This is a biorethics bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Bioethics Bites is made an association with Oxford's Reheiro Center for Practical Ethics and made possible by a

grant from the Welcome Trust. For more information about bioethics bites go to

www dot practical ethics dot oX dot uk

or to iTunes u. a stone on the beach we assume has no moral status

we can kick or hammer the stone and we've done the stone no harm.

Typical adult human beings do have moral status.

We shouldn't, without a very good reason, kick a man or woman.

Often contentious moral issues such as embryo research or abortion or

whether to turn off a life support machine turn on disagreement about the moral

status of the embryo, fetus or individual.

So the key questions are who or what has moral status and why.

Jeff McMahon of Rutgers University takes on these tricky questions.

Jeff McMahon, welcome to Bioethics Bites.

Thank you very much.

The topic we're going to focus on today is humans and moral status.

Let's start at the beginning. What is moral status?

If it's okay with you, I'm going to call it moral status.

In my view, moral status is a set of intrinsic properties possessed by an individual that grounds the

attribution of rights or that grounds a requirement of respect for that individual that is in some way independent of that

individual's interests.

What do you mean by intrinsic there?

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