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drnickbone comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong
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That's a common fallacy. Let me illustrate:
The notions of hot and cold water are nonsensical. The water temperature is continuous from 0C to 100C. How would you divide this into distinct areas? You would have to draw a line between neighboring values different by tiny fractions of a degree, but that seems absurd!
For a morally relevant example, it is quite absurd to suppose that humans aged 18 years and 0 days are mature enough to vote, whereas humans aged 17 years and 364 days are not mature enough. So voting ages are morally unacceptable?
Ditto: ages for drinking alcohol, sexual consent, marriage, joining the armed services etc.
Actually, there is a case to say that they are. Discrimination by category membership, instead of on a spectrum, means that candidates which have more merit are passed aside in favor of ones with lesser merit- particularly in the case of species, this can be problematic. The right of a person to be judged on their merits, if asked in abstract, would be accepted.
The only counter-case I can think of it is to say that society simply does not have the resources to discriminate (since discrimination it is) more precisely. However, even this does not entirely work out as within limits society could easily improve it's classification methods to better allow for unusual cases.
The main advantage of simple discrimination rules is that they are less subject to Goodhart's law.