Abstract
The entry distinguishes two concepts of moral status – moral status as the possession of fundamental moral rights and as the possession of moral considerability – and deals with several criteria that have been proposed for their attribution. It reviews the rationales and the difficulties of accounts centering on membership in the human species, personhood, sentience, being a teleological center of life, and being a member of the biotic community. It suggests that a multi-criterial account, distinguishing different levels of moral considerability, may provide the most convincing approach to the issue.
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Further Readings
Jaworska, A., & Tannenbaum, J. (2013). The grounds of moral status. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/grounds-moral-status/
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Reichlin, M. (2016). Moral Status. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_300
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_300
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