Reification as a vice: rethinking bioethics beyond moral status

Abstract

In this paper, I argue for an expansion of moral concern in bioethics beyond sentience-based and status-based frameworks. Drawing on Lukács' and Honneth's work on reification, I show that even where the sentience, species membership, or moral status of an entity is unknown, there are compelling ethical reasons to be concerned about the creation, manipulation, and use of such entities. I reconceive reification not just as a social pathology but as a moral vice: a disordered, objectifying mode of perception. Understood in this way, reification provides a flexible normative framework that applies across a wide range of entities, including humans, non-human animals, plants, ecosystems, and even inanimate objects. This vice-based approach helps explain why certain modes of interaction are ethically flawed regardless of the moral status of the entity in question. This facilitates a more inclusive ethical sensibility suited to emerging biotechnologies and the ecological challenges that pose an increasingly complex challenge for bioethics.

Introduction

The idea that ethical oversight is required for scientific research has gained almost global acceptance since the formulation of the Nuremberg Code in 1947. Since then, ethical codes, principles and frameworks have proliferated. Ethical protocols extend well beyond the protection of human subjects, to many areas of research, including those involving non-human1 animals. At the same time, scientists have developed increasingly complex and sophisticated ways of manipulating, designing and creating organisms [1, 2]. The derivation of gametes from somatic cells, creation of genetically-modified mice for research, design of synthetic yeast chromosomes, and genetic modification of kelp in the service of ‘assisted evolution’ can all be viewed, in some senses, as producing novel biological entities whose moral, legal or ontological status may be unclear.

Yet ethical evaluation of scientific research involving non-human entities still tends to rely heavily on facts about species membership [3] and clear-cut distinctions between organisms and artifacts, plants and animals [4]. Moral status is decided on the basis of these distinctions, as well as the presence or absence of capacities such as consciousness or sentience [5, 6]. As a result, ethical guidance frequently awaits answers from the very scientists whose work is under scrutiny: does the entity in question possess the relevant properties? What is its proper biological classification (e.g. plant or animal, gamete or zygote, organism or tissue)? This lends support to critics of bioethics, such as Adam Hedgecoe, who suggest that the interdependency between bioethics and scientific research tends to stifle the critical dimension of ethical inquiry [7].

Bioethics is a discipline that necessarily informs, and is informed by, science [8]. But there is an uncomfortable irony in, for example, the fact that scientists have found it necessary to inflict suffering on fish in order to determine scientifically whether fish can feel pain [9]. Moreover, these experiments do not necessarily lead to consensus. Some scientists remain convinced that fish cannot feel pain [10], others are equally sure that they do [11], while still others maintain that the jury is still out [12].

In what follows, I will argue that, when construed as a vice, the concept of reification captures a class of concerns that other bioethical tools miss. To illustrate the concept of reification in a bioethical context, I take the phenomenon of the cockroach backpack or ‘roboroach’ as an example. Electrodes were implanted into live cockroaches, which could then be made to turn right or left at the press of a button. The resulting ‘roboroach’ [13] was marketed as an educational toy. Although this sparked some ethical concern at the time, bioethicists were largely silent on the subject. Perhaps this was in part because it is hard to pin down the precise moral problem. Cockroaches are commonly exterminated as vermin, in ways that prioritize efficiency over humane killing. Cockroaches are not subject to the legal restrictions that apply to other animals in many jurisdictions [14]. Moreover, few people feel the kind of intuitive empathy towards cockroaches that they may feel towards cats or dogs used in research [15].

Some would argue that the only ethical concern is whether the cockroaches were made to suffer. The manufacturers claimed they were not: the insects were ‘anesthetized’ with cold water before the electrodes were implanted [13]. But should one be convinced? There is debate as to insects’ capacity for pain and consciousness [16]. If suffering is the only morally significant issue here, it seems again that bioethicists must wait for further research to establish whether cold water is an effective anesthetic in cockroaches. Perhaps this is one reason why bioethicists have been largely silent on matters relating to the kind of animals whose suffering is not self-evident; they are still waiting for the data.

This brings me back to the dependency on science noted above. Moreover, it seems to re-emphasize the idea that sentience and suffering are the only things that matter, morally. In contrast, I suggest that the moral unease many people felt in relation to the roboroach can be better understood and explained in terms of reification.2

Reification

In this section, I outline my approach to reification, drawing on Lukács and Honneth. My aim here is not to offer a detailed analysis of either of these thinkers, but – to use Honneth’s own term – to “process” the concept for use in bioethics [17].

In Marxist theory, reification describes a structural phenomenon arising from capitalist social relations. Lukács, for example, views reification as the inexorable process by which capitalism transforms people and their interactions into things. Human beings come to appear as objects: interchangeable and quantifiable [18]. Axel Honneth acknowledges the connection between reification and capitalism, but views reification in a more explicitly normative way. Honneth contrasts reification with recognition – the natural, healthy mode of human perception. Reification is a kind of sickness: a disordered way of seeing things that displaces the ability to recognize one’s fellow humans [17].

In his 2005 Tanner Lecture, Honneth argued for a greater role for reification in moral philosophy, noting that Martha Nussbaum and Elizabeth Anderson draw on concepts closely related to reification in their work, without using that specific term [19]. Over twenty years later, the term is largely absent from mainstream bioethics discussion (with one or two recent exceptions, which I will discuss later in this paper). Instead, it remains the province of scholars who specialize in political or Marxist philosophy, or in the work of thinkers such as Honneth and Lukács.

My own usage of reification draws on both Honneth and Lukács, while diverging from each in certain respects. Like Honneth, I treat reification as a normative concern, rather than a primarily descriptive account of phenomena associated with economic or political systems. Nevertheless, reification in my approach takes seriously the ways in which capitalist logics continuously invite one to apply the status of ‘thing’ to an ever-expanding range of entities, including human beings, non-human animals, living systems, artifacts and objects. This facilitates the urge to manage, control, and manipulate them as tools for human advancement. Insofar as research contributes to this process, it is a site of particular concern. However, I am more hopeful than Lukács that even within a capitalist context, a degree of resistance is possible. The acknowledgment that reification is a vice empowers moral agents, systems and institutions (including scientists and bioethicists) to push back against the tendency to reify and to articulate concerns that might otherwise go unheeded. This is a key motivation for my argument.

It is not easy to pin down an exact definition of reification in Honneth’s work [22], nor to situate his conception of reification in frameworks familiar to bioethicists. His analysis is not the sort that sets out necessary and sufficient conditions to identify reification or differentiate it from other attitudes and phenomena. In this paper, I do not attempt to establish which interpretation of reification is correct, or most faithful to Honneth’s or Lukács’ intentions. Indeed, in Honneth’s own words, reification is a “philosophically unprocessed nugget” [17, p.18] which needs further work before it can be fruitfully applied. Accordingly, there are many different interpretations of reification in the literature. What unites existing scholars who have grappled with the concept of reification is that, with a very few exceptions [21, 22], they do so in relation to its significance for human interactions [23–26].

It is worth mentioning here that the word used by Honneth, ‘Verdinglichung’ has a subtle difference from its common English translation ‘reification’, derived from the Latin ‘res’ or (thing). While the German ‘Ding’ can also be translated as ‘thing’ and the two words are closely related, there is a kind of slipperiness in the terminology. Reification often indicates a metaphysical or structural transformation of relations or objects: the process by which a phenomenon becomes a thing. By contrast, Verdinglichung more readily suggests a disposition or mode of perceiving. This latter sense aligns closely with Honneth’s view that the tendency to see the inhabitants of the world as mere things is a “pathology” – a warped mode of perception that, once it takes hold, infiltrates one’s life and proliferates like a virus [19, 27].

This distinction between the metaphysical and the moral aspects of reification is central to my discussion. I use the term ‘reification’ in a way that aligns more with its German counterpart than its Anglo-Latin etymology. Thus, on my account, the statement ‘X reifies Y’ does not presuppose anything about whether Y is or is not a thing. It implies that X is engaged in a particular mode of perception in which Y is regarded as a mere thing. It is this that opens the possibility of treating reification as a vice. In this, I diverge from Honneth himself, who does not explicitly endorse a virtue ethics approach. Indeed, in places he takes an almost deontological stance, suggesting that reification is always morally wrong (I will discuss this further in a later part of the paper).

Things and means

I have suggested that reification can go some way towards explaining the moral unease with which some people responded to the roboroach. But what does it actually mean to treat something as a mere thing? Is it always wrong to do so, or only in cases where they are not things? For Honneth, reification is a kind of disposition, or attitude that constitutes the world around one – including oneself – as mere things. In turn, these things can be used as tools to serve one’s purposes. When reification applies to human beings, it overlaps with Kant’s formula of humanity, which states:

So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means [28, p.429].

When one treats a person merely as a means, one often uses them instrumentally: as a tool; a stepping stone towards some ulterior end; in short, as a thing. In this respect, Kant’s Formula of Humanity offers a helpful point of entry for clarifying what reification involves, in terms that will be familiar to most bioethicists.

A first formulation, therefore, might be:

X reifies Y when X uses Y as a mere means to an end.

And following on from this:

X reifies Y when X uses Y as a mere thing.

It might reasonably be asked why the concept of reification is needed, if Kant’s Formula of Humanity essentially serves the purpose. Moreover, many contemporary Kantians have interpreted and applied Kant’s philosophy in ways that bring new dimensions to questions of animal ethics [29], and to the interactions between individual morality and broader political and economic structures [30], Despite this, the Kantian approach is not sufficient for my purposes, for four reasons.

Firstly, my concern draws on a capitalist critique that goes beyond individuals to incorporate the social structures that are created and enforced by capitalism, specifically in domains that are of relevance to bioethics. On a narrow Kantian view, it is the individual’s duty not to treat other humans as mere things. A reification perspective, while acknowledging the agency of individuals, also highlights the position of such individuals in a system that facilitates or even applauds reification. Thus, reification is something more than a straightforward transgression of duty.

Secondly, Kant stipulates that it is wrong to treat persons as things because persons are not things and cannot be things [31]. This necessarily constrains the moral applicability of a concept such as reification only to the context of human interactions [20]. Yet it is clear that at least in one sense, people are things. It is this that makes them vulnerable to being used as mere things. Persons can be used as meat, doorstops, cannon-fodder, fuel, sex-toys, research objects, windbreaks, sunshades, repositories of organs and tissues, baby containers, or artworks.

Thirdly, Kant’s moral theory is explicitly grounded in reason. Scholars might argue about whether this excludes all non-human animals [32], but a Kantian approach is generally held to entail a human-centric worldview that does not easily accommodate the kind of moral duties towards animals that humans have towards fellow persons. And of those who do argue that humans do have Kantian-type moral duties to animals such as cats and dogs, far fewer believe that humans have such duties towards cockroaches, yeast, or single-celled organisms (my argument here is not that we have duties per se towards cockroaches, but that there can nevertheless be moral reasons to resist reifying them).

A final reason for rejecting a purely Kantian approach is its atomistic approach to moral questions. Kantian ethics entail that specific acts, such as lying or killing, for example, are prohibited. The term ‘act’ is reiterated in the first two formulations of Kant’s categorical imperative. If one has Kantian duties towards cockroaches, it seems therefore that these would need to be spelled out in terms of discrete acts that are prohibited. It should be noted that some scholars regard Kant’s moral philosophy as being much more closely aligned with character and the cultivation of virtuous dispositions than he is commonly given credit for [33, 34]. However, these interpretations do not entirely escape the atomistic, act-centered focus. The Kantian form of virtue consists largely in the degree to which an individual’s self-mastery enables her to act in accordance with the categorical imperative [33].

If one’s aim is to distinguish between those acts that are prohibited and those that are permitted, it becomes harder to consider the contextual features of the relationship between the subject and the agent in question. It is in this sense that a Kantian approach seems atomistic. In contrast, reification, as I have suggested, is a disposition. As such, it does not lend itself to a deontological moral framework, based on one’s obligations to other rational beings and cashed out in terms of individual acts. Instead, it is better understood from the perspective of moral approaches that take dispositions as the central feature. In short, reification can be viewed as a vice, rather than as an explanation of what makes a particular act immoral. Accordingly, the modification of cockroaches for use as an educational tool, and as a commodity to be marketed, can be seen as reificatory – and hence, vicious – in a way that eradicating a cockroach infestation might not be.

The first approximation was:

X reifies Y when X uses Y as a mere means to an end.

The link between means and things then allows us to reformulate thus:

X reifies Y when X uses Y as a mere thing.

The focus on dispositions rather than acts yields a further refinement:

X reifies Y when X regards Y as a mere thing.

This last formulation captures the vicious disposition involved in reifying as being integral to the perception of Y as a thing. In this way, one moves away from specific acts that can be classified as reifying, to acknowledge that the acts are a symptom of an underlying moral problem: the vice of reification. This may help to explain why the work involved in creating the roboroach was reificatory in a way that killing a cockroach may not be. Deciding to perform the research, undertake the modifications, and market the resulting roboroaches is an ongoing process in the pursuit of a specific goal, in which the cockroaches themselves were a necessary component. If the cockroaches were not readily available, the roboroach creators would have had to source them, perhaps to breed them. In contrast, someone who discovers a cockroach infestation in her house regrets their presence. She did not choose to put herself in this position and would have preferred to avoid it. Here, the moral difference between the two courses of action starts to become clear. It would be nonsensical to construe the roboroach creators as reluctantly pursuing a course of action that they would have preferred to avoid. Each step systematically cements the degree to which the cockroaches are reified in pursuit of the researchers’ goals.

There are two further points to make here. Firstly, while the roboroach presupposes planning and intent in the pursuit of specific goals, some individuals involved in such projects may be reluctant participants. The masterminds of the project are the ones who conceive the reificatory plan, but its execution – the acts – fall to those who may not share the goals of the project, but who are themselves also reified [21]. The second point is that, while the eradication of a cockroach infestation need not be reificatory, it certainly can be. The difference between the two scenarios is simply that the roboroach cannot come about except via a process of reification.

Reification as a vice

Reification is commonly presented as the opposite of its counterpart: recognition. On Honneth’s account, reification and recognition form a binary, whereby reification is bad, and recognition is good. I suggest that reification and recognition can be understood from a virtue ethics perspective in the same way as more familiar virtues and vices such as cowardice and courage. Here, the virtue ethics perspective lends a nuance to the concept of reification that is absent from Honneth’s own account of the reification/recognition dyad. Honneth’s work implies that reification is invariably and intrinsically wrong. It is pathological – a debasement of the healthy modes of perception that are natural to human beings. Accordingly, it is something to be cured or eradicated. Yet in the context of research ethics, this raises some questions. Arguably, the reifying gaze that I have described is an intrinsic part of scientific research, and perhaps other aspects of human endeavors. If all reification is wrong, this would imply that science itself is morally jaundiced. However, a virtue ethics perspective does not commit us to abolishing reification. One may view science as an endeavor that can in some circumstances justify reification. Nevertheless, reification can be seen as a red flag—an indication that the research should proceed with caution, if at all. Moreover, if one accepts that there are degrees of reification, this opens the possibility for evaluating research for ways of reducing or minimizing reification.

In virtue ethics, virtues and vices are commonly presented in three columns. On the left is the vice of deficit; in the middle, the virtuous mean, and on the right, the vice of excess:

Cowardice	Courage	Rashness
Vanity	Magnanimity	Pusillanimity

A crucial point here is that performing a cowardly or vain action is not incompatible with being a virtuous person overall [35]. However, the tendency to be vain or cowardly is a vice. Therefore, if institutions or social structures facilitate or even enforce or celebrate these dispositions, one should be deeply concerned. Where this is the case, it seems that there is indeed justification for terming the vice in question a “social pathology” [17]. One may reify sometimes without being a vicious person overall, just as one might be harsh, ungenerous or dishonest on occasion. But when reification becomes an individual’s sole, or dominant mode of perceiving, they may indeed be viewed as a vicious person. An institution or system that encourages and applauds reification may likewise be deemed vicious.

Failures of virtue in an individual’s life are not a concern for my argument here. However, environments or institutions that facilitate or enforce reification should be the focus of moral scrutiny. Such scrutiny may be particularly appropriate for bioethicists, especially in the domains that bioethics is equipped to engage with, such as healthcare, interactions with biological entities, and the ethical evaluation of biotechnology and biomedical research. Yet I acknowledge that it remains challenging to say what exactly should follow from this. In the case of the roboroach, can an understanding of reification as a vice help in arriving at any normative conclusions? Conceiving of reification as a vice will not necessarily yield clear prohibitions for specific actions. Nor, perhaps, is it easy to ascertain when and why reification is wrong in some cases if, in others, it may be acceptable.

It may be helpful here to draw on a further aspect of virtue ethics. While virtues and vices are often presented in discrete columns as shown above, it is more accurate to envisage virtue as a spectrum, on which there is no sharp boundary between the vice of deficit, the mean and the vice of excess. Accordingly, there are degrees of reification. This helps to avoid a problem associated with Kant’s approach, namely the distinction between using someone as a mere means, or only partially as a means [36]. For example, if interpreted too strictly, the formula of humanity (FoH) seems to suggest that paid labor, participating in medical research, and donating blood are wrong. The question of how to solve this puzzle is an ongoing subject of contention in the literature [37].

So how does this mere/partial distinction relate to my conception of reification? One possibility is that one could distinguish between items that genuinely are ‘mere’ things – computers, for example – and things that are also something else – humans, animals, and even perhaps other biological entities such as plants and yeasts. Alternatively, one could construct conceptual boundaries between actions that constitute using something merely as a thing, as opposed to partially as a thing. Both alternatives have a certain appeal. But both options lead back to the unresolved philosophical quagmires of just the sort that I am trying to circumnavigate. In the former case, one reverts to the question of moral and metaphysical status. In the latter, one is faced with the weary debates on what kinds of activity constitute using an entity as a mere means rather than only partially as a means [38].

When reification as a vice is envisaged on a spectrum, with reifying on the left, and recognizing on the right, there is no predefined spot at which the distinction between merely/partially reifying can be fixed. It is enough to stipulate that the more one tends to regard entities as ‘mere’ things, the further one gets towards the left end of the reifying spectrum, and the more of a moral problem this is likely to be. This can account for some of the difficulty in articulating what is morally troubling about the roboroach. As I have noted, to regard ourselves as having moral duties towards cockroaches seems to imply that we cannot kill them or call the exterminators. But using the concept of reification as a vice, it makes perfect sense to say that the careful work involved in installing the electrodes, in designing and marketing the creatures as novelty playthings, evidences a degree of reification that exceeds what one might display when accidentally stepping on a cockroach, or even calling in the exterminators. The concept of reification may also shed some light on other ethical issues, such as the creation of embryos for use in research, in comparison to the use of embryos that are ‘left over’ from IVF, and genetically modifying plants or animals, in comparison to selectively breeding them over time. All these endeavors may be reificatory, but some are more so than others. Even this does not necessarily entail that such research should be prohibited, but it does suggest that it should be scrutinized carefully, and that there may be principled grounds for drawing distinctions between them.

Reification, and inattention

Reification has some parallels with related concepts, such as commodification, exploitation, objectification and so on. These concepts, however, are usually perceived as morally problematic insofar as they are applied to the ‘wrong’ kind of entity. However, there is another concept that corresponds more precisely with the kind of disposition that the term ‘reification’ captures in my interpretation. That is ‘inattention’, specifically as discussed in the work of Iris Murdoch [39]. Inattention has in recent years been discussed particularly with reference to animal ethics [22, 40]. The attention/inattention dyad is similar in many ways to the recognition/reification dyad: both refer to dispositions or modes of perception, and in both cases they are presented as more or less binary: attention/recognition = good; inattention/reification = bad. So what, if anything, makes reification more relevant for bioethicists than inattention? I focus here on Silvia Panizza’s 2023 paper, which discusses both inattention and reification in relation to the treatment of animals. Panizza compares both concepts and ultimately concludes that attention/inattention works better as a moral tool. Here, I argue that she is wrong to dismiss reification, for several reasons.

Panizza suggests that if reification is a moral problem, its badness arises from the fact that it is misdirected: one treats x as a thing when x is in fact not a thing. She goes on to argue that animals are not things: they are sentient subjects [22]. Panizza’s analysis thus takes reification to be essentially a category error. One needs to remind oneself of the metaphysical status of animals to avoid the moral problem. However, as noted above, the wrongness of reification need not rest on this distinction. Moreover, since much of Panizza’s analysis focuses on animals’ capacity for sentience and suffering, it opens the prospect of circumventing the difficulty by designing animals that lack these morally problematic capacities, as some have proposed [41].

Genetically modifying animals so as to remove the capacities that cause them to suffer when being farmed or used in research appears to be an appealing way of avoiding moral problems while allowing the ongoing use of animals [42]. If it is the capacity for sentience and/or suffering that distinguishes between things and subjects, to use Panizza’s terminology, then by implication, when these capacities are excised or destroyed, the entity does indeed become a thing and it becomes acceptable to treat it as such. Perhaps it is also permissible, or even desirable, to create animals that lack these capacities for use in research. From a reificatory perspective, however, the creation of beings that lack the properties in question, or the manipulation of animals so as to remove or destroy these capacities, is highly questionable. As with the roboroach, it involves a systematic series of steps enacted on entities to modify them to pursue one’s own goals.

A concern about reification gives one reasons for refusing to modify animals in order to suit one’s needs. Panizza’s argument seems to lead in the opposite direction. Moreover, the prospect of manufacturing creatures lacking the properties required for ‘non-thing-ness’ brings one directly back into the realm of dependency on the biosciences in matters of bioethical concern. The creation of such beings would require research on generations of existing creatures. At each iteration, further tests would be required to verify whether the interventions have been successful or not. This envisaged trajectory is both unsatisfactory and morally problematic in precisely the way that Hedgecoe suggests.

Recognition and attention

Panizza’s treatment of the positive side of the dyad – recognition/attention is also problematic. In her discussion of reification, Panizza notes Honneth’s claim that while recognition is immediate and spontaneous, reification is a “forgetting,” where a “second nature” takes over [43]. Forgetting and lack of attention both presuppose a particular cognitive state. In Panizza’s analysis, this state is contrasted with attention as described in Murdoch’s work: a “just and loving gaze directed on an individual reality” [22, p.97]. Inattention is construed as a kind of forgetting; a slipping of this loving gaze.

There are two difficulties here. Firstly, many of the ways in which humans reify animals involve extremely close attention. I share Panizza’s moral concern about the use of animals in scientific research. But such animals are not ‘forgotten’; the attitude towards these animals is not one of ‘inattention’. Quite the reverse: they are the focus of an intensely interested and attentive gaze. In my example of the roboroach, inattention is highly unpersuasive as a description or normative assessment of what is going on. Cockroaches do not acquire electrodes by accident, nor are they shipped, advertised, marketed, or designed inadvertently. Thus, if there is something ethically worrying about the roboroach, it is implausible to suppose that inattention is the source of the problem. Likewise, the use of animals in scientific research is not a forgetting, or lapse of attention, but an intently focused concentration. Not only is reification entirely compatible with attention; it could be construed as a specific kind of attention.

Thus, reification, I suggest, is a better way of capturing what is happening in contexts such as the roboroach, than inattention. However, Panizza favors a positive requirement in human interactions with animals. It is not enough to acknowledge that animals are not things. Instead, one needs to look at them with the kind of loving gaze described by Murdoch above. It is more plausible, if one approaches it this way, to think that attention of this sort might be incompatible with some forms of animal research. Thus, attention itself is not necessarily beneficial: it must be the right kind of attention. However, this leads to two further problems in the contexts I am discussing. Panizza’s moral concerns focus largely on sentient animals. The loving attentive gaze is easy to extend to one’s familiar, loveable pets, and it is fairly straightforward to see how it should apply also to creatures such as cows and pigs. But it is not obvious that one can expect people to regard cockroaches in this lovingly attentive way.

Returning to inattention, it is apparent that this concept cannot do the kind of conceptual work that reification does. It captures a different class of problems: those that arise from failing to attend lovingly to things that should be thus attended to. The failure of ordinary consumers who love their pets to think about how factory farming or animal research has been involved in the production of the goods they buy can be thought of as a form of inattention [40]. But the painstaking work of scientists and researchers to create roboroaches does not fit this mould. An important distinction here is that reification can be active, while inattention is typically passive, or at least inadvertent. This active element is relevant in the context of research, where objects, animals, organisms, etc. are the focus of intense and active engagement. Accordingly, if one is focusing on the vice, rather than the virtue, it makes sense to regard reification as being a more important concern than inattention. But perhaps one should be more ambitious here. Panizza’s argument suggests that rather than trying not to be vicious (simply avoiding inattention), one should aim to be virtuous and look at animals with the Murdochian form of attention: a just and loving gaze.

With this move, Panizza shifts the moral requirements significantly, to the extent that they may become excessively demanding. However, she does not discuss the effort that is required for the kind of attention that Murdoch describes. Indeed, she seems to view it as being essentially undemanding. Panizza suggests humans have innate knowledge of whether something is an object or an animal and are able to respond immediately and instinctively with the right form of attention [44]. She cites Wittgenstein’s claim that humans have no difficulty in understanding that a rock is not a living creature, whereas a ‘wriggling fly’ is [45]. Panizza claims that small children have this recognition, but often lose it over time, implicitly emphasizing this as the natural condition of human beings. Panizza and Wittgenstein are both skeptical, at least to some degree, that it is necessary to reason in contexts where one’s moral responses to others are concerned. Here, Panizza’s claims, along with those of Murdoch and Wittgenstein, rely on assumptions about the nature of perception and the ways in which it develops, which is open to question. I should add here that I regard Honneth’s own account of recognition as the ‘prior’ and ‘natural’ or healthy mode of perception, as being equally unconvincing.

One’s ability to distinguish between flies and rocks seems immediate. Likewise, it feels immediate when I look at the world around me and perceive it not as a flat mess of coloured shapes, but as a landscape with recognizable objects, some closer and others further away. But the capacity to make sense of what one sees is learned, just as children’s ability to speak their native language is something they have to work on. The supposed immediacy of these abilities arises from the fact that they are learned so early in life that people tend to have little or no recollection of it. People born blind who have their sight restored later in life often struggle to learn how to interpret what they can now see. This ability is not innate, and it does not come easily [46].

Likewise, one learns to categorize objects, animals, and people at such an early age that the process comes to seem natural and effortless, even though it is not at all easy or obvious to begin with. Contrary to Panizza’s claim, very young children are often uncertain how to classify unfamiliar creatures on their first encounters. Through experience, they discover that flies, cats, dogs, etc., have certain properties, which can then be extrapolated when they are faced with other unfamiliar but similar animals [47]. Children may do very cruel things to such creatures, not through evil intent, but through curiosity as to what these things are. In short, while humans may indeed have certain hard-wired abilities, it is not obvious that these include immediate and effortless recognition of other creatures’ subjectivity, nor of the distinction between organisms and objects, nor of the boundaries between those entities that matter, morally, and those that do not [48]. Instead, these are things one learns. Moreover, the question of what one pays attention to, or recognizes, or classifies as an organism or an object is at least partly socially conditioned [49]. To rely on instinct or intuition, then, is to rely on one’s social conditioning as a sound basis for moral judgments.

In the context of bioethics in particular, it seems unsatisfactory to rely on intuitive responses as a basis for moral interactions with other entities. Research contexts go beyond familiar creatures such as dogs, cats, and even flies and cockroaches. They involve the creation, modification, and use of entities outside the sphere of everyday or intuitive experience. In these circumstances – even if one might otherwise agree with Panizza – intuitions have little to contribute to ethical debates about how such entities are used in research, or whether to create them, or modify them. This point also arises in regard to a related argument made by Chappell, who rejects the idea that necessary and sufficient conditions are required in order to distinguish between persons and non-persons. Rather, Chappell asserts – again, citing Wittgenstein – that the body is the best picture of the soul [50]. For Chappell, it is bizarre to examine what properties an entity has in order to establish whether it counts as a person. All one needs to do is look! Yet this places an enormous moral weight on the relationship between the human form – looking like a person – and one’s supposedly instinctive treatment of someone as a person. Again, this resonates with recognition – also a visual concept. But in Chappell’s case, it seems that one (should) only recognize fellow humans. And then, presumably, only if they look human.

These arguments are unhelpful in contexts involving interactions with entities that may only be visible through a microscope, and whose form bears little resemblance to one’s own. For example, consider human embryos, embryo-type entities, and animal-human chimeras. Although these entities are at least partly human, they do not look human in any kind of instinctively obvious or intuitive sense. Moreover, throughout history, people with serious disfigurements have not been instinctively recognized and regarded as persons, precisely because their appearance violated expectations and because deviations from the biological norm were regarded as being not just aesthetically troubling, but morally charged [51]. Thus, while Chappell is right in the context of everyday adults going about their lives, this approach offers little guidance in the most difficult of cases, which are of course the ones in which the most help is needed, and the ones in which bioethicists most obviously ought to have something to say.

The claim that humans are born primed for attention or recognition takes an optimistic view of human psychology and development. But an alternative approach, taking neither recognition nor attention as ‘prior’ is also plausible, and has some basis in the literature [52–54]. Moreover, it is less demanding. Murdoch’s idea of the loving gaze extended beneficently on the world around seems to place one in an impossible position. How can an individual respond lovingly to all the world’s phenomena – or even all the world’s humans – in ways that affirm their subjectivity, uniqueness, etc.? To imagine that people have the capacity for this is to impose a terribly heavy burden on those who are expected to fulfill it. Moreover, as a basis for one’s interactions with biological organisms in the contexts that are relevant for bioethicists, it is wholly inadequate.

The cockroaches that became roboroaches did not acquire backpacks because people did not love them enough, nor because they received insufficient attention, but because people made the decision to regard and treat them as things. Importantly, the alternatives to reification are undemanding. I do not suggest that people must attempt to attend to cockroaches with the kind of loving regard that Panizza describes. Nor do I suggest that one should ‘recognize’ them, in Honneth’s sense. My exhortation is much less demanding and more achievable: that people do not actively seek to cultivate a reificatory attitude towards them, and that where there is evidence of this happening, it is treated as a cause for concern.

To conclude this section, attention and recognition are problematic when construed as somehow more basic or more natural than their counterparts. Again, the virtue ethics perspective helps with this. Virtues and their associated vices, such as courage and cowardice, honesty and dishonesty, are both part of human essential nature. Neither is inherently prior or ‘default’.

Reifying objects

When reification is understood as a vice, it follows that to reify can be vicious irrespective of what is being reified. Scholars such as Panizza habitually assume that reification and similar habits are only problematic in regard to the object they are directed at. But vices – such as selfishness, arrogance, irascibility, dishonesty, or cowardice – are moral problems for the moral agent. Their badness is internal, in a sense. To be a dishonest person is bad, even if one never actually tells a lie! The badness of dishonesty does not derive from harm done to the persons who were lied to. Bearing this in mind, it is easier to understand that the vice of reification is likewise not closely tied to whether the object of reification is indeed an object or not, but to the vicious tendency in the reifier.

This may seem too extreme a position to accept. Must one really feel bad every time one uses an inanimate object as a mere thing? There are two responses to be made here. Firstly, although I argue that reification should be regarded as a vice, the aim in this paper is not to propose a blueprint for individual ethical behavior, but to develop and extend the conceptual tools available to ethicists involved in evaluating scientific research. This may include ethicists of various pedigrees and backgrounds, but to date, it has been the specific domain of bio-ethicists.

Thus, even if an individual’s tendency to reify a computer, a rock, or a cup of tea is vicious, it is not necessarily a bioethicist’s business to intervene. Secondly, since bioethicists are by definition interested in ‘bio’ – living things – their focus is always likely to be primarily on organisms rather than objects or artifacts. Nevertheless, as I have noted above, the distinction between organisms and artifacts is precisely what is coming into question with the ability to manipulate, redesign and create biological structures [55, 56]. The roboroach can be viewed as an artifact-organism hybrid [57]. In these contexts, there is an element of choice about how one construes such entities. To construe them as mere objects is a vicious choice.

The viciousness of this choice does not boil down to the ‘real’ status of the entity in question. I do not disagree that some things are objects. Indeed, contra Kant, I would say that all physically-extended beings, including humans, are objects. My disagreement concerns a) the idea that to treat something as a mere object is ethically neutral in cases where it is an object, and b) the claim that an entity’s status as a mere object is something that is discoverable via enquiry into its properties. Rather, its status as a mere object is something that one superimposes on it and acts upon in one’s treatment of it. As noted, many of the classifications and distinctions used in everyday life are learned. This takes some social effort. To put this effort towards the endeavor of expanding the sphere of mere things is – I suggest – vicious.

The capacity to regard objects as mere things is part of what enables people to dissociate objects from their origins. This dissociation is a key aspect of reification. For example, I can regard my computer as a mere tool. It has no subjective life, no history, no intrinsic value. When it breaks, I replace it. Yet this computer is also a product of the earth; of minerals that have been extracted from the ground, transported and transformed into components assembled in factories according to designers’ specifications. It is packaged and marketed according to strategies devised by professionals. It is shipped from abroad, stored in a warehouse, tended by people at every stage. This machine has absorbed the time and toil of many human beings. In coming into being, and into my possession, it has caused the death and disruption of countless organisms. It has changed the world around it. The business of creating the computer can be construed as a travail that has disrupted the world. This travail is invisible to the end user, but it exists nonetheless. It is part of what the people who buy and use these products consume.

For objects such as computers that are designed as tools, it is most obviously these aspects of travail and disruption that make it something more than just a thing. But the computer also has a relatively high economic value. There are prudential reasons to treat it carefully to get one’s money’s worth from it. However, the point above about travail and disruption should not be confused with merely prudential concerns. There is no prudential reason to treat a disposable plastic cup as anything more than an object. Neither is it likely to have sentimental or aesthetic value. Yet it too is the culmination of travail and disruption, no less than a lovingly hand-made item of great aesthetic and economic value, and perhaps more so.

Computers and cups are, of course, artifacts, in a way that, for example, a rock is not necessarily. What does my approach suggest in a case where an individual spots a nicely smoothed stone by the water’s edge? Would it be wrong to pick up the stone and skim it across the lake? Or would this be to reify it, treating it as a mere thing? The rock also has a trajectory. Its history goes back further than any human can remember. Not only this, but in moving it, one disturbs myriad entities that depend on it, whether microorganisms, grains of sand, etc. The stone is indeed an object, but even this, devoid of sentience, of subjectivity, is not a mere object, since it occupies a space that connects it on every side, and through time, with other objects and entities. It is this that I mean when I suggest that there are no ‘mere’ objects. It is one’s disposition towards an object that makes it ‘mere’. As the example of the skimming stone shows, even when there is no dispute as to whether the thing is an object or an organism, any ‘mereness’ about it is in the eye of the beholder, not a property of the thing itself [3].

Yet it is important to remind the reader that skimming a stone across the lake is not necessarily vicious. Still less so, if the agent picks it up with a thought as to the creatures that may live around and under it, the dislodging of the other stones around it and the disruption that this small displacement causes. Virtues and vices concern the attitudes one cultivates. These are not necessarily to be associated with specific acts at particular moments in time. Moreover, as with other vices and virtues, there may be occasions where reification is called for, and justified. My claim in this paper is not that one must eradicate all forms of reification (as Honneth seems to suggest). Rather, one should look critically at oneself and identify the reificatory tendency as one that – like the tendency towards anger and violence – may sometimes be justified, but is not a disposition to applaud or cultivate. Wherever they seem to be needed, they come at a sacrifice, both to the moral agent, and to the world around them.

A final point here is that while my claim that there are no mere objects may seem bizarre and challenging, it has some resonance with modes of thinking beyond the Western philosophical canon [58]. Several indigenous cosmologies hold values that are incompatible with the idea of strict distinctions between persons and ‘mere’ objects [59]. In these philosophies, stones, trees, and other entities participate in a moral-cosmological order and are not ontologically reduced to instruments for human use [60].

Conclusion

In this paper, I have outlined an understanding of reification as a vice, arguing that it is particularly associated with the biosciences, in ways that should concern bioethicists. There are many aspects of this inquiry that I have had to omit or touch on only very briefly. I cannot hope to address every potential application of the concept of reification for bioethicists, nor rebut every potential criticism. Nevertheless, it is worth addressing the problem of scope. If, as I suggest, one’s attitudes towards objects matter morally, the sphere of moral responsibility is vastly expanded. There are no obvious boundaries at which one may lay down one’s moral concerns and assure oneself that everything beyond here is morally neutral. The idea that I may be reifying the computer I am typing on, and the cup I am drinking from, is strange and perhaps implausible. How can I avoid reifying cups and computers and stay sane? The answer to this concern is to reiterate the importance of the virtue ethics element. I do not argue that we must never undertake a reifying action. I argue that it is important to fight against the tendency to allow reification to dominate the ways in which one perceives the world, and that those who are involved in the design of systems and institutions should give some thought to reification and ask themselves whether the proposed systems increase or reduce the degree of reification involved in the perception and treatment of others and ourselves. The burdens of this approach are thus surprisingly mild, given its admittedly expansive scope.

To summarize, I propose that the concept of reification, understood from a virtue ethics perspective, can form the basis of a new theoretical tool for ethical analysis in contexts involving research on non-human entities. This tool is necessary to help one look beyond the human, beyond the sentient, to inform our relations with the world, with each other, and with oneself. Since humans share the world with a diverse array of entities, only some of which are sentient, but all of whom are interconnected in myriad and unfathomable ways, one should tread cautiously in one’s use of these entities. In particular, it is important to avoid falling into moral traps that encourage false confidence in the ability to classify those beings that one should be concerned about, and those that are meaningless or worthless. In advocating this approach, I recognize that it is both complex and fluid in a way that may be unappealing to many scholars in the analytical tradition, of whom I am one. Yet it is worth persevering, since the tools currently available to bioethicists are not adequate to tackle the moral challenges being currently faced.

Author’s contribution

I am the sole author and wrote the entire paper.

Data availability

Not relevant.

Declarations

Competing interests

No competing interests to report.

Ethical approval

This is a theoretical work with no ethical approval required.

Informed consent

Not relevant – no empirical work, no participants.

Statement regarding research involving human participants and/or animals

This is theoretical work involving no human participants or animals.