Abstract
According to a diverse and widely popular family of moral theories, there is a class of individuals – typically humans or persons – who have the very same, full moral status. Individuals not falling into that class count for less, or not at all, morally speaking. In this article, I identify two problems for such theories, the mapping problem and the problem of misgrounded value, and argue that they are serious enough to be decisive. I will then propose an alternative account of full and equal moral status that avoids those problems. In grounding full moral status in phenomenal consciousness, it preserves the idea that you and I are equal, but at the same time radically expands the community of moral equals. I conclude by discussing some practical implications of my proposal.
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Notes
Virtually all philosophers who use the concept of full moral status agree that having full moral status means being maximally inviolable. Philosophers disagree on what else comes with full moral status. Some, for example, hold that there is a stronger reason to provide aid to individuals with full moral status than to individuals with a lesser moral status. Trying to give a comprehensive definition of full moral status is an important but separate discussion, which I will not entertain in this article. It will be sufficient to focus on maximal inviolability as the central feature of full moral status.
There are other factors that may make a difference, such as special relationships or mode of agency.
The term “dignity” takes on different meanings in different contexts. We may say that people “lack dignity” when they act in certain awful ways. We are then referring to what can be called “achievement dignity,” which refers to the respect-worthy status of someone’s actions, is a matter of degree, and can change over time. That is not the kind of dignity I will discuss in this article. Instead, I use the term “dignity” to refer to a particular moral status, full moral status, and I do that because Patrick Lee and Robert P. George, whose account of human dignity will be a focus of the critical part of this article, do the same, even though I believe that only using the term “full moral status” would be preferable. For a useful discussion of the different concepts of dignity, see, e.g., Gilabert 2018, Chapter 5.
The term “full moral status” is prejudicial, as it suggests that those who have full moral status have maximal moral status. I consider it an open question whether there are or could be superior beings who have a moral status that is higher than what is commonly called full moral status. Having made this disclaimer, however, I will still use the term, for the sake of convenience.
The declaration that “all men are created equal,” which is part of the United States Declaration of Independence, for example, implicitly refers to a creator, and is anchored in the idea that humans are all equally created in the image of God (see, e.g., Fletcher 2001). Jeremy Waldron argues that John Locke, the “Father of Liberalism,” too has defended equal human worth on the basis of our supposed equal God-likeness (Waldron 2002).
In 2014, David Bourget and David J. Chalmers surveyed 931 faculty members in Departments of Philosophy in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australasia, in order to determine their views on central philosophical issues. 72.8% of respondents stated that they accept or lean towards atheism, while only 14.6% stated that they accept or lean towards theism (Bourget and Chalmers 2014, 494). It should be noted that belief in the existence of a god does not guarantee belief in the Abrahamic God, and even less belief that all humans are created in God’s image.
All individuals with full moral status are entitled to the same protections and benefits. That is, all individuals with full moral status have equal moral status, which is why I use the terms “full and equal moral status” and “full moral status” interchangeably.
It should be noted that there have also been more radical departures from the idea of human superiority, such as Paul W. Taylor’s biocentric egalitarianism. Taylor proposes that all organisms, as “teleological centers of life” (Taylor 1981, 210), have equal inherent worth. Though interesting and important, I will not discuss Taylor’s and other biocentric proposals in this article, as my primary goal is to demonstrate that there is a coherent and plausible alternative to human dignity, personhood, and closely related accounts that upholds the claim that there is an exclusive class of organisms with full and equal moral status.
There is a third alternative that we could call “status relationalism,” which is the view that the moral status of an individual is not determined solely by his or her particular characteristics, or his or her membership in some particular kind, but also or exclusively by the relations he or she has or can have with us. A recent proposal of this kind is Thaddeus Metz’s modal-relational account of moral status. Drawing from sub-Saharan African thought, Metz argues that “the more a being is capable of being part of a friendly or loving relationship with normal humans, the greater its moral status” (Metz 2012, 394). His account is not exactly an account of full and equal moral status, as severely cognitively impaired humans as well as certain psychopaths, being “incapable of being subjects of a communal relationship” (Metz 2012, 397), are only accorded partial moral status, but it is close enough to warrant mention. A comprehensive critical appraisal, however, is beyond what I can hope to achieve in this article, so I will only offer a brief observation. If the relevant capacity, for being a subject of a communal relationship, comes in degree, as the first quote suggests – notice the “the more” – and as seems likely, then Metz’s relational account too faces what I call “the mapping problem,” which I will explain below.
While much of what Lee and George have written (see, e.g., George and Gómez-Lobo 2002, 261; Lee 2003, 80, n. 9; Lee 2004, 253; Gómez-Lobo 2005, 105) suggests that the possession of basic natural capacities for certain higher mental functions is a kind of potential, when confronted with the objection that basic natural capacities come in degrees Lee writes that the “genuine criterion for having a right to life is being […] a distinct substance of a rational nature […]. I hold that human beings do differ in kind, and not just in degree, from other animals” (Lee 2007, 97). Unfortunately, he provides little indication as to what exactly he believes it is that makes it true that all humans are different in kind from all other animals, if not the possession of a certain potential. I provide some speculation and respond to Lee in detail in Ebert 2020a, Section 1, which is why I will not rehash my arguments here.
Another important example of an account of this kind is Tom Regan’s theory of animal rights, according to which full and equal moral status is reserved for experiencing subjects-of-a-life (Regan 2004).
For a helpful introductory discussion of the death of essentialism in biology, see Ereshefsky 2017.
That is not to say that the rate of change in evolution is constant. In fact, there is a longstanding debate in evolutionary biology between those who see evolution as a continuous process of small and steady changes and proponents of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, first proposed in Eldredge and Gould 1972, which states that evolutionary change mostly occurs during short periods of rapid evolution interspersed between longer periods of stasis. It is important to note, however, that the short periods of rapid evolution in punctuated equilibrium theory are short not in the everyday sense of “short” but relative to the geologic time scale, and may encompass thousands of generations. The change from one generation to the next is still gradual in the sense relevant to my argument, which is why the debate in evolutionary biology over gradual versus punctual change is irrelevant here. Also, even if we assume, for the sake of argument and contrary to what we know from evolutionary biology, that the biological characteristics that philosophers commonly associate with our special moral status in fact sprang into existence from one generation to the next, it is still true that they could have emerged gradually, as they can surely be conceived in various degrees. Instead of asking you to consider your actual line of ancestor, I would then ask you to imagine a hypothetical spectrum of individuals that begins with you and continues with individuals who have the morally relevant biological characteristics to a progressively lower degree. My argument would go through just the same.
For an older, but still very useful and more general discussion of gradual moral status in deontological moral theory, see DeGrazia 2008, especially the remarks on the sliding-scale model on pp. 192 ff.
For example, if person A has a slightly lower moral status than person B, there is a certain amount of harm to others, for the prevention of which it would be permissible to sacrifice A but not B, other things being equal. Hence, in a situation where just that amount of preventable harm is at stake, having a lower moral status than B can make the difference between life and death for A, even though the difference in moral status is trivial.
“[A]ny view of rightness and wrongness that links them to consequences, whether directly or indirectly, wholly or partly, moves us away from the person-centered exercise of, so to speak, looking at the autonomous person killed to the person-neutral exercise of trying to determine whether the world is a better or worse place, with more or less net pleasure or desire-satisfaction or whatever, as a result of the killing” (Frey 1984, 17).
I have first proposed this term in Ebert 2018.
The non-egalitarian tiers of mental-threshold egalitarian theories of moral status, like consequentialism, typically do not assign value to the cup as such. According to McMahan, for example, killing a sentient non-person is morally wrong to the degree that death harms the victim, which varies with the strength of his or her time-relative interest in continuing to live. This account, which applies not only to non-human animals but also to fetuses, infants, humans with certain severe cognitive impairments, and other humans who fall below the threshold of respect (see, e.g., McMahan 2008, 83 f.), has implications that starkly contrast with common intuition. “[I]t would be permissible (and perhaps even morally required, if other things are equal) to kill the healthy, orphaned newborn in order to use its organs to save […] three other children” (McMahan 2002, 360). It would also be more seriously wrong to kill infants born into favorable socio-economic circumstances than infants who were less lucky, other things being equal (Lippert-Rasmussen 2007, 732). This adds insult to injury and, to me, is an unacceptable implication.
In Regan’s theory, a subject-of-a-life is the functional equivalent of what is more commonly called a person in structurally similar theories, such as McMahan’s.
In 2014, Chappell transitioned from male to female, and changed name from Timothy to Sophie Grace.
Whereas an accidental property of a thing is one such that it is possible for that thing to exist and not to have that property, an essential property is a property without which that thing cannot exist.
It has also been argued that love is not based on the characteristics of the loved one alone, but always “historical” (Nozick 1974, 169) as well.
Just like, in colloquial contexts, it would be odd to refer to an infant as a “non-person,” I realize that my use of the term “somebody” contrasts with the colloquial understanding of the term. People usually do not refer to non-human animals as somebodies, unless they are pets. While Fido the dog is a “he,” the nameless pig in a factory farm usually is an “it.” On my usage of the term the term “somebody,” there is somebody whenever there is a center of consciousness, and vice versa. Being a somebody in that sense is a property of the kind that is appropriate as a basis of full and equal moral status: it is binary, not a threshold property, and essential, as I will argue below.
In David J. Chalmers’ words, phenomenal consciousness is “at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. […] We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness” (Chalmers 1996, 3).
Some philosophers have defended the view that we remain dimly conscious even during dreamless sleep. Edmund Husserl was one of them (Smith 2003). As that view is very speculative, we do better if we do not assume its truth, and instead work on the assumption that the common sense view is correct.
For a detailed discussion of the notion of a level of consciousness, particularly as used in cognitive science, see Bayne, Hohwy, and Owen 2016.
Perhaps the most notable defense of this view in recent times is that set out by Eric T. Olson in his 1997 book, The Human Animal (Olson 1997).
See, e.g., Lee 2004; “it is reasonable to expect that having moral status at all […] should be based on the type of thing (or substantial entity) something is” (p. 262).
Peter van Inwagen has objected that what Lisa leaves behind is not an organism but only the non-essential parts of her organism, a mere collection of cells, while Lisa persists in a “radically maimed” form, as a woman “about as maimed as it is possible for a [wo]man to be” (van Inwagen 1995, 172). Lisa, who is now a bare brain, is then equipped with the non-essential parts that are left of Lian. This is a rather unnatural description of what happens, and raises new questions, but this is not the place to address those questions. I have addressed them in Ebert 2016, Chapter 4.
Liao has objected to this argument that, in all cases of dicephalic twinning, “there are in fact two organisms, although they may not be completely independent organisms” (Liao 2006, 340), and we can imagine that van Inwagen would take a similar position. I have responded to this objection (Ebert 2016, Chapter 4), and so has McMahan (McMahan 2002, 35 ff.; McMahan 2015, 515 f.).
Frances Kamm has objected to that requirement as well (Kamm 2007, 274).
Note that this “we” excludes, e.g., anencephalic infants, and hence does not include quite as many humans as Lee and George would like to include. To my mind, that is an advantage rather than a disadvantage of my view.
The capacity for phenomenal consciousness is conceptually distinct from sentience, if sentience is understood as “the capacity for having any pleasant or unpleasant experiences” (DeGrazia 2020, 18). At least conceivably, there could be animals who are conscious, but to whom the contents of their consciousness do not matter. Hence, while all sentient animals are conscious, it may be the case that not all conscious animals are sentient. If being sentient can be shown to be binary, not a threshold property, and essential, I am open to be convinced that sentience is preferable to the capacity for phenomenal consciousness as a basis for full and equal moral status. In terms of our treatment of animals, however, I suspect that the distinction between the two alternatives is a distinction without a difference, as virtually all conscious animals we affect in morally significant ways, such as the animals we eat, are sentient as well.
The word “normally” here is meant to exclude cases in which killing may arguably not be a failure to show due respect, such as cases of self-defense and euthanasia.
It has been argued that phenomenal consciousness is intrinsically valuable (see, e.g., Siewert 1998), and there is a risk that my view will be mistaken for the view that killing conscious beings is wrong because it reduces the total amount of intrinsic value in the world. That would make conscious beings mere containers of intrinsic value, which I have argued they are not. In contrast, I hold that conscious beings have moral worth in virtue of having the capacity for phenomenal consciousness.
There is debate in the literature over what to do when there is scientific uncertainty and all the best available empirical evidence tells us is that it is merely likely, or possible and not unlikely, that animals of a particular order are phenomenally conscious. For a defense of giving such animals the benefit of the doubt, see, e.g., Birch 2017. For a defense of conservatism with regard to animal consciousness, see, e.g., Murray 2020.
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Acknowledgements
This article was greatly improved by the careful and detailed comments and advice given to me by Valéry Giroux, Kristin Voigt, and five anonymous reviewers, to whom I am most grateful. For helpful discussions of various parts and versions of this article, I would also like to thank George Sher, Baruch Brody, Thaddeus Metz, and audiences at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique in Montréal, Lagos State University, the Twentieth Asian Bioethics Conference in Dhaka, the University of Nairobi, the University of Dar es Salaam, the University of Dhaka, Jagannath University, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, Texas State University, Rice University, the University of Windsor, the University of Rennes 2, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the University of Delhi. Finally, I would like to thank Maqsuda Afroz for proofreading the manuscript and the Centre de Recherche en Éthique for the generous financial support it provided while I was working on this article.
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Ebert, R. Being a World Unto One’s Self. ZEMO 5, 179–202 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-022-00125-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-022-00125-y