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The Journal of Value Inquiry

Erschienen in:

17.11.2015

Individuals, Species and Equality. A Critique of McMahan’s Intrinsic Potential Account

verfasst von: Federico Zuolo

Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry | Ausgabe 3/2016

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Speciesism is standardly considered an unjustified discrimination on the basis of a natural characteristic – species membership – which should have no moral value. As known, the charge of speciesism has frequently been used by animal ethicists as a knock-down argument to reject claims based on the moral priority of humans over animals. A typical charge of speciesism is made against the alleged unwarranted preference for granting rights to severely mentally disabled human beings and not to animals with an equivalent (or even superior) level of consciousness, rationality, sentience (or any other property on which the ascription of rights and moral personality is taken to obtain).¹ Other theorists claim that such an approach is in error insofar as species belonging is not a morally irrelevant property. Humanity, on this view, carries with it a moral value because it is the value of humanity itself that grounds other moral values. Let us call such an approach humanism.² …

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The rejection of speciesism has typically taken two main forms. The first consequentialist form, following Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 1993), has argued that what counts is the weight of an interest, irrespective of whether the individual having such an interest belongs to the human species or to other sentient species. The second deontological form, championed by Thomas Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1983), holds that all animals having a form of conscience and individuality should be granted rights in virtue of their having subjecthood. Subsequently all anti-speciesist theories have either taken one of the two main forms or combined features of both. As we will see below, McMahan’s theory is more consequentialist and interest-based, but also includes some deontological features.

See Timothy Chappell, “On the very Idea of Criteria for Personhood,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (2011): 1–27; Cora Diamond, “The Importance of Being Human,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29 (1991): 35–62; Bonnie Steinbock, “Speciesism and the Idea of Equality,” Philosophy 53 (1978): 247–256; Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 135–152.

James Rachels, Created from Animals. The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 173–174 and passim.

Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing. Problems at the Margins of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 153.

Ibid., pp. 146–147. Here McMahan is talking about persons but, as will become apparent in what follows, these accounts should be applied to all sentient beings.

“According to some accounts of the morality of respect, one may proceed inferentially from the concept of respect, together with a set of claims about the grounds or bases of respect, to conclusions about what sorts of act are or are not compatible with respect for persons. For various reasons, some of which will emerge later, I do not believe that this is a plausible or fruitful strategy. I believe, in fact, that we must proceed in exactly the opposite way …. I believe that we must instead begin with a range of intuitions that arise from sustained reflection about particular problems and cases and then seek to organize, make sense of, and in some cases revise these beliefs with a coherent framework of principles and concepts,” McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 246.

Ibid., p. 147. See also Scott Wilson, “The Species Norm Account of Moral Status,” Between The Species 5 (2005): 1–29.

Richard Arneson, “What, if Anything, Renders All Humans Morally Equal?,” in D. Jamieson (ed.), Singer and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 103–128, has reached a similar conclusion analyzing a previous version of McMahan’s theory.

Derek Parfit, “Equality or Priority?,” The Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1995).

Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 25 (1996): 3–35, p. 10.

As seen, the extreme example is that of anencephalic infants who cannot be badly off because they lack “the capacity for consciousness,” ibid. p. 13.

A proof of this disregard for a prioritarian account is that, on McMahan’s view, the value of the capacities of severely retarded human beings should be assessed in absolute considering what level of well-being a capacity brings about. Hence, if assessed from an absolute perspective, i.e. non-comparative standpoint, the value of the capacities of severely retarded human beings, although fundamental to the life of such beings, counts less than the value of the same capacities of normal human beings who can obtain higher levels of well-being from the same capacity.

Alternatively, we may argue that the Superchimp is a member of another species. See Rahul Kumar, “Permissible Killing and the Irrelevance of Being Human,” The Journal of Ethics 12 (2008): 57–80, p. 74.

McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 156.

In a previous formulation of his view, McMahan explicitly admits that he does not have a solution to this problem but assumes that it can be solved. See Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability, Misfortune, and Justice,” p. 23.

McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 161.

See also Christopher Grau, “McMahan on Speciesism and Deprivation,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (2015): 216–226.

McMahan, “Cognitive Disability,” p. 25.

McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 161.

McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 228–232.

McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, p. 161.

Ibid., p. 241.

See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); and Ian Carter, “Respect and the Basis of Equality,” Ethics, 121 (2011), pp. 538–571.

Jeff McMahan, “Challenges to Human Equality,” The Journal of Ethics 12 (2008): 81–104, pp. 98–101.

Arneson, “What, If Anything.”

Eva Kittay, “At the Margins of Moral Personhood,” Bioethical Inquiry 5 (2008): 137–156, p. 145.

I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to the possible different implications in terms of misfortune or deprivation.

Stijn Bruers, “Speciesism as a Moral Heuristic,” Philosophia 41 (2013): 489–501, has recently argued that ordinary folk morality uses the idea of species as a (morally defective) heuristic to determine the moral status of individuals. The sense in which I refer to heuristic here concerns the value of capacities and has no implication on the determination of the moral status.

Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2006).

I am grateful to an anonymous journal’s reviewer for pressing me to discuss Nussbaum’s position.

I have discussed at length Nussbaum’s theory in “Dignity and Animals. Does It Make Sense to Apply the Concept of Dignity to All Sentient Beings?”, unpublished manuscript.

Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, pp. 240–241.

Titel: Individuals, Species and Equality. A Critique of McMahan’s Intrinsic Potential Account
verfasst von: Federico Zuolo
Publikationsdatum: 17.11.2015
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry / Ausgabe 3/2016
Print ISSN: 0022-5363
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0492
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9537-2

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