Varieties of Sentientism About Moral Standing

Leonard Dung (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

When: Tuesday May 5, at 11am in Houston/18.00 in Bochum  

Where: https://riceuniversity.zoom.us/j/93096236283?pwd=s6SO6NqrM5mnGpqjFtKNfTNoxaHGUg.1

Who: Leonard Dung

What: "Varieties of Sentientism About Moral Standing"  

Abstract 

A being has moral standing exactly if it matters morally for its own sake. According to sentientism, moral standing is grounded in sentience, that is, the capacity for conscious experiences which feel good or bad. There is strong evidence for sentientism based on its extensional adequacy, the resonance constraint, its explanatory properties, and introspection. At the same time, sentientism is limited by the epistemic inaccessibility of sentience, challenges to the trustworthiness of our introspection of sentience, and the existence of other plausible grounds of moral standing, such as some forms of agency. My conclusion is that these objections should lead us to reject exceptionalist sentientism: the view that sentience has unique metaphysical, epistemic, and practical relevance with respect to moral standing. Nevertheless, modest sentientism should be retained: It is plausible that sentience is a sufficient ground of moral standing, even though we cannot be certain of that, there may be other sufficient grounds of moral standing, and there are practical reasons to place significant weight on criteria of moral standing other than sentience.