This dissertation examines two main problems: (1) the identity of beings with moral standing and (2) the adjudication of conflicts arising between beings with moral standing. Solving (1) provides a vehicle for treating (2). Various features of beings identify them as having different kinds of moral standing. These varieties of standing correspond to varying degrees of moral value, establishing a hierarchy of moral priority. Conflicts between beings with moral standing are then adjudicated in favor of the party to the conflict who has the most or weightiest moral value. Moral agents have the weightiest moral value in virtue of their cognitive and affective capacities. Nonhuman mammalian species have a lesser degree of moral value since they lack the cognitive capacities of agents but share their affective capacities. Birds, reptiles, and fish have even less moral value because they have only sentience. Finally, the weakest degree of moral value is had by nonconscious beings, notably plants, which have only a good-of-their-own. Natural objects and artifacts have no moral value at all since they have no cognitive or affective capacities, and no good-of-their-own. Even though moral agents are more valuable from the moral point of view than any other being with moral standing, this does not mean that the interests or good of agents always take precedence over the interests or good of other, nonhuman beings. It is only on those occasions where the basic welfare interests of agents are at stake that a conflict between human and nonhuman beings is resolved in favor of moral agents. In situations where the welfare interests of agents are not at stake--though other non-basic interests may be--while the welfare interests or basic good of nonhumans are at stake, the conflict is adjudicated in favor of the nonhumans.

My dissertation focuses on issues of indeterminacy in ethics and the philosophy of law. My aim is to establish the existence of moral indeterminacy and to show how we can allow some degree of indeterminacy in both ethics and the law without necessarily abandoning objectivist positions that may withstand noncognitivist or legal realist criticisms. The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first, I devote a chapter to each of three sources of moral indeterminacy. The first chapter focuses on the open texture of moral concepts. The second concentrates on value incommensurability, understood as incomparability among morally laden options. The third is devoted to what I call descriptive indeterminacy--situations where morally relevant features can be described in different, equally appropriate ways, and the moral verdict we reach will differ depending upon which description is selected. The second part of the dissertation is devoted to exploring the implications of indeterminacy for ethics and jurisprudence. Chapter Four is given over to metaethics, and is devoted to defending the compatibility of objectivism and indeterminacy. Chapter Five considers a miscellany of challenges to my conclusions in Chapter Four, and further develops the case for the compatibility of objectivism and indeterminacy. Chapter Six examines the structure of moral theories and argues that indeterminacy can be retained in either a rule-based ethic or one less sympathetic to the existence of generally-relevant moral properties. The last chapter is devoted to establishing the existence of ineliminable indeterminacy in any developed system of law.

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