Perspectives

These are personal working notes, not an academic paper, and I don’t claim the ideas are original. Known influences are listed in Notes; corrections and pointers to prior work are welcome.

My general method is to look for hidden assumptions, such as:

• Binary answer. Consciousness and moral status are families of capacities that come in degrees. Treating them as dimensions turns intractable debates into empirical questions.
• Privileged frame. Many dilemmas assume a single correct viewpoint. Identifying the competing frames and tracing how the answer changes between them often dissolves the dilemma.
• Single level. A description can be real at one scale without being fundamental: the ground is flat enough to walk across town and curved enough to cross an ocean.
• Unlimited scope. Every claim holds somewhere and fails somewhere else, so each should state where it applies, what it predicts, and where it fails. A framework with no identifiable failure point is not an explanation.