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Switch to: References
Citations of:
Why We (Almost Certainly) are Not Moral Equals
The Journal of Ethics 21 (4):375-401 (2017)
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While most theorists agree with the claim that human beings have high and equal moral standing, there are strong disagreements about how to justify this claim. These disagreements arise because there are different ways of managing the difficulty of finding a basis for this claim, which is sufficiently substantial to do this justifying work, but not vary in degree in order to not give rise to inequality of moral considerability. The aim of this paper is to review previous attempts to (...) |
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Relational egalitarianism says that moral equals should relate as equals. We explore how moral unequals should relate. |
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The question of the basis of human equality has recently gained increasing attention. However, much of the literature has focused on whether persons—understood as fully competent adults—have equal moral status, while relatively less attention has been devoted to the analysis of what grounds the equal moral status of those human beings who are not fully competent adults. This paper contributes to this debate by addressing the question of the equality of moral status between adults and children. Specifically, this paper has (...) |
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Nicholas Agar, Jeff McMahan and Allen Buchanan have all expressed concerns about enhancing humans far outside the species-typical range. They argue radically enhanced beings will be entitled to greater and more beneficial treatment through an enhanced moral status, or a stronger claim to basic rights. I challenge these claims by first arguing that emerging technologies will likely give the enhanced direct control over their mental states. The lack of control we currently exhibit over our mental lives greatly contributes to our (...) |
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Consider a binary afterlife, wherein some people go to Heaven, others to Hell, and nobody goes to both. Would such a system be just? Theodore Sider argues: no. For, any possible criterion of determining where people go will involve treating very similar individuals very differently. Here, I argue that this point has deep and underappreciated implications for moral philosophy. The argument proceeds by analogy: many ethical theories make a sharp and practically significant distinction between persons and non-persons. Yet, just like (...) |
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“Basic equality” is the thesis that all (or nearly all) human beings are equal in moral status. Widespread interpersonal differences among humans make the task of justifying basic equality notoriously difficult. One strategy for circumventing this difficulty is to identify some morally significant binary (“all-or-nothing”) property that all humans have. This strategy seems promising: if the basis of equality is binary, then those who have it have it equally. However, skeptics have argued against this strategy on the grounds that a (...) |
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Contemporary political philosophers often take for granted that for political purposes all humans are to be considered of equal worth. The difficulty, as Bernard Williams observed, is to find an interpretation of this claim that does not collapse into absurdity or triviality. I show that the principal attempts to solve this problem all beg the question against an Aristotelian proponent of natural hierarchy. I then explore existing proposals for dissolving the problem of basic equality, whether by denying the need for (...) |
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Many theorists think that discrimination is wrongful because it involves treating discriminatees as if they have a lower moral status than others when in fact all people are moral equals. However, there are strong reasons, expounded by Peter Singer and others, to doubt that all people are indeed moral equals. While it may turn out that, ultimately, these reasons can be shown to be unsound, we cannot rule out the possibility that we are not all moral equals. If we are (...) |
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Although thinkers of the past might have started from presumptions of fundamental difference and inequality between (say) the genders, or people of different races, this is no longer the case. At least in mainstream political philosophy, we are all now presumed to be, in some fundamental sense, basic equals. Of course, what follows from this putative fact of basic equality remains enormously controversial: liberals, libertarians, conservatives, Marxists, republicans, and so on, continue to disagree vigorously with each other, despite all presupposing (...) |
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The belief that all human beings are ‘moral equals’ is widespread within the canon of Western liberal philosophy. However, it is unclear precisely what ‘moral equality’ or its associate terms mean, what grounds our ‘moral equality’ and what the implications of being ‘moral equals’ are. In this paper, I distinguish between three ways of understanding ‘moral equality’: the ‘buck-passing’, ‘explanatory’ and ‘reverse-explanatory’ accounts. The buck-passing account of moral equality is in parallel with Scanlon’s buck-passing account of value. It holds that (...) |
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The principle of moral equality is one of the cornerstones of any liberal theory of justice. It is usually assumed that persons’ equal moral status should be grounded in the equal possession of a status-conferring property. Call this the property-first approach to the basis of moral equality. This approach, however, faces some well-known difficulties: in particular, it is difficult to see how the possession of a scalar property can account for persons’ equal moral status. A plausible way of circumventing such (...) |
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It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider (...) |
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In the debate on the basis of moral equality, one conclusion achieves near consensus: that we must reject all accounts that ground equality in the possession of some psychological capacity (Psychological Capacity Accounts). This widely held view crystallises around three objections. The first is the Arbitrariness Objection, which holds that the threshold at which the possession of the relevant capacities places an individual within the required range is arbitrary. The second is the Variations Objection, which holds that there is rational (...) |
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