Growing moral relations
Subtitle: critique of moral status ascription
By: Mark Coeckelbergh
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781137025951
Subjects: Ethics; PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy
Description: "New scientific and technological developments challenge us to reconsider the moral status of entities such as chimpanzees or artificially intelligent robots: what place should we give them in our moral world order? Engaging with a variety of theoretical sources, this book offers a relational approach to moral status that questions individualist and objectivist assumptions made in these discussions, and proposes a less dualistic view by emphasizing the entanglement of natural, social, and technological relations. But it also asks why it is so hard to move towards a more relational understanding. The author's answer is an original discussion of the conditions of possibility of moral status ascription. Influenced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, he argues that our specific way of ascribing moral status, and indeed the very project of moral status 'ascription', is made possible by, and limited by, particular linguistic, social-cultural, natural-bodily, material-technological, religious-spiritual, and historical-spatial conditions. The 'living' moral epistemology that emerges from this 'philosophical yoga' -an exercise in becoming more aware of your moral breathing - urges us to recognize that changing our moral thinking depends on the growth of our relations and hence of our form of life"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note:; title: Acknowledgements; title: Introduction - The Problem of Moral Status; title: PART I: MORAL ONTOLOGIES: FROM INDIVIDUAL TO RELATIONAL DOGMAS; title: Individual Properties; title: Appearance and Virtue; title: Relations: Communitarian and Metaphysical; title: Relations: Natural and Social; title: Relations: Hybrid and Environmental; title: Conclusion Part I: Diogenes's Challenge; title: PART II: MORAL STATUS ASCRIPTION AND ITS CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY: A TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT; title: Words and Sentences: Forms of Language Use; title: Societies and Cultures (1): Forms of Living Together; title: Societies and Cultures (2): Forms of Life; title: Bodies and Things: Forms of Feeling and Making; title: Spirits and Gods: Forms of Religion; title: Fences, Walls, and Maps: Forms of Historical Space; title: Moral Metamorphosis: Concluding the Transcendental Argument; title: General Conclusion; title: References; title: Index.