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PhilGoetz comments on A Normative Rule for Decision-Changing Metrics - Less Wrong
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Ideally, an ethics should not contain the concept "person".
We already know the concept of "person" is bankrupt unless you allow degrees of personhood (unless you are content with an ethics that has no problem with torturing dogs, but forbids saving 2 people using the organs from one brain-dead death-row convict with a terminal disease that gives his vegetative torso one month to live).
But even figuring out how much personhood to give each "person" isn't the best solution. If you contemplate different worlds with different amounts and types of joys, pains, and experiences; your judgement of which worlds are preferable shouldn't change according to how someone rather arbitrarily draws the "person" boundaries within it.
Besides, it will all be irrelevant once you've been assimilated anyway.
My ethics has the concept of personhood in it and doesn't allow degrees of personhood... but I don't think the brain-dead death-row convict with the terminal disease is a person. (Because they're brain-dead, not because they're on death row or because they're terminal.) Are you making the error that all humans must be persons for all definitions of "person"?
(I also have a problem with torturing dogs. My entire ethics isn't about persons.)
That is the usual form that this error takes. If you choose to define people differently, but still as a binary predicate, you're just going to have some other horrible results elsewhere in your ethical system.
I'd like to see some support for this.
It's much nicer to be able to say that a sperm+egg only gradually become a person, than to have to argue about when its personhood transitions from 0 to 1.
I don't think this eliminates much real inconvenience, although it might soothe ruffled feathers in very superficial discussions. If you can have fractional people, that creates the following problems:
The idea of fractional people is less common that the idea that personhood is a cluster of properties in thingspace, and various beings partake of those properties to a greater or lesser extent.
This seems to carve reality at its joints more than the idea of fractional people, but is certainly still problematic.
It may seem difficult, but we already, in practice, have many classes of fractional persons and it doesn't seem too problematic.
Juveniles, for example, or the handicapped (who have rights in varying degrees - a permanent vegetable doesn't have the right to not be killed by another person, but a low-functioning autistic most certainly does); and past examples of attempts to make someone personier haven't been too bad. (I think here of Terri Schiavo, and the attempts by right-wingers to make her seem less brain-dead than she was - remember Frist's diagnosis-via-videotape?)
Sure it is. You don't have a (ethical) problem with dogs torturing dogs, do you?
I don't think dogs typically do anything I'd label torture, mostly because it'd have to be more systematic than just fighting. But no, I don't think any ethically wrong act is performed if one dog hurts another dog. I'd probably still try to break them up.
I was using person as the most conventional reference of "a thing woth caring about". I don't draw ethical distinctions of personhood, but work off the extent of pleasure and pain felt by anything that can do so. How you figure that out, or begin to compare it, is of course one hell of a problem.