Abstract
Prominent non-speciesist attempts to determine the amount of moral
standing properly attributable to conscious beings argue that certain non-human
animals should be granted the highest consideration as self-conscious persons.
Most of these theories also include a lesser moral standing for the sentient, or
merely conscious, non-person. Thus, the standard approach has been to advocate
a two-tiered theory—'sentience' or 'consciousness' and 'self-consciousness' or
'personhood'. While the first level seems to present little interpretative difficulty,
the second has recently been criticized as a rather obscurantist label. For it
would seem, both on empirical and conceptual grounds, that self-consciousness/personhood
comes in degrees. If these observations are at all revealing, they indicate that the two-tiered model is inadequate. This is the view I will support here, replacing the standard dichotomy with a more accurate seven-tiered account of cognitive moral standing adaptable to all three major perspectives of moral reasoning, namely, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics.