Rainer Ebert, "The Dignity of Subjectivity Account of Full & Equal Moral Status"
Channel: Radio-CRÉ
Date: 2021-03-12

Speaker | Conférencier : Rainer Ebert, CRÉ-GRÉEA
Organization | Organisateurs : CRÉ , GRÉEA

This event has been organized as part of CRÉ's Midis de l'éthique | Activité organisée dans le cadre des Midis de l'éthique du CRÉ

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Abstract (excerpts | extraits)

Traditional morality maintains that it is as seriously morally wrong to kill one human being as it is to kill any other human being, yet less seriously wrong to kill other animals, as human beings have a special moral status and are one another’s moral equals. On another view, which has emerged more recently, the boundaries of the community of moral equals should be redrawn so as to include all and only persons, regardless of species membership. Both views, which continue to enjoy a great deal of popularity in contemporary moral philosophy, radically mark out a certain class of conscious beings for special treatment. In this talk, I will argue that doing so conflicts with our modern scientific understanding of nature, according to which all life on earth is interrelated, through evolution, and biological characteristics come in degrees. If we could look at all organisms that have ever existed at once, we would see in front of us a continuous spectrum of the properties that philosophers commonly associate with our special moral status, with no recognizable discontinuity that would recommend itself as a line of moral demarcation. As I have argued elsewhere, that is a serious problem not only for defenders of human dignity but also for Jeff McMahan and others who similarly seek to superimpose a binary morality onto living nature. One would have to define a map between the continuous spectrum of biological characteristics on the empirical side, which is messy as all of nature is, and the neatly compartmentalized world of traditional or otherwise dichotomous morality, and there is little hope that this can be done in a non-arbitrary and intuitively plausible way.