![]() ![]() You always know what is due to you morally, since you know your own consciousness directly, but you can be genuinely uncertain what you owe to others. Should you treat everyone as if they are sentient just to be on the safe side (but think what a waste of resources for the false positives), or should you put half your effort into each individual (but that may result in neglecting a deserving case)? The sentience criterion runs into the problem of other minds and in unfavorable cases can render it unworkable as a basis for morality. But as things are, the scope of moral obligation is indeterminate so far as you are concerned, so you don’t know how to be moral in this world. It would be different if morality had nothing to do with sentience and everything to do with outer behavior, since then your obligations would be equal for all the individuals you encounter. You agree that obligation requires sentience, but you don’t know who has it. Then you will be placed in a moral quandary, since you can’t apply the sentience-morality connection with any confidence. The distribution of sentience is opaque to you. Suppose that half the people you are acquainted with are conscious and half or not-but you don’t know which is which. The question of other minds is instructive: here there can be genuine doubt about the scope of morality. What if a tribe was equally attentive to the unconscious minds of its members as to their conscious minds-wouldn’t that make them more morally sensitive than us? Is the emphasis on conscious mental states a moral prejudice? Or is it just that we don’t tend to believe in the unconscious mind but would change our moral tune if we did? Similarly, it is good to satisfy a person’s conscious desires, but is it equally good to satisfy someone’s unconscious desires? Utilitarianism exhorts us to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but does that extend to unconscious happiness? The fact of being conscious makes a moral difference, though not the same difference as that between (say) being square and being in pain-the former having no moral significance at all. It is worse to feel a conscious pain than to have one that is outside of consciousness, but surely one ought to do something about someone’s pain even if he or she is not conscious of it. Why does the property of consciousness have such a central role in moral thinking? What about unconscious pain and unconscious desire? Suppose for a moment that these are possible (the supposition is not absurd): would such states also ground moral obligation? The answer is unclear: one feels that they would count to some degree but not as much as fully conscious pain and desire. It is this type of state of sentient beings that is deemed morally significant.īut this doesn’t settle the question of the connection between sentience and morality, because we have yet to explain what sentience as such has to do with morality. Thus “Pain is bad” is the prime example of a moral proposition, because it leads directly to ought-statements such as “You ought to do something about that person’s pain”. ![]() These are the mental states that create obligation and trigger moral action, along with their positive counterparts. ![]() All the things that we don’t like, that turn us off, that bring us down, that ruin our day: thwarted desires, nasty sensations, unpleasant forebodings. Pain and suffering are paramount in this class: from physical injury to bad smells to romantic pangs to boredom, lassitude, and despair. Rather, there is a subclass of mental states that are morally relevant-the class that includes desire, happiness and unhappiness, agreeableness and its opposite, good experiences and bad. There is nothing good or bad about having such mental states considered in themselves: they impose no moral obligations on moral beings (we are not obliged to increase the incidence of seeing yellow). But what is it about consciousness that confers value on it? Not merely its subjectivity or its intentionality or its rationality or its innerness, since many conscious states have these features but have nothing particularly to do with morality-for instance, seeing yellow or thinking about the moon. That is, it is states of consciousness that form the necessary and sufficient conditions for morality to apply. Obviously it is not intended that the merely physical states of sentient beings impose such obligations the idea is that it is in virtue of the mental states of sentient beings that moral obligations apply. The thought is that the states of insentient objects impose no obligations on us while the states of sentient beings do. ![]() It is often said these days that morality applies when and only when sentience is present, but the exact connection between the two is not often spelled out. ![]()
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