Citation

Author Website

https://sites.google.com/view/danielwest?pli=1

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Jonathan Birch, Précis of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI

Abstract

In The Edge of Sentience (2024, 2025), Birch develops a precautionary framework for crafting public policies about potentially sentient systems. Underlying this framework is a commitment to the democratic principle that the public should authorize all significant moral judgments that arise during the policymaking process. In this commentary, I suggest that Birch’s framework fails to live up to this commitment by requiring scientists without public accountability to make consequential moral judgments. I suggest a friendly amendment to Birch’s framework by replacing the idea of a scientific meta-consensus with the method of formal expert elicitation, a well-tested method of gathering expert opinions on complex topics in a way that makes their value judgments clear and accountable to democratic oversight.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Daniel West is a doctoral student in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. His work focuses on issues in environmental philosophy. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1951