People are not fungible

If people are fungible—can be exchanged for exact duplicates without this making any significant difference of value—then any two situations where there is the same number of exactly similar people are equivalent in value. After all, we can get from one situation to the other by just replacing the people in the one situation by the people in the other.

But suppose there are infinitely many exactly similar happy people and every second one ceases to exist. Obviously, something bad has happened—a lot of value has gone out of the world. But the number of exactly similar happy people is the same. So people are not fungible.

Two kinds of fungibility

I was teaching Jennifer Whiting's "Impersonal Friends" this morning—I love that piece—and I was going into the usual distinction between the fungible and nonfungible. I generally illustrate this with heirlooms. While money is fungible, the ring inherited from great grandmother is not: if the ring were swapped out for another just like it, it wouldn't be as good.

As I was teaching, though, I realized that that's too quick. Suppose that in the first place great grandmother instead had a different but similar ring and it was passed down through the generations to us. That would make no difference to anything that matters to us. So the ring is broadly fungible: it can be swapped for another ring with relevantly similar historical properties. The same seems true of all heirlooms.

But are persons fungible in the same way? Here's a thought. If something rightly matters a great deal to me it matters objectively at least somewhat. It rightly matters a great deal to me that I exist. It thus rightly matters a great deal to me that all of my history wasn't swapped for that of another similar individual. Therefore it matters objectively at least somewhat. Hence I am objectively not fungible even in that broader sense.

More on fungibility and naturalism

In an earlier post, I argued against materialism on the grounds that persons are non-fungible but material objects are fungible or at least persons are non-derivatively non-fungible, while material objects are at best derivatively non-fungible.

Here's a pathway to arguing that if naturalism is true, then at least some persons are fungible. Since no persons are fungible, it follows that naturalism is false.

Start with the thought that:

1. Something wholly composed of fungible parts is fungible.

If this is right, and material objects are composed of elementary particles, then all material objects are fungible since elementary particles are fungible. And that's all we need for our argument.

But (1) may not be quite right. After all, arguably, the Mona Lisa is (derivatively) non-fungible, but all the elementary particles making it up are. There would be no loss if we replaced the particles of the Mona Lisa one by one. The non-fungibility of the Mona Lisa is grounded in the non-fungibility of the arrangement of the parts: If suddenly the Mona Lisa was burnt up, but by coincidence the particles in the ashes and smoke arranged themselves in an exactly similar arrangement, something of value would be lost. There is something special here about the arrangement.

What makes the arrangement of the Mona Lisa's particles special is the specialness of the artistic process that produced that arrangement. This suggests:

2. Something wholly composed of fungible parts arranged by a fungible process is fungible.

A fungible process is one such that it is value-relevant whether it is replaced by an exact copy. The painting of the Mona Lisa is like that. Given (2), it is very plausible that things composed of fungible parts are at best derivatively non-fungible, with their non-fungibility derived from that of the process of generation.

Now you or I perhaps did have our parts get arranged by a non-fungible process: our parents' loving union. But even persons produced by in-vitro fertilization had their parts arranged by our biological parents' bodies through their gametes, and the process of gamete production in a person is arguably non-fungible.

However, at least one person—namely, a first human person—has no person as a biological parent, on pain of an infinite regress. If theism is true, that person may still be the product of a non-fungible process of creation by a (divine) person. But naturalism rules out not only dualism but also theism. A naturalist who does not believe in an infinite past will have to hold that there is a first person who is in no way produced by a person. And there it seems that the process producing that first person is fungible—it plausibly doesn't matter value-wise which of two exactly similar brute animals mated with a brute animal to produce a person. (If it is responded that primates like those we descend from are themselves non-fungible, then just take the argument further back in our evolutionary past.)

Fungibility, persons and materiality

This seems plausible:

1. All purely material objects are fungible.
2. No persons are fungible.
3. So, no persons are purely material objects.

Maybe that's not quite right. One might think that some objects care about (a colleague gave the examples of the Mona Lisa and Grandpa's Bible) are non-fungible. But I think it's plausible that material objects are at most derivatively non-fungible, deriving their non-fungibility from the non-fungibility of people. Thus:

4. No purely material object is non-derivately non-fungible.
5. Every person is non-derivatively non-fungible.
6. So, no person is a purely material object.