Abstract
The ethical principle of respect for persons has been considered by many to be central to any adequate system of ethics. Some have gone so far as to present it as the supreme principle of morality in general. However, this view looks increasingly untenable. Developments in applied and professional ethics over recent decades have challenged the centrality of respect for persons on a number of fronts. Firstly, the connection between ontological personhood and moral personhood has been widely and effectively questioned. Secondly, the connection between moral agency and moral patiency has been questioned. Finally, the principle of respect for persons has been displaced from its former centrality to occupy, in the form of a principle of respect for autonomy, a place in a range of mutually irreducible basic principles. Thus the fragmentation of the idea of the moral person has been accompanied by a decline in the apparent significance of the principle of respect for persons. In the light of this decline, it is reasonable to ask what future the principle of respect for persons can now have.
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Notes
- 1.
Downie and Telfer 1969, p. 15.
- 2.
See Kant 1996.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 4.
Ibid., pp. 84–5.
- 5.
Ibid., p. 80.
- 6.
Some of the relevant limits include: we are not required to regard the choices of others as paramount where they are likely to result in serious self-harm, or harm to others; nor are we required to regard them as paramount where they involve frustrating the choices of others; nor are we required to regard them as paramount where they are clearly based on ignorance or false beliefs.
- 7.
Kant 1996, pp. 83–4.
- 8.
Mill 1962, p. 257.
- 9.
This is not simply the view of utilitarians, such as Bentham and Mill, but is also fundamental to Aristotelian ethics (see Aristotle 1955, book one), and contemporary virtue theory. Neo-Aristotelians , such as Alasdair Macintyre , criticise Kant on the grounds that his theory divorces moral theorising from considerations of human flourishing (see Macintyre 1981, chapter 4).
- 10.
This is the point on which virtue theorists part company with utilitarians. In their view, that there is an essential connection between moral goodness and human happiness/flourishing does not entail that the maximisation of happiness can coherently be made the overriding moral goal. Kantians raise this to a point of principle: moral duty and happiness may sometimes coincide, but the pursuit of happiness cannot, in their view, be the goal of ethics. The four examples discussed in section 2 of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals explicitly concern individual happiness and self-love. But each of them also bears on the question of duty versus the maximisation of general happiness, and in each case it becomes evident that, in Kant’s view, moral duty and the pursuit of general happiness conflict (see Kant 1996, pp. 73–5).
- 11.
Carne 2010, pp. 63–5.
- 12.
See for example the British Medical Association 1993, sections 1:6–1:10.
- 13.
Thus we teach schoolchildren about the twentieth-century world wars not because we think it will make it them happier, or even (realistically) because we think it will make it less likely that similar atrocities will occur in the future, but because we think that understanding their history will help them better understand themselves and their world, and that such understanding is valuable in itself.
- 14.
See Code 1995.
- 15.
Ibid., pp. 83–4.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 17.
See Dillon 1992.
- 18.
Ibid., pp. 72–7.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 73, and passim.
- 20.
Downie and Telfer 1969, pp. 15, 33, 38–64.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 29.
- 23.
Kant 1996, pp. 73, 512–22.
- 24.
Ibid., pp. 514–20.
- 25.
Strictly speaking, there is, for Kant , a contradiction in failing to assist others, but it is a contradiction of a less fundamental kind. Kant’s distinction between perfect and imperfect duties is founded, as Allen W. Wood explains (Wood 1999, pp. 82–4), on a distinction among the ways in which the adoption of a subjective principle of action may turn out to be contradictory, and therefore rationally unacceptable. Some subjective principles are such that their adoption would give rise to what Onora Nell (O’Neill ) (Nell 1975, chapter 1) terms a ‘contradiction in conception’ . Such a principle cannot be willed as a universal law because there could be no coherent system of nature structured by the relevant law. Other subjective principles are such that adopting them would give rise to a ‘contradiction in volition’ (Ibid). Here the principle could serve as the basis for a coherent system of nature, but the system in question would not be one with a place for human beings, as they are actually constituted. For example, there is a possible system of nature in which it is a natural law that nobody will help another when they need it – everyone will be ruggedly individualistic. This system would not be intrinsically self-defeating, but it is not a system that human beings as they are actually constituted could successfully inhabit. Human lives are marked by interdependence. Consequently, humans can conceive of, but cannot coherently will, the existence of such a system of nature. From this it follows, for Kant, that the duty to assist others in need is an imperfect rather than a perfect duty . To assist others in need is morally meritorious, but to fail to take an opportunity to do so is never straightforwardly wrong.
- 26.
Downie and Telfer 1969, pp. 25–30, 37.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 28–9.
- 28.
Ibid., chapter 2.
- 29.
Dillon 1992, p. 73.
- 30.
Beauchamp and Childress 2001, pp. 176–94.
- 31.
Plato’s apparently rather light-hearted example of the doctor who is used to treating slaves , who pours scorn on the ‘gentleman’ doctor, who seeks to inform his patients about their condition, at the same time as providing a cure, provides an illuminating alternative perspective here. While the main medical goal may be to achieve a cure, it is readily apparent that: (1) some ‘cures’ necessarily involve education (e.g. concerning diet and exercise), and (2) what might once have been considered acceptable in the treatment of slaves is by no means appropriate for the treatment of free citizens (Plato 1970, pp. 362–3.).
- 32.
See Beauchamp and Childress 2001.
- 33.
Ibid., chapters 3–6.
- 34.
Ibid., chapters 1, 8.
- 35.
Ibid., pp. 18–21.
- 36.
Ibid., pp. 176–94.
- 37.
At the theoretical level, Beauchamp and Childress concede, commensurability is impossible: ‘we reject… the hypothesis that all leading principles in the different major moral theories can be assimilated into a coherent whole’; ‘In this “theory” there is no single unifying principle or concept’ (Beauchamp and Childress 2001, pp. 338, 405).
- 38.
I should point out that Beauchamp and Childress ’s initial presentation of the process of balancing (Ibid., pp. 18–21) very much suggests that they do have the weighing model in mind. The interpretation of balancing hazarded here is motivated by the recognition that other elements of their position seem explicitly to rule out such weighing.
- 39.
Beauchamp and Childress 2001, pp. 2–5.
- 40.
See Tooley 1998.
- 41.
Ibid., pp. 120–1.
- 42.
Ibid., pp. 117–9.
- 43.
Ibid., p. 117.
- 44.
- 45.
Descartes 1986, pp. 19–20.
- 46.
Tooley 1998, p. 117.
- 47.
See Beauchamp 1999.
- 48.
- 49.
Tooley 1998, p. 122.
- 50.
The locus classicus for the use of the term ‘person’ in the moral and political sense is Locke 1924.
- 51.
Tooley 1998, p. 118.
- 52.
Ibid., 1998, p. 125.
- 53.
- 54.
Singer 1995, pp. 1–9.
- 55.
- 56.
Bentham, quoted in Singer 1993, p. 57.
- 57.
Singer gives the example of a slap that would be very painful for a human child but would be much less painful for a horse (Singer 1993, p. 59).
- 58.
Ibid., p. 60. The discomfort of a vaccination injection would be another case in point: the human adult, who understands why the injection is being given, is likely to suffer less, all things considered, than the animal – or even the young child – who doesn’t understand the reason for this painful intervention.
- 59.
- 60.
Regan 2003, p. 93.
- 61.
- 62.
Regan emphasises that to be a subject-of-a-life is to possess equal moral worth to other subjects-of-a-life , but not necessarily to be a moral person in the full sense (Regan 2003, pp. 93–4, 102).
- 63.
See O’Neill 2002.
- 64.
Ibid., chapter 4.
- 65.
O’Neill 2002, sections 4.1, 5.2.
- 66.
Code 1995, pp. 83–4.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 68.
Ibid., pp. 83–4.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 70.
Kant 1996, pp. 83–5.
- 71.
Of course, doing so might not always result in similar decisions being made – for example, where the principle of beneficence could be meaningfully employed, but that of respect for autonomy could not, it seems much more likely that we will find ourselves favouring euthanasia, in cases of serious incurable disease.
- 72.
Consider the case of a vet working in a research laboratory. It is simple bad faith to pretend that we cannot possibly know how animals feel about certain research procedures. As Steven Sapontzis observes (cited in Rollin 1998), it is easy enough to find out what they would prefer – open the cages.
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Lucas, P. (2011). Fragmentation. In: Ethics and Self-Knowledge. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1560-8_2
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