Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman

2 The Paradox of Inhumanity

2 The Paradox of Inhumanity In the previous chapter, some of the basic logical problems with the model of monstrosity were broached. The de¤nition of “inhumanity” in the Encyclopedia encapsulates these problems: “vice that places us outside of our species, that makes us cease to be men; hardness of heart concerning which nature seems to have made us incapable.”1 If the species is an inclusive set of characteristics, how could a particular trait cancel out the value of the whole? Could not such a trait only do so by being excluded from the set in the ¤rst place? The inhuman would thus be outside of the human, at least as nature intended it. But if humans are notwithstanding capable of this so-called vice, is not the inhuman within the human? How could nature be violated in such a way that resistance to inhumanity crumbles? When we pose such questions, some of the fundamental paradoxes of the Enlightenment mixture of ethics and anthropology become apparent. These paradoxes have possible solutions. The paradox of inhuman humanity could be solved by applying the theory of logical types: speci¤c and general can be de-linked in order to make it clear that two different senses of inhuman are meant where one is implied.2 To do so leaves one with only a stale tautology: humans are human. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how the campaign against cruelty to animals in England suggests that paradox can be much more productive than tautology. Before this, however, it is important to understand how the paradox of inhumanity was generated in the ¤rst place and why it was so tenacious. The core axioms by which Enlightenment philosophy produced moral monstrosity were already present in seventeenth-century texts. These axioms are by and large reducible to two mutually reinforcing principles of explanation: systematic egoism and the placement of sentiment at the basis of morality. Within these parameters, moral philosophy could only derive good and bad—and good and evil—from a subject’s own experience of pleasure and pain. As Hobbes puts it in Leviathan (1651), moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of good and evil in the conversation and society of mankind. Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different; and divers men differ not only in their judgment on the senses (of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight), but also of what is conformable or disagreeable to reason in the actions of common life.3 This mode of explanation becomes even clearer with Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690): Things then are good and evil, only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that evil which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us; or else procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good.4 A century later, Adam Ferguson would reassert in his Principles of Moral and Political Science (1792), a work summing up the philosopher’s lectures at Edinburgh, “The distinction of good and evil originates in the capacity of enjoyment and suffering. Insomuch that, without the intervention of mind, or some feeling nature, all the varieties of matter and form besides, would be indifferent.”5 As to the question of egoism, I would stress that this is not to be narrowly construed, but rather taken as a methodological tenet: all sensations are referred to an experiencing subject who becomes the ground of all subsequent deductions.6 Even when disparaged by supporters of moral sense (for example, Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson, and, with due consideration of the complexities involved, Rousseau), these axioms proved an ineluctable snare. Even if pity, to take the most obvious case, is innate, it is still my pain that is felt.7 That is, pity as a component of moral sense guarantees correct behavior only because it creates pain in the subject that witnesses the suffering of another. Combined with the The Paradox of Inhumanity 19 emphasis on the gaze, the most basic ethical issue becomes: What does a given person feel...