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
Intergenerational experimentation and catastrophic risk – Fikri Pitsuwan (Center of Economic Research, ETH Zurich)
I study an intergenerational game in which each generation experiments on a risky technology that provides private benefits, but may also cause a temporary catastrophe. I find a folk-theorem-type result on which there is a continuum of equilibria. Compared to the socially optimal level, some equilibria exhibit too much, while others too little, experimentation. The reason is that the payoff externality causes preemptive experimentation, while the informational externality leads to more caution…
Longtermist political philosophy: An agenda for future research – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T. Schmidt (University of Groningen)
We set out longtermist political philosophy as a research field. First, we argue that the standard case for longtermism is more robust when applied to institutions than to individual action. This motivates “institutional longtermism”: when building or shaping institutions, positively affecting the value of the long-term future is a key moral priority. Second, we briefly distinguish approaches to pursuing longtermist institutional reform along two dimensions: such approaches may be more targeted or more broad, and more urgent or more patient.
How to resist the Fading Qualia Argument – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The Fading Qualia Argument is perhaps the strongest argument supporting the view that in order for a system to be conscious, it does not need to be made of anything in particular, so long as its internal parts have the right causal relations to each other and to the system’s inputs and outputs. I show how the argument can be resisted given two key assumptions: that consciousness is associated with vagueness at its boundaries and that conscious neural activity has a particular kind of holistic structure. …