What is moral status?

A being has moral status when it matters morally for its own sake, so that moral agents have reasons to consider its interests or claims in deciding how to act, rather than treating it as a mere resource.

Do animals have moral status?

Many philosophers hold that sentient animals have moral status because they can suffer and have interests; theorists disagree about whether this status is equal to that of persons or comes in degrees.

Moral Status and Rights

Moral status concerns which beings matter morally in their own right and how much, while rights and duties articulate the specific normative relations that hold among them.

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Definition

A being has moral status when it matters morally for its own sake, so that agents have reasons to take its interests or claims into account; rights and duties specify the determinate normative relations, such as claims and obligations, that obtain among beings with such status.

Scope

This area covers the question of which entities have moral standing and on what grounds, the structure and content of moral rights, the basis of moral patiency in sentience and related capacities, and the correlative duties and obligations agents bear. It supplies the account of who and what falls within the scope of morality that every normative theory presupposes.

Sub-topics

Core questions

Which beings have moral status, and what grounds it?
Do all beings with moral status have it to the same degree?
What are rights, and how do they relate to duties?
What is the basis of an agent's obligations toward those with moral status?

Key theories

Sentience as the ground of moral status: Singer's view, following Bentham, that the capacity to suffer and enjoy is the criterion for having interests that must be given equal consideration, extending moral status to sentient non-human animals.
The subject-of-a-life criterion: Regan's account on which beings that are subjects of a life, with beliefs, desires, and a welfare that matters to them, possess inherent value and corresponding moral rights.

History

Questions of moral status were transformed by the animal ethics literature of the 1970s and 1980s, with Singer (1975) arguing from sentience and Regan (1983) from inherent value for the inclusion of non-human animals. The analysis of rights was systematized earlier by Hohfeld (1919), whose taxonomy of jural relations remains foundational, and the grounds of status continue to be debated in bioethics and the ethics of artificial minds.

Debates

The grounds of moral status: Whether moral status rests on sentience, rationality, being the subject of a life, or species membership shapes the moral standing of animals, infants, the severely cognitively impaired, and future AI systems.
Equal versus graded moral status: It is disputed whether moral status is an all-or-nothing matter shared equally by all who have it, or whether it comes in degrees that vary with cognitive and other capacities.

Key figures

Peter Singer
Tom Regan
Wesley Hohfeld
Christine Korsgaard

Seminal works

singer1975
regan1983
hohfeld1919

Frequently asked questions

What is moral status?: A being has moral status when it matters morally for its own sake, so that moral agents have reasons to consider its interests or claims in deciding how to act, rather than treating it as a mere resource.
Do animals have moral status?: Many philosophers hold that sentient animals have moral status because they can suffer and have interests; theorists disagree about whether this status is equal to that of persons or comes in degrees.