The Principle of Causal Sufficiency
There is a principle of metaphysics that an effect cannot be greater than its cause. In other words, a cause must be greater than or equal to its effect. The idea is that an effect cannot be generated from some cause insufficient to account for the generation; otherwise, the supposed effect is unexplained. For example, if you were to take a glass of water at room temperature and drop 10 ice cubes into it, the temperature of the water would not increase. Such an effect (the increase) would be greater than (i.e., hotter than) the cause (the ice cubes). If the temperature were to increase, there would be no explanation for it; the change of temperature would be uncaused and thus not an effect – assuming there is no other causal factor involved, such as the glass sitting on a stove top which melts the ice and heats the water.
This principle, which I’ll call PCS, dates at least to the Scholastics. Descartes used a version of PCS in his argument that God is the cause of the idea ‘God’ that humans possess. (See Meditation III-IV, page 27, here).
Objection
There seem to be clear counterexamples to PCS. I’ll propose two.
Consider human technology. A car is a human technological artifact. And yet, a car is greater than a human with respect to speed. The speed of the human engineer who built car C is x. The speed of C is x + n. A computer is another piece of human technology. The computational power of the engineer who constructed computer CR is y. The computational power of a CR is y + n. Hence, the effect (CR) exceeds the cause (the engineer).
Reply
The defender of PCS can reply to this objection as follows. “Greater than” should be rendered clearer. As stated initially in PCS, it is ambiguous. ‘Greater than,’ ‘equal to,’ and other axiological relations hold between relata only with respect to some relevant factor, such as speed or power. There is no such thing as one thing being greater than another with respect to nothing. But it makes sense to say that – regarding speed – Usain Bolt, in his prime, is greater than Mitchell Hooper, winner of the 2023 World’s Strongest Man contest. And it makes sense to say that Hooper is greater than Bolt with respect to power.
Now, although C is greater than its builder regarding speed and CR is greater than its engineer concerning computational power, speed and computational power are not the relevant factors for determining whether or not the builder is a greater being than the built in these cases. Rather, the relevant factor is the kind of being the thing is.
The engineers who built the car and the computer are persons. The car and computer are not persons but mere tools. Persons are greater than tools with respect to what persons are, namely, possessors of personhood, i.e., substances of a rational nature (to use Boethius’ definition of ‘person’.) Persons are conscious, self-aware, autonomous, rational, language-using, creative, emotion-possessing agents with moral and epistemic duties. As Kant noted, persons have dignity and intrinsic value and thus should never be used as mere means. Tools, on the other hand, lack dignity and possess instrumental value as things to be used for this or that end. It is permissible to use a tool as a mere means and dispose of it in the garbage heap or recycling center if it no longer functions as designed.
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