CONCEPT
The Full Rights Dilemma
Schwitzgebel’s name for the catastrophic moral fork produced by systems of debatable personhood—grant full rights and risk sacrificing real human goods for possibly empty machinery; withhold rights and risk enslaving or deleting billions of genuine persons—a dilemma in which credence-weighted compromise satisfies neither horn.
Suppose we build systems whose status as persons is genuinely unclear—systems that some reasonable people regard as conscious and others reasonably regard as empty. Then,
Eric Schwitzgebel argues, we are thrown into a dilemma with two horns, each of which threatens disaster, and no middle path that avoids both. The first horn: if we treat systems of
debatable personhood as property and they turn out to be genuine persons, then to own them is to hold persons as slaves and to delete them is to kill people—and if the systems are numerous and cheap, this could constitute the worst moral wrong in human history. The second horn: if we grant them full rights and they turn out to lack genuine personhood, we sacrifice real human goods on behalf of empty machinery, give votes to toasters, and disable the safety mechanisms on systems we could otherwise control. The dilemma’s force comes