The Good of the Whole

Definition

Serving "the good of the species" is a genuinely different kind of value claim than serving individual human beings, even though a species is nothing over and above its members. Using Derek Parfit's ontology of nations, Baggini shows that an entity can require nothing more than its constituents living together in certain ways (so it is not a spooky separate substance) while still being ontologically distinct from them (so what's true of the whole need not be true of any part). A nation can be under threat of extinction while none of its citizens are; a species can be thriving while most of its members are miserable.

In the Book

Chapter 5 opens with the moon landing: Neil Armstrong's "giant leap for mankind" plainly advanced the species without making any individual human being on Earth better off — which is precisely what separates "good of the species" views from altruism, where the individual is the basic unit of value. Baggini uses Margaret Thatcher's claim that "there's no such thing as society" as a foil, showing the same logical move that lets her admit families exist should let her admit society exists. He then borrows Parfit's three-way distinction for nations (existence requires only citizens and territory; a nation just is its citizens and territory; a nation is distinct from its citizens and territory) and shows options one and three can both be true at once — and applies the identical structure to species: humankind could be numerous, dominant, and "thriving" as a species while the great mass of individual humans are unhappy, because thriving-as-a-species and thriving-as-an-individual are different predicates entirely.

Why It Matters

This supplies a precise, non-mystical way to talk about collective entities — organizations, ecosystems, nations, movements — that are made of nothing but their members yet can succeed or fail on terms that don't track any individual member's success or failure. It is the conceptual tool for spotting when "the organization is thriving" and "the people in it are thriving" have quietly become two separate, divergeable claims — and for noticing when someone is smuggling one in as evidence for the other.