Steve Watson

In fact, I had also assumed that an additional contributing factor to the supposedly widespread template could be sought in the transformation of the common forms of the shamanic experience (see, for exx., M. Eliade, Shamanism) into more sophisticated and intellectualised forms affected by mythological retellings – such as we might see in the Christ story and the supposed Harrowing of Hell episode added quite some time later. (I don’t doubt that the initial popularity of the Frazer paradigm was motivated by its usefulness as a stick with which to beat the Christians – as if to say that their story could be explained as just another version of a common theme; where to be explained was to be explained away. Christians of the time, and I think both Lewis and Tolkien are examples, felt obliged to react by claiming that God tells stories in the real world that we are prepared to understand because we’ve seen them before in the mythological world. This, however, is beside the point.)

It turns out, however, that there are very few models for any such template. There are a fair number of stories of dying gods, but the details of their stories are not at all regular. And neither is there any great regularity in their ritual expressions – when these even exist or can be discovered. There follows a selection of the deities most prominently offered as exemplars of the type, together with a schematic description of the relevant mythological content, and also with whatever may occur as a related ritual. It is noticeable that there are almost no examples of gods actually explicitly dying and rising again as required.

 I do notice that more than a few of these stories have an element of sexual attachment in them. This is something that isn’t properly explained by the template of the corn story, and is not what you’d expect from the shamanistic aspect either. Perhaps it’s just a natural addition people make to stories as a motivator for some kinds of actions: part of our set of innate narrative preferences.)

It is proposed that Proto-Indo-European had a single original vowel timbre: e (though I’ve also seen original e and o claimed – by G. Bourcier, for example, in History of the English Language, (Stanley Thornes:Cheltenham, UK:1981, pp. 30ff.)

The three proposed basic vowel timbres of the reconstructed system are then supposed to have been produced by the action of the three proposed laryngeals of PIE (see this post) upon that original vowel; thus:

γ+e / e+γ → e / ê
χ+e / e+χ: → a / â
h+e / e+h: → o / ô

[Note that the three proposed laryngeals are of unknown pronunciation and these characters are merely placeholders. That being the case, how is it argued that the pronunciation of these sounds had the claimed differential effects? A mystery.
Note also that the circumflex is in place of the macron to indicate vowel lengthening]

In addition, the vowels i and u were produced by the glides j and w in their role as vowels;
and there is also supposed to have been a syllabic laryngeal pronounced as ə.

Given these developments, as far as I’ve been able to make out, the standard reconstruction of the vowel system of Proto-Indo-European is as follows:

[Note that the sound of ‘a’ is (in IPA) [ɑ]. Which is another mystery, since LJ Brinton & LK Arnovick in The English Language: A Linguistic History (Oxford:OUP:2006) pp. 111, 139 indicate that it is central, but ɑ is used for the back at that height.]

[The note of uncertainty above is because there are alternative reconstructions whose merits I am not qualified to assess, and the various presentations even of the standard version are not exactly user-friendly, so that I can’t be sure that I’m interpreting them correctly. (Still, this will be accurate enough for my purposes.)]

To continue: the (now) three vowels combined with the two glides (w, and j) to produce a system of diphthongs:

which have also their lengthened counterparts.

Proto-Indo-European to Primitive Germanic

The changes to the vowels are as follows:

* In some contexts.

Which may also be displayed as:

Which results in the following vowel system:

with the following diphthongs (and their long versions:

Primitive Germanic to Old English

There are two major processes; both named by Jacob Grimm.

1. Umlaut

   [Note that the ‘i’ above should actually be the rounded ‘y’ sound.]

2. Breaking

   Operates on the short and long sounds thus:

   PG	OE (IPA)	Example (short)	Example (long)
   æ	ea (æə)	*hærd → heard ‘hard’	*næh → nēah ‘near’
   e	eo (ɛə/ēə)	*fehu → feoh ‘cattle’	*lēht → lēoht ‘light’
   i	io (iə)	*tihhian → tiohhian ‘to consider’	*betwīh → betwīoh ‘betwixt’

   The changes only occur when the vowels precede a liquid+other consonant or h+another consonant, and not always even then..

And these changes together with several other modifications apparently result in the OE vowel system describable as follows:

[Note that the table entries are the OE letters not the IPA symbols. Length is shown by a macron or a following single quote (if I can’t find the appropriate unicode) and roundedness is indicated by underlining.]

Together with the diphthong system shown here:

Old English to Middle English

We observe the following pure vowel movements:

The OE diphthongs monophthongized:

(Which, note, added a long ɛ to the ME vowel repertoire)

And new diphthongs appeared

Explanations have been offered for the appearance of these new diphthongs. I take these from Brinton & Arnovic, op. cit. p. 256.

• Borrowing of [ɔɪ] and [ʊɪ] from French.
• Vocalization of [w] to [ʊ] after [ɑ], [ō], [ē], and [ī] to produce [aʊ], [ɔʊ], [ɛʊ], and [ɪʊ]
• Vocalization of [j] to [ɪ] after ME front vowels to produce [æɪ]
• Vocalization of [ɣ] to [ʊ] after ME back vowels to produce [aʊ] and [ɔʊ]
• Development of glide [ɪ] before [χ] after ME front vowels to produce [æɪ]
• Development of glide [ʊ] before [χ] after ME back vowels to produce [aʊ] and [ɔʊ]

The remaining consonants are:

• fricative: s
• laryngeals: γ, x, h

and the semi-vowels

• nasals: m, n (written with a dot beneath as vowel sounds)
• liquids: l, r (written with a dot beneath as vowel sounds)
• glides: w, j

These consonantal sounds changed according to quite regular rules to create the Primitive Germanic consonantal system.

Grimm’s Law (The First Consonant Shift): PIE → PG:

The above table describes a set of consonantal shifts occurring in the course of the first millennium BC, which marks the development of Primitive Germanic out of Proto-Indo-European.

Explanations have been proposed for the observed changes:

1. {/unvoiced stops/, /unvoiced aspirated stops/} → /spirants/
   Primitive Germanic speakers-to-be had a tendency to pronounce stops with an open glottis so that with the release of the ‘stop’ the air would flow unimpeded.
2. /voiced aspirated stops/ → /voiced spirants/
   as for 1.
3. /voiced unaspirated stops/ → /unvoiced stops/
   The other stops became aspirated or spirants, so voicing became unnecessary to distinguish these stops

Examples from Latin → Old English

quod → hwaet, canis → hund, genu → cneow, gelidus → cold, pecus → feoh

Apparent irregularities in the application of the rules above were also regularities, but the relevant rules referred to the phonological environment of the consonants undergoing change.

Verner’s Law (Grammatical Change): PG → OE

This table describes a set of further transformations of consonantal phonemes observed in the transition from PG to the historically recorded Germanic languages, such as Old English.

The explanation offered is:

/vowel/ + /unvoiced spirants/ + /vowel/ → /vowel/ + /voiced spirants/ + /vowel/
In the context of voiced vowels about a spirant, the inertia of the movement of the glottis gave voice to the spirant, except when the PIE pitch-accent had fallen on the syllable preceding the consonant, because the work needed to form a pitch accent was sufficient to also allow clear articulation of the unvoiced consonant.

Examples:

(PIE) *upéri → (PG) *ufer → (OE) ofer [pron. ‘over’]
(PIE) *patér → (PG) *faθer → (OE) faeder [with [d] < [ð]]

There is a question whether Yoga is necessarily a religion or whether it is possible to be a practitioner and remain, for example, a good Christian. Now, ‘Yoga’ is the name of a wide variety of beliefs and practices – we might compare it to the Dao of the classical Chinese culture – but in this context the yoga intended is obviously the physical practice of assuming poses associated with and supposedly justified by the particular metaphysics found in the classic Hindu Samkhya–Yoga darshana. This yoga is roughly speaking Hatha yoga – as described in the Hathayoga Pradipika, and the ideological underpinning tends to look to the Raja yoga and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which make no specific theological claims. The exact stemma of the typical modern western yoga is pretty confused, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much at the moment. Suffice it to say that it is that form transmitted to us by Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and others.

Note that Vivekananda deliberately sought to create a secular practice suitable to be taught to the whole world, and Krishnamacharya’s version, which he taught to BKS Iyenagar, K Pattabhi Jois, and TKV Desikachar, was an extraordinary mix of techniques from hatha yoga, British military calisthenics, and South-western Indian wrestling traditions (Sjoman, NE, The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, New Delhi:Abhinav:1996 ref. in White, DG (2011) “Yoga, Brief History of an Idea” (Chapter 1 of Yoga in Practice)) Thus it would probably be a surprise if there was a coherent religious essence to the resultant practice.

The arguments that have been presented for considering yoga to be a necessarily religious practice have both trivial and even more trivial forms. The trivial form can be seen in the claim that as yoga is a product of a certain religious tradition, and the very Sanskrit names of the asanas are references to various Hindu religious concepts – like the surya namaskar ‘Salute to the Sun (God)’ – the practice of yoga will lead one willy-nilly to performing religious rituals and thus participating in another religion. (Kremer, W. “Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?” BBC News Magazine.) “Religious intentions may not be there to begin with but practising yoga might lead them to develop.” But it’s not at all clear that there is a necessary connection between the performance of the postures and the holding of certain beliefs. What counts is always the intention, and unless the claim is that the intention will be generated by habit, if the intention to worship is not there then there is no worshipping being done.

The even more trivial form is that now endorsed by the Indian Supreme Court: that yoga is traditionally understood to be a religious practice and therefore must always be that. But this is really a determination that in the cultural circumstances of India, the law will simply define yoga as a religious practice because it’s too hard to do anything else. I don’t see that there’s anything in that administrative decision to alarm or even interest practitioners outside India.

On the other hand, there may be religious objections to the claims that are made for yoga’s benefit to its practitioners. The traditional claim – made implicitly rather than explicitly in the older texts, so far as I can discover – is that the dedicated practice of Hatha yoga will demonstrate to the resistant mind (citta) that the body (let it be prakriti) is not part of the self (let it be purusa) and that the self and body are indeed independent. The realisation of kaivalya (independence) in more than a merely intellectual manner is the desired point of this practice, and will assist the practitioner in the achievement of whatever particular style of moksha is appropriate to the yogin. This, however, suggests at least a couple of  comments.

First, the absolute independence of body and self cannot be acceptable to all religious traditions: the Christian sinner, for example, may be a sinner because of the effect of the flesh upon the soul – in the gnostic tradition corrupting it, but in any case facilitating its decline. Certainly, Christians believe that the soul can be saved from the flesh and that it will continue to exist when the flesh is sloughed off at death; but while the soul is incarnated it forms a complete person and the flesh is not irrelevant to that person.

Secondly, the realisation of independence is a step to liberation of the purusa element from the cycle of reincarnation. This is a very much a religious doctrine.

Now, it is possible that this can all be dismissed as irrelevant to the practice of modern yoga, but in that case what is the evidence that there is any benefit at all? Is it just massively coincidentally the case that the postures intended to fulfil one very specific metaphysical function also fulfil a general physical fitness function. How lucky is that!

Second – and this may matter more – the division of the casualties into non-combatants and combatants is disputed for the Gazan side. By their own telling, almost all the casualties are women and children and other innocent bystanders; but this is a claim that clearly serves their propaganda purposes and seems to be inconsistent with statistical analyses of the demographic profile of the casualties. The Israelis claim that the greater part of the casualties consists of HAMAS operatives of one kind or another. It should be noted that similar disputed claims in previous Israeli-Arab clashes have eventually shown that an accurate accounting is much closer to the initial Israeli estimates than to the Arab claims. Given that Israel is a professional modern army and its society has many routes of independent accountability, this should come as no surprise. Nevertheless, we shall consider two cases: ‘CD-A’ will label the case where 90% of the casualties are civilians and ‘B’ will label the case where 50% are.

How is the proportionality rule to be understood?

The reason that proportionality is fixed on as a point of complaint in this war is surely that proportionality is one of the criteria for a Just War in modern Just War theory. Actually, it is two of the criteria, since it occurs both in jus ad bellum and in jus in bello. We can think of them easily enough as two versions of the same rule So far as the first goes, it is claimed that in a just war the act of going to war is a proportional response to the evil that otherwise justifies the war. We can call this the first criterion of proportionality, and label it P1. The second rule, P2, requires that the harm caused by actions taken in a war should be proportional to the goods that are sought by those actions. Clearly, P1 and P2 are versions of the same rule,

P: that the harm caused by an action (or course of actions) ought to be proportional to the good gained.

There is a question that arises even before we look for the justifying moral theory for this rule P, and that is whether the judgement of justness is to be made as a judgement on the actor or the action. We typically speak as if we are judging the actions themselves, but the way the rule is phrased in P takes no account of the intentions of the actor. Is this reasonable? If it is not reasonable, then we could rephrase the rule as

P_int: that the harm intended by an action (or course of actions) ought to be proportional to the good intended.

Then again, we need to ask whether this ignores the important aspect of what the actor reasonably expects to happen. Should the rule be rather,

P_exp: that the harm foreseen by an action (or course of actions) ought to be proportional to the good foreseen.

Where’s the justification for the proportionality rule?

The fundamental difficulty with JWT is that it is usually presented as if it has no foundation in any fundamental ethical theory such as utilitarianism or Kantian ethics, but simply appears at the level of general claims about specific kinds of actions. This means that when a question arises over the judgement of some action, we have no deeper theory from which to derive an answer, but must either appeal to casuistry and the application of principles of analogy etc. to the (not very) fundamental previously accepted truths, or simply point to our intuitions.

This is obvious to almost everyone who works in this area, but is hardly taken seriously as a problem. For example, an effort is made by Hurka (T., ‘Philosophy & Public Affairs, 2005, 33:1, pp. 34-66) to investigate and clarify the notion of proportionality directly, but he repeatedly comes up against the lack of general theory that should motivate these supposed principles of justice in war; and he recognises the difficulty, but he does not make any move to address it effectively.

Hurka notes (pp. 39 f,) for example, that some (James Turner Johnson, Morality and Contemporary Warfare, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 27–28 – referring to ius ad bellum proportionality) have suggested that proportionality need only mean that the total good resulting should outweigh the total bad resulting. But even if it is accepted that optimality is not required – And why shouldn’t it be? No answer – the claim lacks plausibility. What if an action in pursuit of a just cause leads to some slight excess of harm over good? Is it just obvious that that makes it unjust? It isn’t obvious to me. The fact that optimality is not required means that we are not dealing with a pure consequentialism here; but then, what is it? The situation of a slight excess of harm might be accounted for if we weighed the goods more heavily than the harms (Douglas Lackey, The Ethics of War and Peace, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989, pp. 40–41), so that in the calculation the harms would have to very much outweigh the goods before the proportionality criterion would take effect. But what could be the justification for such a weighting other than an ad hoc fix to a faulty moral calculator? The difficulty may be that whereas it makes sense to count the total harms, it doesn’t make equal sense to count the total goods, but only those goods relevant to the justification of the war – which justification is not to be made on pure consequentialist grounds – otherwise we’d count all sorts of irrelevant benefits achieved through violence as making that violence acceptable (just.) But then we have the further problem of deciding precisely how widely the net of relevant goods needs to be cast; and for that we’d need some general principle or theory that tells us the conditions required for relevance – and we have no such theory.

And so it continues. A thoroughly typical expression of exasperation is found on page 57:

when it can find some more abstract value that underlies them and see how far each instantiates that value. But the considerations in play here seem irreducibly diverse: political self-determination and the protection of a national home on the one side, death and suffering on the other. This leaves their comparison to direct intuition …

Nonetheless, he continues, “I hope to have vindicated the common-sense view that …”; but he hasn’t: he has only shown us where our intuitions take us in several special cases. We will get nowhere until we get more basic.

Notwithstanding references to Cicero or Augustine or to other naïve first steps towards a theory of moral warfare, the basic shape of modern JWT is due to work done in the tradition of St Thomas Aquinas. The roots of JWT are found in the Summa Theologiae II-II, 40, in which it is stated that

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. …

Secondly, a just cause is required, namely that those who are attacked, should be attacked because they deserve it on account of some fault. …

Thirdly, it is necessary that the belligerents should have a rightful intention, so that they intend the advancement of good, or the avoidance of evil.

These criteria, however, are derived by Aquinas according to his own understanding of the sources of morality in the Natural Law imposed by God upon the World. That Law we can come to know through reason, on the assumption that it is intended by the Lawgiver for the benefit of those for whom He is responsible and over whom He has authority. God, being reasonable, will make to be the case that which reason shows must be the case if God’s purposes are to be achieved. And because God is good, the purpose of God’s laws will be human flourishing. Therefore, to discover what God’s laws are, we need only ask what laws would lead to human flourishing.

The difficulties this poses for our question are many and obvious. The most significant problem is that if God is denied – as He usually is in modern philosophy – then morality is basically without any foundation. This is now a commonplace observation – especially since G. E. M. Anscombe (‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Philosophy 33, No. 124 (January 1958).) But even if we accepted the assumptions necessary to Aquinas’s scheme, the only principle that lies underneath the various rules to be adopted as a moral code is that we think (or agree) that by treating those rules as if they had moral force humans would flourish (or, alternatively, that we think that if everyone actually followed those rules humans would flourish.) The argument then moves on to justifying the claim about the increased likelihood of flourishing, or perhaps we would need to deal with the definition of flourishing.

An article by Peter at Conscious Entities considers the question of whether philosophical zombies have rights. It seems to me that under most forms of ethical theory that have been attractive to philosophers they would do. Let’s consider them systematically:

(a) Teleological theories

a.1 – Consequences are Utilities

A consequentialist theory – if it grants rights to any moral agents at all – does so because the consequences of that grant are better than the consequences of not doing so. Obviously, the most important of these are the members of the class of Rule Utilitarian ethical theories, in which it is claimed that rights are rules of social interaction that, if everyone follows them, together with the other rules that are in force and observed, will lead to greater utility than would be the case if any other rules were followed.  

a.1.1 – Utilities are Felicities

If utility is understood to be some kind of happiness or pleasure, then the moral agent in question, being a zombie, does not contribute to the result of the felicific calculation. What difference would this make to the result of the calculation? Suppose we got a different result by zeroing out all the contributions to the final sums made by the happiness (positive or negative) of the moral agent. Is this equivalent to considering the case of the calculation for the society as if that agent was simply not a member? Well, not quite, because the agent, operating according to the various rules imagined to be in force, will produce felicific effects in other members of the society. We can say, however, that unless the felicific significance of the zombie agent is greater than that of random other members, there is no reason to believe that it will affect the final outcomes.

a.1.1.1 – proportion of zombies

We might also wonder whether it makes a difference how many zombies there are. In the penultimately extreme case that there is just one non-zombie in the society, it is still likely that the happiness of that one member would be maximised by the calculations that justified the grant of rights in the zero-zombies situation. In the case of a society entirely constituted of zombies, there is no felicific consequence to be considered and no such thing as a distinction between right and wrong or good and bad.

a.1.1.2 – determinability of zombiehood

We might also note at this point that it makes a difference for these kinds of theories whether we are able to determine the fact of zombie-nature and the ease and accuracy with which this determination can be made. If it were possible to make this determination easily and accurately then clearly rules might include conditional statements of application relating to the zombie-status of the agents and patients involved. Such a rule might very well be the rule that came top in the appropriate felicific calculation, and such a rule might very well exclude zombies from the possession of rights. Counting against that possibility, we would have to consider that the philosophical zombies are likely to behave just as non-zombies would behave if systematically discounted in ethical calculations; which is to say, they would likely behave as if they saw themselves as alienated from the moral system in force and this might plausibly lead to more unpleasantness for the non-zombies than if they were all treated identically.

a.1.2 – decision theory vs. definitional theory

At this point the merely notional nature of the calculations involved prevents any further specificity, which is usually the case with this sort of thing. These calculations are never performed – they are impossible in principle; but from Bentham on utilitarians have been quite clear that their systems are not intended to be decision procedures, but they are intended to demonstrate that there really are precise conditions that distinguish in fact between right and wrong. Our inability, even in principle, to discover these conditions in any particular case, makes no difference to its rightness or wrongness, which is an objective fact of the world. Of course, this may mean that the proper rule to be followed might be a rule containing conditional statements of application relating to the zombie-status of the agents and patients involved – even if it was in principle impossible to make the determination. We would then be systematically prevented from knowing the right thing to do by yet another of the epistemological blocks to using the felicific calculus as a decision procedure.

(b) Deontological Theories

b.1 – Kantian theories

The standard alternative to the utilitarian theory is some form of deontological theory, usually derived from Kant. Rights in this case derive from the application of the Categorical Imperative. But this has several forms and is justified accordingly in several different ways. The justifications are related, of course, and the classes of good or bad actions determined by each form are supposed by Kant to coincide, so that it should not matter which of these we consider. Since this is not universally accepted, let’s look at the two most important forms of the CI: the universal law form and the principle of ends form.

b.1.1 – Universal Law

Kant’s justification for this form, though tricky in details, and missing important parts, is fairly easy to apply to the zombie case. We are told that one follows the rule:

Always act so that the maxim of your action can rationally be taken to be a universal law.

Any rational being will follow a categorical imperative, because it is only in that way that it demonstrates that it is operating with a Free Will. If it is to distinguish amongst all the things that might be covered by categorical imperatives but are not, it will apply The Categorical Imperative. All of the reasoning behind this refers only to the rationality of the moral agent. In this case the universal law form of the categorical imperative should apply to any rational being – and the zombie would be included amongst those along with robots and Martians and smart squid.

b.1.1 – Principle of Ends

According to the PE form of the CI:

Treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only.

This is somewhat trickier. Let’s agree to ignore an objection that worries that zombies lack humanity and therefore are not covered by the CI:PE. This would be defining the zombies out of the question. For convenience we might rephrase it as

Treat yourself and others, always as ends and never as means only.

In any case the argument for treating oneself and others (moral agents) as ends is that one and they are unconditionally valuable: they are not valuable just because they are necessary to the achievement of some other end which has value. That would make them merely conditionally valuable. What makes them unconditionally valuable is that they are value-giving. And they are value-giving because they are rational and are able to formulate plans in which some things are conditionally valuable.

In so far as that goes, the philosophical zombies may be stipulated to be rational and therefore value-giving in just the same way that non-zombies are. The only objection might be that in the case of a zombie it is hard for us to imagine that value really is given to the necessary elements of a plan that it forms. Note that something which is conditionally valuable for the agent X is something for which it can be said that it is valued by X because it is a means to an end which X desires. If we are able to give a definition of desiring that does not exclude zombies then we‘ve got no problem, otherwise we do.

b.2 – God’s Law

Much less popular these days, but still important because the philosophical shape of our rights talk preserves the imprint of its origins therein, is the idea that rights are given to us as amongst the regulations instituted by God for the proper running of the World, His creation. The general picture of is most accessibly put forward by Aquinas, but the consequence in Human Rights is developed by Locke. According to this view, God has so ordained the world that it operates according to certain rules that He has promulgated, whose effect is to make the world perform that function for which God has designed it. (God being rational always has a reason for what He does, and thus had a reason for creating the world and man in it.) Some of these rules we do not have the choice to disobey: these are the Laws of Nature. With regard to others we may exercise our Free Will. These are the Natural Laws. Amongst the Natural Laws are our Human Rights. God has given us a certain number of rights that, if we acknowledge and respect them will lead to the proper functioning of the world.

Moreover, God has made it the case that we can identify these Natural Laws by the use of reason. Roughly speaking, we can say that, if we assume that God wants us to achieve X in the world, and it seems reasonable to the wisest amongst us that this purpose would best be achieved by organising the world thus and so, then we are justified in claiming that the world is in fact so arranged. The wisest amongst us have determined that God’s purpose is human flourishing in this world, and that this would be best achieved if we all had certain unalienable rights, therefore we do have such rights.

We could simply stop at this point and just point out that this is essentially the position that we had in the case of the rule utilitarians, except that now we have the claim that utility equal flourishing. For utilitarians the obligation to obey the utilitarian rule comes from the idea that obligations are always conditional on delivering our preferences, and this principle will best deliver our preferences. For Natural Law theorists, the obligation to follow the Law comes from the authority of the creator to organise His creation. (Yes, that’s a moral notion. No I don’t know how it’s justifiable.) But this difference applies only to the originating source of all moral normativity, and we are here concerned with the particular rules which partake of that normative force.

b.2.1 – Zombie flourishing

Let’s assume that human flourishing is in fact the worldly function. The questions relating to rights for zombies in this case are pretty obvious, and the first question would have to be: does God’s plan include the flourishing of (human) zombies? We can make some headway on this if we can establish what normal human (non-zombie) flourishing would be. If this flourishing essentially required something like ‘Joy’ or the experience of the love of God or some other such internalia, then this would be something that a zombie could not achieve, and therefore the flourishing of zombies could not include it. This being the case, zombies would be in the position of beings incapable of participating in God’s plan for the world, and therefore the world was not designed for the flourishing of zombies. Zombies are here to be considered as incidental parts of God’s plan, like animals and plants and the landscape.

If, on the other hand, human flourishing was something like the development of souls able to know God, then whether or not zombies could flourish would depend on unanswerable questions like whether they had souls (they were not stipulated to lack them) or whether it was possible to ‘know’ God in the proper way without an experiential capability. And on the answer to such questions would hang the possibility of zombie flourishing. We don’t seem to be getting very far in these theological speculations.

b.2.2 – Zombie rules

But happily, none of that may be necessary. It may be sufficient to consider that since zombies behave in exactly the same way that non-zombies do, we could say that the flourishing of the non-zombies under the regulations that would be proposed to allow the flourishing of a population without zombies would be completely unchanged. Unless there was the possibility of some form of regulation that would preferentially encourage the flourishing of non-zombies, there is no reason to modify the Natural Laws that would have been derived for the non-zombie case; and therefore we conclude that zombies would be attributed all the same rights and duties as non-zombies. And so, they do have all our rights and duties.

b.2.2.1 – discriminating Zombies

In the alternative case that we are able to discriminate zombie from non-zombie, and this discrimination may be achieved practicably, the possibility might well arise that we could conditionalise the Natural Law so that some rules would apply differently according to zombie-status. If that were the case, we would again have to refer to the kind and possibility of zombie flourishing before we could know what God would have us so.