Creating some concepts

OK, so I have a little tiny bit more structure in my thinking here.

Something has moral standing if it counts, in its own right, morally speaking. It is wrong to kick a cat because by causing harm to a cat we wrong the cat itself.

Moral status goes further. Moral status refers to to the sets of normative features governing how we are to treat those things that have moral standing, this definition comes from Shelly Kagan. If we are obliged not to harm a being, that is part of its moral status. If we are obliged not to lie to it, then that too is part of its moral status.

Some philosophers take a unitarian view, claiming that all beings that have moral standing have equal moral status. So, Peter Singer writes, “Pain and suffering are bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex or species of the being that suffers. How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pains of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals” (Singer 2011: 53). This view follows from what Singer calls the principle of equal consideration of interests, which entails that “the fact that other animals are less intelligent than we are does not mean that their interests may be discounted or disregarded” (Singer 2011: 49).

Others take a hierarchical view. Kagan and David DeGrazia both hold that there are different levels of moral status. Persons are in the highest level and then there's a sliding scale down to insects, say. Persons is not restricted to humans, nor are all humans persons. The thinking here is that moral standing is grounded in the capacity for welfare and the capacity for rational choice - and that these qualities vary. As they determine moral status, to the extent that they vary, moral status too varies. Kagan writes, “A hierarchical approach to normative ethics emerges rather naturally from two plausible thoughts. First, the various features that underlie moral standing come in degrees, so that some individuals have these features to a greater extent than others do (or in more developed or more sophisticated forms). Second, absent some special explanation for why things should be otherwise, we would expect that those who do have those features to a greater extent would, accordingly, count more from the moral point of view. When we put these two thoughts together they constitute what is to my mind a rather compelling (if abstract) argument for hierarchy” (Kagan 2019: 279).

The latter might seem to privilege some over others more than the former, but in practical terms the unitarian will come to the same conclusions, though by differing pathways depending on her moral theory. The utilitarian acting on the principle of equal consideration of interests will, just like the hierarchical moral status theorist, say that it would be wrong to save the squirrel not the child from drowning.

A child has many more years of life ahead of her than a squirrel. A child is capable of more complex and rich emotional relationships. A child, who has attained a sufficient level of reasoning capacity, will have more and more wide-ranging preferences and desires for the future. Thus a child will lose more by dying and will be harmed more. The life of a child, it seems, is more valuable. Kagan would say the child has greater moral status; Singer would say that the child would suffer more by dying because of his capacities, though his moral status is no different from the squirrels. As aggregate happiness or preference fulfillment is what counts, the loss of the child would be worse than the loss of the squirrel.

But if we consider future generations, the squirrel will lead to exponentially more lives capable of squirrel level pleasure than the child will lead to human lives of human level pleasure. Nick Bostrom's concern about utility monsters seems relevant here. Bostrom's claim is that were AI sentient (and thus had moral standing and status), as it would be so much cheaper to run digital minds with sentience (and, in his thought experiment, capable of perhaps greater and more intense pleasure than human minds) than human minds, you'd get more 'bang from your buck' by diverting resources to running digital minds. I am not suggesting that squirrels would contribute anything like the quantity of pleasure or utility of his utility monsters, but the exponentially larger number of squirrels than humans which would be generated by saving the squirrel rather than the child might weigh in the balance of giving greater preference to the drowning squirrel, if one were to consider future outcomes rather than individual lives. But here there does seem to be a particular weight or obligation presented by the mere existence of a being opposed to the potential future utility it might generate. If the moral status of the present being outweighs the aggregate moral status of potential beings, then it appears that a hierarchy does exist in the adoption of a theory that does not value the interests of non-identity bearing individuals.

This may be right. Only a being with an identity can be harmed - as argued by Derek Parfit. Putative beings do not have identities and cannot be wronged by our actions. However, this runs up against the intuition that by destroying the environment we are harming future generations. If that is the case, as Toby Ord would argue, then surely there is some morally significant factor to be considered in the case of the rapidly breeding squirrels.

All that aside, these debates over unitarianism and hierarchical moral status do avoid speciesism. Or at least, they might. I'll get to that another day.

The claim is that the interests or moral status of the being in question is dependent on the capacities of the individual. Greater capacity for welfare (as in deeper and more complex relationships and pleasures, greater intensity and complexity of pleasures and pains and higher levels of rationality and autonomy) lead to the preferring of some individuals over others. Thus in the pond scenario, one should save a healthy chimp over a severely cognitively disabled infant; a healthy and very clever dog over a chimp with severe Down Syndrome, perhaps (chimps can have DS); and maybe a squirrel over a dog with a particular condition that limits its cognition. The species doesn't count morally.

But here we are in more deep water, because while I can appreciate a Monet painting, I cannot appreciate the olfactory richness than my dog enjoys. Nor can I see all the colours a pigeon can see or echo locate like a bat. Don't these very different capacities affect this arbitrary sliding scale of reasoning and complexity? Further, it's not obvious that it is 'better' to be able to flourish in a human environment than to excel in another sphere. Perhaps that is going too far: it's not obvious that it is better to flourish as a macaque than as a squirrel. Different animals have different capacities for their evolutionary niche and their survival and flourishing demands different skills and ignores different weaknesses.

Beyond this, there remains the inability to be sure that the lives of certain creatures really are 'less rich'. Consider orcas. Cetaceans are deemed by many philosophers to attain or approach the status of persons, so they already have a somewhat privileged position in animals ethics. But perhaps they exceed us in a morally highly significant capacity. The part of their brain which is thought to relate to social connections and bonding is proportionally larger than in humans. In addition, they appear to have culture and complex communication. It may be that they experience more intense pain and pleasure than do humans. Fortunately, we do not often need to save them from drowning.