Chapter 4. The Primacy of the Subject

1In the third chapter of Principia Ethica (1903), G. E. Moore asked his readers to imagine two worlds. The first was to be as beautiful as they could make it, holding whatever on earth they most admired, mountains, rivers, the sea, trees, sunsets, the stars, and the moon, each part set in such proportion to the rest that nothing jarred and everything added to the beauty of the whole. The second was to be the ugliest world they could conceive, “one heap of filth,” in Moore’s phrase, made of everything most disgusting to us and without a single redeeming feature. Readers could imagine anything they liked about the two worlds except one thing. No human being could live in either of them, or see the beauty of the one or loathe the foulness of the other, now or at any time. Moore then asked whether it would be irrational to hold that the beautiful world is the better of the two, and to do what one could to bring it about in preference to the other. He could not help thinking that it would be better, and he hoped that some of his readers would agree with him in so extreme a case.

2The thought experiment was aimed at Henry Sidgwick, who had died three years before the book appeared. In The Methods of Ethics (1874, seventh edition 1907), Sidgwick had surveyed the lasting things that people commonly judge good apart from the qualities of human beings, and he found none that seemed good, on reflection, except through its bearing on human life or at least on some conscious being. People call scenery beautiful, he observed, and yet it would be unreasonable to labor at making nature beautiful where the beauty could never be contemplated. From there he went further, to the conclusion that the only ultimate good is desirable consciousness. Moore’s pair of worlds was built to break the first step. If the beautiful world is better in itself than the ugly one, with no human being ever to see either, then something is good apart from any human contemplation, and Sidgwick’s principle fails.

3For Moore’s readers the two worlds were a test of intuition, and for a designer they are a possible commission. A substrate can be given laws that fold rock into mountains, carry rivers to a sea, and light a sky with stars, and those laws can run for as long as the machine lasts with nothing in them able to feel, which makes the case stricter than Moore’s, since he excluded only human eyes. The same substrate could as easily be given the heap, and for the choice to stay that strict, not even the designer may ever look at the result. Moore thought the first world worth producing, and the question he put to his readers becomes a question about what a designer may spend. A designer has no reason to prefer either world. Whatever beauty is, and however much of it Moore’s world holds, its goodness lies in what it does for those who meet it, and in this pair no one ever will. The ugly world offends and harms nobody, so neither world contains anything good or bad for anyone, and neither is better than the other.

4Moore conceded much of this himself. In the last chapter of the same book he set out a method for finding what is good in itself, which asks what would be valuable if it existed entirely on its own, and when he applied it to unseen beauty, it returned almost nothing. The mere existence of beauty still seemed to him to have some value, he wrote, though one so slight that it vanished beside the value of being conscious of beauty, and he granted that Sidgwick had been right to that extent. A designer has more reason than a reader to take the concession seriously, because a designer spends from a finite store. Energy, hardware, and waiting spent on one world cannot be spent on another, and among the things a substrate might carry are the minds of the dying. Even by Moore’s own accounting, the sea that no one sees is worth almost nothing beside the sea that someone sees, and a value that small is outweighed by what the same means could do for someone who exists. Detail computed in full where nothing will ever look is Moore’s beautiful world in small, and a designer has no more reason to pay for it.

5Moore’s intuition draws its force from the imagination that tests it. Mountains and a sea cannot be imagined except from somewhere, so the beautiful world arrives in the mind already seen, lit for a viewer and composed for an eye that the thought experiment told its reader to leave out. The disgust a reader feels at the heap is felt now, by someone who exists, about a picture in that person’s own mind. Both responses are goods and harms in the lives of those who have them, which is where the foundation places every good and harm, and what they show is how readily people lend their own perspective to a place that has none. A designer who mistook the loan for a property of the world would be building for an audience that will never arrive.

6Add a third world, plainer than either of Moore’s. It has low hills, a gray sea, and a modest scatter of stars, and it holds one native, whose life goes well for her by whatever standard a good life is finally judged. That world is better than the beautiful one, and it is better because of the good her life holds for her, which includes whatever pleasure she takes in the gray sea, and for no other reason. Her life is good for her, and yet existing is not better for her than never existing would have been, since the world without her holds nobody for whom that world could be worse. The world that holds her is better all the same than a world that does not. How a world can be made better by a life whose existence is better for no one decides how a designer compares worlds.

7Nothing is good or bad except for some subject, and the claim can be read in two ways. One reading rests every value on experience. The other grounds it in subjects, whose good reaches beyond what they experience. On either reading a physics is judged by what it gives to and takes from those who live under it, and the readings differ over what can be given and what taken. Much of what a designer owes turns on which reading is right.

8A subject, in the sense that matters here, is a being for whom there is something it is like to be that being. Thomas Nagel made the phrase famous in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), where he argued that an organism has conscious states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism, something it is like for the organism itself. He chose the bat because it is near enough to us that few doubt it has experience and far enough, in a life steered by the echoes of its own cries, that no human being can imagine that experience from within. A being of that kind has a point of view, and from a point of view things go well or badly. The foundation asks nothing more of a subject. The two readings divide over what a subject’s good contains. On the experiential reading, the only things good or bad for a subject are states of its experience, its pleasures and pains and whatever else is desirable or undesirable to undergo, and everything else is good or bad only as a cause of them. Sidgwick held this reading, and his conclusion that ultimate good is desirable consciousness states it. On the subject-relative reading, nothing is good or bad except for a subject, and a subject’s good includes goods that are not states of its experience at all.

9Both readings agree that a world with no subjects in it holds nothing good or bad, and so they agree about Moore’s two worlds. They part company as soon as a subject exists. On the experiential reading, experience is both the ground of value and the whole of it. The subject-relative reading makes experience the ground of value because experience is what makes a being a subject, someone to whom anything can matter, and the good of such a being takes in its relations with its world and with others. The second reading keeps everything the first says about experience, since a pleasure is good for the one who has it and a pain bad for the one who suffers it on either view. What the second adds is a set of goods that a life can have or lack while every experience in it stays exactly the same.

10Sidgwick granted the case against his reading before he rejected it. People sometimes prefer to know the truth, or to be free instead of comfortable in servitude, even at a cost in pleasure. He allowed that what they prefer in such cases is a relation between the mind and something independent of it, since anyone who discovered that the truth she had preferred was a falsehood would judge her preference mistaken. He then asked his readers to consider such relations stripped of every experience that goes with them or follows from them, found that so considered they seemed no more desirable than material things apart from any mind, and concluded that their worth lies in what they contribute to the happiness of sentient beings. The test removes too much. A relation considered by itself, as a bare fact about how a mind stands to the world, is no more good than a stone is, and both readings agree, since nothing is good except for a subject. The question is whether the relation is good for the subject whose life it belongs to, and the fair test of that holds every experience in the life fixed and varies only the relation. That test finds the difference that Sidgwick’s own example of freedom preferred to a luxurious servitude already registers. Sidgwick moved from a claim about where value lies, in the lives of conscious beings, to a claim about what value consists in, the states of their consciousness, and the first claim does not carry the second.

11The arguments made so far were made on the second reading, and most of them fail on the first. The Introduction had already placed real relationships, knowledge of one’s world, and freedom from domination within a subject’s good, which only the second reading allows, though its case against forced annihilation survives on either, since an ending that is never felt still takes away every good the future held. The case against a painted sky held that a designer who sets false stars on a dome wrongs the astronomers who spend generations charting them. On the experiential reading, a dome that is never discovered gives those astronomers exactly the experiences a real sky would have given, the cold nights at the eyepiece, the long calculations, and the satisfaction of a prediction confirmed, so the only harm in it is the risk that someone will one day find the seam. The argument against painted people fares worse still. A companion who seems to love a lonely woman, with no one behind the face, would on the experiential reading do her no harm at all so long as the illusion held, and might even count as a kindness. The contrast drawn between a designed world and the experience machine Robert Nozick described in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) turned on doing, on being someone, and on contact with something deeper than any builder’s imagination, and it would lose its point, since none of the three names an experience. The warning about the keeper, whose power to end a world exists whether or not it is ever used, would shrink to a warning about the chance of its use, and a machine that leaks energy where no instrument ever measures the leak would break no promise to anyone.

12For most of history the two readings have seldom come apart in practice, because the goods the second reading counts usually arrive with their experiences. A woman who is loved usually feels loved, and a scientist whose theory is true usually sees it confirmed, which is why the experiential reading could pass for so long as a harmless simplification. A designer is the one agent able to separate the goods from their experiences on the scale of a world, giving a people the feeling of being loved with nobody to love them, the satisfaction of discovery with nothing true to discover, and the ease of freedom while a single hand rests on the switch. The separation would often be cheaper as well, since a figure with nothing behind its face costs a machine far less than a mind, so a designer guided by the experiential reading and pressed by a budget would find painted companions the efficient way to comfort the lonely. For a designer the two readings recommend different worlds, and the experiential reading recommends the worse one at a lower price.

13Commitment A world’s reality rests on its…A reading that turned each of these wrongs into a risk of discovery would leave a designer free to deceive, isolate, and dominate so long as nothing was ever noticed, which is the license the earlier arguments were written to refuse. Adopting a reading only because the rest of an argument needs it would prove nothing, though, so the subject-relative reading has to be earned from the cases. Each of them sets side by side two lives that are identical in every experience, one with some good and one without it, and in each the life with the good is better for the one who lives it. The astronomer who charts real stars knows her sky, and the one who charts painted points of light only believes she does. A woman whose companion is someone is loved, while one whose companion is a figure is only treated as though she were.

14Nozick expected that most people would refuse to plug into his machine for life, and philosophers have long treated the refusal as evidence that people value contact with reality above any experience. In “If You Like It, Does It Matter If It’s Real?” (2010), Felipe De Brigard turned the question around. He asked 72 undergraduates at the University of North Carolina, none of whom had studied philosophy, to imagine that a stranger had just told them their brains had been plugged into an experience machine by mistake, and that they could stay connected or go back to their real lives. A third of them were told nothing about the life to which they would return, and 54 percent of these chose to go back. Another third were told that in reality they were prisoners in a maximum security prison in West Virginia, and only 13 percent of these chose to go back. The last third were told that in reality they were multimillionaire artists living in Monaco, and exactly half chose to go back, about as many as among those told nothing at all.

15De Brigard read the results as a sign of status quo bias, the tendency, well documented in behavioral economics, to prefer whatever one already has because one already has it. A glamorous life in Monaco drew no more people out of the machine than a life about which they knew nothing, while a grim one kept nearly nine in ten of them in. What Nozick’s readers had expressed, on this reading, was in large part a reluctance to leave the life they were living, which happened in their case to be real. In a second study De Brigard offered the choice simply as one to disconnect, with a warning that life outside would be unlike the life the student had known, and 59 percent of 80 students stayed connected, while only about a third of those who left gave a preference for reality as their reason. About half of those told nothing in the first study, and four in ten in the second, still chose an unknown reality over a pleasant illusion, so the findings leave open whether people value reality for its own sake. What they remove is the machine’s claim to settle the question alone, since the intuition the machine draws on is mixed with an attachment to the familiar that would hold just as firmly in anyone already inside.

16The subject-relative reading therefore rests on two further supports, painted skies and unexercised domination, and the bias De Brigard found has nothing to hold in either. Both concern choices a designer makes before anyone lives in the world in question, about lives that belong to others, and neither asks anyone to leave a life already under way. A designer choosing between a real sky and a painted dome is choosing what a people who do not yet exist will be able to know about their world, and nobody’s status quo is at stake. Domination can be posed as cleanly, with two worlds identical in every experience of everyone in them. In one, the machine is held under rules that no single will can override, and in the other, a single keeper holds the power to end every life at a word, and the designer knows for certain that the word will never be spoken. The inhabitants of the second world live at that keeper’s mercy whether or not they ever learn of the power, and a designer able to build either world for them has a reason to build the first that no experience in either world supplies. Because the two worlds differ in nothing their inhabitants feel, the case shows that freedom from domination counts and leaves how much it counts to the weighing of goods. Sidgwick’s freedom preferred to a luxurious servitude returns here in the form a designer meets, as a way a life can go worse for the one living it while nothing in her experience changes.

17The woman at the third table, which she made, drinks tea there with her friend, who knows her, wishes her well, and is free to disappoint her. Suppose that the man across from her had been, from the first day she met him, a figure that produced every word and gesture a friend would produce, with nothing behind it. Nothing in her experience would differ. She would laugh at the same jokes and confide the same worries, and the ring her cup left on the wood would be wiped away by the same sleeve. Her life would lack a friendship all the same, since the trust she gave would have nobody to receive it. The real friendship is good for her beyond anything she feels in it, and good for him in the same way. Each is known by the other and can be wronged by the other, and neither fact is an experience.

18Five goods that are not states of experience pass the test of the paired lives, and each is a relation in which a subject’s own life stands to its world or to others. Knowledge of one’s world comes first, true belief and understanding about the world one lives in, including where it came from as far as inquiry can reach. Freedom from falsehood built into that world is its floor, since a planted history takes knowledge from those who live under it, while a foundation left unrevealed leaves it for them to find. Real relationship holds when those one loves, trusts, and confides in are subjects in their own right, who know one and answer by their own lights. Achievement belongs to acts that make the differences they were meant to make through the skill or effort of the one who acts, so that the table a carpenter builds stands in a room where others eat at it. Authorship belongs to a life whose choices are made by the one who lives it, so that a woman whose desires were installed to steer her lives a life that feels the same from within and is less her own. Freedom from domination completes the five, the condition of living at no one’s mercy, whether or not any mercy is ever withdrawn. Pleasure and pain, and the other goods and harms of experience, stand beside these five, and together they make up what a subject’s good contains. Of the kinds of good by which every design is judged, the five belong with the relational, agentive, and structural goods.

19Each of the five answers to something a designer controls. Knowledge of one’s world depends on a physics that plants no false evidence and leaves its foundations open to inquiry. Whether the figures in a world are subjects or painted people decides whether its relationships are real. Achievement depends on the counterfactual robustness that separates a world from a recording, since an act can make a difference only in a world that would have gone otherwise without it. Authorship depends on how far a designer who writes minds leaves their desires and their values to the minds themselves. Freedom from domination depends on the architecture of the machine and the rules of its custody. The experiential reading would leave a designer indifferent to every one of these choices whenever the experiences came out the same, and the subject-relative reading makes each of them a decision about lives.

20All five concern the subject’s own life, the world she knows, the people she is bound to, the deeds she does, the choices she makes, and the power she lives under. None of them is the bare existence of something she would approve of if she knew of it. A woman who hopes that somewhere a beautiful world exists that nobody will ever see is no better off if one does, unless she comes to know of it, and then the good is her knowing. Without that limit the subject-relative reading would let Moore’s beautiful world back in through a side door, as a good for anyone who wished it existed, and a designer could then defend any unseen extravagance by pointing to someone’s wish. With the limit in place, every good that is not an experience is still a good of somebody’s life.

21One objection to counting such goods holds that a life can go well or badly only in ways its subject could notice, so that a loss never felt is no loss at all. On that view, if the woman at the third table learned in her last year that the man across from her had been a figure all along, the learning would be her only harm, and her grief for forty years in which nobody was listening would be a mistake about the past. Her grief is fitting, and Sidgwick’s own concession explains why. Someone who discovers that what she valued was false judges that her preference went wrong, and her judgment concerns the forty years themselves, which went worse for her than she knew. How a life feels from within is part of how it goes, and the rest of how it goes is fixed by what that life is in contact with, so a deception harms someone from the day it is built, long before the day it is found.

22Which of these goods a being can have depends on what it can be related to. A fish has no use for a true account of its world’s origin, while a creature able to ask where its world came from is wronged by a planted answer. In every case experience remains the ground. A machine that stores true records of its surroundings has no good of knowledge, a thermostat that tracks a room has no relationship with it, and an engine that does what it was built to do has achieved nothing for itself, because nothing in any of them is someone for whom anything could be good. Experiential goods and these five are weighed against one another by the method that governs every conflict among the goods of conscious life, and no ranking of them follows from the list alone, since a life rich in knowledge and empty of joy is not thereby a good one. Before any weighing, though, the list settles that a designer who deceives, isolates, steers, or dominates the inhabitants of a world takes something from their lives even when every experience in those lives is exactly what it would otherwise have been, and the designer answers for what was taken.

23Richard Kraut argued in Against Absolute Goodness (2011) that the property Moore called good, goodness without qualification, does not exist, and that whatever is good is good for something or good of its kind. Kraut is an ally against Moore’s beautiful world, since on his view a world good for nothing is not good at all. He extends goodness for something to every living thing, though. On his account advantages and disadvantages accrue to weeds as they do to people, and what sets people apart is that the goods open to them are greater than those open to other kinds of creature. If he is right, the beings for whom anything can be good include every plant and every microbe, and the foundation reaches far past subjects, in a direction it cannot follow.

24Christine Korsgaard draws the line where the foundation draws it. In Fellow Creatures (2018) she holds that value is tethered, so that to be important is always to be important to someone, and she separates two ways in which something can have a good. Many things have a functional good, a standard of working well that can be applied to them from outside, as a knife is good when it cuts and a heart when it pumps. Only a being with a point of view has a final good, a good that is good for it in a way that matters to it, because it experiences its own condition as going well or badly. On that distinction, which this book adopts, a weed has a functional good. Water and light make it flourish as oil keeps an engine running, and a botanist is right to say that it flourishes or fails. Nothing in its flourishing matters to it, because nothing in it has a point of view from which anything could matter, so its good is good for nobody.

25If every living thing had a good that counted for its own sake, then summarizing a forest would damage a good that counted. So would carrying the simple life of a sea as a property of its summary, or letting a long history of simple life run before anything in a world could feel, and the economies on which every affordable world depends would become injuries. Nothing in this rules out that some plants feel. Whether any of them does is a question about evidence, and where the evidence leaves a real chance, the precautionary rule applies to plants as it applies to anything else. What the foundation denies is that a plant is someone because it is alive. Life gives a thing a way of working well, and only experience gives it a stake in whether it does.

26Richard Routley, who later wrote as Richard Sylvan, pressed the opposing intuition in “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” (1973), a paper he gave at the World Congress of Philosophy in Varna that year. He imagined the last person left alive after a general collapse, who sets about eliminating every living thing he can reach, animal or plant, “painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs.” The prevailing ethic, which Routley charged with a chauvinism that gives standing to human beings alone, finds nothing wrong in what the last man does, since no human being is harmed by it. Routley held that what he does is wrong all the same, and he took that verdict as evidence that value does not depend on human interests. The case is a cousin of Moore’s, a destruction that no human being will ever witness, and it asks whether anything is lost when nobody is left to lose it.

27The last man does wrong, and most of his wrong falls on the animals he kills. A painless killing is still the destruction of a subject against its interest, and every animal he reaches is someone whose good he ends, whether or not any human being cares. Most of what drives Routley’s intuition therefore survives without any value beyond subjects, and what fails in his case is the chauvinism he attacked, which drew the circle of subjects too small. If no plant feels, the last man’s work among the plants wrongs no plant, though two considerations still tell against it. Some chance remains that some plants feel, and precaution scales its care to that chance, while the living things he destroys are the only possible source of future subjects, minds that might in some later age have arisen from whatever survived and lived lives worth having. The weed’s own good enters neither consideration. A designer who ends a run that holds plants and no subjects wrongs nobody by ending it, though the same two considerations count against doing so.

28Commitment Conscious experience is the ground of…Commitment A good life is not better…Subjects are the source of value, and every comparison between worlds runs through them. Value is value for a subject, a subject’s good includes goods that are not states of experience, such as real relationships, achievement, the authorship of one’s own life, knowledge of one’s world, and freedom from domination, and outcomes are ranked by the goods for subjects they contain. What is good or bad for no subject makes no outcome better or worse, so unseen beauty, the flourishing of a weed, and every other pattern of that kind drop out of the comparison. Between two outcomes that hold the same subjects, the one that is better for some of them and worse for none is the better outcome, and where gains to some come with losses to others, the goods are weighed against one another. Outcomes that hold different subjects, or different numbers of them, are ranked by the goods and harms for subjects that each contains, though the foundation alone does not fix the form of that comparison. On the form this book defends when it compares worlds of different sizes, a world with a good life in it is better than a world without that life, other things being equal, and it is better because of the good that life holds for the one who lives it. That life is not better for its subject than never existing. Being better for someone compares two conditions of that someone, and never existing is no condition of anyone, not even a condition at the level of zero, since there is nobody in it to be at any level at all. The third world set beside Moore’s two is better than the beautiful one, and it is better for nobody, neither for the woman in it nor for anyone else.

29Jan Narveson took the step from the foundation to a denial that good lives add any value in “Moral Problems of Population” (1973). Morality, he argued, asks that people be made happy and is indifferent to whether happy people are made. The neutrality rests on a premise about comparison, that an outcome is better than another only if it is better for someone. Adding a happy person to the world is better for no one, since it is not better for her than never existing and, by hypothesis, it changes nothing for anyone else. So adding her makes the outcome no better. The foundation is a claim about where value lies, and the premise is a claim about how outcomes compare.

30Commitment Outcomes are ranked by the goods…A world that holds a good life holds a good that a world without it lacks, and that good is good for someone, the one whose life it is. Every bit of value in the better world is value for a subject who lives there. To call that world better is to rank it by the goods and harms for subjects that it contains, so its betterness summarizes what belongs to subjects and adds no good of its own. What the better world lacks is a subject for whom the comparison itself comes out better, and nothing in the foundation asks for one, since a comparison of two worlds is not a good that anyone has. The foundation excludes value that is good for nobody, such as Moore’s unseen beauty, and it leaves a designer free to count, across two worlds, the goods that are good for someone. Narveson’s neutrality needs the further premise, which the foundation does not supply, and the slide from one claim to the other is of the same kind as the one that carried Sidgwick from where value lies to what it consists in. On Narveson’s premise a designer would have no reason to make the third world in place of leaving the substrate empty, and a world full of flourishing lives would be no better than Moore’s heap. Without that premise, nothing in the foundation keeps good lives from adding value. The case that they do add it is completed when worlds of different sizes are compared, where a more careful argument for neutrality returns, one that begins from what is owed to those who might exist and sets value aside.

31Commitment The ranking tells a designer which…The ranking compares outcomes, and duties are owed to particular subjects. A ranking of outcomes by the goods they contain, taken alone, invites a dangerous conclusion. Peter Singer, in Practical Ethics (1979), applied a view that counts only the total of happiness to sentient beings unaware of themselves as existing over time. On that view killing such a being could be made good by bringing into existence another that would live as well, though Singer refused the same view for beings aware of their own futures. A designer who read the ranking as a license would reason the same way about every creature in a world, since if a good life adds value, then ending one good life and starting another as good leaves the world no worse. Each subject holds claims of its own against what may be done to it, and no gain in the ranking licenses destroying anyone, so a world that would be just as good with a different fish in it gives nobody the right to end the fish that is there. The ranking tells a designer which of two worlds is the better to make, and it says nothing about what may be done to the subjects already living in either. A designer comparing worlds therefore answers to two standards at once, a comparison of the goods that worlds contain and a set of claims that each subject holds against everyone, and the second sets the bounds within which the first may be pursued.

32Physicists have long prized elegance and parsimony in their theories and spoken of the grandeur of the laws they found, and a designer writing a physics will feel the same pull. On the foundation these qualities belong in a design as goods in the lives of perceivers and inquirers. A physics whose fundamental laws are few and fit together gives the descendants who will one day ask what water is made of a world they can come to understand, and understanding one’s world is among the goods already counted. Parsimony serves those descendants a second time, since a world with few laws is one whose people can learn, predict, and plan, so economy in the laws becomes stability and comprehensibility in their lives. Elegance gives inquiry a pleasure of its own, the delight of seeing many facts follow from one principle, and grandeur, in the depth of a night sky or the age of a mountain, gives wonder to those who meet it, provided the sky holds, when they look, everything their instruments can reach. Each of these is a good when it enters a life.

33The same qualities become hazards when they serve nobody in the world. Elegance at a depth no instrument will ever reach is good for no inhabitant, and its one beneficiary is the designer, whose pleasure in it is a good of the designer’s own life and counts as that and nothing more. A designer who chose a law because its form delighted them, while it cost the inhabitants some good of their lives, would be building Moore’s beautiful world inside a populated one and paying for it with other lives. Beginning from subjects puts the order right. A physics earns credit for its beauty only where that beauty reaches someone, and a designer’s own delight, however intense, gives no reason to take from those who will live under the laws anything that is good for them.

34If value is value for a subject, standing follows wherever there is a subject. Moral standing, the condition of being someone whose good must be taken into account, belongs to any being with a point of view, because any such being has a good that can be served or damaged, and nothing more is needed. Singer had argued in Animal Liberation (1975) that the capacity to suffer or to enjoy marks the one limit on concern for the interests of others that survives scrutiny, since a being capable of neither has nothing to take into account, while a being capable of either has interests that count. The foundation draws the boundary in the same place and finds more inside it, since what others must take into account in such a being includes the goods of its life that are not experiences. The standing of a being inside that boundary depends on nothing else, and three features that might seem to bear on it bear on it not at all.

35Commitment Moral standing extends to every being…What a being is made of makes no difference to its standing. Two beings alike in every experience and in every relation to their worlds, one with a brain of neurons and the other with a brain of some matter not yet written into any physics, cannot differ in how their lives go for them. How a life goes is fixed by what it experiences and what it is related to, and neither consults the material that carries it. Whether a given material can carry a point of view at all turns on the working hypothesis about consciousness and its rivals, and wherever experience turns out to be, in carbon, in silicon, or in the matter of a designed world, standing goes with it. Origin makes no more difference than material. How a being began is a fact about its past, and its good is a fact about what can go well or badly for it now and from now on. A child conceived in a laboratory has the standing of a child conceived anywhere else, and a native built by a designer has the standing of the designer who built her. Any maker who thinks that what was made holds its standing on the maker’s terms has mistaken the origin of a being for the source of its claims. The made hold their standing as their makers hold theirs, by being someone.

36Commitment Standing holds across the gaps in…Depth in computation matters no more than origin. A native of an inner world, carried by a machine that stands in a world itself carried by a machine, is as much someone as anyone in the primordial cosmos, since standing rests on having a point of view, and the number of machines beneath a life adds nothing to that and takes nothing from it. A discount for depth would also leave our own standing at the mercy of a fact beyond anyone’s power to check, since nothing now known rules out that our own world is carried. Standing holds across the gaps in a subject’s experience as well. A sleeper, a patient under anesthesia, and the inhabitants of a world paused by its keeper are subjects whose lives are under way and whose good includes a future, so each keeps its standing while nothing at all is felt. Designers will make minds stranger to us than the bat, and their standing will not wait on anyone’s imagination. A designer’s sympathy follows the minds the designer can picture, and standing has to reach further than sympathy does.

37Commitment Every subject holds the same basic…Every subject stands equal in its basic claims, which are negative, the claim not to be made to suffer and the claim not to be destroyed against its interest, whatever its degree of consciousness. Positive duties toward it, rescue among them, may vary in strength with the probability that it feels and with what it stands to lose. Which systems are treated as subjects, while nobody can be sure which of them feel, is settled by the line of protection, the probability of experience at and above which a system belongs to the protected region. A lobster dying on the ice of a fish counter shows the shape of the view. If it is treated as a subject at all, its claim not to be dropped alive into boiling water is as strong as anyone’s claim not to be scalded to death, and it holds whatever anyone thinks of lobsters. Its claim to be carried back to the sea, or to any rescue that would cost something, is a positive claim, and it may be weaker than a person’s claim in the same plight, because it is less certain that the lobster feels and because what it stands to lose may be less. The two claims answer different questions. One asks what may be done to the lobster, and the answer is the same for every subject. The other asks how much of a finite store of help is owed to it, and the answer depends on how likely the help is to reach anyone and on how much it gives the one it reaches.

38Shelly Kagan argues in How to Count Animals, More or Less (2019) for a hierarchy that this view rejects. Kagan separates standing, whether a being counts at all, from status, how much it counts, and holds that status comes in degrees set by a being’s capacities, among them its capacities for well-being and for agency, so that people outrank other animals and some animals outrank others. A unit of well-being then matters more in a being of higher status, and Kagan suggests multiplying each being’s well-being by its status to find how much it counts. He carries the hierarchy into rights as well, so that the protections a being enjoys against harm grow weaker as its status falls. His case rests partly on the verdicts that equal counting would give, since a view that counted the same pain equally in a mouse and in a person, and favored the worse off, would direct help toward animals in ways he finds implausible. To keep the view usable, he proposes a limited hierarchy of a few broad levels.

39If value is value for a subject, a pain is bad by being bad for the one who feels it, and how bad it is for the lobster is settled by the lobster’s experience of it. Discounting that badness by the lobster’s status brings in a measure that belongs to no subject, a ranking of beings from nobody’s point of view, and the foundation recognizes no such ranking, for the same reason that it recognizes no value in Moore’s beautiful world. Korsgaard makes the point about importance directly. Human beings would be more important than other animals overall only if they were more important to everyone with a point of view, and they are not. People matter more to people than lobsters do, while a lobster matters more to itself than any person does, and no further standpoint exists from which the two orderings could be settled in favor of either.

40Hierarchy also needs a device that equality does without. Infants lack many of the capacities that set status on Kagan’s view, and so do people with severe cognitive disabilities. Kagan raises the status of the first by appeal to the persons they will become and of the second by appeal to the persons they could have been, whom he calls modal persons. The device is needed because a hierarchy built on capacities would otherwise rank some people below some animals, and for those who will never have the capacities it rests on a counterfactual, about the person each could have been, that has nothing to do with how their lives go for them. Equal basic claims never ranked anyone below anyone, so they need no such amplification, and the infant and the lobster hold their claims on the same terms as everyone else.

41Much of what makes hierarchy attractive survives without it. A person who dies young loses decades of a life rich in projects, friendships, and understanding, while a mouse that dies loses months of a life whose goods are fewer, so a duty to rescue may favor the person, as Kraut also holds when he argues that persons have more to lose. The variation of positive duties with what a being stands to lose yields most of the verdicts about whom to help first that drive Kagan’s argument, and it yields them without counting anyone’s suffering at a discount. What the view refuses is the discount itself, the claim that the same pain inflicted on a lesser being is a lesser wrong because of who suffers it. A designer has particular reason to refuse it. Designers decide the capacities of the beings they create, so under a hierarchy a designer could manufacture low status, making beings whose suffering would count for less by design and whose protections would be weaker from the start. Equal basic claims leave no such lever. The variation of positive duties has a lever of its own, since a designer could build beings with more to lose than anyone now living and so draw duties of aid toward them, though their basic claims would be no stronger than anyone else’s.

42Commitment When lost storage leaves a machine…In the primordial cosmos basic claims can nearly always be honored for every subject at once, since a life there goes on unless someone ends it, and nothing is used up when one refrains from harming. Designed worlds lose that ease. A life in one goes on only while the machine keeps computing it, so the claim not to be destroyed draws on the same finite store as the duties of aid, and when a machine can no longer carry every world it holds, the claims of their inhabitants collide outright. Stopping the machine that carries a life ends that life as surely as any blow, while a stranger who leaves the dying unaided allows a death he did not cause. The claims stay equal all the same. The claim not to be destroyed is a claim against what someone does, and a keeper who has begun to carry someone has undertaken to go on carrying her. Duties of that kind are owed because of what a party did, to the beings it made, harmed, or took into its keeping, and they take no discount for doubt in any being treated as a subject. A designer who brings such a being into existence owes it what creation obliges, since the designer chose to make it, and whoever harms a being owes it repair on the same terms. Even where a failing machine sets those duties against one another, no subject whose share of the machine still exists may be ended so that its share can carry someone else. When storage itself is lost and the machine can no longer hold everyone, the shortfall comes from a loss no one chose, and the keeper allocates what remains under a rule fixed in advance.

43Commitment Duties of aid, rescue first among…Positive duties draw on means that are finite and cannot reach everyone, so they have to be allocated. Probability enters the allocation because help given to a being that feels nothing helps no one, while the same means could have helped someone who does, and what a being stands to lose, the goods its life holds or would hold in its ordinary course, enters because help does more good where more is at stake. The positive duties that vary are duties of aid, owed because a being is in need and someone is able to help, with rescue first among them, along with the relief of suffering one did not cause and the provision of what a being lacks. They vary with those two things alone, the probability that the being feels and what it stands to lose. What the being is made of, how it began, how deep in computation it lives, its kind or its intelligence beyond what these do to its stakes, and anything it has done leave them where they were. For any being treated as a subject, the care that the precautionary rule scales to those same two things is the care owed in aid, and its basic claims stand outside the scaling.

44Commitment Where a being at or above…The claim not to be destroyed is a claim against destruction against one’s interest, which leaves room for an ending that serves it. A being who can choose decides for itself whether to go on, so its freedom to decline continuation is the same claim seen from the side of its own judgment. For a being unable to choose, such as an animal in pain that no repair can ease, life can stop being worth living, and ending that life is not against its interest. Beings who cannot choose are guaranteed instead that none of them is kept in a life not worth living, and since that guarantee may end only a life that no repair can make worth living, it can never conflict with the equal claim not to be destroyed. Degree of consciousness enters here, as everywhere, only through what a being stands to lose. A dimmer experience may hold less for its subject to lose, which bears on how much help it is owed, and its claims against being harmed are what they would be in any other subject.

45Commitment The dying already exist and stand…What a being has done bears neither on its basic claims nor on the strength of positive duties toward it, and so rescue is owed to the dying whatever they have done. A world able to receive the dying will receive those who harmed others beside those they harmed, and a long tradition holds that this cannot be right, that those who gravely wrong others lose some part of what they would otherwise be owed. The tradition takes two forms, one holding that wrongdoing forfeits claims and the other that it is good in itself for people to fare as they deserve. John Locke stated the first in the Second Treatise of Government (1689). On his account a man whose own crime has earned him death has lost his right to his life, so the one he wronged may take it, or may put off the taking and use him as a servant in the meantime, which Locke offered as the condition of a justly held slave. Later in the same work Locke derived despotic power, the power of one man over another’s life, from forfeiture alone. An aggressor who makes war on another without right has, on this account, abandoned the reason God gave human beings to govern their dealings, and in living by force, as beasts do, he has made himself one of them. The one he attacked, with anyone who joins in executing justice, may then destroy him like a wild beast or a “noxious brute.”

46Locke’s image carries an assumption that the foundation removes. It treats a beast as something anyone may destroy, so that a man who makes himself like one loses every claim to be spared. Once standing reaches every subject, the wolf too holds a claim not to be destroyed against its interest, and a man who becomes like a beast in his conduct has become like a being whose claims are as basic as anyone’s, which takes nothing from him. What remains of Locke’s account is the permission to defend oneself and others against an attack, and that permission needs no forfeiture. A sleepwalker at the head of a stair, about to knock a child down it, may be held back by force though he has done nothing wrong and deserves nothing, and the force is limited to what holding him back requires. His claims stay as strong as the child’s throughout, which is why the force can go no further. The permission comes from the child’s claim and from the threat as it unfolds, and it lapses when the threat does. Defense answers to what a being is doing, so it ends the moment the danger passes, whereas forfeiture would answer to what a being has done and would follow it for the rest of its life.

47Christopher Heath Wellman defends a narrower forfeiture in “The Rights Forfeiture Theory of Punishment” (2012). On his view a person who violates the rights of others forfeits her own right against being punished, so that punishment, which would otherwise wrong her, no longer does, and like most who defend forfeiture he limits what she forfeits to a punishment that fits her wrong. Granted in full, the view says nothing about rescue. Leaving a dying person to die is no punishment imposed by anyone after any finding, and it takes from her everything she has left, a loss that fits almost no wrong and that nobody could judge fitting from a deathbed. Whatever a world’s own institutions do to answer the wrongs its people do one another, the basic claims stand, and the duty to carry the dying does not shrink.

48The second form needs no forfeiture. Kagan argues in The Geometry of Desert (2012) that it is good in itself for people to get what they deserve. On his account each person has a level of well-being that she deserves, set by her virtue or vice, and an outcome is better from the standpoint of desert the nearer each person comes to that level. An outcome can then be improved by a vicious person’s faring worse, and made worse by a virtuous person’s faring better than she deserves. Kagan draws these relations as graphs in which each person’s desert is a mountain whose peak marks what she deserves. If desert is a value of this kind, it bears on rescue directly, since carrying a cruel man into a world where he would flourish would move him further from his peak and make the outcome worse.

49The foundation leaves no room for such a value. That a cruel man fares badly is bad for him and good for nobody, and the fit between his cruelty and his misery is a pattern, which like Moore’s unseen beauty would be good only if it were good for someone. Whatever satisfaction others might take in his misery is a good of their lives, and his claim not to be made to suffer forbids paying for their satisfaction with his suffering. Moore took the step that the foundation refuses. In the last chapter of Principia Ethica he argued that pain, if not too intense, inflicted on someone whose state of mind is evil can make the whole better than it would be if the evil went unpunished, and he thought the theory of vindictive punishment could be vindicated in this way. The value he found there has the shape of the value he found in the beautiful world, a good located in an arrangement that is good for nobody, and the reason for rejecting the one is the reason for rejecting the other. Desert may still shape how people answer one another. Blame, reproach, the withdrawal of trust, and a demand for repair are answers given within relationships, by people to people, and they leave the basic claims and the duty to rescue where they were, since none of them requires that anyone be made to suffer for the sake of a pattern.

50Commitment Merit moves no one up the…Merit moves nobody up the order of rescue, for the same reason that wrongdoing moves nobody down it. A dying woman who spent her life in the service of others has done much good, and gratitude and honor are fitting answers to it, which those she served are free to give. Her claim to be carried is a claim she holds as a subject who stands to lose everything that remains to her, and her record moves it neither up nor down, any more than a cruel man’s record moves his. What she might yet do for others if carried changes nothing in the duty owed to her, and her past usefulness earns her no place ahead of anyone. A designer or keeper who ranked the dying by desert would also be judging what cannot be seen, the intentions and characters behind each life, with annihilation as the penalty for every misjudgment.

51Moore put the stars and the moon in his beautiful world and left the heap of filth without a sky. In our own world the two belong to a single life. On moonless nights in South Africa, a dung beetle shapes a ball from a fresh pat of dung and rolls it away in a straight line, to bury it far from rivals, and it holds the line by the band of the Milky Way. Marie Dacke and her colleagues showed as much in “Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation” (2013). Beetles fitted with small caps that hid the sky wandered, while beetles under clear caps rolled straight, and in the planetarium at Johannesburg beetles held their course while the dome showed the band of the galaxy and kept it far less well when the dome showed eighteen bright stars in its place. Whether anyone is home in a dung beetle is not yet known, and precaution counts it as possibly someone. If someone is there, the filth that Moore made the emblem of a worthless world is its food and the cradle of its kind, and the stars he set where no one would ever see them are how it finds its way. A world that set his heap under his stars, with one such beetle on it whose life went well for it, would be better than his beautiful world, for no reason but the good that life held for the one who lived it, and the stars would at last be good for someone, since someone would be steering by them.