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OK. Moral status, as has already been pointed out a couple of times this morning,

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starts off as a matter of self-interest, so it starts off with the easy proposition that we matter.

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And then of course, the problem becomes how do we define the weak so our self-interest as humans encourage us to

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start from the assumption that humans matter and it's a common intuition that humans matter more?

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So what might be called indeed, what has been called off by by some present company included folk psychology

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accounts of moral status rely on species boundaries so humans have moral status.

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Most of the species dooms humans and non-humans nobleness.

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This may be a sensible heuristic in everyday life, since the chances are that many of the humans we will meet will have full moral status

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and also that will encounter few beings with full moral status who are not human.

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But as we well know, and it's often the case with everyday heuristics, it turns out on closer scrutiny to be philosophically problematic.

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So while both self-interest and our everyday intuition suggest there's something special about being human.

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Various analyses, including again by those here today,

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have demonstrated that basing moral status on biological species membership is philosophically difficult to justify.

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And that's both because biological species is a contested concept in itself.

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So there's no no clear single definition of what the biological species creatures exist that are between species that cross the boundaries.

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And of course, if we say that human species membership is necessary and sufficient, we are open to the charge of species ism.

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So there is no sound reason for, according to biological property of species membership.

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Any moral significance?

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In the context of contemporary bioethics, new knowledges and emerging technologies that proposed to disrupt the conventional categories,

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processes and boundaries of biology have prompted us to revisit the question of species and moral status on several fronts,

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so our thinking about species and moral status is being challenged in new ways.

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Firstly, we're able to disrupt species boundaries,

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not just philosophically but biologically the creation of interspecies chimaeras and disrupting the human non-human species.

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Boundary forces us also to go beyond species boundaries. In considering the moral status of the new beings created, second,

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we now have a greater understanding of the biology underlying the cognitive and psychological capacities that,

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on at least some accounts, give rise to moral status.

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This also enables us potentially to manipulate these these capacities with the congruent possibility that this might lead to enhanced moral status.

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So this may lead to members of existing biological species having new moral properties or even to the creation of new moral species.

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So what we might call them a moral species transition and the subject of this,

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this moral status enhancement need not to be human, though of course they might be.

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So we might think, for example, of cognitively enhanced animals, super chimps or,

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as Walter said, super bonobos might be better or of creating post humans or post post persons.

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No, if biological species membership is unimportant when it comes to moral status,

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then we might say that biological species transitions are irrelevant in terms of whether or not they alter moral status.

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And that being the case, you might think that this would be a very short paper and could just stop it.

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But I do think that thinking about species transition species boundaries are both biological,

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biological and moral can prompt us to useful approaches for our considerations, for our rethinking of moral status.

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And that's what I propose to do in the rest of what will not be such a short paper.

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To do this, I need to begin by setting out a few issues in how we think about moral status.

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And I think particularly thank the previous two speakers for having brought up a number of points, which I think framed this discussion well.

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So when we ask the question about moral status, we're asking what it is to matter morally for one's own sake.

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Am I alone with David in thinking that the position of interests is the basis for moral hazard or ability?

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And this, of course, implies having certain capacities that give rise to those interests.

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So this account is one both about interests and about psychological capacities that grounds them, but is relative moral status.

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So when we start to think of whether beings can have more or less moral status is relative moral

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status about what interests are being has or what we owe to a being in view of its interests.

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So again, I'm taking is read that in order to have any kind of moral status of being has to have morally considerable interest in the first place.

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So now I'm asking a question that deals with degrees of moral status if they can be such a thing.

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Similarly, I'm talking here of interests and obligations.

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I haven't phrased the question in the language of rights, but the same question could be asked in terms of what rights are being.

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OK, so to illustrate the difference that I'm trying to to tease out here, let's say we have two beings A and B, and they have sets of interests.

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Interests of any interests would be if the interests of a are equal and identical in all respects to the interests of B.

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Does that mean that A and B have the same moral status? Or could we say that if A has a higher moral status than B,

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our obligations to satisfy the interests of or a subset of A's interests are greater

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than our obligations to satisfy the interests of bee or a subset of bees interests.

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So, in other words, is moral status about what interests there are and what obligations we own.

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Or can we say moral status is based on something else and therefore our obligations in

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respect of the interests that beings of different moral status have will be different,

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even though the interests or the interest is the same? So are we saying that if the moral status of of a is more than be the interest of A.

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somehow count more than the interests of BEE for any interest that they share equally?

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OK, and this is assuming as well that we have no special responsibilities towards A or B,

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so we have no special relationships, nothing like like this is cats.

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Would a having a higher moral status justify or require us to place the satisfaction of AI's interests above that would be OK.

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I'm not actually going to answer the question, but I think in asking it,

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it frames some interesting points about the way that we're trying to relate to interests, obligations, maybe rights and moral status.

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Do variable interest or variable rights lead to variable moral status?

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Clearly, they're likely to ground different obligations, but does that actually mean different moral status?

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And I think this was a claim that was starting to emerge from some of what what you were

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saying that having different sets of rights might actually mean a different moral status.

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In posing the question in the first place, we have a problem of Commencer ability and of severability of interests.

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So what might or could it mean to state that, for example?

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A mouse or a super mouse and a human have the same interest in continued life.

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I don't think that we necessarily do, but if we were to try and make that work and we have the same interest in something, how can we measure that?

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Regarding severability, can a single interest in, say, the continuation of one's life be disentangled from the contingent interest

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that we have in all the things that we might do with our lives once continued?

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This further and evidentiary and epistemic problem with respect to interest and the strength

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thereof in that if I claim I have as strong an interest in continued life as you do,

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how do we know that's true? How how can we judge this? OK,

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I'm not going to attempt here to produce a definitive account of moral status because

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that is the job of this entire conference and many better minds have attempted it.

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But let me say some things about a general account of moral status that we might start

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to use to think about species transitions and moral and moral status enhancement.

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So moral status is, I think, related to interests. It's based on capacities.

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It should be species neutral. I also think that's the argument for equal consequential consideration that's being told is is one that applies here.

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And that to me, it's plausible to describe, at least to some elements of what is called Unitarian ism, which means we have.

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So this is in counter position to the claim that variable rights, for instance, give rise to variable status.

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We have a moral status, which is the right to have our interests taken into consideration.

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And then what we are, you will vary depending on those interests, but we all have at heart the right to having just taken into consideration.

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Okay. So if we think that's the case, of course, starting to talk about moral status enhancements perhaps doesn't really make sense,

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because if we're going to say we all have one and it's the same, how can you how can you in Hudson?

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So please bear in mind that throughout this discussion,

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I am treating both moral status in the idea of full moral status as what I call problem concepts.

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That is, I'm going to use them, but I'm not going to.

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I'm not going to use them uncritically.

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I'm going to use them in ways that they have been thought about to try and show in ways that we need to rethink psychoanalysis.

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OK. Some further problems in connecting in connecting moral status and interests is that obviously moral status is not just the sum of our interests,

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or at least I can be, and not all interests seem to be relevant to moral status.

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So, for example, if I acquire a bicycle, I also acquire an interest in owning a bicycle pump.

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But it doesn't seem to me that my moral status in that more Unitarian sense is increased.

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Thereby,

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I'm not sure how vital it is actually to try and disentangle moral status from interest or to understand exactly how they relate to each other.

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And the reason for that is given that the main reason we want to understand what moral status of being has,

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at least in a practical sense, is to know how we should treat it. Perhaps it doesn't matter.

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So if you consider cases of morally justifiable assisted dying in which a being that you consider to be a person to have full moral status?

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Ordinarily, a kind of thing would be wrong to kill if that being all things considered, no longer has an interesting continued life.

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Most of us wouldn't want to say that person has less moral status, but if the upshot of our analysis is that killing this being might,

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after all, be permissible, how much does the moral status question matter?

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So, I mean, to put aside exactly how much we need to to dig that out, I think that's a question less practical than theoretical.

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All the same,

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it does seem that there are certain sorts of critical interest critical life interests that are more relevant to moral status than others.

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And we've seen a few of them already identified today. So these results in common thresholds in views where we have degrees of moral status,

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one being sentience, another being personhood or full moral status.

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And I understand why this that personhood is just a shorthand.

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Personhood is a useful term that that we like to apply when what we mean is moral status.

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What do we mean when we speak of full moral status? I'm going to return to this problem of fullness later, but for now,

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I'll just use that synonymously in which some philosophers have have treated as as personhood.

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So when we speak of full moral status, we tend to mean a bundle of moral rights are the most common.

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One is not to be killed, but also rights to self-determination, not to be used instrumentally, cetera.

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And that's grounded. As David, I think, convincingly argued in the idea of a narrative life, a respect.

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When we talk about respect for life, we mean not just are beings aliveness, but having a life as a coherent whole.

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So this relates in some ways to Regan's idea of the experiencing subject of a life.

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But it's more than just experience.

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It is the narrative what makes that life into a whole and is therefore related to what gives the individual what related to questions about identity.

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So what it is that makes a life coherent whole is on some accounts, at least.

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And in one sense of the term, what gives an individual living that life a coherent identity?

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And this has implications for how we think about potential moral status in Huntsman's.

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OK, so let's consider now some types of what might be commonly thought of as moral status enhancement.

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I'm not claiming that they all are. In fact, I'm going to go on later and say that some of these are not.

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But when we think about the kinds of enhancement technologies, memorisation, et cetera,

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the kinds of things that we're saying, this might result in increased moral status.

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Here are the sorts of things we think about human nonhuman chimaeras.

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So we had that. The idea that prompted the first big discussion in bioethics of human nonhuman chimaeras was the still mythical human neurone mouse,

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which didn't get made in that form in the end. More recently, we have seen human mouse neural chimaeras not with neurones per se,

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but with other brain cells, which do appear to be smarter or have increased cognitive capacities.

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We we are also seeing the creation of human pig chimaeras via the process of blastocyst implementations

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that are being suggested that these chimaeras might make good hosts for for growing human organs.

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But actually, if you put in pluripotent cells at the blastocyst stage, there is a chance that they're going to go into.