This session will focus on Will Gildea's paper "The Moral Status of Humans and Animals: Towards a New View".

Abstract

All views of the moral status of humans and animals face serious objections. They are either insufficiently egalitarian, insufficiently hierarchical, or insufficiently theoretically robust. I propose the seed of a new view of moral status, called the Engagement View, which is well-placed to avoid these key problems. On this view, moral status is grounded primarily by sentience and certain emotional capacities as they figure in engagement with the world. The Engagement View enables us to account for the equal moral status of humans with severe cognitive impairments. It also supports a form of hierarchy in the moral status of beings, but is highly revisionary about which beings may occupy the upper reaches of moral status.