When I taught calculus, the average grade on the final exam was around 55%. One could make the case that this means that our grading system is off: that everybody’s grades should be way higher. But I suspect that’s mistaken. The average grasp of calculus in my students probably really wasn’t good enough for one to be able to say with a straight face that they “knew calculus”. Now, I think I was a pretty rotten calculus teacher. But such grades are not at all unusual in calculus classes. And if one didn’t have the pre-selection that colleges have, but simply taught calculus to everybody, the grades would be even lower. Yet much of calculus is pretty straightforward. Differential calculus is just a matter of ploughing through and following simple rules. Integral calculus is definitely harder, and exceling at it requires real creativity, but one can presumably do decently just by internalizing a number of heuristics and using trial and error.
I find myself with the feeling that a normal adult human being should be able to do calculus, understand basic Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid basic formal and informal fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. But I doubt that the average adult human being can learn all these things even with excellent teachers. Certainly the time investment would be prohibitive.
There are two things one can say about this feeling. The first is that the feeling is simply mistaken. We’re all apes. A 55% grade in calculus from an ape is incredible. The kind of logical reasoning that an average person can demonstrate in an essay is super-impressive for an ape. There is little wrong with average people intellectually. Maybe the average human can’t practically learn calculus, but if so that’s no more problematic than the facts that the average human can’t practically learn to climb a 5.14 or run a four-minute mile. These things are benchmarks of human excellence rather than of human normalcy.
That may in fact be the right thing to say. But I want to explore another possibility: the possibility that the feeling is right. If it is right, then all of us fall seriously short of what normal human beings should be able to do. We are all seriously impaired.
How could that be? We are, after all, descendants of apes, and the average human being is, as far as we can tell, an order of magnitude intellectually ahead of the best non-human apes we know. Should the standards be another order of magnitude ahead of that?
I don’t think there is a plausible naturalistic story that would do justice to the feeling that the average human falls that far short of where humans should be at. But the Christian doctrine of the Fall allows for a story to be told here. Perhaps God miraculously intervened just before the first humans were conceived, and ensured that these creatures would be significantly genetically different from their non-human parents: they would have capacities enabling them to do calculus, understand Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc. (At least once calculus, physics and writing are invented.) But then the first humans misused their new genetic gifts, and many of them were taken away, so that now only statistically exceptional humans have many of these capacities, and none have them all. And so we have more geneticaly in common with our ape forebears than would have been the case if the first humans acted better. However, in addition to genetics, on this story, there is the human nature, which is a metaphysical component of human beings defining what is and what is not normal for humans. And this human nature specifies that the capacities in question are in fact a part of human normalcy, so that we are all objectively seriously impaired.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to read the Fall. Another way—which one can connect in the text of Genesis with the Tree of Life—is that the first humans had special gifts, but these gifts were due to miracles beyond human nature. This may in fact be the better reading of the story of the Fall, but I want to continue exploring the first reading.
If this is right, then we have an interesting choice-point for philosophy of disability. One option will be to hold that everyone is disabled. If we take this option then for policy reasons (e.g., disability accommodation) we will need a more gerrymandered concept than disability, say disability*, such that only a minority (or at least not an overwhelming majority) is disabled*. This concept will no doubt have a lot of social construction going into it, and objective impairment will be at best a necessary condition for disability*. The second option is to say only a minority (or not an overwhelming majority) is disabled, which requires disability to differ significantly from impairment. Again, I suspect that the concept will have a lot of social construction in it. So, either way, if we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired, for policy reasons we will need a disability-related concept with a lot more social construction in it.
Should we accept the story that we are all seriously impaired? I think there really is an intuition that we should do many things that we can’t, and that intuition is evidence for the story. But far from conclusive. Still, maybe we are all seriously impaired, in multiple intellectual dimensions. We may even be all physically impaired.
Malebranche held something like this on broadly Cartesian grounds: he held that we can recognize by rational reflection on mind and body that their natural relationship should have certain features and when we comare this discovery to our actual mind-body relationships we learn that some of those features are missing. This affects our cognition -- we are over-dependent on the senses, and so have difficulty paying adequate attention to abstract ideas. He also held that it interfered with our control of the bodies, so, while he doesn't give it a large scope, he can be said to have held that there was a physical disability aspect, as well.
ReplyDeleteAugustine seems to have thought that in the Garden, we had total voluntary control over our bodies' functioning. The lack of that is a serious impairment.
ReplyDeleteDr Pruss
ReplyDeleteI really don't think the Christian doctrine of the Fall can account for why "all of us fall seriously short of what normal human beings should be able to do."
The problem is that the things you describe as what normal human beings should be able to do
"they would have capacities enabling them to do calculus, understand Newtonian physics, write a well-argued essay, deal well with emotions, avoid fallacies, sing decently, have a good marriage, etc." includes "avoid fallacies". But if before the Fall, humans had been the way humans should be, they would have avoided the Fall. It's only because Adam (figuratively speaking) fell short of what a normal being should be able to do, that the Fall happened in the first place.
Adam fell short of what he was able to do. That's why it was a sin.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteDr Pruss
I think you are using a very narrow understanding of 'being able' here. In my opinion, if Adam had truly been able to avoid the fall, he would have avoided it. But I use 'able' in a much broader sense, and I think, in the context of this argument the broader sense is required, because what is the difference between human normalcy and human perfection?
Just like I am not smart enough to fully understand quantum mechanics, Adam apparently was not smart enough to understand the consequences of his choice. Or maybe he was too weak. All these things to me clearly fall under imperfection. If human normalcy entails human perfection, and I don't see what else 'what human beings should be able to do' could possibly mean, then being too weak to do something or to avoid something is also an inability
No, I meant it in a pretty broad way. On the picture you sketch, Adam wasn't very responsible, and then God's reaction would have been excessive. For the action to be the mortal sin it was, Adam had to have the capability to refrain.
ReplyDeleteWell, as a matter of fact, I have always thought that God's reaction in the story was excessive.
ReplyDeleteTo say that for the action to be a moral sin, Adam had to have the ability to refrain seems question-begging, because I think one should first consider whether the Fall-story really includes a (mortal) sin rather than a mistake due to Adam's imperfection . I think that if we are to take your description of 'what normal human beings should be able to do' to its consequences, we have to go for the latter option.
But I feel we'll have to agree to disagree on this.