Comment on Don't ban chimp testing

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 22:35:14 GMT

Utilitarian ethics don't necessarily imply the moral equivalence of a chimp to a toddler. That's more a question of personhood criteria, which you can easily express in utilitarian or deontological terms.

I do think LWers would be a lot more likely to make that equivalence, but I suspect that's more because for various reasons we tend to think of personhood mainly in terms of cognition rather than pattern-matching against appearance and behavior.

Discuss