Consciousness and Moral Status

Claims about the value of life for those in a 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, especially its levels or modes.

In this book Joshua Shepherd presents a systematic account of features of consciousness that ground its value. These features include phenomenally conscious experiences of value, as well as structural features such as the unity of consciousness, and the cognitive sophistication afforded by higher levels of consciousness, that ground the value of a conscious mental life through time. He also considers test cases involving non-humans and those 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 will be an account of moral status that explains the importance of phenomenal consciousness while raising difficult questions about the value of self-consciousness, the value of intelligence, and the moral status of beings whose conscious mental lives differ in crucial ways from those of healthy human adults.

This book will be of great interest to philosophers and students of ethics, bioethics, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Joshua Shepherd is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Carleton University, Canada, and a Research Professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain.