Title
Valenced sentientism as a promising framework for addressing the ethical challenges raised by neurosurgery called hemispherotomy
Abstract
In the field of applied ethics, it is widely accepted that as soon as a creature is capable of having conscious experiences, it must be granted moral status and rights, such as the right not to die and not to suffer. However, it is currently a subject of intense debate whether the attribution of phenomenal consciousness is a necessary (see, e.g., Lin, 2020; Kriegel, 2019), sufficient (Van der Deijl, 2020), or neutral condition (Lee, 2019; Kammerer, 2019) for the attribution of moral status—specifically whether only sentience (valenced phenomenal experience) is morally significant. The aim of my presentation is to highlight the limitations of the phenomenal “sentientist” approach, which holds that welfare goods are eo ipso phenomenal goods, by relying on a concrete case study: the isolated hemisphere following hemispherotomy, which potentially presents itself as an island of negative phenomenology. I will argue that a more constrained theoretical framework, which is called “narrow sentientism” (see also Birch, 2024), is better suited to address the ethical debates posed by such challenging cases.
About Charlotte
Charlotte is a research associate at the University of Bonn, working at the Chair for Epistemology, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy. She is also associated with the Center for Science and Thought in Bonn.