Moral Status Phần 1 pps

If an entity has moral status, then wemay not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged togive weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being.Further

I S S U E S I N B I O M E D I C A L E T H I C S

Moral Status

I S S U E S I N B I O M E D I C A L E T H I C S

General Editors

John Harris and Søren Holm

Consulting Editors

Ranaan Gillon and Bonnie Steinbock

The late twentieth century has witnessed dramatic technological ments in biomedical science and the delivery of health care, and these devel- opments have brought with them important social changes All too often ethical analysis has lagged behind these changes The purpose of this series

develop-is to provide lively, up-to-date, and authoritative studies for the increasingly large and diverse readership concerned with issues in biomedical ethics— not just healthcare trainees and professionals, but also philosophers, social scientists, lawyers, social workers, and legislators The series wll feature both single-author and multi-author books, short and accessible enough to be widely read, each of them focused on an issue of outstanding current importance and interest Philosophers, doctors, and lawyers from a number

of countries feature among the authors lined up for the series.

Moral Status

M A RY A N N E WA R R E N

C L A R E N D O N P R E S S · OX F O R D

1 9 9 7

Obligations to Persons and

Other Living Things

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© Mary Anne Warren 1997

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Warren, Mary Anne

Moral status / Mary Anne Warren.

(Issues in biomedical ethics)

Includes bibliographical references.

1 Euthanasia—Moral and ethical aspects 2 Abortion —Moral and ethical aspects.

3 Animal rights 4 Duty I Title II Series.

R725.5.W37 1997 179.7—dc21 97–7803

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My thanks go, first, to my spouse, Michael Scriven, who has vided moral support and valuable critical responses Next, to thestudents and colleagues at San Francisco State University who haveshared with me their thoughts about the ethical issues addressedhere Dianne Romain, Laura Purdy, Rita Manning, and otherfriends in the Society for Women in Philosophy have supported andencouraged me for many years.

pro-I owe special philosophical debts to Michael Tooley, Peter Singer,Mary Midgley, and J Baird Callicott, whose moral philosophiestaught me much, even while inspiring disagreement on some points.Professor Tooley was head of the Philosophy Department at theUniversity of Western Australia when Michael and I went there in

1982, and I benefited from the opportunity to compare ourapproaches to the problem of moral status In 1986, I spent sometime at the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University,which Professor Singer directed, and where some of the ideas forthis book were hatched and tested Professor Midgley was also agreat source of inspiration In 1990, she came to San Francisco State

to speak at the conference on animal rights that I helped to nize; our conversations revealed similarities in our viewpoints thathelped to persuade me that I was on the right track ProfessorCallicott has been kind enough to give critical attention to my pastwork, which has helped me to clarify my views

orga-Finally, I am grateful to the two anonymous readers at OxfordUniversity Press, whose comments substantially improved the book;and to my editors, John Harris, Peter Momtchiloff, and AngelaBlackburn, for their assistance and support

Acknowledgements

Part I: An Account of Moral Status 1

6 A Multi-Criterial Analysis of Moral Status 148

8 Euthanasia and the Moral Status of Human Beings 185

Contents

An Account of Moral Status

PA RT I

This is a philosophical exploration of the concept of moral status.

To have moral status is to be morally considerable, or to have moralstanding It is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, orcan have, moral obligations If an entity has moral status, then wemay not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged togive weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being.Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely becauseprotecting it may benefit ourselves or other persons, but because itsneeds have moral importance in their own right

The questions addressed here involve the criteria that ought to beused in ascribing moral status to entities of diverse kinds Thesequestions are of more than academic interest, since our answers tothem influence our positions on issues that are among the mostpressing of our time, and show every sign of remaining so into thenext century These include the morality of euthanasia, under vari-ous circumstances; whether women have a moral right of access tosafe and legal abortion; whether human beings are entitled to utilizeother animals for food, biomedical research, and other purposes;and whether we have moral obligations towards natural plant or an-imal species, populations, and ecosystems, that are threatened byhuman activities

In this introductory chapter, I comment on moral status as an tuitive or common-sense concept, and on two widespread—thoughnot universal—beliefs about which things have moral status andwhich do not Then I elaborate somewhat upon the concept ofmoral status, and consider why we need such a concept in order tomake sense of our moral obligations towards human beings and therest of the natural world Next, I review some of the major positions

in-on current issues that relate to moral status, outline the book’s ters, and preview some of its conclusions The chapter closes with

chap-1

The Concept of Moral Status

two responses to what is probably the most common objection tothe type of account that I defend.

1.1. Moral Status as an Intuitive Concept

Is it morally wrong to take a stone and grind it into powder, merelyfor one’s own amusement? Most people would say that it is not—un-less there are special circumstances Perhaps the stone belongs tosomeone for whom it carries precious personal memories Perhaps itcontains fossilized dinosaur bones from which important scientificknowledge could be gleaned, or valuable gems which could be sold

to feed starving people In these cases, we might say that it would bewrong to destroy the stone for no good reason But most of uswould regard it as wrong only in so far as it causes harm to humanbeings, or deprives them of important benefits The stone itself doesnot seem be the kind of thing towards which we can have moralobligations

In defence of this common-sense view it might be pointed outthat, to the best of our knowledge, stones are both inanimate and in-sentient That is, they are neither alive nor capable of feeling pleas-ure or pain They have no desires or preferences which we mightthwart by treating them in one way rather than another As far as wecan tell, a stone does not care whether it persists in an unalteredstate for a billion years, or is immediately smashed into bits It has

no needs, interests, well-being, or good of its own, which we could

or should take into account in our moral deliberations

Is it wrong to kill a helpless human child, merely for one’s ownamusement? Most people would say that it is, and be taken abackthat the question was even asked A child is normally presumed tohave not just some moral status, but a very strong moral status, fullyequal to that of older human beings (About human embryos andfoetuses there is, of course, much less agreement.)

This widespread belief in the full and equal moral status ofhuman beings may be defended in various ways, depending uponone’s ethical or religious commitments A theist who derives moralclaims from the will of a deity may maintain that this being has en-dowed each of us with equal moral rights, dignity, value, or worth

A Kantian deontologist may say that all moral agents have an

oblig-4 An Account of Moral Status

ation to respect the autonomy of all other moral agents, treatingthem as ends in themselves and never merely as means A classicalutilitarian may say that moral agents are obliged to give equal con-sideration to the potential pleasures and pains of each human beingwho will be affected by their actions.1Some utilitarians go further,arguing that all beings that are sentient (that is, capable of experien-cing pleasure and pain) are entitled to equal moral consideration, re-gardless of their biological species; but few utilitarians would denythat all sentient human beings are so entitled.

There is, then, substantial consensus about the moral status ofthose entities which appear to occupy the extreme ends of the spec-trum At the one extreme, stones and other inanimate objects areusually presumed to have no moral status at all, even though theymay legitimately be valued and protected for other reasons At theopposite extreme, human beings are usually held to have a moralstatus which is at least as strong as that enjoyed by any other en-tity—or at least any that is part of the natural world Some peoplemay believe that there are supernatural beings that possess astronger moral status; but about the existence of such beings there

is no general consensus

1.2 Disagreements about ‘Clear’ Cases

Yet even when we confine our attention to the extreme ends of thespectrum of moral status, the consensus is not complete Somephilosophers reject the concept of moral status entirely, taking asceptical view of all attempts to use that concept to work towardsthe solution of moral problems Some argue, for instance, that theconcept of moral status is inherently anthropocentric (human-centred) and elitist.2On this view, even the most basic presumptionsabout moral status that most of us share—for example, that human

The Concept of Moral Status 5

1 Classical utilitarianism is the view that morally right actions are those that duce the most pleasure and the least pain or suffering, with the pleasures and pains

pro-of each individual counting the same as those pro-of each other John Stuart Mill’s

Utilitarianism is the definitive statement of this theory: Utilitarianism: With Critical Essays, ed Samuel Gorovitz (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 11–57.

2 See Thomas H Birch, ‘Moral Considerability and Universal Consideration’,

Environmental Ethics, 15, No 4 (Winter 1993), 313–32.

beings have full moral status, while inanimate objects normally havenone—are a reflection of overweening human pride.

Ethical egoists reject the presumption that all human beings havemoral status for a different reason In their view, each moral agenthas obligations only to itself; each is, from its own perspective, theonly thing in the universe that has moral status Moral nihilists re-ject this presumption because they reject all moral principles, in-cluding those that are definitive of moral status Cultural ethicalrelativists deny that any moral claim can have general or cross-cultural validity, because they believe that moral truth is entirely de-termined by the prevailing beliefs within a particular cultural group

On this view, there is no such thing as the moral status that an

enti-ty has, or ought to have, for all moral agents Nothing has moralstatus except in the context of a culture wherein it is accorded moralstatus by a majority of persons; and the moral status that it haswithin each such culture is merely that which the majority of per-sons within the culture currently believe it to have Finally, moralsubjectivists hold that all moral claims, including claims aboutmoral status, are strictly a matter of individual opinion On thisview, there can never be any rationally defensible basis for endorsingone opinion about moral status rather than another

I hope in the chapters that follow to provide good reasons for jecting these sceptical challenges to the concept of moral status Forthe moment, however, I want to focus upon the views of those who

re-do not reject the concept of moral status, yet who appear to rejectone or both of these common presumptions about moral status.Some people seem to ascribe strong moral status to things thatare entirely inanimate For instance, some philosophers in the Jaintradition hold that we have moral obligations to such things asearth, air, fire, and water However, they do not in fact hold thatwholly lifeless things have moral status On the contrary, they urgethe gentle treatment of earth, air, fire, and water precisely becausethey believe that these things are inhabited by many small beings.These beings are not only alive, but sentient; moreover, they can eas-ily be killed or made to suffer by careless human actions.3

In some cultures, stones in general are not granted a strong moral

6 An Account of Moral Status

3 Padmanab S Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 109: and S Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, vol i (New

York: Macmillan, 1929), 297.

status, but certain stones are regarded as sacred Uluru, a red stone monolith near Alice Springs, Australia, has been sacred toaboriginal peoples for millennia, as have many other places and fea-tures of the Australian landscape Aboriginal Australians are notunique in ascribing sacredness to natural places and objects; thereare sacred sites in every part of the world where animistic beliefs areextant Thus, if sacredness is a form of moral status, then it is onethat is often ascribed to what seem to be inanimate objects Usually,however, the belief in the sacredness of a particular place or object

sand-is accompanied by the belief that it sand-is, or contains, a living and tient being (or beings), such as a deity of some sort, or the spirit of

sen-a humsen-an sen-ancestor Here too, we find thsen-at people rsen-arely sen-ascribe morsen-alstatus to entities that they regard as entirely inanimate

There are also people who deny that all human beings have fullmoral status Racists deny the equal moral status of groups ofhuman beings whose appearance and ancestry is, or is thought to be,different from their own Sexists deny that female (or, occasionally,male) human beings have a moral status equal to that of thefavoured sex Prior to this century, the most illustrious philosophers

in the Western tradition have all but unanimously relegated femalehuman beings to a markedly inferior moral status Philosophical lu-minaries as diverse as Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, DavidHume, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ArthurSchopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche have maintained thatwomen cannot be permitted the same autonomy as men, becausethey are naturally less capable of rational thought and action, andthus incapable of genuine moral agency.4

In our own time, philosophers are less likely to claim that women

The Concept of Moral Status 7

4 Aristotle, Politics (London: Heinemann, 1932), 63–5; Augustine, Of the Work

of Monks (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1956), 40; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1947), 466–7; David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1987), 193;

Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, trans.

John T Goldwaite (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960),

78; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of the Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 263–4; Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: A Series

of Essays (St Clair Shores, Mich.: Scholarly Press, 1970), 106; and Friedrich

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1935), 166 The views of

these and other philosophers respecting natural mental differences between women

and men are explored in my 1980 book, The Nature of Woman (Inverness, Calif.:

Edgepress).