Benjamin Elmore

In this paper, I will give a defense of the argument from marginal cases as a way of defending the moral standing of nonhuman animals. The work of Martha Nussbaum and Shelly Kagan may be used in an attempt criticize the argument, but I will attempt to block moves to do this that are based on Nussbaum’s species-norm and Kagan’s modal personism. Christine Korgaard has directly attacked the argument from marginal cases, but I will argue that the version I offer is resistant to her criticisms because sentience is a property that even she takes to be very important.

In this article, I will rebut Amartya Sen's arguments that John Rawls's political philosophy gives us a form of closed rather than open impartiality. I will argue that there is plenty of room within Rawls's own theory of justice to accommodate the requirements of open impartiality. I will appeal to the way the original position is used in public reason and the method of reflective equilibrium to defend Rawls. Given the way that it fits into Rawls's broader theory, the original position should not be construed as a form of closed impartiality, doomed to be infected unduly by parochial cultural values. Rawls's contractualism is more defensible and versatile than Sen envisions. Some elements of Sen's argument have been briefly addressed before, but this article provides the only sustained, systematic treatment of this important issue.

In this paper, I will reconstruct and evaluate Martha Nussbaum’s critique of John Rawls on the political status of nonhuman animals. Nussbaum’s criticisms go beyond pointing out the inadequacy of Rawls’s own view on the issue of nonhuman animals. Rather, she thinks that the Rawlsian social contract cannot plausibly be used to adequately construe humans as having duties of justice to nonhuman animals. I will review attempts in the secondary literature on Rawls and nonhuman animals that are most relevant to Nussbaum’s criticisms and argue that there are plausible resources to defend Rawls against these objections, at least in terms of the possibility of his theory being modified to go beyond his own view in a helpful way. The conclusion is that Nussbaum’s arguments are not decisive against Rawls, so her own theory will be a rival rather than a nonrival to the Rawlsian social contract tradition on the issue of duties of justice to nonhuman animals. Even so, the theories can be allies in advocating for animal rights.

In this paper, I will critique Paul Draper’s recent model of God’s motivational structure, according to which God can make hard choices. I will argue that this model illegitimately treats value in a purely teleological way, as something to be promoted. Following T.M. Scanlon’s work on value theory, when we consider the fact that value is to be respected rather than merely promoted, this realization will significantly foreclose on the possible cases in which hard choices can conceivably be made by God. Most importantly, I challenge the idea that God can face hard choices between aesthetic and moral value in the way Draper suggests.

In this thesis, William Alston’s influential defense of divine command theory is critically evaluated. It is argued that Alston, in positing evaluative particularism, undermines his defense because moral particularism, a rival theory of moral obligation, follows from evaluative particularism. Furthermore, the moral particularist need not deny that God has moral obligations. Even if evaluative particularism did not entail moral particularism, it fails to makes God’s commands non-arbitrary, contrary to Alston’s claims. On divine command theory, God does not make commands for moral reasons, which is a fundamental principle of moral agency, necessary for any moral action to be non-arbitrary. Also, the divine nature does not uniquely pick out particular good actions to be obligatory. It is also objected that Alston’s evaluative particularism posits a God which is either conceptually incoherent or non-existent, demonstrated by an evidential argument from evil given in the paper.

In How to Count Animals, more or less, Shelly Kagan sketches and argues for a hierarchical account of moral status. Although the book is fairly lengthy at 304 pages of text, Kagan is correct in calling it a sketch, since what this book provides us with is a foray into one aspect that a comprehensive ethical theory must include, in his view, if it is to be plausible. Even so, the work that he does, if one accepts hierarchy, opens up many different avenues to be further pursued in animal ethics.

In this essay, I argue that contractualism, even when it is actually used to construe our moral duties towards non-human animals, does not do so naturally. We can infer from our experiences with companion animals that we owe moral duties to them because of special relationships we are in with them. We can further abstract that we owe general moral duties to non-human animals because they are the kinds of beings that we can have relationships with, and because of the capacities that make possible this relational capacity. This type of approach better explains our duties to non-human animals and other non-rational beings than does the trustee account that Scanlon leaves room for in his contractualism.