Event
About the Event
The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy will host the 2025 MEP summit, with discussion topics centered on the consciousness, sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, and political status of nonhumans, with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems. The aim of this event is to connect researchers and other experts with an interest in these issues across a variety of topics, fields, and career stages.
The summit will include lightning talks, group discussions, breakout sessions, and plenty of open space for talking and relaxing. Both days will also include vegan breakfast and lunch, along with a reception.
Topics seen as within scope for this summit included but are not limited to:
Which beings matter? What is the evidence regarding sentience, agency, and other morally significant capacities in particular insects, AI systems, or other nonhumans?
How much do particular beings matter? How, if at all, can we make interspecies or intersubstrate welfare and moral weight comparisons?
What benefits or harms particular beings? How does, say, insect farming or reinforcement learning affect the welfare of the relevant nonhumans?
What do we owe particular beings? Which moral, legal, and political frameworks should we use to assess our interactions with particular nonhumans?
What follows for our actions and policies? How, for instance, should we set priorities in a multispecies and multisubstrate moral, legal, and political community?