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Those are all examples of people looking down on other people. To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't sa

Those are all examples of people looking down on other people. To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.

frotaur 1y ago
There is a philosophical/probabilistic argument that explains why 'rocks are people too' holds less weight than 'pigs are people too'. We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain. Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well. If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out. All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.