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Lecture

CPP Colloquium "Arbitrariness and the Threshold for Moral Status"

Date
Thursday 21 November 2024
Time
Series
CPP Colloquia 2024-2025
Location
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden
Room
0.06

The Centre of Political Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Dick Timmer, Assistant Professor (wissenschaftlicher Beschäftigter) at TU Dortmund.

 

Dr. Dick Timmer, Technische Universität, Dortmund

Abstract


It is widely held that entities have moral status if they possess a significant property up to a sufficient degree. However, for any status-conferring property, there is some incrementally different property that does not ground moral status. Critics maintain that this renders any threshold arbitrary. In this paper, we reject the Standard Response to this arbitrariness objection, which maintains that moral status thresholds are not arbitrary but merely vague. Instead, we defend the moderate discontinuity view. This view holds that thresholds denote moderate rather than radical shifts in moral status; and that significant shifts in moral status of entities on opposite sides of the threshold should be a function of their distance from the threshold rather than the threshold itself. Crucially, it follows from this is that we cannot maintain simultaneously that moral persons have (i) equal moral status, and (ii) that their moral status is superior to that of nonhuman animals.

 

About the Center for Political Philosophy (CPP) Colloquia Series


The CPP is a collaboration between the Institute for Philosophy and the Institute for Political Science at Leiden University. Attendance of the Colloquia is free and there is no need to register. See CPP for more information. For further questions please contact dr. Tim Meijers at t.meijers@hum.leidenuniv.nl

All are welcome!

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