On Human Nature

Scruton's (The Soul of the World) latest book is a collection of four short essays, three of which are revised from Charles E. Test memorial lectures presented at Princeton University. Although engaging, these essays are written for academics and can be somewhat bewildering and intractable to wider audiences. Scruton begins the first chapter by claiming that we are essentially physical, biological animals, but he ultimately rejects this view, concluding that we are embodied, incarnate persons, where persons are emergent entities that are irreducible to the sum of their parts. What differentiates persons from other emergent entities, he says, is that they laugh, judge other persons morally responsible, see themselves as moral agents persisting through time, and are free. Scruton's claim that personhood is irreducible to biological organisms allows him to sidestep the debate concerning whether freedom is compatible with determinism; causal determinism might be true of the physical world but not necessarily the emergent world—that is, so long as reductionism is not true of personhood. This is a novel yet precarious way to avoid questions of freedom and its apparent inconsistency with the scientific assumption of determinism.