Minorities and Philosophy Lecture: The Moral Significance of Being Human Abstract

Abstract:
When trying to establish the special moral importance that we give to human beings, philosophers generally find the concept of species membership an insufficient ground for justifying that status. They instead insist on locating morally significant intrinsic properties of human beings to serve as the basis for moral status. Often they drop the term “human” and prefer a normative concept such as “person.” They either insist that a purely natural concept does not have normative content, or they accept the view that species membership as a criterion for is special moral status is morally arbitrary in the same way that racism, sexism, or heterosexism are. A numbers of philosophers (James Rachaels, Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan, among others) point out that the morally relevant attributes are not possessed by all human beings, and may well be possessed by nonhuman animals.

These views either explicitly or implicitly write certain human beings out of consideration for that special status and render them unequal to other humans with the morally relevant attributes. While some philosophers find this result acceptable, I do not. I dispute the view that we must find the morally relevant attributes in humans to justify their special moral status, and argue instead for the moral relevance of species membership (on relational grounds); while, at the same time, granting that nonhuman animals can have morally relevant traits that ought to guide our treatment of them.