Moral Status, Misc

Mark Johnston (2016, 2017) has argued on ethical grounds against a wide variety of "naturalistic" world views, which imply 'in our close vicinity, there are many persisting things all ontologically on a par, very similar in their features and such that they come into being and cease to exist at various times'—'personites', for short. Johnston argues that if personites exist, their intrinsic properties are compatible with their being people and thus having moral status; but since moral status is an intrinsic (...) matter, this implies that personites enjoy the same kind of moral status as people, a conclusion which leads to various bizarre ethical consequences. In response, we defend the view that although personites exist, they lack moral status, and have intrinsic properties (including modal properties) which no person could have. We also isolate a different argument for the moral status of certain personites, based on the claim that they instantiate properties which 'person' could very easily have expressed; we show how this argument can be resisted by adopting a pluralistic semantics, on which predicates like 'person' and 'being with moral status' express many properties even at the actual world. (shrink)

A brief critical notice of _What Is a Person?_ by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire focusing on their relational account of what gives human beings a dignity.

For the more than a decade, I have advanced an account of what makes persons, animals, and other beings entitled to moral treatment for their own sake that is informed by characteristically African ideas about dignity, a great chain of being, and community. Roughly according to this account, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is capable of communing (as a subject) or of us communing with it (as an object). I have mainly argued that this characteristically (...) African and relational approach to moral status is a better account than salient Western approaches, especially individualist views associated with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Over the years, several commentators have raised criticisms of my approach, including that it objectionably: entails that we may rightly dominate mentally incapacitated human beings; prioritizes mentally incapacitated human beings over animals with similar cognitive abilities without sufficient justification; entails that intelligent aliens lack moral status; cannot make sense of our duties towards the dead; and is unable to account for the standing of species as distinct from their members. In this chapter I provide a comprehensive response to these and related objections, defending the initial account as an attractive way to understand what makes a being matter morally for non-instrumental reasons. For many animals to have a moral status would have important implications for the practice of agriculture, for instance farming animals for food and expanding crops. (shrink)