I think that’s approximately true, but I also think it goes the other way around as well. In fact, just a few hours before reading your comment, I made a post using basically the same example, but in reverse (well, in both directions):
For example, I might wonder “Are fish conscious?”, which seems on the face of it an empirical question. However, I might not yet know precisely what I mean by “conscious”, and only really want to know whether fish are “conscious in a sense I would morally care about”. In this case, the seemingly empirical question becomes hard to disentangle from the (seemingly moral) question “What forms of consciousness are morally important?”
(Furthermore, my answers to that question may in turn may be influenced by empirical discoveries. For example, I may initially believe avoidance of painful stimuli demonstrates consciousness in a morally relevant sense, but then change that belief after learning that this behaviour can be displayed in a stimulus-response way by certain extremely simple organisms.)”
One idea informing why I put it that way around as well is that “consciousness” (like almost all terms) is not a fundamental element of nature, with clear and unambiguous borders. Instead, humanity has come up with the term, and can (to some extent) decide what it means. And I think one of the “criteria” a lot of people want that term to meet is “moral significance”.
(From memory, and in my opinion, this sequence did a good job discussing how to think about words/concepts, their fuzzy borders, and then extent to which we are vs aren’t free to use them however we want.)
(Also, I know some theories would propose consciousness is fundamental, but I don’t fully understand them and believe they’re not very mainstream, so I set them aside for now.)
A given worldview represents a combination of views, sometimes very difficult to disentangle, such that uncertainty between worldviews is constituted by a mix of empirical uncertainty (uncertainty about facts), normative uncertainty (uncertainty about morality), and methodological uncertainty (e.g. uncertainty about how to handle uncertainty, as laid out in the third bullet point above).
I think that’s approximately true, but I also think it goes the other way around as well. In fact, just a few hours before reading your comment, I made a post using basically the same example, but in reverse (well, in both directions):
One idea informing why I put it that way around as well is that “consciousness” (like almost all terms) is not a fundamental element of nature, with clear and unambiguous borders. Instead, humanity has come up with the term, and can (to some extent) decide what it means. And I think one of the “criteria” a lot of people want that term to meet is “moral significance”.
(From memory, and in my opinion, this sequence did a good job discussing how to think about words/concepts, their fuzzy borders, and then extent to which we are vs aren’t free to use them however we want.)
(Also, I know some theories would propose consciousness is fundamental, but I don’t fully understand them and believe they’re not very mainstream, so I set them aside for now.)
This page is also relevant, e.g.: