From Human Nature to Moral Philosophy

Abstract

In recent times the conception of the human being, particularly in Western moral philosophy, has been of an intellectual center, installed in a biological vessel like a “ghost in the machine”—according to Gilbert Ryle's haunting image. To be sure the machine in this image is fashioned of biological matter and governed by biological laws, but it is also subject to the “higher” law of the will, no less than to fundamental laws of physics. It is also the manifest image of the self in Western society outside the academy—the image a person procures by dint of growing up in a distinctive human climate—the image that each of us, in an increasingly wider circle centered on Europe, must master if we are to maneuver successfully in the contemporary legal and social milieu. It makes some sense to invoke such an image for the purposes of certain traditional moral theories. For the image, or something very like it, easily renders talk of individual responsibility sensible.