If I take a “non-sentient” chicken and cut off its wings, and I watch it as it helplessly tries to fly repeatedly, but is unable to, this strikes me as a form of harm to the chicken and its values even if the chicken is not having a subjective experience of its condition.
I’m curious how you would distinguish between entities that can be harmed in a morally relevant way and entities that cannot. I use subjective experience to make this distinction, but it sounds like you’re using something like—thwarted intentions? telos-violation? I suspect we’d both agree that chickens are morally relevant and (say) pencils are not, and that snapping a pencil in half is not a morally-relevant action. But I’m curious what criterion you’re using to draw that boundary.
One could make similar inquiries into ‘dissociation’. If a person is regularly dissociated and doesn’t feel things very intensely, does it make it more okay to hurt them?
This is an interesting point; will think about it more.
I’m curious how you would distinguish between entities that can be harmed in a morally relevant way and entities that cannot. I use subjective experience to make this distinction, but it sounds like you’re using something like—thwarted intentions? telos-violation? I suspect we’d both agree that chickens are morally relevant and (say) pencils are not, and that snapping a pencil in half is not a morally-relevant action. But I’m curious what criterion you’re using to draw that boundary.
This is an interesting point; will think about it more.