Responsibilities that Do Not Derive from Rights

The "ethics of rights" represents the dominant contemporary approach to understanding the nature of moral obligation. However, some writers have criticized the "rights-based" approach to morality by claiming that morality cannot be based entirely on fundamental principles which assign rights to human individuals. Instead what we need is a pluralistic understanding of normative ethics which recognizes that besides rights, notions such as responsibilities, values, interests, utility, and other moral notions are also fundamental moral concepts.

According to Joseph Raz, "`x has a right' means that, 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" ["Nature of Rights" Mind 93 (1984), pp.194-214]. This formula expresses is what is called the "beneficiary view" of rights which regards the "interests of people as the only ultimate value," and assigns duties to others which are grounded in rights of individuals to have their well-being or interests protected. This is a useful way of thinking about rights that I will return to later one. However, for now, I want to focus on the limitations of this view.

One important limitation of rights‑based moralities stems from their being nothing more than the grounds of duties to individuals. But, as Raz and others have argued, there are some things which we morally ought to do and to value which do not stem from duties to particular human individuals which arise in virtue of their rights; "There is more to morality than rights and duties and precepts which can be derived from them" (183).

Raz rejects moral individualism: i.e., the view that the only morally significant values are ones which resolve to individual personal interests. Rights‑based theories are usually individualistic in that they do not recognize "any intrinsic value in any collective good" (186). They typically hold that collective goods have only instrumental value. Since there are some collective goods which have intrinsic value, he concludes that rights-based approaches to morality cannot encompass all that which moral agents ought to do or to value.

As an example of this he cites various collective goods which individuals may value but which do not resolve to benefits to individuals:

Consider collective goods such as living in a beautiful town, which is economically prosperous, and in a society that is tolerant and cultured. Living in such a society is in the interest of each of the inhabitants: it is more agreeable to live in such a society, whatever one's personal circumstances, than to live in one which lacks these attributes. But the fact that it is in my interest to live in such a society is not normally considered sufficient to establish that I have a right to live in such a society....This is explicable on the definition of rights offered above, according to which a right is a sufficient ground for holding another to have a duty. It is the common view that my interest in living in a prosperous, cultured, and tolerant society and in a beautiful environment is not enough to impose a duty on anyone to make my society and environment so (189‑190).

The existence of such collective (or public) goods suggests that, "It is implausible to assume that an individual can conduct his whole life on the basis and sole motivation of respecting other people's rights" (198).

In addition to moral duties which are derived from the rights of individuals, Raz also mentions duties which arise in the context of various personal relationships: "Personal friendships, marital relations, one's loyalty and sense of pride in one's workplace or one's country are among the most valuable and rewarding aspects of many people's lives" (200). The moral significance of personal relationships consists in the fact that special duties may arise in such cases which do not correspond to rights which individuals may demand.

For instance, "Friendships entail a special concern for the welfare of the friend, concern for his welfare over and above the concern required of us towards other human beings generally..." (197). We may, in his example, feel we have a duty to compensate a friend for a loss, even though we did not cause it, because of the value which we place on the friendship. Such a duty, he argues, does not derive from our friend's "right to compensation" since compensation for a loss is not something which he can demand.

These reflections are perfectly consistent with, and indeed support my claim that there are certain moral responsibilities that we can have that are non-optional but also non-peremptory. Since friends are supposed to care for their friends' well-being and happiness, they can be thought to have a special role-related moral responsibility to compensate them for a loss, even though their friends cannot demand that they do so. One has such responsibilities independently of any rights that one's friends may have against you.

As a second example of duties that do not derive from rights, Raz discusses the duty not to destroy a valuable work of art which one owns. Normally. ownership entails the right to dispose of one's property in any way that one pleases. Owning a Van Gogh painting gives me the right to destroy it, even though one ought not to exercise that right because one has a responsibility not to wantonly destroy something of beauty and value.

On the other hand, despite the fact that many people would derive pleasure from seeing the painting, no one has a right that I shall not destroy it. "Nevertheless, while I owe no one a duty to preserve the painting I am under such a duty. The reason is that to destroy it and deny the duty is to do violence to art and to show oneself blind to one of the values which give life a meaning" (197). Put in another way, I have a non-optional but non-peremptory responsibility to protect the painting even though I have the right to destroy it. Saying that I have the right to destroy it simply means here that no one else is in a position to demand that I not destroy the painting. Yet having a responsibility to protect it entails that I have a moral responsibility not to destroy it. While I may exercise my right to destroy my painting, doing so would leave my action open to moral criticism. One sometimes has a responsibility not to do things that one has a right to do.

I prefer the term "responsibility" to denote what Raz describes as "duties which do not derive from rights." In his example, the owner has a responsibility not to destroy the Van Gogh painting but to preserve it, though his ownership gives him the right to destroy it. I, the painting's owner, in particular have this responsibility because ownership places me in a position of power over the objects I own; my possessions are specially vulnerable to me.

But my right of ownership is limited by a coordinate responsibility to care for items of my property which are valuable and specially vulnerable to harm. I may, in this case, have a duty to care for a valuable work of art, though that duty is owed to no one in particular in virtue of his or her rights. Responsibilities to protect valuable moral patients which are not persons provides an example of a moral responsibility that does not derive from someone's rights.

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Legalism and Responsibility

A somewhat different approach to the limitations of rights-based moralities has been developed by John Ladd ["Legalism and Medical Ethics." Contemporary Issues in Biomedical Ethics. J. W. Davis et. al. Eds.. Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1978: 1‑35]. Ladd criticizes what he calls "legalism" in medical ethics and argues for moving away from a legalistic approach to one based on the notion of responsibility. He writes, "By `legalism' I shall mean: `the ethical attitude that holds moral conduct to be a matter of rule following, and moral relationships to consist of duties and rights determined by rules'"(1).

According to Ladd, legalism leads to the "almost exclusive use of the concept of rights as a category of analysis for problems in medical ethics....As a result,...our view of these problems and how to go about resolving them is unduly narrow and dogmatic, i.e. "legalistic" in the worst sense" (6). The legalistic approach is limited in the medical and other contexts because of its essential reliance on the notion of rights, and therefore, on the limitations of an exclusively "rights-based" approach to ethics. There are, he argues, three essential features of rights which make them particularly inappropriate in the medical context: "(1) the peremptory nature of rights, (2) the particular kind of interpersonal relationship implied in the appeal to rights, and (3) the ethical importance of distinguishing between the possession and the exercise of a right" (16).

First, "unlike other moral considerations, such as appeals to generosity, appeals to rights are appeals that are peremptory; to secure them it is usually permissible to use coercion, either in the form of legal action or in the form of self‑help" (16). Second, rights "represent a relationship between two persons (or parties): the right‑holder and the right‑ower. To have a right is to have a right against someone (or against anyone or everyone)" (17). Third, "one can possess a right only if one can choose not to exercise it" (17): "Strictly speaking, this condition requires that right‑holders (and right‑owers) be competent adults capable of self‑directed choice." Ladd argues that, "these three properties of rights show why it is sometimes quite inappropriate ethically to base medical decisions on the notion of rights alone. For neither medical advice nor patients' requests need be peremptory, that is, advanced as demands backed by force, nor does the doctor‑patient relationship need be an adversary one" (18). Generally speaking, "standing on one's rights is a last ditch stand, to be taken only after communication has broken down or when there was no hope for communication to begin with" (20). "Indeed, if one insists on a right, it will more than likely destroy the relationship altogether because it implies the absence of trust, which may be more important ethically. That is why the appeal to rights is sometimes inappropriate, improper, and immoral" (19).[i] A fourth feature of the notion of rights, acording to Ladd, is that there can be no rights without rules: "it is quite impossible to understand what is involved in asserting a right without examining a rule, or a possible rule, that it refers to or with which it is correlated in some way" (7).

But, rights and the rules they are based on, Ladd argues, are often mistakenly treated as context-independent guides to action: [I]n dealing with issues of medical ethics, and with other kinds of ethics that are concerned with problems of modern life, we must begin by recognizing the contextual character of rules, practices, and concepts. Legal answers are relevant in legal contexts, but may not be so in other contexts; by the same token, some moral categories may be appropriate in one context and quite inappropriate in other contexts. In general, then, we must take into account the context in which problems arise and in which our rules, principles, etc. are designed to operate before we can determine how and to what extent they are valid for the radically new kinds of situation that arise in modern medicine and modern life in general (4).

Ladd contrasts the rule-guided, context-independent, "right-based" approach to moral questions with an approach which he terms "the ethics of responsibility." Responsibility, unlike rights, operates contextually relying on the discretion of the moral agent to determine what is the morally "best" response to make in a given situation. While agents may have recourse to moral and legal "rules" in making these judgments, the ethics of responsibility acknowledges that it may not always be possible to bring any particular action‑situation completely under rules. Situations calling for moral judgments are often unique and require the moral agent to devise a "fitting" response, not just one that follows a rule.

In the medical context, "the unreflective acceptance of an ethics of rights in preference, say, to an ethics of responsibility, inevitably leads to moral confusion and irresponsibility...for the simple reason that the ethics of rights rests on the twin assumptions that, from a moral point of view, someone must have a right and that, in the ultimate analysis, rights relationships can only obtain between equals" (29). As an alternative, he suggests, "we need [an ethics] that covers such things as caring, as providing for another person's needs‑‑in more general terms, we need an ethics of giving and receiving" (22). The ethics of care and the VCP provide the basis for such an approach to normative ethics. It may also enable us to better understand the sorts of moral relationships that exists between "unequals".


Ladd's views are consonant with my own; the doctor-patient relationship is a special moral relationship characterized by the VCP as one in which the physician or caregiver has special responsibilities to protect her patient that cannot be reduced to or entirely derived from the patient's rights. These responsibilities are highly discretionary, but non-optional in the sense that the physician can be rightfully blamed or called to account for failing to fulfill them, even though they are also non-peremptory in that no one can demand that these responsibilities be fulfilled as their right.

The reflections in the last two sections, then serve to cement the proposal that there is a class of moral obligations, what I call moral responsibilities, that are distinct both from peremptory duties derived from the rights of others and from supererogations.

Having reviewed the meaning of the term "responsibility" we are now in a position to consider and respond to several objections to the kind of account I have been developing.

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.

Moral Agency and Autonomy

While both psychological and non-psychological organisms can, on my view, be the objects of our moral responsibilities, and psychological organisms can be the holders of rights, only moral agents can be the bearers of moral obligations, duties, and responsibilities. Since moral responsibilities presuppose there being a moral agent who is capable of being ascribed moral obligations, it follows that if there were no moral agents in the universe, then there would be no moral obligations.

Kant thought that moral agency, or rational moral agency, was the sole basis for moral status. He wrote "Two things find the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" [I. Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. trans Lewis White Beck, 1956, p. 166]. Rational moral agency is what makes moral autonomy possible, for Kant. Moral autonomy is the highest known form of psychological agency. A morally autonomous individual is one who directs his or her own voluntary behavior in accordance with an internalized conception of the moral law. The term "autonomy" literally means "living by ones own law" or "giving law to oneself." The autonomous individual is one who is capable of independent moral judgment and decision-making and whose will is directed by their own moral conceptions and rational judgments, not by the will of another or by instinct or emotion. As John Christman writes, "Put most simply, to be autonomous is to be one's own person, to be directed by considerations, desires, conditions, and characteristics that are not simply imposed externally upon one, but are part of what can somehow be considered one's authentic self." ("Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy"). The concept of moral autonomy plays a central role in liberal social and political philosophy as well as in normative ethics. One must, however, distinguish among various senses in which the term "autonomy" is commonly used, for instance, between basic autonomy which is the moral status in which the individual has the capacity to make their own decisions and speak for themselves, and be held morally accountable for their actions, and ideal autonomy in which a person is maximally authentic and free from all forms of distorting influences on their judgment. For this discussion, I will be using the term "autonomy" in the basic sense, though I want to emphasize that even in this sense, autonomy is a personal achievement.

As Warren points out, Kant held that moral agency is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for full moral status, while she, and many other philosophers, including myself, who have thought about this question, strongly doubt that it is a necessary condition. On the view I have been discussing, there are at least three levels of moral standing: one for living, non-psychological organisms, another for living psychological organisms, and a third for living rational moral agents. So on my view, while moral agency is not necessary for a being to have moral standing, it is sufficient.

Additionally, on my view, being a moral agent or rationally autonomous is not a necessary condition for being capable of holding rights; some moral patients who are not also moral agents, are capable of being ascribed rights based upon their psychological agency. But while moral agents can also function as the objects of obligations, and can also be the holders of rights, moral obligations can only be meaningfully ascribed to moral agents. Only autonomous moral agents, those with full moral agency, are ascribed full moral responsibility for their behavior.

There is a problem, though, in deciding when something qualifies as a moral agent. Predictably, philosophical opinion on this question divides between those who favor a minimalist and a maximalist view. Kant and Locke were minimalists who argued that moral agents must be capable of being held morally and legally accountable for their actions, and that therefore, only normal human adults qualified as moral agents with full moral status. Human infants and young children, persons with some kinds of severe mental disorders or disabilities, the comatose, and sentient non-human animals, would, on this view, be excluded from the category of moral agents.

Other philosophers have noticed that even some animals seem to know the difference between "right" and "wrong" and exhibit some of the psychological capacities necessary for moral agency. Your dog probably know that it is not supposed to urinate on the carpet. While not, strictly speaking, a moral wrong, the fact that dogs can be trained to avoid behaviors which their human masters find distasteful, seems to indicate that they are capable of at least some limited form of moral agency. Research on primates, by Franz de Waal, and others, strongly suggests that some apes possess a sense of justice. Many animals exhibit behaviors like caring for their young and defending them against predators that seem to us to be moral responses indicative of some degree of moral agency.

For instance there is a documentary film about a group of African elephants that adopted an orphaned calf (as described in Ingfei Chen,"The Social Brain" Smithsonian Magazine June 2009, pp. 38-43):

When the baby elephant falls into a water hole, the matriarch quickly marches in, followed by the others. Together she and a second female use their tusks, trunks and legs to free the calf from the muck. Another animal paws at the steep bank with its foot, building a ramp the youngster uses to climb to safety. "It's really remarkable...," how the elephants rapidly sized up the crisis and worked together to save the baby. "It's a very high sort of functioning that very few animals are able to do....humans can do it only on good days."

The case is reminiscent of the famous example from Peter Singer in which a small child falls into a shallow lake and a passerby must decide whether it is worth ruining his good shoes to wade into the water to rescue him. On good days, presumably, the answer is he should.

John Rawls attempted to solve the problem of defining the range of moral agency by proposing that we think of moral agency is a "range property," that is, being capable of having a sense of justice or a conception of moral obligation or being accountable for one's voluntary actions, is a complex set of psychological capacities which different individuals may possess in differing degrees. This allows for us to use the term "moral agent" in a maximalist way to describe young children and some non-human animals, who possess some, but not all, of the psychological capacities necessary for full moral agency at least to some degree.

While I am comfortable with this suggestion, I think we will still need to have another concept, that of "full moral agency" or "moral autonomy" to designate those kinds of individuals which have these capacities in sufficient measure as to make them fully accountable and morally responsible for their behavior. Full moral agency, moral autonomy, is a moral status that not all moral agents, nor all human beings, ever achieve. Only those individuals who have attained full moral agency can be held strictly accountable, morally speaking, for their behavior.

Young children are generally not accorded full moral status because the degree with which they are in control of their moral faculties is insufficiently developed. We exempt young children from criminal liability for certain kinds of moral or legal wrongs they may commit, or if we do hold them accountable for them, do so with their immaturity functioning as a mitigating factor in ascriptions of blame and punishment. Children are not yet morally autonomous moral agents, and one way to understand this is to recognize that paternalism is justified when children are concerned. Parents should sometime override their children's wills when doing so is in the child's best interests. Children cannot give consent for medical procedures in their own names; they cannot be parties to contracts, and they cannot vote. Children develop moral competence though the process of socialization, and if all goes well, they do eventually attain adulthood and so achieve the moral status of full moral agency and become autonomous moral agents. Children grow in moral stature as they acquire the complex set of psychological capacities necessary for full moral agency or basic moral autonomy, but they can be considered to be moral agents, albeit novice or immature ones, before that time, at least once they have sufficiently developed linguistic capacities so as to allow them to be capable of "giving an account" of their actions. Thus, I agree with Warren when she writes, "Without a language that is capable of representing moral concepts and principles, real moral agency is not possible" (p. 161).

By "real" here I think she must mean "full", since elsewhere she suggests that some non-linguistic animals exhibit some of the characteristics of moral agency. In any case, I see no problem in using the term "moral agency" in both the maximalist sense and in the more restricted minimalist sense of individuals who have attained full moral agency or moral autonomy, so long as it is clear which sense is being employed.

But, on my theory, being a moral agent, to any degree, is not a necessary condition of being capable of holding rights, so even infants, and probably also human fetuses who have developed to the point of psychological awareness, can be ascribed meaningful rights, whether or not they are also considered to be moral agents. So can intelligent social animals such as elephants, whales, chimpanzees, dolphins and other categories of psychologically complex animals.

Even sentient non-human animals who are not capable of moral agency, for instance, the baby bunny nibbling on the grass in my backyard, can also be considered possible right-holders as well as the objects of the moral obligations of moral agents. Thus, for instance, one thing one should teach one's children is not to set baby bunnies on fire for fun. On Warren's view this is due to the Anti-Cruelty principle. On my view, moral agents do have non-optional moral responsibilities to avoid and prevent needless pain to psychological organisms, and these duties can be enforced by means of rights ascribed to the object of those responsibilities. Even non-psychological but living entities, such as bacteria and plants, can be the objects of the moral responsibilities of moral agents, but they cannot be the holders of rights and the duties towards them cannot be demanded and coercively enforced.

Another noteworthy feature of my view is that some kinds of organizations, such as corporations and governments, can be ascribed full moral agency, even though they are not living beings. Corporations can have both rights and obligations even though they are not alive and do not die. Organizations which have centralized internal decision-making structures, operated by human moral agents, can be ascribed a kind of moral agency which is not reducible to the agency of their human operators. Corporations and governments can be held morally and legally accountable for their actions. I will discuss this matter in greater detail at a latter stage in the argument, but for the time being, I wish to indicate that moral agency, even full moral agency, is not in my view a grade of moral status that is reserved only to living normal human adults. It is also conceivable that alien creatures, such as E.T. or the Vulcans from Star Trek, should be regarded as possessing full moral agency, and similarly, advanced intelligent robots and androids, such as "Data" will be considered to qualify for full moral agency, where this means that they can be treated as the bearers moral obligations for whose fulfillment they can be held fully morally and legally accountable.

Entities that have the moral status of full moral agency, or autonomous moral agents will also by that token be the holders of rights. Full moral status is a sufficient condition of being a right-holder on my view, because as I will demonstrate later on, being the bearer of moral obligations, such as the responsibility to protect the vulnerable, entails that those moral agents who have them must also have at least some rights. This conclusion will follow on the supposition, which I will also address later, that the status of full moral agency has moral content, that is, full moral agency or moral autonomy carries with it certain substantive moral responsibilities. Put another way, full moral agency functions as both a necessary and a sufficient condition for having certain kinds of moral obligations.

Moral agents that have attained full moral autonomy have also a kind of inherent value which is distinct from the inherent value of living things, and psychological organisms, though when the moral agent in question is a living adult human being, she or he also possesses these other kinds of inherent value. Kant thought this this was the only kind of intrinsic moral value, but, I have explained why I disagree with this view. However, I will continue to employ Kant's term "dignity" to refer to the specific kind of intrinsic moral value that living, sentient, moral agents that have attained full moral agency or autonomy possess. Artificial moral agents, such as corporations and robots, do not have "dignity" in this sense. Living sentient alien species who are capable of being treated as full moral agents, will probably also have this kind of inherent value, but since we do not know of any such creatures, we can defer this question as speculative at this time.

Adult human beings who possess the usual complement of developed psychological capacities necessary for full moral agency or moral autonomy, and who have been sufficiently socialized so as to understand the concept of moral duty, have "dignity" because they are not only capable of having moral obligations, but because they actually do have them, and as a consequence of having moral obligations, also must have certain rights. Thus, having dignity is a sufficient ground for having rights. But, as I have emphasized it is not a necessary condition for having rights. There can be, therefore, things whose moral standing makes them capable of being ascribed meaningful rights, but which do not have the status of fully competent moral agents.

Thus far in this discussion I have avoided using the terms "person" and "personhood." These terms have been the topics of extended philosophical controversy, as Warren's discussion in Chapter 4 of her book, attests. My use of the term "moral agency" tracks many of the key features of the ways in which philosophers have wanted to use the terms "person" and "personhood." On maximalist view of personhood, any entity that exhibits some of the capacities associated with moral agency to at least some degree, can be considered to be a "person," even though they may not have attained the standing of autonomous moral agents. On a minimalist view, only entities that have attained full moral agency or basic moral autonomy, can be called "persons." But this is too restrictive since it would imply that human individuals do not become persons until they graduate from high school.

Using the maximalist sense, a intelligent adult chimpanzee who has been taught to use signs to communicate with human beings, can be regarded as a person, and so can young children, and certain categories of human adults with impaired psychological abilities, such as those with advanced dementia. Corporations are also regarded as "legal persons" and should also, I believe, be regarded as moral persons with respect to their social responsibilities and other sorts of moral obligations which they can possess. Governments, and some other kinds of organizations with centralized internal decision-making structures, would also be legal and moral persons in this sense, albeit non-living, artificial ones.

However, corporations, governments, chimpanzees, dolphins, intelligent androids, and extra-terrestrial life forms, are not human. The question to which we must not turn our attention is whether or not being human confers upon an entity some additional moral stature.