Positive Liberty

I was really impressed by the sophistication of DSH’s critique of Rowe’s post about natural law theory. Too few people talk about the challenge to natural law that is presented by the death of essentialism. But this is why I think Ayn Rand’s contribution to the ideas of individual liberty is so extraordinary. I think she offers an answer to this problem which rescues natural law—or naturalistic ethics, which is probably a better term—from this challenge.

First things first: it’s true that Darwin’s Dangerous Idea undoes essentialism in the old fashioned sense. We can no longer say that there is some divine spark of uniqueness in human beings that sets them apart categorically from other creatures. See Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 36-39 (1995). And any political theory which says that there is such a spark, and that our rights come from that, and that’s what makes us different than animals and gives us our natural ethical boundaries and whatnot, is doomed.

But essences are real. They’re just not corporeal. As Rand explains in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, essences are mental, but that does not mean that they are not real. As Leonard Peikoff explains,

essences are not attributes marked out by nature apart from man. “Essential” is not a metaphysical, but an epistemological term. “Essential” designates characteristics that perform a certain function in connection with human conceptualization. The function is to differentiate and condense various bodies of data, and the characteristics that perform this function in one cognitive context may not do so in another.

Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand 113 (New York: Meridian 1993) (1991). See also Wallace Matson, Rand on Concepts, in Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, eds., The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand 24-27 (1984). As Matson explains, “[p]ossession of the rational faculty is to be preferred to other characteristics that all and only men have, such as laughter, featherless bipedality, or even language, because of [its] greater explanatory scope, which warrants its designation as the essence of man—essence, not as a metaphysical ingredient apprehended by a mysterious special cognitive faculty, but as an epistemological notion.” Id. at 24. Because possession of rationality explains the qualities that set man apart from other creatures and gives rise to his other unique features. It’s the defining characteristic.

Matson gives an example of how epistemological essences work: consider sulfur. At some point it might be defined as a yellow powdery substance that burns with an odor and kills fleas. But over time scientists will experiment and will change the definition to “a nonmetallic element with the atomic weight of 32.06.” Id. at 25. Eventually, this definition, too, is revised, to Number 16 on the periodic table, “meaning that its atom consists of a nucleus enveloped by two completed electron shells and a third or valence shell containing six electrons.” Now sulfur is defined as element 16, “a statement that, in Rand’s words, ‘stands for chains and paragraphs and pages of explicit propositions referring to complex factual data.’” Id. Now, it’s not that the scientists have somehow penetrated to the true spark within sulfur. “Being No. 16 is no characteristic of sulfur—it is what sulfur is. It is, we might say, a redescription of sulfur in the technological terminology of an articulated theory, in which—ideally at any rate—everything is formally derivable from definitions.”Id.

Next, we can see that this definition cannot be arbitrary. “We cannot conceive that sulfur, which is Element No. 16, should continue to be sulfur but cease to be Element No. 16, i.e., cease to exhibit the behavior that the theory assigns to Element No. 16. To do so would involve contradiction…. [S]ulfur cannot remain Element No. 16 (which is, among other things, the having of exactly six electrons in the valence shell) and combine with Element No. 2 (which is the having of no valence shell at all) chemical combination being the sharing of valence electrons. Helium sulfide is just as straightforwardly contradictory as the round square.” Id. at 26. Thus the essential characteristic is a real one, but, as Rand says, “essences are epistemological.” The nominalist critic is right that essences are in our minds, and not in the thing itself, but that does not mean that our definitions are arbitrary; they are grounded in the real nature of the thing. We cannot define “cat” as, say, “a plant that lives in the desert and has sharp spines” because that is simply not in the nature of cat. (Of course we can use whatever word for the concept of “cat” that we want to, in whatever language, but the concept itself cannot be changed that way without a contradiction.) So essences do exist, and definitions are not arbitrary.

This is so even though the definitions and even the nature might change over time. “Since the category of ‘essence’ arises because of a need of man’s consciousness, the ‘essential’ in each context has to reflect the state of human knowledge.” Peikoff, supra at 13. So a change in the data referring to an object of consciousness will sharpen a definition, which “flow[s] from the facts of the case. In this respect, as we have seen, definitions are ‘empirical’ statements, and reality is the standard of what is essential.” Id. Definitions are not arbitrary even though they will change depending on the data available to us. And this is true even though the nature of the category will change slowly over time, as evolution posits. The concept of “human” stands for certain characteristics, and any particular existent possessing those characteristics will be human so long as it has those characteristics. Evolution—which takes place over glacial millennia—will gradually transform the human species as a collective into some other kind of species, which will have other characteristics. But this will not change any particular human being at all, nor does it change the qualities that make up the concept of human being, or the fact that any existent with those qualities is human.

The bottom line is: the death of essentialism as a metaphysical thing (if anyone ever really considered them that way in the first place) does not mean the death of naturalistic ethics. As Dennett himself puts it,

From what can “ought” be derived? The most compelling answer is this: ethics must somehow be based on an appreciation of human nature—on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy. No one could seriously deny that ethics is responsive to such facts about human nature…. The fallacy is not naturalism but, rather, any simple-minded attempt to rush from facts to values. In other words, the fallacy is greedy reductionism of values to facts, rather than reductionism considered more circumspectly, as the attempt to unify our world-view so that our ethical principles don’t clash irrationally with the way the world is.

Dennett, supra at 468.

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