Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc (Albany Medical College), "Humanism: A Reconsideration"

Forthcoming, Journal of the American Philosophical Association

By Aleksy Tarasenko-Struc

On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger executed his plan. He went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California, murdering six people before taking his own life. At first glance this episode might seem unremarkable—part of a welter of preventable tragedies so common in American life that they’re promptly forgotten after a reflexive burst of outrage. But for many of us what made these acts more difficult to forget was their motive, as explained by Rodger in a video and written memoir: to punish women for refusing him sex and love. Or in his own words:

You forced me to suffer all my life, now I will make you all suffer. … I’ll give you exactly what you deserve, all of you. All you girls who rejected me, looked down upon me… treated me like scum while you gave yourselves to other men. And all of you men for living a better life than me, all of you sexually active men. I hate you. I hate all of you. I can’t wait to give you exactly what you deserve, annihilation.

The case of Elliot Rodger is interesting for a variety of reasons. It’s interesting, first and foremost, as a microcosm of a strain of misogynistic pathology that’s disturbingly in vogue: that of self-identified ‘involuntary celibates’ (‘incels’), about which much has been written. But it’s also interesting for a more general reason. It’s tempting to draw a broader lesson from such incidents, about the motivational limitations of recognizing the humanity of others.

            In many circles within and outside of academia, it’s an article of faith that moral progress comes in the form of more fully seeing the humanity of others. The idea is that seeing people as fellow human beings—perhaps particularly members of marginalized or vilified groups—tends to make us treat them humanely and that we’ll be disposed to treat them inhumanely if we fail to see their humanity. Call this view humanism.

            Acts like Rodger’s seem to challenge humanism for two reasons. First, such acts suggest that people who treat others inhumanely are perfectly aware that their victims are human beings. In other words, perpetrators of inhumanity normally don’t (or can’t) fail to see their victims’ humanity. Call this the humanization objection. Second, acts like Rodger’s seem to indicate that seeing someone as human doesn’t (or can’t) explain why we treat her humanely, because, more often than not, it leads us to treat her inhumanely instead. Call this the motivational insignificance objection. If we’re gripped by these objections, we may worry that humanism is just a political progressive’s fairy tale, the childish fantasy of a Pollyannaish sensibility.

            Or so it has been argued by Kate Manne—easily the most influential critic of humanism—and, still more recently, by social psychologists such as Paul Bloom and Harriet Over. My main goal in a forthcoming paper, ‘Humanism: A Reconsideration’, is to show that these criticisms fall flat, and that it’s much harder to refute humanism than it may seem. I’m also keen to examine, and in some cases to reject, the tacit assumptions underlying the debate.

            I argue, for instance, that a strong version of the humanization objection—namely, that perpetrators of inhumanity can’t see their victims as nonhuman—rests on the assumption that people can’t see others as human and as nonhuman at the same time. But that seems pretty implausible. Seeing someone as an adult, for example, seems entirely compatible with also seeing her as a child, as is believing that someone falls into both categories. So, why wouldn’t it be psychologically possible to, say, see someone both as human and as an animal? And if we weaken the objection—perpetrators of inhumanity, in fact, rarely do see their victims as nonhuman—we soon find plenty of counterexamples in social psychology and genocide studies. (Indeed, Rodger’s own writings even suggest that he might be a counterexample, too. He claims more than once that women ‘think like beasts, and in truth, they are beasts. Women are incapable of having morals or thinking rationally. They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses.’) So, there’s fairly strong evidence that at least inhumanity is committed by people who fail to see the humanity of their victims.  

            The motivational insignificance objection—that seeing someone as human doesn’t (or can’t) motivate us to treat her humanely—doesn’t fare much better once we distinguish different readings of it. As normally formulated, it looks like the claim that seeing someone as human is insufficient for being moved to treat her humanely. Well, that’s undoubtedly true. But it doesn’t threaten the most interesting version of humanism. Few humanists—perhaps none—hold that interpersonal recognition irresistibly compels the recognizer to treat the recognized party with basic human decency. Rather, it’s typically acknowledged that whatever humane motives are triggered by interpersonal recognition, they may have to compete with other, possibly stronger motives—and that the latter sometimes defeat the former. The point is that seeing someone as human disposes us to treat her humanely, not that the disposition is always efficacious. And because seeing someone’s humanity is associated with dispositions to empathize with her, the burden is on the critic of humanism to show that such humane motives are generally weak.

            On the other hand, the motivational insignificance objection could instead be that interpersonal recognition is just motivationally inert. Here I think that the humanist can and should respond by rejecting the assumption on which the objection is based. Many philosophers conceive of seeing someone’s humanity in a way that’s surprisingly overly intellectualized. They think of it as a dispassionate act of mental categorization, utterly separate from our affective and motivationally engaged nature. Seeing someone as a person is, on this picture, not all that different than seeing something as a chair, even if we tend to care more about people than about chairs. That assumption ought to be rejected. Instead, I submit, humanists should take their cue from the later Wittgenstein. We should insist that seeing someone as a person is a state of mind that’s, by its very nature, saturated by person-specific modes of affect and concern for her. In Wittgensteinian terms, to see someone’s humanity is to have ‘an attitude towards a soul.’

            Assuming that this sort of move turns out to be defensible, it would have radical consequences for our understanding of our awareness of other people. But it would also open up the possibility of a significant reorientation of our moral psychology and metaethics. In a seldom-discussed passage in an early paper, ‘Justice as Fairness’, John Rawls writes:

To recognize another as a person one must respond to him and act towards him in certain ways; and these ways are intimately connected with the various prima facie duties. Acknowledging these duties in some degree, and so having the elements of morality, is not a matter of choice, or of intuiting moral qualities, or a matter of the expression of feelings or attitudes…; it is simply the possession of one of the forms of conduct in which the recognition of others as persons is manifested.

Rawls’s suggestion, as I understand it, is that morality is constitutively linked to elementary forms of recognizing other people as such. If so, foundational questions about morality—like those associated with metaethics—ought to reflect that (alleged) fact. Rather than prioritizing questions about the nature of moral judgment and its relation to moral motivation, we would do well to ask how seeing someone as a person is related to moral motivation toward her.  

            In any case, the most defensible form of humanism that emerges from these discussions need not be Pollyannaish at all. It should demonstrate how interpersonal recognition is linked with motives for humane behavior while admitting that there is, indeed, a dark side to seeing the humanity of others. This sort of view would be well characterized by a remark of Thomas Nagel’s toward the end of The Possibility of Altruism. Nagel claims that his project in that book—to show that altruism and morality are possible in virtue of a deep feature of human nature—doesn’t prove that people are basically good. And it’s a good thing, too, because we’re basically complicated, if anything. My point is similar. We can admit that seeing the humanity of others affords us a source of humane motives without oversimplifying—and overly sanitizing—human psychology, which is complex, messy, and prone to the most shocking corruption.