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lessdazed comments on Nonperson Predicates - Less Wrong
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There is something about humans that make them objects of moral concern. It isn't the ability to feel pain, because cows can feel pain. For the same reason, it isn't experiencing sensation. And it isn't intelligence, because dolphins are pretty smart.
I'm not trying to evoke souls or other non-testable concepts. Personally, I suspect the property that creates moral concern is related to our ability to think recursively (i.e. make and comprehend meta-statements). Whatever the property of moral concern is based on, it requires me to say things like: "It is wrong to kill a Klingon iff it would be wrong to kill a human in similar circumstances."
If you come across a creature of moral concern in the wild, and it wants to die (assuming no thinking defects like depression), then helping may not be immoral. But if you create a creature that way, you can't ignore that you caused the desire to die in that creature.
One might think that it is possible to create human-level intelligence creatures that are not entitled to moral concern because they lack the relevant properties. That's not incoherent, but every human-intelligent species in our experience is entitled to moral concern (yes, I'm aware that the sample size is extremely small).
A rational soldier's life is not in conflict with her goalset, only with propagation of her genes.
Morality is not written in the equations of the universe, but I think it a fair summary of the morality we currently follow as attempting to live to the highest and best of potential. And it is totally fair for me to point out a moral position inconsistent with that morality.
But if you create a creature that way, you can't ignore that you caused the desire to die in that creature.
Pig that wants to be eaten != genetically modified corn that begs for death
Creating the corn would be immoral. Creating the pig would be moral - and delicious!
That seems like a fair summary of all moral systems according to their own standards. If so, that wouldn't tell us about the moral system since it would be true of all of them.
I disagree. Otherwise, prevention of suicide of the depressed is difficult to justify.
On the one hand, I agree that it doesn't narrow down the universe of acceptable moralities very much. But consider an absolute monarchist morality: Alexander's potential is declared to be monarch of the nation, while Ivan's is declared to be serf. All decided at birth, before knowing anything about either person. That's not a morality that values everyone reaching their potential.
Assuming one has the intuitions that creating the pig would be moral and not preventing suicide of the depressed is immoral, one may be wrong in considering them are analogous. But if they are, you gave no reason to prefer giving up the one intuition instead of the other.
I don't think they are analogous. Depression involves unaligned preferences, perhaps always, but at least very often. If the pig's system 1 mode of thinking wants him eaten, and system 2 mode of thinking wants him eaten, and the knife feels good to him, and his family would be happy to have him eaten, etc. all is alligned and we don't have to solve the nature of preferences and how to rank them to say the pig's creation and death are fine.
It seems to me that creating the pig is analogous to creating suicidal depression in a human who is not depressed.
As a starting point, a moral theory should add up to normal. I'm not saying it's an iron law (people once thought chattel slavery was morally normal). But the burden is on justifying the move away from normal.
Why don't you try to think some of the many ways in which it's NOT analogous?