Some notes on the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis

Intuitively, we have certain important moral obligations toward our animal companions, a.k.a. pets. To begin with, we ought to keep them safe from harm. We also ought to provide them with certain goods: food, recreation, social life, comfort, freedom to move around, and so on. And we don't kill them except in certain unusual cases (e.g., we might kill them in self-defense, or for their own good when they are very sick). Many of us believe that our moral relationship with our animal companions is similar to our moral relationship to our family members; indeed, many of us believe that our animal companions are family members. By contrast, we do not regard livestock as family members. For instance, we kill livestock in order to eat them. That's no way to treat a family member.

Is there any way to justify the intuitive idea that there is a moral gap between pets and livestock? I believe so. Elsewhere I have argued in favor of a view that I call the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, and I believe that this hypothesis can explain why the moral status of pets differs from that of livestock. In this post, I'll present the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, discuss some of its advantages, and then will discuss one problem for the view.

The main idea

The Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is the conjunction of four claims:

(A) Humans do two morally significant things: (a) We have positive and negative experiences (i.e., we are sentient); and (b) by reflecting on our past experiences and anticipating our future experiences, we integrate our experiences into a self-told life-story. By contrast, livestock animals do only one morally significant thing: They have positive and negative experiences. Livestock animals lack the intellectual abilities necessary in order to integrate their experiences into self-told stories.

(B) A positive experience has positive hedonic value (and a negative experience has negative hedonic value). Human lives and livestock lives both possess hedonic value. However, when a human being integrates her experiences into a self-told life story, she imbues her life with an additional kind of value: narrative value. Livestock lives lack this sort of value.

(C) Hedonic value is morally fungible: it is morally permissible (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of hedonic value in order to produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value. By contrast, narrative value is not morally fungible: it is morally wrong (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of narrative value even if doing so would produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value.

(D) Pets (a.k.a. companion animals) cannot do the work of integrating their lives into stories; but human beings can do the necessary work for their pets. By living in a close relationship with an animal, as humans do with pets, a human being can imbue the pet's life with a certain kind of narrative value, which I call narrative value by proxy. And by-proxy narrative value, like ordinary narrative value, is not morally fungible.

(See here and here for more details and discussion.)

 

If the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion. 

 

Two clarificatory points

 

(1) The value of a non-person's life might be very high despite being morally fungible. To say that the value of a non-person's life is morally fungible is just to say that we can permissibly harm non-persons whenever doing so is optimific (i.e., whenever the good of doing so outweighs the harm). This doesn't mean that we can permissibly kill non-persons whenever we want; in fact, it might be quite difficult to justify doing harm to a non-person. According to the present view, self-actualized persons and persons-by-proxy are protected by non-utilitarian constraints on harm, while non-persons aren't, but none of these classes of individuals should be harmed wantonly.

 

(2) Adopting an animal and turning her into a pet, according to this view, is a way of morally enhancing the animal--i.e., changing her moral status. This carries moral risks, similar to the risks associated with other sorts of moral enhancements. For instance, if we someday acquire the technology to turn regular dandelions into sentient dandelions, we should hesitate to use this technology (because we might not be able or willing to fulfill all of our obligations towards sentient dandelions). Something similar is true of adopting an animal into one's home, if the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true.

 

Morality is about value: an advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis

 

I like the following view:

 

Morality is about value (MIAV): In any given case, if I am morally required to do X, then I am morally required to do X because X is the morally right or best response to some form of morally significant value.

 

MIAV constrains our claims about moral obligations. Given MIAV, if you claim that I am morally required to tell the truth in a certain case, then your claim is plausible only to the extent that you can plausibly claim that truth-telling in that instance is the right response to some form of morally significant value.

 

Consequentialism is compatible with MIAV (and I think, as others have argued, that MIAV captures a very important truth that lies at the heart of consequentialism); but consequentialism also goes further than MIAV. Traditional consequentialism can be understood as the view that the morally right or best way to respond to morally significant value is always to promote it, to maximize it, even if one must destroy some of it in order to create more of it. I think that's wrong. In my view, it's sometimes morally best to respond to morally significant value by refraining from destroying it even if this is non-optimific. There might be other kinds of best responses, as well. Some kinds of value--namely, fungible value (hedonic value)--should be maximized, but other kinds of value--namely, non-fungible value (narrative value)--shouldn't always be.

 

The Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is compatible with MIAV. And if I'm right to think that MIAV is attractive, the compatibility of the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis with MIAV is a big advantage over other views that could explain our obligations towards animals and to one another.

 

How to destroy narrative value

 

It is fairly obvious how to destroy or prevent hedonic value: If we torture someone, or prevent her from doing something that makes her happy, then we have destroyed or prevented hedonic value. But how does one go about destroying narrative value? The plausibility of the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis depends (in part) on the plausibility of our answer to that question.

 

I think the answer should be something like this. I have a certain vision for my life: a plan about how the rest of my days will play out. For example, I have the goal of completing ten more marathons before I die. If you cut off my legs, then you will prevent me from completing those marathons; this will prevent me from realizing an important part of my self-told story. In this way, you would destroy some narrative value. That's a kind of destruction that should be counted in addition to the hedonic value that would be prevented or destroyed by cutting off my legs.

 

Now, if you cut off my dog's legs, then you will not frustrate his life-plans (since he hasn't got any). But you will prevent him from living out the sort of life that I envision for him. For example, I currently live in an apartment which I share with my dog, but I intend someday to have a house with a fenced-in backyard, and I intend for him to make use of the yard to play. If you were to cut off my dog's legs, then you'd prevent this part of the story from being realized, and thus you would destroy a certain amount of by-proxy narrative value. That's a kind of destruction that I think should be counted in addition to the destruction of hedonic value that would result if you were to cut off his legs.

 

Similarly, if you kill a very young baby, you will not frustrate her life-plans (since, like my dog, she hasn't got any). But you will prevent her from living out the life that her parents envision for her. For example, perhaps her parents plan for her to become a doctor; if you kill her, then that part of the story cannot be realized, and by-proxy narrative value is thus destroyed.

 

The problem of overlapping narratives

 

Some (perhaps nearly all) individuals are protagonists in several different narratives. Imagine a young person, Sam, whose parents intend that she will become a doctor, although she intends to become an artist. What should the proponent of the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis say about this case? Well, if Sam is prevented from becoming an artist, this would destroy some narrative value, because it would prevent her from realizing her own self-told story. But if Sam chooses not to become a doctor, and becomes an artist instead, then this would frustrate her parents' plans for her life, and it seems that the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis proponent should say that this would destroy some by-proxy narrative value.

 

Thus, it seems, if we like the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, then we should think that Sam is in a bad predicament: no matter what she does, she will destroy some amount of narrative value; she has to decide which of these portions of narrative value will be sacrificed for the preservation of the other (like a surgeon who has to kill one of two conjoined twins or else both will die).

 

However, intuitively, the fact that Sam's parents have a certain vision for her life is of very little moral significance. Intuitively, Sam's life is Sam's, and she ought to shape it in accordance with her own self-narrative, regardless of whether this matches the stories that others have in mind for her.

 

To resolve this problem, we might try to claim that once an individual becomes a self-narrator, then the stories that others tell about her life cease to be morally significant. But I see no principled reason why that would be so. If Sam's parents' vision for Sam's life was morally important when Sam was a non-self-narrating baby, then I see no reason why their vision would suddenly cease to be morally important once Sam achieves the status of being a self-narrator.

 

Thus, I think, proponents of the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis have a bullet to bite: We have to accept that an individual person has morally significant reasons to conform to others' plans for that person's life. We can claim these reasons are overridden by other reasons (and this might help a little) but I think we're going to have to accept that these reasons exist.

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi David: Interesting post--but I see no reason to think (C) is true, and plenty of reasons to think it is false.

C states: "Hedonic value is morally fungible: it is morally permissible (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of hedonic value in order to produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value. By contrast, narrative value is not morally fungible: it is morally wrong (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of narrative value even if doing so would produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value."

I want to know what evidence there is for each conjunct:

(C)* Hedonic value is morally fungible: it is morally permissible (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of hedonic value in order to produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value.

and

(C)** narrative value is not morally fungible: it is morally wrong (pro tanto) to destroy (or prevent) a certain amount of narrative value even if doing so would produce (or salvage) a greater amount of value.

I think (C)* is false. While it may be morally permissible to prevent or destroy some hedonic value for greater hedonic value where, there are some cases where this seems pro tanto wrong: specifically, those cases that involve sacrificing the life of a sentient being. (Isn't this what we should have learned is wrong with act-utilitarianism?)

I think (C)** is false as well. I see no reason at all to think it is pro tanto wrong to destroy something of narrative value. What gives anyone a moral right to impute narrative value to something, where that narrative value cannot possibly be outweighed, pro tanto, by something else of moral value (e.g. a sentient life)?

[David Killoren]

Hi Marcus, thanks for your interesting comments!

I don't think it is always wrong to sacrifice the life of a sentient being. For example it seems to me that it is acceptable to kill one livestock pig in order to save two livestock pigs. Do you not agree? This is a case in which only hedonic value is sacrificed, so it seems to me a good test case for (C)*.

I would agree that it is pro tanto wrong to kill one intellectually normal human being in order to save two (as in, e.g., a transplant case) but I would invoke (C)** to explain this, that is, I'd say that intellectually normal human beings are self-narrators, and therefore their lives have narrative value, which is (according to (C)**) non-fungible.

With regard to your objection to (C)**, it sounds like you are thinking that just anything can have narrative value. For example, my Coke can could have narrative value if only I say so. If that were the view, then I would agree that it's crazy. But I don't think that just anything can have narrative value. In order for one to have narrative value, one must be the protagonist in a story, and this (I take it) requires at least sentience. I should have been clearer about that. Does this answer your objection, or do problems remain?

[Phil H]

I find this very convincing as a description of (some of) our moral intuitions. I'm not sure that it amounts to a justification. Utilitarians have developed arguments for why hedonic value is morally salient. But what arguments are there for narrative value? Is the argument "people value narrative, therefore narrative has value"? Then we would run into the problem of disentangling the moral things we value from the non-moral things which we value...