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D_Alex comments on In favour of a selective CEV initial dynamic - Less Wrong Discussion
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The lack of threshold is exactly the issue. If you include dolphins and chimpanzees, explicitly, you'd be in a position to apply the same reasoning to include parrots and dogs, then rodents and octopi, etc, etc.
Eventually you'll slide far enough down this slippery slope to reach caterpillars and parasitic wasps. Now, what would a wasp want to do, if it understood how its acts affect the other creatures worthy of inclusion in the CEV?
This is what I see as the difficulty in extrapolating the wishes of simpler creatures. Perhaps in fact there is a coherent solution, but having only thought about this a little, I suspect there might not be one.
We don't have to care. If everyone or nearly all were convinced that something less than 20 pounds had no moral value, or a person less than 40 days old, or whatever, that would be that.
Also, as some infinite sums have finite limits, I do not think that small things necessarily make summing humans' or the Earth's morality impossible.
Ah, OK. Sure, if your concern is that, if we extrapolated the volition of such creatures, we would find that they don't cohere, I'm with you. I have similar concerns about humans, actually.
I'd thought you were saying that we'd be unable to extrapolate it in the first place, which is a different problem.