I think it might have been kinda the other way around. We wanted to systematize (put on a firm, principled grounding) a bunch of related stuff like care-based ethics, individuality, identity (and the void left by the abandonment of the concept of “soul”), etc, and for that purpose, we coined the concept of (phenomenal) consciousness.
When we decided to attach moral weight to consciousness, did we have a comparable definition of what consciousness means or was it very different?
I think it might have been kinda the other way around. We wanted to systematize (put on a firm, principled grounding) a bunch of related stuff like care-based ethics, individuality, identity (and the void left by the abandonment of the concept of “soul”), etc, and for that purpose, we coined the concept of (phenomenal) consciousness.