Personhood

Philosophy

What gives one being higher status over another?

What I believe gives one being higher status over another is something that not all of us would like to admit to. It is power. Power is what makes one being more important than another or at least gives them the illusion of importance over that being. To elaborate, in the past there have been many examples of people regarding themselves higher than others simply because they possess either military or technological superiority over the latter. This advantage usually means that the “superior being” is able to control or manipulate the person they regard as below them. One of these examples is the attitude of the white man during the times of black slavery, who thought themselves “higher” than a black man; simply because they had the power to control the other mans life. However this view of importance is not just taken from the “superior being’s” point of view; to explain: religious believers all over the world believe that their God/Gods are much higher beings than themselves for the simple reason that these “Gods” have a great deal of power over mere mortals like humankind. This is similar to the way that we regard ourselves as higher than the ant or mouse, in that because we are so much more powerful than these other creatures, their lives aren’t as important to us because they do not have the power to make an impact on our lives. We, however, have the ability to make an impact on their existence and change and manipulate it to our will, making mankind to the ant as God is to us.

Do all humans have the same moral status?(rights)

It would be nice to say that we do, that all humans are created equal and that despite the situations they find themselves in, this equality in the “rights” of the human is the same all the way through their lives. However this is not true as on many occasions one human being will seem to have more rights than another. One such occasion may be when a doctor has to choose between saving the life of a small child over that of a elderly man; most doctors would instantly save the younger child due to the fact that it has more “right” to live than the old man. In fact many human notions such as self sacrifice are intrinsically connected to moral status as the person sacrificing themselves to save another person has made the decision that he has less “right” to live than the individual he is saving.