I wrote some thoughts related to moral status (not specifically welfare capacity) and personal identity here (EDIT: to clarify, the context was a discussion of the proposed importance of moral agency to moral status, but you could substitute many other psychological features for moral agency and the same argument should apply):
It seems to me that any specific individual is only a moral agent sometimes, at most. For example, if someone is so impaired by drugs or overcome with emotion that it prevents them from reasoning, are they a moral agent in those moments? Is someone a moral agent when theyâre asleep (and dreaming or not dreaming)? Are these cases so different from removing and then reinserting and reattaching the brain structures responsible for moral agency? In all these cases, the connections canât be used due to the circumstances, and while the last case is the clearest since the structure has been removed, you could say the structure has been functionally removed in the others. I donât think itâs accurate to say âthey can engage in rational choiceâ under these circumstances.
Perhaps people are moral agents most of the time, but wouldnât your account mean their suffering matters less in itself while they arenât moral agents, even as normally developed adults? In particular, I think intense suffering will often prevent moral agency, and while the loss of agency may be bad in itself (although Iâm not sure I agree), the loss of agency from sleep would be similarly bad in itself, so this shouldnât be much worse than a human being forced to sleep and a nonhuman animal suffering as intensely, ignoring differences in long-term effects, and if the nonhuman animalâs suffering doesnât matter much in itself relative to the (temporary) loss of moral agency, then neither would the humanâs. Torturing someone may often not be much worse than forcing someone to sleep (ignoring long-term effects), if the torture is intense enough to prevent moral agency. Or, deliberately, coercively and temporarily preventing a personâs moral agency and torturing them isnât much worse than just deliberately, coercively and temporarily preventing their moral agency. This seems very counterintuitive to me, and I certainly wouldnât feel this way about it if I were the victim. Suffering in itself can be far worse than death.
Now, letâs suppose identity and moral status are preserved to some degree in more commonsensical ways, and the human prefrontal cortex confers extra moral status. Then, there might be weird temporal effects. Committing to an act of destroying someoneâs prefrontal cortex and torturing them would be worse than destroying their prefrontal cortex and then later and independently torturing them, because in the first case, their extra moral status still applies to the torture beforehand, but in the second, once their prefrontal cortex is destroyed, they lose that extra moral status that would make the torture worse.
I think what youâre saying makes sense to me, but Iâm confused by the fact you say âI wrote some thoughts related to moral status (not specifically welfare capacity) and personal identity hereâ, but then the passage appears to be about moral agency, rather than about moral status/âpatienthood.
And then occasionally the passage appears to use moral agency as if it means moral status/âpatienthood. E.g., âPerhaps people are moral agents most of the time, but wouldnât your account mean their suffering matters less in itself while they arenât moral agents, even as normally developed adultsâ. Although perhaps that reflects the particular arguments that that passage of yours was responding to.
Could you clarify which concept you were talking about in that passage?
(It looks to me like essentially the same argument you make could hold in relation to moral status anyway, so Iâm not saying this undermines your points.)
The original context for that comment was in a discussion where moral agency was proposed to be important, but I think you could substitute other psychological features (autonomy, intelligence, rationality, social nature, social attachments/âlove, etc.) for moral agency and the same argument would apply to them.
I wrote some thoughts related to moral status (not specifically welfare capacity) and personal identity here (EDIT: to clarify, the context was a discussion of the proposed importance of moral agency to moral status, but you could substitute many other psychological features for moral agency and the same argument should apply):
Now, letâs suppose identity and moral status are preserved to some degree in more commonsensical ways, and the human prefrontal cortex confers extra moral status. Then, there might be weird temporal effects. Committing to an act of destroying someoneâs prefrontal cortex and torturing them would be worse than destroying their prefrontal cortex and then later and independently torturing them, because in the first case, their extra moral status still applies to the torture beforehand, but in the second, once their prefrontal cortex is destroyed, they lose that extra moral status that would make the torture worse.
I think what youâre saying makes sense to me, but Iâm confused by the fact you say âI wrote some thoughts related to moral status (not specifically welfare capacity) and personal identity hereâ, but then the passage appears to be about moral agency, rather than about moral status/âpatienthood.
And then occasionally the passage appears to use moral agency as if it means moral status/âpatienthood. E.g., âPerhaps people are moral agents most of the time, but wouldnât your account mean their suffering matters less in itself while they arenât moral agents, even as normally developed adultsâ. Although perhaps that reflects the particular arguments that that passage of yours was responding to.
Could you clarify which concept you were talking about in that passage?
(It looks to me like essentially the same argument you make could hold in relation to moral status anyway, so Iâm not saying this undermines your points.)
The original context for that comment was in a discussion where moral agency was proposed to be important, but I think you could substitute other psychological features (autonomy, intelligence, rationality, social nature, social attachments/âlove, etc.) for moral agency and the same argument would apply to them.