Once More, Without Feeling
Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 2-2025
I argue for a pluralist theory of moral standing, on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy can confer moral status. I argue that autonomy doesn’t entail welfare subjectivity, but can ground moral standing in its absence. Although I highlight the existence of plausible views on which autonomy entails phenomenal consciousness, I primarily emphasize the need for philosophical debates about the relationship between phenomenal consciousness and moral standing to engage with neglected questions about the nature of autonomy and its possible links to consciousness, especially if we’re to face up to the ethical challenges future AI systems may pose.
Other working papers
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…
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. …
The structure of critical sets – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
The purpose of this paper is to address some ambiguities and misunderstandings that appear in previous studies of population ethics. In particular, we examine the structure of intervals that are employed in assessing the value of adding people to an existing population. Our focus is on critical-band utilitarianism and critical-range utilitarianism, which are commonly-used population theories that employ intervals, and we show that some previously assumed equivalences are not true in general. The possible discrepancies can be…