Value Narcissism etc
Overview: NTT is Either Invalid or Invalid and Question-Begging
Value Narcissism etc
It will be most helpful to put the basic reasoning of the first part of NTT in its simplest form. Without any commitment to what it is for us to think that an entity has moral value (for discussion of this see Defense of the First Part's Premises), the argument invites us to reason essentially as follows:
- (P1) All sentient humans (or even just you) have moral value
- (P2) There is no trait absent in sentient non-human animals which is such that, if the trait were absent in sentient humans (or you), then they would be not have moral value.
- Therefore, (C) All sentient non-human animals have moral value
For more on how this portrays the basic reasoning of the first part of NTT, see getting to the steel-manned version.
Now, an ambiguity arises in the interpretation of (P2) about what might happen if certain traits were absent from sentient humans – or ourselves. Plausibly, there are some traits or properties without which an entity cannot count as human, or us. These might be having human DNA, originating from certain parents, or originating with an initial set of experiences. Now we need to ask whether the traits spoken of in P2 are supposed to be allowed to include one’s essential properties (or the properties essential to being human).
The Natural Version: P2 seems clearly to speak of traits that do not include such essential properties: we are envisioning humans like oneself losing traits that one has and non-human animals lack (like abstract reasoning ability, moral agency, etc.) and still retaining one’s status as oneself. After all, it says "there are no traits absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to deem ourselves valueless" - the entities losing the traits are clearly supposed still to be us. But on this natural version of the argument it is invalid, because one could hold the view that we might call
- Value Narcissism: one’s essential properties (or the essential properties of being human) are what give one moral value – or are such that, if one lost them, one would lose moral value.
A value narcissist could hold that although humans like oneself (or just oneself) have moral value, and one would retain this value if one lost the non-essential properties that one has and sentient non-humans lack, non-human animals still lack moral value. She could thus accept P1 and P2 but reject C.
The Alternative Version: Now one can try to re-interpret P2 in such a way that the traits to which it refers are allowed to include one’s essential properties. Indeed, Ask Yourself has more recently suggested exactly such an interpretation. Then what P2 is really saying then is that, if we take (or hypothetically imagine) all of the properties away from humans like oneself that one has and sentient non-humans lack, including one's essential properties (and one's not having the essential properties of non-human animals), then the resulting entity - which is not oneself - still has moral value. Ask Yourself has argued that if one were to lose all of the traits that distinguish one from each other non-human animal, then the resulting entity would be identical to that non-human animal, so P1 and P2 so interpreted entail C.
The problem with the validity of the argument even so understood is that this inference presupposes something like the identity of indiscernibles: that if two entities have all of the same properties, then they must be the self-same object. This is a substantive metaphysical thesis, to which certain philosophers have objected (for discussion see [1]).
But as we will see below, the much greater problem with this re-interpretation of NTT is that it has essentially no rational force. The re-interpretation of P2 is essentially just asserting that all sentient beings, human and non-human, have moral value. The argument thus offers little if any reason to change the mind of someone who does not already find this view plausible, and the defense of its premises offers no guidance on how to persuade such an individual.
The main importance of appreciating the invalidity of NTT and exploring what we need to do to make it valid is thus to (i) distinguish the formulation in which P2 excludes essential properties from that in which it includes them, which enables us to (ii) see that the formulation that excludes them presupposes the rejection of a substantive ethical view, and finally to also (iii) see that the formulation that includes essential properties, while being such that it can easily be made technically valid, has (like the argument ‘(P1) we should be vegan; therefore (C) we should be vegan') essentially no persuasive force.
[Margaret: I believe that the above is a much clearer overview of the issues and how the rest of this entry will proceed than what we had here before old summary of issues, and propose that we replace the old summary with the above].
In what follows we will consider a version of the argument's second premise which allows us to talk about the entity that would result from humans like oneself losing various traits, without any explicit assumption about whether that individual would actually be oneself. We will thus use the notion of a counterpart of humans like oneself, which is the entity that would result if one lost various traits (understood broadly to include absences of other traits). This has the advantage of allowing us to consider different possible entities within the language of first order logic, which refers simply to how things are in a model (by including counterparts of us, our models will in essence refer to both actual and non-actual entities).
We will first formalize the first part of NTT in first order logic. We will then show that it is invalid by providing a counterexample in which the premises are true and the conclusion false. In essence, this is a model where all sentient humans (or oneself) have moral value, all of their trait-adjusted counterparts have moral value, but non-human animals lack moral value. The counterexample shows how, on the natural interpretation, one can accept P1 and P2 but reject the conclusion by accepting something like value narcissism.
We will then discuss the alternative interpretation of the argument, according to which this counterexample is impossible. Ask Yourself has invoked a principle about traits and identity to argue that for every sentient non-human animal, one has a fully trait-adjusted counter-part which is identical to that animal. We will comment on how this principle is substantive, but can be easily added to the premises of NTT. We will then comment, however, on how the notion of full-trait adjustment in premise 2 makes the argument essentially assume rather than independently establish the moral value of sentient non-humans.
[Margaret: I believe that this explanation about counterparts, in conjunction with the foregoing explanation of the layout of the section, incorporates everything that we need from the old steel-manning and interpreting section.
The Relevance of the Counterexample: On the natural version of NTT, P2 holds that if one (or other sentient humans) lost traits that one has and sentient non-human animals lack (like abstract reasoning ability, moral agency, etc.), and still retained one’s status as oneself, one would still have moral value. On this interpretation the counterexample is perfectly coherent: one can without any logical confusion hold that as long as sentient humans like oneself retain their identities, they have moral value, while sentient non-human animals lack it. One can coherently (if implausibly) embrace the value narcissist view that one has one's value in virtue of one's essential properties, which non-human animals lack, but which one cannot come to lack while retaining one's status as oneself.
Some individuals faced with arguments for veganism like NTT may well be tempted to embrace something like value narcissism. For instance, in Ask Yourself's debates / discussions with the Warskis, Friend Ed, and Patty Politics, Ask Yourself's conversants seemed tempted to the view that being human (which, if understood as originating from human gametes and such, is plausibly an essential property of humans like oneself) is necessary to for a being to have moral value - at least independent of other considerations like membership in a human community [citations needed]. It is certainly true that Ask Yourself argued substantively against this view by reference to aliens (see below). But if NTT is interpreted in the natural way, on which P2 cannot consider one's losing one's essential properties like species membership, it is difficult to see exactly which premise of NTT this aliens-response is defending. Moreover, some of these interlocutors seemed tempted to something like the following response, which seems reasonable unless much more is filled in about the psychology of the aliens (or more is done to show why membership in any species should be considered morally irrelevant):
- "Humans have a moral value that other humans should respect in virtue of their essential properties such as being human, and non-human animals lack such value. It is true that humans should not want to be killed by aliens and resist this, but this is perfectly consistent with non-human animals lacking moral value and has no clear bearing on why that view is untenable" [citations needed].
Although this view may not have been clearly articulated in the debates, Ask Yourself's response seems to be to insist that it is logically inconsistent, which it is not. In this way the invalidity of the coherence of the counterexample to NTT seems to interact with the problems with Ask Yourself's defenses of P1 and P2 to make the argument much more confusing and much less convincing than an argument of this sort should be.
