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. According to Buchanan, moral status is a threshold concept, and the property one needs in order to reach the threshold is accountability for reasons. He makes a decent case for his claim that dogs are not accountable for reasons at all and that persons are. Although I am sceptical that the most immature persons are significantly accountable for reasons and that there is a meaningful break between them and the most cognitively complex non-persons, here I set these doubts aside. Importantly, Buchanan claims that accountability for reasons is the only property that matters for the possession of moral status. (Note that on his viewd and in his terminology, which differs from mineddogs have moral standing in virtue of being sentient, but only persons have full and equal moral status in virtue of being accountable.) This claim strikes me as somewhat arbitrary and perhaps ad hoc as well. Consider alternative criteria that philosophers have suggested as the basis for full and equal moral status: temporal self-awareness, agency, the capacity for symbolic thought, and moral agency in a broader sense than simply accountability for reasons. These criteria seem no less plausible than Buchanan’s for undergirding our moral statusdassuming, for the moment, that the latter is closely connected with personhood and that sentience is insufficientdyet a wealth of empirical data suggest that the relevant characteristics come in various forms and different degrees, and that many animals have them to some degree. The imagined post-persons, meanwhile, may have equal justification for picking out a property such as excellence or reliability in moral agency as the basis for a moral status higher than that possessed by persons. Buchanan’s commentary contains a reply to this idea: ‘. the moral difference between beings that have the capacity for accountability for reasons and those that do not is of a profoundly different sort than differences among beings as to how well they can exercise the capacity’. This is to say that only a difference in kind, as opposed to a difference in degree, can justify a threshold. One might doubt this. It is not self-evident that a huge difference in degree of some relevant property cannot underlie different levels of moral status, at least where there are no intermediate beings filling in the gulf. But, even if we accept Buchanan’s implicit insistence on a difference in kind, post-persons might conceptualise the relevant difference as indeed being one of kind. They might, for example, maintain that they are genuine moral agents, whereas persons are not, using the term ‘moral’ as a sort of success term that applies only to beings who consistently act morally. Thus I do not think we have to accept Buchanan’s thesis that accountability for reasons delineates the one and only threshold relevant to moral status. In his commentary, Agar asserts that we are incapable of understanding criteria for a higher plane of moral status. Why should we accept this assertion? At the very least, we can stipulate criteria that strike us as plausible. The mere possibility of the scenario described in my thoughtexperiment about post-persons is sufficient to motivate the issues raised in my article. Agar also suggests that our concept of a persondas comprising certain cognitive properties and grounding moral statusdis fairly pliable, stretching ‘downward’ to include many human beings whose cognitive abilities are considerably below average; so perhaps it can stretch upward to include those I have characterised as post-persons. His point about the pliability (or perhaps capaciousness is a better metaphor) of our concept of a person is a good one. But, in my thought-experiment, I emphasised that post-persons, after many generations of genetic enhancement, are so superior to persons in their cognitive and moral capacities that they find it natural to perceive a difference in kind between them and unenhanced humanity. Here their perceptions are similar to those of persons who perceive themselves as different in kind from (many if not all) non-human animals. Agar expresses uncertainty as to whether post-persons actually would perceive themselves as different in kind from us. But I’m not making a counterfactual claim as to what such beings would actually think; I’m building into the thought-experiment the stipulation that they would have this perception. And I argue that this perception would not be unreasonable, based on the differences between post-persons and persons. Because these differences are so great, they are not comparable to the alleged differences in moral capacity between Agar, on the one hand, and Singer and Kravinsky, on the other. The latter differences are much too small to mark out any difference in kind in moral agency. So I don’t see that Agar has cast significant doubt on my arguments. James Wilson’s commentary opens with these words: ‘DeGrazia argues that all sentient creatures have the same moral status.’. This, strictly speaking, is true, but it is also misleading. My main assertion was conditional: if we have sufficient reason to assert that persons have higher moral status than sentient non-persons, then the imaginary post-persons would have about as much reason to assert that they have higher moral status than persons. Only very tentatively did I argue in favour of the interests model of moral status, according to which all beings with moral status have it equally. I was, and am, uncertain about the matter. Wilson goes on to defend what Rawls calls the two moral powersdthe capacities for a sense of justice and for a conception of the gooddas the basis for full moral status, much as Buchanan defended accountability for reasons as the basis. Like Buchanan, Wilson faces the charge of an arbitrary, ad hoc account of moral status. More importantly for the present discussion, post-persons could reasonably emphasise persons’ remarkable deficiencies Correspondence to Dr. David DeGrazia, Department of Philosophy, George Washington University, 801 22nd Street, N.W. Room 525, Washington, DC 20052, USA; [email protected]