Re non-person predicates, do you even have a non-sharp (but non-trivial) lower bound for it? How do you know that the Sims from the namesake game aren’t persons? How do we know that Watson is not suffering indescribably when losing a round of Jeopardy? And that imagining someone (whose behavior you can predict with high accuracy) suffering is not as bad as “actually” making someone suffer? If this bound has been definitively established, I’d appreciate a link.
It’s unclear where our intuitions on the subject come from or how they work, and they are heavily …. distorted … by various beliefs and biases. OTOH, it seems unlikely that rocks are conscious and we just haven’t extrapolated far enough to realize. It’s also unclear whether personhood is binary or there’s some kind of sliding scale. Nevertheless, it seems clear that a fly is not worth killing people over.
Even a person who has never introspected about their moral beliefs can still know that murder is wrong. They’re more likely to make mistakes, but still.
Re non-person predicates, do you even have a non-sharp (but non-trivial) lower bound for it? How do you know that the Sims from the namesake game aren’t persons? How do we know that Watson is not suffering indescribably when losing a round of Jeopardy? And that imagining someone (whose behavior you can predict with high accuracy) suffering is not as bad as “actually” making someone suffer? If this bound has been definitively established, I’d appreciate a link.
It’s unclear where our intuitions on the subject come from or how they work, and they are heavily …. distorted … by various beliefs and biases. OTOH, it seems unlikely that rocks are conscious and we just haven’t extrapolated far enough to realize. It’s also unclear whether personhood is binary or there’s some kind of sliding scale. Nevertheless, it seems clear that a fly is not worth killing people over.
Even a person who has never introspected about their moral beliefs can still know that murder is wrong. They’re more likely to make mistakes, but still.