The Human Status of Frances Kamm

What if you could have a thirty-minute conversation with each of eleven distinguished people about their views on a subject in which you were keenly interested?  What would you think?  If you are like me -- and if that subject was, say, moral philosophy -- you would be a little giddy.  So you can imagine my excitement when I ran across and began to read a recent book by Alex Voorhoeve, Conversations on Ethics (2009).

As a way of processing these conversations, I intend to post some reflections on each, starting now with the conversation that Frances Kamm has with Alex Voorhoeve.  Professor Kamm points to what she believes is the deep structure of morality.  The impetus for this in her life as a philosopher was a graduate seminar taught by Robert Nozick, who earlier in Anarchy, State, and Utopia had introduced the so-called "paradox of deontology."

The paradox of deontology involves this tension.  Assume that, on the one hand, you believe that everyone possesses the same rights against being harmed in a certain way, but then ask, on the other hand, how would you answer this question:  "If you could save Abby and Betty from being harmed in that way by instead harming Calvin, why would you not harm the one to save the two?"

In some of her writing, she examines the assumed status of potential victims in moral thought experiments like the famous runaway trolley car.  Professor Kamm's answer shifts away from the agent who would be doing the violating and shifts to the potential victims of the violated constraint.  Why?

Because I thought, 'Suppose it was the case that I could kill the one to stop five from being killed?  That would imply something about all of us.  It would imply that all of us were useable in a certain way.'  You see, there is a kind of status that is defined in terms of what it is permissible to do to people. One measure of people's worth is what we consider permissible to do to them.  It is true that the five will be mistreated if I don't harm the one in order to stop their mistreatment. But they will still be the kind of beings who should not be treated in that way -- who are inviolable insofar as it is wrong to harm them in a certain way, even in order to realize the greater good of minimizing that type of harm.  If it were permissible to kill the one to save the others, then no one -- neither the one nor the five nor anyone else -- would have the status of a highly inviolable being. So it is this value that is being expressed by this constraint. (pp. 33-34)

This gets at the heart of her idea of human status as part of the deep structure that undergirds moral thinking.  When asked what it is about human nature that begets these requirements against mistreatment, the Harvard professor admits, "I don't know, although I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that we are rational beings" (p. 34).

Frances Kamm, Harvard University

This intrigues me.

Although Prof. Kamm does not say so outright in this conversation, she seems rather indebted to Immanuel Kant.  He is identified in some ways as the father of modern deontology.  He posits (some might say speculates) that the human rational faculty is the seat of the moral requirements that constrain our actions to ourselves and to others.  Perhaps this is the most important connection to Prof. Kamm's present conversation:  Kant also builds his ethical intuitions and considered judgments from what he supposes is the precondition for ethics in the first place, namely, human rationality. This (human rationality), which entails autonomy, makes truly possible morality itself.

Something about human nature also, according to Prof. Kamm, constrains morality:

And I realized that the answer [to the paradox of deontology] lies in the fact that a moral system expresses the worth of a person, and that the worth of a person increases when people are less violable -- as there are fewer constraints that it is permissible to violate.  It is not only what happens to people that matters, but also how their nature requires us to treat them.  The latter determines their worth. (p. 34)

All of this smacks to me not only of Kant but also of a long line of natural law theorists like Thomas Aquinas.  But it also raises for me a number of questions:

• If human morality depends in this way on human nature, to what degree do the evolving findings of biology constrain our judgments about ethics?
• Professor Kamm supposes that the idea that moral constraints exist "has something to do with the fact that we are rational beings," but she leaves open some related matters:  (i) What is "rational"?  (ii) In what way are humans rational, and to what extent?  (iii) What effect on morality there would be if it were established that humans were less rational, or less consistently rational, than is often assumed?
• How does Prof. Kamm move, as David Hume might say, from the descriptive Is to the prescriptive Ought -- from how humans are to how they should act?  What, for her, justifies this move?

No doubt Prof. Kamm addresses these and other basic questions in her essays and monographs.  This conversation with Prof. Voorhoeve is really just a teaser to her further moral philosophy:  it demonstrates (a) the sort of details that she considers in her thought experiments, (b) her prima facie respect for our moral intuitions, (c) the notion that human nature supports a deep structure to the constraints that are involved in moral judgments, (d) moral thought experiments may considered in their full complexity to reveal greater ethical complexity, and (e) her passion for exploring these important matters.

In closing, I want to return to this idea of human inviolability as intrinsic to human moral status: "the worth of a person increases when people are less violable."  This is wonderfully appealing, the idea that human nature is such that it is very difficult to justify any mistreatment of human persons.  This is a sort of Kantian (or other 18th century) idea that has been the basis for universal declarations of human rights.  It is at the heart of liberalism in its various forms.  The impulse is that each life is inherently and (theoretically) equally valuable.  Professor Kamm, who might seem to endorse such a stance, however, complicates matters with the precision of her thought experiments:

Take a case where a single person and five different people are having their rights violated.  Suppose we have to decide whether to save the single person or the five from this rights violation (we cannot save all six).  In this case, we should save the five from having their rights violated.  So it is clear to me that when I don't have to mistreat a person, I should maximize the number of people whose rights are respected.  So maximizing the number of people whose rights are respected is important. ... I mean, the other response is to say that one life is as precious as any number of lives -- that faced with a choice between saving one life and a million other lives, you should flip a coin. (p. 35)

Professor Kamm seems to say that, if she must mistreat one to prevent the mistreatment of five, then, based on human status, she ought not to mistreat the one; however, if she must not mistreat the one to prevent the mistreatment of five, then she ought to favor the five over the one.  This is a potentially fruitful clarification.

The intuitive pull within me is strong to affirm the equal value of one human life relative to another, based on an intrinsic idea entailed in human status, or human nature.  What is so worthwhile in Prof. Kamm's thinking about the deep structure of morality and human status is her ability to clarify what is involved in various situations.  For example, must I mistreat one to save many, or may I avoid mistreating anyone while saving many rather than one?  In so doing, she points to additionally possible ways that we might study these topics of greatest human significance.