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.

Respect for Life Principle

According to the Respect for Life Principle all living things have a moral status and on account of that should not be killed or harmed without good reason. Moral agents, then, can have moral responsibilities towards other living things, for instance, responsibilities derived from the VCP to protect them from harm. But, of course, human moral agents kill and harm other living beings all the time. Should we feel guilty about this? What constitutes a "good reason" for killing, or harming, or otherwise failing to protect something that is alive?

For Warren, the Respect for Life Principle, "imputes no wrongdoing to those who harm living things when there are morally sound reasons for doing so," but the principle alone "does not explain what counts as a sufficiently good reason for harming a living thing" (149). But what counts as "good reason" is a function, at least in part, of that thing's moral status. It is also a function of the moral status of the things that are doing the harming, and their reasons for acting as they do.

In the natural world, biological organisms kill and otherwise harm other biological organisms all the time. The other day I came upon a black snake in my backyard whose slender body was engorged by what I surmised to be some small mice. The snake did nothing morally wrong in eating these mice because snakes are not moral agents and cannot be ascribed moral obligations.

And so it is with respect to all creatures great and small who prey upon one another for their survival. It is a matter of Darwinian survival of the fittest out there in the biosphere. Human moral categories just do not apply, except, of course, to us.

In her book, The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World. (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2004), Kathleen Dean Moore recounts a story that illustrates this point beautifully.

In a wilderness Alaska research camp where Jon works summers, a baby pine marten turned up tangled in a fishnet in a storage shed. A pine marten is a large silky weasel, not a rodent, but close enough for this essay, I hope. And it's fierce -- the hiss, the flashing teeth, the predator's slashing speed. Hearing the baby squeal, the two young aquatic biologists struggled to disentangle it. (110)

Moore says that "what seems important to me about this story is that neither of the men wondered whether they should release the baby marten, whether they should risk the nasty bites to set it free. The only issue was how." The two men obviously felt that it was their moral responsibility to free the baby marten. They were not the cause of its plight, but they understood that without their help this creature was doomed, so they undertook to free it. She continues:

Philosophers say that you can't deduce an ought from an is. It's the old "is-ought" problem that has bedeviled Western philosophy since the eighteenth century, when David Hume explained that from a mere description -- this is the way the world is -- you can't infer a prescription -- this is the way the world ought to be. In one sense he's right: You can stare at the world as long as you want, examine it every which way in all its detail, and it will not reveal to you what ought to be. But that doesn't mean you can't infer what you ought to do, from a description of the way the world is. We do it all the time. Jon made that leap in a flash, the space of a synapse, so fast he was probably never aware of the jump: The marten is caught in the net; therefore, I ought to free it. (111)

Logically speaking the inference is invalid, unless one adds a missing premise, a premise that is a description "not about the world, but about the moral convictions of the person acting in the world" (112). What is this missing premise? Perhaps it is something like the VCP; it is the premise that says moral agents have moral responsibilities to protect vulnerable moral patients when some aspect of their good is dependent on their choices and actions. As Moore writes, "the moral impulse, the silent premise affirming one's own standing as a moral agent, the sharp knife against the tough strands of a net: this may be humanity's unique gift to the universe" (112).

But let's vary this case. Suppose that rather than a baby marten, one finds a Siberian tiger caught in the net. Here most of us would be more inclined to make a different judgment about what we ought to do. Let's assume that the marten and the tiger have the same moral status, they occupy a moral plateau on which we find wild sentient life forms who are not members of mixed moral communities. Based on their moral status alone it seems we should treat them equally. But the difference is that we place ourselves at much greater risk by attempting to free the tiger than we do when we attempt to free the marten. For this reason, most of us would not blame someone who does not try to free the tiger. Why not?

The answer is, I think, that we are also vulnerable living creatures and so we have moral responsibilities to protect ourselves from being killed or harmed. Our reluctance to place ourselves at risk of serious injury or death by means of a tiger mauling us is not just "speciesism" -- an irrational preference for our own kind. It is due to our having a higher moral standing than tigers. We humans occupy the highest moral plateau and thus it would be wrong for us to risk our lives in order to protect a tiger from losing its life.

We can vary the case again. Suppose that you are a hunter-gatherer in the Amazon rain forest and you have trapped a bird in your net. Is it morally permissible to take that animal, kill it, and feed it to your children?

Yes, of course it is, assuming that you and your human family have no other means of survival. Humans are also vulnerable living beings who must nourish themselves in order to survive. Since human beings occupy a higher moral plateau than birds, who are also vulnerable living things that must nourish themselves to survive, there is no wrongdoing in your capturing the bird and killing it for your dinner. But this does not imply that human beings may wantonly kill other living things.

Suppose that rather than a hungry hunter-gatherer, you are a weekend hiker in a national park whose ruck sack is stuffed with granola bars and other edible goodies. May you still trap birds in nets and kill them, say, for your amusement?

I think you may not, even though you can. You may not because trapping and killing birds for your amusement is not a good enough reason to do it. In this case, your standing moral responsibility to protect vulnerable living things becomes the overriding moral principle of action and it outweighs your desire to have some fun. Risking injury or need for nourishment provide good reasons for excusing moral agents from their standing responsibilities to protect vulnerable living things, but wanting to see what it is like to kill a bird for fun does not.

On this view, then, moral agents owe other vulnerable living beings certain responsibilities of care that require them, morally speaking, to avoid harming them, and to protect them from harm, unless there are good reasons for excusing them from such responsibilities. If one is excused from one's moral responsibility, then one does not wrong the bird in killing it. But if one is not excused, then what one does is wrong, not because it adversely affects some human interest, but for the sake of the bird itself, who is a moral patient whose status as a living, sentient creature gives it some claim on our moral concern.

This way of thinking of the matter may strike some people as strange. As Warren remarks, "the adoption of the Respect for Life principle seems to require something more akin to spiritual conversion than to a logical deduction" (151). Some people seem to have made this conversion. Albert Schweitzer, for instance, thought that we have a moral responsibility "without limit towards all that lives" (Quoted in Warren, p. 31). Someone who subscribes to this ethics of reverence for life, "tears no leaf from a tree, plucks no flower, takes care to crush no insect." Warren claims that Schweitzer's ethics, "permits no principled distinction between the moral status of plants and that of animals -- or humans." (33) It treats all living creatures as equally valuable, and as equally deserving of our concern and respect.

But Warren (and I) reject this form of radical biological egalitarianism. The reason, she says, is clear:

Any human society which treated ordinary acts of food preparation, personal hygiene, and medical care as the moral equivalents of mass homicide would jeopardize its own survival. For if, on the one hand, members of society adopted the view that the destruction of micro-organisms is as serious a crime as we consider homicide to be, and consistently sought to prevent such destruction, then the health of the human population would suffer severely. And if, on the other hand, they came to see homicide as no more serious a wrong than we consider the destruction of micro-organisms to be, then the society's survival would be threatened by uncontrolled intra-human violence. (37)

All men may be created equal, but all living things aren't. Or at least, all organisms do not have the same moral standing and stature as human moral agents do. Micro-organisms, plants, insects, birds, mammals, and human beings occupy different moral plateaus. Other things being equal, we should treat entities on each plateau impartially with due regard for their particular kind of moral standing. But we do not have to feel guilt or remorse about sacrificing living things with lesser moral stature for those with greater moral stature when there is a good reason for doing so.

But, if so, then doesn't this view boil down to the traditional homocentric theory of moral status where human interests always prevail over those of non-human animals? Neither Warren nor I think so. According to the traditional homocentric view, the value of other living things is only a derived value; their value depends upon their relationship to our interests. But, on the Respect for Life principle, other living things have intrinsic moral value "in themselves". That is, it is wrong to wantonly harm them for their sakes, not just for ours. As Warren writes,

It makes more than verbal difference whether we believe, on the one hand, that all living things have a claim to our consideration, however, modest; or, on the other hand, that plants and other non-sentient life forms should be protected only when they have demonstrable value to human beings. If we believe that the needless destruction of living things is a wrong against them, not just a possible wrong against other human beings, then we will be more likely to search for ways to reduce the needless killing that we do, individually and collectively. We will not be permanently content with methods of agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing, manufacturing, mining, transportation, energy production, forestry, recreation, flood control, and waste disposal that cause the needless destruction of harmless plants and animals. Respect for life may, therefore, substantially improve humanity's chances of surviving and flourishing into the deep future.(150)

This is a homocentric argument for a biocentric ethics. There is nothing wrong with it since it is, after all, for human moral agents that we fashion, critique, and re-create, our ethical philosophies, since we are the only things in the universe that we know of to which they apply. The reason why we should embrace a biocentric ethics now is that doing so will help our global civilization make a transition to a sustainable form of development. Sustainability means different things to different people, but in this context, it means a future in which life on earth, including human life, will continue to flourish. It is difficult to think of anything that could constitute a higher moral purpose than this.

Psychological Organisms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Moral Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Gravity

The theory of moral status I have developed is designed to allow us to make moral judgments having to do with the treatment of members of various kinds of moral patients. A moral patient's particular grade of moral stature is proposed as a normative factor that determines, at least in part, whether or not certain kinds of acts or omissions regarding that individual are morally permissible, required, or forbidden.

I have illustrated how my notion of moral stature can be applied in several cases, e.g., human embryos, sentient fetuses, and infants, I have argued that while all of these kinds of moral patients have intrinsic value and are human beings, they have different grades of moral stature, and thus may ethically be treated differently. I have also illustrated how this account applies in cases of various kinds of non-human moral patients. Psychological organisms with greater moral stature, e.g. primates, cetaceans, elephants, etc., deserve greater respect than those with less developed or complex psychological capacities. Organisms that are not sentient, that have only the basic level of intrinsic moral standing, can be considered as moral patients, but the degree of respect they command is weaker than that of psychological organisms. Moral agents, particularly, autonomous moral agents, that is, persons like you and me, have the highest grade of moral stature. We are on a moral plateau that gives us both rights and responsibilities as members of the human moral community. Our responsibilities to protect vulnerable persons are weightier than comparable responsibilities to protect nonhumans on my view, other things being equal.

But it is necessary to introduce another normative factor to make this account better able to capture and explain our moral intuitions, a factor, that I will refer to as moral gravity. The intuitive idea of moral gravity is that some kinds of things that affect a moral patient's well-being, or interests, are more important than others. The notion of the "gravity" of different kinds of human rights violations can be used to illustrate this idea.

Amnesty International (an organization I have been associated with in various capacities for many years) has a mission statement in which it commits itself to oppose certain kinds of grave abuses of human rights. What are grave abuses? Well, torture, rape, murder, genocide, and arbitrary imprisonment are definitely on this list. What is not on the list of grave abuses of human rights that Amnesty International works on are, e.g. copyright infringement, infringements of personal privacy, denial of voting rights, and various kinds of labor abuses, for instance, requiring workers to work more than 60 hours a week. The international standards promulgated by the ILO (International Labor Organization) specify that the normal work week should be no more than 48 hours per week, with a maximum of 12 additional hours in voluntary overtime permitted. When workers are required to work for more than 60 hours per week, it is a human rights abuse. But it is not a grave abuse in Amnesty's view. There are probably several hundreds of millions of workers in the world who regularly are required to work more than 60 per week (think of young Wall Street lawyers in high-powered law firms, or medical interns at busy urban hospitals, not just low-wage workers in Asian sweatshops). In terms of the numbers of people whose human rights are affected, the abuse of overtime is a major human rights issue. But because the form of abuse is itself not considered "grave" it does not get much attention from human rights organizations like Amnesty International.

It is possible to think of moral gravity as a property of certain kinds of interests. The interests that have the greatest gravity are the ones most closely connected to an individual's survival, well-being, and freedom. These kinds of interests are sometimes called "ultimate interests" because they are typically the sorts of things that people regard as ultimately valuable or valuable for their own sake. They are interests like: not being killed, not being tortured, not having one's freedoms restricted, not having to be a slave, having enough to eat, having a safe place to live, and so forth. There are lots of other interests that people have that do not have much gravity as compared to these kinds of ultimate interests. For instance, I am interested in riding bicycles. I like it as a form of exercise and a form of transportation. I really enjoyed living in Copenhagen for a few months last fall because I got to ride my bike everyday on very safe bicycle paths along with lots other people who like me have a liking for biking. I would be unhappy if I could not ride my bicycle, but, as the saying goes, it wouldn't kill me not to. I could live without it.

How then does moral gravity affect our moral judgments? It seems that the straightforward answer to this question is that actions which threaten or harm an interest which has greater moral gravity to the moral patient concerned are more serious than those that threaten or harm an interest that has lesser moral gravity. The prohibition against killing other persons is the most serious moral prohibition because the interest that we have in staying alive is considered to be the ultimate interest which has the greatest moral gravity. If we cease be alive, nothing much else matters. The prohibition against theft of personal property is far less serious than the one against killing and other forms of physical assault against persons, e.g. rape, torture. That we have an interest in our property is clear, but whether it is an ultimate interest is doubtful. Like other Americans, I own a lot of things. But there is nothing that I own that I could not live without. If you steal my bike it harms me, but the interest involved in this case just isn't that grave. I can get another one.

But the gravity of the theft of a bicycle can be different for different people. Consider the classic film The Bicycle Thief in which the theft of a bicycle leads to a cascade of hardships for a whole family in post-war Rome. In this case, the bicycle was essential for a man's job that he needed to feed his family, and so the theft of his bicycle was a graver offense than if someone were to steal my bicycle. So this normative factor is going to be context-sensitive and it is therefore going to be difficult to say general things about it. Nevertheless, I think the intuition we have about it is sufficiently clear. It is possible to extend the idea of moral gravity to other kinds of moral patients.

Nonhuman animals which are sentient have different kinds of interests than do human beings, but it seems reasonable to suppose that they are also interested in some things ultimately such as avoiding pain and suffering, keeping their freedom, having enough to eat, having a safe place to live, and so forth. Non-psychological organisms, such as plants and bacteria, do not have interests, but may be said to have a "good of their own". A plant needs sunlight, water and soil in order to grow. These things constitute the good for plants such that depriving a plant of these things would kill it, while doing other things to it, like picking its fruit or pruning its branches, would not. It is possible to think that non-living moral patients, that is, those which have only derived moral status, for instance, works of art, also have goods of their own. It is better for a statue to be intact than to have parts missing or destroyed, for instance. The act of destroying a valuable work of art can be consider as a moral offense, but not nearly as grave as killing a sentient life form or a person because works of art only have derived moral status.

Assuming that the idea of moral gravity is sufficiently clear, we can now attempt to state the way in which moral gravity interacts with moral stature. All normative ethical theories require an account of the ways in which different normative factors interact with one another. This is as true for monistic theories, ones that propose a single fundamental moral principle, as well as for pluralistic theories, those that propose that there are several fundamental moral principles. Although I am a pluralist, I have been focusing attention on just one moral principle, the Vulnerability-Care Principle. But nevertheless, it is necessary to provide an account of how the different normative factors associated with the VCP interact with one another because, like other principles that apply generally, this principle can generate conflicts with itself. That is, we can have conflicting moral responsibilities to protect different vulnerable moral patients.

We can think of moral gravity and moral stature as two normative factors that combine to determine the weight of a moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable. In physics weight is a function of an object's mass times the force of the gravitational field that it is in, as given by Newton's Second Law:

F = ma: the net force on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration.

It would be nice if there was some way to quantify the notions of moral gravity and moral stature so that we would be able to calculate the precise weights of various kinds of moral responsibilities. But alas, I know of no such calculus and doubt that we can ever have one, because gravity and stature are not the only two normative factors and the VCP is not the only fundamental moral principle. But we can use the notion of moral weight analogously to the way we use and understand weight in physics.

In this case, the moral gravity of an interest or good is analogous to the A factor, and the moral stature of the patient is analogous to the M factor. The moral weight of a responsibility or obligation is then obtained by (figuratively) multiplying the A and the M. When ones does this one gets linear graphs that indicate that when one holds M (stature) constant, greater A (gravity) yields greater F (moral weight). Similarly, when one holds A (gravity) constant, greater M (stature) yields greater weight, and conversely in each case. The first relationship has been illustrated already with the examples of grave versus non-grave human rights abuses. The responsibility, say, not to kill another person comes out as weightier than the responsibility not to force people to work excessive overtime. The second relationship has been discussed earlier with respect to various duties towards non-human animals. For instance, I opined earlier that the duty not to kill a human person is weightier than a comparable duty not to kill a nonhuman psychological organism. I also argued that since not all human beings have the same moral stature, it is a less weighty offense to kill a human embryo than it is to kill an sentient fetus, which is less weighty an offense that to kill an infant or child who is assumed, according to the Human Rights Principle, to be a full member of the human moral community. Killing non-psychological organisms is not a very weighty matter because while they are moral patients and have some moral standing, their moral stature is slight compared to other kinds of moral patients.

Using this formula it is fairly easy to generate intuitive judgments about the weight of different moral responsibilities. One can test the theory by making up trolley car examples in which a moral agent (say, yourself) is in a forced choice situation in which you must choose between, say, killing a pet rabbit and killing a person. Tie them both to the tracks and let your moral intuitions tell you which way you would steer the trolley. If you would choose the kill the bunny, then your intuitions agree with what F=MA would predict. If not, then there is something wrong with my theory or something wrong with your moral intuitions, assuming, of course, that other things are equal, that is that there are no other morally relevant normative factors that might affect the judgment.

For instance, suppose that the person is a mass murderer and that if you don't kill him by running over him with the trolley he will carry out an evil plan in which 1000 innocent people will be killed. I bet you didn't think of that right off the bat, did you? This would, however, introduce another normative factor besides M and A and would complicate the interaction of these factors with our moral judgments. So let's just hold these other possibly relevant normative factors in abeyance for the time being and keep it simple.

When we do this, however, things still get complicated quickly when we vary the M and the A simultaneously. How would you decide a forced choice between say, depriving a psychological organism of its freedom, say to keep them in a cage for the amusement of tourists, versus not having a way for tourists to be amused by seeing animals in cages? Presumably, the interest that the animal has in its freedom is pretty grave, that is, it has a high A, while the interest that tourist have in being amused is not very grave at all, it has a low A. But tourists, assuming they are fully autonomous moral agents, have greater moral stature than nonhuman animals, so their interests, even their non-grave interests will count more.

So what is the answer you come to? Is it morally permissble to keep animals in cages at tourist attractions or isn't it? On the basis of these two normative factors alone, I would judge that it isn't. But, obviously even this simple case can get more complicated if you begin asking questions about, say, what happens to the animals if you close the zoo? and, What happens to the livelihoods of the people who own and operate the zoo? But, we have agreed to leave out these other normative factors. If we do this, then it would seem to follow that sometimes human interests ought to be sacrificed in order to protect the important interests of nonhuman animals.

This is precisely the result I wished to obtain. It is the result that follows from adopting a biocentric rather than a homocentric theory of moral status. Things get even more complicated when we vary the numbers of individual moral patients involved. Suppose that rather than just one chimpanzee on the trolley tracks we have 100 of them. And suppose on the other side we have one human person. While the lives of chimps are less intrinsically valuable than those of human persons, the lives of 100 chimps are collectively more valuable than the life of one person. If we had 100 people on one of the tracks and 1 on the other, I doubt many of you would choose to steer the trolley towards the 100. But what if there are 100 chimps, or dogs, or parrots? Should we still prefer to save one human life if doing so means ending 100 animal lives? Suppose it is not 100, but 1000 animal lives? Or pick an even higher number of your choice. If there is no threshold at which you would be willing to say it is morally preferable to sacrifice a human being to save some number of sentient animals, then my theory is not for you.

You want a theory that assigns zero weight to our moral responsibilities towards nonhuman animals and nature, that is, you want a homocentric ethics of the traditional kind. On this view, no matter how grave the interest or good of an nonhuman living thing is to its survival or well-being, its interests can never override any human interest, no matter how trivial. One gets this sort of view by assigning zero to the animal's moral stature for M factor. If you multiply zero times anything you get zero as the moral weight of the responsibility to protect. On the other hand, if you ascribe any non-zero number to an animal's M, their moral stature, and also assign some non-zero number to its A, or the gravity of its interest or good, then by adding more individuals we increase the moral weight of the responsibility to protect. At some point or another, the weight will be greater than those generated by conflicting human interests, and the latter will be out-weighed by the former. That is, as moral agents, we will be obliged to sacrifice some human interests in order to fulfill an even weightier responsibility to protect some vulnerable nonhuman organisms.

The principle of moral weight here operates to settle the conflict between two different moral responsibilities generated by the VCP. In general, the greater the weight of a moral responsibility, the harder it is to override it in favor of a conflicting moral responsibility. On my view, there are few if any non-overridable moral responsibilities; all or nearly all of them are defeasible under various circumstances in which combinations of normative factors yield great weight to some other moral responsibility requiring a different course of action. I do not think that moral stature and gravity are the only two normative factors that determine the weight of our moral obligations. There are other normative factors that can affect our "all things considered" evaluation of moral cases.

But I do think that these notions capture something important and useful about the way in which we ordinarily think about responsibilities to protect various categories of moral patients. The notions of moral stature and moral gravity can be part of a new philosophical vocabulary for making cross-species comparisons of our moral responsibilities. It can also, I will argue, be used along with other normative factors, to help explain other some moral intuitions we have about our responsibilities to one another as members of the human moral community.

Moral Weight and Prima Facie Duties

Earlier I introduced the concept of moral gravity and illustrated it with some examples of how moral stature interacts with moral gravity to determine the weight of our moral obligations to protect the vulnerable. I want to develop this idea a bit further now into a general schema for thinking about the notion of the weight of different moral obligations in general.

Intuitively we all think that certain moral obligations are more compelling, that is, weightier, than others. This kind of intuition is particularly important when we are called upon to resolve conflicts among our prima facie duties. The notion of a prima facie duty was introduced by W. D. Ross as a way of reinterpreting the notion of categorical imperatives in Kantian ethics. Although Ross gave various interpretations of this notion, it is now generally understood among moral philosophers that one has a prima facie duty to do something just in case an agent has some reason to think that he or she has a moral obligation to act in a certain way, and that reason does not involve an appeal to personal inclination or self-interest or to the total consequences of performing that action. He writes that,

When a plain main fulfils a promise because he thinks he ought to do so, it seems clear that he does so with no thought of its total consequences, still less with any opinion that these are likely to be the best possible. He thinks in fact much more of the past than of the future. What makes him think it right to act in a certain way is the fact that he has promised to do so – that and, usually, nothing more.

Ross provided examples of six prima facie duties: fidelity, gratitude, justice, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and self-improvement, but suggested that there might be many more. So, for instance, in addition to such standard prima facie duties as “One ought to keep ones promises” or “One ought to refrain from injuring others,” there might be prima facie duties such as, “One ought not to discriminate against persons on account of their race,” or, “One ought not to believe things which are not true,” or “One ought to ensure that those accused of crimes get fair trials.”

In each case of a proposed prima facie duty moral agents are thought to have a pro tanto reason for acting in the ways that a description of a duty provides just because it is the sort of reason that counts as a moral reason for action. As I will use this expression, one has a pro tanto moral reason to do A, when one is aware of a state of affairs S that provides a moral reason for A-ing, even if there are other states of affairs of which one might become aware that would give one a moral (or other) reason not to A.

Prima facie duties are usually contrasted with “all things considered” moral duties, that is, ones in which all of the morally relevant factors have been taken into consideration in a process of moral deliberation before deciding whether the agent does in fact have an actual or operative duty to do something. As Shelley Kagan explains it: “To say that something is your duty all things considered is to say that you are required to do it given all of the relevant factors that are relevant to the case at hand. In contrast, to say of something that it is a prima facie duty is only to note the presence of one or more of the factors that would generate an all things considered duty—in the absence of conflicting factors.”

Ross himself expressed some dissatisfaction with the term “prima facie duty” and suggested that perhaps “conditional duty” or “claim” might better capture his meaning, but ultimately rejected these alternatives. The term “prima facie” is unfortunate because it suggests that the duty is only apparent, and the phrase “all things considered” is rather cumbersome. In my discussion I will use the term “standing moral responsibility” in place of “prima facie duty”, and the terms “actual” (or sometimes “operative”) moral obligation, for the notion of an all things considered duty.

So then, if moral agents have in general a standing moral responsibility to protect vulnerable moral patients, then it will often be the case that different special responsibilities generated by this general standing moral responsibility will come into conflict with one another. How does one resolve these kinds of conflicts? Ross feel back on moral intuition, but perhaps we can do better than that. The idea that there might be a formula of some kind that we could use to actually calculate the weight of our moral responsibilities has appealed to many philosophers, though none has come up with a satisfactory account. I don't think my account is ultimately satisfactory either: it is presented as a heuristic device to aid the understanding of the set of normative factors that might potentially influence judgments of these kinds.

The basic schema is as follows:

W = A x O x P

where W stands for the weight of a particular prima facie duty or standing moral responsibility, A stands for agent-relative factors, O stands for the kind of obligation involved, that is, the gravity of the interest or value that is being protected by having such an obligation, and P stands for patient-relative moral factors, such as the moral stature of the patients to whom the agent's obligation is directed.

We can illustrate how this schema works using simple thought experiments in which we hold two of the three variables constant and vary the third. For example, if we specify that the A is a competent moral agent with no special relationship to the patient involved, and the P is a normal healthy human child, then we can vary the O factor as follows: Suppose O is the obligation not to murder. This is a weighty moral obligation. It is weightier than the obligation not to injure, which is in turn weightier than the obligation to provide some benefit to a moral patient. So, if killing is given the value 100, and injuring the value 75, and benefiting the value 25, and we set A and P to 1 each, then, the schema predicts that the prima facie responsibility not to kill the child is weightier than the similar obligation not to injure it, which is weightier than the obligation to provide the child with a benefit. This is in turn explained by the fact that the underlying interests involved have greater gravity in relationship to the patient's well-being or good. So, O is going to be an independent variable that will affect our judgment about the weights of various moral obligations we might have. Other things being equal, the more grave the interest involved the weightier the corresponding moral obligation.

But, let's hold the O factor the same and vary the P factor, that is, the moral stature of the patient involved. Suppose that one patient is the normal healthy child as above and another is a sentient non-human animal such as say a rabbit. Let's put the child and the rabbit on the trolley tracks so that the moral agent involved has to make a forced choice between injuring the child and injuring the rabbit. In this case, we would assign the P factor a high value, say 100, and the rabbit a smaller, but not insignificant value, say 50. Since the A and O factors are held constant, the schema predicts that our choice should be to injure the rabbit, since our obligation to refrain from injuring sentient nonhuman animals is less weighty than our corresponding obligations not to injuring human beings, because the former have lower moral stature. And this is what the schema predicts (roughly) that in a forced choice between these two prima facie responsibilities, we should choose to save the child.

But this is still far too simple to account for our moral intuitions. We can see this by introducing quantities of moral patients.

W = A x O x (nP)

where n is a number of patients. Suppose that instead of one rabbit on the tracks we have 50 rabbits and one is still forced to choose between injuring one child and injuring 50 rabbits. If we use the values for moral stature I suggested earlier, the obvious conclusion would be that the obligation not to injure 50 rabbits is 25 times weightier than the obligation not to injure one child. But is it? We can fudge this by assigning an arbitrarily low value to the nonhuman patients involved, say 1 as opposed to 50, but this seems pretty arbitrary and just an ad hoc way of saving the intuition that human interests matter more than nonhuman interests. As I said before, if your view is that human interests, no matter how trivial, will always outweigh animal interests, then my theory is not for you.

But clearly quantities do matter. We can see this using standard cases in which there is a forced choice between steering the trolley so it collides with one innocent helpless person who is tied to the tracks or steering it so it will collide with five innocent helpless persons who are tied to the other track. Most everyone who is asked about such cases comes to the conclusion that it is preferable to injure or kill one person than it is to injure or kill five, other things being equal.

But what if that one person is your own mother? Here is where the notions of derived or observer-relative moral status and moral partiality come into play so as to raise the stakes involved and change the moral calculation. Suppose that on one track lies your own mother, and on the other a complete stranger. The additional moral stature your own mother has in your eyes would give her life greater value than the life of a mere stranger, and so, if forced to choose, most of us would (perhaps reluctantly) steer the trolley into the stranger. Except, of course, if your own mother was an evil-doer who abused you as a child. This kind of consideration lowers your mother's moral stature and makes it more likely that you would choose to sacrifice her for the stranger, who, presumably, is innocent. These kinds of considerations have nothing to do with the intrinsic moral standing of the patient, but rather, are due to the patient's derived moral status. In order to account for these kinds of factors, we shall have to make the proposed schema even more complex:

W = A x O x n(P +/- D)

where D represents the increment or decrement of moral stature in a moral patient due to their relational or derived moral status.

We probably also have to complicate the A factor, which we have taken to represent a normal adult human moral agent. But in addition to their standing moral responsibilities, moral agents can also have various kinds of special responsibilities due to the particular roles they occupy, their own past actions, the promises they have made, and so forth. These additional sorts of agent-relative factors can also affect the weight of an obligation, sometimes in crucial ways. So, for instance, if a physician happens to be on the scene when another person suffers a heart attack along with a non-physician, most people would I think judge that the obligation of the physician to attempt to help this person is weightier than the obligation of the non-medical bystander. It would be even greater is the medical person is a trained EMT who has been in fact summoned to the scene by a 911 call. Such an individual has a strict duty to provide aid to the patient in distress, which ordinary bystanders do not have. So, then, we need to make the schema look something like this:

W = (A +/-R) x O x n(P +/-D)

where R stands for agent-relative factors, such as social roles, that function to increase or decrease the agent's level of responsibility.

Again, this formula is just illustrative. It is far from clear what the relationship is among these different sorts of normative factors. I have represented them in terms of multiplication and addition, but I could have equally well used powers, or logarithms to the variables and the way they interact. In fact, it is not possible to determine the precise formula for thinking about these kinds of issue by doing armchair philosophical thought experiments like the ones I have been offerring. One needs to actually develop a range of cases and present them to subjects and measure their responses, and then find the data points, and then choose which sort of formula (if any) best fits the curve. That is, it might be doable through empirical moral psychological research, but even then, it is not going to be easy.

Yet as moral agents we make these kinds of judgments all the time. Assuming that our moral intuitions are not wholly arbitrary, it must then be the case that our brains are following some kinds of patterns or using some kinds of algorithms to arrive at judgment about the relative weights of our moral duties. But we are obviously a long way from understanding how we make these kinds of complex moral judgments. Which is why moral philosophers such as Ross, and I, fall back on using the intuitions of expert moral judges as the basis for deciding among conflicting moral responsibilities. Moral intuitions may be slippery and uncertain, but they are still better than simplistic formulas as a guide to moral judgment.

However, even simplistic moral formulas have some value in that they can be used to help us disentangle the different sorts of normative factors than can affect our intuitive judgments about the weight of different duties and responsibilities. The schema presented here is offerred only as a first rough approximation, a heuristic, that tells us that there are at least three basic kinds of normative factors that can affect the moral weight of an obligation: those related to the agent, those related to the type of obligation or interest involved, and those related to the patient's moral stature. This already gives us a lot of complexity, but I doubt it is adequate as it stands, since it leaves out what are called contextual factors, for instance, what the knock-on consequences of certain actions for other moral patients, and 'threshold effects', that is, when the harm done by fulfilling a prima facie obligation to say, refrain from restricting the free movement a person, would be so great as to tip the balance in favor of doing so, as for instance, when the person involved is the carrier of a serious infectious disease who might spread it to others. Such thresholds can alter our judgments even when duties derived from basic human rights are involved. So I am not claiming a lot for my schema; only that it is a way of starting to get a handle on these very complex matters.