Moral Status: Obligations to Persons and Other Living Things

The Moral Obligations of Some Debts

If given the opportunity to reduce your debt, albeit at some financial risk, would you take it? Interviews and observations in two debt settlement firms show that debt settlement clients tend not to calculate financial risks in deciding which debts to try to settle. Rather, they treat their relationship with their creditor as a reciprocal and ongoing one. If the service provided by their credit...

Genetic enhancement, post-persons, and moral status: author reply to commentaries.

I am grateful to the journal for commissioning commentaries by Allen Buchanan, Nicholas Agar, James Wilson and Thomas Douglas, 4 and to those authors for their thoughtful remarks. In this brief reply, I respond to them in turn. Buchanan remains doubtful that there could be post-persons in the sense of beings who might plausibly be regarded as having higher moral status than (mere) persons. Acco...

Genetic enhancement, post-persons and moral status: a reply to Buchanan.

Responding to several leading ideas from a paper by Allen Buchanan, the present essay explores the implications of genetic enhancement for moral status. Contrary to doubts expressed by Buchanan, I argue that genetic enhancement could lead to the existence of beings so superior to contemporary human beings that we might aptly describe them as post-persons. If such post-persons emerged, how shoul...

Harming future persons: obligations to the children of reproductive technology.

Semiotic Approach to Globalization: Living in a World of Glocal Things

This paper is an effort to discuss the concept of glocalization from a semiotic point of view. In order to carry out a semiotic analysis of globalization or glocalization, first globalization needs to be defined from a semiotic perspective. Therefore, first an explanation of globalization and glocalization in semiotic terms is provided. Some believe the ongoing process in the world cannot be be...