Churchland on dualism, Part II

Let’s continue our look at Paul Churchland’s critical discussion of dualism in his textbook Matter and Consciousness. I have noted that while Churchland neglects even to mention the most important arguments for dualism and devotes space to arguments that dualist philosophers themselves don’t actually put much stock in, he does at least discuss two arguments that many such philosophers do think important: the argument from introspection and the argument from irreducibility.

As Churchland summarizes the argument from introspection, it states that the thoughts, sensations, desires, and emotions we encounter in introspection are just plainly different from electrochemical activity in neural networks. As he summarizes the argument from irreducibility, it states that language, reasoning, the introspectible qualities of sensations, and the meaningful contents of our thoughts cannot plausibly be accounted for in materialist terms; for example, knowledge of the molecular structure of a rose and/or of the brain would not allow a physicist or chemist to predict what it would be like to experience the smell of a rose.

Churchland’s summary of these arguments is superficial. For example, it is clear from his gloss on the argument from irreducibility that he regards Frank Jackson’s famous “knowledge argument” as an important instance of it. Yet he does not actually state Jackson’s argument, thus denying the unwary reader an opportunity to appreciate its full power. (Churchland does briefly discuss Jackson’s argument later in the book, but only after having disposed of dualism and plumped for materialism, thus giving the misleading impression that the argument is merely a puzzle an already-established materialism must solve rather than an independent argument for dualism in its own right.)

Worse than this, though, are the responses he gives to the two arguments in question, which are presented as decisive but are in fact exceedingly feeble. The argument from introspection has no force, Churchland assures us, because introspection cannot be trusted in light of the fact that there are clear cases from the history of science showing that our natural powers of observation have misled us in other domains. What cases are these? “The red surface of an apple does not look like a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths, but that is what it is,” Churchland says; “The sound of a flute does not sound like a sinusoidal compression wave train in the atmosphere, but that is what it is. [etc.]”

The problem with this response should be obvious, at least to someone with knowledge of the history of the mind-body problem and of modern philosophy generally. In particular, there is an obvious reason why the cases Churchland appeals to not only do not make the point he thinks they do, but in fact make the case for dualism even stronger. For the reason the identities in question – red with such-and-such a light wavelength, sound with a such-and-such a wave pattern, etc. – are plausible in the first place is that the early modern thinkers who inaugurated the “mechanical” conception of nature that informs modern science introduced a crucial distinction between features of the observable world that are observer-relative and those that are observer-independent – the famous primary quality/secondary quality distinction (spelled out in different ways by Galileo, Descartes, Locke, et al.). Colors, sounds, heat, cold, and the like as common sense understands them were relegated to the “observer-relative” side of the divide, and color, sound, heat, cold, etc. as objective, physical properties were, accordingly, redefined in terms of wave activity, the motions of particles, or some other “observer-independent” phenomena.

To see how this works in the case of one of Churchland’s examples, let’s distinguish between RED (in caps) and red (in italics) as follows:

RED: the qualitative character of the color sensations had by a normal observer when he looks at fire engines, “Stop” signs, Superman’s cape, etc. (which is different from the qualitative character of the sensations had by e.g. a color blind observer)

red: whatever physical property it is in fire engines, “Stop” signs, Superman’s cape, etc. that causes normal observers to have RED sensations

Now what seems to common sense to be very different from “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths” is RED. And sure enough, what science has shown to be identical to “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths” is only red, not RED. Indeed, part of the reason for distinguishing red and RED is precisely that RED seems clearly not to be identical to something like “a matrix of molecules reflecting photons at certain critical wavelengths,” since the “matrices of molecules” etc. are what they are regardless of who is looking at them while qualitative character is observer-relative.

Part of the problem with Churchland’s response to the argument from introspection, then, is that it commits a fallacy of equivocation: The sense of “red” in which “Red seems different from any property of a matrix of molecules etc.” (i.e. RED) is different from the sense of “red” in which “Science has shown that red really is just a property of a matrix of molecules etc.” (i.e. red). A similar fallacy is committed when he appeals instead to sounds or any other sensory qualities. Thus his examples do not show that our powers of observation have misled us in other domains, and thus should not be trusted in the case of introspection.

That’s one problem with his response. Another is that when we understand what is really going on in the history-of-science examples Churchland appeals to, we can see that they actually strengthen the case for dualism rather than undermine it. For if colors, sounds, heat, cold, etc. as common sense understands them – that is, in terms of their qualitative, phenomenal character – exist only in the mind of the observer and not in the physical world (which is comprised of nothing more than colorless, odorless, soundless, tasteless particles in motion, or whatever), then it seems clear that they cannot exist in the brain, or in any other physical object or system of physical objects, either. Hence they must be immaterial. As I have noted before, that was exactly the conclusion explicitly drawn by early modern thinkers like Cudworth and Malebranche – and at least implicitly by Descartes, Locke, and the other early modern advocates of the “mechanical philosophy” who also happened to be dualists – and by several philosophers since. Their view was that dualism, far from being a pre-scientific holdover destined to be abandon once we have sufficient knowledge of the brain, in fact follows from the very mechanistic conception of matter taken for granted in modern science. The basic problem was one of the themes of Thomas Nagel’s celebrated 1974 article “What is it like to be a bat?” (though Nagel is less committal there about precisely what philosophical conclusion we ought to draw from the problem). It was explicitly appealed to in defense of dualism in Richard Swinburne’s 1986 book The Evolution of the Soul.

Now Churchland or some other materialist might think there is a way to carve up the conceptual territory that doesn’t have such an implication. Fine and dandy, let’s hear it and evaluate it. But he oughtn’t to pretend that the “reductions” in question clearly favor materialism when in fact, historically, they were taken to favor the opposite view! And, especially, he oughtn’t to convey this false impression when purporting to offer an evenhanded presentation of the case for dualism.

Churchland’s treatment of the argument from irreducibility is equally bad. As evidence that our powers of reasoning can in fact be accounted for in materialistic terms, he appeals to the existence of electronic calculators. As evidence that language can be similarly accounted for, he appeals to the existence of “computer languages.” He fails even to mention the most glaringly obvious reply to such “explanations” – that they involve nothing more than a couple of bad puns, since so-called calculators don’t literally “calculate” and computers don’t literally possess “language.” Rather, both electronic calculators and computers generally are inherently devoid of any intentionality or powers of reasoning whatsoever, and have simply been designed by human beings – who do have genuine powers of reasoning and language – to carry out certain operations that aid us in our exercises in calculation and the like by simulating certain mental processes. To “explain” mental phenomena in terms of what computers do is thus precisely to get things back-asswards, since what computers do cannot be accounted for apart from the human minds which assign to their states and operations whatever meanings they have.

Again, the point isn’t that Churchland might not have a way to respond to such arguments. The point is that he pretends that the claims he makes easily and uncontroversially rebut the argument from irreducibility when in fact his claims are extremely controversial even among non-dualists. (John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus are only the two most prominent non-dualist philosophers to have criticized the suggestion that mental processes can be explained in terms of “computational” ones.) The hapless beginning student coming away from Churchland’s discussion would have no idea that his “Gee whiz, look what computers can do!” shtick is, by itself anyway, philosophically about as serious as “proving” that time travel is theoretically possible based only on what one saw once in a Star Trek episode.

Churchland also suggests that whatever explanatory difficulties materialism has are at least equally matched by any dualist attempt to explain mental phenomena in terms of “nonphysical mind-stuff.” Here again Churchland proves only that he doesn’t understand what the main arguments for dualism actually say. As I noted in my first post in this series, those arguments are not quasi-scientific “explanatory hypotheses” in the first place, but rather attempts at metaphysical demonstration. They do not “postulate” “mind-stuff” (whatever that is) any more than mathematicians “postulate” the existence of the number 48 as the “best explanation” of why 47 and 49 do not fall right next to each other in the series of natural numbers. If the arguments fail, they do not fail for the sorts of reasons that explanatory hypotheses fail (considerations of parsimony, lack of fit with existing empirical theory, etc.), any more than an attempted mathematical proof, when it fails, can fail for such reasons.

But that brings us to Churchland’s positive arguments against dualism, which we’ll look at in a third post.

Searle, Aquinas, and property dualism

In an addendum to his article “Why I Am Not a Property Dualist,” John Searle suggests that property dualism really entails substance dualism. For it describes mental properties as “arising from” and existing “over and above” the brain, and “these metaphors suggest that… consciousness is something separate from the brain” given that “uncontroversial properties of the brain, like weight, shape, colour, solidity, etc.” are not said to exist in that way. For consciousness to exist “over and above” the brain requires that it be “a separate thing, object, or non-property type of entity.”

Searle’s claim here seems reminiscent in some ways of Aquinas’s argument for the subsistence of the human soul at Summa Theologiae I.75.2:

Therefore the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation "per se" apart from the body. Now only that which subsists can have an operation "per se." For nothing can operate but what is actual: for which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent.

Aquinas has argued earlier for the first claim made in this passage, viz. that intellectual operations do not involve a bodily organ. What he saying here is that this claim entails that that which carries out these operations, the human soul, must “subsist” apart from the body; it isn’t a mere accident or attribute of the body. The reason is the Scholastic principle that agere sequitur esse, activity follows upon being. Heat, as a mere accident or attribute, cannot cause something to be hot; rather it is the substance which has the heat that causes something else to be hot. Similarly, an operation which is not carried out by any bodily organ but which – qua operation rather than substance – cannot exist apart from some substance or other, must inhere in something immaterial.

So, when Searle tells us that immaterial mental properties would have to inhere in something immaterial rather than in a material object like the brain, he is saying something which seems to dovetail with Aquinas’s argument.

Still, things are a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, unlike many contemporary property dualists, Aquinas does not regard consciousness (as contemporary philosophers tend to understand “consciousness”) as immaterial. Rather, it is intellectual activity (grasping abstract concepts, reasoning, etc.) that he takes to be immaterial. Second, Aquinas is not only not a property dualist, he is not (contrary to appearances) a substance dualist either, certainly not in the way that sort of view has been understood since Descartes. Rather, he is a hylemorphic dualist. From a Thomistic point of view, substance dualism, property dualism, materialism, idealism, neutral monism, and all other post-Cartesian theories of the mind presuppose a mistaken and muddleheaded conception of both mind and matter – a conception which (among other things) makes it very difficult for contemporary philosophers even to understand the Thomistic view. As when dealing with Aquinas’s position on other specific philosophical questions, the only way properly to understand what he says about the relationship between mind and body is to situate it within his general metaphysics, which presupposes an understanding of the notions of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accident, essence and existence, analogical predication, etc. I set all this out in Aquinas, with chapter 4 devoted to Aquinas’s psychology and how it differs radically from contemporary substance dualism, property dualism, etc.

Now, some further reading, while you wait for your copy of Aquinas to arrive: First, my essay “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist,” which explains why Searle’s own anti-materialist arguments in philosophy of mind do in fact entail property dualism, despite his attempt to avoid this result. Second, check out David Oderberg’s article “Hylemorphic Dualism” for an overview of the Thomistic position. Third, take a look at Alfred Freddoso’s article “Good News, Your Soul Hasn’t Died Quite Yet” for a discussion of some of the differences between the Thomistic view and the standard modern ones (and why Catholics, especially, should be wary of the latter, including modern versions of dualism).

Plato’s affinity argument

In an earlier post I suggested that the arguments of great philosophers of the past need to be understood, not only in the context of their times, but also in light of how later thinkers built on them. For an argument can contain, inchoately, real insights which only later thinkers were able to spell out adequately; and we will miss these insights if, overly fearful of anachronism, we insist pedantically on reading the argument in isolation from this later tradition. What ultimately matters in philosophy is not exactly who said exactly what, exactly when and exactly how. What matters is what is true, and whether an argument is likely to lead us to it. Anachronism, then, while a danger, is a less serious danger than loss of truth. To think otherwise is to abandon philosophy for mere scholarship. (Scholarship has its place, of course. But its place is to serve the ends of philosophy.)

What immediately prompted that post were some reflections on Plato’s Phaedo, on which I had been lecturing at the time. The Phaedo is famously concerned with the immortality of the soul, and Socrates is represented as putting forward four main lines of argument in its defense – or rather, as commentators these days often emphasize, four sub-arguments in the course of what should be understood as a single long, complex argument. Modern readers of the Phaedo often dismiss the arguments as manifestly bad. David Stove, in The Plato Cult, describes them as “so contemptible that, on their own merits, they could hardly ever have imposed upon a child of eight” (pp. 100-1). This sort of judgment is, I think, completely unwarranted. When understood both in the context of Plato’s philosophy as a whole and in light of the ongoing classical tradition of thinking about the soul which Plato inaugurated, his arguments can be seen to be very interesting indeed. That is not to say either that Plato’s arguments are adequate as they stand or that all of them can at the end of the day be defended. It is to say instead that the arguments embody serious considerations in favor of the soul’s immortality, and that at least some of these considerations were developed by later writers into more complete and compelling arguments. Modern readers often fail to see this because – as with their treatment of Aquinas’s Five Ways – they too frequently lack familiarity with the metaphysical presuppositions of the arguments, and read into them modern assumptions which classical writers did not make and often would have rejected.

The four arguments in question are usually labeled the cyclical argument, the recollection argument, the affinity argument, and the final argument. Let us begin by briefly surveying the arguments. It is evident from the dialogue that the cyclical and recollection arguments are intended to work in tandem. Putting aside the details of the examples Socrates uses in stating them (e.g. the long discussion about the Form of Equality) we might summarize the case that these first two arguments are together intended to make as follows:

1. We have knowledge (of Forms and of mathematical truths) that could not have come from sensory experience or in any other way been learned during this life.

2. So it must have been acquired during an existence prior to this one.

3. So our souls must have pre-existed their embodiment in this life.

4. But things arise out of their opposites in a cyclical pattern, such as sleeping from waking and waking from sleeping.

5. So, just as souls pre-exist their embodiment during life, so too must they continue on disembodied after death.

One way this line of reasoning might be challenged is via the suggestion that even if our souls pre-existed this life, perhaps their embodiment has altered them to such an extent that they will not survive our deaths, the “cycle” being thereby broken. Answering such an objection seems to be the point of the affinity argument, the core of which might be summarized as follows:

1. The soul knows the Forms, which are eternal, whereas the senses know material things, which pass away.

2. But each of these faculties is like the thing it knows (e.g. the senses are material, the soul is invisible).

3. Thus it is because the senses are like the things they know that they too pass away.

4. So the soul, since it is like the Forms that it knows, must not pass away.

Following Socrates’ presentation of the affinity argument in the Phaedo, his interlocutors Simmias and Cebes raise some further objections, including Simmias’s famous suggestion that the soul may be a mere harmony or attunement of the body’s components, like the harmony of a lyre. This begins a long discussion which culminates in the final argument, which might be summarized as follows:

1. The soul is the principle by which a thing is alive.

2. So it participates in the Form of Life.

3. But a thing cannot participate in contrary Forms (e.g. fire, which participates in the Form of Hot, cannot participate in the Form of Cold).

4. So the soul cannot participate in the Form of Death.

5. So the soul cannot perish.

Now I have no intention of exploring each of these arguments in any detail. Indeed, the line of reasoning enshrined in the combination of the cyclical and recollection arguments is one which I – as a Thomist who takes the soul to be the form of the body – do not think can succeed at the end of the day. One obvious objection to it is that its first premise is false if (as I would maintain) an Aristotelian analysis of concept formation is correct. Another is that step 2 doesn’t follow from step 1 all by itself: Even if our knowledge of forms and of mathematical truths cannot have come from the senses, it may be that it was stamped into our intellects by God when He created our souls (as per a rationalist theory of innate ideas) or that it results from a kind of divine illumination (as per St. Augustine). And of course, the stuff about things arising out of their opposites needs to be tightened up, to say the least. All the same, I’m sure a serious Platonist could give the argument a run for its money, and it would be a useful philosophical exercise to see how far it could be defended against objections. Much farther than most contemporary readers would suppose, I would bet.

Anyway, it is the second two arguments that I think are the most interesting. In the case of the final argument, this is not because it is sufficient to establish personal immortality. It is not. But what it does do, it seems to me, is foreshadow the Aristotelian-Thomistic insight that while particular composites of matter and form – that is, individual material substances – are generated and pass away, form itself (and thus the soul) is not susceptible of perishing. For a material substance’s perishing just amounts to its matter losing its form, and a form can’t coherently be said to lose its form (because it is a form). But then, since the soul is (on the A-T analysis) just a kind of form, the soul is not susceptible of perishing.

The reason this does not by itself establish personal immortality is that the forms of material things, considered by themselves, are in general mere abstractions. What exist concretely are individual material substances, and thus form and matter together. For this reason, matter too, considered apart from form, is a mere abstraction – speaking concretely, matter always exists with some form or other. And thus, if the soul qua form were imperishable merely in the sense just described, it would be no more imperishable than matter is. As Aquinas says in On the Principles of Nature, “prime matter [i.e. matter without form], and even form, are neither generated nor corrupted… properly speaking, only composites are generated” (2.15). A thing’s matter carries on after its destruction in the sense that the matter simply takes on a new form; its form carries on in the sense that some new substance with the very same form can always come into being. It is only the individual concrete substance that the form and matter together compose which comes into being and passes away. Since it passes away, though, the survival of its form – its soul, in the case of a living thing – merely qua something which another, future substance might take on, does not entail that the substance itself survives in any sense. When a particular rose bush dies, its form carries on in the sense that new rose bushes can always come into being, but that rose bush is gone for good.

For the imperishability of the human soul to ensure personal immortality, then – the survival not merely of the abstract form of man, but of your form or soul specifically – it would have to be what the forms of other material things in general are not: a kind of subsistent form, something whose operations are not, or at least are not entirely, dependent on matter. That is to say, it would have to be something which operates as a kind of immaterial particular thing even when it informs the matter of the body. Only then would its survival count as the survival of the particular human being whose soul it was. Or rather, it would count as the survival of the chief part of that particular human being; for the whole human being to come back into existence, the soul would have to be reunited with the matter that made up its body, which in Aquinas’s view it does at the resurrection. But the survival of the soul as a kind of immaterial particular at least makes this possible in a way it would not be if the human soul were like every other form.

I spell out Aquinas’s position in detail in chapter 4 of Aquinas. The point for now is that the reasons why the soul should be understood as something which operates independently of matter are not to be found in Plato’s final argument. But they are hinted at in Plato’s remaining argument for the soul’s immortality, namely the affinity argument.

As it happens, the affinity argument is the one some commentators seem to regard as the worst of Plato’s arguments for the soul’s immortality. One reason for this is that they often interpret it as an argument from analogy. That is to say, they think Plato is arguing along something like the following lines: If the soul is like the Forms in one respect – namely, being invisible to the senses – then it is probably like them in another respect as well, viz. in being imperishable. The trouble with the argument, then, is obvious: The analogy is simply too weak and undeveloped to support the conclusion.

It is understandable why a modern reader would read the argument this way. Plato does make use of an analogy, after all. And modern readers are used to thinking of metaphysical arguments as quasi-empirical hypotheses a la Paley’s “design argument” for God’s existence. But as every Thomist knows, not every philosophical use of analogy constitutes an “argument from analogy” in the modern sense, and metaphysical arguments (or good metaphysical arguments, anyway) are not quasi-scientific empirical ones. A failure to make these distinctions is what leads so many modern readers to misread Aquinas’s Fifth Way as a precursor of Paley. It is also what leads them to misread Plato as offering a lame argument from analogy for the immortality of the soul.

In fact, as Michael Pakaluk has pointed out, the affinity argument is not an “argument from analogy” at all, but rather “an argument about the nature of things.” Plato is not saying: “The soul is like the Forms in one way, so there is some significant probability that it is like them in this other way too.” Rather, he is saying something like: “The soul of its nature is X. But as we know from the example of the Forms, which are also X, things that are X are imperishable. So the soul is imperishable.”

What is X? As Lloyd Gerson suggests in his book Knowing Persons: A Study of Plato, what Plato seems to be emphasizing here is that the soul, like the Forms, is immaterial (p. 86). What the argument is (arguably) saying, then, is that whereas the senses pass away just as the things they know pass away, because both are material, the soul by contrast must be as imperishable as the things it knows – namely the Forms – because like the Forms, it is immaterial. In other words, it is, on this interpretation, the immaterial nature of the Forms that makes them imperishable, so that something that shares that nature – as (the argument claims) the soul does – must be equally imperishable. Notice, again, that this is not a probabilistic argument from analogy, but, in effect, an attempt at a proof. The argument is not:

1. The Forms are imperishable.

2. The soul is in some other respects analogous to the Forms.

3. So it is probably like them in being imperishable too.

That would indeed be a bad argument. Rather, the argument is (I am suggesting) to be understood along something like the following lines:

1. What is immaterial is imperishable.

2. The Forms are immaterial.

3. So the Forms are imperishable.

4. But since the soul knows the Forms, it must be as immaterial as they are.

5. So the soul must be imperishable.

Say what you will about this argument, it is not an argument from analogy, and it is not probabilistic. (Leave such weak tea arguments to the moderns. The ancient and medieval philosophers preferred the strong drink of metaphysical demonstration.)

OK, but what of the crucial premise 4? If it does not rest on an argument from analogy, what does it rest on? I would suggest that what Plato is gesturing at here is a line of argument that would later be developed more thoroughly and carefully by writers like Aristotle and Aquinas. The basic idea is that the intellect’s grasp of an abstraction like triangularity (for example) would simply not be possible unless it were as immaterial as triangularity itself is. There are three main considerations in favor of this judgment:

A. For a parcel of matter to take on a form is for it to become a thing of the kind the form is a form of; for example, for it to take on the form of triangularity is just for it to become a triangle. Now for the intellect to grasp the nature of a thing is just for it to take on the form of that thing. And in that case, if the intellect were material, it would become a thing of the kind that it grasps; for instance, it would become triangular when it grasps the form of triangularity. But this is obviously absurd. So the intellect is not material.

B. Forms and our thoughts about them are precise, exact, or determinate in a way no material thing can be even in principle; hence a thought cannot possibly be anything material.

C. Forms are universal while material representations are necessarily particular; hence to grasp a form cannot in principle be to have a material representation of any sort.

Obviously these arguments need spelling out, and I have said much more about them in several places. All of them are discussed in The Last Superstition (see especially pp. 123-126) and at greater length in Aquinas (see especially pp. 151-159), and both books set out in detail the metaphysical background apart from which the arguments cannot properly be understood. Arguments of the sort represented by B and C are discussed in more detail in the “Intentionality” chapter of my book Philosophy of Mind. Argument B in particular was the subject of an earlier post, and has in contemporary philosophy been developed most thoroughly by James Ross (see e.g. his article “Immaterial Aspects of Thought”). The point for now is that there is a family resemblance between what Plato was apparently up to in the affinity argument, and later arguments in the broad classical tradition that attempt to show, not by means of probabilistic arguments from analogy, but on the basis of an analysis of the nature of thought itself, that the soul (or its intellectual powers, in any event) cannot even in principle be material.

Apart from their misguided tendency to interpret classical metaphysical arguments as quasi-empirical hypotheses, another reason modern interpreters often badly misunderstand the affinity argument may be that, as Gerson notes, they tend to take for granted a post-Cartesian “representationalist” conception of knowledge (Knowing Persons, pp. 81-2). But the classical and medieval approach to knowledge was in general not representationalist. The great pre-modern writers did not regard the mind as a veil of “representations” which needed somehow to be correlated with external objects and events. Rather, for them knowledge involved a kind of union – not a correlation, but an identity of sorts – of the knower and what is known, insofar as when we know, one and the same essence or nature exists simultaneously in the intellect and in the world. (I have discussed this idea at greater length in an earlier post.) Naturally, then, if the object of knowledge is immaterial, that with which it is (in some sense) identical – the state of the knower – was regarded by them as immaterial too.

Here, though, as so often happens when modern readers encounter the arguments of ancient and medieval philosophers, the clearing up of one misunderstanding is likely only to lead to another. “How can the mind possibly be identical with what it knows?” the modern reader is bound to ask incredulously. “What absurdity!” Just as they often assume (with little or no argument, other than an appeal to the authority of Frege) that the concept of existence is entirely captured by the existential quantifier, so too might contemporary readers assume that the concept if identity is entirely captured by the identity relation as it is understood in modern logic. But this would be a mere prejudice. As Gyula Klima has emphasized in a series of important papers, the metaphysical doctrines of pre-modern philosophers typically presuppose semantic and logical doctrines that are very different from, but every bit as sophisticated and defensible as, those taken for granted by most contemporary philosophers. (What I have to say in the earlier post just linked to, and what I have said in recent posts about the Thomistic doctrine of analogy, may provide at least a hint of some of the differences. But this is a gigantic topic of its own.)

In general, while contemporary readers know that the difference between their view of the world and that of the ancient and medieval philosophers is radical, they generally do not know just how radical it is. Indeed, their ignorance of the differences is so great that they typically do not so much as even understand what the ancients and medievals were saying – hence (for example) they regard Aristotle as having put forward a “functionalist” “philosophy of mind,” Plato as having given an “argument from analogy,” and Aquinas as having foreshadowed Paley. In short, the moderns insist on reading the great figures of pre-modern philosophy as if they were all essentially just less well-informed versions of themselves – a double insult.

I suggested in an earlier post that Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument for dualism represents a corrupted version of earlier and better Scholastic arguments. What is true in it isn’t new, and what’s new isn’t true. But if Descartes marks a decline, Plato’s affinity argument marks the beginning of an ascent. It is a mark of our own philosophical impoverishment that we can no longer recognize either the ascent or decline for what they were – much less the power of the Aristotelian-Scholastic arguments to which the ascent led and away from which the decline has taken us.

Of course, you might not agree with me about that. So at least agree with the more measured words of Gerson, with which I’ll conclude: “[The affinity] argument, like the others, is not supposed to stand on its own. And at its core there is an argument which, far from being inconsequential, is the origin of a family of immensely influential arguments for the immateriality of the person. These arguments are refined and elaborated upon by countless later Platonically inspired philosophers. They are still, in my view, worthy of interest.” (Knowing Persons, p. 79)

The Thomistic tradition, Part II

Concluding my overview of the main varieties of Thomism, with some final outtakes taken straight from the Aquinas cutting room floor:

6. Analytical Thomism: This newest approach to Thomism is described by John Haldane (pictured at left), its key proponent, as “a broad philosophical approach that brings into mutual relationship the styles and preoccupations of recent English-speaking philosophy and the concepts and concerns shared by Aquinas and his followers” (from the article on “analytical Thomism” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich). By “recent English-speaking philosophy” Haldane means the analytical tradition founded by thinkers like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, which tends to dominate academic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and her husband Peter Geach are sometimes considered the first “analytical Thomists,” though (like most writers to whom this label has been applied) they did not describe themselves in these terms, and as Haldane’s somewhat vague expression “mutual relationship” indicates, there does not seem to be any set of doctrines held in common by all so-called analytical Thomists. What they do have in common seems to be that they are philosophers trained in the analytic tradition who happen to be interested in Aquinas in some way; and the character of their “analytical Thomism” is determined by whether it tends to stress the “analytical” side of analytical Thomism, or the “Thomism” side, or, alternatively, attempts to emphasize both sides equally.

We might tentatively distinguish, then, between three subcategories within the group of contemporary analytic philosophers who have been described as “analytical Thomists.” The first category comprises analytic philosophers who are interested in Aquinas and would defend some of his ideas, but who would also reject certain other key Thomistic claims (perhaps precisely because of their perceived conflict with assumptions prevalent among analytic philosophers) and thus fail to count (or even to count themselves) as “Thomists” in any strict sense. This sort of “analytical Thomism” might be said to emphasize the “analytical” element at the expense of the “Thomism.” Anthony Kenny (who rejects Aquinas’s doctrine of being) and Robert Pasnau (who rejects certain aspects of his account of human nature) would seem to exemplify this first tendency. A second category within analytical Thomism would comprise thinkers who do see themselves as Thomists in some sense, and who would argue that those aspects of Aquinas’s thought which seem to conflict with assumptions common among analytical philosophers can be interpreted or reinterpreted so that there is no conflict. This approach might be said to give both the “analytical” and the “Thomistic” elements of analytical Thomism equal emphasis, and is represented by thinkers like Geach, Brian Davies, and C. F. J. Martin (all of whom would attempt to harmonize Aquinas’s doctrine of being with Frege’s understanding of existence) and Germain Grisez and John Finnis (who would reinterpret Aquinas’s ethics so as to avoid what Moore called the “naturalistic fallacy”). The work of Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump also possibly falls into this second category, though since it is often interpretative and scholarly rather than programmatic, it is harder to say.

Thomists of other schools have been very critical of both of these strains within analytical Thomism, sometimes to the extent of dismissing the very idea of analytical Thomism as being no more coherent than (in their view) “transcendental Thomism” is. But there is a third possible category of “analytical Thomists,” namely those whose training was in the analytic tradition and whose modes of argument and choice of topics reflects this background, but whose philosophical views are in substance basically just traditional Thomistic ones, without qualification or reinterpretation. Here the “Thomism” would be in the driver’s seat and the “analytical” modifier would reflect not so much the content of the views defended but rather the style in which they are defended. The work of writers like Gyula Klima and David Oderberg seems to fall into this category. Moreover, some writers who appear to fall into the second category of analytical Thomists when writing on certain topics seem closer to this third category when writing on others. (Martin, Davies, and Haldane would be examples, since while some of their work attempts to harmonize analytic themes with Thomistic ones, at other times they are more inclined to challenge certain common analytic assumptions in the name of Thomism.)

In addition to the various schools of thought within Thomism that I have been describing, other approaches could be distinguished. For example, while Aquinas is generally understood to be an Aristotelian, commentators like Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995) have emphasized the Platonic elements in his thought. John Deely advocates bringing Thomism together with semiotics, the general theory of signs and signification. I have not attempted to be comprehensive, and what I have said about the main approaches has been brief and oversimplified. But hopefully it will give the reader some (very general) guidance through the gigantic and often bewildering body of literature on Aquinas and Thomism. In the interests of full disclosure, I might mention that my own understanding of Aquinas has been influenced most by the work of writers in the Neo-Scholastic, Laval/River Forest, and Analytical schools (especially the third category of analytical Thomism that I distinguished). In particular, I follow these approaches in reading Aquinas as the pivotal figure in an ongoing “Aristotelico-Thomistic” tradition, a “perennial philosophy” which has its roots in the best of ancient Greek thought and continues to this day.

Further reading:

Treatments of the history of and various schools of thought within Thomism can be found in: Romanus Cessario, A Short History of Thomism (Catholic University of America Press, 2003); Helen James John, The Thomist Spectrum (Fordham University Press, 1966); Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Blackwell, 2002); Ralph M. McInerny, Thomism in an Age of Renewal (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968); and Brian J. Shanley, The Thomist Tradition (Kluwer, 2002). Useful collections of essays can be found in: Victor Brezik, ed., One Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards, A Symposium (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1981); Deal W. Hudson and Dennis Wm. Moran, eds., The Future of Thomism (American Maritain Association, 1992); and the series Thomistic Papers published by the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas (Meridian Books, 1958) contains a useful collection of papal statements on the significance of Aquinas for Roman Catholic thought. Gerald A. McCool has developed a controversial interpretation of the recent history of Thomism in a series of books; see his Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (Fordham University Press, 1989); From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (Fordham University Press, 1989); and The Neo-Thomists (Marquette University Press, 1994). His interpretation is debated in John F. X. Knasas, ed., Thomistic Papers VI (Center for Thomistic Studies, 1994).

The Neo-Scholastic approach to Aquinas is summarized in Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (B. Herder Co., 1950; reprinted by Ex Fontibus Co., 2006). A recent treatment of Garrigou-Lagrange’s thought is Richard Peddicord, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P. (St. Augustine’s Press, 2005). Presentations of existential Thomism can be found in Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952) and Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (Vintage Books, 1966). John F. X. Knasas, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists (Fordham University Press, 2003) is a recent defense and Ralph McInerny, Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Catholic University of America Press, 2006) a recent critique. Two recent introductions to Laval/River Forest Thomism are The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008) and Benedict M. Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). For transcendental Thomism, see Joseph Donceel, ed., A Marechal Reader (Herder and Herder, 1970). For Lublin Thomism, see Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Eerdmans, 1997). For analytical Thomism, see the chapter on Aquinas in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Basil Blackwell, 1961); John Haldane, ed., Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); The Monist, Vol. 80, No. 4 (1997), a special issue on Analytical Thomism edited by Haldane; and Craig Paterson and Matthew S. Pugh, eds., Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue (Ashgate, 2006).

Fossils and Frankenstein monsters

One sometimes hears it said that studying the works of Thomists only distorts one’s understanding of Aquinas. “Read St. Thomas himself, and forget the commentators!” This sounds sophisticated, or is supposed to. In fact it is superficial. No great philosopher, no matter how brilliant and systematic, ever uncovers all the implications of his position, foresees every possible objection, or imagines what rival systems might come into being centuries in the future. His work is never finished, and if it is worth finishing, others will come along to do the job. Since their work is, naturally enough, never finished either, a tradition of thought develops, committed to working out the implications of the founder’s system, applying it to new circumstances and challenges, and so forth.

Thus Thomas had Cajetan, Plato had Plotinus, and Aristotle had Aquinas himself – to name just three famous representatives of Thomism, Platonism, and Aristotelianism, respectively. And thus you cannot fully understand Thomas unless you understand Thomism, you cannot fully understand Plato unless you understand Platonism, you cannot fully understand Aristotle unless you understand Aristotelianism, and so on. “But writers in the traditions in question often disagree with one another!” Yes, and that is all the more reason to study them if one wants to understand the founders of these traditions; for the tensions and unanswered questions in a tradition reflect the richness of the system of thought originated by its founder.

Great philosophers, then, are not museum pieces, or shouldn’t be. Karl Popper famously derided the incessant “spectacle cleaning” of those linguistic philosophers who became so obsessed with the words we use to talk about philosophically problematic phenomena that they lost sight of the phenomena themselves. Historians of philosophy can make a similar mistake if they are not careful, becoming so obsessed with the minutiae of historical context that they make the arguments of a Plato or an Aristotle, an Augustine or an Aquinas, a Descartes or a Kant come to seem like fossils, so deeply embedded in the contingent controversies of their times that they can no longer speak to us today.

When an argument presented as paradigmatically Thomistic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, or whatever is dismissed by the historian as “anachronistic” – as an accretion of the later tradition which must be stripped away in order to get at the “authentic” teaching of the founder, or as a reconstruction that goes beyond the actual text – then we are in danger of losing sight of the point of studying the thinkers in question in the first place. As Aquinas himself put it, “the study of philosophy is not about knowing what individuals thought, but about the way things are” (Exposition of Aristotle’s Treatise On the Heavens I.22). An argument as actually stated by some great philosopher of the past may be incomplete or unclear, and seem open to various objections. And yet it may also embody real insights, and contain in embryonic form a more compelling line of thought that later thinkers in the tradition have merely refined and strengthened rather than made from whole cloth. To ignore the latter is not to do justice to the thought of the founder, but precisely to do him an injustice. More to the point, it is to risk failure to discover the truth about some substantive philosophical matter in the name of a pedantic, narrow conception of “scholarship.” Hence those who study (for example) Plato’s arguments for the immorality of the soul and the theory of Forms, or Aquinas’s Five Ways, while ignoring the ways later Platonists and Thomists have interpreted and defended those arguments, blind themselves to the real power of these ideas.

As every Aristotelian knows, however, vices tend to come in pairs. And in avoiding the mistake of fossilizing great thinkers of the past, we must take care not to fall into the opposite error of making them over in our own image. This is what occasionally happens when the contemporary analytic philosopher pulls a volume of some great philosopher of the past off the shelf and decides he’s going to do said philosopher the favor of reconstructing his arguments in a style that might make them acceptable to a referee for Nous or The Philosophical Review. The result is sometimes interesting. But sometimes it involves (say) attributing to Aristotle a “functionalist” philosophy of mind, or interpreting Aquinas’s Third Way as an exercise in possible worlds theorizing. That is to say, the result is occasionally a kind of Frankenstein monster – the attempted reanimation of a (presumed) corpse via the latest philosophical technology, which yields only a grotesque distortion of the original. (Readers interested in these particular examples are referred to Aquinas, which among other things attempts to clear up some common misunderstandings of the Third Way and of the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach to the mind-body problem.)

If the historian of philosophy is sometimes overly attentive to historical context, then, the analytic philosopher is sometimes insufficiently attentive to it. If his standard of philosophical respectability is what he was taught in grad school or what he hears talked about at the latest APA meeting, he is naturally going to assume that if Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, or whomever really has something of interest to say, it must be expressible within the conceptual boundaries with which he and his friends in the profession are familiar. But a past philosopher’s significance is not to be measured in terms of the degree to which he approximates our opinions and assumptions. On the contrary, as Christopher Martin has said, “the great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realise that after all we [moderns] might have been mistaken” (Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, p. 203). A failure to interpret and evaluate the arguments of a past philosopher on their own terms not only entails misunderstanding what he had to say, but also deprives us of the opportunity of uncovering possible errors or limitations in our own thinking.

The only way for a philosopher to avoid both sterile historicism and ahistorical arrogance – both fossils and Frankenstein monsters – is to strive to understand the history of his subject while always keeping in mind that this historical knowledge is not an end in itself, but a means of approaching philosophical truth. In particular, it requires understanding the ongoing traditions of thought to which many of the great thinkers of the past contributed. To understand not just Thomas, Plato, or Aristotle, but Thomism, Platonism, or Aristotelianism, as living systems, is simultaneously to situate these thinkers within their proper intellectual context and to understand their contemporary relevance.

Schrödinger, Democritus, and the paradox of materialism

Erwin Schrödinger was yet another of those early twentieth-century thinkers cognizant of the deeply problematic character of the mechanistic conception of the material world inherited from the early modern period – and yet another to see, in particular, that this conception of matter, far from opening the way to a materialistic solution of the mind-body problem, in fact created the problem and appears to make any materialistic solution to it impossible.

The reason does not (as one might suppose) have anything essentially to do with quantum mechanics, of which Schrödinger was one of the fathers. It has rather to do with a relatively simple philosophical point which was first made by the likes of Cudworth and Malebranche and repeated in recent years by writers like Nagel and Swinburne (as noted in the second of the earlier posts linked to above). Two relevant texts are Schrödinger’s essay “On the Peculiarity of the Scientific World-View” (from What is Life? and Other Scientific Essays) and chapter 6 of his Mind and Matter, entitled “The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities” (reprinted in What is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches – a more recent volume which does not include the earlier essay).

To summarize what I’ve said at greater length in earlier posts, the philosophical point in question is that the early moderns’ move of redefining matter so that it is devoid of color, odor, taste, sound, and the like as common sense understands them necessarily made these sensory qualities inexplicable in materialistic terms. Hence, if one is going to affirm the existence both of matter (as redefined by the moderns) and of the sensory qualities (or “qualia,” as they have come to be known, relocated from the external world to the internal world of the mind), then it seems one is necessarily committed to mind-body dualism of some sort (whether substance dualism or property dualism). The only way to avoid such dualism is either to reject the existence of matter (as Berkeley did), to reject the existence of the sensory qualities (as eliminativists do explicitly and most other materialists do implicitly), or to reject the mechanistic conception of matter that led to the problem in the first place (as Aristotelians do; though Aristotelianism still leads to a non-Cartesian form of dualism – what David Oderberg calls hylemorphic dualism – for reasons that have nothing to do with sensory qualities or qualia).

To be sure, Schrödinger himself does not explicitly draw an anti-materialist conclusion. He notes merely that what he calls the “objectivation” of matter – the conceptual removal from it of anything that smacks of the personal or of mind (cf. Thomas Nagel’s “objective/subjective” distinction) – makes the mind itself deeply mysterious. This is compatible with views like Colin McGinn’s “mysterianism” or Joseph Levine’s “explanatory gap” position, which affirm materialism even as they deny that we can understand, or at least (in Levine’s case) that we do in fact understand, how materialism can be true. Not that Schrödinger himself affirms this kind of view either; he simply calls attention to the problem raised by the modern conception of matter without trying to resolve it. (For my part, I consider McGinn’s and Levine’s positions non-starters. You might as well say, in response to Gödel, “Maybe the consistency of a formal system containing computable arithmetic really is internally provable after all, and our minds are just constitutionally incapable of seeing how.”)

Schrödinger’s emphasis is also less on the mind-body problem per se than on the epistemological paradox he sees implied by the modern “objectivation” of matter. As he puts it in “On the Peculiarity of the Scientific World-View”:

We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [modern scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it. (p. 216)

That is to say, the picture modern science (as informed by an “objectified” mechanistic conception of matter) paints of the natural world presents it as devoid of the sensory qualities and of anything personal. And yet the picture itself exists only within the minds of persons – scientists themselves – and takes as its evidential base the senses, and thus the very sensory qualities it refuses to locate in nature.

This epistemological paradox was a major theme of E. A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (Burtt being, as I have noted before, one of several major early twentieth-century scholars who emphasized the problematic character of the mechanistic revolution, before this theme went down the academic memory hole sometime in the 1960s). But awareness of it goes back much farther than that – indeed (and as Schrödinger reminds us) all the way back to the 5th century B.C., and in particular to Democritus, one of the fathers of atomism. In a famous fragment, Democritus imagines a conversation between the intellect, which (as Democritus naturally assumed) must endorse the atomists’ banishment of the sensory qualities from nature, and the senses, which form the evidential basis for the atomist theory:

Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

It must be emphasized that Democritus is, commendably, calling attention to a difficulty facing a theory that he himself endorses; and that we have no idea how, or even if, he tried to resolve it. It is by no means obvious that any materialist in the intervening millennia has done any better. Many of them have done worse; indeed, vulgar materialists of the New Atheist stripe typically show no awareness that there is a problem here in the first place. Unfortunately, this includes Daniel Dennett, a well-known philosopher of mind. Dennett explicitly endorses an eliminativist position vis-à-vis the sensory qualities (see e.g. his essay “Quining Qualia”) – which is to his credit insofar as (I would argue) any consistent materialist must ultimately be an eliminativist anyway. What is not to his credit is his utter blindness to the deep philosophical puzzles such a position opens up, his peddling of shameless caricatures of anti-materialist views, and in general his refusal to concede that opponents of materialism are motivated by serious philosophical concerns.

Schrödinger provides us with a plausible account of the origins of this sort of blindness (in scientists, anyway – philosophers like Dennett should know better). In “The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities” he writes:

Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do. (p. 164)

In the case at hand, neuroscientists who begin, as every empirical scientist must, with observations – that is to say, with conscious experiences whose character is determined by various sorts of qualia or sensory qualities – go on to construct a theoretical description of the physical and neural processes associated with perception. This theoretical description then takes on, as it were, a life of its own, coming to seem as real or even more real than the concrete experiences that led to it, and the language in which the former is couched comes to be applied to the theorist’s description of the latter. Thus an explanation of “heat” in the sense of molecular motion comes to seem, especially when coupled with neuroscientific data, an explanation of “heat” in the sense of a certain kind of tactile sensory quality; an explanation of “red” in the sense of light of a certain wavelength comes to seem an explanation of “red” in the sense of a certain kind of visual sensory quality; and so forth.

But this is a muddle, a subtle committing of the fallacy of equivocation. The key theoretical concepts – molecular motion, light wavelengths, neural firing patterns, and so forth – are always understood in light of a broadly mechanistic conception of the natural world which follows the early moderns’ project of excluding final causes, sensory qualities and the like from matter and redefining it in abstract mathematical terms. To “explain” sensory qualities or qualia in such “scientific” (i.e. mechanistic and “objectified”) terms is thus really to change the subject. Earlier generations of philosophers and scientists realized this, which is why few of them were materialists – they saw that, by definition as it were, sensory qualities could not be “material” given the new conception of matter. But later generations – especially the current generation of scientists, who tend to be far more specialized and often seem less philosophically-minded or philosophically-educated than their predecessors – have forgotten this conceptual history. And this forgetfulness and philosophical shallowness together with the practical successes of modern science have hardened many of them – or at least the more vocal of the pop science writers among them – into a crude scientism which assumes that there are no philosophical problems, or at least no serious ones, which science is not capable of answering.

Thus, when philosophers come along – whether dualists or the more sophisticated and fair-minded sort of naturalist (e.g. a Searle, a Nagel, or a Chalmers) – and point out that existing neuroscientific “explanations” of consciousness and the like do not in fact explain the relevant phenomena at all, it comes to seem like these philosophers are inventing a new problem in a desperate and obscurantist attempt to salvage a belief in human dignity and specialness. In fact they are simply calling attention to a very old problem that the mechanistic theoretical model itself has created, and of which earlier generations of philosophers and scientists were well aware. In fact it is scientism which fosters obscurantism, ignoring as it does clear conceptual distinctions and forcing all intellectual life into a methodological procrustean bed. And in fact the mechanistic “objectified” conception of matter inherited from the early moderns is not a scientific discovery at all but a philosophical posit, and one which creates philosophical problems rather than solves them.

Obviously I am not claiming to establish these large claims here. (Doing so is in large part what The Last Superstition is about.) And obviously there are different moves a materialist might try to make in order to get around the problems in question (though, equally obviously, I don’t myself think any such moves can succeed). The point is that the problems are real ones, and serious ones. Any naturalist who dismisses them as motivated by irrational religious fanaticism is either ignorant or dishonest; certainly Democritus, Schrödinger, Burtt, Searle, Nagel, Chalmers et al. have no theological ax to grind. It goes without saying that our knowledge of the human brain has come a very long way since the 5th century B.C. But philosophically speaking, the history of materialism from Democritus to Dennett marks a precipitous decline.

Addendum 9/14: It occurs to me on re-reading the post that the Chalmers reference in the first sentence of the second-to-last paragraph is, coupled with the “or,” unintentionally misleading: Chalmers is a naturalist, but he is also a dualist of sorts. My apologies. The conceptual lay of the land vis-à-vis this subject is extremely complex, the range of possible positions is very large, and it is difficult briefly to summarize the issues without oversimplification – especially when (as was the case with this post) one is writing late on a Saturday night!

Is self-ownership axiomatic?

In my recent post on Murray Rothbard, I addressed the question of whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership could be said to be axiomatic. Let’s pursue the question a little bit further. In particular, let’s pursue the question of whether it is even plausible to suggest that the principle is axiomatic in the strictest sense of “axiomatic.”

Notice that I am not asking whether the principle is true; nor am I asking whether there are any good reasons, of some sort or other, to believe it. Those are separate questions. I am asking whether, if it is true and justifiable, its truth and justification are plausibly of the sort that strict axioms enjoy. Again, what I am asking is whether the principle is plausibly axiomatic in the strictest sense.

What sense is that? One traditional way of thinking about it is this: A principle is axiomatic in the strictest sense if any proposition you could give as evidence for it would be less obviously true than the principle itself is. The law of non-contradiction is a standard example. Nothing you could say in defense of the law of non-contradiction is as obviously correct as the law of non-contradiction itself is. Call this special characteristic of strictly axiomatic propositions “self-evidence.”

So, is the libertarian principle of self-ownership axiomatic or self-evident in this sense? Before you answer, keep in mind that the principle says far more than merely that (say) your right hand belongs to you. When you look at your right hand and judge, spontaneously and quite correctly, “This is mine,” you might initially be inclined to think that the principle of self-ownership must be right. Indeed, maybe it is axiomatic!

Not so fast. Your right hand is indeed yours, as is your right foot, your right eye, and every other body part you can name. All well and good – and not terribly controversial. But what exactly does that entail? Does it entail that you are entitled to do absolutely anything you want with those body parts, provided you do not infringe the liberty of others? Does it entail that you can even do things that are immoral – on the grounds that since it’s your body, you have the absolute right to abuse it so long as you harm no one else? More to the point, is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that you can do these things?

Let’s be more specific: Is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that, so long as you harm no one else in doing so, you have an absolute right to do the following: Commit suicide; inject yourself with heroin, even repeatedly, to the point of addiction; have a major body part surgically removed for no reason other than that you just feel like doing so; deliberately engage in self-deception (it’s your mind, after all); and, in general, do to and with yourself things you believe it is immoral to do?

Consider further: Suppose your adult child or best friend informs you that he has decided to do one of these things. To take a clear and fairly simple example, suppose he has become a devout follower of Schopenhauer and has decided, on well-thought out philosophical grounds (rather than some fleeting whim, say), to commit suicide. And suppose you try to talk him out of it, but to no avail. Is it strictly axiomatic or self-evident that you must not use force to prevent him from killing himself – such as by stealing his glass of hemlock, locking him in a padded room, or whatever? Because that is what the libertarian principle of self-ownership entails.

Again, to avoid irrelevant objections, keep in mind that the question is not whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership, radical implications and all, is true or in some way defensible. The question is whether it is strictly axiomatic or self-evident, whether it is strictly axiomatic or self-evident that one has a right to do the things mentioned above, and an obligation to refrain from keeping others, even children and friends, from doing any of them.

When we keep in mind what the principle entails, I think it is quite obvious that the principle is not strictly axiomatic or self-evident. Indeed, this is, I submit, so obvious that it is remarkable that anyone would suggest that it is – as Rothbard may have (though, as I noted in my earlier post, it is not at all clear that Rothbard really meant to use the term “axiom” in anything other than a loose and popular sense). Unlike the law of non-contradiction, it is quite easy to doubt whether the libertarian principle of self-ownership is true; indeed (and again unlike the law of non-contradiction) probably most people on considering it would judge that it is not true. Of course, that doesn’t show that it isn’t true, but it is very strong grounds for doubting that it is self-evident or strictly axiomatic. More to the point, any argument one could appeal to in order to convince the doubters that the principle is true would obviously have to appeal to premises that are more evident than the principle itself is – in which case, it simply cannot be said to be strictly axiomatic.

Perhaps the rhetoric of property led Rothbard astray here. In some contexts, saying “It’s my property” does indeed crisply settle the question of whether one may carry out a certain course of action. But not in all contexts. In everyday life, we are all well aware that the fact that you own your back yard (say) does not entail that you have no obligation in justice to allow the fire brigade access to it in order to get to the burning building behind it, or to avoid using it to engage in dangerous scientific experiments. Conversely, we are well aware that the fact that you have these various obligations does not entail that you don’t “really” own your back yard after all. In everyday contexts, that is to say, we are well aware that to say “X is my property” simply does not entail “I can do absolutely anything I want with X provided doing so violates no one else’s property rights.”

It is only when, after the fashion of “rationalistic” approaches to moral and political thinking of the sort Burke and Hayek criticized, we abstract away from the complex details of human life that property rights can seem have such extreme implications. (It happens, as Wittgenstein might put it, when we “sublime the logic of our language [concerning property].”) Property rights are not all-or-nothing. For almost all theories of property historically – and certainly for classical natural law theory, which is in my view the correct approach to moral questions generally – private property rights, even when very strong, nevertheless come with various qualifications. (For those who are interested, I develop and defend such an approach in my essay “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” which is forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy. As I argue there, the correct approach to property rights rules out both the level of government and taxation that socialists and egalitarian liberals favor, but also the extreme laissez faire position of libertarianism. It is, in short, conservative.)

To suggest that you either go along with Rothbard or you are logically committed to going the whole hog for socialism is just too silly for words. Rothbardians seem to think their man (or maybe some precursor like Lysander Spooner) was the first thinker in history ever to think about property in a consistent way. In fact all he did was simply invent a grotesque caricature of the idea of private property.

(I recall once asking a radical libertarian what he thought he would be obliged to do if his own adult son informed him that he intended to commit suicide and he could not talk him out of it. Troubled, he thought for a moment and then replied that he hoped he would have the courage to do the right thing and allow his son to kill himself. “This,” I thought, “is a young man whose mind has been rotted out by theory.” But, being young and childless, it was merely theory, and we can have good hope that he will reconsider: Growing older and having children are pretty good cures for extreme libertarianism, though unfortunately not infallible ones.)

Anyway, if this judgment is mistaken, appealing to a purported “self-ownership axiom” is not going to show that it is.

Rothbard revisited

I called attention in a recent post to Prof. Gerard Casey’s reply to a critique of Murray Rothbard that I had posted some years ago at the old Right Reason blog. What follows is a response to Casey. (If they have not already done so, interested readers are urged to read both my original piece and Casey’s reply before proceeding, since I will not be recapitulating everything already said.)

The main point of my original piece was to show that, whatever one thinks of his writings on economics, Rothbard was a bad philosopher and therefore unjustified in the stridency with which he asserted some very extreme positions in moral and political philosophy and attacked those who disagreed with those positions. As I emphasized in that piece, the issue is not whether there might be some way or other to salvage this or that Rothbardian claim. The point is rather that Rothbard’s own arguments for his positions in ethics and political philosophy are extremely bad.

Casey begins his defense of Rothbard’s philosophical abilities by saying that “it is not all that difficult to find examples of fallacious, contentious or less-than-perfectly articulated arguments in the works of philosophers who, by general consensus, are far from being mediocre. One could instance David Hume’s treatment of infinite divisibility in A Treatise on Human Understanding, or cite J. S. Mills’ [sic] erstwhile proof of the principle of utility in Chapter IV of his Utilitarianism, or select Aquinas’s Third Way in the Summa Theologiae which, according to some critics, exhibits modal, quantifier shift, and scope fallacies!”

The comparison of Rothbard to Hume, Mill, and Aquinas might seem too risible to be worth responding to. But presumably Casey means to suggest, not that Rothbard was in their rank as a thinker, but only that these eminent philosophers vividly illustrate that an occasional lapse into fallacy does not entail that one has no talent as a philosopher. Fair enough. But I did not claim that Rothbard was a bad philosopher merely because he committed a fallacy here or there. I claimed he was a bad philosopher because his philosophical arguments were as a matter of course crude, superficial, and unoriginal even when otherwise interesting, that his most central philosophical positions maintained a crude and fallacious quality even when developed and restated over the course of several years, and that his absurd confidence in them was in any event out of all proportion to their actual merit. I focused on one of Rothbard’s key arguments in particular as an illustration, but I emphasized that the point was that the kinds of faults it exhibited could easily be found elsewhere in his writings. These faults cannot be attributed to the thinkers Casey mentions.

There are other problems with Casey’s examples in any event. The trouble with the Hume example is that it does not concern something central to Hume’s philosophy, whereas my Rothbard example concerned, again, his key argument in ethics and political philosophy. And contrary to popular belief (and as I show in my forthcoming book Aquinas) Aquinas’s Third Way in fact commits none of the fallacies Casey mentions. (This is yet another instance in which ignorance of the metaphysical assumptions underlying Aquinas’s theistic arguments has led modern commentators badly to misinterpret them.) To be sure, the Mill example is stronger, since the principle of utility is certainly central to Mill’s moral philosophy; and Casey could have added Berkeley’s “master argument” to the list too (though some would defend even Mill and Berkeley from the charge of fallacy). Still, Berkeley gave other and more interesting arguments for his immaterialism, and Mill’s body of significant philosophical work extends well beyond this one argument for utilitarianism, indeed well beyond ethics altogether. Similarly, Hume’s reputation, and Aquinas’s, are well-established apart from the arguments in question. (As my regular readers know, I do think Hume is quite overrated. But I do not deny that he was nevertheless an important philosopher.)

The trouble with Rothbard is that he has no generally recognized body of serious work in philosophy to which one could appeal, in defense of his philosophical significance, in the face of an attack on some particular argument. His handful of arguments in moral and political philosophy just are his philosophical oeuvre; if they are especially bad, his general badness as a philosopher is undeniable. (“But who ever thought Rothbard was a serious philosopher in the first place?” you ask. Well, Rothbardians think he was; indeed, they regard him as a kind of “renaissance man,” and their absurd overestimation of his significance in the history of thought is comparable to Objectivists’ overestimation of Ayn Rand’s significance.)

But let’s move on to the details of Casey’s reply. In my original piece, I set out four main lines of criticism of Rothbard, and Casey’s paper is divided into sections corresponding to each of them, which he labels “Feser’s First Criticism,” “Feser’s Second Criticism,” etc. (with some sub-sections responding to particular issues arising in the course of dealing with each line of criticism). For ease of exposition I will respond to Casey section by section, each section of what follows corresponding to one of his sections or sub-sections. Hopefully this will make our exchange easier to follow that it otherwise would be.

FIRST CRITICISM:

Casey notes that I object that the principle of self-ownership doesn’t follow from the premises Rothbard seems to adduce in support of it, and he concedes that it does not follow from them. But this is irrelevant, Casey says, because Rothbard was not trying to argue for the principle of self-ownership in the first place; he intended it instead as an axiom. Hence my objection is (Casey holds) misdirected.

Now it is true that Rothbard sometimes refers to the thesis of self-ownership as an “axiom.” Still, there are two problems with Casey’s line of defense. First of all, if Rothbard seriously intended the principle of self-ownership as an axiom, then that surely only bolsters my claim that he was a bad philosopher. For the principle of self-ownership is extremely controversial; whether or not it is true, there are many people – including intelligent, rational, and well-informed people – who do not believe that it is. It is in this respect very different from other principles often put forward as axiomatic – the principle of non-contradiction, for example – which have a “self-evident” character and which very few people have ever seriously denied. Hence it is neither at all prima facie plausible to suggest that the thesis of self-ownership be taken as axiomatic, nor wise as a strategy for convincing people to accept a political philosophy that is extremely controversial (as anarcho-capitalism is) to base it on an equally controversial first principle. Even a non-philosopher can see this. Surely a non-mediocre philosopher would have seen it too.

Secondly, in dealing with this first criticism, Casey does not quote in their entirety the relevant passages from For a New Liberty and “Justice and Property Rights.” I do quote the entire For a New Liberty passage toward the beginning of my original piece. The reader who goes back and takes a look at it will see that Rothbard does indeed clearly give an argument – let’s call it the “reductio argument,” since he tries to reduce the denial of self-ownership to absurdity – in defense of the thesis of self-ownership.

Now it is also true, as Casey says, that it is a logical solecism to argue for an axiom or first principle. But given the textual evidence, what follows from this is not that Rothbard didn’t argue for the principle, but that since he did argue for what he claimed was an “axiom,” he was even more muddleheaded than I let on in my original piece. This judgment is given further support by another passage from For a New Liberty where Rothbard asks of what he calls the “nonaggression axiom,” “how is this axiom arrived at? What is its groundwork or support?” and suggests that “there are three broad types of foundation for the libertarian axiom… the emotivist, the utilitarian, and the natural rights viewpoint” (p. 26). How can an axiom be “arrived at” or given a “foundation”? And even if there is some sense in which it can (see below) how is it even intelligible to suggest that that foundation might in theory be utilitarian or emotivist? (Obviously Rothbard himself rejected utilitarian and emotivist approaches; the point is that if some moral principle really is axiomatic, the very idea of an emotivist or utilitarian “foundation” for it cannot even arise in the first place. For if a principle is emotive in content then it is non-cognitive and therefore cannot be an axiom; and if it is supported by utilitarian considerations, then those considerations are logically prior to it and, again, it is therefore not axiomatic.)

Furthermore (and as the passage just quoted indicates) while Rothbard sometimes speaks of self-ownership as axiomatic, he also often speaks instead of the “nonaggression axiom” as what is fundamental to libertarianism, where the “nonaggression axiom” rules out the initiation of violence or the threat of violence against another person or his property. This is evidently a different principle from the self-ownership principle, though there is obviously a connection between them. Indeed, Rothbard treats the principle of self-ownership as a justification for the nonaggression principle: the reason you should not initiate violence against others is that they own themselves. But if the nonaggression principle is itself justified only by reference to the self-ownership principle, in what sense is it “axiomatic”? And if it is not axiomatic – if Rothbard’s reference to the “nonaggression axiom” is not meant seriously (given that the nonaggression principle is actually something he thinks needs to be justified by reference to some other principle) – then the fact that he sometimes refers to the principle of self-ownership as an “axiom” does not show that he really believed it to be strictly axiomatic either.

Hence, either Rothbard was not serious about treating self-ownership and/or nonaggression as axiomatic – that is, he was using “axiom” in some loose, popular sense and not a technical philosophical sense – or, again, he was serious about it, and thus was simply muddleheaded in raising the question of what “foundation” one ought to give such principles. Either way, Casey’s first line of defense fails.

SECOND CRITICISM:

Now Casey also suggests, in the next section of his article, that what I have called Rothbard’s “reductio argument” be understood, not as a direct argument for the thesis of self-ownership, but rather as an indirect defense of the sort that tries to show that anyone who denies self-ownership must be led into a performative self-contradiction. This would be an application of what is known as the method of “retortion,” and it is sometimes deployed in defense of axioms, as Aristotle deploys it in defense of the principle of non-contradiction. So, while a direct argument for an axiom would be a solecism, an indirect defense of the retortion sort is perfectly legitimate; and this, Casey claims, is what Rothbard was up to.

But there are three problems with Casey’s suggestion that the “reductio argument” was intended as an application of the method of retortion. First, while Rothbard deploys the “reductio argument” in For a New Liberty, where he makes much of the idea that libertarianism rests on an “axiom” of non-aggression or (alternatively) self-ownership, he also deploys versions of the same argument in both “Justice in Property Rights” and The Ethics of Liberty, where, interestingly, the “axiom” idea does not play a role. But if this argument was not intended as an application of the retortion strategy in the latter two works (since there is no talk there of an “axiom” of self-ownership), but rather as a direct argument for self-ownership, then we have good reason to think it was intended as a direct argument in For a New Liberty as well (where, as we have seen, Rothbard’s use of the term “axiom” is very slippery in any event).

Moreover, even if Rothbard shifted strategies between For a New Liberty and the later works – that is, even if he intended his argument as an application of the retortion strategy in the earlier work but not in the later works – that would hardly help Casey’s defense. For it would constitute a tacit admission on Rothbard’s own part that the “axiom” approach is implausible and should be abandoned. And in that case, Casey’s appeal to the “axiom” interpretation as a way of rescuing Rothbard’s arguments from my criticisms would be undermined.

Second, the retortion interpretation of what I have called Rothbard’s “reductio argument” is implausible even apart from these textual considerations. For the “reductio argument” goes well beyond the appeal to performative self-contradiction that is central to the retortion strategy, making reference as it does to various empirical economic claims.

Third, even if Rothbard really did for all that intend the “reductio argument” as an exercise in retortion, it is still a very bad argument, for all the reasons set out in my original piece. Indeed, given all the problems outlined in that piece, it is an even worse argument if interpreted as an exercise in retortion, since the whole point of retortion arguments is to provide a crisp and conclusive proof that will close off any further debate.

In my original piece, I noted that Rothbard fails to consider and respond to a number of obvious alternatives to self-ownership that a critic might put forward. Casey considers each of these in turn:

The “no one owns anybody” alternative:

Rothbard argued that “since ownership signifies range of control, [the claim that no one owns anybody, not even himself] would mean that no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly vanish.” In response, I pointed out that “while having ownership of something does imply having a range of control over it, having a range of control over it doesn’t imply ownership … Animals have a range of control over their environment, but since ownership is a moral category implying the having of certain rights, and animals (by Rothbard’s own admission) have no rights, it follows that they have no ownership of anything. And of course, their lack of ownership of anything hasn’t caused animals as a whole to ‘vanish,’ ‘quickly’ or otherwise.”

Casey suggests that I am interpreting Rothbard uncharitably here, and that he intended the claim that “ownership signifies range of control” not as a conditional – in which case he would be guilty of affirming the consequent (since from “If I own x, then I have a range of control over x” it doesn’t follow that “If I have a range of control over x, then I own x”) – but rather as a technical definition and thus a biconditional. In particular, for Casey, what Rothbard is saying in the passage in question is that “the term ‘own’ in the context of one’s body” entails by definition “the right to control one’s body free of coercive interference.”

One problem with this move is that it simply does not fit the textual evidence. In the passage in question, Rothbard doesn’t say that “ownership of one’s body signifies the right to a range of control over it” but rather merely that “ownership signifies range of control.” That is to say, in this particular passage Rothbard is evidently concerned with ownership in general and not merely with self-ownership; and he is not making the (normative) point that ownership entails a right, but rather the (descriptive) point that it entails certain practical abilities such as the ability to feed, clothe, and shelter oneself.

Another, related problem is that Casey’s proposal entirely strips Rothbard’s argument of whatever force it might have had. If Rothbard is saying that the rejection of self-ownership would entail the practical impossibility of doing what is necessary to stay alive, then he is making an interesting claim that, if true, would constitute very strong grounds for endorsing the thesis of self-ownership. But if he is saying only that the rejection of self-ownership would entail the rejection of a “right to control one’s body free of coercive interference,” then he is not saying anything his critic doesn’t already know. The critic can say “Yes, of course denying self-ownership entails denying such a right. But so what? Since I deny self-ownership, I’m quite happy to deny also that there is such a right. What you need to show is that denying self-ownership would also entail something that I would not want to accept – such as the extinction of the human race. And your merely definitional point does nothing at all to show that.”

The “God owns us” alternative:

In response to my point that Rothbard fails even to consider the possible objection that it is God, rather than we, who own us, Casey points out that I myself once asserted in my book On Nozick that “someone might respond that God owns us, so that we cannot own ourselves … But self-ownership is no more inconsistent with belief in God than private property is.” He then says that “Professor Feser is entirely within his rights to change his mind on the matter of self-ownership, if that is what he has in fact done, but he would surely not wish to have it held against his competence as a philosopher that he once endorsed a position that is substantially the same as that put forward by Rothbard.”

But this is weak even as an ad hominem. There is no inconsistency between what I said in On Nozick and what I said in criticism of Rothbard. For my criticism of Rothbard was not that there is no way to reconcile self-ownership with God’s ownership of us. My criticism of Rothbard was rather that he did not even address the issue in the first place, even though it is (as Casey himself acknowledges) an objection that many theists might naturally suppose (whether correctly or incorrectly) has force against the thesis of self-ownership. (Why Casey thinks Rothbard himself held “substantially the same position” as the one I took in On Nozick is something he does not tell us.) Nor is it any good to say, as Casey does, that Rothbard should not be expected to address every possible criticism, since the objection at hand is hardly an obscure one, raising as it does an issue that goes back at least to Locke. Moreover, Rothbard was famously on friendlier terms with theists than many other contemporary libertarians have been, and in other contexts more sensitive to their concerns than (say) a Rand or a Nozick would have been. There is simply no excuse for his having failed to address this issue.

Moreover, to say that self-ownership can be reconciled with God’s ownership of us does not entail that a radically libertarian conception of self-ownership can be reconciled with it. For example, Locke, who claims both that God owns us and also that there is nevertheless a sense in which we own ourselves, denies, on theological grounds, that our self-ownership rights can possibly be absolute. In particular, for Locke, they cannot be strong enough to allow either suicide or the selling of oneself into slavery. (See my book Locke for detailed discussion of this issue.) And since Casey raises the question of my current views on this matter, I should note for the record that they have indeed changed: I would now say that the standard contemporary libertarian conception of self-ownership is not compatible either with classical natural law theory or with theism. (Some of the reasons for this judgment are given here, and my current views on self-ownership are developed in my essay “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” forthcoming in Social Philosophy and Policy.)

The various “partial ownership of others” alternatives:

Casey’s treatment of these alternatives is brief, and can be found on page 9 of his essay. Go read it if you haven’t already, because since I’m not even clear what his argument is supposed to be, I fear I might misrepresent it if I try to summarize it.

In response to my criticism of Rothbard here, Casey says that “ownership implies the right to dispose of one’s possessions in any way one chooses, subject to the limitations of not infringing upon the rights of others. To the extent that one cannot so dispose, to that extent one is not an owner.” I can only speculate that his point is that talk of “partial ownership” in my proposed alternatives is therefore somehow suspect: one either owns something or one doesn’t. But Casey himself uses the qualifier “to that extent,” which appears implicitly to acknowledge that ownership can be partial. And that it can be partial is in any case obvious from everyday experience. For example, you and your roommate might buy a car together and come to some agreement as to who can drive it and when. True, to the extent that you can’t drive it just whenever you want, “you are not an owner,” but only to that extent; and this is just a roundabout way of saying that you and your roommate are each partial owners, rather than either being a complete owner. So, I am not clear how what Casey says is supposed to be a problem for my criticism of Rothbard.

Casey also suggests that Rothbard’s assertion of “the absurdity of ‘proclaiming that every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself’” shows that there is something inherently fishy in the very idea of everyone having partial ownership of everyone else. For that idea too entails (Casey claims) “the peculiar situation of people being able to own all or some of other people but not able to own themselves.” Again, I am not at all clear what Casey is talking about. The “partial ownership of others” scenarios in question do not involve “people being able to own all or some of other people but not able to own themselves.” Rather, they involve people who do own themselves at least partially while also having partial ownership of others. Hence the absurdity Rothbard thinks he sees in the scenario he describes is not even relevant to the cases I was describing. Casey seems to be just insisting dogmatically that ownership is all-or-nothing, when whether this is the case or not is precisely (part of) what is in question.

THIRD CRITICISM:

One of Rothbard’s claims was that to assert a right of ownership over others entails asserting that those others are subhuman. In response, I pointed out that some defenders of slavery would deny this, and insist that recognizing the full humanity of others is consistent with claiming a right to keep them as slaves. Once again, I am not clear about what Casey’s reply to this objection is supposed to be. It seems to me he does little more than simply re-assert Rothbard’s position. He does say that any claim on the part of some to have ownership rights over others would have to be “grounded in some significant difference between the two groups. Accidental differences of height or weight, or hair colour or language will obviously not suffice to ground such a right in one group of human beings as against another.” True enough. But it doesn’t follow that the difference in question would entail that the one group is less human than the other. For example, a would-be slave owner might try to argue that while he and his prospective slave are both human, the (alleged) fact that the slave has a much lower degree of intelligence shows that he is more like a human child than a human adult and thus cannot be trusted to run his life for himself. To answer such a would-be slave owner, then, one must do more than merely point out that slaves are human.

For what it is worth, classical natural law theory would absolutely rule out chattel slavery, not on the grounds of the sort of radical self-ownership Rothbard affirms, but rather on the ground that each human being has a natural end to which all other ends – including those of a would-be slave owner, but including also his own contingent ends – are subordinate. That is to say, since I am ordered by nature to certain ends, I cannot be turned away from them by some other human being, as if I were his property; but neither do I have a natural right to do just whatever I feel like doing with myself, as if I were, in some strong sense, my own property. Libertarians often claim that the only way to show that chattel slavery is wrong is to affirm (their understanding of) self-ownership. But in fact, the actual, natural law reasons why chattel slavery is wrong also entail that libertarianism is wrong. (Classical natural law theory does allow that some lesser forms of servitude – a life-long work arrangement as punishment for a crime, say, or as a way of paying off a debt – can in principle be legitimate, but in practice are too fraught with moral hazard to be justifiable.)

Here as elsewhere, though, the issue is not whether Rothbard’s position is or is not correct or defensible. The point is that Rothbard’s own arguments for his position are subject to obvious objections that he does not even consider.

FOURTH CRITICISM:

Rothbard asserted that “allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirements for life: production and exchange.” In response, I pointed out that “animals do not engage in ‘production and exchange,’ certainly not in the laissez-faire economics sense intended by Rothbard, but they are obviously alive.”

In defense of Rothbard, Casey says: “Rothbard is clearly not saying that those who do not engage in production and exchange are not alive. If he had claimed this, there would be some point to Feser’s animal counterexample.” Well, of course Rothbard wasn’t saying that, but neither was I claiming that he was. The question isn’t whether those who don’t engage in production and exchange in Rothbard’s sense will instantly die. The question is whether life could continue over time without production and exchange. Rothbard is evidently claiming that it could not; as Casey puts it, “Rothbard’s point, if I understand it correctly, is an economic one to the effect that production and exchange are substantive human activities that are essential to human survival.” But that Rothbard is wrong is obvious from the animal example. Animals don’t ‘produce’ or ‘exchange’ things in the economic sense, and yet they are able to sustain themselves in existence. Human beings could do the same if they needed to, hunter-gatherer style. To be sure, this wouldn’t be a very satisfying way of life for us civilized people, but that’s beside the point. Rothbard is trying to show that unless you accept his conception of self-ownership, you are logically committed to a system that would make continued human life impossible. And he simply fails to come anywhere close to showing that. Indeed, it is obvious that he fails to show it – the animal counterexample is hardly that difficult to come up with – which was exactly my point. Here, as elsewhere, Rothbard makes preposterously bold claims without even bothering to address obvious possible objections.

There are also obvious difficulties with Rothbard’s claim that the “parasitism” of one group living off another is inconsistent with the system of production and exchange. One problem is that it obviously isn’t true: By Rothbard’s own anarcho-capitalist lights, the history of the human race is largely a history of “parasites” (e.g. governments) living off of the wealth generated by those who produce and exchange. If such “parasitism” is incompatible with a system of production and exchange, how has this system been able to survive so long, “parasites” and all?

Of course, Rothbard might claim that, even if this is possible as a practical matter, there is no economic principle that could justify it. But (a critic might ask) since it is practically possible, how could any economic principle that ruled it out itself be justified? Wouldn’t the centuries-long empirical, practical success of such a “parasitic” system falsify any such economic principle? Alternatively, Rothbard might hold that such parasitism is ruled out by a moral rather than economic principle. But if so, it cannot be the principle of self-ownership that rules it out, because that would make the argument in question – which is intended to establish self-ownership – a circular one.

Moreover, it has to be a moral principle strong enough to rule out, not just slavery – which, as we have seen above, there is ample moral reason to reject in any case – but all forms of “parasitism,” since Rothbard’s claim seems to be that parasitism as such is incompatible with production and exchange. But such a principle would therefore entail that children, elderly parents, the infirm, etc. – all of whom are “parasites” in Rothbard’s sense, since they live “at the expense” of others without producing or exchanging – have no right to our assistance. Some Rothbardians would no doubt try to fudge this obscene consequence by claiming that we have in many cases “consented” to help such people, so that our obligations to them are contractual and thus compatible with the system of production and exchange. This is not only ad hoc and implausible – such a libertarian reduction of all human relationships to economic ones is, for my money, as preposterous and repulsive as the Marxist version – but clearly won’t cover every case even by the Rothbardian’s own lights. Fetuses resulting from unplanned pregnancies and cripples without friends, families, marketable skills, or a nearby charity are just out of luck in a Rothbardian “society.” (Indeed, for Rothbard, unwanted unborn children must be regarded as “coercive parasites” – which, from a classical natural law theory point of view, is pretty much a reductio ad absurdum of his entire moral and political philosophy.)

Any moral principle strong enough to get Rothbard what he needs in order to salvage the argument in question would, then, be either question-begging or prima facie highly implausible. But again, whether such a principle could ultimately be defended is not what is at issue. The point is that the potential problems with Rothbard’s position should be obvious, and yet he failed even to consider them.

So, Casey’s defense of Rothbard fails. Indeed, our consideration of it has indicated that Rothbard may have been an even worse philosopher than I let on in my original post. Which is saying something.