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Our fellow creatures
Published in John Vorhaus, Valuing Profoundly Disabled People, 2017
This account does not succeed: it leaves too much unexplained. If it is a decisive question whether a human is able to benefit from a relationship, then it should be possible to say something about what that benefit is. If there is no way of describing what it is, then we are in no position to confirm that there is any benefit. Nagel maintained that there is something it is like to a bat, though we have no way of knowing what, subjectively, it is like for the bat (Nagel 1974). But this might be accounted for by the difference between the sensory apparatus of humans and bats; in any case, Nagel is making an epistemological point about the subjective character of experience, whilst Gunnarson is making the point that some child’s subjective experience is both unknowable by us and yet also a benefit for that child. It is hard to see how we can both not know anything about someone’s experience and yet also maintain that it makes a beneficial difference to her.
Why I am pro-choice
Published in Bertha Alvarez Manninen, Jack Mulder Jr., Civil Dialogue on Abortion, 2018
One of the most telling reasons for why we ought to avoid inflicting needless pain is that if we were to “shift our perspective and see things from another’s point of view, we will regard ourselves as having reasons provided by his pain [to avoid inflicting needless suffering].”47 This captures another important reason for attributing moral status only to conscious beings. We can sympathize with them, and feel that we have obligations to them, because they have a point of view, an inner life, that is affected by our treatment of them. A being that can have experiences, be a locus for consciousness, not just an object, but rather a subject. As Thomas Nagel writes: … an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience …48Nonconscious objects, having no such phenomenology, can have no point of view, no inner life, that is affected by our treatment of them, and thus they cannot suffer or benefit from anything done to them. To borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone? … Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. – One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing. 49This passage eloquently captures the essence of what is called the “interest view” of moral status. Given that stones are inanimate things that lack the capacity to feel pain and to have consciousness, this tells us “about the kind of thing that stones are – what falls within and what exceeds the sense of their type.”50 Nonsentient beings are not the types of beings to whom we owe moral consideration because nothing at all is important to them.
Consciousness in a Rotor? Science and Ethics of Potentially Conscious Human Cerebral Organoids
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2023
Federico Zilio, Andrea Lavazza
If HCOs might have a form of sentience, it would not only be able to process, for example, external stimuli, but also to experience them and not just be a processing machine, according to what Nagel calls “something it is like to be” for that entity while interacting with external stimuli (Nagel 1974). Consequently, this subjective character of experience (the “what it is like for the entity”) would imply that such entities could develop a tendency to pursue events that are good for their survival and flee negative ones, feeling them also as positive and negative experiences (e.g., suffering); hence, as argued above, the possibility of an initial form of moral concern. That tendency is not absolute and does not imply that there is always an ability to pursue one experience over another. It is important to stress here that the mere process of action and reaction to certain stimuli does not determine the presence of moral interest in the entity, but rather the possibility that in these processes the entity may feel something.1