Last month, a truck carrying over four thousand lobsters slid off the road and turned over in the small town of Brunswick, Maine. The driver emerged from the crash relatively unscathed, but his crustacean cargo, which fell onto the road, had to be destroyed. Before the month was out, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sent a proposal to the state government for a monument memorializing the slaughter. Shaped like a five-foot high granite tombstone, it would display a picture of a lobster and be inscribed with the words “In Memory of the Lobsters Who Suffered and Died at This Spot, August 2018,Try Vegan, PETA.” PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said“PETA hopes to pay tribute to these individuals who didn’t want to die with a memorial urging people to help prevent future suffering by keeping lobsters and all other animals off their plates.” The state Department of Transportation turned the proposal down.

Now, I work in Maine, and I can confidently assure you that Mainers don’t take kindly to proposals to keep lobsters off their plates. In this case, both locally and nationally, PETA came in for considerable ridicule. To many people, the notion of a lobster memorial seemed utterly absurd. But why should this be? Why should we cast aspersions on a memorial to the killing of 4500 lobsters, but take seriously a memorial to the wanton murder of 2980 human beings on September 11, 2001? That’s a serious philosophical question.

Press a person on it, and they’re likely to say something like “Because they’re only lobsters, and people’s lives matter a lot more than lobsters’ lives.” That’s an intuitively plausible, or at least understandable, response. I think it’s safe to say that, at a gut level, most of us consider humans’ lives far more significant than lobsters’ lives. But “intuition” is just a fancy, philosophical name for cognitive bias. So, appealing to intuition to justify a position is just appealing to bias to justify that position. That’s not to say that biases are without value, only that they’re not good enough all on their own. In this case, citing intuition boils down to something like “I just can’t help believing that human lives matter a lot more than lobster lives do.” And that doesn’t get us anywhere.

Notice that our imaginary interlocutor doesn’t say “Human lives matter moretomethan the lives of lobsters do.” That would express a subjective moral stance. Instead, she states that human livesmattermore than lobster lives do, which is a claim about the objective value of human lives in contrast to that of lobster lives.

Over the centuries, philosophers have tied themselves up in knots (an activity that we philosophers excel at) to rationally justify the intuition—the bias—that human lives matter more than the lives of the “lower” animals. Judging from the continuing disputes in moral philosophy, it’s safe to say that they haven’t succeeded.

Notice my use of the scare-quoted wordlowerin the last paragraph. That word provides the key to unpacking the idea that lobster lives don’t matter much, if at all, in the scheme of things. The notion that some forms of life are higher or lower than others strikes a chord in many of us, but when you begin think about it, it’s perplexing. It’s not an idea that comes from (or is endorsed by) biological science. In fact, one of the most important philosophical implications of Darwin’s theory was the demolition of the idea that some organisms rank higher than others.

If we say that humans are higher than lobsters, we owe an explanation of in what sense they’re supposed to be higher. What’s at work here is what philosophers call the notion ofintrinsic value. To get a hold of what’s meant by this, it’s useful to contrast intrinsic value with instrumental value. The instrumental value of a thing resides in its consequences—or, to put the point more crudely, in what it can get for you. Money is a good example. What’s the point of having money? Certainly not to just sit there and admire it, like one might do with Michelangelo’s David. The value of money is entirely instrumental. In contrast, the intrinsic value of a thing is its value in and of itself. For instance, some people think that happiness is intrinsically valuable. It’s not that we want to be happy because it leads to something else. We just want to be happy because…well… it’s good to be happy.

我认为，那些认为善待动物组织(PETA)提出的龙虾纪念活动荒谬可笑的人，很乐意承认龙虾有相当大的工具价值，因为捕龙虾是缅因州经济的重要组成部分，但他们否认龙虾有很大的内在价值。

The idea that some kinds of organisms are higher than others—in other words, the idea that the world of living things is organized as a hierarchy with those with the greatest intrinsic value at the top, those with the least value at the bottom, and everything else at one or another rank somewhere in-between—is known as the Great Chain of Being. For centuries, European scholars took for granted that the Great Chain provided the most accurate picture of the cosmos. Traditionally, God was placed at the apex of the hierarchy, because he is by definition the supremely perfect and infinitely valuable entity. And weHomo sapiens谦虚地把自己置于上帝之下(“仅仅低于天使”)，因为我们认为自己是按照上帝的形象塑造的。相比之下，龙虾在等级上的地位很低，远远低于许多其他生物。这就是为什么它们不重要的原因。

Where does the idea of the Great Chain of Being come from? According to the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, the author of the immensely influential 1936 bookThe Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, it was cobbled together by philosophers in late antiquity, out of raw materials extracted from the writings of Plato and Aristotle. It persisted for centuries, and then faded out in the latter part of the eighteenth century as a scientific conception of species began to replace the older, prescientific one.

洛夫乔伊的书是一本杰出的学术著作，是思想史上的杰出贡献。但他关于生命之链的职业生涯的故事不可能是正确的。这是为什么。

首先，请记住，我在这篇文章的开头谈到了人们对善待动物组织(PETA)提议的路边龙虾纪念馆的反应。如果像我说的那样，那些嘲笑这个观点——以及与之相关的我们不应该吃动物的观点——的人这么做是因为他们相信龙虾是一种低级的生命形式，这表明，“存在的大链”的概念非但没有在18世纪末消失，而且在21世纪初还很活跃。世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区

Couldn’t this attitude be chalked up to scientific illiteracy? Nope. Scientists—in fact, professional biologists—also regularly indulge in this sort of hierarchical thinking.Biologists Emanuele Rigato and Alessandro Minelli demonstrated this in a survey of more than 67,000 articles in major biological journals, and guess what they found? The pre-Darwinian language of “higher” and “lower” infects lots of biological journals, evenevolutionaryones (the distinguished journalMolecular Biology and Evolutionis the worst offender, with 6.1% of the articles surveyed using hierarchical language).

洛夫乔伊的故事是错误的另一个原因是它太狭隘了。即使“存在之链”只是一个哲学上的人工制品(事实上它不是)，它也不是一个独特的从亚里士多德和柏拉图的思想中流出的西方的东西。事实上，如果你放弃这个假设，看看其他的传统，你会发现它的足迹到处都是。自然的等级观念出现在《创世纪》中，上帝赋予人类统治野外野兽的权力，在印度和西非的宇宙学中也有体现。最引人注目的例子之一是阿兹特克人，很难指责他们借鉴了古典雅典的圣贤。According to the anthropologist P. R. Sanday, “Gods, humans, and animals were ordered according to a chain of being in which each segment participated in a common essence and depended on other segments to survive…,” and so:

在权力、能力和完美的阶梯上，现在的人类被置于神之下，高于所有其他动物。这个阶梯显示在进餐顺序中。低级别的动物互相吃，植物，所有的动物都吃，而神吃人是为了生存。

I’ve explained why Lovejoy’s story can’t be right. It doesn’t account for the staying power of hierarchical thinking in human psychology, or it’s persistence in science, or its wide distribution across cultures. But I haven’t shared my view of what the right explanation is, and why it is so easy to think that Lobster lives matter far less than human lives. That’s going to be the topic of next month’s blog.