I generally avoid arguing with people who are already doing what I’d prefer they do. But I do find this point interesting.
Try framing the argument this way:
Omega lets you save one human life, but doing so requires you to create X humans who are extremely mentally retarded, to the point that they have no long term goals, can probably only experience pain or joy in the moment, and are incapable of the more complex pleasures and suffering that a regular human would be able to. But those X humans must spend their lives locked in a box that is rarely cleaned, force-fed food that is unhealthy for them, for about a year or two until they are killed.
Then try the argument again, but replace the long description I gave with “human babies, who will never develop past baby-hood.” Because I think it’s legitimately similar. If there was a gene that caused a human to live up to about a year and then die, with no chance of growing up, but also be extremely tasty, would it be okay to clone a bunch of them to eat?
For the record, my answer in terms of “lives saved” for this question is probably around 10,000 (basically started with the life expectancy of the human, multiplied by about a hundred, which is about how much more I think the average human is capable of appreciating life than the average pig. Note that this is an average human. The numbers do change if I knew what kind of life the human was likely to lead). I could be persuaded that the coefficient should be a bit more, but I really can’t imagine it being higher than x10,000, for a total ratio of 1,000,000 : 1. If you assign a higher number for the average human, I think that’s a decision made purely out of human-centric bias rather than the value of intelligence or human capacity for joy.
And my answer in terms of “If you had to live your life being marginally less happy because you didn’t get to eat tasty retarded-human-flesh, how many retarded-humans/babies would have to be saved in order to give up that amount of happiness”, the number drops dramatically. Perhaps not zero, but not more than 10.
I generally avoid arguing with people who are already doing what I’d prefer they do. But I do find this point interesting.
Try framing the argument this way:
Omega lets you save one human life, but doing so requires you to create X humans who are extremely mentally retarded, to the point that they have no long term goals, can probably only experience pain or joy in the moment, and are incapable of the more complex pleasures and suffering that a regular human would be able to. But those X humans must spend their lives locked in a box that is rarely cleaned, force-fed food that is unhealthy for them, for about a year or two until they are killed.
Then try the argument again, but replace the long description I gave with “human babies, who will never develop past baby-hood.” Because I think it’s legitimately similar. If there was a gene that caused a human to live up to about a year and then die, with no chance of growing up, but also be extremely tasty, would it be okay to clone a bunch of them to eat?
For the record, my answer in terms of “lives saved” for this question is probably around 10,000 (basically started with the life expectancy of the human, multiplied by about a hundred, which is about how much more I think the average human is capable of appreciating life than the average pig. Note that this is an average human. The numbers do change if I knew what kind of life the human was likely to lead). I could be persuaded that the coefficient should be a bit more, but I really can’t imagine it being higher than x10,000, for a total ratio of 1,000,000 : 1. If you assign a higher number for the average human, I think that’s a decision made purely out of human-centric bias rather than the value of intelligence or human capacity for joy.
And my answer in terms of “If you had to live your life being marginally less happy because you didn’t get to eat tasty retarded-human-flesh, how many retarded-humans/babies would have to be saved in order to give up that amount of happiness”, the number drops dramatically. Perhaps not zero, but not more than 10.