The Fragmentation of Being

a perfectly natural property mentioned, being Kris McDaniel is a perfectly natural
property. But at least one person has this property. So at least one person is fully real.
As with all the other arguments we have attended to, there are ways to resist. An
initial worry one might have is over whether it is illicit to place properties like being
Kris McDaniel on the naturalness scale. Arguably, when Lewisfirst introduced the
notion of a perfectly natural property, he had only what one might call“qualitative”
properties in mind, and certainly the putative examples of perfectly natural proper-
ties suggested by Lewis and those in his school are all“qualitative.”That said, I don’t
think that it is illicit to include“non-qualitative”properties among those ranked with
respect to their naturalness. For one thing, we are already ranking modes of being
along the naturalness scale, but modes of being do not seem to be“qualitative”
properties in the same way that, for example, colors or shapes are. Moreover, I am
open to the view that a haecceity just is a mode of being that, as a matter of necessity,
is enjoyed by exactly one thing. We’ll explore this possibility later in section 6.7,
but if this theory of the nature of haecceities is correct, then if we allow any mode
of being to be ranked on the naturalness scale, we must allow haecceities thus
construed as well.
A second worry is that the more general principle is subject to counter-examples.
Consider the propertybeing the actual inventor of bifocals. On the face of it, this
property does not supervene on the distribution of all other perfectly natural
properties and relations, since a duplicate of this world could fail to contain the
person who is the actual inventor of bifocals, who we will assume to be Ben Franklin.
(That other world contains someone who at that world is the inventor of bifocals,
but who is not the actual inventor of bifocals.) Butbeing the actual inventor of
bifocalsis not a perfectly natural property. So the more general principle is subject to
counter-example.
Perhaps it is—but it is not clear that this is a counter-example. Forbeing the actual
inventor of bifocalsmight have in its supervenience basebeing Ben Franklin, and if
the latter is a perfectly natural property—or in turn supervenes on other perfectly
natural properties or relations—then we do not have a counter-example to the more
general principle.
A third worry is that this argument overgeneralizes. Perhaps other beings besides
persons have haecceities that fail to supervene in the same way. Then a parallel
argument will yield the conclusion that these beings are fully real as well. I’m not
unduly concerned about the existence of a parallel argument for the full reality of
conscious beings that do not have sufficient mental acuity to count as persons, since
I am inclined to think that any being enjoying conscious states enjoys full reality. But
I would be disturbed were the argument generalizable so as to apply to things such as
holes. Does it?
Perhaps. Suppose there is a God. Suppose this God were to create two universes that
are mirror images of each other (so to speak) but spatiotemporally disconnected from
one another. In each universe, there is a donut with a single hole in the middle of it.

 PERSONS AND VALUE