Abstract
Many theories of moral status that are intended to ground pro-choice views on abortion tie full moral status to advanced cognitive capabilities. Extant accounts of this kind are inconsistent with the intuition that the profoundly cognitively disabled have full moral status. This paper improves upon these extant accounts by combining an anti-luck condition with Steinbock’s stratification of moral status into two levels. On the resulting view, a being has full moral status if and only if (1) she has moral status and (2) (a) has had advanced cognitive capacities, (b) has the potential to develop such capacities, or (c) would have had such capacities were it not for luck. I argue that modal accounts of luck provide a non-speciesist basis for attributing the lack of advanced cognitive capacities in humans to luck without doing the same for non-human animals.
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Notes
My characterizations of the concept of full moral status are drawn from Jaworska and Tannenbaum (2013).
Warren (2000) tries to identify a cognitive difference between fetuses and infants that would ground a difference in moral status; she suggests self-awareness, which she claims fetuses lack and infants possess. Unfortunately, Warren does not cite any empirical research in support of this suggestion. Rochat’s (2003) work on self-awareness in infants shows that, while a distinction along Warren’s lines can be drawn, this distinction would conflict with most people’s intuitions regarding non-human animals. Rochat (2003) distinguishes five levels of self-awareness. Newborn infants exhibit the first level, which is manifested in their differential responses to contact with others and their own bodies. But most non-human animals clearly possess this level of self-awareness. Given that, as I discuss below, most non-human animals intuitively lack full moral status, the self-awareness exhibited by newborn infants does not seem to be sufficient for full moral status. Infants do not achieve Rochat’s next level of self-awareness, which is manifested in imitative behavior, until the age of six months. This is too late a starting point for full moral status. Nor does this kind of self-awareness distinguish infants from other animals capable of imitation.
I use the term ‘(un)lucky’ to refer to good or bad luck. In some cases, I may use the term ‘luck’ without specifying a valence; such terms should be interpreted similarly.
The adjustment is drawn from Harman (2003, 184). If one is inclined to think that those who have permanently lost consciousness lack moral status, they might further adjust the theory so that a being has moral status if and only if it (i) is not dead, (ii) was once conscious, and (iii) has the potential to regain consciousness.
I understand the notion of potentiality in Tooley’s sense: “an organism possesses a property potentially if it will come to have that property in the normal course of its development” (Tooley 1972, 55–6).
The claim that humans have a higher moral status than other animals does not, of course, entail the permissibility of practices like killing animals for food or conducting clinical tests on them. Rather, moral status simpliciter may be enough to entitle one to immunity to such practices.
Steinbock writes:
A handicap, even a very severe one, does not take away an infant’s status as someone’s child. The fact that an infant is unlikely to develop into a complex, reasoning being should not, and usually does not, lessen his parents’ love and concern for him. Nor does the infant’s lack of potential remove parental obligations. So while the greater potential of human beings differentiates us from other species, and justifies our special human moral status, the absence of this potential in an individual infant does not radically change its status.” (Steinbock 1996, 69)
Clause (2*a) is formulated to include those who have lost their ACCs through injury or disease.
Moral individualism is made up of a positive component and a negative component. The negative component states that how an individual is treated should not be determined by her group membership. The positive component, as formulated by Rachels (1990), states that how an individual is treated should be determined by her “particular” properties. Rachels does not define the notion of a “particular property” (or “individual characteristic” (1990, 174)) appealed to here. I take him to intend particular properties to be the complement of group memberships. On this understanding, the positive and negative components of moral individualism are equivalent.
McMahan, on the other hand, after citing Rachels’s formulation, proceeds to characterize the positive component of moral individualism as the thesis that “our fundamental reasons not to kill or harm other individuals derive from these individuals’ intrinsic properties” (2005, 354; emphasis added). McMahan does not comment on his replacement of the ‘particular’ in Rachels’s formulation with ‘intrinsic’. However, this revision of the thesis has important consequences. “A thing has its intrinsic properties in virtue of the way that thing itself, and nothing else, is” (Lewis 1983, 197). But, on the stratified anti-luck account, some creatures have their moral status not just in virtue of themselves, but also in virtue of the events that deprived them of (the potential for) ACCs. Instead of seeing this as a genuine conflict between moral individualism and the stratified anti-luck account, I believe that we should reject McMahan’s more metaphysically loaded formulation of moral individualism in favor of Rachels’s more neutral formulation. For nothing in the spirit of moral individualism recommends McMahan’s formulation over Rachels’s, nor is it clear why intrinsic properties per se are of greater moral importance than extrinsic properties.
A reviewer for this journal suggested I address this suspicion.
McMahan (1996, 5, 8) defines the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR) as humans who are “almost entirely unresponsive to their environment and to other people”. The definition is, apparently, stipulative (Kittay 2008, 233). As Kittay (2008) notes, this stipulation limits the extension of the phrase almost entirely, if not entirely, to non-actual humans. In his (2002), McMahan uses the same phrase, but without defining it. In the latter, he assumes that CSMR individuals’ cognitive capabilities are comparable to those of unspecified non-human animals. Unless he has in mind here an extremely limited class of animals (mollusks only?), he seems to have abandoned the (1996) definition.
Note that my claim is that moral properties’ immunity to bad luck extends to full moral status. I do not claim that the immunity to bad luck comes from an application of luck egalitarianism to full moral status; rather, luck egalitarianism—or more specifically, the intuition underlying it—explains why full moral status’s desert-conference pushes in the direction of immunity to bad luck but not good luck.
According to Coffman,
S is lucky with respect to E at t iff (i) S is sentient at t, (ii) E has some objective evaluative status for S at t, (iii)″ there was just before t a large chance that no event sufficiently similar and equal in significance to E would occur at t and (iv) E lies beyond S’s direct control at t. (2007, 396)
My proposal involves only a minor revision of Coffman’s analysis; we need only replace (i) with (i)′ and (iii)″ with (iii)‴. This gives us
“S is lucky with respect to E at t iff” (i)′ S was once sentient and is not dead, “(ii) E has some objective evaluative status for S at t”, (iii)‴ “there was just before” t ′ (the time at which E occurs) “a large chance that no event sufficiently similar and equal in significance to E would occur at” t ′ and “(iv) E lies beyond S’s direct control at t”. (Coffman 2007, 396)
Stephen Makin suggested the argument of this paragraph.
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Surovell, J. But for the Grace of God: Abortion and Cognitive Disability, Luck and Moral Status. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 20, 257–277 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9755-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9755-0