by Oliver Waters
If you were a medieval peasant in the year 1323 AD, would you have believed that slavery was morally permissible?
The odds are that you would have. After all, most people at the time saw slavery as a permanent fact of life, not an abomination that ought to be abolished. But it’s very tempting to assume that you, as a rational, thoughtful individual, could have transcended your historical setting to grasp its transcendent wrongness.
To do so however, you would have needed to reject the mainstream beliefs of your society. You would have had to think through the issue via first principles. This would include developing a coherent theory that accounted for human moral equality – a tall order, given the bulk of humanity didn’t manage this feat for another few hundred years.
It can be fun to pass judgment on the silliness of past generations, but the real work of moral philosophy is figuring out which ideas we take for granted today that future generations will look back on with the same contempt as we do for slavery.
After all, as Mark Twain warned:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
With that in mind, here’s a moral claim that’s obviously true, according to most people alive today:
It is always morally wrong to kill an innocent human being.
When we look at this claim more closely however, from first principles, it appears to be not only false, but a dogma responsible for a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering.
Many of you may already partially agree, perhaps regarding the issue of abortion. An unborn human foetus is clearly human, genetically speaking. Yet many believe it is morally legitimate to terminate a foetus’ life under certain circumstances. You may be keenly aware that banning abortions causes a huge amount of harm, mostly to the women who are forced to carry the foetus to term.
But others think that abortion is indeed tantamount to murder, and therefore a grave moral evil. In other words, they attribute a ‘right to life’ to a human foetus.
To find clarity on this issue, and many more, we need to delve deeper into what kinds of things have what kinds of rights. A sensible minimum requirement is that they are sentient or conscious to some degree. If they can suffer, then they certainly have an interest in not suffering. My refrigerator, for instance, has zero interests, because it has zero experiences.
Having an interest in something is a pre-condition to having a right against that interest being frustrated by another moral agent. I say ‘moral agent’ because your rights can only be respected by beings that have the capacity to make choices according to reasons. You cannot demand of a wolf that it respect your rights, because it is not the kind of creature who can.
Some people think that if a creature can suffer in a basic sense, then it has a right to life. This is what motivates many vegetarians or vegans to avoid killing animals, even painlessly, for food. Most of us however don’t think that you should go to prison for 20-to-life for killing a chicken. We think doing so is fine so long as the chicken is not subjected to unnecessary suffering.
So does a chicken have a right to life, or not?
As the philosopher Michael Tooley pointed out in a 1972 paper, a being can only logically enjoy a right to something if it has the capacity to desire or value that thing. While human beings can typically desire to continue to exist into the future as temporally extended selves, no other known animal on Earth can. Other animals simply lack the cognitive machinery to imagine themselves alive tomorrow, let alone next year. Note that this ‘self-awareness’ has nothing to do with recognising your own physical body momentarily in a mirror, which many animals can do. Rather, it is about appreciating that you are a being with a persisting psychological identity.
Obviously, other animals possess various desires that facilitate their survival. They want to eat, to hunt, to sleep and to mate, just as we do. But while their minds can represent basic categories like ‘prey’, ‘kin’, and ‘danger’ – they cannot entertain the concept of their own existence, or fear death as the end of it. They lack recursive languages, with flexible combinations of objects and ‘nesting’ that is unique to human beings. As researcher Angela Friederici has pointed out in her survey of the human language faculty, the ability to bind words into a linguistic sequence is essentially non-existent in the chimpanzee, our closest intellectual cousin in the animal kingdom.
This means that other creatures don’t have the same relation to their future selves as human beings typically do, which has deep moral implications. The philosopher J. David Velleman argued that the moments of well-being that make up a cow’s life, for instance, are non-cumulable (they cannot be simply summed up) since the cow cannot conceive of the relations among, and the collective meaning of, these moments. You therefore cannot speak of the lost future well-being of that cow by having its life cut short, because those future moments are not psychologically integrated with its past ones.
Because other animals cannot conceptualise death, Tooley argued, they can have no interest or desire in avoiding it, which might then be frustrated by a person who chooses to kill them.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus made a fascinating argument along these lines when he said that death is not bad for any creature, as it merely extinguishes the desire for life, rather than frustrates it. By analogy, when we cease being hungry, we don’t think of this as a bad thing. Rather, we just cease to desire food. Similarly, Epicurus argued, if you lose your life, you simply have no more desires that could be frustrated. So how have you been wronged?
This seems true enough for cows. When you kill a cow, you terminate all the physiological processes that constitute its desires. You destroy its interests, rather than frustrate them. The contents of its thoughts are all bound up with its experiences – once all experience disappears, so does that content.
But human beings have ideas, beliefs, goals and plans. These are abstract mental representations that aren’t reducible to the hardware of the brain or body. This is analogous to your computer having software as well as hardware: the information in the system is not identical to the transistors that happen to be processing it.
Now of course, if you destroy your computer completely, you will lose all the information on it as well. Doesn’t the same apply to a human being? If your brain is destroyed – so is all the information that made you who you were as a person. But here we need to distinguish between physically instantiated information – the bits and bytes that exist on your PC or the specific patterns of information in your brain – and abstractions themselves.
Consider the difference between numerals and numbers. We tend to assume that these are identical things, because we generally use the terms interchangeably. But they’re not. ‘Numerals’ are the physical markings of ‘1, 2, 3’ etc that we use to perform calculations on a notepad. ‘Numbers’, on the other hand, are the entities that we take these numerals to represent. We assume that numbers actually exist, and that we are trying (fallibly) to accurately represent their properties.
Of course, numbers don’t exist in the same way that chickens or atoms exist. It’s more that we can’t seem to imagine possible worlds without them playing an explanatory role, thus we can’t help but think of them as being ‘real’. The same goes for ideas or abstractions more generally. Your desire to ‘live a good life’ can be characterised in two quite different ways. First as a specific, physical manifestation of neuronal patterns in your brain. But secondly as the abstract concept of ‘living a good life’ that exists whether or not you are currently representing it.
Humans uniquely have projects: plans that extend beyond the physical processes of their own bodies. The contents of these projects extend out into the world, and so don’t disappear when the body does. All of a cow’s desires can be satisfied ultimately by stimulation of the relevant brain reward areas. But if I want an orphanage to be built, this goal cannot be accomplished by sticking an electrode in a certain part of my brain and dialling up the current.
Of course, many of our fellow creatures are engaged in extended projects, from building complicated nests to performing elaborate mating rituals. But nowhere in their brains do they represent these processes. They are simply programmed to enact a sequence of actions that combine to produce something complex, like a spider’s web.
The abstract projects that we humans represent in our minds don’t have to be complicated or grandiose – they can be the simplest act of generosity for someone we love, or just reading a good book. The point is that we intend to further grow and enrich our mental representations, the contents of which are not reducible to the fleshy brain matter that embody them.
This is why it makes sense to talk about continuing on someone’s dreams or projects long after they’re gone. Those unfinished projects still exist, in the abstract realm. As goals, they continue to be frustrated long after the person’s death.
Such goals are what the philosopher Bernard Williams termed ‘categorical desires’ and are to be distinguished from ‘conditional desires’. Categorical desires are those that are not conditional upon being alive. For instance, the desire that your children survive into adulthood is a categorical one. You want your children to survive whether or not you do. This desire therefore can provide motivation and justification for you to continue to live, in order to care for them. A conditional desire on the other hand, such as ‘if I continue to live, I don’t want to be in pain’, doesn’t by itself provide a reason to continue living.
Philosophers like Christopher Belshaw have argued that only humans can have categorical desires. This is because the structure of such a desire is a specified transformation of the world, which is not tethered to the person’s egocentric perspective. My cat cannot desire ‘world peace’ or the building of bridge. He cannot desire the objective state of affairs that he be content with the food that he has been given (lamentably).
In summary, it is humanity’s unique capacity to mentally represent abstractions that makes it the case that they are wronged when painlessly killed against their will. And conversely, the lack of this capacity is what makes it not murder to kill a chicken or an unborn foetus.
It’s also, much more controversially, why it’s not murder (morally speaking) to terminate the lives of human beings suffering severe cognitive impairments. In the philosophical literature, ‘severe’ or ‘radical’ impairments means having psychological capacities that are limited to those of the most cognitively sophisticated non-human animals., i.e., lacking language or abstract thought. Millions of human beings around the world are in this category, perhaps suffering late-stage dementia or other severe cognitive disabilities, congenital or acquired.
The idea that they are human and therefore have an absolute right to life underpins the current laws that prevent the ending of their lives, even if their carers and guardians believe this would be the best and most compassionate course of action.
But the assumption that belonging to the species ‘human’ automatically means that you are a ‘person’ with a right to life is just crude ‘speciesism’. It is to dogmatically favour your own species over others, instead of affording rights to beings based on their actual physical and psychological properties.
The fundamental problem with any such ‘group-based’ account of moral status and rights is that it assigns them to an individual based on the attributes of other individuals. As the philosopher Jeff McMahan has put it, the notion that facts about the nature of some individuals determine how other individuals that lack that nature should be treated is a form of ‘moral alchemy’.
Calling someone with no capacity for rational thought or language a person with an equal right to life definitely sounds compassionate, but the effects can be devastating. In many cases such human beings are needlessly suffering, as are their carers. The ethicist Peter Singer has written extensively about this kind of harm, and provides thoughtful, nuanced arguments for how different cases ought to be considered.
Of course, we always need safeguards to protect such human beings from malicious actors, such as inheritance-grabbing relatives or ideologues, who may be motivated to lie about their mental capacities for personal gain. This means that evaluations of such capacities should always be done by respected, independent scientific experts, with the full cooperation of family and friends.
It should also be made perfectly clear that just because such human beings don’t have a right to life does not imply that they should be harmed or killed. The exact same principle applies with our beloved pets – the fact that my cat shouldn’t be kept alive at all costs with taxpayer funds does not mean that I, as his guardian, should put him down.
But any guardian, by definition, bears the responsibility to make decisions on their dependent’s behalf. This includes whether their life is, all things considered, worth living. To abrogate that responsibility is to fail in one’s duties as a guardian, as the only one in the relationship who has the ability to make such decisions.
Moral theorising in the aftermath of the holocaust and other major atrocities of the 20th century has concerned itself primarily with expanding the circle of moral rights to cover more and more beings. While this was an understandable and necessary response to the horrific previous lack of proper attribution of rights, it was never coherent as a project of endless extrapolation. We will not achieve moral nirvana when all creatures on Earth enjoy the same moral status and rights. This is because particular rights attach to particular psychological capacities. Recognising this fact is a precondition for navigating our way safely through many great moral quandaries of our time.