An old story came to mind a little earlier, as I was doing my morning tarantella (i.e., brushing my teeth, feeding the dogs and cats, making and drinking coffee, and cleaning up the detritus of the previous evening): “The Cage,” by A. Bertram Chandler. It involved a group of human spacefarers captured and caged by an alien race. At first that other race isn’t aware that humans are intelligent, purposeful creatures. What clues them in is when one of the humans captures a vermin creature and builds a cage for it. The final line of the story: Only intelligent beings put other beings in cages.
Striking, isn’t it? Communication alone isn’t guaranteed to be possible with the completely alien. Actions must fill the gap. If the Other can deduce one’s intelligence from one’s actions, that can unlock the cage door. But that opens another door as well: the nature of purposive consciousness.
Consciousness is the beginning; purposive consciousness – what I’ll henceforth call sentience — is the end. Sentience is born from simple consciousness when the conscious one turns his awareness on himself:
In facing that realization and the questions it compels upon him, the individual’s capacity for abstraction is unleashed. It has broached the threshold to reasoning. In particular, it becomes capable of categorization: the assembly of real things into abstract groups, according to the properties they possess.
Let’s pause here to simplify the rest of the discussion. The individual under discussion shall henceforward be called Smith. Smith is not alone in the world. There are others like him. As he encounters them, he becomes aware of the commonalities and distinctions among them.
One property Smith quickly perceives is his own purposiveness. Some of the things he does are automatic, but not all. Those other actions are taken to fulfill a purpose. That purpose may not last long, but while it does, it determines his non-automatic thoughts and deeds.
From his purposiveness Smith infers that property in others like him. This is the germ of another property soon to impinge upon his consciousness: his conscience.
The above is semi-fanciful. We don’t know very much about the development of the intellectual primitives. What we do know is that sentience precedes conscience. Only the sentient can have a sense of what Clarence Carson called “the moral order of the universe.” We believe nonhuman animals to lack sentience – i.e., that their actions are guided by commands embedded in their flesh, which we call instincts.
Now and then a departure from our assumptions will arise to trouble us. We deem ourselves superior to “the lower orders” by dint of our sentience and our consciences. Animals, we tell ourselves, have no concepts; therefore they can make no distinctions between right and wrong. But then we hear of a dog sacrificing himself to protect his human, and we wonder. We learn of a brute torturing or killing a parent, sibling, or child, and we wonder further.
My surmise is that some animals can be “ennobled” (C. S. Lewis) by the affection that springs from a long association with and care by a human. It’s more difficult to explain why some humans behave as if they lack consciences. Suffice it to say that our understanding is less than perfect.
For conscience, in a purely secular and spatiotemporal view, arises from the perception of humans as a category: conscious animals with reasoning powers and purposes. That evokes species-kinship, sometimes expressed by the phrase “We are all brothers.” Adam Smith called it “fellow-feeling.” Today we call it compassion or empathy.
Conscience – the product of self-awareness and our common possession thereof – underpins all the rest.
Hillel’s dictum “What is hateful to you, do not do to another” is the foundation layer of conscience. There’s more, of course. Conscience doesn’t just restrain us; it also impels us to help one another, to do good and charitable works. Christ’s decree “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” embeds Hillel’s rule and extends it. Yet our consciences get many of us there long before we encounter either Hillel or Christ.
But there are still those questions: Why don’t all humans respond to their consciences? Why do some animals act as if they have consciences of their own? No one has a watertight explanation for psychopathy or sociopathy. No one has a convincing explanation for a dog’s protectiveness over his master. We can’t communicate reliably with sociopaths or dogs, though we can, and often do, put them in cages.
We need those questions answered.
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