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Alicorn comments on Suffering - Less Wrong
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Comments (92)
Most people do this intuitionally, and most people keep to make rationalisations of their intuitive judgements or construct neat logical moral theories in order to support them (and these theories usually fail to describe what they are intended to describe, because of their simplicity relative to the complexity of an average man's value system).
That said, for me an agent is the more morally significant the more is it similar to human, and I determine suffering by comparison with my own experiences and some necessary extrapolation. Not much useful answer perhaps, but I don't know of any better.
Similar to a human in what way? We're more closely related to the aforementioned cartilaginous fish than to any given sapient alien. We probably have psychology more similar to that of a border collie than that of at least some possible types of sapient alien.
Similar in an intuitive way.
As for the fish, I don't know, it depends how the aliens are thinking and communicating. In this respect, I don't feel much similarity with fish anyway.
As for the collie, very probably we are more similar. And I would probably care more about border collies than about crystalline baby-eating aliens. If you have a dog, you can probably imagine that the relation between a man and a collie can be pretty strong.