(nods) Yup.

A lot of the difficulty here, of course, as in many such scenarios, is that I'm being asked to consider the sufferers in this scenario people, even though they don't behave like any people I've ever known.

That said, I can imagine something that suffers the way they do and that I still care about alleviating the suffering of.

The threshold between what I care about and what I don't is, as always, pretty friggin arbitrary.