The Edge of Sentience: a conversation with Jonathan Birch

Overthink Podcast | Interview

“I think there are three really important ideas here. One is that for all of our ethical disagreement about why sentience matters, and how much it matters, and how strong our obligations are in these cases, I think there can be a consensus - what John Rawls calls an overlapping consensus - around the idea that we have a duty to avoid causing gratuitous suffering. In some cases, the suffering can be caused intentionally and in other cases it’s the product of negligence, recklessness, just not taking the risks seriously enough. And we can all agree that we have this duty and so we need ways of working out what it requires of us. And then that’s the second key idea, that we can think about under what sort of conditions could a system with uncertain sentience still trigger this duty to avoid gratuitous suffering…”