There are different forms of consciousness. For example we sometimes
contrast being conscious with being comatose. That’s not the sort of
consciousness I’m concerned with. Instead I want to focus on perceptual
consciousness of objects. When I talk about consciousness, I mean the sort
of consciousness that is often involved when you see an apple’s shape and
location. This is perceptual consciousness of objects.
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‘If psychologists can really identify something that deserves to be called perception without awareness,
they must have an operational grasp on not only
what it takes to perceive something,
but on
what it takes to be conscious of it.
If this is really so, philosophers have something to learn from them [...] about what consciousness [...] does’
\citep[p.~148]{Dretske:2006fv}
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Nationality is ethically irrelevant.
What follows?
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In this book,
Caplan \& Weinersmith are arguing that it’s in citizens of rich countries interests
to have open borders. This is just fairly simple economics.
(Albeit revealling, for it shows citizens of rich world countries’ in-group loyalty,
their desire to keep ‘us’ and ‘them’ separate,
trumps their greed.)
But here is a more philosophically interesting part of their argument.
Immigration laws are discriminatory in a way that is immoral unless you believe
nationality is ethically relevant.
I would have taken this issue as a topic, but it seems to me so simple and obvious
that it can be delt with in a single page. In fact there are only 50 words on this page.
And personally, I find that excessive.
It could probably be written in 25 words.
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Aside: Bear this in mind when I give you 500 word assignments.
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Peter Singer argues that
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By contrast, Thomas Pogge is arguing that citizens of rich countries have a moral obligation
to
‘The usual moral debates concern the stringency of our moral duties to
help the poor abroad. Most of us believe that these duties are rather
feeble, meaning that it isn’t very wrong of us to give no help at all.
Against this popular view, some (Peter Singer, Henry Shue, Peter Unger)
have argued that our positive duties are quite stringent and quite
demanding; and others (such as Liam Murphy) have defended an intermediate
view according to which our positive duties, insofar as they are quite
stringent, are not very demanding. Leaving this whole debate to one side,
I focus on what it ignores: our moral duties not to harm. We do, of
course, have positive duties to rescue people from life-threatening
poverty. But it can be misleading to focus on them when more stringent
negative duties are also in play: duties not to expose people to
life-threatening poverty and duties to shield them from harms for which
we would be actively responsible’
\citep[p.~5]{pogge:2005_world}.
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‘The common assumption [...] is that reducing severe poverty abroad at the expense of our own affluence would be generous on our part, not something we owe, and that our failure to do this is thus at most a lack of generosity that does not make us morally responsible for the continued deprivation of the poor’
\citep[p.~2]{pogge:2005_world}
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scene from altered carbon where couple gets daughter back in old body
Relevant because one is a familiar person in an unfamiliar body;
the other is an unfamiliar person in a familiar body (Ortega’s boyfriend’s).
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Introduce the task for the seminars ...
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Will consider another argument
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‘what’s good for a person is worth caring about only out of concern for the person,
and hence only insofar as he is worth caring about’
\citep[p.~612]{velleman:1999_right}.
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In ‘Children of Ruin’, a tiny group of interstellar explorers function
quite happily light years (and a lifetime of travel) from the nearest
humans until one day they discover that they are the last humans alive.
They experience a loss of value.
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Velleman’s argument conflicts with this principle.
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‘A Kant-inspired variant on this latter position has been advanced by
Velleman (1999). He considers that a person’s well-being can only matter if
she is of intrinsic value and so that it is impermissible to violate a
person’s rational nature (the source of her intrinsic value) for the sake
of her well-being. Accordingly, he holds that it is impermissible to assist
someone to die who judges that she would be better off dead and competently
requests assistance with dying. The only exception is when a person’s life
is so degraded as to call into question her rational nature, albeit he
thinks it unlikely that anyone in that position will remain competent to
request assistance with dying. This position appears to be at odds with the
well-established right of a competent patient to refuse life-prolonging
medical treatment, at least when further treatment is refused because she
considers that her life no longer has value for her and further treatment
will not restore its value to her’
\citep{young:2019_voluntary}.