Sorry, still not crisp. If you’re using sapience as a synonym for language, language is not a crisp category either. Crows and elephants have demonstrated abilities to communicate with other members of their own species. Chimpanzees can be taught enough language to communicate bidirectionally with humans. Exactly what this means for animal cognition and intelligence is a matter of much dispute among scientists, as is whether animals can really be said to use language or not; but the fact that it is disputed should make it apparent that the answer is not obvious or self-evident. It’s a matter of degree.
Ultimately this just seems like a veiled way to specially privilege humans, though not all of them. Is a stroke victim with receptive aphasia nonsapient? You might equally well pick the use of tools to make other tools, or some other characteristic to draw the line where you’ve predetermined it will be drawn; but it would be more honest to simply state that you privilege Homo sapiens sapiens, and leave it at that.
If you’re using sapience as a synonym for language, language is not a crisp category either.
Not a synonym. Language use is a necessary condition. And by ‘language use’ I don’t mean ‘ability to communicate’. I mean more strictly something able to work with things like syntax and semantics and concepts and stuff. We’ve trained animals to do some pretty amazing things, but I don’t think any, or at least not more than a couple, are really language users. I’m happy to recognize the moral worth of any there are, and I’m happy to recognize a gradient of worth on the basis of a gradient of sapience. I don’t think anything we’ve encountered comes close to human beings on such a gradient, but that might just be my ignorance talking.
Ultimately this just seems like a veiled way to specially privilege humans,
It’s not veiled! I think humans are privileged, special, better, more significant, etc. And I’m not picking an arbitrary part of what it means to be human. I think this is the very part that, were we to find it in a computer or an alien or an animal would immediately lead us to conclude that this being had moral worth.
Sorry, still not crisp. If you’re using sapience as a synonym for language, language is not a crisp category either. Crows and elephants have demonstrated abilities to communicate with other members of their own species. Chimpanzees can be taught enough language to communicate bidirectionally with humans. Exactly what this means for animal cognition and intelligence is a matter of much dispute among scientists, as is whether animals can really be said to use language or not; but the fact that it is disputed should make it apparent that the answer is not obvious or self-evident. It’s a matter of degree.
Ultimately this just seems like a veiled way to specially privilege humans, though not all of them. Is a stroke victim with receptive aphasia nonsapient? You might equally well pick the use of tools to make other tools, or some other characteristic to draw the line where you’ve predetermined it will be drawn; but it would be more honest to simply state that you privilege Homo sapiens sapiens, and leave it at that.
Not a synonym. Language use is a necessary condition. And by ‘language use’ I don’t mean ‘ability to communicate’. I mean more strictly something able to work with things like syntax and semantics and concepts and stuff. We’ve trained animals to do some pretty amazing things, but I don’t think any, or at least not more than a couple, are really language users. I’m happy to recognize the moral worth of any there are, and I’m happy to recognize a gradient of worth on the basis of a gradient of sapience. I don’t think anything we’ve encountered comes close to human beings on such a gradient, but that might just be my ignorance talking.
It’s not veiled! I think humans are privileged, special, better, more significant, etc. And I’m not picking an arbitrary part of what it means to be human. I think this is the very part that, were we to find it in a computer or an alien or an animal would immediately lead us to conclude that this being had moral worth.