ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an influential article by Nicholas Agar in which he considers the possibility of supra-persons: persons of the future who have higher moral status than healthy adult human beings. Agar responds to the difficulty in conceiving of the moral grounds for supra-personhood with an inductive argument. One large group of problem cases for commonsense morality revolves around the kinds of machines likely to emerge in the future. Some of the problems these cases raise have very little to do with the value present within consciousness. The account of phenomenal value presented suggests that there is moral importance attached to this latter task. Of course entities with higher moral status are still possible, and perhaps actual. Many think that moral status is a threshold concept – once philosophers reach a certain point, their have all the moral status there is to have. Others have suggested that moral status could increase in a non-linear way.
