What does it mean for persons to have infinite value?

It is intuitive to say that persons have infinite value, and recently Rasmussen and Bailey have given some cool arguments for this thesis.

But what does it mean to say that humans have infinite value? If we think of values as something very much like numbers, then I guess it just means that humans have the value +∞. But we shouldn’t think of values as numbers. For instance, to do that loses sight of incommensurability.

We probably should think of value-comparison as more fundamental than “having value z”. Thus, there is a relation of being at least as valuable as on possible items of evaluation (substances, properties, pluralities, whatever). This relation is reflexive and at least arguably transitive.

We can now define:

1. x is more valuable than y if and only if x is at least as valuable as y but y is not at least as valuable as x.

Next we can try to define a relation of being infinitely more valuable than. One approach is:

2. x is infinitely more valuable than y if and only if x is more valuable than any finite plurality of duplicates of y.

I am not quite sure this works, given that sometimes the value of an item rests in the fact that it is the only one of its kind, and then a plurality of duplicates might lose out on an aspect of the value. If we focus on intrinsic value, perhaps we don’t need to worry about this. Or maybe we can proceed probabilistically:

3. x is infinitely more valuable than y if and only if for every natural number n, a 1/n chance of x is more valuable than certainty of y.

Or perhaps we can take being infinitely more valuable than as a primitive transitive and irreflexive relation.

But now, if what we have are the above ingredients, what does it mean to say that something has infinite value? Here are two options, a maximal and a minimal one:

4. Maximal: x has infinite value if and only if x is infinitely more valuable than everything else.

5. Minimal: x has infinite value if and only if x is infinitely more valuable than something else that has positive value.

On the maximal option 4, you and I do not have infinite value, since you are not infinitely more valuable than I and I am not infinitely more valuable than you. Indeed, only a being like God is a plausible candidate for having infinite value in the maximal sense.

In the minimal option 5, “has positive value” is added to avoid the potential problem that literally everything that has positive value has infinite value, because anything with positive value is infinitely more valuable than something with no value or with negative value. What does it mean for something to have positive value? I guess it’s for it to be more valuable than nothing. (I am using a very broad sense of “item”, including such “items” as “nothing”, when I talk of value in this post.)

But option 5 probably doesn’t capture the intuition that infinite value distinguishes persons from, say, trees. For while arguably a person is infinitely more valuable than a tree, it is also quite plausible to me that a tree is infinitely more valuable than some non-living things like fundamental particles. Or if you don’t share that intuition, suppose eternalism. Then a tree that exists for a year could be infinitely more valuable than a tree that exists for an instant, since there could turn out to be infinitely many instants in a year.

In any case, whether these speculations about the value of trees are right, the important point is that the intuition we were trying to capture with the statement that persons have infinite value was that persons have a lot of value. But having infinitely more value than something of positive value could just mean that you have infinitely more value than something of infinitesimally positive value, which is compatible with not having much value at all.

If the above is right, then it’s false or unhelpful to talk of persons having infinite value simpliciter. What may make sense, however, are specific comparisons such as:

6. A person has infinitely more value than a dollar

or:

7. A person has infinitely more value than a tree.

We might try for something more daring, though:

8. A person has infinitely more value than any non-person.

I think (8) if true would capture a fair amount of the original intuition, and do so without any arbitrary singling out of a unit of comparison like a dollar or a tree. But I do not know if (8) is true. There could be kinds of good that we have no concept of, and those kinds of good could be at least incommensurable with the goods of persons. Something with such a good need not be infinitely less valuable than a person—they might be mutually incommensurable.

So, speaking for myself, I am happy with sticking to a fairly arbitrary unit, and going for something like (6) or (7).