Isaiah Berlin’s “Pelagian Soul”

Ilya Winham is correct that Isaiah Berlin distinguishes between basic liberty, understood as our capacity for choice of which we gain and retain awareness only by making choices, and political liberty in both its negative and positive aspects. But Winham fails to see that two distinct ideas of humanity, and thus of inhumanity or dehumanization, correspond to these two distinct ideas of liberty, respectively.

Humanity in an ontological sense is associated with basic liberty: the capacity for choice marks an essential distinction between humans and non-humans. Non-humans, including lower animals driven by instinct, lifeless robots and zombies have no capacity for choice. Berlin insists that a human’s “capacity for choice . . . cannot be eliminated” and that “you cease to be a human being” only if your choices “have become zero,” that is, only if you no longer can make any choices. ¹ In short, we learn from experience that a power to choose is “essential to being a human being.” ² We gain this knowledge because, as long as we are alive, we make some choices. Even brainwashing cannot entirely eliminate a living person’s awareness of his capacity for choice:

Even brainwashing allows people some basic liberties. You can either get up from the chair or sit down. You can either light a cigarette or not light it. Some basic liberty is preserved, but a lot has gone. Choices have become limited [but not zero]. ³

Berlin says that brainwashing can deprive a human of his basic liberty to some extent. It can force people to “behave like zombies, like dolls” so that they are “robbed . . . of some degree of their humanity.” ⁴ But even brainwashing cannot reduce choices to zero. We observe that brainwashed people still make some limited choices and so their awareness of their capacity for choice is not totally annihilated. Their awareness of the capacity is extinguished only if they no longer desire to make any choices whatsoever, only if they no longer know what choosing is. This can happen to us humans only when we are dead, although brainwashing can push us far in that direction while we are still alive.

Berlin, in the passages just quoted, suggests that ontological humanity coincides with biological humanity. But he might also think that if a person is so brainwashed that he is only aware that he can make a few trivial choices such as whether to smoke or not, his dehumanization is as nearly complete as if he were dead. It makes sense to say that a living human with such a restricted awareness of his capacity for choice no longer has ontological humanity in any meaningful sense: he has so little of it left that he might as well have none. Berlin sometimes says as much: “There is a minimum level of opportunity for choice—not of rational or virtuous choice alone—below which human activity ceases to be free in any meaningful sense.” ⁵

Following Aristotle’s wise advice, we ought not to demand precision about the point at which a human’s basic liberty is so reduced that it disappears in any meaningful sense. We may say that no significant degree of ontological humanity remains once awareness of the capacity for choice is restricted to some (unspecified) set of a few trivial choices. Or we may insist that a spark of ontological humanity remains until death, when our choices are reduced to zero. Nothing of importance turns on this issue for my reading. ⁶

By contrast, humanity in a distinct moral sense is associated with a virtually sacred minimum sphere of political liberty: a commitment to this sacred minimum marks a conceptual distinction between a normal human and an abnormal, perhaps even insane, human. For Berlin, a normal human is a reasonable moral agent who believes, or at least acts as if he believes, in “a minimum of common moral ground” that includes not only tragic value pluralism but also moral priority for certain fundamental social rules of person, property, promising, and punishment. Normal humans accept that complying with these social rules is essential for their survival, that is, the survival of normal humans in society. The rules may be referred to as rules of human decency or rules of humanity in a moral sense, that is, the sense understood by normal humans. As Berlin explains, “When I speak of a man as being normal, a part of what I mean is that he could not break these rules easily, without a qualm of revulsion.” ⁷ This, he claims, is what drives “modern translations into empirical terms of the kernel of truth in the old a priori natural law doctrines.” ⁸ Such fundamental rules of decency or justice distribute and sanction certain basic human rights (reminiscent of natural rights) not to suffer certain grievous forms of damage. In turn, the human rights carve out and protect a sacred minimum sphere of political liberty.

There is no doubt that, for Berlin, a sacred minimum sphere of political liberty must be respected to avoid indecency and inhumanity in the moral sense. The “frontiers” of this sacred minimum sphere are, he says, “defined in terms of rules so long and widely accepted that their observance has entered into the very conception of what it is to be a normal human being, and, therefore, also of what it is to act inhumanly or insanely.” ⁹ Again, when referring to the minimum sphere, he insists that “for the great majority of men, at most times, in most places, these frontiers are sacred, that is to say, that to overstep them leads to inhumanity,” and then he goes on to point out that “the minimum area [of political liberty] that men require if such dehumanization is to be averted . . . is no more than a minimum; its frontiers are not to be extended against sufficiently stringent claims on the part of other values.” ¹⁰ To the extent that his human rights are violated and his minimum sphere of liberty is thereby invaded, the individual is treated indecently and is dehumanized in the moral sense that he is not given the respect due to a normal human being. Those humans who violate his rights are classified as abnormal in a moral sense insofar as they refuse to obey the fundamental social rules. Their refusal may be associated with their vain attempt to impose some monistic social utopia or with their unbridled romantic wish to realize their particular way of life at the expense of common humanity. At a logical extreme, in a Hobbesian war of all against all, there are no recognized moral rights and no sacred minimum of political liberty exists for anyone. Normal humans regard such a state of total war as madness because their overriding moral goal of human survival is given no weight: instead of complying with social rules of decency, every human does whatever he believes is necessary for self-preservation, such as killing innocents, stealing the fruits of their labor and investment, refusing to provide life-saving help when he could easily do so, breaking promises, and so forth. Normal humans do not exist in such a pernicious environment, where everyone has a justified fear of losing his life at any time because all are selfish and cannot be trusted to cooperate.

It is a serious mistake to think that awareness of a capacity for choice is sufficient to identify a normal human being in Berlin’s moral sense of “normal.” Abnormal and even insane humans are also aware of their power to choose among alternative courses of action. In a Hobbesian state of total war, for instance, which is a state of moral idiocy or madness for normal humans since respect for the common moral minimum is entirely absent, selfish individuals motivated by an intense desire for self-preservation know that they can choose actions other than those that they perform.

In the example of the concentration-camp prisoners, Berlin is apparently saying that although they were oppressed by the Nazis, the living prisoners did not cease to be human beings in the ontological sense. It is one thing to be dehumanized in the moral sense of not being treated with the decency and respect due to normal humans: the prisoners are dehumanized in this sense insofar as their basic human rights are violated and their sacred minimum sphere of political liberty is invaded. But it is quite another thing to be dehumanized in the metaphysical sense of losing one’s awareness of the capacity for choice. There is no confusion involved in saying that the prisoners were dehumanized in the moral sense without necessarily being dehumanized in the ontological sense. Their human rights are violated but they may remain completely aware of their capacity for choice.

Berlin is certainly horrified by the possibility of oppression by authoritarian governments that employ “scientific brainwashing or conditioning” not only to invade the individual’s sacred minimum of political liberty but also to tamper with, get at, and limit his belief in his capacity for choice. ¹¹ Brainwashing is so frightening because it can cause living humans to lose much of their awareness of their capacity for choice. But it does so by violating basic rights and invading the sacred minimum sphere of political liberty. Berlin clearly regards it as a technique of coercion. He says that it controls and shapes its victims against their will. It obstructs their political liberties: it deprives a person of positive liberty because he is “not now master,” ¹² and it deprives him of negative liberty because he is not now aware of many feasible actions beyond a limited few among which he could potentially choose, free from coercive interference. In short, brainwashing dehumanizes its victims in both the moral sense and the ontological sense.

Suppose the Nazis had brainwashed the prisoners so that they were deluded into a belief that they were Nazis too and never considered resisting Nazi commands. Even so, the prisoners would retain some awareness of their capacity for choice because they would still make some choices such as whether to smoke or not. We can say that they were dehumanized in the metaphysical sense to a great degree, in addition to being dehumanized in the moral sense, insofar as their awareness of their capacity to choose was greatly reduced as a result of the coercion they suffered. We can also argue that they have no meaningful degree of ontological humanity left at this point. Still, the Nazis would need to murder them to extinguish all awareness of their capacity for choice. Only by violating a prisoner’s right to life could the Nazis reduce his choices to zero and thereby remove all vestiges of his ontological humanity.

Basic liberty and political liberty, although distinct ideas, are intimately connected. Basic liberty underlies political liberty. It would be pointless to predicate positive or negative liberty of any creature or thing that lacked a capacity for choice. Conversely, deprivation of political liberty below a sacred minimum may cause a human’s basic liberty to erode away. As our basic rights are trampled, we are left with fewer opportunities to make choices. If we are unable to throw off our oppressors, we tend to adapt by limiting our choices to ones permitted by them. We may develop habits of blind obedience to the oppressors, so that our awareness of our capacity for choice diminishes. Brainwashing exploits this natural vulnerability to a frightening degree. Dehumanization in the moral sense then proceeds hand in hand with increasing degrees of dehumanization in the ontological sense.

Winham is correct that, for Berlin, indecent ways of life, including totalitarian regimes that rely on extensive brainwashing to subdue the masses, can persist for a considerable time rather than quickly fall of their own accord. Berlin is especially emphatic about this when he discusses what he calls the “artificial dialectic” invented and skillfully deployed by Stalin “to preserve the inner impetus—the perpetual tension, the condition of permanent wartime mobilization—which alone enables [the abnormal Soviet] form of life to be carried on.” ¹³ He insists that “those who believe that such a system is simply too heartless and oppressive to last cruelly deceive themselves.” ¹⁴ He points out that the regime did not crumble with Stalin’s death. Stalin’s successors continued to employ the dialectical “zigzag path” for another thirty years or so before the regime finally collapsed. ¹⁵ Similarly, there is no reason to think that Berlin would deny that a Hobbesian state of total war might persist for quite a long time.

But we must not conflate persistent totalitarian regimes and wars with an enduring civil society, that is, a tolerably decent society in which most members at most times are normal humans who accept the minimum of common moral ground, even though at all times some abnormal members may commit crimes, and occasionally there may be catastrophic interruptions in which decency is impossible. As Berlin says, for instance, “Soviet society is not, in the normal sense, a civil society at all.” ¹⁶ Rather, it was an abnormal society whose members were relentlessly bullied and deceived in the vain pursuit of an incoherent communist utopia, not a genuine community but more “like an army on the march” kept together only by the skillful methods of violence and deception employed by the leaders. In contrast to this fake Soviet community organized around an irrational value monism, a genuine community or civil society is organized around the reasonable minimum of common moral ground. It is a “normal human society” in Berlin’s moral sense of “normal”: “The purpose of normal human societies is in the first place to survive; and, after that, to satisfy what Mill regarded as the deepest interests of mankind, that is to say, to satisfy at any rate a minimum number of men’s normal desires after their basic needs are satisfied.” ¹⁷ Unlike a totalitarian regime, a normal human community is a moral kind of society that implicitly accepts value pluralism together with fundamental rules of decency and the associated minimum sphere of political liberty.

A continuing widespread commitment to the common moral minimum is necessary for a normal human community to remain stable. The breakdown of such a genuine civil society into an abnormal totalitarian regime or insane Hobbesian war is a form of social instability, indeed, a moral calamity. Moreover, while it is true that an enduring totalitarian regime or state of war is compatible with Berlin’s empirical claim that most people at most times and in most places are normal humans, his claim does imply that enduring totalitarian states or wars are relatively infrequent phenomena as are self-destructions (as opposed to destructive foreign invasions) of normal human communities. I am not arguing that his claim is supported by the available empirical evidence. Nor do I think that he provides (or intends to provide) a plausible explanation for the relative frequency of enduring civil societies. But perhaps his claim and its implications account for his tendency to stress that normal humans are able to feel sympathy for so many different forms of life after imagining themselves in those social contexts across history. He tends to downplay that normal humans will feel antipathy for totalitarian regimes and Hobbesian states of war, although there is no doubt that they can imagine themselves in those contexts as well.

Winham’s misunderstandings ultimately stem from his failure to see that Berlin works with two distinct notions of humanity that can be consistently combined. He is not alone in this failure. Even John Gray is blind to the moral concept of a normal human, for example when he insists that, for Berlin, human nature is nothing but “the capacity for choice, and for a self-chosen form of life.” ¹⁸ Since “selfhood is a matter of invention,” he claims, “Berlin does not by human nature mean us to understand any unvarying human passions or needs.” ¹⁹ So, for Gray, we cannot properly attribute to Berlin any notion of a permanent moral nature which is displayed by normal humans who recognize the overwhelming importance of certain unvarying human needs and interests centered on human survival. But Berlin is a troubled rationalist, not an unbridled romantic. His claim that a capacity for choice is essential to human nature is not at odds with his claim that most humans at most times and in most places choose to accept a minimum of common moral ground and so discover a posteriori that they share a common moral nature. ²⁰ There is no suggestion of an innate moral nature that is given a priori and constrains our capacity to choose. A closely related mistake is to interpret Berlin’s minimum of common moral ground as so thin that it does not demand common decency but instead permits unrestrained value pluralism and thus includes all ontological humans, even wrongdoers who repeatedly violate others’ human rights.

I will conclude with a few remarks about Berlin’s “self-proclaimed ‘pelagian’ soul.” ²¹ We must be careful when interpreting his assertion in his letter to Andrzej Walicki that it is “better [to] choose badly than not choose at all, better [to] determine oneself disastrously than be determined for by benevolent manipulators.” ²² Like Pelagius, he clearly believes that it is better to have basic liberty than not to have it, better to have free will than to have one’s fate set by “impersonal forces” beyond one’s control. ²³ This is tantamount to saying that it is better to be a human than a non-human, given his view that our capacity for choice is essential to our humanity in the ontological sense. But his belief carries no implications for the moral evaluation of the choices we make. Although our awareness of the capacity depends on our choices, that awareness or knowledge comes even if we make indecent choices. Moreover, once acquired, its persistence does not depend on the realization of decent choices.

Berlin is not asserting, and clearly does not believe, that it is better to make indecent choices than decent choices. After all, a person whose behavior is “determined for by benevolent manipulators” makes no choices at all except perhaps a few trivial ones, and thus lacks even ontological humanity in any meaningful sense: he has so little awareness of his capacity for choice that he might as well be dead. According to normal humans committed to the minimum of common moral ground, however, it is better to choose to comply with the fundamental rules of decency than to choose to break them. In short, a Pelagian soul is consistent with a normal human’s value judgment that decency has moral priority over indecency. There is no conflict between humanity in the metaphysical sense and humanity in the moral sense.

Even so, Berlin seems off-track when he leaves the impression that an indecent human choice is always better than no choice at all, and thus better than the beneficial behavior of lower animals driven by instincts or of robots programmed by benevolent humans. As Rawls says, any sane method of moral evaluation must consider consequences. ²⁴ From that perspective, the life-saving behavior of a dog trained to sniff out bombs or to rescue humans from drowning is morally better than the wrongful choice of a human who murders another human. So is the useful behavior of a robot programmed by “benevolent manipulators” to perform tasks that are too dangerous or boring for human workers. I doubt that Berlin would dispute this, upon reflection. A generous reading is that he intends only to say that a disastrous choice is better than no choice for the human agent in isolation, that is, if and only if we consider the consequences for him alone when it is reasonable to suppose that any harmful effects for others are trivial. The disastrous consequences to a person of a bad choice do not lead us to conclude that it would be better for him to be dead or transformed into a bug. ²⁵

Berlin’s considered view, as I understand it, is that, for humans, it is better to have basic liberty than not to have it, since some meaningful degree of awareness of the capacity for choice marks humanity in the ontological sense; and also better to make choices in accordance with the fundamental social rules of decency, since the commitment to a common moral minimum marks humanity in the moral sense. Indeed, Berlin seems inclined to believe that our free will is a decent will. For him, the free will of a normal human is a decent will, and most people in most places and at most times are said to be normal in his moral sense. He apparently thinks that the will, although free to create and do evil, tends in most of us to listen to frail human reason and moves in accordance with its minimum moral demands. True, his troubled rationalism must not be confused with the mainstream faith that an omnipotent Reason is guaranteed to solve all conflicts of values. Nevertheless, a modicum of liberal optimism lies at the core of his doctrine, which stresses that humans are capable of maintaining a precarious decency despite our power to choose evil.