Zwierzęta mają twarz, a zabawa w zabijanie jest niemoralna. Dwa przykłady współczesnej refl eksji etycznej

Experiments involving the transplantation of human stem cells and their derivatives into early fetal or embryonic nonhuman animals raise novel ethical issues due to their possible implications for enhancing the moral status of che chimeric individual. Although status-enhancing research is not necessarily objectionable from the perspective of the chimeric individual, there are grounds for objecting to it in the conditions in which it is likely to occur. Translating this ethical conclusion into a policy recommendation, however, is complicated by the fact that substantial empirical and ethical uncertainties remain about which transplants, if any, would significantly enhance the chimeric individual's moral status. Considerations of moral status justify either an early-termination policy on chimeric embryos, or, in the absence of such a policy, restrictions on the introduction of pluripotent human stem cells into early-stage developing animals, pending the resolution of those uncertainties.

It is a common claim in debates about abortion and the killing of animals that individuals, such as foetuses and non-human animals, that have psychological capacities significantly lower than those of adult human persons also have a moral status lower than that of persons. And those who defend this claim typically assume that it implies that the moral constraint against killing a foetus or animal is, if other things are equal, weaker than the constraint against killing a person. Many of these same people also claim, however, that the difference in moral status makes no difference to the strength of the constraint against causing suffering. They argue that the reason not to cause suffering to an individual who neither deserves nor is liable to be caused to suffer is equally strong whatever the nature or moral status of the potential victim is. There is, however, a type of individual whose psychological capacities and moral status are such that it is plausible to believe that the reason not to cause them to suffer is weaker than the reason not to cause equivalent suffering to a person. Most non-human animals are psychologically intermediate between these low-status individuals and persons. This raises the question, which is explored in this chapter, whether most animals have an intermediate moral status that makes their suffering matter more than that of the low-status individuals but less than that of persons.

Common-sense morality implicitly assumes that reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn between the ‘full’ moral status usually attributed to ordinary adult humans, the partial moral status attributed to non-human animals, and the absence of moral status, usually ascribed to machines and other artefacts. These assumptions were always subject to challenge; but they now come under renewed pressure because there are beings we are now able to create, and beings we may soon be able to create, which blur traditional distinctions between humans, non-human animals, and non-biological beings. Examples are human non-human chimeras, cyborgs, human brain organoids, post-humans, human minds that have been uploaded into computers and onto the internet, and artificial intelligence. It is far from clear what moral status we should attribute to any of these beings. While commonsensical views of moral status have always been questioned, the latest technological developments recast many of the questions and raise additional objections. There are a number of ways we could respond, such as revising our ordinary suppositions about the prerequisites for full moral status. We might also reject the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between full and partial moral status. The present volume provides a forum for philosophical reflection about the usual presuppositions and intuitions about moral status, especially in light of the aforementioned recent and emerging technological advances.

The exponential progress of AI systems today compels scientists and philosophers to redefine their conceptual frameworks to better understand the nature of these new technologies and their moral status. Among the various theories that are used to respond to the challenges posed by intelligent systems are instrumentalism, Socio-technical Systems Theory (STST) and Mediation Theory (MT), all widely adopted in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This paper intends to present the main features of these theories and provide a comparative analysis of them in order to assess their contribution to the process of understanding the moral status of artificial intelligence. Our investigation intends to show how (1) instrumentalism is inadequate to account for the moral status of AI, (2) STST, while helping to highlight the link between AI, society and morality, lends itself to the criticism of anthropocentrism, (3) MT in its Latourian version has the merit of highlighting the active character of technological artefacts and thus of artificial intelligence in the moral sphere. However, the principle of symmetry it proposes poses the problem of the de-accountability of the human agent. (4) MT in its postphenomenological form seems to partially resolve the problem of moral responsibility, but the opacity of the terminology it employs exposes it to various criticisms. In light of these results, we intend to show how an understanding of the moral status of intelligent systems cannot be based on the diametrically opposed positions that consider technologies either morally neutral or else moral agents similar to humans, whereas particularly useful elements can be found in STST and in postphenomenological MT.

There are many accounts ascribing moral status to animals, most of them departing from what we take to justify moral status for human beings and discussing similarities and differences. In order to frame our obligations for promoting the interests of others, we first have to understand the basis for moral obligation. Christine Korsgaard (2005) suggests that self-reflection on normative issues is the defining characteristic of human morality. Arguably, this sets human persons apart from other living beings inhabiting this planet, including some belonging to the human species, and is the basis for according moral worth. Allen Wood has argued that we have reason to include human beings who lack the capacity of self-reflection in the moral community as they have some part in rational nature (Wood and O’Neill, 2008). Apparently, this position implies that there is a moral gulf between humans and other animals. But neo-Kantians as Wood, O’Neill and Korsgaard have argued that several of the elements that we find to be of moral consideration for persons, are such that we also share with animals and are part of the basis for human normative reflection. We should therefore accord them some moral status and count animal desires and needs to be morally significant. Assuming this account gives an acceptable basis for moral consideration of animals, it does not give any specific indications of what kind of moral duties we have towards animals, beyond that we should avoid causing unnecessary suffering and restrictions on their life-space. I will suggest a relational extension of this approach to the moral status of animals, based on existing interactions between humans and animals. Animals form an inescapable part of human life-worlds, and belong to our value systems. Human beings form different kind of relationships with different animals – domestic and non-domestic. We express respect, awe, compassions, disdain and contempt for animals, thus emphasizing their likeness with and difference from humans. We regard them as having particular natures or ways of life. Some are more important for our understanding of our own life than others. All these relations provide basis for moral arguments regarding what we do owe animals, suggesting a middle way between the commodification witnessed in industrial husbandry and the moral status suggested in animal rights approaches.

Reviewed by: Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England Sally Parkin Abate, Corinne S., ed., Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003; hardback; pp. vii, 204; RRP £45; ISBN 0754630439. The essays in this collection present an English literary perspective on female spaces in Early Modern England. Through the medium of plays by Shakespeare, Wroth, Cavendish, Marvel, and Ford, female experience could transform the domestic and private sphere, providing agency and authority to English women. Though catalogued as English literature, the collection of essays is a welcome addition to gender studies, exploring 'indistinguished space', and presenting possibilities other than those of basic misogyny and the concepts often associated with vagina dentata. The essays propose that the Early Modern subculture of femaleness is more expansive and formative than has been previously understood or explored. Using the genre of plays, the book is divided into three parts or categories, each using a title from King Lear to provide a focus for the readings of privacy, domesticity and the 'indistinguished space' experienced by women in Early Modern England. Part I, 'Concealing Continent: Settings for Intimacy and Resistance', presents three essays which are contextualized within the physical and philosophical settings assigned to women in the period: marriage, the bedchamber, and interiors of the body. Lisa Hopkins, through The Duchess of Malfi, explores the interiors of women's bodies. Despite entombment, fashionable clothes and Ferdinand's fetishisation, the Duchess rises above patriarchal classification through her independent voice and spirit. Interiors represent safety to her, exteriors the dangerous world. Her death enables her to escape the world of exteriors but her interiority enables her to remain unmarginalized. Through The Taming of the Shrew, Corinne S. Abate analyzes marriage, seeing it not as a barrier to women's agency but a safe realm for female agency. The private and domestic spaces offered by marriage provide an avenue of removal from patriarchal restrictions. Katherine develops a marital interiority, a space that makes the public sphere immaterial, providing an escape from her father's domination and her poor public reputation, providing her with a private space. While both are inter-related, the lack of public existence becomes intensely beneficial. Kathryn Pratt takes the medium of Mary Wroth's Urania to [End Page 183] bridge the female private sphere and the public world that both repudiates and mirrors that world. Tree imagery, passion, possession, and the ownership of land emphasize the precarious position of self-ownership in a society that deprived women of legal rights pertaining to self and property. Wroth shows how the intersection of two notions, 'estate' as property and 'estate' as a mental, moral, or agentive status, reveal the subject's failure to achieve an identity which is unified. Pratt's exploration of the disjunctions between the body and the material world raises key issues faced by women in the Early Modern period. Part II, 'Hospitable Favors: Rituals of the Household', focuses on customary practices and family and household habits, and the opportunities which such spheres allowed women, either to resist or negotiate. Nancy A. Gutierrez explores the wider ramifications of arranged marriages through John Ford's The Broken Hearted. The dynamics of conflict can divide households, rupture the state, and threaten women's sanity. However, rather than portraying Penthea as a victim, Gutierrez shows that Penthea uses her victimisation to create her own space (by food refusal), thus establishing agency and concept of self. Theodora A. Janowski cites the poetry of Andrew Marvel and Margaret Cavendish to explore women's eroticism. Cooking was perceived by both as a highly erotic activity that challenged patriarchy. Although women were restricted to the domestic sphere, this did not deny them power to use their talents, needlework, voices, and culinary pursuits, for the pleasure of both themselves and other women. Their unwillingness to marry or reproduce imposed its own restrictions on inheritance and family dynasties. Catherine G. Canino explores female dominion over male identity in The Faerie Queen, portraying other ways in which patriarchal designs could be upset. The essay underlines the point that the power of the female characters and their domination of male identity in Spenser's work mirror that of the childless...

This special issue commemorates the 40th anniversary of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics with a collection of original essays addressing some of the major themes in the book. It opens with intellectual autobiographies by Beauchamp and Childress themselves. Subsequent articles explore the topics of common morality, specification and balancing of moral principles, virtue, moral status, autonomy, and lists of bioethical principles. The issue closes with a reply by Beauchamp and Childress to the other authors.

The article describes the problems of business communications in the context of globalization and the information society. Attention is drawn to the ethics of modern communication processes and the influence of neuropsychology as a fundamentally new approach to the formation of the communication space and the implementation of effective communications.
 The study of the changes taking place in the social space is relevant. The content and direction of communication, ethical, social and psychological processes are influenced by the information society, and vice versa, since they are also factors of its development.
 The idea of a balanced harmonious society becomes a problem in the context of contradictions between the processes of globalization and the integration of social processes, on the one hand, and the desire to preserve cultural identity, ethnic and religious integrity, individualization of the personal origin, on the other.
 In the modern global communication space, there is a threat of violence in the form of terrorist acts, anomie, marginalization and other antisocial phenomena that destroy the principles of common human cultural ethics and morality, strengthening the trend of the spread of deviant behavior in society, and an increase in the number of mental disorders of the personality.
 The multipolarity of the modern world order has exposed new problems focused primarily on the ethical, psychological, cultural and communicative sphere of social reality. The problems of the dialogue of cultures, religious consensus, tolerance, psychological stability and resistance to stress have become relevant in response to the need to solve the problem of uniting the economies of territories, political strategies, religions, cultures. The problem of using linguistics in the formation of consciousness and the culture of thinking is gaining importance.
 Modern social, economic, technological conditions have become a factor in changing the consciousness of an individual in a very short time. Thus, main areas should be highlighted: the sphere of family and household relations; the sphere of education; the sphere of information and communication; the sphere of ethics and culture.

Human Nature and Moral Status in Bioethics

Nowadays many people attribute a morality to various social animal species, morality that goes far beyond ‘morality’ in the sense of an analogous system for the regulation of social behaviour. They are convinced by the huge amount of observations and stories collected by students of animal behaviour, and presented to them in popularizing books by authors such as Marc Bekoff, Marc Hauser, and Frans de Waal. The definition of morality from which criteria for classifying a system for the regulation of social behaviour as a morality must be derived is discussed in Sect. 6.2. Section 6.3 categorizes the moral behaviour patterns of animals identified by animal behavioural scientists in four clusters. Section 6.4 deals with what capacities are needed for moral behaviour. Sections 6.5 and 6.6 consider when behaviour can be said to be rule governed. In Sect. 6.7, I examine whether animals can have moral motives. Section 6.8 goes into the occurrence of social disapproval as a criterion for norm violation. Section 6.9 discusses the relation between animal morality and human morality, and argues that animal morality regulates behaviour automatically and unconsciously. However, a large part also of human morality is non-reflective and functions in the same manner as animal morality. In contradistinction to animal morality, human morality makes use of both System I processes and System II processes and can be both non-reflective and reflective. Section 6.10 contains some reflections on the moral status of animals belonging to a species that has a morality. Section 6.11 offers some concluding remarks.

Dependency is a central aspect of human existence, as are dependent care relations: relations between caregivers and young children, persons with disabilities, or frail elderly persons. In this book, Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar argues that many prominent interpretations of Christian love either obscure dependency and care, or fail to adequately address injustice in the global social organization of care. Sullivan-Dunbar engages a wide-ranging interdisciplinary conversation between Christian ethics and economics, political theory, and care scholarship, drawing on the rich body of recent feminist work reintegrating dependency and care into the economic, political, and moral spheres. She identifies essential elements of a Christian ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations in a globalized care economy. She also suggests resources for such an ethic ranging from Catholic social thought, feminist political ethics of care, disability and vulnerability studies, and Christian theological accounts of the divine-human relation.

Remembering Joseph Frank Ann E. Berthoff (bio) Joseph Frank died in early March at the age of ninety-four. His biography of Dostoevsky was, from the first, hailed as a masterpiece of incomparable importance for scholars and as a fascinating study for all readers. "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," published in the Sewanee Review in 1945 when he was still in his twenties, was destined to be influential (and controversial) throughout the rest of the century. I want to note his other contributions to literary criticism and the history of ideas—and to remember him as a friend for over fifty years. Warner and I first met Joe in 1955, the new husband of Marguerite (Guiguite) Straus whom we had known from graduate-school days. The ship carrying us to Sicily (for my husband's Fulbright professorship at the University of Catania) stopped for a day at Cannes; Joe and Guiguite were spending the summer in a nearby village, and true to their radiogram received in mid-Atlantic—"Rendezvous Cannes"—they met the boat and transported us to a house set in a Bonnard garden. After admiring one another's children and the local wine on their terrace, we went in for lunch at a Bonnard table—rabbit, as I remember, followed by fresh cherries. The conversation begun on the terrace continued at lunch—and for decades thereafter. Joe was profoundly American, but his attachment to Europe, to France especially, helped define him. He knew the languages, the literature, the intellectual history of Europe; and for many Europeans he had deep sympathies, along with an occasional amused impatience. Among his friends he counted European and emigré poets and philosophers, critics and scholars. He wrote about them, championed them, and as director of the Gauss seminars at Princeton he invited them to present whatever ideas they wished to have considered in circumstances that, with Joe's careful questioning and easeful geniality, made for conversation enjoyed by everyone in attendance. Joe was at home with French and German critics and philosophers, both contemporary and from earlier times. In any conversation about the state of criticism, we would anticipate his amused cry, "It's all in Hegel!" When he wrote about pretentious critics, he didn't waste time scolding; but, when it came to illogical argument or mistaken allusion, he was a master of the put-down. When Lionel Trilling cites Hegel on Gemütlichkeit, the defining characteristic of art as he wished it to be understood, Frank observes that it is "unfortunate that Mr. Trilling decided to venture into such deep philosophical waters. . . . The ideas he so generously attributes to Hegel are [End Page 496] entirely of his own devising." (And in a long footnote he shows that in the context of Hegel's disquisition, Gemüth means barbaric stupidity. Ouch!) In explaining the significance of the Yeatsian title of his first collection of essays—The Widening Gyre (1963)—Joseph Frank defined the terms which were to engage him throughout his writing career: "The image it evokes seems to me to picture one of the crucial dilemmas of modern culture, a culture whose creations more and more tend to deny or negate some essential aspect of the human agency at their source and to escape from its control. Whether through a preference for the mythical imagination, the dehumanization of art, or the depreciation and renunciation of spirit, the same dialectic may be observed at work all through modern culture. The falcon cannot hear the falconer." Together with articles on Mann and Ortega and four Americans, The Widening Gyre includes two long essays that had originally appeared in the Sewanee Review: "Malraux's Metaphysics of Art" and "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." In the Malraux essay Frank describes the "the imaginary museum"—Malraux's idea that photography has made available the entirety of world art, thus transforming "the relation of modern man to his past." "The chief architect of the imaginary museum" is modern art, which has rediscovered "the power of art to transform the world independently of verisimilitude or representation." He defends Malraux from the scorn of certain art historians as well as from uncritical appreciation, concluding the powerful essay with this...

Advocates of people with disabilities sometimes have advanced their cause within a conceptual frame of human exceptionalism, shaped specifically by one or another proposal about a moral property or capacity with which human individuals alone are endowed. This essay is a philosophical reflection about the notion of moral status. Arguments presented here show, however, that framing the pursuit of protection for people with disabilities in terms of humanity's exceptional moral status is more hazardous than helpful. Appeals to moral status do not settle debates about whether there are obligations to provide protection and support for individuals with disabilities because the idea of moral status is as contentious as the disagreements it is invoked to resolve.

Some arguments for moral vegetarianism proceed by appealing to widely held beliefs about the immorality of causing unjustified pain. Combined with the claim that meat is not needed for our nourishment and that killing animals for this reason causes them unjustified pain, they yield the conclusion that eating meat is immoral. However, what counts as a good enough reason for causing pain will depend largely on what we think about the moral status of animals. Implicit in these arguments is the claim that sentience is sufficient for having moral status. These arguments, however, fail to specify the conceptual connection between the two. I argue in this paper that sentience is not sufficient for moral status. Thus, although animals experience pain as it is physically bad, their experience of it is not in itself morally bad. They are harmed in feeling pain, but this harm is not of a moral kind. This distinction parallels the more familiar distinction between moral and non-moral goods. When considered, this significantly mitigates the force of sentience-based arguments for moral vegetarianism. Since animals lack moral status, it is not wrong to eat meat, even if this is not essential to nutrition.

Is it OK to lie to Siri? Is it bad to mistreat a robot for our own pleasure? Under what condition should we grant a moral status to an artificial intelligence (AI) system? This paper looks at different arguments for granting moral status to an AI system: the idea of indirect duties, the relational argument, the argument from intelligence, the arguments from life and information, and the argument from sentience. In each but the last case, we find unresolved issues with the particular argument, which leads us to move to a different one. We leave the idea of indirect duties aside since these duties do not imply considering an AI system for its own sake. The paper rejects the relational argument and the argument from intelligence. The argument from life may lead us to grant a moral status to an AI system, but only in a weak sense. Sentience, by contrast, is a strong argument for the moral status of an AI system—based, among other things, on the Aristotelian principle of equality: that same cases should be treated in the same way. The paper points out, however, that no AI system is sentient given the current level of technological development.