This long essay, “A Theory of Human Dignity,” presents and defends a general theory of human dignity, with special attention paid to spelling out its background metaphysics, formulating and justifying a basic set of dignitarian moral principles, and critically addressing hard cases for the theory.
“A Theory of Human Dignity” is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download, read, and/or share a .pdf of the complete text of this essay HERE.
This nineteenth installment contains section V.3.3.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
II. Refuting the Dignity-Skeptic and Debunking a Dignity-Debunking Argument
III. The Metaphysics of Human Dignity
III.2 Real Persons and Minded Animals
III.3 A Metaphysical Definition of Real Personhood
IV. Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
IV.0 How Nonideal Can a World Be?
IV.2 How to Solve the Universalizability and Rigorism Problems
IV.3 How to Solve the Problem of Moral Dilemmas
IV.4 Policy of Truth: The Murderer-at-the-Door Revisited
IV.5 One Last Thing, By Way of Concluding This Section
V. Some Hard Cases For Broadly Kantian Nonideal Dignitarian Moral Theory
V.0 How Hard Can Hard Cases Be?
V.1 Abortion and Infanticide: Introduction
V.1.1 The Neo-Person Thesis, Neo-Persons, and Non-Persons
V.1.2 A Five-Step Argument for the Neo-Person Thesis
V.3 Non-Human Animals and Their Associate Membership in The Realm of Ends
V.3.1 Real Persons and Different Species
VI. Enacting Human Dignity and The Mind-Body Politic
VII. Conclusion
V.3.3 Moral Comparison
In this sub-sub-section, I want to argue for what I’m calling The Moral Comparison Thesis, which says:
There’s compellingly good reason to believe that the suffering of any human or non-human minded animal that is a real person, whether via bodily nociperception or without bodily nociperception, is substantially more morally significant than the bodily nociperception of any human or non-human minded animal that isn’t a real person, assuming roughly comparable levels of experienced intensity.
In order to carry out that argument, I’ll also need to define some terminology. By “moral significance,” in the present context, I mean the following:
X is morally significant if and only if X has moral value, and the presence or absence of X in the life of an experiencer E not only makes a determinate, noticeable, life-modulating difference in the life of E, but also partially determines the application of moral principles to E.
In turn, by “life-modulating difference,” I mean a difference that saliently affects the content or course of one’s life (for example, starting a romantic relationship, ending a romantic relationship, moving to another city or country, losing your job, starting a new job, etc.), without necessarily implying a life-changing difference in the stronger sense of radically restructuring the content or course of one’s life (for example, falling permanently in love, experiencing the death of a loved one, falling into the grip of a serious addiction, mastering a serious addiction, finding one’s permanent calling or vocation in a non-religious sense, religious conversion, etc.).
Given those definitions, my argument for The Moral Comparison Thesis will deploy five basic premises: (i) The Mental-Mental Gap Thesis, originally defended by Thomas Nagel, (ii) the sharp distinction between bodily nociperception and suffering, that I argued for in sub-sub-section V.3.2, which entails that it’s fallacious for Bentham and Singer to infer the existence of suffering from the mere fact of a minded animal’s experience of bodily pain, (iii) The Multiple Realization Thesis, originally defended by Hilary Putnam, (iv) The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis, originally defended by Jaegwon Kim, and also something I call (v) The Schematization Thesis. In the rest of this sub-sub-section, I will unpack and offer justification for premises (i), (iii), (iv), and (v), and then explicitly lay out my argument for The Moral Comparison Thesis.
(1) The Mental-Mental Gap
Nagel’s classic essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?,” is all about explanatory gaps.[i] An explanatory gap obtains just in case one set of concepts cannot be reduced to or entailed by another set of concepts, whether by analytical definition, analytical entailment, or even by some weaker kind of reduction such as necessary coextension. If every explanatorily irreducible set of concepts picks out a set of distinct properties and facts in the world, then every explanatory gap entails a corresponding ontological gap and failures of logical supervenience or nomological supervenience at the level of properties and facts. The inferential step from explanatorily irreducible concepts to distinct properties and facts has been much discussed since the first publication of Nagel’s essay in 1974, and remains controversial. What many readers of “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” over the last 47 years seem not to have noticed, however, is that Nagel actually discloses two different explanatory gaps in the philosophy of mind and not just one.
First and foremost, there’s Nagel’s well-known explanatory gap between mentalistic concepts and physicalistic concepts.[ii] Mentalistic concepts are concepts whose content and ascription imply full consciousness or subjective experience, and the first-person point of view, or in Nagel’s terms, “what it is like to be, for an organism”:
[F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience.[iii]
Subjective character is specific phenomenal character, for example, the quite peculiar feeling experienced by a certain kind of cinephile, of being simultaneously bored stuffless and also intensely saddened, by virtue of watching the truly awful 1959 Rock Hudson – Doris Day movie Pillow Talk.[iv] So mentalistic concepts are concepts whose content and ascription imply specific phenomenal character. Physicalistic concepts, by contrast, are concepts whose content and ascription imply only first- or second-order physical properties or facts, the exclusively non-subjective and objective character of the natural world, and the third-person/impersonal point of view: so roughly, what it is like for something to be fundamentally or superveniently physical. Nagel’s claim is that physicalistic concepts can never adequately capture or explain the specific phenomenal character of subjective experience. Let’s call this The Mental-Physical Gap.
But second, for Nagel there’s also a seemingly equally intractable explanatory gap between the mentalistic concepts that we apply to the conscious states of animals belonging to our own species (aka “conspecific animals”), and the mentalistic concepts that we apply to the conscious states of animals belonging to other species (aka “heterospecific animals”). Nagel’s claim is that although we are capable of understanding the specific phenomenal character of the subjective experience of conspecific animals (hence there is no general skeptical problem of other minds, at least for other conspecific minded animals), nevertheless we are incapable of understanding the specific phenomenal character of the subjective experience of heterospecific minded animals: for example, what it is like for a bat to get around in the world by echolocation. As he puts it in another essay:
We ascribe experiences to animals on the basis of their behavior, structure, and circumstances, but we are not just ascribing to them behavior, structure, and circumstances. So what are we saying? The same kind of thing we say of people when we say they have experiences, of course. But here the special relation between first- and third-person ascription is not available as an indication of the subjectivity of the mental. We are left with concepts that are anchored in their application to humans, and that apply to other creatures by a natural extension from the behavioral and contextual criteria that operate in ordinary human cases. This seems definitely unsatisfactory, because the experiences of other creatures are certainly independent of the reach of an analogy with the human case. They have their own reality and their own subjectivity.{v}
I’ll call this The Mental-Mental Gap. One direct implication of The Mental-Mental Gap that Nagel does not explicitly mention, but which will be highly relevant to us later, is what I’ll call The Nagel Proportionality Thesis:
The greater the degree of neurobiological and behavioral difference between the human species and another minded animal species, then the wider The Mental-Mental Gap between us and those heterospecific animals.[vi]
Those closely familiar with the argument-structure of “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” will also notice that I have reversed Nagel’s order of argumentation. In fact, he first argues for the existence of The Mental-Mental Gap, and then, second, he uses that gap as the basic premise in his argument for the Mental-Physical Gap. Officially then, The Mental-Mental Gap is supposed to be the sufficient reason for The Mental-Physical Gap:
This [Mental-Mental Gap] bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts about experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible from only one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism.[vii]
In other words, for Nagel, The Mental-Mental Gap is supposed to entail The Mental-Physical gap. But this is a mistake. Although The Mental-Mental Gap is perfectly consistent with The Mental-Physical Gap, nevertheless the two gaps are logically independent. This is because it is perfectly coherent to hold that we cannot understand the specific character of the subjective experience of heterospecific minded animals and also hold that reductive physicalism is true, hence there is no Mental-Physical Gap.
It’s true that at least one version of reductive physicalism—a hyper-strong version of type-type physicalism, or mind-brain identity theory, that implies both the analytically necessary identity of mentalistic concepts with physicalistic concepts, and also the metaphysically necessary identity of mental properties with physical properties—is sufficient for closing The Mental-Mental Gap. But not every version of reductive physicalism is of this hyper-strong sort. Indeed, most reductive physicalists, including the defenders of classical type-type physicalism, explicitly reject the hyper-strong analyticity version of the mind-brain identity theory and opt for the metaphysically necessary a posteriori identity of mental properties with physical properties, aka “contingent identity,” while also rejecting both the analytically necessary identity of mentalistic concepts with physicalistic concepts and the analytically necessary identity of mental properties with physicalistic concepts, alike.[viii] Therefore, it’s obvious that closing The Mental-Mental Gap is not generally necessary for the truth of reductive physicalism.[ix] Nor, indeed, is closing The Mental-Mental Gap necessary for physicalism of any sort, whether reductive or non-reductive.[x] So Nagel’s Mental-Physical Gap is logically independent of his Mental-Mental Gap: the latter is consistent with the denial of the former.
From this point forward, then, I’m going to assume the logical independence of the two Gaps, and also that Nagel’s argument for the existence of The Mental-Mental Gap, in and of itself, especially including The Nagel Proportionality Thesis, is basically sound.
(2) Multiple Realization, Structure-Restricted Correlation, and Schematization
Both The Multiple Realization Thesis and also The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis arise out of philosophical debates about functionalism in the philosophy of mind.[xi] Functionalism in general holds that minds are not separate substances and that mental properties are not intrinsic non-relational properties of something, but instead that mental properties are identical to functional properties: that is, extrinsic relational patterns of occurrent or dispositional causal transition from inputs to outputs,[xii] applying to the external and internal states of physical machines or living organisms. Standard examples of functional properties are the properties instantiated by sequences of digital computations carried out by a universal Turing machine, which are the special focus of computational functionalism, as well as those properties instantiated by those neurobiological processes in the brains and central nervous systems of animals that are apt to cause behavior, which are the larger focus of psychofunctionalism. According to metaphysical functionalism, whether reductive or non-reductive, functional properties are second-order physical properties[xiii] that are strongly supervenient on first-order physical properties (downwardly identical or logically supervenient in the case of reductive functionalism, and naturally or nomologically supervenient in the case of non-reductive functionalism). So metaphysical functionalism holds that mental properties are identical to a certain special sort of second-order physical property that is strongly supervenient on first-order physical properties.
Metaphysical functionalism is committed to the truth of both The Multiple Realization Thesis and The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis.
The Multiple Realization Thesis asserts that one and the same functional property can be instantiated across the actual world and also across logically and really possible worlds in many different physical individuals, types of organism, natural kinds, and compositional stuffs.[xiv] This is partially verified by the empirical facts that the very same kind of computational software (for example, Microsoft Word 2016, which is what this text is being processed in) can be instantiated in many different sorts of hardware, and that the very same generic type of physiological or neurobiological process (for example, digestion or sleep) can be instantiated in many different species of animals (for example, humans, Great apes and other primates, bats, and cats).
The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis, on the other hand, asserts the relativization of the instantiation of mental properties to species-specific physical structure types, or as Kim puts it:
If anything has mental property M at time t, there is some physical structure type T and physical property P such that it is a system of type T at t and has P at t, and it holds as a matter of law that all systems of type T have M at a time just in case they have P at a time.[xv]
In other words, mental properties occur in animals under specific physical conditions in a lawful way, and this lawful regularity is found across species insofar as they share the same basic neurobiological physical constitution. If mental properties are functional properties, then The Structure-Restricted Correlation thesis is a necessary condition of the multiple realizability of mental properties. So if metaphysical functionalism is true, then The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis follows automatically. But even if mental properties are not identical to functional properties—but only, for example, strongly supervenient on functional properties—nevertheless The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis remains true, because all that it says is that minded animal X has a mental property at a time only if X has a certain physical structure and there is some lawful connection between instantiations of that mental property and fundamental physical properties of that instantiated physical structure. Indeed, it is important to see that The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis is perfectly compatible with various denials of mind-body physicalism, whether the physicalism that is denied is reductive or non-reductive. For even if mental properties are neither identical with nor in any sense strongly supervenient on either first-order or second-order physical properties, there can still be structure-restricted correlations between mental properties and physical properties in minded animals.[xvi]
How can we isolate a given structure-restricted correlation? I think that the correct answer is the one offered by Kim, namely, that we isolate it by (i) finding the causal-functional characterization of that mental property, and then (ii) correlating the causal-functional role picked out by that characterization with a certain species-specific neurobiological constitution in minded animals.[xvii] Again however, it’s crucial to remember that we do not have to identify mental properties with functional properties in order to do this. All we that is required is to have a causal-functional characterization of the relevant mental property. Consider, for example, the causal-functional characterization of the mental property of the experience of bodily pain (aka, bodily nociperception) that I sketched above: Bodily nociperception is the minded animal’s experience of tissue damage or neurobiological systemic disruption or distress within its own body; bodily nociperception is subject-dependent (in self-conscious or self-reflective animals), multiply realizable, and multiply functional; and bodily nociperception has a necessary connection (other things being equal) to animal behavior. The causal-functional role of bodily nociperception is multiply realized in humans, Great apes and other primates, bats, cats, and so-on, and therefore determines a set of structure-restricted correlations between the mental property of being in bodily pain and different species-specific neurobiological constitutions.
This point leads to one last concept that we’ll need before I get to the explicit argument for The Moral Comparison Thesis. This is the concept of a schematization of a mental property. The basic idea behind the schematization of a mental property is that heterospecific minded animals will typically subjectively experience the same sorts of things—for example, colors, sounds, or pain—quite differently, precisely because their neurobiological constitutions are quite different, and also in some sort of systematic relation to the precise differences in neurobiological constitution. The mental content of a body-schema, in turn, is essentially non-conceptual.[xviii] Otherwise put, a schematization is the essentially non-conceptual way that different types of animal bodies directly and endogenously affect the specific phenomenal character of consciousness in those minded animals. This, in turn, is also sometimes re-presented conceptually in the form of a distinctive body-image that gives a correspondingly distinctive underlying phenomenological spatiotemporal organization to a self-conscious/self-reflective animal’s primitive bodily awareness and affects.[xix] Finally, and slightly more abstractly put, a mental property is schematized if and only if the specific phenomenal character of the essentially non-conceptual mental content of its instances is regularly and systematically modified and shaped (sometimes also via a conceptualized body-image) by the multiple realizations of its corresponding causal-functional role in different neurobiological substrates under different structure-restricted correlations.
My thesis here, then, is that necessarily, all minded animal consciousness is schematized. This is what I’ll call The Schematization Thesis. Human pain and bat pain are both pain, in the sense that they each play the same causal-functional role in the human species (homo sapiens) and the bat species (microchiroptera). But in virtue of The Schematization Thesis, a bat’s subjective experience of bodily pain will be radically different from a human animal’s subjective experience of bodily pain, not merely neurobiologically, but also phenomenologically. Indeed it is precisely the notion of schematization, and thus implicitly The Schematization Thesis, that drives the basic intuition that Nagel uses to motivate The Mental-Mental Gap Thesis and The Nagel Proportionality Thesis themselves. We lack any sort of adequate conceptual or theoretical understanding of what it’s like to be a bat precisely because the subjective experiences of humans and of bats are schematized radically differently, and precisely because the differing essentially non-conceptual contents of schematization across different species are given directly only to conspecific minded animals.
It doesn’t follow from this fact, however, that in order to have correct perceptions or make true judgments about other minded animals, whether human or non-human, one must be standing in some sort of identity relation to their mental states, whether type-identity or token-identity. Nor does it follow that this cognition of other minded animals happens fundamentally by means of analogical inference or “theory-of-mind.” Instead, on my view, correctly perceiving and judging the mental states of other minded animals occurs only by means of pre-reflectively consciously simulating their essentially embodied mental states in oneself, that is, by means of what I call empathic mirroring.[xx] Empathic mirroring, in turn, is a matter of emotional cognition, not theoretical cognition, and it’s mediated by essentially non-conceptual content,[xxi] not by conceptual content. Empathic mirroring is as effective for cognizing non-human minded animals[xxii] as it is for cognizing other human minded animals. So in general, we can’t “read” or conceptually understand other minds. But we can, to a greater or lesser extent, as it were, “dance” with, essentially non-conceptually resonate with, other minded animals, whether human or non-human. At the same time, where other species are concerned, we must also, to borrow a phrase from The London Underground, “mind the gap”—by which I mean that we must also explicitly accept the existence of Nagel’s Mental-Mental Gap.
In any case, here’s my full-dress argument for The Moral Comparison Thesis, laid out step-by-step.
1. Assume the notion of a minded animal’s consciousness as a capacity for subjective experience, also characterized by Nagel as “what it is like to be, for an organism.”(Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
2. Assume both The Mental-Mental Gap Thesis and The Nagel Proportionality Thesis: We are incapable of understanding the specific phenomenal character of the subjective experience of heterospecific animals (The Mental-Mental Gap Thesis), and the greater the degree of neurobiological and behavioral difference between the human species and another minded animal species, the wider the Mental-Mental Gap between us and them (The Nagel Proportionality Thesis). (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
3. Assume The Multiple Realization Thesis: One and the same functional property can be instantiated across the actual world and also across logically and really possible worlds in many different physical individuals, types of organism, natural kinds, and compositional stuffs. (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
4. Assume The Structure-Restricted Correlation Thesis: Mental properties occur in animals under specific physical conditions in a lawful way, and this lawful regularity is found across species sharing the same neurobiological physical constitution. (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
5. Assume The Schematization Thesis: Necessarily, all minded animal consciousnessis schematized, and a mental property is schematized just in case the specific phenomenal character of the essentially non-conceptual content of its instances is regularly and systematically modified and shaped (sometimes also via a conceptualized body-image) by the multiple realizations of its corresponding causal-functional role in different neurobiological substrates under different structure-restricted correlations. (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
6. Assume that conscious states like being in bodily pain, that is, states of bodily nociperception, have corresponding causal-functional characterizations that describe their causal-functional roles. (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
7. Therefore, the causal-functional role of bodily nociperception is multiply realized under different species-specific structure-restricted correlations. (From 3, 4, and 6.)
8. Therefore, The Schematization Thesis applies to bodily nociperception in all minded animals. (From 5 and 7.)
9. Therefore, there’s compellingly good reason to believe that the bodily nociperception of bats and other neurobiologically heterospecific animals is not only phenomenologically radically different from the human experience of bodily pain but also in fact conceptually inaccessible to us. (From 1, 2, and 8.)
10. We have compellingly good reason to believe that a type of bodily nociperception in heterospecific animals can be anywhere near as morally significant as the bodily nociperception of real human persons only if it is phenomenologically very similar to bodily nociperception in real human persons. This is because our reason for believing that the experience of bodily pain in our own species is morally significant is necessarily based on first-person evidence. But the less phenomenologically similar a given consciousness-type C1 (say, a bat’s bodily nociperception) is to another consciousness-type C2 (say, a conscious human animal’s bodily nociperception), then the less reason we have to believe that C1 has all or even any of the consciousness-based properties that C2 has. (Premise.)
11. Human real persons can suffer, whether via their bodily nociperception or without bodily nociperception, and this suffering is substantially morally significant. (Premise, justified by arguments already provided.)
12. Therefore, there’s compellingly good reason to believe that the suffering of any human or non-human minded animal that is a real person, whether via bodily nociperception or without bodily nociperception, is substantially more morally significant than the bodily nociperception of any human or non-human minded animal that isn’t a real person, assuming roughly comparable levels of experienced[xxiii] intensity. In other words, The Moral Comparison Thesis is true. (From 9, 10, and 11.)
NOTES
[i] See J. Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354-361.
[ii] See also T. Nagel, “Conceiving the Impossible and the Mind-Body Problem,” Philosophy 73 (1998): 337-352; and T. Nagel, “The Psychophysical Nexus,” in P. Boghossian and C. Peacocke (eds.), New Essays on the A Priori (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 433-471.
[iii] T. Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?,” in T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 165-180, at p. 166.
[iv] (Dir. M. Gordon, 1959).
[v] Nagel, “Panpsychism,” in Nagel, Mortal Questions, pp. 181-195, at 191, underlining added.
[vi] This point is vividly brought out by Stanislaw Lem in his brilliant sci-fi novel, Fiasco, trans. M. Kandel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987). It’s about the tragic impossibility of rational human contact with truly alien real persons. The alien Quintans, who are indeed real persons, are a living network of “coarse, bloated mounds” on the surface of the planet Quinta. Naturally, they’re radically misunderstood by a team of contact-seeking Earthians, and ultimately blasted into smithereens by them, even despite the Earthians’ best intentions.
[vii] Nagel, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?,” p. 172.
[viii] E.g., the classical type-physicalist mind-brain identity theory defended by Place and Smart explicitly rejects analytical concept identity and also explicitly asserts contingent property identity. See U.T. Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?,” British Journal of Psychology 47 (1956): 44-50; and J.J.C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-156.
[ix] E.g., prior to 2005, Kim was a reductive physicalist who also asserted the existence of a Mental-Mental Gap. See J. Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction,” in J. Kim, Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 309-335, at 334. In later years, Kim was a non-reductivist about consciousness, although he remained a reductive physicalist about intentionality—see J. Kim, Physicalism, Or Something Near Enough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), and also presumably still held The Mental-Mental Gap Thesis.
[x] See D. Lewis, “Mad Pain and Martian Pain,” in N. Block (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology (2 vols., Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 216-222.
[xi] See, e.g., J. Kim, Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), chs. 4-5.
[xii] For the functionalist, these inputs and outputs may be, but do not have to be, stimulus inputs and verifiable outputs. So Functionalism comprehends Behaviorism, yet extends well beyond it.
[xiii] More precisely, a functional property is the property of having a first-order physical property with a certain causal-role specification. See H. Putnam, “On Properties,” in H. Putnam, Mathematics, Matter, and Method: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 305-322, at pp. 313-315.
[xiv] See, e.g., Kim, Philosophy of Mind, chs. 4-5; and Putnam, “On Properties,” at pp. 313-315.
[xv] Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction,” p. 313.
[xvi] See, e.g., R. Hanna and M. Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), section 8.1.
[xvii] See Kim, “Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction.”
[xviii] See R. Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), ch. 2.
[xix] For the distinction between body schema and body image, see Hanna and Maiese, Embodied Minds in Action, pp. 68-70; and S. Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 37-38.
[xx] See, e.g., E. Thompson, “Empathy and Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 1-32.
[xxi] See, e.g., M. Maiese, Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
[xxii] See, e.g., V. Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Knopf, 1986).
[xxiii] I say “experienced” here and not the slightly more specific “subjectively experienced,” so as to include the class of non-human non-person proto-sentient or simple minded animals within the scope of The Moral Comparison Thesis.
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