Moral Status

This paper considers the hotly debated issue of whether one should grant moral and legal personhood to intelligent robots once they have achieved a certain standard of sophistication based on such criteria as rationality, autonomy, and social relations. The starting point for the analysis is the European Parliament’s resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017) and its recommendation that robots be granted legal status and electronic personhood. The resolution is discussed against the background of the so-called Robotics Open Letter, which is critical of the Civil Law Rules on Robotics (and particularly of §59 f.). The paper reviews issues related to the moral and legal status of intelligent robots and the notion of legal personhood, including an analysis of the relation between moral and legal personhood in general and with respect to robots in particular. It examines two analogies, to corporations (which are treated as legal persons) and animals, that have been proposed to elucidate the moral and legal status of robots. The paper concludes that one should not ascribe moral and legal personhood to currently existing robots, given their technological limitations, but that one should do so once they have achieved a certain level at which they would become comparable to human beings.

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development.

The use of the concept of moral status is commonplace today in debates about the moral consideration of entities lacking certain special capacities, such as nonhuman animals. This concept has been typically used to defend the view that adult human beings have a status higher than all those entities. However, even those who disagree with this claim have often accepted the idea of moral status as if it were part of an undisputed received way of thinking in ethics. This paper argues that the use of this concept, however common, distorts our understanding of how to behave towards different individuals in different circumstances. When moral status is identified with the interest in living or the capacity for well-being, it becomes an arbitrary and irrelevant criterion. When it is used as a synonym of moral consideration or considerability, in a way that is compatible with the principle of equal consideration, it becomes trivial and confusing. When used, instead, to defend the unequal moral consideration of interests of equal weight, it has several implausible implications. In particular, the claim that unequal status is justified because of the value (either final or intrinsic, or instrumental) of cognitive capacities implausibly entails that our exercising those capacities should have priority over the promotion of our wellbeing. The idea of full moral status is also problematic as it implies the possibility of status monsters. In addition, its use is based in a misconceived way of what it would really entail to have a full status by virtue of having rational capacities. The paper concludes that we have strong reasons to abandon the concept of moral status altogether.

This is the pre-peer-reviewed version of the following entry: “Animals, Moral Status of”, published in in LaFollette, Hugh (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2013, 292-302. This entry has been published in final form at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee156/abstract

This paper addresses the absurdity of a theory of the ontological grounds of consciousness which is known as "panpsychism." To this end, I first formulate panpsychism and present the theory's motivations. I then dismiss common intuitive objections to the theory. In the second chapter, I develop a novel objection that is based on panpsychism's moral implications. I take this objection to the be strongest version of the intuitive objection to panpsychism. In the third chapter, I examine how the panpsychist might avoid this objection. If the strongest version of the intuitive objection to panpsychism can, as I argue, be overcome, then I take it to be the case that dismissing panpsychism as "absurd" is unwarranted.

This paper is merely an MA thesis. Judge lightly!

The argument from relevance expresses an intuition that, although shared by many applied ethicists, has not been analyzed and systematized in the form of a clear argument thus far. This paper does this by introducing the concept of value relevance, which has been used before in economy but not in the philosophical literature. The paper explains how value relevance is different from moral rele-vance, and distinguishes between direct and indirect ways in which the latter can depend on the former. These clarifications allow the argument to explain in detail how we can make two claims. The first one is that being a recipient of value should be the only criterion for full moral considerability. This follows if we accept that value relevance should determine, directly or indirectly, moral relevance. The second claim is that, given what the main theories of wellbeing imply regarding what entities can be recipients of value, sentience is both a sufficient and a necessary criterion for full moral considerability. The paper argues that this conclusion stands even if we hold views that consider other values different from sentience.

The question of the basis of human equality has recently gained increasing attention. However, much of the literature has focused on whether persons – understood as fully competent adults – have equal moral status, while relatively less attention has been devoted to the analysis of what grounds the equal moral status of those human beings who are not fully competent adults. This paper contributes to this debate by addressing the question of the equality of moral status between adults and children. Specifically, this paper has three aims. First, it provides a conceptual map of this complex issue. Second, it argues that the challenges that have been raised against standard accounts of persons’ equal moral status are even more forceful when applied to the question of adults and children’s moral equality. Finally, it examines what a commitment to adults and children’s moral inequality entails and what it does not, thereby showing that the justificatory role of the principle of moral equality is not as far-reaching as commonly assumed.

Henry Shevlin's paper-"How could we know when a robot was a moral patient?"-argues that we should recognize robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as psychological moral patients if they are cognitively equivalent to other beings that we already recognize as psychological moral patients (i.e., humans and, at least some, animals). In defending this cognitive equivalence strategy, Shevlin draws inspiration from the "behavioral equivalence" strategy that I have defended in previous work but argues that it is flawed in crucial respects. Unfortunately-and I guess this is hardly surprising-I cannot bring myself to agree that the cognitive equivalence strategy is the superior one. In this article, I try to explain why in three steps. First, I clarify the nature of the question that I take both myself and Shevlin to be answering. Second, I clear up some potential confusions about the behavioral equivalence strategy, addressing some other recent criticisms of it. Third, I will explain why I still favor the behavioral equivalence strategy over the cognitive equivalence one.

There is no doubt great appeal in the idea that all persons are equal: they all bear the same value as human persons and they all deserve concern for and respect of their legitimate interest to pursue a fulfilled life. However, any concept of moral equality that anchors moral status in empirically observable, natural capacities, like the ability to identify reasons and act upon them, ends up facing the same problem: human abilities come in varying degrees, thus people’s moral value must vary as well. The objection from variation says that people are not equal because their moral status varies in accordance with their different capacities. After a short introduction to the idea of moral equality, I will turn to John Rawls’s concept of equal status and its resilience to this objection. His solution amounts to an approach that treats differences in moral personality above a certain threshold as natural assets, whose distribution, like that of any other natural ability, is subjected to the difference principle. Yet, naturalist conceptions of moral equality face another, more challenging version of the objection from variation. Richard Arneson and Jeremy Waldron raised the question whether rational agency is relevant enough to offer a comprehensive idea of what we call a person. This worry shifts the debate toward a more pluralistic view about human capacities that ground a person’s basic status. Human interactions are complex and rich enough to cast doubt on conceptions that put their whole weight behind a single, generic, though fundamental human capacity. I will argue that alternative, more sensitive ways are necessary to make a convincing plea for human equality. Starting with Rawls’s observation that a conception of justice articulates only one aspect of morality, I shall argue that a robust theory of moral equality goes far beyond securing equal basic rights and liberties. There is not only one moral interest or the moral interest par excellence, from which all requirements of morality derive. There is not only one human capacity that might serve to ground moral equality.

Anti-abortion violence ('AAV') is anathema to almost everyone, on all sides of the abortion debate. Yet, as this article aims to show, it is far more difficult than has previously been recognised to avoid the deeply unpalatable conclusion that it can sometimes be justified. Some of the most frequently-occupied positions on the morality of abortion will imply precisely that conclusion, I argue, unless conjoined with an especially stringent and unattractive form of pacifism. This is true not only of strict anti-abortion views, but also, more surprisingly, of some of the most familiar and influential moderate defences of abortion rights. The latter conclusion raises the question, which further work will be required to fully resolve, of what our account of abortion ethics and prenatal moral status must be if it is to enable reconciliation of the common-sense rejections of both pacifism and AAV. I end with reasons to expect that the path to an account that satisfies this demand, without generating further significant intuitive problems, will be far from straightforward.

Can robots have significant moral status? This is an emerging topic of debate among roboticists and ethicists. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it presents a theory-'ethical behaviourism'-which holds that robots can have significant moral status if they are roughly performatively equivalent to other entities that have significant moral status. This theory is then defended from seven objections. Second, taking this theoretical position onboard, it is argued that the performative threshold that robots need to cross in order to be afforded significant moral status may not be that high and that they may soon cross it (if they haven't done so already). Finally, the implications of this for our procreative duties to robots are considered, and it is argued that we may need to take seriously a duty of 'procreative beneficence' towards robots.

Although the idea of dignity has always been applied to human beings and although its role is far from being uncontroversial, some recent works in animal ethics have tried to apply the idea of dignity to animals. The aim of this paper is to discuss critically whether these attempts are convincing and sensible. In order to assess these proposals, I put forward two formal conditions that any conception of dignity must meet (non-redundancy and normative determinacy) and outline three main approaches which might justify the application of dignity to animals: the species-based approach, moral individualism and the relational approach. Discussing in particular works by Martha Nussbaum and Michael Meyer I argue that no approach can convincingly justify the extension of dignity to animals because all fail to meet the formal conditions and do not provide an appropriate basis for animal dignity. I conclude by arguing that the recognition of the moral importance of animals and their defense should appeal to other normative concepts which are more appropriate than dignity.

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York. Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules...

A Doença de Alzheimer é uma patologia neurodegenerativa que afeta a cognição em domínios que correspondem a memória episódica, memória semântica, habilidades visuoespaciais e funções executivas. Registra-se, também, a geração de quadros de anosognosia, alterações de humor e de personalidade, prejuízo a processos relativos a atenção e a incidência de sintomas psiquiátricos diversos. Para além desse quadro médico, tem-se verificado esforço para que a patologia seja interpretada para além do modelo médico de investigação, caracterizando a demência como uma patologia da pessoalidade, em que os distúrbios orgânicos são apenas parte do quadro verificado de corrosão da pessoalidade. Considerando essa abordagem pessoal da demência, investigamos os elementos da pessoalidade trabalhados por Stancioli e da abordagem da identidade desenvolvida por Parfit como fundamentos para que possamos avaliar quais são nossas obrigações éticas em relação à pessoa com demência. A avaliação prática foi feita a partir da seleção de casos reais e fictícios, porém baseados em circunstâncias reais, que nos possibilitaram a apreensão dos principais problemas vivenciados pela pessoa com demência no seu dia-a-dia e que mais afetam sua pessoalidade. Enfim, já com uma impressão ética construída a respeito do assunto, avaliamos as atuais disposições acerca da proteção e da inclusão da pessoa com demência em nosso direito e propomos que a eficácia do Estatuto da Pessoa com Deficiência e da regulamentação do processo de curatela no Código de Processo Civil de 2016 dependem da adequada apreensão do conceito de deficiência e da interpretação da curatela em um modelo funcional e desvinculado da ideia de cognição e discernimento.

There are three views on the relation between moral status and consciousness: the sentientist, the existentialist, and the fundamentalist views. The sentientist view focuses on the fact that an entity becomes sentient by virtue of being conscious. The existentialist view emphasizes the sense in which an entity becomes irreplaceable by having consciousness. The fundamentalist view focuses on the role of consciousness in grounding morally relevant cognitive abilities. This paper aims to make the detailed lines of thought underlying these three views explicit, and to point out the ethical contexts in which each view matters. Since the existentialist view has been discussed much less than the other two views, this paper also aims to clearly explicate the existentialist view.

Peter Singer's arguments against the morality of the typical Ameri-can diet focus on the pain of animals, and lead to the conclusion that we must become committed vegans. His approach ignores the impact that different psychological capacities can legitimately have on our moral appraisal of the interests of beings. Although we ought to eat less meat because of the externalized environmental costs that factory farming inflicts upon future people, an ideal diet may contain some environmentally sustainably raised meat. Finally, the perception of ethical puritanism in committed vegans may be an obstacle to achieving the real reductions in animal suffering that they advocate.

Standard liberal theories of justice rest on the assumption that only those beings that hold the capacity for moral personality (CMP) have moral status and therefore are right-holders. As many pointed out, this has the disturbing implication of excluding a wide range of entities from the scope of justice. Call this the under-inclusiveness objection. This paper provides a response to the under-inclusiveness objection and illustrates its implications for liberal theories of justice. In particular, the paper defends two claims: first, it argues that both the CMP and the potential capacity for moral personality (PCMP) are bases of moral status. This pluralist account of the basis of moral status can broaden the scope of justice and provide a solid philosophical justification for the common-sense intuition that almost all human beings have a moral status that is different and superior to that of nonhuman animals. Second, contra what is commonly suggested, it contends that potential and actual moral persons have different and unequal rights, other things being equal.

This paper provides a new analysis and critique of Rawlsian public reason’s handling of the abortion question. It is often claimed that public reason is indeterminate on abortion, because it cannot say enough about prenatal moral status, or give content to the (allegedly) political value which Rawls calls ‘respect for human life’. I argue that public reason requires much greater argumentative restraint from citizens debating abortion than critics have acknowledged. Beyond the preliminary observation that fetuses do not meet the criteria of political personhood, I contend, public reasoners may say nothing about prenatal moral status. Indeed, respect for human life (as distinct from respect for persons) is not, I show, a genuine political value, whose interpretation lies within public reason’s remit. This fact does not, however, prevent deliberators from drawing determinate conclusions regarding the law of abortion. Instead, I show, public reason has radically permissive implications for the legal regulation of feticide, inclining heavily towards the view that abortion should be allowed with little or no qualification, right until birth. I end by giving grounds for thinking that, even if the argumentative restraint which public reason enjoins over prenatal moral status does not generate indeterminacy, it is nonetheless objectionable.

Many theories of moral status that are intended to ground pro-choice viewson abortion tie full moral status to advanced cognitive capabilities. Extant accounts ofthis kind are inconsistent with the intuition that the profoundly cognitively disabledhave full moral status. This paper improves upon these extant accounts by combiningan anti-luck condition with Steinbock’s stratification of moral status into two levels.On the resulting view, a being has full moral status if and only if (1) she has moralstatus and (2) (a) has had advanced cognitive capacities, (b) has th e potential todevelop such capacities, or (c) would have had such capacities were it not for luck. Iargue that modal accounts of luck provide a non-speciesist basis for attributing thelack of advanced cognitive capacities in humans to luck without doing the same fornon-human animals.

Disability Studies Quarterly Vol 36, No 1 (2016) - The present essay aims to respond to recent arguments which maintain that persons with severe cognitive impairments should  not enjoy the full moral status or equal dignity as other “cognitively-able” humans. In the debate concerning moral standing and worth, philosophers Singer and McMahan have argued that individuals with certain impairments should not be granted full moral status and therefore, by extension, should not be awarded the same inviolability as humans without cognitive impairments. In response, I argue that an overlooked social ability – the capacity to narrate – provides grounds for the full moral status of individuals with severe cognitive impairments, and thus provides a defense and support for individuals with such “disabilities” to play a robust role in moral action and contribution to human living.

In the contemporary debate on moral status, it is not uncommon to find philosophers who embrace the the Principle of Full Moral Status, according to which the degree to which an entity E possesses moral status is proportional to the degree to which E possesses morally relevant properties until a threshold degree of morally relevant properties possession is reached, whereupon the degree to which E possesses morally relevant properties may continue to increase, but the degree to which E possesses moral status remains the same.  One philosopher who has contributed significantly to the contemporary debate on moral status and embraces the Principle of Full Moral Status is Mary Anne Warren.  Warren holds not only that it is possible for some entities to possess full moral status, but that some entities actually do, e.g., normal adult human beings.  I argue that two of Warren’s primary arguments for the Principle of Full Moral Status—the Argument from Pragmatism and the Argument from Explanatory Power—are significantly flawed.

This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency (AMA) in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artifcial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included
in human practices normally assuming moral agency and responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA.

I show that an overlooked feature of our moral life—moral status—provides a route to vindicating naturalist moral realism in much the same way that the Humean theory of motivation and judgment internalism are used to undermine it. It presents two explanatory burdens for metaethical views.  First, a given view must provide an ecumenical explanation of moral status, which does not depend on the truth of its metaethical claims (say, that there are mind-independent facts about moral status).  Second, its explanation must be consistent with persistent normative ethical disagreement about what constitutes moral status. I conclude that naturalist moral realism succeeds, while quasi-realism fails because it cannot meet the latter requirement. This argument has three results: we have a new route for metaethical vindication more generally and for naturalist moral realism in particular; quasi-realism’s plausibility is undermined by an inability to explain disagreement, but not for the familiar reasons.

The argument from potentiality for embryo protection relies on the assumption of a specific devel-opmental potential of human embryos: as human embryos under normal conditions naturally developing into beings whose strong moral status is uncontroversial, namely into human persons, they likewise enjoy strong moral status. In my paper, I endeavour to spell out the ontological foundations of the argument from potentiality and to discuss them critically in the light of new empirical findings in embryology. Particular attention is hereby paid to recent attempts to analyse the relevant notion of potentiality in terms of dispositions possessed by human embryos. I argue that, putting aside inappropriate essentialist speculations, there is no straightforward disposition of an embryo to become a person; such a disposition, if any, being rather successively generated in a multi-factored, highly context-sensitive process of biological development.

What is the moral status of vegetative state patients? I examine the moral status of vegetative state patients through the lens of a Mark Bernstein's theory of moral status he calls experientialism. Experientialism says conscious experience is necessary and sufficient for moral status. I argue that conscious experience is not necessary for moral status. I contend that experientialism fails to capture the possible moral significance of Adrian Owen's experiments on vegetative state patients, which suggest that some VS patients have a mental life deserving of some moral considerability.

This paper proposes a methodological redirection of the philosophical debate on artificial moral agency (AMA) in view of increasingly pressing practical needs due to technological development. This “normative approach” suggests abandoning theoretical discussions about what conditions may hold for moral agency and to what extent these may be met by artificial entities such as AI systems and robots. Instead, the debate should focus on how and to what extent such entities should be included in human practices normally assuming moral agency and responsibility of participants. The proposal is backed up by an analysis of the AMA debate, which is found to be overly caught in the opposition between so-called standard and functionalist conceptions of moral agency, conceptually confused and practically inert. Additionally, we outline some main themes of research in need of attention in light of the suggested normative approach to AMA.

Singer claims that there are two ways of challenging the fact that brain-dead patients, from whom organs are usually retrieved, are in fact biologically alive. By means of the first, the so called dead donor rule may be abandoned, opening the way to lethal organ donation. In the second, it might be posited that terms such as “life” and “death” do not have any primary biological meaning and are applicable to persons instead of organisms. This second possibility permits one to acknowledge that brain-dead patients are deceased because they are irreversibly unconscious. In the commentary which follows, I will argue that Singer’s second option is preferable since it (a) provides a higher amount of organs available for transplant, and (b) is better suited to the meaning of “death” which occurs in ordinary language. I will also defend such a concept of death against the objections raised by Michael Nair-Collins in the article Can the brain-dead be harmed or wronged? On the moral status of brain death and its implications for organ transplantation.

I defend the bold claim that self-described speciesists are not really speciesists. Of course, I do not deny that self-described speciesists would assent to generic speciesist claims (e.g. Humans matter more than animals). The conclusion I draw is more nuanced. My claim is that such generic speciesist beliefs are inconsistent with other, more deeply held, beliefs of self-described speciesists. Crucially, once these inconsistencies are made apparent, speciesists will reject the generic speciesist beliefs because they are absurd by the speciesists’ own lights.

"We argue in this essay that (1) the embryo is an irredeemably
ambiguous entity and its ambiguity casts serious doubt on the arguments claiming its full protection or, at least, protection against its use as a means for stem cell research, (2) those who claim the embryo should be protected as ‘‘one of us’’ are committed to a position even they do not uphold in their practices, (3) views that defend the protection of the embryo in virtue of its potentiality to become a person fail, and (4) the embryo does not have any rights or interests to be protected. Given that many are willing to treat the embryo as a means in other practices, and that human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research holds great potential to benefit many people, one cannot but conclude that hESC research is permissible and, because of its immense promise for alleviating human suffering,
even obligatory."

According to John Austin, “status” is “the most difficult problem in the whole science of jurisprudence”, traditional definitions of such concept as “a quality” were dismissed by the British legal philosopher as a paradigmatic instance of the “jargon of occult qualities” which Bentham deplored. Austin’s attitude towards the concept of status is the natural outcome of his conception of conceptual analysis as a kind of intellectual dissection whose aim is to bring to light the ultimate building blocks of legal thought. Austin’s “decompositive” analysis is still the dominant mode of conceptual elucidation among analytic legal philosophers. The aim of this book is to put forward an alternative “connective” model of conceptual clarification, which takes seriously the historical dimension of legal thought and culture. Through the analysis of ancient (Seneca) and modern (Pufendorf) texts, two different understanding of status are isolated and described: (i) status as condition, or mode of being; and status as position. In this way the concept of status is placed in its proper context, and explained as a device that is part of a sophisticated intellectual strategy to cope with the problem of giving an account of legal relations among agents in an institutional setting, and hence as an attempt to represent a central aspect of the ontology of the social world

There are three views on the relation between moral status and consciousness: the sentientist, the existentialist, and the fundamentalist views. The sentientist view focuses on the fact that an entity becomes sentient by virtue of being conscious. The existentialist view emphasizes the sense in which an entity becomes irreplaceable by having consciousness. The fundamentalist view focuses on the role of consciousness in grounding morally relevant cognitive abilities. This paper aims to make the detailed lines of thought underlying these three views explicit, and to point out the ethical contexts in which each view matters. Since the existentialist view has been discussed much less than the other two views, this paper also aims to clearly explicate the existentialist view.