Abstract
Historically, biocentrists have ascribed interests to organisms via an account of function. One promising account of function for this purpose is the organizational or autopoietic account of function, according to which some entity x has a function of self-maintenance when the parts of x contribute to the goal of self-maintenance. In this paper, I will present the autopoietic account of interests and provide some reasons for thinking that this account is promising. I will also present a possible issue for the biocentrist who uses the autopoietic account of function given the following two claims: (1) what it means to be a biological “self” is ambiguous, and (2) the autopoietic account of interests relies on a self boundary. I argue that the proponent of this account then needs to choose a definition of individual and explain why that definition is morally relevant. Otherwise, the proponent of the autopoietic account has not given an account of what constitutes a harm or a benefit for a biological individual, and there are good reasons to believe that this is a necessary component of any account of interests.
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Notes
Some authors (Basl, 2019) use ‘interests’ in a morally neutral sense (e.g., the lawnmower has an interest in its own maintenance). For the purposes of this paper, I will only be focusing on morally considerable interests.
I will be using goal terminology and claiming that non-sentient entities may be goal oriented. However, much of the literature has instead used the term teleology and made the claim that certain entities may exhibit a teleology. For the purposes of this paper, there are no significant differences between being teleologically oriented, exhibiting a teleology, and being goal oriented or goal directed. For consistency’s sake, I will be using the term ‘goal directed’. However, there is a problem with this term in that it might be too wide: The biocentrist is not interested in all and any goals but is instead interested in a certain type of goal – or a goal that was created in a certain type of way. For example, the biocentrist might only care about those goals that are relevant to self-maintenance (autopoietic account), or the biocentrist might only care about those goals that have been determined by natural selection (etiological account). In this way, the biocentrist is not claiming that goals themselves do all the work. Rather, the goals in mind are connected to welfare (or morally considerable interests), thus grounding the relationship between these goals and interests or welfare.
In this paper, I will be using the term biological entity rather than organism as this allows for a wider variety of entities with interests – possibly wholes such as ecosystems, or parts of organisms if they exhibit the right kind of behavior. Some authors focus only on organisms and claim that ecosystems have no interests (Varner, 2002), and some claim that ecosystems do have interests (Callicott, 1980). I am not taking a stance on this question, but only using terminology that would allow for ecosystems and other entities to have interests.
As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, it doesn’t seem obvious that goal-directedness is sufficient for morally considerable interests, even in humans. Perhaps one needs goal-directedness + a conscious state. I discuss this possibility in footnote 8.
James Griffin has a similar example in Well-being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance, 1986.
Of course, there may be many harms occurring in this example, but goal-directedness explains at least one of them.
One may claim that the subjective state of some sort was necessary for the goals to happen in this instance. As an anonymous reviewer noted, without the cognitive state, Susan never would have formed a goal. Plausibly, her interest is thwarted regardless of her cognitive state, but the cognitive state was necessary to form the interest.
I would like to draw a distinction between those circumstances (or entities) which should be considered background conditions and a proper cause or contribution to the interests. In some cases, like the Susan case, subjectivity does not contribute to the interests of the entity, even if it helped the interests get off the ground initially. However, background conditions may not solve the problem for the account that relies solely on goal-directedness: even if Susan’s cognitive state has nothing to do with whether her goal has been achieved, we need goal-directedness + some cognitive state to have an interest in the first place, for anyone. In other words, what it means to be goal-directed requires a cognitive state in any entity at all. This is a problem for biocentrists who would like to confer interests on entities without any cognitive states. I concede that this is indeed a problem for the proponent of the autopoietic account: they must show that cognitive states are not necessary in any way. To do some work in building up the account, another example may help. The following example is from Gary Varner (1998), who discusses his cat, Nancy. Nancy has an interest in her health, even though she likely has no beliefs, and no cognitive states which are about her health. If Nancy suffers from a malignant tumor, but her cognitive state never changes – she never feels pain or anxiety of any sort related to the tumor, plausibly, Nancy is still harmed by having poor health. In this way, the health goal has been formed and the health goal matters to Nancy, even though there was no cognitive state that “kicked off” the goal for Nancy. Thank you to Hunter Gentry, David O’Brien, and an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this point.
Depending on the account of function, some authors have claimed that the organism itself has a function, but most authors have used the terminology/framework that all organisms are teleologically organized if their parts have a function.
As mentioned in footnote 3, I am using the concept of function, but Sune Holm (2017) uses the concept of teleology to ground normativity. I take function to be a subset of teleology (i.e.: one way to be teleologically organized is to have a function). It may end up being that a more general concept of teleology is the most promising account of interests, but function will work for the purposes of this paper because having a function is one way of being teleologically organized.
I borrow this terminology from McShane (2021).
John Basl distinguishes the subjectivist challenge into three separate criteria: subject-relativity, nonderivativeness, and nonarbitrariness. I focus on the criterion of nonarbitrariness, as I believe subject-relativity and nonderivativeness are subspecies of nonarbitrariness.
This is different from a subjective account of welfare (in the context of subjective and objective welfare). That is, one may claim that all welfare is subjective, in that it must be experienced by the entity in question. So, my welfare is dependent on my experiences. This is in contrast with an objective account of welfare in which things may be good or bad for me, regardless of my experience and regardless of whether I know that the states have occurred or not. So, it would be bad for me to not get any vitamin D all winter, even if I never noticed and my quality of life had not gone down, because it would be bad for my body. In this paper, I will be working with an objective account of welfare, as (solely) subjective accounts cannot make room for nonsentient biological entities who have no subjective experience. This is discussed more earlier on in footnote 8. Plausibly, the most accurate account of welfare may make room for both objective elements as well as subjective elements.
While in this paper I focus on goal-directedness, teleology, and function, there may be better ways to ground interests for biological entities without subjective states. However, I am currently focusing on evaluating accounts that have been put forth as accounts of function, and thereby, interests.
Of course, there is nothing in this account which necessitates that this is the only way an entity may have a function. Rather, this is the way in which it has an organizational or an autopoietic function. Additionally, the entity might have parts that are organized toward many goals, and only one of those goals is self-maintenance.
Notably, di Paolo does not think that the autopoiesis is the only necessary condition for teleology. In (2005), di Paolo also argues that we need a concept of adaptability (not necessarily used in the natural selection sense) to get teleology off the ground for organisms. According to di Paolo, adaptability is “the capacity of an organism to regulate itself with respect to the boundaries of its own viability” (430).
For di Paolo, these entities have a “meaningful perspective on the world”, or sense-making although this is not understood in terms of subjective experience. Rather, it is understood in terms of normativity: there are circumstances that can be good and bad for the entity in question, regardless of subjective experience (Di Paolo 2005, 2009; Thompson 2011a, 2011b).
Notice that this “aiming” need not rely on any particular account of function or goals. These behaviors seem to ensure her survival but we could give a few different explanations of these aiming behaviors.
It should be noted that humans don’t just have a goal of maintaining life, but a goal of maintaining a certain quality of life, all other things being equal. For example, if an individual is in extreme pain and would rather terminate her life than continue on living, this interest is also morally important.
Clarke discusses the ambiguity for both a biological individual (2010) and organism (2012). For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on a self-maintaining individual rather than organism. Although perhaps the proponent of the autopoietic account often does find organisms to be bearers of interests, there is nothing in the account that necessitates that we are able to distinguish organism from non-organism and that organisms are the only bearers of interests.
For more on issues surrounding groups (specifically species), see Russow’s discussion (1981) : “Why do Species Matter?”
Clarke also notes that even if we accept this view: some think that an “adaptation at a level” is a response to selection at that level, but Gardner and Grafen (2009) disagree: an adaptation is only when there is exclusive selection at that level (no lower-level selection). In this way, the units of selection and the units of adaptation are not the same. This further shows that this view of individuality is underdescribed: depending on our view of what counts as adaptation, what counts as an individual will change. Another possible problem with this view of individuality is that it includes inclusive fitness, or the idea that an individual does not just increase her own reproductive success, but also strives to maximize the overall reproductive success of her relatives as well (W.D. Hamilton (1964, The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour I & II). Inclusive fitness, at first glance, does not fit neatly with the autopoietic account, as the autopoietic account focuses on self maintenance.
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Hoffmann, S. An evaluation of the autopoietic account of interests. Synthese 200, 229 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03658-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03658-2