Functional neuroimaging research suggests that status-based evaluations may not solely depend on the level of social status but also on the conferred status dimension. However, no reports to date have studied how status level and dimension shape early person evaluations. To explore early status-based person evaluations, event-related brain potential data were collected from 29 participants whil...

This article is a discursive examination of children's status as knowledgeable moral agents within the Swedish child welfare system and in the widely used assessment framework BBIC. Departing from Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, three discursive positions of children's moral status are identified: amoral, im/moral and dis/loyal. The findings show the undoubtedly moral child as largely...

While contractualism seems to solve some of the more pressing concerns of other moral theories, it does not conclusively address the moral status of non-human animals. Peter Carruthers claims that contractualism excludes animals from having full moral status. I argue that Carruthers’ arguments are fatally flawed due to his reliance on contradictory claims, unlikely assumptions, and flagrant vio...

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...

I compare a ‘realist’ with a ‘social-relational’ perspective on our judgments of the moral status of artificial agents (AAs). I develop a realist position according to which the moral status of a being particularly in relation to moral patiency attribution is closely bound up with that being’s ability to experience states of conscious satisfaction or suffering (CSS). For a realist both moral st...

Artificial agents such as robots are performing increasingly significant ethical roles in society. As a result, there is a growing literature regarding their moral status with many suggesting it is justified to regard manufactured entities as having intrinsic moral worth. However, the question of whether artificial agents could have the high degree of moral status that is attributed to human pe...

There are various philosophical approaches and theories describing the intimate relation people have to artifacts. In this paper, I explore the relation between two such theories, namely distributed cognition and distributed morality theory. I point out a number of similarities and differences in these views regarding the ontological status they attribute to artifacts and the larger systems the...

Part One addresses the question whether the fact that some persons love something, worship it, or deeply care about it, can endow moral status on that thing. I argue that the answer is ‘‘no.’’ While some cases lend great plausibility to the view that love or worship can endow moral status, there are other cases in which love or worship clearly fails to endow moral status. Furthermore, there is ...

This research examines how moral values regulate the behavior of individual group members. It argues that group members behave in line with moral group norms because they anticipate receiving ingroup respect when enacting moral values that are shared by ingroup members. Data from two experimental studies offer evidence in support. In Study 1 (N = 82), morality-based (but not competence-based) i...