Humanism: Intersections of Morality and the Human Condition

Kant urged that we ‘treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’

Posted by Keith Tidman

At its foundation, humanism’s aim is to empower people through conviction in the philosophical bedrock of self-determination and people’s capacity to flourish — to arrive at an understanding of truth and to shape their own lives through reason, empiricism, vision, reflection, observation, and human-centric values. Humanism casts a wide net philosophically — ethically, metaphysically, sociologically, politically, and otherwise — for the purpose of doing what’s upright in the context of individual and community dignity and worth.

Humanism provides social mores, guiding moral behaviour. The umbrella aspiration is unconditional: to improve the human condition in the present, while endowing future generations with progressively better conditions. The prominence of the word ‘flourishing’ is more than just rhetoric. In placing people at the heart of affairs, humanism stresses the importance of the individual living both free and accountable — to hand off a better world. In this endeavour, the ideal is to live unbound by undemocratic doctrine, instead prospering collaboratively with fellow citizens and communities. Immanuel Kant underscored this humanistic respect for fellow citizens, urging quite simply, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality, that we ‘treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’. 

The history of humanistic thinking is not attributed to any single proto-humanist. Nor has it been confined to any single place or time. Rather, humanist beliefs trace a path through the ages, being reshaped along the way. Among the instrumental contributors were Gautama Buddha in ancient India; Lao Tzu and Confucius in ancient China; Thales, Epicurus, Pericles, Democritus, and Thucydides in ancient Greece; Lucretius and Cicero in ancient Rome; Francesco Petrarch, Sir Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, and François Rabelais during the Renaissance; and Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, A.J. Ayer, A.C. Grayling, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among the modern humanist-leaning philosophers. (Dewey contributed, in the early 1930s, to drafting the original Humanist Manifest.) The point being that the story of humanism is one of ubiquity and variety; if you’re a humanist, you’re in good company. The English philosopher A.J. Ayer, in The Humanist Outlook, aptly captured the philosophy’s human-centric perspective:

‘The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect; tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs’.

For humanists, moral decisions and deeds do not require a supernatural, transcendent being. To the contrary: the almost-universal tendency to anthropomorphise God, to attribute human characteristics to God, is an expedient to help make God relatable and familiar that can, at the same time, prove disquieting to some people. Rather, humanists’ belief is generally that any god, no matter how intense one’s faith, can only ever be an unknowable abstraction. To that point, the opinion of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume — ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’ — goes to the heart of humanists’ rationalist philosophy regarding faith. Yet, theism and humanism can coexist; they do not necessarily cancel each other out. Adherents of humanism have been religious, agnostic, and atheist — though it’s true that secular humanism, as a subspecies of humanism, rejects a religious basis for human morality.

For humanists there is typically no expectation of after-life rewards and punishments, mysteries associated with metaphorical teachings, or inspirational exhortations by evangelising trailblazers. There need be no ‘ghost in the machine’, to borrow an expression from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle: no invisible hand guiding the laws of nature, or making exceptions to nature’s axioms simply to make ‘miracles’ possible, or swaying human choices, or leaning on so-called revelations and mysticism, or bending the arc of human history. Rather, rationality, naturalism, and empiricism serve as the drivers of moral behaviour, individually and societally. The pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras summed up these ideas about the challenges of knowing the supernatural:

‘About the gods, I’m unable to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form: for there are things that hinder sure knowledge — the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life’.

The critical thinking that’s fundamental to pro-social humanism thus moves the needle from an abstraction to the concreteness of natural and social science. And the handwringing over issues of theodicy no longer matters; evil simply happens naturally and unavoidably, in the course of everyday events. In that light, human nature is recognised not to be perfectible, but nonetheless can be burnished by the influences of culture, such as education, thoughtful policymaking, and exemplification of right behaviour. This model assumes a benign form of human centrism. ‘Benign’ because the model rejects doctrinaire ideology, instead acknowledging that while there may be some universal goods cutting across societies, moral decision-making takes account of the often-unique values of diverse cultures.

A quality that disinguishes humanity is its persistence in bettering the lot of people. Enabling people to live more fully — from the material to the cultural and spiritual — is the manner in which secular humanism embraces its moral obligation: obligation of the individual to family, community, nation, and globe. These interested parties must operate with a like-minded philosophical belief in the fundamental value of all life. In turn, reason and observable evidence may lead to shared moral goods, as well as progress on the material and immaterial sides of life’s ledger.

Humanism acknowledges the sanctification of life, instilling moral worthiness. That sanctification propels human behaviour and endeavour: from progressiveness to altruism, a global outlook, critical thinking, and inclusiveness. Humanism aspires to the greater good of humanity through the dovetailing of various goods: ranging across governance, institutions, justice, philosophical tenets, science, cultural traditions, mores, and teachings. Collectively, these make social order, from small communities to nations, possible. The naturalist Charles Darwin addressed an overarching point about this social order:

‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him’.

Within humanism, systemic challenges regarding morality present themselves: what people can know about definitions of morality; how language bears on that discussion; the value of benefits derived from decisions, policies, and deeds; and, thornily, deciding what actually benefits humanity. There is no taxonomy of all possible goods, for handy reference; we’re left to figure it out. There is no single, unconditional moral code, good for everyone, in every circumstance, for all time. There is only a limited ability to measure the benefits of alternative actions. And there are degrees of confidence and uncertainty in the ‘truth-value’ of moral propositions.

Humanism empowers people not only to help avoid bad results, but to strive for the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people — a utilitarian metric, based on the consequences of actions, famously espoused by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, among others. It empowers society to tame conflicting self-interests. It systematises the development of right and wrong in the light of intent, all the while imagining the ideal human condition, albeit absent the intrusion of dogma.

Agency in promoting the ‘flourishing’ of humankind, within this humanist backdrop, is shared. People’s search for truth through natural means, to advance everyone’s best interest, is preeminent. Self-realisation is the central tenet. Faith and myth are insufficient. As modern humanism proclaims, this is less a doctrine than a ‘life stance’. Social order, forged on the anvil of humanism and its core belief in being wholly responsible for our own choices and lives, through rational measures, is the product of that shared agency.

Humanism: Intersections of Morality and the Human Condition

Kant urged that we ‘treat people as ends in 
themselves, never as means to an end’

Posted by Keith Tidman

At its foundation, humanism’s aim is to empower people through conviction in the philosophical bedrock of self-determination and people’s capacity to flourish — to arrive at an understanding of truth and to shape their own lives through reason, empiricism, vision, reflection, observation, and human-centric values. Humanism casts a wide net philosophically — ethically, metaphysically, sociologically, politically, and otherwise — for the purpose of doing what’s upright in the context of individual and community dignity and worth.

Humanism provides social mores, guiding moral behaviour. The umbrella aspiration is unconditional: to improve the human condition in the present, while endowing future generations with progressively better conditions. The prominence of the word ‘flourishing’ is more than just rhetoric. In placing people at the heart of affairs, humanism stresses the importance of the individual living both free and accountable — to hand off a better world. In this endeavour, the ideal is to live unbound by undemocratic doctrine, instead prospering collaboratively with fellow citizens and communities. Immanuel Kant underscored this humanistic respect for fellow citizens, urging quite simply, in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality, that we ‘treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end’. 

The history of humanistic thinking is not attributed to any single proto-humanist. Nor has it been confined to any single place or time. Rather, humanist beliefs trace a path through the ages, being reshaped along the way. Among the instrumental contributors were Gautama Buddha in ancient India; Lao Tzu and Confucius in ancient China; Thales, Epicurus, Pericles, Democritus, and Thucydides in ancient Greece; Lucretius and Cicero in ancient Rome; Francesco Petrarch, Sir Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, and François Rabelais during the Renaissance; and Daniel Dennett, John Dewey, A.J. Ayer, A.C. Grayling, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey among the modern humanist-leaning philosophers. (Dewey contributed, in the early 1930s, to drafting the original Humanist Manifest.) The point being that the story of humanism is one of ubiquity and variety; if you’re a humanist, you’re in good company. The English philosopher A.J. Ayer, in The Humanist Outlook, aptly captured the philosophy’s human-centric perspective:

‘The only possible basis for a sound morality is mutual tolerance and respect; tolerance of one another’s customs and opinions; respect for one another’s rights and feelings; awareness of one another’s needs’.

For humanists, moral decisions and deeds do not require a supernatural, transcendent being. To the contrary: the almost-universal tendency to anthropomorphise God, to attribute human characteristics to God, is an expedient to help make God relatable and familiar that can, at the same time, prove disquieting to some people. Rather, humanists’ belief is generally that any god, no matter how intense one’s faith, can only ever be an unknowable abstraction. To that point, the opinion of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume — ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’ — goes to the heart of humanists’ rationalist philosophy regarding faith. Yet, theism and humanism can coexist; they do not necessarily cancel each other out. Adherents of humanism have been religious, agnostic, and atheist — though it’s true that secular humanism, as a subspecies of humanism, rejects a religious basis for human morality.

For humanists there is typically no expectation of after-life rewards and punishments, mysteries associated with metaphorical teachings, or inspirational exhortations by evangelising trailblazers. There need be no ‘ghost in the machine’, to borrow an expression from British philosopher Gilbert Ryle: no invisible hand guiding the laws of nature, or making exceptions to nature’s axioms simply to make ‘miracles’ possible, or swaying human choices, or leaning on so-called revelations and mysticism, or bending the arc of human history. Rather, rationality, naturalism, and empiricism serve as the drivers of moral behaviour, individually and societally. The pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras summed up these ideas about the challenges of knowing the supernatural:

‘About the gods, I’m unable to know whether they exist or do not exist, nor what they are like in form: for there are things that hinder sure knowledge — the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life’.

The critical thinking that’s fundamental to pro-social humanism thus moves the needle from an abstraction to the concreteness of natural and social science. And the handwringing over issues of theodicy no longer matters; evil simply happens naturally and unavoidably, in the course of everyday events. In that light, human nature is recognised not to be perfectible, but nonetheless can be burnished by the influences of culture, such as education, thoughtful policymaking, and exemplification of right behaviour. This model assumes a benign form of human centrism. ‘Benign’ because the model rejects doctrinaire ideology, instead acknowledging that while there may be some universal goods cutting across societies, moral decision-making takes account of the often-unique values of diverse cultures.

A quality that distinguishes humanity is its persistence in bettering the lot of people. Enabling people to live more fully — from the material to the cultural and spiritual — is the manner in which secular humanism embraces its moral obligation: obligation of the individual to family, community, nation, and globe. These interested parties must operate with a like-minded philosophical believe in the fundamental value of all life. In turn, reason and observable evidence may lead to share moral goods, as well as progress on the material and immaterial sides of life's ledger.

Humanism acknowledges the sanctification of life, instilling moral worthiness. That sanctification propels human behaviour and endeavour: from progressiveness to altruism, a global outlook, critical thinking, and inclusiveness. Humanism aspires to the greater good of humanity through the dovetailing of various goods: ranging across governance, institutions, justice, philosophical tenets, science, cultural traditions, mores, and teachings. Collectively, these make social order, from small communities to nations, possible. The naturalist Charles Darwin addressed an overarching point about this social order:

‘As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him’.

Within humanism, systemic challenges regarding morality present themselves: what people can know about definitions of morality; how language bears on that discussion; the value of benefits derived from decisions, policies, and deeds; and, thornily, deciding what actually benefits humanity. There is no taxonomy of all possible goods, for handy reference; we’re left to figure it out. There is no single, unconditional moral code, good for everyone, in every circumstance, for all time. There is only a limited ability to measure the benefits of alternative actions. And there are degrees of confidence and uncertainty in the ‘truth-value’ of moral propositions.

Humanism empowers people not only to help avoid bad results, but to strive for the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people — a utilitarian metric, based on the consequences of actions, famously espoused by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, among others. It empowers society to tame conflicting self-interests. It systematises the development of right and wrong in the light of intent, all the while imagining the ideal human condition, albeit absent the intrusion of dogma.

Agency in promoting the ‘flourishing’ of humankind, within this humanist backdrop, is shared. People’s search for truth through natural means, to advance everyone’s best interest, is preeminent. Self-realisation is the central tenet. Faith and myth are insufficient. As modern humanism proclaims, this is less a doctrine than a ‘life stance’. Social order, forged on the anvil of humanism and its core belief in being wholly responsible for our own choices and lives, through rational measures, is the product of that shared agency.

Farmer Hogget, the Limited God

Posted by Eduardo Frajman

One beautiful autumn afternoon not too long ago, my daughters and I were coming home from an errand. They ran ahead of me, headed for our front yard to climb our knobby, twisted tree, or jump headfirst onto a leaf pile, or some other such wholesome activity that would add a tiny brick to the edifice of their innocent, golden childhoods. 

As I reached them I saw my eldest had stopped. She was prodding at something with her foot, nudging it back and forth. Though half-buried, I immediately recognized it for what it was. “What is it?,” my freckled-faced cherub asked. I saw her little sister step towards us curiously, an expectant smile on her face. The thing was roundish, about the size of a plum. Two blade-like stalks protruded out of one end. Amid the black dirt, I could make out patches of fur and a rigid, unseeing eye. “It’s a rock,” I said. My daughter shot me an incredulous, accusatory look as she wailed “Then why does it have ears?!”




The aftermath of our encounter with the decapitated bunny head will be familiar to most parents. “What happened to it?,” was the first question, the easiest one to answer. “I don’t know. Maybe a dog killed it, or a fox. Maybe it got caught under a lawnmower.”

“That’s sad,” said my youngest. “Why did the bunny have to die?” That was the big one, the one most of us can’t satisfactorily answer to ourselves, let alone to the little children who are so ignorant as to believe that we know everything. Why do bad things happen? Why is there evil in the world?

Regardless of how I chose to tackle the issue among the fallen leaves that day, I don’t really remember, I indubitably cracked the foundation of their innocence with a brief but unavoidable lecture on The Way Things Are. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of us, parents and children and bunnies, could frolic about, carelessly, eternally? But we can’t. That’s just not The Way Things Are. “But why not?,” my daughters insisted. That’s when I brought them inside, disinfected their hands, and slipped an old video about a lovable piglet called Babe (1996) into the DVD player.

In philosophical circles, the attempt to answer the question of evil is called “theodicy.” In its traditional Judeo-Christian form, theodicy aims to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful, loving, infinitely good God with the indisputable evidence that the world is awash with undeserved pain and suffering. This is what Babe is about. Yes, that Babe, the one about the talking pig. Babe, for those of you not in the know, is taken from among his brothers and sisters and becomes a prize at a county fair where he is won by Farmer Hogget. Babe meets the farm’s inhabitants: the sheepdogs Fly and Rex and their litter of puppies, Ferdinand the Duck, who is pretending to be a rooster to avoid being eaten, Duchess the evil cat (aren’t they all?), and the sheep, led by old and wise Maa. Babe gets into some low-key adventures until he is recruited by Farmer Hogget to help herd the sheep. This leads to some trouble with Rex, who besides being the alpha sheepdog is also the keeper of law and order among the animals.

Eventually, Farmer Hogget decides Babe is such a good sheep-pig that he enters him into a sheep dog competition, which of course he wins as everyone cheers deliriously. Everyone loves Babe, though it is often dismissed as just another flick selling the well-worn bill of goods to kids and their parents: “follow your star,” “be yourself,” “there is no secret ingredient.” It’s easy to see why this happens. The film follows the eponymous hero as he comes to understand the rules of Hogget Farm and, seemingly, challenges them by becoming a “sheep-pig.” But this is a misunderstanding based on inattentive watching. Babe never chooses to become a sheep-pig. The choice is made for him by Farmer Hogget – “The Boss,” as he is known to the farm animals. Babe is not a story about a young pig finding agency and thereby finding happiness. It is an allegory about the nature of God’s relationship with His creatures.

That the film is a theological parable is suggested in numerous details throughout. The young runt who will become Babe is “chosen” from among “thousands of pigs.” When Farmer Hogget and Babe first lay eyes on each other, they are said to share “a faint sense of some common destiny.” Later Farmer Hogget’s idea to turn Babe into a sheep pig becomes “the stuff of destiny” and Babe becomes the “pig of destiny.” The narration is inflected with Bible-like pronouncements – “a great flood came to the valley,” “there was only one fate for a creature that took the life of a sheep” – and the ancestry of both sheepdogs and sheep is treated as a marker of atavistic significance. On the night before the sheepdog trials, Hogget is shown watching a choir of children dressed as angels singing on television. And there is, of course, the matter of Babe’s parentage. The little pig, who seemingly has no father, boasts no fewer than three mothers: his biological pig mother, Fly the sheepdog who adopts him, and Maa the sheep who imbues him with moral sense.

This is not to say that Babe is a proselytizing work, looking to turn children into believing, unthinking Christians, along the lines of far inferior films such as the recent Little Boy (2015) or God’s Not Dead (2014). Far from it. Babe means instead to problematize belief, to highlight the very difficult questions raised by existing in a world with God in it. The pigs depicted at the start of the movie, for example, are shown lounging in their stys, waiting to be taken to the slaughterhouse. As they walk towards their deaths, they are said to believe they are headed for “pig paradise,” which is a “world of endless pleasures.” In other words, their religious beliefs serve them as consolation for the unavoidable fate that awaits them. There are plenty of followers of the Judeo-Christian tradition who use religion in this way. After all, God states in both the Old and New Testaments that He will reward those who follow His commandments:

“I will give the rain for your land in its season” (Deuteronomy 11:14)

and “rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven” (Matthew 5:11)

- promising that the sufferers in this world will be eternally rewarded in the next.

But the Bible also warns its readers not to accept this message uncritically, most explicitly in the Book of Job, its own stab at theodicy. Job is a good man, a blameless man, and thus deservedly prosperous and happy. Responding to a challenge, God allows Satan to make Job suffer, for no evident reason other than to see what happens. Satan takes away Job’s possessions, he kills Job’s children, he causes Job to endure great physical pain. Taken to his breaking point, Job lashes out against God. Why do I suffer?, asks Job. I don’t deserve to suffer.

God’s answer is meant to give pause to uncritical believers:

“Who is this who darkens my plans with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:1).

How do you know why I do anything?, asks God. Who are you to question Me? Who are you to pretend you understand how the world works, how anything works? You are nobody, says God to Job. You don’t know anything and you never will. And so, can I tell my daughters that it’s okay the bunny lost its head because it’s now hopping in the never-ending fields of bunny heaven? The Book of Job says no. It says that it is not in our capacity to understand why bunnies lose their heads, why pain and suffering pervade the world. It says only God knows the whys of The Way Things Are.

Likewise, it is not the animals’ place on Hogget Farm to question, let alone challenge, The Way Things Are. The only one who tries, Ferdinand the duck, finds only failure and frustration (though not, notably, punishment). Only The Boss can alter the rules. The film, of course, does not mean for Farmer Hogget to be seen literally as God. He and his wife are normal humans among many: they go to church and celebrate Christmas, they have children and grandchildren, she is the “assistant general secretary of the northeast region” for the Women’s Country Guild, he has “a long and honorable association” with the National Sheepdog Association. On the other hand, the beginning of the film goes out of its way to underline the couple’s specialness. Mrs. Hogget’s victory in a cooking competition is deemed “not a matter of luck” (she is later seen placing her trophy in a shelf stuffed with them). As the couple walk around the county fair, the image fades to black except for a small circle, which follows them around for a few additional moments, indicating their chosen status. Their power, such as it is, is mundane and earthbound, not supernatural. It is only in their own domains that each one of them lords. Inside the house, as made clear by Duchess the cat, it is Mrs. Hogget who is rules, while the farmer deserves only the status of “The Boss’ husband.”

To the farm animals, however, Farmer Hogget is god. His rule is unchallenged, and the animals all understand that their function in the world is to serve and obey him; even Ferdinand the duck, who doesn’t want to be eaten but still knows he must find a way to make himself useful. Hogget is a creator god. He is shown making a dollhouse for his granddaughter, a new gate for the farm, building the obstacles to train Babe for the sheepdog trials, lovingly placing the wool of a recently-shorn sheep on his wagon. He is a patient, loving god. He always has a kind word for his animals, “good dog,” “that’ll do,” and never ever loses his temper. He is a just but merciful god, as is shown by his actions after Maa is killed by a wild dog. The evidence points to Babe, and the Boss makes ready to execute the sentence he deems appropriate, but when he learns of his mistake he changes his planned course of action, like God does towards the city of Nineveh in the Book of Jonah.

Hogget is also a wise god. He is truthful, but is not beyond using slight subterfuge when it suits his aims. He follows his intuition because he knows “that little ideas can turn into the stuff of destiny,” as when he decides to spare Babe from becoming roast pork and turn him into the pig of destiny, but is willing to learn new things, as when he uses the fax machine he initially mistrusted. He realizes that Rex the dog, the Old-Testament prophet of the farm and the keeper of its laws, attacks Babe, the New Testament prophet of love, out of jealousy and fear of being replaced. It’s worth remembering that the only character with any stake in the outcome of the climactic sheepdog trials is Hogget himself. Fly articulates the most awful possible outcome: “The Boss will look like an idiot!” After Babe triumphs in the trials, after the animals in the farm and the crowd in the stands erupt in celebration, the camera shows the two of them standing alone, a ray of sunshine emerging from the clouds and shining down on the two chosen ones. It then shows Hogget’s face from Babe’s perspective, a halo of sunlight around his head, projecting gentleness and pride and love. “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

And so, Babe’s happiest state manifests itself in a moment of service to his god. And yet, just the night before, Babe had sunk into a deep crisis of faith. In preparation for the trials the Boss had modified The Ways Things Are. While hitherto only dogs and cats had been allowed in the house, Babe was invited in to partake in the best food and the warmth of the fireplace. Duchess the cat was livid at this unwanted invasion onto her turf. She tried to scratch at Babe, but this only earned her temporary banishment. On her second try, she went for the more subtle approach. “Why do you think you’re here?,” she asked the pig. “Why are any of us here?,” he parried. All creatures have a purpose, Duchess told Babe. The dogs herd the sheep, the cow gives milk, the cat looks beautiful. “What do you think your purpose is?” Babe didn’t know, so Duchess told him the truth, that a pig’s purpose is to be eaten. Babe could not believe it. He ran to his adoptive mother Fly and asked her whether humans ate his biological mother, the rest of his family. “Yes, dear,” said Fly. “Even The Boss?” “Yes, dear.” Babe was inconsolable. He wouldn’t eat or move. The other animals were heartbroken. Babe had lost his innocence. He had learned the awful implications of The Way Things Are. Even Rex, his former nemesis, could not stand to see him like that. “The Boss needs you!,” he pleaded.

Why does God allow for such things to happen? Why does Babe have to lose his family so we can put bacon in our burgers? If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t He just create some bacon trees, or make bacon taste like dirt for that matter? One of the most famous answers to the question was proposed by Leibniz in 1710, in the only book that he published in his lifetime, called the Essays on Theodicy, in the process introducing the new term.

It’s obvious, according to Leibniz, that God is all-powerful, as well as infinitely good. It stands to reason that if evil exists, it does so because God decided that a world with evil in it is better than a world without evil since God, being all-powerful, could only create “the best of all possible worlds.” Imagine a painting that contains all the possible colors. Some colors are gorgeous and pleasing to the eye, others are dreary or unpleasant to look at. Would the most beautiful painting use only the most beautiful colors? Or is it possible that, by judiciously using the ugly colors, one could enhance the impact of the beautiful colors and thereby achieve an even greater result? For example, anybody would agree that compassion is a great thing, and that a world where compassion exists is better than a world in which it doesn’t. But, in order to feel compassion, a person needs to witness someone else suffering. No suffering, no compassion. The same is probably true of most positive emotions, many of which are magnified by being preceded by bad emotions. Consider the pleasure of eating something after an extended period of fasting.

Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” theory was criticized by many for being, at best, too naïve and, at worst, willingly blind to the mind-shattering levels of bad things that actually exist in the world. Voltaire famously satirized Leibniz in Candide (1759), a novel in which a young man’s suffering of tragedy upon tragedy is played for laughs not unlike those elicited by Willie E. Coyote’s travails in Looney Tunes films. Imagine that, early on in your life, you discover that your parents, siblings, everyone like you, is being raised as food for a “superior” species. Imagine that, any day, you could be killed and eaten by your “owner.” Would you conclude from this knowledge that the world you live in is the best possible world?

As David Hume put it in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, you can only get to Leibniz’s conclusion if you start out by assuming an infinitely good, all-powerful God exists. If you start by looking at the evidence, however, you might conclude something else entirely. You might conclude that God doesn’t exist, that the world is just the random consequence of an immeasurably complex series of natural laws and events that led us to a state of affairs in which I love my daughters so much that I find it necessary to shield them from grief by explaining away a decapitated bunny head. Or perhaps, as some have argued, God does exist but He’s just plain nasty. Hume didn’t find this likely, since just as there are plenty of terrible things in the world, there are plenty of wonderful things in it as well. Perhaps God is just like us, only more so. This is essentially what the ancient Greeks believed.

In the film, though, Babe chooses a different option. The same one that, curiously, Rabbi Harold Kushner proposes in his now-mostly-forgotten bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner begins with the problem of evil as seen by Job as well as Babe. Since there is no doubt that evil exists, how can it be that an all-good, all-powerful God also exists? He then examines the evidence available to him, in defiance of God’s admonition at the end of the Book of Job. Kushner rejects the idea that God does not exist, and he cannot bring himself to suggest that God might be evil. It follows, therefore, that God must not be all-powerful. God is in charge, but not fully in charge.

The same is true of Farmer Hogget. He has all the qualities one wants in a god: he is capable, wise, merciful, full of grace. But he is not fully in charge of what happens. He cannot prevent his sheep from being stolen, or Fly to lose her puppies, or Maa from being mauled by a wild dog. He cannot make a world in which pigs and ducks are not eaten. And so, when Babe the pig is lying in his house, refusing to eat or to budge, about to die of dehydration, Farmer Hogget can do nothing but sing the plaintive song of the limited god:

“If I had words to make a day for you/I’d sing you a morning golden and new/I would make this day last for all time/Give you a night deep in moonshine.”

“I love you”, says Farmer Hogget to Babe with his song, but certain things even I can’t make happen. “I can’t make a perfect world. I can’t take away your pain. Are you still with me?”

A Philosophy of Gestures

By Thomas Scarborough

 

A weighty philosophical tome it may not have been, nor a seminal paper, nor a famous meeting which made the greatest contribution to modern philosophy, but a single gesture. Unusually, for a gesture – since gestures are so quickly lost in the tumult of our daily life – it was one of the best recorded gestures of time. 

Piero Sraffa – otherwise known for his lectures on economics at Cambridge – impulsively brushed his chin with his fingers. So important was Sraffa to Ludwig Wittgenstein – above all, it would seem, through that single gesture – that Wittgenstein acknowledged Sraffa in his Philosophical Investigations. The same Wittgenstein, that is, who wrote to his professor G.E. Moore: “Dear Moore,... the whole business [of acknowledgement] is too stupid and too beastly.” For such sentiments, Wittgenstein was denied his BA degree. Citations, at Cambridge, were required by the regulations.

Wittgenstein finally wrote acknowledgements in his Philosophical Investigations, but not to his mentors Gottlob Frege, or Bertrand Russell, nor to any of the luminaries he there refers to merely as “other people” – only to Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa. The acknowledgement to Ramsey seems somewhat cursory: through him, he “was helped”. But his acknowledgement to Sraffa is profound: "I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book". And “this book”, in turn, arguably had the most consequential effects of the century, in philosophy. While it is not known which stimulus it was that Wittgenstein refers to in his book, it is generally assumed that the gesture encapsulates it all – followed by Sraffa's interrogation of Wittgenstein:   

“What is the logical form of that?”  

Sraffa need not have brushed his chin with his fingers. It might as easily have been a punch. “What is the logical form of that?” Or a hug. Even a jig. Or, for that matter, a legacy, or a rampage. President Kennedy's visit to West Berlin, we may suppose, was a gesture. The Bomb under Mururoa. The independence of East Timor. The destruction of the Twin Towers. In their broadest sense, these are gestures all. They are actions, that is, performed to convey a feeling or intention.

Let us now turn our attention to another gesture – in another place, another time. It is a gesture which holds much in common with that of Sraffa. The details of this gesture, unlike Sraffa's, are lost in time – yet we may assume that it was the one gesture which raised all other gestures to prominence in a certain young man's mind.

In his introductory observations in Of Morals, David Hume wrote simply: “I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture.” Hume, that is, observed not merely that the voice reveals the effects of passion, but gesture. Or to put it more broadly, it was not merely Hume's mastery of words and ideas which informed his moral philosophy, but his witness of gesture.

Hume, in this way, may be said to foreshadow Wittgenstein. Like Wittgenstein, gesture caused him to look beyond a world of mere words and logical structures. Wittgenstein merely saw what Hume had seen before. Hume had had his Sraffa moment, two hundred years before – although, to be sure, he had not made much of it.

Hume, further, appeared to assume a logic of gesture. We do not need to look far to find it. We find it in that fleeting comment in Of Morals: “I see the effects of passion...” Gestures, for Hume, were “effects”. Further, these effects were “seen” – and presumably therefore, interpreted. Effects, of course, have causes. And both causes and effects, in turn, are what systems are made of. Whatever one may say about Hume's ethics, he believed in some kind of gestural trade.

We give gestures and we take them. We balance gestures. We contemplate them. We arrange gestures within our world. This is the stuff of which our moral life is made. While on the surface of it, such gestures may appear to have no logical form – being intangible, mysterious, and as Hume considered, “perfectly inexplicable by human reason”, yet we know what they are. We have a repertoire of gestures. This repertoire has definition, of a kind. And further, it forms a vast network – personal, social, global. 

Piero Sraffa might cast some further light on this. Usually it is assumed that Sraffa gave Wittgenstein the impulse for abandoning ethics as a rational quest. We imagine that Sraffa, brushing his chin, would have answered his own question thus: 

“There is no logical form of that, of course. Ethics and logic do not mix.”

Yet Sraffa himself was an ethicist, and a systematic one at that. He was a Ricardian – which is, he sought a balance of human and material value. Let us for a moment suppose that there may be a variant reading of Sraffa. Supposing that Sraffa's internal dialogue would have read something like this:  

“What is the logical form of a gesture, Wittgenstein? Speak, Wittgenstein, for I see it before us so clear. I recognise a gestural trade.” 

Supposing that gestures are logical forms. Supposing that there exists a system of gestures – where we understand gestures in their broadest sense. Gestures, then, might be organised structurally, as a kind of gestural ethics. This raises a number of questions which are beyond the bounds of one short essay – yet one may suggest that chief among them are these:

Firstly, may a system of gestures be so ordered as to be more pleasing than other systems of gestures? How, then? and on what basis? And secondly, would such a system of gestures be unique and autonomous, as G.E. Moore suggests? Or is the way in which we trade in gestures in some way fundamentally the same as the way in which we dialogue in history, law, geography, and theology – in fact chemistry and physics, too?

It would seem too daring to take on both questions at once – yet with a leap of the imagination, Sraffa might help us further with the first. Supposing that the emphasis of Sraffa's question was this:   

“Logic, Wittgenstein, is little pieces of thought. Think, Wittgenstein – think more expansively! Look at the meaning of this gesture, socially and globally!”

Sraffa's gesture clearly combined action with meaning. Not only that, but in that moment in which he brushed his chin, he used the expression of an entire culture – not merely of a man. His gesture combined history and society, heritage and cultivation. It exploded the bounds of logic. Good morals, Sraffa might have suggested, do not lie in the study of logical pieces.
 
Sraffa, after all, was a globalist. Supposing this interpretation to be true, the lesson might not have been lost on Wittgenstein. On the surface of it, while he abandoned any logic of ethics, his mature philosophy embraced forms of life – namely, the notion that our language is embedded in the entire matrix of our lives: sociological, historical, linguistic, physiological, behavioural.

David Hume, apparently, moved in much the same direction. In his later thinking, his ethics came to encompass not merely individual morals, but “the happiness of mankind”. A raft of moral gestures, he thought, rested “solely” on considerations which took the whole of society into account: justice, fidelity, honour, veracity, allegiance, and chastity.
 
Both of these conclusions, of Wittgenstein and of Hume, the first located in the 20th century, the second in the 18th, may originally have been motivated by gestures – so opening up to these key philosophers a more apposite and expansive thinking, an ethics in the context of the whole world, in all its varied manifestations.

There remains one more gesture which we find in the annals of philosophy, without which this essay would not seem to be complete. It was the final, touching gesture of Immanuel Kant. Rather than signalling a philosophy that was yet to come, this was a retrospective gesture.

When Kant's doctor called on him in his final days, the ailing Kant, with some difficulty, stood up to receive him, and would not allow himself to be seated again until the doctor had taken his place.

One might wonder what it was all about – if Kant had not, reportedly, explained it himself. It was, said Kant, the sign of a life that had connected the personal with the universal. That is, it was a gesture which revealed the categorical imperative – a gesture as wide as the world, and not merely for his own sake – in fact, even at his own expense. For Kant, too, gestures embodied an ethic which transcended narrower, personal, parochial interests.