Human Form and Relations of Right

In December 1930, Soviet Russia invited the kobzars – itinerant bards, usually blind, who sang Ukrainian epics and traditional songs – and their young guides to a congress of folk singers, ostensibly to learn how their art could better aid the goals of Soviet society. The Kobzars were a political problem for the Soviets: they were revered by the Ukrainian people, but their art was traditional – i.e., ‘nationalistic’, ‘medieval’, and ‘patriarchal’ – and clearly at odds with the government's aims. But the congress was a ruse. Once its ‘work’ was over, the kobzars were packed intro trains so that its real purpose could be accomplished: upwards of 300 were executed under the cover of night and thrown into mass graves, their traditional instruments burned.

It is obvious that even the most dyed in the wool socialist might still be horrified by what was done to the Kobzars in the name of advancing their political ends, no matter how good or beautiful they might be. This principled non-consequentialism is roughly the position that David Wiggins wants to defend in his essay, ‘Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical’ (Reference Wiggins2008), where he argues that ‘solidarity for the human qua human’ must be the basis of any ‘true’ or ‘sincere’ benevolence (concern for the welfare of all). Wiggins wants an account of benevolence that respects the fact that, as Philippa Foot puts it, we grant to each individual person ‘a moral space’ which others ‘are not allowed to invade,’ so that no man will want or allow serious evil to come on another – not even to spare similar evils upon others or to work for the best outcome in the aggregate (Reference Foot2001, p. 103). That we do this, Foot suggests, implies that there is ‘a kind of solidarity between human beings, as if there is some sense in which no one is totally to come out against one of his fellow men’ (Reference Foot2001, p. 204). This solidarity, Wiggins argues, is at the root of the ethical as such, and it carries with it a commitment to the deontological – in particular, to absolute prohibitions.

For Wiggins, the connection between solidarity and the deontological goes like this. It is central to the ethical that some acts are categorically forbidden, precisely because they offend human solidarity, and thus ‘poison the source of the ethical itself.’ Such acts include judicial condemnation of the innocent, murder, and acts of unprovoked violence; there is, in such acts, always an identifiable victim, and ‘real’ benevolence evinces concern and care for them. Solidarity is the name Wiggins gives to the ‘feeling’, ‘sentiment’, or ‘response’ that can be ‘expected from almost anyone who is party to the ethical’ (Reference Wiggins2008, p. 5). Drawing on Simone Weil, Wiggins argues that it is constitutive of the ethical that we recognize in one another ‘not merely a subject of consciousness but a being who will try to make sense of us even as we try to make sense of him or her, each of us bringing to bear more or less similar expectations, a canon of the reasonable not entirely at variance with our own’ (Reference Wiggins2008, p. 9). When we pass a stranger on the road, we encounter not a thing to be used but another human person – a fellow member of the ‘party of humankind’.

The first expectation that follows from this mutual recognition is negative: there is a range of actions – injury, murder, plunder, or pillage – that are forbidden, because such acts ‘menace the ethical itself and corrupt its basis in mutual recognition’ (Reference Wiggins2008, p. 14). Absolute prohibitions are ultimately grounded, then, in solidarity, which is grounded in the recognition that we are responsible to each member of our kind, such that we cannot sacrifice the well-being of any single member for the sake of the whole. This solidarity is the root of morality, which consequentialism, with its emphasis on the individual's responsibility to ensure the best outcomes for the whole, cannot account for.

I certainly agree with Wiggins that absolute prohibitions are essential to excellence in practical thought and action, and therefore that all forms of consequentialism are direct attacks on our traditional understanding of the ethical as such. However, the phenomenon of mutual recognition he has isolated is not obviously deontological in character but perhaps, as Michael Thompson names it, dikaiological (Thompson, Reference Thompson, Wallace, Pettit, Scheffler and Smith2004, pp. 333–84). It will be instructive to note the difference, in order to raise the question whether a proper account of benevolence is what is needed in order to combat consequentialism, or whether the remedy lies first in restoring the virtue of justice its proper place in ethical thought and reflection.

We can begin by noticing that the acts that Wiggins wants to rule out categorically are all acts of injustice; each one is no mere wrongdoing but a paradigm example of wronging someone. As Wiggins himself notes, each forbidden act he highlights implies a victim, and Wigginsian solidarity requires that we not willingly create victims by our actions or policies. This suggests that what the phenomenon of mutual recognition isolates is the fact that ‘it is characteristic of the human being to develop the capacity to pair itself off dikaiologically with others’, which comes to the same as the claim that ‘the concept of the human is a concept of a manifold of persons’ who stand in relations of right to one another (2004, p. 376–378). Thompson argues that relations of right cannot be reduced to statements of deontological commands, because deontological and dikaiological thoughts take different logical forms, making it impossible to reduce one to the other.

For Thompson, when two strangers meet on a road and recognize that they are both bearers of human form, part of what they recognize is that it is possible for either of them to wrong the other in a variety of ways – that there is a ‘special possible mode of dependence of the actions of one agent on facts it apprehends about another’ (Reference Thompson, Wallace, Pettit, Scheffler and Smith2004, p. 347). This special apprehension is that one is joined in a relation of right with another person, a recognition that one can only come to with another human being in relation to oneself. Justice, understood as a virtue that an individual possesses depends on this sort of mutual recognition in our first personal thought and judgement, which has a bipolar, practical form: there must be a someone who can possibly be wronged by you, rather than a mere object of generic harm or locus of your own moral failure.

Thompson contrasts this bipolarity of thought with monadic expressions of deontic rules, principles, or laws. X did wrong in doing A, or I did wrong in that I lied to you, is monadic in form, and therefore logically distinct from X wronged Y by doing A, or I can't do A, it wrongs Y.Footnote ¹ What is distinctive of the dikaiological and absent in the monadic is this relation to the other. In monadic judgements, the other shows up in the act type description, whereas in dikaioloical judgments the other shows up in relation to the subject of the judgment itself.

Thompson notes that it is characteristic of a just person to operate with certain first-person judgments of a bipolar or essentially relational form, because justice is the virtue that is essentially about our transactions with others.Footnote ² And the object of justice, traditionally conceived, is the ius, or the owed, and can only be determined objectively between two persons. For example, Aquinas argues that ‘that which is right in the works of the other virtues, and to which the intention of the virtue tends as to its proper object, depends on its relation to the agent only, whereas the right in a work of justice, besides is relation to the agent, is set up by its relation to others’ (ST II-II 57.1).

So, we have two different accounts of the phenomenon of mutual recognition that Wiggins isolates. For Wiggins, the strangers on the road recognize themselves as members of the party of humankind, as responsible to one another in various ways. This recognition elicits a response of solidarity – a feeling or sentiment that is at the root of ethical life, and that must be respected by any potential account of benevolence as a virtue. Thompson diagnoses the imagined encounter differently; strangers on the road recognize one another as ‘members of a manifold of persons’, that is, as agents ‘apt to be joined pairwise’ by concrete relations of right (Reference Thompson, Wallace, Pettit, Scheffler and Smith2004, p. 354). For Thompson, this recognition has nothing to do with identifying some supposed root of the ethical as such, but is simply the basis of understanding (with the Aristotelian tradition more generally, and Philippa Foot more specifically) justice as a virtue that is natural in the sense that it goes beyond the materials provided by mere convention or culture and belongs to what we might call the life cycle of the human to develop in the natural course of their lives.Footnote ³ Relations of right join pairs of individuals who share no social practices or institutions or common Bildung – they might be strangers in a deep sense that all they have in common is that they are each individual bearers of one and the same human form. And this at least suggests that our self-conscious experience of one another, in the ordinary course of life, is life form dependent, or is a kind of form-consciousness. The charge that exists between the two poles in moral, bipolar judgments, can only exists between human persons. If there turn out to be rational spiders on Mars, we cannot claim, a priori, to stand in relations of right to them.

One might reasonably wonder what is really at stake here, whether we explain the mutual recognition of the strangers on the road in terms of solidarity and benevolence or relations of right and justice. I suspect that much will hang on it, but I can only begin to suggest a line of response here. First, if Thompson's analysis is correct, then Wiggins was wrong when he famously argued that facts about human nature can only be given ‘an unconvincing speaking part’ in our ethical reflection.Footnote ⁴ In the phenomenon of mutual recognition as Thompson parses it, we see the apprehension of human form playing an indispensable role in first personal judgements of bipolar normativity. Here we see human nature not as an alienated, empirical concept, but as deployed in our ordinary judgments of ourselves in relation to others – as non-accidentally falling under a practical nexus that binds us together in our shared forms of practical thought and judgment.

Second, we do well to remember that for the Aristotelian tradition, justice is a moral virtue that is perfected in friendship (philia). Justice does not require that we love or even like the other person to whom something is owed; it requires only that we have a stable will to give to them their due. But it is of course more perfect that we care for them, that we come to have a kind of mutual affection and concern for their well-being, but we can lack this feeling and still have the thought that we must not wrong our fellow man. And while Aristotle and Aquinas both recognize a very thin sort of mutual affection that humans may have for one another simply in virtue of bearing a common form, it seems far too thin to motivate anyone from wronging one another when it might benefit them to do so.

Third, not all absolute prohibitions suggest a victim. Apostasy, bestiality, desecration, and even adultery seem to lack victims and Wigginsian solidarity does not help us to understand why the act descriptions themselves ‘connote depravity or wickedness’ and are therefore forbidden as well. The deontological concept of the forbidden seems broader than the material Wiggins is working with, which suggests that his account is after a reality that is more narrow in its scope.

Finally, we should note that mutual recognition as Thompson understands it is not a feeling or a passion but a particular form that practical thought necessarily takes. If what we want is a morality that is ultimately grounded in reason rather than natural sentiment, then the appeal of Thompsonian neo-Aristotelianism over Wigginsian neo-Humeanism will be plain.