So there's been some discussion in the recent literature and actually some discussion in this room over the last few days of
whether we should cognitively enhance or just enhance beings in ways that might be thought to affect their moral status.
That's just to give a few examples from the literature.
Sarah Chan and John Harris have considered whether we should cognitively enhance animals in significant ways,
ways that might be thought to increase their moral status. On the other hand.
Adam Shriver and Paul Thompson have argued that we should, in fact,
significantly cognitively dis enhance at least some animals to prevent them from suffering some of the harms involved in factory farming.
More controversially, and I think largely undiscovered, looked at the top contention,
and Claudia Tamborine have defended the kind of extreme cognitive enhancement of
some human persons in ways that might be thought to affect their moral status,
so they defend what they call the soft decapitation of some criminal offenders.
This would involve inducing a kind of docile and healthy, but severely cognitively impaired state and in psychopaths.
And then, as was mentioned in a couple of talks yesterday,
there's been quite a bit of discussion about whether it would be possible and necessary desirable to enhance the
cognitive capacities of existing human persons in ways that would increase their moral status to super personal levels.
So and so one question that I think is going to be relevant to all of these discussions is is whether it's good for you to have moral status,
whether your moral status contributes to your well-being or as I like to be equivalent, whether it has prudential value to you.
If your status has prudential value,
then presumably we have some reason to bring about cognitive enhancements of the sort that would increase moral status,
at least as long as they're not. They don't affect numerical identity.
On the other hand, if moral status is bad for you, we presumably have reasons not to bring about those kinds of cognitive enhancements and in fact,
that everyone's talking about cognitive dissonance.
But I think a little bit surprisingly less question about the prudential value of moral status hasn't attracted much attention.
So a lot of people have noted that cognitive enhancements or just enhancements might affect a being's moral status.
And there's been quite a bit of discussion about the possible implications of such changes in moral status for the well-being of other people.
So a lot of the discussion, for example, about whether we should produce beings with super personal moral status has been
about whether this would be something bad for the for the people left behind,
for the for the mere moral persons who don't get the increased moral status.
But the question of whether moral status is good for the bearer of the moral status itself seems
to have been almost completely neglected as far as I'm aware from the literature I've seen,
apart from in some work by Sarah Chan and John Harris.
And the only exceptions in the world.
So and so what I want to do in this talk is to begin to sort of explore the credential value of moral status by thinking
about three different kinds of credential value or this value that we might think that moral status would have.
I'm not going to arrive at any firm conclusions about any of these types of value,
but I want to sort of try to try out some initial speculative arguments.
First, a couple of preliminary comments. So first of all, just to comment on how I'm going to understand moral status,
I'm going to take moral status to be a metric of the overall strength right and counterfactual robustness of one's fundamental moral rights.
So in this kind of view, you can get more moral status by acquiring new fundamental rights or through an
increase in the strength or robustness of at least some of your existing rights.
And there are obviously lots of other ways of thinking about moral status.
We might instead think of moral status as sort of something in the background that gives you more rights.
We might think of moral status in broader ways that takes into account not just moral rights,
but also interests that have some kind of moral significance, even if they don't give rise to rights.
And I'm actually sympathetic to some of those broader ways of thinking about moral status.
But I'm just going to stick to this kind of simpler, rights based understanding because it makes the presentation of what I want to say simpler.
And I do actually think that I am going to make a play to some other accounts of moral status as well.
I'm not sure exactly have a family that extends to other kinds of accounts of moral status.
And the second part of your comment,
and this is the third one on the handout I'm going to skip to the second one is just a comment on the scope of the argument.
So I'm not going to try to arrive at any conclusions about whether we should in fact pursue
cognitive enhancements or just enhancements of the sort that would affect moral status.
I think that the question about the prudential value of moral status is sort of interesting,
mainly because of its relevance to answering this moral question.
But answers to this moral question are going to depend on all sorts of considerations that are not going
to get into like questions about whether there are down theological constraints on alternative beings,
moral status, questions about the effects of changes in most cases and one being for other beings and so on.
OK, so let me move on to the first kind of value that I think moral status might have,
and this is what I'm going to kind of instrumental value, and it's what I'm going to call protective value.
So I think that the idea of protect their value is probably best illustrated by reference to legal status.
So it's tempting to think that legal status has some kind of credential value when an individual possesses a legal right to something.
It's often good for them that they possess that right. So it seems good for me, for example, that I possess the legal right to self-determination.
That's characteristically conferred on citizens of a liberal democracy.
The right to spend my time off of my labour generally live my life as I please within some constraints.
I would be in one way worse off where I do like this right? As, for example, the slaves and the citizens of some authoritarian states.
So why is this legal, right, good for me?
Well, one answer is one reason why it's fiction is that it helps to protect some aspect of my well-being in this case.
So some interest of mine, in other words, in this case, my interest in self-determination.
So provided that people are at least somewhat disposed to comply with the laws in my possession of a legal right to
self-determination makes it less likely that I will in fact be deprived of my self-determination compared to a situation like that,
right? So my legal state legal status seems to have a kind of instrumental value for me by helping to protect my interests,
making it less likely that some of my interests will be set back. So this is what I mean by particular value.
So it's my moral status, good for me in a similar way. Does it also help protect our values?
Well, I mean, it might seem kind of initially plausible that it does suppose that I have a moral and not just a legal right to
self-determination and suppose that people are generally somewhat disposed to comply with their moral gains,
including those moral duties that are correlative tomorrow, right?
So people have generally respect one another's more rights than it might seem that my possessing a moral right
to self-determination again makes it less likely that I will in fact be deprived of my self-determination.
So this moral right has this kind of protective value. OK,
but I want to try and suggest that actually the kind of what we might want to say about the protective
value of legal status of legal rights doesn't doesn't carry over straightforwardly to the moral case.
And that's because I think there's an important analogy between legal and moral rights
that has to do with the relationship between rights and the interests that they protect.
So legal rights, it seems to me, a kind of practically independent of the interests that they protect.
Someone could easily deprive me of my legal rights to something without doing anything to undermine my interest in it.
Someone could take away my legal right to self-determination. But I would still have an interest in such determination.
I would still be better off if I could determine the course of my life. And presumably, actually,
this is the situation that most people who in fact lack the legal right to self-determination that may have no legal rights determination,
but they nevertheless have an interest in self-determination.
But I think we don't have the same kind of independence between the relationship between a moral right and the interests that it protects.
And in fact, I think it's quite plausible that having an interest in it or in something or at least
a certain kind of interest in something is sufficient for having a moral right to it,
at least if we understand more rights in a kind of weak sense,
which is I'm inclined to do so in the hand that it says that I think it might be plausible
that you have a moral right if and only if you have to have a certain kind of interest.
I should just say if that's a mistake in mind, that it's correct in this version of this.
I just want to say that having a certain kind of interest might be sufficient for having a moral right.
So why might that be the case? Well,
one reason it might be the case is that it might be the case that having a certain kind of interest in something is what grounds your moral rights.
This is, I think, what proponents of the so-called interest theory of rights would claim, but they might also be other reasons why I'm having it.
Having a certain kind of interest is sufficient sufficient for having a moral right.
So, for example, it might be that moral rights and interests have some common source.
So it might be, for example, that my having an interest in self-determination implies that I had the capacity for self-determination
and maybe my capacity for self-determination is what gives me a moral right to self-determination.
In any case, I'm not I'm not going to agree for this view that interests are sufficient for my rights.
I'm just going to now sort of take this as an assumption.
The correct area of moral status will say that if you have a certain kind of interest, then you have a moral right.
And I'm going to explore how this might affect how we think about the protective value of moral status or moral rights.
OK, so in suggesting that our legal rights have particular value,
I implicitly compared a situation in which I have a legal right to something to a situation in which I let that legal right,
but I still have the interest that in the actual situation is protected by that right?
So I compared a situation, an actual situation in which I have an interest and a right to self-determination.
So a case where I didn't have the legal right to self determination, but I still have the interest in self-determination.
So this is a kind of this is like comparison one on the end handout. And when we made this comparison,
it looked as though I'd be better off in the actual situation than in the counterfactual situation because my interest
would be less likely to be set back if it was accompanied by this right than if it was not in company by now.
I think this kind of comparison makes sense in the legal case because as I pointed out earlier,
I could well be in the situation in this kind of fiction situation in which I have an interest in self-determination,
but I don't have a legal right to self-determination, someone a lawmaker could easily put me in that situation.
But I don't think that the same kind of comparison makes much sense in the moral case.
And because it allows us to imagine a counterfactual situation that actually no
one could bring about a situation in which I have an interest in something,
but I don't have the right that in fact, according to the correct, their own moral status would always come along with that interest.
So I don't think this comparison of type one kind of makes no sense in the case of moral rights, I mean,
it's probably logically and made it physically possible for me to have an interest in self-determination without having a moral
right to self-determination because morality could have been otherwise a different type of moral status could have been correct.
But but it's kind of practically irrelevant comparison because no one can put me in that situation.
No one has the power to change morality in that way, given morality is as it is,
the only way that someone can deprive me of my moral right to something will also involve depriving me of my interest in it.
So, for example, I suspect it's possible that the only way that someone could derive any of my moral right
to self-determination would be by extinguishing my capacity for self-determination.
And that would also, I think, take away my interest in self-determination. So,
so this suggests that the kind of sort of evaluative question that's really a practical relevance here is whether whether
I'm better off with some rights and interests that it protects than I would be without both the interests and the rights.
So this is a comparison to on that. And I think that the answer to this question is just really going to depend on the nature of interest
and probably actually the nature of the underlying capacities and the protection provided by the right.
And it is going to be a secondary consideration.
So me kind of motivate that suggestion with a couple of cases, so in the first case, I, of course, own pleasure.
We were to imagine that through some form of cognitive enhancement,
a pig acquires the capacity for some kind of higher pleasure that can currently only be enjoyed by a cognitively more sophisticated beings.
Let's say the pleasure of appreciating the beauty of nature.
So maybe it will say that this pig has acquired a new interest in being exposed to natural beauty say,
and maybe would also want to say that it's acquired a new fundamental moral right against being deprived of such exposure.
And in this case, it seems to me that we're going to have to say that pig is at least in one way better off with this new capacity,
this capacity for this higher form of pleasure and the associated interest and rate than
it would have been without the capacity and thus without the interest in the right.
So with this capacity, this pig has presumably at least some chance of experiencing this higher pleasure.
Without this capacity, there's no chance it will get to experience it. But now let's compare this to a case.
This is the higher porcine suffering case in which through some form of cognitive enhancement,
a pig acquires the ability to experience some higher form of suffering but no higher form of cases.
And maybe the pig acquires the ability to experience humiliation when previously
this was a form of suffering only available to more sophisticated creatures.
So again, we might think that this pig has acquired a new interest and interest in not being humiliated.
Maybe also a new fundamental moral right and moral right not to be humiliated.
But in this case, it seems that sort of other things being equal,
the pig is going to be worse off with this new capacity and renew interest in the new right than it would have been without them.
So with with this new capacity, there's maybe some chance that the pig will in fact suffer humiliation without them.
There would have been no chance of suffering humiliation. So, I mean,
the point of these kind of these cases is just to suggest that it seems like it's
that it's the value of underlying capacity that's doing all the work in these cases.
And whether the pig is better off with or without some capacity is going to depend on whether it's a capacity for suffering harm,
in which case it would be bad to have the capacity or whether it's a capacity for enjoying some good,
in which case it will be good to have the capacity.
The protection provided by the moral rights in these cases seems to be just most a kind of parasitic,
secondary considered consideration and consideration that might amplify the value of having some
good capacity because it makes it more likely that that capacity will in fact be exercised.
Or that might mitigate the value of having a bed capacity because it reduces the chances that will.
In fact, one will in fact suffer a harm that one is not capable of suffering.
So I think that if we focus on comparison to then.
The protection provided by a more right is not functioning as a sort of value in the sense of something that we can plug into a
moral calculus as a factor that counts in favour of bringing about an enhancement of moral status or against bringing about it.
This enhancement of moral status or the right of doing is kind of modifying the
amount of value or just value that bringing about a good or bad capacity might have.
OK, so that's all I want to say about and protect the value,
and I want to move on to talk about a possible kind of discovery that I think moral scientists might have.
And again, this is a kind of instrumental value.
And I'm going to call it vulnerability to you,
so the thought here is that having moral status might be a bit like having a fragile or needy disposition.
It might make it harder for others to avoid harming you and therefore increase the chances that one will in fact be harmed.
So why might moral status be bad for you in this way? Well, I suppose that you have some moral right against being harmed in some way,
I suppose you have a moral right to bet against being caused to suffer pain and suppose that someone some moral agent in fact,
causes you to suffer pain and thus infringes this right? So in this kind of case, you're being harmed by being caused to suffer pain.
I think it's also plausible that you have suffered another how much is the harm of having your rights infringed?
So I think it's plausible that it's kind of known instrumentally bad for you to have your rights infringed.
So why do I think that I don't have an argument for this view about just the motivation I think it was going to be?
Maybe you can help to explain some intuitions that might be somewhat widely held.
So, for example, I think many of us would probably prefer to suffer pain as a result of some natural misfortune,
like a random genetic mutation or some kind of natural disaster than to suffer pain as a result of the intentional actions of another moral agent.
And one way of explaining that intuition, if you have it, would be to say that in the case where your pain is caused by another moral agent,
you suffer any additional harm, which is the harm of having your right symptoms.
I think that this kind of view that right infringements are bad for you and may also
help to account for some of our intuitions about cases or moral status enhancement.
So this is the porcine self-determination case on the handout.
Suppose that we enhance the moral status of all pigs. So they acquired something like the moral right to self-determination enjoyed by persons.
But suppose we kept treating them in the same ways that we treat, treat them currently,
we keep subjecting them to factory farming practises of the sort that we employ today.
So I think it seems intuitively plausible to think that these pigs have been made worse off in some way.
And I think that one way to account for this is certainly not the only way, but one way to account for this would be to say, Well,
we've made these pigs worse off because now we're not only harming them by inflicting all kinds of suffering on the suffering of the sort,
in fact, by factory farming practises. But we're also systematically infringing their right to self-determination.
And that's a further harm. OK, so let's suppose that I'm writing that having your rights infringed is bad for you,
then it seems like having moral status is going to be instrumentally bad for you in the sense that it makes you vulnerable to a new kind of harm,
a kind of harm that you weren't susceptible to previously.
Well, it makes it more likely that you will be subject to this form of harm increase in more states.
It involves acquiring more and more rights. Then it becomes more difficult for other people to avoid infringing your rights
and more likely that they're going to harm you by infringing your rights. And that's what I'm calling vulnerability discouraging.
Now, how bad is this this value? How bad is it?
Is it to be more vulnerable to rights infringements? I don't really have a clear view about this.
I mean, I think this I've said intuitions that have pushed me towards the view that think would suggest that it's not very bad at all.
I mean, I think most of us probably don't care that much about of our rights and terms as compared to other kinds of harm.
Most of us probably care much more about not suffering pain than we care about not having our rights against being caused to suffer pain infringed,
for example. But on other hand, I think there are some kind of theoretical views,
and I'm thinking here mostly of our views about dignity according to which and certain kinds of rights infringements, at least, are very bad.
Some people think that certain kinds of rights infringements,
the kinds of rights infringements they tend to get described as kind of insults to dignity, things like.
Degrading and humiliating treatment are actually kind of incompatible with having even even a minimally decent life,
so these people seem to think that certain kinds of rights infringements are extremely bad.
Well, that's one interpretation of what you're saying, and I don't have any argument against that view.
So I'm just going to leave open the question of how bad the rights infringements might be and therefore how bad this vulnerability,
this value of moral status is. OK, so the final possibility I want to consider is that.
Moral status might just possess not instrumental value for you,
it might be a constituent of your wellbeing like pleasure, as most people accept your pleasure as well, or,
like many objective various therapists about well-being,
would think that achievements or meaningful relationships or knowledge perhaps have this kind of not instrumental value.
So this seems to me to be a kind of reasonably plausible view that moral status might be a constituency of your well-being,
but it's not that close and you want the kind of positive argument for it would be.
And what I want to do in the rest of the time is just to think about some different ways
in which you might try to argue that moral status is not instrumental you could feed.
So, so one way you might try to execute this, it would just be to invoke some existing objective list theory of well-being,
which includes moral status as one of the items on the list.
But as far as I'm aware, I'm or isn't on any of the standard list, so I don't think that's a very promising way to go.
Another possibility would be to appeal indirectly to some objective list value,
so you might argue that moral status is partly constitutive of some other good.
That, according to some objective list theory, is a constituent of well-being. So one possibility here, I think, might be to.
To appeal to this concept of dignity, their dignity is sometimes spoken of as something that's that's good for you to have some.
Some people think that possessing dignity is in fact necessary for living even a minimally decent life,
and dignity is sometimes equated with possessing a particular level of moral status.
The level of moral status enjoyed characteristic enjoyed by cognitively normal adult humans formal statement from more personal.
So perhaps our moral status is kind of constitutive of our dignity, which is in turn a constituent of our well-being.
So I think that when when people speak of dignity as being necessary for a minimally decent life,
they must mean not that having dignity is necessary for people living a minimally decent life,
but that being treated with dignity is necessary for a minimally decent life.
And being treated with dignity seems to mean something more like being treated in a way that is appropriate to your moral status.
Not having a lower status. So being figurative, they might just mean on my kind of account tomorrow if they is not having your rights infringed or
maybe not having your rights systematically infringed or not having certain of your rights infringed.
The very important rights, for example, and having moral status isn't going to do anything to ensure that you are treated with dignity.
In this sense, it's not going to do anything to ensure that your rights are in fact not infringed.
In fact, I just argued in the previous section that in most cases is going to make you more likely to have your rights infringed.
Another possibility, I think, would be that to argue that moral status is partly constitutive of self-respect.
So I think it seems plausible to think of self-respect as consisting in rightly viewing yourself as having full moral status.
So self-respect because this in the conjunction of having full moral status and recognising the Okumura status.
And I think it seems reasonably plausible to think that self-respect is something
that might belong on a on on a kind of objectively very well being institution,
the stature in the well being. But if few a few comments about this kind of argument that, first of all,
invokes a good that is going to be available only to a very limited range of beings as beings that are in fact capable of recognising demoralisation.
So it's not going to be available to non-human animals,
at least in the absence of very extreme forms of cognitive enhancement that's going to have practically kind of limited relevance.
The second thing to note about this suggestion is that as well as being a constituent constituent of self-respect,
moral status could also be a constituent of self disrespect itself.
And I'm thinking of self disrespect as being something like wrongly viewing oneself as lacking moral status.
So, so that's the conjunction of having four more stages, but taking yourself not take four months.
So I think, again, it's sort of plausible that having self disrespect is bad for you,
and this seems to be a kind of bad that is enabled, in fact, by having moral status away from high moral status.
But I think that the most important problem with this kind of approach is self-respect, is that once we distinguish self respect and self disrespect,
it's no longer very clear that self-respect has prudential value over and above the absence of self disrespect.
So I think it's plausible that self disrespect is going to positively bad for you.
But I think it's not very clear that self respect is positively good for you.
So consider the case of a Jewish person living in Nazi Germany who comes to accept the kind
of prevalent view in this society that Jewish people have less than full moral status.
So this person manifests itself disrespect on my view,
and I think it's plausible that that's bad for that person, that they have this kind of self disrespect.
But now compare this person to an area in person living in Nazi Germany who
rightly takes himself to have full moral status that he manifests self respect.
Is it good for that person that he has self respect over and above just the absence of the self disrespect that the Jewish person has?
I don't have a I have it dangerous,
and that is not good for this person to have self respect as something over and above the absence of self disrespect.
So I'm inclined to think that self disrespect is as bad here, but not that self respect is good for you.
So that kind of undermines the view that moral status might be good for you by being a constituent in self-respect.
OK, so that's what they say about possible sort of theoretical arguments for why we might want to put moral
status on on a list of constituents and well-being on a kind of objective list theory of our being.
I know once you just consider a couple of other strategies that you might take besides appearing to kind
of philosophical theories to justify putting moral status on the list of constituents who are being.
So, so one strategy would just be to sort of appeal directly to intuitions and just
sort of reflect on whether having a life with more moral status would be better
than having a life with less moral status while trying to bracket all the kinds
of instrumental effects that I was discussing in the previous three sections.
And I find that when I try to reflect on those cases, I just don't have any clear intuitions I don't have.
I don't find that a persuasive way of getting to the idea that moral status is a constituent of well-being.
There's another kind of slightly more direct way in which we might try to appeal to intuitions that bridgework suggested that we might try to
determine what belongs on an objective list theory of well-being by considering when we felt we felt sorry for someone or feel bad for someone.
So hooker suggests that if we would say we're glad for some being if we discover that it possessed some property,
or if we would feel sorry for being if we discovered that it let some property,
then that might suggest that that property is a constituent of well-being, that you apply that to the kind of moral status.
That's the place that we were just to discover that neonates or perhaps severely cognitively impaired
adult humans definitely don't have from our status when previously we were kind of uncertain about that.
Would we then feel sorry? And it's basically a whole fixed all the instrumental effects you might think that of having moral status.
So supposing we assume that regardless of whether these beings have moral status,
they're going to be treated in ways that are compatible with their having full moral status.
There would be what we then feel bad for these neonates and severely cognitively
impaired adult humans if we discover that they definitely don't have full moral status.
I don't have a clear I don't I don't feel bad for them if I could try to imagine this kind of case.
So I'm not sure that this is going to work. On the other hand, I can think of a case going the other direction.
Suppose we were to discover that chimpanzees definitely do have full moral status when previously where we were uncertain about this.
And again, it's hold kind of instrumental effects, fit fix, and it's a surprise regardless.
Chimpanzees are definitely going to be treated as though they possess for moral status would
be then so glad for the chimpanzee if we discovered that it actually has formed processes.
Again, I don't I don't feel that pull of that very strongly.
So. I might have a decent credit intuitions,
so maybe you'll tell me that you do have intuitions that suggest that moral status should be on in a kind of objective listener about being,
but I don't I don't feel that strongly.
OK, so that's basically the size I've got with thinking about these arguments by way of conclusion.
And I mean, I don't have, as I say, a firm conclusion about any of these kinds of this value or value.
The kind of the case that I'm most kind of inclined to be persuaded by is this case of vulnerability values and does seem
quite possible to me that having moral status as instrument of this value by making you vulnerable to rights infringements,
which which harm you. Whereas I don't think that the either the argument for a non instrumental value of a particular value was very persuasive.
So if that turns out to be right, then it seems that.
From the perspective of someone considering whether to cognitively handsome being and worried
about the possible effects of this cognitive enhancement on the beings own well-being,
then it seems like we should say, well,
the fact that this enhancement is going to cause them of marital status enhancement that gives you a reason not
to pursue the enhancement is going to cause some prudential just value this kind of vulnerability discovery,
and it's not going to cause any kind of credential value.
So the fact that the cognitive enhancement is a moral status enhancement gives you a reason not to pursue that enhancement.
And as long as we just focussed on the considerations of the well-being of the enhanced individual.
Now, it might be that that reason is outweighed by other considerations,
I think it seems to me very plausible that if the capacity that we're thinking of giving this being is itself good for living,
if it's a has to be for some higher form of pleasure which might actually be realised,
for example, then that might well outweigh this kind of vulnerability discovery.
But the the effect on moral status itself would be something that would count against the the more the marque's latest enhancements.
OK, thanks.