The Normative Problem for Panpsychism

Combining panpsychism—the view that all entities have some form of phenomenal consciousness—with sentientism, which grants special moral status to conscious beings, creates a normative problem: it erases the moral asymmetry between living and nonliving things and could overturn established ethical beliefs. The article argues that both positions have strong support, so rejecting one is not a viable escape. Four potential strategies are examined: limiting morally relevant consciousness to valence (pleasant or unpleasant experiences), replacing panpsychism with panprotopsychism, separating phenomenal from normative aspects, or expanding ethics to include all entities. None fully resolves the problem, as each either leads to counterintuitive consequences or weakens the motivation for panpsychism. The normative challenge thus seriously undermines panpsychism's ability to achieve reflective equilibrium.

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Abstract

This article addresses a normative problem for panpsychist views of consciousness. This problem arises when panpsychism is combined with sentientism. According to sentientism, entities endowed with phenomenal consciousness have a special moral status. According to panpsychism, all entities in the universe have phenomenal consciousness in some form. Synthesizing these positions leads to a violation of the normative asymmetry between living and nonliving entities, and potentially leads to a revision of established moral beliefs. The article argues that we have good reasons for both panpsychism and sentientism, and therefore we cannot avoid the normative problem by simply rejecting one of them. We identify four strategies that panpsychists might employ to address the normative challenge they face: narrowing morally relevant phenomenal properties to valence properties, abandoning panpsychism in favor of panprotopsychism, dissociating the phenomenal and normative aspects of experience, and revising our ethics to include new entities. However, none of the strategies provides a definitive solution to the normative problem, because they either have counterintuitive implications or undermine the motivation for developing panpsychist theories of consciousness. We conclude that the normative problem poses a serious obstacle to the justification of panpsychism as a theory of consciousness that satisfies the requirements of reflective equilibrium.