Consciousness makes things matter
Andrew Y. Lee (University of Toronto)
GPI Working Paper No. 25-2024, forthcoming at Philosophers' Imprint
This paper argues that phenomenal consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject, or the kind of thing that can be better or worse off. I develop and motivate this view, and then defend it from objections concerning death, non-conscious entities that have interests (such as plants), and conscious subjects that necessarily have welfare level zero. I also explain how my theory of welfare subjects relates to experientialist and anti-experientialist theories of welfare goods.
Other working papers
Welfare and felt duration – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
How should we understand the duration of a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, insofar as its duration modulates how good or bad the experience is overall? Given that we seem able to distinguish between subjective and objective duration and that how well or badly someone’s life goes is naturally thought of as something to be assessed from her own perspective, it seems intuitive that it is subjective duration that modulates how good or bad an experience is from the perspective of an individual’s welfare. …
Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…