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bgrah449 comments on The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies - Less Wrong
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Upvoted. In the words of Penn Fraser Jillette: "Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie with AIDS."
That statement has always puzzled me a bit. Why does it matter that the junkie has AIDS? That's a death sentence, so either "saving" the junkie means curing the AIDS and it doesn't add anything to stipulate that it was originally suffered (unless it's just an intuition pump about AIDS sufferers tending to be seen as a particularly worthless echelon of humanity?). Or, it means rescuing the junkie from a more immediate danger and leaving the AIDS intact, in which case no real saving has happened - the cause of death has just changed and been put off for a while. And over those remaining years of the junkie's life there's a nontrivial chance that the voluntary slaughter of all those chimps will ultimately result in another AIDS infection, which is another death sentence!
I always took the statement to be more about: Ignoring real-world effects of chimpanzees going extinct, no amount of animal death, in and of itself, is considered more horrible than any amount of human death. Animal life has no inherent worth. None.
Neither does most human life, according to many people who agree with this statement.
I assumed the meaning was 'to save one junkie with AIDS from some imminent death that has nothing to do with junkie-ness or AIDS'. I.e., I would value even a few extra months of a junkie's life over any amount of chimpanzee lives.