4th Nagoya Meta-Philosophy Workshop 2.0
Date: 16:30 to 18:00pm, Apr 25, 2025; 2025年4月25日(金) 16:30~18:00pm
Venue: Infomatics Depatment Building 1F, Lecture Room3; 情報学研究科1F、第3講義室
Program:
Intuition and Moral Status Hierarchicalism
Xihe Ouyang (University of Calgary)
Abstract: According to Shelly Kagan, Jeff McMahan, and Peter Vallentyne, the moral status of an individual is determined by the extent to which the individual has (has now, might/will have, or could have had) certain psychological capacities. Roughly speaking, the greater one’s relevant psychological capacities, the higher their moral status. In this paper, I offer a twofold critique of this kind of moral status hierarchicalism. On the one hand, I argue against the primary argument in favor of this view (the argument from distribution) by challenging the key intuition on which the argument relies, thereby reducing the appeal of this position. On the other hand, drawing on their general methodology, I argue that a good reason to reject moral status hierarchicalism is that even with Kagan’s practical realism, he fails to explain away the counterintuitive result of this theory in the case of normal variation.