Do Animals Have an Inner Child?

Nowadays it is commonly accepted that humans have an inner child. The idea is natural enough: the personality and experiences of the young child stick in the mind in later years, shaping later life. They don’t just disappear at an appointed age, discarded like clothes that no longer fit. The brain bears their imprint going forward. Memories of early life will linger, even if they don’t go back to infancy. We can suppose that play and feelings of dependency will persist; the mother will feature prominently. It is also not unreasonable to believe that the adolescent also leaves remnants of himself as she transforms into adulthood—the inner teenager. Perhaps the inner middle-aged man survives into old age. We have many inner selves not just the most recent one. But is it the same with animals? Once the question is asked the answer seems obvious: of course they do. They too go through stages of maturation characterized by personality changes, accumulating memories, rising intelligence, sexual maturation, and so on. The child lives on: the kitten inside the cat, the pup inside the dog. The adult animal has to live with this secondary self. If it is traumatized, the adult will also be. A huge powerful animal will harbor an infantile inner child. Dinosaurs had their inner children. The baby dinosaur lives on. The adult will remember childhood—the food, the parents, the fear of predators.

In many cases its memory of childhood will be better than human memory; it was born with a more advanced brain and has a shorter childhood. The fledgling will remember its mother and possibly its father. It will remember the lessons taught, feeding at the teats of the mother, sibling rivalries, childhood anxieties. A lion will remember when it didn’t have to hunt for food, and possibly miss those happy lazy days. Its inner child may be more present to it than ours is. For all we know, the whole process may be pretty traumatizing—the hunting, being hunted, aloneness, hunger, fighting. They may well be in need of a good therapist. We don’t know. They don’t say. They may suffer from maternal deprivation, fear of abandonment, agoraphobia. They may have a tormented emotional life. If neglected by their parents, they may suffer from the emotional results. Do they resent the mother for turning them out into the wild before they felt ready? It’s a rough old world out there in animal land—survival of the fittest and all that. Oh, for those halcyon days inside the mother’s pouch (assuming you are a marsupial)! Imagine if you could remember life inside the womb or egg—abruptly followed by the dangerous outside world. We humans are spared these haunting thoughts, but try to imagine what it would be like to have clear memories of life inside the womb; it might feel like a lost paradise (if rather cramped). If there is any truth in Freud’s theories, they would surely carry over mutatis mutandis to our primate relatives and beyond; but no one ever talks about this. I believe that human developmental psychology generalizes to animal developmental psychology, with minor variations. Animals have an inner child too.[1]

[1] The inner child in cats and dogs may be the reason they take to us humans—it takes them back to their childhood. Also, their inner child may make animals more fearful of us than they need to be. I think it is good to remember that animals too are stuck in the psychological past to some degree, a mixture of mature and immature.

Family Resemblances and Skeptical Solutions

We all remember Wittgenstein’s famous sections on games and family resemblance; I won’t repeat them. The point I want to make is that they can be construed as providing a skeptical solution to a skeptical problem. Not that Wittgenstein saw them this way; on the contrary, he had no notion of this kind of dialectic in the Investigations (contrary to certain interpretations of his text). But this idea occurred to me while remembering those sections; I don’t offer it as my own view of the matter (or anybody’s). It’s just an idea that someone might have (I have never seen anyone defend it in its own right). It runs as follows: we want to know what a game is, so we hunt for a common essence, focusing on observable qualities of games. We fail to find one after much diligent searching. We then conclude, in a skeptical spirit, that games are indefinable: there is nothing that they are, no common essence. But then, there can be no such thing as games—games don’t exist, though a bunch of unrelated activities are called games. We are under a kind of conceptual illusion. Games are like magic tricks: there are no magic tricks, not really, though there are tricks of sleight-of-hand (just not magical). This is the “skeptical paradox”. But then it occurs to our imaginary philosopher that he can use Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance to fashion a skeptical solution: games have no essence, but they can be united by family resemblance. There are games, but they are not constituted by a common essence, rather by loose family resemblances. We just need to give up our assumption that all concepts are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. Maybe this is a bit of a wrench, a conceptual shock, but it saves the concept from elimination. We hoped for more, but we can settle for less. A straight solution would be Bernard Suits’ definition in terms of freely adopting unnecessary obstacles, but our imaginary philosopher has never heard of this definition, or has but doesn’t like it. He therefore opts for a skeptical solution. He is an essence skeptic about games but not a meaning (use) skeptic.

Once he has satisfied himself with respect to games, his ambition grows. Maybe some other problematic concepts can be similarly treated. Thus, the irreducible diversity of meaning is no proof of the incoherence of the concept of meaning: names, quantifiers, and prepositions have nothing semantically in common, but they do have a family resemblance to each other. The same for rules. There is a class of meanings and a class of rules, but there is nothing that unites these classes except family resemblance. You may not like it, but you had better lump it, if you are not to fall prey to semantic skepticism. With meaning taken care of, you move on to existence and consciousness, two notoriously problematic concepts. The class of existing things is united only by family resemblance not by a single feature they all share. Existents are like games. Or again, you might introduce the concept of a paradigm case: to be a game is to be similar to a paradigm case of games, and likewise for existence. We all accept that football is a game; well, all games resemble football to one degree or another, but the resemblance is loose and family-like. Similarly, we all know that the Empire State Building exists; well, all existing things bear some family resemblance relation to the Empire State Building. Similarly, we could define consciousness as anything resembling, family-wise, a paradigm case of consciousness, say, a sensation of pain. Consciousness is unified by family resemblance not common essence. We can’t give a straight solution to these problems of definition, but we can give a skeptical solution by invoking the concept of family resemblance. Whether this is an adequate definition is a separate question, which I won’t discuss here (I think not). My point here is that family resemblance offers a way to respond to skeptical challenges by suggesting a skeptical solution. If you were in the business of rejecting traditional straight definitions in favor of skeptical definitions, this would be a way to implement your program. Skeptical paradoxes could be defused (to some extent) by advocating family resemblance as a skeptical solution. True, there is no such property as being a game (or existence or consciousness), but there can still be a meaning to these words, underpinned by family resemblance.[1]

[1] Actually, this whole way of proceeding is alien to me, since I think we can give a straight definition of games (see my Truth by Analysis), following Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper. I am here offering another type of philosopher a new tool in his or her toolbox. Good luck with it! Also, this take on family resemblance provides a new way to try to interpret Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, by combining Kripke’s Humean apparatus with Wittgenstein’s treatment of games. It’s not the skeptical paradox about rule-following that powers the argument but the skeptical paradox about definition exemplified by games. I leave this to others to work out (I think it is rubbish).

Why I Publish Here

The reasons are pretty obvious. First, I have been academically cancelled, so I find it difficult these days to get my work published in the usual places. Second, and equally important, the form of my recent writing is not standard academic form: it is concise, reference-free, and straight to the point. Third, there is just too much of it: no publisher could take on such a large quantity of writing, especially in the form in which it is written. Fourth, I get to write in exactly the way I want to write without having to cater to referees and editors. Fifth, the publishing process is instantaneous; no waiting a year or more till it comes out. Sixth, I simply have too many ideas to write them all up in standard academese; it would take a lifetime. Seventh, this way I can publish all over the world and not just locally. Fortunately, the internet exists, or else I would have thousands of pages of unpublished material just lying around (or I would just not have bothered). What is not true is that this blog is a kind of diary or just whimsical reflections; it is primarily a place for me to publish my philosophical results (as they used to say). And the truth is that I mainly write for posterity these days.

Mathematical Ethics

You might not think that ethics is a very mathematical subject, unlike (say) physics. But we do have the felicific calculus which purports to quantify the rightness of an action according to the amount of happiness (pleasure) produced by it. The quantified variables include intensity, duration, extent, and correlated pain. And this idea is not so far removed from common ethical sense: we constantly compare the quantity of pain and pleasure likely to be caused by an action. We decide how much punishment a criminal action warrants by assessing its hedonic consequences; we might even make ratio judgments (this crime is twice as bad as that crime). It may not be very exact, but it is mathematically formulable. Couple this with the analogy often drawn between ethics and mathematics: both are said to be knowable a priori. Thus, we might say that a given action is known a priori to be twice as bad as another action, say because double the number of people will be harmed. We seem to be able to rank actions according to their degree of moral rightness and express this in quasi-mathematical terms. It isn’t all vague feelings and fuzzy logic. Our mind does seem to be functioning mathematically when thinking ethically.[1]

But there is another mathematical dimension to ethics less remarked upon: the number of ethical principles that comprise morality. We are all aware of the ten commandments, which give the impression that morality can be summed up in ten separate principles, ten being a nice round number (eleven would seem strange). God, it is felt, settled on ten and only ten—not a lot for lackadaisical humans to remember, though requiring some memorization. Philosophers, too, have enunciated lists of principles or edicts to which a definite number can be attached. Thus, W.D. Ross offers seven prima facie duties as comprising the total content of a deontological ethics: fidelity, reparations, gratitude, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, and self-improvement. The magic number is seven, neither more nor less. G.E. Moore proposed four intrinsic goods: pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and esthetic appreciation. Jeremy Bentham got it down to two: promoting happiness and preventing pain. Kant reduced it still further to one: the good will, respect for the moral law, the categorical imperative. The only basic good is willing what can be universalized. I am not here concerned with the substance of these doctrines, only with their arithmetic: 10, 7, 4, 2, 1. This has a bearing on moral psychology, since moral agents have to be aware of, and be able to use, the precepts in which the right and the good consist—five hundred would be quite infeasible. One is ideal, but difficult to achieve theoretically. The arithmetic matters.

The trouble with any list longer than one item is that the principles may conflict, and often do. Which one do you choose to act on at any given moment—minimizing pain or maximizing pleasure? The utilitarian moral system doesn’t tell you. Moore doesn’t tell us which of his goods is the most important, and by how much. Should you spend your time making friends or appreciating art or producing pleasure? Ross notoriously conceded that in a case of conflict you just have to use your judgment, with no overarching ethical principle to guide you. This can leave you paralyzed ethically. In fact, this problem puts morality in peril, because you are always in danger of acting immorally; you can’t be morally perfect. Indeed, it is hard to avoid being morally shabby much of the time, since conflicts inevitably leave you acting immorally in some respect. You break a promise in order to work on your self-improvement or increase your beneficence or prevent a war. You strive to maximize happiness in some at the cost of allowing pain in others. It becomes impossible to be moral, i.e., to do the right thing all the time. But then, being completely moral isn’t an achievable goal—you are going to act badly no matter what you do. This may lead to skepticism or cynicism about morality, or atheism if you believe that morality derives from God. You want to act morally all the time, but morality itself makes this impossible, according to these pluralistic moral systems. If you can’t do right most (or all) of the time, then what point is there in it? Is it that your actions are always partly right and partly wrong? How do you decide when it is right to break a promise or to lie? Isn’t morality supposed to enable you to decide such questions? Pluralistic moralities make moral dilemmas irresoluble. This is an old story. But monolithic moralities don’t work; they are too simple. Ethics totters. Are we supposed to just muddle through or “go by our gut”? Where is the guidance that morality is supposed to provide?

I don’t think this problem has a straight solution, i.e., a solution that identifies some new moral precept, similar to the ones already enunciated, that provides a moral algorithm. Pluralism is unavoidable, but pluralism leads to moral conflicts, and moral conflicts produce moral uncertainty, indeed indeterminacy, which can lead to moral nihilism. Morality seems to consist of a bunch of moral values that form no natural unity and can easily clash with each other. Truth-telling can conflict with compassion, promise-keeping with beneficence, knowledge with pleasure, esthetic appreciation with justice. We seem headed for moral skepticism and moral inertia. But the lack of a straight solution is not the lack of any solution; perhaps we can provide something workable but not quite up to what we were hoping for. Let me suggest an analogy: the nature of existence. We wonder what existence is (what “exists” means) and look for a property like those already recognized—shape, color, size, solidity, etc. But we come up short: existence isn’t anything like being perceived or thought about or spatial or material or mental. It doesn’t seem like a regular property at all. In desperation we might then settle for a primitivist theory: existence is an indefinable simple irreducible property. Then it occurs to us that it is not like the familiar properties of things—a first-order property, as we like to say. It is a second-order property—the property of a property having instances. For red things to exist is for the property of redness to have the property of having instances. This is a kind of skeptical solution to our problem; we change our expectations about the form of the property (sic) of existence. We settle for less. In effect, we treat “exists” as a quantifier. It thus has a kind of mathematical character: “There is at least one object x such that…”.

By analogy, we can treat “right” in a similarly second-order quantificational way: it doesn’t denote a specific first-order moral duty or value, but generalizes over the domain of such duties or values. To say that a particular action is (or was) right is to say that it satisfies most of the precepts we accept as morally correct—or at least many, or anyway the important ones. It is a property of a collection of duties not a duty in that collection. For example, I go to an art gallery with a friend of mine in order to show gratitude for a favor he did me, thus producing knowledge and pleasure. The action is right because it instantiates the full range of Moore’s first-order types of good: esthetic appreciation, friendship, knowledge, and pleasure (as well as Ross’s gratitude duty). In fact, it had no moral downside—assuming I didn’t break a promise in order to go with my friend to the gallery, or lied about where I would be spending the afternoon, or neglected my duty to help people in need. That’s why I said most, because it can easily be argued that my action was morally wrong, given the amount of suffering in the world that I should be out there alleviating. All we can realistically expect is that our actions are instances of many of our prima facie duties. This may not add up to what we were hoping for—a recipe for moral perfection—but it is better than an abject admission that all we can achieve is a sorry mixture of right and wrong. It is a skeptical solution (like Hume’s treatment of causal reasoning)—a surrogate for the straight solution we were seeking. It enables us to say that our actions are largely right, if not entirelyright. And, like the existence case, the form of the concept of right is second-order; it is a kind of meta concept. Existence requires us to go up a level and speak of first-order properties; moral rightness requires us to go up a level and speak of first-order moral duties. To do our moral duty tout court is to maximize the number of prima facie duties that we fall under: all of them ideally, but failing that most, or at any rate many of the most important ones. We maximize the quantity of moral goodness in the action we perform. This won’t resolve all moral dilemmas and conflicts, but it is better than nothing; it mitigates the problem of moral plurality. If we combine it with a quantitative conception of individual values, we get a modestly mathematical model of moral reasoning: we are trying to maximize the number of values instantiated by our actions and their individual quantity of value. For instance, we are trying to foster friendship, show gratitude, produce pleasure, and appreciate art—all to a reasonably high degree. There was a fair amount of pleasure, much esthetic appreciation, and a decent quantity of friendship enhancement. Thus, we are thinking mathematically—in terms of number and quantity. We aren’t just blindly obeying some specific moral rule without any kind of computation—as it might be, “Produce pleasure!”. The missing ingredient in the traditional lists of goods and duties is “Think mathematically!” The ten commandments need an eleventh commandment, viz. “When obeying these commandments maximize the number and quantity of goods produced”. This is a meta and mathematical commandment. And let’s not forget that ethical reasoning can be explicitly and complicatedly mathematical, as when deciding about government policy concerning large groups of people, probabilities, and degrees of goodness (e.g., taxation policy). How much money, if any, should I give to charity? Should I provide an expensive treatment for my cat at the vet’s? Should I go and visit a distant relative? Ethics is often hard because the math is hard (in this respect it is like prudence).

I am proposing a theory of the logical form of an ethical proposition: the logical form of the proposition that x is right (where x is a particular action) is given by the proposition that the number of duties or values is maximized by x. Like Russell’s theory of descriptions, the analysans contains a quantifier, here ranging over duties or values, as well as the concept of maximization. It doesn’t take “right” as a logical primitive, and it doesn’t interpret “right” as we naturally would in “gratitude is right”. That use of “right” is not a quantified meta use but a first-order use. The difficulty comes (as Ross realized) with all-out moral judgments (not prima facie judgments); here we run into problems of interpretation and conflict. The skeptical solution is intended to rescue morality from the problems posed by its inherent plurality. Really, what other kind of solution could there be? If morality consisted in a single all-encompassing precept, wouldn’t we have discovered it long ago? Once we determined that the rule “Do what God commands!” is not sustainable, we knew we were in for a rough ride. Morality simply doesn’t have a nice unified shape, a common essence, a single magic formula. This is why we need a bit of mathematics to manage it. It’s like predicting the weather—complex, multifaceted, fallible.[2]

[1] Is it true that all a priori thought is overtly or tacitly mathematical, while a posteriori thought is not? Logic is clearly mathematical (it can be used to formulate mathematics) and analytic propositions take the form of equations (the meaning of “vixen” is identical to the meaning of “female fox”). We count meanings by reference to such equations. And many philosophers have taken mathematical truths to be analytic. The exception would seem to be ethics, but if I am right ethics is quite mathematical in its own way. Certainly, mathematical certitude has been an ideal of moral reasoning. The senses, by contrast, are neither a priori nor mathematically ratiocinative.

[2] I have never been able to take moral anti-realism very seriously, but moral anti-coherentism troubles me: that is, the idea that it is not possible to make morality consistent. Duties so easily conflict; no simple rule is free of counterexample. We can’t even say it is wrong to lie without needing to append qualifications. The need for the “prima facie” operator is immediately disconcerting. The clash between consequentialism and deontology seems irremediable. It is just not a well thought out coherent body of doctrine, but a kind of ragbag of rules of thumb. One longs for some moral rigor. But I would not draw anti-realist conclusions from this.