Psychology study mapping moral intuitions about agency and experience across entities

conscious awareness, exert greater self-control, plan ahead, develop fears, feel pleasure, and erupt into rage. Subjects also provided their personal opinions on which individual, within the pair, they liked most, wanted to make happy or destroy, was most deserving of punishment, and most likely had a soul. I assume that everyone reading about the design of this study has already formed an opinion about some of the comparisons. Presumably everyone believes that a living adult is more consciously aware than a dead person, fetus, dog, and robot. Presumably everyone believes that all animals feel more pain than a dead human or a robot. And presumably everyone would rather make a dog happy than a frog, and would be more likely to allocate souls to fetuses, babies, and adult humans than to robots and frogs. But are we more conscious than God? Does a chimpanzee feel more embarrassed than a baby? Can a person in a vegetative state feel more pleasure than a frog or robot? What dimensions, if any, cause us to lasso some things together but not others? What things cluster together and why? As a reminder: this study is about our intuitions, not about what scientists have discovered about the minds and emotions of these different things. Adding up the large set of responses produced a map or landscape defined by two dimensions: experience and agency. Experience included properties such as hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, desire, consciousness, pride, embarrassment, and joy. Agency included self-control, morality, memory, emotion recognition, planning, communication and thinking. Experience aligned with feelings, agency with thinking. With these dimensions, we find God at one edge, high in agency and low in experience. On the opposite side, huddled together on the landscape, defined by low agency and high experience, we find fetuses, frogs, and people in a vegetative state. High in both agency and experience were adult men and women. Robots and dead people were low on experience and in the middle for agency, whereas dogs, chimpanzees, and human kids were high on experience and middling on agency. This landscape not only helps us understand how people classify these different entities, but also plays a more active role in guiding individuals’ judgments to punish, provide pleasure, and avoid harm. If you have to harm something, pick an entity low in experience, such as dead people and robots who can’t suffer. If you have to punish something, pick an entity high in agency, such as living adults who recognize the difference between right and wrong and have the capacity for self-control. What this work shows is that people have strong intuitions about which things are morally responsible as agents and which are deserving of our moral concerns as patients. Moral patients are high in experience, and can thus suffer as victims, innocent or not. This is why many countries have created laws against harming nonhuman animals, including restrictions on which animals can serve in laboratory experiments, what can be done to them, and how they should be housed. This is also why we don’t do experiments on fetuses, newborns, adults in a vegetative state, or humans with neurological disorders that knock out aspects of their experience and agency. Once something enters the arena of moral patients, we Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 90 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012836