Wandile Ganya

In this article, I consider the implications arising from the commonplace premise that the nature of being admits in ontological kinds. That is, there are actual, fundamentally different genera of being in the world, namely human and non-human beings. That for entities to be considered suitable for valuation under the same ethical rubric, it must be assumed that the general character of their mental states is commensurate. However, if we accent that it is indeterminable what kind of being an entity is without access to the phenomenological character of its experiences, then it may be argued that the ethical standards for non-human animals which follow from our inductive descriptions will always remain a matter of opinion, expressed from a particular point of view delimited within the metaphysical commitments derived from a human ontology of being.

This paper aims to ground an argument for a widened scope in regard to the motivations or reasons accounting for moral considerability. Such a scope, it is here argued, would account not only for human persons but animals, ecosystems, hypothetical artificial moral agents and so-called Martians as well. And it does so by first distinguishing between two categories of entities: members of group X, and entities not of group X. This basic distinction is then employed to articulate the groundwork for a two-level, multimodal account of moral considerability and gives signification to the idea of de facto moral friends. To achieve this, it appropriates much of its central tenets from the affluence of African philosophical, and intellectual heritage, on this occasion, the notion of Ubuntu. Lastly, this paper assumes the viewpoint of metaethical X-centrism, alternatively, metaethical anthropocentrism in constructing moral claims.