Moral Status

Humans are the only beings that appear to be capable of debating moral status. This makes us moral agents because we are the ones that decide who or what has moral status and how much they have. Because animals cannot determine their moral status or that of other beings we refer to them as moral patients. Moral patients have certain rights that are determined based on their needs. This means that people should not base moral decisions on their own wants. For example, if I like the taste of chicken that does not mean that I need chicken or that this want trumps the need of that animal for survival. Basic protection of needs include preventing unnecessary suffering and death. Since certain humans become vegetarians, vegans, animal rights activists, etc, we know humans are capable of respecting the needs of non-humans. An overwhelming number of people do eat meat, though. This could lead to the belief that it is part of human nature to eat meat. We could also say that it is human nature to watch television because a majority of people do so. Yet people have only had television in recent years and most people would be reluctant to say it was our nature. It does not follow that one is in our nature because most people now do so and the other is not. Especially since evidence suggests that people developed without the instinct or biology that would incline them towards meat. People do not look at a living animal and crave its meat, we do not see road kill and feel hungry and we do not seem instinctually inclined to chase after animals like we see most cats and dogs do. We also have a long intestine that allows meat to rot inside of us, relatively small canine teeth, and hands that are better developed for picking berries than rending flesh. These facts would incline one to feel that harming animals was not a matter of survival for humans, as it is with many animals, except in times of extreme need. This would mean harming moral patients like non-humans is not something people ought to do in a situation where they do not risk starvation.

Animals are not the only moral patients. Children are another example. They are not capable of making reasoned decisions for themselves so their parents become guardians that make decisions for them. This is a natural delineation of moral status between adults, who make their own decisions that we must respect, and children who have decisions made for them. We do not even think about doing this and most people would not question that it is a good practice. This determination of moral status is probably part of our nature.

We would all agree that a crushing a potato chip is not wrong because it is inanimate and cannot care about that and certainly we would not say the same of a human, a child, or most animals (with the exception of insects and spiders in many people’s cases). This might lead one to believe that we do not naturally assign moral status to inanimate objects, but this is not necessarily true. An exception would be something like a gravestone. Destroying a gravestone would likely be seen as an affront upon the person, or the family of the person the grave is dedicated to. This means that objects can have moral status, but only in relation to people.

Could an object have moral status that is not related to the emotional connection that humans feel?