MORTIMER J. ADLER ON PRESUPPOSITIONS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

On what factual presuppositions about the nature of man does a teleological ethics depend for the truth of its normative conclusions? There are, it seems to me, only four.

First, that man, like any other animal, has a certain, limited number of natural needs, and that the natural needs that are specifically human will differ from those of other animals, as man differs specifically from them. I have dealt with the question of how man differs from other animals in an earlier book, "The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes." I think that book decisively establishes the proposition that man differs in kind from other animals by virtue of his having the related powers of propositional speech and conceptual thought, powers totally lacking in all other animals. Future scientific discoveries may falsify this proposition, but at the moment there is not a shred of empirical evidence to the contrary.

Second, that man, because he has the power of conceptual thought, is uniquely a time-binding animal--the only animal whose consciousness embraces an extensive past and a far-reaching future. Human memory and imagination, augmented and transformed by the power of conceptual thought, emancipate man from imprisonment in the immediate present. This proposition about man, like the preceding one, is supported by all the scientific evidence now available. The importance of its truth for the truth of a teleological ethics should be evident on a moment's reflection. Man could not engage in the pursuit of happiness--he could not seek the ultimate end of a whole good life--if that temporal whole, encompassing his past and his future along with any present moment, were not an object he could hold before his mind at all times in his life, except perhaps the period of his infancy.

Third, that man does not have any genetically pre-formed patterns of species-specific behavior, that is, he does not have definite instincts, as other animals do. While he does have instinctual drives or needs, these are subject in man's case to inhibition and sublimation by his power of conceptual thought, with the result that each man determines for himself the manner in which he responds to or satisfies his instinctual drives or needs. Although this proposition is challenged by some behavioral scientists, and especially by popularizers of ethology, it has the support of overwhelming empirical evidence. Its significance for a teleological ethics should be evident: that each man ought to make a really good life for himself presupposes that he can determine for himself how he shall respond to his natural needs, including those that are called "instinctual" such as the sexual drive. This would not be so if his instinctual needs were fulfilled by genetically determined patterns of behavior, the same for all men because they are species-specific.

Fourth and last, that man, having the power of conceptual thought, also has freedom of choice--a freedom that enables him, at any moment of his life, to choose one partial good rather than another, without being determined to do so by his past experience, the habits he has formed, or the character he has developed up to that moment In other words, he has, through freedom of choice, the power of self-determination, the power of creating or forming himself and his life according to his own decisions. Freedom of choice is presupposed by any form of moral philosophy that involves categorical oughts, for a categorical ought is meaningless unless the individual it obligates is free to obey or disobey it. Unless he had freedom of choice, the individual subject to categorical oughts could not be held morally responsible for his acts. This presupposition is even more important for a deontological ethics that is also teleological, for without freedom of choice at every critical moment in a man's life, he could not be responsible for making or failing to make a whole good life for himself. Is this presupposition factually true? All I need say on this score is that there is no scientific evidence against it. I have dealt elsewhere with the philosophical dispute about free will and determinism and with the possibility that freedom of choice will be falsified or confirmed by scientific evidence in the future.

To sum up: in the present state of the empirical evidence, none of the factual presuppositions of a teleological ethics can be dismissed as false. On the contrary, the scientific evidence now available and the evidence of common experience overwhelmingly favor the first three presuppositions, and while the fourth is still philosophically disputed, there is as yet no decisive evidence to the contrary.

* Chapter 17, from Mortimer Adler's book, "The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense."