The basis of human equality

Let us take stock. Essentially, my argument is that if anything has the set of basic capacities for rational action, it has moral status; all human beings have this set no matter their maturity level or disability status; therefore, all human beings have moral status — what I call ‘dignity’ — which makes them objects of respect. This argument was made with a view towards providing a basis for human equality. Any basis that depends on properties that come in degrees is flimsy at best. The chief virtue of Jeff McMahan’s work is that he has shown that our liberal egalitarian principles must be revised if we are to make one’s moral status depend on the exemplification of certain psychological properties. To his very great credit, this is something he recognizes (e.g. 2008, 104), and

with great intellectual integrity, he is willing to follow his principles where they lead. In particular, he is willing to claim that killing a healthy orphaned newborn infant for its organs is permissible, since he thinks a newborn’s “psychological connectedness” is not strong enough to generate a time-relative interest in continuing to live.118 _{He is worth}

quoting at length:

Suppose that a woman who wants to be a single parent becomes impregnated via artificial insemination, but dies during childbirth. She has no close friends and no family — no one to claim the child. The newborn infant is healthy and so is an ideal candidate for adoption. But suppose that, in the same hospital in which the infant is born, there are three other children, all five years old, who will soon die if they do not receive organ transplants. The newly orphaned infant turns out to have exactly the right tissue type: if it were killed, its organs could be used to save the three ailing children. According to the view I have developed, it ought to be permissible, if other things are equal, to sacrifice the newborn orphaned infant in order to save the other three children (2002, 359; cf. 2007, 152).

This frank acknowledgment appears in a discussion of troubling implications that function as reasons to reject his view altogether. Nonetheless, he is willing to bite the bullet, because he thinks not biting it leads to morally inconsistent positions, specifically with respect to how we treat certain animals (McMahan 2013). Since I refuse to accept this, I have labored to develop an alternative account of the nature of human beings and a morally consistent view of the wrongness of killing to support my judgment.119 _Those

118 _{McMahan distinguishes between interests and time-relative interests, because he does not think}

identity is the basis of rational egoistic concern. He says,

One's time-relative interests are always, as the label is intended to suggest, relativized to one's state at a time. They are different from one's interests (as traditionally understood) in that they are affected by the strength of the prospective prudential unity relations whereas one's interests are not. One’s interests are concerned with what would be better or worse for oneself as a temporally extended being; they reflect what would be better or worse for one's life as a whole. If identity were the basis of rational egoistic concern, there could be no divergence between one's interests and one's time-relative interests (2002, 80).

119 _{A clear way of expressing the disagreement between McMahan and I goes like this: he thinks it is} more counter-intuitive to believe that a day-old embryo is entitled to the same protections from being killed as those of us who can read this text than it is to believe that killing an orphaned healthy newborn infant for its organs is permissible — I do not.

who attach moral status to psychological properties that come in degrees should take heed, because more is at stake than we realize. The egalitarian principles, so cherished in Western societies, that have been foundational to democracy and an impetus for much progress are at risk of being undermined.

By contrast, my view implies that the moral status we have in virtue of being rational animals is one that does not come in degrees. This is precisely what our egalitarian principles require, and they are elegantly satisfied by an all-or-nothing

property: the possession of a rational nature. Those that have a rational nature have a non- instrumental worth I call “human dignity” Human dignity is inherent and ineliminable, and there is a duty to respect it at every stage of development or at any degree of (non- ultimate) incapacity throughout human life. While some may be discomforted by the “conservative” implications this view may have for the practices of abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide, I am happy to embrace those implications.120 _{One should see my position as resonating with the ethical forecast}

given by G.B. Giertz at the 1966 Ciba meeting (see Chapter 1). As he saw it, “respect for the value of the human being and hence democracy is in danger” when a society

embraces social practices that deny “that every human life, even the most wretched, has a meaning” — or human dignity, as I put it (Giertz 1966, 140).

120 _{Though I should also say that “liberals” ought to deny that the permissibility of voluntary}

euthanasia entails the permissibility of voluntary “organ donation” euthanasia. Standard euthanasia practices are typically justified by an appeal to the patient’s “dignity” in death (a dignity that is grounded in autonomy), and that one must respected as an end in the choice to die by a painless lethal intervention. But if dignity is grounded in autonomy, then a “paradox of autonomy” remains for mortal harvesting policies, since they require the donor to consent to being used as a “tissue bank” that can be killed for utilitarian benefit, and not purely for the patient’s own sake.

Nonetheless, the view that human beings have some sort of non-instrumental worth by virtue of what they are, and what they are is determined by their ultimate capacities for rational action, shares a surprising amount of common ground among philosophers of divergent political persuasions. The so-called “capabilities approach” that recognizes the moral significance of the freedom to pursue one’s flourishing, and that one’s opportunity to do so is best understood in terms of their capabilities (or capacities), is one that is interpreted in various ways through Rawlsian and Aristotelian lenses

(Robeyns 2016). Early in her development of the relation between human capabilities and human rights, Martha Nussbaum (a political liberal) notes that one of the senses of

“capabilities” she is working with is called “basic capabilities” — “the innate equipment of individuals that is the necessary basis for developing the more advanced capability” (1997, 289).121 _{Similarly, to account for the notion that each of us possesses an}

ineliminable human dignity, Robert George and Patrick Lee (political conservatives) appeal to the notion of a “basic natural capacity” for conceptual thought that “human beings have in virtue of the kind of thing they are” (Lee and George 2008b, 185). While I tend to side with Lee and George regarding the implications for the ethics of killing, it is

121 _{Nussbaum has since dropped this conception of basic capability, because, in her view, it does not}

adequately secure the political equality of those with severe mental and cognitive disabilities. She says, “that it is quite crucial not to base the ascription of human dignity on any single ‘basic capability

(rationality, for example), since this excludes from human dignity many human beings with severe mental disabilities” (Nussbaum 2008, 362). Yet she makes the same mistake Singer and McMahan make; concepts like “severe mental disability” cannot attributed to human beings unless the human form essentially includes the basic capacity for rationality and so forth. Another problem is that she posits some arbitrary and unspecified minimal threshold one must meet for being capable of engaging in “major human life- activities” (Ibid., 363). Hence, PVS patients and anencephalic children don’t make the cut in her view, “since it would appear that there is no striving there, no reaching out for functioning” (Ibid.). Yet if we are just going by appearances, the same could have been said of Terry Wallis, someone who clearly had equal dignity while in his non-responsive state. Therefore, Nussbaum’s revised view of human dignity should be rejected for the same reasons McMahan’s and Singer’s should be rejected: it is arbitrary, unfair, and rests upon metaphysical confusion.

striking how prominent the agreement is that basic capacities (or “capabilities”) for rational action are foundational to our egalitarian principles. And it is a good thing too. For it gives us a principled reason to care for a healthy orphaned newborn infant, and soundly reject as impermissible the proposal to kill it for its organs.