Patrick McKee

Is it good to have a body? This question seems interesting, but hard to get a grip on, because all familiar welfare subjects have bodies. But we may soon be able to make AI welfare subjects that do not. This prospect helps us imagine what a disembodied life might be like, and compels us to assess its value. I argue that it is good to have a body—both for humans and for AIs. Embodiment provides what I call _physical agency_, constituted by sensory awareness and the capacity to directly and intentionally affect the physical world. I argue that physical agency is an intrinsic welfare good by considering cases in which it is absent or limited and by situating it in a broader picture of the good life. I assess the implications for philosophy of disability, and defend an analogy from human to AI welfare.

Most scholars who argue that users cannot have genuine friendships with their AI companions attempt to show this by arguing that no current AI can be a friend back to its user. Lott and Hasselberger (2025) argue, instead, that the reason such friendships aren’t possible is that the user cannot be a friend to an AI. In short, the user cannot care for the AI in the way required for friendship, since the AI lacks a good of its own. Here, we argue that Lott and Hasselberger have missed various ways in which AI companions can indeed have interests of their own in the teleological sense employed in their argument, and, further, that, intuitively, non-delusional individuals can genuinely care for an artifact for that artifact’s own sake. Therefore, those who deny that users can be friends with their AI companions should either argue that the notion of “to care for” that’s relevant to befriending is based on a kind of morally-relevant welfare that doesn’t reduce to teleological interests, or simply take the more typical line of showing that AI companions can’t be friends back to their users.

I argue that it is better to live an extremely long, drab life than a happy life of normal length. I rely on four premises, concerning (1) the separability of well-being in time, (2) the circumstances in which we should prolong someone’s life, (3) the shape-of-a-life hypothesis, and (4) tradeoffs between different levels of well-being within a life. I show that the conclusion has implications for the Millian lexical superiority view and for population ethics. It may also have implications for the well-being of animals in captivity and artificially intelligent welfare subjects.

I argue that, if naturalistic dualism about consciousness is true, there are many conscious beings in the immediate vicinity of each of us. I give two arguments for this conclusion: an argument from analogy and an argument from inference to the best explanation. Both adapt traditional arguments for the existence of other minds. Together, they pose a novel challenge to naturalistic dualism. They also undermine a recent family of arguments for dualism in general and for substance dualism in particular.

I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception.