Positing a Soul Will Not Defeat Arguments for Animal Liberation
A Euthephro Style Dilemma for souls.
Those of us who advocate for an end to the brutal torture of billions of sentient beings on factory farms often will make the arguments from marginal cases. The argument claims that, for any trait that is said to make animals not matter, there are some humans (or other beings who would be morally relevant, who possess that trait. The following will be a non exhaustive list
Intelligence: There are severely mentally impaired humans who still shouldn’t be tortured to death before being turned into food by factory farms.
Species: We can imagine a being who wasn’t the human species but still mattered. The aliens from krypton in superman are not human, but it would be impermissible to torture and kill them for food.
Having Moral Knowledge: There are many severely mentally impaired humans who lack robust moral knowledge and many psychopaths. Neither one should be tortured and eaten for food.
However, there is one trait that is often given as a trump card by theists. That trait is having a soul. Theists will say that animals lack souls, but humans have them, so humans matter but non humans don’t matter. This argument will not work, as we will see. There is a knock down argument against it which I shall present.
No, it doesn’t involve denying that people have souls (though I do deny that). Theists won’t grant that. It involves thinking that even if there are souls, they cannot confer value.
If one has a soul one of two things can be the case. Either
A) A soul confers value because possessing a soul gives other things like moral understanding, intelligence, or other things.
B) A soul confers value just because it exists—a soul doesn’t causally affect the world or the agents that have souls, it just grants them moral worth.
Either way, a soul cannot confer worth. If we take option A then this cannot justify caring about humans who lack intelligence or moral understanding. If this is true, then a soul giving moral worth is in virtue of giving other characteristics to soul possessing beings, but then those who lack those other characteristics don’t have moral worth.
However, option B is subject to a devastating reductio. If souls are just God’s stamp of approval—an invisible, causally inert, cosmic stamp—then souls confer moral worth while having no effect on the world. If this is true, then if we uncovered a passage saying that some humans lack souls—for example, humans from Ireland—then they would lack moral significance. This would be true even though they would be like non Irish people in every single respect—souls after all, are causally inert on this account. They don’t affect either the subjective life of the being with the soul or external features of their character. On this account, one could be like the rest of humans in all respect, but not matter because they don’t have God’s magic stamp of approval—a stamp that is invisible and doesn’t affect the world at all!
Yet this is a wildly implausible account of moral ontology. Imagine if you discovered that you did not have a soul—a passage in the old testament concluded that members of your ethnic group were devoid of souls. On this account, there is quite literally no way you could rule this out in principle. While it’s true that you can know with certainty that you can suffer, if souls have no affect on the world, then you cannot know who has a soul, beyond the fact that it’s merely proclaimed that people have souls.
If souls don’t do anything, then it’s hard to understand how they can give moral worth. But if they do anything, they run straight into the jaws of the original argument.
I always understood that when I granted souls to people it gave then the ability to experience, and that the people I choose not give give souls are just p-zombies...