Moral patient
An entity that can be benefited or harmed but is not a moral agent.
What it commits you to
A moral patient has interests without agency: it can be benefited and harmed but cannot be held responsible. The distinction is what lets an ethics give weight to animals, to patients, and — in Metzinger's argument — to artificial systems capable of suffering. It is also the weakest point in any ethics that assumes agency is the entry ticket to moral consideration.
Which realms lean on this
Ethics is where the realms argue about what counts: the parties, the pleasures, the duties, the care.
ethics · 9 realms — The Benthamite Foundry, The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Stoic Ramparts, The Ubuntu Weave, The Virtue Garden.
Canon that discusses this
modern · 2006
Ethics of Care
Held develops the care perspective into a full ethical position and argues against the priority claim of justice: obligations arise inside particular relationships, are partial, and are not derivable from general principles. The book that made partiality respectable in moral theory. The excerpt below paraphrases Held's thesis rather than quoting the 2006 book.
modern · 1950
Computing Machinery and Intelligence
Turing replaces 'can machines think' with a behavioural test, then spends most of the paper answering his own opponents and proposing a trainable machine with sensory apparatus, a system of registers, and deliberate moral engineering of what he calls slave-maid behaviour.
primary · 1907
Pragmatism
Eight lectures given at the Lowell Institute in November and December 1906 and published the following May. Dewey moves the question of meaning from reference to consequence and argues that the moral life is a method of inquiry rather than a code, which makes intellectual humility a methodological requirement.
primary · 1863
Utilitarianism
Mill defends the intuitions Bentham's calculus was meant to replace: higher and lower pleasures, the justice principle that each person counts as one, and the liberty principle against the tyranny of the majority. Published the year after the Origin of Species, and much of the argument is a reply to the comparison.
See also
Moral status
ethicsThe property of counting as a party that can be owed something and can be wronged.
Speciesism
ethicsTreating an entity's species membership as the reason for its moral consideration.
Care ethics
ethicsObligations arise inside relationships, are partial, and resist general principles.
Dignity
ethicsA standing that cannot be earned, lost, or traded, and so cannot be the output of an objective.