The question of whether potential matters morally has shaped debates in ethics for decades. Philosophers often appeal to potential when explaining why human infants should be treated differently from non-human animals - despite sharing similar immediate cognitive abilities. A newborn, the argument goes, has the potential to develop sophisticated cognitive capacities; a cat does not. According to this intuition, potential influences moral reasons even when present capacities are closely matched.
However, as the new paper in The Philosophical Quarterly notes, this view faces familiar objections. Critics claim that potential is too indeterminate, too dependent on unusual thought experiments, or too easily manipulated by hypothetical interventions. They argue that potential can lead to both over-inclusiveness - treating too many beings as morally similar to human infants - and under-inclusiveness - excluding infants in extreme or impaired conditions. Because of such problems, some philosophers have rejected the moral relevance of potential altogether.
The new article challenges this line of reasoning by demonstrating that nearly every objection raised against potential applies equally to views based on "immediately exercisable capacities." Many contemporary ethical frameworks - including those used in discussions of personhood, bioethics, and end-of-life decisions - claim that what matters morally is an individual's current capacity for consciousness or self-awareness. This view aims to avoid appeals to potential by focusing on what an organism can do now.
According to the paper, this strategy fails. When examined carefully, accounts based on immediate capacities encounter the same structural difficulties that plague potential. For example, if one tries to characterize capacities strictly in terms of what is "physically possible right now," the view becomes over-inclusive: even organisms lacking consciousness might suddenly acquire it through artificial intervention. Conversely, if the definition is narrowed to "normal circumstances," strange scenarios involving abnormal environments or technologies render the view under-inclusive.
A central contribution of the analysis is the side-by-side demonstration of these parallels. For every objection against potential - whether concerning extensional adequacy, modal proximity, dependence on normal environments, or the intrinsicness of moral properties - an analogous objection applies to capacities. This suggests that the problems critics attribute to potential are not unique to it. Instead, the issues appear to be features of a broader category of moral reasoning that relies on dispositions, developmental pathways, and counterfactual evaluations of what an organism could become.
One example considered in the paper involves artificially implanting devices that give a cat the ability to develop higher cognitive capacities. Critics argue that if potential were morally relevant, such interventions would imply that cats deserve similar moral treatment to newborn humans. However, the author notes that similar concerns arise when discussing individuals who temporarily lack consciousness but could regain it through medical intervention. The intuitive judgments that critics rely on to challenge potential must also be reconsidered when applied to capacities.
Further complications arise when trying to distinguish between internal and external factors. Many attempts to define morally relevant potential rely on whether development is "self-originating" - whether the growth of higher cognitive capacities arises from the organism itself rather than from external additions. Yet similar problems surface when defining capacities. A conscious state, for example, may depend on environmental conditions such as oxygen supply, access to nutrients, and the absence of harmful gases. The line between enabling conditions and intrinsic properties becomes difficult to draw clearly.
The paper also highlights the continuity problem: both potential and capacities come in degrees, yet our moral intuitions often treat the presence of a capacity - or a potential - as a threshold rather than a spectrum. Philosophers typically avoid assigning slightly different moral statuses to beings who differ minutely in developmental trajectory or capacity, but defending this threshold while acknowledging underlying continuities remains challenging.
In its later sections, the article proposes that both potential and capacities may best be understood as dispositions - properties that manifest under particular conditions. This interpretation helps explain why both concepts face analogous challenges: dispositions themselves are notoriously difficult to define without encountering masking conditions, finks (factors that prevent a disposition from manifesting), or mimicry (cases where something appears disposed but is not). The parallels across the objections may therefore reflect the general philosophical complexity of characterizing dispositions rather than a problem specific to potential.
From the perspective of Seven Reflections' Dimensional Systems Architecture (DSA), the debate can be reframed in structural terms. DSA treats capacities and potentials as expressions of underlying field configurations - structures that represent not only what an entity is but what it can develop into under various conditions. When examined through this systems lens, the distinction between "current capacities" and "future potential" dissolves into a continuum of available trajectories that reflect the structure of the system itself. Moral reasoning, in this view, is implicitly operating over a multi-dimensional map of possible developments, not just present states. This interpretation helps explain why arguments against potential inadvertently challenge the very frameworks built on capacities: both rely on structural dispositions embedded in the same underlying field logic.
The article concludes that critics face a choice. Either they must apply the same objections to the more widely accepted view that capacities are morally relevant - or they must acknowledge that the problems facing potential may be less decisive than previously thought. If solutions exist for capacities, then analogous solutions likely exist for potential as well.
