Vegans and the intrinsic moral community, Part 1

Vegans (as represented by groups like PETA) find it morally abhorrent to eat or use animals, demanding instead we give them rights - that is, treat them with respect and dignity, like other persons. In my June 16 post, I went though why a version of that view is incorrect about personhood, as no nonhuman animals (that we know of) qualify as persons or can have rights. The mistake in that view infects the typical PETA argument, often made by otherwise respectable philosophers as a version of the 'argument from marginal cases'. For one example, see Lori Gruen’s “The Moral Status of Animals” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/).

My view maps onto the sophisticated account of personhood by Christine Korsgaard, who argues that humans uniquely (as far as we know) face a problem, the problem of normativity. This problem emerges because we alone can have rational reflection upon our desires – that is, we can reflect on our desires, and so can have ‘second-order desires’ about our first-order desires – I desire the ice cream, but I also desire to lose weight, so I desire (second-order) to no longer desire that ice cream. Of course, our reason may not win out – as I inhale the cone anyway – but we alone in Earth’s animal kingdom are capable of this kind of reflection, which is required for moral valuing. (An interesting side note: did the Neandertals have such an ability – were they persons? Or any other species in Earth’s past? If so, we have no evidence of it – we appear to be the first.)

So, as we endorse a description of what we want ourselves to be, we constitute what is usually termed our ‘practical identity’; this practical identity is then required for moral identity because without it one could never view a life as worth living or an actions as worth doing. That is, rational beings alone are capable of normative attitudes – of moral valuing. As such, only rational beings could be part of the intrinsic moral community (or moral persons), because without such agents, morality would cease to exist. If humans overnight became extinct from the Earth, leaving the rest of the flora and fauna of the planet intact, there would be no more moral community. Hence, none of the rest of the planet could be part of the intrinsic moral community – things morally valuable in themselves, without any external relationships, regardless of how others instrumentally value them.

As such, other (non-rational) animals can only be valued instrumentally. They are not valuable in themselves. But this conclusion, though sound, is almost unanimously denied by philosophers, who oft find it founders on the ‘argument from marginal cases’. Here is Gruen’s exposition:

“Personhood is not, in fact, coextensive with humanity when understood as a general description of the group to which human beings belong. And the serious part of this problem is not that there may be some extra-terrestrials or deities who have rational capacities (It seems likely that Kant recognized this when he wrote "man, and in general every rational being"). The serious problem is that many humans are not persons. Some members of humanity—i.e. infants, children, people with advanced forms of autism or Alzheimer's disease or other cognitive disorders—do not have the rational, self-reflective capacities associated with personhood. This problem, unfortunately known in the literature as the problem of "marginal humans," poses serious difficulties for "personhood" as the criterion of moral considerability. Many beings who's positive moral value we have deeply held intuitions about, and who we treat as morally considerable, will be excluded from consideration by this account.”

So either the argument that includes only agents in the intrinsic moral community is flawed, or else some humans are not intrinsically valuable – specifically, ‘marginal humans’, the humans who are not agents. So what’s the right answer? Does the previous argument mean that it’s all right to eat an aborted fetus or a severely retarded child – or Grandpa with Alzheimer’s? Stay tuned for the next installment soon…