Abstract
Abstract
Much of the literature on basic equality has focused on the question of what grounds the equal moral status of persons, typically understood as fully competent adults. However, less has been said about what justifies the equal moral status of those human beings who do not hold a wide range of sophisticated cognitive capacities, such as severely cognitively disabled human beings and children. This chapter contributes to filling this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of children’s moral equality. Specifically, I argue that children’s moral equality is entailed by a commitment to a kind of respect which requires providing children with those social conditions that foster their development into well-adjusted adults who hold a proper and stable capacity for moral personality. This is because unequal consideration and treatment precludes, or at least is a significant obstacle to, the provision of some goods that are crucial to the cultivation of a proper and stable capacity for moral personality. Children’s moral equality, then, is a constitutive requirement of what is owed to them qua moral status-holders.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
Reference43 articles.
1. Aristotle. 1984. ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes, 3718–4009. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2. Arneson, R. J. 2015. ‘Basic Equality: Neither Acceptable nor Rejectable’. In Do All Persons Have Equal Moral Worth?: On ‘Basic Equality’ and Equal Respect and Concern, edited by Uwe Steinhoff, 30–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Friendship, Transactive Dialogues, and the Development of Scientific Reasoning;Social Development,1993
4. Autonomy and Oppressive Socialization;Social Theory and Practice,1991
5. Brighouse, H. 2002. ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have?’. In The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by D. Archard and C. M. Macleod, 31–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.