Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

Are there nonhuman animals who behave morally? In this paper I answer this question in the affirmative by applying the framework of care ethics to the animal morality debate. According to care ethics, empathic care is the wellspring of morality in humans. While there have been several suggestive analyses of nonhuman animals as empathic, much of the literature within the animal morality debate has marginalized analyses from the perspective of care ethics. In this paper I examine care ethics to extract (...) its core commitments to what is required for moral care: emotional motivation that enables the intentional meeting of another’s needs, and forward-looking responsibility in particular relationships. What is not required, I argue, are metarepresentational capacities or the ability to scrutinize one’s reasons for action, and thus being retrospectively accountable. This minimal account of moral care is illustrated by moral practices of parental care seen in many nonhuman animal species. In response to the worry that parental care in nonhuman animals lacks all evaluation and is therefore nonmoral I point to cultural differences in human parenting and to normativity in nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Many nonhuman animals have the emotional capacities to form caring relationships that matter to them, and for their immediate welfare. Drawing from care ethics, we argue that these relationships also matter as objectively valuable states of affairs. They are part of what is good in this world. However, the value of care is precarious in human-animal interactions. Be it in farming, research, wildlife ‘management’, zoos, or pet-keeping, the prevention, disruption, manipulation, and instrumentalization of care in animals by humans is ubiquitous. (...) We criticize a narrow conception of welfare that, in practice, tends to overlook non-experiential forms of harm that occur when we interfere with caring animals. Additionally, we point out wrongs against caring animals that are not just unaccounted for but denied by even an expansive welfare perspective: The instrumentalization of care and caring animals in systems of use can occur as a harmless wrong that an approach purely focused on welfare may, in fact, condone. We should therefore adopt an ethical perspective that goes beyond welfare in our dealings with caring animals. (shrink)

One reason for the widespread resistance to evolutionary accounts of the origins of humanity is the fear that they undermine morality: if morality is based on nothing more than evolved dispositions, it would be shown to be illusory, many people suspect. This view is shared by some philosophers who take their work on the evolutionary origins of morality to undermine moral realism. If they are right, we are faced with an unpalatable choice: to reject morality on scientific grounds, or to (...) reject our best- confirmed scientific explanation of our origins in order to save morality. Fortunately, as I show, we have no reason to accept the deflationary claims of some evolutionary ethicists: morality, as we ordinarily understand it, is fully compatible with evolution. (shrink)