4 0 4C H A P T E R 1 9 ■ M o r a l R e a s o n i n gthe criterion of moral status, then not even a fly should be killed without
some good reason.
But what counts as a good enough reason for the destruction of a liv-
ing thing whose primary claim to moral status is its probable sentience?
Utilitarians generally hold that acts are morally wrong if they increase the
total amount of pain or suffering in the world (without some compensatory
increase in the total amount of pleasure or happiness), or vice versa. But the
killing of a sentient being does not always have such adverse consequences.
There is room in any environment for only a finite number of organisms
of any given species. When a rabbit is killed (in some more or less painless
fashion), another rabbit is likely to take its place, so that the total amount of
rabbit-happiness is not decreased. Moreover, rabbits, like many other rap-
idly reproducing species, must be preyed upon by some other species if the
health of the larger biological system is to be maintained.
Thus, the killing of sentient beings is not always an evil in utilitarian
terms. However, it would be morally offensive to suggest that people can
be killed just because they are too numerous, and are upsetting the natural
ecology. If killing people is harder to justify than killing rabbits — as even
most animal liberationists believe — it must be because people have some
moral status that is not based upon sentience alone. In the next section, we
consider some possible arguments for this view.viii Personhood and Moral Rights
Once they are past infancy, human beings typically possess not only a capacity
for sentience, but also such ‘higher ’ mental capacities as self-awareness and
rationality. They are also highly social beings, capable — except in pathologi-
cal cases — of love, nurturance, co-operation, and moral responsibility (which
involves the capacity to guide their actions through moral principles and ide-
als). Perhaps these mental and social capacities can provide sound reasons for
ascribing a stronger right to life to persons than to other sentient beings.
One argument for that conclusion is that the distinctive capacities persons
have enable them to value their own lives and those of other members of
their communities more than other animals do. People are the only beings
who can plan years into the future, and who are often haunted by the fear
of premature death. Perhaps this means that the lives of persons are worth
more to their possessors than those of sentient non-persons. If so, then kill-
ing a person is a greater moral wrong than killing a sentient being which
is not a person. But it is also possible that the absence of fear for the future
tends to make the lives of sentient non-persons more pleasant, and more
valuable to them, than ours are to us. Thus, we need to look elsewhere for a
rationale for the superior moral status that most (human) persons accord to
one another.
Moral rights are a way of talking about how we should behave. That it
is evidently only persons who understand the idea of a moral right does
not make us ‘better ’ than other sentient beings. However, it does give us97364_ch19_ptg01_383-422.indd 404 11/15/13 5:45 PM
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