Letters
Vol. 16 No. 5 · 10 March 1994
From Robert Nozick
In the last portion of a generally positive review of
The Nature of Rationality (
LRB, 27 January),
Ian Hacking unaccountably puts forward four propositions of his own
manufacture and tries to lay them off on me. These are: 1. If a trait
distinguishes humans from animals, and if individuals vary in degree in
this trait, then some individuals are closer to animality than others.
2. Some individuals
are closer to animality than others. 3. A
free-market society is biologically inevitable. 4. Whatever (adaptation)
evolution produces is good. My book does not endorse these propositions
or make the arguments that Hacking puts forward in his review: I do not
assert these propositions, I do not believe them, I find them repugnant
and I think they can be shown to be false. This letter’s primary aim is
to distinguish Hacking’s arguments and voice from my own. I also hope
to convince readers of Hacking that his theses are false and untenable.
In
addition to false and misguided theses, Hacking also uses figures of
speech and rhetoric to insinuate what he has no basis for asserting
explicitly. I had speculated that rationality might be an evolutionary
adaptation, and that just as individuals show biological variation in
other traits that play a complementary role in social co-operation, they
also might vary in the intensity of their capacity for rationality.
Hacking writes that if rationality has degrees, it ‘turns out to be no
more a human universal than skin pigment’. These are Hacking’s words,
and this is Hacking’s analogy, carefully chosen to insinuate racism.
Throughout my discussion I spoke of ‘variety among the members of a
group’, never of differences between groups. My one mention of groups
spoke of ‘cultures whose traditions are unreceptive to Weberian
rationality’. Because, following Max Weber, I had spoken of one form of
rationality as extending its sway in the world, Hacking also writes of
rationality’s ‘biologically ordained mastery of the universe and its
denizens’ – am I mistaken, or is this Nazi-like rhetoric?
Hacking’s
first thesis is this. If rationality distinguishes people from animals,
and if people differ in their degree of rationality, then it follows
(and we must infer) that ‘some people are closer to animality than
others.’ Let us call this Hacking’s Inference to Animality Thesis.
Presumably this thesis is not only about rationality. If
any
trait distinguishes people from animals, and if people differ in degree
along this trait, then Hacking would have us infer that ‘some people are
closer to animality than others.’ Many writers have claimed that
language is what distinguishes people from animals but, despite the fact
that different individuals develop and use this linguistic capacity to
different extents, to my knowledge no one other than Hacking has claimed
that these writers said, believed or had to infer that some individuals
are closer to being animals than others. Noam Chomsky emphasises that
all human beings, very quickly, learn quite specific grammars from
paltry data, and he speculates that there is a specialised biological
basis for such learning. All humans possess this capacity to learn
language yet Shakespeare and Joyce draw upon and extend the full
resources of English, and they write sentences and lines that I could
never aspire to write. Perhaps my difference from them is solely
environmental, but I tend to doubt that had I been raised in their exact
environment I would have their same literary skills. There may be a
biological basis to differences among individuals in their capacities to
use language or these differences may stem from complicated mixtures of
biological and environmental factors. If language distinguishes human
beings from animals, and human beings differ in their linguistic
capacities, does it follow, as Hacking claims, that some individuals are
closer to being animals than others?
The important gulf between
humans and animals is this: all humans are able to learn and use a human
language; no animals are. The large differences in linguistic ability
among humans are relatively minor by comparison. All people have passed
the significant threshold, and the variations do not put some
individuals closer to those on the other side of the threshold. Suppose
that ability to fly unaided is what distinguishes birds from other
animals. Yet some birds fly more swiftly than others, and with greater
dexterity, and some can fly higher. Still, the slower flyers are not
more non-birdlike than their fellow birds; they are not closer to being
cats. All are birds, equally birds, by virtue of being able to fly
unaided. It doesn’t matter that they show different skills in flight.
Similarly
for other human traits. Other writers think that not only consciousness
but a capacity for self-consciousness is what distinguishes people from
animals. It doesn’t follow that the rest of us are closer to being
animals than are such acknowledged geniuses of self-consciousness as
Montaigne, Henry James and Sigmund Freud.
All humans share a
capacity for rationality. If we suppose that it is this capacity that
distinguishes people from animals, still, the gulf that separates people
from animals constitutes a threshold all people have crossed, compared
to which the differences among individuals in their rationality are
minor. If there are individuals whose capacity for rationality is less
intense or less developed, they are not closer to animals, any more than
are those whose linguistic capacity is less intense or less developed.
The
writers who wished to distinguish people from animals were not seeking a
biological definition, say in terms of number of chromosomes. They were
looking for a valuable trait, one to compliment human beings with. With
every proposed candidate for such a trait, and not just
rationality, individuals show variation. Since I do not accept Hacking’s
Inference to Animality thesis, I do not infer that some people are
closer to animality than others. The question is whether Hacking himself
can avoid this serious and monstrous error. There are only two ways:
either Hacking must hold that the whole project of commending people by
distinguishing them from animals is in error and is intrinsically
objectionable, whatever trait it focuses upon, or Hacking must propose a
valuable trait that serves this purpose on which individuals do not
show any variation at all. However, Hacking does not follow either of
these two ways in his review and since he does endorse the Inference to
Animality Thesis, it appears, therefore, that Hacking does accept that
conclusion that ‘some people are closer to animality than others’. On
the other hand, I reject Hacking’s Inference to Animality Thesis, and I
also reject its conclusion.
In my book, I was not, in fact,
attempting to distinguish people from other existing animals, and I
would not be distressed to learn that chimpanzees or dolphins or Alpha
Centaurians had the capacity to be rational, self-conscious, use
language etc. At the end of a book, a portion of which offered
evolutionary speculations about rationality, I wrote: ‘Although our
rationality is, initially, an evolved quality – the nature of
rationality includes the Nature in it – it enables us to transform
ourselves and hence transcend our status as mere animals.’ It has
enabled all of us to do that.
In
The Examined Life, I
wrote that authors should take steps to guard against their ideas being
distorted and misapplied. It is, of course, extremely difficult to
anticipate the most heinous distortions. Racism is an abomination, a
plague humanity has inflicted upon itself. It leads to horrors, it is
false, and it morally corrupts those who see the world through its
distorted lens. I thought it unnecessary to say anything this evident in
the book, but I did speak of related more subtle matters. I criticised
Thomas Sowell’s argument that discrimination against blacks in the
United States is not very serious; I said that the even application of
given standards is not enough to show non-discrimination, there also
must be no bias in the selection of which standards to apply; and I used
this distinction to criticise an often cited statistical argument that
there was no discrimination against women in university graduate
admissions (pages 103-104 and note 59). There could be no greater
distortion of my book than what Hacking does: to enlist it to aid the
racist and cognate arguments which Hacking makes or insinuates.
Hacking
puts forward two other theses which are false, misguided, and nowhere
proposed in my book. These theses hold that a free-market economy is
biologically inevitable, and that whatever is biologically selected for
is therefore good.
I reject the view that a free-market economy is
biologically inevitable. First, even if rationality is a biological
adaptation, there is no necessity that a society will be built around
that particular biological trait rather than around some other one.
Second, other modes of social organisation also utilise rationality – a
free-market economy is relatively recent, after all. Third, a market
economy makes special use of a particular form of rationality, Weberian
rationality, but there is no biological necessity that a society will
utilise that. Even if Weberian rationality most flourishes in a market
economy, and even if there were a
social-scientific law that
says all societies must eventuate in ones where Weberian rationality
most flourishes – I know of no such law – this would not make a market
economy biologically inevitable.
While in
The Nature of Rationality
I did not discuss the relation of evolution to a market economy at all,
I did explicitly reject Hacking’s Biological Inevitability Proposition
in a previous book,
The Examined Life, where I wrote (page 281):
Issues about human nature have tended to be discussed in terms of what traits or features are unalterable
– for example, are people ineradicably possessive and self- and
family-centred or (this seems to be the implicit alternative) is
socialism possible? It seems more fruitful to consider how much energy
society would have to expend to alter or diminish certain traits and how
much energy to maintain modes of cultural socialisation that would
avoid these traits. Innate human nature is best conceived not as a set
of fixed outcomes but as a gradient of difficulty: here is how steep the
price is for avoiding certain traits. So while human nature may not
make certain social arrangements impossible, it may make them difficult
to achieve and maintain.
Biology does not determine
market forms, much less make them inevitable. Although market society is
not biologically inevitable, not every biological determination of a
feature of society need be repugnant. Someone’s attitude towards
biological determination, if it exists, will depend mainly upon an
evaluation of the character of the determined feature in comparison to
that of the excluded alternatives (unless that person’s vision of human
autonomy demands – as mine does not – society’s complete freedom from
any biological constraint).
I also reject Hacking’s proposition
that whatever evolution produces is good. At the close of my speculation
about an evolutionary explanation of the economist’s motivational
assumption of wealth maximisation (an assumption economists apply to
explain behaviour in all societies, market or not), based upon the
(empirical) supposition that throughout most of human history, except
for the past hundred and fifty years, wealthy people tended to reproduce
more, producing more children who themselves lived to reproductive age,
I wrote: ‘Are so few of us concerned with the higher things of life
because those of our ancestors’ contemporaries who did care left fewer
offspring and
we are descended from those who tended to care
about material possessions instead?’ (page 127). Hardly a lauding of
whatever evolution might produce! (Nor could my detailed discussion of
the technicalities of evolutionary fitness and function on pages 114-119
fit with an uncritical attitude towards evolution’s products.) The
adulation of whatever evolution produces is absurd and, in some
imaginable instances, evil.
When in the last few pages of
The Nature of Rationality
I turned from more technical reflections on rationality to consider its
place and role in the modern world, I drew upon Max Weber to see
rationality, in its Weberian form, as an enormously transformative force
(of course, as embodied in people, their actions, and the institutions
these form, not as some transcendent force). I wrote:
Rationality
has reshaped the world. This is the great theme of Max Weber’s writing:
economic and monetary calculation, bureaucratic rationalisation,
general rules and procedures came to replace action based upon personal
ties, and market relations were extended to new arenas. Rationality,
together with related institutional changes that explicitly utilise and
depend upon rationality, has brought many benefits and thus enabled
rationality to extend its domain further.
Yet this has made the
world, in various ways, inhospitable to lesser degrees of rationality.
Those cultures whose traditions are unreceptive to Weberian rationality
have fared less well. Within Western societies, the balance has shifted
in the division of traits that served in hunter-gatherer societies.
Rationality first was able to extend its sway by bringing benefits to
other traits too, but the other traits became more dependent upon
rationality and rationality became more powerful and subject to fewer
constraints. Rationality is proceeding now to remake the world to suit
itself, altering not only its own environment but also that in which all
other traits find themselves, extending the environment in which only
it can fully flourish. In that environment, the marginal product of
rationality increases, that of other traits diminishes; traits that once
were of co-ordinate importance are placed in an inferior position. This
presents a challenge to rationality’s compassion and to its imagination
and ingenuity: can it devise a system in which those with other traits
can live comfortably and flourish – with the opportunity to develop
their rationality if they choose – and will it?
In
these paragraphs I noted a powerful trend in the modern world, and I see
a problem this presents. Does Hacking think it is not a powerful trend?
Does he think it does not have serious consequences on individuals’
lives and presents no serious problem? It is ironic that the very
paragraph where I thought I was pointing out a problem attendant upon
the spread of capitalism with its Weberian rationality is the one
Hacking uses to draw a conclusion celebrating – the words are Hacking’s,
and are the last words of his review – ‘the most rational ones …
[being] engaged in a biologically ordained mastery of the universe and
its denizens’.
It is astounding that Hacking, a philosopher with
some reputation as an intellectual historian, can think it legitimate to
play so fast and loose with what an author says. I speak of individual
differences within a group, Hacking introduces talk of ‘skin pigment’; I
worry about the dominance of Weberian rationality, Hacking introduces
talk of ‘biologically ordained mastery’. And Hacking closes by writing:
Just
look at the extraordinary slide we see in this book. We pass from
technical discussions of paradoxes and dilemmas within a rigorous formal
theory, to a hypostasised entity, rationality, that is out there
‘extending its sway’ (swaying not the mind but the world order). This
entity is biological, the product of evolutionary struggle. There is a
stupendous is/ought move here. Rationality is – well – rational. It’s
about right decision, reasonableness: that’s value. Evolution is where
we have got to: that’s fact. So we have got to what’s right. We who have
arrived at a free-market economy have not invented another of the
varied cultural forms that so characterise the amazing creativity of our
socially imaginative species. The present dominating cultural form is
presented as inevitable, contingent only on the course of neo-Darwinian
evolution itself.
Where to begin? When I say that
rationality changes the world, I, of course, mean that it is the
continuing rational actions of individuals, and the ensuing
institutional effects, that produce these changes, not some hypostasised
entity. And I nowhere speak of evolutionary ‘struggle’. Hacking charges
next that ‘there is a stupendous is/ought move here,’ in the book. It
is difficult to reconstruct the steps of Hacking’s move, which exists
only in his review, not in my book. The
is starting point is the book’s hypothesis that rationality is an evolutionary adaptation. The supposed move to
ought
appears, from what Hacking writes, to have two major components: a step
to rationality’s being valuable (because evolution produced it), and a
step to a free-market society being biologically inevitable and hence
valuable. Each step is muddled and I do not make either one. However, I
do think that rationality
is valuable; that is why I wrote a
book on the subject. So evolution did produce something that also is
valuable, but it is not valuable
because evolution produced it –
there is no is/ought move here. (I denied earlier the propositions that
whatever evolution produces is good, and that a free market society is
biologically inevitable.) I could examine closely Hacking’s presentation
of the supposed first step to show how muddled it is. (There is less to
examine in Hacking’s presentation of the second step about biological
inevitability; he just asserts it.) However, there is no point to such
close examination because Hacking wouldn’t deny that these two steps are
muddled – that’s why he calls it a ‘slide’. But where does this slide
take place? Where exactly does the book make this stupendous is/ought
move? Nowhere but in Hacking’s mind. Five lines after his sentences
quoted above, Hacking gives us his closing words about ‘the most
rational ones … (being) engaged in a biologically ordained mastery of
the universe and its denizens’.
How can Hacking have proceeded in
this bizarre and irresponsible fashion? At one point he writes: ‘I’m
worried that no reviewer I’ve come across – the book has been out for
some time now – has mentioned this readily noticed inference’ (to the
conclusion that some people are closer to animality than others). The
reason no other reviewer of the book mentioned this is plain: it is just
not there.
It is possible that even Hacking does not accept the
Inference to Animality Thesis, for he says that its conclusion ‘appears
to follow’. I don’t think it follows, and have shown that it doesn’t. If
Hacking also doesn’t think it follows then his attempt to pin on me a
conclusion that I don’t state via an inference that I don’t make and
that he himself knows to be invalid is even more reprehensible.
I too would find offensive and repugnant a book fitting the description Hacking offers. To so describe
The Nature of Rationality
is a slanderous distortion. Hacking mixes my sentences with grotesque
musings and inferences that are wholly his own contribution. It is
loathsome that he fabricates, and seeks to attribute to me, theses which
I condemn utterly.
Robert Nozick
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Vol. 16 No. 6 · 24 March 1994
From Ian Hacking
There is one important difference between Robert Nozick and myself (
Letters, 10 March).
He speculates that rationality might be an evolutionary adaptation. He
calls it a ‘trait’. I think of it as cultural. I do not conceive of it
as a trait at all (
trait meaning ‘a genetically determined characteristic or condition’ –
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
third edition, 1992). Hence not only are the four theses that Nozick
calls ‘Hacking’s theses’ not mine, but the first one, about traits, is
also not in my opinion relevant. I cannot find any reason for holding
that rationality, in the sense of the earlier parts of the book, can be
an evolutionary adaptation – although I’m sure that only our species
could develop that idea of rationality. It is a social product of a very
powerful sort, admirably expounded by Nozick himself. But it is not a
trait that individuals have in varying degrees. People in a society that
values rationality may reason better or worse, by the current standards
of that society, but one is not thereby more rational than another.
Other communities may not value the same forms of rationality, at least
in the very theoretical version favoured by Nozick. It is a group thing,
as are all cultural artifacts, and Nozick is offering a sophisticated
philosophical analysis of a concept of rationality expressed in a large
and relatively homogeneous group to which both of us belong. There may
be an underlying sense in which humans have a capacity to reason.
Nozick’s rationality, however, is not something inherited but a
particular social form that is acquired.
The differences between
us matter – they are differences between a philosopher who feels closer
to evolutionary biology and cognitive science, and another who feels
closer to cultural anthropology. Because of the time-honoured Western
connection between rationality and humanity, these differences have
political and social meanings, and your readers need to see how things
look from the two distinct perspectives. Hence although my review was,
as Nozick notes, ‘generally positive’, I was critical at the end. I
welcome his clarifications and the overall stance expressed in his
letter.
Ian Hacking
University of Toronto
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