Kathleen Finlinson & Ben West, May 2025
"you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals." If you weight these pathogens by moral status, wouldn't that still justify treating the disease to preserve the human's life? (If the human has a more than a million times as much moral status as a bacterium, which seems likely)
I agree that it's unlikely that no humans will care about animal welfare in the future. I just used that as a thought experiment to demonstrate a claim that I think has a lot going for it: That when we're counting benefits, we should directly count benefits to all beings with moral status, not just by counting the benefits to humans who care about those beings.
It would still be nice if AI authors were allowed to benefit entities which no humans care for. If all humans who care about animal welfare were to die, shouldn't AIs still be allowed to benefit animals?
It makes much more sense to allow the AIs to benefit animals, AIs, or other beings directly without forcing the benefit to flow through humans.
I couldn't find this meetup group. Does it still exist?