The thesis that animals feel a morally relevant kind of pain is an incredibly popular one, but explaining the evidence for this belief is surprisingly challenging. Michael Murray has defended neo-Cartesianism, the view that animals may lack the ability to feel pain in a morally relevant sense. In this paper, I present the reasons for doubting that animals feel morally relevant pain. I then respond to critics of Murray’s position, arguing that the evidence proposed more recently is still largely unpersuasive. (...) I end by considering the implications for moral discourse and praxis. (shrink)

Empirical evidence shows that people have multiple time-biases. One is near-bias; another is future-bias. Philosophical theorising about these biases often proceeds on two assumptions. First, that the two biases are _independent_: that they are explained by different factors (the independence assumption). Second, that there is a normative asymmetry between the two biases: one is rationally impermissible (near-bias) and the other rationally permissible (future-bias). The former assumption at least partly feeds into the latter: if the two biases were not explained by (...) different factors, then it would be less plausible that their normative statuses differ. This paper investigates the independence assumption and finds it unwarranted. In light of this, we argue, there is reason to question the normative asymmetry assumption. (shrink)

According to standard comparativist views, death is bad insofar as it deprives someone of goods she would otherwise have had. In The Ethics of Killing, Jeff McMahan argues against such views and in favor of a gradualist account according to which how bad it is to die is a function of both the future goods of which the decedent is deprived and her cognitive development when she dies. Comparativists and gradualists therefore disagree about how bad it is to die at (...) different ages. In this paper I examine two prominent criticisms of gradualism and show that both misconstrue McMahan. I develop a related criticism that seems to show that a gradualist cannot coherently relate morbidity and mortality. This criticism also fails, but has an instructive implication for how policy-makers setting priorities for health care investments should regard choices between life-saving interventions and interventions against non-fatal diseases in the very young. (shrink)

We worry about becoming non-existent, but not about coming into being. But both events are similarly bad according to Deprivationism; hence, it seems that we should display symmetric attitudes towards both. This entails the implausible conclusion that we should display negative attitudes towards the time of our birth. In a series of articles Brueckner and Fischer offered one of the most prominent attempts to block this conclusion by appealing to a temporal bias towards future pleasures. Inspired by Yi’s criticism of (...) their view, we argue that there is an appropriate sense of deprivation in which late birth can deprive of future pleasures. Hence, Brueckner and Fischer’s Temporal Bias does not explain the attitudinal asymmetry. In addition, to make sure that one picks out the appropriate sense of deprivation, we offer a restriction, the Historical Condition, that prevents us from considering that every value one would otherwise have is value that one was deprived of due to one’s actual birth/death. Finally, we present a novel account for the attitudinal asymmetry that relies on what we call ‘Interests Proximity Bias’. (shrink)

Good physical experiments conform to the basic methodological standards of experimental design: they are objective, reliable, and valid. But is this also true of thought experiments? Especially problems of personal identity have engendered hypothetical scenarios that are very distant from the actual world. These imagined situations have been conspicuously ineffective at resolving conflicting intuitions and deciding between the different accounts of personal identity. Using prominent examples from the literature, I argue that this is due to many of these thought experiments (...) not adhering to the methodological standards that guide experimental design in nearly all other disciplines. I also show how empirically unwarranted background assumptions about human physiology render some of the hypothetical scenarios that are employed in the debate about personal identity highly misleading. (shrink)

The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war ( jus ad bellum) and the other governing the conduct of war ( jus in bello). The two sets of principles are regarded, in Michael Walzer’s words, as “logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict accordance with the rules.”1 Let us say that those who fight (...) in a just war are “just combatants,” while those who fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause are “unjust combatants.” (A just cause is an aim that can contribute to the justification for war and that may permissibly be pursued by means of war.)2 The most important implication of the idea that jus in bello is independent of jus ad bellum is that.. (shrink)

This paper argues that certain central tenets of the traditional theory of the just war cannot be correct. It then advances an alternative account grounded in the same considerations of justice that govern self-defense at the individual level. The implications of this account are unorthodox. It implies that, with few exceptions, combatants who fight for an unjust cause act impermissibly when they attack enemy combatants, and that combatants who fight in a just war may, in certain circumstances, legitimately target noncombatants (...) who bear a significant degree of moral responsibility for a wrong, when the prevention or rectification of that wrong constitutes a just cause for war. (shrink)

This paper argues that certain central tenets of the traditional theory of the just war cannot be correct. It then advances an alternative account grounded in the same considerations of justice that govern self-defense at the individual level. The implications of this account are unorthodox. It implies that, with few exceptions, combatants who fight for an unjust cause act impermissibly when they attack enemy combatants, and that combatants who fight in a just war may, in certain circumstances, legitimately target noncombatants (...) who bear a significant degree of moral responsibility for a wrong, when the prevention or rectification of that wrong constitutes a just cause for war. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin Miller have presented an account of why killing is wrong that implies it can be permissible to kill certain human beings in order to use their organs for transplantation.1 Since I am going to criticise their arguments, I will begin by applauding their willingness to defend an unpopular position and by registering my agreement with their substantive conclusion about organ procurement. The criticisms I will offer are intended to be friendly in spirit; but they are also, (...) of course, meant to be effective.Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of disabling, in particular, the wrongness of totally disabling. ‘The rule against disabling,’ they write, ‘fully explains all that is bad and wrong with… killing.’1One might think that their view is just a slight modification of the familiar view that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of harming. According to this view, killing is normally gravely wrong because it inflicts on its victim a particularly grievous harm by depriving him of all the good that his future life would otherwise have contained. If the authors' view were just a restatement of this harm-based account of the wrongness of killing, one might conclude that their emphasis on disability is needlessly provocative. But in fact their view is quite different. This is because disabling is only one form of harming. On might seriously harm a person—for example, by causing him to experience mild chronic pain for the remainder of his life—without in any way disabling him. He would retain all his abilities but would be less comfortable while exercising them. Because there are thus forms of harming that are not instances of disabling, a rule …. (shrink)

The main objection to human embryonic stem cell research is that it involves killing human embryos, which are essentially beings of the same sort that you and I are. This objection presupposes that we once existed as early embryos and that we had the same moral status then that we have now. This essay challenges both those presuppositions, but focuses primarily on the first. I argue first that these presuppositions are incompatible with widely accepted beliefs about both assisted conception and (...) monozygotic twinning. I then argue that we never existed as embryos. If this last claim is right, killing an embryo does not kill someone like you or me but merely prevents one of us from existing. (shrink)

Some philosophers, most notably Julian Savulescu, have argued that potential parents have a moral reason to do what they can to have a child with the highest expected level of well-being.1 This is not just a reason to do what will make a particular child better off than he or she would otherwise be but also a reason to choose, from among different possible children, the one that has the highest expected well-being. The claim that potential parents have such a (...) reason is then often deployed as a premise in arguments in support of genetic enhancement. Robert Sparrow has argued in response that this claim implies that potential parents have a reason to choose to have female children only, primarily because women are genetically disposed to live, on average, 3–7 years longer than men.2 He takes this implication to be a reductio of this particular form of argument in support of human enhancement. In her paper, Sexual dimorphism and human enhancement, Paula Casal seeks to rebut Sparrow's argument and then goes on to suggest that a better case for the selection of female children could be made on grounds of moral enhancement, since women are far less genetically disposed to be violent and aggressive than men.3 Recognising, however, that the creation of only female children would lead to human extinction, she concludes that the way to achieve the best outcome would be to use techniques of genetic modification, should they become available, to make men more like women in certain respects: smaller, less aggressive, less competitive, less violent, less obsessed with sex, less prone to taking great risks, and less likely to die early from accident, combat, or disease.Like Larry Temkin, I am largely in agreement with Casal on these matters. In this short commentary, I …. (shrink)

This essay explores problems of consistency among commonsense beliefs about the comparative moral status of animals, fetuses, and human beings congenitally endowed with cognitive capacities and potential no higher than those of higher animals. The possibility of genetic cognitive enhancement exacerbates some of these problems, but also offers new resources for understanding the basis of our moral status as inviolable.

Most contributors to the debate about brain death, including Dr. James Bernat, share certain assumptions. They believe that the concept of death is univocal, that death is a biological phenomenon, that it is necessarily irreversible, that it is paradigmatically something that happens to organisms, that we are human organisms, and therefore that our deaths will be deaths of organisms. These claims are supposed to have moral significance. It is, for example, only when a person dies that it is permissible to (...) extract her organs for transplantation.It is also commonly held that our univocal notion of death is the permanent cessation of integrated functioning in an organism and that the criterion for determining when this has occurred in animals with brains is the death of the brain as a whole – that is, brain death. The reason most commonly given for this is that the brain is the irreplaceable master control of the organism's integration. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Jeff McMahan’s arguments for his claim that we are not human organisms, and the arguments of Derek Parfit to the same effect in a recent paper. McMahan uses these arguments to derive conclusions concerning the moral status of embryos and permanent vegetative state patients. My claim will be that neither thinker has successfully shown that we are not human beings, and therefore these arguments do not establish the ethical conclusions that McMahan has sought to draw (...) from the arguments in respect of the moral status of embryos and PVS patients. (shrink)

This article considers the objection to abortion that a woman who voluntarily engages in sexual activity is responsible for her fetus and so cannot have an abortion. The conclusion argued for is that the conceptions of responsibility that can ground the objection that are considered do not necessitate a requirement on the part of a pregnant woman to carry her pregnancy to term. Thus, the iterations of the responsibility objection presented cannot be used to curtail reproductive choice.

Referred to as “a foundational concept” of bioethics, personhood has long figured prominently in discussions of entities’ moral status and attendant rights and duties (Farah and Heberlein 2007, 39)...

Opponents of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research claim that such research is incompatible with the moral principle that it is always wrong intentionally to end a human life. In this essay, I discuss how that principle might be revised so that it is subject to as few difficulties as possible. I then argue that even the most defensible version of the principle is compatible with the moral permissibility of hESC research.

According to Carson Strong, the future of value account of the wrongness of killing is subject to counterexamples. Ezio Di Nucci has disagreed. Their disagreement turns on whether the concepts of a future of value and a future like ours are equivalent. Unfortunately, both concepts are fuzzy, which explains, at least in part, the disagreement. I suggest that both concepts can be clarified in ways that seem plausible and that makes them equivalent. Strong claims that better accounts of the wrongness (...) of killing exist. I show that those alternative accounts are unsatisfactory. (shrink)

What sort of thing, fundamentally, are you and I? For convenience, I use the term persimal to refer to the kind of thing we are, whatever that kind turns out to be. Accordingly, the question is, what are persimals? One possible answer is that persimalhood consists in being a human animal, but many theorists, including Derek Parfit and Jeff McMahan, not to mention John Locke, reject this idea in favor of a radically different view, according to which persimalhood consists in (...) having certain sorts of mental or psychological features. In this essay, I try to show that the animalist approach is defensible as against the mentalist approach. I also suggest that animalists have a plausible story to tell about cases such as brain transplantation and dicephaly that might appear to support the mentalist approach. (shrink)

According to the theory of intrinsic value and moral standing called the ‘substance view,’ what makes it prima facie seriously wrong to kill adult human beings, human infants, and even human fetuses is the possession of the essential property of the basic capacity for rational moral agency – a capacity for rational moral agency in root form and thereby not remotely exercisable. In this critique, I cover three distinct reductio charges directed at the substance view's conclusion that human fetuses have (...) the same intrinsic value and moral standing as adult human beings. After giving consideration to defenders of the substance view's replies to these charges, I then critique each of them, ultimately concluding that none is successful. Of course, in order to understand all of these things – the reductio charges, defenders of the substance view's replies to them, and my criticisms of their replies – one must have a better understanding of the substance view as well as its defense. Accordingly, I address the substance view's understanding of rational moral agency as well as present its defense. (shrink)

Agent-relative restrictions prohibit minimizing violations: that is, they require us not to minimize the total number of their violations by violating them ourselves. Frances Kamm has explained this prohibition in terms of the moral worth of persons, which, in turn, she explains in terms of persons’ high moral status as inviolable beings. I press the following criticism of this account: even if minimizing violations are permissible, we need not have a lower moral status provided other determinants thereof boost it. Thus, (...) Kamm’s account is incomplete at best. And when, to address this incompleteness, it is insisted that our moral worth derives from specific moral statuses, the inviolability account comes to seem deficient because it begs the question against those who are not initially persuaded that minimizing violations are impermissible. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 96-98.

In the debate regarding the moral status of human embryos, the Embryo Rescue Case has been used to suggest that embryos are not rightholders. This case is premised on the idea that in a situation where one has a choice between saving some number of embryos or a child, it seems wrong to save the embryos and not the child. If so, it seems that embryos cannot be rightholders. In this paper, I argue that the Embryo Rescue Case does not (...) independently show that embryos are not rightholders. (shrink)

Recent debates in just war theory have been concerned with the status of combatants during war. Unfortunately, however, the debate has, up to now, focused on self-defensive wars. The present article changes the focus slightly by exploring the status of combatants during military humanitarian intervention (MHI). It begins by arguing that MHI poses a number of challenges to our thinking about the status of combatants. To solve these it draws on Jeff McMahan's theory of combatant liability. On this basis, the (...) article contends that, first, combatants engaged in atrocities lack the same set of rights and liberties held by intervening combatants. Second, and more controversially, drawing on McMahan's theory as well as the notion of complicity, it suggests that the same applies to those combatants who do not perpetrate atrocities but are merely ordered to defend the target state against the intervening state. (shrink)

The recent debate over the moral responsibility of psychopaths has centered on whether, or in what sense, they understand moral requirements. In this paper, I argue that even if they do understand what morality requires, the content of their actions is not of the right kind to justify full-blown blame. I advance two independent justifications of this claim. First, I argue that if the psychopath comes to know what morality requires via a route that does not involve a proper appreciation (...) of what it means to cause another harm or distress, the content of violations of rules against harm will be of a lower grade than the content of similar actions by normal individuals. Second, I argue that in order to intend a harm to a person?that is, to intend the distinctive kind of harm that can only befall a person?it is necessary to understand what personhood is and what makes it valuable. The psychopath's deficits with regard to mental time travel ensure that s/he cannot intend this kind of harm. (shrink)

In Epicurean cosmology, material reconstitution, or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία) is the necessary consequence of the infinity of time and the eternity of atoms. I examine Lucretius’ treatment of this phenomenon (DRN 3.843–864) and consider the extent to which his view enables us to develop an Epicurean response to the question: what makes a person at two different times one and the same person? I offer a reading of this passage in the light of modern accounts of persistence and identity, and what (...) Lucretius states in Books 3 and 4 about memory and the soul’s motions. Guided by the metaphysical implications of this analysis, I determine the type of relation which, according to Lucretius, holds between the mental and the physical. (shrink)

Common arguments from the abortion debate have set the stage for the debate on stem cell research. Unfortunately, those arguments demonstrate flawed reasoning—jumping to unfounded conclusions, using value laden language rather than careful argument, and ignoring morally relevant aspects of the situation. The influence of flawed abortion arguments on the stem cell debate results in failures of moral reasoning and in lack of attention to important morally relevant differences between abortion and human embryonic stem cells. Among those differences are whose (...) interests are at stake and the difference between an embryo in and out of the womb. Stem cell research differs from abortion in morally relevant ways and should be freed from the abortion debate and its flawed reasoning. (shrink)

Many of us think we have agent-centred options to act suboptimally. Some of these involve favouring our own interests. Others involve sacrificing them. In this paper, I explore three different ways to accommodate agent-centred options in a criterion of objective permissibility. I argue against satisficing and rational pluralism, and in favour of a principle built around sensitivity to personal cost.

Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorized by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorization generates a moral cost, which counts against a war's proportionality, and that having authorization allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community's authorization, (...) this means that some wars will be proportionate if fought by democracies, disproportionate if not. (shrink)

In war a soldier behaving properly should take into account a universal requirement not to kill, to be applied strictly in dealing with civilians, but at the same time to support the exception of taking the life of enemy combatants as an act of selfdefense. This is the usual way to distinguish morally the proper treatment to soldiers and civilians. In this article the author criticizes it and outlines a different way to understand and justify the moral distinction mentioned.

This article brings animal protection theory to bear on Temple Grandin’s work, in her capacity both as a designer of slaughter facilities and as an advocate for omnivorism. Animal protection is a better term for what is often termed animal rights, given that many of the theories grouped under the animal rights label do not extend the concept of rights to animals. I outline the nature of Grandin’s system of humane slaughter as it pertains to cattle. I then outline four (...) arguments Grandin has made defending meat-eating. On a protection-based approach, I argue, Grandin’s system of slaughter is superior to its traditional counterpart. Grandin’s success as a designer of humane slaughterhouses however is not matched by any corresponding success in offering a moral defence of meat-eating. Despite, or perhaps because of, the popularity of her work, Grandin’s arguments for continuing to eat animals are noteworthy only in how disappointing and rudimentary they are. If we can thank Grandin for making a difference in the lives of millions of farm animals, her work can also be criticized for not engaging the moral status of animals with the depth and rigor that it deserves. (shrink)

Recent work in moral theory has seen the refinement of theories of moral standing, which increasingly recognize a position of intermediate standing between fully self-conscious entities and those which are merely conscious. Among the most sophisticated concepts now used to denote such intermediate standing is that of primitive self-consciousness, which has been used to more precisely elucidate the moral standing of human newborns. New research into the structure of the avian brain offers a revised view of the cognitive abilities of (...) birds. When this research is approached with a species-specific focus, it appears likely that one familiar species, the chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus), also exhibits primitive self-consciousness. Given the likelihood that they are primitively self-consciousness, chickens warrant a degree of moral standing that falls short of that enjoyed by persons, but which exceeds the minimal standing of merely conscious entities. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of chefs to a position of cultural prominence. This rise has coincided with increased consciousness of ethical issues pertaining to food, particularly as they concern animals. We rank cookbooks by celebrity chefs according to the minimum number of sentient animals that must be killed to make their recipes. On our stipulative definition, celebrity chefs are those with their own television show on a national network in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia. (...) Thirty cookbooks by 26 such chefs were categorized according to the total number of cows, pigs, chicken, fish and other species they included as ingredients. The total number of animals killed was divided by the number of non-dessert recipes to generate an average number of animal deaths per recipe for each book. We outline the rationale for our project and its methodology before presenting a ranked table of 30 cookbooks by celebrity chefs. This method generates several interesting findings. The first concerns the wide variation in animal fatalities among cookbooks. The chef with the heaviest animal footprint killed 5.25 animals per recipe, while the omnivorous chef with the smallest footprints killed 0.19 per recipe. Clearly, not all approaches to meat eating are equal when it comes to their animal mortality rate. Pigs and large ruminants are all substantially bigger than poultry, which are themselves bigger than many fish. The prime determinant of a chef’s place in the index was the number of small animals his or her recipes required. Whether a chef cooked in the style of a particular cuisine (Italian, French, Mexican etc.), by contrast, had no discernible influence on his or her ranking. We analyze how different chefs present themselves—as either especially sensitive or insensitive to ethical issues involving animals and food—and note cases where these presentations do or do not match their index ranking. -/- . (shrink)

Issues of personal identity are relevant in biomedical ethics, but in what way? The mainclaim that structures Quante’s book is that the debates about bioethics and medical ethicshave not been sufficiently clear about the different meanings of ‘personal identity’. Hedistinguishes four questions: 1)conditions of personhood (what properties and capacitiesmust a thing have to be a person: consciousness? self-consciousness? consciousness of timeand one’s persistence in time? rationality? capacity to recognize others and communicate with them?), 2) the question of unity or synchronous (...) identity(when can we speak aboutprecisely one person?), 3) the question of persistence or diachronous identity(when is a personat one point in time identical with a person at another point in time?) and 4) the question of personality or biographical identity(the existential conception of identity in the sense that people have identity crises). One can add to these a related question which Quanteaddresses while discussing the other questions: 5)what are we? (are we persons essentially,or are we rather human beings? is the sortal which defines our persistence conditions‘person’ or rather ‘human organism’ or maybe something else?). (shrink)

In Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, L. W. Sumner argues that theories of well-being must not pick out some kinds of human lives as richer in prudential valuethan others. I argue that we should reject this methodological stricture, but should embrace his insight that many kinds of lives are good for people to live. I also reject his claim that a theory of well-being would fail if it took the form of a list of things that are good for us. Nonetheless, (...) I argue, if we construct such a list in a way that caters to the diversity of good human lives, we will be led to the conclusion that they are united by their relationship to the flourishing of our natural capacities. I distinguish between bottom-up and top-down strategies for defending this Aristotelian conception of well-being, and argue in favor of a bottom-up approach. (shrink)

The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very (...) mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the property Feuerbach and Marx called “species-being,” the human being’s distinctive tendency to identify herself as a member of her species, and to think of the species as a “we.” It links the notion to Kant’s theory of rights, arguing that every claim of right commits the maker of that claim to something like world government, and therefore to the conception of humanity as a collective agent. It also links species-being to the concept of (...) practical identity, arguing that the conceptions under which we find our lives and actions valuable are ones according to which we make a positive contribution to the life of the species. It then argues that the resulting conception of humanity, together with certain considerations about the nature of the good, provides grounds for challenging the familiar claim that death is generally worse for human beings than for animals. On the other hand, because of species-being, the extinction of our species is a much worse prospect for human beings than for the other animals. (shrink)

From fertilization to approximately the sixteenth day of development, human embryonic cells are said to have the capacities of totipotency and monozygotic twinning, both of which are problematic to a theory of ensoulment at fertilization. In this article I will address the problems which these capacities pose to such a theory and present an interpretation of the biological data which renders ensoulment at fertilization more plausible. I will then argue that not only is an ensoulment theory consistent with current biological (...) data on the human embryo, but it may offer an explanation for the phenomencon of monozygotic twinning. (shrink)

Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by an inextricable relationship between the personal, the political, and (...) the philosophical. If one grants that the “special relationship” between mother and child requires moral recognition, then I need first to make vivid the case that this relationship in the case of a child who lacks some “normal capacities” is indistinguishable from any mother‐child relationship. If this is so, then I believe I can make a case that has as its conclusion that the moral personhood of even the severely cognitively disabled must be granted. Moreover, such recognition, I argue, necessitates the recognition of others who bear no special relationships to the child. (shrink)

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic (...) psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR. (shrink)

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic (...) psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR. (shrink)

The Hybrid View endorses utilitarianism about animals and rejects utilitarianism about humans. This view has received relatively little sustained attention in the philosophical literature. Yet, as we show, the Hybrid View underlies many widely held beliefs about zoos, pet ownership, scientific research on animal and human subjects, and agriculture. We develop the Hybrid View in rigorous detail and extract several of its main commitments. Then we examine the Hybrid View in relation to the view that human use of animals constitutes (...) a special relationship. We show that it is intuitively plausible that our use of animals alters our moral obligations to animals. That idea is widely believed to be incompatible with the sort of utilitarian approach in animal ethics that is prescribed by the Hybrid View. To overturn that conventional wisdom, we develop two different principles concerning the moral significance of human use of animals, which we call the Partiality Principle and the Strengthening Principle. We show that the Partiality Principle is consistent with several key commitments of the Hybrid View. And, strikingly, we show that the Strengthening Principle is fully consistent with all of the main commitments of the Hybrid View. Thus we establish the surprising result that utilitarians about animals can coherently offer a robust and intuitively appealing account of the moral significance of animal use. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie aktuelle philosophische Diskussion um eine angemessene Bestimmung des Todesbegriffes ist vor allem durch zwei konkurrierende Ansätze geprägt: Gemäß dem einen Ansatz ist der menschliche Tod der Tod des Körpers, gemäß dem anderen Ansatz der Tod der Person bzw. des Bewusstseinslebens. Der vorliegende Beitrag zeigt, dass beiden Ansätzen ein dualistisches und objektivistisches Verständnis des Menschen zugrunde liegt, dessen Anwendung in der Praxis zu zahlreichen Konflikten führt. Um diese Konflikte zu lösen, wird unter Rückgriff auf zentrale Einsichten der philosophischen Anthropologie Helmuth (...) Plessners ein integratives Konzept des menschlichen Todes entwickelt, das es erlaubt, die personale Perspektive auf den Tod einzubeziehen. Auf der Grundlage dieses Konzeptes erscheint es geboten, das Hirntodkriterium als Todeskriterium aufzugeben und die aktuellen Organspendekampagnen grundlegend neu auszurichten. (shrink)

-/- Policy regulations of ethically controversial genetic technologies should, on the one hand, be based on ethical principles. On the other hand, they should be socially acceptable to ensure implementation. In addition, they should align with ethical theory. Yet to date we lack a reliable and valid scale to measure the relevant ethical judgements in laypeople. We target this lacuna. -/- We developed a scale based on ethical principles to elicit lay judgments: the Genetic Technologies Questionnaire (GTQ). In two pilot (...) studies and a pre-registered main study, we validated the scale in a representative sample of the US population. -/- The final version of the scale contains 20 items but remains highly reliable even when reduced to five. It also predicts behaviour; for example, ethical judgments as measured by the GTQ predicted hypothetical donations and grocery shopping. In addition, the GTQ may be of interest to policymakers and ethicists because it reveals coherent and ethically justified judgments in laypeople. For instance, the GTQ indicates that ethical judgments are sensitive to possible benefits and harms (in line with utilitarian ethics), but also to ethical principles such as the value of consent-autonomy. -/- In conclusion, the GTQ can be recommended for research in both experimental psychology and applied ethics, as well as a tool for ethically and empirically informed policymaking. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach emphasizes species-specific abilities in grounding our treatment of animals. Though this emphasis provides many action-guiding benefits, it also generates a number of complications. The criticism registered here is that Nussbaum unjustifiably restricts what is allowed into our concept of species norms, the most notable restrictions being placed on latent abilities and those that arise as a result of human intervention. These restrictions run the risk of producing inaccurate or misleading recommendations that fail to correspond to the (...) true needs of animals. Here and throughout the essay the argument draws from the lives of captive apes, especially those with extensive experience with humans. A further criticism is that the normative guidance the capabilities approach does provide is merely at the level of heuristics. Preference testing, it is argued, also uses species norms profitably as a heuristic, but it does so within a much larger and fecund system of assessing an animal’s well-being. (shrink)

A person is biased toward the future when she prefers, other things being equal, bad events to be in her past rather than her future or good ones to be in her future rather than her past. In this paper, I explain why both critics and defenders of future bias have failed to consider the best version of the view. I distinguish external time from personal time, and show that future bias is best construed in terms of the latter. This (...) understanding of future bias avoids several standard objections. I then consider a new justification of future bias which is consistent with that construal. My discussion points to a new position regarding the basic relation that grounds rational egoistic concern over time, according to which that relation is asymmetric between person-stages. I also explain how this way of justifying future bias would resolve the apparent tension between the future bias we display in our own case and our relative indifference toward the timing of the good and bad things that happen to other people. (shrink)

The philosophers Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan hold variations of the view that infant interests in continued life are suspect because infants lack the cognitive complexity to anticipate the future. Since infants cannot see themselves as having a future, Singer argues that the future cannot have value for them, and McMahan argues that the future can only have minimal value for an infant. This paper critically analyzes these arguments and defends the view that infants can have interests in continuing to (...) live. Even though infants themselves lack a strong psychological connection to the future, others who are involved in an infant’s life can anticipate, on an infant’s behalf, the kind of future that awaits the infant, and on the basis of this insight judge that continuing to live would be in the infant’s interests. After defending this position, I argue that this position on the interests of infants in continued life does not commit one to opposing abortion, and it does not commit one to the view that our ethical obligations to protect the lives of sentient animals are the same as our ethical obligations to protect infant lives. (shrink)