Moral Status Phần 4 pdf

jects. ‘If it really were possible’, he says, ‘to save many lives by an ex￾periment that would take just one life, and there were no other way

those lives could be saved, it might be right to do the experiment.’57

3.4. Objections to the Sentience Only View

The conclusions that Singer draws from the principle of equal con￾sideration entail that many of us should change our daily behaviour,

especially our diets. Yet these conclusions are more consistent with

practical necessity than are some of the implications of the Life

Only view. While no one can exist without causing the deaths of

many living things, most people could lead satisfactory lives without

consuming animal products that are produced in inhumane ways.58

Some people gain important medical benefits from the continued

use of animals in biomedical research; but equivalent expenditures

on education, housing, and other social needs might produce as

great an overall improvement in human welfare, with less non￾human suffering.

Unfortunately, the Sentience Only view has implications which

are more troubling than the ones that Singer emphasizes. There are

four potentially fatal objections to the principle of equal considera￾tion. Three of these—the environmentalist, Humean/feminist, and

human rights objections—spotlight problematic consequences of

the view that sentience is the only valid criterion of moral status.

The fourth objection involves some implications of the principle of

equal consideration which I argue are impossible to reconcile with

the demands of practical necessity.

The Environmentalist Objection

Many environmental ethicists reject the Sentience Only view because

it denies moral status to plants, species, and other non-sentient ele￾ments of the biosphere.59 On the Sentience Only view, we may have

Sentience and the Utilitarian Calculus 71

57 Ibid. 78. 58 There are, however, questions about the nutritional adequacy of a vegan diet

for pregnant and nursing women, and young children. See Kathryn Paxton George,

‘Should Feminists be Vegetarians?’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,

19, No. 2 (Winter 1994), 405–34. 59 For instance, Rolston, Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple

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morally sound reasons to protect these things, but these reasons can

only be based upon the interests of sentient beings, since non-sen￾tient entities have no interests that can enter directly into our moral

calculations. Species, Singer says, ‘are not conscious entities and so

do not have interests above and beyond the interests of the individ￾ual animals that are members of the species’.60 We have, therefore,

no moral obligations to species as such.

In contrast, deep ecologists argue that natural plant and animal

species, populations, and habitats can all have moral status. Aldo

Leopold, the intellectual founder of the contemporary environmen￾talist movement, called for an ethic in which human beings are seen

as members of the biological community, having moral obligations

to the community’s other members.61 Within such an ethic, an or￾ganism’s moral status is based upon its ecosystemic relationships to

the rest of the biosphere. Leopold would probably have agreed, for

instance, that it is more important to protect the remaining stands

of bishop pines on the California coast than the wild radishes that

grow by the roadsides there. For the pines are an important and vul￾nerable part of the indigenous plant community; while the radishes

are hardy European imports which are in no danger of disappear￾ing.62

On the Sentience Only view, such considerations are irrelevant to

moral status. Trees—however vital to the ecosystem—have no more

moral status than wild radishes. To many environmentalists, a the￾ory which allows us to have moral obligations regarding the non-sen￾tient elements of the natural world but never to them, seems just as

inadequate as the Kantian theory, which allows us to have duties re￾garding animals, but never to them. John Rodman recounts that he

first perceived a particular piece of California coastal chaparral ‘in

terms of sagebrush, scrub oak, and cactus’, and only later learned

that it was also home to dusky-footed woodrats. ‘On reflection,’ he

72 An Account of Moral Status

University Press, 1988), 94, 146; and J. Baird Callicott, ‘On the Intrinsic Value of

Nonhuman Species’, in Bryan G. Norton (ed.), The Preservation of Species

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 280–4.

60 Peter Singer, ‘Not for Humans Only: The Place of Nonhumans in

Environmental Ethics’, in K. E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre (eds.), Ethics and the

Problems of the 21st Century (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,

1979), 203. 61 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970). 62 The pine is Pinus muricata, the radish, Raphanus sativus.

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