You ask if we could breed intelligent parrots without any explanation of why we would want to. In short, because we can doesn’t mean we should. I’m not 100% against the idea, but anyone trying this seriously needs to think about questions like:
At what point do the parrots get legal rights? If a private effort succeeds in breeding intelligent parrots without government buy-in, it will in effect be creating sapient people who will be legally non-persons and property. There are a lot of ways for that to go wrong.
ETA: presumably the researchers will want to keep controlling the parrots‘ reproduction, even as the parrots become more intelligent. What happens if the parrots have their own ideas about who to breed with? Or the rejected parrots don’t want to be sterilised? Will the parrot-breeders end up repeating some of the atrocities of the 20th century eugenics movement because they act like they’re breeding animals even once they are breeding people?
Is there a halfway state where they bred semi-intelligent parrots that are smarter than normal parrots but not as smart as people? (Could also be the result of a failed project.) What happens to them? At what stage does an animal become intelligent enough that keeping it as a pet is wrong? What consequences will there be if you just release the semi-intelligent parrots into the wild?
What protections are there if the parrot-breeding project runs out of funds or otherwise fails? Will it end up doing the equivalent of releasing a bunch of small children or mentally handicapped people into the wild where they’re ill-equipped to survive, because young intelligent parrots don’t get the legal protections granted to human children?
If there was a really compelling reason to breed intelligent parrots, then these objections could be overcome. But I don’t get any sense from you of what that compelling reason is. “Somebody thinks it sounds cool” is a good reason to do a lot of things, but not when the consequences involve something as ethically complex as creating a sapient species.
Yes. But I think most of us would agree that coercively-breeding or -sterilising people is a lot worse than doing the same to animals. The point here is that intelligent parrots could be people who get treated like animals, because they would have the legal status of animals, which is obviously a very bad thing.
And if the breeding program resulted in gradual increases in intelligence with each generation, there would be no bright line where the parrots at t-minus-1 were still animals but the parrots at time t were obviously people. There would be no fire alarm to make the researchers switch over to treating them like people, getting informed consent etc. Human nature being what it is, I would expect the typical research project staff to keep rationalising why they could keep treating the parrots as animals long after the parrots had achieved sapience.
(There is separate non-trivial debate about what sapience is and where that line should be drawn and how you could tell if a given creature was sapient or not, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole right now.)
I forgot to highlight that I think parrot’s general social and physical compatibility with humans — and humans’ general sympathy and respect for parrots—is probably greater than any alternative except dogs. They also can fly. People quickly report and prosecute dog fighting. I bet regular or kinda smart or very smart parrots would all do fine. 100% speculation of course.
Parrots are social animal that frequently are held without any other parrots to socialize with.
That suggests that humans don’t care that much about treating them according to their values.
You ask if we could breed intelligent parrots without any explanation of why we would want to. In short, because we can doesn’t mean we should. I’m not 100% against the idea, but anyone trying this seriously needs to think about questions like:
At what point do the parrots get legal rights? If a private effort succeeds in breeding intelligent parrots without government buy-in, it will in effect be creating sapient people who will be legally non-persons and property. There are a lot of ways for that to go wrong.
ETA: presumably the researchers will want to keep controlling the parrots‘ reproduction, even as the parrots become more intelligent. What happens if the parrots have their own ideas about who to breed with? Or the rejected parrots don’t want to be sterilised? Will the parrot-breeders end up repeating some of the atrocities of the 20th century eugenics movement because they act like they’re breeding animals even once they are breeding people?
Is there a halfway state where they bred semi-intelligent parrots that are smarter than normal parrots but not as smart as people? (Could also be the result of a failed project.) What happens to them? At what stage does an animal become intelligent enough that keeping it as a pet is wrong? What consequences will there be if you just release the semi-intelligent parrots into the wild?
What protections are there if the parrot-breeding project runs out of funds or otherwise fails? Will it end up doing the equivalent of releasing a bunch of small children or mentally handicapped people into the wild where they’re ill-equipped to survive, because young intelligent parrots don’t get the legal protections granted to human children?
If there was a really compelling reason to breed intelligent parrots, then these objections could be overcome. But I don’t get any sense from you of what that compelling reason is. “Somebody thinks it sounds cool” is a good reason to do a lot of things, but not when the consequences involve something as ethically complex as creating a sapient species.
It’s worth noting that both of these things are basically already true, and don’t require great intelligence.
Yes. But I think most of us would agree that coercively-breeding or -sterilising people is a lot worse than doing the same to animals. The point here is that intelligent parrots could be people who get treated like animals, because they would have the legal status of animals, which is obviously a very bad thing.
And if the breeding program resulted in gradual increases in intelligence with each generation, there would be no bright line where the parrots at t-minus-1 were still animals but the parrots at time t were obviously people. There would be no fire alarm to make the researchers switch over to treating them like people, getting informed consent etc. Human nature being what it is, I would expect the typical research project staff to keep rationalising why they could keep treating the parrots as animals long after the parrots had achieved sapience.
(There is separate non-trivial debate about what sapience is and where that line should be drawn and how you could tell if a given creature was sapient or not, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole right now.)
I forgot to highlight that I think parrot’s general social and physical compatibility with humans — and humans’ general sympathy and respect for parrots—is probably greater than any alternative except dogs. They also can fly. People quickly report and prosecute dog fighting. I bet regular or kinda smart or very smart parrots would all do fine. 100% speculation of course.
Parrots are social animal that frequently are held without any other parrots to socialize with. That suggests that humans don’t care that much about treating them according to their values.
Good point. In fact I can imagine people treating smarter parrots even worse sometimes because they would be extra annoying sometimes