The biomedical enhancement of human capacities has emerged as one of the most philosophically invigorating areas of contemporary bioethical research. In exploring the ethical dimensions of emerging biotechnologies and human–machine interfaces, the literature on human enhancement has made significant contributions to traditional problems in moral philosophy. One such area concerns the enhancemen...

Moral status ascribes equal obligations and rights to individuals on the basis of membership in a protected group. Substance change is an event that results in the origin or cessation of individuals who may be members of groups with equal moral status. In this paper, two substance changes that affect the moral status of human embryos are identified. The first substance change begins with fertil...

Many contemporary bioethicists claim that the possession of certain psychological properties is sufficient for having full moral status. I will call this the psychological approach to full moral status. In this paper, I argue that there is a significant tension between the psychological approach and a widely held model of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID, formerly Multiple Personality Disord...

This paper addresses the question: Who or what can have a moral status in the sense that we have direct moral duties to them? It argues for a biocentric answer which ascribes inherent moral status value to all individual living organisms. This position must be defended against an anthropocentric position. The argument from marginal cases propounded by Tom Regan and Peter Singer for this purpose...

BACKGROUND Advocates of people with disabilities sometimes have advanced their cause within a conceptual frame of human exceptionalism, shaped specifically by one or another proposal about a moral property or capacity with which human individuals alone are endowed. METHODS This essay is a philosophical reflection about the notion of moral status. RESULTS Arguments presented here show, howev...

Several authors have speculated that (1) the pharmaceutical, genetic or other technological enhancement of human mental capacities could result in the creation of beings with greater moral status than persons, and (2) the creation of such beings would harm ordinary, unenhanced humans, perhaps by reducing their immunity to permissible harm. These claims have been taken to ground moral objections...

The paper analyses whether the old problem concerning the moral status or value of human embryos is implicated in the moral evaluation of embryonic stem cell research. It briefly outlines the moral status debate and then proceeds to show that all current attempts to bypass the problem fail.

We all agree that it is generally wrong to kill persons. Although we may differ over exceptions, and over which beings qualify as persons, the judgment that it is wrong, other things equal, intentionally to kill paradigm persons represents common moral ground. At the same time, there is profound disagreement regarding the ethics of killing-or allowing to die-those beings whose moral status is l...