The central themes of my research are moral status, basic equality, and our duties to animals.

My doctoral thesis asks which entities matter morally for their own sake, and why. It aims to provide a new answer to two questions: what are the grounds of moral status? And how is moral status distributed among humans and animals?

These questions generate a puzzle, and so have not been answered satisfactorily. The puzzle arises from the tension between two commonly held ethical intuitions. The hierarchical intuition is that humans matter morally more than animals. And the egalitarian intuition is that humans matter equally amongst themselves. But explanations of hierarchy tend to undermine equality. For instance, one popular explanation of why humans matter more than animals is that humans have a greater capacity for rational thought. But if that’s so, can we account for the rights of human beings without rational capacity? If not, we might forge a more inclusive view of who matters by moving away from capacities like rationality, and asking whether moral status might be grounded in less hifalutin capacities such as the capacity for experience of a positive or negative valence. But then what of the common idea that humans matter more than the other animals? If we need to relinquish the idea that humans matter more than animals, how revisionary need that be for our ethics in general?

I am developing a new account of moral status which can solve this puzzle in a theoretically defensible way. I aim to leverage the account to help illuminate the nature of some of our duties to animals, in an individual sense and a political sense too.