Widening Our Moral Circle
By Noel Castree, Professor of Society & Environment, University of Technology Sydney. Originally published by The Conversation.
Morality involves judgements about good and bad, right and wrong. Humans are inescapably moral animals. Yet it is rare for most of us to reflect on how well our moral compasses are working.
This is where professional philosophers can play a useful role. Employing rigorous logic, applied to both hypothetical and real examples, they can, now and then, force us to think twice. Which is precisely what New York University philosopher Jeff Sebo does in his fine new book The Moral Circle: Who matters, What Matters, and Why.
Philosophy for the people
The Moral Circle is very much a work of public philosophy: that is to say, it employs exacting reasoning, but is written accessibly, with none of the citations or footnotes characteristic of a scholarly monograph.
In this sense, it follows in the footsteps of William Macaskill’s What We Owe the Future. In just 145 lucid pages, Sebo seeks to show that “our current moral faculties are outdated”. He uses the metaphor of a circle to make the case for rethinking “which beings matter and why, as well as what we owe them and why”.
Sebo’s key claims are that “very many non-humans belong in the moral circle” and that “humans might not always take priority”.
Rather like Peter Singer’s landmark book Animal Liberation (which has been recently updated), The Moral Circle addresses members of Western, largely secular, technology-saturated, high-consuming societies. The book’s premise is that the most powerful sections of global society have an unprecedented power over other things, which means they have new, commensurate moral responsibilities.
Pushing at moral boundaries
So, why do we need to expand the scope of our moral concern? Sebo argues that our current moral circle is too small and also has too few classes of “moral patients” within it.
Historically, he notes, the circle has gotten bigger and more crowded. This is good. But Sebo further notes that we still tend to prioritise human welfare in most cases – i.e. the welfare of non-humans is weighted lower.
He further notes that we tend to place a limit on what counts as a morally considerable non-human. Animals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, various other aquatic species and special ecosystems, such as the Great Barrier Reef, tend to command most of our moral attention.
Sebo argues this is wrong, as well as arbitrary. It is wrong because there are many cases where non-human welfare deserves moral priority over human welfare. For instance, we could – and, according to Sebo, we should – eat more plant-derived foods so as to spare billions of farm animals not very pleasant lives.
It is arbitrary, Sebo claims, because there are two key criteria for recognising a moral patient, namely that it is sentient (self-aware) and able to exercise agency (capable of acting in several different ways to achieve its own goals).
It follows that, in today’s world and the one likely to eventuate by, say, 2060, everything from advanced robots to genetically re-engineered pets to ant colonies will deserve serious moral consideration.
Reason versus moral prejudice
Humans are, at present, unique, in that we are the planet’s only “moral agents”. We are not only capable of moral reasoning, but able to discharge many of our perceived moral responsibilities. Sebo uses hypothetical and real cases to get his readers to acknowledge their unreflective moral prejudices.
He conjures a scenario where three close friends – all seemingly human – discover that two of them are, in fact, not human at all. It turns out one is a descendant of Neanderthals, while the other is a robot.
Philosophers like to reason using such hypotheticals, and Sebo does a good job showing what a hard time we would have justifying leaving the robot or the Neanderthal out of our moral circle. After all, both would be complex organisms that not only possess agency, but are self-aware. They are conscious of who they are, and once thought of themselves as human.
Later in the book, Sebo considers the real case of an insect farm start-up company called Innovafeed, which has set up a factory producing protein from millions of black soldier fly larvae. Entomologists have shown that things like beetles, wasps and praying mantises are complex beings, definitely sentient and very much agents. Where would agriculture be without the free pollination services that bees provide?
As with the hypothetical case, Sebo gives readers pause for thought. Can we morally treat insects as a means to our own ends, giving little-to-no consideration of their welfare? He acknowledges that we might want to weigh their welfare less highly than other members of our moral circle. But he makes the case that it is difficult to exclude them.
Real world morality
Sebo is, of course, well aware that we can’t give equal moral weight to all members of our moral circle in all situations. He advocates a “co-beneficial” approach to moral judgement and action. This involves maximising welfare and minimising harm among relevant moral patients in any situation, be it a proposal for a new Tasmanian fish farm or a plan to manufacture androids for use as house servants.
The latter part of The Moral Circle presents arguments to help us weigh different interests – our own against those of non-human others. At one point, Sebo acknowledges how discomfiting his own logic is.
“I set out to show that we should include insects and future AI systems in the moral circle,” he writes, “and yet I now feel compelled to add microbes, current AI systems, and many other beings too.”
But the basis of his argument is logically sound. For it is we humans, especially in the richest parts of the world, who have placed ourselves in an ever-expanding set of morally significant relationships with various non-human others.
This article was originally published by The Conversation and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
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