Technological change is creating possibilities for the future of ‘the person’ that are hard to evaluate using standard economic or legal procedures. These include: the possibility of the total loss of all persons and the possibility that human persons will be replaced with persons, or person-like entities, of other kinds such as enhanced members of other species or artificial intelligences. This workshop sought to grapple with these two possibilities by considering both how existing policy evaluation procedures dealt with issues of personhood and what different philosophical theories about the nature and importance of personhood implied for public policy. The workshop also considered how philosophers could better interact with policy makers on complex and controversial issues such as the future of personhood.
Convened by: Simon Beard and Timothy Campbell
List of Papers and Presenters:
Francesca Minerva (University of Ghent) – Personal identity and Future Technologies
Tom Douglas (Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics) – Parfitian Survival and Punishing Crimes from the Distant Past
Jeff McMahan (University of Oxford) – Personal Identity and Allocation of Scarce Health Resources
Jeremy Williams (University of Birmingham) – Death, Personal Identity, and Public Justification
Hannah Tierney (Cornell University) – The Problem of the Beginning and the End
Max Suffis (Rice University) – Indexicality and Personal Identity
Timothy Campbell (Institute for Futures Studies) – Don’t Lose Your Head: A Moral Assessment of Whole-Body Transplantation
Simon Beard (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) – Personal Identity and Quality of Life
Chase Bednarz (Northwestern University) – Practical Causal Set Modelling for Time Relative Personal Identity
