PHI 1102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Noble Eightfold Path, Speciesism, Sentience
29 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Wrong action is not reduced by the virtues or by something that does not reflect the virtues. To conduct right action, you then must poses these admirable character traits (virtues) You can mimic these virtues, but you will still not be acting right. Right action is what the virtuous person would do in a particular circumstance. It uses the ideal of a hypothetical virtuous person as an example of what the right action is. If you do what this virtuous person would do, then you are acting in the right. On human rights- we attribute rights to human with greatly differing psychological capacities. But such humans share something: they are all experiencing subjects of a life. Some possibilities: sentience, self-awareness, the capacity for self-directed activity. These psychological capacities are shared by many non-humans animals, including ones commonly used in research. These capacities give such non-human rights, and thereby the special protection that rights bring.
