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Contemporary Moral Issues

UTSA Fall 2023

Frey, “Moral Standing, The Value of Lives, and Speciesism”

▪ Vivisection

▪ Speciesism

▪ The Unequal Value Thesis

Membership in the Moral Community and Moral Value

▪ X’s life has moral value in proportion to quality of X’s life.

▪ The greater the quality of X’s life, the greater the value of X’s life.

▪ The value of X’s life is a function of capacity for quality.

Function of Capacity for Quality

▪ Suppose that X has a valuable life.

▪ The function of capacity for quality of X’s life maps X’s capacity to experience a good life
onto how well X’s life is going (i.e., the value of X’s life).

▪ Thus, the function of capacity for quality takes the overall degree of X’s capacity to have
a good life and gives us an output of a degree of how valuable X’s life is.

▪ If Smith has a high degree of being capable of experiencing a good life, then Smith will
have a high degree of a valuable life, even if it turns out to be the case that Smith’s life is
going very poorly.

▪ If Jones has a low degree of being capable of experiencing a good life, then Jones will have
a low degree of a valuable life, even if it turns out to be the case that Jones life is going
very well.

▪ Recall Mill’s claim that it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a fool dissatisfied.

▪ Examples:
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Do non-human animals have a moral status?

▪ Sentience, pain, and moral patients.

▪ The ability to experience pain might be a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition
to count as having a moral status.

▪ What about moral agents or rational agency?

▪ For Frey, what it takes to have a moral status (what sorts of things belong in the moral
community) is an open question.

▪ So, appealing to membership in the moral community is not the best way to answer the
question regarding animal ethics and vivisection.

▪ So, we can assume that at least some non-human animals do have a moral status and are a
part of the moral community.

▪ Frey thinks there are still reasons to think that non-human animals do not have as much
value as human animals.

Intuitive Data.
▪ Frey claims that, upon reflection, everyone will agree with the following claims:
1. At least some non-human animals have at least some value.
2. Not all non-human animal life has the same value.
3. Human lives are more valuable than non-human animal life.
▪ Intuitive support.

▪ Consider a case where you must choose between saving the life of a dog or a human and
you cannot save both. Which would you save?

▪ Frey claims that even the staunchest utilitarian like Singer or Norcross will save the human.

▪ If you say that both the dog and the human have equally valuable lives, then it would be
arbitrary to save the human instead of the dog.

▪ Maybe there are other interesting reasons.

▪ But Frey claims that (intuitively speaking) we already tend to accept that a human life is
more valuable than a dog’s life.
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Presumption and Burden of Proof

▪ In a court of criminal law, you are presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

▪ The burden of proof is on the prosecutor to show that you are not innocent.

▪ The burden of proof is not on you to prove that you are innocent.

Presumption and Burden of Proof for the Unequal Value Thesis

▪ You might think that the presumption is that it is morally permissible to use non-huma n
animals to things like research (maybe for food) where this would be to benefit humans.

▪ But Frey thinks this is false.

▪ The presumption is against the use of non-human animals because we generally think that
it is morally wrong to be cruel to use non-human animals for these reasons.

▪ Thus, the burden of proof is on the proponent of vivisection.

Compare the quality/value of human life with the quality/value of rabbit life
▪ What is the capacity of quality of human life?

▪ What is the value of human life?

▪ What is the capacity of quality of rabbit life?

▪ What is the value of rabbit life?

▪ Frey claims that there is nothing about the behavior of a rabbit’s life that we can appeal to
that would count as good evidence in support of the claim that the quality of a rabbit’s life
is comparable to that of a human life.

▪ Therefore, a human’s life is more valuable than a rabbit’s life insofar as the human has a
greater degree of capacity for quality in life than the rabbit.

Objection
But we don’t know what it is like to be a rabbit. You would have to be a rabbit to know this. So,
we cannot assume that it has a lesser degree of capacity for quality.

Response
But if we cannot know what it is like to be a rabbit, then we also cannot know that a rabbit’s life
is equal in quality/value to that of a human. And we do have good empirical evidence to suggest
that we can know that a rabbit does not have the same degree of capacity for quality.
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Advantages of Frey’s Argument?

▪ No appeal to religion or theological views.
▪ No appeal to the sanctity of life principle.

Marginal Cases and the Problem of Speciesism

▪ What is a marginal case?

▪ What is speciesism?

▪ If the reason one accepts that it is morally permissible to use non-human animals in cases
of research (or maybe food) is because they lack rationality, then this must also apply in
case where a human is no longer rationally competent (i.e., in marginal cases).

▪ This would entail that it is morally permissible to use infants and the brain dead for research
and food. But this would be absurd.

▪ However, if we deny this entailment, then it would commit us to some form of speciesism.

Frey’s Responses
▪ One might simply bite the bullet and accept speciesism as a consequence of the view.

▪ One might do a consequentialist calculation to show that less good is produced.

▪ One might appeal to rule utilitarianism.

▪ We can consider whether X has a valuable life simply by thinking about whether we would
be willing to take on X’s life.

Two Forms of Speciesism

▪ Frey argues that we stand in moral relationships with others not because of membership
in a species but because of things like autonomy, choice, critical reflection, etc.

▪ Consider Star Trek.

▪ Direct Speciesism: Discrimination on the basis of species membership only.

▪ Indirect Speciesism: Discrimination on the basis of human criteria like autonomy, choice,
critical reflection, etc.

▪ Objection?