Topic of my talk is is what connexion there is between an individual's moral status and his or her proper,
and that means morally proper political and legal status. So I'm I'm not a fan of moral status talk, but that's all right.
No, no offence to the conference organisers.
But you know, I think I think we can minimise the damage as long as we're very clear about what we mean by it.
So I'm going to use moral status in the in the verdict of sense.
So the way I'm going to think about it is that an individual's moral status is
just a summary way of referring to all the vindictive facts about that being,
i.e., all the facts about what we do and do not go to that being what kind of treatment,
what kind of treatment of that being or about other things that being cares about whatever to happen.
So so my thesis is, as you can tell,
as you probably guessed from the title of the talk is that the connexion between moral status and now in our moral state is so understood.
Moral status in the predictive sense and proper political and legal status is tenuous or weak.
So basically, what another way now that we've now that I've explained what I mean by moral status?
I guess another way to express my thesis would be the fact that we morally owe or don't owe a variety
of things to an individual does not have much by way of implications for what their political,
what, what their political or legal status ought to be. It does have and and very little doesn't mean none.
But I'm going to in my short time here, I'm going to focus on what I take on what I what I think will be the more controversial aspect of my view,
which is where the connexion is absent.
I think that the standard view would be that you would recognise quite a few places where the connexion is present.
And when I agree with that, I'm just not going to say I'm only going to focus on the areas where I think I disagree with the common wisdom,
which is where other people think there is a connexion, and I think there isn't.
So I'm to start, I'm going to talk about political status and then legal status and then run through a few implications and then I'll be done.
So I. In political philosophy, I endorse a weak form of political liberalism.
I'm not sure it's ever been enunciated before, but here it goes.
So my version says that the fact that something is good never grounds a reason for the state to pursue it.
So I have an argument for this version of political liberalism.
And that argument also in effect grounds sort of half of my thesis,
the thesis about there being a tenuous connexion between moral status and proper political status.
So I think that when we think about what the state ought to do, we have to focus on what kind of thing the state is.
I think it ought to be uncontroversial. I don't know if it is uncontroversial,
but I think it ought to be uncontroversial that the state is an institution and borrowing from a philosopher named Michael Hardiman.
All defined an institution is an ongoing software producing structure that includes offices and positions,
the occupants of which can change over time.
So in order to help us think sort of in an unbiased way about what the institutional nature of the state implies for what the state ought to do,
we should. Set the state aside and think about other institutions and what their institutional nature implies about what they ought to do.
So I think uncontroversial corporations are institutions.
So let's just think this think for a second about what the institutional nature of a corporation implies for what it ought to do.
So. So we've got so you've got a corporation, so you set up a corporation and then and then you have a question,
well, how how am I, how are we going to use it? How am I going to use it? Now there's some moral constraints that are simply given.
So you're not allowed to if you if you are the.
The owner of a corporation, you're not allowed to use it to kill people.
OK, that's just a given. Morality set certain constraints on what you are and what you may or may not do with your corporation.
But a lot, there's quite a bit, but there are there's quite a bit of leeway.
So how do you how do we I mean,
so you just sort of brute morality doesn't really answer that many questions about what ought to be done with the corporation.
What does sort of answer those questions?
Well, I think we have to look to how and why the corporation exists in order to get more answers to our questions.
So. I think I think like all other institutions, Corp. a corporation,
the sustaining of a corporation is a joint action made possible by shared intention intention to intentionality.
So what I mean by a joint action is that it's it's a numerically single action that many people are doing and shared.
And by end, when I say it's made possible by shared intentionality.
What I mean is the way that action is being accomplished is via the various people doing it,
having individual intentions that mesh with each other in the right way.
So. I think what we what we get when we think about this corporate analogy and we think about how corporations are sustained.
We are we at least may plausibly arrive at the conclusion that the corporation is to be used so as to serve the ends of those who sustain it.
So we get something like the shareholder theory of corporate obligation.
And I know that's controversial, I know not everybody accepts the shareholder theory, but if they if they don't accept the shareholder theory,
chances are the reason why they don't accept it is because they have a brought because because their
understanding of which set of individuals partakes of that joint intentionality is more expansive.
But I think I hope most, most, all of us can agree that whatever that set of individuals is,
that sustains the joint intentionality that makes the corporations sustenance possible that.
That what the corporation ought to be used for.
You know, the people, the people who are employed to work for the corporation, the managers, et cetera.
What they ought to do is serve the ends of those who sustain the corporation.
So I think that the same is true of the state.
There is a set of individuals who sustain the state through joint intentionality and
therefore the state is to be used to serve their ends again within moral limits,
even if they want to use the state to go around killing people. That's not OK.
So. Now we can return with that much on the table, we can return to the question of political status and who should have.
Well, political like as as with all the other.
As with all of it, as with all the other levers at the disposal of the state, the state, you know, has all sorts of power, does all sorts of things.
One of the things it does is allocate status. As with all other things it does,
I think the most general thing that can say that we can say that's true about how political stands off to be
allocated is that it ought to be allocated in a way that serves the ends of those who sustain the state.
So if it's if and what if and when it's true that some individual ought to be accorded political status.
The reason why it's true is because doing so serves the ends of those who partake of the joint intentionality that sustains the state.
So it's never the individual's moral status that does the grounding work. It's always some something else, something quite different.
So really, there are two ways then that it can be morally required of the state that it accord.
Political status to some individual one is that is that that individual him or herself partakes of the shared intentionality,
the stink that sustains the state because, you know, operating under this sort of assumption that there,
although it's a contingent truth, that it'll be a nearly exceptionalist truth,
that those who sustain the state will care about them, that they themselves, that they will want political status for themselves.
And then the second way is whether that individual is central to the ends of those who partake of the shared intention just to sustain the state.
In other words, whether they're sort of cared about whether their well,
their good is thought of amongst those who partake of this shared intentionality.
It's thought of a sense as if they as if they if they think of it as sort of central to why they are partaking of the shared intentionality,
why they're going to the trouble. Now,
I admit that what I've said here seems to open the door to institutionalised bigotry because
it seems like basically what I'm sort of implicitly allowing here is that if a group
of people sustain a state and they're all bigots and there's some other and there's this
other group of people whose well-being they don't care about at all is matter of fact.
They help these people do really badly,
that they're sort of their sort of bigotry actually justifies withholding political status from this other group of people or non or non people,
whoever these other individuals may be.
But ultimately, I think this is a question of excluding individuals from partaking of shared intentionality, and I never said that was OK.
So, right, so people, I never I never said it was OK, I never said it was possible,
never mind morally OK for a group of people who want to partake of shared intentionality with each other to prevent other people from so partaking.
So you could sort of your sort of the sort of bigoted project I've nothing I've said commits me to saying
that the bigoted project is sort of your sort of morally permitted to even get that project off the ground,
if you would like to. OK, so that's that's the end of what I have to say about political status.
OK, moving on to legal status, so if we asked the question about whether an individual's moral status.
Entails that they ought to have some kind of legal status.
Basically, we're asking a question about the truth of legal moralism. And now the kind of legal moral ism that we are being forced to talk about here.
It's not your father's legal moralism, it's not Hart Devlin legal moralism.
For those of you who know the devil Devlin debate,
it's not about whether the fact that some moral proposition is widely accepted or as part of the social morality,
whether that fact entails that the law ought to sort of embody it or enforce it.
Now, this is new, this is new school legal moralism, this is whether the fact that some more of the proposition is actually true.
Entails that the legal system ought to be sort of structured so as to embody it or enforce it or discharge it or whatever.
So when it comes to this kind of legal moralism, I take my cues from a legal philosopher named R-rate Duff.
So does. Has a very helpful analogy, I think, for thinking about philosophy of law.
He what he proposes is that before we can know what content the law ought to have, we need to first think about why we have such a thing as the law.
And I think that's absolutely right.
And the reason and the way he he demonstrates the usefulness of this way of approaching it by pointing out that we that if we wanted to make sense,
if we wanted to know what content some other body of rules had, we would definitely stop to first think about why we have that body of rules at all.
And so his analogy is bodies of rules for professional societies.
So he often comes back to medicine as his key example.
So take Take an organisation like the American Medical Association, the main professional body for four physicians in the United States.
Let's say they had a clean slate.
You know, imagine a time when there just wasn't it when they had no code of conduct for doctors yet, and they were trying to come up with one.
How would they have sort of started to think about what content their code ought to have?
Well, Duff proposes and I I think this is right that the first thing they would have had to think about is, you know, why practise medicine?
What's medicine for? What are we doing that for? And then once we have an idea of what we're doing medicine for,
then we can think about what a good set of rules governing the conduct of medicine would look like.
So, you know, under the supposition that that is and that that sort of that that sounds intuitively right,
Duff wants to say, Well, we should say the same thing about legal systems.
Why do we have? Why have legal systems as opposed to not have it?
Well, what Duff says is that just as the just as the AMA's Code of Professional Conduct is to is to govern the conduct of physicians as physicians,
the law is to govern is a code of conduct to govern the behaviour of citizens living together as citizens living together.
So we have to think about why just and so analogously, just like we in the case of the AMA.
The first thing you have to think about is say, why do medicine? The first thing we got to think about here is sort of why live together?
Why live together in some sort of organised way with political structures instead of living in anarchy?
So. We don't need to give an answer to that question.
We can actually get pretty far and thinking about what the law ought to say.
Just knowing that that question needs to be asked, never mind actually answering it.
We can just put in a placeholder for whatever the answer is,
whatever the answer is to why live together under political structures instead of having anarchy?
Whatever the answer is, the placeholder word for it at least does placeholder word for it.
Is the rest high?
That is the sort of the body of ends that we together are trying to achieve through political means instead of leaving it to anarchy to solve it.
So what the law is for then, is to promote and make more likely the achieving of the public.
And this essentially makes legal philosophy a branch of political philosophy.
And I think that I think that's entirely right and proper that it should be conceived of that way.
We need to do a little political philosophy first media.
We need to determine what the public is and then we can find out what sort of laws we ought to have.
So if it's right that legal philosophy is a branch of political philosophy,
then we then I kind of already answered the question about legal status by answering the question about political status.
My weak political liberalism. My claim that.
It's never the fact that something is good that grounds the fact that the state ought to produce it and ergo, I guess.
And then, you know, even more so it's never the fact that an individual's moral status that grounds any fact about it.
What's what's status? The state recorded that individual so that weak political liberalism entails legal liberalism.
So the way I'm going to define it is that the fact that some action would be bad for
someone or wrong someone never grounds a reason for us to use the law to address it.
What does ground reasons for us to use laws to address things is that the doing of that thing undermines the public.
So we get two conclusions for this from this, it's never an individual's moral status,
the grounds for proper legal status and legal moralism is false.
So I'm something more like a legal liberal. I think I think I'm a legal liberal in a strong sense that even stronger than Joel Feinberg was,
who is considered sort of the standard bearer of legal liberalism. Interestingly, Duff himself ends up endorsing legal moralism.
But I think that he just didn't properly follow through the implications of his own argument.
But that's by the by. All right.
So that's it for the. That's it for my sort of defence of the idea that moral status has very little to do with proper legal status.
So what are the policy implications? Well, I think some of I think at least a few of the policy implications of what I said will be quite intuitive,
like they will accord with with people's pre theoretical intuitions.
But I only don't have that much time. And so I want to focus on the controversial things.
So I'm just going to I'm just going to tell you the controversial implications, not the uncontroversial ones.
And only even then only a couple of the controversial implications just because of limits to my time.
So I think the most interesting implications of what I said so far are in terms of what we are morally
permitted to do as a because there are implications in terms of what we're morally required to do.
But I want to focus on the implications in terms of what we're morally permitted to do.
So if we want, if we want to extract some implications from what I've said, we have to ask.
At least this one question.
Well, at least these two questions, excuse me, which individuals partake of the joint intentionality that sustains the state,
call that set of individuals x and which individuals are such that their good is central to X ends?
There again, the reason we have to ask that question is because those are the individuals such that it's quite it,
we're it's we're going to have a good argument for a court,
for being more for our being morally obligated to accord them some political and legal status.
I'm going to focus on on this artificially intelligent machines, but just because I think it's interesting.
So I submit to you that is at least the ones that sort of get talked about, the ones that are most likely to exist.
The first ones that are most likely to exist will be guys that cannot partake of joint intentionality.
The reason why is because I think partaking of joint intelligence finality requires seeing other individuals as rational agents remember,
joint intentionality involves each amount involves each individual that partakes of that joint intentionality,
having one or more intentions that meshes in the right way with the intentions of others.
And I think that if you look at what people who are experts in this area of sort of social metaphysics will tell you,
people like Bretman who have even quite weak requirements for shared intentionality will tell it.
Tell you that the intentions have to have some sort of second personal reference.
They have to be intentions to do something with others. And I think AI's can't do that.
And the reason I think I could do that, they can't. They can't have thoughts like that.
The reason I think that goes back to a distinction I think we owe to Pierre Straw since freedom and resentment.
I could be wrong there. The distinction between two different ways of viewing others, viewing other objects,
we can view other objects and buy objects, I include living things and even intelligent living things.
We can view other objects as things to be managed or as things to be reasoned with.
These are two sort of very basic fundamentals the sort of basic fundamental distinction between these two ways of approaching other individuals.
So hurricanes, I think all of us view are we view them as things to be managed.
It wouldn't make sense to view them as things to be reasoned with. They just are what they are.
We can try to predict what they're going to do and then react accordingly in whatever way best promotes our ends.
Other human persons of average intelligence and maturity, at least we can, and often we do interact with them as individuals to be reasoned with.
We don't just take what they're going to do as a given and then try to protect our interests the best we can.
We think we can engage with them and propose reasons why they ought to change their intentions and things like that.
So my understanding of A.I. is, is that they only do the form.
They interact with all of us in that formal way and exclusively in that formal way.
For that reason, they cannot partake of shared intentionality.
So they are not amongst the individuals who partake of the shared intentionality that sustains the state.
I also would say this would propose, and this is an empirical claim,
that they are not central to the ends of those who do partake of the shared intentionality that sustains the state.
So one implication then I think and this is making a big leap,
there are a bunch of intermediate premises that I'm leaving out just for the sake of time.
I think it's permissible to withhold citizenship from them and all the things that go along with citizenship, like the right to vote.
I also think it's permissible to make no law criminalising the destruction of AIDS.
And again, I'm leaving out a whole bunch of intermediate premises,
but I do think that by a series of sensible premises we can get from what I just said about joint intentionality to that conclusion.
So that's just a taste of some of the implications we get out of what I've said.
I have to stop there for time and consideration. I look forward to your questions and thank you for listening.