ABSTRACT
To consider an extreme view first, it is sometimes held that only members of one's tribe, nation or race fall within the scope of morality, rather than people everywhere, and that outsiders are of no account. Contract theories draw the boundaries of moral standing much more liberally than Kantian ones, and are not so readily to be discarded. The question of their merits can temporarily be set on one side, so that the issue can be raised of whether all living human beings are within what Bernard Williams has called 'the constituency of morality.' Indeed there may well be creatures which are capable of gratification and of frustration but not of the sensation of pain; having a point of view that they too would be included in the scope of morality. It is sometimes suggested that whole ecosystems have moral standing, or that the biosphere as a whole does.
