We wonder about the moral impact of dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 people.

What about dust specks in the eyes of 3^^^3 poodles? Or more to the point, what is the moral cost of killing one person vs one poodle? How many poodles lives would we trade for the life of one person?

Or even within humans, is it human years we would account in coming up with moral equivalencies? Do we discount humans that are less smart, on the theory that we almost certainly discount poodles against humans because they are not as smart as us? Do we discount evil humans compared to helpful humans? Discount unproductive humans against productive ones? What about sims, if it is human*years we count rather than human lives, what of a sim which might be expected to run for more than a trillion subjective years in simulation, do they carry billions times more moral weight than a single meat human who has precommitted to eschew cryonics or upload?

And of course I am using poodle as an algebraic symbol to represent any one of many intelligences. Do we discount poodles against humans because they are not as smart, or is there some other measure of how to relate the moral value of a poodle to the moral value of a person? Does a sim (simulated human running in software) count equal to a meat human? Does an earthworm have epsilon<<1 times the worth of a human, or is it identically 0 times the worth of a human?

What about really big smart AI? Would an AI as smart as an entire planet be worth (morally) preserving at the expense of losing one-fifth the human population?