"Rupert" > wrote
> On Jul 8, 6:30 am, "Dutch" > wrote:

[..]

> Okay, let's look at what he says:
>
> "On the conceptual level Saugstad gets this result by distinguishing
> two kinds of capacities: capabilities and abilities. In order to be a
> moral agent, a person must be able to take a moral responsibility for
> his or her actions, and to be answerable for them. This requires not
> only the capabilities of free will, reason and a linguistic
> competence; but also the operative ability of realising these
> capabilities in practice. However, a subject may have the capabilities
> of moral agency without having the operative abilities. In that case
> the subject is a moral person without being a moral agent, since moral
> personhood is grounded on the actual capability and not on the
> potential ability."
>
> The problem with this for me is that it leaves me in the dark about
> what it is to have the capabilities of free will, reason, and
> linguistic competence.

I don't see what is mysterious about those capabilities, they are apparent
when they manifest.

> It's totally unclear to me in what sense
> newborn infants have these capabilities and nonhuman animals don't.

We know from experience that newborn infants have them because we have
observed many, to put it mildly, mature and develop them into operative
abilities, while at the same time we have yet to witness a nonhuman animal
do so.

> He
> really needs to elaborate. I mean, Chomsky has this hypothesis that
> linguistic competence is somehow innate from birth, and only humans
> have it. It's a trendy hypothesis at the moment, but I've read a book
> which is highly critical of it. That might give one sense in which
> infants have the "capability" for linguistic competence and nonhuman
> animals don't. But we need to be clearer about what sort of scientific
> hypotheses have to be vindicated in order for this argument to work.

The science is in the laboratory of everyday life. Observations of countless
billions of animals and humans leads to this inescapable conclusion.

I
> would say he is more raising questions about the argument from
> marginal cases than giving a rebuttal, outlining a scientific research
> programme which might undermine it. But he needs to get more specific
> about what kind of scientific results he's hoping for here. Perhaps
> Saugstad's thesis will be more illuminating about what exactly the
> proposal is.

There is no further "research" necessary, all that was needed was to propose
the distinction between the notions of capability and ability and test the
idea for plausibility. It turns out that it is completely plausible and
descriptive of the way we think about rights. It even refutes the old saw
"what if non-human aliens landed.." When you combine that with the idea that
animals are accorded consideration based upon a wide range of levels of
sentience eariler in the essay we have a comprehensive way to understand our
moral thinking. I would submit that even "Animal Liberation" type thinking
is not totally inconsistent with this approach, although the AMC is not.