This paper illuminates the explanatory role of vagueness und species membership against the background of scientific developments in recent stem cell research. With the help of the Neo-Aristotelian concept of “life form naturalism” ontologically vague entities such as stem cells, all above induced pluripotent stem cells, could be described as necessary constituents for the correct sorting and naming of natural processes and its bearers. Furthermore this specific assessment allows drawing some important ontological and ethical consequences.

In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot aims to provide an account of moral evaluation that is both naturalistic and cognitivist. She argues that moral evaluation is a variety of natural evaluation in the sense that moral judgments of human action and character have the same “grammar” or “conceptual structure” as natural judgments of the goodness of plants and animals. We argue that Foot’s naturalist project can succeed, but not in the way she envisions, because her central thesis that moral evaluation is (...) a variety of natural evaluation is not entirely correct. We show that both moral and natural evaluation are species of kind evaluation, which encompasses moral, natural, and artifact evaluation. Kind evaluation is a form of evaluation, according to which things are evaluated qua members of a kind, in such a way that the kind into which something is classified informs the standards of evaluation for things of that kind. Because the source of the normative standards for moral evaluation is different from the source of the normative standards for natural evaluation, moral evaluation is not a species of natural evaluation. However, both are varieties of kind evaluation. This account of moral evaluation as a variety of kind evaluation is still an effective response to non-naturalism and to non-cognitivism. (shrink)

Synthetic organisms are at the same time organisms and artifacts. In this paper we aim to determine whether such entities have a good of their own, and so are candidates for being directly morally considerable. We argue that the good of non-sentient organisms is grounded in an etiological account of teleology, on which non-sentient organisms can come to be teleologically organized on the basis of their natural selection etiology. After defending this account of teleology, we argue that there are no (...) grounds for excluding synthetic organisms from having a good also grounded in their teleological organization. However, this comes at a cost; traditional artifacts will also be seen as having a good of their own. We defend this as the best solution to the puzzle about what to say about the good of synthetic organisms. (shrink)