't yet exist—so why should we be so dis-

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turbed at the prospect of nonexistence after ourdeath? But somehow it doesn't feel the same,The prospect of nonexistence is frightening, atleast to many people, in a way that past nonex-istence cannot be.

The fear of death is very puzzling, in a waythat regret about the end of Ufe is not. It's easyto understand that we might want to have morelife, more of the things it contains, so that we seedeath as a negative evil. But how can the prospectof your own nonexistence be alarrning in a pos-itive way? If we really cease to exist at death,there's nothing to look forward to, so how canthere be anything to be afraid of? If one thinksabout it logically, it seems as though deathshould be something to be afraid of only if wewill survive it, and perhaps undergo some terri-fying transformation. But that doesn't preventmany people from thinking that annihilation isone of the worst things that could happen tothem.

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10

The Meaning ofLife

Perhaps you have had the thought that nothingreally matters, because in two hundred yearswe'll all be dead. This is a peculiar thought, be-cause it's not clear why the fact that we'll bedead in two hundred years should imply thatnothing we do now really matters.

The idea seems to be that we are in some kindof rat race, struggling to achieve our goals andmake something of our lives, but that this makessense only if those achievements will be perma-nent. But they won't be. Even if you produce agreat work of literature which continúes to beread thousands of years from now, eventuallythe solar system will cool or the universe willwind down or collapse, and all trace of your ef-forts will vanish. In any case, we can't hope for

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even a fraction of this sort of immortality. Ifthere's any point at all to what we do, we haveto find it within our own lives.

Why is there any difficulty in that? You can ex-plain the point of most of the things you do. Youwork to earn money to support yourself and per-haps your family. You eat because you're hun-gry, sleep because you're tired, go for a walk orcali up a friend because you feel like it, read thenewspaper to find out what's going on in theworld. If you didn't do any of those things you'dbe miserable; so what's the big problem?

The problem is that although there are justi-fications and explanations for most of thethings, big and small, that we do within life, noneof these explanations explain the point of yourlife as a whole—the whole of which all these ac-tivities, successes and failures, strivings and dis-appointments are parts. If you think about thewhole thing, there seems to be rio point to it atall. Looking at it from the outside, it wouldn'tmatter if you had never existed. And after youhave gone out of existence, it won't matter thatyou did exist.

Of course your existence matters to otherpeople—your parents and others who careabout you—but taken as a whole, their liveshave no point either, so it ultimately doesn'tmatter that you matter to them. You matter to

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The Meaning of Life

them and they matter to you, and that may giveyour life a feeling of significance, but you're justtaking in each other's washing, so to speak.Given that any person exists, he has needs andconcerns which make particular things and peo-ple within his life matter to him. But the wholething doesn't matter.

But does it matter that it doesn't matter? "Sowhat?" you might say. "It's enough that it mat-ters whether I get to the station before my trainleaves, or whether I've remembered to feed thecat. I don't need more than that to keep going."This is a perfectly good reply. But it only worksif you really can avoid setting your sights higher,and asking what the point of the whole thing is.For once you do that, you open yourself to thepossibility that your life is meaningless.

The thought that you'll be dead in twohundred years is just a way of seeing your lifeembedded in a larger context, so that the pointof smaller things inside it seems not to beenough—seems to leave a larger question un-answered. But what if your life as a whole didhave a point in relation to something larger?Would that mean that it wasn't meaninglessafter all?

There are various ways your life could have alarger meaning. You might be part of a politicalor social movement which changed the world for

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the better, to the benefit of fu ture generations.Or you might just help provide a good Ufe foryour own children and their descendants. Oryour life might be thought to have meaning in areligious context, so that your time on Earth wasjust a preparation for an eternity in direct con-tact with God.

About the types of meaning that depend onrelations to other people, even people in the dis-tant future, Tve already indicated what theproblem is. If one's life has a point as a part ofsomething larger, it is still possible to ask aboutthat larger thing, what is the point of if? Eitherthere's an answer in terms of something stilllarger or there isn't. If there is, we simply repeatthe question. If there isn't, then our search fora point has come to an end with somethingwhich has no point. But if that pointlessness isacceptable for the larger thing of which our lifeis a part, why shouldn't it be acceptable alreadyfor our life taken as a whole? Why isn't it allright for your life to be pointless? And if it isn'tacceptable there, why should it be acceptablewhen we get to the larger context? Why don't wehave to go on to ask, "But what is the point ofall thafí" (human history, the succession of thegenerations, or whatever).

The appeal to a religious meaning to life is abit different. If you believe that the meaning of

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The Meaning of Life

your Ufe comes from fulfilling the purpose ofGod, who loves you, and seeing Him in eternity,then it doesn't seem appropriate to ask, "Andwhat is the point of that"?" It's supposed to besomething which is its own point, and can't havea purpose outside itself. But for this very reasonit has its own problems.

The idea of God seems to be the idea of some-thing that can explain everything else, withouthaving to be explained itself. But it's very hardto understand how there could be such a thing.If we ask the question, "Why is the world likethis?" and are offered a religious answer, howcan we be prevented from asking again, "Andwhy is that true?" What kind of answer wouldbring all of our "Why?" questions to a stop,once and for all? And if they can stop there, whycouldn't they have stopped earlier?

The same problem seems to arise if God andHis purposes are offered as the ultimate expla-nation of the valué and meaning of our Uves.The idea that our lives fulfil God's purpose issupposed to give them their point, in a way thatdoesn't require or admit of any further point.One isn't supposed to ask "What is the point ofGod?" any more than one is supposed to ask,"What is the explanation of God?"

But my problem here, as with the role of Godas ultimate explanation, is that I'm not sure I

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understand the idea. Can there really be some-thing which gives point to everything else_by en-compassing it, but which couldn't have, or need,any point itself? Something whose point can't bequestioned from outside because there is nooutside?

If God is supposed to give our lives a meaningthat we can't understand, it's not much of a con-solation. God as ultimate justification, like Godas ultimate explanation, may be an incompre-hensible answer to a question that we can't getrid of. On the other hand, maybe that's thewhole point, and I am just failing to understandreligious ideas. Perhaps the belief in God is thebelief that the universe is intelligible, but not tous.

Leaving that issue aside, let me return to thesmaller-scale dimensions of human life. Even ifUfe as a whole is meaningless, perhaps that'snothing to worry about. Perhaps we can recog-nize it and just go on as before. The trick is tokeep your eyes on what's in front of you, andallow justifications to come to an end inside yourlife, and inside the lives of others to whom youare connected. If you ever ask yourself the ques-tion, "But what's the point of being alive atall?"—leading the particular life of a student orbartender or whatever you happen to be—you'llanswer "There's no point. It wouldn't matter if

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The Meaning of Life

I didn't exist at all, or if I didn't care about any-thing. But I do. That's all there is to it."

Some people find this attitude perfectly satis-fying. Others find it depressing, though un-avoidable. Part of the problem is that some of ushave an incurable tendency to take ourselves se-riously. We want to matter to ourselves "fromthe outside." If our lives as a whole seem point-less, then a part of us is dissatisfied—the partthat is always looking over our shoulders at whatwe are doing. Many human efforts, particularlythose in the service of serious ambitions ratherthanjust comfort and survival, get some of theirenergy from a sense of importance—a sensethat what you are doing is not just important toyou, but important in some larger sense: impor-tant, period. If we have to give this up, it maythreaten to take the wind out of our sails. If lifeis not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is itsgoal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves soseriously. On the other hand, if we can't helptaking ourselves so seriously, perhaps we justhave to put up with being ridiculous. Life maybe not only meaningless but absurd.

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what does it all mean? - mrs. thomas...

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