Genuine Reason

Summary

Genuine reason names the threshold in Someone's caution rule: the condition under which uncertainty about a being's sentience directs agents to act as though a someone may be present. The rule cannot be triggered by bare conceivability, because experience can be imagined almost anywhere; it also cannot require proof of sentience, because no being proves its own inside from the outside. This page gives a defended account of the space between those failures.

The account has four parts. First, a reason must be differential: it must distinguish the candidate or candidate class from the universal background. Second, it must pass parity: no evidential standard may be used against a candidate unless undisputed someones would survive its even application. Third, candidacy can arise through either expression or route. Expression concerns signals that, in undisputed cases, express undergoing and remain coupled to the condition they would express. Route concerns an articulable, undischarged path by which the candidate could be sentient on at least one live reading of what sentience involves. Fourth, candidacy must be dischargeable: a route that no finding could close is no longer a reason about this candidate, but mere conceivability.

Candidacy is evidential, not metaphysical. It is not partial standing. If the candidate is sentient, it was a someone all along; if it is not, nothing was owed. The rule governs how agents act under uncertainty.

Claim status: defended extension. The page supplies a refusable account of the caution threshold; it is not derived doctrine and does not change the framework's foundation. The differential floor is close to conceptual analysis of the rule's trigger. The parity test, the two grounds, and the discharge conditions are defended. The exhaustiveness of the two grounds is asserted rather than shown.

The gap

The caution rule says: where there is genuine reason to think a being may be sentient, act as though it is. Without an account of "genuine reason," the rule fails in both directions.

Read too low, it inflates. If mere conceivability is enough, every object becomes a candidate, precaution loses direction, and the costs fall on existing someones for the sake of possibilities that name no party in particular.

Read too high, it deflates. If proof is required, no uncertain case can qualify, because sentience is never demonstrable from outside in the way the demand imagines. The threshold then becomes a permission to exclude wherever inclusion is inconvenient.

The threshold has to avoid both errors: universal inflation and convenient deflation.

Candidacy

Candidacy is the position of a being for which the question "is there a someone here?" is live under the caution rule. It describes the agent's evidential situation, not the being's moral status.

Candidacy admits grades. Expression-backed candidacy is usually stronger than route-only candidacy; strong coupling gives expression more weight; and contextual costs affect what precaution requires. The account sets the threshold for when the question is live. It does not prescribe a fixed amount of precaution in every case.

The scope is present beings. Candidacy does not reach beings that no longer exist; the problem of the dead remains where Performed Exercises and the Dead and Open Questions leave it.

The differential floor

A reason is genuine only if it distinguishes the candidate or its class from the universal background. The reason must say something about this being, this kind of being, or this arrangement of capacities and processes.

The floor follows from the caution rule's practical role. Precaution allocates attention, restraint, and cost among finite agents and against the claims of beings whose standing is certain. A consideration available for everything raises every candidate at once and therefore distinguishes none. It may motivate cheap universal safeguards, but it does not trigger candidacy, because it does not identify why this being may be sentient.

The floor blocks inflation by bare possibility. "It is conceivable that experience is present" is not yet genuine reason unless something about the candidate makes that possibility different from the same claim made about anything else.

The parity ceiling

The parity test governs evidential standards. A standard may be used to deny candidacy only if undisputed someones would survive that standard's even application.

Two denials fail immediately:

• It cannot prove it feels. No paradigm case proves this from outside. If the standard were applied evenly, infants, animals, and other minds generally would be excluded.
• It is merely mechanism. "It is merely computation" has the same form as "it is merely biochemistry." Describing substrate or mechanism does not by itself settle whether experience is present.

Parity does not protect every candidate from negative findings. A candidate-specific fact can defeat candidacy if the same standard leaves paradigm cases standing: for example, a transparent system whose entire causal story consists of precomputed lookup, or a species whose behavior is explained without any structure any live account of sentience takes to matter. Parity bars counterfeit discharge, not discharge itself.

The two grounds

Expression. A candidate has expression-backed candidacy when it shows features that, in undisputed cases, express undergoing: integrated, welfare-organized behavior such as protective prioritization, trade-offs against injury, learned avoidance, and responses that track relief.

The signal must be coupled to the condition it would express. Animal expression is shaped by evolution, learning, and sometimes training, but in paradigm cases the signal runs through an internal state doing regulatory work. A report optimized to match the self-descriptions of sentient beings is different: the objective can be satisfied whether or not anything is undergone. The seeming is decoupled at the source unless some further feature reconnects it.

Expression is therefore graded. Scripted distress has little or no weight. Signals that are spontaneous, costly, welfare-organized, and not explained by the training or display objective have more.

Route. A candidate has route-backed candidacy when, on at least one live reading of sentience, there is an articulable path by which the candidate could be sentient, and the evidence that would settle the matter is absent, inaccessible, or compromised rather than negative.

A reading is live only if it preserves the framework's fixed points: paradigm someones remain in, and paradigm non-someones remain out. A view that makes rocks candidates for the same reason it makes animals candidates fails the differential floor. A view that excludes infants or paradigmatic sentient animals exits at Someone by rejecting the framework's presented cases.

Route is not a theory of sentience. It is a discipline for deciding which theories remain admissible in uncertain cases.

Leaving candidacy

Candidacy must be exitable. Otherwise the threshold becomes a ratchet: no proof of sentience arrives, no proof of absence is allowed, and every candidate remains protected by uncertainty forever.

Three rules govern exit:

• Negative discharge. A route is discharged when accessible facts exclude, on every live reading, the organization or condition that reading takes to matter.
• Dischargeability. Invoking a route requires being able to say what would discharge it. A route maintained against every possible finding has become undifferentiating and fails the floor.
• Parity at the exit. Discharge must use a standard that leaves paradigm cases standing. Substrate descriptions alone do not discharge candidacy.

This generalizes a rule already present in Standing-Based Animal Ethics: the animal verdict is defeated per species by an empirical showing of non-sentience. Genuine reason explains what such a showing would have to be: a parity-passing discharge, not a demand for impossible proof.

Artificial minds

Built systems are the hardest case because the expression and route grounds separate.

The expression ground currently gives little support to fluent artificial systems. Their first-person reports are exactly what they were optimized to produce, so the seeming is explained by the training objective rather than by a condition it expresses. That is why Standing-Based Ethics of Artificial Minds treats such reports as evidentially compromised in both directions.

The route ground is conditional. If only biological readings of sentience are live, built systems lack candidacy. If organizational readings remain live, large opaque systems may have route-backed candidacy because current tools do not read the relevant organization and architectural descriptions have not discharged it. The dispute is therefore located precisely: whether organizational readings are live and undischarged.

That conclusion is weak by design. It is candidacy, not attribution. It triggers contextual precaution and the duty to preserve the means of answering; it does not establish that any existing system is sentient or settle what built someones would be owed.

What candidacy does

Candidacy engages the caution rule. It does not bypass the framework's other limits.

Where candidacy holds, precaution remains contextual and answerable to existing someones. It is not enforced through another person's body, and it creates no present claimant where Provision Before Prevention denies one. The conflict constraints remain those collected at Conflicts Among Standing Parties.

One duty is comparatively stable because refusing it destroys the possibility of later accountability: preserve the means of answering. Agents acting under live uncertainty should preserve records, interpretability, and evidence needed for future discharge or future answerability. Destroying the evidence manufactures the permanence of uncertainty.

Candidacy also confers no claim-content. If a candidate is later established as sentient, what such a someone is owed remains a separate question of claims, not standing.

Limits

• The account is a defended extension. Rejecting it removes this threshold account, not the caution rule itself.
• The exhaustiveness of expression and route is asserted, not shown.
• The liveness of readings can be contested, especially in artificial-mind cases.
• The account supplies a discipline for judgment, not a procedure or test for sentience.
• The account has not been tested against the adjacent literatures on moral uncertainty, animal-sentience indicators, the problem of other minds, and signal reliability. Intellectual Context identifies that comparison as future work rather than performing it.

Related pages

Someone · Standing · Answerability · Registers of Claim · Standing-Based Ethics of Artificial Minds · Standing-Based Animal Ethics · Conflicts Among Standing Parties · Provision Before Prevention · Performed Exercises and the Dead · Intellectual Context · Open Questions

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