Moral Status Phần 2 docx

I argue that personhood, in the full-blooded sense that requires

the capacity for moral agency, is indeed a sufficient condition for full

moral status. It is not, however, a necessary condition; infants and

mentally disabled human beings ought to have the same basic moral

rights as other sentient human beings, even though they may not be

persons in this sense. In the weaker sense which does not require

moral agency, personhood is sufficient for a moral status stronger

than that of mentally simpler organisms such as worms or oysters,

but it is not sufficient for full moral status. Genetic humanity, on the

other hand, is at best an indicator, not an independently valid cri￾terion, of moral status. Some genetically human entities (e.g. sperm

and ova) may have little or no moral status, while some non-human

entities may have full moral status.

Chapter 5 examines two theories of moral status which are based

upon relational rather than intrinsic properties. Some deep ecolo￾gists, such as J. Baird Callicott, hold that the moral status of a mem￾ber of a particular biological species depends entirely upon that

species’ role—positive or negative—within a social or biotic com￾munity. Feminist ethicists, such as Nel Noddings, have argued that

the moral status of living things always depends upon our emotional

connections to them.19 I argue that both these theories contain in￾sights that need to be incorporated into an adequate account of

moral status; but that neither membership in a social or biological

community nor emotional connectedness can serve as the sole cri￾terion of moral status.

Chapter  proposes a new account of moral status, which gives

weight both to such intrinsic properties as life, sentience, and per￾sonhood, and to social, emotional, and biosystemic relationships. (I

shall say more about this presently.)

In Part II, this multi-criterial approach to moral status is applied

to three contemporary moral issues. Chapter 7 reviews the principles

proposed in Chapter , and previews the arguments of the next three

chapters. Chapter 8 explores the moral permissibility of euthanasia,

under various controversial circumstances. Chapter 9 deals with the

ethics of abortion; and Chapter 10, with the moral status of non￾human animals. Chapter 11 presents a few concluding remarks

The Concept of Moral Status 19

19 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 86–8.

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about the goal of achieving a greater consensus in our judgements

of moral status.

While no theory of moral status can yield incontrovertible con￾clusions on such contentious issues, I argue that a multi-criterial ap￾proach enables us to take better account of the full range of morally

relevant considerations than is possible with any of the uni-criterial

approaches. It enables us to see, for instance, that what we owe to

human foetuses is often different from what we owe to human be￾ings who have already been born, or to non-human animals; and

that none of these obligations can be understood in isolation from

the others, or from what we owe to natural plant and animal species,

and to ecosystems.

1.8. Moral Status as a Multi-Criterial Concept

Christopher Stone aptly describes the uni-criterial approaches to

moral status, as those which

propose . . . that there is a single key [property]: life, or the capacity to feel

pain, or the powers of reason, or something else. Those things that possess

the key property count morally—all equally and all in the same way. Those

things that lack it are utterly irrelevant, except as resources for the benefit of

those things that do count.20

Stone rejects this kind of moral monism. He refers to his own ap￾proach as ‘moral pluralism’. Although my views are in some re￾spects similar to his, and indebted to them, I do not follow him in

this usage. In much contemporary philosophical discussion, the

term ‘moral pluralism’ refers to the view that there is an irreducible

plurality of moral theories, which are mutually incompatible and yet

equally rationally defensible. On this view, we are doomed to live

with many moral disagreements of the most basic sort, with no hope

that the global human community can ever agree about even the

most fundamental moral principles. While this may be true, it is not

a view that I wish to defend.

My view is, rather, that any satisfactory account of moral status

20 An Account of Moral Status

20 Christopher D. Stone, Earth and Other Ethics: The Case for Moral Pluralism

(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 13.

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