Chew on That, Professor!

How trite it is to assert that every person matters. But how do you go about proving it?

You publish a book, you get email. As a rule, I answer them all, even the critical ones. Especially the critical ones. Analytic philosophy trains you for that. You learn to meet objections the way a patient submits to surgery. You don’t undergo it for the pain. You undergo it because, with luck, something that shouldn’t be there gets removed and you’ll think more clearly afterward.

But sometimes you get an email that you decide not to answer. You glean that what the sender wants is merely to make you feel the weight of their contempt. They’re not writing to hear back from you, and so they won’t.

But that doesn’t mean that you don’t dwell on their words, thinking subjunctively about how you would respond if you thought a response might lead to meaningful dialogue.

I received such an email about six weeks ago. I read it a few times, pondered, and then, deciding not to respond, deleted it. I’m reconstructing the gist of it now:

“I listened to you on ‘Closer to Truth’[1] yesterday, and what struck me was not the depth of your ideas but the ease with which you mistook your own wishful thinking for ‘rigorous secular philosophy.’

As far as you’re concerned, we are unintended by-products of blind physical processes who are spinning around on a rock in a universe that neither knows nor cares that we exist. Yet from this picture of cosmic indifference, you somehow wring the grand assurance that ‘every person matters.’ To whom, exactly? On what authority? You never say. You have no argument. There isn’t a possible argument to be had. You say there’s nothing beyond us, but then talk as if there’s some great, glowing importance in every human life anyway. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways, no matter how cleverly you phrase it.

I looked you up and discovered, to my horror, your family background. A line of pious men who devoted themselves to interpreting the halacha. And the glory of your lineage ends with you, “a public intellectual,” explaining why none of it meant anything. I’m sure your forebears of blessed memory would be very proud.

The truth is, if what you say is right, then nothing matters, which means that nothing you say matters. And if that’s the case, why should anyone waste one second taking you seriously? Chew on that syllogism for a while, professor.”

The sender’s use of the term “halacha” reveals where he’s coming from. “Halacha” is the Hebrew word for the collective body of Jewish religious laws derived from the Written and Oral Torah. It literally translates to “the way to go.” Since I don’t remember the sender’s name, and wouldn’t publish it anyway without his permission, I’ll just call him Hal.

Hal signs off by inviting me to chew on his “syllogism.” I did. It took about forty seconds. The problem with ‘nothing you say matters, so why take you seriously’ is that, given his reasoning, it applies with equal force to the email containing it. His “syllogism” is self-undermining.

But his email gave me more to chew on, namely his charge that I don’t—can’t possibly—have a way of arguing that every person matters. Let’s call that proposition, so crucial to ethics, the Universal Mattering Claim.

Hal fired three questions at me that he assumes I can’t answer. He doesn’t need to explicitly say what his own answers are. He was right about my halachic background. I know his answers.

To whom do we matter? The Almighty.

On whose authority do we matter? The Almighty’s.

What is the argument for the Universal Mattering Claim? The Almighty, being responsible for all of existence, indubitably matters, and he purposefully created us, as he purposefully created everything that exists. But only we are described as having been created “in his own image.”[2] Whatever is meant to be covered by this intriguing phrase, surely it entails that every person matters. The Bible makes the implication clear, offering up our being made in God’s image as the sufficient reason for why murder is wrong (Genesis 9:6).

Hal assumes that since his answers, if true, are sufficient to ground the Universal Mattering Claim, then they are also necessary. “You can’t have it both ways,” he chastises me. But he’s mistaken. A condition’s being sufficient doesn’t entail that it’s also necessary. I have answers to Hal’s three questions, though my answers sometimes consist in challenging the presuppositions behind his questions. This is what Wittgenstein characterized as showing the fly out of the bottle. (He optimistically theorized that all philosophical problems could thus be eliminated.)

To whom do we matter? The presumption here is that in order to matter we have to matter to another, whether mortal or immortal. That presumption is wrong. To matter means to be deserving of attention. We speak both of what matters and of who matters, and in both cases, we mean by mattering: being deserving of attention. When it comes to our own existential longing to matter, it’s the person’s very own attention to themselves of whom they want to prove themselves deserving. I could write a whole book about this point. In fact, I did.

By whose authority do we matter? Again, a false presupposition. We don’t need anyone’s authority to matter. To be a person is to morally matter (which isn’t to claim that only persons morally matter). To be the kind of creature whose life can go well or badly in ways that call for concern, remorse, repair, and celebration is already to stand in the space of moral importance. There is no extra stamp of approval that needs to be added from the outside.

What’s your argument for the Universal Mattering Claim? Here Hal underestimates the resources of the secular moral thought he dismisses. There are several arguments, originating in different moral orientations, but converging on the same claim: every person morally matters.

Both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, the reigning theories of modern ethics, have the universal mattering claim built into their very structure. A utilitarian holds that what ultimately matters is the balance of overall wellbeing—or “utility”—over suffering. The greatest good for the greatest number. Crucially, in that calculus, each person’s wellbeing has to be counted. “Each to count for one and none for more than one,” as the slogan goes. You’re not allowed to leave someone’s suffering out of the equation just because it’s theirs and not yours, or a member of some other group rather than your own. Impartiality is one with the utilitarian point of view. In that way, utilitarianism has embedded within its structure the Universal Mattering Claim.

Kantianism structures the point differently, but with the same universal reach. For Kant, what is morally basic is not wellbeing but rational agency: the capacity to set ends and guide our actions by reasons. The Categorical Imperative instructs us to treat humanity, in ourselves and in others, always as an end in itself and never merely as a means. That “in others” is not ornamental. The very form of the principle demands that any maxim you act on be one you can, in principle, will as a universal law. If you claim the right to treat some rational beings as mere tools, while insisting that your own rational agency be respected, you contradict yourself: you are making yourself a special case without any principle that could be accepted from every standpoint. Built into Kant’s framework, then, is the Universal Mattering Claim.

Those are two large, familiar ethical traditions that have built into their very structures the Universal Mattering Claim. But I don’t want to rest my case simply on the authority of the tradition. As I see it, the mattering theory I present in The Mattering Instinct offers three independent routes to the same conclusion. In fact, I’d go so far as to claim that these arguments don’t simply assume the Universal Mattering Claim, as utilitarianism and Kantian deontology do, but argue for it.

I didn’t present these arguments in the book, but only gestured toward them—well, really, only gestured to the one I’m going to call the Genealogical Argument from Longing, which I regard as the deepest of the three, the one that gets to the heart of the matter. I’ll call the others the Pragmatic Presupposition Argument and the Argument from Moral Protest. I originally planned to lay all three out in The Mattering Instinct but was dissuaded by consideration of how much philosophical argumentation the general reader can reasonably be asked to tolerate . But Hal has goaded me into showing what I’ve got.

Thanks, Hal.

*****

The Pragmatic Presupposition Argument begins from the observation that some cognitive commitments sit at the base of everything we think and do. We don’t prove them; we rely on them to think. The principles of logic—such as the law of non-contradiction—are of this sort. Try to prove them and you’ll be caught using them in your proof. This was the vicious circularity in which Descartes entangled himself, feeling cocky enough to attempt to prove logic once he thought that he’d proven God. The principle of induction, which underlies empirical reasoning, is another such principle—a lesson bequeathed us by David Hume. When it comes to both a priori and a posterior reasoning, we are employing principles which are so fundamental to being able to think coherently that, if you try to justify them “from outside,” you circularly end up using them. Yet we are right to rely on them, because these principles are necessary for pursuing coherent thought and lives. The belief that I matter has the same presuppositional quality. To care about your future, to make plans, to feel the whole panoply of human emotions, all of which are giving you feedback about how your life is going, is to take for granted that your life is not a trivial detail in the universe. That assumption is not the conclusion of an argument; it’s a condition of being able to live as a thinking, feeling, choosing agent. And if that is true for you, it’s true for everyone who is an agent of their own action. The logic that licenses “I matter” for you licenses “I matter” for everyone. Taken together, that is simply: every person matters.

The Genealogical Argument from Longing uses a different starting point. Plato said that in our reaching for beauty, there is beauty. I suggest that in our longing to matter, there is mattering. That longing is not just a craving for a warm feeling; it reorganizes what kind of creature we are. It transforms a clever creature into a normative creature, one who applies questions of justification to itself, asking “What should I do? What sort of life is worth living? What would make me the kind of person I can bear to be?” It turns us into the values-seekers that we are, sometimes with disastrous results, true, and yet something quite distinctive in the evolutionary chain: a creature who needs a reason to feel justified in its own struggle to flourish. What a leap! Once that transformation has occurred, the universe contains something it didn’t contain before. —the space of justification, praise and blame, aspiration and regret. The whole domain of “ought” exists because there are beings of matter who long to matter, which is the most elegant way I know to characterize our species. Any creature in whom that longing has taken root, which is every one of us, is a locus of value, and to be such a locus is to morally matter.

The third route is what I call the Argument from Moral Protest. Here the starting point is the familiar moral emotions of resentment, outrage, and indignation on one’s own behalf. When someone lies to us, humiliates us, or treats us as expendable, we don’t just experience hurt; we feel wronged. Outrage is not a mere howl of pain. It already contains a judgment: you are not allowed to treat me like that. I am deserving of the dignity due to the kind of being that I am, the richness of my inner life and dreams. The kind of being that I am constitutes sufficient reason for you not to wrong me as you have. But of course, the facts we are appealing to are not unique to us. They are shared wherever there is another human life. They too are capable of being humiliated, ignored, written out of the story. They too have lives they are trying to make add up. Once we see that, the symmetry pressure kicks in. If these features give me grounds to protest when I am treated as if I don’t matter, they give you the same grounds to protest when I do the same to you. If I refuse to extend that recognition—to accept that you, too, have claims against me—I am using my outrage as a one‑way street, treating my own moral emotions as authoritative and yours as mere noise. To take our own indignation seriously, and to understand what it commits us to, is to acknowledge that the authority we claim for ourselves when we feel ourselves wronged must be granted to others as well. And that is just another way of saying: every person morally matters.

*****

For Hal, the Universal Mattering Claim rises or falls with the truth of his theology. And true enough, if his theology is right, then we morally matter. But also true: if his theology isn’t right, then we morally matter. Where does that leave us? It leaves us all morally mattering.

Would any of these arguments—some gathered from the history of philosophy, some based on conclusions I draw from identifying us as creatures whose mattering instinct throbs at our core— impress Hal? Almost certainly not. The way that Hal expressed himself to me suggests that this is not just a philosophical/theological disagreement. It suggests rather that his own response to the mattering instinct is at stake. And when that is at stake, we fight with all we’ve got. The contempt he felt the need to express was as much defensive as offensive. Hal’s attempt to cut me down to size is itself a small example of what happens when we refuse to see in others the same existential longing that we so fiercely defend in ourselves.

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[1] “Closer to Truth” is a long-running public television series hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn that is also available as an audio and video podcast. It primarily explores the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion, addressing questions about the cosmos, consciousness, and meaning.

[2] Genesis 1:26; 1:27; 5:1; 9:6. The New Testament also uses the phrase—for example, Corinthians 1:15; 2 Corinthians 4:4; 2 Corinthians 3:18; Colossians 3:10—but with a notable difference. The Hebrew Bible uses the phrase in relation to creation, proclaiming that all humanity is made in the image of God. The New Testament is more restrictive, connecting the phrase not with creation but salvation: only Jesus perfectly embodies the image of God, but those who are saved by following Jesus are actively being renewed into the divine image (Roman 8:29; Collossans 3:10). The consequences of this difference seem to me enormous.