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The Necessity of Design
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
In Jeff McMahan's The Ethics of Killing, an example involving a congenitally retarded child and a dog of similar cognitive ability is used to attempt to show that arguments about the potential to manifest traits are morally irrelevant to the abortion debate. McMahan argues that our intuition to enhance the child rather than the dog may be irrational. I explain that the only way to maintain common-sense ethics and strongly held intuitions about function and dysfunction is to accept a theory of design and to think, not in terms of “species” but, in terms of kinds of things that are designed to function in specific ways, where the failure of an individual of the kind to manifest characteristic functions is indicative of a privation rather than evidence that the individual is not – or not yet – a member of that kind and thus not as morally significant as members of the kind.
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- Copyright © The author 2008. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
References
1 This example is found in section 6.3 of McMahan's The Ethics of Killing.
2 “Speciesism” is generally regarded as a bad thing due to its arbitrariness. For a full discussion of “speciesism,” see Singer's, Peter Animal Liberation (The New York Review, 1975)Google Scholar.
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5 For example: God and angels are persons but are not human beings.
6 For example: injury, Alzheimer's disease, retardation, etc.
7 It could be said that I am assuming that which I seek to prove, namely that there is something wrong with the retarded child.
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13 IBID Boorse, p. 562
14 This idea comes from David Hull's article A Matter of Individuality.
15 This idea comes from Philip Kitcher's article Species.
16 I am indebted to David Hershenov for this idea.
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23 IBID, Kitcher
24 IBID, Kitcher
25 IBID, Kitcher
26 IBID, Kitcher
27 IBID, Kitcher
28 IBID, Kitcher
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