Unequal Equality and the Need for an Ultimate Container

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The quote above is from Animal Farm by George Orwell. It came to mind when I was thinking of my gradation of multi-ontological personhoods, the idea being that every or most things can be a person, according to various scientific and philosophical understandings, but that they are, by virtue of their varying natures, different kinds of persons. In other words, I have posited a gradation, spectrum or range of personhood, organized not by value but by characteristics - by qualities but not by quality.

It is all a bit of a cheat, or at least a potential cheat, because what is the point of creating a category of something if all of the things within that category are in fact radically different, or inhabit the category for radically different reasons? What I need is a bigger container in which I can put my personhood container, in order to provide an overarching rationale or model of personhood, but of course that does not really solve the problem, since I would in turn need another container for the that container, and so on. 

I noticed the same problem when listening to a cosmologist give a year end summary of the current thinking about the beginnings of the universe. It all came off as kind of funny to me, because apparently the reigning ideas are that the universe came from nothing, that it has its own rules, that the stuff inside the universe is not like the universe itself, that all of our physics breaks down before the Big Bang, and that we should not be surprised if the universe turns out to be unlike anything we have ever known before. In other words, the container that we have needs to fit into another container to give it a rational and meaningful context, and so on. So it is the same problem.

I suppose what resolves the rational contradiction for me is that it all just feels right. As a teenager I developed this idea of a sensual morality. Something is wrong if it feels wrong. It was the argument I used for being a vegetarian. Of course, now that I know more about plants, I feel bad about eating them too. So the new task is to somehow reconcile the idea that somethings have to die in order for other things to live. This is the central problem of being human, and in my view the central problem, or one of the central problems, that animates religious, philosophical and scientific thought.

There are many ways that this is done, but as far as I can tell they all suffer from the ultimate container problem.