Agreed. The proper translation of "too hard" is usually "I don't care."
There's a difference between making it seem morally neutral and not implying anything about its morality or lack thereof. What SaidAchmiz was trying to do is the latter.
Nagel had no problems with taking objective attributes of experience -- e.g. indicia of suffering -- and comparing them for the purposes of political and moral debate. The equivalence or even comparability of subjective experience (whether between different humans or different species) is not necessary for an equivalence of moral depravity.
The language I use is deliberate. It accurately conveys my point of view, including normative judgments. I do not relish the idea of antagonizing anyone. However, the content of certain viewpoints is inherently antagonizing. If I were to factually state that someone were a rapist, for example, I could not phrase that in a neutral, objective way.
For what it's worth, I actually love jkaufman.. He's one of the smartest and most solid people I know. But his views on this subject are bigoted.
Here is a thought experiment. Suppose that explorers arrive in a previously unknown area of the Amazon, where a strange tribe exists. The tribe suffers from a rare genetic anomaly, whereby all of its individuals are physically and cognitively stuck at the age of 3.
They laugh and they cry. They love and they hate. But they have no capacity for complex planning, or normative sophistication. So they live their lives as young children do -- on a moment to moment basis -- and they have no hope for ever developing beyond that.
If the explorers took these gentle ...
This is a variant of the argument from marginal cases: if there is some quality that makes you count morally, and we can find some example humans (ex: 3 year olds) that have less of that quality than some animals, what do we do?
I'm very sure than an 8 year old human counts morally and that a chicken does not, and while I'm not very clear on where along that spectrum the quality I care about starts getting up to levels where it matters, I think it's probably something no or almost no animals have and some humans don't have. Making this distinction among hum...
"Suppose we found a morphine-like drug which effectively and provably wireheads NON-WHITE PEOPLE to be happy with their living conditions, and with no side effects for WHITE PEOPLE consuming their flesh."
Has a different sort of emotional impact, no?
This is a silly strawman, but I'll respond anyway, because why not.
The difference is that we (well, not me, but the OP and people who agree with him) only care about chickens to the extent that they are (allegedly) suffering, and we think it's not ok for them to suffer. On the other hand, we think that NON-WHITE PEOPLE (just like WHITE PEOPLE) have the right of self-determination, that it's wrong to forcibly modify their minds, etc.
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.