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Dallas comments on Is Politics the Mindkiller? An Inconclusive Test - Less Wrong Discussion
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Infants and fetuses are not sapient. Arbitrarily privileging biological life regardless of its mental capability would set a horrible precedent. Note that there isn't that coherent of a line between more intelligent mammals and human babies.
(Assuming we rely on sapience as the chief criterion for privileging life, as you seem to imply)
You are also not in a sapient-testable state when you're under the effects of anesthesia, or in deep sleep.
You might object that you will be in such a state again once you wake up - in other words, that you have the future potential to be in a sapient state.
That, however, would also apply to a human baby, albeit given another time horizon, while it would not apply (to the same degree) to many other mammals, whose individual future potential is much more limited.
Why would you be worthy of protection (e.g. while in a medical coma) based on regaining testable sapience in a matter of weeks - or months - if a baby weren't?
Our local surroundings could be made into a dense volume of self-replicating computronium hosting as many bare-minimum sapients as possible, but only a few people here would argue that it's morally imperative to carry that out to full term.
Another difference is that the mature sapient has typically specified, or would specify, that it should be reinstated in advance, and works within the framework of society. If the baby survives any sort of abuse it undergoes until it is sapient, then it might be entitled to some damages, but until then, it lacks self-ownership and is susceptible to destruction by its possessors.
Well, in point of fact I don't feel sure that "For The People Who Are Still Alive" works here. But if we end a consciousness that has already started, even if it's currently paused, that certainly appears to reduce its "average lifespan". We can infer that this decision procedure would reduce the chance of a random real human satisfying his/her desires for more life, if the argument in the linked post works at all.
Of course there is. The latter is human and the former (assuming you mean "more intelligent non-human mammals") is not. It is very easy to tell the difference and there are no doubtful cases.
There are no comparably clear lines to separate human fetuses, infants, children, and adults.
It's good to note the obvious oversight in the grandparent's claim. That said, a charitable reading of that claim (operationalized for your convenience) is that there does not exist a prediction rule that takes a fairly detailed description of a being's* behavior in some task requiring intelligence and outputs a high accuracy classification.
*selected from a known mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of possibilities limited to human infants and adult intelligent mammals.
To look for one presumes, as does Dallas, that the division between entities with rights and entities without is to be drawn in terms of current mental capability. Someone in dreamless sleep currently has less mental capability than an awake baby, or, I guess, a soon-to-be-born one. The argument for turning off Terri Schiavo's life support was that she had no possibility of regaining any mental function, not that she currently had none.
Why are you replying to me instead of Dallas? I'm not defending the argument. I just noticed that more than one person was distracted by the obvious oversight, so I zombified Dallas's claim as best as I was able.
Bet: If you give me 1,000 pictures each of fully developed chimpanzees, dolphins and some newborn babies (none of which have any birth defects) I will be able to distinguish between every one. (I will then assign moral weight consistently according to the principle "My species matters more so there!")
RichardKennaway made a similar comment and I replied here.