I suppose to me, one’s moral weight is in their mind.
The problem that i see with that is the following: Assume a child has little neural activity (which, btw, is not true at all; children and newborns often have higher neural activity than grown-ups), but assume for a moment that a child had little neural activity, and therefore would be less worthy of preservation.
Now, somebody who has migraine, or has repeated electrical shocks in their brain, might be in a lot of pain, but has probably more neural activity than you. Would you now consider that since they have more neural activity, they are more worthy of life than you are? And what if you and that other person would be bound to the tracks of a trolley problem? Wouldn’t it then be the ethical thing to kill you because you have less neural activity?
I don’t mean to say that neural activity ∝moral weight. I am merely asserting that something without neural activity at all (or similar construct) can’t be worth anything. This is why a rock has no moral value, and I don’t need to treat a rock nicely.
I am less confident – but still fairly confident – that consciousness, pain, and so on require at least a couple neurons – how many, I’m not sure – but creatures like tiny snails and worms probably aren’t worth consideration, or if they are then only very little. Shrimp are complex enough that I cannot say for sure that they aren’t equal in value to a human, but my intuition says they still don’t have fully-fledged sentience; I could be wrong though.
The strongest evidence that shrimp don’t have sentience is anthropic – if there are trillions of times more shrimp than humans, why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable? But anthropic arguments are questionable at best.
why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable?
haha yes i agree with that :D
my personal (kinda spiritual) take on this is that we are conscious because we are “nature’s soldiers” and we’re fighting the greater cause of life itself. That is what our consciousness is targeted at and what gives it justification in front of the world.
The problem that i see with that is the following: Assume a child has little neural activity (which, btw, is not true at all; children and newborns often have higher neural activity than grown-ups), but assume for a moment that a child had little neural activity, and therefore would be less worthy of preservation.
Now, somebody who has migraine, or has repeated electrical shocks in their brain, might be in a lot of pain, but has probably more neural activity than you. Would you now consider that since they have more neural activity, they are more worthy of life than you are? And what if you and that other person would be bound to the tracks of a trolley problem? Wouldn’t it then be the ethical thing to kill you because you have less neural activity?
I don’t mean to say that neural activity ∝moral weight. I am merely asserting that something without neural activity at all (or similar construct) can’t be worth anything. This is why a rock has no moral value, and I don’t need to treat a rock nicely.
I am less confident – but still fairly confident – that consciousness, pain, and so on require at least a couple neurons – how many, I’m not sure – but creatures like tiny snails and worms probably aren’t worth consideration, or if they are then only very little. Shrimp are complex enough that I cannot say for sure that they aren’t equal in value to a human, but my intuition says they still don’t have fully-fledged sentience; I could be wrong though.
The strongest evidence that shrimp don’t have sentience is anthropic – if there are trillions of times more shrimp than humans, why am I a human and not a shrimp? Isn’t that astoundingly improbable? But anthropic arguments are questionable at best.
haha yes i agree with that :D
my personal (kinda spiritual) take on this is that we are conscious because we are “nature’s soldiers” and we’re fighting the greater cause of life itself. That is what our consciousness is targeted at and what gives it justification in front of the world.
I apologize, I just realized I got mixed up with a neighbouring debate regarding animal welfare lol. Thus the shrimp.