I mentioned this in a footnote. For one thing, consciousness alone isn't capable of conferring personhood; after all, pigeons are conscious, and they aren't persons.
For another thing, the naive consciousness view is subject to counterexamples. Suppose an adult loses all conscious capacity for nine months, after which they will regain it. Suppose you know that this is what will happen. Would it be permissible to kill that adult while they lack consciousness? Obviously not.
The result is that you wind up having to say that the moral status of an unconscious human hinges on whether they were *previously* conscious (people like Boonin actually say this). But this is bizarre, and also subject to counterexamples: https://philpapers.org/rec/BECDAP
Really love this one, obviously they can try to present relevant traits like past sentience but when scrutinized such as "if X has been sentient for a plank second and then becomes non sentient they are now morally different then the fetus at an almost equal stage of development" but this seems absurd, to me almost similar to someone giving the trait of "looking like a human" as an answer to the vegan NTT.
Yeah, that's basically Boonin's view. I don't think it works. Kaczor gives a pretty comprehensive discussion; for a free resource, Beckwith's review of Boonin's book is pretty good: https://philpapers.org/rec/BECDAP
I wrote a response to this article here:
https://travistalks.substack.com/p/contra-reilly-on-name-the-trait-and
The trait is consciousness. I also think the point of name the trait isn't that there couldn't be one but they aren't nearly as simple and intuitive.
I mentioned this in a footnote. For one thing, consciousness alone isn't capable of conferring personhood; after all, pigeons are conscious, and they aren't persons.
For another thing, the naive consciousness view is subject to counterexamples. Suppose an adult loses all conscious capacity for nine months, after which they will regain it. Suppose you know that this is what will happen. Would it be permissible to kill that adult while they lack consciousness? Obviously not.
The result is that you wind up having to say that the moral status of an unconscious human hinges on whether they were *previously* conscious (people like Boonin actually say this). But this is bizarre, and also subject to counterexamples: https://philpapers.org/rec/BECDAP
Really love this one, obviously they can try to present relevant traits like past sentience but when scrutinized such as "if X has been sentient for a plank second and then becomes non sentient they are now morally different then the fetus at an almost equal stage of development" but this seems absurd, to me almost similar to someone giving the trait of "looking like a human" as an answer to the vegan NTT.
Yeah, I think past consciousness views have lots of very odd consequences. See here for some examples: https://philpapers.org/rec/BECDAP
The trait is having been conscious in the past and being such that they will be conscious in the future, on many views.
Yeah, that's basically Boonin's view. I don't think it works. Kaczor gives a pretty comprehensive discussion; for a free resource, Beckwith's review of Boonin's book is pretty good: https://philpapers.org/rec/BECDAP