Today's Guest Author: Mark Causey, M.Div., Ph.D
Teaches Philosophy and Liberal Studies at Georgia College & State University
Member: UU Congregation of Gwinnett (in Lawrenceville, GA).
Board of Trustees UU Animal Ministry
Philosophically speaking, inherent worth is contrasted with
instrumental worth. For something to
have instrumental worth indicates that it is valuable only as a means to an
end. Money has instrumental worth in
this sense. It is a means to an end
(i.e. the things I can purchase with it).
Money has no value except its current exchange value for goods and
services. For something to have inherent
worth means that it is valuable in and for itself. An entity with inherent worth is an end in
itself. Our first principle (as it currently
stands) concerning the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” is meant to
call attention to the fact that [human] persons (the dictionary presently
limits the term “person” to humans) are ends in themselves. It is meant to prohibit our usage of persons
as mere instruments, like tools and things, for our purposes. In Kant’s formulation, we should always treat
others as ends in themselves and never merely as a means to our own ends. Each person is his or her own unique center
of value. Slavery was a denial of the
inherent worth and dignity of the personhood of the slave. The slave was a person reduced to mere instrumental
value. UUs rightly rejected this
reduction of persons on moral grounds.
Of course the present first principle goes beyond merely prohibiting
slavery in that it also calls us positively towards and attitude of respect for
all persons regardless of the many differences that may exist between us. I will address the issue of equal worth below.
The question currently being posed by the First Principle
project is whether all beings, not
just human beings, have inherent worth.
To answer this question in the negative and to reserve inherent worth
for human persons only invites a further question: “On what grounds do we deny
inherent worth to other beings?” To
reply on the grounds that other beings are simply not human is to beg the
question. It doesn’t tell us why humans,
and only humans, have inherent worth
to begin with.
A large part of our inheritance from both classical western
philosophy and our Judeo-Christian past is the notion of the hierarchy of
values in terms of beings that Arthur Lovejoy dubbed the Great Chain of
Being. With God at the top and humans a
close second (or third if you are a medieval theologian and count angels as
second), then follow the animals, plants, and finally inanimate things like
rocks and dirt. It should of course be
noted that even within the human category, there was traditionally also a
hierarchy in terms of sex and race in which white males tended to count for
more than women who counted for more than slaves and so on. In Biblical terms this was cashed out through
the Genesis story of the separate and special act of the creation of humans as
distinct from the rest of creation. But
this worldview also belongs to the days of the geocentric universe, and few of
us take the Genesis creation myths to be literal, scientific accounts of the
origins of the universe. This sort of
hierarchical ranking of beings is out of touch with modern science. Ever since Darwin we have realized that
whatever differences exist between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom
are differences of degree not differences of kind. We all share a common biological ancestor.
But worldviews, especially when they favor our interests,
are hard to change. Humans have been set
apart and above the rest of nature on the basis of intelligence (rationality),
the possession of a soul, being moral, having language, and so on. Indeed, Descartes went so far as to claim
that only humans had minds and could feel pain.
Animals in his view were just very cleverly constructed automatons whose
shrieks of pain as they were being vivisected were just so many squeaks of
their cogs and springs. Recent advances
in our scientific understanding, especially the contributions of animal
ethology and cognitive ethology, have largely discredited all of the above
reasons given for human uniqueness. True
to Darwin’s early insights, recent science is continuing to blur the
distinction between human animals and the rest of the animal kingdom. The work of biologists and ethologists like
Marc Bekoff, Jonathan Balcombe, Frans De Waal, and Jane Goodall has
demonstrated a far greater degree of human/animal continuity than
discontinuity. These scientists, among
many others, are challenging us to expand our understanding of non-human
animals in terms of their amazing cognitive, emotional, and even moral
capacities.
The moral point,
however, is that whatever the real differences (of degree) between us, they are
morally irrelevant. Insofar as other animals are subjects of
their own lives with, as Tom Regan observes, a biography not just a biology,
they are not the sorts of things we can legitimately use as instruments for our
own purposes. Insofar as they have the
capacity to experience pain and suffering the generally accepted moral harm
principle states that we should never cause harm to another without a very good
reason. Because animals other than us
also care about their own lives and their lives can go better or worse for
them, they are very different from a tool fashioned for our use. If human pain and suffering counts at all
morally, then so does theirs. There is
no qualitative difference, no difference in kind. As Jeremy Bentham famously noted: “The
question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?”
The word being,
however, can also include more than just humans and other animals. It can also include other life forms like
plants or fungi. While these may not be
sentient beings like us (so there is here a difference in kind not just degree)
is there any reason to entirely exclude them from our circle of moral
concern? We do so at our own peril. We humans are latecomers to the world. As our seventh principle reminds us we are
merely members of an interdependent web.
As Aldo Leopold formulates it in his famous Land Ethic: “A land ethic
changes the role of Homo sapiens from
conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it...it implies
respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as
such.” The world into which we are born
is much older, complex, and complete than we are. We are just barely beginning to understand
the complex balance and intricacies of our planet’s ecosystems, which through
our ignorance and hubris we are rapidly destabilizing and destroying. It is the height of hubris on our part to
think that this world, billions and billions of years in the making, is simply
raw material put here for our use. But
if we assign to the rest of nature only instrumental worth, that is exactly
what we are saying.
One of the most common objections I hear when presenting or
talking about the First Principle Project is the objection that replacing the
word “person” with the word “being” now means that we are all the same. “Does that mean that a tapeworm or a
cockroach has exactly the same inherent value as a human being?!” What I believe has happened here is that the
objector has subconsciously inserted the word “equal” into the formulation of
the revised principle. What we are
saying is that we are “called to affirm and promote the inherent worth and
dignity of all beings.” What the
objector is hearing is that we are “called to affirm and promote the equal inherent worth and dignity of all
beings.” If every being has equal
inherent worth, does that mean I can no longer swat a mosquito? But the First Principle project is not
proposing to insert the word “equal” into the principle. It is quite natural for us to hear the word
“equal” here because it is implied (although not explicitly stated) in the
current wording of the principle. What we hear in the current first principle
is that all persons, regardless of race, sex, ability, identification, etc.,
have equal worth and dignity. We are so
used to fighting for the principle of equality amongst humans, as we should,
that we automatically transfer this notion to the proposed changed wording
including all beings.
Does acknowledging inherent worth in all beings necessarily
mean equal worth? After all, if all
beings have exactly the same worth, what justifies my use of any being even for
my own vital needs? I would have no
moral right to eat either a carrot or a cow.
I would have no right to cut down a tree to build my house. Or take an antibiotic to cure an
infection. We would arrive at a moral
dead-end in which no realistic action would really be possible. Even the deepest ecological vision, Arne
Naess’ Deep Ecology Movement, only proposes biospherical egalitarianism in principle allowing that “any
realistic praxis necessitates some killing, exploitation, and suppression.” All that the proposed principle change is
asking is for a paradigm shift in our thinking about the more-than-human world—a
shift away from anthropocentric instrumental value, towards an acknowledgement
and respect for inherent worth. It is a
call to expand our circle of moral concern and compassion beyond the limits of
our own species and to acknowledge the truth of our membership in the larger
life community that has value in its own right.
It had value before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene and it still does now.
We will still have to make difficult decisions as our
interests legitimately conflict with the interests of other beings. We do this amongst equal humans all the
time. What is different about the
acknowledgment of the inherent worth of the non-human world is that our human
interests will not (or at least should not) always automatically win. The world is not simply a stockpile of
resources for our exploitation. To
assert that simply because humans can—and have—dominated the rest of nature
that this justifies our attributing inherent worth only to humans is really
just another form of the “might makes right” argument that we would rightly
reject if applied in human affairs. Any
number of otherwise unacceptable acts could be justified on that argument.
The only way to justify the view that non-human nature has
only instrumental value, would be to establish some way in which humans are
separate from and independent of the rest of nature. Such a view was once commonly held and its
remnants are very much with us still (much like the view of white racial
superiority was once commonly accepted and its remnants are still all too much
with us still). But such a view flies in
the face of reason and science, and even our own deepest intuitions and
feelings. As a thought experiment try
this. Complete the following sentence:
“Only humans can ______.” Make sure you
complete the sentence in a way that qualifies every human being and no other
type of being. For example, “Only humans
can use language” won’t work because not all humans can use language (infants
and severely mentally challenged people cannot and some primates and even some
parrots can in a more robust way than simply repeating words or phrases). Now ask yourself if whatever you filled in
the blank with is a morally relevant
characteristic.
This is not at all to deny that humans are distinctive in
our advanced cognitive, linguistic, social, and moral capacities. But these
differences of degree do not in any way correspond to superiority in value. Difference here need not mean better—just
different. We do not treat more
intellectually advanced humans morally as having more inherent worth than the
rest of us. We would not, for instance,
condone the involuntary use of lower IQ human beings in painful medical
experiments in order to find a cure for a higher IQ individual on the basis of
IQ differences alone. Animals and plants
have capacities we do not possess. We
cannot echo-locate like a dolphin or a bat nor photosynthesize like a
plant. Humans are not the sole bearers
of value.
So how to decide when our interests conflict? The Great Chain of Being makes it easy. Humans win. Every time. But if we reject the
notion of the chain in favor of an interdependent web, what can guide our
decisions? I would suggest that there
are some morally significant factors to consider: factors like sentience (the
ability to feel pains and pleasures), consciousness, and sociality. Vital interests trump non-vital
interests. Living things have more at
stake than inanimate objects. It is hard
to imagine doing a moral harm to a rock.
Easier to imagine harming a plant.
Easier still to imagine harming an animal or a human. Conscious beings, animals human and
non-human, have a sense of self that persists over time and interests in how
their lives go. Social beings have more
complex capacities for relationships and experiences. It means that a harm to a member of the
society causes pain to other members.
For example the death of a social being also affects the others in that
society who mourn their loss (humans are not the only animals to mourn our
dead—elephants for one do so as well). Is
this just another Great Chain of Being worded differently? I don’t think so. There is nothing here to imply that humans
must always come out on top. For
example, in the choice of whether to eat the cow or the carrot the cow gets
greater consideration because of the morally relevant facts that cows are
sentient, conscious, and social beings.
As Alan Watts wryly observed, he was a vegetarian because “cows scream
louder than carrots.” But what about the
human’s interest in eating the cow (because they really like the taste of a
good steak)? It loses because the
non-vital interest (taste preference) does not override the cow’s vital
interest in remaining alive. This blog
entry is not the place to work out all the ethical issues (as if I could
anyway). My point is simply this:
recognizing the inherent worth of other-than-human beings does not commit us to
a moral dead end or an impossible practical position of non-action. It simply requires us to recognize at a minimum that the rest of nature has
value which does not depend on what use humans can put it to. It simply asks us to make a more humble, as
well as a more ethically, intellectually and scientifically defensible
assessment of our place in the grand scheme of things. Spiritually it calls us to expand our circles
of compassion by opening our hearts and our arms to embrace the more-than-human
world in which we live. That’s all we’re
really asking.
