The Rationalizing Role of Consciousness and the Moral Status of Fish, AI, and Zombies

It is intuitively obvious that our conscious experiences play a part in rationalizing our behaviors, at least sometimes. How is this possible? Theories that explain consciousness in terms of mental representation have an easy answer. If conscious states are reducible to mental representations, then it is the contents of these more basic representations that rationalize our behaviors. Theories that do not tie conscious states directly to mental representations have a harder time, but they do have a story to tell. Conscious states do not have representational content built into them. Rather, they pick up representational content because we use them in certain ways, as signals of outward phenomena. It is in virtue of this derived representational content that conscious states can rationalize behavior. I will argue that if this is the right way of looking at things, then the phenomenal character of a creature’s experiences cannot make a moral difference to how we should treat that creature. No matter what your theory of consciousness is, I think that tells us something interesting about what matters morally. I will go on to draw some lessons for hard cases of moral status: philosophical zombies, fish, and AI.

Speaker: Joshua O'Rourke, Stanford University

Room 126