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MinibearRex comments on The Ethical Status of Non-human Animals - Less Wrong
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I'm still considering the main point of your article, but one paragraph got me thinking about something.
Could it be that slavery was wrong, not because the ethical intuition "it is ok to force creatures less intelligent than you to serve you" is incorrect, but because we were putting in the wrong input? Your paragraph made me think of this quote by C.S. Lewis:
In the 19th century, people believed that African humans were less intelligent than white men, and had the intelligence of mere animals. This factual statement was incorrect. Is that, rather than the then-accepted belief that coercion was acceptable, the root of the evil of slavery?
Although it also has occurred to me that this reason why slavery was acceptable is quite likely to be rationalization. Which makes me suspicious of my own arguments.
Good argument: and I've always liked that Lewis quote. It's frustrating when people use moral criticism on people who are actually simply working off different factual preferences.
In terms of rationalisation, I would expect there to be an element of both. It's not very surprising that 19th century Westerners would honestly believe that the Africans they came across were less intelligent: people often mistake people from another culture as lacking intelligence, and that culture being less scientifically and socially (if that can be meaningfuly measured) developed wouldn't help. On the other hand, you have to look down on people when you mistreat them, or else hate them. In fact, I think I remember reading about a psychological experiment where people disliked people simply because they'd victimised them in some constructed game. I'll try to root it out...
There was more to slavery than estimations of intelligence - the justifications varied wildly, were usually absurdly simple to disprove, and often contradicted each other ("they were designed by God to be enslaved by superior races" vs "they have weaker self-control and would kill/rape us if left unchecked", for example.)
However, the point that it was a failure of rationality, not ethics, is still valid. Unfortunately that was the OP's point as well.
Even if there were a race that was actually inferior, would it be okay to enslave them, or otherwise mistreat them? Or let's say instead that we had excellent genetic tests that predicted someone's intelligence. How should the identifiably stupid people be treated?
I think their preferences should still receive equal weighting. Peter Singer's fond of this quote by Sojourner Truth in relation to this point:
This rather depends on whether intelligence relates to the sorts of feelings involved. I'm not sure we can have an absolute divide between 'sentient' and 'self-aware' by your measurement, and I think there might be some other meaningful question about whether more intelligent species have a wider/deeper range of preferences. So neither I nor a sheep likes having a leg crushed, but the pain I feeled is combined with a sense of regret about what I'll miss out in in life, shock to my sense of identity, whatever.
I'm not sure if this is just a way to try to justify my inuitive presumption in favour of humans and then more intelligent animals, though.