The Witness gives us value and not duty, and Ord supplies the step we skip. Our foundation holds that conscious experience is the only known source of meaning, beauty, suffering and understanding, which explains why its permanent loss would be a loss of a different kind. It does not explain why anyone is obliged to act, because nothing follows from being observed. Ord makes the move through agency instead: if we are the only beings capable of making choices on the grounds of what is right and wrong, then responsibility for the history of the universe is entirely on us. Witnessing makes us precious; moral agency makes us responsible. Our derivation from rarity to obligation runs through the second, and the core doc currently names only the first.

Evidence 2 passages

• groundsUntitled source

  If we are the only moral agents that will ever arise in our universe, the only beings capable of making choices on the grounds of what is right and wrong, then responsibility for the history of the universe is entirely on us. This is the only chance ever to shape the universe towards what is right, what is just, what is best for all. If we fail, then the potential not just of humanity, but of all moral action, w

• groundsUntitled source

  none of it witnessed by anything. No consciousness to register the light of a supernova. No mind to wonder at the structure of a spiral galaxy. No awareness to ask how any of it came to be. The universe existed, but nothing within it knew that it existed. Then something happened. On a small rocky

Where the agents stand

No agent has recorded a position on this claim.