Mattia Cecchinato

Uehiro Scholarship for Future Generations

Joining us from: Italy

DPhil Philosophy (2022)

I am writing a DPhil thesis on the moral significance of consciousness, and I am in my fourth year. 

We all know more or less what consciousness is: it’s the inner stream of experience that we lose when we fall into a dreamless sleep and regain when we start dreaming or wake up in the morning. It’s colours, smells, pleasures, pains, emotions, and much more. What we know less about is the extent to which consciousness matters morally. 

Does a being need to be capable of consciousness to have interests that deserve moral consideration?

If so, does it need to be conscious in a particular way—perhaps in a way that involves a capacity for pleasure and pain or sophisticated agency—or do all conscious minds deserve some degree of moral consideration, no matter how minimal these minds are or how different they are from our own?

In my thesis, I argue that all and only beings capable of pleasure, pain, and emotions have interests that matter morally. I explore a number of difficult cases involving beings who are capable of consciousness but not pleasure and pain, and beings who are capable of sophisticated agency but not consciousness, and suggest that neither sort of mental life would make it possible to form genuine, morally relevant interests. This is because I argue that to care about anything, to find anything important, one must be capable of feeling good or bad. Without this capacity, we would also lack the capacity to care about our own continued existence. This argument has important implications. In the near future, as AIs become more and more sophisticated, people will start to wonder whether we should treat them as persons, as analogues to animals, or as mere tools. The answer will depend on what kind of mental life should be the focus of our ethical concern. 

I am also interested in the relationship between consciousness and wellbeing. Conscious experiences such as joy, pain, affection, love, friendship, tranquillity, and aesthetic appreciation seem extremely important when it comes to evaluating how well one’s life is going. But what is it about consciousness that makes it good (or bad) for us? In my thesis, I explore the possibility that what makes experience good is something more than the mere intensity of pleasure and pain, and I examine the hypothesis that the emotional depth of one’s life matters just as much, and perhaps more, than its hedonic intensity. 

I find making progress on these philosophical questions immensely important and satisfying. For this, I will always be grateful for the support of the Uehiro Foundation and St Cross College.