Agency, Personhood and the Metaethical Grounds of Moral Status

Debates about moral status focus on whether personhood or the capacity for suffering is necessary and sufficient for being a moral rights bearer. Debates about personhood take the capacity for autonomy or, more broadly, agency to stand in for personhood. Some of these views even argue that agency is an alternative ground for moral status (Liao 2010; Regan 2004/1984), while others equivocate personhood and agency (Korsgaard 2009; 2011; 2012; 2013). Yet for this argument to work, it is necessary to show why the fact that an individual is an agent renders beings who possess such a capacity moral rights bearers. This requires a theory that treats agency as sufficient for moral standing rather than merely a necessary condition for personhood. In this paper, I provide such an argument. To do so, I show that ‘agent’ represents an independent moral ground for moral status because it is an evaluatively thick term.