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Addresses the questions, why should we respect humanity in all persons? and why not regard extremely immoral persons as having forfeited all respect? Respect for persons as persons is distinguished from respect for personal merit and conventional roles, but that someone is a person is not sufficient to explain why we must respect the person. The essay sketches some Kantian grounds, formal and substantive, for presuming that all human beings ought to be respected, and then addresses several objections. For example, should we respect sociopaths? The Kantian legislative perspective sketched earlier suggests reasons for a strong presumption for treating basic respect for humanity as non‐forfeitable, and arguably neither self‐protection, just punishment, nor legitimate moral censure require that we set aside the presumption.

Hume is held by various scholars to be a utilitarian, a rule-utilitarian, a halfhearted utilitarian, or not a utilitarian at all, and he is also held to be a consequentialist or he is not held to be a consequentialist. The remarkable fact of many of these opposing views is that they are grounded in the same passages by Hume. This chapter examines the nature of the utilitarianism that Hume commonly invokes.

This chapter begins an argument for ethical theory. It focuses on the elements of ethical theory that have to be seen as useful, and indeed as indispensable for adequate ethical reflection. These include fairness, respect for persons, and sympathy.

This chapter discusses the three foundations—fairness, respect for persons, and sympathy—and examines how the considerations that they point toward might be combined in a single theory. It considers one influential attempt to reduce all moral considerations to consideration of consequences, namely act consequentialism.

This chapter explores what it means to respect persons when scarce, life-saving resources (e.g., flu treatment) must be distributed. In different age cases, both an older person and a younger one need a scarce resource to survive, but we can save only one; in different number cases, we can use the resource either to save one person or to save five, but not to save everyone. The chapter applies three accounts of respect for the worth or dignity of persons to such cases: the Respect-Expression Approach to Kant’s Formula of Humanity, an Equal Worth Account, suggested by Jeff McMahan, and a Kant-Inspired Account of Dignity (KID). The chapter argues that KID has more plausible implications than the others. The chapter ends by contrasting KID with a benefit-maximizing view of the distribution of scarce resources—one that uses the Quality Adjusted Life-Year (QALY) as a measure of improvement in health-related quality of life.

This chapter refers to Blackstone's Commentaries to further examine Blackstone's interpretation of the place that the respect for persons holds in the law. Blackstone believed that common law rejected the notion of “respect of persons”—the Christian term used in the New Testament to depict how Christ refused to respect the differences in social classes—since the common law did not account for social rank and position. With this, common law is described not merely as Christian, but as something enlightening. The chapter explains that America's criminal justice system rejects this respect of persons because it aims to treat people equally, and that this approach veers away from treating offenders with respect.

This chapter discusses the ethical issues raised by brain-computer interface (BCI) research in humans. It is organized around the three principles set out in the Belmont Report of 1978, which is generally considered the founding document of modern human research standards. The three principles are beneficence, respect for persons, and justice. Beneficence requires that the potential benefits of human research (to humanity and perhaps to the research subjects) far outweigh its risks to the subjects. Respect for persons requires that informed consent be obtained from the subjects. Justice requires that the benefits and burdens of the research be fairly distributed.

The overriding ethical precepts of clinical medicine are benevolence and respect for persons. Benevolence—a disposition to do good and promote the well-being of the patient—goes back to Hippocratic times. Respect for persons elaborated in 1974 requires that individuals should be treated as autonomous and that those with diminished autonomy should be protected. Autonomy is defined through quotations and commentary essentially as self-legislated and not ruled by others or outside causes or forces. Sickness impinges on autonomy and may diminish it through effects on cognition or the ability to act directly, or through unwanted effects of relationships or context. This increases the responsibility of healers to meliorate the negative impact of sickness and actively support the intactness of the person. How this is accomplished is detailed.

Carl Tollef Solberg and Espen Gamlund suggest that in allocating scarce, life-saving resources we ought to consider how bad death would be for those who would die if left untreated. We have moral reason, they intimate, to prioritize persons for whom death would be worse, according to the Time-Relative Interest Account of the badness of death. In response, I try to show that an allocation principle that specifies minimizing the badness of death among those vying for a life-saving resource would fail to respect the worth of persons. Solberg and Gamlund mention several other allocation principles. But, I argue, even when these others also come into play, allocations can fail to respect persons’ worth. A principle of respect for the worth (or dignity) of persons should, I contend, be employed in the allocation of scarce, life-saving resources. I sketch and apply a Kantian principle in an effort to allay the common worries that such a principle will be too vague to be useful and implausibly disallow length of future life to be a deciding factor in choosing whom to save.

The moral values of remembrance are sometimes embodied in social practices of memorialization, which in its various incarnations is always essentially a type of symbolic activity, so the chapter begins with a discussion of the nature of symbolic activity and symbolic value. Its central claim is that the moral value of memorialization is realized symbolically, by activities and practices that have symbolic meaning. According to the “thesis of lesser value,” as it is called here, however, symbolic value is not a terribly serious sort of value as compared with the value of actually making a difference in the world. It is either non-moral value or moral value that has less weight. Several reasons are presented to counter this: memorialization can express moral attitudes of respect for value as well as persons; can embody a commitment to justice; and can implicate a community’s sense of what is integral to its collective identity.

Ethical norms of different sorts work together to inform and facilitate responsible deliberation and action with respect to memorializing the victims of wrongdoing. These are divided into consequentialist and non-consequentialist norms, and the latter are subdivided into norms for the expression of intrinsically valuable attitudes, the possession and exercise of virtues, and the prescriptions of deontology. The approach is eclectic rather than systematic, as it draws on each of these normative approaches for assistance in developing a credible alternative to an exclusively consequentialist approach to an ethics of remembrance. The chapter focuses on three intrinsically valuable attitudes—self-respect, respect for persons, and fidelity to the dead—expressed by processes of memorialization. It then asks how remembrance can be made to endure so that these valuable attitudes are sustained over time. This is called the “sustainability of memory problem,” and commemorative rituals are singled out for their particular importance in this regard. The chapter concludes by returning to the theme of forgiveness and suggesting how commemoration and forgiveness can be coherently combined in a program of transitional justice.

One dominant theme in Tom Hill’s work is his interpretation of Kantian respect for persons, which he contrasts with an aristocratic view according to which individuals merit differential treatment owing to heredity and social rank. This chapter explores this contrast, arguing that the sort of respect characteristic of the Kantian notion grounded in one’s dignity and the sort of respect characteristic of honor codes involve different conceptions of personhood and, correspondingly, different conceptions of moral and social order. In particular, it is argued that on the Kantian notion, respect for persons essentially involves calls second-personal address and acknowledgment, while the notion of honor respect involves conceiving of persons as having a particular hierarchical status that is socially constituted. One significant point of contrast between second-personal respect and honor respect, developed in this chapter, concerns differences in appropriate responses to violations of these forms of respect.

Chapter 2 introduces the idea of dignity as species integrity. For human beings, respecting dignity requires making reasonable efforts to support human capabilities at a basic floor level. Human capabilities include the central kinds of things we can do and be as human beings, including capacities for a life narrative; health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; relating to nature; play; and participating in the environment. Contrary to what “healthy aging” advocates claim, medical progress will not eliminate threats to these human capabilities. Chapter 2 compares dignity as species integrity with sub-Saharan African conceptions of Ubuntu, the Nguni word for “humanness.” Ubuntu prizes relational values and human capacities for harmonious relationship. The chapter concludes that to have global traction, capability lists must be balanced, life stage informed, and provisional.

Political liberalism seeks to define the principles of political association in terms that are independent, not only of religious convictions and substantive notions of the human good, but also of the individualist ideals, encouraging a self-critical attitude toward the conception of the good one espouses, to which the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill typically appealed. This chapter explores the basic problem of political life to which political liberalism aims to provide a solution, the means—among which the moral assumptions, particularly a principle of equal respect for persons—by which it seeks to solve this problem, and the ends it can reasonably hope to achieve by the solution it develops.

This chapter considers arguments against purpose theory, first rebutting some influential objections to it in the literature, many of which claim that it would be disrespectful of persons, and hence immoral, for God to assign us a purpose. It then presents a new objection to the idea that God's purpose grounds meaning, namely, that the best explanation of why God alone might constitute meaning in life is that God has perfections that we cannot conceivably exhibit, features such as atemporality, simplicity, and infinity, which are widely taken to be incompatible with purposiveness. With this argument, the chapter maintains that the most promising reason to believe God-centred theory in general undercuts the particular, purposive version of it that has dominated the field.

This chapter defends a constraint on punishment that is grounded in considerations of offender reform. It contends that punishment is unjustifiably contemptuous, and thus fails to treat offenders with respect as moral persons, if it tends to undermine the prospects of their reform. Restrictions on offenders’ access to basic goods such as housing, welfare, and in some cases employment tend to undermine offenders’ prospects for reform: first, such restrictions can undermine offenders’ motivation to engage in moral reflection and reassessment of their behavior; second, the bans tend to hinder their opportunities to make changes in their lives, to take the necessary steps to avoid repeating the bad choices they made in the past. Such restrictions reflect, and convey, contempt for offenders, and thus are inappropriate as modes of punishment.

Trafficking is a major source of kidneys for transplant in the world today. This practice involving the exploitation and even murder of organ sources is ethically indefensible. Some argue that a regulated market would be far more preferable. It would not. There is no evidence that a market would increase the supply of kidneys, it does nothing for other vital organs and it is almost certain that a market could not be regulated. Selling organs, even in a tightly regulated market, violates the existing bioethical framework of respect for persons since the sale is clearly being driven by only by profit. It also violates, in the case of living persons, the ethics of medicine itself. The core ethical norm of the medical profession is the principle, “Do no harm.” The only way that removing an organ from a living person is morally defensible is if the donor chooses to undergo the harm of surgery solely to help another; not to make money. The creation of commerce in body parts puts medicine in the position of removing body parts from people solely to abet those people’s interest in securing compensation as well as to let middle-men profit