If anything, we have to do more philosophy of mind because now we have to think not only about the conditions for consciousness, but also about the conditions for valence and how consciousness and valence need to be connected in order to add up to sentience. If you imagine a being with consciousness but without any kind of positive or negative valence, like a pure color perceiver or a pure sound perceiver, but nothing feels good or bad, everything just feels neutral, I have a hard time imagining that there are stakes for that individual. A lot of the evolutionary story about potentially how consciousness came to emerge was because sentience itself, feeling the valence, was probably the thing that made it adaptive in the first place.
There are also no clear technical barriers towards the development of AI systems with advanced and integrated versions of all of these capabilities. If we invest in building knowledge, building capacity, building political will, we could improve our impacts on local and global, present and future, human and non-human stakeholders. I guess that's Smokey there, is it? Oh, yeah. You're taking a little nap.
Good morning, Jeff. How are you? Really good. Well, it's wonderful to have you on as a repeat guest. We had a great conversation back in episode 26 where we already answered the sort of central sentientism questions of what's real and how do we understand, you know, how do we go about working out what's real and true, who matters and what matters. Nice to get all of that out of the way in one conversation.
And then how do we make a better future? Right? So that was, we're done and dusted on that. And here what I wanted to focus on in a way is going back over some of those questions because your latest book, The Moral Circle, hits that second question really hard. You know, who matters? But then what are the implications of that and how should we work that through into how we think about how to make a better world. So it'd be great to dig into that today. So congratulations on getting the book out. And it was also great to see it was endorsed on the back cover by two of my other guests, Peter Singer and Barbara King, too. So, it's nice connections there with other guests. And of course, you cite many of the people I've had the honor of talking to in this podcast series, too. But before we get on to working through the book and some of its main themes, I guess that's Smokey there, is it? Oh, yeah. You're taking a little nap, participating in the episode. Awesome. Luna's downstairs, but she might make a guest appearance later on. We'll see. Okay. And the book's dedicated to Smokey, I think.
Yeah, it is dedicated to Smokey.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so before we get on to the book and its themes, how would you best introduce yourself for those who missed our first episode or haven't come across your expansive work already? And to be honest, even the people who listen to episode 26 will need an update because you're adding programs and jobs and initiatives and books every time I turn around. So,
Sure. So, my name is Jeff Sebo. I am a philosopher by training and I teach at New York University primarily in the environmental studies department though I also work with bioethics and medical ethics and philosophy and law and I broadly speaking ask how humans can better interact with the non-human world and that includes a lot of the questions that the conversation today will address: who might matter, how much might they matter, what might they need, what might we owe them, what follows for our actions and policies and priorities. And without going into detail about all of the little projects and programs, I can note briefly that at NYU, in addition to working in environmental studies, I direct the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. And this is a research center that examines important issues at the intersection of environmental and animal protection. And so that includes issues related to agriculture and farmed animal welfare, biodiversity, and wild animal welfare.
And then I also direct the recently launched Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy. This is a research, outreach, and field-building center that examines the nature and intrinsic significance of non-human minds with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems because of their importance and difficulty as research subjects. And so probably our conversation today will straddle those topics but maybe focus a little bit more on the latter topic: who might matter and how much might they matter.
Yeah. Thank you. And a good place to start I guess would be to just frame the big picture of what you're trying to achieve in the book because it clearly feeds into all of those agendas, is addressing that central question of who matters and what the implications are. So I'm interested in, you know, how would you big picture introduce the book, but maybe a slightly cheeky question to start: many people are familiar with the idea of a moral circle, but does it need to be a circle? Because some people are almost nervous that there's some implications in it being a circle. You know, does it necessarily center us? Do you get less important as you get out towards the edges?
Yeah, I actually did think long and hard about the metaphor as I was starting the project, and actually as I was starting work on a paper that preceded the project, and I was concerned about the metaphor partly for that reason, because it implies that humanity is at the center of the circle and that other beings matter or are closer to the center to the degree that they resemble us, and I was concerned about that possible implication.
Also, there are other types of spatial metaphors that could be interesting to explore. So, for example, you might think of a sphere and that would allow for more directionality, or you could imagine a cone where it would include sort of space and time, right? Not only an expanding community but then also expanding into the future. And so I played with those. I ultimately decided to stick with the circle, however, not for any really good conceptual or substantive reason, but rather because I decided that the project was going to be provocative and alienating enough without also switching metaphors up on people. And so I decided to keep a familiar, recognizable metaphor and then offer some challenging ideas within that metaphor. But yeah, no, really great question to start with. I think a good set of issues for us to keep in mind.
And I can see that, right. You start with something familiar and then you blow people's minds once they're into the book rather than... And how would you frame it, the overall story of the book that you lay out?
The overall question of the book is exactly as we were saying before: which beings might matter and what might we owe them and what might follow for our policies and priorities. And we can start with the observation that while views about this issue are shifting, we right now at least increasingly agree that all humans and many non-human animals like mammals and birds merit consideration in decisions that affect them. But the book asks, should we go farther? And if so, how far should we go? And what should the details be? And again, what are the implications? And what I planned to argue when I started writing the book was that we should go quite a bit farther. For example, by including all vertebrates and many invertebrates and some near-future AI systems in our moral circle for reasons that we can discuss. That would already be very significant moral circle expansion. But I surprisingly and distressingly found myself committed by my own arguments to potentially going even farther than that, for example, extending at least a little bit of consideration to plants, fungi, microscopic organisms, maybe even current or very near-future AI systems. And that is an even more surprising, even more, at least for me, distressing set of possible implications. And so it might be interesting to discuss why I found myself committed to those conclusions and what might follow from those conclusions.
Yeah. Thank you. And those of us who've, you know, been vocal vegans on Twitter will have heard the 'plants feel pain' response enough times to feel a bit of dissonance as we listen to that. I was exploring the, you know, the arguments and the ideas. But it's a fascinating way you tell the story. So let's, we can dig into that a little bit later on. And maybe a good place to start, as you went on that journey yourself, is to think about, you know, if we're working out who matters and how big this circle or this shape or this sphere or this cone should get and who's inside it, what are the criteria we should use to take that judgment? So, what do you settle on? Because again, there's lots of different ways of judging who might matter.
Yes. And that starting observation that there are a lot of different ways of judging who might matter is key to the framework and the argument and recommendations that I lay out in the book. So, just to flesh that idea out a little bit, there are of course a lot of secular and religious philosophical worldviews about the basis for moral standing. And obviously some are more plausible and widely accepted in contemporary philosophy than others. But just to take a few examples, you might think sentience is required for moral standing, the ability to consciously experience positive and negative states like pleasure and pain. Or you might think that consciousness without sentience is enough for moral standing, the ability to have subjective experiences, to have subjective feelings even if they lack a positive or negative valence. Or you might think that agency without consciousness is enough for moral standing, the ability to set and pursue your own goals based on cognitive states that function like beliefs and desires even if it feels like nothing to be you. And what I argue in the book is that we might have our own view about that debate. I, like you, lean towards the sentience view, that sentience is both necessary and sufficient for moral standing. But given how difficult these issues are, given how many smart people disagree about them, given how many smart people have been confidently wrong and conveniently exclusionary about them in the past, given that ultimately we need to be making these decisions together in the context of ongoing disagreement about these issues, for all of these reasons, I think that accepting at least a weakly pluralistic view is valuable. So even if I feel confident that sentience is both necessary and sufficient for moral standing, I ought to give at least a little bit of weight to other reasonable views like the consciousness view or the agency view and explore their implications as well in the spirit of caution and humility and collaboration in the context of disagreement and uncertainty.
Yeah. And one of the reasons I really like the book and the way you think generally is that humility that leads to a pluralism, and as you say, it's a way of dealing with uncertainty that is not just about collaboration and bringing people on the journey with us and, you know, teaming up with people who might disagree. It is also a genuine philosophical, you know, ability to cope with the fact that we might be wrong. So, um, yeah, so I appreciate that pluralism, although as you say, you know, I tend to zero in on sentience and ask questions about why you need anything else and whether you need anything else. On the thing that I guess we're going to struggle to disagree on, that sentience is, you know, a really relevant important thing. If someone asks you, okay, why is sentience important for moral consideration? How do you explain that? Why do you think sentience is important?
Yeah, I think there are different ways to answer that question, but a short and sweet way to answer the question is to say that you need to be able to have feelings or experiences that feel good or bad to you in some way or another in order for it to matter to you what happens to you and in order for it to matter to you what happens in the world. If you imagine a being with consciousness but without any kind of positive or negative valence, like a pure color perceiver or a pure sound perceiver, but nothing feels good or bad. Nothing feels to be done or not to be done. Everything just feels neutral. I have a hard time imagining that there are stakes for that individual in what happens to them or in what happens in the world. And likewise, if you imagine a being with robust agency but without consciousness, a being who can set and pursue goals based on cognitive states that function like beliefs and desires, I once again have a hard time imagining that it really matters to that being whether they satisfy their desires or achieve their goals. For me, it really does seem very intuitively plausible that it matters for you only when it feels good to you to achieve your goals or it feels bad to you to fall short. So, I think that might be a short way of putting it.
Now, it is worth emphasizing that sentience is compatible with a wide range of types of positive and negative valence. We are not only talking about bodily pleasures and pains. We are talking about any conscious experience, any subjective experience that feels good or bad in any way, shape or form. So that can include bodily pleasures and pains. It can include more emotional or intellectual satisfaction or frustration or happiness or suffering. So, anything that you like or dislike subjectively, experientially would be enough to make you a sentient being and enough to make it really matter to you what happens and give you stakes in what happens. And that is when, for me, it starts to feel intuitively plausible that there is a kind of intrinsic moral significance that I have a responsibility to consider.
Yeah. So sentience almost by definition is the capacity to value yourself or something about yourself. You want to care about yourself in some way. And then the common sense view of morality is that it's to do with whether we care about others because they care about themselves. And if you care about yourself in any way, however basic, you are a sentient being, I guess is another way of putting it.
Yeah, that is another way of putting it, with the caveat that the agency view will claim those concepts too. So an agency view will say that an agent is a being with the capacity for belief and desire and intention and cares and concerns and goals that are selected and pursued in light of those beliefs and desires and intentions and cares and concerns. But we can imagine a being who has all of those functional behavioral capacities and sets and pursues goals in those ways and then has those goals achieved or not and has those desires satisfied or not without being conscious at all, without being sentient at all, without having any subjective experience, without feeling like those goals need to be pursued or those desires need to be satisfied. So the debate between the sentientist and the agency theorist is not about whether moral standing depends on you valuing things, but is rather about what it takes to value things in the relevant sense and the morally significant sense that gives you that intrinsic significance.
Yeah. And I had a fascinating conversation with Nico Dirnfeld on this topic because he'd done some really interesting work about that boundary and I still count him as a sentientist because he does see sentience as, you know, relevant. He includes every sentient being in his moral consideration. But he is looking at the boundary of that and saying, is it possible to have some form of value for an entity that doesn't require their ability to feel value themselves? And I struggle with that because I imagine an agent that has, you know, sets goals and either achieves them or doesn't. And you could describe that as having a desire to achieve those goals in that it has a configuration of information processing or a behavioral pattern that implies it's trying to achieve the goal. And you could call that desire. I still ultimately struggle because the being themselves feels no different. It's absolutely nothing whether those goals are achieved or not. So you could thwart their goals in the most brutal manner and the being themselves feels no different. And that feels to me like the being themselves doesn't value even their own goals which removes the moral salience. But I think Nico's work and what you're implying there is that, is there some wiggle room between the being's ability to feel value and there still being some sort of concept of value there even if the being doesn't feel? Am I getting that roughly right?
Yeah, that is exactly the situation. And this goes back to your cautionary note about the metaphor of the moral circle because we are both sentient and agentic as humans and for us we experience the value of our desires and goals through our consciousness. And so of course it seems plausible to us that consciousness is an important ingredient in the significance of our goals and desires and agency. But we have to allow for the possibility, at least I think, that there could be some kind of intrinsic value in pure robust agency stripped of consciousness even if it might be difficult for us to intuitively imagine that as conscious and agentic beings. So this is where that not just desire to get along with other people in the context of disagreement, but also really wanting to be a little bit humble given our limited perspective and our limited ability to imagine what it might not be like, but what kinds of intrinsic values might exist in other types of beings who are similar to us in some ways but different to us in some ways. I think trying to cultivate that openness is important even if ultimately you do have a lot of confidence still in your own favorite theory of moral standing.
Yeah. Thank you. And in a way there's an analogous tension when you talk about sentience as you defined it versus consciousness, and often these terms are, you know, sometimes used synonymously. I quite like focusing on sentience in sentientism partly because it enables us to sort of sidestep philosophy of mind to some degree. Whereas I think the definition of consciousness itself can get, you know, drawn into that in different ways. Whereas I think sentience sometimes has a chance of being able to stand back and say, well, whatever your philosophy of mind, you know, if it feels good or bad, that, you know, matters. But there's also a distinction you made there which was between consciousness as being, you know, a capacity for any sort of awareness and sentience being an awareness that is specifically valenced. So like you said, can feel good or bad in whatever way that is. And I think that's a fascinating tension to explore for similar reasons to the tension with agency.
I came across this, I think David Chalmers gave a speech a few years ago which I count as my first citation even though I'm not an academic because he put up a screenshot of one of my articles when he was discussing it, but he was talking about what he described as the choice between broad sentientism and narrow sentientism. So his idea of broad sentientism was you care about every conscious being, every being that has the capacity for awareness, whatever its nature, whereas narrow sentientism focuses just on the valenced aspect of that. And that's really what you're discussing, but you're saying the former really is focusing on consciousness and sentience is specifically valence, which I think is the way it's most often used in the literature these days. But it leads to a similar sort of question because David had a thought experiment of, I think he was talking about the Vulcans, which again is a slightly warped version of, you know, a sci-fi Star Trek story about a being that could be conscious. You know, they are subjectively aware, but they have absolutely zero valence. So, in a sense, it pulls out our intuitions in lots of different ways because David's conclusion really was, even though this being has no valence at all, so in a sense cannot care about anything or themselves, it would be horrendous to needlessly harm them. You know, he felt that strong intuitive pull. So, he was being drawn towards a broad sentientism. And I'm interested in your thoughts on that tension too.
Yeah. Great. A lot there. So, just to reply to a few points that you made at least briefly. First of all, yes, the terminology is confusing. Different people use these terms in different ways. Consciousness, as you know, for many people means being awake instead of asleep or being self-conscious as opposed to not self-conscious. Here we are using it in the phenomenal consciousness sense to describe what happens when it feels like something to be you. When you can have subjective experiences that feel like something from the inside. And then sentience, as you say, is consciousness plus valence in a certain sense. So, not only does it feel like something to be you, but it can feel good or bad. You can have feelings or experiences that you like or dislike. So, yeah, consciousness is the ability to have feelings and then sentience is the ability to have feelings that are positive or negative, good or bad, that you like or that you dislike.
And here I have some bad news for you. We are not able to avoid philosophy of mind if we focus on sentience instead of consciousness. If anything, we have to do more philosophy of mind because now we have to think not only about the conditions for consciousness but also about the conditions for valence and about how consciousness and valence need to be connected in order to add up to sentience. That is not a trivial step, right? We might be able to presume that all animals who are conscious are also sentient because we share an evolutionary history with them and they likewise have a bodily ability to detect helpful and harmful stimuli that they use for survival purposes. But when we think about designs for AI systems, for example, we might observe that they have many of the ingredients for consciousness architecturally and computationally and we might observe that they have an ability to detect helpful and harmful stimuli. But we then have to ask, are those hooked up in a way that could plausibly add up to conscious experiences that feel good or bad? And the science of that and the philosophy of that is pretty impoverished in comparison to the science and philosophy of consciousness right now. So, if anything, we have more work to do. Sorry to say. But we can perhaps return to that to answer your question about the Vulcans.
Yeah, this is an area where I am not persuaded by this kind of thought experiment. I definitely share the intuition that there is intrinsic moral significance in this kind of conscious and agentic being. However, I think that we can explain that intuition while still affirming the idea that sentience, valenced conscious experience, is a necessary condition for moral standing. So in particular when I try to imagine this being, I am imagining someone who is conscious, having subjective experiences, and robustly agentic, setting and pursuing their own goals in a self-directed manner. And just because of my own experience as a human and my experience of others as humans, I think I have a very hard time intuitively disentangling the idea of a conscious and agentic being from the idea of a conscious and sentient and agentic being. I have a very hard time imagining someone who consciously is having desires and preferences and setting and pursuing goals and having them be satisfied and frustrated without having any kind of bodily or emotional or intellectual positive or negative experience as part of those activities. And so I think that, and even if you could disentangle them, how sure should we be, like back to your earlier point.
So I think my intuitions are drawing from me imagining someone who really is having some at least weakly positive or negative experience. But that is one cause for concern. Another is more perhaps virtue ethical or care ethical. I have this impression, and this is similar to what Kant argued about animals even though he denied that they are intrinsically morally significant, that even if someone lacks sentience and therefore lacks moral standing according to the sentientist view, once they look and act exactly like a sentient being and have many of these same ingredients like consciousness and robust agency, I might have a responsibility to treat them as though they matter simply as a way of cultivating a disposition to express respect and compassion and care towards beings who function and behave in this kind of way, in order to train myself, prime myself for treating actually sentient beings with the right kind of care. So even if you just stipulate that they lack moral standing, there could be a good case for treating them as though they have moral standing on kind of virtue ethics grounds or care ethics grounds. So I think there are a lot of ways to explain the intuition that this individual had moral standing even if you want to affirm the sentientist view. Now am I certain that these arguments are good ones? No. And this is part of why I think humility requires giving a little bit of weight to the idea that they do have moral significance. But if the question is how do I philosophically assess that case, then that is my answer.
Yeah. Thank you. And again, it's tricky like with the agency case because I think our consciousness and our sentience are so tightly bound together, it's hard for us to disentangle them. And you can argue that again the evolutionary story about potentially how consciousness came to emerge or be developed was because sentience itself, feeling the valence, was probably the thing that made it adaptive in the first place. So there's an evolutionary story about why they should be tied together. So it's hard to disentangle them.
Exactly. Yeah. Although, you know, there are some, you know, meditators who will tell you that they think they can achieve a state of human consciousness that is completely neutral and valence-free and even free of time. I'm a little skeptical about that.
But what that leads to in the thought experiment is this, you know, I'm imagining this Vulcan being, like you say, a rich behavior with rich experience of some sort and behavioral repertoire, but at the same time we have to think that that being literally wouldn't mind being tortured. I mean they wouldn't care either way and it's just such an alien concept for us to, you know, get our heads around. I think that can be difficult, but like you say, when we start thinking about entities that aren't like us or aren't even biological, right, we're going to have to struggle with some of these, you know, these difficult disentanglements that we're not used to. So, yeah.
Now, so that sets out some of the core ideas of the criteria you'd use. One thing, a challenge I've faced myself was when I interviewed Josh Gellers a while back. He's quite a strong critic of sentientism in general but also, you know, any approach that uses a property or a criteria, a characteristic of an entity as a qualification criteria. So, you know, the cynical view would be if you pick something like sentience, you know, isn't there a worry that we're just doing what us humans have always done, which is we pick a characteristic of ourselves that we declare as important and then we assess others for how like us they are, and the more like us they are, the more they matter. And we know, you know, the horrors that can lead to within intrahuman ethics, right? And aren't we just doing the same by picking sentience as a characteristic? And in a way he prefers a more hybrid approach or one that takes a deeply relational approach that doesn't think about characteristics at all. It thinks about the nature of relations and maybe also takes on a less, you know, it's not turning away from a naturalistic approach but it's turning away from a more narrow scientific approach that thinks about probabilities, characteristics and physical matter and thinks maybe more about emotions and relations and connections. What do you think of that broad challenge to the properties approach?
Yeah, I think that is a really interesting and important challenge and that it gets a lot right. So first of all it is true that we are asking and answering these questions from an anthropocentric perspective, from a human-centric perspective, and we do have this history of going through a list, going down a list of properties, capacities that we ourselves possess and then deciding one at a time, this is the one that matters, no, this is the one that matters, no, this is the one that matters. And so yeah, I guess the background of that history where we started by saying you need to be a certain kind of human and then oh no, you need to be a human in general and then oh no, you need to be a linguistic and rational being in general and now oh no, you need to be a sentient being in general. That is part of a troubling pattern where we just keep picking a slightly broader, slightly more widely possessed capacity that is central to our experience of our own significance and then treat that as the marker for what you need to matter in any way, shape or form. And I think that should give us pause.
Now, is there a way around it? Not necessarily. Because ultimately, we are interacting with these beings whether we like it or not. And our own human perspective is inescapable. And so, we have to do the best we can to ask who might matter and what they might need and what we might owe them from our human perspective, notwithstanding the bias and ignorance that we are increasingly becoming aware of. So I think that it is a good cautionary tale, but also an inescapable, unavoidable part of our predicament as moral agents who are trapped within our own perspective and our own life form.
When it comes to the actual proposal that we replace a property view with a relational view, I think that the better proposal would be to combine a property view with a relational view, which is what I try to do. And I think that would be important even for the relational view because if you think that relationships of various kinds are what matter for morality, you need to think at least a little bit about properties and capacities in order to understand what kinds of relationships are at stake in particular situations. For example, whether you have bonds of care and mutual affection with someone depends in part on whether you each have the individual capacity to experience affection for another being, right? And whether you have a certain kind of bond of vulnerability or power control over the vulnerable depends in part on whether they have properties or capacities that render them vulnerable in particular ways.
And so I think that Josh and others are right to point out our troubling history of being overly anthropocentric without properly correcting for our biases and ignorance. I think Josh is right to point to the importance of relationships in at least practical ethics if not theoretical ethics too. However, I think that Josh is wrong if this is what he means, to think that that can be a replacement for or alternative to a good faith assessment of what capacities or properties might matter and who might have them and what might follow for our interactions with them. I just think we have no way out but through as far as that goes and we should just study that as carefully as possible in combination with a similarly careful examination of which relationships might matter.
Yeah. Thank you. And part of my frustration with a relational approach, because I see relationships as deeply important because they're so important to sentient beings rather than the other way around. But even if you just look at relations, you know, you can't look at relations in isolation. That doesn't even make any sense, right? But I worry that actually the nature of relations is even more vulnerable to warping by the powerful than characteristics are because it is by definition the powerful that get to define the nature of the relations. And if the nature of those relations justifies needlessly harming others, you know, that nature of relation might be, you know, someone who is enslaved or an animal that is farmed, right? That's a relational stance as well. So I almost see that the characteristic, the property, is almost like a bulwark against those types of oppression because at least you can have a scientific or a naturalistic grounding that can say whatever the nature of the relations the powerful have defined, you can appeal to the sentience of an entity regardless of their relations and say they should matter.
And I guess I counter the anthropocentrism challenge because again I think it is a really important challenge we should always be aware of and we can never entirely escape from because we're humans so, you know, that view will also always be anthropocentric. One thing that helps is that sentience seems very likely to have been around for hundreds of millions of years before humans. And if we look across the world today, humans are a vanishingly tiny percentage of all the sentient beings. So that helps, you know, frame it as something that counters anthropocentrism for me. You know, it puts humans in a much more humble place rather than it being taking the sentience of humans and then using that as a criteria. But yeah.
Yeah. So just a couple of thoughts about that. The first is I agree there are of course degrees of anthropocentrism here and degrees of anthropomorphism here and the broader we go, the more we look to capacities of ours that are more widely shared, the more that does induce a kind of humbler orientation to our own place in the moral universe and that is helpful. Now, I think critics are still right to point out that we are ultimately just selecting a somewhat broader capacity that is still central to our experience of our own moral significance. And it could be possible to go broader still, to think about agency without sentience or life without agency. And then we would be humbler still. We would be thinking about an even broader moral universe where humanity is even less significant relatively speaking. So I think those replies of yours make sense though I think there is still some truth to the critique that merits careful consideration.
Now one point that you made that I would make a little bit differently is I agree with you that the relational view is susceptible to its own critique of the properties view. In other words, we are a particular kind of being with a particular kind of mind and a particular set of relationships casting judgment on other kinds of minds and other kinds of relationships through our own experience. Right? And that can lend bias both to the properties view and to the relational view. Right? When it comes to the properties view, we might be projecting our own experience of our own properties onto an assessment of what other properties might matter and who might have them. And then for the relational view, we might be projecting our own experience of our own morally significant kinds of relationships onto the other sorts of relations and interactions that exist in the world. And similar biases can crop up, similar problems can crop up either way.
However, I would not say that this problem exists more for the relational view than for the property view in the way that you suggested in part because the relational theorist can reply in the same kind of way that the property theorists can, that it is not ultimately up to us which relationships matter. And this is a common idea in feminist care ethics, for example. So feminist care ethics say, 'Hey, emotions and relationships are a really important part of morality.' And then other people say, 'Oh, so I get to decide who matters to me based on who my friends and family are.' And then the feminist care ethicist says, 'No, no, no, no, no. That might be one morally significant type of relationship. But patterns of power and oppression, for example, are another morally significant kind of relationship. And when you wield power over someone and when you oppress someone then that gives you certain responsibilities towards them whether you like it or not, whether you announce that this is a morally significant kind of relationship or not.' So I think that we can, the properties people can offer that kind of reply and the relational people can offer that kind of reply. So basically we are all stuck in the same predicament here.
Yeah. Thank you. So we've framed a choice of some criteria that you want to use pluralistically and open-mindedly and with, you know, uncertainty around sentience and agency and consciousness and you hinted earlier on that you yourself have gone through a journey about, okay, who then matters if we use those sort of criteria. So what's your thinking at the moment about where the edges of these concepts are? You know, where is the boundary of meaningful agency? You know, does a Roomba or a thermostat count or does that not quite count? And the same with sentience, right? How far out does it get across the animal kingdom, across substrates, even through the developmental life cycle of a human from, you know, conception to death? That's a crazily broad question. And I should ask a better question, but how have you come to think about the edges and therefore who does get included if we use these criteria?
