This paper was published as a GPI working paper in October 2024.

Abstract

I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary developments of the theory, while avoiding highly counter-intuitive implications of previous arguments for the same conclusion.

Introduction

An individual has moral standing just in case they matter morally in their own right and for their own sake (Kamm 2007: 227–230). You and I have moral standing. Rocks do not. Why not?

According to one influential view, it’s because rocks aren’t sentient. ‘Sentience’ can be understood in both a broad and narrow sense (Browning and Birch 2022). In the broad sense, it’s synonymous with the capacity for phenomenal consciousness. In the narrow sense, which I’ll rely on here, sentience requires not only the capacity for phenomenal consciousness, but for phenomenal states that feel good or bad, exemplified by experiences of pleasure and pain.

According to Singer (1993), sentience (so understood) is a necessary condition for moral standing, because it’s a necessary condition for being the kind of individual whose life can go better or worse. Stated otherwise, sentience is necessary for being a welfare subject. Singer’s overall view might be summarized as the claim that welfare subjectivity is necessary and sufficient for moral standing and sentience is necessary and sufficient for welfare subjectivity.

In this paper I’ll grant the first biconditional stated above for the sake of argument and focus on the following challenge to the second. The assumption that sentience is a prerequisite for wellbeing appears to be in tension with a bunch of theories of welfare, as a number of philosophers have noted recently (Kagan 2019: 32–34; van der Deijl 2020; Bradford 2022).^[1] Notably, that includes the desire-fulfilment theory, which Singer (1993) endorsed,^[2] since it’s far from obvious that consciousness is a necessary condition for having satisfied desires.

Should we think that some individuals without any capacity for phenomenal consciousness can be benefited and harmed because they have desires that may or may not be fulfilled? How we answer this question may have implications that reach beyond the desire-fulfilment theory itself. Objective list theories of welfare may recognize desire-fulfilment as one welfare good among others (e.g., Arneson 1999). Hybrid theories may treat fulfilment of desires for particular objectively valuable objects as constitutive of welfare (Par!t 1984: 501–502; Kraut 1994), raising the question of whether individuals without any capacity for phenomenal consciousness can instantiate these objective-subjective hybrids.

In this paper, I’ll show that there are indeed good reasons to think that some individuals should be counted as welfare subjects although they lack the capacity for consciousness, provided we assume that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I’ll show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of the theory and to avoid certain highly counter-intuitive implications that arise from reliance on a simplistic understanding of its commitments.

I begin in section 2 by explaining why some philosophers have thought that the desire-fulfilment theory of welfare requires us to recognize the possibility of welfare subjects without any capacity for phenomenal consciousness and why I think those arguments are unconvincing. In section 3, I consider a plausible modification of the desire-fulfilment theory put forward by Sumner (1996) and Heathwood (2019) and argue that the best way to understand this proposal treats it as recognizing positive affect as necessary for the welfare good of desire-fulfilment. Whereas Lin (2020a,b) argues that the kind of modified desire-fulfilment theory discussed in section 3 makes phenomenal consciousness a necessary condition for being a welfare subject, I take the contrary view. Although many find it intuitive to suppose that affective states have to be consciously experienced, in section 4, I show that there are good grounds for recognizing the possibility of affective states occurring without phenomenal consciousness. In section 5, I argue that there are also good grounds for according moral standing to individuals without any capacity for phenomenal consciousness who exhibit emotions and sentiments. I conclude that we have good reason to think that the putative welfare good of desire-fulfilment can be instantiated by individuals without any capacity for consciousness, although the conditions are far more restrictive than the arguments I’ll discuss in section 2 would suggest. In section 6, I explore some of the implications of the view developed here for our thinking about invertebrates and AI systems as welfare subjects.

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1. ^{^}

   See also Berger et al. (ms) and Goldstein and Kirk-Giannini (ms).

2. ^{^}

   Singer now endorses a hedonistic theory of welfare instead (de Lazari-Radek and Singer 2014).