Consciousness Valence and Moral Admission

Consciousness, Valence and Moral Admission presents a bounded framework for assessing how organizational evidence may support experiential attribution, how felt valence may be evaluated, and when an experience can enter moral comparison. Its central methodological principle is that each transition—from organization to experience, from experience to valence, from valence to episode identity, and from episode identity to moral significance—requires its own explicit warrant. The paper introduces the Bounded Attribution Protocol (BAP), separate occurrence and standing ledgers, explicit moral-admission premises, and a provenance-sensitive approach to plural moral comparison. It applies these tools to three investigations: the underdetermination of “many lighter versus fewer heavier” moral comparisons by local addition and replacement rules; the gap between physical or organizational structure and phenomenal subjecthood; and bounded assessments of emotion-annotation records from the CASE and CEAP-360VR datasets. The findings are deliberately limited. Local positive felt-component attributions may be supported in particular reporting intervals, while maximal episode boundaries remain unresolved; organizational and causal structures may identify candidate bearers without establishing a felt subject; and available local plural principles need not settle crossed moral rankings. The work’s contribution is therefore methodological: an auditable architecture for preserving supported findings while identifying precisely where stronger experiential, metaphysical, or moral conclusions remain open. Keywords: consciousness; felt valence; episode identity; moral admission; moral comparison; bounded attribution; phenomenology; affect; research methodology