See my personal website here.

My research focusses on moral status, the basic equality of humans, and our duties to animals.

I am developing a new account of moral status – of what makes a human, animal or other entity matter morally for its own sake. The account provides answers to these questions: what properties underpin moral status? Do animals matter as much as human beings? And what does equal moral status entail? How, for instance, does moral status relate to the ethics of killing?

We need a new account of moral status because we face an unsolved puzzle. We tend to believe that humans matter more than animals. Philosophers typically explain this intuition by observing that only humans have the capacity for rationality, autonomy, or some other advanced capacity. But this view is at odds with the idea that humans are one another’s equals regardless of how rational they are. I think we must either abandon the idea that humans matter more than animals, or the idea that humans are equals.

I offer a response to this apparent dilemma that preserves a commitment to human equality as well as many hierarchical intuitions. We can abandon the idea that humans matter more than animals, since we don’t need a hierarchy of status to explain the intuitive idea that humans sometimes have stronger entitlements than animals. For instance, I show how we can defend the idea that humans virtually always have more robust rights not to be killed than animals without recourse to a hierarchy of status. And by rejecting status hierarchies, we can explain the basic moral equality that holds among humans. This, I argue, is an advantage that a non-hierarchical view has over many popular hierarchical views of the moral status of humans and animals. I also give an account of which properties underpin human moral equality, appealing to sentience but also other foundational mental capacities.

My view of moral status can help answer many applied questions. For example, I apply the framework to questions of how society should respond to the killing of farmed animals.