Moral circle expansion is the process of increasing the number and type of entities given moral consideration over time and potentially into the future.
The general idea of moral inclusion was discussed by ancient philosophers and since the 19th century has inspired social movements related to
human rights
Human rights are moral principles or normsJames Nickel, with assistance from Thomas Pogge, M.B.E. Smith, and Leif Wenar, 13 December 2013, Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyHuman Rights Retrieved 14 August 2014 for certain standards of hu ...
and
animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their Utilitarianism, utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding s ...
. Especially in relation to
animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their Utilitarianism, utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding s ...
, the philosopher
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...
has written about the subject since the 1970s, and since 2017 so has the think tank
Sentience Institute, part of the 21st-century
effective altruism movement. There is significant debate on whether humanity actually has an expanding moral circle, considering topics such as the lack of a uniform border of growing moral consideration and the disconnect between people's moral attitudes and their behavior. Research into the phenomenon is ongoing.
History
The moral circle was discussed as early as the 2nd century by
Stoic
Stoic may refer to:
* An adherent of Stoicism; one whose moral quality is associated with that school of philosophy
* STOIC, a programming language
* ''Stoic'' (film), a 2009 film by Uwe Boll
* ''Stoic'' (mixtape), a 2012 mixtape by rapper T-Pain
* ...
philosopher
Hierocles, who described in ''On Appropriate Acts'' the concentric social circles of a human being, for whom duty to the innermost circle was strongest.
The concept was developed more fully by
William Lecky in his 1869 work ''History of European morals from Augustus to Charlemagne''.
Edward Payson Evans
Edward Payson Evans (December 8, 1831 – March 6, 1917) was an American scholar, linguist and early advocate for animal rights. He is best known for his 1906 book on animal trials, ''The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals.'' ...
, an early advocate for
animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their Utilitarianism, utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding s ...
, published ''
Evolutional Ethics and Animal Psychology''in 1897. He argued that humans need to move past
anthropocentric
Anthropocentrism (; ) is the belief that human beings are the central or most important entity in the universe. The term can be used interchangeably with humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human exceptionalism. ...
conceptions that view humans as fundamentally different and separate to all other beings and that, as a result, humans have no moral obligations toward them. The
utilitarian
In ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximize happiness and well-being for all affected individuals.
Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different charac ...
philosopher and animal rights advocate
J. Howard Moore
John Howard Moore (December 4, 1862 – June 17, 1916) was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator, humanitarian and socialist. He is considered to be an early, yet neglected, proponent of animal rights and ethical vegetarianism, and was a ...
argued for a
sentiocentric philosophy in his 1906 book
''The Universal Kinship'', asserting that humans should care about all sentient life based on shared
evolutionary
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
kinship:
The partially emancipated human being who extends his moral sentiments to all the members of his own species, but denies to all other species the justice and humanity he accords to his own, is making on a larger scale the same ethical mess of it as the savage. The only consistent attitude, since Darwin established the unity of life (and the attitude we shall assume, if we ever become really civilised), is the attitude of ''universal gentleness and humanity''.
The concept was notably developed by the utilitarian philosopher
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...
in his 1981 book
''The Expanding Circle'', which is titled after the concept of moral circle expansion. This book sets out a common theory of the expanding circle: humans started by only valuing those most similar to themselves, such as their family or social group, but then humans began to value other residents of their nation and finally humanity as a whole; the same process of expansion is now taking place with respect to
animal rights
Animal rights is the philosophy according to which many or all Animal consciousness, sentient animals have moral worth that is independent of their Utilitarianism, utility for humans, and that their most basic interests—such as avoiding s ...
. Singer also references the expanding circle in some of his other works.
Moral circle expansion has also been addressed by some later writers, whose definitions of it may not be exactly the same as Singer's.
Robert Wright responds to Singer with a more critical conception in his 1994 book ''
The Moral Animal'':
The most cynical explanation of why so many sages have urged an expanded moral compass is the one set out near the beginning of this chapter: a large compass expands the power of the sages doing the urging.
T. J. Kasperbauer's 2018 book ''Subhuman'' defines the expansion of the moral circle in reference to an increase both in the number of things considered moral patients and how many kinds of things are considered moral patients. Kasperbauer also adds in that this degree of consideration for things newly in the moral circle must be large enough to be important.
The
effective altruism movement, particularly the
Sentience Institute, regularly discusses moral circle expansion as a part of its philosophy. Launched in 2017, the Sentience Institute was founded as a spinoff of the Effective Altruism Foundation as a "think tank dedicated to the expansion of humanity's moral circle." Its website provides a more detailed model of the circle itself, including concentric circles, with the innermost denoting full moral consideration and the outermost only minimal moral consideration, with some things lying totally outside any of the circles. They additionally distinguish between a moral circle for attitudes and a moral circle for actions and between a societal moral circle and between an individual moral circle. Moral circle expansion as a concept per se was developed in a 2021 paper in the journal ''Futures'' entitled "Moral Circle Expansion: A Promising Strategy to Impact the Far Future" by Sentience Institute co-founder
Jacy Reese Anthis
Jacy Reese Anthis ( ; born December 16, 1992), who has written under the name Jacy Reese, is an American social scientist, writer and co-founder of the Sentience Institute with Kelly Witwicki. He previously worked as a Senior Fellow at Sentien ...
and philosopher Eze Paez.
Claimed expansions
Many different entities have arguably entered, and sometimes exited, the moral circle at some point during human history:
* Humans of other genders (
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
,
women's rights
Women's rights are the rights and entitlements claimed for women and girls worldwide. They formed the basis for the women's rights movement in the 19th century and the feminist movements during the 20th and 21st centuries. In some countries, ...
,
opposition to the patriarchy,
transgender rights
A transgender person is someone whose gender identity is inconsistent or not culturally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth and also with the gender role that is associated with that sex. They may have, or may intend to establi ...
)
* Humans of other nationalities (
xenophobia
Xenophobia () is the fear or dislike of anything which is perceived as being foreign or strange. It is an expression of perceived conflict between an in-group and out-group and may manifest in suspicion by the one of the other's activities, a ...
)
* Humans of other races and ethnic groups (
anti-racism
Anti-racism encompasses a range of ideas and political actions which are meant to counter racial prejudice, systemic racism, and the oppression of specific racial groups. Anti-racism is usually structured around conscious efforts and deliberate ...
)
* Humans of other families/tribes/social units
* Non-human animals, especially mammals; these are still believed to be entering the moral circle (
anti-speciesism,
sentiocentrism
Sentiocentrism, sentio-centrism, or sentientism is an ethical view that places sentient individuals (i.e., basically conscious beings) at the center of moral concern. Both humans and other sentient individuals have rights and/or interests that ...
)
* Ecosystems and species (
rights of nature
Rights of nature or Earth rights is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges twentie ...
)
* Plants (
plant rights)
* Artificial intelligence (
robot rights
The ethics of artificial intelligence is the branch of the ethics of technology specific to artificially intelligent systems. It is sometimes divided into a concern with the moral behavior of ''humans'' as they design, make, use and treat artifi ...
)
* Future people (
longtermism
Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. It is an important concept in effective altruism and serves as a primary motivation for efforts that claim to reduce existential risks to humanity.
Sigal S ...
)
* Deities
* Past people (i.e., ancestors)
Any given entity or group of entities may enter the moral circle at different times for different people. This current expansion of the moral circle to include animals is referred to by Kasperbauer as an expansion from a circle of all humans to a circle of all sentient things.
Sigal Samuel has also suggested that
plants
Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclude ...
,
nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. Although humans are ...
and
robots "\n\n\n\n\nThe robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the site they are allowed to visi ...
may be beginning to enter the moral circle.
Anthis and Paez refer to the circle as a "multidimensional gradient" that ranges from wishing harm on someone to caring about someone even more than one's self.
Counterarguments
Kasperbauer and others point out that it is not entirely clear whether the actual conditions of animals used for food or scientific research are improving, despite claims that they are entering the moral circle.
A related criticism is that
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, ...
gave some animals a
protected status that they no longer have, so they have experienced moral circle contraction. Other suggested groups that have left the moral circle or gone farther from the center of the moral circle are
gods
A deity or god is a supernatural being who is considered divine or sacred. The ''Oxford Dictionary of English'' defines deity as a god or goddess, or anything revered as divine. C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greater ...
,
prisoner
A prisoner (also known as an inmate or detainee) is a person who is deprived of liberty against their will. This can be by confinement, captivity, or forcible restraint. The term applies particularly to serving a prison sentence in a prison. ...
s,
ancestors, while
infants and
fetus
A fetus or foetus (; plural fetuses, feti, foetuses, or foeti) is the unborn offspring that develops from an animal embryo. Following embryonic development the fetal stage of development takes place. In human prenatal development, fetal dev ...
have had different moral standings in different societies.
The idea of a moral circle has also been criticized as based in
Western
Western may refer to:
Places
*Western, Nebraska, a village in the US
*Western, New York, a town in the US
*Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western world, countries that id ...
morality and so not reflecting the diversity of moral views found in the rest of the world, including concepts such as
ahimsa that give greater value to
animals
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and go through an ontogenetic stage in ...
than found in Western culture.
Causes of expansion
The question of what causes the expansion of the moral circle is an active topic of debate among the idea's proponents.
Robert C. Solomon argued that empathy is a cause of moral circle expansion. The inclusion of animals within the moral circle has been credited to various traits that some animals possess, such as being cute or intelligent or having relationships with humans. By contrast,
Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a Secularit ...
has emphasized the importance of
rationality among humans as a way in which the moral circle is expanded.
Another theory is that moral circle expansion is related to climbing
Maslow's hierarchy of needs and so being able to focus on others to a greater extent once more personal needs have been fulfilled. The relationship between laws and what people consider to be part of their moral circle is also a subject of inquiry.
In psychology
The concept of a moral circle and its expansion, including the causes of its expansion, has been the subject of much recent work in the field of
moral psychology.
Psychologists have found significant biases in how people think of their moral circle based on the way that the question is framed, as well as that people tend to give more moral consideration to high-sentience animals than to low-sentience animals, more moral consideration to animals than to plants, and more moral consideration to plants than to "villains" such as murderers. The Moral Expansiveness Scale (MES) is a psychological measure of altruism that developed from thinking about moral circle expansion.
See also
*
Evolution of morality
The concept of the evolution of morality refers to the emergence of human moral behavior over the course of human evolution. Morality can be defined as a system of ideas about right and wrong conduct. In everyday life, morality is typically associ ...
*
Moral progress
Moral progress refers to improvement in concepts such as moral beliefs and practices experienced on a societal scale. Michele Moody-Adams noted that "moral progress in belief involves deepening our grasp of existing moral concepts, while moral p ...
*
Reverence for Life
The phrase Reverence for Life is a translation of the German phrase: "." These words came to Albert Schweitzer on a boat trip on the Ogooué River in French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon), while searching for a universal concept of ethics for our ...
*
Science of morality
The science of morality may refer to various forms of ethical naturalism grounding morality in rational, empirical consideration of the natural world. It is sometimes framed as using the scientific approach to determine what is right and wrong, i ...
References
Further reading
*
Volume 1an
Volume 2at
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."
It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital libr ...
.
*
* See, for instance
Figure 2: The Expanding Concept of Rights
*
*
*
*
{{Effective altruism, state=collapsed
Concepts in ethics
Effective altruism
Peter Singer
Psychological concepts