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Ghatanathoah comments on Desires You're Not Thinking About at the Moment - Less Wrong Discussion
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Unless you have an insanely low level of akrasia, I'd be wary of using your behavior as a guide to your values.
Not necessarily. If animals desire radically different things from humans then you'd treat them differently even if you valued their desires equally. I don't think dogs and cats animals have the same sort of complex desires humans do, they seem to value attention and food and disvalue pain, fear, and hunger. So as long as you don't actively mistreat animals you are probably respecting their desires.
If a dog walked up to you and demonstrated that it could read, write, and communicate with you, and seemed to have a genius level IQ, and expressed a desire to go to college and learn theoretical physics, wouldn't you treat it more like a human and less like a normal dog?
I'm not saying "having desires" isn't a factor somewhere, but I'm not a vegetarian so clearly I don't mind killing animals. I have no de-facto objection to eating dog meat instead of cow meat, but I'd be appalled to eat human. As near as I can tell, this applies exclusively to humans. I strongly suspect I'd be bothered to eat a talking dog, but I suspect both the talking and non-talking dogs have a desire not to be my dinner. The pertinent difference there seems to be communication, not desire.
I'm fine calling the relevant trait "being human" since, in this reality, it's an accurate generalization. I'm fine being wrong in the counter-factual "Dog's Talk" reality, since I don't live there. If I ever find myself living in a world with beings that are both (!human AND !dinner), I'll re-evaluate what traits contribute. Until then, I have enough evidence to rule out "desire", and insufficient evidence to propose anything other than "human" as a replacement :)