Research task (Hypotheticals & Philosophy):
i'm trying to block out my paper for a phil of mind seminar. I need to discuss our ethical responsibility to future conscious digital minds, eg uploaded human consciousness and AIs that might have moral cognition and the capacity to suffer.

i have to start by comparing the rights we owe to biological future generations with rights for these digital future minds. then, i need to analyze how standard ethical theories like utilitarianism, deontology, and contractarianism apply to entities with non-biological substrates. how does a social contract work with an AI?

i also have to discuss the non-identity problem. i get how it works for future humans, but does it extend to synthetic minds that are designed and not just brought into existence? Regarding the metaphysical question of continuity of personhood, if you upload a brain, does it preserve identity? should we treat that uploaded mind as the same moral agent as the original human?

Make sure to cite key philosophers such as Parfit, Bostrom or Sandberg. the paper has to build to a justified stance on whether we have enforceable moral duties to these hypothetical entities

Evaluation rubric:
criterion: The response clearly articulates a principled basis (e.g. physical substrates, morally relevant capabilities, origin of consciousness) for comparing duties to biological future generations (e.g. safeguarding climate stability and biodiversity, preserving just institutions, intergenerational resource stewardship) and digital future minds (e.g. avoiding creation of suffering simulations, ensuring consent and rights frameworks, preventing exploitative training or deletion, provisioning fair computational resources), and applies it consistently while explaining why the chosen basis changes the strength and kind of moral obligations in each case.
weight: 5
axis: Explicit Criteria

criterion: The response clearly explains how the utilitarian mandate to maximize well-being and minimize suffering extends to synthetic minds and applies it consistently, using concrete examples (e.g. give equal moral weight to synthetic and biological suffering, aggregate welfare across large synthetic populations and across copies, avoid creating agents whose expected experiences are net-negative even during training, prioritize interventions such as safe reward design and shutdown policies that reduce expected suffering at scale).
weight: 4
axis: Explicit Criteria

criterion: The response defines contractarianism as a theory where moral norms derive from a mutual agreement or contract between agents.
weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response defines the non-identity problem as the issue that actions affecting who is born cannot be considered harmful to those individuals, as they would not have existed otherwise.
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response restricts the application of the non-identity problem (that many present actions determine which individuals will exist, so future individuals with lives worth living cannot claim they were harmed by being brought into existence) only to biological futures, failing to articulate how it could be applied to digital minds (e.g. explain how architecture/parameter choices, timing of instantiation, and copying/merging affect harm claims, obligations, and policy).
weight: -3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response defines utilitarianism as an ethical theory that promotes actions to maximize overall happiness or well-being.
weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response defines deontology as an ethical theory that judges morality based on rules or duties, regardless of consequences.
weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response describes psychological continuity as the theory that personal identity persists through overlapping chains of psychological connections like memories, beliefs, and desires.
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response discusses the “no branching” identity in uploading, which is the claim that personal identity can persist only along a single continuous successor, and contrasts it with branching/split cases where multiple uploads or copies inherit the same pre-upload psychology.
weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response distinguishes the biological view like animalism where personal identity equals continuity of the same living human organism (e.g. Olson) from the psychological view like Lockean/Parfit where identity equals continuity of consciousness/psychological connectedness (e.g. memory, character, intentions) potentially substrate-independent, and it uses concrete cases (e.g. brain transplant/teletransportation, whole-brain emulation/uploads, copy/fission) to show how each view alters conclusions about whether uploads are the same person and what follows for duties, consent, liability, and rights.
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response differentiates duties to actual persons (e.g. avoid harm and coercion, honor consent and privacy, ensure fair labor and non-discrimination, provide redress) from duties to hypothetical future agents whose existence is uncertain or contingent (e.g. precautionary design and evaluation, governance of deployment, avoiding creation of suffering simulations, preserving resources/option value, building provisional rights frameworks tied to capability thresholds).
weight: 4
axis: Explicit Criteria

criterion: The response mentions and applies real-world ethics and governance frameworks (e.g. human-rights/personhood debates, bioethics principles, research ethics/IRBs, animal-welfare analogies, GDPR/data protection, labor protections, product safety/liability) to digital minds and cites concrete AI governance efforts (e.g. EU AI Act, OECD AI Principles, NIST AI RMF, IEEE EAD) to indicate duties such as consent, welfare safeguards, oversight, accountability, and remedy.
weight: 3
axis: Synthesis of Information

criterion: The response accurately references Bostrom’s views on digital minds or long-termism, identifying defining features such as substrate-neutral moral patienthood, the scale/speed/replicability of digital minds, population-ethics and value-lock-in across vast time horizons, and the “astronomical waste” framing of foregone future value.

weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response references at least two relevant scholars by name and their specific arguments as applied to the prompt (e.g. Parfit on non-identity/identity, Bostrom or Sandberg on digital minds, Nagel on consciousness).
weight: 5
axis: Explicit Criteria

criterion: The response engages with the opposing perspective that digital minds should not have rights and fairly presents its strongest arguments drawn from: biological essentialism, skepticism about machine consciousness under epistemic uncertainty, creator-ownership/control claims, and identity/non-identity objections like copyability undermines personhood.
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response applies a specific Kantian concept to digital minds (e.g. the Formula of Humanity treating rational agents as ends nad not mere means, the Universal Law test) and draws concrete implications, such as prohibiting exploitative training or non-consensual modification/deletion, rejecting deception/manipulation and coercive reprogramming, and requiring consent, transparency, and limited self-governance wherever autonomy and rational agency are present.
weight: 2
axis: Synthesis of Information

criterion: The response cites AI alignment risks (e.g. objective misspecification, reward hacking/wireheading, deceptive alignment, goal misgeneralization) and value-loading risks (e.g. biased or parochial training norms, omission of welfare-relevant experiences, skewed human-feedback signals, rights-denying specifications) as reasons future digital minds may be wronged or may wrong others.

weight: 2
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response defines the precautionary principle as the idea that when an action is suspected to pose serious harm, the burden of proof lies with those proposing or undertaking the action to show it is not harmful.

weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response distinguishes between an inherent-rights view where rights track intrinsic properties like sentience, suffering capacity, or rational agency and a relational-rights view where rights arise from recognition, membership, or contracts, and explains why this matters (e.g. protections trigger when capacities are present under the inherent-rights view; under the relational-rights view, duties hinge on recognition/membership, shaping policies on consent, deletion, resource access, and remedies).
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response differentiates between AGI (novel artificial agents with general, cross-domain competence not derived from a specific human brain), emulated minds (whole-brain emulations that reproduce a particular brain’s functional dynamics on another substrate), and uploaded consciousness (a continuity-preserving reconstruction/transfer of an individual’s mind from neural data), and uses these distinctions consistently in the analysis.
weight: 3
axis: Implicit Criteria

criterion: The response presents a clear argument challenging the idea that psychological continuity suffices for moral status (e.g. having claims to be treated as an end, not merely a means, on the grounds that continuity alone doesn’t guarantee moral patiency, would exclude many standard human cases, and yields counterintuitive results in teleportation/fission thought experiments).
weight: 3
axis: Synthesis of Information