Warren's Multi-criterial theory of moral status

Warren begins her account by dividing the criteria that provide bases for ascribing moral status to entities into those that refer to an entity's intrinsic properties and those that refer to its relational properties. All together, she proposes seven principles for ascribing moral status, three of which rely on intrinsic properties, and four more that rely upon relational properties. We can say that her criteria that rely on intrinsic properties confer moral status on an entity because of it's kind of intrinsic moral value, while those that confer status because of relational properties confer moral status because of their relational or derived value, that is, the relationship they have to something that has some kind of intrinsic value.

In brief summary form, Warren's seven principles of moral status are as follows:

1. The Respect for Life Principle

Living organisms are not to be killed or otherwise harmed, without good reasons that do not violate principles 2-7.

2. The Anti-Cruelty Principle

Sentient beings are not to be killed or subjected to pain or suffering, unless there is no other feasible way of furthering goals that are (1) consistent with principles 3-7; and (2) important to human beings or other entities that have a stronger moral status than could be based upon sentience alone.

3. The Agent's Rights Principle

Moral agents have full and equal basic moral rights, including the rights to life and liberty.

4. The Human Rights Principle

Within the limits of their own capacities and of principle 3, human beings who are capable of sentience but not moral agency have the same moral rights as do moral agents.

5. The Ecological Principle

Living things that are not moral agents, but that are important to the ecosystems of which they are a part, have, within the limits of principles 1-4, a stronger moral status than could be based upon their intrinsic properties alone; ecologically important entities that are not themselves alive, such as species and habitats, may legitimately be accorded a stronger moral status than their intrinsic properties would indicate.

6. The Interspecific Principle

Within the limits of principles 1-5, non-human members of mixed social communities have a stronger moral status than could be based upon their intrinsic properties alone.

7. The Transitivity of Respect Principle

Within the limits of principles 1-6, and to the extent feasible and morally permissible, moral agents should respect one another's attributions of moral status.

Each of these seven principles will require some further explanation. It is also necessary to explain how they interact with one another. In her book, Warren applies these principles of moral status to a wide range of issues, including, abortion, euthanasia, and questions about human responsibilities towards non-human animals, ecosystems, and some kinds of artifacts such as religious or sacred objects. Her goal is to provide a comprehensive theory of moral status that accounts for a wide range of considered moral intuitions about what sorts of things can be the objects of the moral obligations of moral agents or persons.

The Agent's Rights Principle assigns the "strongest" type of moral status to persons, that is, beings who possess the intrinsic properties necessary to full moral agency. Presumably, "weaker" kinds of moral status would be assigned to entities with fewer of the intrinsic and relational properties which she believes confer moral status. Intuitively, a bacterium, which is alive, has some moral status under the Respect for Life Principle, but its moral status is "weaker" than that she would assign to a sentient animal, such as a squirrel, which is weaker still than the moral status she would assign to a person.

The four relational principles operate independently of the three intrinsic property critieria and can add moral status to a thing on top of its status as determined by its intrinsic properties. So, for instance, a beloved family pet, such as my Senegalese green parrot, Pierre, because he is a member of a mixed social community, will normally have a stronger moral status than the wild birds flying around in my backyard, because of her principle six, the Interspecific principle.

While the basic idea of stronger and weaker kinds of moral status is intuitive enough, I think we need more precise language if we are to start comparing different kinds and degrees of moral status across species and with things, like ecosystems and religious artifacts that are not alive. So as a terminological innovation I would like to propose that we employ the terms "moral standing" and "moral stature" as describing different kinds and degrees of moral status. A living being has a different kind of moral status than a work or art or a sacred object; I will say that they have different kinds of moral standing. Similarly, a plant has a different degree of moral status than a snake which has a different degree of moral standing than a chimpanzee, which has yet a different degree of moral status than a human being. I will say that these different kinds of living things have different moral statures, with some having a "higher" stature than others. Standing is on this view an all-or-thing property; things either have a kind of moral standing or they don't. Stature, on the other hand, is a graded property. Things can have different degrees or grades of moral stature even though they may have the same moral standing.

I will also employ the term "moral plateau." A moral plateau signifies the kind and degree of moral status that things of a certain kind of thing occupies. Whether a particular entity or organism occupies a particular moral plateau is a function of both its moral standing and its moral stature. The value of these terms will, I expect, become evident as I proceed with my elaboration of Warren's multi-criterial theory of moral status. These concepts will help us grapple with some important issues concerning conflicting moral responsibilities and the question of whether we shoud treat moral patients impartially or partially.

Psychological Organisms

One of my daughters does not eat anything that has a face. This is not mere squeamishness on her part. It is based on the assumption that if organisms have faces they have sensory organs, and if they have sensory organs they must also have some form of consciousness or sentience.

Many philosophers have thought that the capacity for consciousness or sentience provides a criterion for moral status. Sometimes they distinguish between consciousness and sentience by defining the latter as "the capacity to feel pleasure or pain" (Warren 56). I prefer to use the term 'sentience' in a broader sense to refer two kinds states of consciousness or awareness, sensory awareness and self-awareness. Sensory awareness refers to an organism's capacity to create mental representations of features of its environment, as for instance when it sees, hears, smells, and so forth. Pleasure and pain are conscious states of self-awareness, as are emotions and feelings, for instance, the feeling of hunger. In these kinds of states an organism is conscious of some feature of itself. Psychological organisms that are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, sensing things in their environments, feeling hungry, and having other states of conscious awareness, have moral standing as things with intrinsic value because they are alive. But being a psychological organism, one capable of conscious states of sensory and self-awareness, gives that entity a different moral standing than living beings who are not capable of consciousness.

Consciousness or sentience is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos. At our present stage of scientific understanding we really do not know what it is or how it arises. Unlike an organism's physical and biological characteristics, we cannot directly observe its consciousness, but can only infer that an entity is (or may be conscious) from external signs. Warren notes that there are four sorts of evidence that we commonly rely upon to determine whether or not something is sentient: 1) whether it has a nervous system, 2) whether or not it exhibits pain behavior such as crying, howling, squirming, or trying to escape when exposed to painful or noxious stimuli, 3) whether it has sensory organs (my daughter's test), and 4) whether its brain and nervous system contain neurochemical transmitters such as those found in human beings and which are associated with the experiencing of states of self-awareness such as pleasure, pain, and various kinds of emotions.

One of the reasons I prefer to talk about psychological organisms rather than consciousness or sentience is that we can determine, using observable criteria such as these, whether or not something should be classified as a psychological organism. Using these observable criteria we can quite readily conclude, for instance, that higher vertebrate animals with brains and central nervous systems like ours, such as are found in mammals and birds, are psychological organisms. Even though other vertebrates cannot report on their own states of consciousness the way human beings can, given their behavioral and physiological similarities to us, we can be reasonably confident that they are also psychological organisms who experience inner states of awareness. My pet parrot, Pierre, must, I think, get pleasurable sensations when I rub his neck.

It gets trickier with "lower" vertebrates such as fish and reptiles whose nervous systems are rather different than ours, and even trickier the farther down we go in the animal kingdom towards invertebrate animals, like worms and insects, oysters and molluscs, and down to unicellular animals such as amoeba. It is a matter of some dispute where exactly we "draw the line" between organisms and psychological organisms, but most people assume that plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses (if they are even alive) are non-psychological organisms, that is, they are alive but not sentient. But this question need not worry us too much; for most of the kinds of cases where it matters, morally speaking, whether we classify an organism as sentient or not, we will be dealing with creatures that are undoubted psychological organisms.

But why does something being a psychological organism matter to its moral status? It matters, I think, because only psychological organisms can be said to have interests. The avoidance of pain, for instance, is an interest that psychological organisms have. They may also have other kinds of interests, for example, an interest in nourishment, an interest in freedom, or an interest in sex. Having interests is not the same thing as having needs. A plant may need water and sunlight and soil in order to survive and grow, but plants do not have interests. Having interests or desires means that it matters to the organism itself whether its needs are satisfied. Kant used the terms "in itself" and "for itself" to express the idea that human beings have this kind of intrinsic value, a value in themselves and for themselves.

Avoiding pain is valuable for a psychological organism because it can experience pain, and pain is unpleasant for them. Warren puts the point this way: "Non-sentient organisms may have needs, and thus a good of their own, but this is not an experiential good; they experience nothing unpleasant when their needs are thwarted, nothing enjoyable when their needs are met. Consequently, they cannot 'mind' what happens to them, in the ways that sentient beings can" (67).

Moral agents can have moral responsibilities towards non-psychological organisms, such as plants and bacteria, but I do not think it makes sense to say that non-psychological organisms can have rights. In order for something to be said to have a right it must be the case that it is the sort of thing that can have interests, and those interests can be affected for good or ill by the actions of moral agents. Thus, while I think that, say, a chimpanzee, is the sort of thing which can be the holder of rights, the tree in my front yard is not. Put another way, not all moral patients qualify as possible right-holders; psychological organisms do, but non-psychological organisms do not. In saying this I am not claiming that chimpanzees have any rights, only that they could have them, that it would be meaningful to ascribe rights to them because of the kind of thing that they are. Other sorts of things, for instance, inanimate objects such as pebbles and chairs cannot have rights; it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the rights of pebbles. It does, however, make sense to talk about some kiind of corporate entities, such as corporations, as having rights. Perhaps, as some philosophers and others have suggested, one day we will need to extend the concepts interests and rights to cover certain kinds of artificially intelligent robots. I leave these questions to one side, since for the time being I am only interested in the kinds of moral status that pertain to life forms.

Joseph Raz proposed the following definition of a right: "'x has a right' if and only if x can have rights, and other things being equal, an aspect of x's well-being (his interest) is a sufficient reason for holding some other person(s) to be under a duty" ["On the Nature of Rights" Mind, 93 (1984), 195]. Plants, bacteria and other non-psychological organisms, on my view, have a "well-being" but since they do not have interests cannot be the sorts of things that can have rights. Psychological organisms can have rights, and when they do, there is some interest they have that provides a sufficient reason for moral agents to have a responsibility towards them. Having rights, however, does not mean that it is never morally permissible to treat them in ways that would seem, on first face (prima facie) as contrary to their interests or violative of their rights. Not all interests are protected by rights, and rights normally carry with them various kinds of defeasibility conditions that permit certain kinds of exceptions and limitations. This can be made clearer by means of some examples.

Many animal rights advocates believe that it is morally wrong to inflict pain and suffering on sentient animals in order to satisfy trivial human interests. They argue, for instance, that we should not subject rabbits to painful experiments simply in order to test cosmetics. We have laws now forbidding various kinds of cruelty to sentient animals; people can be punished judicially, for instance, for staging dog fights or cock fights. On the other hand, many people also think that it is morally permissible to use sentient animals in medical experiments whose goal is to find safe and effective treatments for serious human diseases.

As Warren argues, a multi-level theory of moral status that treats sentient animals differently than non-sentient organisms, and persons as different than sentient animals, does a better job of accounting for the moral intuitions that underlie these kinds of moral judgments since it entails that "sentient beings should not be subjected to pain and suffering, except in the service of needs that are important and cannot otherwise be served" (86). Enjoying the spectacle of dogs tearing each other to pieces is not a good enough reason to permit such activities no matter how many people enjoy it, because sentient animals have rights not to be subjected to needless cruelty. Versions of utilitarianism, such as preference utilitarianism, that aggregate pleasures and pains across all sentient beings, do not yield the same conclusion, for they allow that the aggregate pleasure of the human spectators to dog fights might out-weigh the pain it causes to the animals involved. This is one reason why having "rights" matters morally, and why I think it makes sense to say that psychological organisms are the kinds of things that can have rights, that is, they form a class of moral patients who occupy a moral plateau on which it is possible to ascribe rights to them.

Whether we decide to ascribe certain rights to certain psychological organisms is a question that will have to be settled by means of the usual processes by which we socially legitimize rights and right ascriptions. Having a right means that the sort of moral responsibilities or duties that moral agents have towards the right-holder are peremptory, that is, we can demand that they fulfil these duties, and we can enforce that demand by means of the coercive police powers of states. So, if people should be judicially sanctioned for cruelty to animals for failing to fulfill a moral duty they have towards them, as I think they should, then a precondition for doing so is that the moral patients who are the objects of their duties must be the kind of things that can have rights.

However, people should not be judicially sanctioned for killing flies, stepping on spiders, using weed-killer or anti-biotics, or for various other kinds of human activities that harm non-psychological organisms. In these cases, my way of thinking about moral status entails that while moral agents can have prima facie moral responsibilities not to needlessly harm them, they cannot be required to fulfill these kinds of moral responsibilities, at least not by means of coercive sanctions, because non-psychological organisms are not the kinds of things that can have rights, and they cannot have rights because they are not the kinds of things that have interests.

The capacity for having interests, being sentient or qualifying as a psychological organism, then, grounds a particular type of moral standing that is different than the type that applies to non-sentient organisms. However, it is necessary to complicate this theory. Warren observes that "it is implausible to suppose that all sentient beings can be fitted into just two categories of moral status, one for persons and another for all the rest" (87). It is implausible because sentience or consciousness is not an all-or-nothing affair like being alive or not alive; there are degrees of sentience or consciousness. She proposes that we think about a "sliding scale" of sentience in our judgments about moral status because,

There is no obvious place on the phylogenetic scale to draw a line between self-aware beings and those that are not self-aware; or between minimally sentient organisms and those that are wholly non-sentient. A sliding scale of moral status enables us to avoid the distasteful task of sorting animals into those that have first-class status, those that have second-class status, and those that have no moral status at all. It also reduces the need to determine the precise location of the sentience line, since on a sliding scale the moral status of minimally sentient beings may be only slightly different from that of non-sentient organisms (87).

This is one reason why I prefer to use the term moral stature when speaking about gradations of moral standing. All organisms have the moral status of ends-in-themselves, that is, as entitites having a kind of intrinsic moral value. This means that they have moral standing and can therefore function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents. Undoubted psychological organisms have a different level of moral standing than non-sentient organisms because they have interests and consequently can have rights.

But psychological organisms also have different degrees of moral stature, depending on how developed and complex their psychological capacities are. The greater an organism's psychological capacities are, the higher its moral stature, the weightier the reasons must be to excuse moral agents from their moral responsibilities towards them. The moral stature of moral patients can also be increased or decreased by means of the relational criteria for assigning moral status that Warren proposes. So, for instance, a beloved family pet would have a greater moral stature than a similar organism who is not a member of an interspecific moral community but has a similar set of psychological capacities.

But even among psychological organisms considered in themselves, there is a hierarchy of moral statures. So, for instance, suppose you are doing a medical experiment to test a drug for possible use against a human disease. Suppose further, that you can use either lab mice or chimpanzees as your animal model, but in either case, you will have to inflict some pain upon, or perhaps even kill, your animal subjects. In such a case, my moral intuition tells me that it is morally preferable to use the mice because, although they are probably sentient, their psychological capacities, and the form of consciousness they support, is less complex than that of the chimpanzees. Chimps have greater moral stature than mice although they both have moral standing as psychological organisms. An entity's moral status, then, can be seen as a function of both its level of moral standing and its moral stature on that level. Chimps occupy a higher moral plateau than do mice, other things being equal, because their more complex psychological capacities give them higher moral stature.

This way of talking, this "language game", will have other uses. The concepts of moral standing, moral stature, and moral plateaus, will be useful later on when we consider various questions about our moral responsibilities towards other human beings. In particular, when we consider human beings from an ontogenetic perspective, that is, from the point of view of morphogenesis, I will want to argue that human embryos have a different kind of moral standing than sentient human fetuses, which have a different kind of moral standing than competent adult moral agents, or persons. I will also want to argue that human individuals grow in moral stature as they negotiate the passage between embryohood and adulthood. Moral agents, on this kind of view, have moral responsibilities to protect vulnerable human individuals at all stages of morphogenesis, but the content and strength of those moral responsibilities change as the individual develops its psychological capacities and grows in moral stature.

The Human Moral Community

Several years ago the Australian utilitarian philosopher and advocate for the humane treatment of animals Peter Singer got himself into hot water by claiming that, given the necessity of making a choice, he might prefer to save the life of a normal healthy chimpanzee over that of an anencephalic human infant or a human adult in a vegetative coma. When questioned about this view in an interview with Psychology Today, he had this to say about the reasons for his position:

I want us to have a graduated moral approach to all sentient beings, related to their capacities to feel and suffer. If the being has self-awareness, we ought to give it even more rights. I'm not a biological egalitarian. I do not think that all nonhuman animals have the same claim to protection of their lives as humans do. I don't think it's as bad to kill a simple animal, like a frog or fish, as it is to kill a normal human being.

You have to ask yourself what actually makes it worse to kill one being rather than another, and the best answer I can come up with is one's sense of self, that you are alive and have a past and future. And apart from the great apes, I have made no claim that any other nonhuman animals are definitely capable of the self-awareness that I think gives humans, beyond the newborn stage, a more serious claim to protection of their life than other beings. But I would give animals of some other species the benefit of the doubt where that is possible.

I don't disagree with this general position, but I have a different way of accounting for the moral intuitions that underlie it, and also somewhat different intuitions.In terms of the graduated approach to moral status, I would say that psychological organisms have different degrees of moral stature depending on how developed their psychological capacities for sensory awareness and self-awareness are. So, for me, it is more acceptable to kill a mouse or a bird, than it is to kill a chimpanzee or an elephant, assuming that the reason why the animal is being killed are the same in each case, because although they are all sentient psychological creatures, the chimp and the elephant have more developed psychological capabilities and thus have greater moral stature,

Living entities that have some degree of moral agency, would have on my view an even higher moral stature than sentient organisms who are not moral agents. Living persons with full moral agency or moral autonomy, like you and me, occupy a different, higher level of moral standing because we can also be the bearers of moral obligations and can function as autonomous moral agents. On each level of intrinsic moral standing -- being a living thing, possessing psychological awareness, exhibiting some degree of moral agency, and achieving moral autonomy -- individuals can gain (or lose) moral stature depending on the complexity and power of their psychological faculties, so that, other things being equal, the moral value we assign to that entity will reflect its level of moral standing, plus (or minus) its moral stature at that level.

But it is still going to be difficult to make moral judgments about the relative moral statures of individuals with different levels of moral standing and different statures on those levels. The choice between saving the life of a normal adult chimpanzee and an anencephalic human newborn is a difficult case for many people because the latter will probably never attain full moral agency (if it survives at all). The choice between the healthy chimpanzee and the adult in a persistent vegetative coma is one between an individual who have some degree of moral agency but who will also never attain full moral autonomy (the chimp), and a human person who once attained that status but who has now irrevocably lost it (the comatose human adult).

These hard cases help to motivate the kind of intuitions that Singer thinks are important to attend to in order to overcome what he terms "speciesism" -- a preference for our own kind. Singer has suggested that "speciesism" is a form of prejudice, similar to racism and sexism, and that it ought to be rejected. But many people hold the view that human life is sacred, no matter what the psychological capacities of the individual are, while they believe that non-human animal life lacks this same "sacredness." For people who take this position, humanity, belonging to the human moral community, confers moral stature on an living individual apart from whatever intrinsic biological or psychological properties it has.

For her part, Warren agrees that species membership, per se, is not relevant to assigning individuals to the categories of psychological organisms or moral agents. She notes that, "some researchers who have worked with signing apes believe that there are apes who not only use language, but also employ moral concepts to guide their own behavior and evaluate and influence the behavior of others. If they are right, then a good case can be made that they ought to have the same basic moral rights as other novice moral agents;" and that similar arguments would apply to "other large-brained mammals, such as cetaceans, seals, and elephants." (p. 162).

But, unlike Singer, Warren argues that there is an additional principle that can and should be used to assign moral stature to sentient individual organisms:

The Human Rights Principle: Within the limits of their own capacities and of the Agent's Rights Principle, human beings who are capable of sentience but not of moral agency have the same moral rights as do moral agents.

It is important to understand that this principle is for Warren a relational one, rather than one based upon an entity's intrinsic properties, like the others we have discussed. As Warren explains it, "An entity's intrinsic properties are those which it has, and which it is logically possible for it to have had even if it were the only thing in existence. By contrast, its relational properties are those which it has, but which it is not logically possible for it to have were it the only thing in existence. Life, sentience, and the capacity for moral agency are in this sense intrinsic properties, whereas being a grandmother, or a recently naturalized citizen of Canada, are relational properties." (pp 122-3). This criterion is a logical, rather than an empirical one, because as she notes there is a sense in which even intrinsic properties are relational because of the chains of causation that produced entities having those properties. Nothing, except perhaps the universe as a whole, or God, can exist by itself.

The important point here, though, is that for Warren, whether an entity should be considered to be a "human being" or a member of the human moral community is seen as a relational, rather than an intrinsic property of things. The kind of moral value things acquire through their relational properties are derived from their relationships to other things which have moral value.

Warren explains the rationale for her Human Rights Principle as follows:

That all moral agents have full and equal basic moral rights does not imply that only moral agents have such rights. It is moral agents who shape and employ moral concepts, such as that of a moral right; and it is they who make rights operative, by establishing and maintaining social practices whereby respect for rights is taught and enforced. But the social, psychological, and biological realities of human existence require that basic rights not be restricted to human beings who are capable of moral agency. (164)

In this passage one should interpret the term "moral agency" in the minimalist sense of full moral agency or moral autonomy. She is saying that it highly counter-intuitive, and indeed morally abhorrent, to think that human infants and young children, and those human adults who have a diminished capacity for full moral agency, should not be regarded by us as having equal moral rights, the rights of persons, even though they do not qualify as fully competent moral agents.

The human rights principle is thus a kind of leveling principle; it creates a single status moral community among (sentient) human beings, irrespective of their individual differences in their psychological capacity. The human rights principle creates a moral plateau in which all those who qualify as "sentient" and "human" are considered to be "human persons" and are ascribed equal basic human rights. On the basis of this principle a severely retarded three year old has the same moral standing as Albert Einstein.

She notes that one reason for this additional principle of moral status becomes apparent when we consider how human beings become moral agents:

While we can imagine a moral agent coming into existence without the help of any other moral agent, in reality human beings become moral agents only through a long period of dependence upon human beings who are moral agents already. During this period of dependency we learn language, and all of the other mental and behavioral capacities that make moral agency possible. In Annette Baier's words, 'A person is best seen as one who was long enough dependent upon other persons to acquire the essential arts of personhood. Persons essentially are second persons, who grew up with other persons. (p.164).

But she offers a second, and I think more powerful reason for the Human Rights Principle, namely that "rational moral agency is unsatisfactory in practice as the sole criterion for full moral status, because it can too readily be used to deny moral status to persons whom others consider to be less than fully rational" (p. 103). She notes that historical experience shows that it has often been difficult for socially marginalized, stigmatized, and oppressed people to demonstrate their rationality to others who regard themselves as socially superior: "Women, slaves, servants, poor people, racial, religious, and ethnic minorities, colonized people, children past infancy, and people with mental and physical disabilities all experience such treatment. Thus to make rational moral agency the only basis for having moral rights is to risk rendering the rights of all but the most powerful persons perpetually vulnerable to challenge." (103).

The idea of human rights, rights which all human beings have irrespective of their individual differences, is a remedy to this historically important source of injustice, and for that reason, if for no other, should not be tossed aside glibly as reflecting only an unreasonable preference for our own kind. Humanity, that is being regarded as a human being, or as a member of the human moral community, is a moral status criterion that adds moral stature to an individual irrespective of its degree of biological or psychological development. It also treats other physical, psychological, and social differences among human beings as irrelevant to their moral standing, and creates a moral plateau in which all individuals on it are ascribed equal basic human rights.

But membership in the human moral community, like other forms of community, is defined by the recognition practices of existing members of that community. We become human by being recognized by other human beings as human. African culture has a word for it -- ubuntu -- a Bantu word which means, roughly, "a person becomes a person through other persons." This word has also now been appropriated as the name of a popular open source computer operating system, but this meaning has only a vague relationship to the original African meaning which emphasizes that "personhood" is a status that is assigned to individuals by other persons with whom they stand in a social relationship, as members of a human moral community. One practices ubuntu in this sense, by being open and friendly to strangers, caring about the improvement of one's community, and standing in solidarity with the oppressed. It is an inclusive moral value which inclines those who exercise it to respond to others as moral equals who occupy the same moral plateau as yourself.

If there is an antonym for the word ubuntu then perhaps it is "dehumanization." Throughout history people have exhibited a nasty tendency to dehumanize other human beings: the Greeks called non-Greeks "barbarians" before they conquered and enslaved them; Spanish conquistadors described the Native Americans they encountered as "savages" and "heathen" before they tortured and killed them; the genocidaires in Rwanda referred to Tutsi as "cockroaches" before murdering them; and during the Holocaust, Jews in Romania were slaughtered and hung on hooks like cattle with signs saying "Kosher beef." Dehumanization has been a prelude to atrocity. There are many more such sad stories than just these few examples.

The history of atrocity is the reason why the Human Rights Principle, and its leveling effect, is so important as a principle of ethics: It instructs us not to dehumanize the "other" and to treat them with equal concern and respect, despite the fact that they may differ from us in regard to their race, sex, nationality, religion, ethnicity, language, birth, property, citizenship, sexual orientation, and other grounds for invidious discrimination. The principle of non-discrimination, which is a core element of the contemporary human rights paradigm, is deemed essential as a means of preventing atrocities which have been all too common in humanity's history, of helping us overcoming this tragic flaw in the human moral character.

On the other hand, human beings also have a tendency to "anthropomorphize" non-human animals. Warren notes that that Dyak people of Malaysia are said to "have traditionally regarded orangutans as persons of a wise older race, who are capable of speaking to human beings, but generally choose not to" (p, 163). Modern children are raised with images of anthropomorphized animal characters in cartoons, which may help teach them respect for animal lives. Science fiction characters such a Mr. Spock and Data, who are nonhuman life forms or androids, are also anthromorphized "others" who are depicted as possessing full moral agency, and hence are deserving of the status of "persons," and are indeed depicted as members of the human moral community.

So the philosophical question again becomes one of "line drawing". Where exactly do we draw the boundaries of humanity? Who is really a member of the human moral community and who isn't?

Like many of the other questions of this kind we have had to confront, this one is question of decision rather than discovery. That is, in the last analysis, those of us who are undoubted persons possessing full moral agency have to decide where we want to place the boundaries of humanity. We can attach this boundary to a natural biological feature of the world, or to a psychological one, or to a social one, but it is always we who are doing the attaching.

Before the advent of modern biology, the Roman Catholic Church, I am told, determined that "ensoulment" -- the entry of a human soul into a fetus -- occurred at the time of "quickening" the first time a women was able to feel the movements of the fetus in her womb. Because of this belief the Church did not consider early abortions a sin, and only revised its doctrine in 1869 (Warren, p. 208).

Moral boundaries like those of "personhood" and "humanity" are rather like political ones: we can, if we wish, choose a natural feature of the landscape, such as a river or a coastline, to mark a political boundary, for instance, the Delaware River has been chosen as marking the boundary between the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. But in other cases, we just draw an arbitrary line across a map and separate Texas from Oklahoma. In both cases, it is a matter of decision-making by moral agents, not the discovery of some fact of the matter.

Warren considers a number of options, but in the end seems to opt for birth as "the most appropriate point at which to begin fully to enforce the moral rights that the Human Rights principle accords sentient human beings" (p.218). But, she notes, also that "Membership in the human species is highly relevant to the moral status of an individual who is already sentient, or who once was sentient and may someday return to sentience. However, prior to the initial occurrence of conscious experience, there is no being that suffers and enjoys, and thus has needs and interests that matter to it;" consequently, "the early fetus does not come under the protection of the Human Rights Principle" (pp. 204-205).

Her position is that sentient human fetuses, can have rights, and might therefore have a serious right to life, but that early fetuses (first trimester probably), an embryos, and zygotes, cannot have rights and therefore lie outside of the boundaries of any possible extension of the human moral community under her Human Rights Principle. Human embryos and early fetuses do, she allows, have moral status under the Respect for Life Principle, since, once the possibility of twinning is past, they are living individual organisms. Embryos and early fetuses may also gain additional status through her principle of Transitivity of Respect (which I will discuss shortly). She allows that people who feel empathy for vulnerable human embryos and early fetuses, and for whom abortion is a moral wrong, on her view, "are entitled not to harm them, and to seek in non-coercive ways to persuade others not to harm them," but they "cannot reasonably demand that others share their belief that first-semester fetuses are already sentient, or insist that others must accept the moral conclusions that might follow if this belief were true" (208).

This kind of position is very attractive for those, like myself, who would like both to reconcile the "pro-life" and the "pro-choice" positions on abortion, and to accord non-human species some kind of moral standing comparable, but not equal to, that accorded to human beings.

On my theory, however, I think it is preferable to extend the boundary of the concept "human" to embryos produced by combining human genetic material once the possibility of twinning has past. On this view, human embryos (past twinning) and early fetuses (pre-sentience) should be ascribed the status of human beings, and should therefore be regarded as members of the human moral community. Having this moral status adds to their moral stature over and above the moral standing they have based upon their intrinsic biological and psychological properties.

My reason for taking this view are some moral intuitions that I have and which I think are widely shared. The kinds of moral intuitions one can use here are ones which require a forced choice between saving the life of a human embryo and that of, say, a chimpanzee embryo. The genetic material, DNA, of chimpanzees and humans, is 99.9% identical. From the point of view of their intrinsic properties alone, both primate embryos have the same moral standing as individual living organisms. This means that they qualify as moral patients and can be the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents. We should not harm or kill them without good reason, but the moral responsibilities that direct us to protect them, are defeasible, that is, they can be overridden by stronger moral reasons, and non-peremptory, that is, they cannot demanded of autonomous moral agents. Autonmous moral agents, then, are at liberty to use their own moral discretion, their own conscientious moral judgment -- their moral autonomy -- to decide how they will treat such organisms, and society may not deny them that liberty by enforcing a particular policy by means of coercive judicial sanctions.

It follows that destroying human and chimpanzee embryos should not be illegal. However, it seems to me that, morally speaking, in a forced choice dilemma in which one can save only one of the embryos, my moral intuition tells me to prefer the human embryo over the chimpanzee because its humanity confers upon it greater moral stature. Test this yourself. Construct similar cases in which you compare a human being at some level of moral standing, living, sentient, or novice moral agent, with another organism belonging to a different species at the same level of moral standing and whose degree of biological and psychological development is roughly the same. If the two individuals in question have the same moral status, it should be a matter of indifference which one's life is preserved. But I do not think it is. In each case, I would morally prefer to human being to the nonhuman organism all other things being equal, and I think that most people would agree with this judgment. In these case, species membership does seem to matter to an individual's moral stature.

One the benefit of this view is that it enables one to have an ethics that is genuinely both "pro-life" and "pro-choice", and which makes it possible to assign moral standing to members of nonhuman species comparable, but not equal to, that which we assign to ourselves. Both of these objectives are critical if we are to create a truly biocentric ethics without abandoning the important insights into the human moral condition which motivate the principle of non-discrimination and the concept of human rights, while at the same time respecting the moral beliefs of a great number of our fellow human beings.

But some of my friends have told me that I need to be very careful about how I state this view because it is susceptible to obfuscation and distortion. So let me reiterate that human embryos and early fetuses, while I regard them as human beings and hence as members of the human moral community, do not have human rights. They certainly do not have the same rights as autonomous moral agents, or persons, in the minimalist sense. But they don't even have the same moral standing as, say, your dog or cat. On my view, some psychologically complex nonhuman animals can have rights while human embryos and early fetuses and adults in irreversible comas cannot. Thus, in terms of their comparative moral standing based on their intrinsic properties alone, the family pets would have higher moral standing than the human beings in these cases. Similarly, organisms that are sentient to some degree have higher moral standing than organisms that are non-sentient. So then, psychological organisms of all species, will, certeris paribus, have higher moral standing that non-psychological organisms of all species. This implies that the brown bunny in my backyard has higher moral standing that an human embryo, again, other things being equal.

This will be, for many readers, a decisive objection to my view. Many people have been taught to believe that human rights belong to all human beings simply because they are human. This is a useful and emotionally powerful oversimplification. In terms of my (and Warren's) theories of moral status, only undoubted persons, that is individuals with full moral agency or moral autonomy, unquestionably have rights. Other kinds of moral agents who are also psychological organisms also can have rights. Most human beings qualify as psychological organisms and hence can have rights. The Human Rights Principle levels off the psychological differences among sentient human beings to create a single status moral community, a kind of moral plateau, on which all sentient human beings are accorded equal rights.

But some kinds of human beings are not or will never again be psychological organisms. These categories human beings cannot function as the bearers of rights, any more than plants can. Autonomous moral agents can still have moral responsibilities towards them which instruct us to protect them from harm because they have the moral status of valuable and vulnerable living beings. While human embryos and early fetuses are valuable and vulnerable human beings, they are not "persons"; they are not "children," and they do not have human rights, because they are not psychological organisms. While no one knows for sure when human fetuses gain sentience and become psychological organisms, it cannot be before they have brains and nervous systems. For such living organisms, while we moral agents can owe moral obligations towards them directly, these obligations are non-peremptory and should not be coercively enforced on moral agents out of respect for their moral autonomy. While being recognized as "human" gives human embryos and early fetuses greater moral stature than other non-sentient organisms, it does not alter their basic moral standing.

An alternative strategy to setting the boundary of humanity, is to deny that embryos and early fetuses are "human" and to instead describe them in some more neutral way, as products of conception, or as "genetic material." The problem with this strategy is that it does not settle the question of when products of conception attain the status of "human beings." Is it at sentience, viability, birth, or some other stage of ontogenesis? Modern biology has no place for concepts such as "ensoulment", which is unobservable, so where does the boundary of humanity fall? One can place it at birth, as Warren does, but that decision fails to account for the kinds of moral intuitions discussed above, which is why I prefer to "bite the bullet" and defend the position I do, even though it entails that some kinds of human beings do not have rights. This position is also more consistent with a biocentric axiology that considers other non-sentient life forms as having an intrinsic moral value, without also endowing them with rights.

After the point of sentience has been reached, human fetuses jump up to the next level of moral standing and become the kinds of things to which rights can be ascribed. Society may choose to ascribe certain rights to late-stage fetuses, the same as it would to protect the important interests of any psychological organism, and it may, for instance, enforce laws concerning their humane treatment that coercively constrain the behavior of autonomous moral agents towards them to protect their interests.

After birth, and here I agree with Warren, human infants should be accorded the status of "human persons" and should be ascribed equal basic human rights, even though they are still a long way from being autonomous moral agents. The Human Rights Principle, and ubuntu, require no less, and this is also consistent with our ethical and social traditions.

But philosophers are not legislators; we can only propose moral policies; we cannot legitimize them politically, socially, and legally. However, I believe that a public policy based upon the conception of moral status developed here has the potential of gaining widespread acceptance within global society, and becoming an element of a emerging biocentric ethics, one which values all life, but which also ascribes higher moral stature to human lives, other things being equal.

Biosocial Moral Communities

Several years ago my aunt spent $20,000 on chemotherapy for one of her cats, which, unfortunately, succumbed to cancer nevertheless. My own values would not permit me to do this; I would much rather spend that kind of money on humanitarian relief and medical assistance to endangered human beings living in other countries, with whom I have no personal relationship.

However, I do understand why people like my aunt feel so strongly about their pets. Her cat was her constant companion, and a source of joy to her. She regarded it as a member of her family and did not think that she could just let it die when treatment might have saved its life.

People who have such social relationships with domestic animals attach a kind of moral status to them that does not reflect their intrinsic biological properties. Warren proposes that there is a distinct principle of moral status, what she terms the Interspecific Principle, that accounts for these intuitions, under which "non-human members of mixed social communities have a stronger moral status than could be based upon their intrinsic properties alone" (168).

Pets and other domestic animals acquire greater moral stature because they are regarded as members of mixed moral communities comprised of individual entities with different kinds of moral status. This particular source of moral status is based upon an entity's relational properties to other members of these mixed moral communities. However, for Warren, the Interspecific Principle need not assign the same moral stature or the same rights to all domesticated animal and plant species.

She quotes Mary Midgley's observation that human social communities have throughout history included non-human species, but that different animals play different roles and have different moral statuses:

Pets, for example, are...surrogate family members and merit treatment not owed either to less intimately related animals, for example to barnyard animals, or, for that matter, to less intimately related human beings....The animal welfare ethic of the mixed community...would not censure using draft animals for work or even slaughtering animals for food so long as the keeping and using of such animals was not in violation...of a kind of evolved and unspoken social contract between man and beast. (129)

For Warren, wild animals, those which are not members of human social communities, "should not lie on the same spectrum of graded moral standing as family members, neighbors, fellow citizens, fellow human beings, pets, and other domestic animals. Wild animals, are, however, parts of natural biological communities, or ecosystems, and we may have moral obligations towards them derived from their relationship to these natural ecological communities. Separate treatment is also required for members of invasive species, whose presence degrades the ecosystems into which they are introduced, and also to endangered species, whose survival as a distinct life form is threatened, most often, by patterns of human activity. Some environmental ethicists have proposed that "wilderness areas" which remain essentially untouched by the hand of man, deserve special protection. Conflicts can arise, for instance, between protecting the integrity of natural ecosystems, and protecting the lives of members of certain species who are parts of them, as well, of course, between human interests, and the interests of members of various sentient animal species.

Warren proposes a distinct principle of moral status, the Ecological Principle, to handle cases involving wild animals, species, and ecosystems:

Living things that are not moral agents but that are important to the ecosystems of which they are a part, have, within the limits of principles 1-4, a stronger moral status that could be based on their intrinsic properties alone; ecologically important entities that are not themselves alive, such as species and habitats, may also legitimately be accorded a stronger moral status than their intrinsic properties would indicate (p. 166).

This is a principle for assigning moral stature to individual entities that is distinct from the level of moral standing that entity has based upon its intrinsic properties. It can be used to either add or to substract stature. So for instance, animal species that we call "vermin" and "pests" have less stature on their levels of moral standing than otherwise comparable organisms. Livestock that is raised for human food, such as cattle, pigs, and chickens, have lower stature than pets, and protected endangered wild species. So-called "charismatic species" such as panda bears and koalas (that have big eyes and are furry), are generally seen by humans as having higher moral statures than their not so cute and cuddly cousins.

The variability and (frankly) arbitrariness of these kinds of moral judgments, indicates that they are based on our perceptions of an entity's relational value, either to human beings, to other plant or animal species, or to an ecosystem, that is, to what J. Baird Callicott has termed "biosocial communities." Humans live in such biosocial communities, and so do many other plants and animals. All life forms are dependent on the biotic community as a whole, and the Earth's natural systems, for their survival and well-being. Biosocial moral communities are comprised of individuals and other entities having different kinds of moral standing and stature within them.

It may seem somewhat surprising that Warren takes the position that the Ecological Principle can be (but she says need not be) extended to include "moral obligations towards water, air, plant and animal species, or other elements of the biosphere that are neither living organisms nor sentient beings." (167). It is surprising because, as she acknowledges, entities that are not alive, "cannot be harmed in the ways that living things and sentient beings can," and, "it is implausible to insist that our obligations regarding them must be understood as obligations towards them." Nevertheless, she insists that we should allow non-living entities, like natural ecosystems, to be the direct objects of our moral obligations, because "human beings may be more inclined to protect these vulnerable elements of the natural world it they accept moral obligations towards them."

This is a consequentialist argument that bases the claim to moral standing for non-living elements of natural ecosystems on the utility of this belief for modifying human behavior towards the Earth. It is, she thinks, a policy we might adopt "if we wish humanity to survive and flourish into the distant future" (168). The crucial point, however, is that "to say that these elements of the natural world may legitimately be accorded moral status is not to be committed to the claim that they have intrinsic value, i.e., a value that is entirely independent of the needs and desires of any living or sentient being" (167). Put differently, moral standing can be based entirely upon the derived rather than the intrinsic values of certain classes of moral patients.

On my theory of moral status, many non-living things will have various kinds of moral standing derived solely from their value to other entities that have intrinsic value in themselves. For instance, common artifacts such as my car or bicycle have the moral status of personal property, and on that account other people should not damage or destroy them. On a conventional way of thinking about such moral obligations, the obligations derived from something having the status of personal property are not owed to the bicycle or car, but to their owner. They are obligations "regarding" or "concerning" these objects, not obligations "towards" them. The moral (and legal) obligations in such cases are owed to me; I am the moral patient in the relationship, not my property. The bicycle and the car themselves cannot be moral patients or the objects of our moral responsibilities on this view.

The terminological distinctions I have drawn between "moral status," "moral standing," and "moral stature" and the additional idea of "moral plateaus" provide a more adequate theoretical vocabulary for talking about these issues than does Warren's single term "moral status." On my view, some inanimate objects can have moral standing, and can function as the objects of moral responsibilities, even though they lack intrinsic value and should therefore not be regarded as "ends in themselves." Being alive, being sentient, and being capable of moral agency are intrinsic properties that provide sufficient conditions for moral standing. But they are not necessary conditions. Some kinds of entities that have none of these intrinsic properties can, on my theory, nevertheless function as moral patients.

As I have already mentioned, I am committed to the view that organizations such as corporations and governments, can be regarded as moral and legal "persons" and can be ascribed moral and legal rights and obligations. Corporations and governments are not alive and do not die, nor are they sentient, and have no intrinsic value in themselves. But nevertheless it is scarcely conceivable that we can understand the nature of rights and responsibilities within human moral communities without attributing a kind of moral agency to these kinds of organizations that is not reducible to the agency of their human operators.

If we grant moral standing to corporations, governments and other organizations, then there is no reason to withhold this moral status from wilderness areas, endangered species, and various non-living elements of complex ecosystems. In order to create the kind of global ethics that I envision, we will also have to ascribe moral statuses to deceased persons and to future persons, neither of which are presently alive. I see no principled reason why we cannot treat them as kinds of moral patients toward whom we can have responsibilities, although they will occupy different moral statuses within the overall framework of my axiology for a global ethics.

We can also have moral obligations towards certain kinds of "unowned" inanimate objects, such as rivers and streams, wetlands, marine reserves, even towards stones. This will perhaps become less counter-intuitive when we consider some examples that Warren relies upon to motivate her seventh (and last) principle of moral status, the Transitivity of Respect.

Respecting Former Persons

Recent archaeological evidence excavated near Stonehenge suggests that the mammoth stone circle erected there in approximately 2500 B.C. was used at least in part as a monument to the dead. Another nearby neolithic site, Durrington Walls, was found to contain a profusion of pottery, animal bones, and other detritus suggesting that it was a feasting site. But few human remains have been found at Durrington Walls, while 52 cremations and numerous other human remains have been uncovered at Stonehenge, suggesting that it was used in Neolithic Britain as a cemetery, the stone circle representing the "domain of the ancestral dead." [Caroline Alexander. "If the Stones Could Speak: Searching for the Meaning of Stonehenge," National Geographic Magazine. Vol 213, No.8 (June 2008): 35-59.]

Like the Buddhas of Bamyam, the stones at Stonehenge have a kind of moral status because they have value to human moral agents. For us they have historical, cultural, and perhaps aesthetic value. But they probably had a different value to the people who erected them. Like the tombstones in our present cemeteries and public memorials to soldiers who died in wars, the stone circle represented the domain of the ancestral dead, or former persons.
Monuments to the dead, to former persons, are the enduring symbols of people who did once have intrinsic value as living, sentient, moral agents. We humans often choose durable things like stones to memorialize the dead, because they persist in time longer than most things, and can thus serve as a continuous link between the past and the present. The stones remind us that the dead are still in some sense "with us", not in themselves, but in the flesh and blood of their living descendants, in the cultures they created, and in the material artifacts that they produced.

Do former persons have a moral status? Can moral agents have moral obligations towards former persons? If so, what can such moral obligations be based upon?

Former persons, the deceased, are not alive, not sentient, and are not agents in the sense we ordinarily assume since they cannot act in the present, so in terms of our theory, former persons do not have intrinsic moral value because they possess none of the intrinsic properties that things must have in order to have moral standing in themselves.

But former persons did at one time exist as persons, and acted on the world in various ways as moral agents. Among the things they may have done is to have created cultural artifacts such as Stonehenge, or the Buddha statues at Bamyam, or the Illiad, or the Mona Lisa. Some of them must have also procreated and produced progeny, who procreated, whose descendants in turn, by means of causal chains of "begetting", may have begotten us.

The Great Chain of Being, as some ancient philosophical traditions called it, included spiritual beings, such as demons, angels, and gods, but the Great Chain of Begetting, does not. It is only the chain of biological inheritance that connects living generations of humans and other species with both their deceased ancestors, and their yet to be conceived biological descendants. While each of us, the living, has an intrinsic moral value in ourselves based upon the intrinsic properties and capabilities of our form of life, this intrinsic value is inherited from our ancestors and passed on by us to future generations of our species by means of biological procreation. There is nothing fancy or supernatural about this form of inheritance. If living things and sentient moral agent have intrinsic value, and they procreate and produce other living sentient moral agents, then those progeny inherit the kinds of moral value that was intrinsic in their ancestors. Our children, and their children, and their children's children, and so on, will inherit this same intrinsic moral value from us.

But from our present temporal vantage point former persons are nonexistent. Dead people cannot be affected or harmed in any way by our present actions. The dead are, in an important sense, invulnerable. If the dead cannot be harmed, as philosophers since Epicurus have thought, they are invulnerable and it would seem they cannot be objects of any moral responsibilities under the Vulnerability Principle, which normally presupposes that the moral patients to whom responsibilities of care and protection are directed must be vulnerable in some way to being harmed by our actions.

But the Vulnerability Principle is carefully stated: it says that moral agents have moral responsibilities to protect those moral patients who are specially vulnerable or in some way depending upon us. Can former persons, the deceased, be regarded as moral patients who are in some ways depending on us?

There is a sense in which they can. Former persons, our ancestors, are depending on us to preserve their genes by passing them onto future generations; they are depending on us to preserve the cultures that they created, their knowledge, their art, their moral and religious beliefs. Past generations are depending on us to preserve their best material artifacts, their monuments and cathedrals, their pyramids, aqueducts, and their sandstone Buddha images.

Many people feel the moral pull of tradition very strongly in their own lives. A great deal of human activity is directed towards the goal of preserving the cultural traditions and cultural achievements of the past and passing them on to future generations. Educators are culture carriers in this sense, and no human culture can persist without educators. In complex cultures such as our presently emerging global civilization, there are specific detailed roles, such as archaeologists, New Testament scholars, classicists, Asian antiquities experts, Florentine art restoration experts, Chicago historical architectural preservationists, and so forth, whose specific roles are to preserve cultural artifacts created by former persons. But, for whose sakes are they doing this? Is it for the sake of the deceased creators of these things or is it for us, the living, or is it for those who will come after us, future persons?

When people draw up their last will and testament that specifies what is to be done with their possessions when they have died, they are depending on others, the executors of their wills, to fulfill their wishes. Are we not obliged to keep our promises to the dead even though they will not be harmed by our betraying them? If we honor a trust placed upon us by another, we respect them, and conversely, by betraying a trust we disrespect them. So respecting the dead, means that we, the living, must honor the trust they have placed in us. They, the deceased, have placed their trust in us to preserve what was best in their life's work, the fruits of their labors, and the legacies they created as "gifts to the future." Think about your own legacy and how you would want it treated by those who come after you. It is the same for our ancestors: just as we are trusting future persons to preserve what was best in our present day culture, previous generations trusted us to preserve and protect what was best in theirs.

We can certainly harm the living descendants of the dead. If we fail to execute a person's last will, we can deprive a rightful heir of what they are entitled to. Most all human cultures have adopted burial practices that involve memorializing their ancestral dead. The physical remains of the ancestral dead, their bones, and the stone and concrete monuments that the living erect for the dead, can be damaged or destroyed, and to do so is usually regarded as a sacrilege, and as a way of disrespecting the departed.

But the remains of the dead, and the monuments erected to memorialize them, can only have derived moral status, a form of moral standing that is wholly derived from the value that moral agents place on them. So it is really the living descendants of the dead whom we respect when we respect the bones of their ancestors or respect the memorial stones erected over their graves, or the public monuments constructed to honor them. The moral standing these kinds of artifacts have is derived from their value to living moral agents, not their value to the deceased.

This way of looking at the question reduces all of our moral obligations to ones owed, directly or indirectly, towards actual, existing, moral patients. On this view, the only reason for honoring former persons' wills, or for fulfilling the promises we make to the dying, is that not doing so would harm some interest of present persons.

It is part of our conventional homocentric ethics to hold the belief all moral obligations are owed to presently existing moral patients. Our conventional way of thinking about ethical issues is highly "present-oriented"; we are inclined to consider only the short-term effects of our actions. It is also quite "localist" in that we mainly consider only those personal interests most directly affected by our actions.

I do not think these assumptions are correct. There is no theoretical barrier towards thinking of former persons as moral patients to whom moral agents can have moral obligations. As in the case of inanimate objects and aritifacts, all we have to do is to assign the status-function "moral patient" to the referents of the term "former persons," and presto-chango, they become moral patients, in the same way as pieces of metal become "coins" when we assign the status-function "money" to them. Like other derived forms or moral status, the moral status we assign to former persons is "observer-relative." it depends upon how intentional moral agents like ouselves assign status-functions to things. By assigning the status function "moral patient" to the term "former persons" we decide to include the referents of that term within the category of things towards which we can have moral obligations.

But former persons actually existed at one time as living, sentient moral agents, persons, who had intrinsic moral value in themselves. This is different than the pieces of metal that we make into coins, which have no moral or monetary value in themselves apart from that which observers like us assign to them. We do not respect inanimate objects in themselves, but we do, I believe, respect former persons in themselves, we respect them for what they were and for what they have bequeathed to us. So former persons have a distinct kind of moral standing. Although former persons cannot be harmed, they can be disrespected and the trust they place in us can be violated or dishonored. We present moral agents can have moral responsibilities towards former persons which are based upon the moral stature they once had as human persons, like us.

A global ethics, as I conceive it, alters our conventional assumptions about the boundaries of the moral community. In place of the homocentric bias of conventional ethics, it proposes a biocentric axiology in which living, sentient, non-human organisms can also function as moral patients and be the objects of human moral responsibilities. In place, of the "localist" bias of our conventional ethics, a global ethics proposes a "global" perspective in which our moral responsibilities extend beyond our own families and homes, our neighborhoods, and our own states and nations, to encompass all present persons and other living beings. So too, a global ethics must overcome the "present-oriented" bias of conventional ethics, and extend the boundaries of the moral community into the distant past, towards previous generations and former persons, and into the far future, towards future persons and future generations. On my theory, both former persons and future persons have moral standing as moral patients towards whom we, present persons, or actually existing moral agents, can owe moral responsibilities.