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davidpearce comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong
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This strikes me as a very impatient assessment. The human infant will turn into a human, and the piglet will turn into a pig, and so down the road A through E will suggest treating them differently.
Similarly, the demented can be given the reverse treatment (though it works differently); they once deserved moral standing, and thus are extended moral standing because the extender can expect that when their time comes, they will be treated by society in about the same way as society treated its elders when they were young. (This mostly falls under B, except the reciprocation is not direct.)
(Looking at the comments, Manfred makes a similar argument more vividly over here.)
Vanvier, do human infants and toddlers deserve moral consideration primarily on account of their potential to become rational adult humans? Or are they valuable in themselves? Young human children with genetic disorders are given love, care and respect - even if the nature of their illness means they will never live to see their third birthday. We don't hold their lack of "potential" against them. Likewise, pigs are never going to acquire generative syntax or do calculus. But their lack of cognitive sophistication doesn't make them any less sentient.
My intuitions say the former. I would not be averse to a quick end for young human children who are not going to live to see their third birthday.
Agreed, mostly. (I think it might be meaningful to refer to syntax or math as 'senses' in the context of subjective experience and I suspect that abstract reasoning and subjective sensation of all emotions, including pain, are negatively correlated. The first weakly points towards valuing their experience less, but the second strongly points towards valuing their experience more.)
Vanvier, you say that you wouldn't be averse to a quick end for young human children who are not going to live to see their third birthday. What about intellectually handicapped children with potentially normal lifespans whose cognitive capacities will never surpass a typical human toddler or mature pig?
I'm not sure what this would look like, actually. The first thing that comes to mind is Down's Syndrome, but the impression I get is that that's a much smaller reduction in cognitive capacity than the one you're describing. The last time I considered that issue, I favored abortion in the presence of a positive amniocentesis test for Down's, and I suspect that the more extreme the reduction, the easier it would be to come to that direction.
I hope you don't mind that this answers a different question than the one you asked- I think there are significant (practical, if not also moral) differences between gamete selection, embryo selection, abortion, infanticide, and execution of adults (sorted from easiest to justify to most difficult to justify). I don't think execution of cognitively impaired adults would be justifiable in the presence of modern American economic constraints on grounds other than danger posed to others.
Historically, we have dismissed very obviously sapient people as lacking moral worth (people with various mental illnesses and disabilities, and even the freaking Deaf). Since babies are going to have whatever-makes-them-people at some point, it may be more likely that they already have it and we don't notice, rather than they haven't yet. That's why I'm a lot iffier about killing babies and mentally disabled humans than pigs.
Speaking as a vegetarian for ethical reasons ... yes. That's not to say they don't deserve some moral consideration based on raw brainpower/sentience and even a degree of sentimentality, of course, but still.