Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Is Agar biased against ‘post-persons’?
  1. Ingmar Persson
  1. Correspondence to Dr Ingmar Persson, Department of Philosophy, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, Gothenburg 40530, Sweden; ingmar.persson{at}filosofi.gu.se

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

I shall discuss only one of Nicholas Agar's main claims,1 namely ‘that the bad consequences/of moral status enhancement/are, in moral terms, so bad that a moderate probability of their occurrence makes it wrong not to seek to prevent them’. His other main claim, which I grant, is that moral status enhancement to the effect of creating beings with a moral status higher than that of (mere) persons—post-persons—is possible. My chief objection to Agar's argument is that it is biased in favour of (mere) persons. This comes out when he sums it up: ‘the creation of post-persons would be a morally bad thing. It is likely to impose significant penalties on mere persons’. Suppose it is true that the creation of post-persons will impose such significant penalties on mere persons that they are worse off than they were before the creation of post-persons. Then it follows that the creation of post-persons is bad for mere persons, but it does not follow that it is bad overall. This follows only if it is not the case that post-persons receive benefits to an extent that morally outweighs the burdens to mere persons. (For simplicity, I bracket sentient non-persons.) As far as I can see, Agar does not show this—that is why I think he is biased towards mere persons, and simply assumes that what is bad for them is bad overall.

I have, in fact, been too concessive to Agar …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Competing interest None.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

Linked Articles

Other content recommended for you