I will say that I don't worry too much when the rationality of my viewpoints is called into question by a wildly hypothetical corner case. (I don't see a clear

I will say that I don't worry too much when the rationality of my viewpoints is called into question by a wildly hypothetical corner case. (I don't see a clear analogy between your hypothetical and my original question). Why would there be an analogy between my hypothetical and your original question? The role of the hypothetical is not to be a corner case, it's to urge you to consider a scenario that's different from our current corner-case. Being a member of the only high-intelligence species on the planet is a corner-case -- for us the "all other species" set and the "all non-intelligent species" set are equivalent. It's worth asking how your viewpoint holds up when that's not the case. Would you consider the fact that a human fetus can grow up to write a play, learn to sing, discover electricity, debate ethics, and express incredibly deep emotion to be qualitative or quantitative differences from chimps or dolphins? Even if you consider those to be quantitative differences, the quantitative difference is huge Huge by some reckoning I guess. Would you consider the fact that other apes can use tools, raise young, mourn death, form complex social relationships, and teach skills quantitative differences or qualitative differences compared to other mammals? You can do it at every level all the way until you reach single-cell organisms. Do you not see that you're just special-casing your own species because you happen to be a member of it and because it happens to be at the top? I know you don't like hypotheticals, but let's say we weren't at the top, and the species at the top could describe all the skills they have that we don't. I don't suppose you'd say "okay, they are worthy of rights, but I'm not." You'd continue arbitrary suggesting that only those at your level and above are worthy of rights. But if we're all just mammals, why do we care about the ethics of being cruel vs. humane at all? Apes will never grant each other due process of law. If we're so much like them, why do we care? We're not like them, that's why we care. We're much more intelligent than them, so much so that we have the capacity to treat them with compassion. It is your viewpoint -- to eat anything you can kill that's not of your species and that tastes good -- that is similar to the ape's. If you extrapolate from the way humanity is progressing, you'll come to the conclusion that one day, long after both you and I are dead, your viewpoint will be considered barbaric.