Moral Status and Personhood

In order to understand the VCP on must grasp the concept of moral status. Moral status is what determines whether something can function as the A and B terms in the Vulnerability Relation, which is, as you will recall,

The Vulnerability Relation: A is vulnerable to B with respect to C because of D.

The B term specifies the bearer or subject of the sorts of moral responsibilities that I content derive from the Vulnerability Relations, while the A term specifies the addressees, beneficiaries, or objects of these kinds of moral responsibilities. The VCP says that moral agents can have moral responsibilities to protect those who are specially vulnerable or in some way depending on them for their care. But the questions which we must now address are:

Who (or what) can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities in this sense? and,

Who (or what) can function as the objects of moral responsibilities in this sense?

I will begin my discussion of the concept of moral status with the work on this topic by several contemporary philosophers.

Mary Anne Warren has characterized the concept of moral status as follows:

To have moral status is to be morally considerable, or to have moral standing. It is to be an entity towards which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations. If an entity has moral status, then we may not treat it in just any way we please; we are morally obliged to give weight in our deliberations to its needs, interests, or well-being. Furthermore, we are morally obliged to do this not merely because protecting it may benefit ourselves or other persons, but because its needs have moral importance in their own right. [Warren (1997) Moral Status: obligations to persons and other living things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 3]

Personhood is an example of moral status in this sense. To have the status of a person is understood as the basis of having human rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the others. The moral status of persons is typically conferred upon types of individuals who meet certain general criteria, for instance, sentience, rational agency, intentionality, and the like. Normally adult human beings are regarded as persons. I have already noted that moral agency is a precondition for attributions of liability responsibility. So it is reasonable to suggest here that moral agency is likewise a precondition for something functioning as the bearer of moral responsibilities in the substantive normative sense. So, the short answer to the first question is that only individuals who possess moral agency can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities in the vulnerability relation. Since persons possess moral agency, persons can be the bearers of moral responsibilities.

Adult human beings are, for the most part, persons. Philosophers sometimes call human moral agents 'undoubted persons' because there is no doubt that they satisfy the conditions for moral agency. However, not all human beings are also persons in this sense. Individuals in deep comas are not, nor are infants and young children, nor are embryos and fetuses. In none of these kinds of cases does it make sense to ascribe moral responsibilities to these kinds of human beings. There are also some borderline cases in which one might legitimately doubt whether someone is a person, for instance, when dealing with severely psychotic or schizophrenic individuals. People who are deranged in these ways are not normally held to be morally responsible for their actions, even though they look just like undoubted persons.

But there are also certain kinds of things which are persons but are not human beings. The prime example of this category are corporations and other sorts of collective entities. I will return to this topic at a later point, but for the time being, I want to note that corporations and other kinds of collective entities can be ascribed moral responsibilities even though they are not human beings, and in fact, are not even alive. Corporations do not bleed and they do not die. Nevertheless it is important to understand that corporations can satisfy the necessary conditions for moral agency, and hence be regarded as moral as well as legal persons.

If there are extra-terrestrial intelligent races out there somewhere in space, then it is quite possible that we would classify them as persons who are not also human beings. Think, for instance, about the alien in Steven Spielberg's movie E.T. -- not human to be sure, but capable of moral agency and hence moral responsibility nonetheless. It is certainly imaginatively possible to conceive of other kinds of beings which are 'persons' in the sense of possessing moral agency, but which are not human beings. Think about hobbits.

Science fiction provides other examples of possible non-human persons. Issac Asimov's story "The Centennial Man" (later made into a movie called the Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams) contemplates the possibility that some day we will have robots that claim their civil rights as persons under the law. For the time being, this is just a fictional possibility, but some authors, such as Ray Kurzweil, have predicted that the day in which we have such forms of artificially intelligent robots is not as far off as many people think. If and when these robots do come into being we will need to think of them as nonhuman persons.

Some people also think that some of our biological relatives, higher primates such as chimpanzees, or cetaceans such as bottle-nosed dolphins, might quality as nonhuman persons. Other people doubt this is true, which is why it might be possible to call these members of other species "doubted persons". Since I think of personhood as closely connected with those capacities necessary for moral agency, I am comfortable with this designation. Philosophers, by and large, have tended to over-emphasize the evolutionary discontinuities between human beings and other intelligent species. I, on the other hand, am more persuaded by the arguments of the biologists and evolutionary psychologists that there are significant continuities between humans and other members of the animal kingdom in the underlying psychological capacities that make moral agency possible.

Philosophers have spent a good deal of time and lots of ink trying to figure out exactly where to draw the boundaries of moral personhood. While interesting, I am not going to say much more about this topic here other than to note that I believe this is a matter for decision rather than discovery. That is, we will ultimately need to decide to draw the boundary somewhere or another, and where ever we draw it is going to be politically contested, as it is, for example, in the debate over the morality of abortion. We can fix on various kind of natural or psychological features of individuals as the basis for drawing the boundary, but this does not alter the fact that we construct and create it.

Definitional boundaries are rather like political borders in this sense; we can use the presence of a river or a coastline as the marker for a political boundary, say between the states of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but it is still our decision to use this natural feature as a boundary. The ability of the river to function in this way depends upon our collective intentionality to treat it as a political boundary. The same thing is true of the definitions of terms like "person" or "moral agent". We construct the meanings of our symbols.

Moral Patients

We need to understand that while only moral agents, or persons, can function as the bearers of moral responsibilities, it is not the case that only moral agents can function as their objects. As I shall use the term, a moral patient is something that can function as the object of the moral responsibilities of moral agents, that is, something to which moral attitudes such as moral concern, respect, or care can be directed.

Moral patients are things towards which moral agents can have moral responsibilities. On this definition, all moral agents are also moral patients, but moral patients need not be moral agents. Only moral agents can function as the bearers of moral obligations towards others, while moral patients can be the objects of the moral obligations of others, but need not themselves be capable of moral agency.

We generally think of other adult human beings as moral agents, even though some adult human beings lack the effective capacity for moral agency, for instance, persons in comas. To qualify as a moral agent, one must satisfy the criteria generally accepted for mental competence as required for ascriptions of moral responsibility in the sense of liability for moral blame or praise. The actions of moral agents can be evaluated morally as to their blame or praiseworthiness, but not, for instance, the actions of infants and most animals. Nonhuman animals because they lack an effective capacity for moral agency can be readily classified as moral patients.

Thus, a moral patient does not have to be a moral agent or person, but could, for instance, also be nonhuman animals or an entire species, plants, microorganisms, an ecosystem, or even perhaps an inanimate object such as a work of art or a prized possession. The category of moral patients might be quite large and quite differentiated. It will need to be defined further.

Some kinds of moral patients are also agents, just not moral agents. In using the terms 'agent' and 'patient' I do not mean to imply that moral patients lack agency in their own right, or that moral agents cannot also be acted upon by moral patients. A shark, which is a moral patient can kill a man. A human infant, which is another kind of moral patient, can evoke in most human adults a caring impulse. Moral agents act upon moral patients and vice versa. In order to be considered a moral patient, that is, as the object of a moral responsibility, an entity must have some kind and degree of moral status.

As Francis Kamm has noted, there is a broad sense of moral status in which the concept can be defined as "what it is permissible or impermissible to do to some entity. In this sense, rocks may have the moral status of entities to which, just considering them, it is morally permissible to do anything" (F. M. Kamm. Intricate Ethics: Rights, Responsibilities, and Permissible Harm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 227). But we normally use the term in a narrower sense as a contrast between "entities that in some important sense 'count' morally in their own right, and so are said to have moral status, and others that do not count morally in their own right." I will employ the term "moral standing" to denote things which count morally in their own rights either because of their intrinsic properties or relational properties. Having moral standing is a kind of moral status; other things like ordinary rocks do not have moral standing because they have the moral status of things to which we can do anything we please. Some other things which we cannot affect at all by means of human action have a different kind of moral status. The planet Jupiter or the Carina Nebula would fall into this category and would also lack moral standing.

Kamm endorses a suggestion by Christine Korsgaard that entities do not have to be considered to have an intrinsic value in order to have moral status in this sense; they only need to be considered as ends in the sense that some aspect of their good can "provide a reason (even if an overrideable one) for attitudes and actions independent of other considerations" (228). For instance, Kamm says, "A work of art or a tree may count in its own right in the sense that it gives us reason to constrain our behavior toward it (for example, not destroy it) just because that would preserve this entity" (228).

But Kamm further distinguishes doing something to an entity "for its own sake and not just in its own right." For Kamm only entities that have the capacity for sentience or consciousness can qualify as objects for whose sakes we can have moral obligations. I agree that entities which have the psychological capacities necessary for sentience have moral standing and are therefore moral patients. But I disagree with Kamm and also believe that there are organisms which are not sentient towards which we can act morally in their own rights even though they do not have interests in the psychological sense. All of those living things whose well-being can be affected for better or worse by the actions of moral agents can, on this view, be considered to have some kind or degree of moral standing and can therefore function as moral patients within the vulnerability relation.

To clarify the notion of moral status further, Kamm argues that, "there is a difference between one's having a duty to do something and having a duty to a specific entity to do it" (230). When we have a duty to someone, it typically creates a "correlative right or claim had by the entity to which the duty is owed against the person who owes it." We say that we act wrongly when we fail to fulfill a duty or responsibility to do something, but we say that we have wronged someone when we fail to fulfill our duty towards them as a right-holder. The party to whom a moral obligation is owed (its addressee) is not necessarily the party who is benefited or affected by that obligation (its object). This can be made clear by means of an example or two.

Suppose that Sam has mother, Judith, who has had a stroke which left her severely incapacitated and in need of care. But Sam has a job and a young family to care for as well, so he hires Gwen, a professional nurse, who promises Sam to take care of Sam's mother Judith while he is at work. In this example, Sam has a moral responsibility to care for his mother when she is vulnerable and depending upon him for her care, but he can delegate this responsibility to another caregiver who then enters in as a party to this moral relationship.

In this triangular moral relationship Gwen is a duty-bearer; she has a duty to Sam to take care of his mother Judith. Sam is the right-holder and the addressee of Gwen's duty since it is Sam who would be wronged by Gwen if she failed to properly discharge her duties. Judith is an object and beneficiary of Gwen's duty. Judith is in this case is a moral patient who is also a moral agent but who functions as the indirect object of Gwen's moral obligations. Sam functions as the direct object of Gwen's responsibility because she owes her duty to Sam. While Gwen owes her duty to Sam, because of her promise was addressed to him, Judith is the object of Gwen's duty because Gwen now has a responsibility to care for Judith that was delegated to her by Sam. On this account, Sam has a right against Gwen, and Gwen has a duty she owes to Sam, but Gwen also has a moral responsibility towards Judith who is the object and the beneficiary of her care. Judith is the object of Gwen's duties, but Sam is the right-holder who is in a position to demand that Gwen fulfill her responsibilities.

This is an example of how moral patients can function as the objects of a moral agent's obligations although they are not themselves are not right-holders in the relevant sense. Thus, a moral patient can be the object of the moral responsibilities of others without having rights against them.

One can drive this point home more forcefully by substituting something that is not a human being for Judith. Suppose we vary the case and stipulate that Sam asked Gwen to water his plants while he was away on vacation. Sam's plants are not moral agents, nor are they sentient, and are not the kind of things that can have rights. But Gwen still has a duty towards the plants because of the promise she has given to Sam. Sam has rights against Gwen, but Sam's plants don't.

Or consider the case in which Sam asks Gwen to take care of his 1200cc Harley Davidson motorcycle for him, say to change its oil and polish its chrome. In this case we would say that Gwen has a responsibility concerning Sam's Harley, but many people would be disinclined to say that the motorcycle is the object her responsibilities. Sam is still the addressee of Gwen's duties and he would be wronged if she does not do as she has promised. But motorcycles, and most other inanimate, non-living material artifacts, are not normally considered to be things that we can have obligations towards. In such cases, I will say that the object in question has a derived, or observer-relative kind of moral status. Its status is derived from the interests of moral patients who have "goods of their own" or can be regarded as "ends in themselves," but the object of the obligation, its beneficiary, itself cannot.

There can also be cases where a single entity, for example, another person, functions both as the object or beneficiary and the right-older with respect to someone else's duties. When rights ground moral responsibilities, for example, a duty, to refrain from torturing another person by subjecting them to electrical shocks, my duty corresponds to a right on her part not to be tortured. Here the object of my responsibilities and their beneficiary are the same individual. Rights ground moral duties that are in the interest of the right-holders. If I commit torture I both harm the person I torture and I wrong him because I have violated a right which he has against me.

However, when we have moral responsibilities concerning moral patients who are not also moral agents, no such rights are involved. So, for example, I may have a duty not to destroy a tree without good reason because the tree has a moral status, which (other things being equal), gives me reason not to destroy it. But this moral duty does not correlate with right on the part of the tree, and I will not have wronged the tree if I destroy it, although I may still have done something wrong. Trees and other kinds of living things can be moral patients that function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents without their also qualifying as right-holders.

Moral agents can have moral responsibilities that are other-regarding towards (or concerning) both other moral agents and towards various categories of moral patients having intrinsic and derived moral status. Moral agents can also have self-regarding moral responsibilities, that is, persons have can have moral responsibilities to themselves. Moral patients are, in general, things which are valuable and vulnerable to human action in a variety of different ways. Things which cannot be affected for good or for ill by human actions cannot be considered to be moral patients at all. The planet Jupiter, for instance, which is only a great gaseous sphere in space, is something which cannot be a moral patient because we cannot affect it in any way that might be considered as mattering to its "good" or "well-being." The limits of human action also mark the outer limits of possible human responsibilities.

We cannot have moral responsibilities concerning those things whose well-being we cannot affect through our action or inaction. We can't really do anything to Jupiter even though we have now shot satellites into it to try to learn more about it. But this action did not harm Jupiter in any way. Jupiter is, in fact, not even the sort of thing which can be harmed. We can only harm those things which can be thought of as having a well-being or a good of their own. The planet Jupiter has no good of its own, and even if it did, its good could not be affected in any way by human action, which is just another way of saying that things like the planet Jupiter cannot be moral patients.

However, I think that we can have moral responsibilities concerning the Earth, since we can affect the earth for good or ill by our actions. Unlike Jupiter, the Earth has a moral status of its own which derives from its being a living planet – a place in the cosmos where the phenomenon of life has emerged. Perhaps there are other planets in the universe where life has arisen. Personally, I believe that Earth cannot be the only site of life in the cosmos, but at this stage in humanity's scientific understanding of the universe we don't know this. However, we do know that life exists on Earth and that this fact makes Earth rather special. On the bio-centric view of moral value I will develop shortly, life is the basis of intrinsic value.

Uni-criterial vs. Multi-criterial Theories of Moral Status

According to Mary Anne Warren, "ascriptions of moral status serve to represent very general claims about the ways in which moral agents ought to conduct themselves towards entities of a particular sort" (Moral Status: obligations to persons and other living things. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 9). She also notes that "a second important feature of the concept of moral status is that the moral obligations that are implied by the ascription of moral status to an entity are obligations to that entity" (10). Having moral status, then, qualifies something as a possible object of the moral responsibilities and duties of moral agents. If the VCP is a fundamental principle of normative ethics, then it tells us that human moral agents have moral responsibilities towards things which have some kind of moral status, in particular, it tells us that we have moral responsibilities to protect them particularly when they are specially vulnerable and in some way dependent on our choices and actions.

Warren contrasts theories of moral status which are uni-criterial with those that are multi-criterial. A uni-criterial theory of moral status takes the view that there is some single criterion that we can use to determine what the moral status of a particular entity is. Various philosophers have proposed various uni-criterial theories of moral status. Kant's view that take rational agency as the sole criterion of intrinsic moral value, and hence moral status, is one example. Other people have proposed that genetic humanity is the proper criterion. Peter Singer, and other utilitarians have proposed that sentience, in particular, the capacity for pain and pleasure, functions as the sole criterion. Still others take other things such as self-consciousnsess or being the "subject of a life" as providing the criterion for moral status. Others, like Albert Schweitzer, propose that life or being alive is the criterion for having moral status.

But Warren argues that none of these uni-criterial theories of moral status can adequately account for the full range of our considered moral intuitions about cases calling for moral discrimination and judgment. Her view, which I find to be convincing is that "any satisfactory account of moral status must be a multi-criterial one, comprising a number of distinct but related principles" (20-21). In particular, Warren argues that:

(1) there is more than one valid criterion of moral status; (2) that there can be more than one type of moral status, with different types involving different obligations on the part of moral agents; and (3) that the criteria of moral status must include both certain intrinsic properties, including life, sentience, personhood, and certain relational properties, which sometimes include being part of a particular social or biological community. (21)

Like Warren, while I think that it would be nice to have a simpler theory of moral status, it is preferable to have one that is more descriptively adequate and which can account for a wider range of robust moral intuitions that competent moral judges have about cases calling for moral discrimination and judgment found in our current commonsense morality. Theories of moral status, however, should not be expected to satisfy everyone's opinions on these matters. Theories and principles are important in normative ethics because they help us correct our biases and guide our judgment in borderline cases. Theory choice in normative ethics is determined by a number of factors other than simplicity and descriptive adequacy alone, so it does not follow that just because a theory of moral status is "simple" or accounts for a number of current moral intuitions, it is correct. Ultimately, any theory of moral status will have to be discursively legitimized and translated into moral and in some cases legal norms that function to guide the judgment and action of large numbers of human moral agents. Philosophers, like Warren and myself, can only point the way towards such socially legitimized norms, we cannot by writng down our thoughts and reasons create them.

Warren does an excellent job in her book of giving philosophical arguments against the various uni-criterial theories of moral status. I am not going to spend a lot of time here rehearsing her arguments, but suggest that the interested reader consult her work. Since I agree with her general approach, I am going to save some time by jumping right into her own multi-criterial theory of moral status. It is, I believe, the best available account of its kind and so can provide a good starting place for further philosophical development.

The goal of this inquiry, recall, is to provide an account of what I am calling "moral patients", that is, those things which can function as the objects of our moral responsibilities. It is necessary to provide such an account in order to determine the boundaries of the moral community for which, I believe, we need an ethics of global responsibility.

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.

Taking Stock of Moral Status

In the last series of sections I have been developing a theory of moral status that is designed to explain what sorts of things can function as the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents. The account I have offered is rather expansive in that it proposes that moral agents can have moral obligations and responsibilities towards a great many sorts of things. Before moving on to the discussion of how this theory of moral status functions within an ethics of global responsibility, it might be wise to take stock of what I have claimed thus far.

On my theory of moral status, living, sentient moral agents, in particular those moral agents who have achieved full moral stature and who possess the psychological capacities necessary for moral autonomy, can have moral responsibilities towards or concerning:

1. Other moral agents
2. Other sentient creatures
3. Other living organisms
4. Organizations
5. Ecosystems and features of the natural environment
6. Artifacts which are assigned the status of property
7. Former persons
8. Future persons

One might wonder whether this list leaves anything in the universe out. What sorts of things cannot be the objects of moral responsibilities?

Well, as I suggested earlier, there are certain things which cannot be the objects of our moral responsibilities because they cannot be harmed and are not depending on us in any way. The planet Jupiter, or the Carina Nebula, for instance, are things of this sort. We can causally affect these kinds of things but we cannot harm them. Several years ago, on December 7, 1995 to be precise, the Galileo Jupiter probe plummeted into Jupiter's gaseous mass traveling at 100,000 mph. Before it disintegrated it sent back radio signals to receivers on Earth revealing information about the atmosphere of the largest planet in our solar system. We humans causally affected Jupiter, but we did not harm it, nor could we. Jupiter is the not sort of thing which can be harmed and hence we cannot have moral responsibilities towards or concerning it.

Closer to home, it would seem that we cannot have moral responsibilities towards atoms, for instance, boron, the element with the atomic number 5. Atomic elements and chemical compounds have the moral status of things to which we can do anything we please. Considered in themselves, atomic elements and molecules have no moral standing.

But gold is also an element. For centuries human beings have ascribed monetary value to gold, but gold, considered in itself, has no intrinsic value. If I acquire some pieces of gold so that they are owned by me, then they are my personal property and other moral agents may have moral obligations concerning them which mediate their moral relationship to me, their owner. But this is an observer-relative kind of moral status. Pieces of gold are not "ends in themselves" and therefore do not have intrinsic moral standing. The moral standing of pieces of gold is wholly derived. In cases where a moral patient's moral standing is wholly derived, we say that we can have obligations "concerning" those things, but not "towards" those things. We can only have moral responsibilities towards things which have some kind of intrinsic moral standing.

Complex material objects composed of large numbers of atoms and molecules can also acquire derived moral standing. For instance, the pebble that I found on the beach and took home and placed on my coffee table to use as a paper-weight, has acquired the status of an artifact and has also become my personal property. If you take the stone from my coffee table now you have committed theft. Locke thought that we can appropriate (almost) anything we please from nature and by "mixing" our labor with it, and thereby convert it into our personal property. But I do not think that this account of how property is acquired can be correct. If I swim in the Atlantic Ocean I am mixing my labor with it, but the Atlantic Ocean does not thereby become my property. If I spray paint graffiti on your boat, I have mixed my labor with it, but that doesn't make it mine. The so-called "Lockean proviso" (the almost) was his stipulation that one must be careful to leave enough natural resources for others. But the details or exactly how property is acquired need not detain us now.

Human artifacts are those things that have been taken from their natural conditions and intentionally shaped or designed by human action. The class of human artifacts includes everything from neolithic "dawn stones" to the great pyramids at Giza, to the Eiffel Tower, to the notebook computer with which I am writing this sentence. The class of human artifacts can includes immaterial things, intellectual property, such as copyrights and patents. Both material and immaterial human artifacts can acquire derived moral status, for instance, as property, or as works of art such as a painting or a novel, and when they do so, human moral agents can have moral responsibilities concerning them which mediate their moral relationship to the owners of those things.

Certain kinds of organizations, such as corporations and governments, are also artifacts, social artifacts, since they are intentionally designed social structures. We conventionally ascribe to them the moral status of "artificial persons" and regard them as capable of having certain kinds of moral and legal rights and obligations. But organizations that are artificial persons have a wholly derived kind of moral status that is dependent on our social institutions. Their status as artificial persons attributes to them a kind of moral agency which, however, is not wholly reducible to the moral agency of their human creators and operators. Although people sometimes talk as though they think they have moral obligations towards governments, corporations, and other sorts of artificial persons, this is, strictly speaking incorrect because they have no intrinsic moral standing.

Excluded from the class of human artifacts are those features of the world that have been unintentionally causally effected by human action. For instance, the glaciers in Greenland are melting in part because of human actions, but the glaciers are not human artifacts. Glaciers and other non-living elements of the earth's ecosystem have no intrinsic moral value, but they can acquire derived moral status, on my account, through their relationship to living things which have some form of intrinsic moral standing. Wild plants and animals may also be causally affected by human action in unintentional ways, and they are also not artifacts, though we may have moral responsibilities towards them because of their intrinsic properties which give them intrinsic moral standing.

Most artifacts have derived moral standing; that is we can have moral responsibilities towards or concerning them due to their observer-relative properties, It is plausible, but incorrect, to assume that artifacts can only have derived moral status. It is incorrect because human beings have been intentionally shaping and designing certain plant and animal species for 10,000 years. For instance, maize, or corn, is a cereal grain that was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in the highlands of what is now central Mexico. Wild maize had ears and kernels much smaller than our present day corn, which has been selected, hybridized, and genetically engineered to have properties that make it more useful to human beings. The corn plants we grow today are human artifacts, but they are also living organisms, and thus, on my theory of moral status have a basic kind of intrinsic moral standing.

Similarly for certain animal species. Domesticated animals have been specifically bred to suit human interests. The dachshund, for instance, was bred by German hunters to flush out badgers and small animals like rabbits. According to the Wikipedia, "The flap-down ears and famous curved tail of the dachshund have deliberately been bred into the dog. In the case of the ears, this is so that grass seeds, dirt and other matter do not enter into the ear canal. The curved tail is dual-purposed: to be seen more easily in long grass and, in the case of burrowing dachshunds, to help haul the dog out if it becomes stuck in a burrow." Dachshunds, other breeds of dogs, domestic cats, cattle, pigs, chickens and other livestock animals, are all human artifacts. But they are also sentient psychological organisms, and thus have a kind of intrinsic moral standing in themselves, apart from whatever derived moral status they might have due to Warren's Interspecific Principle or some other observer-relative principle for ascribing moral status. Living things which are artifacts, or property, or have some relationship to the survival or well-being or interests of other living things, can have derived moral status in addition to whatever moral status they acquire because of their intrinsic properties.

We have designed our naming conventions so as to exclude ourselves, human beings, from the class of human artifacts, even though we have been extensively shaped and designed by human action. Wild hominids, such as existed a million years ago, and who were our ancestors, were well-adapted to survive as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Modern humans, like you and me, however, have been domesticated so as to be better adapted to living in cities, which are themselves just collections of human artifacts. Civilization, which is etymologically, the practice of building cities, required that we tame ourselves so as to inhibit and redirect certain instinctual behavioral patterns that became maladaptive when we started living in close contact with and cooperating with large numbers of non-kin, that is, with strangers. Nevertheless, if we changed our naming conventions and began regarding ourselves as human artifacts, the same argument would apply: since we would still have the intrinsic properties sufficient for intrinsic moral standing, our moral status would not be wholly derived.

The moral status of former and future persons is also not wholly derived. Since former persons had and actual future persons will have the same intrinsic properties, life, sentience, and moral agency, that ground our moral status, they have (tenselessly) intrinsic moral standing as persons in addition to whatever forms of derived moral status they may be assigned. We can have moral responsibilities towards them, not just concerning them,

Some future persons may be genetically engineered or cloned from existing human genetic materials. They would be artifacts in the same way that genetically engineered corn and cloned sheep now are, but we would probably be wise to exclude them from the class of human artifacts as we do for ourselves. The science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" which was the basis of the film Bladerunner, contemplates the moral consequences of our not doing this. The androids in Bladerunner were composed entirely of organic compounds and were physically indistinguishable from normal humans, though they were specifically created to work on the Mars colony and were designed to live for only four years. Nevertheless, these androids are living, sentient moral agents and so have all of the intrinsic properties sufficient for personhood. Deckard, the bounty hunter whose job it was to hunt down and kill escaped androids, was a murderer.

This seems to have exhausted the set of things which can function as moral patients, that is, which can have moral status as objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents. However, I have omitted thus far discussing one other kind of entity that can have this status -- ourselves. The question which we must now address is: Can human moral agents have moral responsibilities towards themselves?" As will shortly become clear, the way in which I answer this question will have important theoretical consequences.