Show-Me the Argument

I want to announce that Peter Abram is now the new administrator of Show Me the Argument!  Peter is a first year graduate student here at University of Missouri.  Shaun stepped down last year, and I am now as well.  Hopefully, we’ll be able to block out all those spam comments soon.

After finding the site via Google, it appears Show-Me has moved to a new web address.  I wish this would have been announced beforehand, so that folks would have had the opportunity to change their blogrolls and bookmarks! Now I’m afraid that Show-Me will lose a lot of its traffic (whatever that may be), which would be unfortunate given its career thus far.  (Blogs wax and wane, of course, but this one has been fairly consistent.) 

So: if you’re a member of a group blog, say, and you’ve managed to find your way back, please update your blogroll! 

 p.s. perhaps an admin wouldn’t mind sharing the reasons for the change? 

Consider two sets of parents who are considering whether to have a child:

A and B know that if they create their child he will (through no fault of his own) have a very bad life. If they don’t choose to create him, he will never exist.

C and D know that if they create their child he will have a very bad life and he will be morally responsible for the fact that he has a bad life. If they don’t choose to create him, he will never exist.

If we say that A and B have a duty to their prospective child to not create him should we say the same thing about C and D? Are there any moral reasons that A and B have for not reproducing that do not also apply to C and D?

It seems to me that human beings that lack a high level of rationality or cognitive ability  are persons (I’m thinking of fetuses and people in comas) while some animals that have more cognitive ability are not persons. And yet it also seems to me that rationality or cognitive ability has something to do with being a person. Here’s a way to make sense of this:

X is a person iff there is a possible world in which X has degree of rationality Y. (Where Y is a degree of rationality had by some human beings in the actual world but not by any non-human animals of which we are aware.)

If this is right I can claim that human beings who lack degree of rationality Y in this world have it in some other worlds and thus are persons.

Now how can I explain why animals cannot have degree of rationality Y in any possible world? I claim that in order to achieve degree of rationality Y you must have a soul. Or perhaps a certain type if soul if one is inclined to think that animals have souls. (Call the necessary type of soul a P-soul.) All human beings have P-souls but all animals essentially lack P-souls. This is because if you united the body of an animal with a P-soul the animal would not gain a P-soul but rather a new object would be created which had a P-soul. Thus, no animal can achieve degree of rationality Y and thus no animal is a person. But all human beings can achieve degree of rationality Y so all human beings are people.

I like this view because it captures the two intuitions I expressed at the beginning of the post and because I am already a substance dualist.

Thoughts?

Congratulations to Show-Me’s own Eric Roark who has just accepted a tenure-track offer from Millikin University!  Eric is writing his dissertation under Peter Vallentyne and is defending a left-libertarian account of the use and appropriation of natural resources.  His specializations are social & political philosophy and applied ethics.

I came across an interesting argument when teaching intro to logic. I don’t mean it to be a good one, but just share it here.

1. If the truth of its premises does not guarantee the truth of its conclusion, then an argument is not valid.

2. The truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of this conclusion.

3. Therefore, this argument is not valid.

Question: Is this argument valid or not?

 

is here. The posts “What is Pacifism?” by Patrick Todd and “Can Naturalistic Evolution Give Us Reliable Faculties?” by me (Andrew Moon) are up there. Don’t forget that you can go here to the main philosopher’s carnival website where you can nominate a philosophy post (including posts from Show Me)!