But in that case I would be tempted to ascribe moral value to the prosthetic, not the fish.
I doubt there will always be a fact of the matter about where an organism ends and its prosthesis begins. My original point here was that we can imagine a graded scale of increasingly human-socialization-capable organisms, and it seems unlikely that Nature will be so kind as to provide us with a sharp line between the Easy-To-Make-Social and the Hard-To-Make-Social. We can make that point by positing prosthetic enhancements of increasing complexity, or genetic modifications to fish brain development, or whatever you please.
this is why I think the analogy to science is inappropriate.
Fair enough! I don’t have a settled view on how much moral evidence should be introspective v. intersubjective, as long as we agree that it’s broadly empirical.
With respect to this human-socialization-as-arbiter-of-moral-weight idea, are you endorsing the threshold which human socialization currently demonstrates as the important threshold, or the threshold which human socialization demonstrates at any given moment?
For example, suppose species X is on the wrong side of that line (however fuzzy the line might be). If instead of altering Xes so they were better able to socialize with unaltered humans and thereby had, on this view, increased moral weight, I had the ability to increase my own ability to socialize with X, would that amount to the same thing?
I doubt there will always be a fact of the matter about where an organism ends and its prosthesis begins. My original point here was that we can imagine a graded scale of increasingly human-socialization-capable organisms, and it seems unlikely that Nature will be so kind as to provide us with a sharp line between the Easy-To-Make-Social and the Hard-To-Make-Social. We can make that point by positing prosthetic enhancements of increasing complexity, or genetic modifications to fish brain development, or whatever you please.
Fair enough! I don’t have a settled view on how much moral evidence should be introspective v. intersubjective, as long as we agree that it’s broadly empirical.
With respect to this human-socialization-as-arbiter-of-moral-weight idea, are you endorsing the threshold which human socialization currently demonstrates as the important threshold, or the threshold which human socialization demonstrates at any given moment?
For example, suppose species X is on the wrong side of that line (however fuzzy the line might be). If instead of altering Xes so they were better able to socialize with unaltered humans and thereby had, on this view, increased moral weight, I had the ability to increase my own ability to socialize with X, would that amount to the same thing?