I examine the familiar criterial view of personhood, according to which the possession of personal properties such as self-consciousness, emotionality, sentience, and so forth is necessary and sufficient for the status of a person. I argue that this view confuses criteria for personhood with parts of an ideal of personhood. In normal cases, we have already identified a creature as a person before we start looking for it to manifest the personal properties, indeed this pre-identification is part of what makes (...) it possible for us to see and interpret the creature as a person in the first place. This pre-identification is typically based on biological features. Except in some interesting special or science-fiction cases, some of which I discuss, it is human animals that we identify as persons. (shrink)

Moves from is to good—that is, principles that link fact to value—are fundamental to environmental ethics. The upshot is fourfold: (1) for nonanthropogenic goods, only those moves from is to good are defensible which conceive goodness as goodness for biotic entities; (2) goodness for nonsentient biotic entities is contribution to their autopoietic functioning; (3) biotic entities also function “exopoietically” to benefit related entities, and these exopoietic benefits are on average greater than their own goods; and (4) the most general is-to-good (...) principles that are defensible (and hence the ones of greatest importance for environmental ethics) concern a realm of nonanthropogenic goodness that encompasses both living and nonliving nature. (shrink)

There is a gap between what we think and what we think we think about ethics. This gap appears when elements of our ethical reflection and our moral theories contradict each other. It also appears when something that is important in our ethical reflection is sidelined in our moral theories. The gap appears in both ways with the ethical idea glory. The present exploration of this idea is a case study of how far actual ethical reflection diverges from moral theory. (...) This divergence tells against moral theory, and in favour of less constricted and more flexible modes of ethical reflection. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to set out an Aristotelian account of individual autonomy. Individual autonomy is the capacity of the individual to make and act upon judgments for which he is held morally accountable. This sense of autonomy may be contrasted to a number of other senses. Of these, the most important are political or legal autonomy and Kantian principled autonomy. Political or legal autonomy concerns the environment in which an individual operates. It exists where individuals are able (...) to operate reasonably freely.1 For the most part we will not consider this sense except insofar as it is necessary to explain the importance placed on respecting individual autonomy. Kantian principled autonomy has been described recently by Onora O‟Neill in a series of writings.2 On this account, autonomy is seen as a characteristic of the principle behind action rather than of action per se and is not a characteristic of agents at all. (shrink)