Friday, November 16, 2012
Does Evolution Give Us Collective Ownership of Talents and Abilities?
I take issue with the idea of personally owning one’s talents. Sandel makes a “slippery slope” argument when talking about this. He says that, if we do not own our talents, we do not own ourselves. He goes on to say that this may give the political community the impression of “property rights” over the people it governs. I posit that , as a species, we collectively own all of our talents and abilities. They are the direct result of our aggregated successes and failures over millions of years of evolution. Everything that is special and miraculous about us is a collective inheritance from past generations, and we have a collective interest in maintaining and guiding it. Why should you, the lucky person that inherited a great skill, be allowed to forsake the very species that you owe your skills to? Libertarians recognize a collective ownership of the ability to reason but seem to arbitrarily draw a line between this and other collectively produced talents. I say that we each partially own everything that our species is capable of.
Included in our genetic inheritance is the desire to maintain or improve upon our collective inheritance. This might explain our hesitancy to agree with the idea of voluntary cannibalism; we have an ingrained desire and need to preserve the species. Anything that removes from the collective ability to pass on knowledge, skills, and abilities is inherently abrasive to us. One could make the argument that we should actually desire the removal of suicidal tendencies from our species to ensure our ultimate survival, but the idea of engendering a tendency to consume fellow humans merely for sustenance or killing ourselves for money gives us an uneasy feeling such that we ban it.
This might also explain why so many of us rebel against the idea of vastly unequal distributions of wealth in society if such a distribution does not benefit everyone. Since wealth seems to play such a large role in our abilities and opportunities in the world, it feels as if it is interfering with the bettering of our species. In successive generations, wealth is allowed to augment any talents that a person may or may not have. We intrinsically feel that merit should determine opportunity because this is the only way that the species fully exercises its collective ability, but the act of receiving opportunity does not erase your debt to your species. We have allowed social constructs to distance us from this way of thinking, but I think it is present in all of us (even if it’s somewhat dormant).
What do you think? Is there some collective ownership of our current state of affairs?
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I really like what you've written. If every person was understood as having an obligation to humanity, our political and social dialogues would be much more open and just.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few valid (I think) objections to this line of thinking, though. If an individual owes her or his talents to past generations, what benefits are allowed to the individual who inherits them? Must every action that the individual takes be measured so as to provide the greatest benefit to humanity, in a kind of utilitarian sense, without accounting for the desires or even needs of the individual who takes the actions?
If there is some kind of self-preservatory, evolutionary logic behind our disgust with things like cannibalism and our distaste for things like suicide, then why are there small cultural groups in other parts of the world that practice cannibalism? Do they lack the evolutionary consciousness that we have developed? And why is it that others, such as the Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome, were accepting of suicide in a broad sense?