The Boundaries of the Moral (and Legal) Community

Let me invite you to step back from the parochial political disputes that dominate public life in America and most other modern democracies, as well as from the internecine academic quarrels characteristic of so much professionalized scholarship in the modern academy, and reflect, instead, on the broader sweep of moral and political thought, in both the philosophical and practical realm, over the past two or three hundred years. What must immediately strike any observer of this period is the remarkable expansion it has witnessed of what I will henceforth call “the moral community,” that is, the community of creatures that are thought entitled to equal moral consideration, whatever the precise details of what such consideration involves—that is, whether it is a matter of showing “respect,” recognizing the “dignity” of each, or “maximizing the utility or well-being” of each, or some other formulation. I am speaking here about our official ideologies and discourse, not necessarily all our actual practices and laws, though they gradually follow suit over the course of a century or so. But at the level of ideology, reflected in both ordinary moral opinion and in the work of philosophers, we in the West—ignorance of the relevant philosophical and legal traditions requires me to remain agnostic on the proverbial “East,” though the trends seem to be similar—have largely abandoned the ideas that gender, race, ethnicity, religion, class, and now even sexual orientation are morally relevant attributes in the sense that they are attributes that determine the basic moral consideration to which one is entitled. To be sure, in particular contexts, these characteristics may matter