Moral status as a matter of degree?

Southern Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 46, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 181-198

  Degrazia, David ^a  

^a GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950425218     PISSN: 00384283     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2008.tb00075.x     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. See, e.g., D. Callahan, Abortion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970)
2. J. English, "Abortion and the Concept of a Person," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 5 (1975): 233-43
3. E. Langerak, "Abortion: Listening to the Middle," Hastings Center Report 9 (October 1979): 24-28
4. M. A. Warren, Moral Status (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 9
5. J. McMahan, The Ethics of Killing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
6. This cultural change is reflected in A. Taylor, Animals and Ethics (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2003)
7. This section borrows several ideas from a section entitled "What Does It Mean to Speak of Higher and Lower Moral Status?" in D. DeGrazia, "Human - Animal Chimeras: Human Dignity, Moral Status, and Species Prejudice," Metaphilosophy 38 (2007): 315-18
8. For a notable exception, see E. Harman, "The Potentiality Problem," Philosophical Studies 114 (2003): 173-98
9. For a sampling, see the articles in S. Armstrong and R. Botzler, eds., The Animal Ethics Reader (London: Routledge, 2003)
10. See also Taylor, Animals and Ethics. For my argument that the only plausible analysis of the wrongness of cruelty to animals implies that they have moral status (and other arguments for this conclusion), see D. DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 3
11. Cf. Nuffield Council on Bioethics, The Ethics of Research Involving Animals (London: NCB, 2005), 57
12. and J. Rachels, "Drawing Lines," in Animal Rights, ed. C. Sunstein and M. Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 162-74
13. See, e.g., D. DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 7
14. B. Rollin, Animal Rights and Human Morality (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1981)
15. T. Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)
16. M. Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983)
17. S. F. Sapontzis, Morals, Reason, and Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987)
18. R. Rodd, Biology, Ethics, and Animals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990)
19. E. Pluhar, Beyond Prejudice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995)
20. Warren, Moral Status
21. See, e.g., R. G. Frey, Interests and Rights (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980)
22. I defended this thesis in "Equal Consideration and Unequal Moral Status," Southern Journal of Philosophy 31 (1993): 17-31. Now I am less confident that the language of unequal moral status will illuminate more than distort - if we are correct in asserting equal consideration
23. Harman, "The Potentiality Problem," 183
24. See, e.g., Warren, Moral Status. It may also be what McMahan has in mind in The Ethics of Killing
25. I describe without endorsing this model in Taking Animals Seriously, ch. 3, and Animal Rights, ch. 2
26. See my "Great Apes, Dolphins, and the Concept of Personhood," Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997): 301-20
27. See, e.g., "Great Apes, Dolphins, and the Concept of Personhood"; DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously, chs. 5-7
28. D. Reiss and L. Marino, "Mirror Self-Recognition in the Bottlenose Dolphin: A Case of Cognitive Convergence," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (May 2001): 5937-42
29. L. Marino, "Convergence of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Cetaceans and Primates," Brain, Behavior, and Evolution 59 (2002): 21-32
30. W. E. Shields et al., "Confidence Judgments by Humans and Rhesus Monkeys," Journal of General Psychology 132 (2005): 165-86
31. J. Plotnik, F. de Waal, and D. Reiss, "Self-Recognition in an Asian Elephant," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 17053-17057
32. H. Phillips, "Known Unknowns," New Scientist (16 December 2006): 28-31, which discusses key recent findings; and M. Hauser, Moral Minds (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pt. 3, which cites many relevant studies
33. See DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously, 110-12