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
The cross-sectional implications of the social discount rate – Maya Eden (Brandeis University)
How should policy discount future returns? The standard approach to this normative question is to ask how much society should care about future generations relative to people alive today. This paper establishes an alternative approach, based on the social desirability of redistributing from the current old to the current young. …
A non-identity dilemma for person-affecting views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person- affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non- Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ …
The evidentialist’s wager – William MacAskill, Aron Vallinder (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University) Caspar Österheld (Duke University), Carl Shulman (Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University), Johannes Treutlein (TU Berlin)
Suppose that an altruistic and morally motivated agent who is uncertain between evidential decision theory (EDT) and causal decision theory (CDT) finds herself in a situation in which the two theories give conflicting verdicts. We argue that even if she has significantly higher credence in CDT, she should nevertheless act …