Andreas Mogensen

Authored papers (1)

• Once more, without feeling2025ⓒ 2

  Mogensen's GPI Working Paper No. 2-2025 defends a pluralist theory of moral standing on which both welfare subjectivity and autonomy independently confer moral status, with the load-bearing result that autonomous agents who entirely lack affective states—and are therefore not welfare subjects—can nonetheless be wronged. The argument proceeds in two stages: first, drawing on hedonism, desire-fulfilment theory (interpreted with Heathwood's affective reading), value-fulfilment theory (Tiberius 2018), and the resonance constraint (Railton 1986), Mogensen establishes that a capacity for affective states is necessary for accruing any welfare goods; second, he shows that the sufficient conditions for autonomy—reasons-responsiveness, normative/evaluative competence, historical independence from manipulation—nowhere entail affective capacity, so autonomous agents can exist outside the scope of the morality of humanity entirely. The paper then deploys two arguments for the independent moral standing of such agents: an analogy to Kantian respect-based obligations that are demonstrably irreducible to welfare promotion, and what is here called the Argument from Vulcanity, which holds that the monstrous permissibility of killing arbitrarily many affect-less rational agents to benefit a single sentient individual is best explained by autonomous agency conferring non-welfare-grounded moral standing, continuous with McMahan's (2002) account of the wrongness of killing persons. On the consciousness question the paper is deliberately exploratory, showing that global workspace theories (Dehaene 2014) and higher-order theories (Rosenthal 2005; Carruthers 2000) supply plausible a posteriori routes to the entailment that autonomy necessitates phenomenal consciousness, while acknowledging that zombie-based intuitions may resist this move. The paper argues this matters practically because near-term conscious AI systems—per Butlin et al. (2023), who judge such systems 'could realistically be built in the near term'—may be rational agents without any capacity for happiness, suffering, or pain, and whether we classify them as welfare subjects or merely autonomous agents determines which positive obligations of aid we owe them.

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