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
Moral uncertainty and public justification – Jacob Barrett (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
Moral uncertainty and disagreement pervade our lives. Yet we still need to make decisions and act, both in individual and political contexts. So, what should we do? The moral uncertainty approach provides a theory of what individuals morally ought to do when they are uncertain about morality…
A Fission Problem for Person-Affecting Views – Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
On person-affecting views in population ethics, the moral import of a person’s welfare depends on that person’s temporal or modal status. These views typically imply that – all else equal – we’re never required to create extra people, or to act in ways that increase the probability of extra people coming into existence. In this paper, I use Parfit-style fission cases to construct a dilemma for person-affecting views: either they forfeit their seeming-advantages and face fission analogues…
The Conservation Multiplier – Bård Harstad (University of Oslo)
Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and shows when a small change in parameter values has a multiplier effect on exploitation. The multiplier strengthens the influence of a lobby paying for exploitation, and of a donor compensating for conservation. …