OK. Moral status, as has already been pointed out a couple of times this morning,
starts off as a matter of self-interest, so it starts off with the easy proposition that we matter.
And then of course, the problem becomes how do we define the weak so our self-interest as humans encourage us to
start from the assumption that humans matter and it's a common intuition that humans matter more?
So what might be called indeed, what has been called off by by some present company included folk psychology
accounts of moral status rely on species boundaries so humans have moral status.
Most of the species dooms humans and non-humans nobleness.
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
and also that will encounter few beings with full moral status who are not human.
But as we well know, and it's often the case with everyday heuristics, it turns out on closer scrutiny to be philosophically problematic.
So while both self-interest and our everyday intuition suggest there's something special about being human.
Various analyses, including again by those here today,
have demonstrated that basing moral status on biological species membership is philosophically difficult to justify.
And that's both because biological species is a contested concept in itself.
So there's no no clear single definition of what the biological species creatures exist that are between species that cross the boundaries.
And of course, if we say that human species membership is necessary and sufficient, we are open to the charge of species ism.
So there is no sound reason for, according to biological property of species membership.
Any moral significance?
In the context of contemporary bioethics, new knowledges and emerging technologies that proposed to disrupt the conventional categories,
processes and boundaries of biology have prompted us to revisit the question of species and moral status on several fronts,
so our thinking about species and moral status is being challenged in new ways.
Firstly, we're able to disrupt species boundaries,
not just philosophically but biologically the creation of interspecies chimaeras and disrupting the human non-human species.
Boundary forces us also to go beyond species boundaries. In considering the moral status of the new beings created, second,
we now have a greater understanding of the biology underlying the cognitive and psychological capacities that,
on at least some accounts, give rise to moral status.
This also enables us potentially to manipulate these these capacities with the congruent possibility that this might lead to enhanced moral status.
So this may lead to members of existing biological species having new moral properties or even to the creation of new moral species.
So what we might call them a moral species transition and the subject of this,
this moral status enhancement need not to be human, though of course they might be.
So we might think, for example, of cognitively enhanced animals, super chimps or,
as Walter said, super bonobos might be better or of creating post humans or post post persons.
No, if biological species membership is unimportant when it comes to moral status,
then we might say that biological species transitions are irrelevant in terms of whether or not they alter moral status.
And that being the case, you might think that this would be a very short paper and could just stop it.
But I do think that thinking about species transition species boundaries are both biological,
biological and moral can prompt us to useful approaches for our considerations, for our rethinking of moral status.
And that's what I propose to do in the rest of what will not be such a short paper.
To do this, I need to begin by setting out a few issues in how we think about moral status.
And I think particularly thank the previous two speakers for having brought up a number of points, which I think framed this discussion well.
So when we ask the question about moral status, we're asking what it is to matter morally for one's own sake.
Am I alone with David in thinking that the position of interests is the basis for moral hazard or ability?
And this, of course, implies having certain capacities that give rise to those interests.
So this account is one both about interests and about psychological capacities that grounds them, but is relative moral status.
So when we start to think of whether beings can have more or less moral status is relative moral
status about what interests are being has or what we owe to a being in view of its interests.
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.
So now I'm asking a question that deals with degrees of moral status if they can be such a thing.
Similarly, I'm talking here of interests and obligations.
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.
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.
Interests of any interests would be if the interests of a are equal and identical in all respects to the interests of B.
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,
our obligations to satisfy the interests of or a subset of A's interests are greater
than our obligations to satisfy the interests of bee or a subset of bees interests.
So, in other words, is moral status about what interests there are and what obligations we own.
Or can we say moral status is based on something else and therefore our obligations in
respect of the interests that beings of different moral status have will be different,
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.
somehow count more than the interests of BEE for any interest that they share equally?
OK, and this is assuming as well that we have no special responsibilities towards A or B,
so we have no special relationships, nothing like like this is cats.
Would a having a higher moral status justify or require us to place the satisfaction of AI's interests above that would be OK.
I'm not actually going to answer the question, but I think in asking it,
it frames some interesting points about the way that we're trying to relate to interests, obligations, maybe rights and moral status.
Do variable interest or variable rights lead to variable moral status?
Clearly, they're likely to ground different obligations, but does that actually mean different moral status?
And I think this was a claim that was starting to emerge from some of what what you were
saying that having different sets of rights might actually mean a different moral status.
In posing the question in the first place, we have a problem of Commencer ability and of severability of interests.
So what might or could it mean to state that, for example?
A mouse or a super mouse and a human have the same interest in continued life.
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?
Regarding severability, can a single interest in, say, the continuation of one's life be disentangled from the contingent interest
that we have in all the things that we might do with our lives once continued?
This further and evidentiary and epistemic problem with respect to interest and the strength
thereof in that if I claim I have as strong an interest in continued life as you do,
how do we know that's true? How how can we judge this? OK,
I'm not going to attempt here to produce a definitive account of moral status because
that is the job of this entire conference and many better minds have attempted it.
But let me say some things about a general account of moral status that we might start
to use to think about species transitions and moral and moral status enhancement.
So moral status is, I think, related to interests. It's based on capacities.
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.
And that to me, it's plausible to describe, at least to some elements of what is called Unitarian ism, which means we have.
So this is in counter position to the claim that variable rights, for instance, give rise to variable status.
We have a moral status, which is the right to have our interests taken into consideration.
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.
Okay. So if we think that's the case, of course, starting to talk about moral status enhancements perhaps doesn't really make sense,
because if we're going to say we all have one and it's the same, how can you how can you in Hudson?
So please bear in mind that throughout this discussion,
I am treating both moral status in the idea of full moral status as what I call problem concepts.
That is, I'm going to use them, but I'm not going to.
I'm not going to use them uncritically.
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.
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,
or at least I can be, and not all interests seem to be relevant to moral status.
So, for example, if I acquire a bicycle, I also acquire an interest in owning a bicycle pump.
But it doesn't seem to me that my moral status in that more Unitarian sense is increased.
Thereby,
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.
And the reason for that is given that the main reason we want to understand what moral status of being has,
at least in a practical sense, is to know how we should treat it. Perhaps it doesn't matter.
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?
Ordinarily, a kind of thing would be wrong to kill if that being all things considered, no longer has an interesting continued life.
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,
after all, be permissible, how much does the moral status question matter?
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.
All the same,
it does seem that there are certain sorts of critical interest critical life interests that are more relevant to moral status than others.
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,
one being sentience, another being personhood or full moral status.
And I understand why this that personhood is just a shorthand.
Personhood is a useful term that that we like to apply when what we mean is moral status.
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,
I'll just use that synonymously in which some philosophers have have treated as as personhood.
So when we speak of full moral status, we tend to mean a bundle of moral rights are the most common.
One is not to be killed, but also rights to self-determination, not to be used instrumentally, cetera.
And that's grounded. As David, I think, convincingly argued in the idea of a narrative life, a respect.
When we talk about respect for life, we mean not just are beings aliveness, but having a life as a coherent whole.
So this relates in some ways to Regan's idea of the experiencing subject of a life.
But it's more than just experience.
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.
So what it is that makes a life coherent whole is on some accounts, at least.
And in one sense of the term, what gives an individual living that life a coherent identity?
And this has implications for how we think about potential moral status in Huntsman's.
OK, so let's consider now some types of what might be commonly thought of as moral status enhancement.
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.
But when we think about the kinds of enhancement technologies, memorisation, et cetera,
the kinds of things that we're saying, this might result in increased moral status.
Here are the sorts of things we think about human nonhuman chimaeras.
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,
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,
but with other brain cells, which do appear to be smarter or have increased cognitive capacities.
We we are also seeing the creation of human pig chimaeras via the process of blastocyst implementations
that are being suggested that these chimaeras might make good hosts for for growing human organs.
But actually, if you put in pluripotent cells at the blastocyst stage, there is a chance that they're going to go into.