Ethics Matters

Ethical Issues in Pragmatic Perspective

Nicholas Rescher

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030520359
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030520366
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

This book covers a varied spectrum of ethical topics, ranging from the fundamental considerations regarding ethical values, to the rationale of obligation, and the ethical management of societal and personal affairs. Nicholas Rescher shows how fundamental general principles underpin the pragmatic stance we can appropriately take on questions of specific ethical detail. His work on these issues is pervaded by a certain pragmatic point of view. As the popular dictum has it, we humans come this way but once, with just a single lifetime available, to each one of us. Rescher argues that it is a matter of rational self-interest and ethical obligation to use this opportunity for doing something towards making the world a better home for ourselves and our posterity.

© The Author(s) 2021

N. RescherEthics Mattershttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52036-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Personhood

Nicholas Rescher¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Nicholas Rescher

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1 Part I: Humans as Persons

1.1 Human Beings and Being Human

Man is an animal and Homo sapiens a mammalian species. But man is not just that, but is a person as well. And this means that we must be able to do—at least sometimes—those sorts of things that mark a person as such and differentiate them from the rest of creation.

There are various questions of transition which the Theory of Evolution has made unavoidable. One is that of the point of development at which the pre-human humanoids morphed into Homo sapiens: what does it require for a humanoid mammal to be accounted human? And another is that of the point at which humans qualify as rational agents: what does it require for a member of Homo sapiens to qualify as a rational and morally responsible person? Being human is a relatively straightforward matter. The question just doesn’t arise save in the context of the beings we encounter on the surface of our planet. But being a person is something a great deal more difficult and problematic. Here we are dealing not with biological taxonomy but with a complex manifold and convoluted theoretical matters. For here we are dealing not just with facets of what observationally is the case, but with a manifold of more problematic issues regarding what can and might be.

In evolutionary biology, Homo sapiens is a developmental subgroup of beings within the wider category of humanoids. Homo sapiens is a classification subgroup of beings included within the potentially wider groupings of persons.

Persons emerge late in the evolutionary time-table—and for understandable reason. For three stages of evaluative sophistication are involved:

1. 1.
   The plus/minus, pleasure/pain, nice/nasty affective reactivity we find throughout the organic realm.
2. 2.
   The desirable/undesirable judgmental responses that provide evaluation as we move it along the transit from higher primates to proto-humans.
3. 3.
   The right/wrong of ethical evaluation rooted in the developed sense of community that comes on the scene with interactive among Homo sapiens.

Stage 1 requires sensibility, stage 2 requires conscious reactivity, stage 3¹ requires rational evaluation by comparison with what would be and should be different and calls for an awareness of contrast.

Persons alone have an inner thought-life. Reflectivity is present throughout the range of significantly developed organisms: animals can feed themselves, wash themselves, protect themselves, move themselves, but only persons have the cognitive reflexivity needed for forming a self-conception that enables them to interest themselves, concern themselves, and apprehend and appreciate their own consideration. They alone have the self-awareness needed for a self-image in comparative content with feature-attribution to others. Only persons can be proud or ashamed of themselves. Only they can appreciate that there are things they ought or ought not to think or do. Only they can gain entry into the realm of normativity. Animals can form habits of action; persons alone can adopt practical norms and rules.

Personhood is a well-established category of human understanding. The Greeks personalized the forces of nature in the Olympian gods. And throughout human history—from before Aesop until after Brer Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh—we humans make persons of the animals that survive us. The “pathetic fallacy”—the ascription of human characteristic to the innovative creations of nature and artifice (the “cruel sea,” the “unsuitable” machine, the “unrelenting” rain, and the like)—is something so natural and commonplace as to deserve a kinder name.

To all appearances, then, we ourselves hold dual citizenship, both in the human community and in the society of persons. However kinship with our fellows has a somewhat different aspect in the two cases.

We are bound to our fellow humans by bonds of biological kinship. And these ground claims to fraternal solidarity that enjoin mankind and in the pursuit of basic needs—the security of life, liberty, opportunity in the pursuit of happiness.

Personhood, by contrast, is a more difficult matter. Its impetus is rather paternal than fraternal. To persons we can not only support in basic needs but support in ethical innovation, to enhance the realization of potential, to support their cultural growth, to aid not only their well-being and security and to promote their ultimate ethical and “spiritual” constitution. For, like good parents we actually should—and often do—want to see our fellow persons to be not just better off but to become better people.

1.2 Capacities of Persons

Personhood is a decisive classification and being a person is a binary matter—one either is or is not a person. But while we cannot be more or less of a person, one can be a better or worse person. One can certainly honor the obligations and harness the opportunities that being a person puts at one’s disposal to a greater of lesser extent. In this regard personhood is like kingship: a matter of better or worse even if not of more or less.

It is important to distinguish between degrees of personhood (which there cannot be) and degrees of evidence for ascribing personhood (which there certainly are). Granted, the grounds for ascribing personhood to X can be partial and incomplete, but X’s personhood (if indeed there) cannot prove to be partial and incomplete. Incomplete evidence for something is not evidence for something incomplete. Again, someone can display and manifest the features requisite for personhood to varying degrees, but that does not make this individual more or less of a person. To reemphasize, personhood as such is a matter of the possession of capabilities and not of the extent and requiring of their actualization. The extent to which a creature quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck may constitutes a stranger case for saying that it is a duck, but it does not make it more of a duck. Like being a person, being a duck, is not a matter of degree.

As a creature that makes its way in the world by the guidance of information, we intelligent agents have a need for knowledge. And this enjoins a cognitive dynamism on us whose natural consequence is a disaffection from intellectual standing and an aversion to boredom. Our minds require cognitive nourishment every bit as much as our bodies require physical nourishment, and keeping the mind occupied becomes as important as keeping the body fed. Characteristic of persons at large is an impetus to being what is going on in the world and how things function there.

Persons must be mind-endowed. They must be capable of having belief, forming opinions about things—in sum to process information, be it correctly or incorrectly. But they must also be capable of having evaluative attitudes about things, pro or con, favorable or unfavorable.

Persons are bound to have beliefs about how matters stand in the world, creating for themselves some sort of mental thought-model about its arrangements. And they have various needs and wants that give them an interest in what goes on. On this basis—their beliefs and their interests—they make choices. It is this capacity to deploy beliefs, evaluations, and choices into conjoint operation in an endeavor to produce results is what defines them as persons. Agency guided by cognition, evaluation, and choice constitute the heart of the matter. And to be fully a person, a being should not only preside over the aforementioned capabilities of cognitive and practical intelligence (belief, desire, choice) but be conscious and indeed self-conscious thereof.

A reasonable accommodation has to be achieved between two conflicting ideas:

• That the limits of a person’s cognitive world are set by the limits of the individual’s experience. Experience accordingly sets limits to the individual’s cognitive reach beyond which it cannot venture very far.
• That a person’s reflexivity of understanding enables them to realize that reality extends above and beyond them on cognitive range.

The idea of a self, predicated on the contrast between the individual concerned and the rest—both the impersonal remainder but also the personal others. And persons as intelligent beings have a conception of their place in impersonal nature and also as members of a wider grouping of other persons.

This twofold, contrastive differentiation is at the cognitive disposal of persons as intelligent agents, and endows them with an unavoidable awareness of a realm of being that extends beyond the self.

The evaluative dimension spills over into the cognitive. Persons are first and foremost cognitive agents, beings who act on the basis of information and thought. For such beings, radical skepticism is not an option: a systemic refusal to accept contentions creates a 100 percent certainty of lacking the information needed to guide action. A person can reasonably be a mild sceptic, denying the prospect of settling factual issues with 100 percent certainty. But a person cannot reasonably be radical sceptic holding that all factual claims are equimeritorious and that none is deserving of greater credence than any other. For without evaluation rational decision and thereby rational action becomes impossible and persons will no longer function as rational beings.

1.3 Requisites for Personhood

And so, it has to be acknowledged that the physical embodiment of persons (if any) involves issues very different from that of personhood itself. The person at issue might be a multi-nodal plurality of jellyfish-like creature swimming connectively in a soupy sea. Or it might be a climate of disembodied potencies leaping from one organic level to another temporarily enhancing it to a different mode of realization. The possibilities are endless, and await the inauguration of science-fiction unified. But this has important consequences, namely, that personhood as such is detached from its physical manifestations, independent of its species and kinds. (Personhood as such knows no race or sex.) The duties, rights, and claims of personhood stand independent of all of these further taxonomic considerations. They are something more fundamental and deep-rooted, with ethical and metaphysical ramifications that stand independently on their own feet.

So just what are these person-characterizing capabilities—those personabilities as we shall call them. To all appearances they stand as follows:

1. 1.
   Intelligence: the ability deploy thought for acquiring and processing information, encompassing consciousness, perception, reasoning
2. 2.
   Agency: the ability to perform actions—alike mental (e.g., direct attention) and physical (i.e., shift stones) and form habits and rules of action
3. 3.
   Will: the ability to make decisions, act purposively, using intelligence to direct action for the realization of chosen objectives, thus fusing the two preceding abilities.
4. 4.
   Affectivity and judgment: the capacity for positive and negative reductivity, to feel pleasure and pain and to evaluate conditions pro and con, so as to effect evaluation and appraisal, prioritization, assessment of worth
5. 5.
   Reflectivity or self-awareness: the realization of oneself as a being having the preceding abilities that characterize personhood
6. 6.
   Communication: the ability to exchange thought with others
7. 7.
   Socialization: community enlistment and social interaction subject to shared norms and rules

The possession of these personabilities does not require the agent to exercise them constantly and consistently. It is simply a matter of being able to do so often and to some nontrivial extent. Capacity rather than performance is of the essence here.

These personabilities are majoritatively necessary and sufficient conditions for qualifying as a person.² Here the connection is one of logico-conceptual implication. With evidentiation, however, far less is required. The connection need not be one of logico-conceptual necessitation, but can be a matter of eventual indications, with evidentiation, with considerations of inductive harmonization now in the foreground.

Above all, persons must be able to obtain and manage information. And to this end communication is virtually inevitable. For one thing there is the matter of communication with oneself of other times and places by means of memory, recollection, memoranda, and records. For another there is the matter of communication with others. The recording and transmission of information is thus an essential resource of personhood. And the use of language is indemonstrable for the realization of these requisites. All of the essentials of language use—pattern recognition, symbolist realization, pattern detection, habitat acquisition, rule following, etc.—are needed for the operation of the process that implements person-definitive capabilities.

Persons occupy a special place on Nature’s stage because they are “free agents.” They are agents because they can act through thought-guided intervention in the course of events. And they are free because their thought can be developed autonomously rather than as an automaticity re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Personhood
• 2. The Ethical Import of Value Attribution
• 3. The Rational Validation of Ethical Values
• 4. Rationality and Moral Obligation
• 5. On Compromise and Obligation
• 6. Moral Luck
• 7. Fairness Problems
• 8. On the Ethics of Inaction
• 9. Ancestor Worship?
• 10. Distant Posterity (A Philosophical Glance Along Time’s Corridor)
• 11. Is There a Statute of Limitations in Ethics?
• 12. An Ethical Paradox
• 13. Collective Responsibility
• 14. Allocating Scientific Credit
• 15. Morality in Government and Politics
• 16. Problems of Betterment
• 17. Sovereign Immunity in Theological Ethics
• 18. Perfectibility Problems
• Back Matter