Consciousness And Moral Status Reading Group: Week 8
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###### tags: `Consciousness` `Sentience` `Animals` `Cognition`

:::info
- **Reading:** Shepherd, J. (2018). Consciousness and moral status, Taylor & Francis Chapters 16-18 (pp. 89-105)
- **Date:** Sep 22, 2020 12:00 PM (LONDON)
- **Host:** MM
- **Reference:** - [Last week meeting](/@tanzor/value7)

:::

{%youtube 413OForaFh8%}

I didn't understand:
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I found it interesting:
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- [name=MM] Post-persons; can we evaluate moral worth higher than our own?
- [name=Anna] Shepard's argument that machines programmed to mimic human functionality would likely possess roughly the same potential for phenomenal value as humans.
- [name=MM] Kind of weird that Shepherd mentions fetishizing smarts, but then does the same for 'evaluative sophistication'.
> Potentially evaluative sophistication aligns more with human intuitions baout moral worth.
- [name=MM] The possible reasons for why death/killing is bad, inluding self-identity extension over time (and the radical plasticity thought experiment)
> [Derek Parfit's paper on personal identity](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2184309.pdf?casa_token=YReesM3-520AAAAA:BR48x8M9PAPuERp27AdqCBqyL6q8ovisgl8NMY4KjO7j1_ZJenhJNC_OgZiSu_2olWSFIRhbJ99aUsHHKT40GmE166J1Tb_yqeryy4CqXftPNrNogYQ)

I wanted to discuss together:
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- [name=Nitzan] trying to understand how could we deduce on animals' "goals and interests", as these are offered as their existence is offered as criteria for assigning value to harming them ('it is o.k. to use animals as long as you don't restrict their goals').
- [name=Nadine] It seems that Shepherd now suggests that 'simple pleasures' might be very morally valuable (the James quote) - which kind of goes against his prevous point of the size and coherency of the evaluative space being important
- [name=MM] line drawing: Shepherd says "or the way around the thicket is to find incalculable worth in all but the simplest and dullest kinds of conscious mental life, and thus to draw the line quite low on the evolutionary totem pole." But who are these dull and simple creatures? and who said evolution was even relevant here?
- [name=MM] Shepherd criticizes McMahan's time-relative interests account because it 'gets some cases wrong'. Wrong according to who?

Random thoughts here:
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- If we were to follow Shepard's suggestion by solely considering an entity's evaluative sophistication in extreme scenarios (e.g. murder), how would our decisions differ from situations where we follow our intuitions?
- [name=Nitzan] I feel that given the difficulties and ambiguity we raised last week concerning evaluative spaces and their relation to value, it is hard to apply Shepherd's definition as is in order to decide whether some animals have moral worth.
## Notes
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