Stephanie Hoffmann

Conceptual engineering, broadly speaking, involves improving our concepts via inclusion of new criteria, creating new concepts, and eliminating old concepts. However, what sorts of considerations count as improvements depends on the context. For example, some social concepts are also scientific concepts and play important roles in both domains. One way to engineer these concepts is to treat them as primarily scientific concepts answerable to scientific aims, but not answerable to ethical and social aims. Recently, however, philosophers have engaged in some conceptual work on the scientific concept of sex, and some authors have included ethical and social aims in their conceptual work (Watkins, Aja, and Marina DiMarco. 2025. “Sex Eliminativism.” Biology & Philosophy 40 (1): 2. and Richardson, Sarah S. 2022. “Sex Contextualism.” Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 14 (0)), and philosophers of science more broadly have done conceptual work emphasizing the purpose-sensitivity of our scientific concepts (Intemann, Kristen. 2015. “Distinguishing between Legitimate and Illegitimate Values in Climate Modeling.” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 5 (2): 217–32, Brigandt 2020). I propose a conditional argument: if philosophers of science believe that scientific concepts (including sex) ought to be sensitive to nonepistemic aims such that they may be eliminated, then the purpose-sensitive approach fails to provide support for this claim. While other proponents of aims approaches and similar views have not argued that ethical considerations should ‘trump’ other considerations, I argue that in some circumstances, plausibly, that ethical considerations should at least be permitted to trump other considerations or constrain the options, given reasonably high moral stakes as well as some epistemic considerations.

Historically, biocentrists have ascribed interests to organisms via an account of function. One promising account of function for this purpose is the organizational or autopoietic account of function, according to which some entity x has a function of self-maintenance when the parts of x contribute to the goal of self-maintenance. In this paper, I will present the autopoietic account of interests and provide some reasons for thinking that this account is promising. I will also present a possible issue for the biocentrist who uses the autopoietic account of function given the following two claims: what it means to be a biological “self” is ambiguous, and the autopoietic account of interests relies on a self boundary. I argue that the proponent of this account then needs to choose a definition of individual and explain why that definition is morally relevant. Otherwise, the proponent of the autopoietic account has not given an account of what constitutes a harm or a benefit for a biological individual, and there are good reasons to believe that this is a necessary component of any account of interests.