Abstract
I characterize the main approaches to the moral consideration of children developed in the light of the argument from 'marginal' cases, and develop a more adequate strategy that provides guidance about the moral responsibilities adults have towards children. The first approach discounts the significance of children's potential and makes obligations to all children indirect, dependent upon interests others may have in children being treated well. The next approaches agree that the potential of children is morally considerable, but disagree as to whether and why children with intellectual disabilities are morally considerable. These approaches explore the moral significance of intellectual capacities, species membership, the capacity for welfare, and the interests of others. I argue that relationships characterized by reciprocity of care are morally valuable, that both the potential to be in such relationships and the actuality of being in them are morally valuable, and that many children with significant intellectual disabilities have this potential.
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Notes
A morally considerable being is one toward whom moral agents can have direct obligations, as opposed to indirect obligations such as those based on the importance of the being to another moral agent. See Warren 1997, 3.
The argument itself, with its comparison of people with cognitive disabilities to animals, has the potential to have repercussions however it is named. This is shown in G.V. O’Brien’s (2003) argument that the argument from marginal cases can affect social workers’ attitudes towards their cognitively disabled clients.
I speak of the moral ‘consideration’ of children to remain agnostic as to whether the best way to give such consideration to children (and other less paradigmatic humans) is to assign them rights. Some of the authors I discuss are invested in this discourse but this is not of central importance in debates around the argument.
See Skidmore 2001 for an argument that a spillover effect assumes what any indirect approach denies, namely that there is an important moral connection between less and more paradigmatic people—or at least that most people believe there to be such a connection.
These approaches raise issues about how much potential a being has to show or have in order to warrant giving it moral consideration, and give rise to questions about fetuses. However, approaches that justify giving moral consideration to children because of their potential and already developing rationality or autonomy can sidestep this debate. See Warren 1992, discussed below.
Autonomy is notoriously ambiguous, with definitions varying from substantive versions that involve the capacity to pursue correct ends, to procedural versions that involve the capacity to reflect upon values and endorse or reject them at least in part as a result of such reflection. On my view, autonomy involves skills and capacities such as possession of some stable preferences, self-awareness regarding one’s stable preferences, and some power to direct one’s action in accordance with one’s stable preferences. There are therefore degrees of autonomy. In the views under discussion, autonomy is strongly tied to rationality (the ability to have a conception of the good and to revise it in response to self-reflection).
Although Wood does not discuss individuals with severe IDs, his claim that some nonhuman animals deserve moral respect because they manifest either fragments of rational nature or necessary conditions of rational nature, suggests he would similarly accord moral respect to less paradigmatic humans with some of these capacities (such as the ability to desire, and the capacity to feel pain and pleasure). See Wood 1998, 200.
Becker describes his own view as moderate speciesism (1983) but because he justifies his preference for members of the human species on the basis of virtue ethics, and the overall role of the virtues in paradigmatic human lives, it seems more accurately an instance of the interests of others approach.
Leslie Pickering Francis and Richard Norman (1978) refer to many but not all less paradigmatic people’s potential to enter into social relations as a reason to differentiate them, morally speaking, from nonhuman animals. However, their view differs from my own both in failing to specify the features of some interpersonal relationships which make them morally valuable, and in arguing that this capacity makes a difference to the moral status of all less paradigmatic children and adults, including those who do not have this potential. They write: “The combined effect of these relations is to bind all human beings together into a single overall community of a morally significant kind” (518).
An ethics of care emphasizes the importance of thinking about and seeking to meet the particular needs of particular people. Care is held to be a central moral value, and caring relationships that respect the vulnerabilities of caregiver and care receiver alike are valuable not only for their ability to meet needs for care, but also because of the value of this kind of relationship. A feminist ethics of care asks who cares and who receives care, and attends to how dimensions of social difference and public institutions shape the allocation and delivery of care (Tronto 1993). It is concerned with both the private and the public provision of care (Noddings 2002, Robinson 1999, Tronto 1993).
Michael Berube notes that he previously made part of his argument rest upon the capacity of many people with intellectual disabilities to engage in reciprocal recognition. However, in his 2009 essay, he writes that parents of children with autism have pointed out that this capacity may not be found in their children, and so he has decided to remove all ‘performance criterion.’ (355).
David Shoemaker writes that he considers susceptibility to emotional address “the defining feature of the moral community.” (2009, 448) Those who are members of the moral community, on his account, are those who may be held morally responsible for their actions, and he concludes that adults with mild mental retardation, but not those who are psychopaths, are susceptible to emotional address and responsive to being held responsible. I am not interested here in questions about when and whether individuals with IDs should be considered morally responsible. Instead my focus is on our moral responsibility for children with significant IDs.
A special issue of the journal Sexuality and Disability 20 (1) was devoted to this topic in 2002. Ehlers-Flint and Strike and McConnell’s articles, discussed above, were two of the contributions to this issue.
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Mullin, A. Children and the Argument from ‘Marginal’ Cases. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 14, 291–305 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9241-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-010-9241-z