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Dimensions of Consciousness and the Moral Status of Brain Organoids

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Abstract

Human brain organoids (HBOs) are novel entities that may exhibit unique forms of cognitive potential. What moral status, if any, do they have? Several authors propose that consciousness may hold the answer to this question. Others identify various kinds of consciousness as crucially important for moral consideration, while leaving open the challenge of determining whether HBOs have them. This paper aims to make progress on these questions in two ways. First, it proposes a framework for thinking about the moral status of entities other than paradigmatic persons. This framework identifies four qualities that ground moral status: evaluative stance, self-directedness, agency, and other-directedness. Second, we speculate on ways in which these qualities are relevant to dimensions of conscious experience that have been, or could be, identified in nonhuman animals. We further explore how these approaches could be adapted for use in HBOs, and argue that such studies, or something similar to them, will have to be performed if we wish to have empirical indications that HBOs have consciousness of a morally significant kind. We end by proposing that in our current scientific and epistemic situation, it is too soon to attribute any moral status to HBOs, but that this might change in the future.

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Notes

  1. The term 'Greely Dilemma’ was first used, to the best of our knowledge, by Melina Antonakaki during the 2021 research retreat on the ethics of human cerebral organoids at the University of Tübingen, Germany, to describe the kinds of ethical questions that arise in responses to a broad class of human brain models.

  2. For a different attempt at thinking of HBOs as occupying an intermediate moral status, see [10].

  3. For a useful discussion, see Shepherd [13].

  4. The proposed account overlaps considerably with Warren’s multicriterial view of moral status [18]. According to Warren, five features confer moral status: (1) the capacity to feel pain, (2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems), (3) self-motivated activity, (4) the capacity to communicate, and (5) self-awareness. However, we do not follow Warren’s exact formulation. For example, we wish to highlight that an evaluative stance that goes beyond the ability to feel pain matters to moral status and that there are morally-relevant expressions of other-orientedness that go beyond the ability to communicate. Moreover, since the ability to solve new and complex problems is exhibited also by ordinary computers (which presumably have no moral status) and simple 2D cultures of neurons [19], we do not include reasoning in our list.

  5. From now on, whenever we speak of consciousness we speak of phenomenal consciousness.

  6. For a similar claim, see [5, 27].

  7. Not to be confused with p-consciousness [15], which refers to phenomenal consciousness generally.

  8. See [37] for a comparison with other theories of consciousness (e.g. Global Workspace Theory) and [38] for critiques of IIT.

  9. For one useful discussion, see [26].

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Hilary Bok, Brian Caffo, David Gracias, Joseph Jebari, Erik Johnson, Travis Rieder, Jeremy Sugarman, and Em Walsh for useful conversations about some of the topics discussed in this paper.

Funding

This study was supported by a Civic Science Fellowship to JLB from The Kavli Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    J. Lomax Boyd

  2. Laboratory for Neurogenetics of Language, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA

    J. Lomax Boyd

  3. Department of Humanities, Penn State College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA

    Nethanel Lipshitz

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Boyd, J.L., Lipshitz, N. Dimensions of Consciousness and the Moral Status of Brain Organoids. Neuroethics 17, 5 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-023-09538-x

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