Dignity, ecosystems and artifacts

1. If a part of x has dignity, x has dignity.

2. Only persons have dignity.

3. So, a person cannot be a proper part of a non-person. (1–2)

4. A person cannot be a proper part of a person.

5. So, a person cannot be a proper part of anything. (3–4)

6. If any nation or galaxy or ecosystem exists, some nation, galaxy or ecosystem has a person as a proper part.

7. So, no nation, galaxy or ecosystem exists. (5–6)

Less confidently, I go on.

8. If tables and chairs exist, so do chess sets.

9. If chess sets exist, so do living chess sets.

10. A living chess set has persons as proper parts. (Definition)

11. So, living chess sets do not exist. (4,10)

12. So, tables and chairs don’t exist. (8–9,11)

All that said, I suppose (1) could be denied. But it would be hard to deny if one thought of dignity as a form of trumping value, since a value in a part transfers to the whole, and if it’s a trumping value, it isn’t canceled by the disvalue of other parts. (That said, I myself don’t quite think of dignity as a form of value.)

Special treatment of humans

Sometimes one talks of humans as having a higher value than other animals, and hence it being appropriate to treat them better. While humans do have a higher value, I don't think this is what justifies favoring them. For to treat something well is to bestow value on them. But it is far from clear why the fact that x has more value than y justifies bestowing additional value on x rather than on y. It seems at least as reasonable to spread value around, and preferentially treat y.

A confusing factor is that we do have reason to preferentially treat those who have more desert, and desert is a value. But the reason here is specific to desert, and does not in any obvious way generalize to other values.

I don't deny that we should treat humans preferentially over other animals, nor that humans are more valuable. But these two facts should not be confused. Perhaps we should treat humans preferentially over other animals because humans are persons and other animals are not--but this is a point about personhood rather than about value. I am inclined to think we shouldn't argue: humans are persons, personhood is very valuable, so we should treat humans preferentially. Rather, I suspect we should directly argue: humans are persons, so we should treat humans preferentially, skipping the value step. (To put it in Kantian terms, beings with dignity are valuable, but what makes them have dignity isn't just that they are valuable.)

The essentiality of dignity

Start with this:

1. Dignity is an essential property of anything that has it.

2. Necessarily, something has dignity if and only if it is a person.

3. Therefore, personhood is an essential property of anything that has it.

Now, suppose the standard philosophical pro-choice view that

4. Personhood consists in developed sophisticated cognitive faculties of the sort that fetuses and newborns lack but typical toddlers have.

Consider a newborn, Alice. By (4) Alice is not a person, but if she grows up into a typical toddler, that toddler will be a person. By (3), however, we cannot say that Alice will have become that person, since personhood is an essential property, and one cannot gain essential properties—either you necessarily have them or you necessarily lack them.

Call the toddler person “Alicia”. Then Alice is a different individual from Alicia.

So, what happens to Alice once we get to Alicia? Either Alice perishes or where Alicia is, there is Alice co-located with her.

Let’s suppose first the co-location option. We then have two conscious beings, Alice and Alicia, feeling the same things with the same brain, one (Alice) older than the other. We have standard and well-known problems with this absurd position (e.g., how does Alicia know that she is a person rather than just being an ex-fetus?).

But the option that Alice perishes when Alicia comes on the scene is also very strange. For even though Alice is not a person, it is obviously appropriate that Alice’s parents love for and care for her deeply. But if they love for and care for her deeply, they will have significant moral reason to prevent her from perishing. Therefore, they will have significant moral reason to give Alice drugs to arrest her intellectual development at a pre-personhood stage, to ensure that Alice does not perish. But this is a truly abhorrent conclusion!

Thus, we get absurdities from (3) and (4). This means that the pro-choice thinker who accepts (4) will have to reject (3). And they generally do so. This in turn requires them to reject (1) or (2). If they reject (2) but keep (1), then Alice the newborn must have dignity, since otherwise we have to say that Alice is a different entity from the later dignified Alicia, and both the theory that Alice perishes and the theory that Alice doesn’t perish is unacceptable. But if Alice the newborn has dignity, then the pro-choice argument from the lack of developed sophisticated cognitive abilities fails, because Alice the newborn lacks these abilities and so dignity comes apart from these abilities. But if dignity comes apart from these abilities, then the pro-choice argument based on personhood and these cognitive abilities is irrelevant. For it dignity is sufficient to ground a right to life, even absent personhood.

So, I think the pro-choice thinker who focuses on cognitive abilities will in the end need to deny that dignity is an essential property. I suspect most do deny that dignity is an essential property.

But I think the essentiality of dignity is pretty plausible. Dignity doesn’t seem to be something that can come and go. It seems no more alienable than the inalienable rights it grounds. It’s not an achievement, but is at the foundation of what we are.

Evaluating some theses on dignity and value

I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationship between dignity and value. Here are four plausible principles:

1. If x has dignity, then x has great non-instrumental value.

2. If x has dignity, then x has great non-instrumental value because it has dignity.

3. If x has dignity and y does not, then x has more non-instrumental value than y.

4. Dignity just is great value (variant: great non-instrumental value).

Of these theses, I am pretty confident that (1) is true. I am fairly confident (3) is false, except perhaps in the special case where y is a substance. I am even more confident that (4) is false.

I am not sure about (2), but I incline against it.

Here is my reason to suspect that (2) is false. It seems that things have dignity in virtue of some further fact F about them, such as that they are rational beings, or that they are in the image and likeness of God, or that they are sacred. In such a case, it seems plausible to think that F directly gives the dignified entity both the great value and dignity, and hence the great value derives directly from F and not from the dignity. For instance, maybe what makes persons have great value is that they are rational, and the same fact—namely that they are rational—gives them dignity. But the dignity doesn’t give them additional value beyond that bestowed on them by their rationality.

My reason to deny (4) is that great value does not give rise to the kinds of deontological consequences that dignity does. One may not desecrate something with dignity no matter what consequences come of it. But it is plausible that mere great value can be destroyed for the sake of dignity.

This leaves principle (3). The argument in my recent post (which I now have some reservations about, in light of some powerful criticisms from a colleague) points to the falsity of (3). Here is another, related reason. Suppose we find out that the Andromeda Galaxy is full of life, of great diversity and wonder, including both sentient and non-sentient organisms, but has nothing close to sapient life—nothing like a person. An evil alien is about to launch a weapon that will destroy the Andromeda Galaxy. You can either stop that alien or save a drowning human. It seems to me that either option is permissible. If I am right, then the value of the human is not much greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy.

But now imagine that the Whirlpool Galaxy has an order of magnitude more life than the Andromeda Galaxy, with much greater diversity and wonder, than the Andromeda Galaxy, but still with nothing sapient. Then even if the value of the human is greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy, because it is not much greater, while the value of the Whirlpool Galaxy is much greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy, it follows that the human does not have greater value than the Whirlpool Galaxy.

However, the Whirlpool Galaxy, assuming it has no sapience in it, lacks dignity. A sign of this is that it would be permissible to deliberately destroy it in order to save two similar galaxies from destruction.

Thus, the human is not greater in value than the Whirlpool Galaxy (in my story), but the human has dignity while the Whirlpool Galaxy lacks it.

That said, on my ontology, galaxies are unlikely to be substances (especially if the life in the galaxy is considered a part of the galaxy, since following Aristotle I doubt that a substance can be a proper part of a substance). So it is still possible that principle (3) is true for substances.

But I am not sure even of (3) in the case of substances. Suppose elephants are not persons, and imagine an alien sentient but not sapient creature which is like an elephant in the temporal density of the richness of life (i.e., richness per unit time), except that (a) its rich elephantine life lasts millions of years, and (b) there can only be one member of the kind, because they naturally do not reproduce. On the other hand, consider an alien person who naturally only has a life that lasts ten minutes, and has the same temporal density of richness of life that we do. I doubt that the alien person is much more valuable than the elephantine alien. And if the alien person is not much more valuable, then by imagining a non-personal animal that is much more valuable than the elephantine alien, we have imagined that some person is not more valuable than some non-person. Assuming all non-persons lack dignity and all persons have dignity, we have a case where an entity with dignity is not more valuable than an entity without dignity.

That said, I am not very confident of my arguments against (3). And while I am dubious of (3), I do accept:

5. If x has dignity and y does not, then y is not more valuable than x.

I think the case of the human and the galaxy, or the alien person and alien elephantine creature, are cases of incommensurability.

Value and dignity

1. If it can be reasonable for a typical innocent human being to save lions from extinction at the expense of the human’s own life, then the life of a typical human being is not of greater value than that of all the lion species.

2. It can be reasonable for a typical innocent human being to save lions from extinction at the expense of the human’s own life.

3. So, the life of a typical innocent human being is not of greater value than that of the lion species.

4. It is wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being in order to save tigers, elephants and giraffes from extinction.

5. It is not wrong to intentionally destroy the lion species in order to save tigers, elephants and giraffes from extinction.

6. If (3), (4) and (5), then the right to life of innocent human beings is not grounded in how great the value of human life is.

7. So, the right to life of innocent human beings is not grounded in how great the value of human life is.

I think the conclusion to draw from this is the Kantian one, that dignity that property of human beings that grounds respect, is not a form of value. A human being has a dignity greater than that of all lions taken together, as indicated by the deontological claims (4) and (5), but a human being does not have a value greater than that of all lions taken together.

One might be unconvinced by (2). But if so, then tweak the argument. It is reasonable to accept a 25% chance of death in order to stop an alien attack aimed at killing off all the lions. If so, then on the plausible assumption that the value of all the lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes is at least four times that of the lions (note that there are multiple species of elephants and giraffes, but only one of lions), it is reasonable to accept a 100% chance of death in order to stop the alien attack aimed at killing off all four types of animals. But now we can easily imagine sixteen types of animals such that it is permissible to intentionally kill off the lions, tigers, elephants and giraffes in order to save the 16 types, but it is not permissible to intentionally kill a human in order to save the 16 types.

Technology and dignitary harms

In contemporary ethics, paternalism is seen as really bad. On the other hand, in contemporary technology practice, paternalism is extremely widely practiced, especially in the name of security: all sorts of things are made very difficult to unlock, with the main official justification being that if if users unlock the things, they open themselves to malware. As someone who always wants to tweak technology to work better for him, I keep on running up against this: I spend a lot of time fighting against software that wants to protect me from my own stupidity. (The latest was Microsoft’s lockdown on direct access to HID data from mice and keyboards when I wanted to remap how my laptop’s touchpad works. Before this, because Chromecasts do not make root access available, to get my TV’s remote control fully working with my Chromecast, I had to make a hardware dongle sitting between the TV and the Chromecast, instead of simply reading the CEC system device on the Chromecast and injecting appropriate keystrokes.)

One might draw one of two conclusions:

1. Paternalism is not bad.

2. Contemporary technology practice is ethically really bad in respect of locking things down.

I think both conclusions would be exaggerated. I suspect the truth is that paternalism is not quite as difficult to justify as contemporary ethics makes it out, and that contemporary technology practice is not really bad, but just a little bad in the respect in question, even if that “a little bad” is very annoying to hacker types like me.

Here is another thought. While the official line on a lot of the locking down of hardware and software is that it is for the good of the user, in the name of security, it is likely that often another reason is that walled gardens are seen as profitable in a variety of ways. We think of a profit motive as crass. But at least it’s not paternalistic. Is crass better than paternalistic? On first, thought, surely not: paternalism seeks the good of the customer, while profit-seeking does not. On second thought, it shows more respect for the customer to have a wall around the garden in order to be able to charge admission rather than in order to control the details of the customer’s aesthetic experience for the customer’s own good (you will have a better experience if you start by these oak trees, so we put the gate there and erect a wall preventing you from starting anywhere else). One does have a right to seek reasonable compensation for one’s labor.

The considerations of the last paragraph suggest that the special harm of paternalistic behavior is a dignitary harm. There is no greater non-dignitary harm to me when I am prevented from rooting my device for paternalistic reasons than when I am prevented from doing so for profit reasons, but the dignitary harm is greater in the paternalistic case.

There is, however, an interesting species of dignitary harm that sometimes occurs in profit-motivated technological lockdowns. Some of these lockdowns are motivated by protecting content-creator profits from user piracy. This, too, is annoying. (For instance, when having trouble with one of our TV’s HDMI ports, I tried to solve the difficulty by using an EDID buffer device, but then I could no longer use our Blu-Ray player with that port because of digital-rights management issues.) And here there is a dignitary harm, too. For while paternalistic lockdowns are based on the presumption that lots of users are stupid, copyright lockdowns are based on the presumption that lots of users are immoral.

Objectively, it is worse to be treated as immoral than as stupid: the objective dignitary harm is greater. (But oddly I tend to find myself more annoyed when I am thought stupid than when I am thought immoral. I suppose that is a vice in me.) This suggests that in terms of difficulty of justification of technological lockdowns with respect to dignitary harms, the ordering of motives would be:

1. Copyright-protection (hardest to justify, with biggest dignitary harm to the user).

2. Paternalism (somewhat smaller dignitary harm to the user).

3. Other profit motives (easiest to justify, with no dignitary harm to the user).

Affronts to human dignity

Some evils are not just very bad. They are affronts to human dignity. But those evils, paradoxically, provide an argument for the existence of God. We do not know what human dignity consists in, but it isn’t just being an agent, being really smart, etc. For human dignity to play the sort of moral role it does, it needs to be something beyond the physical, something numinous, something like a divine spark. And on our best theories of what things are like if there is no God, there is nothing like that.

So:

1. There are affronts to human dignity.

2. If there are affronts to human dignity, there is human dignity.

3. If there is human dignity, there is a God.

4. So, there is a God.

This argument is very close to the one I made here, but manages to avoid some rabbit-holes.

Death, dignity and eternal life

One way to look at the difference between the deaths of humans and brute animals is to say that the death of a human typically deprives the human of goods of rational life that the brute animal is not deprived of. While it is indeed an important part of the evil of typical cases of death in humans that they are deprived of such goods, however, focusing on this leads to a difficulty seeing what is distinctively bad about the death of humans who are not deprived of such goods by death, say elderly humans who have already lost the distinctive goods of rational life.

Sure, one can say that the death of a human is the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life. But it is unclear why the death of a being that normally has the goods of rational life but actually lacks them is worse than the death of a being that actually and normally lacks the goods of rational life.

(Of course, not everybody shares the normative view that there is something distinctively bad about the death of a human being even when the goods of rational life have already been lost. A significant number of people think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit. But even among those who think that euthanasia in such cases is morally licit, I think many will still think that there is something particularly morally bad about killing such human beings against their clear prior wishes, and those may find something plausible about what I say below.)

How, then, do we explain the distinctive bad in the death of human beings, even ones that lack the distinctive goods of rational life? In the end, I think I would like to invoke human dignity here, but to a significant degree that’s just giving a name to the problem. Instead of invoking and trying to explain human dignity, I want to explore a different option, one that I think in the end will not succeed, but perhaps there is something in the vicinity that can.

Here is a hypothesis:

• It is the nature of human beings to live forever and never die, but the nature of brute animals is to have a finite life.

If this is true, then death always constitutes a mutilation of the human being. It is what directly deprives the human being of the normative diachronic shape of its life. And killing a human mutilates the human being.

Objection 1: If a murderer didn’t kill her victim, the victim would still have died at some later point.

Response: The murderer is still the proximate cause of the victim’s not living forever. And such proximate causation matters. Suppose that my brother murdered Sally’s brother, and to avenge her brother, in true Hammurabic fashion, Sally seeks to kill me. When she finally comes upon me, I am already falling off a cliff. A moment before I would have hit the ground, Sally shoots and kills me. Sally has murdered me, a grave evil. She is the proximate cause of my death. And that matters, even though it would make little difference to my life if Sally hadn’t killed me.

Objection 2: Even if it is the nature of brute animals to have a finite life, it is not the nature of brute animals to die young. But it is not wrong to kill a brute animal when it is young, even though doing so mutilates the brute animal in much the same way that killing a human mutilates the human by causing her life to be finite if the hypothesis is true.

Response: Agreed: it does mutilate the brute animal to kill it when it is young. But to foreshorten the life of a human being from infinity to a finite amount is much worse—in a sense, infinitely worse—than to foreshorten the life of a brute animal from a longer finite length to a shorter finite length.

Objection 3: Christian faith holds that humans will be resurrected. Thus, killing a human being does not succeed in causing the human being to lose infinite life.

Response: Yes, but according to the hypothesis it is not only the nature of human beings to have an infinite future life but it is also the nature of human beings to have a death-free infinite future life.

Objection 4: Imagine an otherwise unremarkable shrub which has a very special nature: it is supposed to live forever, undying. Destroying this shrub would feel distinctively bad as compared to destroying an ordinary shrub, but still not bad in the same way that killing a human being is. Hence, reference to the normativeness of an infinite future life is not enough to explain the distinctive badness of killing humans.

Response: I think that this objection is decisive. Mere invocation of the normativeness of an infinite deathless life is not enough to solve the problem of the distinctive badness of human death. One still needs something like a story about the special dignity of human beings. But it might be that the hypothesis still helps: it multiplies the synchronic dignity of the human being by something like infinity. So less needs to be accomplished by the dignity part of the account.

If naturalism is true, there is an infinite afterlife

1. Deontology is true.
2. A finite being could not have the kind of dignity that deontology ascribes to human beings.
3. So, human beings are infinite. (1-2)
4. If human beings are infinite, they are infinite synchronically or diachronically.
5. If naturalism is true, human beings are finite synchronically.
6. If there is no infinite afterlife, human beings are finite diachronically.
7. So, either naturalism is not true or there is an infinite afterlife. (3-6)
8. So, if naturalism is true, there is an infinite afterlife. (this is a material conditional following from 7)

Of course, there are also arguments that if naturalism is true, there is no afterlife, and if these are sound, then together we get an argument that naturalism is not true.

Dignitary harms and wickedness

Torturing someone is gravely wrong because it causes grave harm to the victim, and the wickedness evinced in the act is typically proportional to the harm (as well as depending on many other factors).

But there are some wrongdoings which are wicked to a degree disproportionate to the harm. In fact, torture can be such a case. Suppose that Alice is caught by an evildoer who in a week will torture Alice by one second for every person who requests this by email. About a hundred thousand people make requests, and Alice gets over a day of torture. Each requester’s harm to Alice is real but may be quite small. But each requester’s deed is very wicked, disproportionately to the harm. The case is similar to a conspiracy where each conspirator contributes only a small amount of torment but collectively the conspirators cause great torture—the law would be just in holding all the conspirators guilty of the whole torture.

Here’s another way to see the disproportion. Suppose that someone is deciding whether to request torture for Alice or to steal $100 from her. Alice might actually self-interestedly prefer an extra second of torture to having $100 stolen. Nonetheless, requesting the torture seems much more wicked than stealing $100 from Alice (unless Alice is destitute).

Similarly, the evildoer could kill Alice with probability 1 − (1/2)ⁿ where n is the number of requesters. Given sad facts about humanity, everyone might know that the probability that Alice will die is going to be nearly certain, and no one requester makes any significant difference to that probability. So the harm to Alice from any one requester is pretty small, but the wickedness of making the request is great.

Another case. It is wicked to fantasize about torturing someone. And to be thought of badly is indeed a kind of harm. But if one can be sure that that the fantasy stays in the mind—think, maybe, of the sad case of a dying woman who spends her last twenty minutes fantasizing about torturing Bob—one might self-interestedly prefer the fantasy to, say, a theft of $100. Hence, the harm is relatively small. Yet the wickedness in fantasizing about torture is great, in disproportion to the harm.

Yet another case. Suppose that with science-fictional technology, someone destroys my heart, while at the same time beaming into my chest a pump of titanium that is in every respect better functioning than my natural heart. I think I have been harmed in one respect: a bodily function, that of pumping blood by my heart, is no longer being fulfilled. But blood is still being pumped, and better. So overall, I may not be harmed. (I may even be benefited.) Yet it seems that to destroy someone’s heart is to do them a grave harm. I am least confident about this case. (I am confident that the deed is wrong, but not of how wrong it is.)

In all these cases, there is a dignitary harm to the victim. And even if it is self-interestedly rational for the victim to prefer this dignitary harm to a modest monetary harm, imposing the dignitary harm is much more wicked. This is puzzling.

Solution 1: Imposing the dignitary harm causes much greater harm to the wrongdoer, and that’s what makes it so much more wicked.

But that seems to get wrong who the victim is.

Solution 2: Alice and Bob are mistaken in preferring not to be robbed of $100. The dignitary harm in fact is much, much worse.

Maybe. But I am not sure. Is it really much, much worse to have ten thousand people request one’s death rather than five thousand? It seems that dignitary harm drops off with the numbers, too, and each individual harmer’s anti-dignitary contribution is small.

Solution 4: Wrongdoings are not a function of harm, but of irrationality (Kant).

I fear, though, that this has the same problem of dislocating the victim from the center of the wrong, just as Solution 1 did.

Solution 3: Dignitary harms to people additionally harm God’s extended well-being, by imposing an indignity on the imago Dei that each human being constitutes. Dignitary harms to people are dignitary harms to God, but they are either much greater when they are done to God (because God’s dignity is so much greater?) or else they are much more unjust when they are done to God (because God deserves our love so much more?).

Like Solution 1, this may seem to get wrong who the victim is. But if we see the imago Dei as something intrinsic to the person (as it will be in the case of a Thomistic theology on which all our positive properties are participations in God) rather than as an external feature, this worry is, I think, alleviated.

I am not extremely happy with Solution 4, either, but it seems like it might be the best on offer.

In vitro fertilization and creating genuine artificial intelligence

Catholic teaching says that there is (at least barring special divine dispensation) exactly one permissible way for human beings to directly produce new human beings: marital mating. This isn't just an arbitrary prohibition--arbitrary prohibitions like the one against pork went out (or, more precisely, underwent aufhebung) when the New Covenant came in. What is the reason for this restriction? We can, after all, permissibly produce other kinds of animals in other ways. There is no Catholic teaching against using artificial insemination in cattle.

I see two options. The first is that it is just the reflexiveness in human beings producing human beings requires the restriction. This seems implausible to me. Imagine that we meet Martians. It would be very odd to think that the Vulcans could permissibly produce new human beings in vitro and humans could permissibly produce new Vulcans in vitro, although humans couldn't permissibly produce humans in vitro (or Vulcans Vulcans).

The second option is that this has something to do with what is special about the target of production: a new human being. But what is it that is special about this target? It seems plausible that it is personhood. This suggests that we are only permitted to directly produce persons by marital mating. (Why? Maybe it has something to do with the more intimate way in which persons are images of God, and hence sacred, as in Paulo Juarez's comment. Or maybe there is a Kantian argument that other forms of production would fail to treat the persons as ends.)

But now if we were to generate genuine artificial intelligence--not merely computers acting as if they were intelligent--then we would have produced a person, and done so apart from marital mating. If I am right that it is personhood that is at the root of the prohibition on in vitro fertilization, it seems to follow that (at least barring special divine dispensation) it is impermissible for us to produce genuine artificial intelligence (AI).

Should this ethical constraint hamper AI research? That depends on whether there is significant reason to think that computers could ever actually have genuine intelligence. If dualism is true (and Catholicism entails dualism), then the only way a computer could gain genuine intelligence, as opposed to merely behaving like an intelligent thing, would be by gaining a soul. But perhaps God has enacted something like a law of nature by which whenever matter is organized in such a way that it could support intelligence, then that matter comes to be ensouled. If so, there could be an ethical problem in aiming at genuine artificial intelligence, and this could ethically restrict AI research since we might not know where the line of sufficient organization would be crossed (presumably, though, we're not that close to the line yet).

Maybe, though, things aren't so simple. Maybe rather than there being a general prohibition on our producing persons except by marital mating, what we have is a general prohibition on our directly producing persons by means other than the natural direct means for originating those kinds of persons. For humans, the natural direct means for origination is marital mating. But for intelligent computers, factory production could perhaps be the natural means for originating. Maybe, but I find more plausible the idea that we simply do not have the right to make persons, except by marital mating.

Dignity, humanity and Aristotelianism

1. All humans have dignity because they are humans.
2. Humans do not have dignity because of an extrinsic property.
3. So, being human isn't an extrinsic property.
4. If to be human is to be a member of a particular biological taxon, then being human is extrinsic. (Biological taxa are defined by gene interchange in a population and are thus extrinsic characterizations of individuals.)
5. So, to be human is not the same as to be a member of a biological taxon.
6. Our best alternative to the biological taxonomic account of what it is to be human is the Aristotelian account that it is to have a human form, so the Aristotelian account is probably true.

Value of species membership

We generally think that humans have a dignity that non-human animals like dogs lack, even when the humans are so disabled that their functioning is on the level of a dog. While Kant rightly insists that dignity does not reduce to value, nonetheless dignity seems to imply a value. Perhaps the point generalizes so that it is better to be a member of a spiffier species even if one personally lacks those features that make the species spiffier.

This isn’t clear, however. I wish I had the amazing mathematical abilities of a Vulcan like Spock. I don’t really wish to be a mathematically disabled Vulcan, whose mathematical abilities are no greater than mine. And if the choice were between being a deficient Vulcan with mathematical abilities slightly weaker than mine and being what I am, I would prefer to be what I am, at least bracketing non-mathematical features of the two species. Thus whatever value there is in being a member of a species with much greater normal mathematical abilities seems easily outweighed by the value of actual mathematical abilities.

But now consider a somewhat different choice: that between being a human like me and a highly deficient Vulcan whose mathematical skills are nonetheless somewhat better than mine. Suppose, too, that in my chosen way of life only the mathematical skills would matter: nobody would make fun of me for having pointy ears, I wouldn’t feel sad at being a deficient Vulcan, etc. It seems quite reasonable to want to be such a deficient Vulcan. This suggests that either the small improvement in actual mathematical skills is ample compensation for being highly disabled, or being a Vulcan counts for a lot.

Being a Vulcan doesn’t seem to me to count for a lot. When I reflect why I’d rather be the deficient Vulcan with mathematical skills somewhat better than mine, neither the deficiency as such nor the Vulcanness as such count for much.

It seems of much greater value to be a deficient human than to be a normal dog, keeping actual abilities the same. But it doesn’t seem to be of much greater value to be a deficient Vulcan than a human, even if normal Vulcans were equal or superior to humans in all respects. Maybe this is because only a dignity-relevant difference between species makes a value difference between species, and Vulcans, even if they are superior, do not have greater dignity.

Or it could even be that the dignity difference doesn’t imply a value difference.

The human as the end-setter

Perhaps the deepest question about human beings is about the source of our dignity. What feature of us is it that grounds our dignity, gives us a moral status beyond that of brute animals, provides us with a worth beyond market value, makes us into beings to be respected no matter the stakes?

I was thinking about the proposal (from the Kantian tradition, but rather simplified) that it is our ability to set ends of ourselves that is special about humans. But as far as I put it, the proposal is obviously inadequate. Suppose I take our Roomba and program it to choose a location in its vicinity at random and then try to find a path to that location using some path-finding algorithm. A natural way to describe the robot's functioning then is this: The robot set an end for itself and then searched for means appropriate to that end. So on the simple end-setting proposal, the robot should have dignity. But that's absurd: even if one day someone makes a robot with dignity, we're not nearly there yet, and yet what I've described is well within our current capabilities (granted, one might want to stick a Kinect on the Roomba to do it, since otherwise one would have to rely on dead-reckoning).

Perhaps, though, my end-setting Roomba wouldn't have enough of a variety of ends. After all, all its ends are of the same logical form: arrive at such and such a location. Maybe the end-setting theory needs the dignified beings to be able to choose between a wider variety of ends. Very well. There is a wide variety of states of the world that can be described with the Roomba's sensors, and we can add more sensors. We could program the Roomba to choose at random a state of the world that can be described in terms of actual and counterfactual sensor values and then try to achieve that end with the help of some simple or complex currently available algorithm. Now, maybe even the variety of ends that can be described using sensors isn't enough for dignity. But now the story is starting to get ad hoc, as we embark on the hopeless task of quantifying the variety of ends needed for dignity.

And surely that's not the issue. The problem is, rather, with whole idea that a being gets dignity just by being capable of choosing at random between goals. Surely dignity wouldn't just require choice of goals, but rational choice of goals. But what is this rationality in the choice of goals? Well, there could be something like an avoidance of conflicts between goals. However, that surely doesn't do much to dignify a being. If the Roomba chose a set of goals at random, discarding those sets that involved some sort of practical conflict (the Roomba--with some hardware upgrade, perhaps--could simulate pursuing the set of goals and see if the set is jointly achievable in practice), that would be cleverer, but wouldn't be dignified.

And I doubt that even more substantive constraints would make the random end-setting be a dignity-conferring property. For there is nothing dignified about choosing randomly between options. There might be dignity in a being that engaged in random end-setting subject to moral constraints, but the dignity wouldn't be grounded in the end-setting as such, but the being's subjection of its procedures to moral constraints.

The randomness is a part of the problem. But of course replacing randomness with determinism makes no difference. We could specify some deterministic procedure for the Roomba to make its choice--maybe it sorts the descriptions of possible ends alphabetically and always chooses the third one on the list--but that would be nothing special.

If end-setting is to confer dignity, the being needs to set its ends not just subject to rational constraints, but actually for reasons. Thus there must be reasons prior to the ends, reasons-to-choose and not just constraints-on-choice. However, positive reasons embody ends. And so in a being whose end-setting makes it be dignified, this end-setting is governed by prior ends, the ends embodied in the reasons the being is responsive to in its end-setting. On pain of vicious regress, such a being must be responsive to ends that it did not choose. Moreover, for this to be dignity-producing, surely the responsiveness needs to to these ends as such. But "an end not chosen by us" is basically just the good. So these beings must be responsive to the good as such.

At this point, however, it becomes less and less clear that the choice of ends is doing all that much work in our story about dignity, once we have responsiveness to the good as such in view. For this responsiveness now seems a better story about what confers dignity. (Though perhaps still not an adequate one.)

Objection: No current robot would be capable of grasping ends as such and hence cannot adopt ends as such.

Response: Sure, but can a two-year-old? A two-year-old can adopt ends, but does it cognize the ends as ends?

Fetal and our potentiality

Consider this standard story:

Whatever value fetuses have derives from their potentiality (and here various distinctions matter) to grow into humans that actually have various valuable features, features that are not simply potentialities. Typical human adults actually have the valuable features that ground their moral status, while fetuses only potentially have these features. The question of the moral status of the fetus, then, is the question of how far their potentiality makes it possible to extend to them the moral status that typical human adults have (and, likewise, to extend the moral status of typical human adults to atypical ones).

I have argued in earlier posts that the kind of potentiality fetuses have does call for the extension of moral status. But I now wonder if this whole line of thought doesn't presuppose a mistaken view, namely that the moral status of typical human adults is grounded in the actual possession of valuable non-potentiality features. Specifically, I worry that this line of thought has too optimistic a view of the human race.

The feature of human beings that matters most centrally seems to be the moral life. But in practice our moral life just isn't all that good. We are full of self-deceit, akrasia and dollops of malice, in different combinations. Is it really the case that typical human beings are morally good in such a way that their actual moral goodness gives them the kind of moral status we are thinking about?

And in any case, even if, say, 70% of adult human beings do have such moral goodness, what about those of us who are in the other 30%? They, too, have moral status. No matter how many crimes one has committed previously, no matter how wicked one is, one has the moral and legal right to a fair trial, to a punishment that does not exceed the gravity of the offense.

What I said about the moral life also goes for the intellectual life: the typical human's intellectual life just isn't much to be proud of. Just think of all the fallacious forms of reasoning we engage in. Plus, I do not know how central the intellectual life is to moral status. Suppose there was a race of super-intelligent mathematicians who had no drive but to prove interesting theorems and no moral life to speak of. Would they have the kind of moral status humans have? I don't know. (It could be that they would have to have the rudiments of a moral life, in that they would have to be attuned at least to the values of truth and beauty to practice mathematics well. So it could be that the thought experiment is impossible.)

Now, it may well be that the above thoughts are too pessimistic. The George MacDonad quote here seems quite significant. But I still think this is worth thinking about, and I think there is something to the idea that the moral status of typical adult humans comes not so much from actual valuable properties, but from their innate potentiality for the good moral life. It is what we should (eventually?) be, not what we are, that is central to our dignity on this suggestion.

A dignity argument against most abortions

1. (Premise) If x has dignity, it is wrong to intentionally kill x primarily for the sake of a benefit to someone other than x.
2. (Premise) Elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly have dignity.
3. (Premise) If elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly have dignity, fetal humans have dignity.
4. Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetal human primarily for the sake of a benefit to someone other than the fetus.

I think something broader than (1) is true—it's also wrong to kill an innocent for the sake of a benefit to x. But (1) will be less controversial. I think (3) is probably the most controversial premise. One argument for (3) is this:

5. (Premise) Dignity is either had by all humans or only by those who satisfy achievement-type conditions for personhood, such as being able to solve relatively sophisticated problems or communicate on a large variety of topics.
6. (Premise) Fetal humans are humans.
7. (Premise) If dignity is only had by those who satisfy achievement-type conditions for personhood, then elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly do not have dignity.
8. Therefore, if elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly have dignity, then dignity is had by all humans, and hence by fetal humans as well.

Alas, premise (2) may be somewhat controversial. Here is an argument for it.

9. (Premise) x can only suffer an indignity if x has dignity.
10. (Premise) Elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly can suffer indignities (and often do).
11. Therefore, elderly people whose minds are functioning very poorly have dignity.

Horrendous evil and indignity

Many horrendous evils are horrendous largely because of horrendous indignity to the sufferer. Such "horrendous indignities" may seem to provide evidence against the existence of God. But on reflection, I think, they do not. For only a being with a dignity can suffer an indignity. It is no indignity for a rock to have mud poured over it. Making fun of a monkey does not harm the monkey. Moreover, only a being with great dignity can suffer a great indignity. Thus, that some beings suffer horrendous indignities entails that these beings have great dignity.

The evidence that many suffer horrendous indignities thus tells us that:

1. There are many finite beings with great dignity,
2. who suffer great indignities.

Now, is this better predicted by theism or by naturalism? Theism predicts (1), though it may not predict (2). Naturalism does not predict (1)—it could even be that naturalism is incompatible with (1) since perhaps great dignity requires being in the image of God; I do not know what it says about (2) (even conditionally on (1)). In any case, the existence of horrendous indignities is also a problem for naturalism, because the existence of beings of great dignity is a problem for naturalism.

Let us step back and ask if (2) is usually such a great problem given theism. We need distinguish "o-dignity", the innate "ontological" dignity of a being, from the "m-dignity" which is a manifestation of o-dignity. In (1) we are talking of o-dignity. Indignity, however, is not the opposite of o-dignity, but of m-dignity. The person who suffers an indignity still has o-dignity—if she didn't have it any more, she wouldn't be suffering an indignity, just as a rock cannot suffer an indignity because it lacks o-dignity. (One's pride can only be hurt when one has pride; otherwise, at worst one's former pride is hurt, and that's not a present hurt.) Thus manifest indignity as such highlights the o-dignity of the being suffering from the indignity. Only the evidently holy can be manifestly blasphemed.

In other words, manifest indignity is a kind of m-dignity. Manifest indignities are self-defeating—they highlight the dignity of that which they demean. (This may remind one of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and of the mockeries Christ suffered.) But horrendous indignities tend to be manifest. As such they paradoxically conduce to the manifestation of o-dignity, and hence there is reason for God to allow them to occur.

True kingship is most manifest when stripped, on the cross and with the side pierced.

The value of unconscious human life

Some think that the life of a human being who has permanently and irreversibly lost consciousness has no value. Here are three arguments against tying human value and human dignity to consciousness.

Argument 1: Leibniz and Freud have taught us that much of our mental life is unconscious. If we just look at a typical person's conscious episodes what we get is a disconnected life, a series of short film clips, rather than the rich story that a typical human life is. It would be strange, then, to make the conscious life be the sole locus of value. This argument is there just to move one's intuitions away from an excessive focus on consciousness. It won't, for instance, be relevant in the case of brain damage so severe that there is good reason to think there are no unconscious mental processes (though in practice it does caution one; we know that medical personnel can be mistaken about whether a patient is conscious, and it seems to be even more difficult to determine whether there are unconscious mental processes).

Argument 2: Some living things, like trees, exhibit metabolic activity. Other living things, like earthworms, exhibit significant movement. Other living things, like geckos (I assume), exhibit conscious awareness. Yet others, like dogs, exhibit significant and flexible problem-solving skills. And others yet, of which the only example we are empirically sure are humans, exhibit the kind of sophisticated intellectual functioning and interaction that is characteristic of persons. But the later entries in this list also exhibit the activities of the earlier ones. Earthworms not only move, but also metabolize. Geckos not only are consciously aware, but also move and metabolize. Dogs not only solve problems, but are conscious, move and metabolize. And humans do all of these—and exhibit sophisticated cognition on top of it. The life of a tree, a worm, a gecko and a dog has value, and the good that is found in each of these is found in the typical life of a human. Not all of these goods require consciousness: the good of metabolism and movement is present in many animals without, as far as we know, consciousness. Thus the life of a human who does not exhibit consciousness nonetheless exhibits a number of other goods. To deny this is basically to deny that humans are animals, or to take the implausible view that the life of a tree or a worm has no value.

Argument 3: Consider the attitude one might have towards someone that one loves who has fallen dreamlessly asleep—say, one's child or one's spouse. One may fondly kiss the beloved's head, recognizing the beloved's present value—fondness always involves an element of taking the beloved to have value. If the value of humans essentially requires consciousness, there is either a mistake here or else the value is entirely constituted by the expected future consciousness. It is implausible to say that a mistake is being made, so let us consider the future-consciousness hypothesis. Suppose that the beloved is going to be executed by a tyrant as soon as she about to regain consciousness. Then there is no future consciousness (except in the afterlife, and I do not think the attitude depends on beliefs about the afterlife). But the tragic absence of a future consciousness does not make one less fond—it does not make one value the person less—but the very opposite. Nor is one's attitude as it is towards a corpse. In the case of the sleeping person who will be executed, one dreads and mourns a future loss; in the case of the corpse, one mourns an already present loss.

Final remarks: The above establishes a weak conclusion: that there is intrinsic value in an unconscious human life. One might think that this weak conclusion avails little. But I think it establishes one thing: It is a mistake to think that one can be bestowing a good on an unconscious patient by killing her. An unconscious patient is not suffering. The evils that have befallen her are evils of privation (maybe the evil of suffering is also an evil of privation, but that is more controversial)—she lacks consciousness, speech, complex two-way interaction, etc. But she still exhibits the kinds of goods that oak trees exhibit. And to kill her is to deprive her even of these goods. (A religious person might say: "It will hasten her happiness in the next life, and that is of value." But rarely do we know that a person's afterlife will be free of suffering. Besides, the hastening is not much of a benefit, because when one is unconscious, one is not waiting. According to her subjective time, she will get the goods of the afterlife just as quickly if she is killed now as when she is allowed to live for another ten years of unconsciousness.)

One might think that it is an indignity for a human to be active only at the level of plants. That, I think, is too high a view of humans. We all begin with a life of purely metabolic activity after conception, and most of us end with a life of purely metabolic activity (if only for a few seconds).

An important question (Trent Dougherty asked me about this today), but one that is not required for my weak conclusions above, is whether the metabolic life is intrinsically more valuable in the human than in the oak tree. The answer is, I think, positive, but it is a hard question. (One argument for a positive answer comes from the hylomorphic view of the human soul—our metabolic life is energized by our rational soul.)