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Consciousness And Moral Status
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Book Synopsis Consciousness and Moral Status by : Joshua Shepherd
Download or read book Consciousness and Moral Status written by Joshua Shepherd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but also the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and humans with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and Moral Status by : Joshua Shepherd
Download or read book Consciousness and Moral Status written by Joshua Shepherd and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seems obvious that phenomenally conscious experience is something of great value, and that this value maps onto a range of important ethical issues. For example, claims about the value of life for those in Permanent Vegetative State (PVS); debates about treatment and study of disorders of consciousness; controversies about end-of-life care for those with advanced dementia; and arguments about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, and non-human animals arguably turn on the moral significance of various facts about consciousness. However, though work has been done on the moral significance of elements of consciousness, such as pain and pleasure, little explicit attention has been devoted to the ethical significance of consciousness. In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of the value present within conscious experience. This account emphasizes not only the nature of consciousness, but also the importance of items within experience such as affect, valence, and the complex overall shape of particular valuable experiences. Shepherd also relates this account to difficult cases involving non-humans and humans with disorders of consciousness, arguing that the value of consciousness influences and partially explains the degree of moral status a being possesses, without fully determining it. The upshot is a deeper understanding of both the moral importance of phenomenal consciousness and its relations to moral status. This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness by : Uriah Kriegel
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness written by Uriah Kriegel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-06-10 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness provides the most comprehensive overview of current philosophical research on consciousness. Featuring contributions from some of the most prominent experts in the field, it explores the wide range of types of consciousness there may be, the many psychological phenomena with which consciousness interacts, and the various views concerning the ultimate relationship between consciousness and physical reality. It is an essential and authoritative resource for anyone working in philosophy of mind or interested in states of consciousness.
Download or read book Moral Status written by Mary Anne Warren and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-11-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Anne Warren explores a theoretical question which lies at the heart of practical ethics: what are the criteria for having moral status? In other words, what are the criteria for being an entity towards which people have moral obligations? Some philosophers maintain that there is one intrinsic property—for instance, life, sentience, humanity, or moral agency. Others believe that relational properties, such as belonging to a human community, are more important. In Part I of the book, Warren argues that no single property can serve as the sole criterion for moral status; instead, life, sentience, moral agency, and social and biotic relationships are all relevant, each in a different way. She presents seven basic principles, each focusing on a property that can, in combination with others, legitimately affect an agent's moral obligations towards entities of a given type. In Part II, these principles are applied in an examination of three controversial ethical issues: voluntary euthanasia, abortion
Book Synopsis Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents by : Gary Steiner
Download or read book Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents written by Gary Steiner and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents is the first-ever comprehensive examination of views of animals in the history of Western philosophy, from Homeric Greece to the twentieth century. In recent decades, increased interest in this area has been accompanied by scholars' willingness to conceive of animal experience in terms of human mental capacities: consciousness, self-awareness, intention, deliberation, and in some instances, at least limited moral agency. This conception has been facilitated by a shift from behavioral to cognitive ethology (the science of animal behavior), and by attempts to affirm the essential similarities between the psychophysical makeup of human beings and animals. Gary Steiner sketches the terms of the current debates about animals and relates these to their historical antecedents, focusing on both the dominant anthropocentric voices and those recurring voices that instead assert a fundamental kinship relation between human beings and animals. He concludes with a discussion of the problem of balancing the need to recognize a human indebtedness to animals and the natural world with the need to preserve a sense of the uniqueness and dignity of the human individual.
Book Synopsis The Significance of Consciousness by : Charles Siewert
Download or read book The Significance of Consciousness written by Charles Siewert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-27 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Siewert presents a distinctive approach to consciousness that emphasizes our first-person knowledge of experience and argues that we should grant consciousness, understood in this way, a central place in our conception of mind and intentionality. Written in an engaging manner that makes its recently controversial topic accessible to the thoughtful general reader, this book challenges theories that equate consciousness with a functional role or with the mere availability of sensory information to cognitive capacities. Siewert argues that the notion of phenomenal consciousness, slighted in some recent theories, can be made evident by noting our reliance on first-person knowledge and by considering, from the subject's point of view, the difference between having and lacking certain kinds of experience. This contrast is clarified by careful attention to cases, both actual and hypothetical, indicated by research on brain-damaged patients' ability to discriminate visually without conscious visual experience--what has become known as "blindsight." In addition, Siewert convincingly defends such approaches against objections that they make an illegitimate appeal to "introspection." Experiences that are conscious in Siewert's sense differ from each other in ways that only what is conscious can--in phenomenal character--and having this character gives them intentionality. In Siewert's view, consciousness is involved not only in the intentionality of sense experience and imagery, but in that of nonimagistic ways of thinking as well. Consciousness is pervasively bound up with intelligent perception and conceptual thought: it is not mere sensation or "raw feel." Having thus understood consciousness, we can better recognize how, for many of us, it possesses such deep intrinsic value that life without it would be little or no better than death.
Book Synopsis Consciousness and Moral Responsibility by : Neil Levy
Download or read book Consciousness and Moral Responsibility written by Neil Levy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neil Levy presents a new theory of freedom and responsibility. He defends a particular account of consciousness—the global workspace view—and argues that consciousness plays an especially important role in action. There are good reasons to think that the naïve assumption, that consciousness is needed for moral responsibility, is in fact true.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Moral Status by : Steve Clarke
Download or read book Rethinking Moral Status written by Steve Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common-sense morality implicitly assumes that reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn between the "full" moral status that is usually attributed to ordinary adult humans, the partial moral status attributed to non-human animals, and the absence of moral status, which is usually ascribed to machines and other artifacts. These implicit assumptions have long been challenged, and are now coming under further scrutiny as there are beings we have recently become able to create, as well as beings that we may soon be able to create, which blur the distinctions between human, non-human animal, and non-biological beings. These beings include non-human chimeras, cyborgs, human brain organoids, post-humans, and human minds that have been uploaded into computers and onto the internet and artificial intelligence. It is far from clear what moral status we should attribute to any of these beings. There are a number of ways we could respond to the new challenges these technological developments raise: we might revise our ordinary assumptions about what is needed for a being to possess full moral status, or reject the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between full and partial moral status. This volume explores such responses, and provides a forum for philosophical reflection about ordinary presuppositions and intuitions about moral status.
Book Synopsis A Theory of Bioethics by : David DeGrazia
Download or read book A Theory of Bioethics written by David DeGrazia and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a compelling theory of bioethics, covering medical assistance-in-dying, the right to health care, abortion, animal research, and the definition of death.
Book Synopsis Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals by : L. Syd M Johnson
Download or read book Neuroethics and Nonhuman Animals written by L. Syd M Johnson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume represents a unique addition to the available literature on animal ethics, animal studies, and neuroethics. Its goal is to expand discussions on animal ethics and neuroethics by weaving together different threads: philosophy of mind and animal minds, neuroscientific study of animal minds, and animal ethics. Neuroethical questions concerning animals’ moral status, animal minds and consciousness, animal pain, and the adequacy of animal models for neuropsychiatric disease have long been topics of debate in philosophy and ethics, and more recently also in neuroscientific research. The book presents a transdisciplinary blend of voices, underscoring different perspectives on the broad questions of how neuroscience can contribute to our understanding of nonhuman minds, and on debates over the moral status of nonhuman animals. All chapters were written by outstanding scholars in philosophy, neuroscience, animal behavior, biology, neuroethics, and bioethics, and cover a range of issues and species/taxa. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scientists and students interested in the debate on animal ethics, while also offering an important resource for future researchers. Chapter 13 is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Book Synopsis Ethics of Artificial Intelligence by : S. Matthew Liao
Download or read book Ethics of Artificial Intelligence written by S. Matthew Liao and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should a self-driving car prioritize the lives of the passengers over the lives of pedestrians? Should we as a society develop autonomous weapon systems that are capable of identifying and attacking a target without human intervention? What happens when AIs become smarter and more capable than us? Could they have greater than human moral status? Can we prevent superintelligent AIs from harming us or causing our extinction? At a critical time in this fast-moving debate, thirty leading academics and researchers at the forefront of AI technology development come together to explore these existential questions, including Aaron James (UC Irvine), Allan Dafoe (Oxford), Andrea Loreggia (Padova), Andrew Critch (UC Berkeley), Azim Shariff (Univ. .
Book Synopsis Conscience and Conviction by : Kimberley Brownlee
Download or read book Conscience and Conviction written by Kimberley Brownlee and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book shows that civil disobedience is generally more defensible than private conscientious objection. Part I explores the morality of conviction and conscience. Each of these concepts informs a distinct argument for civil disobedience. The conviction argument begins with the communicative principle of conscientiousness (CPC). According to the CPC, having a conscientious moral conviction means not just acting consistently with our beliefs and judging ourselves and others by a common moral standard. It also means not seeking to evade the consequences of our beliefs and being willing to communicate them to others. The conviction argument shows that, as a constrained, communicative practice, civil disobedience has a better claim than private objection does to the protections that liberal societies give to conscientious dissent. This view reverses the standard liberal picture which sees private 'conscientious' objection as a modest act of personal belief and civil disobedience as a strategic, undemocratic act whose costs are only sometimes worth bearing. The conscience argument is narrower and shows that genuinely morally responsive civil disobedience honours the best of our moral responsibilities and is protected by a duty-based moral right of conscience. Part II translates the conviction argument and conscience argument into two legal defences. The first is a demands-of-conviction defence. The second is a necessity defence. Both of these defences apply more readily to civil disobedience than to private disobedience. Part II also examines lawful punishment, showing that, even when punishment is justifiable, civil disobedients have a moral right not to be punished. Oxford Legal Philosophy publishes the best new work in philosophically-oriented legal theory. It commissions and solicits monographs in all branches of the subject, including works on philosophical issues in all areas of public and private law, and in the national, transnational, and international realms; studies of the nature of law, legal institutions, and legal reasoning; treatments of problems in political morality as they bear on law; and explorations in the nature and development of legal philosophy itself. The series represents diverse traditions of thought but always with an emphasis on rigour and originality. It sets the standard in contemporary jurisprudence.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Moral Status by : Steve Clarke
Download or read book Rethinking Moral Status written by Steve Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Common-sense morality implicitly assumes that reasonably clear distinctions can be drawn between the full moral status that is usually attributed to ordinary adult humans, the partial moral status attributed to non-human animals, and the absence of moral status, which is usually ascribed to machines and other artifacts. These implicit assumptions have long been challenged, and are now coming under further scrutiny as there are beings we have recently become able to create, as well as beings that we may soon be able to create, which blur the distinctions between human, non-human animal, and non-biological beings. These beings include non-human chimeras, cyborgs, human brain organoids, post-humans, and human minds that have been uploaded into computers and onto the internet and artificial intelligence. It is far from clear what moral status we should attribute to any of these beings. There are a number of ways we could respond to the new challenges these technological developments raise: we might revise our ordinary assumptions about what is needed for a being to possess full moral status, or reject the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between full and partial moral status. This volume explores such responses, and provides a forum for philosophical reflection about ordinary presuppositions and intuitions about moral status.
Book Synopsis Human and Animal Minds by : Peter Carruthers
Download or read book Human and Animal Minds written by Peter Carruthers and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Claims about consciousness in animals are often made in support of their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues that there is no fact of the matter about animal consciousness and it is of no scientific or ethical significance. Sympathy for an animal can be grounded in its mental states, but should not rely on assumptions about its consciousness.
Book Synopsis The Ethics of Uncertainty by : L. Syd M. Johnson
Download or read book The Ethics of Uncertainty written by L. Syd M. Johnson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Consciousness isn't a thing you can poke a stick at. It's not a natural kind, like a bit of quartz, or quarks, or water. Like "life," which can be attributed to many entities, but is not a thing with reality apart from living entities, consciousness can be attributed to conscious entities without being some further thing or fact, some mysterious, mentalizing "force" that can exist without conscious entities. It is manifested in conscious states and creatures, but isn't a thing in and of itself. One of the enduring puzzles about consciousness and conscious states is how they, as apparently mental, nonphysical states, can manifest in a physical entity like a brain. We can point to a physical bit of brain, to a neuron, or a structure like the thalamus, but we can't locate the consciousness within that bit of brain or its neural cells"--
Book Synopsis Matter and Consciousness by : Paul M. Churchland
Download or read book Matter and Consciousness written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In "Matter and Consciousness," Paul Churchland clearly presents the advantages and disadvantages of such difficult issues in philosophy of mind as behaviorism, reductive materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism. This new edition incorporates the striking developments that have taken place in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence and notes their expanding relevance to philosophical issues. Churchland organizes and clarifies the new theoretical and experimental results of the natural sciences for a wider philosophical audience, observing that this research bears directly on questions concerning the basic elements of cognitive activity and their implementation in real physical systems. (How is it, he asks, that living creatures perform some cognitive tasks so swiftly and easily, where computers do them only badly or not at all?) Most significant for philosophy, Churchland asserts, is the support these results tend to give to the reductive and the eliminative versions of materialism. "A Bradford Book"
Book Synopsis Consciousness in Locke by : Shelley Weinberg
Download or read book Consciousness in Locke written by Shelley Weinberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shelley Weinberg argues that the idea of consciousness as a form of non-evaluative self-awareness runs through and helps to solve some of the thorniest issues in Locke's philosophy: in his philosophical psychology and in his theories of knowledge, personal identity, and moral agency. Central to her account is that perceptions of ideas are complex mental states wherein consciousness is a constituent. Such an interpretation answers charges of inconsistency in Locke's model of the mind and lends coherence to a puzzling aspect of Locke's theory of knowledge: how we know individual things (particular ideas, ourselves, and external objects) when knowledge is defined as the perception of an agreement, or relation, of ideas. In each case, consciousness helps to forge the relation, resulting in a structurally integrated account of our knowledge of particulars fully consistent with the general definition. This model also explains how we achieve the unity of consciousness with past and future selves necessary for Locke's accounts of moral responsibility and moral motivation. And with help from other of his metaphysical commitments, consciousness so interpreted allows Locke's theory of personal identity to resist well-known accusations of circularity, failure of transitivity, and insufficiency for his theological and moral concerns. Although virtually every Locke scholar writes on at least some of these topics, the model of consciousness set forth here provides for an analysis all of these issues as bound together by a common thread.
