Noam Chomsky on whether human nature is inherently corrupt, and on moral values

MAN: Noam, another view I frequently encounter lying behind people's reticence to become involved in political activity stems from the idea that human nature is corrupt: egotistical, self-centered, anti-social, and so on--and that as a result, society will always have oppressors and oppressed, be hierarchical, exploit people, be driven by individual self-interest, etc. I often find that you can get agreement on the inhumanity of the system, or on the injustice of a war, or on some specific set of policies, but that people will refrain from becoming active about it because of a sense of hopelessness having to do with this view of human nature. Again, it may just be an excuse, a last line of defense against getting involved--but in order to deal with it as an organizer, you still have to address the claim. I'm curious what you would say to someone like that.

Well, there's a sense in which the claim is certainly true. First of all, human nature is something we don't know much about: doubtless there is a rich and complex human nature, and doubtless it's largely genetically determined, like everything else--but we don't know what it is. However, there is enough evidence from history and experience to demonstrate that human nature is entirely consistent with everything you mentioned--in fact, by definition it has to be. So we know that human nature, and that includes our nature, yours and mine, can very easily turn people into quite efficient torturers and mass-murderers and slave-drivers. We know that--you don't have to look very far for evidence. But what does that mean? Should people therefore not try to stop torture? If you see somebody beating a child to death, should you say, "Well, you know, that's human nature"--which it is in fact: there certainly are conditions under which people will act like that.

To the extent that the statement is true, and there is such an extent, it's just not relevant: human nature also has the capacity to lead to selflessness, and cooperation, and sacrifice, and support, and solidarity, and tremendous courage, and lots of other things too.

I mean, my general feeling is that over time, there's measurable progress--it's not huge, but it's significant. And sometimes it's been pretty dramatic. Over history, there's been a real widening of the moral realm, I think--a recognition of broader and broader domains of individuals who are regarded as moral agents, meaning having rights. Look, we are self-conscious beings, we're not rocks, and we can come to get a better understanding of our own nature, it can become more and more realized over time--not because you read a book about it, the book doesn't have anything to tell you, because nobody really knows anything about this topic. But just through experience--including historical experience, which is part of our personal experience because it's embedded in the culture we enter into--we can gain greater understanding of our nature and values.

Take the treatment of children, for example. In the medieval period, it was considered quite legitimate to either kill them, or throw them out, or treat them brutally, all sorts of things. It still happens of course, but now it's regarded as pathological, not proper. Well, it's not that we have a different moral capacity than people did in the Middle Ages, it's just that the situation's changed: there are opportunities to think about things that weren't available in a society that had a lower material production level and so on. So we've just learned more about our own moral sense in that area.

I think it's part of moral progress to be able to face things that once looked as if they weren't problems. I have that kind of feeling about our relation to animals, for example--I think the questions there are hard, in fact. A lot of these things are matters of trying to explore your own moral intuitions, and if you've never explored them, you don't know what they are. Abortion's a similar case--there are complicated moral issues. Feminist issues were a similar case. Slavery was a similar case. I mean, some of these things seem easy now, because we've solved them and there's a kind of shared consensus--but I think it's a very good thing that people are asking questions these days about, say, animals rights. I think there are serious questions there. Like, to what extent do we have a right to experiment on and torture animals? I mean, yes, you want to do animal experimentation for the prevention of diseases. But what's the balance, where's the trade-off? There's obviously got to be some. Like, we'd all agree that too much torture of animals for treating a disease would not permissible. But what are the principles on which we draw such conclusions? That's not a trivial question.

MAN: What about eating?

Same question.

MAN: Are you a vegetarian?

I'm not, but I think it's a serious question. If you want my guess, my guess is that if society continues to develop without catastrophe on something like the course you can see over time, I wouldn't in the least be surprised if it moves in the direction of vegetarianism and the protection of animal rights.

Look, doubtless there's plenty of hypocrisy and confusion and everything else about the question right now, but that doesn't mean that the issue isn't valid. And I think one can see the moral force to it--definitely one should keep an open mind on it, it's certainly a perfectly intelligible idea to us.

I mean, you don't have to go back every far in history to find gratuitous torture of animals. So in Cartesian philosophy, they thought they'd proven that humans had minds and everything else in the world was a machine--so there's no difference between a cat and a watch, let's say, just the cat's a little more complicated. And if you look back at the French Court in the seventeenth century, courtiers--you know, big smart guys who'd studied all this stuff and thought they understood it--would as a sport take Lady So-And-So's favorite dog and kick it and beat it to death, and laugh, saying, "Ha, ha, look, this silly lady doesn't understand the latest philosophy, which shows that it's just like dropping a rock on the floor." That was gratuitous torture of animals, and it was regarded as if it were the torturing of a rock; you can't do it, there's no way to torture a rock. Well, the moral sphere has certainly changed in that respect--gratuitous torture of animals is no longer considered quite legitimate.

MAN: But in that case it could be that what's changed is our understanding of what an animal is, not the understanding of our underlying values.

In that case it probably was--because in fact the Cartesian view was a departure from the traditional view, in which you didn't torture animals gratuitously. On the other hand, there are cultures, like say aristocratic cultures, that have fox-hunting as a sport, or bear-baiting, or other things like that, in which gratuitous torture of animals has been seen as perfectly legitimate.

In fact, it's kind of intriguing to see how we regard this. Take cock-fighting, for example, in which cocks are trained to tear each other to shreds. Our culture happens to regard that as barbaric; on the other hand, we train humans to tear each other to shreds--they're called boxing matches--and that's not regarded as barbaric. So there are things that we don't permit of cocks that we permit of poor people. Well, you know, there are some funny values at work there.

MAN: You mentioned abortion--what's your view about that whole debate?

I think it's a hard one, I don't think the answers are simple--it's a case where there really are conflicting values. See, it's very rare in most human situations that there's a clear and simple answer about what's right, and sometimes the answers are very murky, because there are different values, and values do conflict. I mean, our understanding of our own moral value system is that it's not like an axiom system, where there's always one answer and not some other answer. Rather we have what appear to be conflicting values, which often lead us to different answers--maybe because we don't understand all the values well enough yet, or maybe because they really are in conflict. Well, in the case of abortion, there are just straight conflicts. From one point of view, a child up to a certain point is an organ of the mother's body, and the mother ought to have a decision what to do--and that's true. From another point of view, the organism is a potential human being, and it has rights. And those two values are simply in conflict.

On the other hand, a biologist I know once suggested that we may one day be able to see the same conflict when a woman washes her hands. I mean, when a woman washes her hands, a lot of cells flake off--and in principle, each of those cells has the genetic instructions for a human being. Well, you could imagine a future technology which would take one of those cells, and create a human being from it. Now, obviously he was making the argument as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but there's an element of truth to it--not that much yet, but it's not like saying something about astrology. What he's saying is true.

If you want to know my own personal judgment, I would say a reasonable proposal at this point is that the fetus changes from an organ to a person when it becomes viable--but certainly that's arguable. And besides, as this biologist was pointing out, it's not very clear when that is--depending on the state of technology, it could be when the woman's washing her hands. That's life, though: in life you're faced with hard decisions, conflicting values.