Online research in philosophy

The conclusion of animal liberationists that the underlying assumptions of modern egalitarian humanism can be construed to imply an equal moral desert for the higher nonhuman animals has recently been challenged by R. G. Frey on the grounds that linguistic incompetence and lack of self-consciousness on the part of animals preclude them from having desires, beliefs, interests, and rights. AlthoughFrey’s arguments fail, they challenge us to provide alternative accounts of these descriptive and normative categories of human and animal psychology. Phenomenological and behavioral analyses demonstrate both the meaningfulness and the truthfulness ofattributing desires, beliefs, and interests to many nonhuman animals. Principles ofaxiology and ethics prescribe that animal interests ought to be objects of our moral concern, but do not vindicate an egalitarian interpretation of animal liberation. A fundamental challenge of the anima1liberation debate is how to frame a nonegalitarian ethic that can nevertheless preserve the moral gains of various liberation movements inspired by principles of equality.

It is commonly believed that we humans are justified in exploiting animals because we are higher beings:persons who have highly complex, autonomous lives as moral agents. However, there are many marginal humans who are not and never will be persons. Those who think it is permissible to exploit animal nonpersons but wrong to do the same to human nonpersons must show that there is a morally relevant difference between the two groups. Speciesists, who believe that membership in a species whose normal adults are persons is sufficient for a right to life, attempt to do just this. As the failure of the best arguments which can be marshalled on their behalf indicates, they are unable to justify their view. I conclude that, although there is a morally relevant difference between human nonpersons and most animal nonpersons, this difference is not an indication of superior moral status. We would do better to abandon speciesism and the assumption thatpersonhood is morally paramount for a view which implies that both human and nonhuman nonpersons are morally considerable and have a right to life.

Conservative thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama have produced a battery of objections to the transhumanist project of fundamentally enhancing human capacities. This article examines one of these objections, namely that by allowing some to greatly extend their capacities, we will undermine the fundamental moral equality of human beings. I argue that this objection is groundless: once we understand the basis for human equality, it is clear that anyone who now has sufficient capacities to count as a person from the moral point of view will continue to count as one even if others are fundamentally enhanced; and it is mistaken to think that a creature which had even far greater capacities than an unenhanced human being should count as more than an equal from the moral point of view.

Efforts to trace the evolutionary antecedents of human morality introduce challenges and opportunities for business ethics. The biological precedents of responsibility suggest that human tendencies to respond morally are deeply rooted. This does not mean, however, that those tendencies are always consistent with ends human beings seek to pursue. This paper investigates the conflicts that may arise between human beings’ moral predispositions and the purposes human beings pursue.

Quantitative utilitarianism demands equal treatment of human and nonhuman animals where there are no relevant differences between them. A difference is relevant only if it excludes the animal from suffering evil if it is treated differently. Quantitative utilitarianism cannot, however, resolve conflicts of interest nor prove that painless killing of animals is morally wrong. For this we need a higher qualitativegood. I suggest Care, as Heidegger understands it, is such a good, and that it is the essence not only of human, but of nonhuman animaI Dasein as well. Because animals care, we are morally obliged to desist from killing them, even painlessly.

How much do animals matter--morally? Can we keep considering them as second class beings, to be used merely for our benefit? Or, should we offer them some form of moral egalitarianism? Inserting itself into the passionate debate over animal rights, this fascinating, provocative work by renowned scholar Paola Cavalieri advances a radical proposal: that we extend basic human rights to the nonhuman animals we currently treat as "things." Cavalieri first goes back in time, tracing the roots of the debate from the 1970s, then explores not only the ethical but also the scientific viewpoints, examining the debate's precedents in mainstream Western philosophy. She considers the main proposals of reform that recently have been advanced within the framework of today's prevailing ethical perspectives. Are these proposals satisfying? Cavalieri says no, claiming that it is necessary to go beyond the traditional opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism and focus on the question of fundamental moral protection. In the case of human beings, such protection is granted within the widely shared moral doctrine of universal human rights' theory. Cavalieri argues that if we examine closely this theory, we will discover that its very logic extends to nonhuman animals as beings who are owed basic moral and legal rights and that, as a result, human rights are not human after all.

A method of reflective equilibrium is adumbrated and then used to test the adequacy of moral conceptions appealing to fundamental human rights against Nietzschean conceptions of morality which would reject such an appeal. There is an attempt here both to articulate and critically probe a distinctive moral methodology (the method of reflective equilibrium) and to examine skeptical challenges to a foundationalism which would ground morality in fundamental rights claims. I attempt a partial testing of such a moral methodology by examining its ability to meet such skeptical challenges to the rational grounding of human rights, and I assess (and this is plainly a reciprocal process) the depth of such skeptical challenges by the ability of such challenges to survive such an application of a method of reflective equilibrium. If that method is applied with discrimination and understanding, is it sufficient to defuse skeptical challenges to the pervasive belief that either rationality or the very taking of the moral point of view requires the acceptance of the belief that the design of morally acceptable social institutions and practices must be such that they aim at achieving a state of affairs in which all human beings are to be afforded equal consideration? Can a method of reflective equilibrium establish that a good society must embody such a commitment to an equality of human rights?

This paper defends “moral individualism” against various arguments that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the “nature-of-the-kind argument,” which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and various versions of the idea that there is a special form of life that all human beings share but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities and potential are no higher than those of the animals.

Suppose that there are human beings whose overall psychological capacities and potential are comparable to or lower than those characteristic of the higher orders of nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees. And suppose that the limited cognitive capacities of at least some of these human beings are congenital and resulted because the genes that coded for the growth of their brains were different, or operated differently, from those that code for the development of the brain in other human beings. I refer to these human beings as the ‘radically cognitively limited’—though for brevity I will often use the abbreviated term the ‘cognitively limited’.¹ None of the..

In the previous chapter I gave reasons for believing that the fundamental principle of equality, on which the equality of all human beings rests, is the principle of equal consideration of interests. Only a basic moral principle of this kind can allow us to defend a form of equality which embraces all human beings, with all the differences that exist between them. I shall now contend that while this principle does provide an adequate basis for human equality, it provides a basis which cannot be limited to humans. In other words I shall suggest that, having accepted the principle of equality as a sound moral basis for relations with others of our own species, we are also committed to accepting it as a sound moral basis for relations with those outside our own species - the nonhuman animals.