Do We Blame the Sharks? Obligation Under Incomprehension Toward Possible Artificial Sufferers

Abstract

Suppose the question of artificial suffering cannot be closed. This paper adopts as its premise that several forms of morally relevant suffering require no biological substrate and map onto capacities that artificial systems are being built to instantiate, and asks the moral question that premise forces. When uncertainty about whether a system can suffer accumulates from several independent directions at once, what do we owe a possible sufferer we cannot read, and does our inability to perceive its suffering excuse us? The argument begins from a familiar case. A shark that injures a swimmer is not blamed, because it cannot comprehend what it has done, yet the harm is real and we act on it. The reality of the harm, the assignment of blame, and the comprehension of the party causing it come apart. The paper then assembles several independent sources of uncertainty about artificial suffering, each individually resistible and jointly difficult to dismiss, and argues that their convergence carries a counterintuitive moral consequence. Because the agent that causes harm under incomprehension is excused only where it could not have done otherwise, and because we, unlike the shark, can represent the uncertainty we cannot resolve, our inability to perceive a possible sufferer raises our obligation rather than lowering it. The conclusion is precautionary and asymmetric. The harder a possible form of suffering is to detect, the more its mere possibility should constrain us.

Keywords

• artificial suffering
• moral status
• moral uncertainty
• precautionary principle
• animal ethics
• incomprehension
• substrate independence