Jeff McMahan on Moral Status (originally on Bioethics Bites)

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• 00:03

  This is bioethics bytes with me, David.

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  Edmonds and me, Nigel Warburton.

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  Bioethics Bytes is made in association with Oxford's Uhiro Centre for Practical Ethics and made possible by grant from the Wellcome Trust.

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  For more information about bioethics bytes, go to www.

• 00:19

  Dot practicalethics dot ox, dot ac dot Uk or to itunesu.

• 00:26

  A stone on the beach we assume has no moral status.

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  We can kick or hammer the stone and we've done the stone no harm.

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  Typical adult human beings do have moral status.

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  We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman.

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  Often contentious moral issues such as embryo research or abortion, or whether to turn off a life support machine, turn on disagreement about the moral status of the embryo, fetus or individual.

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  So the key questions are who or what has moral status and why?

• 00:57

  Geoff McMahon of Rutgers University takes on these tricky questions.

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  Jeff McMahon, welcome to bioethics Bites.

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  Thank you very much.

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  The topic we're going to focus on today is humans and moral status.

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  Let's start at the beginning.

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  What is moral status?

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  If it's okay with you, I'm going to call it moral status.

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  In my view, moral status is a set of intrinsic properties possessed by an individual that grounds the attribution of rights, or that grounds a requirement of respect for that individual that is in some way independent of that individual's interests.

• 01:39

  What do you mean by intrinsic?

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