Moral Status And Human Life

Author : James G. Dwyer
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2010-10-21
Category : Law
ISBN : 9781139493185

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Moral Status and Human Life by James G. Dwyer Pdf

Are children of equal, lesser, or perhaps even greater moral importance than adults? This work of applied moral philosophy develops a comprehensive account of how adults as moral agents ascribe moral status to beings - ourselves and others - and on the basis of that account identifies multiple criteria for having moral status. It argues that proper application of those criteria should lead us to treat children as of greater moral importance than adults. This conclusion presents a basis for critiquing existing social practices, many of which implicitly presuppose that children occupy an inferior status, and for suggesting how government policy, law, and social life might be different if it reflected an assumption that children are actually of superior status.

Author : Joshua Shepherd
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 150 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2018-05-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781315396323

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Consciousness and Moral Status by Joshua Shepherd Pdf

It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but also the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and humans with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Author : Russell DiSilvestro
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2010-04-21
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789048185375

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Human Capacities and Moral Status by Russell DiSilvestro Pdf

Many debates about the moral status of things—for example, debates about the natural rights of human fetuses or nonhuman animals—eventually migrate towards a discussion of the capacities of the things in question—for example, their capacities to feel pain, think, or love. Yet the move towards capacities is often controversial: if a human’s capacities are the basis of its moral status, how could a human having lesser capacities than you and I have the same "serious" moral status as you and I? This book answers this question by arguing that if something is human, it has a set of typical human capacities; that if something has a set of typical human capacities, it has serious moral status; and thus all human beings have the same sort of serious moral status as you and I. Beginning from what our common intuitions tell us about situations involving "temporary incapacitation"—where a human organism has, then loses, then regains a certain capacity—this book argues for substantive conclusions regarding human fetuses and embryos, humans in a permanent vegetative state, humans suffering from brain diseases, and humans born with genetic disorders. Since these conclusions must have some impact on our ongoing moral and political debates about the proper treatment of such humans, this book will be useful to professionals and students in philosophy, bioethics, law, medicine, and public policy.

Author : Mary Anne Warren
Publisher : Clarendon Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 1997-11-13
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780191588150

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Moral Status by Mary Anne Warren Pdf

Mary Anne Warren explores a theoretical question which lies at the heart of practical ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? In other words, what are the criteria for being an entity towards which people have moral obligations? Some philosophers maintain that there is one intrinsic property—for instance, life, sentience, humanity, or moral agency. Others believe that relational properties, such as belonging to a human community, are more important. In Part I of the book, Warren argues that no single property can serve as the sole criterion for moral status; instead, life, sentience, moral agency, and social and biotic relationships are all relevant, each in a different way. She presents seven basic principles, each focusing on a property that can, in combination with others, legitimately affect an agent's moral obligations towards entities of a given type. In Part II, these principles are applied in an examination of three controversial ethical issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion

Author : James G. Dwyer
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2014-05-14
Category : Children
ISBN : 0511932804

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Moral Status and Human Life by James G. Dwyer Pdf

This work of applied moral philosophy develops a comprehensive account of how adults as moral agents ascribe moral status to beings.

Author : Steve Clarke,Hazem Zohny,Julian Savulescu
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2021-08-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780192646415

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Rethinking Moral Status by Steve Clarke,Hazem Zohny,Julian Savulescu Pdf

Common-sense morality implicitly assumes that reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn between the "full" moral status that is usually attributed to ordinary adult humans, the partial moral status attributed to non-human animals, and the absence of moral status, which is usually ascribed to machines and other artifacts. These implicit assumptions have long been challenged, and are now coming under further scrutiny as there are beings we have recently become able to create, as well as beings that we may soon be able to create, which blur the distinctions between human, non-human animal, and non-biological beings. These beings include non-human chimeras, cyborgs, human brain organoids, post-humans, and human minds that have been uploaded into computers and onto the internet and artificial intelligence. It is far from clear what moral status we should attribute to any of these beings. There are a number of ways we could respond to the new challenges these technological developments raise: we might revise our ordinary assumptions about what is needed for a being to possess full moral status, or reject the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between full and partial moral status. This volume explores such responses, and provides a forum for philosophical reflection about ordinary presuppositions and intuitions about moral status.

Author : David DeGrazia,Joseph Millum
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2021-08-26
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781316515839

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A Theory of Bioethics by David DeGrazia,Joseph Millum Pdf

Offers a compelling theory of bioethics, covering medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death.

Author : Mark H Bernstein
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2015-09-29
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0230276628

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The Moral Equality of Humans and Animals by Mark H Bernstein Pdf

Received opinion has it that humans are morally superior to non-human animals; human interests matter more than the like interests of animals and the value of human lives is alleged to be greater than the value of nonhuman animal lives. Since this belief causes mayhem and murder, its de-mythologizing requires urgent attention.

Author : Gary Steiner
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9780231142342

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Animals and the Moral Community by Gary Steiner Pdf

Gary Steiner argues that ethologists and philosophers in the analytic and continental traditions have largely failed to advance an adequate explanation of animal behavior. Critically engaging the positions of Marc Hauser, Daniel Dennett, Donald Davidson, John Searle, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among others, Steiner shows how the Western philosophical tradition has forced animals into human experiential categories in order to make sense of their cognitive abilities and moral status and how desperately we need a new approach to animal rights. Steiner rejects the traditional assumption that a lack of formal rationality confers an inferior moral status on animals vis-à-vis human beings. Instead, he offers an associationist view of animal cognition in which animals grasp and adapt to their environments without employing concepts or intentionality. Steiner challenges the standard assumption of liberal individualism according to which humans have no obligations of justice toward animals. Instead, he advocates a "cosmic holism" that attributes a moral status to animals equivalent to that of people. Arguing for a relationship of justice between humans and nature, Steiner emphasizes our kinship with animals and the fundamental moral obligations entailed by this kinship.

Author : David DeGrazia
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1996-07-13
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0521567602

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Taking Animals Seriously by David DeGrazia Pdf

This book distinguishes itself from much of the polemical literature on these issues by offering the most judicious and well-balanced account yet available of animals' moral standing, and related questions concerning their minds and welfare. Transcending jejune debates focused on utilitarianism versus rights, the book offers a fresh methodological approach with specific and constructive conclusions about our treatment of animals. David DeGrazia provides the most thorough discussion yet of whether equal consideration should be extended to animals' interests, and examines the issues of animal minds and animal well-being with an unparalleled combination of philosophical rigor and empirical documentation. His book is an important contribution to the field of animal ethics and will be read with special interest by all philosophers teaching such courses, as well as biologists, those professionally involved with animals, and general readers concerned about animal welfare.

Author : Gary Steiner
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Pre
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2010-08-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780822970989

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Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents by Gary Steiner Pdf

Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.

Author : Stephen R. L. Clark
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 1984
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : UOM:39015008350244

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The Moral Status of Animals by Stephen R. L. Clark Pdf

Author : Monique Canto-Sperber
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0691127360

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Moral Disquiet and Human Life by Monique Canto-Sperber Pdf

Attempting to steer moral philosophy away from abstract theorizing, this title argues that moral philosophy should be a practical, rational, and argumentative engagement with reality, and that moral reflection should have direct effects on our lives and the world in which we live.

Author : Shelly Kagan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2019-04-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780192565174

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How to Count Animals, more or less by Shelly Kagan Pdf

Most people agree that animals count morally, but how exactly should we take animals into account? A prominent stance in contemporary ethical discussions is that animals have the same moral status that people do, and so in moral deliberation the similar interests of animals and people should be given the very same consideration. In How to Count Animals, more or less, Shelly Kagan sets out and defends a hierarchical approach in which people count more than animals do and some animals count more than others. For the most part, moral theories have not been developed in such a way as to take account of differences in status. By arguing for a hierarchical account of morality - and exploring what status sensitive principles might look like - Kagan reveals just how much work needs to be done to arrive at an adequate view of our duties toward animals, and of morality more generally.

Author : Judith Benz-Schwarzburg
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2019-10-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9789004415072

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Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers? Linking Animal Cognition, Animal Ethics & Animal Welfare by Judith Benz-Schwarzburg Pdf

In Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers?, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg reveals the scope and relevance of cognitive kinship between humans and non-human animals. She presents a wide range of empirical studies on culture, language and theory of mind in animals and then leads us to ask why such complex socio-cognitive abilities in animals matter. Her focus is on ethical theory as well as on the practical ways in which we use animals. Are great apes maybe better described as non-human persons? Should we really use dolphins as entertainers or therapists? Benz-Schwarzburg demonstrates how much we know already about animals’ capabilities and needs and how this knowledge should inform the ways in which we treat animals in captivity and in the wild.