the necessity of logical extremes, and ethics

[Advocate]

To treat beings of another species as incompatible with ethical standing, says Peter Singer, is identical in weight to treating someone that way because of their race.

He is incorrect because of the comparative size of the difference, but none-the-less, many philosophers get by on arguments like that which, however correct, are not blindingly wise observations. When they leap at the opportunity to justify some part of the equation but fail to take the concept to it's logical extreme, they limit themselves to a subset of the issue which does not illuminate the pillars of it. In other words, only by taking ideas to their logical extreme can you check for problems, such as with the matter of scale above.

Bonus: Speciesism may be the correct way to delineate personhood because the mind of a cephelapod may be so radically different that even if it has ethical capacity in some sense, it wouldn't be anything comparable to ours. On the other hand, AI may not be considered to be ethical patients because the kind of approach/avoid mechanism we have as embodied biological beings may not be relevant to AI. The crux of this particular example is whether and how the being cares about certain changes to it's self-identity and environment.

The crux of this post is that partial answers are almost no better than no answer at all, they only point the way; they don't lead to answers or solutions, and that may be a large part of why philosophy is dormant.

[Impenitent]

according to singer, the amount of pain suffered by a thousand flies outweighs the pain felt by your child

utopia

-Imp