8 FREEDOM

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Can this be done? Can philosophy restore the faith in human freedom, when science seems so entirely to dispense with it? I believe that the answer is yes. But there is no greater proof of human freedom, than the vested interest in denying it; and philosophy, which persuades only by speaking softly, is unlikely to win by a show of hands.

     We make choices, and carry them out; we praise and blame one another for our acts and omissions; we deliberate about the future and make up our minds. Like the animals, we have desires; but, unlike the animals, we also make choices - we can choose to do what we do not want to do, and want to do what we do not choose. All these facts seem to imply that we are free to do more than one thing, and that what we actually do is our choice, and our responsibility.

     The belief in freedom seems at first sight to conflict with scientific determinism, which is the view that every event has a cause, and that every event is also determined by its cause. A determines B if B has to happen, given A. The usual argument given for determinism is that the relation between cause and effect is law-like': one event causes another only if there is a law connecting them. And laws have no exceptions. In which case, given the sum of true scientific laws, and a complete description of the universe at any one time, a complete description of the universe at any other time may be deduced. Hence the way the world is at any [98] future time is fully determined by the way the world is now. This goes for my actions too. What I shall do at any future moment is therefore inexorable, given present (and past) conditions. So how can I be free?

     A very old-fashioned view of science is supposed in that account. Scientific laws do have exceptions. They tell us, as a rule, what is probable, given certain conditions. Quantum mechanics holds that even the ultimate laws of the universe must be phrased in terms of probabilities. It is therefore never true that the effect must follow, given the cause; only, at best, that it is very likely to follow.

     This does not remove the problem, however. For even if the law connecting cause and effect is expressed in terms of probability, it is still the case that the effect was produced by the cause, which was produced by its cause, and so on ad infinitum. Hence an action is the result of causes which stretch back in time, to some point before the agent's own existence. His wielding the dagger was caused by movements in the muscles which were caused by impulses in the nerves which were ... Eventually we emerge from the series of causes at the other side of the human person, in a place where he is not. So what part did he play in the action, given that the conditions were in place before his birth which were to lead to it? And in what sense was he free to do otherwise?

     The problem with such an argument is that it is essentially rhetorical: it is an attempt to shift the burden of proof onto those who believe in freedom. Instead of proving that we are not free, it asks us to prove that we are. But why should we do that, when it is obvious that we are free, and when we have yet to be given an argument for thinking otherwise? Hume argued that the idea of freedom arises when we attribute the consequences of an action to the agent, by way of praise and blame. There is nothing in this idea that either affirms or denies determinism, and its grounds are unaffected by the advance of science. Our problem [99] arises because we neglect to ask what we are doing, in describing an action as free. Only if we know what we are doing, will we really understand the concept: and the belief that an action, to be free, must be free from the chain of causes, results either from intellectual indolence, or from a misguided will to believe.

     But what exactly are we doing, in describing an action as free? The problem of free-will is easily run together with another - the problem of the subject, and its relation to the world of objects. In a magnificent work of synthesis, Kant argued that only a 'transcendental subject' could be free, that such a subject is essentially outside nature, and that its freedom is also a form of obedience - obedience not to causal laws, but to the necessary and eternal laws of reason. He then had the task of showing how this transcendental subject could act in the realm of nature, and manifest its freedom here and now. In other words, he stumbled across another 'point of intersection of the timeless with time'. In the end, he was inclined to say, we know that we are free, since freedom is the pre-condition of all decision-making, including the decision to worry about freedom; at the same time we cannot understand this thing that we know, since the understanding stops at the threshold of the transcendental. Whatever lies beyond the threshold cannot be brought under concepts, and therefore cannot be thought. To which there is an obvious response: have you not brought it under concepts, in explaining the problem? If not, perhaps you should heed the last proposition of Wittgenstein's Tractates - That whereof we cannot speak, we must consign to silence'.

     Like all attempts to say what cannot be said, Kant's takes up many pages. Its point is revealed, not in the unsayable conclusions, but in the intelligible approach to them. The first step in that approach is to put aside the word 'freedom', and look instead at the practice in which it occurs: the [100] practice of holding people to account for what they do. Imagine walking down a street, minding your own business, when suddenly confronted by a mugger. Without regard for your desires or feelings in the matter, he strikes you to the ground, removes your wallet, and walks calmly away as you nurse your wounds. If there is such a thing as a free action, then this was it. Not only do you condemn the mugger; you and others will seek to punish him, and feel anger and resentment so long as he goes free. He is responsible for your loss, for your wounds, and for your damaged peace of mind: he acted deliberately in causing your suffering, and cared for nothing but his own advantage.

     Imagine a slightly different case. You have entrusted your child to your friend for the day, being called away on urgent business, and the child being too young to look after itself. Your friend, intending no harm, but drinking more than he should, leaves the child to its own devices, with the result that it strays into the road and is injured by a passing car. Nobody in this situation acted deliberately so as to cause the child's injury. But your friend was nevertheless responsible. His negligence was the key factor in the catastrophe, since by neglecting his duty, he made the accident more likely. To say that he neglected his duty is to say that there are things which he ought to have done which he left undone. You are angry and resentful; you reproach him; and lay the blame for the accident at his door.

     Imagine yet another case. You have asked someone to look after your child, and he does so scrupulously, until suddenly called away by a cry of distress from the house next door. While he is absent, helping his neighbour, who would have died without his assistance, your child wanders into the roadway and is injured. You hold your friend responsible at first, are angry and reproachful; but on learning all the facts, you acknowledge that he acted rightly, in the circumstances, and is therefore not to blame.
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     The three cases illustrate the idea, fundamental to all human relations, of responsibility. They show that a person can be held to account, not only for what he does deliberately, but also for the consequences of what he does not do. And they show that responsibility is mitigated by excuses, and enhanced by negligence or self-centred disregard. If you study the law of negligence, or the legal concept of 'diminished responsibility', you will see that the absolute distinction that we may be tempted to draw, between free and unfree actions, is no more than a philosophical gloss on a distinction which is not absolute at all, but a distinction of degree. Persons are the subject of a constant moral accounting, and our attitudes towards them are shaped by this. This is the heart of the social practice which gives the concept of freedom its sense.

     Let us look first at ordinary personal relations: relations of familiarity, friendship and co-operation, on which our daily lives depend. If someone deliberately injures another, or negligently causes injury, the victim will feel resentment, and perhaps a desire for retribution or revenge. The first step in normal relations, however, is to reproach the person who has wronged you. He may then recognize his fault, and ask to be forgiven. Perhaps he shows a willingness to atone for it, through deliberately depriving himself for your benefit. And perhaps, at the end of this process, you are prepared to forgive him and, having done so, discover that your original feelings towards him are restored. This process is familiar to us in many guises: wrongdoing, reproach, confession, atonement and forgiveness form the stages away from and back to equilibrium in relations of friendship, co-operation and love. The Christian religion recognizes these stages as fundamental, too, in our relation to God. Only if the wrongdoer refuses to recognize his fault, do the original feelings of resentment and desire for revenge continue. For [102] now the wrongdoer is setting aside the norms of peaceful conduct, and throwing down a challenge.

     To take up this challenge is to act in the name not of friendship, but of justice. Where friendship desires reconciliation, and therefore atonement, justice demands retribution, and therefore punishment: one and the same process may be viewed as either - but what makes it atonement or punishment is the intention with which it is inflicted or assumed.

     Both these processes show a search for equilibrium. And both are possible only between persons, whose actions are shaped and opposed through reasoned dialogue. It is always true that I could relate to other persons as I do to objects, studying the laws of motion that govern them, and adjusting their behaviour through the application of medical and biological science. But this would be to step outside the moral dialogue, to treat the other as a mere object, and to circumvent the normal paths to equilibrium. When human beings treat others in this way, it strikes us as sinister, uncanny, even devilish. On the other hand, with certain people, moral dialogue is useless: it makes no difference to them that they inspire resentment, anger or outrage. However we treat them, they will never mend their ways - either because they do not understand the need for this, or because they are driven by impulses which they cannot control. In such cases we begin to renounce the moral dialogue; we feel entitled to treat the other as an object; entitled to apply to him our store of scientific knowledge; entitled to bypass his consent, when seeking a remedy for his bad behaviour.

     The point has been made in other terms by the Oxford philosopher, Sir Peter Strawson, who argues that reactions like resentment and anger are reasonable in part because they are effective. In normal cases, we have a far more effective way of influencing people's behaviour, by responding to them in this way, than is made available by any [103] 'objective' science. Strawson suggests that the conflict between freedom and causality is not a conflict in rem, but a conflict between two kinds of attitude: the interpersonal and the scientific. Interpersonal emotion gives us a far more effective handle on the world than we could ever obtain through a science of human behaviour. But there comes a point where the interpersonal approach ceases to bring rewards. It is then that we begin to look for causes; it is then that we demote the other from person to thing - or, to revert to the Kantian language, from subject to object.

     Now let us return to the idea of freedom. You can see at once that we don't actually need this word. We can say what we want to say in terms of the more flexible notions of responsibility, accountability, and excuses. These are the ideas that we employ, in order to describe people as partners in the moral dialogue. They take their sense from the practices of giving and taking reasons for action, of ascribing rights and obligations, of assessing people in the constant and ongoing dialogue which is the norm of human society.

     We can now move a little further down the path towards the unsayable thing that Kant sought to say. When we 'hold someone responsible' for a state of affairs, we do not necessarily imply that his actions caused it. Nor do we hold someone responsible for everything that he deliberately does. (Excuses may erase responsibility.) The judgement of responsibility attaches an event, not to the actions of a person, but to the person himself. We are, so to speak, summoning him to judgement. And if we use the word 'cause' in such a case, it is usually in a special way - to say, not that your actions were the cause, but that you were the cause. In other words, the term 'cause' no longer links two events, but links an event to a person, so as to charge him with it.

     But how is this link established? Causation seems to be neither necessary, nor sufficient. Nor does the link exist only [104] between a person and the present or past. You can take responsibility for the future, and this 'assumption' of responsibility entitles others to praise or blame you in the light of what transpires. Relations of responsibility, unlike causal relations, are also negotiable. We may, as a result of reasoned dialogue, reduce or increase your 'accountability' for an accident. The relation of the person to the event is not established at the time of the event, nor at any time in particular, but only when the case is 'brought to judgement'. Judgements of responsibility are just that - judgements, making appeal to the impartial court of reason, in which we are equal suitors for our rights. Already we may be tempted to say that the judgement of responsibility does not link objects to objects, but objects to subjects, who stand judged by their fellow subjects in another sphere.

     I remarked on the fact that our attitudes to people may shift from the interpersonal to the scientific, when the first prove unrewarding. The same shift may occur in our attitude to ourselves. Consider the following dialogue:

A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left?
B: I shall take up mountaineering.
A: Why?
B: Because it is good, when life has lost its zest, to put yourself in danger.

B has expressed a decision, and found reasons to justify it. His sincerity is proved hereafter by what he does. If he makes no effort to take up this dangerous occupation, then doubt is cast on whether he meant what he said.

     Suppose, however, that the dialogue proceeds as follows:

A: What are you going to do, now that your wife has left? [105]
B: I expect I shall take to drink.
A: Why?
B: I seem to be made that way.

Here B has expressed no decision, but only a prediction. And he supports his prediction not with a justifying reason, but with evidence - i.e., with a reason for believing, rather than a reason for doing, something. Clearly B's attitude towards his future, in this second example, is very different from the attitude expressed in the first. He is now looking on it from outside, as though it were the future of someone else, and as though he had no part in it. In making a decision I project myself into the future, make myself accountable for it, and look on it as part of myself. Furthermore, if you ask how B knows that he will take up mountaineering, when he has decided to do so, there is no answer other than 'he has decided to do so'. His knowledge is based on nothing, since it is an immediate expression of his conscious self. If you ask, in the second case, how he knows that he will take to drink, then the answer is to be found in the evidence he uses. In the case of a prediction, he can make a mistake. In the case of a decision there is no room for mistakes, and non-performance must be explained in another way - either as insincerity, or a change of mind.

     This distinction touches on the very essence of rational agency. The person who only predicts the future, but never decides, has fallen out of dialogue with others. He is drifting in the world like an object, and sees himself in just that way. Only the person who decides can take a part in moral dialogue, and only he can relate to others as persons do - not drifting beside them, but engaging with them in his feelings, as one self-conscious being engages with another. And surely, there is nothing forced in the suggestion that the person who only predicts his behaviour sees himself as an object, whereas he who decides is seeing himself as a subject. [106] We are closer still to the unsayable thing that Kant wanted to say: to the idea that I am both an object in nature, and a subject outside it, and that freedom is lost when the subject surrenders to the object.

     And perhaps we can stop here, without stepping over the threshold. Perhaps it is enough to say that we can see ourselves and others in two different ways: as parts of nature, obedient to the laws of causality, or as self-conscious agents, who take responsibility for the world in which they act. But these two 'aspects' are so very different, that there will always be a problem as to how they are related, and the problem will not be less intractable than that of the relation between the timeless and time. Moreover, we can now see just what is at stake in the confrontation between science and philosophy, and how there is indeed a 'consolation of philosophy', even in the disenchanted world we live in. By philosophizing we have lifted human action out of the web of causal reasoning in which it is ensnared by science. We have discovered concepts which are indispensable to our lives as rational beings, yet which have no place at all in the scientific view of the world: concepts like person, responsibility, freedom and the subject, which shape the world in readiness for action, and which describe the way in which we appear to one another, regardless of what, from the point of view of science, we are.

     It is with such concepts that the human world is formed. Our attitudes depend upon the way in which we conceptualize each other. You can feel resentment towards another only if you see him as responsible for what he does, and this means applying to him the concepts that I have been discussing in this chapter. Interpersonal attitudes like love, liking, admiration, disapproval and contempt, all depend upon this system of concepts, and to the extent that those attitudes are indispensable to us, and the foundation of happiness in this or any world, then these concepts cannot [107] be replaced. Of course, I can adopt the scientific approach to human beings as to anything else: and, as I argued in the first chapter, it is in the nature of science to sweep away appearances in favour of the underlying reality which explains them. The explanation of the facts on which our interpersonal attitudes are based would describe a world very different from the world of appearances, and one that could no longer be conceptualized in the way that we require. If the fundamental facts about John are, for me, his biological constitution, his scientific essence, his neurological organization, then I shall find it difficult to respond to him with affection, anger, love, contempt or grief. So described, he becomes mysterious to me, since those classifications do not capture the 'intentional object' of my interpersonal attitudes: the person as he is conceived.

     In the last chapter I described the concept of the sacred, and the feelings which depend on it. The sense of the sacred, I suggested, derives from the fact that the meaning which we find in the human person can be found also in objects -in places, times and artefacts, in a shrine, a gathering, a place of pilgrimage or prayer. This 'encounter with the subject' in a world of objects is our 'homecoming'; it is the overcoming of the metaphysical isolation which is the lot of rational beings everywhere. Nothing in the scientific view of things forbids the experience of the sacred: science tells us only that this experience, like every other, has a natural and not a supernatural cause. Those who seek for meanings may be indifferent to causes, and those who communicate with God through prayer should be no more cut off from him by the knowledge that the world of objects does not contain him, than they are cut off from those they love by the knowledge that words, smiles and gestures are nothing but movements of the flesh. But the scientific worldview contains a fatal temptation: it invites us to regard the subject as a myth, and to see the world under one aspect alone, as a [108] world of objects. And this disenchanted world is also a world of alienation.

     We should not forget that the attempt to re-create the human world through science has already been made. Marx's theory of history, and the Nazi science of race are very bad examples of science. But they licensed forms of government in which the scientific view of our condition was for the first time in power. People were seen as objects, obedient to natural laws; and their happiness was to be secured by experts, acting as the theory prescribed. The theory informed the believer that God is dead, and that with him has been extinguished the divine spark in man. Human freedom is nothing but an appearance on the face of nature; beneath it rides the same implacable causality, the same sovereign indifference, which prepares death equally and unconcernedly for all of us, and which tells us that beyond death there is nothing. The sense of the sacred warns us that there are things which cannot be touched, since to meddle with them is to open a door in the world of objects, so as to stand in the I of God. The desacralized view of the world annihilates that sense, and therefore removes the most important of our prohibitions. In describing the Nazi death-camps Hannah Arendt wrote (Eichmann in Jerusalem) of a 'banalization' of evil. It would be better to speak of a 'de-personalization', a severance of evil from the network of personal responsibility. The totalitarian system, and the extermination camp which is its most sublime expression, embody the conviction that nothing is sacred. In such a system, human life is driven underground, and the ideas of freedom and responsibility - ideas without which our picture of man as a moral subject disintegrates entirely - have no public recognition, and no place in the administrative process. If it is so easy to destroy people in such a system, it is because human life enters the public world already [109] destroyed, appearing only as an object among others, to be dealt with by experts versed in the science of man.

     Even if we did not have before us the reality of the Nazi and Communist experiments, we have those works of fiction by Orwell, Huxley and Koestler, which warn us what the world must inevitably become, when humanity is surrendered to science. To see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons. It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalized human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction. In a very real sense, therefore, there cannot be a science of man: there cannot be a science which explores what we are for one another, when we respond to each other as persons. In what follows we will see in more detail why that is so.

9 MORALITY

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People are bound by moral laws, which articulate the idea of a community of rational beings, living in mutual respect, and resolving their disputes by negotiation and agreement. Kant tells us that we are to act 'on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings'; we are to treat rational beings as ends, and never as means only; we are to act with a view to the 'kingdom of ends' in which all rational goals are reconciled. These highly abstract principles (which Kant calls 'formal') are less significant than the procedure which is implied in them. Persons have a unique and precious means to resolve their conflicts - a means denied to the rest of nature. For they are able to recognize each other as free beings, who take responsibility for their decisions, and who possess rights against, and duties towards, their kind. The ideas of freedom, responsibility, right and duty contain a tacit assumption that every player in the moral game counts for one, and no player for more than one. By thinking in these terms we acknowledge each person as an irreplaceable and self-sufficient member of the moral order. His rights, duties and responsibilities are his own personal possessions. Only he can renounce or fulfil them, and only he can be held to account should his duties go unfulfilled. If this were not so, the 'moral law', as Kant calls it, would cease to fulfil its purpose, of reconciling individuals in a society of strangers.
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     As Kant himself pointed out, the moral law has an absolute character. Rights cannot be arbitrarily overridden, or weighed against the profit of ignoring them. Duties cannot be arbitrarily set aside, or cancelled by the bad results of due obedience. I must respect your right, regardless of conflicting interests, since you alone can renounce or cancel it. That is the point of the concept - to provide an absolute barrier against invasion. A right is an interest that is given special protection, and which cannot be overridden or cancelled without the consent of the person who possesses it. By describing an interest as a right we lift it from the account of cost and benefit, and place it in the sacred precinct of the self.

     Likewise duty, if it is to exist at all, must have an absolute character. A duty can be set aside only when it ceases to be a duty - only when it has been fulfilled or cancelled. There can be conflicts of rights and conflicts of duties: but these conflicts are painful precisely because they cannot be resolved. We weigh rights against each other, and give precedence to the one which we believe to be more serious -as when we take food that belongs to John in order to save the life of the starving Henry. Henry's right to help takes precedence over John's right to his property; nevertheless John's right remains, and John is wronged by the act which succours Henry. The issues here are deep and complex. Suffice it to say that any attempt to deprive the concepts of right and duty of this absolute character would also deprive them of their utility. We should thereby rid ourself of the supreme instrument which reason provides, whereby to live with others while respecting their freedom, their individuality and their sovereignty over the life that is theirs. That is what it means, in the last analysis, to treat a person as an end in himself: namely, to acknowledge his rights against us, and our duties towards him, and to recognize that neither right nor duty can be cancelled by some other good. To [113] put the moral law in a nutshell, it tells us that people must be treated as subjects, not as objects; and this means that rights must be respected, and duties fulfilled.

     But the prominence of the moral law in our daily negotiations should not lead us to suppose that morality is merely a system of rules. The moral community is shaped by negotiation, but depends upon many other factors for its life and vitality. In particular it depends upon the affections of those who compose it, and upon their ability to make spontaneous and self-sacrificing gestures for the good of others. A society ordered entirely by the moral law, in which rights, duties and justice take precedence over all interests and affections, would alienate the mere human beings who compose it, and soon fall apart. For it would make no distinction between neighbours and strangers, between the alien and the friend. People need the safety promised by the moral law, and by the habit of negotiation. But they also need something more: the nexus of affection and sympathy which binds them to their neighbours, which creates a common destiny, and which leads people to share one another's sorrows and joys.

     While we esteem the punctilious person who performs all his duties, claims no more than he has a right to, and meticulously respects the rights of others, we cannot really love him, unless he is moved by affection too. But affection requires us to bend the rules, to set aside our rights in the interest of those we love, to do that which is beyond the call of duty, and sometimes to dispense our favours unjustly. And the same is true of sympathy - that generalized affection which spreads from the self in dwindling ripples across the world of others. Actions which spring from sympathy may resemble those commanded by the moral law; but they spring from another motive, and one that is just as necessary to the moral life. The moral being is not merely the rule-governed person who plays the game of rights and duties; he has a distinctive emotional character, which both [114] fits him for the moral life and extends and modifies its edicts. He is a creature of extended sympathies, motivated by love, admiration, shame and a host of other social emotions.

     Hence we judge moral beings not only in terms of their actions, but also in terms of their motives and characters. For we recognize that the moral law is not a sufficient motive; we obey its precepts only when sufficiently prompted by our character and feelings. Guilt, remorse and shame arrest our weaknesses, just as praise, admiration and approval reinforce our obedience. We depend on these social emotions, since it is the web of sympathy that fortifies our moral resolve. We may not consciously acknowledge it, but we nevertheless know that social order is a precarious thing, which cannot be sustained by law alone. Internal and external threats to it can be deterred only if people have the mettle to resist them - the force of character, the emotional equilibrium and the live human sympathies that will prompt them to persist in a cause, to make sacrifices, and to commit themselves to others. This is the origin of the vital distinction that we make, between vice and virtue. In addition to the moral law, therefore, morality involves the pursuit of virtue, and the avoidance of vice.

     The virtues that inspire our admiration are also the qualities which preserve society, whether from external threat or from internal decay: courage and resolution in the face of danger; loyalty and decency in private life; justice and charity in the public sphere. At different periods and in different conditions the emphasis shifts - virtue is malleable, and shaped by material, spiritual and religious circumstances. Nevertheless, the constancy of the objects of human admiration is more significant than the local variations. The antique virtues of courage, prudence, wisdom, temperance and justice, amplified by Christian charity and pagan loyalty, still form the core idea of human excellence. It is these [115] qualities that we admire, that we wish for in those we love, and hope to be credited with ourselves.

     Such qualities require a social setting. They are not solipsistic achievements like the muscles of the body-builder, or the mortification of the anchorite. Only in the context of human admiration and contempt does the virtuous character emerge, and only in the condition of society is virtue properly exercised and rightly understood. But this social setting is also an emotional setting, and emotions are reactions not to the world as it is in itself, but to the world as it is understood. The world is understood differently by people and animals. Our world, unlike theirs, contains rights, obligations and duties; it is a world of self-conscious subjects, in which events are divided into the free and the unfree, those which have reasons, and those which are merely caused, those which stem from a rational subject, and those which erupt in the stream of objects with no conscious design. Thinking of the world in this way, we respond to it with emotions that lie beyond the repertoire of other animals: indignation, resentment and envy; admiration, commitment and erotic love - all of which involve the thought of the other as a free subject, with rights and duties and a self-conscious vision of his past and future. Only moral beings can feel these emotions, and in feeling them they situate themselves in some way outside the natural order, standing back from it in judgement.

     The sympathies of moral beings are also marked by this detachment from the natural order. A horse will run when the herd runs; a hound excited by a scent will communicate his excitement to his fellows; a partridge will throw herself between her brood and the fox that threatens them. The casual observer might see these actions as expressing sympathy - as animated by a feeling which in some way takes account of the feelings and interests of others. But they lack a crucial ingredient, which is the thought of what the other [116] is feeling. In none of the cases that I have mentioned (and they form three archetypes of animal 'sympathy') do we need to invoke this very special thought in order to explain the animal's behaviour. It is a thought which is peculiar to moral beings, involving a recognition of the distinction between self and other, and of the other as feeling what I might have felt. Even the dog who is distressed by his master's sickness lacks this thought. His emotion is not compassion, but anxiety, as the source of his borrowed life runs thin.

     Two of our sympathetic feelings are of great moral importance: pity towards those who suffer, and pleasure in another's joy. Both feelings are held to be part of human virtue. Pitiless people and joyless people alike awaken our disapproval. True, Nietzsche mounted an assault on pity, and on the 'herd morality' which he supposed to be contained in it. But most people remain unpersuaded, and rightly so. For pity and good cheer are complementary. You cannot rejoice in the joys of others, without suffering their pains, and all pleasure requires the sympathy of others if it is to translate itself into joy. It seems to me, indeed, that there is something deeply contradictory in a philosophy that advocates joyful wisdom, while slandering pity as the enemy of the higher life.

     Indeed, whether we look at these emotions from the point of view of the individual, or from that of society, we cannot fail to see them as indispensable parts of human goodness. Sympathy awakens sympathy: it draws us to itself, and forms the bond of goodwill from which our social affections grow. Pitiless and joyless people are also affectionless; if they love, it is with a hard, dogged love that threatens to destroy what it cherishes. We avoid them as unnatural, and also dangerous. The anger of a pitiless person is to be feared; as is the friendship of a joyless one. It is not the pitiless and the joyless who sustain the social order: on the contrary, they are parasites, who depend on the overspill of sympathy [117] which misleads us into forgiving them. Nietzsche condemned pity for favouring the weak and the degenerate. In fact, pity is a necessary part of any society which is able to heal itself, and to overcome disaster. It is indispensable in war as in peace, since it causes people to stand side by side with strangers in their shared misfortune, and arouses them to anger and revenge against the common enemy.

     There is another component in our moral thinking, in addition to the moral law, and the sympathy which extends the scope of it - the component which I shall call, borrowing from Roman usage, piety, meaning the respect for sacred things. Pietas requires that we honour our parents and ancestors, the household deities, the laws and the civil order, that we keep the appointed festivals and public ceremonies - and all this out of a sense of the sacred given-ness of these things, which are not our invention, and to which we owe an unfathomable debt of gratitude. It seems to me that, beneath all moral sentiment, there lies a deep layer of pious feeling. It is a feeling which does not depend explicitly on religious belief, and which no moral being can really escape, however little he may overtly acknowledge it. Utilitarians may regard pious feelings as the mere residue of moral thinking; but, as the argument of the last two chapters implies, they are not a residue at all. Put in simple terms, piety means the deep down recognition of our frailty and dependence, the acknowledgement that the burden we inherit cannot be sustained unaided, the disposition to give thanks for our existence and reverence to the world on which we depend, and the sense of the unfathomable mystery which surrounds our coming to be and our passing away. All these feelings come together in our humility before the works of nature, and this humility is the fertile soil in which the seeds of morality are planted. The three forms of moral life that I have described - respect for persons, the pursuit of virtue and natural sympathy - all depend, in the last [118] analysis, on piety. For piety instils the readiness to be guided and instructed, and the knowledge of our own littleness which make the gift of moral conduct - whereby we are lifted from our solitude - so obviously desirable.

     Piety is rational, in the sense that we all have reason to feel it. It is also a vital asset of society, since it forestalls the desecration of established things. Nevertheless, piety is not, in any clear sense, amenable to reason. Indeed, it marks out another place where reasoning comes to an end. The same is true, it seems to me, of many moral attitudes and feelings: while it is supremely rational to possess them, they are not themselves amenable to reason, and the attempt to make them so produces the kind of ludicrous caricature of morality that we witness in utilitarianism.

     This does not mean that we must simply accept one another's prejudices. On the contrary, morality fails of its purpose, if people cannot reach agreement, and amend their views and feelings in the light of experience, with a view to accommodating others. It means, rather, that we should not expect a 'decision procedure' which will settle moral questions finally and unambiguously. In these areas the task of reason is to clarify our intuitions, to recognize the nature and extent of our commitments, and to search for the points of agreement which will provide a fulcrum on which our prejudices may be turned.

     It may be that, if we knew all the facts, the natural operation of sympathy would lead us to agree in our judgements: so thought Hume. But the historical character of our passions and pieties means that they come into existence fatally entangled in the circumstances that produced them, and can be converted into universal laws only by severing them from their roots, and draining them of vital force.

     It is nevertheless true that, since the Enlightenment, moral thought has shied away from piety and invested its greatest energy in those abstract legal ideas associated with [119] the respect for persons. This has happened for many reasons, and it is not my purpose to examine them. But it is not unreasonable to believe that spoliation[?], over-production and the destruction of the environment all spring from a single source, which is the loss of piety. However deep it may be concealed within our psyche, piety is by no means a redundant part of the moral consciousness but, on the contrary, the source of our most valuable social emotions. It is piety, and not reason, that implants in us the respect for the world, for its past and its future, and which impedes us from pillaging all we can before the light of consciousness fails in us.

     It is piety, too, which causes us to exalt the human form in life and art. Perhaps there are moral beings who are not humans: angels, devils and divinities, if they exist. But we have no direct experience of them. We have no clear image of morality save the image of the human form; such doubts as we feel about the elephant, the dolphin and the chimpanzee are too insecure to revise the overwhelming authority, for us, of the human face and gesture:

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Blake's words flow from the fount of reverence that springs in all of us, and which causes us not merely to cherish the works of unblemished nature, but to look on the human being as somehow exalted above them. I do not mean that all humans are admirable or lovable: far from it. But they are all in some way untouchable. An air of sacred prohibition surrounds humanity, since the 'human form divine' is our only image of the subject - the being who stands above the world of objects, in an attitude of judgement.
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     It follows from what I have said that there will be four separate sources of moral argument: personality, with its associated moral law; the ethic of virtue; sympathy; and finally piety. Most of our moral difficulties and 'hard cases' derive from the areas where these four kinds of thinking deliver conflicting results.

     We do not need to accept Kant's sublime derivation of the categorical imperative, in order to recognize that human beings tend spontaneously to agree concerning the morality of interpersonal relations. As soon as we set our own interests aside, and look on human relations with the eye of the impartial judge, we find ourselves agreeing over the rights and wrongs in any conflict. Whatever their philosophical basis, the following principles of practical reasoning are accepted by all reasonable people:

1. Considerations which justify or impugn one person will, in identical circumstances, justify or impugn another. (The principle of moral equality.)
2. Rights are to be respected.
3. Obligations are to be fulfilled.
4. Agreements are to be honoured.
5. Disputes are to be settled by rational argument and not by force.
6. Persons who do not respect the rights of others, forfeit rights of their own.

     Long before Kant's categorical imperative philosophers wrote of such principles as defining the 'natural law' - the law which lies above all actual legal systems, and provides the test of their validity. Some of the principles have been explicitly incorporated into international law - notably the fourth (pacta sunt servanda). They provide us with the calculus of rights and duties with which our day to day relations with strangers must be conducted, if we are to live by negotiation and not by force or fraud.

     We should see the above principles as 'procedural' (or [121] 'formal', to use Kant's idiom), rather than 'substantive'. They do not tell us what our rights and duties are, but only what it means, to describe an interest as a right, and a decision as a duty. Nevertheless, once this procedure is in place - once human beings are in the habit of settling their disputes by an assignment of rights, responsibilities and duties - it cannot be an open question what our rights and duties are. We will be constrained to settle questions in a manner on which all can agree, and -just as in the common law, which is no more than an extended application of this kind of reasoning - we will tend to agree, just as long as we look on all conflict as though it were the conflict of others, and observe it with the eye of an impartial judge. Why this should be so is a deep question, to which Hume and Kant gave conflicting answers. But that it is so is surely evident.

     Although rational beings, adopting the standpoint of the impartial judge, will tend to endorse the principles given above, it does not follow that they will act on them when their interests tend in some other direction. But there are settled dispositions of character which will ensure that people overcome the temptations posed by greed, self-interest and fear. It is reasonable to admire and cultivate these dispositions, therefore, which owe their reasonableness to the same considerations as justify the moral law. Only the just person will act on the impartial verdict when his own interests conflict with it; only the courageous person will uphold the moral law when others jeer at it; only the temperate person will place rights and duties above the call of appetite. And so on. In short, the traditional virtues provide a source of moral reasoning which endorses the calculus of rights and duties. Whatever reasons we have for accepting the moral law, are reasons for cultivating the virtues.

     To the traditional virtues, which prepare us for membership of a moral community, we must add the wider and more flexible virtues which stem from sympathy. Christian [122] charity (caritas, or fellow-feeling) is pre-eminent among these wider virtues. Philosophically speaking, charity is the disposition to put yourself in another's shoes, and to be motivated on his behalf. It is the disposition to feel pain at his suffering, and joy at his joy.

     This too is a reasonable motive, for without it the moral community would be deprived of its most vital source of strength, and the individual of the most important reward attached to membership - the pleasure of giving and receiving in reciprocal concern.

     It is here, however, that a potential clash arises, between utilitarian ways of thinking and the calculus of rights. The charitable instinct identifies with joy and suffering wherever it finds them and, faced with the bewildering extent of these emotions, finds itself compelled to reason in a utilitarian way. Charity hopes to maximize joy and minimize suffering in general, just as each person spontaneously acts to maximize joy and minimize suffering in himself. To think in this way, however, is to enter into inevitable conflict with the more sophisticated pattern of reasoning that underpins the moral community. I cannot treat persons as the subject-matter of a utilitarian calculation. I cannot inflict deliberate pain on John in order to relieve the twofold suffering of Elizabeth and Mary, without consulting the rights and duties of the parties. We ascribe rights to people precisely because their freedom and their membership of the moral community forbid us from invading their space.

     In short, even if utilitarian reasoning is a natural expression of the sympathy on which the moral life depends, reason demands that it be applied only selectively and within the framework established by the moral law. Questions of right, duty and responsibility must be settled first; only then does the utilitarian calculus apply. A few examples will make this clear. Suppose John is suffering from kidney failure, and only one other person, Henry, is of the same blood-group. [123] With one of Henry's kidneys, John could lead a healthy and normal life, while Henry's life would not be significantly impaired. This utilitarian calculation is entirely irrelevant, when faced with the question whether we ought to compel Henry to release one of his kidneys. For that is something we have no right to do, and all reasoning stops once this moral truth is recognized.

     Suppose Elizabeth and Jane are both suffering from a rare disease, and William, Jane's husband, has obtained at great expense a quantity of the only drug that will cure it. By administering the whole quantity to Jane he ensures a 90 per cent chance of her survival; by dividing it between Jane and Elizabeth, he will provide a 60 per cent chance of recovery to both. Again, the utilitarian calculation, which might seem to favour division, is irrelevant. For William has a special responsibility towards his wife, which must be discharged before the welfare of any stranger can be taken into account.

     Suppose that Alfred is driving a lorry, for the maintenance of which he is not responsible, and discovers that the brakes have failed. If he swerves to the right he kills a man at a bus-stop; if he takes no action he will run down two pedestrians at a crossing, while if he swerves to the left he will drive into a crowd of children. Here, surely, the utilitarian calculus applies, and Alfred would be blamed for not applying it. By swerving to the right he absolves himself of all responsibility for the death of the victim, while at the same time minimizing the human cost of the disaster. The brake-failure is not an action of Alfred's, but a misfortune that afflicts him. His principal duty, in such a case, is to minimize the suffering that results from it.

     Such examples show the true goal of utilitarian thinking, which is not to replace or compete with the moral law, but to guide us when the moral law is silent, and when only sympathy speaks. Hence utilitarian reasoning is of the first [124] importance in our dealings with animals - in particular with those animals to which we have no special duty of care. We should not imagine, however, that the utilitarian calculus could ever achieve the mathematical precision which Bentham and his followers have wished for. There is no formula for measuring the value of a life, the seriousness of a creature's suffering, or the extent of its happiness or joy. To reason in a utilitarian way is to reason as Alfred does in my example: through numbers when these are suggested (as here, where Alfred must count the numbers of threatened lives); but otherwise through an assessment of the moral Gestalt, asking whether 'things in general would be better if ...'. Those who wish to reduce such reasoning to an econometric calculation rid the moral question of its distinctive character, and replace it with questions of another kind - questions concerning 'preference orderings', 'optimizing' and 'satisfying' solutions, and rational choice under conditions of risk and uncertainty. By shaping the moral question so that it can be fed into the machinery of economics, we do not solve it. On the contrary, we put a fantasy problem for experts in place of the painful reality of moral choice. If the answer to moral questions were really to be found in decision theory, then most people would be unable to discover it. In which case morality would lose its function as a guide to life, offered to all of us by the fact of reasoned dialogue.

     Finally, there is the sphere of piety. As I have argued, piety is rational, but not amenable to reason. The person who tries completely to rationalize his pieties has in a sense already lost them. The best we can hope for is a version of what Rawls has called 'reflective equilibrium', in which our pieties are brought into relation with our more critical opinions and modified accordingly, while in their turn influencing our reasoned judgements.

     The motive of morality is complex. Were we immortal beings, outside nature and freed from its imperatives, the [125] moral law would be sufficient motive. But we are mortal, passionate creatures, and morality exists for us only because our sympathies endorse it. We are motivated by fellow-feeling, by love of virtue and hatred of vice, by a sense of helplessness and dependence which finds relief in piety, and by a host of socially engendered feelings which have no place in the serene dispensations of a 'Holy Will'. Hence conflicts and dilemmas arise. The attraction of utilitarianism lies in the promise to resolve all these conflicts, by construing moral judgement as a kind of economic calculus. But the promise is illusory, and the effect of believing it repulsive. So how are moral conflicts resolved? How, in particular, should we respond to the situation in which the moral law points in one direction, and sympathy another, or in which the ethic of virtue clashes with the ethic of piety -as it famously did for Agamemnon?

     First, let it be said that the moral law, when it speaks, takes precedence. For the moral law can exist on no other terms. Only if a right guarantees its subject-matter does it offer protection to the one who possesses it. Only then do rights perform their role, of defining the position from which moral dialogue begins. The essential function of morality, in creating a community founded in negotiation and consent, requires that rights and duties cannot be sacrificed to other interests.

     But rights and duties can conflict. The result is a dilemma, and the distinguishing mark of a dilemma is that, while only one of two things can be done, you have a duty to do both. This duty is not cancelled by the dilemma: you merely have an excuse for not fulfilling it.

     When the claims of right and duty have been satisfied, in so far as possible, the claims of virtue must be addressed. Even if the moral law neither forbids nor permits an action, there is still the question whether a virtuous person would perform it. For example, if we thought, as do many of those [126] who defend abortion, that the human foetus has no rights, and that we have no specific duties towards it, we should still not be entitled to conclude that the foetus can be treated in any way we choose. It may nevertheless be the case - and manifestly is the case - that certain ways of treating a foetus are vicious, and that there are only some ways of treating it that a good person would contemplate, even when persuaded that a foetus lies outside the protection of the moral law.

     Finally, when all requirements of right and virtue have been met, we can respond to the call of sympathy: and here a kind of utilitarian thinking comes into play, as the means to extend our sympathies to all whose interests are affected by our acts. Even so, the authority of this reasoning is not absolute: for sympathy may compete with piety. We rationalize our pieties by measuring them against our sympathies, and discipline our sympathies by testing them against the intuitions which stem from piety.

     While this ordering of the four sources of moral reasoning may be questioned, and while it leaves much unresolved, it corresponds, I believe, to the practice of the ordinary conscience, and accords with the underlying purpose of morality. The real problem that confronts us is not that of justifying moral judgements, but that of justifying the concepts on which they depend. It is the problem that is or ought to be the central problem of modern philosophy: how to make sense of the human world?

10 SEX

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Sex is the sphere in which the animal and the personal meet, and where the clash between the scientific and the personal view of things is felt most keenly. It therefore provides the test of any serious moral philosophy, and of any viable theory of the human world.

     Until the late nineteenth century it was almost impossible to discuss sex, except as part of erotic love, and even then convention required that the peculiarities of sexual desire remain unmentioned. When the interdiction was finally lifted - by such writers as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis - it was through offering a 'scientific' approach to a widespread natural phenomenon. Such was the prestige of science that any investigation conducted in its name could call on powerful currents of social approval, which were sufficient to overcome the otherwise crippling reluctance to face the realities of sexual experience. As a result, modern discussions of this experience have been conducted in a 'scientized' idiom which, by its very nature, removes sex from the sphere of interpersonal relations, and remodels it as a relation between objects. Freud's shocking revelations, introduced as neutral, 'scientific' truths about the human condition, were phrased in the terms which are now more or less standard. According to Freud, the aim of sexual desire is 'union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a [128] temporary extinction of the sexual instinct - a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger'. This scientistic image of sexual desire gave rise, in due course, to the Kinsey report, and is now part of the standard merchandise of disenchantment. It seems to me that it is entirely false, and could become true only by so affecting our sexual emotions, as to change them into emotions of another kind.

     What exactly is sexual pleasure? Is it like the pleasure of eating and drinking? Like that of lying in a hot bath? Like that of watching your child at play? Clearly it is both like and unlike all of these. It is unlike the pleasure of eating, in that its object is not consumed. It is unlike the pleasure of the bath, in that it involves taking pleasure in an activity, and in the other person who joins you. It is unlike that of watching your child at play, in involving bodily sensations and a surrender to physical desire. Sexual pleasure resembles the pleasure of watching something, however, in a crucial respect: it has intentionality. It is not just a tingling sensation; it is a response to another person, and to the act in which you are engaged with him or her. The other person may be imaginary: but it is towards a person that your thoughts are directed, and pleasure depends on thought.

     This dependency on thought means that sexual pleasure can be mistaken, and ceases when the mistake is known. Although I would be a fool not to jump out of the soothing bath after being told that what I took for water is really acid, this is not because I have ceased to feel pleasurable sensations in my skin. In the case of sexual pleasure, the discovery that it is an unwanted hand that touches me at once extinguishes my pleasure. The pleasure could not be taken as confirming the hitherto unacknowledged sexual virtues of some previously rejected person. A woman who makes love to the man who has disguised himself as her husband is no less the victim of rape, and the discovery of her mistake can lead to suicide. It is not simply that consent obtained by [129] fraud is not consent; it is that the woman has been violated, in the very act which caused her pleasure.

     What makes a pleasure into a sexual pleasure is the context of arousal. And arousal is not the same as tumescence. It is a leaning towards' the other, a movement in the direction of the sexual act, which cannot be separated, either from the thoughts on which it is founded, or from the desire to which it leads. Arousal is a response to the thought of the other as a self-conscious agent, who is alert to me, and who is able to have 'designs' on me. This is evident from the caress and the glance of desire. A caress of affection is a gesture of reassurance - an attempt to place in the consciousness of the other an image of one's own tender concern for him. Not so, however, the caress of desire, which outlines the body of the recipient; its gentleness is not that of reassurance only, but that of exploration. It aims to fill the surface of the other's body with a consciousness of your interest - interest, not only in the body, but in the person as embodied. This consciousness is the focal point of the other's pleasure. Sartre writes (Being and Nothingness) of the caress as 'incarnating' the other: as though, by your action, you bring the soul into the flesh (the subject into the object) and make it palpable.

     The caress is given and received with the same awareness as the glance is given and received. They each have an epistemic component (a component of anticipation and discovery). It is hardly surprising, given this, that the face should have such supreme and overriding importance in the transactions of sexual desire. On the scientistic view of sex it is hard to explain why this should be so - why the face should have the power to determine whether we will, or will not, be drawn to seek pleasure in another part. But of course, the face is the picture of the other's subjectivity: it shines with the light of self, and it is as an embodied subject that the other is wanted. Perversion and obscenity involve [130] the eclipse of the subject, as the body and its mechanism are placed in frontal view. In obscenity flesh becomes opaque to the self which lives in it: that is why there is an obscenity of violence as well as an obscenity of sex.

     A caress may be either accepted or rejected: in either case, it is because it has been 'read' as conveying a message sent from you to me. I do not receive this message as an explicit act of meaning something, but as a process of mutual discovery, a growing to awareness in you which is also a coming to awareness in me. In the first impulse of arousal, therefore, there is the beginning of that chain of reciprocity which is fundamental to interpersonal attitudes. She conceives her lover conceiving her conceiving him ... not ad infinitum, but to the point of mutual recognition of the other, as fully present in his body.

     Sexual arousal has, then, an epistemic and interpersonal intentionality. It is a response to another individual, based in revelation and discovery, and involving a reciprocal and co-operative heightening of the common experience of embodiment. It is not directed beyond the other, to the world at large; nor is it transferable to a rival object who might 'do just as well'. Of course, arousal may have its origin in highly generalized thoughts, which flit libidinously from object to object. But when these thoughts have concentrated into the experience of arousal their generality is put aside; it is then the other who counts, and his particular embodiment. Not only the other, but I myself, and the sense of my bodily reality in the other's perspective. Hence arousal, in the normal case, seeks seclusion in a private place, where only the other is relevant to my attention. Indeed, arousal attempts to abolish what is not private - in particular to abolish the perspective of the onlooker, of the 'third person' who is neither you nor I.

     In Chapter 8 I explored some of the ways in which the subject is realized in the world of objects, and placed great [131] emphasis on intention, and the distinction between predicting and deciding for the future. But it should not be supposed that the subject is revealed only through voluntary activity. On the contrary, of equal importance are those reactions which cannot be willed but only predicted, but which are nevertheless peculiar to self-conscious beings. Blushing is a singular instance. Although an involuntary matter, and - from the physiological point of view - a mere rushing of blood to the head, blushing is the expression of a complex thought, and one that places the self on view. My blush is an involuntary recognition of my accountability before you for what I am and what I feel. It is an acknowledgement that I stand in the light of your perspective, and that I cannot hide in my body. A blush is attractive because it serves both to embody the perspective of the other, and also at the same time to display that perspective as responsive to me. The same is true of unguarded glances and smiles, through which the other subject rises to the surface of his body and makes himself visible. In smiling, blushing, laughing and crying, it is precisely my loss of control over my body, and its gain of control over me, that create the immediate experience of an incarnate person. The body ceases at these moments to be an instrument, and reasserts its natural rights as a person. In such expressions the face does not function merely as a bodily part, but as the whole person: the self is spread across its surface, and there 'made flesh'.

     The concepts and categories that we use to describe the embodied person are far removed from the science of the human body. What place in such a science for smiles as opposed to grimaces, for blushes as opposed to flushes, for glances as opposed to looks? In describing your colour as a blush, I am seeing you as a responsible agent, and situating you in the realm of embarrassment and self-knowledge. If we try to describe sexual desire with the categories of human biology, we miss precisely the intentionality of sexual [132] emotion, its directedness towards the embodied subject. The caricature that results describes not desire but perversion. Freud's description of desire is the description of something that we know and shun - or ought to shun. An excitement which concentrates on the sexual organs, whether of man or of woman, which seeks, as it were, to bypass the complex negotiation of the face, hands, voice and posture, is perverted. It voids desire of its intentionality, and replaces it with a pursuit of the sexual commodity, which can always be had for a price.

     It is part of the intentionality of desire that a particular person is conceived as its object. To someone agitated by his desire for Jane, it is ridiculous to say, 'Take Henrietta, she will do just as well.' Thus there arises the possibility of mistakes of identity. Jacob's desire for Rachel seemed to be satisfied by his night with Leah, only to the extent that, and for as long as, Jacob imagined it was Rachel with whom he was lying. (Genesis 29, v. 22-25; and see the wonderful realization of this little drama in Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers.) Our sexual emotions are founded on individualizing thoughts: it is you whom I want and no other. This individualizing intentionality does not merely stem from the fact that it is persons (in other words, individuals) whom we desire. It stems from the fact that the other is desired as an embodied subject, and not just as a body. You can see the point by drawing a contrast between desire and hunger (a contrast that is expressly negated by Freud). Suppose that people were the only edible things; and suppose that they felt no pain on being eaten and were reconstituted at once. How many formalities and apologies would now be required in the satisfaction of hunger! People would learn to conceal their appetite, and learn not to presume upon the consent of those whom they surveyed with famished glances. It would become a crime to partake of a meal without the meal's consent. Maybe marriage would be [133] the best solution. Still, this predicament is nothing like the predicament in which we are placed by desire. It arises from the lack of anything impersonal to eat, but not from the nature of hunger. Hunger is directed towards the other only as object, and any similar object will serve just as well. It does not individualize the object, or propose any other union than that required by need. When sexual attentions take such a form, they become deeply insulting. And in every form they compromise not only the person who addresses them, but also the person addressed. Precisely because desire proposes a relation between subjects, it forces both parties to account for themselves. Unwanted advances are therefore also forbidden by the one to whom they might be addressed, and any transgression is felt as a contamination. That is why rape is so serious a crime: it is an invasion of the sanctuary which harbours the victim's freedom, and a dragging of the subject into the world of things. If you describe desire in the scientistic terms used by Freud and his followers, the outrage and pollution of rape become impossible to explain. In fact, just about everything in human sexual behaviour becomes impossible to explain - and it is only what might be called the 'charm of disenchantment' that leads people to receive these daft descriptions as the truth.

     The intentionality of desire is the topic for a book, and since I have written that book, I shall confine myself here to a few remarks. My hope is to put philosophy to its best use, which is that of shoring up the human world against the corrosive seas of pseudo-science. In true sexual desire, the aim is union with the other, where 'the other' denotes a particular person, with a particular perspective on my actions. The reciprocity which is involved in this aim is achieved in a state of mutual arousal, and the interpersonal character of arousal determines the nature of the 'union' that is sought. All desire is compromising, and the choice to express it or to yield to it is an existential choice, in which [134] the self is, or may be, in danger. Not surprisingly, therefore, the sexual act is surrounded by prohibitions; it brings with it a weight of shame, guilt and jealousy, as well as the heights of joy and happiness. It is inconceivable that a morality of pure permission should issue from the right conception of such a compromising force, and, as I argue in Sexual Desire, the traditional morality, in which monogamous heterosexual union, enshrined in a vow rather than a contract, is the norm, shows far more sensitivity to what is at stake than any of the known alternatives.

     If it is so difficult now to see the point of that morality, it is in part because human sexual conduct has been redescribed by the pseudo-science of sexology, and as a result not only robbed of its interpersonal intentionality, but also profoundly demoralized. In redescribing the human world in this way, we also change it. We introduce new forms of sexual feeling - shaped by the desire for an all-comprehending permission. The sexual sacrament gives way to a sexual market; and the result is a fetishism of the sexual commodity. Richard Posner, for example, in his worthless but influential book entitled Sex and Reason (but which should have been called Sex and Instrumental Reason), opens his first chapter with the following sentence: There is sexual behaviour, having to do mainly with excitation of the sexual organs.' In reality, of course, sexual behaviour has to do with courtship, desire, love, jealousy, marriage, grief, joy and intrigue. Such excitement as occurs is excitement of the whole person. As for the sexual organs, they can be as 'excited' (if that is the word) by a bus journey as by the object of desire. Nevertheless, Posner's description of desire is necessary, if he is to fulfil his aim of deriving a morality of sexual conduct from the analysis of cost and benefit (which, apparently, is what is meant by 'reason'). So what are the 'costs' of sexual gratification?
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One is the cost of search. It is zero for masturbation, considered as a solitary activity, which is why it is the cheapest of practices. (The qualification is important: 'mutual masturbation', heterosexual or homosexual, is a form of nonvaginal intercourse, and its search costs are positive.)

Posner proceeds to consider hypothetical cases: for example, the case where a man sets a 'value' of 'twenty' on 'sex' with a 'woman of average attractiveness', and a 'value' of 'two' on 'sex' with a 'male substitute'. If you adopt such language, then you have made woman (and man too) into a sex object and sex into a commodity. You have redescribed the human world as a world of things; you have abolished the sacred, the prohibited and the protected, and presented sex as a relation between aliens: 'Th'expence of spirit in a waste of shame', in Shakespeare's famous words. Posner's language is opaque to what is wanted in sexual desire; it reduces the other person to an instrument of pleasure, a means of obtaining something that could have been provided equally by another person, by an animal, by a rubber doll or a piece of Kleenex.

     Well, you might say, why not, if people are happier that way? In whose interest is it, to retain the old form of desire, with its individualizing intentionality, its hopeless yearnings, its furies and jealousies, its lifelong commitments and lifelong griefs?

     Modern philosophers shy away from such questions, although they were much discussed in the ancient world. Rather than consider the long-term happiness and fulfilment of the individual, the modern philosopher tends to reduce the problem of sexual morality to one of rights - do we have a right to engage in, or to forbid, this or that sexual practice? From such a question liberal conclusions follow as a matter of course; but it is a question that leaves the ground [136] of sexual morality unexplored. This ground is not to be discovered in the calculus of rights and duties, but in the theory of virtue. What matters in sexual morality is the distinction between virtuous and vicious dispositions. I have already touched on this distinction in the last chapter, when considering the basis of our moral thinking. I there emphasized the role of virtue in creating the foundations of moral order. But it is also necessary, if we are to give objective grounds for the pursuit of virtue, to show how the happiness and fulfilment of the person are furthered by virtue and jeopardized by vice. This, roughly speaking, is the task that Aristotle set himself in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he tried to show that the deep questions of morality concern the education of the moral being, rather than the rules governing his adult conduct. Virtue belongs to character, rather than to the rules of social dialogue, and arises through an extended process of moral development. The virtuous person is disposed to choose those courses of action which contribute to his flourishing - his flourishing, not just as an animal, but as a rational being or person, as that which he essentially is. In educating a child I am educating his habits, and it is therefore clear that I shall always have a reason to inculcate virtuous habits, not only for my sake, but also for his own.

     At the same time, we should not think of virtue as a means only. The virtuous person is the one who has the right choice of ends. Virtue is the disposition to want, and therefore to choose, certain things for their own sakes, despite the warring tendency of appetite. Courage, for example, is the disposition to choose the honourable course of action, in face of danger. It is the disposition to overcome fear, for the sake of that judged to be right. All rational beings have an interest in acquiring courage, since without it they can achieve what they really want only by luck, and only in the absence of adversity. Sexual virtue is similar: the disposition to [137] choose the course of action judged to be right, despite temptation. Education should be directed towards the special kind of temperance which shows itself, sometimes as chastity, sometimes as fidelity, sometimes as passionate desire, according to the 'right judgement' of the subject. The virtuous person desires the person whom he may also love, who can and will return his desire, and to whom he may commit himself. In the consummation of such a desire there is neither shame nor humiliation, and the 'nuptuality' of the erotic impulse finds the space that it needs in order to flourish.

     The most important feature of traditional sexual education is summarized in anthropological language as the 'ethic of pollution and taboo'. The child was taught to regard his body as sacred, and as subject to pollution by misperception or misuse. The sense of pollution is by no means a trivial side-effect of the 'bad sexual encounter': it may involve a penetrating disgust, at oneself, one's body, one's situation, such as is experienced by the victim of rape. Those sentiments express the tension contained within our experience of embodiment. At any moment we can become 'mere body', the self driven from its incarnation, and its habitation ransacked. The most important root idea of sexual morality is that I am in my body, not as a 'ghost in the machine', but as an incarnate self. My body is identical with me: subject and object are merely two aspects of a single thing, and sexual purity is the guarantee of this. Sexual virtue does not forbid desire: it simply ensures the status of desire as an interpersonal feeling. The child who learns 'dirty habits' detaches his sex from himself, sets it outside himself as something curious and alien in the world of objects. His fascinated enslavement to the body is also a withering of desire, a scattering of erotic energy and a loss of union with the other. Sexual virtue sustains the subject of desire, making him present as a self in the very act which overcomes him.
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     Traditional sexual education also involved a sustained war against fantasy. Fantasy plays an important part in our sexual doings, and even the most passionate and faithful lover may, in the act of love, rehearse to himself other scenes of sexual abandon than the one in which he is engaged. Nevertheless, there is truth in the Freudian contrast between fantasy and reality, and in the belief that the first is in some way destructive of the second. Fantasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a pliant substitute - and that, indeed, is its purpose. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all it is difficult and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence as subjects, rearrange things in defiance of our will. It requires a great force, such as the force of sexual desire, to overcome the self-protection that shields us from intimate encounters. It is tempting to take refuge in substitutes, which neither embarrass us nor resist the impulse of our spontaneous cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in which unreal objects become the focus of real emotions, and the emotions themselves are rendered incompetent to participate in the building of personal relations. The fantasy blocks the passage to reality, which becomes inaccessible to the will. In this process the fantasy Other, since he is entirely the instrument of my will, becomes an object for me, one among many substitutes defined purely in terms of a sexual use. The sexual world of the fantasist is a world without subjects, in which others appear as objects only. And should the fantasy take possession of him so far as to require that another person submit to it, the result is invariably indecent, tending to rape. The words that I quoted from Richard Posner are indecent in just the way that one must expect, when people no longer see the object of desire as a subject, wanted as such.

     Sexual morality returns us, then, to the great conundrum [139] around which these chapters have revolved: the conundrum of the subject, and his relation to the world of space and time. Can we go further along the road to the unsayable? And if so, by what means of transport?