If an objective list theory is true, couldn’t it be the case that there are kinds of goods unavailable to us that are available to some other nonhuman animals? Or that they are available to us, but most of us don’t appreciate them so they aren’t recognized as goods? How could we find out? Are objective list theories therefore doomed to anthropocentrism and speciesism? How do objective list theories argue that something is or isn’t one of these goods?
Yeah, these are good questions. I think objective list theories are definitely vulnerable to anthropocentric and speciesist reasoning. It’s certainly open to an objective list theorist to hold that there are non-instrumental goods that are inaccessible to humans, though I’m not aware of any examples of this in the relevant literature. This sort of question is occasionally raised in the literature on “supra-personal moral status” (i.e., moral status greater than humans). (See Douglas 2013 for a representative example. Fun fact: this literature is actually hundreds of years old; theologians used to debate whether angels had a higher moral status than humans).
Arguing over non-instrumental goods is notoriously difficult. In practice, it usually involves a lot of appealing to intuitions, especially intuitions about thought experiments. Not a fantastic methodology, to be sure, but in most cases it’s unclear what the alternative would be.
If an objective list theory is true, couldn’t it be the case that there are kinds of goods unavailable to us that are available to some other nonhuman animals? Or that they are available to us, but most of us don’t appreciate them so they aren’t recognized as goods? How could we find out? Are objective list theories therefore doomed to anthropocentrism and speciesism? How do objective list theories argue that something is or isn’t one of these goods?
Hey Michael,
Yeah, these are good questions. I think objective list theories are definitely vulnerable to anthropocentric and speciesist reasoning. It’s certainly open to an objective list theorist to hold that there are non-instrumental goods that are inaccessible to humans, though I’m not aware of any examples of this in the relevant literature. This sort of question is occasionally raised in the literature on “supra-personal moral status” (i.e., moral status greater than humans). (See Douglas 2013 for a representative example. Fun fact: this literature is actually hundreds of years old; theologians used to debate whether angels had a higher moral status than humans).
Arguing over non-instrumental goods is notoriously difficult. In practice, it usually involves a lot of appealing to intuitions, especially intuitions about thought experiments. Not a fantastic methodology, to be sure, but in most cases it’s unclear what the alternative would be.