6. Persons and Value
6.1 Introduction
I exist and so do you. But in what way (or ways) do we exist? And do we exist to the
fullest degree? These questions are not pressing for those philosophers who think
that there is only one way to exist, and that there is no distinction between
existence, being, and being one of what there is, and who deny that any entity
enjoys any more existence or being than any other. For these philosophers, who
perhaps are the majority of those who think about these questions, there are still
interesting questions about what kind of properties creatures such as ourselves
have, but there are no interesting questions about our existential status per se.
But, for the reasons articulated in the previous chapters, I am not one of these
philosophers, and so the questions are pressing for me. These are the questions
Ipursuehere.
I will focus here on whether we exist to the fullest extent. To recall the results from
the previous chapter, an entity exists to the fullest extent just in case it enjoys a
fundamental mode of being. A fundamental mode of being is a perfectly natural
mode of being. One enjoys a mode of being just in case one falls within the range of
the possible quantifier that corresponds to this mode. In general, the degree of being
enjoyed by some entity is proportionate to the naturalness of the most natural mode
of being enjoyed by that entity.
In what follows, I will distinguish three different views on which persons enjoy a
fundamental mode of being. On thefirst view, persons enjoy a fundamental mode of
being that is also enjoyed by other entities that are not persons. On the second view,
there is a distinctive fundamental mode of being that is enjoyed by all and only
persons. The third view is the most radical: on it, each person enjoys a fundamental
mode of being that is enjoyed byonlythat person.
Note that I am primarily interested in the question of whether those things who
are persons are fully real, and am only derivatively interested in the questions of
whether persons are essentially persons or whether being a person is itself a funda-
mental property.
It turns out to be very difficult to defend the view that we are fully real, but perhaps
not impossible. The primary goal of this chapter is to show just how complex the
issues involved are.