This sounds like a Sorites paradox. It’s also a subset of a larger problem. We, regular modern humans, don’t have any scalar concepts of personhood. We assume it’s a binary, from long experience with a world in which only one species talks back, and they’re all almost exactly at our level. In the existing cases where personhood is already undeniably scalar (children), we fudge it into a binary by defining an age of majority—an obvious dirty hack with plenty of cultural fallout.
A lot of ethics problems get blurry when you start trying to map them across sub- through super-persons.
This sounds like a Sorites paradox. It’s also a subset of a larger problem. We, regular modern humans, don’t have any scalar concepts of personhood. We assume it’s a binary, from long experience with a world in which only one species talks back, and they’re all almost exactly at our level. In the existing cases where personhood is already undeniably scalar (children), we fudge it into a binary by defining an age of majority—an obvious dirty hack with plenty of cultural fallout.
A lot of ethics problems get blurry when you start trying to map them across sub- through super-persons.