On Being Morally Considerable

Modern moral philosophy has taken ethical egoism as its principle foil for developing what can fairly be called a humanistic perspective on value and obligation. That is, both Kantian and Humean approaches to ethics tend to view the philosophical challenge as that of providing an epistemological and motivational generalization of an agent’s natural self-interested concern. This chapter discusses four distinctions that must be kept clear needing attention. The first is that between moral rights and moral considerability. A second distinction is that between what might be called a criterion of moral considerability and a criterion of moral significance. The third distinction turns on the difference between questions of intelligibility and questions of normative substance. The fourth is that there is another respect in which the present inquiry involves framework questions rather than questions of application.