Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T00:46:12.743Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ethical Embodiment and Moral Reasoning: A Challenge to Peter Singer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Abstract

This paper addresses Peter Singer's claim that cognitive ability can function as a universal criterion for measuring moral worth. I argue that Singer fails to adequately represent cognitive capacity as the object of moral knowledge at stake in his theory. He thus fails to put forth credible knowledge claims, which undermines both the trustworthiness of his moral theories and the morality of the actions called for by these theories. I situate Singer's methods within feminist critiques of moral reasoning and moral epistemology, and argue that Singer's methods are problematic for moral reasoning because they abstract from their object valuable contextual features. I further develop this claim by showing the importance of embodiment for the construal of objects of moral knowledge. Finally, I develop the moral and scholarly implications of this critique. By showing that the abstract, universal methods of reasoning Singer employs cannot credibly construe the objects of ethical inquiry, I call into question the validity of these methods as a means to moral knowledge in general. Furthermore, since moral reasoning takes place within an embodied moral landscape, it is itself a moral enterprise. Singer's moral reasoning, and ours, must be held accountable for its knowledge claims as well as its concrete effects in the world.

Type
Further Essays on Embodiment
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. The generalized and concrete other: The Kohlberg‐Gilligan controversy and moral theory. In Women and moral theory, ed. Kittay, Eva and Meyers, Diana T.Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the self: Gender, community, and postmodernism in contemporary ethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Code, Lorraine. 1991. What can she know: Feminist theory and the construction of knowledge. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 2002. Narratives of responsibility and agency: Reading Margaret Walker's moral understandings. Hypatia 17 (1): 156–73.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1993. Rethinking standpoint epistemology. In Feminist epistemologies, ed. Alcoff, Linda and Potter, Elizabeth. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. The Cambridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kittay, Eva. 2005. On the margins of moral personhood. Ethics 116 (1): 100–31.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kittay, Eva. 2009. The personal is philosophical is political: A philosopher and mother of a cognitively disabled person sends notes from the battlefield. Metaphilosophy 40 (3‐4): 607–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahan, Jeff. 2003. The ethics of killing: Problems at the margins of life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McMahan, Jeff. 2009. Cognitive disability and cognitive enhancement. In Metaphilosophy 40 (3‐4): 582605.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherwin, Susan. 1989. Feminist and medical ethics: Two different approaches to contextual ethics. Hypatia 4 (2): 5772.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Singer, Peter. 1979. Practical ethics. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Singer, Peter. 2009. Speciesism and moral status. Metaphilosophy 40 (3‐4): 567–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tong, Rosemarie. 2004. Feminist approaches to bioethics. In Handbook of bioethics: Taking stock of the field from a philosophical perspective, ed. Khushf, George. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic.Google Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 1998. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar