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.

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.

Moral Partiality and Impartiality

We are now in a position to give an account of the notions of moral partiality and impartiality which links these notions to the concepts of moral stature and moral weight. The account I will offer allows for some kinds of morally permissible partiality based on a moral patient's observer-relative moral stature in the eyes of particular moral agents. The moral stature of a moral patient consists of both its moral standing based on its intrinsic or observer-independent properties, e.g., whether or not it is alive, sentient, or a moral agent, together with whatever additional increase or decrease in its moral stature that is due to the imputation of value or status to it by particular observers.

Warren's four relational criteria for assigning moral status: The Human Rigts Principle, the Interspecific Principle, the Ecological Principle and the Transitivity of Respect Principle can be used to add moral stature to patients who are otherwise on the same level of moral standing based on their intrinsic properties alone. The fact, for instance, that Fido is someone's beloved pet and is regarded as a "member of the family" gives Fido greater moral stature in her owner's eyes than another dog according to the Interspecific Principle. If we, as second-party observers, respect this attribution of additional moral stature, then we ought to also regard Fido as having somewhat greater moral stature than another unowned and unloved canine, Rex, even though, based on their intrinsic properties alone, Fido and Rex have the same moral standing.

These relational or derived principles for ascribing moral stature can also explain why certain other kinds of moral partiality are permissible, for instance, a partiality towards one's own interests, towards those of one's friends, family, and significant others, and perhaps some other kinds of special relationships among persons. However, in each of these kinds of cases the kinds of partiality are limited or restricted in various ways by the countervailing principle of moral impartiality. The impartiality principle is based on the idea of equality of moral standing. Looking only at the intrinsic moral properties places different moral patients with the same intrinsic properties on the same moral plateaus. So, the account of moral status aims to provide a basis for explaining both our intuitions about permissible moral partiality and about the basis for moral impartiality.

To begin we must get clear on what we mean by moral partiality and impartiality. There is a broad general sense of the terms partiality and impartiality that have little or nothing to do with moral obligations. Bernard Gert has proposed a definition of impartiality in the broad sense: “A is impartial in respect R with regard to group G if and only if A's actions in respect R are not influenced at all by which member(s) of G benefit or are harmed by these actions” (quoted by Troy Jollimore, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Jollimore's gloss on this definition is as follows: Impartiality is probably best characterized in a negative rather than positive manner: an impartial choice is simply one in which a certain sort of consideration (i.e. some property of the individuals being chosen between) has no influence.... Thus, for Gert, impartiality is a property of a set of decisions made by a particular agent, directed toward a particular group. Gert's analysis captures the important fact that one cannot simply ask of a given agent whether or not she is impartial. Rather, we must also specify with regard to whom she is impartial, and in what respect.

For instance, I have been watching the Beijing Olympics on TV for the past week or so. In Olympic events such as diving or gymnastics where the contestant's scores are determined by panels of judges, it is obviously important that the judges be impartial, in the sense that they should not allow their loyalty to their own countries of origin to determine how they rate an athlete's performance. Their judgments should be based entirely on the observed merits of their performance as assessed against some objective standard of "goodness" and "difficulty", and, specifically, they should not be influence by their liking or disliking for the particular nations the athletes represent. The IOC has devoted a good deal of thought to the question of how to reduce (if not entirely eliminate) various kinds of bias that might influence judge's scoring of these events. They have different judges from different countries; they throw out the highest and lowest scores; they allow appeals and videotape reviews, and so forth. The goal is to make these competitions as fair as possible by eliminating or reducing possible biases. This broad sense applies to all forms of impartial judgment.

What then characterizes moral impartiality? It is impartiality in which moral judgments about obligations we owe toward various kinds of moral patients are not permitted to be influenced by certain properties of the individuals concerned. For instance, if two children are in need of a life-saving operation but I can only afford to pay for one operation for one child, the impartial attitude would regard it as a matter of indifference which child one saves. In order to be impartial in cases likes this, one ought to use some fair decision-making procedure like flipping a coin to determine which child gets the operation.

But if one is the parent of one of the children, then we normally think that it is morally permissible to prefer her over the other child. Indeed, if a parent allowed his own child to die while using the resources available to rescue another child, one would normally think that he is either a saint or a callous fool. The special moral relationship between parents and their own children licenses a particular kind of permissible moral partiality in such cases. We are even inclined to say that parents have special moral responsibilities to protect their own children from harm which they do not have in the same way towards other children, or at least, that their special obligations to protect their own children are weightier than any general obligations they might have to protect vulnerable persons in general.

How can we account for this kind of intuition? Most consequentialist theories in normative ethics hold that strict impartiality towards the interests of different persons is an essential feature of the moral point of view. On this kind of impartialist account, the person who flips the coin is doing the only moral thing. This, however, is often treated as an objection to impartialism, since it conflict with most people's ordinary moral intuitions about this and similar cases. One potent objection against utilitarianism is that it is too demanding of moral agents since it appears to leave no room for this kind of moral partiality. Deontologists can also be impartialists, but they can also defend the view that there can be limited partiality towards certain persons, e.g. oneself, one's family members, and other close associates. (See Jollimore, op.cit. for a good discussion of the differences between consequentialist and deontological theories of moral partiality). But a deontologist who wishes to make room for some kinds of permitted moral partiality must also account for the strong moral intuitions we have about the importance of impartiality in certain contexts of moral judgment.

My approach to normative ethical theory is deontological, but I want to give an account for both our intuitions about permitted moral partiality and for our intuitions about the importance of moral impartiality. My theory of moral stature and its relation to the moral weight of obligations allows me to do this. Recall that I as defined it, the moral weight of an obligation is a function of both the moral stature of the moral patient(s) to whom it is directed, and the moral gravity of the interest(s) of those patients that are at stake. Moral stature is determined by both an individual's intrinsic moral standing and by any observer-relative increments or decrements in their moral standing based upon the the values and preferences of the observer.

Given this account of moral weight we can explain the intuition that a parent should give greater moral weight to his responsibility to provide the operation to his own child than he should to provide it to another child who is equally in need of the operation. In this observer's eyes, his child has greater moral stature than another child does, although the interests that are at stake, staying alive, are equally grave. In deciding to give preference to his own child he is not deciding that the death of his child is a graver harm than the dealth of the other child, rather, he is imputing greater moral stature to his child, and this factor, not the gravity of the interest involved is what tips the moral scales in his child's favor and makes his responsibility to save his own child a weightier obligation than his responsibility to save the other child.

Philosophers who defend the impartialist view, however, might object that we should not allow such observer-relative judgments of moral stature to enter into moral deliberation. Rather, they argue, we should attempt to adopt the perspective of an "ideal observer" who is free of any bias or subjective preference that would ascribe greater moral stature to one child -- both children would be harmed by dying. The problem with this argument is that it is difficult to define what an ideal observer is in any non-circular fashion, and even if we could do so, it is not at all clear that any actual moral agents can or should try to function as ideal observers. As Thomas Nagel has argued, the ideal observer has a "view from nowhere". Ideal observers are imaginary moral agents who are not socially situated any place in the real world. Real moral agents, like you and me, are always socially situated in some network of interpersonal relationships, and in these relationships we attribute greater moral stature to some groups of moral patients based upon our observer-relative preferences and values. Like most other people, I sometimes prefer my own interests over those of other people. I paid a lot of money to educate my children, but not so much to help educate other people's. I like some people more than others. I like some animals more than others. I care more about my property than I do about yours, and so forth. These are not strange or shameful admissions. This is the way people are, and any ethical theory that ignores these facts is going to be difficult to universalize.

But even so, the degree of partiality that I am permitted is limited. In the case of my child needing a life-saving operation, I am not permitted to murder another child and harvest his organs to transplant into my child to save her life. The reason for this is the Human Rights Principle which requires that we treat all persons has entitled to equal dignity and rights, and murdering another child would obviously violate his human rights. Recall that in discussing Warren's multicriterial theory of moral status I noted that the seven principles she proposes are lexically ordered. Each later principle, it is stipulated, should be applied within the limits of the preceding principles. So given that the three principles based on a moral patient's intrinsic properties: life, sentience, and agency are the first principles listed, the four relational principles can only be applied within the limits imposed by these more basic principles. One cannot simply decide to prefer bacteria to human beings when we place them both on the trolley tracks. More importantly, the four relational or derived principles of moral status cannot be applied in contradiction to the three intrinsic principles. The four relational principles are also ordered, with the Transitivity of Respect principle being the most restricted because it is last, and the Human Rights Principle being the least restricted because it is the first of the relational criteria of moral status.

As I argued earlier, the Human Rights Principle is also an observer-relative criterion and the increment of moral stature it provides to human children who are not yet fully autonomous moral agents is a derived rather than an intrinsic form of moral status. We assign to all human persons the moral status "holder of human rights," and doing this places children on the same moral plateau as fully autonomous adult moral agents. The Principle of Transitivity of Respect, which confers added moral stature on your own child is restricted in its application so that it cannot overrule the Human Rights Principle. The Human Rights Principle is epistemically objective, while an individual's observer-relative partiality towards his children or his pets, or his property, is epistemologically subjective. That persons have equal human rights is a social or institutional fact that exists though our collective intentionality, while the individual's own attributions of moral stature are both ontologically and epistemically subjective. In cases in which a subjective attribute of moral stature conflicts with an objective one, based either on a moral patient's intrinsic moral standing or on their epistemically objective derived moral stature, the objective moral status principles should prevail. The notion of human rights, in particular, the core principle of equal dignity (equal moral stature) and the right of nondiscrimination are designed specifically to rule out certain kinds of partiality towards certain groups of moral patients who have been historically oppressed due to some features of their group identities.

Moral partiality can be either negative or positive so that relying on epistemically subjective observer-relative attributions of moral stature can either add or detract from the weight of an obligation owed to groups of moral patients. Historically, many people have accepted some version of the doctrine of human superiority/inferiority according to which some groups of human beings are inherently or "by nature" inferior to other groups. Members of groups deemed "inferior" have often been dehumanized, that is, their moral stature has been reduced in the eyes of particular moral agents, and this dimunition of moral stature has often been a prelude to human rights abuse.

The doctrine human inferiority has been the source of a great deal of suffering and injustice in human history, but because of the progress of the human rights paradigm we are finally succeeding in getting rid of it once and for all. But we do still need to be constantly reminded that all human persons have equal human rights and that it is not morally permissible to treat some groups differently because of their race, sex, religion, language, nationality, birth, property and other grounds of invidious discrimination. Everyone should be regarded as having the highest grade of moral stature, of standing on a moral plateau in which all human lives are of equal value. So when the other relational principles of moral status come into conflict with the Human Rights Principle, the Human Rights Principle outweighs them. By creating a moral plateau in which all human persons have the same moral stature, the Human Rights Principle enforces the principle of impartiality so that when personal partiality conflicts with the demands of human rights, human rights trump them.

But then what are we to day about our moral responsibilities towards other kinds of moral patients, such as sentient animals to whom the Human Rights Principle does not apply? Is it impermissible partiality to prefer to save a human being's life over that of a chimpanzee? Suppose that we have on the trolley tracks a rather severely mentally impaired human infant and a normal healthy chimpanzee. As noted earlier, Peter Singer stirred up a lot of controversy by claiming that as a utilitarian he might well choose to save the chimpanzee. But this is because he ignores or disregards the Human Rights Principle under which even mentally impaired infants are accorded the same moral stature as fully autonomous moral agents. Since this principle increases the moral stature of the human infant based on its intrinsic properties alone, it tips the moral scale in favor of saving her.

The preference for human lives is not based on an irrational preference for our own kind, but on hard won moral wisdom about what is necessary in order to prevent historically prevalent forms of oppression, suffering and injustice. While chimpanzees are indeed the kinds of creatures that can have rights, they do not at present have them. We can construct a rights regime for chimpanzees, and indeed, Singer and others are trying to do just that with new legislation in Spain (see news story). I have no objection to this at all; I am in fact strongly in favor of doing so for chimpanzees, cetaceans, whales, elephants, and some other cognitively complex animals. But, the point here is that no such rights regime presently exists. There is no set of institutional facts that support the claim that chimpanzees have rights. In this case we are thrown back onto using their intrinsic properties as the basis for ascriptions of moral standing and adding to it whatever observer-relative epistemically subjective increment of moral stature that animal lovers like Singer would want to attribute to these creatures. It is certainly morally permissible to rescue chimps from conditions of abusive captivity and protect those in the wild who are endangered, indeed, on my account we have strong moral responsibilities to do so. But at this time, we cannot say that chimpanzees have rights, only that they can have rights, and, perhaps, that they ought to have them, that is, that we humans ought to construct a rights regime to govern the ways in which we human treat these cognitive complex and vulnerable creatures.

If there were such a regime, then it would enable people like Singer to make peremptory demands on other moral agents that could be enforced coercively. There are a few such laws in some jurisdictions, for instance, laws forbidding various kinds of cruelty to animals, but they do not yet constitute a global rights regime such as now exists for human rights. But if some animals ought to have rights I do not think we should call them "human rights". I think the term "human rights" ought to reserved for the rights of human beings. I have some problem with the term "animal rights" because humans are animals, and "nonhuman animal rights" sounds odd. I think we ought to be talking about "chimpanzee rights" "elephant rights" "whale rights" and so forth since in each case the sorts of threats to the grave or vital interests of these cognitively complex sentient organisms vary to some extent. Whales are threatened by pollution in the oceans, but bonobos aren't. It makes no sense to suppose that whales have a right to vote or to equal pay for equal work, or other things that we regard as human rights. It is better to construct a rights regime designed specially to thwart the particular threats that creatures of these kinds have been subjected to.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Singer and others are successful in constructing these kinds of rights regimes for certain species of nonhuman animals. Suppose that there are now in existence institutional facts that allow us to state as an epistemically objective truth that chimpanzees have certain rights. In this case, I imagine that the Chimpanzee Rights Principle will work in more or less the same way as the Human Rights Principle does. So suppose I have a beloved chimpanzee as a pet, call her Cindy who needs a life-saving operation, but their is another chimp, call him Sam, who also needs this operation. Would it be morally permissible for me to give Cindy preference over Sam? I would say "yes" because of the Interspecific Principle gives Cindy greater moral stature as a member of a mixed communiity. But it would still be wrong for me to kill Sam to harvest his organs to save Cindy because of Sam's equal chimpanzee rights. When there is an epistemically-objective rights regime in place certain kinds of moral partiality are ruled out of bounds while other kinds of moral partiality are permitted.

We can account for a number of important moral intuitions we have about these matters by means of the notions of intrinsic and derived moral status leading to differences in the moral statures of different groups of moral patients. One interesting feature of this account is that it avoids the objection that in being morally partial to certain moral patients we are counting their interests as more valuable than the interests of comparable others. This is not so because we accord each individual's interests equal gravity when they are equally central to that individual's survival, well-being or freedom. What varies is their moral stature based on observer-relative criteria for assigning moral status. Some of these criteria are epistemically subjective and reflect the agent's own preferences, values, and indeed, biases, while others are epistemically objective and are derived from institutional facts that set limits on permitted forms of moral partiality. But these additional criteria are ordered so that the Human Rights Principle gets priority.

That human beings naturally exhibit various forms of partiality can be taken as a given. The task for normative ethics is to find ways to limit or control this tendency in order to keep it within morally acceptable limits. This is one reason why many moral philosophers want to insist that impartiality is essential to the moral point of view. It is because without it, and the institutional facts embodied in legal norms to enforce impartiality, humans would most likely revert to something like Locke's state of nature, in which there is no impartial judge and each man seeks only to advance his own interests. The mutual benefits obtained through the rule of law are far superior to those we could secure in such a condition, which is why civilized human societies construct ethical codes and enact laws to enforce compliance with them.

But there are also advantages to having a division of moral labor under which people are permitted and indeed required to care for the people and things that they are most motivated to care about. Some consequentialists have recognized this fact and have argued that the overall good of society is best promoted by permitting some forms of moral partiality. I think this is often the case but also that our intuitions about such matter are better explained by the theories of moral stature and moral weight I have developed here.