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.)
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.)