Moral Reasons Not to Posit Extended Cognitive Systems: a Reply to Farina and Lavazza.

Given the metaphysical and explanatory stalemate between Embedded (EMB) and Extended (EXT) cognition, different authors proposed moral arguments to overcome such a deadlock in favor of EXT. Farina and Lavazza (2022) attribute to EXT and EMB a substantive moral content, arguing in favor of the former by virtue of its progressiveness and inclusiveness. In this treatment, I criticize four of their moral arguments. In Sect. 2, I focus on the argument from legitimate interventions (Sect. 2.1) and on the argument from extended agency (Sect. 2.2). Section 3 concerns the argument from better protection (Sect. 3.1) and the argument from better treatment (Sect. 3.2). Sections 4 and 5 are dedicated to counterarguments against each respectively. By distinguishing between EXT (intended as an ontological claim on the extension of cognition) and the extended view (intended as a moral heuristic), I argue that it is sufficient to use this second version for directly addressing and evaluating moral problems on normative grounds, independently of the causal (EMB) or constitutive (EXT) cognitive influence of the external resource on the agents’ minds. Moreover, I argue that the arguments and assumptions used by EXT theorists do not foster values of progressiveness and inclusiveness. To conclude, in Sect. 6, I show that the analysis of each argument converges on the conclusion that EXT does not have substantive moral content and implications per se, since they always depend on further assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]