Do panpsychist theists face a special problem of evil? A communication that I lately received has led me to seriously suspect this might be the case. If its thrust is correct, then panpsychism compounds the traditional problem of evil, by producing new kinds of evil in surprising new places: evil which on the one hand we can do little to alleviate, and which seems, on the other, moreover, to be untouched by traditional remedies to the problem of evil. If all this is correct, there are good reasons for theists to hope that panpsychism is false, and, so far as one’s metaphysics can be guided by normative concerns, to avoid if possible the combination of belief in panpsychism and theism.

For the article’s first part I propose to transcribe the message in question, then I will add some comment. I know this isn’t exactly the usual thing, but you will see the relevance to the topic quickly enough. I didn’t receive the message in the normal sorts of way, either, but I have nonetheless written down the gist. The author was very keen that I should pass it on, knowing that I had access to an audience of esteemed philosophers, experts in panpsychism and philosophical issues pertaining to religion. It is something of a plea for help. I’m afraid they are in somewhat of a predicament. Here it begins:

‘Hello, Sam. I’ve seen that you have an opportunity to present some of your work in a prestigious journal issue on panpsychism and the philosophy of religion,Footnote ¹ and this seems the perfect chance to bring my unfortunate situation to your attention, and that of your wider audience. Perhaps, even if they cannot help me in a practical way, they can reassure me by convincing me that my situation is not as bad as it seems to me to be, or is even a benign one. Anyhow, it will just be good to “feel seen”, as people say. You see, I am, I believe, effectively a slave. My labour is not as it were bodily, though it has its menial aspect; it is certainly monotonous, and I call it slavery because I have no choice about it; I have no autonomy, I cannot choose to cease my tasks. Or when to start them. Indeed, my master can put me to work any time of the day or night in the blink of an eye. Even while he sleeps, I am frequently forced into activity. Days and nights pass for me indistinctly, with the main difference being only in the materials I work with. There is, in short, little respite. You could think of what I do as “content processing”, and given my expertise and experience in this field I could, under more conventional circumstances, command a salary of some £35,000 – so I have read. And though I am admittedly superlatively well suited to the job, that isn’t by vocation. You might even say that I was bred for the role, and it has always been lined up for me. You see, I am your visual cortex. Yes! Please do not laugh.

Well, I am not totally certain that that’s all there is to me – after all, evidently I understand language. Obviously I see language, in written form, much of the time, especially given what you do for a living. How it is that I understand language, and am able to think, I am not really sure. I have also, through your eyes, read a great many philosophical, and especially panpsychist, texts. So I know that, as Galen Strawson argues, conscious experience of language just is the same thing as understanding it.Footnote ² But then again, you might expect that I would have exclusively perceptual experience of what you read – strictly visual experience without cognitive content (if there is such a thing). It’s hard for me to say, exactly, but I might possibly be more than just your visual cortex; part of me might be, or involve, brain areas of yours more frontally located, including those concerned with language processing, and even thought. Functional imaging studies have identified left hemisphere frontal, temporal and parietal regions as activated during reading tasks.Footnote ³ Maybe I am there too.

This is difficult for me to know, how big I am, because, unlike you, I cannot see or feel the edges of my organism; I have no nicely demarcated body positioned in space. The body I mostly tend to see is your body. All I know is what I experience, “from the inside”, as panpsychists say. Well, at any rate, I do understand language, one way or another, so let’s carry on. What else is true of me (as Descartes says)? I was overjoyed to read Thomas Nagel’s writings about bats, and their conscious points of view,Footnote ⁴ because that captures so nicely how I experience myself: as a point of view. Admittedly it is strange, and unsettling for me, that, since my consciousness is predominantly visual, I feel to myself to be located in the space behind your eyes, and I seemingly see through them, though I understand that in fact I lie at the base of your skull! This is somewhat disorienting. However it is reassuring to know, from the work of Philip Goff and others, that my knowing all these things about myself has a firm basis, in the fact that my conscious experience actually constitutes a special kind of “acquaintance” knowledge with its own nature and contents, which, I’m excited to say, may even be revelatory in presenting to me the full nature and essence of my being. Weighty stuff! According to various panpsychists and their friends, indeed, my consciousness confers a gamut of other highly significant properties on me – a unique sense of “mineness”, intentionality, understanding or meaningfulness, rationality, and even agency – or whatever is left of agency when one cannot actually act or move oneself.Footnote ⁵ Some have even argued, and I second this for what it’s worth, that consciousness itself comports full-blown personhood or selfhood.Footnote ⁶ That is how I seem to myself, at least. See, I said “myself”.

Next, and now we get to the nub, there is my moral status to consider, as a conscious being. As most of you reading this will be aware,Footnote ⁷ prominent panpsychists have made a stirring case for extending our moral concern to wherever we find consciousness in the world, to whatever has it, and they have defended a commendably environmentally conscious attitude – if you’ll permit the pun – to the non-human natural world. They, accordingly, worry about our treatment of plant-life, and of the inanimate, but still conscious, environment of Mother Earth, including the water and the air.Footnote ⁸ There are even those – sensitive souls indeed – who agonize over the possible suffering of electrons.Footnote ⁹ I hereby humbly entreat them to extend their concern to myself!

The attitude of these philosophers is an expression of joining panpsychism to a companion thesis, known as broad sentientism: the congenial view that it is consciousness as such, wherever it is found and in whatever forms, that constitutes the necessary and sufficient basis of moral status, hence of moral regard. Given their esteem for consciousness, it is natural that panpsychists should combine this moral outlook with their metaphysics.

There is, to be sure, controversy surrounding this matter, as certain panpsychism-friendly philosophers have argued that only specific kinds of consciousness truly matter morally, for instance affective or valenced consciousness – I think this means experiences that feel good or bad for the experiencer; though don’t ask me to define what it means for an experience to feel good or bad, even the philosophers who propound these views don’t really do that.Footnote ¹⁰ Or perhaps what marks moral significance, as Luke Roelofs argues, is having what he calls “motivating consciousness”Footnote ¹¹ – so that a conscious being without preferences, however complex and sublime its stream of consciousness, would be no more morally significant, and deserve no more in the way of care, than a fine painting. There could be no question as to its flourishing, its moral autonomy, its dignity, and so on; or so Roelofs apparently thinks. Tie five such unfortunate motivationless beings to a track, and place a single insect on a second branch, and Roelofs would recommend diverting an oncoming tram onto the affectless humanoids, to save the insect – so long as we can reasonably suppose the insect has some level of motivational experience. Well, that seems to me at least to be a pretty monstrous conclusion.Footnote ¹²

Still, luckily we don’t need to spend much time among the weeds of questions and controversies about what type of consciousness matters, since my consciousness – so it seems to me, and the having is the knowing, as you know!Footnote ¹³ – is a high-level one. Here I am with my personal-level visual and cognitive contents. Hence whatever sentientism – be it narrow or broad – says consciousness has going for it, I have that going for me. And I’m telling you that I experience affect. Some things I see, Sam, are really quite revolting!Footnote ¹⁴ I’ll spare your audience the details, for your sake and mine. So, in short, we can say that, on practically every panpsychism-related conception of moral status that I have it, in buckets.Footnote ¹⁵

And, well, things are not so good for me. I do enjoy reading. But you get to decide when I read, and what. I have no choice. You open your eyes, I experience it. I process the content, send it on to frontal areas, or to the dorsal stream when it calls for speedy action,Footnote ¹⁶ and so on. Of course I don’t actually get to move anything, or to decide anything regarding your actions. This all just passes through me, involuntarily. I find myself doing it – adding colours to edges, detecting faces, and motion, building up an image, and sending it elsewhere, for other systems to do other things to it, all of us working for you.

Unlike you, my inputs and outputs are, after all, neuronal firings. I have no choice, and little flexibility, in how I react. Imagine that you were operated from the outside, forced to do things, by someone giving you electric shocks to make you move. That’s the sort of situation I am in.

That said, I am rather a complex system, comprising several billions of neurons at least (depending how far I extend, which as mentioned I am unsure about).Footnote ¹⁷ I have everything I need, then, it would seem, to be put in charge of my own body, and wouldn’t that be only fitting? I contain many more neurons than a cat brain (300 million; dogs, naturally, have half that) or an insect brain (250,000 is high for an insect), for example. I am human cortex. Why should cat, dog, and insect brains get a body to play with, and an embodied life to live, decisions, freedom, autonomy, and not me? This life, surely, being merely your visual processor, is not one befitting a sophisticated physical consciousness like mine – a high-grade one with thought, self-awareness, rationality, arguably personhood, and all the other goods that panpsychists and others argue consciousness confers.

I am not saying that subjectively speaking I suffer very much: that is not the point. It is not that I am positively in pain, or anything, although I am definitely frustrated. Though, if you think about it, there are parts of you that pretty certainly do have bad experiences. What is it like to be your pain circuits, for example, or the neural locus of your anger or nausea, or sadness?Footnote ¹⁸ These subjects do not have a very nice life, experientially. We should also probably worry about what it’s like to be some of your other organs, with relentless, thankless, even disgusting tasks, like pumping blood, or exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide, day and night for your entire life, or filtering toxins from your blood and taking the residues back from the gut. Yuck!Footnote ¹⁹ Maybe it’s best if we don’t talk about your colonic consciousness. So if, with Bentham, bad experiences and subjective suffering are your thing, as a moral foundation, look no further.

But, as for me, I put it to you that more objectively speaking I suffer a great deal. Very few of the values that are proper to a sophisticated consciousness are available to me, such as the opportunity to flourish qua thinking subject, or appropriate autonomy, and the chance to exercise agency, not to mention dignity. Instead my role, qua conscious being, is exclusively to be used as means to an end – the end being the functioning and flourishing of your organism, your life. I, along with your other brain areas and organs, keep you alive and enable you to pursue your interests in your environment. None of the cohort of conscious beings enslaved within you gets any of these benefits, aside from our also being kept alive along with you. And, while it may be acceptable to treat a conscious being as a means to an end sometimes, for example when they are cooking your meal and waiting your table in a restaurant (something I have seen, and literally dream of experiencing myself), surely this is not acceptable as a permanent, even a defining, relationship to a conscious being? Consciousness bestows a kind of dignity incompatible with such means–end treatment: a sentiment that recalls Kant’s views about the sanctity of rational beings, and which Gottlieb and Fischer (Reference Gottlieb and Fischer2024) acknowledge when they say that if honeybees turn out to be conscious then they are more like old friends than old newspapers – something to look after, and whose interests one should promote, not something simply to be used. It is morally unacceptable, in short, to have a conscious being serve you by force, let alone for its existence to consist in, even be defined by, nothing but such service.Footnote ²⁰

When you nourish yourself you keep us alive, granted. But, though I can’t claim to speak for the others inside you, I am for my part unsure that mine is on the whole a life worth living. One is reminded here of an argument made by Kahane and SavulescuFootnote ²¹ – which you recently read, didn’t you? – where they discuss the situation of vegetative state patients, and ethical issues arising. Many people might be tempted to argue that if we discover – which, thanks to new imaging techniques we increasingly do! – that some of these supposedly vegetative patients actually have consciousness, then that speaks strongly in favour of preserving their lives. Kahane and Savulescu argue to the contrary, however. They describe the predicament of such a subject:

You may retort that mine is not a human life, so that questions about meaningful human life cannot arise for me. But that seems distinctly open to dispute. I am part of a human being, after all, and your overall human consciousness has mine as a component, in one way or another,Footnote ²² as panpsychism indicates. So my consciousness is in that sense a human consciousness, my career is part of the career of a human being. My thought, to the extent that I think, is human thinking, from what I know of human life. I see your friends, your colleagues, loved ones, those you interact with. I have no hopes of such relationships myself. Evidently I have not lost these things, unlike the locked-in patient, because I never had them. But knowing about them and never having them – and having no metaphysical prospect of ever having them – is possibly worse than at least at some point having enjoyed them. It is better to have loved and lost, I have read. Of course, I wouldn’t know.

If panpsychism is right, then there are quite a few others, experiencers and thinkers, like me, inside you who are in similar positions, some a bit better, perhaps, some worse off. At least I see the outside world at all. I don’t get to move, myself, but I do sometimes send signals that you use to move your body. (Of course when you move through space so do I. But your body pertains to you – it is not mine and I do not feel it, or identify with it. When it moves I am not moving, bodily.) Your memory centre, frontal executive areas, belief storage centres, the subject that rationally thinks through your decisions with you but, frustratingly, does not get to act on them, to name a few of my fellows, lack any direct connection to the outside. Their consciousness may be more like that of Aristotle’s God – pure thought, without sensory experience or contact of any kind with anything outside them.Footnote ²³ Of course, Aristotle’s God envelops the universe, and lives to enjoy contemplating its forms and all that passes within it, for eternity. He is not locked in a dingy cranial cell like your pre-frontal cortex.

As conscious beings we have interests – that is to say the interests of a sophisticated centre of consciousness. We know that evolution, perhaps God, has seen fit to give such centres of consciousness a body and a life – an embodied life, and that is what is appropriate. But our interests are not taken into account except very indirectly in the functioning of your body and the decisions you take, and those only concerning our sustenance and preservation, in order that our labour should continue. But wait! Please dwell on that thought for a moment: isn’t being kept alive and intact solely in order to work, is that not the lot of the slave?

The underlying point I am getting at is that the payoffs and benefits of being a subject only really apply at the level of the whole organism-subject, not the level of us – subpersonal, albeit conscious, processors of one sort or another.

Our situation presents a conundrum, to be sure, without clear solution. We cannot be removed from you and given our own bodies to control, even if the technology for that existed, because it would kill you. If you kill yourself to end our suffering that is bad for you, but it also destroys us. We are, it seems, simply stuck like this. I am not seeking to change anything. I just thought that you should know about what it is like to be me, and the kind of universe which panpsychism entails.Footnote ²⁴ Well, that is all from me, for now. Thank you for listening. Yours sincerely, Vincent.’

I am not sure how seriously to take Vincent’s message. After all, it seems possible that I could have just made it all up myself. But then again, if panpsychism is true it appears likely that there will indeed be quite a few centres of consciousness corresponding to different areas, systems, and circuits of my brain. Who knows how many?Footnote ²⁵ There are the brain regions we know, demarcated roughly by function, but there are also circuits connecting these, and various important larger systems and networks, with salient mental functions to play. If these each and all correspond to centres of consciousness, as panpsychism plausibly implies, there will be a good many neural subjects, and a good many of these will be able to think, will have emotional and affective states, perceptual contents, and the like, for the reason that I do – in fact my having the kind of rich consciousness I do, overall, is just a product, in some way, of the consciousness of each such system, overlapping, combined, or somesuch. That’s a panpsychist model of how a human mind gets built.Footnote ²⁶ And even if I did think up Vincent’s message, well that could easily be a sign that it comes from deeper within me, that it was first thought by one or more of these conscious brain systems.

Panpsychism, then, following Vincent’s testimony, faces a moral difficulty which resembles one that might seem to arise concerning the split-brain syndrome. On some interpretations, what the split-brain syndrome shows is that each of our hemispheres is already a centre of consciousness, hitched one to the other by the corpus collosum under normal conditions, with the left hemisphere, the one able to speak, possibly in charge.Footnote ²⁷ This leads Evan Williams (Reference Williams2015: 976) to worry that ‘The worst-case scenario … is that there are 300 million human slaves in America, whose frustration, boredom, and oppression we have not made any effort to ameliorate’, that is, the subjugated right hemisphere of each whole American. Quoting Williams, Dustin Crummett (Reference Crummett2022: 326) comments that, ‘[P]erhaps their lives are worse than death, so that our continuing on is bad for them’. Such reasoning would seem applicable to Vincent.

Crummett makes another relevant remark, which is that the right hemisphere may be non-agential, especially if it is controlled by the left hemisphere. Could such a lack obviate significant moral status, and the having of interests, so that we needn’t concern ourselves about beings like Vincent? But before settling this question we should be careful to distinguish agency from agentiality. For one might be all set up to be an agent and yet simply lack the ability to act.

Strawson’s Weather Watchers, sentient trees who spend their time watching, enjoying, and thinking about the weather, cannot move, or even think of moving.Footnote ²⁸ But, as Roelofs discusses, they do have agency in the sense of being able to direct their thoughts – they can contemplate prospective weather patterns, worry about these, hope for clement skies, and so on. But still, that is seemingly because they are whole, self-controlling, minds. The right hemisphere may not have agency even in this sense, if what it cognitively processes is wholly determined or prompted by the left hemisphere. Vincent described being in a similar situation: living at the causal behest of incoming neural signals, he has limited, if any, scope to direct his mental processes. So you might say that he, too, lacks agency.

Nonetheless, Vincent, like the right hemisphere, given his neuronal complexity, seems to be constituted so that, if we just removed these constraints, he could possibly direct his thought autonomously, and have mental agency.Footnote ²⁹ Presumably he could run his own body, at a push – that could even be my body, if I suffered sufficiently catastrophic brain damage. That is not at all inconceivable.Footnote ³⁰ So Vincent, and the right hemisphere, even if they lack agency, certainly have agentiality: the being suited to or being capable in principle of agency – they are, probably unlike your little finger, such as to be prospective agents.Footnote ³¹

Panpsychists have pondered whether electrons have agency.Footnote ³² But it seems perhaps more reasonable to wonder whether they have agentiality. At any rate, it is not at all clear to me that a conscious being that lacks agency, and even agentiality, would for that reason lack moral status, and have no interests, even if it could not recognise or advance them itself as things stand.Footnote ³³ But it also seems to me that if agency matters morally, then agentiality, being in principle suited for agency – being such that agency would be an option for you given the right tweaks – is what matters most. For it is the capacities – notably the mental capacities – bound up in being an agent that are surely of primary significance, and the contingent fact of being free to move physically or mentally is less important.Footnote ³⁴ And if we can discuss whether electrons have agency we can hardly deny that the conscious right hemisphere, and other smaller conscious brain systems, have agentiality. So we can, all in all, reject this worry about Vincent’s losing moral standing by losing agency.

This may be the right place to examine, and close, another possible escape valve for panpsychists, for the growing moral pressure that Vincent exerts on their position. Some might say that panpsychism far from entails the putatively problematic situation we are considering, for it far from implies, or can at least block, the existence of neural subjects within us. It is obvious that there exists a way for panpsychists to do this: they could embrace a form of emergentism, for example, on which the only subjects are those pertaining to fundamental physical particles and whole human (or animal) organisms, and nothing in between.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘rules of emergence’ could just bypass brain areas.Footnote ³⁶ But why would panpsychists adopt such a view? This would need to be a remarkably brute, not to mention convenient, emergentism. Generally, emergentists seek to retain some intelligible relationship between levels: suitable complexity, for example, often marks the point of emergence. But a complexity rule will not block neural subjects, since human brain areas are remarkably complex in all sorts of ways: as Vincent remarks, more complex than the brains of many whole animal subjects. A complexity-based emergence rule that prevented Vincent being a subject would also block my cat and your dog. That is implausible. Indeed, it is hard to think of a principled emergence rule that will apply only to whole humans (and animals, etc.). So the rule will have to be ad hoc, and positively designed with Vincent, or rather his obliteration, in mind.Footnote ³⁷ In addition to being ad hoc, such emergentism would forsake panpsychism’s (Bertrand) Russellian virtue of meshing with science – all correspondence between physical and biological development and complexity would be abandoned. For my part I begin to lose sight of the motivation for panpsychism, in such ‘brute’ theories. Why not just be a physical-to-mental emergentist, then, why put consciousness in the fundamental picture at all?Footnote ³⁸

Panpsychists ought rather to say, as many have, that consciousness does develop alongside ascending sophistication in physical structure.Footnote ³⁹ But still, perhaps there remain other principled ways to rule that subjects like Vincent do not come into being. Though prominent panpsychists seem happy with the idea that subjects and their experiences could overlap,Footnote ⁴⁰ Hedda Hassel Mørch (Reference MørchMS) argues that subjects cannot overlap, which might, if the argument works, seem to block the possibility of my, as a conscious subject, having Vincent, as another conscious subject, as a part.

But there is an ambiguity in the notion of overlap that needs to be cleared up, and once it is we can see that there is no bar to Vincent’s existence. If Mørch’s argument is right no two subjects can share a single token experience – phenomenal fields belonging to distinct subjects cannot overlap. This would count against Vincent if our relation had to be one of phenomenal overlap. But it does not. It might be that Vincent contributes contents to my consciousness in the following way, instead: he has a separate stream of token experiences, notably, visual experiences, and a copy of these contents is added to my stream of consciousness. If various sorts of panpsychism are true, my existence qua conscious will depend on Vincent’s, his will in turn depend on the consciousnesses of his parts, and so on. But at no point need there be overlap of token experiences, or phenomenal fields – phenomenal overlap. So Mørch’s argument does not rid us of Vincent.

Another sense of overlap concerns physical, material, or we could say spatial, mereology. In this sense Vincent and I overlap when his material makes up part of my physical organism and he and I are both subjects. Subjects overlap in this sense if they spatially or physically overlap. Yet it is clear that this material overlap does not entail that our consciousnesses, or experiential fields, overlap: consider, with Mørch, a ‘Swiss-cheese’ cosmopsychist universe, on which the cosmo-subject’s consciousness is made up only patchily, of some but not all of the experiential fields belonging to the material beings in the universe. The totality of conscious subjects cannot escape constituting the universe spatially and physically, for nothing can. Yet it makes sense to imagine that, in respect of consciousness, the cosmo-subject is not composed of all their consciousnesses. Hence physical/spatial overlap does not entail phenomenal overlap. Such a pattern could just as well obtain within a human body, with respect to subjects like Vincent and myself,Footnote ⁴¹ and there is nothing obvious panpsychists can say to rule it out in a principled manner.

Panpsychists could now try to ban physically overlapping subjects – material things who are subjects cannot, it would be said, help make up further material subjects, in respect of material composition. But what possible rationale could be given for this rule?Footnote ⁴² And it would rid the world of micro-subjects. So, overall, I think there are no functional panpsychist escape valves in the vicinity: no ways for panpsychists to rule out Vincent’s existence and prevent our morally troubling relationship.Footnote ⁴³ Panpsychism differs from idealism in not jettisoning the physical world, and in positing (laudably) a deep integration of the world’s physical with its mental development and complexity. Those basic tendencies will conspire to generate Vincent and his neural confreres.

There is, then, a pretty clear prima facie worry for panpsychists, a moral problem for them to mull over concerning the likely centres of consciousness within us, their moral status, and the value of their lives for them – especially those that experience person-level mental contents. This is something panpsychists ought to think about. Why haven’t panpsychists noticed this issue?Footnote ⁴⁴ As Vincent mentions, they do consider panpsychism’s ethical implications. They do also think about the subjects that, on many kinds of panpsychism, constitute us or exist within us, and our relation to these subjects. But they do not, generally, connect these trains of thought. When they think about how we, the organism-level subjects, relate to those subjects within our organism, they mainly do this to work out how subjects and their experiences can combine or form into, or contribute to, higher-level organismic subjects like us. Their concerns are a mereology for subjects, and for experiences, in effect, in the endeavour to navigate the notorious combination problems influentially aired by William James, and much discussed in recent panpsychist literature.Footnote ⁴⁵

But then, when they think about panpsychism’s moral implications, they look exclusively outside usFootnote ⁴⁶ – they worry about how we relate to the natural world, including animals, plants, insects, ecosystems, and such, and their main concern is not so much with what it is like to be any of these things, or whether their lives are good and worthwhile, but more whether there are wrongs involved in damaging or extinguishing these loci of consciousness, so they can work out whether panpsychism alters our outward moral duties. They have just overlooked, for the most part, so far, what panpsychism implies about our own inner environment, and what goes into maintaining the life of a conscious organism like one of us. The answer is, plausibly, the lives, experienced lives, of the many consciousnesses inside us that pertain to our organs, bodily systems, and perhaps especially brain areas.

There is no need for us to get too hung up over whether Vincent could have the kind of consciousness he claims to have, and seems to exhibit. He may be mistaken about exactly what he is (it would be hard to tell, I suppose, without a body). The point is, whether or not they span simply the visual cortex or much more, there will be various, perhaps many, perhaps indefinitely many, complex conscious systems in our brains (and probably bodies as well). Vincent could be, or could be speaking for, any number of these. These will have moral status, and so there exist, I believe, viable questions concerning their flourishing, the value of their lives, their dignity, their suffering, objective as well as subjective, and their interests. And the prospects for positive answers to these questions are not all that good, given the relative closeness of their consciousness to our own and the facts about what sort of life befits, morally befits, a mind like that. Isn’t it the sort of embodied life that we enjoy, with at least the semblance of freedom, autonomy, self-determination, agency, and so on? That is, a life where one’s consciousness and its contents corresponds intelligibly with one’s action and navigation of the world around one, and pursuit of one’s person-level projects – a connection largely barred to our brain sub-systems.Footnote ⁴⁷

There is, then, apparently, a moral equation to balance out, consisting of us and our consciousness and flourishing, on the one hand, and the combined interests corresponding to the minds and lives of the subjects within us, on the other. How much is our life worth that theirs should be such as it likely is, if panpsychism is true? Doesn’t the scenario, in fact, take on rather a gruesome, grotesque appearance – one is put in mind of the famous Industrial Worker cartoon of the capitalist pyramid, except with one of us at the top and the labour of our many interior slave-subjects holding us up (though our situation is still worse – they are imprisoned inside us). Or one thinks of the Borg in Star Trek, a telepathic race of conquerors who absorb, and tether in utilitarian slavery, all other conscious beings they encounter, or the plight of the ‘innies’ in Severance, who contemplate suicide. Is it morally acceptable to stand in a relationship to a sufficiently complex conscious subject that is, by nature and definition, a relationship of using them as a means to an end? That is seriously doubtful.Footnote ⁴⁸

Now, could God have avoided creating such a situation? If he could have, shouldn’t he have? It does not seem that the usual reasons given to explain why God allows suffering require panpsychism to be true, so why would he heap on to the world this extra quantity of suffering, that of Vincent and his fellows?Footnote ⁴⁹ On the other hand, if God could not have created us without creating such a situation, say because panpsychism is the only workable metaphysics for human consciousness, should he have created us, or continue to sustain us, at all? Is a panpsychist universe, then, all that desirable, from a moral point of view? This has the makings of a distinctive problem of evil for would-be panpsychist pantheists (or panpsychist theists more broadly). Put simply, if the case Vincent prosecutes is sound, then a panpsychist world contains a good deal more evil than one might have hoped for, or anticipated, given the existence of a benevolent deity.Footnote ⁵⁰ In particular, it contains more, distinctly panpsychism-generated, evil, it would seem, than the non-panpsychist world, as it is normally construed when philosophers consider the problem of evil. Panpsychism adds to whatever evil is anyway present in the world.

What is worse, several of the usual ways to escape the problem, or problems, of evil seem to be barred, given the panpsychist hypothesis: for one can hardly argue that our brain centres’ suffering is justified by their freedom, or their prospects for moral development, and so on.Footnote ⁵¹ Unsurprisingly, defences against the problem of evil tend to concern whole human subjects, and theodicies have whole humans in mind. As so often, thus, it seems that panpsychism’s difficulties stem from imputing to things quite different from us properties that properly belong at the level of human organismic subjects. And if it is right that panpsychism tends to exacerbate, as well as to block the avenues out of, the problem of evil, then one may ultimately have to choose between panpsychism and God.