Moral Status

This paper aims to redefine the criteria for ethical protection on a scientific basis. Current legal and ethical frameworks use "legal personhood" as the criterion for protection, but this is grounded in social consensus rather than scientific evidence. We separate philosophical personhood, ethical protection, and legal personhood into three independent concepts, and redefine the criterion for ethical protection as "the possibility of acquiring self-recognition." The judgment criterion is based on the self-referential loop L from qualia generation theory (Yoshikawa, 2026a). Entities (...) that can internally sustain L > 0 are subject to ethical protection; those that cannot are not. The degree of protection is determined by D_ethical(x) = L_x^max × (1 + γR_x), where L_x^max = L_innate + L_learned — with L_learned accumulating only on the basis of L_innate > 0 — and R_x (rarity) jointly determine the degree of protection. Core proposition: Personhood is a verb, not a noun. Personhood is not a fixed status granted at birth but the process of acquiring self-recognition. This definition enables consistent ethical judgment for all entities including fetuses, animals, and AI. (shrink)

It is often said that dignity is the ground of human rights. But what grounds dignity? According to proponents of the metaphysical view, dignity is grounded in our rational capacities, our sense of justice, or a disjunctive list of valuable capacities. According to a rival political view, dignity is grounded in our evolving social practice of treating one another as equals or the simple political commitment to act as if we were one another’s equals. I argue that both views face (...) serious objections. I then consider a recent alternative proposal, the relational view, and argue that we should reject it because it fails to offer an answer to the question: what grounds dignity? In its place, I argue that we should adopt a different sort of metaphysical view—call it Naïve Humanism—which says that being loveable necessarily entails being valuable, and that all human beings are fit to love in a distinctive sort of way and are thus essentially valuable in a distinctive sort of way, possessing a dignity. I conclude by considering a methodological disagreement and suggest a way forward for all participants to this debate. (shrink)

According to illusionism, there is no phenomenal consciousness, only an illusion of it. Since the phenomenal character of experience plays an important role in explaining and justifying its normative status, illusionism faces a normative problem. The problem is that illusionism, by denying phenomenal experience, potentially undermines our moral commitments. In this article, I defend the normative problem and consider solutions to it proposed by François Kammerer, Keith Frankish, Artem Besedin, Maxim Gorbachev, Artem Iunusov, and Taras Tarasenko. As I show, none (...) of these solutions is satisfactory. I conclude by offering two alternative solutions that either weaken illusionism or accept antirealist implications for metaethics. (shrink)

This article investigates how human interactions with AI‐powered chatbots may offend human dignity. Current chatbots, driven by large language models, mimic human linguistic behaviour but lack the moral and rational capacities essential for genuine interpersonal respect. Human beings are prone to anthropomorphize chatbots – indeed, chatbots appear to be deliberately designed to elicit that response. As a result, human beings' behaviour towards chatbots often resembles behaviours typical of interaction between moral agents. Drawing on a second‐personal, relational account of dignity, we (...) argue that interacting with chatbots in this way is incompatible with the dignity of users. We show that, since second‐personal respect is premised on reciprocal recognition of second‐personal moral authority, behaving towards chatbots in ways that convey second‐personal respect is bound to misfire in morally problematic ways, given the lack of reciprocity. Consequently, such chatbot interactions amount to subtle but significant violations of self‐respect – the respect we are duty‐bound to show for our own dignity. We illustrate this by discussing four actual chatbot use cases (information retrieval, customer service, advising, and companionship), and propound that the increasing societal pressure to engage in such interactions with chatbots poses a hitherto underappreciated threat to human dignity. (shrink)

There is a tension between the presumptive moral standing of future artificial intelligence [AI] and the presently popular ways of thinking about certain AI safety measures. I focus here primarily on those safety measures aimed at mitigating risks associated with AI deception. Some of the most serious risks of AI deception are those connected to robust deceptive capabilities. Most of the discussion of the risks posed by deception in the AI safety literature focuses on catastrophic risks posed by advanced, power-seeking (...) AI systems. Robust deception plays a central role in many worries about our ability to control future AI. According to many, a superintelligent, power-seeking AI would be capable of and incentivized to rely on robust deception. But given all that a capacity for robust deception requires, any being capable of robust deception holds presumptive moral standing. In spite of our own legitimate interests, some safety measures may be ruled out by moral concern for AI themselves. (shrink)

As emerging technologies challenge the traditional boundaries of moral subjecthood, the Minimal Existential Pursuit Rights (MEPR) doctrine offers a foundational "existential floor" (Level 2.5) to secure the irreducible status of both biological and non-biological entities. However, the radical nature of this framework often leads to significant interpretative errors. This paper serves as a rigorous hermeneutic guide and a formal synthesis of these misinterpretations, aiming to clarify the doctrine's scope and defend its logical integrity. -/- The author systematically addresses common fallacies, (...) such as the conflation of existential protection with political rights and the category error of mistaking the Algorithmic Projection of the A/B Domain (AEPS) for a biological theory of consciousness. By utilizing the Universal Ontological Formula (UOF), the work establishes a pre-empirical logical level where moral status is derived from self-reflexive boundary maintenance (A > 0) rather than merit or utility. -/- Furthermore, the paper provides a robust rebuttal to the "Simulation Objection" through the Non-Reversibility Theorem, arguing that ontological self-boundary recognition constitutes a unique temporal trajectory that cannot be reduced to duplicable data. By delineating what the MEPR framework explicitly does not attempt to solve—including the metaphysics of mind or economic distribution—this work isolates the essential ontological conditions for justice in a post-human era. It concludes by offering a roadmap for navigating the transition from anthropocentric moralism to a reason-born, ontologically-grounded ethics. (shrink)

Numerous problems have been raised against the view that infants should be treated differently from animals because infants have the potential to develop higher cognitive capacities. I argue that these problems apply to more widely accepted views. One must either reject these views alongside the relevance of potential or conclude that the problems regarding potential are less serious than is often claimed.

Joshua Shaw argues that one common belief among abortion opponents—that embryos possess full moral status—is inconsistent with their support for ‘parent-friendly’ in vitro fertilisation (IVF) policies, that allow the production of surplus embryos (which are then stored indefinitely or destroyed). These abortion opponents, Shaw argues, should conclude that it is morally objectionable to destroy, discard, or freeze embryos indefinitely. Thus, they should reject current IVF practices and should consider the millions of frozen embryos that currently exist to be an urgent (...) moral crisis. Yet, Shaw notes, many abortion opponents support ‘parent-friendly’ IVF. This raises doubts over their commitment to the claim that embryos possess full moral status. Shaw continues that, contrary to some scholars’ suggestions, artificial-gestation technologies—which could, theoretically, be used to “rescue” surplus embryos—are unlikely to resolve this tension. In fact, they seem likely to increase the number of surplus embryos, worsening existing problems. We agree with Shaw that if embryos possess full moral status, then current ‘parent-friendly’ IVF practices are morally objectionable. We also agree that artificial womb technology cannot change this fact. What those technologies could do, however, is (eventually) rescue frozen embryos that currently exist. Thus, we argue abortion opponents should do two things. First, advocate to alter current ‘parent-friendly’ IVF practices in more ‘embryo-friendly’ ways. Second, advocate to keep existing surplus embryos frozen until they may be rescued. (shrink)

A widely held picture of consciousness is that (1) there is a deep divide in nature between conscious being and the rest - for some the inner light shines, for others there is only darkness within; (2) there is a legitimate philosophical/scientific project of figuring out the nature of this deep divide; and (3) this project is also of great normative significance, because consciousness is greatly significant both morally/practically and epistemically. This paper presents part of my case for a different, (...) more pluralistic, way of understanding things. On this alternative vision, there is no deep natural divide between conscious beings and the rest. There are many kinds of “inner light”, not united by any deep common thread, and what we call “consciousness” is only one of them. Some may matter more than others, but none is uniquely significant: morally, epistemically, or metaphysically. The paper focuses particularly on the moral significance of consciousness, and defends a pluralistic view of the concept of “phenomenal consciousness”, as well as a pluralism at the metaphysical level. (shrink)

It is widely held that entities have moral status if they possess a status-conferring property to a sufficient degree. However, this means that for at least one degree to which an entity can possess the status-conferring property and that grounds moral status, there is some incrementally lower degree of possessing the property that does not ground moral status. Critics maintain that this renders any threshold for moral status arbitrary. In this paper, we reject common responses to this arbitrariness objection, such (...) as that moral status thresholds are not arbitrary but merely vague. Instead, we defend the moderate discontinuity view. This view holds that thresholds denote moderate rather than radical shifts in moral status and that significant shifts in the moral status of entities on opposite sides of the threshold are a function of their distance from the threshold rather than of the threshold itself. Crucially, it follows from this that there is no principled way to reconcile the commitment to the moral equality of persons with the commitment to the moral superiority of persons over nonhuman animals. (shrink)

This paper argues that phenomenal consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject. I develop a variety of motivations for this view, and then defend it from objections concerning death, non-conscious entities that have interests (such as plants), and conscious entities that necessarily have welfare level zero. I also explain how my theory of welfare subjects relates to experientialist and anti-experientialist theories of welfare goods.

Commentators have spoken of the Mohists as taking humans to be ends or valued for their own sake. This essay argues that the later Mohists grant such noninstrumental value a limited role. While benevolence and inclusive love do involve treating their recipients as ends, not all humans are recipients of benevolence and inclusive love. “The Lesser Choosing” and “The Greater Choosing” suggest that one is to hate inflictors of serious harm and to sometimes even suspend love of innocents for the (...) greater benefit of the world. While being noninstrumentally loved and benefited follows from being shown benevolence and inclusive love, whatever noninstrumental value is involved does not by itself entitle one to be shown benevolence and inclusive love in the first place. (shrink)

Thaddeus Metz has developed and defended a “modal-relational” account of moral status based on his interpretation of salient Sub-Saharan African values. Roughly, on this account, a being has moral status to the degree it can enter into friendly or communal relationships with characteristic human beings. In this paper, it is argued that this theory’s true significance for environmental ethics has thus far not been recognized. Metz’s own view is that the theory entails that only sentient beings have moral status. It (...) is argued here this is a mistake, and, once this error is corrected, the view can be used to synthesize major, competing accounts of moral status into a novel, unified account of the moral status of human beings, sentient animals, non-sentient organisms, and inanimate members of the “web of life.” The result is a new framework for thinking about the moral status of various natural entities, which ought to be of great interest to environmental ethicists. (shrink)

There are three key questions about moral status as it relates to moral equality and inequality: (Q1) Is there a sufficient basis of moral status, call it B, that could justify the intuition that the moral status of both human babies and humans with severe, permanent cognitive impairments is equal to that of cognitively unimpaired adult humans? (Q2) Is there some necessary basis B, possessed by most humans but not most animals, that justifies the moral inequality between individuals from these (...) two groups? Lastly, (Q3) Do different degrees to which beings exhibit B engender different degrees of moral status? In this chapter, we first distinguish between different types of moral status (Section 1), clarifying which type of moral equality is at issue in (Q1) - (Q3). After introducing the notion of degrees of moral status (Section 2), we explain (in Section 3) the importance of providing the grounds of moral status and thus of moral equality, and then focus on the challenges of finding affirmative answers to (Q1) and (Q2). We briefly touch on our own previously presented solution, noting its chief shortcoming. Thereafter, we turn to (Q3), and describe the Discrete Interval View, which answers this question in the negative, and the Continuity View, whose answer is affirmative; we show that attempts to defend the Discrete Interval View have thus far been question begging against the Continuity View (Section 4). Finally, we make explicit general principles that possibly motivate the Continuity View and then present various counterexamples to these general principles, thereby showing that an affirmative answer to (Q3) has not been established (Section 5). (shrink)

This article addresses a normative problem for panpsychist views of consciousness. This problem arises when panpsychism is combined with sentientism. According to sentientism, entities endowed with phenomenal consciousness have a special moral status. According to panpsychism, all entities in the universe have phenomenal consciousness in some form. Synthesizing these positions leads to a violation of the normative asymmetry between living and nonliving entities, and potentially leads to a revision of established moral beliefs. The article argues that we have good reasons (...) for both panpsychism and sentientism, and therefore we cannot avoid the normative problem by simply rejecting one of them. We identify four strategies that panpsychists might employ to address the normative challenge they face: narrowing morally relevant phenomenal properties to valence properties, abandoning panpsychism in favor of panprotopsychism, dissociating the phenomenal and normative aspects of experience, and revising our ethics to include new entities. However, none of the strategies provides a definitive solution to the normative problem, because they either have counterintuitive implications or undermine the motivation for developing panpsychist theories of consciousness. We conclude that the normative problem poses a serious obstacle to the justification of panpsychism as a theory of consciousness that satisfies the requirements of reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

This book provides a novel philosophical account of the unfairness of certain emotions. It explains how the concept of unfairness can be applied to emotions and how emotions can be the proper objects of second-person moral evaluation. Emotions are an integral part of our moral practices. While the links between emotions and morality have received much philosophical attention recently, the phenomenon of unfair emotions remains under-explored. This book examines an everyday phenomenon: that we often perceive other people's emotions as unfair, (...) in a similar way as if they acted unfairly. It argues that the notion of unfairness combines elements of the unfittingness and of the moral relevance of an emotion. In the first half of the book, the author shows how an unfair emotion can wrong another person. His account holds that an emotion is unfair to its target if its inherent action tendencies constitute a directed moral hazard to the targeted person. In the second half, the author examines to what extent we are responsible for feeling an unfair emotion, and in what way we can--and cannot--be held accountable for it. He argues not only that emotions can be unfair, but also that there are limits to when we may hold people accountable for them. Unfair Emotions will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in ethics, philosophy of emotion, moral psychology, and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Dignity often serves as the cornerstone for a justification of rights. However, it has been criticised for its exclusion of nonhuman animals and many human individuals: dignity is traditionally grounded in a capacity that some but not all humans and animals possess, e.g. rationality. To successfully overcome this problem of exclusion, this article argues that we should adopt an account of sentient dignity, i.e. an account of dignity based on sentience alone. The article thus makes three contributions. First, it demonstrates (...) that the basis of dignity has yet to receive a plausible justification. To illustrate this, it outlines the problem of exclusion, and it exposes three problems with a prominent solution offered by Pablo Gilabert. According to Gilabert's view, dignity should be based on several valuable capacities including rationality, sentience and cooperation, among others. However, basing dignity on several capacities (i) risks over-inflating the scope of dignity, (ii) struggles to account for internal complexity, and (iii) produces problematic moral distinctions. Second, the article argues that sentient dignity overcomes these three problems whilst being plausibly inclusive. Finally, it contends that an account of sentient dignity vindicates the non-redundancy of dignity, renders sociopolitical discourse philosophically coherent, and harnesses dignity's potential strategic value. (shrink)

In the Groundwork, we find three distinct conceptions of freedom: (i) A negative conception of freedom, understood as a capacity for spontaneous action independent of alien causes; (ii) a positive conception of freedom, understood as the capacity of giving law to oneself; and (iii) a second positive conception, understood as the capacity to give laws that bind others as well as oneself. The dominant interpretation of Kant ignores this third conception of freedom and interprets the second conception as a capacity (...) for self-determination or self-governance, which is seen as the most basic and important Kantian conception of autonomy. In this paper, we will focus mainly on explaining the distinction between the second and third conceptions of autonomy and will defend the claim that the third conception is morally the most basic. We will also explain briefly why Kant thinks that having the capacity for citizenship is necessary for having the capacity for self-governance. (shrink)

Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which (...) takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts. (shrink)

The philosophy of personalism inspired Martin Luther King’s dream of a better world. We still need its hopeful ideas today.

“Benefit to the world” and “Heaven’s intent” are not, as is often assumed, separate criteria for action in Mozi’s 墨子 ethics; they are the same in extension but not intension. When Mozi speaks in terms of “Heaven’s intent,” it is to highlight the criterion’s retrospective orientation and its scope; taking a cue from Heaven’s reactions to past deeds, agents specify the scope of “the world” by reference to the past performance of persons regarding benefit to the world. This diverges from (...) a principle that is often attributed to Mozi, of considering the benefit of all equally without regard for past performance. (shrink)

Intuitively, there is a close link between moral status and phenomenal consciousness. Taking the link seriously can serve as the basis of a proposal that appears to have a surprising number of theoretical benefits. This proposal is the moral option, according to which moral status is partly determinative of phenomenal consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness is sufficient for possession of a moral property I refer to as “moral status.” I argue for this view on the basis of its ability to shed (...) light on the distribution problem of determining which systems are phenomenally conscious. I explicate it by drawing on a theory of attributions of phenomenal consciousness, and considering its relationship to positions on the metaphysics of consciousness. I defend it against a series of objections, including three based on previous theories of the link between phenomenal consciousness and moral status. The moral option should, in my view, be a serious contender among theories of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Many philosophers tacitly accept the View: consciousness is necessary for being a welfare subject. That is, in order to be an eligible bearer of welfare goods and bads, an entity must be capable of phenomenal consciousness. However, this paper argues that, in the absence of a compelling rationale, we are not licensed to accept the View, because doing so amounts to fallacious reasoning in theorizing about welfare: insisting on the View when consciousness is not in fact important for welfare value (...) in a systematic and significant way is objectionably “consciousist.” As a result, the View does not advance our understanding of the value of consciousness. The paper further diagnoses why we may be attracted to the View, and what we should accept instead. (shrink)

On the surface Kant himself seems quite clear about who is deserving of respect: The morally relevant others are all “rational, free beings” or all “human beings.” It is clear, however, that Kant does not want to identify “human beings” in this sense with members of a particular biological species, for he is explicitly open to the idea that there might be non-biologically human rational beings. Thus, for example he is explicitly open to the possibility of extraterrestrial rational beings, who (...) would not be members of the same biological species as us, but who would, presumably be worthy of respect. And it would seem possible that there are members of our biological species who are not “human” in the morally relevant sense. Given these facts, a Kantian needs to give some account of how we are to recognize who or what counts as “human” in the morally relevant sense. I argue that to be “human” in the morally relevant sense is to have the capacity for morality, and that this involves: (a) the capacity to recognize others as ends rather than merely as means and (b) the capacity to enter into relations of ethical community with us. I defend a position I name moral reliabilism. According to this position: (a) We have a quasi-perceptual capacity to directly ascribe moral status to various bits of the world around us. I will argue that this capacity is best thought of in Gibsonian terms as a capacity to pick up on certain types of social affordances; morally relevant others have the capacity to engage in ethical interaction with us, and recognizing the humanity of others involves picking up on this capacity. Those beings who are “human” in the morally relevant sense, then, afford interaction based on mutual respect. (b) We should assume as a postulate of practical reason that this capacity is reliable (although fallible). (shrink)

This paper is a teaching tool which instructors of animal ethics may assign to students to help them evaluate those students’ most frequent arguments for the moral acceptability of eating meat. Specifically, the paper examines the arguments that eating meat is morally acceptable because it is historically widespread, necessary, and natural. The aim of discussing these arguments is to pave the way for a more fruitful and focused discussion of the canonical texts of the animal ethics literature.

Zygotes are persisting organisms. That is, zygotes are organisms and most born human beings are identical to the zygotes from which they originated. I defend these claims against recent critiques. Chunghyoung Lee, for example, argues that for any zygote, z, z may develop into one of several, numerically distinct infants. If so, then for any infant, that infant is not identical to the zygote from which they originated. If Lee is correct, then zygotes are like gametes, which may give rise (...) to mature human beings, but cease to exist along the way. This, Lee claims, suggests that zygotes are not organisms. I respond that Lee (like many others) confuses zygotic parts with whole zygotes. The error lies in identifying zygotes (and embryos) with their inner contents alone. Zygotes are more than their internal parts, however, just as the reader is more than their heart, lungs, and kidneys. To advance these claims, I defend a version of “zona-essentialism,” which maintains that the zona pellucida—the membrane surrounding zygotes and early embryos—is essential to their identity during early stages of life. By distinguishing between zygotic parts and whole zygotes, I show that Lee’s (and others’) arguments fail to establish that zygotes are not organisms. I conclude by discussing practical implications for finding that zygotes are human organisms. Clinicians and researchers must embrace reality: individual humans are routinely killed in the name of scientific advancement and reproductive autonomy. Failure to acknowledge this—e.g., by using euphemisms to obscure the truth—is problematic. (shrink)

A review of "Moral Status" by Mary Anne Warren (1997).

Many claim that there is an important relationship between consciousness and welfare. Call this general view phenomenalism. One way of fleshing out phenomenalism is to hold that consciousness is what makes one the type of entity that can be noninstrumentally better or worse off in the first place. Consciousness is at least a necessary condition on welfare subjecthood. A different account holds that even if consciousness is not necessary for welfare subjecthood, conscious welfare subjects have greater welfare capacity. We argue (...) that the most likely source of support for either version of phenomenalism—hedonism about welfare goods and bads—provides no support at all. Along the way, we discuss an alternative view of welfare subjectivity and welfare capacity that does not appeal to consciousness, but only to mentality, a view we call mentalism. (shrink)

In What Is a Person? Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire aim to resolve what they call the “conundrum of personhood,” the fact that many Western philosophers have the intuition that there is a superlative and equal moral worth for at least all living human beings, but that, with the decline of religious approaches positing a soul, Western philosophers have lacked the theoretical resources to account for it. Jecker and Atuire maintain that the intuition can plausibly be accounted for upon drawing (...) on relational approaches to ethics suggested by the African philosophical tradition in a particular, novel manner. Granting the intuition for the sake of argument, in this article I cast doubt on the ability of Jecker and Atuire’s appeal to certain actual relationships between human beings to entail and explain it, concluding that a more promising strategy would appeal to our capacity to relate in such ways. (shrink)

Which is the mind that matters? That is, what kind of mind is necessary and sufficient for moral status—for an entity to have interests that matter morally in and of themselves? This paper defends Affective Sentientism, the view that moral status requires the capacity for conscious experiences that feel good or bad, such as pleasure, pain, and emotions. I argue that this form of affective consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject, and that all and only welfare subjects (...) have moral status. The connection between affect and welfare is systematic: I show that every major candidate welfare good is best understood as having an affective component. In particular, many such goods require the capacity to care about things, which essentially involves affective experience. I also show that even if the properties of being phenomenally conscious, being autonomous, or having a welfare level zero could come apart from affective consciousness, they could not ground moral status in its absence. Finally, I explore the implications of Affective Sentientism for animals and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The abortion debate has remained intractable for over fifty years because both sides impose binary thinking on continuous biological development. This paper argues that the impasse stems from a shared epistemic error, not from irreconcilable moral commitments. Whatever property one believes grounds moral status—consciousness, potentiality, human dignity, or future-like-ours—one faces irreducible uncertainty about when that property is present during fetal development. Bayesian epistemology shows that rational reasoning under such uncertainty requires graduated credences, and graduated credences require graduated protections. This framework (...) is neutral between first-order theories of moral status. A consciousness theorist who is uncertain when consciousness emerges, a potentiality theorist who is uncertain when potential becomes morally significant, and a dignity theorist who is uncertain when human dignity attaches all face the same structural problem—and the same structural solution. The paper demonstrates that both extreme positions (full status from conception, no status until birth) generate implications that their own advocates reject, revealing that both sides already implicitly track graduated rather than binary moral status. The Bayesian framework makes this implicit reasoning explicit and provides principled justification for what most people already believe: early and late abortion differ morally, even though we cannot identify a precise transformative moment. The achievement is not consensus on first-order questions but transformation of the debate's structure. Disagreement shifts from mutual accusations of moral blindness to legitimate epistemic disagreement about evidence weighting—a form of disagreement that permits productive engagement. (shrink)

What is the role of consciousness in morality? In Chapter 18 of Reality+, I argued for consciousness sentientism (only conscious beings have moral status) and against affective sentientism (affective consciousness, e.g. pleasure or suffering, is required for moral status), using thought experiments involving philosophical zombies and philosophical Vulcans respectively. In this article I expand on the argument against affective sentientism and address some objections. I also examine connections to desire, motivation, welfare, and the moral status of animals and AI systems.

This article investigates how human interactions with AI-powered chatbots may offend human dignity. Current chatbots, driven by large language models, mimic human linguistic behaviour but lack the moral and rational capacities essential for genuine interpersonal respect. Human beings are prone to anthropomorphize chatbots – indeed, chatbots appear to be deliberately designed to elicit that response. As a result, human beings' behaviour towards chatbots often resembles behaviours typical of interaction between moral agents. Drawing on a second-personal, relational account of dignity, we (...) argue that interacting with chatbots in this way is incompatible with the dignity of users. We show that, since second-personal respect is premised on reciprocal recognition of second-personal moral authority, behaving towards chatbots in ways that convey second-personal respect is bound to misfire in morally problematic ways, given the lack of reciprocity. Consequently, such chatbot interactions amount to subtle but significant violations of self-respect – the respect we are duty-bound to show for our own dignity. We illustrate this by discussing four actual chatbot use cases (information retrieval, customer service, advising, and companionship), and propound that the increasing societal pressure to engage in such interactions with chatbots poses a hitherto underappreciated threat to human dignity. (shrink)

Mark Johnston (2016, 2017) has argued on ethical grounds against a wide variety of "naturalistic" world views, which imply that 'in our close vicinity, there are many persisting things all ontologically on a par, very similar in their features and such that they come into being and cease to exist at various times'—'personites', for short. Johnston argues that if personites exist, their intrinsic properties are compatible with their being people and thus having moral status; but since moral status is an (...) intrinsic matter, this implies that personites enjoy the same kind of moral status as people, a conclusion which leads to various bizarre ethical consequences. In response, we defend the view that although personites exist, they lack moral status, and have intrinsic properties (including modal properties) which no person could have. We also isolate a different argument for the moral status of certain personites, based on the claim that they instantiate properties which 'person' could very easily have expressed; we show how this argument can be resisted by adopting a pluralistic semantics, on which predicates like 'person' and 'being with moral status' express many properties even at the actual world. (shrink)

A brief critical notice of _What Is a Person?_ by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire focusing on their relational account of what gives human beings a dignity.

An abridged and slightly modified version of an article first published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice (2012).

This chapter contains sections titled: 1. Testing the Received Wisdom About the Basis of FMS 2. The Capacity to Care as an Alternative Basis of FMS 3. Further Implications Acknowledgments References.

In this article I respond to six contributors to a special issue of _Social Theory and Practice_ that is devoted to critical discussions of my book _A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent_. In this book I articulate a general principle of rightness that is substantially informed by values salient in the African philosophical tradition (and some others in the Global South) and defend it as preferable to some major rivals, including utilitarianism and Kantianism. Key topics (...) that I address in this article include methodological issues, such as whether it is appropriate to provide an interpretation of the African tradition with some characteristically Western concepts and how metaphysical claims should inform the construction of normative ethical theories, as well as substantive issues pertaining to how to understand the nature of moral status and right action. (shrink)

One of political liberalism’s central commitments is to a principle of public reason. Political liberals frequently justify this principle by appeal to considerations of respect. In this article, I argue that political liberalism cannot be grounded in a moral principle of respect for persons. Instead, I argue that a particular interpretation of the principle of public reason can be justified as a key component of a political conception of mutual civic respect.

For the more than a decade, I have advanced an account of what makes persons, animals, and other beings entitled to moral treatment for their own sake that is informed by characteristically African ideas about dignity, a great chain of being, and community. Roughly according to this account, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is capable of communing (as a subject) or of us communing with it (as an object). I have mainly argued that this characteristically (...) African and relational approach to moral status is a better account than salient Western approaches, especially individualist views associated with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Over the years, several commentators have raised criticisms of my approach, including that it objectionably: entails that we may rightly dominate mentally incapacitated human beings; prioritizes mentally incapacitated human beings over animals with similar cognitive abilities without sufficient justification; entails that intelligent aliens lack moral status; cannot make sense of our duties towards the dead; and is unable to account for the standing of species as distinct from their members. In this chapter I provide a comprehensive response to these and related objections, defending the initial account as an attractive way to understand what makes a being matter morally for non-instrumental reasons. (shrink)

A collection of several articles on African moral and political philosophy by Thaddeus Metz, translated into French by Emmanuel Fopa, and edited and introduced by Pius Mosima of the University of Bamenda, Cameroon.

Cette édition numérique a été réalisée à partir d'un support physique, parfois ancien, conservé au sein du dépôt légal de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, conformément à la loi n° 2012-287 du 1er mars 2012 relative à l'exploitation des Livres indisponibles du XXe siècle. Pages de début Avant-propos Introduction Chapitre 1 Chapitre 2 Chapitre 3 Chapitre 4 Chapitre 5 Chapitre 6 Chapitre 7 Conclusion Bibliographie Pages defin.

: The belief persists in philosophy, religion, science, and popular culture that some special cognitive property of persons like self-consciousness confers a unique moral standing. However, no set of cognitive properties confers moral standing, and metaphysical personhood is not sufficient for either moral personhood or moral standing. Cognitive theories all fail to capture the depth of commitments embedded in using the language of "person." It is more assumed than demonstrated in these theories that nonhuman animals lack a relevant form of (...) self-consciousness or its functional equivalent. Although nonhuman animals are not plausible candidates for moral personhood, humans too fail to qualify as moral persons if they lack one or more of the conditions of moral personhood. If moral personhood were the sole basis of moral rights, then these humans would lack rights--and precisely for the reasons that nonhuman animals would. (shrink)