Does Panqualityism Solve the Normative Problem?

This article addresses the normative challenge to panpsychism. This challenge stems from the need to reconcile panpsychism with both sentientism and the normative asymmetry between living and nonliving entities. Two unsuccessful strategies for addressing this challenge are considered. First, one might argue that the moral implications of panpsychism are not so significant as to have any impact on our actual practice. However, panpsychism presupposes a more inclusive approach to animal consciousness and potentially leads to the notion that our nervous system includes multiple auxiliary subjects. Second, counterexamples to sentientism can be proposed. However, such counterexamples have not yet been proposed. A more successful approach to resolving the normative challenge is panqualityism, according to which fundamental properties are unrealized qualia, or “mental qualities”. Panqualityism faces the Q-zombie objection, which stems from the conceivability of beings that have mental qualities and cognitive access to them but lack a distinct sense of self. Panqualityism can resolve this problem by denying the existence of a distinct sense of self, but this potentially undermines the idea of separateness of persons. Since this idea underlies the imposition of strict deontic constraints on our actions, it still implies counterintuitive moral consequences. Panqualitiysts have three ways to respond to this problem: embrace consequentialism, embrace agent-neutral deontology, or reject the very division of moral theories into agent-neutral and agent-relative.