Animalism without biologism

Animalism holds that we are animals. This is a pretty common-sense view. We are clearly mammals, and mammals are animals.

However, there is a common objection: cerebrum transplants. As the objection goes, if your cerebrum is transplanted from your skull to a different skull (or to a supportive vat), you follow the cerebrum, while the animal stays with the lower brain and the rest of the body. So you are not the animal.

Let me say something that will sound silly: This objection is guilty of biologism about animals. The biologism here consists in the claim that we should take how biologists think about the continuity of animal life to be normative for how we should think about the identity of animals. You might think it’s obvious that we should engage in biologism about animals. But biologists are not metaphysicians, and the question of the metaphysical identity over time of animals does not really enter into the empirical investigations biologists engage in.

On what I think is the correct metaphysics of animals, the identity of an organism over time is grounded in the persistence of the animal’s soul or form, a metaphysical feature of the animal which is largely beyond the interest of contemporary biologists. Moreover, the animal’s form is responsible for its teleological structure, which defines what the animal’s flourishing is, and what is and is not central to that flourishing. It is plausible—though not necessary—to think that the form tends to remain with those components of the animal that are more central to its flourishing as the kind of thing it is.

In the case of homo sapiens, central to its flourishing is the exercise of the excellences of intellect and will. And the cerebrum is more directly involved in these exercises than any other part of the body, so it is plausible to think that the human animal goes with the cerebrum in a transplant.

Biologistically speaking, it is tempting to think of the intellect and will as subserving the animal functions of homeostatic maintenance, growth and reproduction. But that is a mistake. In a human, the functioning of the intellect and will is more central to flourishing than the animal functions.

This may seem discontinuous from other animals. Some will be happy with the discontinuity and some will think it’s a reductio ad absurdum of the view. But I think there is less discontinuity than seems to be the case. Think of dogs. It seems that their social life, with one another and with humans, constitutes more of their flourishing than their performance of the functions that define biological life. The social life presumably evolved because it promoted nutrition, growth and reproduction, but the social life appears more valuable. Given the likely ties between this social life and the cerebrum, it would not surprise me if dogs went with their cerebra in a cerebrum transplant.

The questions here are ones of value, and we should avoid biologism about value, even in non-human animals.

Sexual symmetry and asymmetry

I want to think a bit about conservative Christian views of sex and gender, but before that I want to offer two stories to motivate a crucial distinction.

Electrons and Positrons

Electrons and positrons (a positron is a positively charged anti-particle to the electron) are very different in one way but not so much in another. If you take some system of electrons and positrons, and swap in a positron for an electron, the system will behave very differently—it will be attracted to the things that the electron was repelled by and vice versa. But if you replace all the electrons by positrons and all the positrons by electrons, it won’t make a significant difference (technically, there may be some difference due to the weak force, but that’s dominated by electromagnetic interaction). Similarly, a cloud of electrons behaves pretty much like a cloud of positrons, but a mixed cloud of electrons and positrons will behave very differently (electrons and positrons will collide releasing energy).

Electrons and positrons are significantly pairwise non-interchangeable, but globally approximately interchangeable.

We might conclude: electrons and positrons significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically.

On the other hand, if you have a system made of photons and electrons, and you swap out a photon and replace it by an electron, it will make a significant difference, but likewise typically if you swap out all the photons and electrons, it will also make a significant difference (unless the system was in a rare symmetric configuration). Thus, photons and electrons are significantly pairwise and globally interchangeable, and hence significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

Heterothallic Isogamous Organisms

Isogamous sexually-reproducing organisms have equally sized gametes among their sexes, and hence cannot be labeled as “female” and “male” (biologists define “female” and “male” in terms of larger and smaller gametes, respectively). Instead these sexes get arbitrarily labeled as plus and minus (I will assume there are only two mating types for simplicity). In heterothallic organisms, the sexes are located in different individuals, so two are needed for reproduction. Humans are heterothallic but not isogamous. But there are many species (mostly unicellular, I believe) that are heterothallic and isogamous.

We can now suppose a heterothallic and isogamous species with pretty symmetric mating roles. In such a species, again, we have significant individual non-interchangeability in a system. If Alice is a plus and Bob is a minus, they can reproduce, but if you swap out Bob for a plus, you get a non-reproductive pair. But if the mating roles are sufficiently similar, you can have global approximate interchangeability: if in some system you put pluses for the minuses and minuses for the pluses, things could go on much as before. A group of pluses may behave very much like a group of minuses (namely, over time the population will decrease to zero), but a mixed group of pluses and minuses is apt to behave very differently. We thus have pairwise non-interchangeability but approximate global interchangeability.

We might similarly say: pluses and minuses in our heterothallic and isogamous species significantly differ relationally but do not differ much intrinsically. On the other hand, cats and dogs significantly differ both relationally and intrinsically.

The Distinction

We thus have a distinction between two kinds of differences, which we can label as relational and intrinsic. I am not happy with the labels, but when I use them, please think of my two examples: particles and isogamous organisms. These two kinds of differences can be thought of as denying different symmetries: intrinsic differences are opposed to global interchange of the types of all individuals; relational differences are opposed to pairwise interchange of the types of a pair of individuals.

Conservative Christian Views of Sex and Gender

Conservative Christians tend to think that there are significant differences between men and women. In addition to cultural traits, there are two main theological reasons for thinking this:

1. Marriage asymmetry: Men and women can marry, but men cannot marry men and women cannot marry women.

2. Liturgical asymmetry: Only men can serve in certain liturgical “clerical” roles.

Of these, the marriage asymmetry is probably a bit more widely accepted than the liturgical asymmetry. (Some also think there is an authority asymmetry in the family where husbands have a special authority over wives. This is even more controversial among conservative Christians than the liturgical asymmetry, so I won’t say more about it.)

We could suppose an arbitrary divine rule behind both asymmetries. But this is theologically problematic: a really plausible way of reading the difference between the Law of Moses and the Law of the Gospel is at that in the Law of the Gospel, we no longer have arbitrary rules whose primary benefit is obedience, such as the prohibition on eating pork.

If we are to avoid supposing an arbitrary divine rule, we need to suppose differences between men and women to explain the theologically grounded asymmetries. And this is apt to lead conservative Christians to philosophical and theological theorizing about normative differences such as women being called more to “receptivity” and men more to “givingness”, or searching through sociological, psychological and biological data for relevant differences between the behavior and abilities of men and women. The empirical differences tend to lie on continua with wide areas of overlap between the sexes, however, and the normative differences are either implausible or likewise involve continua with wide areas of overlap (men, too, are called to receptivity).

But I think we are now in a position to see that there is a logical shortcoming behind the focus of this search. For differences between men and women can be relational or intrinsic, and the search has tended to focus on the intrinsic.

However, I submit, purely relational differences are sufficient to explain both the marriage and liturgical asymmetries. One way to see this is to pretend that we are a heterothallic isogamous species (rather than heterothallic anisogamous species that we actually are), consisting of pluses and minuses rather than females and males.

Then, if marriage has an ordering to procreation, that would neatly explain why pluses and minuses can marry each other, but pluses can’t marry pluses and minuses can’t marry minuses. No intrinsic difference between pluses and minuses is needed to explain this. Thus, as soon as we accept that marriage has an ordering to procreation, we have a way to explain the marriage asymmetry without any supposition of intrinsic differences.

Likewise, if there is going to be an incarnation, and only one, and the incarnate God is going to be incarnate as a typical organism of our species, then this incarnation must happen as a plus or a minus. And if married love is a deep and passionate love that is a wonderful symbol for the love between God and God’s people, then if the incarnation is as an individual of one of the sexes, God’s Church would then symbolically have the opposite sex. And then those whose liturgical role it is to stand in for the incarnate God in the marriage-like relationship to the Church would most fittingly have the sex opposite to that of the Church. Thus, if the incarnate God is incarnate as a plus, the Church would be figured as a minus, one can explain why it is fitting that the clergy in the relevant liturgical roles would be pluses; if the incarnate God is incarnate as a minus, we have an explanation of why the clergy in these roles would be minuses as well. (Interestingly, on this story, it’s not that the clergy are directly supposed to be like the incarnate God in respect of sex, but that their sex is supposed to be the opposite to that of the Church, and given that in the species there are only two sexes, this forces them to have the same sex as the incarnate God: the clergy need to have a sex opposed to the sex opposed to that of the incarnate God.)

Now, we are not isogamous, and we have female and male, not plus and minus. But we can still give exactly the same explanations. Even though in an anisogamous species there are significant intrinsic biological differences between the sexes, we need not advert to any of them to explain either the marriage or the liturgical asymmetry. The marriage asymmetry is tied to the pairwise non-interchangeability of the sexes and explained by the procreative role of marriage. The liturgical asymemtry is tied to the marriage asymmetry together with the symmetry-breaking event of God becoming incarnate in one of the sexes.

As far as this story goes, there need not be any morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female to explain the marital and liturgical asymmetries. The relational difference, that you need male and female for a mating pair, is morally significant on this story, but in a way that is entirely symmetric between male and female. And then we have one symmetry-breaking event: God becomes incarnate as a male. We need not think that there is any special reason why God becomes incarnate as a male or a female—it could equally well have been as a female. The decision whether to become incarnate as a male or a female could be as arbitrary as the decision about the exact eye color of the incarnate God (though, of course, eye color does not ground either significant intrinsic or significant relational differences). But if it were an incarnation as a female, other changes would be fitting: the clergy who symbolize the nuptial role of the incarnate God would fitting be female, in the exodus story it would fitting be female lambs and goats that would be sacrificed, and it would be fitting that Sarah be asked to sacrifice her first-born daughter.

I am not saying that there are no morally significant intrinsic differences between male and female. There may be. We are, after all, not only heterothallic but also anisogamous, and so there could turn out to be such intrinsic differences. But we need not suppose any such to explain the two asymmetries, and it is safer to be agnostic on the existence of these intrinsic differences.

Nothing in this post is meant as an argument for either the marriage asymmetry and the liturgical asymmetry. I have argued for the marriage asymmetry elsewhere, but here I am just saying that it could be explained if we grant the procreative ordering of marriage. And my arguments for the liturgical asymmetry are based on fittingness. But fittingness considerations do not constrain God. While we can explain why the clergy are of the same sex as the incarnate God by the nuptial imagery story that I gave above, God could instead have chosen to make the clergy be of the opposite sex as the incarnate God, in order to nuptially signify the people with the clergy, or God could chosen to make the clergy be of both sexes, to emphasize the fact that salvation is tied to the humanity (see St. Athanasius on this) and not the sex of the incarnate God. But when many things are fitting, God can choose one, and we can then cite its fittingness as a non-deterministic explanation.

Though, I suppose, I have at least refuted this argument:

3. The only way to explain the marriage and liturgical asymmetries is by supposing morally significant intrinsic differences between female and male.

4. There are no such intrinsic differences.

5. So, probably, the asymmetries don’t exist either.

I have refuted it by showing that (3) is false.

A physicalist argument for proper functions in biology

1. We have beliefs.

2. A belief is a mental state with the proper function of reflecting reality.

3. Our mental states are biological states. (Follows from standard physicalism)

4. So, some biological states have a proper function.

Can our cells be substances?

A standard Aristotelian principle says:

1. No substance is a part of another substance.

I was just struck by how (1) says less than it seems to. One interesting philosophy of biology question is whether our symbiont bacteria are part of us. But:

2. All bacteria are substances.

3. We are substances.

4. We are not bacteria.

5. So no bacteria are parts of us. (By 1-5)

This argument is fine as far as it goes. But there is a metaphysical possibility that its conclusion leaves open which it is easy to forget.

Let’s grant that our symbiont bacteria are not a part of us. But perhaps their matter is a part of us. In other words, maybe the bacteria are matter-form composites just as we are, but their matter is a part of our matter, whereas their form is not a part of us at all, and hence they as wholes are not parts of us. They merely overlap us in matter.

And the point can be generalized. Before I noticed this point today, I used to think that the Aristotelian commitment to (1) requires us to deny that our cells are substances. But (1) leaves open the possibility that our cells are substances whose matter is a part of us, while the cells as wholes are not parts of us.

I don’t really want to say this. I would like to supplement (1) with this principle which has generally been a large part of my reason for affirming (1):

6. The matter of one substance is never a part of another substance.

My reason for accepting (6) has been that the identify of the matter is grounded in its substance, and if the matter had its identity doubly grounded, it wouldn’t be one thing, but two, and so it wouldn’t be the same matter in each substance.

In fact, (6) is a special case of a stronger claim:

7. No two substances have any matter in common.

Here is an argument that establishes (7) directly. Start with this plausible thesis:

8. No two material substances have all of their matter in common.

But now if (7) is false, then it should be possible to have two plants that have some matter in common. We could further imagine that the non-common matter perishes, but both plants survive. If so, then we would have a violation of (8). So, it’s plausible that if (7) is false, so is (8).

Here is a different line of thought in favor of (7):

9. Matter is grounded in the accidents of a substance.

10. Two substances cannot have any accident in common.

11. If x is entity grounded in a and y is an entity grounded in b and a ≠ b, then x ≠ y.

12. So, two substances cannot have any matter in common.

So, all in all, while (1) leaves open the possibility of our cells and bacteria being substances and yet having their matter be a part of us, we have good reason to deny this possibility on other grounds.

It would be very neat if one could derive (1) from (7). From (7) we do directly get:

13. No substance with matter is a part of another substance.

But it would take more argument to drop the “with matter” qualifier.

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.

Group impairment and Aristotelianism

Aristotelians have a metaphysical ground for claims about what is normal and abnormal in an individual: the form of a substance grounds the development of individuals in a teleological ways and specifies what the substance should be like. Thus a one-eyed owl is impaired—while it is an owl, it falls short of the specification in its form.

But there is another set of normalcy claims that are harder to ground in form: claims about the proportions of characteristics in a population. Sex ratios are perhaps the most prevalent example: if all the foals born over the next twenty years were, say, male, then that would be disastrous for the horse as a species. And yet it seems that each individual foal could still be a perfect instance of its kind, since both a male and a female can be a perfect instance of horsehood. Caste in social insects is another example: it would be disastrous for a bee hive if all the females developed into workers, even though each one could be a perfect bee.

The two cases are different. The sex of a horse is genetically determined, while social insect caste is largely or wholly environmental. Still, both are similar in that the species not only has norms as to what individuals should be like but also what the distribution of types of individuals should be. There is not only the possibility of individual but of group impairment. But what is the metaphysics behind these norms?

Infamously, Aristotle interpreters differ on whether forms are individual or common: whether two members of the same species have a merely exactly similar or a numerically identical form. Here is a place where taking forms to be common would help: for then the form could not only dictate the variation between the parts of each organism’s body but also the variation between the organisms in the species. But taking forms to be common would be ethically disastrous, because it would mean that all humans have the same soul, since the soul is the form of the human being.

Here’s my best solution to the puzzle. The form specifies the conditions of the flourishing of an individual. But these conditions can be social in addition to individual. Thus, a perfectly healthy and well-nourished male foal would not be flourishing if it lacks a society with potential future mates. And while each worker bee can internally be a fulfilled worker bee, it is not flourishing if its work does not in fact help support a queen. These social conditions for flourishing are constitutive. It’s not that the lack of a queen will cause the worker bee to die sooner (though for all I know, it might), but that the lack of a queen is constitutive of the worker bee being poorly off.

Once we see that there can be constitutive social conditions for flourishing, it is natural to think that there will be constitutive environmental conditions for flourishing. And this could be the start of an Aristotelian philosophy of ecology.

Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science

The collection Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (eds: Simpson, Koons and Teh) is now available. It's divided into a physical sciences and a life sciences part.

My piece on the Traveling Forms interpretation is in the physical sciences part (interestingly, though, that interpretation is more about us than about physics).

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.

Three levels of sex/gender

The biological understanding of male and female is something like this. Some species reproduce sexually. Some species that reproduce sexually exhibit a consistent difference in size between the two gametes that come together in sexual reproduction. In those species, the producer of the larger gamete is called “female” and the producer of the smaller gamete is called “male”. We can thus draw a distinction between a species having sexes, namely having respective producers of two different kinds of gametes, each of which is needed for sexual reproduction, and the species having male and female sexes.

Let me speak vaguely but heuristically. Human reproduction has a deep ethical and theological significance because it produces persons. Moreover, humans normally reproduce sexually (the exception of course being twinning). So it’s unsurprising if the existence of two sexes among humans has intrinsic ethical and theological significance. But the difference between male and female seems to have no intrinsic ethical or theological significance. It matters that there are two reproductive kinds, but that one of the two kinds produces a larger gamete than the other has no intrinsic ethical or theological significance.

But of course even though what defines the difference between male and female humans is the difference in gamete size, the actual differences between male and female humans are not in fact limited to differences of gamete size. Those humans that produce smaller gametes produce more of them, while those humans that produce larger gametes produce fewer of them and gestate offspring. Humans have “primary sex characteristics” that support differing ways of reproductive functioning.

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine earth* where there are humans*. To a cursory external examination, humans* live, look and behave just like humans, and have the same kind of sexual differentiation. One sex produces lots of gametes and the other relatively few. The sex that produces fewer gametes gestates offspring for nine months, has mammary-type glands that nourish offspring after gestation, is a little smaller on average, etc. But on earth*, it also turns out that the the sex that produces relatively few gametes produces the smaller gametes. (There may be evolutionary reasons why this is unlikely. But unlikely is not impossible.) Thus, on earth* male humans* fill the same biological roles as female humans do on earth, except at a near-microscopic level where the sizes of gametes become visible.

Now overlay on this the social level. This could go in multiple ways. It is easiest to imagine that on earth*, male humans* have the same social positions, and suffer from the same sorts of discrimination, as female humans do on earth. But it could in principle be reversed: it could be that the social position of male and female humans* is like that of male and female humans, respectively. Or it could be nullified: there could be no significant differences in social position.

This suggests that there are three levels to sex/gender:

• The definitionally fundamental distinction between male and female in terms of gamete size.

• Other biological differences—particularly with respect to reproductive functioning.

• The social distinctions.

The first two tend to be lumped together as “sex” or “biological sex”, while the last gets called “gender”. But there really are three distinct levels. We might roughly call them: “biological gametic sex”, “biological functional sex” and “social gender”. Thus, among humans*, the connection between biological functional sex and biological gametic sex is the reverse of how it is among humans. So we now have three different senses of terms like “man”, “woman”, “male” and “female”.

Life

Accounts of biological life characterize it by lists of features such as “reproduction, metabolism, functional organization, growth, responsiveness to the environment, movement, and short- and long-term adaptations” (SEP s.v. life). But Jewish, Christian and Muslim theists have reason to worry about such accounts of life in the light of the fact that our scriptures present God as the paradigm of a living being.

Here are some options:

Option 1: Modify one’s theology to make God fit with something pretty close to one of the biological accounts of life. Mormonism is a fairly radical example of this. A more moderate version might be some version of process theology, though one may need to jettison some features, like metabolism and growth.

Option 2: Trinitarians have this option available: The Son proceeds from the Father and the Spirit from the Father and/through the Son and these processions could count as reproduction. Moreover, because Trinitarian processions multiply persons but the resulting persons are one God, Trinitarian reproduction has an internality that might count as a kind of growth—not that the divine essence grows, but that the number of persons of the one God grows. This solution would have the important consequence that the Old Testament texts that present God as living are proto-Trinitarian. Obviously, this solution is unlikely to be attractive to Jews and Muslims, though there may be some Kabbalistic analogue that might appeal to some Jews. Moreover, unless one adopts some version of process theology, this solution still requires one to drop a number of the features in traditional accounts of biological life, such as metabolism, movement and adaptation.

Option 3: Replace the biological accounts of life with something radically different which makes God a paradigm instance of life. Here are three such possibilities for characterizing life:

A. Living things are ones that have some mental property like consciousness or purposefulness.

B. Living things have teleology.

C. Living things are ones that have a well-being, that are capable of being well.

Suboption A is pretty radical: it requires either saying that plants have a mental life or that plants aren’t alive. I think it’s not that crazy to say that plants have something like mental life. Maybe they are aware of their environment in a way that goes robustly beyond the mere data processing of a digital thermometer. And it seems plausible that one can ascribe a certain kind of purposefulness to plant processes.

Suboption B is pretty close to the purposefulness variant of suboption A, but teleology is a more general concept than mental purposefulness. For me, the main difficulty with suboption B is that I think all substances have teleology. And I don’t want to extend life to elementary particles. But those who do not think that teleology extends to all substances might like Suboption B.

Suboption C is, of course, related to Suboption B. I have the same worry about C as about B: I think all substances that have teleology have a well-being. Elementary particles have well-being—the only difference between them and organic substances is that as far as we can tell, elementary particles are always well. This is of course very controversial, and those who do not accept it may like C.

There are, no doubt, other options and suboptions. I am attracted to Options 2 and 3A.

Fingers and other alleged body parts

Squeeze your fingers around something hard. It feels like you’re making an effort with your fingers. But you’re making an effort with muscles that are in your forearm rather than in your fingers—fingers have no muscles inside them.

Now, if I thought that bodies have proper parts, I would be inclined to think that my body’s parts are items delineated by natural boundaries, say, functional things like heart, lungs and fingers rather than arbitrary things like the fusion of my nose with my toes or even my lower half. But when we think about candidates for functional parts of the human body, it becomes really hard to see where the lines are to be drawn.

Fingers, for instance, don’t make it in. A typical finger has three segments, but the muscles to move these segments are, as we saw, far away from the finger. What is included in the finger, assuming it’s a real object? Presumably the tendons that move the segments had better be included. But these tendons extend through the wrist to the muscles. Looking at anatomical pictures online, they are continuous: they don’t have any special boundary at the base of the finger. Moreover, blood vessels would seem to have to form a part of the finger, but they too do not start at the base of the finger.

Perhaps the individual bones of the finger are naturally delineated parts? But bones only have delineated boundaries when dead. For instance, living bones have a nutrient artery and vein going into them, and again based on what I can see online (I know shockingly little about anatomy—until less than a year ago, I didn’t even know that fingers have no muscles in them), it doesn’t look like there is any special break-off point where the vessels enter the bone.

Perhaps there are some things that have delineated boundaries. Maybe cells do. Maybe the whole interconnected circularity system does. Maybe elementary particles qualify, too. But once we see that what are intuitively the paradigmatic parts of the body—things like fingers—are not in the ontology, we gain very little benefit vis-à-vis common sense by insisting that we do have proper parts, but they are things that require science to find. It seems better—because simpler—to say that in the correct ontology the body is a continuous simple thing with distributional properties (“pink-here and white-there”). We can then talk of the body’s systems: the circulatory system, the neural system, ten finger systems, etc. But these systems are not material parts. We can’t say where they begin an end. Rather they abstractions from the body’s modes of proper function: circulating, nerve-signaling, digital manipulating. We can talk about the rough locations of the systems by talking of where the properties that are central to the explanation of the system’s distinctive functioning lie.

Life science and physical science

I've been thinking that in a nutshell one could put much of the distinctiveness of Aristotelian philosophy as follows: life science is at least as fundamental as physical science.

Does the size of an organism matter morally?

One might with pull a small plant from one's garden with little thought. But one wouldn't do that to a full grown tree. Of course it's harder to pull out a tree, but that doesn't seem to be all that's going on. The tree seems more significant.

Part of that is that the tree has been growing for a longer time. Temporal size definitely seems to matter. We would think a lot harder about cutting down a tree that hundreds of years old rather than one that's five years old. (Interestingly, we tend to have the opposite judgment in the case of people: it is perfectly understandable when an older person lays down their life for a child. Maybe this is because people have an irreplaceability that plants do not.)

But what about pure spatial size? Does that matter? I once thought about this case. We kill insects for minor reasons. But would we do that if the insects were our size? I thought at the time that we would have more hesitation to kill the large insects for minor reasons (we might not hesitate on self defense), but that this was an irrational bias.

But I now think there might be a justification to thinking of spatially larger organisms as having more value. The larger organisms have more cells, and that makes for a complex system, just like a castle made of ten thousand Legos is more complex, other things being equal, than one made of a thousand.

In the case of people, I guess we will have a duty of justice to bracket reasons arising from the number of cells. So we shouldn't save the fatter person just because he has more cells.

But what about dogs, say. Is it really the case that if a Chihuahua and a Great Dane are drowning, other things being equal we should try to save the Great Dane?

Maybe the differences due to the number of cells are on a logarithmic scale, and hence are only significant given an order of magnitude difference? But a Great Dane is an order of magnitude heavier than a Chihuahua, and so I'd guess it has an order of magnitude more cells.

Maybe the moral difference requires several orders of magnitude? Or maybe it runs on a loglog scale?

Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree and spatial size doesn't matter morally at all.

If size doesn't matter morally at all, we have a nice argument that the parts of a substance are never substances. For if the parts of a substance are ever substances, the cells of a multicellular organism will surely qualify. But if the cells are substances, then they are living substances. But surely an order of magnitude difference in the number of living substances destroyed makes a moral difference.

A damselfly

Some of the cool animals in our local zoo are not part of the zoo. But the space they occupy is part of the zoo.

Artifacts like zoos thus have space as part of them. But what is this "space"? The zoo's space orbits the earth's axis once per 24 hours. It's a movable space. It's something like what I've called the internal space of a substance (except that a zoo isn't a substance).

Animalism

I just had a really naive thought. Let's imagine what a definition of animals would be like. It would say something like this: Animals are things that maintain homeostasis, take in nutrients and grow, reproduce, initiate and control a large variety of types of motion in response to changing environmental features, etc. It's not very easy to come up with details of the definition, but it seems like it would go something like this. Well, it's pretty clear that we do these things, as well as doing any plausible items we'd want to add to the definition. So we're animals. Case closed.

What could an anti-animalist say? I guess her best hope would be: The definition is close to the truth, but not quite. Rather, animals are things that non-derivatively maintain homeostasis, take in nutrients and grow, etc., etc. But it seems to me that there is a natural dilemma. Derivative homeostasis (say) either is or is not a case of homeostasis. If it is, that seems all we need for animalhood (along with analogous other qualities). If it is not, then the anti-animalist can't say that we have homeostasis, and that's absurd.

Dignity, humanity and Aristotelianism

1. All humans have dignity because they are humans.
2. Humans do not have dignity because of an extrinsic property.
3. So, being human isn't an extrinsic property.
4. If to be human is to be a member of a particular biological taxon, then being human is extrinsic. (Biological taxa are defined by gene interchange in a population and are thus extrinsic characterizations of individuals.)
5. So, to be human is not the same as to be a member of a biological taxon.
6. Our best alternative to the biological taxonomic account of what it is to be human is the Aristotelian account that it is to have a human form, so the Aristotelian account is probably true.

The greatest discovery in the history of human biology

If one searches for "the greatest discovery in the history of biology", the top hits indicate that it was the discovery of DNA. Maybe, though I'm not sure. But least in the history of human biology, the greatest discovery surely was the discovery that pregnancy is caused by coitus. (A discovery presumably made independently in multiple cultures.)

Functionalism, biological antireductionism and dualism

According to functionalism, a mental state such as a pain is characterized by its causal roles. But if one physical state plays the causal role of pain, so do many others and so the characterization fails. For instance, if neural state N plays the causal role of pain in me, so does the conjunction of N with my having blue eyes. One could require minimality of the state, but that won't help. First, plausibly, there is no minimal state that plays the role: if a state plays it, so does that state minus a particle. Second, even if there is one, it is very unlikely to be unique. There is likely to be redundancy, and there will be many ways of getting rid of redundancy.

The solution to this problem in the spirit of Lewisian functionalism is to restrict one's quantifiers to natural states. There are two ways of doing this. First, we could restrict the quantifiers to states which are sufficiently natural, whose degree of unnaturalness is below some threshold. (An obvious way to measure unnaturalness is to measure the length of the shortest linguistic expression taht expresses the state in terms that are perfectly natural.) But this is unlikely to work. If mental states have degreed unnaturalness, presumably there will be a lot of variation in the degree of unnaturalness. Some mental states will, for instance fall far below the threshold. Those states could then be made slightly more complicated while still staying below the threshold, so once again we would have a problem.

So we better restrict quantifiers to perfectly natural states, at least in the case of the basic mental states (or maybe protomental states—I won't distinguish these) out of which more complex ones are built. Thus we have our first conclusion:

1. If functionalism is true, basic mental states are perfectly natural.

This has an interesting corollary. Presumably no macroscopic state of a purely physical computer is perfectly natural. Thus:

2. If functionalism is true, a purely physical computer has no basic mental states, and hence no mental states.

Thus, the only way a computer could have mental states is if it wasn't purely physical (Richard Swinburne once suggested to me that if a computer had the right functional complexity, God could create a soul for it.)

What about organisms? Well, if organisms are purely physical, then their mental states will be biological states (subject to evolution and the like). So:

2. If functionalism is true, then some of the biological states of a minded purely physical organism are perfectly natural.

This is an antireductionist conclusion. Thus,

3. Functionalism implies that all minded organisms have non-physical states (dualism) or some minded organisms have perfectly natural biological states (antireductionism) (or both).

Moreover, our best account of naturalness is that it is fundamentality. If that is the right account, then our antireductionism is pretty strong: it says that some biological states are fundamental.

Moreover, functionalism is the only tenable version of physicalism (I say). Thus:

4. Physicalism implies biological antireductionism.

Transgender realism, abortion, animalism and colocationism

There are two major families of views on our relationship to the biological world. On animalism, we are animals of the species homo sapiens. Animalism comes in two varieties: physicalist animalism says that we are purely physical animals and dualist animalism says that some or all animals, including all of us, have non-physical features such as non-physical mental states or a soul (of a Cartesian or an Aristotelian sort). On colocationism, wherever one of us is present, there is an animal of the species homo sapiens present as well, but we are not identical to such an animal. There are multiple varieties of colocationism. On the constitution view, we are wholly constituted by our associated animals. Typically, such constitution theorists are physicalists—the animals are purely physical and hence so are we. The other main variety of colocationism is further-aspect dualist colocationism on which our associated animals are purely physical, but we are not. This includes a view on which we are souls (which count as located wherever the ensouled bodies are), a view on which we are a composite of an animal and a soul and a view on which we are partly constituted by an animal and partly constituted by a non-physical aspect. The debate on animalism versus colocationism is thus to a significant degree orthogonal to the debate between physicalists and dualists.

If animalism is true, then a normal adult, say Sally, used to be a fetus, and to have killed that fetus would have been to kill Sally, and it would have deprived Sally of even more than killing Sally now would. Thus, animalism strongly suggests that abortion is wrong, though violinist-type arguments could be used to try to resist that conclusion. On the other hand, colocationist views are much more congenial to pro-choice philosophers, and hence appear to be somewhat dominant in the pro-choice moral philosophy scene. For if colocationism is true, then it could be that the human animal existed significantly before Sally came to be colocated with it, and if so, then killing that human animal in abortion would not have been a killing of Sally. Though, a colocationist could also think that colocation started at fertilization and hence a killing of the fetus would also be a killing of the colocated Sally.

So whether animalism or colocationism is the right metaphysics of us is very relevant to the moral status of abortion.

Now I will cautiously wade into waters that are rather unfamiliar to me, and I apologize if I use terminology in non-standard ways. The question of animalism versus colocationism appears to be very relevant to the question of transgender realism. Let Type I Transgender Realism (1TR) be the view that some people literally are men in female bodies or women in male bodies. Let Type II Transgender Realism (2TR) be the claim that some people who had female bodies and felt that they were or should be men are now, after gender reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment, literally men, and some people who had male bodies and felt that they were or should be women are now, after gender reassignment surgery and hormonal treatment, literally women. If 1TR is true, so is 2TR: surely a man in a female body does not cease to be a man after the body is surgically modified to be more male-like. But at the same time, the law in a number of jurisdictions tracks 2TR but not 1TR, requiring surgery for legal classification as male or female.

Now, it seems very plausible that whether a human animal is male or female (or hermaphrodite) depends on biological criteria very much like those by which we ask whether an elephant or a gecko or maybe even a plant is male or female (or hermaphrodite). These criteria do not depend on psychological states but on whether the organism is such that it should produce its own sperm or such that should produce its own eggs (or both). It is also very plausible that men are male (though they may be more or less feminine) and women are female (though they may be more or less masculine). So if we are human animals, then whether we are male or female, and hence whether we are men or women, depends solely on biological criteria, and 1TR is false.

Moreover, if we are human animals, then 2TR is also false, at least given the current surgical methods. If we remove a mouse's female reproductive system and reshape what remains to look like male genitalia, and treat with hormones, what we have is a female mouse that has lost its reproductive system and behaves like a male. It might be more complicated if a functioning male reproductive system is transplanted. But I think it would still be true that the resulting mouse isn't such that it should produce sperm. Moreover, the mouse doesn't produce its own sperm—it produces the donor's sperm. Here's another route to the conclusion that even a functioning male reproductive transplant doesn't turn the female mouse male. After mere removal of a female (respectively, male) mouse's reproductive system, what we have is a female (respectively, male) mouse that is missing a reproductive system. But now imagine two identical twin female mice, A and B. Both have their female reproductive systems removed. But B then has a male reproductive system added, and then removed. If B became male upon addition of the male reproductive system, then B should still be male after removal thereof—a male does not cease to be a male after losing the reproductive system, but becomes a mutilated male. But A and B may be exactly alike at the end of suffering all this cruelty. It would then be odd to say that of two exactly similar mice, one is male and one is female. So we should say that they are both female, and hence B was female all along, even while having the male reproductive system.

Maybe an animalist could get out of this argument by distinguishing between sex and gender, and denying the idea that a man is an adult male human and a woman is an adult female human. Instead, perhaps, a man is an adult masculine human and a woman is an adult feminine human. The appeal to non-human animals in my argument then becomes irrelevant because only human animals can be men and women. On this story, there will be a disnalogy between the triple of terms "human", "woman" and "man" and triples like "chicken", "hen" and "rooster". A hen is a female chicken, but a woman need not be a female human. While this animalist-compatible view would let one preserve 1TR and 2TR, it would not be compatible with the aspiration that "a woman in a man's body" may have to be really female. It is my impression it is more the genderqueer than the transgendered who use phrases like "male woman" or "female man". Besides the idea of literally male women and female men seems problematic.

On the other hand, if colocationism is true, it is much easier to hold to 1TR and 2TR. Sure, Sally's associated animal (the animal that she is partly or wholly constituted by) may be male, but perhaps maleness and femaleness in a human person is not simply determined by whether the human animal is male or female. Colocationism could allow one to hold to 1TR without revisionary biology and without the oddness of saying that Sally is a male woman. Moreover, colocationism makes it plausible that sexual reassignment surgery could be a valuable thing: it is fitting that a man be associated with a male animal and a woman with a female animal, and while my arguments above suggest that surgery will not change the sex of the associated animal, it could somewhat improve the fit between the person and the associated animal.

Of course, colocationism by itself does not imply 1TR or 2TR: one could still think that a person is a man if and only if the person is associated with an adult male human animal and that a person is a woman if and only if the person is associated with an adult female human animal. But colocationism opens options beyond that.

So the debate between animalism and colocationism is not only highly relevant to the abortion debate but also to the question of transgender realism. Settling the question between the animalists and colocationists would not completely settle the latter two questions, but it would lead to significant progress.

Let me end by saying, without argument, that we are primates and all primates are animals. Hence animalism is true.

Inductive inferences across kinds

I observe some ravens, and they are all black. This gives me good reason to think all ravens are black. This is an inductive inference within a natural kind. One might have this picture of the inductive inference here: observing the ravens, we learn something about the appropriate-level universal raven that they fall under. One might then think that all inductive inference is like this: We observe instances of a genuine, non-gerrymandered natural kind K, and conclude that the kind is such-and-such.

But I don't think this is all that happens. Here are a few other kinds of cases.

1. From the fact that octopi behave in some ways like we do, we infer that they are conscious. But there is no biological taxon K that contains both octopi and humans such that we have good reason to think that all Ks are conscious. The lowest level taxon containing octopi and humans is the subregnum Bilateria and we have little reason to think all Bilateria are conscious. We might seek for a natural kind that isn't a taxon, like critters that exhibit apparently intelligent behavior. But that's a gerrymandered kind. We might try for a non-gerrymandered kind, like critters that exhibit intelligent behavior, but then we would have to have reason to think that octopi exhibit intelligent behavior rather than merely apparently intelligent behavior, and our problem would return.
2. We have good reason to think that all life on earth descends from a single ancestor. But organism on earth isn't a natural kind.
3. We can do induction within artificial kinds. That all the pens that I have observed have ink in them gives me reason to think all pens have ink. But pen isn't a natural kind.

Does this matter? Maybe. (I think a theist may have a better explanation of why induction not-within-a-kind works than a naturalist. But the thoughts here are inchoate.)