Bioethics, Substance Dualism and the Argument from Self-Awareness

Bioethics, Substance Dualism and the Argument from Self-Awareness J. P. Moreland E.T.S. - 2011 Throughout history, most people have been substance and property dualists. Thus, regarding the mind/body problem, Jaegwon Kim's concession seems right: "We commonly think that we, as persons, have a mental and bodily dimension….Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions.…"i And regarding issues in personal identity, Frank Jackson acknowledges: “I take it that our folk conception of personal identity is Cartesian in character—in particular, we regard the question of whether I will be tortured tomorrow as separable from the question of whether someone with any amount of continuity— psychological, bodily, neurophysiological, and so on and so forth—with me today will be tortured.”ii People don’t have to be taught to be dualists like they must if they are to be physicalists. Indeed, little children are naturally dualists. Summing up research in developmental psychology, Henry Wellman states that “young children are dualists: knowledgeable of mental states and entities as ontologically different from physical objects and real [non-imaginary] events.”iii It seems to me that there are two tasks for any adequate philosophy of mind: (1) articulate one’s position and explain why dualism is the commonsense view (2) defend one’s position. I believe that there is an argument that simultaneously satisfies both desiderata in a non-ad-hoc way and, thus, the argument can thereby claim the virtue of theoretical simplicity in its favor. In what follows, I shall present the argument and defend its most crucial premise, and respond to two criticisms that have been raised against it. Before we examine the arguments, I want to offer some brief remarks about the soul and the sort of high, intrinsic value human persons possess which is of relevance to bioethical reflection. Now, one could believe in the soul and reject this sort of value, and one could reject the soul and embrace this sort of value. Whether or not each view can be justified is, of course, another matter. And, in any case, the existence of the soul, rightly in my view, factors into a good deal of bioethical argumentation. As I see it, physicalists of various stripes have a difficult task in attempting to justify this sort of value for human persons in so far as they are material objects, that is, without appealing to some sort of divine voluntarism or nonphysical emergent properties. In so far as we are physical objects, we are of little value, or so it seems to me. But, you may respond, what of the body? Are you being Platonistic here and devaluing the body’s worth? No, not at all. I just don’t think the body is of much value simply in so far as it is physical. As I see it, the body has value for these reasons: (1) As a Thomist, I take the body to be an ensouled, extended, physical structure; thus, the body includes the soul to be a body, and it is of value accordingly. By contrast, a corpse is of little intrinsic value. (2) It has secondary qualities, which serve as the metaphysical grounding of many of its aesthetic properties, and neither secondary qualities nor aesthetic properties are physical. (3) It exemplifies certain geometrical relations, e.g., shape and symmetry, but these are not physical, they are abstract (though I am open to the claim that their property-instances are physical). (4) It exemplifies a certain relational 2 complexity of arrangement, but since this complexity is an abstract object, it is not physical (though I am open to the claim that the relevant property-instance is physical). (5) It is owned by the person, it is the vehicle, perhaps by way of natural signs (as with Thomas Reid), in virtue of which the person is known, and it is intimately and causally related to the person. (6) It exists and, in so far as any existing thing has value, it does. (7) It is physical. (6) and (7) involve little value compared to the other factors. It must be kept in mind that the intrinsic value/beauty of the creation is due to factors like (2)-(4) above, not (7). This can be seen in the following observation: If Berkeley’s immaterialist ontology had been true, little of value of the created world would have been lost, metaphysically speaking. If I am correct about this, then while the body has incredible value, it is not largely due to its being physical. In as much as a physicalist identifies us with a physical object—e.g., an animal, composed material object, the brain or an atomic simple—to that extend he has a problem with accounting for the high, intrinsic value of human persons. An appeal to the emergent properties constitutive of personhood won’t help, because these are not physical and, thus, such an appeal fails to locate our value in our mere physicality. The Simple Argument Stewart Goetz has advanced the following type of argument for the non-physical nature of the self, which I have modified:iv (1) I am essentially an indivisible, simple spiritual substance. (2) Any physical body is essentially a divisible or complex entity (any physical body has spatial extension or separable parts). 3 (3) Principle of Indiscernibility of Identicals (4) Therefore, I am not identical with my (or any) physical body. The premise most likely to come into dispute is (1), and I will offer a defense of it shortly. Here, I want to make a few brief comments about (2), especially the role that extension and separable parts play in it, along with the associated notion of simplicity in (1). Part/whole relations are important for treatments of substances, and there are two kinds of parts relevant to our discussion—separable and inseparable (aka modes). Setting aside properties, there are two ways something can be simple in the sense relevant to our discussion: by being uncomposed of separable parts or by being metaphysically indivisible. I use “metaphysically indivisible” to mean what many philosophers say by “indivisible in thought.” Something could be metaphysically divisible but not physically divisible (if, say, such division annihilated the whole), but not conversely. Moreover, all particulars that are metaphysically indivisible are uncomposed, but not conversely (an continuously extended whole with no separable parts could still be divided). According to our usage, a substance with inseparable parts is simple. Any relevant entity to which I am identical on a physicalist view is (most likely to be) composed of separable parts (e.g., the living body, brain, or a standard sub-region of the brain) or (less likely) at least divisible (a physical simple if such there be).v I want to advance two arguments for premise (1). Both arguments support the claim that we are directly aware of ourselves as indivisible, simple spiritual substances. Here is the first one. It often happens in science that a range of apparently unrelated data can be unified if a theoretical entity is postulated as that which is causally responsible for 4 that range. The postulation of electrons unified a wide range of phenomena by depicting them as effects of the electron’s causal powers. Sometimes a range of apparently unrelated items of knowledge can be unified if one has knowledge by acquaintance with some relevant object. For example, there are many things I know about a certain spatial region R in the philosophy classroom in which I usually lecture. For example, I know that everyone walks around R and not through it. R is rectangular in shape, about four feet tall and two feet in width and breadth. R does not contain metal in it, R contains something that is darker than yellow, if a book is placed near the top of R it will hover in stable suspension off the floor. I know all these things. But rather than being a set of isolated pieces of knowledge, there is a unifying pattern to them. Indeed, I know each of them in virtue of knowledge by acquaintance of the podium that overlaps R. It is on the basis of that acquaintance that I know the items in question. There are many apparently unrelated items of knowledge people commonsensically have of themselves. At the very least, these are strong intuitions that are widely embraced (sometimes expressed in the first person): (i) I am an indivisible, uncomposed thing that cannot exist in degrees. If I lose, say, half of my body or brain, I am not thereby a half of a person. I am an all or nothing kind of thing—either I am present or I am not. In some brain operations and cases of Dandy Walker Syndrome, well over half of the brain is absent. But while the person may lose functioning, we have strong intuitions that a whole person is present. 5 (ii) Pairs of people are not themselves conscious subjects of experience. Siamese twins involve two, not three subjects of experience. When two people shake hands, a new subject of experience does not come-to-be. We are inclined to think that the reason for this is that subjects of experience cannot be composites. Thus, pairs or larger groups of anything—conscious or unconscious—in whatever relational structure cannot be a conscious subject of experience. My knowledge of this fact is a species of the following genus: For any x and y, the union of x and y is not itself a thinker.

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