The Appeal to Differentiated Degrees of Moral Status

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume I, p. 42 of the PDF edition · English translation

14.1. The Magnitude Thesis

The principle of equal consideration prescribes that we not be biased when considering the good of the individuals affected by our decisions. Equal consideration has the following implication:

• Magnitude Thesis (MT): The strength of the reasons to avoid harming and to benefit someone depends on the magnitude of the harms and benefits, not on the species of those affected. The greater the harm/benefit, the stronger these reasons.

Thus, according to the MT, we have reason to prioritize avoiding harm to, or benefiting, nonhuman animals whenever doing so would mean avoiding a greater harm or providing a greater benefit than prioritizing humans would.

14.2. The appeal to degrees of moral status

The MT is sometimes rejected by appealing to the idea of special status:

• Special Status Thesis (ST): Some individuals have a special status that entitles them to be prioritized even when they would be less harmed if they were not.

According to the ST, it is as if certain individuals held a trump card. This trump is usually called dignity. In this respect, we can distinguish two types of ST:

Total ST: If A has the special status and B does not, A has priority, no matter how much more B would be harmed if not prioritized.

Threshold ST: If A has the special status and B does not, A has priority, unless the harm to B is above a certain threshold*.

*The many variants of this position set this threshold at different points.

Whether we are talking about total ST or threshold ST, both reject the MT, since they hold that there are at least some circumstances in which we should prioritize the individuals who would be less harmed if they were not prioritized.

The beings granted special status under the ST vary. Most commonly, it is held that they are the members of the human species⁴². At other times, however, it is held that they are not all humans, but only those who have the capacity to make autonomous decisions⁴³ (roughly, normal adult humans).

Is it just to assign differentiated degrees of moral status? We will discuss this below.

14.3. Is it just to assign differentiated degrees of moral status?

To assess whether assigning differentiated degrees of moral status is just, we need to know how to assess whether a decision is just. On this point, a widely accepted view is that a decision is just if it is impartial, in the sense of not being biased. But how do we know whether a decision is impartial? A widely used method consists in imagining whether we would approve of it if we did not know what position we would occupy among those affected by it.

A method of this kind was first proposed by John Harsanyi⁴⁴ in 1955, and a very similar method was later used extensively in John Rawls's 1971 work A Theory of Justice⁴⁵, influencing many later works.

The method consists in imagining rational and self-interested agents who aim to maximize their own well-being but have not yet been born into the world in which they will live. This is the so-called original position. In it, these agents must decide which moral and political principles will govern that future world. However, they must decide behind a veil of ignorance, where they do not know what characteristics they will have after they are born. They will not know their race; gender; nationality; whether they will be born into rich or poor families; whether they will be born healthy or with some disease; what talents or difficulties they will have, and so on. In short, behind the veil of ignorance we can know nothing about factors that depend on good or bad luck.

The basic idea is that whatever rational, self-interested agents would consider just/unjust under such conditions would in fact be just/unjust.

It is sometimes argued that the veil of ignorance thought experiment does not apply to our decisions that affect nonhuman animals or that affect humans who lack a sense of justice (such as babies, children up to a certain age, and adults who are victims of certain diseases or accidents that impair cognitive capacities). Rawls himself thought so. He believed that it only makes sense to protect with principles of justice those beings who have a sense of justice⁴⁶ (since this is necessary for deciding on the basis of the veil of ignorance). However, this reasoning would only make sense if, for someone to be treated unjustly, it were also necessary for that someone to have a sense of justice. Yet the following example suggests that beings who lack a sense of justice can also be treated unjustly. Let us see:

Imagine that a baby girl was born with a disease that will prevent her throughout her entire life from developing a sense of justice. Imagine that, because of this, she receives less food than the other babies in a nursery. The fact that she does not now have (and never will have) a sense of justice does not make the treatment she received any less unjust. It is unjust simply because her well-being is given less weight on the basis of an arbitrary factor, which is the result of the natural lottery and which does not lessen the harm she suffers from receiving less food. Of course, for someone to be held responsible for committing an injustice, they need to have a sense of justice. But this example seems to show that one does not need to have a sense of justice in order to suffer an injustice. If so, then the alleged lack of a sense of justice in nonhuman animals cannot justify our failing to apply the veil of ignorance method to our decisions that affect them.

Another objection to applying the veil of ignorance to our decisions that affect nonhuman animals was raised by Peter Carruthers. He argued that, if the agents are reasoning on the basis of the veil of ignorance, then they can presume they will be human after the veil is lifted, since animals are not capable of this⁴⁷. However, as

Donald VanDeVeer⁴⁸ and Richard Ryder⁴⁹ observed, the agents in the original position also know that they are capable of understanding and arguing about very complex moral and political principles, but this does not mean that in the original position they can presume they would retain this very high level of rationality after the veil was lifted, since, if they could, they would be tempted to favor the most rational individuals in a biased way. Thus, if in the original position the agents cannot assume they will be highly rational after the veil is lifted, then it makes no sense to maintain that they can know what species they would belong to or that they would have complex cognitive capacities.

Mark Rowlands⁵⁰ observed that one of the aims of the veil of ignorance is to rule out undeserved advantages and disadvantages that are the result of the natural lottery, such as the characteristics one is born with. That is exactly why the veil of ignorance excludes knowledge of the natural properties one would have. However, membership in a species, like all other natural properties, is an undeserved result of the natural lottery, and therefore the benefits and harms that result from it are also undeserved. That is why, Rowlands concludes, knowledge of what species we will belong to must be excluded in the original position. For exactly the same reason, knowledge that we are capable of autonomy must be excluded in the original position. True justice must take into account all those who may be affected by our decisions, and not only humans or only beings who also have a sense of justice.

So let us apply the veil of ignorance method to the claim that all members of the human species (or only humans capable of autonomy) should have a higher status. To test whether these positions pass the impartiality test, we have to ask:

(1) Would we consider it just to give a higher status to humans if we knew we could be born as members of any other species?

(2) Would we consider it just to give a higher status to beings capable of autonomy if we knew we could be born without this capacity?

Remember that behind the veil of ignorance we have to decide on the assumption that we have an equal probability of being assigned to be any of the individuals in the future world. That being so, it seems that rational, self-interested agents would certainly reject such higher statuses, given the possibility of discovering, after the veil was lifted, that they are not human or that they are humans incapable of autonomy. And the greater this possibility, the more vehemently they would seem to reject them.

In the real world, this possibility would be enormous, given that the number of nonhuman animals is astronomically greater than the number of humans. The human population is around 8 billion individuals. According to some estimates, at any given time there are somewhere between 1 and 10 quintillion sentient nonhuman animals⁵¹ on the planet. This difference in size is so astronomical that it is hard to picture. An example, however, will help. If we draw an analogy with the span of one year, the human population would represent at most 0.25 seconds of the year. The entire rest of the year would be nonhuman animals.

Thus, after the veil was lifted, we would very likely discover that we had been assigned to be born as nonhuman animals. The odds of being human would be, at best, 1 in 125 million (and the odds of being humans who will one day develop autonomy would be even smaller).

This suggests that the idea of a higher moral status for members of the human species or for bearers of autonomy is grounded:

(1) In self-interest (since we know that, in the real world, we are not nonhuman animals or humans incapable of autonomy)

(2) In the mistaken belief that we ourselves could not be disadvantaged by it (each of us, because of disease or accident, may come to lose autonomy).

All of this seems to show that a privileged status for humans or for beings capable of autonomy is defended only because its defenders belong to the privileged group. From an impartial point of view, we would consider such things extremely unjust. Perhaps we would even consider them the height of arbitrariness. If so, then the idea of differentiated moral status is itself completely unjust⁵².