Ortega and Utilitarians

Initially, we may identify what might appear as common ground: the utilitarian, like Ortega’s hunter, aims at “happiness.” Clearly, however, the same word refers to different experiences.

For the utilitarian, happiness means pleasure. To claim that all sentient creatures strive for happiness is to say that they strive for pleasure. If one animal hunts another, it is for the “pleasure” of eating it. Further, the aim of all human action is pleasure or happiness.

For Ortega, this analysis does not go very far. Insofar as humans have broken with Nature and have entered History, their goal is freedom, not happiness. Even if they were to return to Nature as a hunter in search of happiness, it is not for the sake of “the pleasant.” Pleasure is not so much a goal as that which accompanies achievement in action. It is compatible with, perhaps even enhanced by, much pain and effort. Finally, it is a mistake to claim that animals, human or non-human, eat just for pleasure. They hunt and eat to survive (at least) and this brings with it pleasure. The way they hunt and the way they eat actually constitutes them as members of the species that they are.

Ortega y Gasset VI The Ethics of Hunting

Some writers criticize the practice of hunting on utilitarian grounds. The claims here are that pleasure is good and pain is bad, that right actions maximize the balance of pleasure over pain (that is the utilitarian part), and that hunting can be shown to not maximize pleasure over pain (and the anti-hunting part). This critique calls those who resist applying the utilitarian framework and only that framework to non-human species “speciesists.”

Part of the disagreement with the hunting concerns the definition of what is meant by hunting. Ortega y Gasset defines “hunting” as “what an animal does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own.” For the utilitarian, this definition misses the ethically relevant dimensions. That the hunter and the hunted belong to different species is beside the point. That the species have mutually adapted to each other such that, qua species, each depends on the other introduces extraneous data.

The utilitarian decrees that only pleasure and pain have an ethical weight, and not only humans but other animals too can feel pleasure and pain. For the utilitarian, hunting would be “what one sentient animal does to inflict death on another sentient animal, perhaps for the pleasure of eating it or displaying it.” From a utilitarian point of view, the only question is the extent to which the hunter can inflict death with minimal pain, as compared with the pain induced and the pleasure forfeited should the animal not die at the hunter’s hands.

Two features of Ortega’s account of hunting drop out of the utilitarian account. First, the difference of species disappears as irrelevant. As a basis for an ethic of hunting, this has troubling implications. Whether one hunts and eats or displays one’s own species is relevant only to the extent that it might increase the pleasure and pain involved. The utilitarian cannot oppose cannibalism on the grounds that it is cannibalism, only on the grounds that under certain circumstances it creates less than optimal balance of pleasure over pain. Further, though in principle it would not differentiate between species, in practice it values the species suffering pain over the species that inflicts the pain. The result is that animal rights advocates may feel pleasure at news of hunter accidents (and express such pleasure on internet forums) because at least there are fewer hunters to inflict pain on animals. Sometimes those who advocate animal rights must consciously remind themselves that "people are animals too" -- and this statement elevates humans to a moral status the activist can too easily lose sight of. (reference)

Second, the ecosystem drops out of the utilitarian calculus. Institutions, organizations, and systems, even ecological systems cannot feel pleasure or pain. Only individuals within those systems can; only individuals are real. Consequently, the only way to take account of an ecological system is through the pain felt by individuals; the collapse of an ecosystem and the extinction of species concerns the utilitarian only insofar as the individual sentient animals feel pain during the collapse. The utilitarian can have no objection to the extinction of a species, for an extinct species can no longer feel pleasure or pain. The utilitarian is pained only by the pain felt by the members of the species so long as they happen to exist. But “happening to exist” is itself neither good nor bad.

At this point I cannot but wonder if the utilitarian metaphysic is simply too truncated, if its inability to recognize certain realities does not doom those realities in its drive to efficiently maximize pleasure. Michael Pollan roots this metaphysic in a form of life. He notes “how parochial , and urban, an ideology animals rights really is. It could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose any threat to us (a fairly recent development) , and our mastery of nature seems unchallenged. ‘In our normal life,’ Singer writes, ‘there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.’ Such a statement assumes a decidedly citified version of ‘normal life,’ certainly one no farmer – indeed, no gardener – would recognize.” (pp. 325-6).

According to animal rights advocates those who reject the utilitarian account are “speciesists.” This term of criticism may be accepted if we define it. To be a speciesist is to claim, minimally, that species and ecological systems ought to count directly in our ethical considerations. It is to claim that the continued existence of a species is a good that we should value, that an ecosystem is worth preserving even if more pleasure and less pain would seem to be the result of developing it. It is to claim that while the pains and pleasures of individuals are important, there are also goods and evils other than the pain and pleasures of sentient individuals. There is more in the world than is dreamed of....

Ortega y Gasset V, Happiness and Freedom

Ortega has followed two trails. The success of his argument depends on his ability to make them coincide. We can define each trail by its endpoints. One trail leads from Nature to History; the other trail leads from the laborious chores and jobs to the pleasing. On Ortega’s telling Nature and the pleasing coincide with one another. [actually, I don't think this is quite right, but I've got to go back to re-read to get the right nuance.] Likewise, history and the laborious designate the same destination.

This is a surprising move. Philosophers working in the wake of Hegel see humans moving from forced labor toward freedom, and this is a steady move forward. In hunting Ortega sees humans moving from forced labor to happiness, and this move is a reversal back to Nature. He makes this move in the following paragraph:

“All this indicates that man, painfully submerged in his work or obligatory occupations, projects beyond them, imagines another kind of life consisting of very different occupations, in the execution of which he would not feel as if he were losing time, but, on the contrary, gaining it, filling it satisfactorily and as it should be filled. Opposite a life which annihilates itself and fails – a life of work – he erects the plan of a life successful in itself – a life of delight and happiness” (p. 37).

This last phrase, “a life of delight and happiness,” marks the precise place where we would have expected to read “a life of freedom and liberty.” But Ortega is convinced the hunter is looking back and not forward, that he is looking for happiness and not going deeper into history and toward freedom.

Ortega y Gasset IV, Internal goods, attention

In his analysis of hunting, Ortega picks up on this distinction between actions done for their own sake (“the pleasing”) and those which lead us to external goods (“the laborious”). The dichotomy defines human life: “So here is the human being suspended between two conflicting repertories of occupations: the laborious and the pleasing.” (p. 37). This distinction, and not the distinction between “difficult and easy,” leads the philosopher to the heart of the human action: “Happy occupations, it is clear, are not merely pleasures; they are efforts, and real sports are effort. It is not possible, then, to distinguish work from sport by a plus or minus in fatigue. The difference is that sport is an effort made completely freely, for the pure enjoyment of it, while work is an obligatory effort made with an eye to the profit” (p. 42).

Now we can hunt either as work or sport. We do not violate the act of hunting if we do it for one or the other of these purposes. However, after the Paleolithic era, once humans developed agriculture and no longer had to hunt, humans continued to hunt. Aristocrats hunt, and the working masses fight for the privilege of hunting. Dick Cheney hunts, and Tred Barta hunts. We hunt in pursuit of happiness. We hunt in order to hunt.

Like Pieper’s description of festivity, the activity of hunting itself can transform our usual habits of attention. Usually, “[o]ur attention, which is what aims our vision, seizes on that spot on the horizon because we are persuaded that what interests us will appear there. This attention to the preconceived is equivalent to being absorbed in one point of the visible area and not paying attention to the other points.” However, “[t]he hunter’s look and attention are completely opposite to this. … Thus, he needs to prepare an attention of a different and superior style – an attention which does not consist in riveting itself on the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness. It is a ‘universal’ attention, which does not inscribe itself on any point and tries to be on all points. There is a magnificent term for this, one that still conserves all its zest of vivacity and imminence: alertness. The hunter is the alert man” (p. 138).

Ortega y Gasset III, Action, External and Internal Good

I want to make another approach to the nature of hunting and its relation to diversion in Ortega y Gasset’s work. To do this I must introduce some background, so hang with me.

Philosophers often make a distinction between two kinds of activities. We engage in some activities for the sake of their outcome or their product. These activities we would not take up without the reward promised at the end. Most people find exercise odious, but will pay money for the space and equipment in order to claim the reward: chiseled abs or at least lower blood pressure. Some rewards get artificially attached to activities in order to entice us into them. Most of us would not seek employment were it not gainful.

On the other hand, we sometimes do things just for the sake of doing them, sometimes even in spite of the consequences. Children play for the sake of playing, even if their parents have called them to dinner “for the last time.” We eat for the sake of tasting, though we will have to run an extra mile tomorrow. And though some may worry that dancing may lead to sex, we do both for their own sake, and not for their outcome. Likewise, we worship for the sake of worship, and not for the benefits that might accrue to the worshiper.

The examples betray themselves, however. Some people love to exercise and would do it for its own sake; professional athletes play for a paycheck; worshipers sometimes try to manipulate God. All activities have outcomes; all activities have their own inner integrity which we can learn to enjoy. There are not two types of activities; there are two dimensions of all activities – or, rather, the domination of one dimension over the other determines the type. The dimensions define the activity; the activity does not define the dimension. The line between the two types of activities not only blurs … it moves. We may initially learn to cook out of an obligation to our family, grow to love the act of cooking for its own internal goods, and then become a professional chef cooking, most of the time, for the sake of a paycheck.

Josef Pieper, writing on the nature of “festivity,” which we do for its own sake, suggests the difference between the two types of activity lies in the quality of attention with which we accomplish the act: “the field of vision widens, concern for success or failure of an act falls away, and the soul turns to its infinite object; it becomes aware of the illimitable horizon of reality as a whole.” Festivity “is a kind of expectant alertness.”[1] Allowing the concern for success or failure to fall away is, simply, to move out of a perspective in which we act for the sake of results. From that perspective, this move may feel like a loss of focus. It may feel like “giving-up.” If I run the race only to win, then why should I keep running once it is clear that I will not win? (Coaches, take note.) However, if we no longer evaluate an activity by its results, if we allow our “field of vision” to widen, it keeps us from giving up on the activity itself. It allows us to take in the nature of the activity, to appreciate its intricacy as we perform it, and so develop an “expectant alertness,” a consciousness of the act guided by the act.

Ortega y Gasset draws on this framework for his analysis of hunting.

[1] Josef Pieper, In Tune With The World: A Theory of Festivity. St. Augustine’s Press, 1999, p. 17.

Ortega y Gasset II, Bad Faith

Few philosophers develop an interest in the nature of hunting. Most come to hunting with an already formed view of human nature. Hunting can be used to illustrate or provide evidence for that view. But of course any independently developed philosophy of human nature may remain ambivalent with regard to hunting.

By way of example, one obvious criticism of Ortega y Gasset comes from those who share his philosophy of human nature: Hunting is the very definition of “bad faith.” To flee History is to deny ourselves the freedom and the responsibility to make ourselves what we are; to fall back into Nature, worse, to deliberately set out to become nature, is to identify with “things.” It is to use freedom to deny freedom. This vacation from the human condition is the height of irresponsibility.

Once the same view of human nature supports opposite positions, we can't help but wonder if the dualisms don’t obscure more than they reveal.

Ortega y Gasset I -- History, Nature, Human Nature

Aldo Leopold agrees with Pascal in characterizing outdoor activities as a diversion. Fleeing to the out of doors is a fleeing from something. However, for Leopold, the diversion is not from unhappiness per se, nor from ourselves or our “condition.” Rather, we seek a contrast with mechanization and the factory (“Wildlife in American Culture,” p. 181), with crowding, polluted air, and the same old scenes (“Conservation Esthetic,” p. 171 -2). Outdoor recreation generally, and hunting in particular, offers freedom from modernity.

Jose Ortega y Gasset sounds a similar note. “This is the reason men hunt. When you are fed up with the trouble-some present, with being ‘very twentieth-century,’ you take your gun, whistle for your dog, go out to the mountain, and, without further ado, give yourself the pleasure during a few hours or a few days of being “Paleolithic” (p. 125).

As with Pascal, hunting reveals something of the human condition. But here hunting is not simply diversion because “diversion, usually indicates only comfortable situations, to the extent that, used carelessly, it connotes ways of life completely free of hardship, free of risk, not requiring great physical effort nor a great deal of concentration. But the occupation of hunting, as carried on by a good hunter, involves precisely all of those things…. Now this is a more serious matter. Diversion loses its passive character, its frivolous side, and becomes the height of activity.” (p. 30).

On the other hand, Ortega y Gasset appeals to a structurally similar account of human nature as revealed by this “active diversion.” According to Pascal, humans are a contradiction, hamstrung between their greatness and their misery; according to Ortega y Gasset, humans embody a sublimation, rising out of Nature into History.

In the realm of nature, there is no freedom. Everything is determined, if not by causal laws, then by the form of life. “The animal is given not only life, but also an invariable repertory of conduct. Without his own intervention, his instincts have already decided what he is going to do and what he is going to avoid. Therefore, it cannot be said that the animal occupies himself with one thing or another. His life has never been empty, undetermined.” The human too is an animal and so belongs to nature, and this is crucial to Ortega’s account.

However, the human is unique in that he “has lost his system of instincts or – which is the same thing – retains only instinctual stumps with residual elements incapable of imposing on him a plan of behavior” (p. 35). In one respect, this is freedom, and the human can “invent his own tasks or occupations.” It is the possibility of History, where new things might happen and where the human might remake himself or herself into something new. “Man is a fugitive from Nature. He escaped from it and began to make history, which is trying to realize the imaginary, the improbable, perhaps the impossible. History is always made against the grain of Nature” (p. 129).

Given this dichotomy between History and Nature, Ortega can situate the activity of hunting. Hunting is natural: “Hunting is not an exclusively human occupation, but occurs throughout almost the entire zoological scale…. The cat hunts rats. The lion hunts antelopes. The sphex and other wasps hunt caterpillars and grubs. The spider hunts flies. The shark hunts smaller fish. The bird of prey hunts rabbits and doves. Thus, hunting goes on throughout almost all of the animal kingdom. There is hardly a class or phylum in which groups of hunting animals do not appear. Hunting is, therefore, not even peculiar to animals” (p. 60).

That is, Nature itself contains differences of nature … differences of species or form. The cat and the rat; the falcon and the dove, the wasp and the caterpillar all differ in nature. But they also interlock with one another in an ecological system.

The hunt belongs to Nature because it is one of the primary ways that the different forms relate to one another. Ortega defines “Hunting” as “what an animal [though not only an animal] does to take possession, dead or alive, of some other being that belongs to a species basically inferior to its own” (p. 62). The hunt, then, acknowledges the difference of nature and the interrelations of nature established by Nature.

For humans to hunt, then, amounts to rebounding out of History and back into Nature. “The hunter is, at one and the same time, a man of today and one of ten thousand years ago. In hunting, the long process of universal history coils up and bites its own tail” (p. 127). Hunting is the diversion from History with Nature. “Man, projected by his inevitable progress away from his ancestral proximity to animals, vegetables, and minerals – in sum, to Nature – takes pleasure in the artificial return to it… (121). “It has always been at man’s disposal to escape from the present to that pristine form of being a man, which because it is the first form, has no historical suppositions. History begins with that form. Before it, there is only that which never changes: that which is permanent: Nature. ‘Natural’ man is always there, under the changeable historical man” (p. 125).