Henry Imler May 27th, 2006
In an earlier post, I talked about Cushing’s paper, Against Humanism that argued successfully against Humanism in the following two formulations:
Primary Speciesism :
All and only (innocent ) humans are moral persons
Necessary Agency for Personhood (NAP) :
One is not entitled to the kind of moral consideration that persons receive without the capacity for moral agency.
Primary Speciesism is obviously wrong. Cushing points this out when he brings up the case of an alien with abilities identical to ours. Another way to look at this is to imagine a great ape drinking an elixir that develops his cognitive abilities to match those of an adult human, a Dr Zaius:”Planet of the Apes Character List(Dr Zaius)”:http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/PlanetoftheApes/character1.htm if you will. These beings would obviously be persons and therefore would have rights to life. There is nothing on a genetic basis that gives us moral worth. Strict Speciesism is easily thrown out the window with other prejudices such as racism and sexism. So far, I agree completely with Cushing.
However, when it comes to NAP, I think Cushing has a good point. If one holds to NAP, then they are forced to disallow for the moral worth of babies and the retarded. They would be on the same plane as animals because of their reasoning abilities. The notion that human babies have the same moral worth as cats is frightening, to say the least. I think one can modify the approach so that one is not lead into a indefensible position that Cushing lists.
As a Christian, I am tempted to use the easy out of the soul requirement for personhood. Under this view, whoever has a soul is a person (being with moral worth). However, this is empirically impractical, even it if is true. Who around here carries a mark designating if they have a soul? The Christian would reply that the Bible sets forth the beings that have souls. What about beings that the Bible is silent about? Say we encounter aliens. The Bible is silent on the status of their souls. How do we go about determining their moral worth? Christians maintain that the soul leaves the body. What about the people that have nearly died and come back? Did they lose their moral worth while they were seemingly dead? Then there is the animal issue. Christians maintain that animals do not have souls. What if animals are found to have the ability to be rational and communicate? Can we still sanction their wholesale destruction at a whim? If they have no soul and therefore no moral worth, then we can. On the other hand, what if God has imbued the higher animals with souls and did not tell us, since the Bible was written to our situation? Since there is no empirical way to measure the soul, this gets very messy, very quickly.
What if one were to only use a future of value requirement as a starting point in the search for personhood?
The reasoning would be as follows:
- A future has value if the subject will have the ability to make moral determinations.
- X, in its future will have the ability to make moral determinations.
- C1. Therefore, X’s future has value.
- Subjects with valuable futures are personsO.
- X’s future is valuable.
- C2. Therefore, X is personO.
- PersonsO have a right to life.
- X is a personO.
- C3. Therefore, X has a right to life.
While for most cases, I would prefer that approach, as it gets around most of his complaints and provides a way to develop a class of beings with moral worth, it has some limitations that are very disheartening. What about beings that had the ability to make moral determinations, but now are unable to and will never again be able to? An real-world example of this would be a person who has Alzheimer’s. Also, what about those humans who can never make moral determinations, such as the severely retarded? Under the above approach, those individuals would not have a claim to life. I am not prepared to make such a determination; my intuitions are too strong otherwise.
I want to build a personhood and ethical theory that uses the above principles, allows for the moral worth of the past-persons and person-like beings. The ethical side of the theory would use my formulation of ethical relativity:”The Unsound Argument(Real Ethical Relativity)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/real-ethical-relativity, which is nothing like ethical relativism, but instead uses consequentialism to resolve conflicts within a deontological framework.
So far, I can come up with the following personhood categories:
- Persons
- Entities that are below Persons
- Past-Persons - beings that used to be persons, but are not currently persons.
- Proto-persons - Entities, that if allowed to develop naturally, will develop into persons
- Person-like Entities- Entities that have some of the qualities of a person, but not enough to qualify as a person and via natural development will not develop into a person.
- Non-Persons - Entities that are neither proto-persons, not person-like
- Hyper-persons -Entities that are above Persons
- Entities that have more qualities than persons and therefore have more moral worth
- Purely hypothetical
- God
- Other Supernatural Beings
- More advanced life forms, such as Star Trek’s Q.
I want to incorporate all of these classes into the personhood/ethical theory, but I don’t know how to deal with person-like entities. I might be able to solve the animal and severely retarded issues by introducing a clause that the more like a person one becomes, the more of a right to life they receive, a sort of graded personhood. All of this is still unclear where the lines of rights to life are and might seem very arbitrary. Perhaps all beings that are alive have a right to life and when conflicts arise, the beings with the higher moral worth win out over the less ones, ala ethical relativity’s consequences. More thought is needed.
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