Daniel Elbro

Two approaches to grounding moral standing: interests-first or value-first?

Do non-human animals have moral standing? Work on this question has focused on choosing the right grounding property (for example, personhood or sentience) while little attention has been paid to the various ways that the connection between grounding properties and moral standing has been explained. In this paper, I address that gap by offering a fresh way to approach the debate over the grounds of moral standing, including a novel taxonomy of positions, and argue that one kind of position, which takes a ‘value-first’ approach, is preferable to the other, which takes an ‘interests-first’ approach. According to value-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have properties that make them valuable. According to interests-first accounts, some individuals have moral standing because they have interests, and any interest must always be taken into account. I argue that we should prefer value-first accounts because they engage directly with the problem the concept of moral standing is employed to solve, and because interests-first accounts cannot meet their explanatory burdens without begging the question against value-first accounts.

Agency as the Grounds for Moral Standing

My thesis (which you can see here) asks whether we have direct obligations to non-human animals—that is, whether they have moral standing—and if so, what are the grounds of their moral standing? I argue for three main claims:

1. Although many influential accounts of the moral standing of animals appeal to the capacity for sentience as their grounds, this appeal cannot do the explanatory work required of it.
2. Animals, both human and non-human, have the capacity for volitional agency: we have control over what we do, and therefore can (and must) make choices by acting on our desires.
3. There is good reason to think that volitional agency is the grounds of the moral standing of human and non-human animals

Here is review I wrote for the KCL Philosophy blog of a talk by Cécile Fabre.

I appeared on a KCL PPE student podcast, The Lion's Share, discussing the ethics of true crime.