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.
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.