Abstract

In this engaging, highly instructive, well-written, and carefully constructed work, Bernstein inquires into the qualities that confer moral patienthood on an individual. To be a moral patient is to be an individual deserving of moral consideration ; and to be so deserving requires that the individual have a “welfare” in that it must be capable of being made better or worse off. An individual qualifies as a moral patient if and only if it has a welfare. In the first part of the two-part book, Bernstein discusses three theories of personal welfare—three ways of conceiving how individuals can be made better or worse off—that yield three different conceptions of moral patienthood.