Abstract
One of the largest controversies in death and dying focuses on what dies and what is lost when that entity is dead. For the most part, those who work in the field are interested in the death of people, but it is a reasonable position that people are not the only things that matter in the discussion. Properties other than being a human person can confer intrinsic value on those beings that instantiate them. For example, in the animal rights debate, some argue that anything that is living deserves moral consideration based upon that fact. Others draw the line among the entities we must respect somewhere between those beings with the ability to feel pleasure or pain and those who can feel neither. Other folks have a different standard that will create bigger or smaller groups depending on what properties they think are relevant. In this chapter, I will argue that an adequate, pragmatic value theory must be very, very complex. First, it should view value as hierarchical . Some properties being instantiated matter more than others, although each is worthy of consideration in its own right. In addition, how we value life depends on the context we have carved out to consider the living thing. Sometimes, we focus on the general properties it has, whereas in other cases, its individuality should be of main concern.
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Notes
- 1.
Lloyd finds a similar problem in defining species of animal and plants. He argues that different criteria can be used depending on assumptions made earlier in the taxonomy (Lloyd 2007, 40).
- 2.
I will limit myself here to a discussion of human persons and human personal identity, although what is said about them will work well for many other entities that can fulfill the requirements of how personhood or personal identity is used in at least one circumstance.
- 3.
Lloyd asserts that there are no cross-cultural universal definitions of terms such as self, agency, and causation (Lloyd 2007, 108–9).
- 4.
I think that Gould makes a mistake here. He is correct that the branch and stem clearly are different, but only if our perspective comes from far enough, but not too far, away from the bush. That is, if we are very close to the join, then we see an area in which we can claim both stem and branch. Too far away, and we cannot see either, but merely a bush. Vagueness and subjectivity is always present based upon the context. Even in the case of species, there isn’t one definition that works, although there is one that we use most of the time because it generally works, just as Newtonian physics is good enough in most cases unless we need to do finer work.
- 5.
I am aware of the existence of fossils and petrified organisms, but these entities were not alive as rocks.
- 6.
These divine entities are merely causally, rather than metaphysically, impossible.
- 7.
I put aside the issue of whether the cessation of life needs to be permanent. Although permanent cessation is clearly death, it is sometimes useful to talk about people dying and being brought back to life. For the sake of clarity, we could distinguish between permanent death and temporary death, although the latter might be an odd term in most contexts.
- 8.
This is not always true given that 1 % of the population is an identical twin, triplet, quadruplet, and so on (Sagan and Singer 2014, 122).
- 9.
The grand siècle thought it could reduce, if not eliminate, the unknown by reducing it to a mathematical formula. The same idea is at the root of much of the discussion about death. There is an assumption that if we reduce things to their parts, then we can fully understand what is happening.
- 10.
For more information on human biomes, see HMPC (2012).
- 11.
Or any individual animal biome, for that matter.
- 12.
Julia Glahn argues that a dead human body has dignity because it is still part of the human community, although it does not have the dignity that a living body does (Glahn 2009, 38).
- 13.
This notion of social construction will play a very large role in the next section on socially embedded persons and personal identity.
- 14.
This might be too Western of a view. Some societies attribute agency and personhood to the dead (Lloyd 2007, 110).
- 15.
I am using Norman Kretzmann's definition of natural potentiality here. An object has natural potential to become X if the object has the capacity to become X (Kretzmann 1999, 39). This is not a mere metaphysical possibility, as found in Tooley's wonder-cat example. “[I]f no one deliberately intervenes to prevent it from happening, it will, in the vast majority of cases, happen.” (Feinberg 2014, 70).
- 16.
This claim is argued for more extensively in Technology, Transgenics, and a Practical Moral Code .
- 17.
McMahan argues that only a developed fetus has the potential to become a person, which he defines as an embodied mind (McMahan 2014).
- 18.
I think that Little’s view is correct for potential versus actualized properties. However, there should be concern about thinking about an individual as either a human being or self. It is sometimes required to think about a moral agent as a human being in order to compare her value to that of other human beings. In addition, we can think of an entity becoming more valuable as it instantiates more properties that increase its intrinsic worth.
- 19.
James Walters takes the position that moral values can alter as a developing individual draws closer to or moves away from “the threshold of indisputably personal life, the life of the normal adult in any society” (Walters 1997, 63). However, he is worried about social policy based on the concept of personhood because it would struggle to get it right in marginal cases (Ibid.).
- 20.
Various philosophers have agreed that full moral standing requires a sufficiently high level of cognitive functioning Engelhardt’s (1986). Kantian position is consistent in large part with Feldman’s . McCormick (1974) argues that personhood belongs to those individuals who can enter into meaningful relationships. Fletcher (1997) proposes what looks to be the lowest standard of these types with his claim that any entity that has at least an IQ in the 20–40 range is a person. McMahan states that, roughly, the entity must have the capacity for self-consciousness (McMahan 2002, 6). McMahan’s definition implies that an entity need not be self-conscious in order to be a person.
- 21.
Christian Smith claims that persons are centers of subjective experience, durable identity, moral commitment, and social communication (Smith 2010, 68). However, requiring moral commitment makes the psychological person a moral agent, which is not identical to being a psychological person. In addition, one can be a person without durable identity; the latter is about personal identity over time rather than personhood.
- 22.
Feldman contends that psychological persons are not essential to identity. He writes that someone with a degenerative mental disease, such as Alzheimer’s, can lose her status as a psychological person yet still be the same entity (Feldman 1992, 103). My organic whole approach to identity would make such a result impossible.
- 23.
It might not be possible to avoid the internalist-externalist debate with this type of psychological person. An internalist believes that “all the conditions that constitute a person's thought and sensations are internal to their skin and contemporaneous, inside and now.” (Mendola 2008, 1). On the other hand, an externalist believes that “features of a person's external environment or history are part of what constitutes that person's beliefs, desires, and sensations.” (Ibid.). Given our constitution as interrelated and interdependent components in larger organic wholes, externalism seems to have greater explanatory power when considering who we are as persons in those larger contexts.
- 24.
- 25.
I have argued elsewhere that the moral platform might create inconsistencies because it is built to have different values and principles that might not always be in accord with each other. In general, if we can, we should resolve the inconsistencies by modifying the moral code that supervenes from the moral platform.
- 26.
Personal identity might also by synonymous with individual identity, which applies to any existing object. It could also be used to refer to the identity of living things over time.
- 27.
The embedded person can be the immediate, intermediate, and overall psychological person. The decision process or needs of the moment should determine to which entity the conversation refers.
- 28.
Gell contends that the externalist theory of agency-attribution is the correct way of understanding what a person is. This theory rejects the mind as being a set of internal experiences, instead claiming that the mind is “in the public domain, as language, practices, routines, rules of the game, etc.” (Gell 1998, 126).
- 29.
Christian Smith contends that the core of a person is “a centering, interior focal point of personal being, consciousness, and activity.” (Smith 2010, 62).
- 30.
Norman Care claims that persons can be social and historical particulars, which is a vastly more expansive concept than the one developed here. “Consider what persons are in respect of their actual involvement in the circumstances and activities of everyday life.” (Care 1996, 44).
- 31.
I am basing this position, in part, on the distributed processes of social perception and cognition that denies that cognition and perception must be internal. Hence, if cognition can be internal and external, then so can personhood. See Smith and Collins’ (2009) “Contextualizing Person Perception: Distributed Social Cognition.”.
- 32.
Bennett Helm also argues that friendship is a “kind of plural agency.” (Helm 2010, Chap. 8).
- 33.
In reality, the transformations would require or release energy, which would alter the amount of matter-energy. For the sake of the argument, assume some sort of Dyson sphere is operating here.
- 34.
The decay of radioactive elements would be another way of understanding this point.
- 35.
- 36.
Barry Dainton argues that phenomenal continuity in which we are systems of experiential capacities is the best account and sufficient for persistence (Dainton 2008, 21 and 112–3).
Although Dainton intimately links phenomenal continuity with psychological persistence, my concern about his approach is that two entities might have the very same phenomenal continuity but not have the same psychological continuity. Massive alterations in one’s psychology entail the same person as long as phenomenal continuity is maintained, but there are legitimate reasons in many circumstances to say that the vastly changed entity is not numerically identical to that of the old even though Dainton’s view would say they are numerically identical.
- 37.
Perhaps a better way to describe this problem is to keep a person's brain intact inside her head, and then to wonder if we can duplicate that brain and its emergent properties through artificial intelligence. To have a second person, we would most likely need something along the lines of Searle's synthetic brain that exactly duplicates every relevant property of the original brain, but if we could do it—and there is no reason to think we can—then we would have two different entities with the very same psychological states. In this case, the two would be the same person in the short term, and we should treat them the same because they are identical in a very significant sense of the term if one is not a person who adopts the somatic approach to individual identity. As new experiences and thinking happen and alter each, the two will become different persons.
- 38.
Searle rejects Artificial Intelligence on the grounds that it is about programs and not about the machines. Moreover, “Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon”. (Searle 1981, 372).
- 39.
I do not spend much time with this thought experiment because it is causally impossible and likely to remain so.
- 40.
Their reality should be understood as dependent, in part, on the content and the minds of those involved in the situation. Perhaps the best way to think about it is along the lines of George Berkeley’s “Esse est percipi” with regard to the context, but the individual objects within the context might be independent in significant ways.
- 41.
However, it is clear that adult personality varies across age. Middle age is the most stable time period (Milojev and Sibley 2014, 29).
- 42.
For example, unlike adults, infants do not bind beliefs to the belief holders (Kampis et al. 2013, 232).
- 43.
Earl Conee has argued that it happens the moment that one crystal is placed on top of another. This view can be useful in certain contexts, but not the vast majority of instances when a heap is something we need to think or do something about.
- 44.
Of course, if there are contradictory states of existence in reality, then we would have to rethink a great deal of our views about rationality. However, as I established in Chap. 1, our theory should never force reality to conform to it; the theory should conform to reality. To address the issue, we might have to create a more complex view that delineates various forms of rationality that are relative to context.
- 45.
Satisfying people’s intuitions is not necessarily a pragmatic good.
- 46.
I am concerned that the combination of the different components will lead to a form of reductionism that misses the fact that the whole might not be equal to the sum of the parts. Identities through narration are one useful way of thinking about how this composition works. Hilde Lindemann states that narrative identities consist of “stories [that] display the various facets of who the person is.” (Lindemann 2014, 4). Betty Flowers claims that our personal stories shape us (Flowers 1998, 51). Both recognize that external facts constrain the stories, but that there is still power for an individual to create her own identity and individual personhood. Returning to the irreducible organic whole, David Vellman makes claims that there are two values, momentary and overall, that are sympathetic to my understanding of organic wholes and context creating a form of reality. According to Vellman, momentary and overall value do not reduce to each other, nor can they be analyzed in terms of each other. The overall value of our lives is determined not by summing up all the momentary values, but by the narrative of the whole and how those momentary values are “stitched” together and how they relate to each other and to the whole (Vellman 1991).
- 47.
Most of us do not know our parents well enough to work with overall moral agents, so we have to make do with intermediate persons.
- 48.
Since many of the states of affairs Frankena lists can be experienced by higher order animals or all sentient creatures, then their experiencing of them at particular times will make them more intrinsically valuable at that time.
- 49.
What will also change the value of an individual is if an evil person has positive experiences, such as pleasure, when he does not deserve it. An evil person having a positive experience might make it much lower in intrinsic value than if a good person had the same experience. Furthermore, if a good person has negative experiences when she deserves good ones, then the value of her having the experience is much lower than it would have been if she had deserved it. An evil person receiving a disvaluable experience might be less intrinsically disvaluable than a good person having the same experience (Ross 1988, 136–7).
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Cooley, D.R. (2015). Defining and Valuing Properties and Individuals. In: Death’s Values and Obligations: A Pragmatic Framework. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 62. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7264-8_3
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