Linville's A Defense of Human Dignity - A brief summary

II. Linville seeks to defend the traditional doctrine of human dignity, the idea that humans enjoy a special worth -- moral standing. Moral standing is granted as a result of a uniquely human characteristic that make us possess more worth than other creatures. Aristotle pointed to rationality, Thomas Huxley to linguistics, and other arguments to intelligence, culture, etc. Linville appeals to Kant's basis of human dignity -- on the capacity for us to make moral judgements and decisions. This idea is called human moral agency. Critics have ruled out other traits because (1) humans are not the only ones who have access to intelligence, linguistics, or moral capacities, and (2) The issue of moral relevance. A white supremacist might maintain that the empirical results of a studying showing the intellectual superiority of whites justifies discriminatory treatment against other races. Linville quotes Singer that equality is not an empirucally determined fact, but a prescription on how we should treat human beings. Singer applies the principle of equality interspecifically, and to quote Bentham, "the question is not "Can they reason? Nor Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?" .

III. The main argument that Taylor makes is these candidates for our moral standing -- uniquely human characterstics like rationality and autonomy -- are only of relative value to our own species. He asks: "Valuable to whom and for what reason?" He points out that other species excel at other things, and he considers all arguments against this special pleading: "To use only standards based on the good of humans is already to commit oneself to holding that the good of humans counts more than, or is more worthy of consideration than, the good of nonhumans, which is the point in question." Thus, the species-relative theory of value resembles relativism.

Linville objects to this understanding by formulating a uniquely human property that qualifies its bearer for greater moral standing from a moral point of view rather than any species' point of view. He distinguishes between "Great-making properties" and "Excellence properties".

Excellence properties are only properties that makes a creature better at something than another creature. In excellence properties, having a trait that others do not simply makes it a better instance of kind K than the other. In a Great-making property, having a trait that others do not confers value instead of simply being a better instance. Thus, Taylor only maintains that the "greater value" one enjoys under GMP is one that is kind-specific, and GMPs are reducible to EPs. He even says that the uniqueness of the human is what makes it only valuable from a human perspective, and creatures that do not have the property do not need or value it. Thus, humanists presuppose that the great-making trait is great already, thus assuming what they attempt to prove, making it a circular argument -- and a hidden assumption.

IV. Linville's argument stems from perfect being theology, or the theology of God. If God's great-making properties -- of logically maximal power, knowledge, goodness, etc. makes him worthy of worship, then humans would be valuable as well. That is, by definition, what it means to possess a great-making property. Thus, Taylor makes a misstep in proving that the coherent concept of worship is not coherent, which Linville takes to be an intuitively wrong conclusion. 

Is human rationality only valuable from a human perspective? Linville grants that even if rationality and autonomy are not, by themselves, great-making, as other creatures can have it, they are properties essential to moral agency. Thus, the assessment of moral agency affects those properties as well. 

Why assume moral agency could grant human dignity? Firstly, humans are the only moral agents. Linville appeals to Kant here, saying that contemplating on the moral law within infinitely raises his own worth. 

Take the basic contention of human dignity: Humans are morally superior to nonhumans (MS). Taylor reads it: Humans are "moral betters" of nonhumans (MS1), which is clearly confused, as animals without moral agency are incapable of the virtues and vices needed to judge a person morally in the first place. 

Thus, Taylor offers a second reading: Individuals with moral capacities are of greater inherent worth than individuals lacking such capacities. Taylor contends that like the relative value of rationality and language, why assume moral agency is not also useful only to moral agents? The relativity argument is not good here, as if he did, morality and moral capacities are of merely instrumental value as they serve uniquely human interests, such that morality is a means to non-moral values, and morality becomes a system of hypothetical imperatives. There is no goodness in and of itself.

Citing Kant again, Linville points to two things with dignity rather than price: moral agents and the moral law itself. If we reduce morality to non-moral ends, then critiquing the doctrine of human dignity on moral grounds is just pulling the rug from under oneself.

V. Then, if there are any great-making properties, there is an impartial point of view from which they have value intrinsically. Linville puts forward his final argument, from the viewpoint of possible worlds: For any possible worlds w and w*, if w includes moral agents and w* lacks moral agents, then, all other things being equal, w is of greater value than w*. Consider two worlds: one where there were no moral agents, and another where there were. If God had multiple possible worlds he could elect to become reality, the latter would have greater value than the former. Is this special pleading, as we are projecting our own prejudices? Linville says no, as in this case, God is merely morality personified, such that the world's quality is evaluated by the equivalent of a moral point of view. 

Why suppose that moral agency is a world-enhancing property? There is a necessary connection between moral agency and moral values. If there were no moral agents, there are no moral values, only morally neutral subjects and objects. Linville points to this line of thinking from theodicies -- answers to the Logical Problem of Evil. Genuine moral agency is a necessary condition of a world's producing moral goodness. 

He continues by addressing other points of view. Even if not all judgments of inherent worth are from the moral point of view, such as the aesthetic, this does not rule out the fact that they infringe upon moral standing. There is one challenge -- to say that the beautiful enjoys moral standing that is more than or equal to morally dignified persons -- but it is a challenge made from the moral point of view rather than the aesthetic. 

Linville concludes by addressing Taylor's main inquiry: human life is "valuable to whom and for what reason?" If moral inherent worth is coherent, then there is an impartial moral standpoint from which that worth may be discerned.