Philosophy 433
History of
Ethics
Darwall
Winter
2008
ROUSSEAU
I
I Rousseau:
the background. Rousseau was an
almost exact contemporary of Hume's.
Their dates overlap almost precisely.
Hume was born in 1711 and died in 1776.
And Rousseau was
born one year earlier
and died two
years later (1712-1778). Moreover, their
lives intertwined in one pretty remarkable incident.
Hume invited Rousseau to make his home in
While
Rousseau is mainly known as a political philosopher, certain central
moral philosophical
themes underlie his political views.
These concern the nature of liberty, freedom, and obligation. In particular, Rousseau describes a kind of
moral freedom or autonomy which begins, with his thought, to play a
central
role in moral philosophy. This is
Rousseau's idea that human beings are both free and obligated only by
virtue of
their capacity to obey a law which they prescribe for themselves, and,
specifically, by laws that they would prescribe by exercising this
capacity.
We saw an
antecedent of this idea in the "transcendental" interpretation of
psychological makeup,
but to laws
which she wills for herself. Her nature
is thus a "law to itself" not just in
II Masters
and slaves: both unfree?
The
first chapter of On the Social Contract begins famously:
"Man
is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
One believes himself the others’
master, and
yet is more a slave than they."
While this passage
appropriately sets the
theme of
freedom and unfreedom, it does so in a
slightly
misleading way. The contrast seems to be
between a freedom human beings might have in a state of nature, outside
of any
relations in a social or governmental order, and an unfreedom
that occurs in societies and states.
That this can't really be Rousseau's contrast is suggested by
his saying
in Chapter VIII, "On the Civil State," that in a properly democratic
civil state, there is the acquisition of the “moral freedom” mentioned
above. And it seems to be this freedom
that contrasts with the sort of slavery that Rousseau attributes to the
slaveholder. The person who has moral
liberty is
"master of himself". He only
owes "obedience to the law [he] has prescribed for himself." He who would master
another as slave, fails to be morally free himself--he fails to follow
any law he
would prescribe for himself. But we are
getting ahead of our story.
III
Negative
liberty is the absence of restraints or hindrances to doing what a
person wants
to do, or perhaps might want to do. A
person is free in this sense if there is nothing stopping him from
executing
his will. There are various variations
on this theme. Sometimes only the
absence of restraints posed by the will of others is counted; sometimes
the
absence of restraints of any kind. Now,
a slave may well be unfree in this sense,
but the
master is likely not to be, relatively speaking. So
if there is a
sense in which neither slave nor master is free, it will have to be
some other
sense.
Positive
liberty is a condition of a person's will and action.
A person is positively free when she is
autonomous, master (mistress?) of herself, when she determines herself
by her
own judgment of what she should do. Here
the contrast is with what Kant called heteronomous conduct--conduct
that
results from the will of another, or from other sources within the
self, say
appetites, passions, etc., that conflict with one's sense of what one
should
(or would best) do.
To put the
difference between these kinds of liberty in a nutshell:
one concerns the absence of impediments to
the will, however that will might be formed, the other concerns the
forming of
the will itself.
Now when
Rousseau characterizes the kind of "moral freedom" that can be
acquired only in civil society, he contrasts it with a "slavery" that
consists in being "driven by appetite alone." Moral
freedom, then, is positive liberty in
IV Natural
independence How,
then, are we to understand the freedom
with which Rousseau says all are born?
Consider the following passages:
"This
common freedom is a consequence of man’s nature. His
first law is to attend to his own
preservation, his first cares are those he owes himself, and since, as
soon as
he has reached the age of reason, he is the sole judge of the means
proper to
preserve himself, he becomes his own
master.” (42)
This
language might lead one to think that Rousseau is here talking about
what later
calls moral freedom, since we have the same association with
self-mastery, but
it is hard to see how it can be since Rousseau explicitly says in VIII
that in
entering the social contract, people give up their "natural freedom"
in order to gain, through civil association, the possibility of moral
freedom. And the "natural freedom" seems
to
be the very "common freedom" to which he earlier refers.
Rousseau says that we gain “moral freedom” by
“substituting justice for instinct in [our] conduct.” (53)
We get some
insight into what Rousseau means by this "common" or
"natural" freedom in Chapter IV, "Of Slavery." Here
he speaks of a “primitive independence”
(46), that " no man has a natural authority
over his
fellow-man." (44) Because this is
so, "conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among
men." (44) His point here seems to be that there is no natural
authority that
any person has to direct the life of another and be obeyed. Each person (of the age of reason) has the
authority to direct his own life. And
others can direct him only by convention, i.e., only by his will or
consent
taken together with others’ (i.e., by their collective will).
Note also
that Rousseau explicitly expresses this idea as a statement of the
dignity that
any person has. For a person to attempt
to renounce or alienate the direction of his own life is to renounce
"one's quality as a man." (45) It cannot, therefore, be justified. Note the doctrine of the dignity of man.
V
Well, recall that Rousseau says that we must give up natural freedom in entering civil society, but that we thereby acquire the possibility of "moral freedom” which alone makes man truly the master of himself." Presumably, this must be what the master of slaves lacks. In having slaves, in particular, in willing for them a condition he could not will for himself, he does not act according to a law he would prescribe for himself. And thus he is not truly master, even of himself. This is why I say the opening passage of Chapter I is misleading. It seems to contrast the freedom of "natural man" with the unfreedom of the slaveholder, as though these were two dimensions of the same species of freedom. But actually they are not, since both have the right, as we might say, to direct their own lives. The difference is that the slaveholder is not truly a governor of himself because he does not live by laws that he prescribes for himself.
VII Autonomy
(moral freedom). It is useful at this
point to note Rousseau’s
formulation of the major problematic of The Social Contract: "Find a form of association that will
defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full
common
force, and by means of which, each, uniting with all, nevertheless obey
only himself
and remain as free as before. This is the
fundamental problem for which the social contract provides the
solution."
(49-50)
There are
two different contrasts that are involved in Rousseau's thinking at
this point. We can put the difference
between these two
different contrasts crudely by saying that one concerns the subject of
the will
and the other concerns the object of the will.
Let us take the first contrast first.
A. This is a contrast Rousseau
draws between
private will and general will. When we join the social compact "each of us puts his
person
and his full power in common under the supreme direction of the general
will;
and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible member of the
whole.”
(50) We are capable of willing from different perspectives, as it were. I can will from my own personal perspective,
as myself. So, when I choose my clothes
in the morning, for example, it seems that I simply consult my own
tastes and
preferences and choose from own point of view.
But, we can also choose and intend from standpoints that are
essentially
conceived as knowingly shared;
that is, I can choose to do something
as part of a "we." I can
choose or will from a perspective we (which may be more or less
extensive)
share as related in some way or other, say, as friends, or as part of
the same
community, or team, and so on. The
"general will" is an essentially shared will; its subject is the
person as identified with this shared standpoint.
B. The second contrast concerns whether what is willed is personal, pertaining to a particular person, or not. Rousseau says that moral liberty consists in obeying a law that one prescribes for oneself. This means that insofar as a particular action is willed, it is willed as falling under a law (we might also say "principle" here) that one wills. In Chapter VI of Book II, "On Law", Rousseau writes, "when I say that the object of the laws is always general, I mean that the law considers the subjects in a body and their actions in the abstract, never any man as an individual or a particular action." (67)
Thus, to will a
particular action as falling under a willed law, is to will it as part
of
willing that actions of such and such kind be performed in
circumstances that
are thus and so, for some "such
and such" and some
"thus
and so".
If we put
these two "moments" together, we get that the autonomous person wills
his actions as
(i) falling under general principles
(laws) which he wills that
all follow, and
(ii) that he wills this from a
standpoint that all members of the
community can share.
Now,
actually, these two moments are not entirely distinct.
The proper object of the general will is
itself general--"there is no general will concerning
a particular object" (66). And the
idea of a law that could be prescribed from a particular individual's
point of
view also seems oxymoronic. So each
moment seems to involve the other.
VIII Autonomy and the
social contract.
If we take for granted, then,
Rousseau's assertion that there is a kind of moral liberty or autonomy
that is
realized in an agent's being guided by a law she prescribes for
herself, we
seem to have something like the following explanation for why autonomy
requires
civic association. There can be autonomy
only if individuals have available a shared perspective from which they
can
consider by which principles ("laws") they should guide their lives. But this shared perspective will be available
only if there exists a consensual community
with which
all identify.
Now actual
members of communities will, of course, disagree about what laws should
be prescribed, about what is for the common
good. Two points should be stressed here.
(a) What Rousseau calls the
"general
will" is, as it were, the correct will from this standpoint, i.e. which
law really would be most for the common good, and not necessarily what
any
particular person, or even every particular person happens to will from
that point
of view. [See Book II, Chapter III, "Whether the General Will Can
Err."]
(b) If someone disagrees with the
(correct)
general will, and refuses to act appropriately, then Rousseau thinks it
will be
no violation of his autonomy to require him to do so.
Indeed, Rousseau seems to say that if he is
thus forced, then he ends of up acting autonomously.
As Rousseau puts it, "he shall be forced
to be free." (53)
At this
point we should no longer take for granted that acting autonomously
involves acting
on self-prescribed law, and ask why we should believe that. Consider, for example, a heroin addict who
shoots up because of an overwhelming desire for heroin.
We need to distinguish different cases here.
[Assume that the only considerations relevant
to what to do concern the agent himself.]
It is not enough that he wishes he didn't have such a strong
desire for
heroin. Because he may still think that
given that he does have such a strong desire, he really should shoot up. If this is his state of mind, it is hard to
see how he fails to act autonomously.
His shooting up is not just the result of desires to which he is
simply
subject. On the contrary, he endorses
his action, it is what he thinks he should
do, though,
of course, his endorsement is conditional on his having the addiction. To get someone whose action is not autonomous
it seems we need
someone who shoots up despite the fact that he thinks he shouldn't.
But does this give us what Rousseau needs? The person who is guided by what he should do seems to be guided by some conception of law.