Linville's Argument from Personal Dignity -- A Brief Summary.

 Linville's Argument from Personal Dignity reveals that the Kantian notion of personal dignity presupposes that persons exists on the account of moral personhood. He weighs the contemporary theories of normative ethics and finds them lacking in their metaethical account of duties. Furthermore, he examines various worldviews and how the idea of personhood fits into them and concludes that a naturalistic worldview cannot account for personhood.

For any moral theory, it must both be consistent with our moral convictions/intuitions and offer a satisfactory account of implications. He attributes moral standing to individuals -- which cannot be fulfilled by egoism, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. Egoism frames all moral actions in terms of the agent. Thus, only indirect duties apply to anyone else. However, this is clearly contrasted our moral convictions that an egoist says that rape is wrong, he can only say that it wrongs the rapist, which is grotesque (Joyce 2006) -- so only person who affords moral standing is the agent.

Linville also has significant disagreements with utilitarians over the lack of moral standing for its individuals. Utilitarianism is the theory that right actions are those that have good consequences for the most number of people. Classical utilitarians follow the hedonist theory of value, which places pleasure with intrinsic value -- others have used human flourishing, or the meeting of interests to fulfill this role. Both Bentham and Mill, founders of utilitarianism, have claimed that duties of justice such as human rights are not actually real, but utilized only insofar as they are beneficial for social utility. Thus, all duties of justice are merely derived from the principle of utility, and natural rights are not inherent, only when they are useful. The main issue with this is the Problem of Justice -- an action's maximizing utility and its being fair and justice have no connection with one another. Another issue is Tom Regan's Receptacle Problem, which says that it is not individuals that are valued by the utilitarian, but their mental states, in the case of Mill's pleasure-centered utilitarianism, or satisfaction of interests or individuals. However, Linville explains that intuitively, we should not only care about mental states, but for persons in and of themselves. Thus, utilitarianism fails to account for the moral standing of individual persons.

Concerning Virtue Ethics, the idea that morality is concerned about the goodness of agents rather than the rightness of acts, Linville criticizes it in that virtue ethicists cannot adequately account for situations in which we owe direct duties towards people. For example, in situations where we ought to help people, a virtue ethicist would point out that the reason why we ought to do so is because it would be charitable and benevolent. But when we explain why rape is wrong in the same terms, namely that it would be uncharitable and malevolent, it seems to be these things, but so much more. So, virtue ethics cannot truly ground a respect-for-persons ethic. 

Linville is not citing the same objection he has of egoism -- that consistent virtue ethicists are only acting out of concern for their own character-- because he believes that virtue ethicists can act out of truly conscious altruism and generosity, but he explains that "the devil is in the metaethical details". 

Robert Johnson (2004) proposes external sources for virtue ethicists to ground their virtue in, and presuppose a moral duty. This would allow them to not treat traits as direct duties. Kant explains that he first sets out principles of moral law, based on rational agency, and then defines virtue as acting according to this law. Thus, standard virtue ethics cannot account for persons, but one with external grounding may.

Linville argues for Kant's Principle of Humanity -- "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end." He distinguishes between two ways to have value: dignity and price. Having a price means having a mind-dependent and market value, which may be expressed in terms of other items. Having dignity resists valuation, as dignity is a value that is intrinsic, having no essential reference to anything else. To have Kantian dignity is a property all humans have, which is not reducible in value to anything else. This is the basis for natural, inherent, and imprescriptable rights.

Finally, under naturalism, can persons be accounted for? Under the Astonishing Hypothesis, everything you are is no more than nerves firing and chemicals reacting. Under strict naturalism, the idea that nature is all that exists, and nature itself is whatever will be disclosed by the ideal natural sciences, persons that possess a first-person subjective point-of-view appear to lie beyond the scope of the third-person objective analysis. Dennett believes that if our minds are simply the organization of the brain, the final physical theory will be exhaustive and leave no quarter to persons. If one is required to leave out the subjective by explaining it via the objective, the self will disappear. Susan Blackmore agrees with this and concludes that there is no such thing as the self. However, Linville notes that science itself is impossible unless persons have observations and thoughts, which are both experiences.

Then, as Owen Flanagan said, when we demythologize the person, there will be no dualism or libertarian free will. Dennett explains that our evolutionary impulses drive us to view things in terms of ultimate explanations of a teleological nature. But if our selves are really just molecules of a mechanistic nature rather than a teleological one, we would have no moral agency or autonomy, and thus, personhood breaks down.

How about relaxed naturalism? Under such a theory, mental causation and physical phenomenon are reconciled. Goetz, Taliaferro, and Kim suggest that there will be some supervenience of the mental on the physical world, called property dualism. Property dualism says that physical objects may have mental properties, such as the brain and the emergent mind. 

The supervienience/exclusion argument, which Kim proposes, is due to several factors. (1) Physicalists are committed to the causal closure principle, that all causes are physical in nature. (2) They are also committed to causal exclusion, where if any event has a sufficient cause, then no event distinct from it can be the cause. Thus, physical events have physical causes, and no mental cause can effect a physical event. Linville says that if the idea of law is irreducibly mental in nature, it is hard to see how moral behavior is motivated by moral law. Thus, this eliminates the Kantian grounds and means of treating persons as ends.

But what if the mind is irreducible? This would escape the explanatory power of science, as it requires bridge laws of necessary correlations between mental and physical properties. However, the prospects of such a theory is bleak, as consciousness is altogether different from what we see in a three-dimensional composition of atoms and neurons that account for all physical phenomena of the brain. Thus, Linville concludes that eliminativism is implausible, reductionism is ultimately unsuccessful, and property dualism cannot possibly account for mental causation and consciousness

These are only some of the issues that face the naturalist. Others include how to derive the personal from the nonpersonal, the intrinsically valuable from the valueless, and how if the human species is a product of blind forces, why we would have special and intrinsic value assigned to our species.

Linville finds that Kant's grounds of personal dignity in moral agency the dignity-conferring property, as reflecting on the moral law within infinitely elevates his own worth. Morality itself must be of intrinsic rather than instrumental value, so Kant identifies two things with dignity rather than price: human persons, and the moral law itself. Linville explains that genuine respect for persons requires genuine respect for the law.

Are there any other foundations for personal dignity? Michael Martin suggests the Ideal Observer Theory, the idea that a perfectly impartial and informed observer analyzes moral judgements in terms of feelings of approval and disapproval. The attribute of intrinsic dignity is a natural property. However, this theory faces a Euthyphro dilemma: Either the observer values Kim intrinsically because Kim has intrinsic value, or Kim is intrinsically valuable because the observer values her. Whereas in the former, a respect-for-persons ethic can just replace the ideal observer theory as the more parsimonious theory, the latter presupposes moral facts about Kim. In the case that the observer values Kim, why would it value Kim intrinsically unless she actually is intrinsically valuable? Russ Shafer-Landau points out a dilemma. Either the naturalist will begin to smuggle in moral facts that play role in determining the ideal observer’s feelings of disapproval or approval, or admit to only knowing nonmoral facts, in which case, there is no reason to suppose the outcome is a morally desired one. Thus, there is no room for robust account of intrinsic value of persons. 

Kai Nielsen explains that Kant's respect-for-persons account can be accounted for by Hobbesian egoism. But what about a powerfully placed egoist, that does not worry about retaliation or consequences, such as Plato's Glaucon? Nielsen concedes that there would be no need to respect others, and “We must simply decide what sort of person we shall strive to become”. Thus, the moral law is merely a matter of decision -- "conditional, hypothetical, not categorical." Thus, egoism cannot serve as a foundation for moral law.