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Notes
I will limit myself to discussing respect on a Kantian model, since I do not believe that other kinds of accounts (e.g., fundamentally consequentialist accounts) get at what is important about respect. My aim is to show that the kind of grounding to which Kantian-style accounts are committed leads to the problems identified; in doing so, I assume certain features of the Kantian analysis (i.e., that respect is an appropriate response to the value of a certain kind of rationality) in order to show that these insights of the Kantian account can be retained in a better analysis of respect so long as we ground it differently. This account is thus not meant as an amplification of Kantian ideas; the goal is to use Kantian insights to jumpstart an account that seems to fit better with how the moral attitude of respect functions in our ethical lives.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. T.E. Hill, Jr., trans, A. Zweig (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1785], 2002).
I have argued elsewhere that Kant’s account (and other contemporary accounts such as Stephen Darwall’s) amounts to this stronger claim, but the weaker claim still generates the problem central to this paper. For a more contemporary example of analysis that results in the stronger claim see: Stephen Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect”, Ethics 88 (1977), pp. 36–49. On Darwall’s view in this 1977 paper, the object of respect is certain salient facts about creatures, and respect amounts to giving appropriate weight to these facts in one’s deliberations (in the case of basic moral respect, this salient fact is that one is a rational being). In his revised account in The Second-Person Standpoint [Stephen Darwall, The Second Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)], Darwall revises the view that the object of respect is a particular fact about some object, and argues instead that respect is fundamentally a way of recognizing some thing as having authority (presumably only an individual on the revised view). Respect on the revised view is thus a way of regarding some particular thing, not a way of giving a fact about it a central place in deliberation. However, even on this revised account, the ground of that authority still rests in a feature that can be lost; on the revised view, recognition respect is analyzed as a way of recognizing the authority of something as giving us reasons to regulate our behavior in certain ways, and that authority gives us second-personal reasons when it involves recognition of the second-personal authority of other agents.
Kant’s statement of the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself suggests this understanding, and many have interpreted the obligation in this way. According to Kant, we are obliged to respect humanity (understood as a certain sort of rational nature) in the person of ourselves or others, and this can be taken to mean that it is my rational nature, or your rational nature, that is to be respected. See Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. T.E. Hill, Jr., trans. A. Zweig (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1785], 2002), p. 230. Allen Wood calls this the “Personification Principle”, and for an interesting discussion of how he thinks this principle generates the problem I am identifying, see Allen Wood, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature I”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72:1 (1998), pp. 196–197.
In this paper I will focus on Wood’s response to this problem, but his view is only one of many that Kantians can, and do, hold. My comments here are thus directed at Wood’s particular reading of Kant and his resulting answer to the problem at hand. Some other Kantian strategies that deal with the problem of “borderline cases” include: an expanded understanding of what rationality means for Kant’s purposes [see: Christine Korsgaard, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals,” in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Volume 25/26, ed. G.B. Peterson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004), pp. 79–110, in which she gestures at an account according to which rational nature isn’t a specific capacity, but can be attributed to a rational being in the metaphysical sense, even if it lacks the full realization of the capacity] and appeal to the kind of legislation autonomous moral legislators would agree to, given which principles we take ourselves to have reason to endorse when we adopt the moral point of view (see: Thomas E.Hill, Jr., Respect, Pluralism, and Justice: Kantian Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 96–103). I focus on Wood’s strategy, and put these others aside, because Wood’s account is especially useful in highlighting the more general problem I have identified, since it is through conversation with it (i.e., as generated by the troubling personification principle) that Wood attempts to deal with the more specific problem cited.
Wood, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational Nature I”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72:1 (1998), p. 198.
Ibid, pp. 198–199.
Allen Wood, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 97.
Ibid, pp. 96–97.
Iris Murdoch has wonderful discussions in this area. For example, her discussion of love in “The Sublime and the Good”, in which she argues, “Love is the perception of individuals…Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.” [Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”, Chicago Review 13:3 (1959), pp. 51–52].
Unlike love, though, respect is a way of seeing creatures as having moral status. Although this status is conferred in virtue of the value which the creatures derive from certain features, respect is a way of seeing this status as requiring something of the moral agent (whereas continuing to love is not morally required). Respect is an attitude that involves setting the class apart as requiring a special kind of response; Section 5 will explore the nature of that response in more detail.
This is the sort of argument often made by moral individualists, such as Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan (See: Peter Singer, “All Animals Are Equal”, Philosophic Exchange 1:5 (1974), pp. 243–257; Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Jeff McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures”, Journal of Ethics 9:3–4 (2005), pp. 353–380)). One of McMahan’s arguments will be discussed briefly in the next section.
That is, an account that meets the criteria for a satisfactory account that were set in Section 2.
There has been much more debate (particularly in the animal ethics literature) concerning arguments about the moral status of kinds (particularly species-kinds) than I can do justice to here. What’s more, I regret that I must put the question of the defensibility of the use of these arguments to support speciesism to the side. I would like to note, however, that the account I will argue for here is meant to show how kinds can matter for moral status, but I believe that they do so in a way that ultimately expands, rather than contracts, the sphere of moral considerability (I argue elsewhere that the kind that respect recognizes is all beings that are subjects of lives, and thus obligations of respect are not limited only to human beings). The argument in this paper is not meant to privilege the human species as a morally relevant kind. Instead, the aim has been to establish that kind-membership can be relevant as a way to solve the problem of ‘marginal cases’, without arguing that species-membership is the grounding of that status. On the view argued here, the grounding of the status that respect recognizes is a particular value-conferring feature possessed by normal members of a kind. But that is not the same thing as saying that species-membership grounds that status by itself.
Jeff McMahan, “Our Fellow Creatures”, Journal of Ethics 9:3–4 (2005), pp. 357–358.
Note that this is different from the Korsgaardian strategy mentioned in Note 5 above, according to which the ‘kind’ claim is reasonably read as a metaphysical one. On such a view, even severely brain-damaged infants are rational. The view developed here has the advantage of explaining the value of being a person for the purposes of establishing respect, but without resting on something along the lines of a ‘natural kind’ view; the view argued for here seeks to explain the expanded scope of respect by reference to how the attitude functions, which can be consistent with ‘kind’ claims being either natural or otherwise.
For example, which feature of creatures is the feature that ‘suffuses’ them with the requisite sort of value still needs to be established. For the purposes of this paper, I assumed that this feature was Kantian rationality, but this was assumed simply in order to make the structure of my analysis clear. For even granting this assumption and working within the Kantian framework, I have shown that we have good reasons to respect the brain-damaged infant – that is, we must actually respect him, and not for indirect or merely pragmatic reasons. However, I ultimately reject the Kantian value theory that identifies a very specific kind of rationality as the value-conferring feature, and I argue elsewhere that this feature is not Kantian rationality, but rather a basic subjectivity, or, to borrow a phrase from Tom Regan), ‘being the subject of a life’ [Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2004), p. 243]. The task of this paper is to explain how the formal structure of respect accounts for ‘marginal cases’; however, once that has been established, I argue elsewhere that the feature that does the ‘suffusing’ shouldn’t be thought of as Kantian rationality for two main reasons: (1) Arguments for that restriction are unsuccessful, and (2) The more intuitive ground for the very basic kind of moral respect discussed here is something that undergirds Kantian autonomy – basic preference autonomy – but that can generate obligations even at that more basic level.
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Foreman, E. Focusing Respect on Creatures. J Value Inquiry 51, 593–609 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-017-9597-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-017-9597-6