Ethical obligation arises from the other’s unknowability, not its measured capacities

Evidence

To decide to acknowledge another lifeform as a source of ethical obligation is not to examine a set of empirical descriptions about that lifeform in order to see whether it mea sures up to some predetermined depiction of the interest holder. It is instead to fi nd ethical obligation precisely in the unknowability of the other’s interior world. … Following Hume, Hobbes, and other found ers, we have designed the circumstances of justice in our po liti cal philosophy so that they generally exclude from full consideration members of other countries, other generations, and other forms of life. Why would we not be equally opportunistic when it comes to designing those others directly? — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 503

Categorization

• QUESTION: The genetic-engineering-of-subhuman-workers thought experiment deserves chasing — is there legal scholarship on deliberately designed ‘instrumental beings’ below the threshold of human rights?
• XREF: connects to: Ethics precedes ontology, making our subjectivity hostage to the other from the start — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 506; Genetic engineering will make suffering-based moral standing a matter of design choice, not ontology — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 486; Moral obligations derive from objective ideality, not from society or individual will — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 356 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Moral behaviour springs from the Other’s powerless demand, not from sanctions #corroborates (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 611
• Moral obligations derive from objective ideality, not from society or individual will #qualifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 356