Just as one line appears to be longer than another in an optical illusion, we can have a spontaneous moral judgment that one individual is more important than another. Sometimes such judgments can lead to moral illusions like speciesism and other kinds of discrimination. Moral illusions are persistent spontaneous judgments that violate our deepest moral values and distract us away from a rational, authentic ethic. They generate pseudo-ethics, similar to pseudoscience. The antidote against moral illusions is the ethical principle to (...) avoid unwanted arbitrariness. Speciesism involves unwanted arbitrariness, and psychological research as well as the problem of wild animal suffering demonstrate that moral illusions such as speciesism can be very persistent. (shrink)

In his article ‘In Defense of Eating Meat’, Timothy Hsiao argued that sentience is not sufficient for moral status, that the pain experienced by an animal is bad but not morally bad, that the nutritional interests of humans trump the interests of animals and that eating meat is permissible. In this article I explore the strengths and weaknesses of Hsiao’s argument, clarify some issues and argue that eating meat is likely in conflict with some of our strongest moral intuitions.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed fifteen people at their high school in Columbine, Colorado. National media dubbed the event a “school shooting.” The term grimly expanded over the next several years to include similar events at army bases, movie theaters, churches, and nightclubs. Today, we commonly use the categories “mass shooter” and “mass shooting” to organize and classify information about gun violence. I will argue that neither category is an effective tool for reducing (...) gun violence and use empirical data to show how these categories perpetuate a moral panic that harms already vulnerable demographics. I conclude that we should instead favor a narrower description of individuals and events, (e.g., “X shot Y people at Z”) because we can talk about all of the relevant cases without contributing the undue harms. (shrink)

There is a view that what we owe to other people is explained by the fact that they are human beings who share in a common human life. There are many ways of construing this explanatory idea, and I explore a few of these here; the aim is to look for constructions that contribute to an understanding of what we owe to people with profound and multiple learning difficulties and disabilities. In exploring the idea of sharing in a common life (...) I construe ‘sharing’ as ‘participating in’, and ‘common life’ as the social life characteristic of the environment that someone lives in. My principal purpose is to render the idea of sharing in a common life in terms that help explain its eligibility as a ground for establishing the moral status of people with PMLD. The participatory options I examine each make some call on agency, if only as something hoped for in the future, including when hope flies in the face of expectation. Accordingly I look at conceptions of actual and potential participation in social life, and at the idea of treating people as if they have the potential to participate, even when the existence of any such potential is unlikely. I conclude with some thoughts on the relation between participation and the moral status of profoundly disabled people, and about how much, and how little, the argument has achieved. (shrink)

The character and extent of disabilities, especially cognitive disability, have posed significance problems for existing moral theories. Certain philosophers have even questioned the moral personhood of people with disabilities and have argued that people with profound cognitive impairments should not be granted the same moral status as those who are cognitively able-bodied. This paper proposes an alternative understanding of moral personhood as relational rather than individuated. This relational moral personhood finds its foundation in the clinical practice and psychoanalysis of Julia (...) Kristeva and the hermeneutic narrative identity of Paul Ricoeur. One consequence of this relational personhood is a new understanding of moral status through narrative co-authorship rather than intellectual or social capacity. Another consequence is a refiguration of narrative identity as narrative interdependence. (shrink)

Recent progress in neurosciences has improved our understanding of chronic disorders of consciousness. One example of this advancement is the emergence of the new diagnostic category of minimally conscious state (MCS). The central characteristic of MCS is impaired consciousness. Though the phenomenon now referred to as MCS pre-existed its inclusion in diagnostic classifications, the current medical ethical concepts mainly apply to patients with normal consciousness and to non-conscious patients. Accordingly, how we morally should stand with persons in minimally conscious state (...) remains unclear. In this paper, I examine whether the notion of human dignity could provide us with guidance with the moral difficulties MCS gives rise to. More precisely, I focus on the question of whether we are justified in holding that persons in minimally conscious state possess human dignity. (shrink)

Are we essentially human animals or persons? The aim of this paper is to find a middle way between animalism and constitutionalism and to develop a concept of a person's life which avoids their problems. I will argue for the following thesis: As humans we are persons, but we are persons not in the sense of certain abilities which distinguish our biological kind, but by an intersubjective form of our life. Therefore, I will strictly distinguish between the biological species form (...) of human beings and the life form of humans as persons. This allows me to develop an account of the personal life form which unifies metaphysics and value without succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)