And though your example beings may not be able to pursue their own functional goods, they are still the sorts of creatures who do.
(...)
But I think she would argue similarly about creatures that are defective in other ways, e.g. who has no power to control what they experience or to pursue goals.
Maybe having valenced experiences means they have goods and bads, and not being able to pursue them makes them defective, regardless of what type of creature they are (e.g. if they were designed from scratch to lack the ability to pursue their ends)?
A human infant is not a particular kind of creature, but a human creature at a particular life stage. I believe that it is not proper to assign moral standing, and the properties on which it is grounded, to life stages or to the subjects of those stages. Moral standing should be accorded to persons and animals considered as the subjects of their whole lives, at least in the case of animals with enough psychic unity over time to be regarded as the subjects of their whole life.
Aren’t human infants pretty psychologically disconnected from their future rational selves, though? It’s extremely rare for adult humans to retain memories from experiences in infancy, although I suppose experiences in infancy might still shape their adult personalities.
If I understand you correctly, I think she would agree. Her distinction between “final goods” and “functional goods” comes, I think, from this 1983 paper of hers, though there she calls functional goods “instrumental” instead. The functional good is basically that which allows a thing to function well, e.g. a whetstone is good for the blade because it keeps it sharp and tar is good for the boat because it keeps it from taking in water. The final good is “the end or aim of all our strivings, or at any rate the crown of their success, the summum bonum, a state of affairs that is desirable or valuable or worth achieving for its own sake”. Where does the final good come from? Korsgaard basically argues, if I recall correctly, following Aristotle, that creatures have functions, and that, when we act to achieve some end, to attain whatever we value as good-for us, we take that end to be good in the final sense. I think this is pretty similar to what you were getting at?
Are final goods also functional goods, though? It seems to me that our functions are also supposed to determine our final goods, not just that functional goods are instrumental. Or maybe they happen to coincide for humans? From the abstract of this paper of hers (assuming this is the view she is promoting generally, not just a specific defense of Aristotle):
Drawing on the account of form and matter in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it argues that “function” does not mean purpose but rather a way of functioning — how a thing does what it does. The way human beings do things is by making rational choices. The human good or happiness is not merely a result of rational choice, but consists in it, because a rational action or activity is one whose principle expresses the agent’s conception of what is worth doing for the sake of what.
A rational being who lacks some of the properties that together make rational functioning possible is not non-rational, but rather defectively rational, and therefore unable to function well. [...] It is not as if you could simply subtract “rationality” from a human animal. A non-rational animal, after all, functions perfectly well without understanding the principles of reason, since he makes his choices in a different way.
This gets into modal personism/personhood. I have some objections to this and her responses to the argument from marginal cases in general, some coming from the literature on this topic (I think here and here, but it’s been a while since I read those), but maybe they are based on misunderstandings, since my understanding is pretty shallow here:
I think you could subtract rationality from a human being and they could still function well (in terms of achieving their ends), depending on the context. We still have a lot of instinct and more basic forms of learning that non-rational animals rely on to survive and pursue their own ends, so we could potentially get by on those alone. Of course, our ancestors who lacked rationality probably did make up for it in other ways.
If functions are just the ways we do things, as in her paper that I cite above, and a particular human lacks rationality, rationality can’t be their function. (See also points 3 and 4 for objections to possible responses to this.)
Why would we consider a human whose genes do not support rationality to be defectively rational or a “rational being”, rather than a non-rational being? If it’s determined by their genes, isn’t it in their nature? Why wouldn’t this be a different type/category of creature from a rational human? And by changing enough genes, we could get a completely different non-rational species.
Why isn’t every individual being their own type? On what basis are we grouping them? If we reference species in our definitions, this would be a kind of speciesism. We can even imagine creatures without anything similar to genes or designs, like Boltzmann brains, although maybe they are too unlikely to ever exist.
What if a human never becomes rational due to some omission, e.g. something to do with the environment in the womb or inadequate nutrition? If we gain the ability to enhance nonhuman animals to be rational, couldn’t failing to do so make them defectively rational, too? If we can gain the ability to enhance otherwise non-rational nonhuman animals, couldn’t they be defectively rational now? Is function determined by the “design”, the genes?
Thanks for the clarifications!
Maybe having valenced experiences means they have goods and bads, and not being able to pursue them makes them defective, regardless of what type of creature they are (e.g. if they were designed from scratch to lack the ability to pursue their ends)?
Aren’t human infants pretty psychologically disconnected from their future rational selves, though? It’s extremely rare for adult humans to retain memories from experiences in infancy, although I suppose experiences in infancy might still shape their adult personalities.
Are final goods also functional goods, though? It seems to me that our functions are also supposed to determine our final goods, not just that functional goods are instrumental. Or maybe they happen to coincide for humans? From the abstract of this paper of hers (assuming this is the view she is promoting generally, not just a specific defense of Aristotle):
This gets into modal personism/personhood. I have some objections to this and her responses to the argument from marginal cases in general, some coming from the literature on this topic (I think here and here, but it’s been a while since I read those), but maybe they are based on misunderstandings, since my understanding is pretty shallow here:
I think you could subtract rationality from a human being and they could still function well (in terms of achieving their ends), depending on the context. We still have a lot of instinct and more basic forms of learning that non-rational animals rely on to survive and pursue their own ends, so we could potentially get by on those alone. Of course, our ancestors who lacked rationality probably did make up for it in other ways.
If functions are just the ways we do things, as in her paper that I cite above, and a particular human lacks rationality, rationality can’t be their function. (See also points 3 and 4 for objections to possible responses to this.)
Why would we consider a human whose genes do not support rationality to be defectively rational or a “rational being”, rather than a non-rational being? If it’s determined by their genes, isn’t it in their nature? Why wouldn’t this be a different type/category of creature from a rational human? And by changing enough genes, we could get a completely different non-rational species.
Why isn’t every individual being their own type? On what basis are we grouping them? If we reference species in our definitions, this would be a kind of speciesism. We can even imagine creatures without anything similar to genes or designs, like Boltzmann brains, although maybe they are too unlikely to ever exist.
What if a human never becomes rational due to some omission, e.g. something to do with the environment in the womb or inadequate nutrition? If we gain the ability to enhance nonhuman animals to be rational, couldn’t failing to do so make them defectively rational, too? If we can gain the ability to enhance otherwise non-rational nonhuman animals, couldn’t they be defectively rational now? Is function determined by the “design”, the genes?