Moral Status

Breaking a person's leg wrongs the person. Breaking a chair's leg does not wrong the chair. The chair may belong to someone, and breaking it may wrong them, but nothing has been done to the chair that the chair has any complaint about.

Between those two cases sit almost everything that practical ethics argues over. A laboratory animal, an embryo, a person whose higher brain functions have been permanently destroyed, an old forest, a language model that produces distressed sentences. Every applied question in this tier assumes an answer to where such things fall, and the assumption is almost always made silently.

Mattering for one's own sake

The phrase for its own sake is what the definition turns on. There are excellent reasons not to smash a stranger's window, and none of them is about the window. Reasons of that kind are duties about a thing. A duty owed to a thing is different, and only things with moral status can be owed anything.

The distinction is worth holding onto because it dissolves a common confusion. Someone who says that it is wrong to burn down an ancient wood has not yet said whether the wood has moral status. They may mean that the wood matters in itself, or that people who love it would be deprived, or that future generations have a claim on it, or that a person who would burn it has something badly wrong with them. Those are four different positions and only the first assigns status to the wood.

Kant is the standard illustration. On the usual reading of his remarks about animals, cruelty to an animal is wrong not because the animal is wronged but because a person who treats a suffering creature callously will more easily treat people that way. The duty is a duty about the animal, discharged for the sake of human beings. Almost nobody now finds this satisfying as an account of what is wrong with torturing a dog, and the dissatisfaction is a good place to start feeling the pull of the concept.

Two roles, often confused

Ordinary thought runs the two together because in the paradigm case they coincide. A competent adult human is both: they can be wronged, and they can wrong others.

They come apart in both directions, and the direction that matters is the one where patiency outruns agency. A newborn is not a moral agent. Neither is a person in the late stages of dementia, nor someone with a cognitive impairment severe enough that they cannot be held responsible for anything. It would be monstrous to say that none of them can be wronged. So being a moral agent cannot be a condition of being a moral patient, and any criterion of moral status framed in terms of rationality or moral capacity will exclude human beings that no one is prepared to exclude.

Tom Regan built his case for animal rights on precisely this in 1983, and the structure of the argument is worth having whatever one thinks of his conclusion. Whatever capacity is proposed as the ground of moral status has to be possessed by every human being who obviously has status. Most of the candidates that sound impressive, such as rationality, autonomy, language, and the capacity to make plans, fail that test. The capacities that pass it are much more modest, and they are shared with a great many animals.

The other direction is less discussed and not empty. A being could in principle be an agent without being a patient, if it could recognise reasons and act on them while nothing could go better or worse for it. Whether an artificial system could be like that is a live question, and the advanced tier takes it up.

What the modest capacities are

Bentham put the case for sentience in a footnote to the seventeenth chapter of his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in 1789, and it has framed the discussion ever since. His point was that the question to ask about a creature is not whether it can reason or speak, but "Can they suffer?". A being that can suffer has something at stake in how it is treated, and no amount of intellectual sophistication is needed for that.

The appeal of sentience as a criterion is that it identifies the feature in virtue of which treatment matters to the being itself. Pain is bad for the one in pain. It does not become worse for being felt by something articulate.

Joel Feinberg proposed in 1974 that having interests is the condition on being able to have rights at all, and the proposal turns on there being a point of view for things to go well or badly from. A being with desires, aversions, and a felt life has that. A thing that merely has conditions under which it functions well does not obviously have it, which is why plants and rivers are the hard cases rather than the easy ones.

The dispute at that boundary is genuine. One side holds that a tree has no stake in anything, and that talk of what is good for a tree is the same kind of talk as what is good for a car engine, which is a fact about the standards we apply rather than about the engine. The other side holds that a living thing has a good of its own, directed toward its own flourishing, in a way that no artefact does, and that this is enough. The environmental questions in later tiers turn on which of those is right.

Harm is the concept that connects status to practice. Once a being has interests, actions can set those interests back, and setting them back is what most moral prohibitions prohibit. Feinberg's analysis of harm as a setback to interests, worked out at length in Harm to Others in 1984, is the standard reference point.

Notice that harm so defined is not the same as pain. A person deceived about something that matters to them, and never undeceived, has been harmed without suffering. A person given a painful injection that saves their life has suffered without being harmed. The next article takes the concept apart properly, because a great deal turns on getting it right.

The candidates, in outline

The grounds that have been proposed fall into a small number of families, and each has a characteristic difficulty that later articles work through.

Sophisticated cognitive capacities, such as self-awareness or the ability to form plans for one's own future, mark out something that plausibly matters. They exclude infants and the severely impaired.

The potential to develop such capacities extends the criterion to cover infants and embryos. It has to explain why a potential possessor of a status-conferring property has the status now, when a potential doctor is not currently a doctor.

Sentience and the capacity for interests are possessed by every being anyone wants to include, which is their strength. They also extend status very widely, to most vertebrates and possibly beyond, with practical consequences that most people do not accept.

Membership of a species whose typical members are cognitively sophisticated delivers the ordinary verdicts exactly. It has to answer the charge that species membership is a biological classification, and that treating a biological classification as morally decisive is the structure of the prejudices moral philosophy exists to expose.

Standing in particular relationships, such as being someone's child or a member of a community of mutual accommodation, explains a great deal about how status is actually accorded. It struggles with the being nobody stands in any relation to, who does not thereby stop mattering.

Next

This article has said what it takes for a being to be capable of being wronged, and has used harm as the working example of what wronging consists in. Both concepts need more than they have had. The next article asks what makes someone worse off, why a person's agreement to something can change whether it may be done to them, and where concern for another person turns into a refusal to let them run their own life.