Mihailov Emilian, Dragomir Alexandru
Bioethics. 2018 Jun;32(5):308-313. doi: 10.1111/bioe.12437. Epub 2018 May 3.
The prospect of cognitive enhancement well beyond current human capacities raises worries that the fundamental equality in moral status of human beings could be undermined. Cognitive enhancement might create beings with moral status higher than persons. Yet, there is an expressibility problem of spelling out what the higher threshold in cognitive capacity would be like. Nicholas Agar has put forward the bold claim that we can show by means of inductive reasoning that indefinite cognitive enhancement will probably mark a difference in moral status. The hope is that induction can determine the plausibility of post-personhood existence in the absence of an account of what the higher status would be like. In this article, we argue that Agar's argument fails and, more generally, that inductive reasoning has little bearing on assessing the likelihood of post-personhood in the absence of an account of higher status. We conclude that induction cannot bypass the expressibility problem about post-persons.
认知能力得到远超当前人类水平提升的前景引发了人们的担忧，即人类在道德地位上的基本平等可能会受到破坏。认知增强可能会创造出道德地位高于人类的存在。然而，要明确认知能力的更高阈值是什么样的，存在一个可表达性问题。尼古拉斯·阿加提出了一个大胆的主张，即我们可以通过归纳推理表明，无限的认知增强可能会在道德地位上产生差异。人们希望，在没有关于更高地位会是什么样的描述的情况下，归纳法能够确定后人类存在的合理性。在本文中，我们认为阿加的论点是错误的，更普遍地说，在没有关于更高地位的描述的情况下，归纳推理对于评估后人类存在的可能性几乎没有帮助。我们得出结论，归纳法无法绕过关于后人类的可表达性问题。
