Questions concerning moral
standing typically begin by addressing agency. The decision to begin with this
subject is not accidental, provisional, or capricious. It is dictated and
prescribed by the history of moral philosophy, which has traditionally privileged
agency and the figure of the moral agent in both theory and practice. As
Luciano Floridi explains, moral philosophy, from the time of the ancient Greeks
through the modern era and beyond, has been almost exclusively agent-oriented.
"Virtue ethics, and Greek philosophy more generally," Floridi writes,
"concentrates its attention on the moral nature and development of the
individual agent who performs the action. It can therefore be properly
described as an agent-oriented, 'subjective ethics.'" Modern developments,
although shifting the focus somewhat, retain this particular agent-oriented
approach. "Developed in a world profoundly different from the small,
non-Christian Athens, Utilitarianism, or more generally Consequentialism,
Contractualism and Deontologism are the three most well-known theories that
concentrate on the moral nature and value of the actions performed by the
agent." Although shifting emphasis from the "moral nature and
development of the individual agent" to the "moral nature and
value" of his or her actions, western philosophy has been, with few
exceptions, organized and developed as an
agent-oriented endeavor.
When considered from the
perspective of the agent, ethics inevitably and unavoidably makes exclusive
decisions about who is to be included
in the community of moral subjects and what
can be excluded from consideration. The choice of words here is not accidental.
As Jacques Derrida points out everything turns on and is decided by the difference
that separates the "who" from the "what." Moral agency has
been customarily restricted to those entities who call themselves and each
other "man"—those beings who already give themselves the right to be
considered someone who counts as opposed to something that does not. But who
counts—who, in effect, gets to be situated under the term "who"—has
never been entirely settled, and the historical development of moral philosophy
can be interpreted as a progressive unfolding, where what had once been
excluded (i.e., women, slaves, people of color, etc.) have slowly and not
without considerable struggle and resistance been granted access to the gated
community of moral agents and have thereby also come to be someone who counts.
Despite this progress, which is, depending on how one looks at it,
either remarkable or insufferably protracted, there remain additional
exclusions, most notably non-human animals and machines. Machines in particular
have been understood to be mere artifacts that are designed, produced, and
employed by human agents for human specified ends. This
instrumentalist and
anthropocentric
understanding has achieved a remarkable level of acceptance and
standardization, as is evident by the fact that it has remained in place and
largely unchallenged from ancient to postmodern times—from at least Plato's
Phaedrus to Jean-François Lyotard's
The Postmodern Condition. Beginning with
(at least) the animal rights movement, however, there has been considerable
pressure to reconsider the ontological assumptions and moral consequences of
this legacy of human exceptionalism.
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