Christopher Register (Princeton University), "How to Explain the Importance of Persons"
The Philosophical Quarterly (2023)
By Chris Register
Some creatures matter morally for their own sake, giving us reasons to promote their interests and to avoid harming them. It’s crucial to know which entities matter in this way so that we can do right by all creatures of worth. Historically, humanity has made grave errors on this question. All too often, we have failed to appropriately respect certain kinds of people and non-human animals. While we still fall short on many such counts, we have vastly improved our treatment of at least some morally important creatures. Even so, theoretical disputes are unresolved, leaving us vulnerable to moral risk in unfamiliar cases. For example, would conscious AI deserve moral consideration? What about a person who has entered a permanent state of unconsciousness?
To answer these questions, we need a theory of the grounds of moral status. The grounds of moral status are what make a creature matter morally for its own sake, and so the theory tells us which entities matter and why they matter. It’s common to hold that the grounds of a being’s moral status consist in its mental capacities, such as its rationality, sentience, or capacity to care. Theories in this vein have numerous proponents, and they provide guidance in identifying the morally considerable entities. Unfortunately, careful attention to our own condition shows that the common theories are false.
Before I explain why the common theories are false, let me say what I hope we can learn. Moral and metaphysical epistemology are hard, but on the question of why a person matters morally, I believe our subjective point of view is a privileged guide. Each of us has some insight into what is valuable about our own condition, and we might be able to extrapolate that insight to new cases. To the extent that an unfamiliar creature is similar to us in the morally relevant respects, we (arguably) should afford it equal moral consideration. The question then becomes: what are the morally relevant respects? What is it about us that makes us matter in the way that we do?
There is serious promise here, but also peril. If the strategy works, we may come upon an especially satisfying moral sensibility—one that renders the moral value of other creatures subjectively intelligible to us. If the strategy errs, we may perpetuate a disastrous ego- and/or anthropocentric outlook. For the sake of getting things right, let us take great care when examining the grounds of our own moral significance.
As I hinted at above, revelations are forthcoming. It turns out that the common theories, including the prominent view that all and only sentient creatures have moral status, must be false. Common theories are false because otherwise—and you may want to sit down for this—ethics is ruined! How could this be?
Here’s the negative argument, which builds on the ‘personite problem’ as developed recently by Mark Johnston (cf. Johnston 2016, 2017, 2021). There’s good reason to think that a permissive ontology is true. Characteristically, a permissive ontology recognizes the existence of many more objects than does common sense. Accordingly, persons (or human beings, or whatever) are not alone within their spatiotemporal envelopes. Rather, partially or fully overlapping with you at this very moment, there are multiple other objects that are quite similar to you. In particular, there are objects overlapping with you that share your thoughts, feelings, and concerns. For example, there is an object overlapping you that will cease to exist as soon as you exchange 50% of your (current) matter, but this object thinks and feels just as you do (as least for now). If one of the common explanations is true, then each of these objects matters morally in the way that you do. Yet, this is intolerable. If it were true, our attempts to do good and avoid harm would be futile. If you metabolize too much, you will end the existence of some of these morally considerable beings. So don’t eat anything! But wait… Indeed, it turns out that virtually any action whatsoever would massively harm many such overlapping entities.
To avoid this result, I propose a revised explanation of our moral status. The strategy is to find a property that appropriately discerns among overlapping objects, where it is intelligible why this property makes a moral difference. Then, we have a suitable explanation for why persons are special among what may be a multitude overlapping objects.
The various objects that overlap with each of us share some of our properties, such as our mental capacities. My top-half is an object distinct from me that instantiates my thoughts and concerns. These objects also differ from us in other respects, including in mereological, temporal, and modal properties. My top-half does not have a foot as a part, it cannot survive losing an arm, it’s not as old as I am, and so on. The differentiating properties (properties that we might call ‘sortalish’) discern among the overlapping objects. I argue that a special sortalish property also has what it takes to make the relevant moral difference. This is the property of being the object of a pattern of self-concern.
Self-concern consists in a variety of mental states, including felt ownership and concern for one’s own bodily condition, one’s past experiences, and one’s possible future. It is a neo-Lockean notion that builds on the Lockean notions of self-conscious reflection and concernment, which Locke saw as central to moral personhood. Thus, there is a tradition of taking something like self-concern to be morally relevant. Beyond this, because self-concern can differentiate among overlapping objects, it also has what it takes to explain why we are special within our spatiotemporal envelope. That is how it improves upon the common explanations of our moral status.
The revision, I think, is not idle. It doesn’t merely buttress the common views against arcane metaphysical complications. While the proposed view secures the conservative verdict that persons are morally significant in (roughly) the commonsensical way, it may well deliver surprising verdicts in other cases. It may give new insight to beings at the margins of personhood, such as infants or permanently unconscious humans. It may give new predictions about the moral significance of artificial sentient systems with inhuman embodiment. In fact, I suspect that throwing off the training wheels of a conservative ontological outlook is an important step in developing a comprehensive and future-proof theory of the grounds of moral status. That is a reason to examine our theories in the light of permissive ontologies. Afterward, because we have a keener understanding of why we matter morally, we may better extrapolate to less familiar cases too.
The paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/REGHTE