Challenges to human equality

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 81-104

  McMahan, Jeff ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Animals; Cognitive disability; Equality; Killing

Indexed keywords

EID: 36749095781     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10892-007-9020-9     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. The object of evaluation here is the causing of a human being to cease to exist, not the manner in which the human being is killed. It may well be more seriously wrong to kill a person in an agonizing manner than to kill the same person painlessly. But this is because the former involves two distinct wrongs: causing the agony and causing the death. The claim of equal wrongness applies to the causing of death alone.
2. Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 233-248.
3. Liberal egalitarians who believe that abortion can be permissible may take the fact that fetuses lack the relevant capacities as partial confirmation that it is these capacities that distinguish most human beings from other animals. But if so, they have a problem if they share the common opposition to infanticide (See Jeff McMahan, "Infanticide," Utilitas, forthcoming).
4. Rahul Kumar, "Permissible Killing and the Irrelevance of Being Human," The Journal of Ethics, this issue (cited from two different paragraphs). Emphasis added.
5. Kumar, "Permissible Killing and the Irrelevance of Being Human."
6. Jeff McMahan, "'Our Fellow Creatures'," The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005), pp. 355-359.
7. Kumar, "Permissible Killing and the Irrelevance of Being Human." For a similar view, see Robert P. George and Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, "Statement of Professor George (Joined by Dr. Gómez-Lobo)," an appendix to Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry, a report by the President's Council on Bioethics, available at http://www.bioethics.gov/topics/cloning_index.html (accessed on 30 June 2006).
8. And compare S. Matthew Liao, "Virtually All Human Beings as Rightholders," unpublished manuscript.
9. Kumar, "Permissible Killing and the Irrelevance of Being Human." See McMahan, '"Our Fellow Creatures'."
10. What about human beings who once had higher psychological capacities but have irreversibly lost them? There are two ways in which this view can attempt to accommodate such individuals within the scope of liberal egalitarian principles. One is to claim that even if the acquisition of a certain moral status requires the possession of or potential for certain capacities, that status can nevertheless survive the loss of those capacities and even the loss of the potential for those capacities. The other is to claim that even if the areas of the brain that are the physical basis of an individual's higher psychological capacities are destroyed, that individual remains genetically or otherwise constituted to be directed toward the possession (though not the development) of those capacities as long as he or she remains alive. I think the former of these two claims is more plausible, in part because it provides a basis for the possibility of wronging the dead. Moral claims can not only survive an individual's loss of capacities the possession of which was once necessary for the individual to be able to exert those claims, but can even survive the death of the person who is the source of the claims.
11. Perhaps there are exceptions in rare cases, such as extreme instances of psychopathy, in which a human being has a developed, capacity for instrumental rationality but utterly lacks certain other capacities necessary for moral agency. I will not explore this possibility here.
12. In a seminal paper on abortion, Michael Tooley advanced a complicated argument against the moral significance of potential based on a thought-experiment involving a chemical that, if injected into a kitten's brain, would give that kitten the potential to develop into a rational being [Michael Tooley, "A Defense of Abortion and Infanticide," in Joel Feinberg, (ed.), The Problem of Abortion (Belmont: Wadsworth. Publishing Company, .1.973), pp. 86-88]. This thought-experiment has force against the moral significance of the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic potential. Updating the example for advances in genetics, we can imagine a gene therapy that, if administered to a kitten, would give that kitten the genetic basis for the development of a rational nature in an identity-preserving way. Prior to the administration of the therapy, the kitten would have only extrinsic potential for a rational nature. But after the therapy had been administered, its potential would be intrinsic: it would then be internally directed toward the development of a rational nature. Suppose that immediately after the administration of the therapy, it would, be possible to reverse its effects, causing the kitten to revert to an ordinary kitten with only the extrinsic potential for a rational nature. I think there would be no more reason not to reverse the effects of the therapy than there would be to administer it in the first place. And I agree with Tooley that there would be no more reason not to kill the kitten immediately after it had received the therapy than there would be before. But these intuitions, which I believe would be widely shared, would be indefensible if intrinsic potential were morally more significant than extrinsic potential.
13. See Tim Mulgan, "Critical Notice of The Ethics of Killing," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (2004), pp. 443-460. It is perhaps worth noting here a couple of mistaken assumptions that Mulgan makes about the nature of my position. He assumes that, like Peter Singer, I attribute only impersonal value to the satisfaction of the interests of beings that lack the capacity for self-consciousness, so that these beings are, in effect
14. "replaceable" (Mulgan, "Critical Notice of The Ethics of Killing, p. 455). But I deny that the frustration of one individual's interests through killing can be made up for by the creation and satisfaction of comparable interests though the creation of another individual. He also assumes that I would regard a 10-year-old child as falling beneath the threshold of respect and thus as being outside the scope of liberal egalitarian principles, such as the equal wrongness thesis. But I accept that any child capable of understanding that it has a future and of acting for reasons is a person and comes within the scope of liberal egalitarian principles.
15. Mulgan, "Critical Notice of The Ethics of Killing, p. 458.
16. I owe this specific challenge to Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, who develops it with great ingenuity in "Why Killing Some People is More Seriously Wrong than Killing Others", Ethics (forthcoming).
17. In McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 264-265, I proposed a similar but cruder view. The main difference is that the view I suggested in the book held that all individuals with intermediate moral status have the same status.
18. It is possible to see such a view as an extension of plausible principles of moral liability. For arguments that indicate how we might be led in the direction of such a view by a series of small extensions of a plausible account of liability, see Jeff McMahan, "Self-Defense and Culpability," Law and Philosophy 24 (2005), pp. 760-765.
19. I am deeply grateful to Nir Eyal, Christopher Knapp, Rahul Kumar, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, and Carlos Soto for perceptive written comments on this article, and to Agnieszka Jaworska for unusually helpful discussion.