Human Affairs and Philosophical Examination
Suppose that in a fit of anger Red assaults and seriously injures Green, though prior to the act, Red was aware that the act was morally wrong and thus that it should not be done. Red later regrets the act. Let us call this scenario STORY.
Here we have an event which occurs often enough — or, normatively speaking, unacceptably often — in human affairs and yet invites philosophical examination. What is it about human beings that explains such events? Consider these more specific questions, each of which is prompted by STORY:
How can a human being be so conflicted, knowing that an act is wrong and wanting to avoid it, yet submitting to a powerful desire to do it?
What is a human being?
What is human nature?
Plato, or perhaps Socrates, was likely the first [1] to think in a substantive philosophical manner about such questions. According to Cicero, Socrates was the first philosopher to emphasize ethics. In any case, for Plato, the human being is soul and body. Plato was a soul-body dualist, which means his answer to (2) is that a human being is, roughly, a composite of soul (or mind) and body. We can construe ‘soul’ here as referring to that immaterial aspect of the person which contains the capacities for consciousness (i.e., thought, belief, sensation, desire, will, etc.) and rationality. (Materialists deny that there is an immaterial aspect of the person, as I will note below.)
Plato developed a tripartite theory of the soul such that the human mind comprises a rational element, a spirited element (i.e., emotion), and desire. The rational element ought to lead the soul as a king leads a city. Desire and emotion have important purposes, but they should submit to the leadership of reason. In a person of integrity, an integrated person, this is the arrangement. But a disintegrated person is ruled, at least on occasion, by the passions of desire or emotion. [2]
Plato’s system makes sense of STORY. Red’s mind is — at least at the time of the assault — controlled by emotion and/or desire and yet he realizes that his reason should govern. One might wonder, though, why we need multiple parts of the soul. Why not have a simple rational soul which sometimes moves in its entirety toward what is morally right or reasonable and other times mistakenly toward what is morally wrong or unreasonable? It seems to me that the Stoic view of the soul was something like this, and this view also seems a plausible account of STORY. Since we are dealing with different theories of philosophical anthropology, it is worth noting that versions of idealism can also account for STORY.
What seems less plausible to me is the naturalist/materialist view, which holds that “… there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities.” [3] On this view, human beings are wholly physical, since as spatiotemporal entities we are identical to or constituted by physical objects. Naturalism has no room for immaterial things such as souls or minds, though perhaps naturalism can explain consciousness by making it a property of physical objects. [4] In any case, it is unclear how a completely physical object could be mentally conflicted in the way that Red seems to be in STORY, and hence it appears that naturalism is inadequate to explain STORY.
[1] At least in the Western tradition.
[2] You might be wondering about the will, that is, the capacity to choose. Where does it fit in Plato’s triadic system? A plausible place is the rational element, which might be taken as reason plus will. Unless you want a fourfold theory, with will being the fourth part. You might also wonder about concepts from contemporary psychology, such as intelligence (measurable in terms of IQ), openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. One might say that a tripartite soul is more or less intelligent, conscientious, agreeable, etc.
[3] David Papineau, Naturalism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#OntNat
[4] This might seem like an impure version of naturalism, given that we defined that term by appeal only to the physical. What sort of property would consciousness be if everything that exists is physical?