From one divine person to two or more

1. Personhood is teleologically relational in the sense that a person is the kind of being that necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with other persons.

2. Necessarily, any person other than God is a creature.

3. So, if God is a single person, this person necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with creatures.

4. If a being only finds its fulfillment in relationships with Fs, then the being’s fulfillment depends on Fs.

5. So, if God is a single person, God’s fulfillment depends on creatures.

6. God’s fulfillment does not depend on creatures.

7. Thus, God is not a single person.

8. thus, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.

(I think most non-Christian monotheists these days will say that God is a single person. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be a better view for them to deny that God is a person at all, and to insist that the centrality of personhood to the understanding of God is a mistaken Christian approach.)

Here is another variant on the argument:

9. Necessarily, a person can only flourish in relationship to another equal person.

10. It is possible that God flourishes.

11. If God is a single person, then it is impossible for there to be another person equal to God.

12. So, God is a single person, it is impossible that God flourishes. (9 and 11)

13. So, God is not a single person. (10 and 12)

14. So, if God is a person, God is two or more persons.

Now, granted, it is a standard view in Christianity that one cannot prove the doctrine of the Trinity by reason. If the arguments above are sound, have I contradicted that view? No, for several reasons. First, the arguments don’t establish that God is three persons. Second, the arguments only establish that if God is a person at all, then God is two or more persons—but a further argument is needed that God is a person at all. (Perhaps perfect being theology can yield that.)

The thesis of the uniqueness of our self-consciousness

I am toying with the thesis that each person’s self-consciousness is qualitatively different. Perhaps all persons have uniquely individuating properties, something like haecceities, and for each such individuating property there is a different quale of seeing oneself as an instance of it. One might even think the quale is the unique individuating property. Or, alternately, it might be that each person’s qualia are different: my quale of red is a quale of me-seeing-red, my quale of middle-C is a quale of me-hearing-middle-C and your quale of red is a quale of you-seeing-red while your quale of middle-C is a quale of your-hearing-middle-C. There is, presumably, something that all of my qualia have in common, and all your qualia have in common, and so on.

What consequences might there be of such a view?

First, some people have the intuition that there is something mysterious about self-consciousness, something that goes significantly beyond mere consciousness (pace my thoughts here). The qualitative conscious difference thesis could be a way of capturing that mysterious extra in self-consciousness.

Second, this would be a way to support and explain intuition of the non-fungibility and irrepeatability of persons. There is something irrevocably unique about all our perceptions of the world.

Third, we might get a neat account of second-person knowledge. What happens in second-person knowledge—very mysteriously!—is that we come to see that special qualitative feature of the other, albeit in a different mode, from the outside.

Fourth, the thesis might make one even more cautious about some thorny epistemological matters. There cannot be such a thing as two people with the same qualitative evidence: each person’s evidence must be qualitatively different from that of every other person. The concept of being an epistemic peer becomes dubious: you unavoidably see the world differently from me. The application of Bayesianism to fundamental matters becomes even more fishy. Plausibly, we have essentiality of origins, so that if there is a God, you and I couldn’t have existed in a world without God. On the qualitative uniqueness thesis, this means that there are qualitative features of our mental lives that cannot be exemplified in a world without God. We can then expect that we will have some trickiness when we ask questions like: “How likely is it that the evidence I have would obtain if God didn’t exist?” Similar issues come up for fundamental laws of nature. In particular, we cannot really do Bayesian reasoning on our total evidence, and we should probably see Bayesianism as a mere toy model.

An argument from wonderful people

1. Person x appears like they are in the image of God.

2. So, probably, x is in the image of God.

3. If God doesn’t exist, no one is in the image of God.

4. So, God exists.

Persons and temporal parts

On perdurantism, we are four-dimensional beings made of temporal parts, and our actions are fundamentally those of the temporal parts.

This is troubling. Imagine a person with a large number of brains, only one of which is active at any one time, and every millisecond a new brain gets activated. There would be something troubling about the fact that we are always interacting with a different brain person, and only interacting with the person as a whole by virtue of interacting with ever different brains. And this is pretty much what happens on perdurantism.

Maybe it’s not so bad if each brain’s data comes from the previous brain, so that by learning about the new brain we also learn about the old one. And, granted, on any view over time we interact to some degree with different parts of the person—most cells swap out, and we would be untroubled if this turned out to hold for neurons as well. But it seems to me that it is a more attractive picture of interpersonal interactions if there is a fundamental core of the person with which we interact that is numerically the same core in all the interactions, so that the changing cells are just expressions of that same core.

This is not really much of an argument, just an expression of a feeling.

Beyond persons?

I wonder if creation includes beings that are qualitatively as high above mere persons like us as mere persons are qualitatively above non-persons. Persons have agency and intellectuality (let’s say) and that gives them a dignity above non-persons. Is there some quality Q that is even more impressive than agency and intellectuality and that is actually found in some creatures?

We have no idea what that quality Q would be, and just as personhood is surely inconceivable to a non-person, Q would likely be inconceivable to us.

I think our only approach to the question is through divine revelation, and it may be that divine revelation just does not include enough information.

Here is my best line of thought towards a negative answer. Jesus Christ is king of creation. Moreover, plausibly, he is king of creation not just as God, but as a human being. As God, he presumably would have Q. But as a human being, he lacks Q. But just as having personhood seems a prerequisite for being king over persons, it seems that having Q would be a prerequisite for being king over those with Q.

On the other hand, one might think that God might want to make the possessors of Q humble, and being ruled over by a human being might be a good way to do that. So I don’t think we have a decisive answer.

Bailey's Priority Principle

Andrew Bailey formulated and defended the Priority Principle (PP), that we think our thoughts in a primary rather than inherited way. His main argument for PP is a two-thinkers argument: if I think my thoughts in an inherited way, then something else—the thing I inherit the thoughts from—thinks them as well, but there aren’t two thinkers of my thoughts. While this argument is plausible, I think it skirts around the main intuition behind the PP. That intuition is that there is something implausible about us being thinkers in a derivative way. This intuition, however, is quite compatible with there being something that derives its thoughts from us, but not so Bailey’s argument, which (unless I am missing something) equally rules out the hypothesis that we inherit our thoughts and the hypothesis that our thoughts are inherited by something else.

Is there a way to argue for PP in concert with this intuition, namely to argue that whether or not there are two thinkers of my thoughts, I am their primary thinker? Such an argument would also escape the following apparent counterexample. Social organizations can have thoughts, derivative in a complex way from their members’ thoughts. But now suppose I join a club, and everyone else resigns membership. Then the club’s opinion on matters relavant to the club’s subject matter comes to be inherited from me. So now there are two thinkers, the club and me, though I am the primary one. This case (which to be fair I am not completely sure of) is a counterexample to Bailey’s argument but not to its conclusion.

My students came up with two closely related arguments, which we might put something like this. First, among our thoughts are intentions. If these are derivative, we are puppets of the primary intender, contrary to our freedom. Second, some of our thoughts are deliberate. It is a contradiction in terms that we think deliberately and yet our deliberate thought is inherited from a prior deliberate thinker—puppetry is incompatible with deliberativeness.

These arguments do not directly show that we are always primary thinkers, so they immediately imply only a weaker version of the PP (WPP), namely that sometimes we think non-derivatively. WPP is still interesting. For instance, it rules out standard perdurantist theories on which we inherit all our thoughts from our temporal parts. Furthermore, WPP makes PP moderately likely: for it is plausible that if there is any thought-inheritance it always goes in the same direction.

That said, maybe there is some reason to accept WPP without PP. Here is one kind of case. Possessing a concept is, perhaps, a way of thinking. But given some moderate semantic externalism, sometimes we possess a concept—say, of a quark—by inheriting it from an expert. Or suppose that the extended mind thesis is true, so that we count as knowing some things because they recorded on our devices. Maybe electronic devices don’t have knowledge, so this isn’t exactly knowledge inheritance. But imagine that you train a parrot to remember all your credit card numbers (a foolish idea) and you carry the parrot with you always. Now you inherit the knowledge of the numbers (under some description common between you and the parrot, definitely not “credit card number”) from the parrot. I am dubious of the extended mind thesis, but there is no need to stick one’s neck out. WPP does justice to many of our intuitions.

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.

Evaluating some theses on dignity and value

I’ve been thinking a bit about the relationship between dignity and value. Here are four plausible principles:

1. If x has dignity, then x has great non-instrumental value.

2. If x has dignity, then x has great non-instrumental value because it has dignity.

3. If x has dignity and y does not, then x has more non-instrumental value than y.

4. Dignity just is great value (variant: great non-instrumental value).

Of these theses, I am pretty confident that (1) is true. I am fairly confident (3) is false, except perhaps in the special case where y is a substance. I am even more confident that (4) is false.

I am not sure about (2), but I incline against it.

Here is my reason to suspect that (2) is false. It seems that things have dignity in virtue of some further fact F about them, such as that they are rational beings, or that they are in the image and likeness of God, or that they are sacred. In such a case, it seems plausible to think that F directly gives the dignified entity both the great value and dignity, and hence the great value derives directly from F and not from the dignity. For instance, maybe what makes persons have great value is that they are rational, and the same fact—namely that they are rational—gives them dignity. But the dignity doesn’t give them additional value beyond that bestowed on them by their rationality.

My reason to deny (4) is that great value does not give rise to the kinds of deontological consequences that dignity does. One may not desecrate something with dignity no matter what consequences come of it. But it is plausible that mere great value can be destroyed for the sake of dignity.

This leaves principle (3). The argument in my recent post (which I now have some reservations about, in light of some powerful criticisms from a colleague) points to the falsity of (3). Here is another, related reason. Suppose we find out that the Andromeda Galaxy is full of life, of great diversity and wonder, including both sentient and non-sentient organisms, but has nothing close to sapient life—nothing like a person. An evil alien is about to launch a weapon that will destroy the Andromeda Galaxy. You can either stop that alien or save a drowning human. It seems to me that either option is permissible. If I am right, then the value of the human is not much greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy.

But now imagine that the Whirlpool Galaxy has an order of magnitude more life than the Andromeda Galaxy, with much greater diversity and wonder, than the Andromeda Galaxy, but still with nothing sapient. Then even if the value of the human is greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy, because it is not much greater, while the value of the Whirlpool Galaxy is much greater than that of the Andromeda Galaxy, it follows that the human does not have greater value than the Whirlpool Galaxy.

However, the Whirlpool Galaxy, assuming it has no sapience in it, lacks dignity. A sign of this is that it would be permissible to deliberately destroy it in order to save two similar galaxies from destruction.

Thus, the human is not greater in value than the Whirlpool Galaxy (in my story), but the human has dignity while the Whirlpool Galaxy lacks it.

That said, on my ontology, galaxies are unlikely to be substances (especially if the life in the galaxy is considered a part of the galaxy, since following Aristotle I doubt that a substance can be a proper part of a substance). So it is still possible that principle (3) is true for substances.

But I am not sure even of (3) in the case of substances. Suppose elephants are not persons, and imagine an alien sentient but not sapient creature which is like an elephant in the temporal density of the richness of life (i.e., richness per unit time), except that (a) its rich elephantine life lasts millions of years, and (b) there can only be one member of the kind, because they naturally do not reproduce. On the other hand, consider an alien person who naturally only has a life that lasts ten minutes, and has the same temporal density of richness of life that we do. I doubt that the alien person is much more valuable than the elephantine alien. And if the alien person is not much more valuable, then by imagining a non-personal animal that is much more valuable than the elephantine alien, we have imagined that some person is not more valuable than some non-person. Assuming all non-persons lack dignity and all persons have dignity, we have a case where an entity with dignity is not more valuable than an entity without dignity.

That said, I am not very confident of my arguments against (3). And while I am dubious of (3), I do accept:

5. If x has dignity and y does not, then y is not more valuable than x.

I think the case of the human and the galaxy, or the alien person and alien elephantine creature, are cases of incommensurability.

Of snakes and cerebra

Suppose that you very quickly crush the head of a very long stretched-out serpent. Specifically, suppose your crushing takes less time than it takes for light to travel to the snake’s tail.

Let t be a time just after the crushing of the head.

Now causal influences propagate at most at the speed of light or less, the crushing of the head is the cause of death, and at t there wasn’t yet time for the effects of the crushing to have propagated to the tip of the tail. Furthermore, assume an Aristotelian account of life where a living thing is everywhere joined with its form or soul and death is the separation of the form from the matter. Then at t, because the effects of crushing haven’t propagated to the tail, the tail is joined with the snake’s form, even though the head is crushed and hence presumably no longer a part of the snake. (Imagine the head being annihilated for greater clarity.)

Now as long as any matter is joined to the form, the critter is alive. It follows that at time t, the snake is alive despite lacking a head. The argument generalizes. If we crush everything but the snake’s tail, including crushing all the major organs of the snake, the snake is alive despite lacking all the major organs, and having but a tail (or part of a tail).

So what? Well, one of the most compelling arguments against animalism—the view that people are animals—is that:

1. People can survive as just a cerebrum (in a vat).

2. No animal can survive as just a cerebrum.

3. So, people are not animals.

But presumably the reason for thinking that an animal can’t survive as just a cerebrum is that a cerebrum makes an insufficient contribution to the animal functions. But the tail of a snake makes an even less significant contribution to the animal functions. Hence:

4. If a snake can survive as just a tail, a mammal can survive as just a cerebrum.

5. A snake can survive as just a tail.

6. So, a mammal can survive as just a cerebrum.

Objection: Only physical effects are limited to the speed of light in their propagation, and the separation of form from matter is not a physical effect, so that instantly when the head is crushed, the form leaves the snake, all at once at t.

Response: Let z be the spacetime location of the tip of the snake’s tail at t. According to the object, at z the form is no longer present. Now, given my assumption that crushing takes less time than it takes for light to travel to the snake’s tail, and that in one reference frame w is just after the crushing, there will also be a reference frame according to which z is before the crushing has even started. If at z the form is no longer present, then the form has left the tip of the tail before the crushing.

In other words, if we try to get out of the initial argument by supposing that loss of form proceeds faster than light, then we have to admit that in some reference frames, loss of form goes backwards in time. And that seems rather implausible.

Our sharp existence

This argument is fairly well trodden, but I still have to say that I find it quite compelling:

1. If physicalism is true, then there was no sharp time at which I came into existence.

2. There was a sharp time at which I came into existence.

3. So, physicalism is false.

Why think (1) is true? Well, if physicalism is true, there is nothing more to me than an arrangement of particles. And which exact arrangements count as sufficient for my existence seems quite vague. And why think (2) is true? Well, if there is no sharp time at which I came into existence, then there will be worlds where it is vague whether I ever exist at all. For instance, if it is vague whether I already existed by time t₁, then imagine a world just like ours up to t₁, but where immediately thereafter everything is annihilated. If it is vague whether I existed by time t₁ in our world, then it that world it will be vague whether I ever exist. But it can’t be vague whether I ever exist—vague existence is an impossibility.

Objection 1: There are many entities very much like me, each of which comes into existence at a sharp time, sharing most of their particles, and I am one of them. None of these entities is privileged, but as it happens I am only one of them. The entities differ in fine details of persistence and existence conditions.

Response: If none are privileged, then all these entities are persons. And so in my armchair there are many persons, and likewise wherever any human being is, there are many persons. Now, notice that there is more room for such “slight variation” when an individual is physically larger (i.e., has more particles). So it follows from the view that where there is a larger person, there are more persons. All the persons co-located with me have presumably the same experiences and the same rights (since none are privileged). So it follows that if you have a choice between benefiting a larger and a smaller person, you should benefit the larger. This sizeism is clearly absurd.

Objection 2: A Markosian-style view on which there are brute facts about composition can say that there is only entity where I am, and the other clouds of particles do not compose an entity.

Response: Yes, but while that counts as materialism, it doesn’t count as physicalism. It adds to the fundamental ontology something beyond what physical science talks about, namely entities that are brutely composed. Moreover, presumably persons are causes. So the story adds to physicalism additional causes.

Objection 3: Nobody can say that there was a sharp time at which I came into existence.

Response: It’s easy for the dualist to say it. I come into existence when my soul comes into existence, joined to some bit of matter. There is no vagueness as to when this happens, but of course the details are not empirically knowable.

Literature and science

I think we learn at least as much about ourselves as persons from literature as from science. This is surprising if physicalism is true.

Gaining and losing personhood?

1. Love (of the relevant sort) is appropriately only a relation towards a person.

2. Someone appropriately has an unconditional love for another human.

3. One can only appropriately have an unconditional R for an individual if the individual cannot cease to have the features that make R appropriate towards them.

4. Therefore, at least one human is such that they cannot cease to be a person. (1–3)

5. If at least one human is such that they cannot cease to be a person, then all humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person.

6. If all humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person, then it is impossible for a non-person to become a human person.

7. All humans are such that they cannot cease to be a person. (4,5)

8. It is impossible for a non-person to become a human person. (6,7)

9. Any normal human fetus can become a human person.

10. Therefore, any normal human fetus is a person. (8,9)

(I think this holds of non-normal human fetuses as well, but that’ll take a bit more argument.)

It’s important here to distinguish the relevant sort of love—the intrinsically interpersonal kind—from other things that are analogously called love, but might perhaps better be called, say, liking or affection, which one can have towards a non-person.

I think the most controversial premises are 2 and 9. Against 2, I could imagine someone who denies 7 insisting that the most that is appropriate is to love someone on the condition of their remaining a person. But I still think this is problematic. Those who deny 7 presumably do so in part because they think that some real-world conditions like advanced Alzheimer’s rob us of our personhood. But now consider the repugnance of wedding vows that promise to love until death or damage to mental function do part.

Standing against 9 would be “constitution views” on which, normally, human fetuses become human animals, and these animals constitute but are not identical with human persons. These are ontologies on which two distinct things sit in my chair, I and the mammal that constitutes me, ontologies on which we are not mammals. Again, this is not very plausible, but it is a not uncommon view among philosophers.

Infinite value

1. All persons have infinite value.
2. Nothing in the universe other than persons has infinite value.
3. There was a first person in the universe.
4. Everything in the universe has a cause.
5. The first person in the universe wasn’t caused by a person in the universe.
6. Nothing with finite value can cause something with infinite value.
7. So, something not in the universe and with infinite value caused the first person in the universe.

I am not confident of premise (1).

Physicalism, persons, fission and eliminativism

People are philosophically unhappy about nonlocality in quantum mechanics. It is interesting to me that there is an eerily similar nonlocality on standard psychological theories of personal identity. For on those theories:

1. You survive if your memories survive in one living person.

2. You perish if your memories fission between more than one living person.

Now imagine that your brain is frozen, the data from it is destructively read, and then sent to two different stations, A and B, located in opposite directions five light minutes away from your original brain. At each station, a coin is simultaneously flipped (say, in the rest frame of your original brain). If it’s heads (!), the data is put into a freshly cloned brain in a vat, and if it’s tails, the data is deleted.

On a psychological theory, if both coins land heads you perish by (2). But if exactly one coin lands heads, you survive at that station. So whether you exist at one station depends on what happens simultaneously (according to one frame) at a station ten light minutes away.

Note, however, that this is not explicable via quantum nonlocality, because quantum nonlocality depends on entanglement, and there is no relevant entanglement in this thought experiment. It would be a nonlocality beyond physics.

I think one lesson here is that ostensibly physicalist or physicalist-friendly theories of persons or minds can end up sounding oddly dualist. For if dualism were true, it wouldn’t be utterly surprising if facts about where your soul reappears could have a faster-than-light dependence on far away events, since souls aren’t governed by the laws of physics. Similarly, on functionalism plus psychological theories of personal identity, you could move between radically different physical embodiments or even between a physical embodiment and a nonphysical realization. That, too, sounds rather like what you would expect dualism to say.

If I were a physicalist, I would perhaps be inclined to be drawn by these observations towards eliminativism about persons. For these observations suggest that even physicalist pictures of the person may be too deeply influenced by the dualist roots of philosophical and theological reflection on personhood. If these roots are seen as intellectually corrupt by the physicalist, then it should be somewhat attractive to deny the existence of persons.

What does it mean for persons to have infinite value?

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

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

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

We can now define:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6. A person has infinitely more value than a dollar

or:

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

We might try for something more daring, though:

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

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

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

Quasi-divinization and love

When we deeply love someone, we are apt to raise them to a quasi-divine status in our hearts.

If naturalism is right, this is misguided, for the evolved clouds of particles that are the people we love do not in fact have any quasi-divine status.

If theism is right, then this quasi-divinization could well be appropriate: for persons participate in God in such a way that they are in God’s image and likeness. But although not necessarily misguided, the quasi-divinization is dangerous, lest it cross the line into idolatry. (See C. S. Lewis’s Four Loves.)

I think that the theistic outlook on the quasi-divinization in love better fits with the plausible observation that this kind of deep love is sometimes both laudable and yet still morally dangerous, while on the naturalistic outlook, it is merely misguided.

On a twist on too-many-thinkers arguments

One of the ways to clinch a too-many-thinkers argument (say, Merricks’ argument against perdurantism, or Olson’s argument for animalism) is to say that the view results in an odd sceptical worry: one doesn’t know which of the many thinkers one is. For instance, if both the animal and the person think, how can you know that you are the animal and not the person: it seems you should have credence 1/2 in each.

I like too-many-thinkers arguments. But I’ve been worried about this response to the sceptical clinching: When the animal and the person think words like “I am a person”, the word “I” refers to the person, even when used by the animal, and hence both think the truth. In other words, “I” means something like: the person colocated with the the thinker/speaker.

But I think I have a good response to this response. It would be a weird limitation on our language if it did not allow speaker or thinker self-reference. Even if in fact “I” means the person colocated with the the thinker/speaker, we should be able to stipulate another pronoun, “I*”, one that refers just to the thinker/speaker. And it would be absurd to think that one not be able to justifiably assert “I* am a person.”

Can free will be grounded in quantum mechanics?

Robert Kane famously physicalistically grounds free will in quantum events in the brain. Free choice, on Kane’s view, is constituted by rational deliberation involving conflicting motivational structures with a resolution by an indeterministic causal process—a causal process that Kane thinks is in fact physical.

Here is a problem. Suppose Kane’s view is true. But now imagine a possible world with a physics that is like our quantum physics, but where panpsychism is true. The particles are conscious, and some of them engage in libertarian free choices, with chances of choices exactly matching up with what quantum mechanics predicts. The world still has people with brains, in addition to particle-sized people. The people with brains have particles that are persons in their brains. Moreover, it turns out that those indeterministic causal processes in the brains that constitute free choice are in fact the free actions of the particle-sized people in the breains.

All of Kane’s conditions for freedom will be satisfied by the people with brains. For the only relevant difference is that the quantum-style causal processes are choice processes (of the particle people). But these processes are just as indeterministic as in our world, and it’s the indeterminism that matters.

But the actions of the brain possessors in that world wouldn’t be free, because they would be under the control of the particle people in the brains. We could even suppose, if we like, that the particle people know about brains and want to direct the big people in some particular direction.

One could add to Kane’s account the further condition that the indeterministic causal processes in the brain are not constituted by the free choices of another person. But this seems ad hoc, and it is not clear why this one particular way for the indeterministic causal processes to be constituted is forbidden while any other way for them to be constituted is acceptable. The details of how quantum indeterministic processes work, as long as they are truly indeterministic and follow the quantum statistics, should not matter for free will.

This problem applies to any physicalist account on which free choices are grounded in quantum processes.

There is a way out of the problem. One could accept a pair of Aristotelian dicta:

1. All persons are substances.

2. No substance is a part of another substance.

But it is not clear whether the acceptance of these dicta is plausible apart from the fuller Aristotelian metaphysics which holds that all substances are partially made of non-physical forms. In other words, it is not clear that acceptance of (1) and (2) can be well motivated within a physicalist metaphysics.

The sacredness of the individual

There is a deontic prohibition on killing innocent people. But in general I think there is no similar deontic prohibition on destroying communities. For instance, there seems to be no deontic prohibition on a government dissolving a village or a city. Indeed, the reasons the state would need to have for such dissolution would have to be grave, but not outlandishly so. The state could permissibly intentionally dissolve a village or a city to end a war, but could not permissibly intentionally kill an innocent for the same end.

One might think this means that individuals are more valuable than the communities they compose. But we shouldn’t think that in general to be true, either. For instance, if a foreign invader were to threaten to dissolve a city without however killing anyone there, and the citizens could repel the invader at an expected cost of, say, six defenders’ and six attackers’ lives, it would be reasonable for the city to conscript its citizens to repel the invader. Thus the value of the shared life of the citizens is worth sacrificing some individual lives to uphold. But it is still not permissible to intentionally kill these innocent civilians.

I think it’s not that persons are more valuable than the villages and cities they compose, but rather they are sacred.

It is worth noting that where a community is sacred (two potential examples: sacramental marriages; God’s chosen people), there could very plausibly be a deontic prohibition on dissolution.

More and more I think the sacred is an ethical category, not just a theological one.

Person is not a natural kind

1. God is not a member of any natural kind.

2. If person is a natural kind, then every person is a member of a natural kind.

3. God is a person.

4. So, person is not a natural kind.