Hi all,

Lorin:
>>There is one certain thing which possesses intrinsic value--ourselves.
>>That is, we value ourselves, our own life, intrinsically (we cannot value
>>ourselves instrumentally without stating a tautology (i.e. we value our
>>life for the purposes of our life)).  We value other humans intrinsically
>>by logical analogy to ourselves.  In other words, if we recognize that we
>>have intrinsic value to ourselves, we cannot without contradiction deny
>>that other systems that matter to themselves have intrinsic value.

Jim:
>I think I'm with you at this point, but confess I don't know what to make
>of the jump (if it is a jump) from our self-conscious valuation of
>ourselves, which strikes me as a form of moral/axiological deliberation, to
>the idea of other "systems" that "matter to themselves."

Lorin again:

Two claims I have made above:
1. The equivocation between mattering to oneself and intrinsic valuation
2. The analogical jump from recognizing that we matter to ourselves to
recognizing that other organisms matter to themselves. 

I take it you do not have issue with the first point, that if an entity
matters to itself it therefore has subject-independent intrinsic value (if
nothing else, this is my definition of intrinsic value).  Moreover, I
assume you agree that humans matter to themselves (Why is this?  Not sure,
but it seem to be an extremely strong intuition).  So the question then is
how we can determine if other entities matter to themselves?  Here I think
it is important to avoid falling into the trap of a self-conscious notion
of "mattering to oneself".  Perhaps it would be better to speak of
mattering to oneself as having an end in oneself.  For humans, mattering to
oneself is the conscious representation of having an end in oneself; this
is not to say that mattering to oneself is a distinct property from having
an end in oneself but rather to make an identity claim, as both concern the
same *thing*.  Thus, on my logic, at least in the case of humans, having an
end in oneself means that humans have intrinsic value.

The next step is, of course, to show that other entities have ends in
themselves.  Here I employ the notion of autopoeisis and still find
Watson's critique unsatisfactory.  As Jim noted, 

[snip]
>>[Watson} traces [autopoiesis] in environmental ethics back to Kenneth
Goodpaster's "On >>Being Morally Considerable," where Goodpaster writes
(Watson's quoting), " 'the core of >>moral concern lies in respect for
self-sustaining organization and integration in the >>face of pressures
toward high entropy.' "  Watson's retort  to this claim is: "This >>covers
everything from crystals through all living things to storms, ecosystems,
>>corporations, nation states, and every other organized entity in the
universe." 

For Warwick Fox, autopoietic entities are both self-organizing *and*
self-regenerating.  It is not merely a matter of sustaining itself, but of
being able to preserve itself under pressure from outside interventions.
An ecosystem has this ability; a rock does not.  Once a rock is crushed
into dust, it has no internal principle of re-organization with which to
renew itself (no end-in-itself).  Thus, I think that life is at the root of
all autopoietic entities, whether it be a direct property of the entity
itself, or whether it be a property of the elements which make up the
entity.  The key idea to recognize is that autopoiesis avoids the atomistic
conception of life, by allowing that systems of life--eg. ecosystems--also
exhibit autopoeisis as a non-reductive consequence of the life interactions
of the elements which comprise it. To put it simply, I think life is a
necessary element of autopoeitic entities, but it is not a defining
element.  Ecosystems are not alive in the conventional sense, but they
certainly are autopoietic as a consequence of the life elements which they
contain.  To be alive is to have an end in itself, and non-live entities
composed of life interactions also develop ends-in-themselves.  In the end,
what I hope to show is that there are holistic outcomes of life
interactions which deserve moral value. 

To respond to Watson's critique, then, storms (like stones) are not
autopoietic, because life is not a fundamental element to their existence
and, as a consequence, they are only organized not regenerative.
Ecosystems and nation-states are autopoeitic.  Corporations are somewhat
tricky, however.  I would be inclined to say that corporations which
exhibit the ability to sustain and regenerate themselves, beyond the
control of the entities which make them up, would be autopoeitic (for
myself, this is an obvious characteristic of nation-states, which is why I
have very little trouble saying that they are autopoietic).  Here one might
also refer to bureaucracy.  Although it seems somewhat unusual to say that
bureaucracy has autopoeisis, and thus moral value, because it appears to
have an independent end in itself, I think it's inclusion is a necessary
consequence of my argument here.  So I accept it, albeit hesitantly.

Also, I recognize that this approach excludes certain systems which many
environmentalists would like to have included.  For example, I do not
believe that a mountain has intrinsic value.  Of course, it may have
aesthetic value, which is certainly plausible reason for preserving it from
quarrying.  It is important to note that moral decisions are not exhausted
by the presence of intrinsic value; intrinsic value is just another factor
to take into account when making moral decisions.

Lorin:
>>Ultimately, all those entities which, if they had agency, could matter to
>>themselves have intrinsic value.  

Jim:
>Do you actually mean "agency" here, or a term more akin to either
>"rationality" or "self-consciousness"?  I think (higher) animals may have
>more self-consciousness than either agency or rationality--but perhaps it
>would be best if you elaborate a bit further.

Lorin:
>Here I am using a notion of "hypothetical
>>agency" to determine if an organism matters to itself.  It is not the case
>>that an organism has to have agency to have moral status, only that its
>>moral status needs to be comprehensible from the (hypothetical) position of
>>a *rational* agent.  

Jim:
>To me, this sounds like you're saying moral status needs to be
>comprehensible to a "knowing" outsider--i.e. to a human who can make sense
>of an idea that another organism *could* matter to itself.  OK.  But this
>seems very different from suggesting that other organisms do in fact matter
>to themselves.  Or it could be that I'm just thick. . . .

Lorin again:
First off, I mean agency in the self-conscious, moral participant sense.
That is, entities with agency are ahave at least some degree of freedom in
comprehending and making moral decisions.  Humans are the paragon of moral
agency, but they are not necessarily the sole moral agents (although the
latter may only be a claim based on future evolutionary possibility rather
than on present reality).  The notion I am trying to get across is that
those entities which have ends in themselves would, *if* they had agency,
matter to themselves.  Put differently, I am taking the idea of humans as
end-in-themselves intuitively mattering to themselves and applying it,
hypothetically (because that's all one can do), to all autopoietic
entities.  It is not to say that agency is a requirement for moral status;
rather, it is to say that the reason we value ourselves intrinsically
applies analogously and hypothetically to other autopoietic entities.  Our
intuition is that if we matter to ourselves, we have intrinsic value.
Analogously, entities having ends-in-themselves (autopoiesis) would
necessarily matter to themselves were they to have agency.  So they must,
therefore, have intrinsic value.  That these entities do not actually
matter to themselves does not erode the logical move from having an
end-in-oneself to having intrinsic value because, if it works for humans,
it must also work for all entities which have ends in themselves.  It is
the end-in-itself, not the mattering to oneself, which lies at the root of
intrinsic value, even for humans.  

Hope this is clearer than it was before, although I doubt it :) 
Cheers,
Lorin



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