Environmental Ethics

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.