The Ethics of Star Trek: Holograms' Rights

Thanks, WYMM! I will now rebut Con's case.CON's CASEP1. Personal AutonomyCon talks about the importance of autonomy in establishing moral culpability. To use his words, it is in virtue of the fact that a begin makes conscious choices that it has "moral significance." There are three concerns I have here.Firstly, Con makes an effort to claim that babies and the mentally handicapped "are perfectly capable of having basic rights" because "'personal autonomy' is in no way connected to 'rationality'." But, this doesn't seem plausible. If, for instance, a baby chooses to pick up and toss an electric device into the tub as he watches his mom wash the dog (and the dog is electrocuted to death), is the baby to be held to account for his actions? No--we deny that the child is morally culpable because he was unable to appreciate the consequences of his actions. In other words, the baby is not culpable because he could not make rational choices. Similarly, if I have 2 options (one which is right and one which is wrong), and I lack the capacity for determining which is ethically right and which is ethically wrong, I cannot be blamed for choosing the ethically wrong option. Con asserts that morality becomes meaningless if reality were deterministic because people could never be culpable for their actions. But, using that logic, if rationality too is a necessary precondition for culpability, then rationality is necessary for morality as well. If we cannot assess our decisions to determine or understand what actions were right and which were wrong, we can never be blamed for our actions since we will perpetually be unable to appreciate what we are doing. Ergo, rationality matters if Con wants personal autonomy to work they way he wants it too. And, even if you don't buy that, Con defines autonomy as "conscious control;" clearly, the baby throwing electronics lacks that. Research tells us that babies develop consciousness sometime between 5 and 15 months. [1] It also seems entirely plausible that many of the mentally ill are not conscious either, but react in a merely reflexive fashion. Consequently, Con's arguments both support the idea that agents must be rational and conscious. Babies and the mentally impaired are neither, and so Con must necessarily regard them as lacking moral significance. But he doesn't, and that's the inherent contradiction in his first premise.Secondly, (a) Con's boulder example doesn't really prove anything. It commits an omitted variable bias, where it fails to consider other factors that may contribute to a thing's moral status. (b) Why is choice necessary to have moral worth? Even if we grant that choice is necessary to act morally/to be a moral agent, why does that necessarily imply that choice is necessary to be worthy of moral consideration? One doesn't seem to follow from the other. For instance, a citizen of a nation might be considered a legal actor in society, someone who has certain responsibilities that citizens don't, but if a non-citizen is attacked on the streets, they still have legal worth and the government must come to their aid. Even if you don't buy the example I give, though, Con still needs to explain the link, otherwise his argument is just a non-sequitur. Thirdly, Con says that without autonomy, one is reduced to the level of a tree stump. Given my first objections, it seems that Con would agree that babies are moral tree stumps. Fortunately, however, there are other qualities that distinguish babies from tree stumps so as to prevent this diminution in status. Tree stumps, for example, have no interests and don't suffer (see my case for a fuller explanation).Con attempts to argue that suffering is not a moral criterion because it's merely a physical reaction. But, I don't see why this objection succeeds. Con is missing a premise to his argument here; he he has failed to explain why physicality--why the fact that suffering is merely and electrical response--matters, morally-speaking.Even more importantly, thought rationality, and consciousness are also products of biological and neurological processes. I can only make autonomous choices because of my biological and physical condition. Does this then invalidate autonomy as a standard for rights?But, even if you don't buy my attacks on Con's P1, if I can dismantle his P2, I will have still rendered his conclusion false. Remember, only one of his premises need to be false in order for the conclusion he draws from them to also be erroneous. So I don't need to defeat both of his premises, I only need to take out one. In some cases, I only need to win one argument to invalidate a premise.P2. HologramsCon begins with a lengthy discussion on debate parameters. The holograms described in the OP must have all of the traits that they are described as possessing in Star Trek Canon. This is, first and foremost, a debate about the ethics of Star Trek, and thus asks us to put ourselves in the position of the actors of the Star Trek universe. It is not a debate about the ethics of real-life Earth. And, while this debate seeks to apply broad principles to reality (such as autonomy, fairness, etc.), it does not seek to apply specifics. For instance, I might have a debate about the ethics of the Q Continuum (a society of virtually omnipotent beings); while the general principles are applicable to real-life, many details are not. In other words, I specifically chose Star Trek because it is otherworldly, and because it is not an exact analog of Earth; any attempts to force this debate into a real-world paradigm thus violate the principles of this debate. Also, there are significant differences between humans and holograms even in the Star Trek universe, so it doesn't seem abusive to frame the debate in this fashion. Con then gives us the children and the teddy bear example. He explains that the differences between the two children (one being humanity, the other being holograms) can be boiled down again to autonomy. Con writes: "artificially intelligent computers are limited by the choices afforded to them by their programming; no matter how vast the array of potential decisions may seem, they are still impersonal and mechanistic devices which lack the faculties of consciousness and free will that distinguish the animate from the inanimate."Firstly, the obvious response to this argument is: aren't we, in our own way, machines as well? Humans have limits to our programming too. There are concepts we cannot grasp, things we cannot do, and so forth. Why are the limits of human design any different from the limits of artificial programming? Con never explains. Con also commits an ipse dixit fallacy when he suggests--without warrant--that the holograms in question lack free will. Humans were programmed to breath, and holograms were designed to do certain things, but that we were programmed with built-in goals that doesn't mean that we cannot exercise free will by expanding beyond our initial programming through the choices we make. Clearly, the holograms in question have done just that. The Doctor, for instance, went from being a medical instrument to something that wanted to play music and to write prose. He acquired desires and expanded beyond the limits that he was initially given. That is the hallmark of free will.Secondly, Con also suggests that it is impossible for computers to gain a conscious. But aren't our brains just complex computers? If we could develop it, why is it impossible that, at some point, machines could become complex enough to get it as well? Thirdly, Con's arguments pretty much rest solely on his intuition. He has no evidence that artificial intelligences could not become sufficiently complex to have a consciousness. He has no evidence that they could not, in the future, develop free will or defy their own programming. He has no evidence that computers couldn't display traits like creativity, ingenuity, or independence. His case is built almost totally on assumptions.The following replies will concerns themselves with showing that presumptions against holograms having (or being incapable of) consciousness or in favor of human beings having consciousness are not logical.Fourthly, "There is no way we can determine if other people's subjective experience is the same as our own. We can only study their behavior...Nils Nilsson writes 'If a program behaves as if it were multiplying, most of us would say that it is, in fact, multiplying." [2] Fifthly, "[I]magine that engineers have invented a tiny computer that simulates the action of an individual neuron. What would happen if we replaced one neuron at a time? Replacing one would clearly do nothing to change conscious awareness. Replacing all of them would create a digital computer that simulates a brain." If we believe Con, "then conscious awareness must disappear during the procedure (either gradually or all at once)...[T]here would be no point during the procedure when he can claim that conscious awareness ends and mindless simulation begins." [2] Sixthly, suppose that a human being is born that is not actually a human being, but a being who is a "zombie;" they lack some property of autonomy (like free will). "This new animal would reproduce just as any other human and eventually there would be more of these zombies. Natural selection would favor the zombies, since their design is (we could suppose) a bit simpler. Eventually the humans would die out. [I]t is...impossible to know whether we are all zombies or not. Even if we are all zombies, we would still believe that we are not." [2] The impact of this argument is fairly straightforward: if we assign rights to ourselves, and we are zombies (or cannot disprove that we are zombies), then there doesn't seem to be any distinction between us and a machine.SOURCES1 - http://www.newyorker.com...2 - http://en.wikipedia.org...