Friday, September 21, 2012

Just Matter and Personhood

In our last class, Shawn brought up a possible objection to the Just Matter theory which goes more or less as follows:

  1. If Just Matter theory is true, then 'person' is a phase sortal.
  2. If 'person' is a phase sortal, then we cannot make sense of our obligations and responsibilities towards other persons.
  3. But we can make sense of our obligations and responsibilities towards other persons
  4. Therefore, Just Matter theory is false.
I am curious about what you guys think of this objection, specifically premise 2. While in class, we did not give many reasons for thinking that 2 is true, but we also did not give any reasons for thinking that 2 is false. Here's one:

      5.   'child' is a phase sortal.
      6.   We can make sense of our responsibilities towards children.
      7.   if 5 and 6, then 2 is false
      8.   Therefore, 2 is false.

Hopefully 5 and 6 are uncontroversial, so here's a defense of 7: it seems that any explanation of our responsibilities towards people insofar as they are children will allow for the fact that having the phase sortal 'child' entails having certain responsibilities towards them. But it seems like an analogous case can be made for 'persons' as phase sortal. Just like, insofar as something is a child, there are special responsibilities we must have towards them, it seems like insofar as something is a person, we can have special responsibilities towards them. There doesn't seem to be anything about the phase sortal 'person' that differentiates it from the phase sortal 'child' unless we assume that 'person' is not a phase sortal. But this would be to beg the question against the Just Matter theory.

Of course, there might be special reasons for thinking that 'person' couldn't be a phase sortal, but I see no principled reason for denying this. Any thoughts?

4 comments:

  1. I think you're right, that we can have special responsibilities towards something in virtue if it being a person, even if "person" is a phase sortal. Nonetheless, I think making personhood phasal will cause problems for a smaller subset of cases where we think we have a responsibility.

    To see this, consider how the phasist about persons deals with the Deon/Theon puzzle. Say Deon is a person, and Theon is the part of Deon that is all of him but his left hand. If I cut off Deon's left hand, what happens? the phasist will say that Deon gets destroyed (or becomes scattered) and Theon gains the phase "person".

    The problem seems to be with responsibilities we seem to gain with respect to certain individuals, which we think keep when the person changes parts. For instance, let's say I made a promise to Deon. We should think I'm still obligated to keep my promise, and yet it is hard to see how, since Deon is no longer around, and I never made a promise to Theon. So, there is a subset of moral responsibilities we think we have that the phasist can't account for.

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  2. Thanks for starting this thread Damian. My undergrad education has included at least a few conversations about the relationship, if any, between metaphysics and ethics, and so I'm excited to see these themes in play. With that said, I have intuitions that there might be more to Shawn's objection than is readily apparent. I think these intuitions might stem from a few questions about the framing of the objection and Damian's argument by analogy against (2).

    First, I wonder if Shawn's the first two premises could be developed to provide a bit more depth:

    (1) If Just Matter theory is true, then 'person' is a phase sortal.
    (2) If 'person' is a phase sortal, then we cannot make sense of our obligations and responsibilities towards other persons.

    I'm quite new to talk of sortals so perhaps I'm off the mark, but I wonder if Shawn's objection can be read (or tweaked/restated toward improvement) as articulating an intuition that JMT is incompatible with a constitutive notion of ethical autonomy. Try this:

    (1) If autonomy is not constitutive of persons then why we ascribe moral responsibility, reduces to radically subjective non-rational sources.
    (2) If our attributions of moral responsibility reduce to radically subjective non-rational sources we can't make sense of our responsibilities and obligations to others.
    (3) JMT reduces the identity of materially instantiated objects in the universe to descriptions of hunks of matter.
    (3) If we have mind-states that are constitutive of us as persons, then a set of non-material to material relations (between minds and bodies) would be essential to the identification of at least some materially instantiated objects in the world.
    (4) So, if JMT is true and persons are material objects, it better not be the case that we have properties of mind-states, like autonomy, that are constitutive of us as persons.
    (5) From (1)(2) and (4), if we can make sense of our ethical practices, then JMT is false.

    Second: I wonder, in regard to Damian's argument by analogy:

    5. 'child' is a phase sortal.
    6. We can make sense of our responsibilities towards children.
    7. if 5 and 6, then 2 is false
    8. Therefore, 2 is false.

    Can make sense of our responsibilities to children without holding that they are persons and persons are autonomous? We certainly don't hold the same kind of moral responsibilities to chairs and other phase sortals. Can we have moral responsibilities to non-autonomous beings? If JMT excludes the possibility of identifying a constitutive notion of moral autonomy and this argument relies on this feature of persons, then 2 is not false, though (6) might seem to be on JMT, once revised to read:

    (6') We can make sense of our responsibilities towards children because they are autonomous persons.

    I might be off-base here, of course, as I'm new to phase sortal talk.

    Some Questions: Can persons be self-realizing phase sortals on a JMT view/Am I misunderstanding the work phase sortals can do in relation to the ascription of autonomy? Is autonomy, in fact, a presupposition of making sense of moral responsibility? Is it possible that we are mistaken in thinking that we can make sense of our moral responsibilities?

    Apologies if this is a bit messy. Everything in a rush right now.

    Cheers,

    Nick T

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  3. Damn, I had a really neat reply to Nick, and it seems not to have been posted. Here goes:

    Your argument 5-8 seems to run as follows: purely physical objects cannot have mental properties. If this is true, and autonomy is a mental property, then purely physical objects cannot be autonomous. If it is true that autonomy is essential for personhood, then purely physical objects cannot be persons. Finally, JMT asserts that we are purely physical objects. Therefore, if JMT is correct, then we are not persons.

    I think the right answer to your argument is to deny the first step, and claim that purely physical objects CAN have mental properties. If this is the case, then JMT is compatible with us being persons. I guess the question becomes: can there be a physicalist account of mental properties. Many philosophers think that there can. And in order to avoid your argument, the Just Matter theorist is committed to either giving such an account or giving a different account of responsibility that doesn't rely on mental properties at all.

    In terms of my argument by analogy, the point was that there are some special responsibilities we have towards children that we do not have towards other persons. Given that 'child' is a phase sortal, it seems like phase sortals can involve special responsibilities. By analogy, there is no reason to think that if 'person' was a phase sortal, we couldn't also derive responsibilities from that.

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  4. Damian, thank you for the thoughtful reply. Your exegesis of my argument is on point--and I expected that you might point out the possibility of denying first step. I realize that you do not advance a physicalist account of mental properties and that JMT is not necessarily your view.

    I would note, however, that to account for autonomy it seems we would need a physicalist account of mental properties that are not epiphenomenal--but that play an explanatory role in explaining our agency. I have doubts that this is possible on a physicalist picture. While epiphenomenal mental properties seem at least prima facie consistent with physicalism, agency EXPLAINED in terms of first person mind states rather than brain states--by reference to autonomy as substantial and causally efficacious--seems inconsistent with views that want to assert that explanations of objects are purely physical. Some explanations of objects, it seems, of autonomous persons, in particular, presuppose contents that are non-purely physical and that do the explanatory work regarding the identity and at least some of the causal efficacy of those objects.

    Perhaps, I've missed something though and you can help me to clarify?

    Thanks again,

    Nick T

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