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DxE 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.)
My sperm has the potential to become human. When I realized almost all of them were dying because of my continued existence, I decided that I will have to kill myself. It was the only rational thing to do.
It seems to me there is a significant difference between requiring an oocyte to become a person and requiring sustenance to become a person. I think about half of zygotes survive the pregnancy process, but almost all sperm don't turn into people.
Would this difference disappear if we developed the technology to turn millions of sperm cells into babies?
Doesn't our current cloning technology allow us to turn any ordinary cell into a baby, albeit one with aging-related diseases?
Probably, but in such a world, I don't think human life would be scarce, and I think that the value of human life would plummet accordingly. They would still represent a significant time and capital investment, and so be more valuable than the em case, but I think that people would be seen as much more replaceable.
It is possible that human reproduction is horrible by many moral standards which seem reasonable. I think it's more convenient to jettison those moral standards than reshape reproduction, but one could imagine a world where people were castrated / had oophorectomies to prevent gamete production, with reproduction done digitally from sequenced genomes. It does not seem obviously worse than our world, except that it seems like a lot of work for minimal benefit.