Dimensions of Consciousness and the Moral Status of Brain Organoids

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.