It’s not about communication. It’s not even about sensing. It’s about subjective experience. If your mind worked properly but you just couldn’t sense anything or do anything, you’d have moral worth. It would probably be negative and it would be a mercy to kill you, but that’s another issue entirely. From what I understand, if you’re in a coma, your brain isn’t entirely inactive. It’s doing something. But it’s more comparable to what a fish does than a conscious mammal.
Someone in a coma is not a person anymore. In the same sense that someone who is dead is not a person anymore. The problem with killing someone is that they stop being a person. There’s nothing wrong with taking them from not a person to a slightly different not a person.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them
A mass murderer is still a person. They think and feel like you do, except probably with less empathy or something. The world is better off without them, and getting rid of them is a net gain. But it’s not a Pareto improvement. There’s still one person that gets the short end of the stick.
It’s not about communication. It’s not even about sensing. It’s about subjective experience. If your mind worked properly but you just couldn’t sense anything or do anything, you’d have moral worth. It would probably be negative and it would be a mercy to kill you, but that’s another issue entirely. From what I understand, if you’re in a coma, your brain isn’t entirely inactive. It’s doing something. But it’s more comparable to what a fish does than a conscious mammal.
Someone in a coma is not a person anymore. In the same sense that someone who is dead is not a person anymore. The problem with killing someone is that they stop being a person. There’s nothing wrong with taking them from not a person to a slightly different not a person.
A mass murderer is still a person. They think and feel like you do, except probably with less empathy or something. The world is better off without them, and getting rid of them is a net gain. But it’s not a Pareto improvement. There’s still one person that gets the short end of the stick.