Here’s another stab and replying through the comment box; let’s see if it works this time.

The best place for you to go for a reply is Chapter 4, section 2 of Thompson’s essay (pp. 33ff), in which he discusses the irreducibility of natural-historical categoricals to other more familiar kinds of categoricals. I’ve tried to give some glosses of the reasons, and I’ll try to give some more, but of course he has more space and more talent than I do, and it was his idea to begin with. But here’s a few of the reasons he suggests to think that your analysis of natural-history categoricals won’t actually pan out.

1. Determining what counts as “intervention.” First, the attempt to finesse problems by attaching a qualification of “without (serious) human interference” (either inside or outside the scope of the quantifier — I’m not sure which you meant, but I’m not sure it matters, either). You’re right that I doubt whether “interference” can be cashed out in terms that are independent of the sort of natural life-cycle categoricals that you’re trying to use the notion of “interference” to explain. Thus Thompson: “[T]he question what counts as [‘intervention’] is surely to be answered, in any given case by appeal to the system of natural historical judgments with the relevant kind as subject. And so we cannot simply take such a category for granted and then employ it in an account of our form of thinking. —If the mother bobcat leaves her young alone, they will wither and rot; if she nurses them they will develop thus and so. In whichcase, though, do we find ‘intervention’, and in which rather ‘what happens, ceteris paribus’? No one will insist that the mother’s nursing be viewed as the intervention of something alien, from without, into an otherwise inviolate cub-system set to evolve in its own direction. But to deny it is just a more stilted way of expressing the thought that bobcats are not to be compared with caterpillars—they do not strike out alone and set themselves straightaway to munching. No, ‘the mother nurses them for several weeks’; I heard about it on a nature documentary.”

You might object that my quotation here isn’t responsive to your condition, which depends on human intervention specifically (so bobcat intervention might not cause problems). But there are certainly cases in which serious human intervention (if “intervention” means anything other than the sense that transparently depends on the aristotelian categoricals themselves) is precisely what makes aristotelian categoricals true. For example, there are aristotelian categoricals that are true of humans: for example, humans master language at an early age, but this would hardly be so if not for massive efforts on the part of other human beings towards babies and young children (as both the case of feral children, and also the fact that the overwhelming majority of babies would simply die if abandoned, demonstrate). You could try to change it to an “alien species” criterion instead of referring to humans particularly, but there are also aristotelian categoricals that are true of domesticated plants and animals; fig trees reproduce by grafting (which is somethign we do), wheat grows in such-and-such a way and ripens in the fall (thanks to tilled soil), domestic cats like to be touched by humans (but feral cats don’t), etc. (And the same could be said of any symbiotic pair of species you cared to pick; for what it’s worth, I think you’re right that “rats have fleas” is true as an aristotelian categorical — that’s part of the reason rats are such loathsome creatures! But that’s because fleas are a permanent and salient feature of the rat’s distinctive form of life, not because some percentage of rats do or don’t have fleas.)

I have some other worries about this criterion, but they’re mostly more trifling, so let’s move on to…

2. Semantic problems with the statistical quantifier. One of the first problems with an attempt at a statistical reading of the quantifier, even with the sort of qualifications you’ve suggested, is that any particular value you pick for the statistical level needed to satisfy the quantified formula is likely to be wrong in some cases. Examples (1)-(5) might plausibly be thought to imply that most, or the overwhelming majority of domestic cats, coyotes, humans, male and female emperor penguins, etc. etc. But that’s not true of all true aristotelian categoricals. For example, the mayfly breeds shortly before dying. I know this is true; I saw it in a nature documentary. However, as a matter of statistical fact, most mayflies die long before breeding at all. (Similarly leatherback sea turtles, to take a nearer cousin of ours.) You could try to patch this up by adding the qualification, “most S’s that reach the appropriate stage of their life exhibit trait T,” but of course this obviously does nothing more than relocate the problem to “appropriate stage of their life.” (And of course you cannot define it as “the stage in their life at which the overwhelming majority of them exhibit trait T,” since that is as tightly circular an analysis as you could hope for.)

3. Logical problems with the statistical quantifier. There are also some straightforward, if technical, logical reasons not to read “The cat has four legs” as “Most cats,” “The overwhelming majority of cats have four legs (… when such-and-such defeaters aren’t operative …).” As Thompson points out, aristotelian categoricals support inferences that statistical generalizations don’t; in this respect they are more like universal than statistical generalizations. For example, just as “All Greeks are European” and “All Greeks are mortal” jointy entail “All Greeks are both European and mortal,” so also “The domestic cat has four legs” and “The domestic cat has a tail” jointly entail “The domestic cat has both four legs and a tail.” But if you tried to do the same thing with a statistical generalization you would be committing a fallacy; “most Americans are white” and “most Americans are female” don’t jointly entail “most Americans are both white and female.” (The same is true for “overwhelming majority;” due to the size of the majorities that are usually required to be “overwhelming,” concrete examples might take several conjunctions before they fail to preserve overwhelmingness, but the important thing is that they can fail to preserve it eventually. Whereas with universal generalizations and aristotelian categoricals you can preserve the same level of generality no matter how high you stack the conjunctions.)

My previous guest post on the argument from marginal cases got a number of provocative comments that I’d like to reply to; but I’m having some baffling and frustrating trouble with the comment form. So until I’ve gotten that sorted out, I’ll use this space to expand on one of the points that I wanted to make anyway: the use that my argument makes of Michael Thompson’s notion of “aristotelian categoricals,” such as “The domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur” or “Humans walk on two legs” or (what’s important for the argument) “Humans are rational creatures.”

Here’s an attempted gloss of the argument that may express things more clearly than I did at first. I used Thompson’s notion to argue that appeals to species normality can do more than ethical vegetarians (such as James Rachels) seem to think that they can do, since they seem to take the species normality argument to amount to nothing more than an arbitrary appeal to the pure Cambridge relation of being a member of the same taxon as other members who are rational. Of course that has precious little ethical bearing by itself, but what I suggested is that there’s a much more charitable reading of the species-normality appeal on offer, in light of Thompson’s aristotelian categoricals. It’s not that “Humans are rational creatures” asserts that all humans are rational (as might have been said before “marginal cases” were introduced as a counterexample), or that it asserts “many (most) humans are rational creatures” (as Rachels and others seem to have misinterpreted it). Rather, “humans are rational creatures” asserts a teleological fact, about the form of life that is proper to creatures of the human kind, to the effect that each individual human is supposed to be able to exercise certain forms of rationality just as we are supposed to have two legs and cats are supposed to have four. I suggested that this makes an important difference, and the difference that it makes might help (1) explain the special moral standing that anti-vegetarians attribute to individual “marginal case” humans but not to individual normal animals, and (2) undermine Rachels’ and others’ attempt to offer hypothetical animals with freak intelligence as a counterexample. For the details, see the post.

Anyway, this brings me to a couple of comments by Alex. First:

Firstly, why does the fact that the paradigm cases of an object-type have a certain property commit us to saying that all objects of that type have that property? (e.g because paradigmatic humans are morally relevant, all humans are morally relevant) – won’t this commit you to (for example) the idea that all humans have the property of ‘having two arms’ because paradigmatic humans do?

The best response here is just a clarification of the argument. That you shouldn’t butcher and eat infants, or the severely mentally retarded, or the comatose, is one of the unargued premises of all the arguments, shared between by imaginary interlocutors. I don’t think it needs argument; it’s one of the background conditions of having a reasonable theory of ethics that you believe this, not something that a theory of ethics should have to convince you of.

What does need argument is the claim that there’s a difference between “marginal case” humans and normal animals that would explain extending that moral standing to the humans while denying it to the animals. The argument for that isn’t based on a general principle that “Paradigmatic humans have P” entails “All humans have P.” (I freely concede that for any reasonable candidate for the morally relevant sort of rationality, there will be many humans in abnormal or transitory circumstances who don’t have it.) The inference that I do want to endorse is that if “the adult human has P” is true as an aristotelian categorical, then “all humans have a natural capacity for P” is true as a universal generalization (for some important sense of the phrase “natural capacity”). Not all humans have two arms, but all humans do have the natural capacity (in some sense) for having two arms; that’s why armlessness is a tragedy for you but not for a trout, and that’s why a human with the intelligence of a cow is thought of as having a profound disability, but a cow with the intelligence of a cow is not: because the one is a case of having a rational faculty that’s damaged (perhaps irreparably), while the other is a case of not having any rational faculty at all.

Of course, at best this only explains more fully what the appeal to aristotelian categoricals and teleological talk about the human form of life is supposed to do. Which brings us to Alex’s second remark:

But the notion of “aristotelian categoricals”/”telos” conflicts wildly with a modern scientific worldview, and we can hardly justify redeeming it because it achieves some cuddly ethical conclusions. (Second key question) Don’t you have a give an independent reason to believe in these categoricals first, and then you may be entitled to refer to them to establish conclusions elsewhere.

… to which there are a couple of things to say.

First, I didn’t intend my post to provide compelling reasons to reject the ethical vegetarian position (indeed, I accept a form of it, so a fortiori I don’t think there are compelling reasons to reject all forms of it). But I do think that the arguments in favor of the position aren’t as good as they could be, and that the devotion that nearly all ethical vegetarians show to the argument from marginal cases is misguided. One of my reasons for thinking that is that I think there are alternatives on offer that start from philosophical premises that most ethical vegetarians simply haven’t (yet) demonstrated an understanding of. Maybe those premises are wrong (I don’t think they are, but I don’t think they entail the anti-vegetarian conclusion, either), but ethical vegetarians will have to recognize the premises and give reasons to doubt them, or to doubt the inference drawn from them, before any progress will have been made. A full explanation and defense of the independent reasons for Thompson’s claims is better found in Thompson’s essay (there’s also a good discussion in Philippa Foot’s book Natural Goodness), and was in any case beyond the scope of the post.

Second, though, I do hope to use the rest of this post to take up the subject anew, and offer at least a sketch for the defense of Thompson’s claims about “aristotelian categoricals” and about the sort of teleological talk that go along with them. Partly because I think that something like Thompson’s picture is necessary for any kind of reasonable account of the nature of goodness (and thus for the foundations of any reasonable ethical theory). But the work that aristotelian categoricals will do for you in ethical theory is just a side benefit, not the primary reason for accepting them into our philosophical picture. The primary reason is that statements such as these:

1. The domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur.

2. Coyotes hunt small game.

3. During the mating season, the male emperor penguin warms the egg while the female returns to the sea to feed.

4. Humans are rational animals.

5. Humans are the only known animals that use language, but not the only animals that use tools.

… are all both meaningful and true, and commonplace bits of what has sometimes been called “natural history.” But it’s hard — indeed, I think, impossible — to give a good account of what they truly say by squeezing them into any the familiar set of logical quantifiers, whether existential, universal, or statistical. A good analysis of (1)-(5) needs to do at least two things: (i) it needs to be materially adequate (i.e., it needs to provide a gloss that’s true when they are true and false when they are false); and (ii) it needs to be semantically serious (i.e., it needs to provide a gloss of the statements, not some other statements that are considered easier to deal with).

But if you interpret (1) to mean “all domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur,” then your interpretation is not even materially adequate; after all, that’s not true (just ask poor Tibbles, who has been shaved and maimed in a tragic accident). If you interpret it as “some domestic cats,” “many domestic cats,” “most domestic cats,” or even “the overwhelming majority of domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur,” then that will be something true, but it won’t be semantically serious. It doesn’t capture all of what is meant by the categorical statement, and you can see this by considering some parallel cases: some cats are blind, many cats are tabbies, either most cats are male or most cats are female — I don’t know which — and the overwhelming majority of cats are vaccinated against common diseases. But “The domestic cat is blind,” “the domestic cat is a tabby,” “the domestic cat is male,” “the domestic cat is female,” “the domestic cat is vaccinated against common diseases” are all quite obviously false. Material adequacy breaks down in the parallel cases because semantic seriousness wasn’t maintained in the original case.

So how can we understand categoricals like (1)-(5)? Well, you could decide that we can’t, and toss them out as not precise enough for the uses of a logical or scentific language. That, though, would seem to me to be a gross error about the nature of logic and its relation to everyday language, of the sort exposed by Wittgenstein when he said:

F. P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a ‘normative science’. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. —But if you say that our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum. —Whereas logic does not treat of language—or of thought—in the sense in which a natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the word “ideal” is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper sentence looked like. (Philosophical Investigations, § 81)

If we take seriously our responsibility to get everyday language right, rather than discarding it in favor of the will-o’-the-wisp of an “ideal” language, what sorts of understandings might be on offer? Well, Thompson’s suggestion is that we can understand the sorts of natural-historical statements such as (1)-(5) by reference to the role that those traits play in the natural life cycle of that kind of organism, that is, to facts about the form of life that that sort of creature enjoys and the way that that life is supposed to go. We say that the domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur because that’s part of the way that domestic cats live under normal circumstances; having four legs is how they walk and having a soft coat of fur is how they stay warm. There are domestic cats out there that have two or three legs, or are bald; but that is something abnormal about them, due to abnormal circumstances (whether hereditary, or congenital, or acquired in the course of their life). In this case, it’s something that would generally be considered a defect, something wrong with the poor creature; but you can imagine cases (cats that can talk, or cats that can leap four stories) where the extraordinary trait would be preternatural, or better than cats are expected, in the normal course of things, to have.

What’s important is to see how these terms — “natural,” “form of life,” “supposed to go,” “normal,” “abnormal,” etc. — involve us in teleological talk. The fact that conditions are normal or abnormal, that the natural course of events is disrupted or allowed to proceed, are involved with teleological notions, notions of the natural ends that certain sorts of creatures have and the functions that their various distinctive traits serve in realizing those ends. And it’s not immediately obvious whether there is any way that this kind of teleological talk could be reduced to non-teleological talk. (It’s certainly not merely statistical: if all the cats in the world lost their hair through a mysterious virus, that wouldn’t make “domestic cats have a soft coat of fur,” or make baldness normal for the domestic cat. It would mean only that for the time being all cats are abnormal, due to abnormal conditions. Nor will appeals to evolutionary history do, since making sense of evolutionary history already requires you to talk about terms such as species and life-cycle functions such as eating, keeping warm, reproducing, etc., all of which involve you in teleological talk about the roles that each activity serves in the organism’s form of life. And, to ascend up a level of abstraction, if “fitness” isn’t a teleological notion, then what in the world is?)

That brings me to the last of the objections: isn’t Aristotelian teleology just the sort of thing that was rightly expelled from proper natural science in the 16th century? I don’t think, actually, that teleological talk does conflict with a modern scientific worldview — if “a modern scientific worldview” means the worldview presupposed by actual working science. I do recognize that it conflicts with any number of explicit philosophies of science, from early modern mechanism to high logical positivism to the modern day; but, well, so what? There’s good reason to think that it conflicts with them not because teleological language is, in and of itself, anti-scientific, but because the expulsion of teleological language accompanied the remarkable success of two specific branches of science — mechanics and chemistry — that for the past five centuries scientists and philosophers have repeatedly tried to “reform” all the special sciences by imposing standards of language specific to mechanics and chemistry on them. But there’s precious little reason to think the methods or forms of language appropriate to mechanics and chemistry are also what will work best for biology, geology, ecology, paleontology, epidemiology, metereology, tidology, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. etc. etc. In fact, as I think Thompson convincingly shows, these methodological constraints are distinctly inappropriate for biology (and “natural history” broadly), because teleological talk about life cycles and natural functions is both irreducible to non-teleological terms, and essential to understanding commonplace biological statements about species, their traits, their lives, the organization of their bodies and the operation of their organs or tissues, and indeed the foundational concept of “life” itself.

Of course, I’ve only sketched out the arguments here, and referred to further discussions. I don’t expect this to be a knock-down argument in favor of aristotelian categoricals and their employment in inferring teleological facts. But if you think that you’ve got a way to reduce them to terms without teleological import, or to understand the categoricals without mentioning teleological facts at all, or to do biology while dispensing with both the categoricals and the teleology, well, try me.

N.B.: I am not Richard Chappell, nor was meant to be. I’m Charles Johnson, and I normally post at Rad Geek People’s Daily; I’ve volunteered to help out a bit while Richard is away. My interests wander a lot, especially around the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of logic, and ethical and political theory; here’s a chance to combine a bit of all three. I think that we have some pretty substantial ethical obligations toward non-human animals (hereafter: “animals”; sorry, taxonomic correctness). In fact, I think those obligations are substantial enough that we’re ethically bound, among other things, to stop slaughtering cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. for food. I can’t say, though, that I’m particularly thrilled with the state of the philosophical debate, and in particular I’m not particularly thrilled with a lot of the arguments that try to defend something like my conclusion. Part of the problem is a problem that’s general in a lot of applied ethics: the desire to make arguments that seem to be compatible with a lot of very different philosophical or meta-ethical views tends to end up with arguments that are actually compatible with only a very narrow view of what the world contains. (That’s because, by design, anything that looks too philosophically murky or controversial is pared away in order to make the argument’s appeal broad enough. But what if the world really does have philosophically murky or controversial features?) As a chief example, take the argument over so-called “marginal cases” and the ethical significance of belonging to a particular species.

Here’s stereotype of how the dialectic goes. Quid tells Quo that she should give up meat, and when Quo says “I’d rather not; I like meat”, Quid tells her that it’s cruel to slaughter your fellow creatures for your own benefit (especially when the benefit is so trivial as getting a meal that you like better). After all, nobody would think that it’s O.K. to kill and roast your fellow humans, even if it turns out that roast man-flesh is a truly delicious meal. Quo isn’t convinced; she argues that slaughtering humans and slaughtering animals is different, and when Quid demands to know why, Quo remarks that humans have some distinctive mental capacity that gives humans a direct moral standing that animals, like plants and rocks, don’t have. (Which property Quo picks isn’t relevant here. Common candidates include self-consciousness, reflective reason, abstract thinking, moral agency, and some other stuff.)

Quid comes back with the famous “Argument from Marginal Cases”. There are a lot of different ways to gloss the argument, depending in part on the details of the pro-meat argument that it’s responding to, but here’s a schematic gloss: pick any mental property that you like that might explain a difference in moral standing, and tag it Morally Relevant Rationality (MRR) for convenience. No matter what property you pick, one of two things will be true. Either (1) all humans will have MRR, but many or most animals will have it too (e.g.: responsiveness to pain, formation of desires), in which case MRR will be too broad to justify slaughtering animals; or else (2) no animals will have MRR, but there will be at least some humans who don’t have it either, in which case MRR will be too narrow to live up to our expectations of a rational ethical theory. Horn (1) of the dilemma is clear enough; to account for horn (2), Quid points out that for pretty much any distinctive mental property that you can find in paradigmatic cases of humanity (healthy adults with no congenital defects and a normal upbringing), there will be at least some “marginal cases” — infants, the comatose, people with brain lesions, the severely mentally retarded, feral children, etc. — who don’t have it now, or lost it, or never had it to begin with. But any ethical theory that entails that we could ethically slaughter infants, the comatose, people with brain lesions, the severely mentally retarded, feral children, etc. for food is monstrously wrong. Therefore there are no reasonable candidates for MRR that do the work anti-vegetarians want them to do. Therefore, put down that steak.

The argument’s attractive because, among other things, it saves you from the hard philosophical work of having to respond to each concrete suggestion for MRR, or having to engage with the specific arguments for the connection between MRR and moral standing. After all, if the dilemma really does cover all plausible candidates then Quid can use the argument as a schematic for a response to any candidate for MRR and any account of the connection between it and moral standing. The problem, though, is that there’s a perfectly good response to the Argument from Marginal Cases on the record — the call it Argument from Species Normality — and, as far as I know, ethical vegetarians in the literature haven’t yet successfully responded to it. In fact, as far as I know, ethical vegetarians in the literature haven’t even understood it.

Here’s how the response goes. Quo concedes that Quid has pointed out a genuine difficulty. But, she says, there’s a way out. Here’s how. Take horn (2) of the dilemma, and choose some mental property that paradigmatic humans have but animals don’t. It’s true that not all humans have that property. But there is another, closely related property that all and only humans (including all “marginal cases”) do have: each and every one is human. This may seem trifling or crude, but suppose that Quo goes on to point out that being human means (among other things) being a member of a species whose paradigm cases have MRR, that is, one of the kind of creature for whom it is normal to have MRR. So even though there will be humans who individually lack MRR, Quo contends that enjoying the human form of life — even if, in a particular case, the mental faculties that are involved in that form of life are undeveloped or frustrated or damaged (perhaps irreparably) you are obligated to treat them differently from the way you would treat an animal; for animals the place occupied by MRR isn’t empty or inaccessible; it just doesn’t exist.

The canonical vegetarian response to the Argument from Species Normality seems to be to misunderstand it. One way to misunderstand it is to bring out the doctrine ethical individualism, as if it explained anything; the idea is that “being a member of the same species as x, y, and z” is a pure Cambridge relation; why should that external relation have any burlier ethical consequences than “having the same name as x” or “being the third person born after y.” Why should having these kind of “properties” have any ethical bearing at all? Wouldn’t making ethical distinctions based on them be a case of arbitrary (and therefore unjustifiable) group privilege? (People who like ghastly neologisms sometimes call this “speciesism,” by analogy with “racism” and “sexism.”)

But this is a mistake, and I think it’s a mistake that’s no less crude for being so common. Making it may be the result of making some other mistakes about the logical form of statements about living creatures and the natural kinds they belong to, of the sort discussed by Michael Thompson in The Representation of Life; as Thompson shows, philosophers tend to try to understand statements about living creatures and their distinctive forms of life with a much too narrow idea of what sorts of logical features statements can have, and they tend to systematically get things wrong by excluding, or ignoring, the kinds of teleological facts that Thompson calls “aristotelian categoricals.” For example, consider the natural-historical statement, “the domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur.” This is a true general statement. And it is not to be refuted by pointing “But look at poor Tibbles, who has been shaved and maimed in a tragic accident!” The reason that it is true is not that all domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur (poor Tibbles doesn’t). Nor is it that some or many or most or even the overwhelming majority of domestic cats have these features. (Even if some mad scientist released a virus that caused all the domestic cats in the world to permanently shed their fur coat, “the domestic cat has a soft coat of fur” would still be true.) It’s that cats are the kind of creature that has four legs and soft fur under normal conditions, even if tragic circumstances have altered those conditions for some cats, or even for all cats temporarily. (If they altered conditions for all cats permanently, that might constitute a change in the form of life for cats as such. But that’s not important here.)

These distinctions make a difference. In particular, it’s important to see how aristotelian categoricals make a difference for what we can say about individual members of the species. They make a difference with respect to value, in obvious cases. If Tibbles has two legs, that’s a tragedy; it’s something wrong with poor Tibbles. If I have two legs, that’s normal; that’s how humans are. The fact that we recognize my two-leggedness as normal and Tibbles’ two-leggedness as a defect is tied up with the fact that I’m supposed to have two legs and that Tibbles is supposed to have four. And that’s a biological fact about Tibbles herself, not just a Cambridge relation to other members of her species. It goes similarly with humans who suffer from a cognitive defect. The point of the appeal to normality isn’t relational or statistical; the point is to show how all human beings, each and every one of them, individually has a particular intrinsic property. That property isn’t just sharing a species with other humans who do have MRR. It’s having, individually, a faculty for MRR (whatever that may be), and we’re supposed to be able to exercise it, even if in particular cases that faculty is not yet developed, or inactive, or frustrated, or irreparably damaged. A human being that can’t comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning has a something wrong with her (that’s what calling it a “disability” or a “defect” means); a pig that can’t comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning is just living how the pig lives.

(Actually that’s not quite right. An infant that can’t understand language or reflectively reason isn’t abnormal or defective. But that’s no more difficult to deal with than the fact that people who are sleeping don’t exercise MRR while they’re unconscious. The normal condition in the human form of life is that infants will develop MRR over time. Not so pigs.)

I think this is also closely related to the other common response to the Argument from Species Normality — what we might call the Argument from Freak Intelligence. Here’s how James Rachels put it (in “Darwin, Species, and Morality”, Animal Rights and Human Obligations, Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., p. 100

This idea—that how individuals should be treated is determined by what is normal for their species—has a certain appeal, because it does seem to express our moral intuition about defective humans. “We should not treat a person worse merely because he has been so unfortunate,” we might say about someone who has suffered brain damage. But the idea will not bear close inspection. Suppose (what is probably impossible) that a chimpanzee learned to read and speak English. And suppose he eventually was able to converse about science, literature, and morals. Finally he wants to attend university classes. Now there might be various arguments about whether to permit this, but suppose someone argued as follows: “Only humans should be allowed to attend these classes. Humans can read, talk, and understand science. Chimps cannot.” But this chimp can do those things. “Yes, but normal chimps cannot, and that is what matters.” Is this a good argument? Regardless of what other arguments might be persuasive, this one is weak. It assumes that we should determine how an individual is to be treated, not on the basis of its qualities, but on the basis of other individuals’ qualities. This chimp is not permitted to do something that requires reading, despite the fact that he can read, because other chimps cannot. That seems not only unfair, but irrational.

I think Rachels is obviously right here; it would be wrong to treat the hyperintelligent chimp that way on those grounds. (A fortiori, it would also be wrong to slaughter a hyperintelligent pig and eat it. The fact that normal swine are not as intelligent as human beings wouldn’t be a reasonable ground for denying it a right to life.) Species membership isn’t a good grounds to make a distinction in cases of freak intelligence. But he’s just wrong to draw the conclusion that the case of humans with cognitive defects has to be symmetrical with the case of animals with freak intelligence. Perhaps the problem is that Rachels is still thinking of the appeals to species or kind as if they were just appeals to membership in a set with some particular defining characteristic. If that’s all that was at stake, then trying to make an ethical distinction based on it surely would be arbitrary. But that’s nota all; the Argument from Species Normality gains whatever force it has by appealing to faculties or potentialities that each individual humans, as a human, has. Think of it this way: a pig with freak intelligence has, ex hypothesi, manifested MRR. Actuality entails potentiality, so the pig has the faculty for MRR and it makes sense to demand that it get the same moral level of consideration you give to your fellow humans (whatever the right level for that is). But that does not entail that you also have to demand that animals with normal cognitive abilities for their species get the same level of consideration you give to your fellow humans with severe cognitive defects (whatever the right level for that is). Non-actuality doesn’t entail non-potentiality, and you have to distinguish between the cases where a faculty is present but unexercised, damaged, frustrated, undeveloped, etc. and those in which there isn’t any faculty to lament the damaging of at all. And one of the reasons that you would give for making distinctions of this sort just is that there’s a difference between a healthy adult pig with the cognitive abilities of a pig and an adult human with the cognitive abilities of a pig. If you aren’t approaching the world of life with a rich enough conceptual framework to recognize these kind of teleological facts, then you probably need to enrich your conceptual framework before you can sensibly deal with the notion of goodness at all.

Now, is it true that the distinctively human faculty for MRR, whatever that is, even if it’s not being exercised, and even if it can’t be, in a particular case, really does make for a burly difference in moral standing between humans and animals? Probably, but is it enough of a difference to justify slaughtering and eating the animals even though you’d never consider treating “marginal case” humans that way (and would rightly be punished harshly for doing so)? I doubt that it is true. But I think to give a good reply to the Argument from Species Normality, you’ll need some kind of argument that specifically engages with the details of the particular faculty that’s suggested to play the role of MRR, and the details of the account that’s given to connect it to moral standing, in order to show that it doesn’t make enough of a difference, or doesn’t make the right kind of difference, that’s needed to justify the incredible suffering inflicted by the meat industry. Trying to avoid the messy part of the argument by skipping over the details and making an appeal to marginal cases just won’t get you anywhere that you should want to go.

An exegetical note off to the side:

Protagoras: Frege seems to have thought sentences with non-referring expressions are meaningless, ….

This is a common misunderstanding of Frege’s view, one that I suspect comes about from people reading Russell and Wittgenstein’s thoughts about propositional meaning and truth-valuability back into Frege, who did not share their conclusions. Wittgenstein and Russell held that any significant proposition has a truth value, but what Frege explicitly states in “Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung” is statements with empty proper names express a thought but have no truth-value. Since Frege’s claim is that the sense of a statement is the thought expressed by it, and the referent of a statement is its truth-value, this means that he regards them as having a sense but no reference, just as (he thinks) the empty designator in them has a sense but no reference. Here’s the relevant passage:

“The thought, accordingly, cannot be the Bedeutung of the sentence, but must rather be considered as its sense. What is the position now with regard to the Bedeutung? Have we a right even to inquire about it? Is it possible that a sentence as a whole has only a sense, but no Bedeutung? At any rate, one might expect that such sentences occur, just as there are parts of sentences having sense but no Bedeutung. And sentences which contain proper names without Bedeutung will be of this kind. The sentence ‘Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ obviously has a sense. But since it is doubtful whether the name ‘Odysseus’, occurring therein, has a Bedeutung, it is also doubtful whether the whole sentence does. Yet it is certain, nevertheless, that anyone who seriously took the sentence to be true or false would ascribe to the name ‘Odysseus’ a Bedeutung, not merely a sense; for it is of the Bedeutung of the name that the predicate is affirmed or denied. Whoever does not admit the name has a Bedeutung can neither apply no withhold the predicate. But in that case it would be superfluous to advance to the Bedeutung of the name; one could be satisfied with the sense, if one wanted to go no further than the thought. If it were a question only of the sense of the sentence, the thought, it would be needless to bother with the Bedeutung of a part of the sentence; only the sense, not the Bedeutung, of the part is relevant to the sense of the whole sentence. The thought remains the same whether ‘Odysseus’ has a Bedeutung or not.” (32-33)

Hope this helps.

geniusNZ: “If everyone owned the road infront of their house Can you imagine having a toll on EVERY section of road as well as signs every 10 meters telling you how much you are going to pay and if you dont want to pay that you need to do a handbreak turn.”

I can imagine any number of things. The question is why in the world you think people would do something that silly. I mean, many people currently own the driveway that leads up to their house, but very few of them place tollbooths on it. Before government got involved in the building of roads, what typically happened was that smaller residential and city roads, and some trails through the wilderness, were built either (1) by cooperative labor or (2) funded by local businesspeople, and then left open for public use; turnpikes were usually limited to large highways. I suspect that much the same thing would happen if roads were privately provided today. Of course, it’s possible that people in some neighborhood or another could be so silly, or hate traffic passing through their neighborhood so much, that they’d put up all kinds of onerous blocks to traffic. But then why bother driving through their neighborhood if they are so uptight about you doing so?

geniusNZ: “The point is that in reality the process of making a market may cost more than operating without it. this may result from the type of good or the way it is used or the externalities etc.”

If your argument is an economic one then I don’t think it’s a very strong one. Roads are not public goods (they are both rivalrous and excludable); it is easy to seek money from anyone who benefits from positive externalities (e.g. asking businesspeople along the road to help with maintenance costs, with the payoff being a better road in front of their business); owners of roads will typically have strong incentives to avoid congestion, and if a patchwork of ownership ends up somehow causing congestion problems then that will just mean that there is an entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone willing to buy up or build a less congested network of roads in the area. (In fact the problems that you mention above are not even problems with externalities at all; they’re alleged problems with transaction costs. But the fact that you transfer control to the government doesn’t mean that transaction costs disappear; it just means that they are shifted from up-front costs to costs hidden within the tax bureaucracy. In fact, given that roads are especially notorious as a source of pork-barrel projects for enterprising legislators, and notoriously unresponsive to commuters’ needs (as opposed to senior legislators’ political priorities), it’s quite likely that road-building and road-maintenance are among the worst examples of the inefficiency created by transferring enterprises from the voluntary sector to the government sector.

“The constraint-theorist must take these constraints as being more important than human wellbeing. After all, if they really just valued human wellbeing, they would be maximizers instead.”

This line of argument presupposes that you can spell out what “human well-being” is without ever mentioning (say) justice or respect for persons as a constitutive part of the account. (If you can’t, then saying that someone who just cares about human well-being should try to maximize it even if it means violating the side-constraints or not is rather like saying that someone who just cares about singing the Ode to Joy should sing it even if it means singing “and so say all of us” instead of “Tochter aus Elysium.”)

But why should you believe that? And why should you expect someone who is not already a consequentialist to accept the doctrine?

Richard: “Yes, many libertarians take (e.g. property) rights as fundamental, rather than freedom. They’re not the kind of libertarian I was discussing in this post.”

I think this is a confusion. Libertarians do not, generally, regard liberty (in the sense that is relevant to a theory of political legitimacy) and individual rights as two concepts that you can spell out quite independently of each other and then ask about the boundary conditions or prerequisites that the one imposes on the other. Rather they generally take the two notions to be analytically connected to one another in such a way that you have to understand each in order to understand the other. (How do you know whether you are free? By looking at whether your property rights are being respected. How do you know what property rights you have? By looking at what sorts of actions would infringe on your liberty.) There are exceptions — the official position of Stinerite egoists, for example, requires a claim that freedom is more fundamental than individual rights, which are merely instrumentally valuable insofar, and only insofar, as the social truce they produce tends to maximize freedom for the agent. But there’s good reason to say that these exceptions, where they happen, tend to undermine the libertarianism of the person holding them to the degree that they are treated seriously (e.g. Benjamin Tucker’s egoist polemics involved him in assertions that it would be right to do unlibertarian things under certain specifiable conditions), so it’s unclear that this constitutes any avenue for attack on libertarianism; at most it just constitutes an avenue for criticising some libertarians as inconsistent.

Richard: ‘But as I suggest here, your ‘moralized’ conception of freedom has some absurd consequences. If you hold that a person is “free” so long as their rights are not being violated (or “aggressed” against), then you must hold that a justly imprisoned criminal is not thereby deprived of his liberty. Clearly this is mistaken — prison is the paradigm case of unfreedom!’

I don’t think this actually does the work you think it does. “Liberty” and “freedom” are words with many different senses; I think it is clearly false that there is a univocal notion of “unfreedom” that you can use to determine whether a justly imprisoned criminal is free or unfree. Certainly there is a sense of freedom in which any constraint on action whatsoever constitutes a constraint on freedom; i.e. in which “free” and “unfree” line up roughly with “voluntary” and “involuntary.” If that’s all you mean then a justly imprisoned criminal is indeed unfree; but then so what? That’s not the sense of freedom that libertarians consider relevant to their theory of political legitimacy. There’s another sense of the term “freedom” in which you are free if you are being treated according to a full set of human rights and unfree if you are not; here “free” and “unfree” line up only with “voluntary” and “involuntary” only when the actions are non-aggressive, and being prevented from rape, pillage, murder, et cetera is not to be considered a limitation on what you might call “political freedom,” since there is no human right to rape, pillage, or murder.

You might think that this still offends against common sense; that we ought to consider a prisoner, even a justly imprisoned one, a paradigm case of unfreedom in the political sense as well as in the volitional sense. I agree that people often are inclined to say (1) that prisoners aren’t free in a political sense, and (2) that this is justifiable if they are justly convicted criminals. But I’d suggest that people tend to believe both (1) and (2) together only because it’s very common to mistakenly believe (3) that we’re entitled to treat criminals according to less than a full set of human rights in punishment for their crimes. If (3) were true, it would follow that you can justifiably do things to criminals that would limit their freedom, and incarceration under such-and-such conditions might be among those things. But if (3) is false (as I think it is), then either (a) you can justifiably incarcerate someone for such-and-such a crime, as a defensive measure against imminent danger to others — in which case it is just as false to claim (1) as to claim that a would-be rapist’s political freedoms are being infringed when you push him away; or (b) incarcerating someone under such-and-such conditions for such-and-such a crime would be an infringement of political freedom, in which case you shouldn’t imprison people like that for such-and-such a crime, and that any justifiable action on the part of the criminal justice system would have to be limited to things like fines or ordering the payment of damages. (I think, incidentally, that (a) is clearly the case for certain crimes, but that (b) is clearly the case for many crimes for which people are typically imprisoned today.)

In other words, prison is the paradigm case of one kind of unfreedom. But that’s not the kind of unfreedom that libertarians primarily care about. (The paradigm case of the kind of unfreedom that they do primarily care about is not prison, but rather slavery.)

Richard: “Anyway, it still fails the well example, because the person stuck down the well is not being aggressed against. Rather, he is being ignored. Aggression is a subset of intervention, after all.”

Not so. My point above is precisely that one kind of inaction (specifically, negligent inaction) is a form of aggression, in the sense that libertarians use the word. If knowingly leaving someone to suffer and die in a well, or leaving someone to perish in a structure fire, when you could save them without further danger to yourself and when it’s likely that nobody else could or would, does not amount to an act of aggression, then what does it amount to? That seems aggressive to me, but if you don’t like using the word with that signification then feel free to suggest some different name for it — coercion? rights-violation? tort? injustice? — and I’ll use that name for the purposes of this discussion. My point will be served so long as there exists any ethical category Epsilon such that (1) Epsilon is plausibly connected with a conception of political freedom; and (2) Epsilon covers (i) all acts of non-defensive violence (including extortion by credible threat), (ii) all acts of fraud, and (iii) all cases of harm from negligence, but does not cover other kinds of wrongs or vices. Whatever it is you call Epsilon, libertarians think that that is the only ethical category such that you can rightly force people not to engage in the acts that come under it; and non-libertarians think that there are some further kinds of actions that people can be rightly forced not to do. The important thing to note is that it’s quite possible to be a libertarian, and to admit (iii) to membership in Epsilon (aggression/rights-violation/tort/whatever) without also being compelled to admit the sorts of things that you think your well example ought to force people to admit (e.g. not giving enough money to some specific program designed to alleviate systemic poverty or provide disaster relief, etc.).

Richard: “As an aside, trying to ground morality on inviolable ‘rights’ is rather silly and fetishistic”

Maybe so, but I’m not at all clear on what you mean by the phrase “trying to ground morality”. Certainly libertarians do not need to claim (and most do not claim) that all legitimate moral claims are reducible to claims about inviolable rights. (Libertarians may very well think that intemperance, miserliness, cowardice, bigotry, foolishness, et cetera are wrong and should be condemned; to remain libertarians they need only hold that they should not be stopped by violence.) If you mean to suggest that any inclusion of inviolable rights in a moral theory makes it silly (which is what you suggest in the post you link to) then the response is twofold/ First, that libertarians who emphasize rights don’t need to hold that it is never justifiable to violate those rights in order to defend a libertarian political programme; they just need to hold that it is not justifiable to violate those rights systematically (if it is justifiable to murder one person in order to save many under extraordinary circumstances, it does not necessarily follow from that that it’s justifiable to establish a political order that routinely violates rights in order to achieve this or that putative benefit). Second, that there are just as many and as serious objections against theories that suggest that you can legitimately violate rights in order to maximize some good that does not include considerations of justice in it (e.g., scapegoat cases, Williams’ objections against impersonal calculation, etc.), and it seems to me that if you think the choice is obvious or that one of the alternatives is just silly, you probably need to think about the problem harder. (Certainly your post on side-constraints doesn’t fully make the case; among other things it requires that we share your intuition that you can give any kind of account of what the good for human beings is that doesn’t refer to things like justice and respect as constitutive parts of it. I think that this is a fallacy, exposed and probably decisively refuted by Socrates. In any case, there is quite a bit of debate over it, and it is for precisely this reason that side constraints are supposed to constrain the way that they do, so dismissing the idea as silly seems to me at best overly hasty.)

Richard: “Finally, the traffic example doesn’t depend upon physical risks. Suppose that without traffic laws, people would just drive very very slowly and carefully, and so it would be no more dangerous than our current system.”

Where this is true I don’t see what possible justification there is for government-imposed traffic laws. I can see good reasons to legally punish people who endanger others on the road. Whatever laws are adopted to that end could justifiably be enforced on anybody who uses any road.

I can also see good reasons for the owners of road to establish utilitarian rules of the road, which aim at making the use of the road as smooth and convenient for travellers as possible. But I have no idea why rules adopted under this second justification should have the force of law or why they should have to be the same on all comparable roads. Why not let the owner of each road decide what the rules for their road will be, and letting travelers decide which road they prefer to take? (Of course, someone who refused to obey the rules of the road could be evicted from the road by the owner, and if they refused to go voluntarily they could be arrested for trespassing. But that’s different from legally enforcing uniform traffic laws on all roads.)

At this point you might say, “Ah, but wait. Who owns the roads? The government, of course, so that’s why the government should be making and enforcing the rules of the road even when they don’t have an immediate safety justification.” But why should the government own roads?

Richard: “Imagine you find yourself stuck down a well. Libertarians claim that you are perfectly free so long as everybody else leaves you alone, since that way you suffer no interference. But surely we can see that this is mistaken. If left alone, you would dwindle and die. That’s not any sort of freedom worth having.”

As has been pointed out, the idea that libertarians analyze freedom as “non-interference” is a serious mistake; libertarians in fact analyze freedom as “non-aggression”. This is important to your intuition-pump, though, because it is quite certain that endangering other people through reckless driving is an act of aggression, and there is also a good case to be made that refusing to rescue someone in an emergency can, in some cases, constitute an act of aggression. This, however, depends on a lot of circumstantial factors — such as the nature and urgency of the emergency, the role (if any) you played in creating the emergency, the means at your disposal for making some individual contribution to the rescue, the means at others’ (including the victim’s) disposal for the rescue, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (This is important, because you’ll need some pretty burly argument to generalize, as you want to, from your intuitions about the case of a person in dire emergency from having fallen down a remote well, to circumstances that are quite different along all of these axes, such as systemic poverty or the damage from natural disasters or ….)

Of course, I note your objection above that the very institution of private property requires “aggressive interference,” and so (you claim) contradicts the non-aggression account of freedom. But that is just begging the question, in a particularly crass way, against the libertarian; libertarians hold that the concept of aggression is analytically connected with violations of property rights. Thus enforcement of property titles (up to and including the use of violence) is considered by libertarians to be a defensive, rather than aggressive, use of force. While some libertarians (William Lloyd Garrison, Leo Tolstoy, Robert LeFevre) have been principled pacifists, most are not, and there is nothing in the concept of libertarian freedom that demands complete non-resistance; it demands only the abandonment of aggressive force. Maybe you think that this distinction is unjustified or does not do the work that libertarians want it to do; but if so you ought to mention that, and give some argument for it, not just obliterate the distinction and speak as though libertarians have not addressed it.

In a similar vein, your attempt to treat taxes and traffic laws as of a piece with one another is no less question-begging. Libertarians have a perfectly good reason, if you accept the distinction between aggressive and defensive uses of force, to sanction the enforcement of traffic laws but not the enforcement of tax laws. To wit: people who defy traffic laws are putting other people in imminent danger, and threatening to destroy their property or their lives; people who refuse to pay tax are doing nothing of the sort, and are threatening only to keep their own stuff. Of course, again, you might find this argument suspect; but if so the burden is on you to acknowledge that it’s out there and show what’s wrong with it.

Jason: “As a practicing (but moderate) libertarian, I would suggest that winning the permanent gratitude of one other person is easily worth the effort spent in extricating him from a well.”

This may be true for all I know, but it’s certainly not the right reason to rescue people from wells. The right reason is that leaving people to suffer and die is cruel (and perhaps in some cases unjust, i.e. a violation of their rights).

David: “Forget personal feelings … could anyone explain the precise point which cause them to treat ‘freedom’ ( to do anything you like I presume?) as more important than society enforced rules.”

The libertarian conception of freedom is not freedom “to do anything you like”; it is freedom “to do anything you like” without violating other people’s rights (the set of rights being derived from the non-aggression principle; i.e. no slavery, assault, extortion, theft, fraud, or vandalism allowed). The reason for treating it as more important than “society enforced rules” is that vices are not crimes, and slavery is wrong.