=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2287/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=No Brainer: Why Consciousness is Neither a Necessary nor Sufficient Condition for AI Ethics
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-2287
|authors=David J. Gunkel
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aaaiss/Gunkel19
}}
==No Brainer: Why Consciousness is Neither a Necessary nor Sufficient Condition for AI Ethics==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper9.pdf
No Brainer: Why Consciousness is Neither a Necessary
nor Sufficient Condition for AI Ethics
David J. Gunkel1
1
Northern Illinois University, USA – dgunkel@niu.edu
Abstract. The question concerning the moral and/or legal status of others is
typically decided on the basis of pre-existing ontological properties, e.g. wheth-
er the entity in question possesses consciousness or sentience or has the capaci-
ty to experience suffering. In what follows, I contest this standard operating
procedure by identifying three philosophical problems with the properties ap-
proach (i.e. substantive, terminological, and epistemological complications),
and I propose an alternative method for defining and deciding moral status that
is more empirical and less speculative in its formulation. This alternative shifts
the emphasis from internal, ontological properties to extrinsic social relation-
ships, and can, therefore, be called a “relational turn” in AI ethics.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Ethics
1 Introduction
Ethics, in both theory and practice, is an exclusive undertaking. In confronting and
dealing with others, we inevitably make a decision between “who” is morally signifi-
cant and “what” remains a mere thing. These decisions (which are quite literally a cut
or “de-caedere” in the fabric of being) are often accomplished and justified on the
basis of intrinsic, ontological properties. “The standard approach to the justification of
moral status is,” Mark Coeckelbergh explains, “to refer to one or more (intrinsic)
properties of the entity in question, such as consciousness or the ability to suffer. If
the entity has this property, this then warrants giving the entity a certain moral status”
[1]. According to this way of thinking—what one might call the standard operating
procedure of moral consideration—the question concerning the status of others would
need to be decided by first identifying which property or properties would be neces-
sary and sufficient to have moral standing and then figuring out whether a particular
entity (or class of entities) possesses this property or not. Deciding things in this fash-
ion, although entirely reasonable and expedient, has at least three philosophical prob-
lems, all of which become increasingly evident and problematic in the face of artifi-
cial intelligence and robots.
2
2 Three Philosophical Problems
2.1 Substantive
First, how does one ascertain which exact property or properties are necessary and
sufficient for moral status? In other words, which one, or ones, count? The history of
moral philosophy can, in fact, be read as something of an on-going debate and strug-
gle over this matter with different properties vying for attention at different times.
And in this process, many properties that at one time seemed both necessary and suf-
ficient have turned out to be spurious, prejudicial or both. Take for example the facul-
ty of reason. When Immanuel Kant defined morality as involving the rational deter-
mination of the will, non-human animals, which did not possess reason, were categor-
ically excluded from moral consideration. It is because the human being possesses
reason, that he (and the human being, in this particular circumstance, was still princi-
pally understood to be male) is raised above the instinctual behavior of the brutes and
able to act according to the principles of pure practical reason [2].
The property of reason, however, has been subsequently contested by efforts in ani-
mal rights philosophy, which begins, according to Peter Singer’s analysis, with a crit-
ical intervention issued by Jeremy Bentham: “The question is not, ‘Can they reason?’
nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but ‘Can they suffer?’” [3]. According to Singer, the morally
relevant property is not speech or reason, which he believes would set the bar for
moral inclusion too high, but sentience and the capability to suffer. In Animal Libera-
tion (1975) and subsequent writings, Singer argues that any sentient entity, and thus
any being that can suffer, has an interest in not suffering and therefore deserves to
have that interest taken into account [4]. This is, however, not the final word on the
matter. One of the criticisms of animal rights philosophy, is that this development, for
all its promise to intervene in the anthropocentric tradition, still remains an exclusive
and exclusionary practice. Environmental ethics, for instance, has been critical of
animal rights philosophy for organizing its moral innovations on a property (i.e. suf-
fering) that includes some sentient creatures in the community of moral subjects while
simultaneously justifying the exclusion of other kinds of “lower animals,” plants, and
the other entities that comprise the natural environment.
But even these efforts to open up and to expand the community of legitimate moral
subjects has also (and not surprisingly) been criticized for instituting additional exclu-
sions. "Even bioethics and environmental ethics," Luciano Floridi argues, "fail to
achieve a level of complete universality and impartiality, because they are still biased
against what is inanimate, lifeless, intangible, abstract, engineered, artificial, synthet-
ic, hybrid, or merely possible. Even land ethics is biased against technology and arte-
facts, for example. From their perspective, only what is intuitively alive deserves to
be considered as a proper centre of moral claims, no matter how minimal, so a whole
universe escapes their attention" [5]. Consequently, no matter what property (or prop-
erties) comes to be identified as morally significant, the choice of property remains
contentious, debatable, and seemingly irresolvable. The problem, therefore, is not
necessarily deciding which property or properties come to be selected as morally
3
significant. The problem is in this approach itself, which makes moral consideration
dependent upon a prior determination of properties.
2.2 Terminological
Second, irrespective of which property (or set of properties) is selected, they each
have terminological troubles insofar as things like rationality, consciousness, suffer-
ing, etc. mean different things to different people and seem to resist univocal defini-
tion. Consciousness, for example, is one property that has been cited as a necessary
and sufficient condition for moral subjectivity [6]. But consciousness is persistently
difficult to define or characterize. The problem, as Max Velmans points out, is that
this term unfortunately “means many different things to many different people, and no
universally agreed core meaning exists” [7]. In fact, if there is any general agreement
among philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, ethologists,
AI researchers, and robotics engineers regarding consciousness, it is that there is little
or no agreement when it comes to defining and characterizing the concept. Although
consciousness, as Anne Foerst remarks, is the secular and supposedly more “scien-
tific” replacement for the occultish “soul” [8], it appears to be just as much an occult
property or what Daniel Dennett calls an impenetrable “black box” [9].
Other properties do not do much better. Suffering and the experience of pain—which
is the property usually deployed in non-standard patient-oriented approaches like
animal rights philosophy—is just as problematic, as Dennett cleverly demonstrates in
the essay, “Why You Cannot Make a Computer that Feels Pain.” In this provocatively
titled essay, Dennett imagines trying to disprove the standard argument for human
(and animal) exceptionalism “by actually writing a pain program, or designing a pain-
feeling robot” [9]. At the end of what turns out to be a rather protracted and detailed
consideration of the problem—complete with detailed block diagrams and program-
ming flowcharts—Dennett concludes that we cannot, in fact, make a computer that
feels pain. But the reason for drawing this conclusion does not derive from what one
might expect. According to Dennett, the reason you cannot make a computer that
feels pain is not the result of some technological limitation with the mechanism or its
programming. It is a product of the fact that we remain unable to decide what pain is
in the first place. What Dennett demonstrates, therefore, is not that some workable
concept of pain cannot come to be instantiated in the mechanism of a computer or a
robot, either now or in the foreseeable future, but that the very concept of pain that
would be instantiated is already arbitrary, inconclusive, and indeterminate [9].
2.3 Epistemological
As if responding to Dennett’s challenge, engineers have, in fact, not only constructed
mechanisms that synthesize believable emotional responses [10] [11] [12], but also
systems capable of evincing something that appears to be what we generally recog-
nize as “pain.” The interesting issue in these cases is determining whether this is in
fact “real pain” or just a simulation. In other words, once the morally significant
property or properties have been identified and defined, how can one be entirely cer-
4
tain that a particular entity possesses it, and actually possesses it instead of merely
simulating it? Answering this question is difficult, especially because most of the
properties that are considered morally relevant tend to be internal mental or subjective
states that are not immediately accessible or directly observable. As Paul Churchland
famously asked: “How does one determine whether something other than oneself—an
alien creature, a sophisticated robot, a socially active computer, or even another hu-
man—is really a thinking, feeling, conscious being; rather than, for example, an un-
conscious automaton whose behavior arises from something other than genuine men-
tal states?” [13]. This is, of course, what philosophers commonly call “the problem of
other minds.” Though this problem is not necessarily intractable, as I think Steve
Torrance has persuasively argued [14], the fact of the matter is we cannot, as Donna
Haraway describes it, "climb into the heads of others to get the full story from the
inside" [15].
3 Thinking Otherwise
In response to these problems, philosophers—especially in the continental tradition—
have advanced alternative approaches to deciding the question of moral status that can
be called, for lack of a better description, “thinking otherwise” [16]. This phrase sig-
nifies different ways to formulate the question concerning moral standing that is open
to and able to accommodate others—and other forms of otherness.
3.1 Relatively Relational
According to this alternative way of thinking, moral status is decided and conferred
not on the basis of subjective or internal properties decided in advance but according
to objectively observable, extrinsic relationships. As we encounter and interact with
other entities—whether they be another human person, an animal, the natural envi-
ronment, or a domestic robot—this other is first and foremost experienced in relation-
ship to us. The question of moral status, therefore, does not depend on and derive
from what the other is in its essence but on how she/he/it (and the choice of pronoun
here is part of the problem) stands in relationship to us and how we decide, in the face
of the other, to respond. Consequently, and contrary to the standard operating proce-
dures, what the entity is does not determine the degree of moral value it enjoys. In-
stead the exposure to the face of the Other, what Levinas calls “ethics,” precedes and
takes precedence over all these ontological machinations and determinations [17].
This shift in perspective—a shift that inverts the standard procedure by putting ethics
before ontology—is not just a theoretical proposal; it has, in fact, been experimentally
confirmed in a number of practical investigations with computers, AI, and robots. The
computer as social actor (CASA) studies undertaken by Byron Reeves and Clifford
Nass, for example, demonstrated that human users will accord computers social stand-
ing similar to that of another human person and that this occurs as a product of the
extrinsic social interaction, irrespective of the actual intrinsic properties (actually
known or not) of the entities in question [19]. These results have been verified in two
5
studies with robots, where researchers found that human subjects respond emotionally
to robots and express empathic concern for the machines irrespective of knowledge
concerning the properties or inner workings of the device [19] [20]. Although Levinas
himself would probably not recognize it as such, what these studies demonstrate is
precisely what he had advanced: the ethical response to the other precedes and even
trumps decisions concerning ontological properties.
3.2 Radically Empirical
In this situation, the problems of other minds—the difficulty of knowing with any
certitude whether the other who confronts me has a conscious mind or is capable of
experiencing pain—is not some fundamental epistemological limitation that must be
addressed and resolved prior to moral decision making. Levinasian philosophy, in-
stead of being tripped up or derailed by this epistemological problem, immediately
affirms and acknowledges it as the condition for possibility of ethics as such. Or as
Richard Cohen succinctly describes it, “not ‘other minds,’ mind you, but the ‘face’ of
the other, and the faces of all others” [21]. In this way, then, Levinas provides for a
seemingly more attentive and empirically grounded approach to the problem of other
minds insofar as he explicitly acknowledges and endeavors to respond to and take
responsibility for the original and irreducible difference of others instead of getting
involved with and playing all kinds of speculative (and unfortunately wrongheaded)
head games.
This means that the order of precedence in moral decision making can and perhaps
should be reversed. Internal properties do not come first and then moral respect fol-
lows from this ontological grounding. Instead the morally significant properties—
those ontological criteria that we assume anchor moral respect—are what Slavoj
Žižek terms “retroactively (presup)posited” [22] as the result of and as justification
for decisions made in the face of social interactions with others. In other words, we
project the morally relevant properties onto or into those others who we have already
decided to treat as being socially significant—those Others who are deemed to pos-
sess face, in Levinasian terminology.
3.3 Literally Altruistic
Finally, because ethics transpires in the relationship with others or in the face of the
other, decisions about moral standing can no longer be about the granting of rights to
others. Instead, the other, first and foremost, questions my rights and challenges my
solitude. This interrupts and even reverses the power relationship enjoyed by previous
forms of ethics. Here it is not a privileged group of insiders who then decide to extend
rights to others, which is the standard model of all forms of moral inclusion or what
Singer calls a “liberation movement” [4]. Instead the other challenges and questions
the rights and freedoms that I assume I already possess. The principal gesture, there-
fore, is not the conferring rights on others as a kind of benevolent gesture or even an
act of compassion for others but deciding how to respond to the Other, who always
6
and already places my rights and assumed privilege in question. Such an ethics is
altruistic in the strict sense of the word. It is “of or to others.” This means, however,
that we would be obligated to seriously consider all kinds of others as Other, includ-
ing other human persons, animals, the natural environment, artifacts, technologies,
and artificial intelligence. An “altruism” that limits in advance who can be Other is
not, strictly speaking, altruistic.
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