160 ARGUMENTS: MONOTHEISTIC CONCEPTIONSThe answer expresses a view sometimes called speciesism, which
means “unjustifiably favoring one’s own species.” This is an evaluative
term, and it is either accompanied by an argument defending the
allegation of unjustifiability or it is a mere term of abuse. It may be
true, as those who use the term sometimes say, that hippos would assign
ultimate value to their own kind if they could. Those who hold a respect
for persons ethic agree that were hippos capable of holding such
positions, they would be persons – self-conscious minds embodied in
hippo bodies – and as persons they would be correct in ascribing
ultimate value to persons.
Consider the notion of baseline natural intrinsic worth where X has
baseline intrinsic worth if and only if the proposition It is wrong to use
X for the sake of something else in a way that reduces X’s intrinsic
worth, and wrong to destroy X. The notion of baseline natural intrinsic
worth is the notion of unexchangeable natural intrinsic worth writ in a
different script. Monotheists frequently, perhaps typically,^51 have taken
being a person to include having unexchangeable intrinsic natural
worth, or baseline natural intrinsic worth. (This is one reason why the
typical monotheistic doctrine that persons survive the death of their
bodies is not an arbitrary addition to monotheism.) Were God, then, to
obliterate one person and fiat another, simply for the sake of changing
the population content, this would be wrong. One standard basis for this
view is that persons are agents, possessing rationality, freedom,
responsibility, and the capacity to love God and others. Having baseline
intrinsic natural worth, on this account, is inherently associated with
having moral worth – with being capable of moral agency.^52
The monotheist, then, can hold that while God has allowed a great
many sorts of things that possessed exchangeable intrinsic natural
worth to come and go, God has also has supplemented or replaced them
with a species whose members have unexchangeable intrinsic natural
worth.^53 So if God must have a morally sufficient reason for allowing
things with exchangeable intrinsic natural worth to cease to exist, both
in the sense of individuals dying and of species becoming extinct, it is
possible that God has such reason. Thus E5 There is no moral
justification that God could have for permitting species that have
natural worth to become extinct, an essential premise in the critic’s
argument, is false. Hence, even if we, as it were, make a present to the
critic of premise E4 If God exists then God has permitted species of
beings that have natural worth to become extinct, and this was wrong
unless God has sufficient moral justification for doing so, another
essential premise in that argument, the argument fails; and of course E4
is itself hardly an evident truth.^54