Is Human Worth Normally Distributed?

The more your nature causes you to perform certain actions, the less praiseworthy you are for performing them.

Written by Joel Carini.

Many people think intelligence research is cover for bigotry: assigning IQ scores to individuals implies that the highly intelligent are morally superior. But the majority of researchers deny any implication of moral superiority. This includes not only liberal or politically-disengaged researchers but also the libertarian Charles Murray.

Yet Nathan Cofnas, philosopher of biology at Cambridge, recently ditched this strategy. He provided an affirmative answer to the question, “Are Smart People Superior?” Cofnas argued that moral worth is proportional to intelligence, all else being equal, because human intelligence is both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable.

However, Cofnas’s argument is undermined, I argue, by his misuse of moral categories, chiefly moral worth. Cofnas’s “moral worth” conflates at least three distinct moral notions: Human dignity, social utility, and the moral worth of human actions.

The moral worth of human actions, I argue, is inversely proportional to our natural endowments, being a function of the difference between accomplishments/behavior and natural capacity. And human dignity, I argue, is directly incompatible with gradations of “worth” and independent of accidental differences. Dignity can be rejected, but it cannot be made scalar.

Social utility is the only moral category with which intelligence is arguably proportional. And that claim itself must be evaluated on its own merits, given the downsides of high IQ, the other forms of value human beings bring, not to mention the pride the claim is likely to engender in some individuals.

The smart are not morally superior. And researchers into intelligence and related human traits should, as they have usually done – at least since the Second World War – refrain from making moral inferences.

Social Utility, the Moral Worth of Actions, and Human Dignity

Cofnas’s moral argument focuses on the category of “moral worth.” Cofnas treats moral worth as a scalar that goes up and down depending on the quantity of desirable properties an individual possesses and the behaviors he exhibits. In so doing, however, Cofnas conflates the three distinct moral categories mentioned above.

Cofnas’s category of “moral worth” is best identified with “social utility.” To the extent that highly intelligent people perform roles in society of which they are uniquely capable, being highly intelligent has great social utility. Hence social utility could be argued to be proportional to intelligence. If we replaced all Cofnas’s uses of “moral worth” with “social utility,” his arguments would be much more plausible and much less contentious. The only qualifications would have to do with the downsides of high intelligence and the cases where individuals squander their high intelligence. Cofnas is well aware of these, concluding his piece with an exhortation to the mentally well-endowed to make use of their talents.

The additional moral valence of Cofnas’s arguments comes with their implications for human dignity – that it is not equal – and the use of evaluations of moral worth that assign praise or blame.

The Moral Worth of Actions

Consider how we evaluate the moral worth of actions. An action’s moral worth is, in fact, inversely proportional to the natural endowments of psychological characteristics that gave rise to it. The more your nature causes you to perform certain actions, the less praiseworthy you are for performing them. This is because we assign praise and blame in accord with what we attribute to the human will – rather than to nature, instinct and in-built personality.

Cofnas recognizes this: “No one is responsible for being born with a particular polygenic score for IQ … For the most part, we don’t praise or blame people merely for being born bright or dim.” However, he follows this up by saying, “But intelligence–or at least the expression of intelligence–is to some extent the result of our choices.” This sentence exhibits the essential confusion. Is it intelligence that gives moral worth, or the expression of intelligence which is the result of our choices?

Cofnas is clearly aware that we cannot assign praise or blame based on innate intelligence, but only to the actions that express this intelligence. At the same time, he seems to want to highlight the unique good people of high intelligence are able to demonstrate. Since this is not within their control, it cannot be grounds for judgments of praise or blame (although if used well, it will be a source of social utility).

To assign people greater or lesser “moral worth” on the basis of some combination of innate capacities and actual accomplishments is merely to confuse the two. Our assessments of social utility are proportional to innate capacities, pending their expression. But our assessments of the moral worth of actions and hence, of their praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, depends only on the expression of capacities. This is in line with the principle: “To whom much is given, much will be required.”

This means that if we had to “operationalize” the moral worth of human actions, we would consider the difference between an individual’s behavior and their natural endowments. Moral worth would not be proportional to intelligence, but in fact inversely proportional. We praise a person more to the extent that virtuous action did not come naturally. To whom much was given, we expect much more. 

Human Dignity

Cofnas intends his claim about differences in moral worth to conflict with the egalitarian claim that “all men are created equal.” This claim is associated, especially in Kantian and Christian personalist philosophy, with the idea that every individual is of infinite intrinsic value, incommensurable with instrumental goods – an idea that is often termed “human dignity”. 

Human dignity is supposed to be determined by membership in the human species or, more precisely, by membership in a species whose members are persons or that exhibits what Aristotle called rationality. As such, it is held to be equal for all individuals. Cofnas’s claim that some human beings have greater or less moral worth seems to imply that this quality of dignity or value varies, presumably along its own normal distribution (as some function of intelligence and other qualities).

Even if one rejects Kantianism, the concept of human dignity does not become scalar. It simply disappears. If human beings do not possess this kind of value, then the only value they possess is that of social utility. Cofnas provides no reason that justifies his use of “moral worth” for what is nothing but “social utility.” Consider his description of the benefits that flow from high intelligence: “In practice, intelligence is more often employed for good … Most high-IQ countries are not Nazi dystopias. They are on average wealthier, more cooperative, and less corrupt.”

This description permits us to say that high intelligence provides for high social utility. It does not license the inference of greater moral worth. The equal human dignity of individuals does mean that it would be intrinsically good for any person to enjoy the benefits of living in a high-IQ society. Less intelligent people experience the benefits that flow from high intelligence all the time.

At the same time, people of high intelligence should not underestimate the great value people of lower intelligence bring to society. There are many tasks, including all of Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs,” that depend on qualities other than high intelligence. If our power grid went down, we would see quite clearly that high intelligence is only of such great value conditional on many other roles in society being played well. 

Human Rationality and Differential Intelligence

Cofnas’s final error is not specific to him but shared with the philosophical tradition stemming from Peter Singer. On this view, what makes human beings “special” is certain cognitive capacities that are not unique to humans and which some humans possess less of than some animals. Singer, for example, argues that a dolphin has greater worth than a six-month-old child. The dolphin’s raw IQ – compared across species – is higher than that of the infant.

But this, again, conflates two different concepts. One is “the human difference” – that which distinguishes the human species from non-human animals, or what Aristotle called “rationality.” The other is the property of intelligence that varies among humans and can be compared across species. These are distinct.

The simplest demonstration of this is the way in which a mentally-disabled human being can have a capacity for language that exceeds that of the brightest apes and parrots. Even the infant who cannot speak is already the kind of organism that has what philosopher John Finnis calls the “radical capacity” to develop the capacity for language. The human difference, what Aristotle called “rationality,” is not graded.

Even the mentally disabled human being possesses the radical capacities unique to members of our species. Their disability consists in the fact that these are inhibited by physical defect. Where human rationality is unable to display itself in acts of higher intelligence, it remains the case that “smiles from reason flow.” The joy exuded from the face of the young man with Down Syndrome reminds us that this individual has the same humanity and human reason as oneself, and is just as much an inhabitant of “the cognitive niche”.

Without recognizing this radical difference at the species level, Cofnas and Singer wrongly conclude that the very thing that makes human beings “special” is something human beings have in greater and lesser degrees.

At the same time, I concede that a consistent utilitarian (or consistent naturalist) who rejects Kantianism will deny the radical difference between human beings and non-human animals. But it only follows that variable cognitive capacity can play into differences in social utility, not moral worth. 

The Shared Premise of Moral Naturalism and Social Constructionism

Cofnas’s project comports with other attempts to assimilate the ethical to the scientific; it is a form of metaphysical naturalism. According to this doctrine, all and only what is described in the best theories of natural science exists.

One of the main strategies of naturalistic philosophy is to undermine the categories of traditional moral thought, dismissing them as superstition. I consider myself, if anything, more sympathetic to this strand of philosophy. If naturalism is correct that we must content ourselves with all and only the categories of natural science, then the categories of traditional morality must go. Cofnas’s moral anti-realism nods in this direction.

However, there is another naturalistic strategy, which Cofnas employs, namely reductionism –attempting to reduce the categories of traditional morality to those of natural science by “operationalizing” them. Cofnas wants to present “moral worth” as a function of intelligence, behavior, and related factors.

But this reductionism leads to the naturalistic fallacy, crossing from the “Is” of science to the “Ought” of morality without justification, and casting inegalitarian moral judgments as the fruit of empirical social science. Frankly, this is an insult to the project of empirical social science. The reason research into such controversial topics as IQ and race is scientifically legitimate is that it is merely a factual question and therefore has no direct moral implications.

The social constructionist left seems to believe that such research would imply moral differences; and Cofnas concurs with them. Differences in IQ do imply the moral inferiority of the individuals (and potentially races) who are lower in IQ. Cofnas thereby confirms the suspicions of the social constructionist left that empirical social science is just cover for a kind of Social Darwinist morality.

So in addition to being philosophically weak, Cofnas’s arguments constitute a bad strategy for realist social science.

The social constructionist left thinks that human equality implies equality in natural endowments. This involves them in a large project of reality-denial. Yet Cofnas makes the same error in equating moral equality with equality in natural endowments. He just takes the contrapositive: That empirically-observable differences in natural endowments undermine the principle of human equality.

Moral philosophy should free us from the idea that moral worth is determined by our natural endowments. Our possession of such capacities and talents are merely the effect of what the philosopher John Rawls called “the natural lottery.” We could say that it is merely the product of the hand we are dealt.

But morality is not in the hand we are dealt: It’s all in how we play our cards.

Joel Carini is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Saint Louis University. He writes about the intersection of philosophy and religion at his Substack and Twitter.

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