Moral Status, Luck, and Modal Capacities: Debating Shelly Kagan

Abstract

Shelly Kagan has recently defended the view that it is morally worse for a human being to suffer some harm than it is for a lower animal (such as a dog or a cow) to suffer a harm that is equally severe (ceteris paribus). In this article, I argue that this view receives rather less support from our intuitions than one might at first suppose. According to Kagan, moreover, an individual’s moral status depends partly upon her ‘modal capacities.’ In this article, I argue that the most natural strategy for justifying Kagan’s theory faces some important challenges. More generally, I argue that philosophers who wish to defend the view that human beings have a higher moral status than that of the lower animals face a dilemma. Either their theory of moral status will imply (unacceptably) that some severely cognitively impaired human beings have a significantly lower moral status than that of typical human beings, or these philosophers will be forced to ground moral status in a set of properties so far removed from a subject’s actual capacities that it will become difficult to see why these kinds of properties should have such moral importance.

Are the folk utilitarian about animals?

“…23 22 See Jaquet (2019) for a similar debunking argument focusing only on the role of cognitive dissonance. 23 Lloyd (2021) argues that hierarchical views such as Kagan's cannot offer a plausible account of why cognitively impaired humans with capacities comparable to some non-human animals should be placed high on the hierarchy. The findings concerning such humans we reported above suggest that intuitions about the high moral status of such humans may also need be downgraded.…”

“… 18 Notice, moreover, that our findings only offer intuitive support to a deontological hierarchy—they don’t directly support the axiological hierarchy that Kagan ( 2019 ) also defends on which, e.g., an identical pain matters more in a human than in a non-human animal. While Kagan claims intuitive support for such difference, others deny it (see Lloyd 2021 ). This issue also requires further empirical research.…”