Current Philosophy

0009 Michael Davis. "Interested Vegetables, Rational Emotions, and Moral Status," Philosophy Research Archives 11 (1985), pp. 531-550.

Discussion of the rights of the unborn, the comatose, and other non-sentient or not fully rational beings has often turned on what Davis calls the 'independence thesis' -- that a creature's moral status is independent of our emotions about it. He offers a number of examples, mostly contemporary, of this thesis in action. And while he acknowledges that some rationalists who believe in it do allow some role for our emotional reactions, this role is a minor, non-essential one. Davis seeks a moral theory that makes sense of our intuitions, say, that someone who beats his dog is doing something wrong.

Utilitarianism would seem at first to be such a theory, because it tries to minimize suffering. But there are at least two problems. One problem is that utilitarians in fact do not seem compelled to extend the moral community far enough: a comatose person does not suffer and therefore has no moral standing. And consequently, the second problem arises: the moral rankings can seem inverted. A 'human vegetable' lies outside the moral community, while the louse on his body does not.

So Davis seeks another point of attack, and he asks a more general question. When can emotions be good reasons for anything? It is clear that people actually do use emotions (e.g., liking. or anger) as reasons to justify their actions. But should they? Is it rational to do so? Davis tries to answer this question by defining rationality in a way that would not beg the original issue, i.e., in a way that would be acceptable to someone who holds the 'independence thesis'. He cannot quite manage this task, but he succeeds in identifying two ways in which an appeal to an emotion might produce agreement among rational persons. One (less interesting) way is for some people's emotions to provide other persons with good reasons for doing something: for example, your fear of something may move me to a sympathetic response even if I don't know you and have no personal benefit in view. The second, more interesting way emotions can be reasons is for them to be rational emotions.

Davis enumerates three ways in which emotions can be rational.
  1. They may be rational in a constitutive sense, where someone lacking a certain emotion (e.g., fear of death) would by that fact be considered not quite rational.
  2. They may be rational in a regulative sense. where we would expect any rational being to make the same choice -- for example, to avoid torture.
  3. They may be rational in an associative sense, when they make some sort of sense, are not forbidden by reason, and are characteristic of rational beings as they actually are; becoming angry in the face of repeated gross insults is rational in this last sense.

Davis does not try to fully develop the implications of this analysis But he does illustrate its application. He criticizes Joel Feinberg's version of the 'independence thesis' and shows how his own ideas lead to an opposite conclusion. Feinberg has formulated an 'interest principle' stating that 'the sorts of things who can have rights are precisely those who have (or can have) interests'. Davis notes that there is an ambiguity here. While comatose persons or plants cannot have an active interest in anything, they can have passive interests. Feinberg would object. saying that plants cannot literally benefit from what we do. Yet Davis notes that in fact we do (sometimes) take care of a plant for its own benefit, that we care about its health for its own sake. The relevant question for him here is: can such concerns be called rational in any of the senses listed above? He believes that an argument can be constructed to the effect that concerns for non-sentient beings are rational in the associative sense, although in this paper he leaves the argument only in outline form.

Davis does not deny that the 'independence thesis' is appropriate when applied to rational creatures: our moral standing should not depend on how others feel about us. But he believes that he has shown that it is incorrect in the hard oases, where indeed it has often been applied.

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