Intuition and Kagan's Hierarchicalism

UCalgary Philosophy Doctoral student Xihe Ouyang's article "Intuition and Kagan's Hierarchicalism" has been published in the journal Utilitas, one of the leading international journals in ethics (Cambridge University Press). 

In this paper, Xihe argues against Shelly Kagan's moral status hierarchicalism. Unlike unitarianism, which suggests that every being with moral standing has the same moral status, hierarchicalism holds that there is more than one moral status, and that the moral status of some beings is higher than that of others. According to hierarchicalism, the moral status of an individual is determined by the extent to which the individual has (has now, might/will have, or could have had) certain psychological capacities. Roughly speaking, the greater one’s relevant psychological capacities, the higher their moral status. Moreover, this view has significant practical implications, as it suggests that typically, compared with beings of lower moral status, a being with higher moral status has more or stronger relevant rights and/or their interests carry greater weight in moral calculus.

Xihe provides a twofold critique of Kagan's hierarchicalism in this paper.  On the one hand, he argues against the primary argument in favor of Kagan's view (the argument from distribution) by challenging the key intuition on which the argument relies. He suggests that the key underlying intuition is, in all likelihood, rooted in the bias of the powerful. By challenging the validity of this intuition, the paper undermines the force of the argument from distribution, thereby reducing the appeal of Kagan's stance.

On the other hand, Xihe argues that a good reason to reject Kagan's account of moral status is that he fails to explain away the counterintuitive result of his theory in the case of normal variation. Prima facie, hierarchicalism implies that even among cognitively unimpaired adults, there exists variation in moral status. This result seems counterintuitive and consequently casts doubt on hierarchicalism. Xihe argues that Kagan’s two attempts to solve this problem were unsuccessful. They either contain the unacceptable presupposition that there are indeed differences among ordinary unimpaired people’s moral statuses or they are predictably problematic and lead to the unsatisfactory result of moral status relativism.

Aside from moral status and moral standing, the paper also touches on some other important philosophical topics, such as distributive justice, moral intuition, and moral relativism. A revised version of this paper will be included as a chapter in Xihe's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Calgary, which centers on egalitarianism.