Who wrote the circle of life
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Many factors enabled the moral circle to expand in the past They invite us to envision a possible future in which we’ve stretched our moral universe still further. They say there’s no reason to assume that once we’ve included all human beings, the circle has expanded as far as it should. These are questions that activists for the rights of animals, nature, and robots all grapple with as they use the idea of the moral circle to mount their arguments. What happens when different beings have competing needs? How do we decide whose rights take precedence? The idea of expanding humanity’s moral circle raises knotty questions.
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What about a robot we may invent in the future that seems just as sentient as chimpanzees and elephants, despite being made of silicon? Maybe you think it would be wrong to discriminate on the basis of substrate, so we need the legal system to recognize robot rights, a theme Northern Illinois University media studies professor David Gunkel explores in his new book of that name. Lake Erie won legal personhood status in February, and recent years have seen rights granted to rivers and forests in New Zealand, India, and Colombia.Īnd then there are some who argue that even machines can be granted rights. Maybe you think we should secure rights for natural ecosystems, as the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is doing. Some people think sentience is the wrong litmus test they argue we should include anything that’s alive or that supports living things. If that’s the case, what degree of sentience is required to make the cut? Maybe you think we should secure legal rights for chimpanzees and elephants - as the Nonhuman Rights Project is aiming to do - but not for, say, shrimp. Many people think that sentience, the ability to feel sensations like pain and pleasure, is the deciding factor.
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If you’re tempted to dismiss that notion as absurd, ask yourself: How do you decide whether an entity deserves rights? Should they all get rights similar to the ones you enjoy? For example, you have the right not to be unjustly imprisoned (liberty) and the right not to be experimented on (bodily integrity). Now it’s cropping up more often in activist circles as new social movements use it to make the case for granting rights to more and more entities. It was introduced by historian William Lecky in the 1860s and popularized by philosopher Peter Singer in the 1980s. The moral circle is a fundamental concept among philosophers, psychologists, activists, and others who think seriously about what motivates people to do good. As they were brought into the circle, those people won rights. Over the centuries, it’s expanded to include many people who were previously left out of it. The circle is the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of moral consideration. There’s a concept from philosophy that describes this evolution - it’s called humanity’s expanding moral circle. Commonly accepted now unthinkable a couple of centuries ago. The same is true for the belief that black people should have the same rights as white people. But just a couple of centuries ago, that idea would’ve been dismissed as absurd. Everyone reading this sentence likely (hopefully!) agrees that women deserve the same rights as men.