We need to talk about so-called “human rights.” Is there something unique about being a homo sapien, such that killing a human is murder and killing a cow is just part of economic life? Ethical vegans seem to think otherwise. And what of the rapid progress being made in the area of artificial intelligence? Will there come a point when we need to consider the liberties of our beloved chatbots? I argue that uniquely human rights can be comfortably explained given the existence of immaterial human souls, but that other common accounts of grounding human rights seem to seriously struggle. If you reject the existence of such a soul, and you care to be intellectually consistent, you should also reject the existence of uniquely human rights. That means no more cheeseburgers for you!
First, we need to consider why some things deserve rights and others do not. I will not attempt to articulate here exactly what is meant by rights. Rather, I will proceed with an entirely agreeable example of a right no matter your definition: “A right-bearer has a right not to be killed intentionally and unjustifiably.” I hope you agree!
We can imagine an alien from another planet that is clearly a right-bearer worthy of moral consideration. I tell you, your conscience would eat you alive if you killed Yoda in cold blood.
Can a blade of grass be properly classified as a right-bearer? We should hope not, lest we all be considered mass murderers. But why? It is living, after all, and so it can be killed. The answer is that not everything that can be killed has a right not to be killed. To be a right-bearer, there must be some criterion that the entity meets. Right-bearers must be worthy of moral consideration, or in other words, they are at least theoretically the subject of others’ duties; if you have a right not to be killed, it follows that I have a duty not to kill you. Note that right-bearers need not necessarily be homo sapiens, and in fact, there really doesn’t seem to be anything special about the organism being a homo sapien at all. We can imagine an alien from another planet that is clearly a right-bearer worthy of moral consideration. I tell you, your conscience would eat you alive if you killed Yoda in cold blood.
Determining why a right-bearer is the subject of others’ duties is a challenging task. We could start by considering the hypothesis that the deployment of consciousness itself is sufficient for right-bearing status. The advantage of this view is that it is entirely intuitive; we plausibly have rights to ensure that conscious beings like you and I retain autonomy, do not suffer needless harm, do not have their futures deprived of them, and so on. Our intuitions indicate that it is morally permissible to tear up a blade of grass, but not to tear up a horse. The clear difference is that the horse is conscious and so it experiences pain, where the grass is not. However, this view of right-bearers would include within it the very farm animals many of us eat on a daily basis. These animals, if they are right-bearers, should not be killed except for maybe in fringe cases such self defense. After all, who can reasonably deny that cows, pigs, or chickens are conscious?
Say you want to avoid that unsavory conclusion. Many feel inclined to add to the list of necessary criteria for right-bearers. For example, one might offer traits like intelligence, rationality, self-consciousness, or moral agency as being necessary for moral consideration. But these escape routes fail if taken by themselves, either in being arbitrary or in causing bigger problems than the one they solve. Consider the rationality criterion: that for an entity to be a right-bearer worthy of moral consideration, they must have a rational conscious experience. If it were demonstrated that pigs possessed higher rationality than newborns or certain mentally disabled humans, and we allowed ourselves to kill pigs, then we should also be allowed to kill said newborns and mentally disabled humans. A perverse consistency! Or what about the moral agency criterion? We cannot reasonably hold a 1-year-old accountable for their actions in the same way that we can hold a 30-year-old, and yet they are both clearly right-bearers! The problem with this approach is evident.
Are we bound to affirming the right-bearing status of animals then? Not necessarily, for there is an alternative view of right-bearers available. If immaterial mental substances exist (which I will call “souls” from here onwards), then right-bearing souls could be qualitatively different from other souls in kind without producing the same ethical quandaries. Even if right-bearing souls embody a material substrate that is immature or incapacitated in some way, such as in cases of infancy or extreme mental disability, they would still be souls with rights because they are of the right-bearing kind.
The advantage of this view is that we can more freely speculate over the question of what distinguishes right-bearing souls from other souls without having to worry about running into those pesky perverse consistencies spoken of earlier. A newborn may not be as rational as a pig, but we still can’t kill the newborn on the hypothesis that she has a uniquely right-bearing soul because her nature is fundamentally different from that of the pig. Merely being limited in her expression of those unique-making traits (whatever they are) by the material constraints of her body is totally irrelevant to her moral worth as an immaterial soul.
I propose that [AI] could not possibly be conscious because consciousness implies the immateriality of the self.
Dualism, that there is not only a material body but an immaterial mental substance, is a convenient view on this issue to be sure. But do we have any reason to believe it? It may be helpful to consider the issue of AI and consciousness to help us answer that question. Whether AI could ever be conscious is a hotly debated topic in today’s discourse. I propose that it could not possibly be conscious because consciousness implies the immateriality of the self.
Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness,” aptly named, refers to the issue of how we ought to explain why material processes (like neurons firing in one’s head) result in first-person experiences (like the experience of seeing the color blue). Imagine for a moment homo sapiens that have firing neurons and move about in the world just like us, only they don’t have any conscious experience. The lights are on, but nobody is home! Philosophers call these hypothetical organisms “philosophical zombies.” There wouldn’t be anything detectably different about them empirically, but surely these philosophical zombies are not like you and I. So why do we have experiences if consciousness really is emergent from material processes? Why is there actually something that it is like to see the color blue? In fact, if I close my eyes, I can experience the color blue when I imagine it even if there is no corresponding blue object to see. Where is that blue experience located? It cannot be a merely material phenomenon.
Another issue for the person who wants to reject the existence of immaterial souls is called the intentionality problem. Our thoughts can be about things. I can think about the ocean, or about my favorite superhero. But things in the material world cannot be “about” anything. There is something qualitatively different about our conscious experience and thought life that cannot be sufficiently explained by materialism. So given that AI is reasonably understood as a byproduct of entirely naturalistic processes, it cannot properly be said to be conscious. These two arguments show that consciousness requires something more than circuits and electricity.
If something has a conscious experience, I have argued that such an experience can really only be explained by the existence of some immaterial substance. Just like the philosophical zombies, AI may get to the point where it appears for all intents and purposes to be a conscious agent like you or I. But appearances can be deceiving. If being a right-bearer requires conscious experience and AI cannot be conscious, then it follows that AI cannot deserve rights in any meaningful sense.
Political discourse often centers on what rights we have. It is less commonplace, however, to discuss who that “we” is.
If you reject the arguments for consciousness necessitating some immaterial substance and consider yourself to be a materialist, then it seems the best course of action is to affirm that all conscious entities are right-bearers. Any attempt to constrict the definition of right-bearers further than this to exclude animals risks arbitrariness or else the exclusion of entities we certainly want to affirm as right-bearers, like infants or persons with severe mental disabilities. Because animals are not sufficiently different from infants inthis view, I want to emphasize the moral gravity of refusing to embrace ethical veganism if you deny dualism. You are choosing on a daily basis not just to be acting immorally (as multiple friends of mine understand themselves to be doing as a result of their continued meat consumption), but really to be a moral monster. Of course, this is not a problem for the dualist, who is at liberty to believe that right-bearing souls are qualitatively distinct from other souls provided they can articulate some argument for their position.
Political discourse often centers on what rights we have. It is less commonplace, however, to discuss who that “we” is. My hope is that the ideas articulated here act as a springboard for others to begin to consider this question with more rigor.
Josef Westberg ‘27 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at j.r.westberg@wustl.edu.