Chalmers, David

philosopher of mind at New York University, known for the "hard problem" of consciousness and the philosophical zombie argument

The host, who reads out questions from the chat, is not named in the transcript; several audience members ask questions, one of them live.

On Consciousness and Morality ● David Chalmers

Andrea Cirla · Jan 17, 2025 · partial coverage

• David Chalmers
• consciousness
• moral status
• sentientism
• philosophical zombies
• trolley problem
• Vulcans
• affect
• Peter Singer
• philosophy of mind

Coverage note: full - automatic transcript of a lecture of about fifty minutes followed by questions.

Core ideas

Chalmers, who long avoided ethics, explores one link between his field and value: the relation between consciousness and moral status. A being has moral status if it matters morally for its own sake. Humans have full moral status, dogs perhaps partial status, cups none, a contrast he illustrates with "Black Lives Matter" versus an "animal lives matter" claim. "Sentientism", a term coined by Richard Ryder, who also coined "speciesism", holds that a being has moral status if and only if it is sentient. Chalmers distinguishes two readings. Broad sentientism ties moral status to phenomenal consciousness, there being "something it is like" to be that being in Thomas Nagel's phrase, and he is sympathetic to it. Narrow sentientism ties it to affective consciousness, the capacity for positively or negatively valenced states like pleasure and pain. This is the dominant view from Bentham ("can they suffer?") to Peter Singer, and the one he rejects.

For broad sentientism, he builds on Charles Siewert's question of whether we would agree to become philosophical zombies, beings that behave like us but have no experience at all, and combines it with the trolley problem. Faced with one conscious human versus five zombies, many would save the human. With a single conscious chicken versus a planet of sophisticated zombies, intuitions divide. Chalmers sees consciousness as at least the primary ground of value, while allowing that intelligence or intentionality might matter somewhat. Against narrow sentientism he introduces "Vulcans": beings, inspired by Star Trek and by real conditions such as pain asymbolia and anhedonia, that are conscious, perceive, think and pursue goals but feel no pleasure or pain at all. In his "Vulcan trolley problem", he judges it wrong to kill five Vulcans to save one human, and "monstrous" to kill a Vulcan to save an hour's drive. He backs the intuition with a dilemma. Either a being with a tiny affective range matters as much as a human, creating an absurd moral discontinuity between it and a Vulcan, or moral status grows with affective range, implying that people with intense emotions matter more than calmer ones.

He answers objections. Vulcans do not matter merely the way a forest does, since they matter for their own sake. Affectively neutral conscious states are perfectly conceivable, much ordinary perception and thought being neutral. Vulcans can have motivation without affect, as affective neuroscience separates "wanting" from "liking". They have at least "Kantian" desires, grounded in judgments that outcomes are good, as opposed to affective "Humean" desires. Affect makes lives better or worse, he concludes, but does not make them matter in the first place: consciousness may be necessary for moral status, affective consciousness is not. In the Q&A, he distinguishes instrumental from intrinsic moral status (a cancer-curing plant, the environment) and stays neutral on whether value is objective, as Derek Parfit held, or comes from what we value. He accepts gradations of moral status among conscious beings and among humans who forfeit some claims. He ties the status of patients to their capacity for consciousness, so that brain death removes it. He accepts Hume's is-ought gap, and ranks cognitive phenomenology above affective and merely sensory phenomenology as the clearest ground of moral status.

Excerpts