# Consciousness And Moral Status Reading Group: Week 1

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- **Reading:** Shepherd, J. (2018). Consciousness and moral status. Taylor & Francis. Part 1. (pp. 7-17).
- **Date:** Aug 4, 2020 12:00 PM (LONDON)
- **Host:** MM

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## I didn't understand:
* what is the difference between non-derivative, intrinsic, and essential value?

Essential and intrinsic values are subclasses of non-derivative value, the difference between them is not so clear though.

## I found it interesting:
* The definition of non-derivative value, specifically with the fried okra example as I thought it could be elaborated on further, potentially changing whether fried okra itself had non-derivative value.

In the discussion we made the distinction between the value of fried okra and the value of the experience of eating fried okra.

* The role of culture and how different cultures might ascribe moral worth to different things.

## I wanted to discuss together:
* can we think of any examples of non-derivative value without moral significacne? (I thought maybe information, or knowledge, was a good candidate, but not sure).

Is fried okra such an example? is the experience of eating fried okra such an example?

* what kind of issues do we run into when we define moral value from the top-down (i.e. assume healthy adult humans have moral value and then think about why and who else?)

Some of us had the intuition that bottom-up approaches tended to be more exclusive and some had the opposite intuition. One potential resolution is that top-down definitions include some and exclude others. For example, for the "all humans have moral worth" definition, comma patients would be included, but great apes would be excluded.

* I found Mary Anne Warren's definition of moral status (p. 14) circular because it includes morality in its definition. Don't we also need to define morality?

## Points raised in discussion

* Is the disposition to protect someone or something the same as moral worth? You might get very different results asking people to decide which person or individual to save/sacrifice, and which has more moral worth.
## Random thoughts here
* on non-derivative value without moral status, I thought Shepherd's example of fried Orka was good.
* Fried Okra is actually not that tasty tbh - agreed!

Uri:
I would like to raise a few points that I find confusing in the discussion about morality and value. It may read as a manifest, but it’s really just a deadend for me that I wish to get the most comments about as I can - because it’s no fun staying there. And it’s probably best to put it down on the table right now.
So, it seems weird to me that when we talk about “value”, we don’t mention the fact that it can never be something truly internal. That is, nothing has value in itself if there isn’t *someone* assessing its value, and of course - this value depends on the observer, not only on the thing being valued. But even if affected by the properties of the thing being valued, the value is in the eyes of the observer. It isn’t a quality that exists somewhere in the world, independently. So I believe the question of what has value and what doesn’t, can’t be asked without referring to who it is that assigns the value. I mean, obviously, the universe doesn’t care about something being conscious or not. The trees and the mountains (probably?) don’t have an opinion about whether sacrificing mice to better the life of humans is “moral” or not.
And since I believe most of you will agree with me that there isn’t some transcendental “moral” that we’re striving to decipher here (or maybe you do?), I believe the question becomes a psychological one, in its root. We could ask *why* humans assign value to consciousness, or any other property. We could perhaps ask how consistent humans are when they try to assign this value to different organisms or systems, but we will still be asking about the way humans think. It might be very interesting, and shed light on elements of the human psyche, but it wouldn’t tell us whether it’s “right” or “wrong” to do anything. It will only tell us about how we, humans, think about consciousness.
I hope this makes sense. I haven’t read the material for this week yet, so I hope things will get clearer for me as we move along. I just wanted to put these thoughts out there and see if anyone cares to comment on them.