CAS PH 150 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Wisdom, Sentience, Serengeti
29 Mar 2017
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Major philosophical questions and terms for animal rights. Terms: direct moral standing: something deserves moral consideration in itself, individually, indirect moral standing: something has moral standing in virtue of its relationship with someone else that has direct moral standing (not in its own right) Ex: my phone has indirect moral standing because of my ownership of it. It is wrong to smash it because it would be hurtful to me not because you are doing an injustice to the phone: suffering. Philosophers focus on whether you can cause suffering for fun, for a purpose, or not at all: sapience: intelligence, reasoning, rationality. The ability to reason about moral issues: sentience: can experience sensations based on experiences. For kant, a good will is the only thing of value: doing the right thing for the right reasons. Therefore you need to reason about morality and act out of morality: kant believed that moral sapience sets humans apart from animals.
