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What
is it like to be a human being?
Almost half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas
Nagel published a famous paper called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The
question I want to ask is: what is it like to be a human being? As it
happens, Tom Nagel’s insightful paper in The Philosophical Review was also
really about human beings, and only marginally about bats. Among other points,
Nagel expressed deep scepticism about the temptation of observational
scientists to identify the experience of being a bat—or similarly, a human
being—with the associated physical phenomena in the brain and elsewhere in the
body that are within easy reach of outside inspection. The sense of being a bat
or a human can hardly be seen as just having certain twitches in the brain and
of the body. The complexity of the former cannot be resolved by the easier
tractability of the latter (tempting though it may be to do just that).
The cutting edge of the human development
approach is also based on a distinction— but of a rather different kind from Nagel’s
basic epistemological contrast. The approach that Mahbub ul Haq
pioneered through the series of Human Development Reports which began in 1990 is that
between, on the one hand, the difficult problem of assessing the richness of
human lives, including the
freedoms that human beings have reason to value, and on the other, the much
easier exercise of keeping track of incomes and other external resources that
persons—or nations—happen to have. Gross domestic product (GDP) is much
easier to see and measure than the quality of human life that people have. But
human well-being and freedom, and their connection with fairness and justice in
the world, cannot be reduced simply to the measurement of GDP and its growth rate,
as many people are tempted to do.
