CONCEPT
Ethical Behaviourism
John Danaher’s argument that an entity deserves moral status if it is roughly performatively equivalent to another entity we already regard as morally considerable—grounded in the observation that behavioral evidence is our primary source of knowledge about moral status in every case.
How do we know that other beings deserve our moral concern? We cannot inspect their inner lives directly; we infer the inner states that ground moral concern from how they behave. This is not a fallback position adopted when better evidence is unavailable: it is the foundational epistemic situation with respect to any mind other than our own.
John Danaher's ethical behaviourism takes this observation as its starting point and draws a demanding conclusion: if behavioral evidence is what grounds our moral judgments about other beings, then consistency requires that we extend the same consideration to any entity whose behavior falls within the range we already accept as sufficient for moral status. The “rough” in rough performative equivalence is important—humans do not behave identically to one another, and the bar is not full human equivalence but the lower threshold we already apply to infants, animals, and persons with diminished capacities. In the era