Does the moral badness of pain depend on who feels it? A common, but generally only implicitly stated view, is that it does not. This view, ‘unitarianism’, maintains that the same interests of different beings should count equally in our moral calculus. Shelly Kagan’s project in How to Count Animals, more or less (2019) is to reject this common view, and develop an alternative to it: a hierarchical view of moral status, on which the badness of pain does depend on who feels it. In this review essay, we critically examine Kagan’s argument for status hierarchy. In particular, we reject two of the central premises in his argument: that (1) moral standing is ultimately grounded in agency and (2) that unitarianism is overdemanding. We conclude that moral status may, despite Kagan’s compelling argument to the contrary, not be hierarchical.

中文翻译：

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所有动物都是平等的，但有些比其他动物多？

痛苦的道德坏处是否取决于谁感受到它？一个普遍但通常只是隐含陈述的观点是，它没有。这种“一元论”的观点认为，不同存在者的相同利益在我们的道德计算中应该同等重要。雪莉·卡根 (Shelly Kagan) 在《如何计算动物》(How to Count Animals, 2019) 中的项目或多或少地拒绝了这种普遍观点，并开发了一种替代观点：道德地位的等级观，疼痛的严重程度确实取决于谁感觉到它。在这篇评论文章中，我们批判性地审查了卡根关于地位等级的论点。特别是，我们反对他的论点中的两个核心前提：(1) 道德立场最终建立在能动性之上；(2) 一元论要求过高。我们得出的结论是，尽管卡根提出了相反的令人信服的论点，但道德地位可能不是等级分明的。