This week's PG WiP Seminar will be led by Will Gildea.

Title: "Humans and Animals: Identical Moral Status, Different Anti-Killing Rights"

Abstract:

Existing views of moral status and the rights not to be killed that they help to ground are inadequate for one of two reasons. Either they fail to accommodate the intuition that humans matter as much as each other regardless of whether they possess advanced psychological capacities, or they fail to imply that killing humans is always or almost always harder to justify than killing animals. I offer an account of moral status and anti-killing rights that, uniquely within the actualist literature, accommodates both intuitions, explaining why humans are equals and also why humans have more robust anti-killing rights than animals. I defend the egalitarian intuition about moral status by arguing that all humans and animals that matter at all matter equally. I defend the intuition about killing by offering a new account of the grounds of anti-killing rights, according to which an individual’s rights not to be killed don’t just stem from their moral status. They can also stem from some of their normal rights against interference and to the receipt of goods. Autonomous humans have special rights of non-interference. And deeply cognitively impaired humans have special rights to certain goods. So, whilst killing animals generally violates their rights, human lives are protected even more robustly against killing.