Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The Inefficacy of the word Conscious

The work Conscious arises from the Latin "con + scius: to know". I would like to examine the word in reference to its efficacy in addressing a moral paradigm.  The word conscious, is vague to the point of obscurity with-in  the neurological spectrum. The word can be used to describe a persons state relative to sleep (conscious vs. unconscious), or it can be use to describe an animals capacity for self-perception (self-conscious of the existence of one as a self), the word is also used to describe an awareness of the external environment through sensor input.  Due to the rudimentary stages of our neuroscience we do not yet have a solid scientific definition of the word with respect to neurobiology or it is to say that we do not yet understand what consciousness is at the level of the brain.

My point here is not to harp on the progress of neuroscience, but to suggest that the word, conscious, be omitted from the discourse on morality. The word becomes a hamper to the conversation when it is being ill-defined and miss-used on both sides of a debate.  To say that "a specific animal should not be used as a food source because it is a conscious-being" is guilty of two fallacies.  Firstly, as I have been describing, the word conscious could mean many things ranging from a self-aware being that is able to critically analyze its environment and deduce consequences from actions and perceive pain that reflects emotion, to a being that is merely not asleep. This leads to the second fallacy: Consciousness has not been demonstrated as a sound criteria for making moral determinations on the value of life.  The lack of demonstration is precisely because of the vast spectrum of circumstance that it could apply to.

My position is to avoid this word in moral debate unless a specific definition can be agreed upon in advance.  I will not here speculate on a more appropriate choice in determining the value of life criteria, but I do suggest that in-order to avoid the charge of relativism, the criteria chosen should be based in the biological and evolutionary sciences.