The essentiality of dignity

Start with this:

1. Dignity is an essential property of anything that has it.

2. Necessarily, something has dignity if and only if it is a person.

3. Therefore, personhood is an essential property of anything that has it.

Now, suppose the standard philosophical pro-choice view that

4. Personhood consists in developed sophisticated cognitive faculties of the sort that fetuses and newborns lack but typical toddlers have.

Consider a newborn, Alice. By (4) Alice is not a person, but if she grows up into a typical toddler, that toddler will be a person. By (3), however, we cannot say that Alice will have become that person, since personhood is an essential property, and one cannot gain essential properties—either you necessarily have them or you necessarily lack them.

Call the toddler person “Alicia”. Then Alice is a different individual from Alicia.

So, what happens to Alice once we get to Alicia? Either Alice perishes or where Alicia is, there is Alice co-located with her.

Let’s suppose first the co-location option. We then have two conscious beings, Alice and Alicia, feeling the same things with the same brain, one (Alice) older than the other. We have standard and well-known problems with this absurd position (e.g., how does Alicia know that she is a person rather than just being an ex-fetus?).

But the option that Alice perishes when Alicia comes on the scene is also very strange. For even though Alice is not a person, it is obviously appropriate that Alice’s parents love for and care for her deeply. But if they love for and care for her deeply, they will have significant moral reason to prevent her from perishing. Therefore, they will have significant moral reason to give Alice drugs to arrest her intellectual development at a pre-personhood stage, to ensure that Alice does not perish. But this is a truly abhorrent conclusion!

Thus, we get absurdities from (3) and (4). This means that the pro-choice thinker who accepts (4) will have to reject (3). And they generally do so. This in turn requires them to reject (1) or (2). If they reject (2) but keep (1), then Alice the newborn must have dignity, since otherwise we have to say that Alice is a different entity from the later dignified Alicia, and both the theory that Alice perishes and the theory that Alice doesn’t perish is unacceptable. But if Alice the newborn has dignity, then the pro-choice argument from the lack of developed sophisticated cognitive abilities fails, because Alice the newborn lacks these abilities and so dignity comes apart from these abilities. But if dignity comes apart from these abilities, then the pro-choice argument based on personhood and these cognitive abilities is irrelevant. For it dignity is sufficient to ground a right to life, even absent personhood.

So, I think the pro-choice thinker who focuses on cognitive abilities will in the end need to deny that dignity is an essential property. I suspect most do deny that dignity is an essential property.

But I think the essentiality of dignity is pretty plausible. Dignity doesn’t seem to be something that can come and go. It seems no more alienable than the inalienable rights it grounds. It’s not an achievement, but is at the foundation of what we are.

A complication in the stone argument

Consider:

1. If God can create a stone he can’t lift, there is something he can’t do—namely, lift the stone.

2. If God cannot create a stone he can’t lift, there is something he can’t do—namely, create the stone.

3. So, there is something God can’t do.

4. So, there is no omnipotent God.

A standard way out of this, which I think is basically right, is that (3) is compatible with God’s being omnipotent as long as the thing God can’t do is metaphysically impossible.

But I want to note a rarely noted thing about the argument, which annoys me when I teach the argument to undergraduates because it is a red herring, but one that complicates the presentation.

The following is plausible:

4. If God were to create a stone he can’t lift, there would be something he couldn’t do—namely, lift the stone.

But (1) does not follow from (4) without further assumptions.

One way to get around this issue is to weaken the conclusion of the argument to the claim that possibly there is something God can’t do. That might create trouble for God’s essential omnipotence. Of course, I do accept that God is essentially omnipotent. But it still weakens the conclusion. And it’s a nuisance in teaching to have to get into essential omnipotence when dealing with the argument.

Essences

Some properties that a thing has partially or wholly explain other properties the thing has or doesn’t have. For instance, my having a body partially explains my being in Waco and wholly explains my having a body or horns. Some properties that a thing has do not explain, even partially, what other properties the thing has or doesn’t have. Call such properties “explanatorily fundamental”.

So, here’s a theory. The primary essential properties of a thing are the explanatorily fundamental properties of the thing. The primary essential properties are both essential in the medieval explanatory sense and the contemporary modal sense (properties a thing cannot exist without).

What about the case of Christ, who is essentially divine and essentially human, and yet prior (in the order of explanation) to the incarnation was not human? Here’s what we could say: Divinity is the one and only primary essential property of Christ. But humanity is a secondary essential property. A secondary essential property of a thing is the sort of property that (a) is not a primary essential property of that thing, but (b) normally is the primary essential property of its possessor. In the case of Christ, his divinity is explanatorily prior to his humanity, but normally a thing’s humanity does not have any property of that thing explanatorily prior to it.

Could God be divinity?

Here's a plausible thesis:

1. If it is of x's essence to be F, then Fness is prior to x.

This thesis yields a fairly standard argument against the version of divine simplicity which identifies God with the property of divinity. For if God is divinity, then divinity is prior to divinity by (1), which is absurd.

But (1) is false. For, surely:

2. It is of a property's essence to be a property.

But propertyhood is a property, so it is of propertyhood's essence to be a property, and so propertyhood is prior to propertyhood if (1) is true, which is absurd. So, given (2), we need to reject (1), and this argument against the God=divinity version of divine simplicity fails.

Can something material become immaterial?

Two angels are playing chess. They are immaterial, but have the causal powers of moving physical pieces on the board. Along comes a big snake and swallows the board. No worries: the angels keep on playing, but now the positions of the chess pieces are kept track of in their minds instead. So the king, say, was first a material object. But the king then became an object wholly constituted by the angels' thoughts, and hence immaterial. And it is the same king. While in chess you can get a new queen by promoting a pawn, you don't get a new king within a game.

(Of course, I suspect that the true ontology doesn't include artifacts like chess kings.)

Essential properties and self-dependence

My being seated now is causally explained by my having sat down. Suppose that my being seated now is an essential property of me. Then, had I not sat down, I wouldn't have existed. So my very existence would have counterfactually depended on my own causal activity. But that would absurdly make me be something too much like a causa sui.

This seems to generalize into an argument for a general principle:

1. No property that counterfactually depends on an entity's own non-essential causal activity can be essential to that entity.

I needed to specify that the relevant causal activity is non-essential, because there is nothing deeply absurd about an entity that has some essential properties follow from causal activity that's essential to the entity.

But the form of argument that I used to get to (1) gives other results. For instance, a leading theory of personal identity holds that in cases where symmetric fission occurs—apparently, a person splitting into two—there were already two co-located people there before the fission. But why are there two people there? Presumably precisely because fissioning occurred—otherwise, there would have been only one.[note 1] Thus the existence of the two people is explained by the fission. But surely if fission is possible, it's possible that it be triggered by the non-essential action of the fissioning individual or individuals. In that case, then, the existence of the two people is explained in part by their very own activity. So this account of fission leads to something like self-dependence and should be rejected.

There may, however, be an objection to the argument. Suppose that the causal self-dependence is not fundamental. Instead, more fundamentally, we have a case where the whole depends on the contingent causal activity of a part. For instance, we may think that the length of an event is an essential property of an event. But the length of an event frequently depends on the contingent causal activity of a part of the event. (Thus, the length of World War II depends on the effects of D-Day, even though D-Day is a part of World War II.) In some such cases we might say that the whole depends on its own causal activity, since the causal activity of the part can sometimes be attributed to the whole.

I am not convinced. I think that in cases like this, it is incorrect to say that the whole depends on the whole's causal activity, but that it depends on the part's causal activity, and in this case the part's causal activity is not in fact correctly attributed to the whole.

In any case, the part-based objection will only apply in cases where the whole's causal activity is derivative from the part's causal activity. I think free choices are not derivative from the causal activity of anything other than the person as a whole, so in the fission case it's still impossible that whether there are two persons should depend on their choices. But this is rather controversial.

If there are cases where the whole depends on its own causal activity because its causal activity is derivative from a part's causal activity, then (1) needs to be qualified to apply to fundamental entities.

The problem of the stone

I like to use the stone argument as a warm-up in a philosophy of religion class. But it's actually kind of tricky to use. Here's a natural way to put it:

1. Either God can or cannot make a stone he can't lift.
2. If God cannot make such a stone, then there is something God can't do.
3. If God can make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.
4. So, there is something God can't do.

But in this formulation, (3) can be easily rejected. It does not follow follow from God's merely being able to make such a stone that there is something God can't do, just as it doesn't follow from God's being able to make a unicorn that there is a unicorn. The correct conditional is:

5. If God does make such a stone, then there is something God can't do, namely lift the stone.

But if we replace (3) by (5) in the argument, the argument ceases to be valid.

This means that the stone argument isn't actually an argument against omnipotence. If all that was in view was omnipotence, one could say: "Sure, God can create such a stone. Were he to create it, he wouldn't be omnipotent. But he hasn't created such a stone and he is omnipotent." Rather, we should take the stone argument as an argument against essential omnipotence. And that makes the argument a little less suited for warm-up classroom use, because one has to introduce the notion of an essential property.

What I actually did in class today is I gave the argument in the invalid form. Alas, nobody caught the invalidity. Though, interestingly, one student was unsure of disjunction-elimination in general.

I also emphasized that the stone wasn't really a problem for omnipotence, but for particular attempts to define omnipotence. I think it's important to to distinguish those atheological arguments that are problems for theism from those that are problems for particular ways of defining theism. The inductive problem of evil is an argument against theism; the stone argument is only an argument against particular formulations.