Moral status assignment: Caveat

Up until now, I presented the moral status concept as a viable means of discussing different approaches regarding the ethical consideration of entities of all kinds (especially human vs. nonhuman beings). Yet there are some caveats or limitations one should keep in mind when dealing with this concept.

One central limitation of the moral status concept is that it is quite a blunt tool. On one hand, this means that moral status statements do not delineate all moral obligations we might have towards a being: obligations that are justified in an indirect way are not covered by moral status concerns. Indirect consideration can lead to a final result that is very different from what initial statements about status might have implied. Therefore, we have to keep in mind that the decision for or against a certain general stance on the level of moral status consideration does not necessarily determine the actual overall normative outcome of an ethical theory. To illustrate this, imagine a theory in which nonhuman animals are assigned the moral status of non-consideration, but where at the same time cruel behaviour towards all kinds of beings is considered highly reprehensible, in principle (e.g. because it is thought to compromise human character, and thereby lead to cruelty towards human beings). Experimenting on animals, in this theory, could be extremely hard to justify. At the same time, a theory that accords all sentient beings basically the same

moral status may come to the conclusion that animal experimentation is easily justifiable as long as the benefits it produces outweighs the harm it does. So, surprisingly, a theory that at the first glance entirely devalues nonhuman beings may, on another level, grant them vigorous protection; while a theory that seems clearly "pro-animal", at a second glance puts animals in a quite precarious position.367 _{It is a somewhat counterintuitive result of these}

considerations that – although that is the usual paradigm – speciesism is not necessarily associated with the sanctioned maltreatment of animals, and that non-speciesism does not necessarily result in a very strong protection of nonhumans. While this is not a shortcoming of the moral status concept, it should be kept in mind that the informative value of general moral status assertions is limited by further moral considerations on more indirect levels.

Adding to the bluntness of moral status statements is the fact that they, as I pointed out above, usually refer to groups of beings (such as "nonhuman animals", "sentient beings", "human beings") rather than individual entities. One central problem at this point is that the delineation of the groups that are picked out may be blurred or continuous. At what point, for example, do human sperm and egg, or human embryo, become a human being? Or, to remind of the subject of this dissertation which is an exemplary case of blurred boundaries, when do animal-human interspecifics? At what point does a being become sentient, or alive, or self-aware? One could, as a general point of criticism, note that the simple structuring into what is a limited number of levels of moral status is much too coarse to capture the continuous, vague reality of status distribution. Accordingly, one could also assume a "sliding scale" of moral status, where entities are assigned continuous variable moral consideration according to what actual properties or characteristics they have, taking into account that they may be inferior in one respect while they are equal in another. An approach that sees moral status as an infinitely graded continuum of different status levels of individuals is also imaginable, but would be beside the point here – this is because we will discuss moral status primarily within a moral framework of the ethical principle of Speciesism, which would not go along with particularism regarding moral status assignment.

The bluntness of the tool of moral status makes it unlikely that particular cases, such as the question of how to treat one specific human-animal chimera, can be coped with in its

367 _{The same is true for a speciesist theory which assumes a prima facie priority of human interests, but makes}

exceptions from this rule if petty interests are staked against vital ones. Here, the human "interest in meat eating" might lose out against a non-human "interest in surviving." Non-speciesist theories,on the other hand, can allow for meat consumption.

entirety by referring to moral status considerations. This, again, is not to say that such considerations are superfluous, but that their informative value is limited because results depend enormously on the specifications for terms such as "being human", "being sentient", etc.: two theories may both state that sentience is the single criterion for moral considerability, and yet come to extremely differing results. For an illustration of this principle, compare Carruthers' extreme pro-animal-testing stance to Singer's (albeit not absolute) condemnation of such practices – both regard sentience as the decisive criterion for moral status, but Carruthers believes that animals do not meet this criterion, and that they therefore do not qualify for high moral status.368 _{Again, decisions made on other levels}

(in this case, assumptions made in philosophy of mind regarding the presuppositions of phenomenological consciousness, which Carruthers deems to be dependent on a "theory of mind") lead to the result that isolated statements about moral status and its criteria have limited informative value.

The possible variations – and limitations – of moral status assignments notwithstanding, note that, on a very basic level, the assessment of moral status can have extremely significant consequences. Moral status questions are not just relevant for seemingly exotic questions like the status of animals (or even chimeras). The inclusion in or exclusion from the realm of morally considerable, or "fully" considerable, beings is one of the most basic decisions of any moral system. Though consideration or non-consideration can be shaped in ways that differ widely regarding actual treatment, moral status assignment is probably the most powerful weapon in moral discourse: extremely morally reprehensible practices were and are often justified not by "fine-tuning" of normative rules (such as "murder is allowed, if you have good reasons" or "torture is ok for the greater good"). Rather, the construction used was, and is, typically one of explicit exclusion of certain subjects out of the moral realm (i.e. negative moral status assignment). Africans were simply not included in the realm of persons in times of slave trade, Jews did not "count" as to-be-considered subjects by the perpetrators of the holocaust, communist regimes styled the ostracising of non-compliant individuals not along the lines of "x does not follow moral rules and must be punished", rather, certain individuals were declared "class enemies", which were then fundamentally excluded from the realm of subjects to be considered morally (allegedly, moral philosophy books in the cold war Eastern Bloc stated as an example of an ethical principle with an admissible perception the phrase "Killing your mother is always wrong,

368 _{Cf.: Singer (1976), Animal Liberation - A New Ethics for Or Treatment of Animals; Carruthers (1992),}

except if she is a class enemy.") So note that even if moral status assignment is a blunt instrument, it has, on the other hand, also the potential to be used as a drastic, incisive tool, with far-reaching consequences.