Extending the Circle of Rights

This week we considered the question: should the circle of rights be extended to include animals and plants? That is, should animals and plants be granted certain unconditional moral or legal entitlements? There are a range of views in the literature:

(1) Feinberg (1974) argues that animals should have rights but plants should not.
(2) Stone (1972) argues that some plants and natural environments should have rights.
(3) Hayward (1998) argues that the circle of rights should not be extended, but that ecological values should be enshrined in our social constitutions, as a natural extension of the logic of human rights.
(4) Attfield (1981) argues that plants cannot be rights bearers but that they can nevertheless be said to have 'interests' and 'value of their own'.

All four articles were interesting, but for now I'll just consider the following proposal by Feinberg (1974):

Interest Principle
The beings who can have rights are precisely those who can have interests.

I think that 'interests' may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral standing. Here are two definitions of 'interest':

1. the advantage or benefit of a person or group
2. a stake, share, or involvement in an undertaking, esp. a financial one

We can talk of animal or even plant 'interest' in the sense of both (1) and (2). What about the 'interest' of a river? If a plant's interests include striving towards the sun, absorbing nutrients and reproducing, do a river's interests include flowing downhill and out to sea? The ascription of 'interests' seems to be a case merely of teleological interpretation, and not a description of metaphysical fact. We look at these entities and ascribe certain 'goals' to them on the basis of their behaviour. We should be hesitant about taking these characterisations to be literally or metaphysically true.

What would it be for an ascription of 'interests' to be literally true? For plants and rivers to really have goals? Well, I think we consider interest ascription to animals to be 'more' true, and interest ascription to humans even more so.The notion of goals - and thus 'interests' in the sense relevant to moral standing - is closely related to psychology, to the concepts of mental states and intentionality. We might therefore refer to these more general debates in the philosophy of mind (e.g.. Dennett's 'intentional stance') in the hope of clarifying the kinds of beings that can have 'interests'.

Traditionally, moral theories have considered the capacity for 'intentional' behaviour to be a necessary and sufficient condition for moral standing. It seems that Stone (1972) is trying to move away from the idea of intentionality as unique characteristic of the mental. It strikes me that if we take an anti-realist view on intentionality* then we can't possibly use it as the basis for moral consideration. And of course, if we take a spectral view then any moral theory which refers to intentionality will of course need to specify the order of interpretation at which story about 'interests' becomes morally relevant.

The worries about this approach have somewhat reinforced my inclination towards moral non-cognitivism, or at least the view that emotional ties to things provide the basis for giving them moral consideration.

Notes:
* Dennett (1989) rejects the label anti-realism, taking intentional idiom to pick out 'real patterns' in the natural world. But, I think that refusing to recognise intentionality at the ontological level counts as anti-realism in a certain sense. In any case, I think the intentional stance has to amount to a spectral view of intentionality - it's not an all or nothing concept, just a way of understanding complex objects (e.g. in particular, humans). So, his view is still likely to give traditional moral theorists a headache.

References:
Attfield, R. (1981) 'The Good of Trees', Journal of Value Inquiry 15, pp.35-54
Dennett, D. (1989) The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press)
Feinberg, J. (1974) 'The Rights of Animals', in Philosophy and Environmental Crisis,  Blackstone, W. (ed.) (Athens: University of Georgia Press)
Stone, C. (1972) 'Should Trees Have Standing', in University of Southern California Law Review 45, pp. 450-501
Hayward, T. (1998) 'Political Theory for a Sustainable Polity' in Political Theory and Ecological Values (Polity Press)

Instrumental vs Relational Value

I just realised I've been using 'instrumental value' in two different ways pretty much ever since I started thinking philosophically. To bring this out I will attempt two definitions:

1. An entity or state of affairs has instrumental value iff it is valuable a means of achieving a certain desideratum, or a series of desiderata.
   
2. An entity or state of affairs has relational value iff its value depends on its relation to other entities or states of affairs.

Are these definitions co-extensive? Well, instrumental value is clearly a species of relational value, but we might think there relational values which aren't properly called instrumental. Let's consider two examples:

(a) a Van Gogh painting
(b) a letter from a friend

Both clearly have relational value: their importance is dependent upon their relation to a group of human beings. But do they have instrumental value? Well, the Van Gogh might do: if you have a gallery it might attract patrons, if you are its owner it might function as a status symbol. Nevertheless, even once these factors have been accounted for, I would suggest there is some extra kind of valuing left over.

To make this kind clearer let's turn to the letter from a friend and suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is something you keep privately; the only people who know about it are you and its author. You value the letter highly, and resolve to keep it on your person until you die. Isn't your attachment to it an end in itself, not a means to an end? If so, then the letter possesses relational but non-instrumental value.

How to describe the foil we've revealed here? I'm tempted to label it 'intrinsic value', but skim-re-reading Weatherson (2008) suggests I shouldn't: it connotes a strong sense of self-subsistence which would make it seem non-relational. I also thought about 'independent value', in the sense of not depending on another value, though still, of course, upon a valuer (if it's a species of relational value). Finally, I wonder about 'fundamental' or 'founding' or 'basic' value, in so far as such values are presupposed by the notion of instrumental value, for I take it that they play the role of defining our desiderata. That is to say, it is our non-instrumental values which animate our pursuit of instrumental value.

But aren't our desiderata themselves always, ultimately, instrumental? I think that there is a certain sense in which this is true but an important context in which this is false, namely that of motivation. To foreground the Darwinian flavour of this question, let's imagine a couple enjoying contraceptive sex. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, we can explain their attraction towards this activity in terms of the paradigmatic 'desideratum' of genetic evolution; the propogation of genes. ( I place 'desideratum' in inverted commas, because, of course, natural selection is a blind effect of physical forces, not a volitional agent; thus not a literal subject of 'desires'. ) An ultimate explanation* of the couple's sexual desires can be given in a way which makes them look instrumental: in the context of a theory of genetic evolution we can say that these desires were selected for because of their instrumental value. But, speaking proximately, that is, in terms of the motivations of the agents themselves, contraceptive sex is clearly enjoyed for its own sake, not as a means of achieveing a further desideratum.

To return to the two ways in which I've been using instrumental value, let me take another example. In a discussion of environmental ethics, we might ask, for example: why we should save a particular natural landscape from destruction by property developers? The tensions in such a debate will arise due to a complex set of competing values, and within this set there will be discerned different types of value. The developer will justify her proposal in terms of instrumental value: she wants to harness the economic potential of the land. Those who oppose her proposal may cite instrumental reasons of a similar kind, such as the economic benefits that such a landscape brings to the community. In such a case they engage with the developer on her own terms, and show that leaving the land as it is is the better option economically. But, more likely, they will suggest that the landscape possess other kinds of value, which should be respected, or at least considered as part of the trade off. These values might be labelled 'aesthetic' or 'spiritual'; they are those which we enjoy when we talk a walk in the country, for example. But, thought I, isn't this attempt to cite non-instrumental values ultimately self-defeating: though we are now in the domain of non-economic values, we nevertheless remain within that of instrumental values - we've now assumed desiderata such as human happiness or spiritual well-being, and given the land value as a means to achieving these.

Any approach which remains within the terms of instrumental value seems somewhat unsatisfactory: if some other means of achieving our ends were available, say, for example, a virtual experience machine, then according to this approach we would no longer have any reason to preserve the natural landscape in question. There's an obvious intuitive resistance here; something about this conclusion feels wrong. Should we just bite this bullet, or is there a problem with the argument? Well, I'd like to suggest a diagnosis: namely that we have moved away from the proximate question 'how** do we as individuals value the landscape?' to the broader question 'why do we as a society value the landscape'? In this shift, we loose the crucial context of an individual valuing human subject - with all its rational and emotional complexities - and instead gravitate towards the abstract conception of a 'rational' society, composed of institutions that act and are founded solely upon intelligible reasons, not in terms of affective attachments. On most substantive (i.e. non-procedural) conceptions, their goal is to abstract from the affective to find common, intelligible, 'objective' values - but if my non-cognitivism about 'basic' values is correct, this is a rather misdirected project, that may well encourage a sterile instrumentalist mindset which fails to consider ethical questions in a genuinely human context.***

Notes:
* I'm inspired by Pinker (2003)'s ultimate / proximate distinction in this context.
** I write 'how' rather than 'why' because I think that most of the relevant valuations (e.g. the non-instrumental ones) are not amenable to 'why' questions, which ask for justification in terms of reasons; I take them to be emotional, i.e. irrational.
*** Perhaps a partial antidote to the problem suggested here would be to rephrase the broader question posed to society - in terms of a more descriptive 'how' instead of an (overly-)explanation-seeking 'why'?

References:
Pinker, S. (2003) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, (London: Penguin Books Ltd)
Weatherson, B. (2008) "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic/>.