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		       PARTICIPANT-FREE MORALITY

			      Dylan Holmes
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			       3/Dec/2021


PEOPLE are the building blocks of morality. When I say "PEOPLE", I mean
individual beings with certain capabilities---choosers, harmers,
promisers, sufferers, perpetrators, and so on. It's a broad operational
definition that potentially includes animals and plants and humans who
haven't been born yet; that's alright. The point is that
"PEOPLE"---individual choosers, harmers, sufferers, perpetrators, and
the rest---are what morality is about.

One important feature about PEOPLE is that they are a human-created
abstraction: they're real, but not a fundamental building block of
nature.

This means, for example, that you can't find them under a
microscope. Much like with rainbows, traffic jams, corn mazes, bus
drivers, or islands, only their material ingredients are visible up
close---it takes a human field of view to recognize their defining
organizational role.

This also means that while most of the time "PEOPLE" will be clearly
identifiable, we should expect nature to provide examples that challenge
our categories. Are toddlers, drunk people, brain-dead people still
/choosers/?  Are split-brain, conflicted, dissociative people still
/individuals/?  While deciding answers to these questions might be
socially or legally important, we shouldn't expect nature to provide a
bright boundary---the PEOPLE concept itself is fuzzy.

If morality is fundamentally about PEOPLE, then our concepts of morality
break down at the boundaries of personhood. We don't quite know how to
think about right and wrong when we can't clearly identify people. This
bugs me.  What I want to know is if we can develop a more robust kind of
morality---a sense of appropriateness, maybe---without thinking about
PEOPLE. Without carving up the world into discrete organisms and
manufactured objects. Without looking for autonomous egos, separated by
membranes, piloting matter.

We already face cultural challenges to our notions of personhood. We're
embarassed by simple cause-and-effect relationships: social or chemical
or genetic determinism, being hungry or angry or intoxicated,
demographic statistics---all factors that modulate our decisionmaking
process.  We hang everything on the idea of a single self inside a
single body, but of course we are complex, conflicted systems: We want
multiple conflicting things. We behave inconsistently. We are marked by
life events we don't remember and reactions we struggle to identify. A
vast ungovernable federation helps us find words, assemble dreams, walk,
and breathe---and we're at sea when these processes break down.

The challenges keep coming. There will be more in the future: Questions
about the personhood of computers. Questions about the welfare of plants
and animals and corporations and robots. Questions about selves that are
uploaded and copied, remixed and tweaked and beamed through space. Of
course, sci-fi conundrums about the future shed light on what is
unworkable in the present.

And there is a lot that's unworkable. Maybe it held together before we
had so much physics-talk in our everyday lives. (We've seen that the
microscopic accounting of cause-and-effect doesn't mix with the
personhood field of view.) Or maybe it never has worked, and we've
simply developed new language to talk about the splits in our social
selves. Either way, I wonder if we can develop a better foundation.