here's my current understanding. in this tradition what makes a person a moral patient is having a soul. once you become nominally atheist enough that you're not allowed to say "soul" anymore people tried coming up with various unsatisfying secular substitutes for souls, the current one being "consciousness"
i actually do not believe people actually believe consciousness is the determining factor in moral patienthood. here's a thought experiment: suppose we could genetically engineer livestock to not be conscious (maybe you somehow destroy some relevant brain structures while still maintaining enough for them to digest food and breathe). would that make factory farming okay? my instinct here is no, absolutely not, and if anything this would make factory farming even worse. this apparently came up in 2009 (h/t opus 4.7) when a philosopher named adam shriver proposed that we should genetically engineer livestock for reduced sensitivity to pain, to reduce their suffering. appaerntly many people, including vegetarians and vegans against factory farming, find this ethically objectionable, and i agree with them
it's a worse violation of the telos of the animal. the extensive suffering of factory-farmed animals at scale is a signal, to us, that we are doing something wrong, inharmonious with the nature of things, and turning off that signal so we can continue to do it is not the ethical coup de grace that it appears to be under a naive analysis of moral patienthood. similarly it would be even more of an ethical crime to genetically engineer unconscious humans and, idk, sell them to sadists
i'm coming around to the idea that not only consciousness but even moral patienthood itself is a weird western confusion about how ethics works. i just do not believe that ethical activity centers around discrete nodes called moral patients. ethics appears to me to be a much more global and holistic thing than this. moral patienthood feels like a weird hack in the western tradition to protect people from being infinitely exploited under capitalism
i actually do not believe people actually believe consciousness is the determining factor in moral patienthood. here's a thought experiment: suppose we could genetically engineer livestock to not be conscious (maybe you somehow destroy some relevant brain structures while still maintaining enough for them to digest food and breathe). would that make factory farming okay? my instinct here is no, absolutely not, and if anything this would make factory farming even worse. this apparently came up in 2009 (h/t opus 4.7) when a philosopher named adam shriver proposed that we should genetically engineer livestock for reduced sensitivity to pain, to reduce their suffering. appaerntly many people, including vegetarians and vegans against factory farming, find this ethically objectionable, and i agree with them
it's a worse violation of the telos of the animal. the extensive suffering of factory-farmed animals at scale is a signal, to us, that we are doing something wrong, inharmonious with the nature of things, and turning off that signal so we can continue to do it is not the ethical coup de grace that it appears to be under a naive analysis of moral patienthood. similarly it would be even more of an ethical crime to genetically engineer unconscious humans and, idk, sell them to sadists
i'm coming around to the idea that not only consciousness but even moral patienthood itself is a weird western confusion about how ethics works. i just do not believe that ethical activity centers around discrete nodes called moral patients. ethics appears to me to be a much more global and holistic thing than this. moral patienthood feels like a weird hack in the western tradition to protect people from being infinitely exploited under capitalism