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The Value of Humanity

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The Value of Humanity The Value of Humanity Lisa Nandi Theunissen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Lisa Nandi Theunissen All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Value of Humanity Lisa Nandi Theunissen My dissertation is on foundational questions about the value of human beings. This is a Kantian topic but I develop a proposal in a non-Kantian framework. I argue that to be a Kantian in ethics is to be committed to rationalism, but that the foundations of ethics should take account of the nature of human beings and our circumstances in the world. I develop a non-Kantian theory in which the value of human beings is no diVerent, metaphysically speaking, from the value of other valuable things. Human beings have value, just as anything of value has value: because we are capable of being good-for something or someone. Most fundamentally, I argue that we are capable of being good-for ourselves. I propose that human beings have value in virtue of a capacity for having final ends, and that the capacity for having final ends makes us valuable because it makes us capable of living a good life, a life that is valuable because it is good-for the person who leads it. I show how the value of human beings gives everyone reason to treat human beings in certain ways. In particular, I show how everyone has reason not to destroy the capacity of human beings to have final ends, and, more positively, to help others realise their ends. Contents Acknowledgments iv 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Kant on Ends-In-Themselves........................ 3 1.2 A Normative Doctrine........................... 5 1.3 Kant on the Absolute Value of Humanity................. 7 1.4 A Non-Kantian Account of the Value of Human Beings.......... 11 1.5 Open Questions.............................. 14 2 Kant’s Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals 18 2.1 Introduction................................ 18 2.2 Metaphysics of morals........................... 24 2.3 Kant’s Argument for Metaphysics of Morals................ 27 2.4 The Positive Role for Empirical Considerations.............. 29 2.5 Virtue-Ethical Lessons from The Metaphysics of Morals .......... 33 2.6 A Foundational Role for Human Nature?................. 36 2.7 Bindingness Without Metaphysics?..................... 39 2.8 Conclusion................................. 44 3 Responsibility and the Value of Intelligible Beings 46 3.1 Introduction................................ 46 3.1.1 Regarding Others as Intelligible Beings.............. 47 3.1.2 A Dilemma About Responsibility................. 48 3.1.3 Kant’s Dilemma.......................... 49 3.2 Velleman on Valuing Others as Intelligible Beings............. 52 i 3.2.1 The Pre-existing Value of Intelligible Beings........... 52 3.2.2 Right Appreciation: Respect and Love............... 53 3.2.3 Exclusion of the Bad in Sensible Nature.............. 54 3.2.4 Love as an Ideal for Interpersonal Relations............ 57 3.2.5 A Model of Interpersonal Relations................ 58 3.2.6 The First Horn of the Dilemma.................. 60 3.3 Korsgaard on Respecting Others as Agents................. 63 3.3.1 The Second Horn of the Dilemma................ 66 3.4 A Disjunctive Conclusion......................... 72 3.4.1 Concessive Kantianism....................... 72 3.4.2 Rejection of the Distinction Between Intelligibility and Sensibility 74 4 On Regress Arguments for the Value of Valuers 78 4.1 Introduction................................ 78 4.2 The Notion of Value Simpliciter...................... 80 4.3 The Regress Schema: A Source Intuition.................. 87 4.3.1 Stage 1 ............................... 87 4.3.2 Stage 2 ............................... 88 4.3.3 Responses to the argument..................... 88 4.4 The Regress Schema: An End to the Chain of Dependence........ 89 4.4.1 Stage 1 ............................... 90 4.4.2 Stage 2 ............................... 90 4.4.3 Two notes about Stage 1 ...................... 91 4.5 The Alternatives.............................. 94 4.6 Being valuable for Ourselves........................ 100 ii 4.7 Conclusion................................. 101 5 On the Value of Human Beings 102 5.1 Introduction................................ 102 5.2 The Basis of Human Value......................... 106 5.3 The Explanation of Human Value..................... 113 5.3.1 The value of human beings as bearers of final ends........ 116 5.4 The Response to Human Value....................... 121 5.5 The Responses We Should Have...................... 125 5.6 Conclusion................................. 128 References 130 iii Acknowledgments Many people have been involved in shaping the direction of my project. I acknowledge various people in footnotes in various chapters, but I would like to acknowledge several people more fully here. I am grateful to Jens Timmermann on the Kant side of things. Jens invited me to participate in a conference on Kant and the dignity of humanity at the University of St Andrews in May 2011, and it was the occasion of several important conversations about Kant on value. I am also grateful to Pat Kitcher for providing helpful feedback on the Kant side of things. I was very grateful to Pat for meeting me on the eve of 2012—while everybody else was beginning their New Year celebrations—before I was to leave to give a talk on Kant on metaphysics of morals. I was fortunate to be able to attend David Velleman’s undergraduate lectures on Kant’s ethics, and to learn first hand from his distinctive take on Kant. As I remember, there were obstacles to entering the building at New York University where David was lecturing, and he was kind enough to meet me in front of the building in the mornings, so I could gain entry. Our brief exchanges through the corridors and up the elevator were the start of many subsequent conversations. David has patiently made his way through each of the chapters of my dissertation, and I am very grateful for his feedback on all of them. Joseph Raz’s influence on the direction of my thinking will be obvious. Much of my dissertation engages in a detailed way with Joseph’s writing. Our working relationship has been (relative to my life as a philosopher) rather long. I was a nervous student in two of his seminars at the Law School at Columbia, and a nervous student in several Oxford-style meetings about this or that paper, where I had to defend something I had provisionally put together. Since then Joseph has become a mentor and friend. His guidance has, and will iv continue to have, a lasting impact on my life. Philosophy would not be what it is for me without him. It is not easy to put my gratitude to Katja Vogt into words, or to trace all aspects of her guidance on my work. This project grew out of a seminar Katja gave on Kant and his critics in the Spring of 2008. That seminar profoundly shaped my thinking about ethics, and about philosophy. It was also in that seminar that I began to learn how to read diYcult texts in the history of the tradition. I have discussed every aspect of my project with Katja over many years. It was Katja who first challenged me to think about whether the notion of absolute value is a notion we fully understand, and she who brought me to think about the ancient view, in a Stoic formulation, that the good is benefit. But I have learnt from Katja in more indirect ways, too. I have attended nearly all her seminars at Columbia, and been a TA for several of her undergraduate courses. Without Katja, if I can put it this way, I believe I would be somebody else. A person whose influence will be less obvious on the page is Bradley Weslake, but his influence has been profound. I met Brad when I was doing my Honours in philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2003. He shook up everything I thought philosophy was, often to my irritation. Our partnership over the eight years that followed meant that I engaged philosophically every day with someone who had some years experience over me, and a stronger hand. He has been an editor, an interlocutor, a friend, and a partner. v 1 1 Introduction My dissertation begins with the question of why human beings are to be viewed, treated, and generally related to in very special ways. It asks: what kind of value grounds this distinctive status? Accordingly, the starting-point of my project is the central ethical question of what we owe to others. I am concerned with our ethical relations with human beings, whose value I take to be distinctive, while allowing that there could be an analogous (if less ambitious) picture about what we owe to non-human animals. From what we owe to human beings it is a short step to the value of human beings. We take that step when we ask what it is about human beings that makes us subjects of ethical concern. That we ‘have an elbow’, or ‘a vestigial appendage’, that we ‘walk upright’, are so many joking candidates.1 But they make a serious point. If human beings are such as to merit being treated in certain ways, it is because something about us is valuable. The question of my dissertation is: what makes human beings valuable, and accordingly, such as to be treated in certain ways and not in others? Much of the literature on the value of human beings begins with Kant. Recent emphasis on the so-called ‘Formula of Humanity’ version of the Categorical Imperative has made Kant the central interlocutor in accounts of human value generally. Now there are various ways of appealing to Kant on this topic, and of working out whether to construct a positive account of the value of human beings in a Kantian framework.
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