Here’s a speculative theory of persons:
- A person is an individual of a sort that pursues the good as such.
What’s interesting on this theory of persons is that mental life is not directly a part of the definition. For pursuit as such does not require a mind: plants pursue particular goods like nutrition and reproduction (but while they pursue particular goods, they don’t pursue the good as such).
I conjecture that pursuit of the good as such requires a mind and will. If this is right, then that brings my teleological definition closer to intuitive accounts of persons. Interestingly, though, I also conjecture that pursuit of the good does not require a conscious mind—just a mind with intention, intentionality and intensionality (funny how different the meanings of these three similar-sounding words are). Since personhood implies dignity, it follows that dignity does not require consciousness. (An important observation for thinking about people in persistent vegetative states.)
But this is all super conjectural.
What if it turns out that one can pursue the good as such without mind? Should I then modify the definition of a person to replace “pursues” with “intentionally pursues”?
I think it depends on whether the kind of being that pursues the good as such without mind still has the kind of dignity that persons have. If so, then I am happy to leave my definition unchanged. But if dignity requires mind, and mind doesn’t follow from pursuit of the good, then I will insert “intentionally” into my account.
As I said, this is all speculative. But one thing I am fairly confident of: being the sort of individual that pursues the good as such is a necessary condition for being a person.
An interesting consequence is this. One could have a kind of being with advanced agency, problem-solving ability, and abstract thought, without its being a person. Indeed, I think such a being might even have the abstract concept of the good, but if it wasn’t of a sort to pursue the instances of that concept as such, it wouldn’t be a person.
If I am right at least about the necessary condition, I think we make some progress on the fine-tuning argument for theism. One of the objections to the fine-tuning argument for theism is this: “Why should we think that a personal designer would want there to be life?” Well, if a person is the sort of being that pursues the good in general, the good as such, and if life is eminently valuable, it is not astronomically unlikely that a personal designer would want there to be life. And given how ridiculously narrow some of the life-compatible ranges in the fine-tuning argument are, “not astronomically unlikely” is all we need.
5 comments:
Which part of your analysis rules out cases where a being is teleologically completed only by another directing it, where that other who is directing it completes it by directing it toward the good as such? I mean, a being (like maybe a plant really is) whose own internal principles somehow *invite* its being so ordered and directed, and where its full perfection requires this?
Hello, Dr. Pruss.
What would you think of an argument starting with two main premises:
1. If a contingent fact C has a contingent explanation, then there is a possible world in which C has a different explanation.
2. At least one such alternative explanation is itself explained.
I think with some subtraction-style arguments, you could derive that there is a world where every contingent fact is explained, and then make a standart Leibnizian argument.
How can we establish that dolphins lack the capacity to pursue the good as such, rather than merely particular goods? Their inability to intelligibly communicate this capacity to us does not establish its absence.
If we limit ourselves to standard empirical methods, we can't.
There might be a religious argument: it seems from the Bible that humans have been given a dominion over earth's non-human animals of a sort that would be unfitting if any of earth's non-human animals were persons.
There is also a defeasible argument from moral intuition. Many of us have the moral intuition that if the only food available to feed our children was dolphins, we would be morally required to kill dolphins and feed them to our children. This intuition would conflict with more deeply held moral intuitions if dolphins were persons. So, we have reason to think that dolphins aren't persons. (I suspect that this argument also depends on some kind of supernaturalist assumptions on which our moral intuitions are at least partly engineered by a being that knows what moral status dolphins have.)
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