University Professor Jeremy Waldron , who has delivered virtually all of the highest-wattage philosophy lectures across the globe, added another to his list when he delivered the six-part Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh from January 26 to February 5, The Gifford Lectures, first given in , showcase the preeminent thinkers in the field of natural theology.
Subsequent lectures distinguished basic equality from normative positions founded upon it; looked at the respective approaches of Thomas Hobbes, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls; considered the work that basic equality must perform; and analyzed the role played by a higher power, culminating in a final lecture exploring the impact of various life stages and profound disabilities on the idea of human equality. Your previous major lectures have tackled big topics—the rule of law, hate speech, torture—but your Gifford Lectures feel like your most ambitious philosophical undertaking to date.
Would you agree? It is a much more abstract theme than I have pursued in any of the other series. And you are right: philosophically this is the most ambitious set of lectures I have given.
They complement and dovetail with the Tanner Lectures on human dignity, which I gave at Berkeley in We don't know exactly what led to our brains becoming the size they are today, but we seem to owe our complex reasoning abilities to it.
It is likely that we have our big brain to thank that we exist at all. When we — Homo sapiens — first appeared about , years ago we weren't alone. We shared the planet at least four other upright cousins; Neanderthals, Denisovans, the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis and a mysterious fourth group. The human brain is advantageously big Credit: Thinkstock.
Evidence in the form of stone tools suggests that for about , years our technology was very similar to the Neanderthals. But 80, years ago something changed. Once H. We started to produce superior cultural and technological artefacts.
Our stone tools became more intricate. One study proposes that our technological innovation was key for our migration out of Africa. We started to assign symbolic values to objects such as geometrical designs on plaques and cave art.
By contrast, there is little evidence that any other hominins made any kind of art. One example, which was possibly made by Neanderthals, was hailed as proof they had similar levels of abstract thought. However, it is a simple etching and some question whether Neanderthals made it at all. The symbols made by H. We had also been around for , years before symbolic objects appeared so what happened?
We had the capacity for art early in our history Credit: SPL. Somehow, our language-learning abilities were gradually "switched on", Tattersall argues. In the same way that early birds developed feathers before they could fly, we had the mental tools for complex language before we developed it.
We started with language-like symbols as a way to represent the world around us, he says. For example, before you say a word, your brain first has to have a symbolic representation of what it means. These mental symbols eventually led to language in all its complexity and the ability to process information is the main reason we are the only hominin still alive, Tattersall argues. It's not clear exactly when speech evolved, or how.
But it seems likely that it was partly driven by another uniquely human trait: our superior social skills. Comparative studies between humans and chimps show that while both will cooperate, humans will always help more.
Children seem to be innate helpers. They act selflessly before social norms set in. Studies have shown that they will spontaneously open doors for adults and pick up "accidentally" dropped items. They will even stop playing to help. Their sense of fairness begins young. Even if an experiment is unfairly rigged so that one child receives more rewards, they will ensure a reward is fairly split. But a person who encounters a bear has no natural right not to be eaten by it.
Unequal power, and our natural right over some other species, means we do not take individuals of other species to be of equal worth to us. What about moral equality among human beings? Here too, Spinoza argued that there are natural inequalities of power and right. The weak have no natural right to live free of harm, and no one has any obligation to protect anyone else. In a state governed by nature, then, people are born unequal, with unequal levels of power and right, and are perfectly entitled to use one another merely as means to ends.
Inequalities of power and right extend into the democratic state. She does not give that power to a king, but pools it with the common power of the whole population. In the democratic state, individuals continue to seek their advantage according to their own natural right or power, but they are now subject to civil laws and enjoy greater security.
For Spinoza, members of a democracy are unequally free, because they are unequal in understanding and power. They will become more rational and more free : better able to act autonomously, undetermined by external powers. They have less rational understanding and are less able to act autonomously in the face of causal determination by other people and things.
Spinoza did not make the disadvantaged responsible for their lack of power, though he thought that we all have the capacity to become more free; his Ethics provides a road-map for increasing our power and rational understanding. The more rational and free are, for him, better and more virtuous human beings.
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