I've got Good and Real on hold at the library. :) Currently working through Cialdini's Influence, muahaha...
Drescher's theory of ethics and decision making is, "You should do what you [self-interestedly] wish all similarly situated beings would do" on the basis that "if you would regard it as the optimal thing to do, then-counterfactually they would too".
He claims it implies you should cast a wide net in terms of which beings you grant moral status, but not too wide: you draw the line at beings that don't make choices (in the sense of evaluating alternatives and picking one for the sake of a goal), as that breaks a critical symmetry between you and them.
This sounds to me like a modernized version of Kantian deontology... interesting.
Where I really trip up with this argument is in the 'granting moral status' step. What does it mean if I decide to say 'a fish has no moral status?'
Let's do a reductio. Say fish have no moral status. Does that mean it's permissible to torture them, say by superstimulating pain centres in their brains? I don't think so, even if the torture achieved some small useful end.
I don't think suffering should be taken out of the equation in favour of symmetries. The latter have no obvious moral weight.
I don't have a good answer for the rest of your comment, but I can answer this:
Where I really trip up with this argument is in the 'granting moral status' step. What does it mean if I decide to say 'a fish has no moral status?'
Drescher does a good job of making sure that nothing depends on choice of terminology. In this case, "a fish has no moral status" cashes out to "I should not count a fish's disutility/pain/etc. against the optimality of actions I am considering."
You can take "should" to mean anything under Drescher'...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.