Recombinant values

An attractive admirer of George Bernard Shaw once wrote to himwith a not-so modest proposal: ``You have the greatest brain in theworld, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to producethe most perfect child.'' Shaw replied: ``What if the child inherits mybody and your brains?'' What if, indeed? Shaw's retort is interesting not because it revealsa grasp of elementary genetics, but rather because it suggests his graspof an interesting and important principle of axiology. Since the brainybut ugly Shaw and his beautiful but apparently dim admirer both fallshort of the ideal, she suggests that the best thing would be togenetically recombine his intelligence with her beauty. But what thenwould be the value of another genetic possibility: that of recombininghis ugliness with her stupidity? Underlining the prompted inference is afundamental principle of the theory of value which, perhapssurprisingly, has so far gone largely unnoticed in the ethicalliterature. I will call it the principle of recombinantvalues. It is the purpose of this paper to formulate the principle in a waywhich makes its content obvious and accessible; to motivate theprinciple philosophically; to both disentangle it from, and exhibitits relations to, principles of evaluative reasoning; to show howthis purely qualitative principle meshes with the infamous thesis ofadditivity of value; and finally, to use it to ground a rathersimple but quite general theory of the intrinsic value ofstates.