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.)

Animal experimentation

We have an intuitive line as to where the suffering in animal’s life is so great compared to the goods in it that when we are able to do so, we euthanize animals when the suffering causes the value of the animal’s life to fall below that line. On the other hand, the life of an animal that falls above this line is a life that is a benefit to the animal.

It seems to me that this intuitive line could be a helpful discernment criterion for animal experimentation. Animals that are used for experiments are often bred for that purpose. Thus, they wouldn’t exist absent the practice of experimentation. It seems, hence, that experiments where the stresses on the animals make the animal’s life fall below this intuitive line are very easy to justify: the animals are benefitted by the practice, even if the experiments do impose some suffering on the animal. It seems plausible that such experiments could thus be justified by the intrinsic value of the knowledge gained for its own sake, or even by pedagogical benefits for students.

On the other hand, if the stresses in the animal’s life are such as to make their life fall below the line, then stronger justification is needed: the prospective benefits of the research need to be rather more significant.

I don’t know how good we are at discerning where that line goes. People with pets and farm animals do make hard decisions about this, though, so we seem to have some epistemic access to the line.

(I do think that it is permissible to be much more utilitarian about animal life than about human life. I certainly would not generalize what I say above to the case of humans.)

One-thinker colocationism

Colocationists about human beings think that in my chair are two colocated entities: a human person and a human animal. Both of them are made of the same stuff, both of them exhibit the same physical movements, etc.

The standard argument against colocationism is the two thinkers argument. Higher animals, like chimpanzees and dogs, think. The brain of a human animal is more sophisticated than that of a chimpanzee or a dog, and hence human animals also have what it takes to think. Thus, they think. But human persons obviously think. So there are two thinkers in my chair, which is innately absurd, plus leads to some other difficulties.

If I were a colocationist, I think I would deny that any animals think. Instead, the same kind of duplication that happens in the human case happens for all the higher animals. In my chair there is a human animal and a person, and only the person thinks. In the doghouse, there is a dog and a “derson”. In the savanna, one may have a chimpanzee and a “chimperson”. The derson and the chimperson are not persons (the chimperson comes closer than the derson does), but all three think, while their colocated animals do not. We might even suppose that the person, the derson and chimperson are all members of some further kind, thinker.

Suppose one’s reason for accepting colocationism about humans is intuitions about the psychological components of personal identity: if one’s psychological states were transfered into a different head, one would go with the psychological states, while the animal would stay behind, so one isn’t an animal. Then I think one should say a similar thing about other higher animals. If we think that that an interpersonal relationship should follow the psychological states rather than the body of the person, we should think similarly about a relationship with one’s pet: if one’s pet’s psychological states are transfered into a different body, our concerns should follow. If Rover is having a vivid dream of chasing a ball, and we transfer Rover’s psychological states into the body of another dog, Rover would continue the dream in that other body. I don’t believe this in the human case, and I don’t believe it in the dog case, but if I believed this in the human case, I’d believe it in the dog case.

What are the reasons for the standard colocationist’s holding that the human animal thinks? One may say that because both the animal and the person have the same brain activity, that’s a reason to say that either both or neither thinks. But the brain also has the same brain activity, and so if this is one’s reason for saying that the animal thinks, we now have three thinkers. And, if there are unrestricted fusions, the mereological sum of the person with their clothes also has the same brain activity, thereby generating a fourth thinker. That’s absurd. Thus thought isn’t just a function of hosting brain activity, but hosting brain activity in a certain kind of context. And why can’t this context be partly characterized by modal characteristics, so that although both the animal and the person have the same brain activity, they provide a different modally characterized context for the brain activity, in such a way that only one of the two thinks?

This one-thinker colocationism can be either naturalistic or dualistic. On the dualistic version, we might suppose that the nonphysical mental properties belong to only one member of the pair of associated beings. On the naturalistic version, we might suppose that what it is to have a mental property is to have a physical property in a host with appropriate modal properties—the ones the person, the derson and the chimperson all have.

I think there is one big reason why a colocationist may be suspicious of this view. Ethologists sometimes explain animal behavior in terms of what the animal knows, is planning, and more generally is thinking. These explanations are all incorrect on the view in question. But the one-thinker co-locationist has two potential answers to this. The first is to weaken her view and allow animals to think, but not consciously. It is only the associated non-animal that has conscious states, that has qualia. But the conscious states need not enter into behavioral explanations. The second is to say that the scientists’ explanations while incorrect can be easily corrected by replacing mental properties with their neural correlates.

Consciousness and AI

Here are three interesting intuitions (or maybe evan data points) worth chewing on:

1. Large language models are smarter than squirrels.

2. Large language models are not conscious.

3. Squirrels are conscious.

I feel—without having formulate a rigorous argument—that these three data points rather nicely support Ben Page’s thesis that computation-without-consciousness is what we would expect non-theistic evolution to yield.

Another argument for animals in heaven

1. All embodied humans are animals.

2. Some embodied humans will be in heaven.

3. So, there are animals in heaven.

But of course given the subject heading, you were likely interested whether there are non-human animals in heaven. That, too, can be argued for on the basis of the fact that we are animals.

4. The complete fulfillment of an animal requires it to be in an appropriate ecosystem.

5. Humans are animals.

6. An ecosystem appropriate to humans includes plants and non-human animals.

7. After the resurrection, the human beings in heaven will be completely fulfilled.

8. Thus, the human beings in heaven will be among plants and non-human animals.

Are there animals in heaven?

This argument is not a complete answer to the question, but is a start:

1. It is unlikely that all non-human earth animals will go extinct before the Second Coming.

2. It is unfitting that the Second Coming be a time where all non-human earth animals go extinct.

3. What is unfitting is unlikely.

4. So, it is likely that some non-human earth animals will survive the Second Coming.

Cerebrums and rattles

Animalists think humans are animals. Suppose I am an animalist and I think that I go with my cerebrum in cerebrum-transplant cases. That may seem weird. But suppose we make an equal opportunity claim here: all animals that have cerebra go with their cerebra. If your dog Rover’s cerebrum is transplanted into a robotic body, then the cerebrumless thing is not Rover. Rather, Rover inhabits a robotic body or that body comes to be a part of Rover, depending on views about prostheses. And the same is true for any animal that has a cerebrum.

It initially seems weird to say that some animals can survive reduced to a cerebrum and others cannot. But it’s not that weird when we add that the ones that can’t survive reduced to a cerebrum are animals that don’t have a cerebrum.

The person who thinks survival reduced to a cerebrum is implausible for an animal might, however, say that this is what’s odd about it. An animal reduced to cerebrum lacks internal life support organs (heart, lungs, etc.) It is odd to think that some animals can survive without internal life support and others cannot.

But compare this: Some animals can partly exist in spatial locations where they have no living cells, and others cannot. The outer parts of my hairs are parts of me, but there are no living cells there. If my hair is in a room, then I am partly in that room, even if no living cells of mine are in the room. But on the other hand, there are some animals (at least the unicellular ones, but maybe also some soft invertebrates) that can only exist where they have a living cell.

One might object that the spatial case and the temporal case are different, because in the spatial case we are talking of partial presence and in the temporal case of full presence. But a four-dimensionalist will disagree. To exist at a time is to be partly present at that time. So to a four-dimensionalist the analogy is pretty strict.

Finally, compare this. Suppose Snaky a rattlesnake stretched along a line in space. Now suppose we simultaneously annihilate everything in Snaky. Now, “simultaneously” is presumably defined with respect to some reference frame F₁. Let z be a point in Snaky’s rattle located just prior (according to F₁) to Snaky’s destruction. Then Snaky is partly present at z. But with a bit of thought, we can see that there is another reference frame F₂ where the only parts of Snaky simultaneous with z are parts of the rattle: all the non-rattle parts of Snaky have already been annihilated at F₂, but the rattle has not. Then in F₂ the following is true: there is a time at which Snaky exists but nothing outside of Snaky’s rattle exists. Hence Snaky can exist as just a rattle, albeit for a very, very short period of time.

Hence even a snake can exist without its life-support organs, but only for a short period of time.

The afterlife of humans and animals

I’ve been thinking a bit about the afterlife for non-human animals. The first thought is that there is a relevant difference between human and non-human animals in terms of flourishing. There is something deeply incomplete about the eighty or so years a human lives. The incompleteness of our earthly life is a qualitative incompleteness: it is not just that we have not had enough pieces of cake or run enough miles. Typically, whole areas of virtue are missing, and our understanding of the world is woefully incomplete, so that one of the most important things one learns is how little one knows. The story of the life is clearly unfinished, even if life has gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, and flourishing has not been achieved. Not so for non-human animals. When things have gone as well as it is reasonable to expect, the animal has lived, played and reproduced, and the story is complete.

If we think of the form of an entity as specifying the proper shape of its life, we have good reason to think that the human form specifies the proper shape of life as eternal, or at least much longer than earthly life. But there is little reason to think that form of an animal’s life specifies the length of life as significantly longer than the typical observed life-span of in its species.

If we accept the thesis which I call “Aristotelian optimism”, namely that things tend to fulfill their form or nature, we have good reason to think there is more to human life than our earthly life, but not so for non-human animals. In the case of humans, this line of argument should worry typical atheistic Aristotelian ethicists, because it would push them to reject Aristotelian optimism, which I think is central to ensuring knowledge of the forms in Aristotle’s system.

By the way, there may be an exception in the above argument for animals whose flourishing consists in relationships with humans. For there its flourishing might be incomplete if it cannot be a companion to the human over its infinite life-span. So there is some reason to think that species that are domesticated for human companionship, like dogs and to a lesser extent cats and horses (where companionship is less central to flourishing), might have an afterlife.

A Thomistic argument for the possibility of an afterlife for animals

1. Accidents are more intimately dependent on substance than substantial forms on matter.

2. If (1) is true and God can make accidents survive without the substance, then God can make forms survive without matter.

3. If God can make forms survive without matter, then God can ensure life after death for animals by making their forms survive and restoring their matter.

4. God can make accidents survive without the substance.

5. So, God can ensure life after death for animals.

The most controversial claim here is (4), but that follows from the Thomistic account of the transsubstantiation.

Of course, there is a great gap between the possibility of an afterlife for an animal and its actuality. And the above argument works just as well for plants and fungi.

Analog photography

For over a decade, all my photography has been digital, but this spring I finally pulled out the 1939 Voigtlaender Vito 35mm camera I inherited from my grandfather, checked with an oscilloscope (photo-detector on one side, flashlight on the other) that the shutter timer was still correct, loaded it up with 100 ISO black and white film, and took a bunch of pictures around Waco over several months. 

I had the pictures developed and scanned by OneStopDeveloping on Etsy.

Last years, Waco installed a bunch of animal-themed sculptures near the zoo. Though one of the pictures is of real animals.

 

Animal consciousness

I wonder if a non-theist can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain.

Start with functionalism. The precise functional system involved with feeling pain in us has no isomorph in non-human animals. For instance, in us, damage data from the senses is routed through a decision subsystem that rationally weighs moral considerations along with considerations of self-interest prior to deciding whether one should flee the stimulus, while in non-human animals there are (as far as we know) no moral considerations.

We can now have two hypotheses about what functional system is needed for pain: (a) there needs to be a weighing of damage data along with specifically moral consideration inputs, or (b) there just needs to be a weighing of damage data along with other inputs of whatsoever sort.

We cannot do any experiments to distinguish the two hypotheses. For the two hypotheses predict the same overt behavior. And even self-experimentation will be of no use. I suppose one could—at serious ethical risk—try to disable the brain’s processing of moral data, and prick oneself with a pin and check if it hurts. But while the two hypotheses do make different predictions as to what would happen in such a case, they do not make different predictions as to what one would remember after the experiment was done or how one would behave during the experiment.

Similar problems arise for every other theory of mind I know of. For in all of them, it seems we are not in a position to know precisely which range of neural structures gives rise to pain. For instance, on emergentism we know that pain emerges from our neural structures, but it seems we have no way of knowing how far we can depart from our neural structures and still get pain. On Searle-style biologism, where functionalistically irrelevant biological detail is essential for mental properties, it seems we have no way of figuring out which biological biological details permit mental function. And so on.

I know of only one story about how we can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain: God, who knows everything, creates us with the intuition that certain behaviors mean pain, and in fact these behaviors do occur in non-human animals.

Simple dualism and animals

According to simple dualism, our immaterial souls are the bearers of our mental states and we are these souls. We have bodies, but the bodies are not parts of us. We are wholly immaterial.

If the motivation for simple dualism is that only an immaterial soul can have mental states, then we should think something similar about higher animals like dogs and octopuses. Thus, in Rover the dog just as in Alice the human, the soul is the bearer of mental states, and the body is not a part of the soul. Now, the name “Alice” on simple dualism refers to the soul, so that “Alice is in pain” means that she is the bearer of the pain and “Alice has a broken leg” means that the leg associated with Alice is broken (compare: “Alice has a broken bicycle”) rather than that a part of Alice is broken. Surely, “Rover is in pain” and “Rover has a broken leg” mean something very close to “Alice is in pain” and “Alice has a broken leg”, respectively. Thus, “Rover” on simple dualism also refers to the soul.

Furthermore, Rover might be Alice’s pet. And the kind of interspecies affection that might exist between Rover and Alice requires that Rover be the right kind of thing to have affections and other mental states, and so, once again, “Rover” must refer to the soul.

But of course we also say that Rover is a dog. The simple dualist now has two options. The first is to take literally the statement that Rover is a dog, and conclude that dogs—and presumably other higher animals—are immaterial souls (if Rover is immaterial and Rover is a dog, then Rover is an immaterial dog; and Rover surely does not differ radically from other higher animals). Thus, strictly speaking, biologists don’t primarily study dogs and octopuses but rather their bodies, and we have never seen any higher animal.

The second option is to deny that Rover is literally a dog. This presumably requires denying that we are literally homo sapiens. Rather, “Rover is a dog” is to be understood as shorthand for “Rover ensouls a dog.”

Neither option looks attractive. I conclude that Rover is not a soul, and neither is Alice.

An argument for animals in heaven

In quick outline, here’s a valid argument:

1. There are plants in heaven.

2. If there are plants in heaven, there are non-human animals in heaven.

3. So, there are non-human animals in heaven.

Let me expand on the argument.

Humans in heaven (i.e., on the New Earth, after resurrection) will have both supernatural and natural fulfillment. The natural fulfillment of humans requires an appropriate environment. That environment requires plants. A heavenly city with no trees or grass or flowers just wouldn’t be heavenly for us. This is fitting as humans were made for a garden. The fall turned the garden into a field of hard labor for survival, but all will be restored, and so there will be a garden again.

But plants, of the sort that form the natural environment of humans, require an ecosystem that includes non-human animals. There need to be pollinators in the air and worms in the ground. And how eerily quiet a garden would be with no birds chirping, how unnatural for humans.

This does not mean that there will be a resurrection of animals. Just as a plant can be perfect without living forever, a non-rational animal can be perfect without living forever. One may, however, worry that we will form attachments to non-human animals and would be saddened by their death. There are three responses. First, perhaps some non-human organisms could live forever, namely particular ones which are important to humans: say, a bonsai or a companion dog. Second, perhaps we wouldn’t form these attachments, maybe because no animals would be tame. Third, it might be that we would all transcend time to the extent that (a) our memory would not fade and (b) we would all have the correct view of time, i.e., eternalism, so that we would be constantly aware that our beloved animal exists simpliciter, albeit in the past.

Time is not the measure of change or animals are not essentially temporal

Imagine that beings like us come into existence at the very first moment of time and they are the only contingent beings. To aid imagination, suppose we are these beings, and it is now the very first moment of time. Then, barring divine promises or other such divine moral considerations, it is possible that both (a) we won’t exist at any point of the future, and (b) it’s not the case that anything else will come into existence. Thus:

1. It is possible that the only contingent beings there are are human-like beings and that contingent beings exist at one and only one moment.

But:

2. Change requires at least two moments of time.

Putting all of the above together, we get:

3. Either (a) human-like beings can exist without time or (b) time does not require change or (c) time cannot have a beginning or (d) time cannot have an end.

I think theists are likely to deny both 3c and 3d: God can create and terminate a timeline. That leaves the theist 3a and 3b. I think both 3a and 3b are plausible moves.

Aristotle famously held that time depends on change, but he thought that time couldn’t have a beginning or an end, and thus he accepted both 3c and 3d. The argument he actually gave for 3c and 3d doesn’t work (basically, it fails to distinguish “not was” from “was not” and “not will” from “will not”), but we can now see that there actually is a plausible Aristotelian reason to accept that time can’t have a beginning or an end if we think time is the measure of change.

Why am I talking of human-like beings rather than human beings? Well, maybe, “human being” is a biological kind, and biological kinds depend on evolutionary history, so maybe it is not possible for human beings to come into existence at the first moment of time, as they wouldn’t have an evolutionary history. But beings just like humans could.

Will dogs live forever?

Suppose a dog lives forever. Assuming the dog stays roughly dog-sized, there is only a finite number of possible configurations of the dog’s matter (disregarding insignificant differences on the order of magnitude of a Planck length, say). Then, eventually, all of the dog’s matter configurations will be re-runs, as we will run out of possible new configurations. Whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has already felt, remembered or done. It will be literally impossible to teach the dog a new trick (without swelling the dog beyond normal dog size).

But a dog’s life is a material life, unlike perhaps the life of a person. Plausibly, a dog’s mental states are determined by the configuration of the dog’s (brain) matter. So, eventually, every one of the dog’s mental states will be a re-run, too.

And then we will run out of states re-run once, and the dog will only have states that are on their second or later re-run. And so on. There will come a day when whatever the dog is feeling, remembering or doing is something the dog has felt, remembered or done a billion times: and there is still eternity to go.

Moreover, we’re not just talking about momentary re-runs. Eventually, every day of the dog’s life will be an identical re-run of an earlier day of the dog’s life (at least insofar as the dog is concerned: things beyond the power of the dog’s sensory apparatus might change). And then eventually every year of the dog’s life will be a re-run of an earlier year. And then there will come a year when every coming year of the dog’s life will already have been done a billion times already.

This doesn’t strike me as a particularly flourishing life for a dog. Indeed, it strikes me that it would be a more flourishing life for the dog to cut out the nth re-runs, and have the dog’s life come to a peaceful end.

Granted, the dog won’t be bored by the re-runs. In fact, probably the dog won’t know that things are being re-run over and over. In any case, dogs don’t mind repetition. But there is still something grotesque about such a life of re-runs. That’s just not the temporal shape a dog’s life should have, much as a dog shouldn’t be cubical or pyramidal in spatial shape.

If this is right, then considerations of a dog’s well-being do not lead to the desirability of eternal life for the dog. As far as God’s love for dogs goes, we shouldn’t expect God to make the dogs live forever.

This is, of course, the swollen head argument, transposed to dogs, from naturalist accounts of humans.

But maybe God would make dogs live forever because of his love for their human friends, not because of his love for the dogs themselves? Here, I think there is a better case for eternal life for dogs. But I am still sceptical. For the humans would presumably know that from the dog’s point of view, everything is an endless re-run. The dog has already taken a walk that looked and felt just like this one a billion times, and there is an infinite number of walks that look and feel just like this one to the dog ahead. Maybe to the human they feel different: the human can think about new things each time, because naturalism is false of humans, and so differences in human mental states don’t require differences in neural states (or so those of us who believe in an eternal afterlife for humans should say). But to the dog it’s just as before. And know that on the dog’s side it’s just endless repetition would, I think, be disquieting and dissatisfying to us. It seems to me that it is not fitting for a human to be tied down for an eternity of a friendship with a finite being that eventually has nothing new to exhibit in its life.

So, I doubt that God would make dogs live forever because of his love for us, either. And the same goes for other brute animals. So, I don’t think brute animals live forever.

All this neglects Dougherty’s speculative suggestion that in the afterlife animals may be transformed, Narnia-like, so that they become persons. If he’s right, then the naturalistic supervenience assumption will be no more true for the animals than for us, and the repetition argument above against dogs living forever will fail. But the argument above will still show that we shouldn’t expect brute animals to live forever. And I am dubious of the transformation hypothesis, too.

At the same time, I want to note that I think it is not unlikely that there will be brute animals on the New Earth. But if so, I expect they will have finite lifespans. For while an upper temporal limit to the life of a human would be an evil, an upper temporal limit to the life of a brute animal seems perfectly fitting.

We aren't just rational animals

I think some Aristotelian philosophers are inclined to think that our nature is to be rational animals, so that all rational animals would be of the same metaphysical species. Here is a problem with this. Our nature—or form or essence—specifies the norms for our structure. Our norms specify that we should be bipedal: there is something wrong with us if we are incapable of bipedality. But an intelligent squid would be a rational animal, and its norms would surely not specify that it is supposed to be bipedal. So, it seems, that the hypothetical intelligent squid would have a different nature from ours.

But that was too quick. For it could be that our nature grounds conditionals like:

1. If you’re human, you should have two arms and two legs

2. If you’re a squid, you should have eight arms and two tentacles.

We have some reason to think there are such conditional normative facts even if we take our metaphysical species narrowly to be something like human or even homo sapiens, since presumably our nature grounds normative conditionals about bodily structure with antecedents specifying whether we are male or female.

But there is a hitch here: if humans and intelligent squid have the same form, what makes it be the case that for me the antecedent of 1 is true while for Alice (say) the antecedent of 2 is true? I think our best story may be that it is facts about DNA, so in fact the antecedents of 1 and 2 are abbreviations for complex facts about DNA.

That might work for DNA-based animals, which are all the animals we have on earth, but it probably won’t work for all possible animals. For surely there nomically could be animals that are not based on DNA, and it is implausible that we carry in our nature the grounds for an array of conditionals for all the nomically (at least) possible genetic encoding schemes.

I suppose we could take our nature to be rational members of the Animalia, with the assumption that the kingdom Animalia necessarily includes only DNA-based organisms (but not all of them, of course). But Animalia seems a somewhat arbitrary choice of classification to tack on to rationality. It doesn’t have the exobiological generality of animal, the earthly generality of DNA-based organism, or the specificity of human.

It seems to me that

• rational DNA-based organism, or

• rational member of genus Homo

are better options for where to draw the lines of our metaphysical species, assuming “rationality” is the right category (as opposed to, say, St. John Paul II’s suggestion that we are fundamentally self-givers), than either rational animal or rational member of Animalia.

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.

Surviving furlessness and inner earlessness

If we are animals, can we survive in a disembodied state, having lost all of our bodies, retaining only soul or form?

Here is a standard thought:

1. Metabolic processes, homeostasis, etc. are defining features of being animals.

2. In a disembodied state, one cannot have such processes.

3. Something that is an animal is essentially an animal.

4. So something that is an animal cannot survive in a disembodied state.

But here’s a parody argument:

5. Fur and mammalian inner ear bones (say) are defining features of being mammals.

6. In a furless and internally earless state, one cannot have such structures.

7. Something that is a mammal is essentially a mammal.

8. So something that is a mammal cannot survive in a furless and internally earless state.

I think 5-7 are no less plausible than 1-3. But 8 is clearly false: clearly, it is metaphysically possible to become a defective mammal that is furless and internally earless.

The obvious problem with 5, or with the inferences drawn from 5, is that what is definitory of being a mammal is being such that one should to have fur and such-and-such an inner ear. The same problem afflicts 2: why not say that being such that one should have these processes and features is definitory of being a mammal.

Animals

Suppose that somewhere in the galaxy there is a planet where there are large six-legged animals with an inner supportive structure, that evolved completely independently of any forms of life on earth and whose genetic structure is not based on DNA but another molecule. What I said seems perfectly possible. But it is impossible if animals are simply the members of the kingdom Animalia, since the six-legged animals on that planet are neither DNA-based nor genetically connected to the animalia on earth.

On the other hand, the supposition that somewhere (maybe in another universe) there is water that does not have H₂O in it is an impossible one. So is the supposition that there are horses without DNA.

So the kind animal is disanalogous to the kinds water and horse. The kind water is properly identified with a chemical kind, H₂O, and the kind horse is properly identified with a biological species, Equus ferus. But the kind animal does not seem to be properly identified with any biological kind.

One can have DNA-based animals and non-DNA-based animals. If the Venus fly-trap evolved the ability to move from place to place following its prey, it would be an animal, but still a member of Plantae. Animals are characterized largely functionally, albeit not purely functionally, but also in reference to the function of their embodiment—there cannot be any animals that are unembodied.

Is animal a genuine natural kind? Or is it a non-natural kind, constructed in the light of our species’ subjective interests? I don’t know. I take seriously, though, the possibility that there is an "Aristotelian" philosophical categorization that goes across biological categories.

More on life

God is alive, angels are alive, people are alive, dogs are alive, worms are alive and trees are alive. What is it that makes them all be alive, while the Milky Way, the Sun, Etna, a car, a Roomba, and an electron are not? I raised a version of this question recently, and since then have had discussions about it with a number of our graduate students, most extensively with Alli Thornton and Hilary Yancey, to whom I am very grateful.

We could say that they are all alive in an analogical sense. But that doesn’t solve the problem, but simply puts a constraint on the shape of a solution. For to solve the problem, we still have to say something about how this particular analogy works.

Here is the best answer I have right now, but it still has some difficulties I will discuss:

• A living thing is one that can act in pursuit of its own ends.

This indeed covers God, angels, people, dogs, worms and trees. Moreover, it produces a gradation of life in respect of the degree and quality with which the thing can act in pursuit of its own ends and the degree of ownership the thing has over its ends. For instance, God is omnipotent and perfectly rational, and he is his own end, so he is most fully alive. All the living creatures, on the other hand, have ultimate ends imposed on them by their nature, to the realization of which end their activity are ordered. However, angels and people additionally make a rational choice of ways to realize their ultimate ends, adopting which ways involves setting themselves intermediate ends. Higher non-human animals like dogs do something that approximates this. Moreover, angels, people and dogs have a wide variety of ways of pursuing that end. On the other hand, trees only pursue a limited variety of ends with a limited variety of means.

A bonus of this definition is that we get the conclusion, which seems intuitively correct, that anything that thinks is alive. For thinking is an end-directed activity—it is directed at action and/or truth. So if we ever make an artificial intelligence system that really thinks, it will be alive.

The Milky Way, the Sun, Mount Etna, a car and a Roomba do not pursue their own ends, I think, if only because they are not substances, and only substances own their ends.

But electrons… This is what troubles me. I think that the fundamental constituents of physical reality, be they particles or fields, are substances. And I think all substances have a teleology, and hence have an end. The distinction I would like to be able to make, however, is between activity in pursuit of an end and teleological activity more generally. Electrons in their characteristic activity are acting teleologically. But their action is not in pursuit of an end. Rather their end is simply to engage in this very activity and nothing more. The activity is teleological, but it does not pursue a telos.

But what if it turns out that electrons do genuinely act in pursuit of an end? Then, perhaps, we will have learned that electrons are a very primitive form of life.

What about God, given divine simplicity, though? God = God’s telos = God’s activity. Well, I think that even if God’s activity is identical with God’s telos, one can make a conceptual distinction that allows one to say that God acts for the sake of that telos, a distinction that perhaps is not there in the case of the electron.

As you can see, I am still not very happy with the account. But it’s the best I have right now.