Volume 2, Issue 3, Fall 1980
Kenneth E. Goodpaster
Pages 281-284
On Stopping at Everything
A Reply to W. M. Hunt
Contrary to W. Murray Hunt’s suggestion, living things deserve moral consideration and inanimate objects do not precisely because living things can intelligibly be said to have interests (and inanimate objects cannot intelligibly said to have interests). Interests are crucial because the concept of morality is noncontingently related to beneficence or nonmaleficence, notions which misfire completely in the
absence of entities capable of being benefited or harmed.