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Summary
The capacity to suffer grants animals a right not to be harmed. This ethical framework prioritizes community beneficence and nurturing over libertarian autonomy, impacting clinical ethics decisions.
Area of Science:
- Bioethics
- Moral Philosophy
- Animal Rights
Background:
- Modern libertarianism often grounds community obligations in the right to autonomy.
- This perspective contrasts with an ethics centered on the capacity to suffer.
Purpose of the Study:
- To critique libertarian ethics by proposing an alternative social contract.
- To explore the implications of suffering-based ethics for clinical decision-making.
Main Methods:
- Philosophical argumentation and critique of existing ethical theories.
- Development of a moral calculus based on the capacity to suffer.
Main Results:
- The capacity to suffer establishes a prima facie right against causing suffering for all sentient beings.
- Community obligations include active beneficence (nurturing) and nonmaleficence.
- A social contract based on mutual nurturing is proposed as an alternative to autonomy-based contracts.
Conclusions:
- Clinical ethics obligations shift when the capacity to suffer is lost or absent.
- A "calculus" of moral worth can be developed, weighing obligations to individuals with diminished capacity to suffer against other primary duties.
- Grounding ethics in the capacity to suffer, though potentially "thin," stimulates critical discussion on the nature of "good" in clinical decisions.