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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Lower animals, small children, the severely brain damaged, and perhaps even paranoid schizophrenics are rightly excluded from the class of free moral agents.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Moral agency admits of degrees rather than a binary threshold, as argued by Fischer and Ravizza's reasons-responsiveness account.
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    • 2.Paranoid schizophrenics and severely brain-damaged individuals often retain partial reasons-responsiveness sufficient for graded moral standing.
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    • 3.Excluding agents from moral freedom entirely based on diminished rationality conflates impaired agency with the complete absence of agency.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Peter Singer and utilitarian traditions ground moral consideration in sentience and capacity for suffering, not rationality or moral agency.
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    • 2.The claim illicitly substitutes criteria for moral responsibility with criteria for moral considerability, collapsing two distinct normative categories.
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    • 3.Lower animals may lack free moral agency yet still possess morally relevant interests that generate obligations in others, as Kant himself acknowledged in indirect duty accounts.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Moral freedom requires a minimal degree of rationality, including an ability to learn from experience, an ability to discern normal reasons for acting, and a capacity for moral improvement.
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    • 2.Lower animals, small children, the severely brain damaged, and perhaps even paranoid schizophrenics all lack some part of the rationality required to qualify as free moral agents.
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    • 3.However causally undetermined some of their behaviors might be, lacking the required rationality disqualifies them from being free moral agents.
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