Nevertheless, I think most of us are committed to taking status-adjusted welfare seriously. If one is uncomfortable with degrees of moral status, unitarianism is a live option. Denying that any creatures have moral status, however, implies that there is no moral difference between harming a person and harming a coffee mug.[79] But most of us feel there is a moral difference, and this difference is explained by the fact that the person has moral standing and the coffee mug does not.
I found I felt like I disagreed with this, and it was interesting to try to work out why, and how I’d look at things instead. Here’s what I came up with (which is meant as more like a report on my intuitive way of looking at things than a sound philosophical theory):
In essence, I’d naturally say one is simply not harming the coffee mug, because the coffee mug can’t be harmed. I wouldn’t naturally say that one is harming the coffee mug, but that this doesn’t matter because the coffee mug lacks some special property that would make its welfare matter.
To expand: That passage seems to assume that we have to look at things the unit of analysis being an “individual” of some sort, or an object or a being or whatever. Taking that perspective, for all individuals/objects/beings in the world, we determine whether they have moral status (or how much moral status they have), how much welfare they’re currently experiencing, how much we can change their welfare, etc., and we make moral judgements and decisions based on that. A coffee mug clearly doesn’t have moral status. If we rejected the idea of moral status, then we’d be committed to saying people also don’t have moral status, and thus that there’s no moral difference between harming a person and harming a coffee mug.
The way I think I want to look at things is using welfare itself as the unit of analysis. Any and all welfare matters. And each unit of welfare matters equally. It’s not that a coffee mug’s welfare doesn’t matter, but rather that it has no welfare, and one can’t affect its welfare. So damaging it doesn’t count as “harming” it in a morally relevant sense. Whereas humans can have welfare, so actions that affect their welfare matter morally.
Perhaps another way to put this is that I’d give each unit of welfare a moral status of 1. And wouldn’t give moral status to any experiencers of welfare.
That said, I think that this post’s way of describing things can essentially capture the outputs of this way of looking at things I have, while also capturing other moral theories and ways of looking at things. And that seems quite valuable, both for communication purposes and for reasons of moral uncertainty. (Also, I’m far from an expert in the relevant areas of philosophy, so there may be reasons why this way of looking at things is conceptually confused.)
Thanks for your many comments. The section of the report you quote hints at the debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists, which is too vexed a topic to discuss fully here. However, it seems to me that you and I basically agree about coffee mugs. The way I would describe it is that coffee mugs lack moral standing (and hence lack moral status) because they are neither sentient nor agential. Entities that lack moral standing can be excluded from our moral reasoning (though of course they might matter instrumentally). According to you, coffee mugs should be excluded from our moral reasoning because they are not welfare subjects. Depending on your theory of welfare and moral status, the list of welfare subjects might be coextensive with the list of entities with moral standing.
I found I felt like I disagreed with this, and it was interesting to try to work out why, and how I’d look at things instead. Here’s what I came up with (which is meant as more like a report on my intuitive way of looking at things than a sound philosophical theory):
In essence, I’d naturally say one is simply not harming the coffee mug, because the coffee mug can’t be harmed. I wouldn’t naturally say that one is harming the coffee mug, but that this doesn’t matter because the coffee mug lacks some special property that would make its welfare matter.
To expand: That passage seems to assume that we have to look at things the unit of analysis being an “individual” of some sort, or an object or a being or whatever. Taking that perspective, for all individuals/objects/beings in the world, we determine whether they have moral status (or how much moral status they have), how much welfare they’re currently experiencing, how much we can change their welfare, etc., and we make moral judgements and decisions based on that. A coffee mug clearly doesn’t have moral status. If we rejected the idea of moral status, then we’d be committed to saying people also don’t have moral status, and thus that there’s no moral difference between harming a person and harming a coffee mug.
The way I think I want to look at things is using welfare itself as the unit of analysis. Any and all welfare matters. And each unit of welfare matters equally. It’s not that a coffee mug’s welfare doesn’t matter, but rather that it has no welfare, and one can’t affect its welfare. So damaging it doesn’t count as “harming” it in a morally relevant sense. Whereas humans can have welfare, so actions that affect their welfare matter morally.
Perhaps another way to put this is that I’d give each unit of welfare a moral status of 1. And wouldn’t give moral status to any experiencers of welfare.
That said, I think that this post’s way of describing things can essentially capture the outputs of this way of looking at things I have, while also capturing other moral theories and ways of looking at things. And that seems quite valuable, both for communication purposes and for reasons of moral uncertainty. (Also, I’m far from an expert in the relevant areas of philosophy, so there may be reasons why this way of looking at things is conceptually confused.)
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your many comments. The section of the report you quote hints at the debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists, which is too vexed a topic to discuss fully here. However, it seems to me that you and I basically agree about coffee mugs. The way I would describe it is that coffee mugs lack moral standing (and hence lack moral status) because they are neither sentient nor agential. Entities that lack moral standing can be excluded from our moral reasoning (though of course they might matter instrumentally). According to you, coffee mugs should be excluded from our moral reasoning because they are not welfare subjects. Depending on your theory of welfare and moral status, the list of welfare subjects might be coextensive with the list of entities with moral standing.