• commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    if someone is sentient, they are morally relevant because they can experience positive and negative valence

    this is a moral virtue only to utilitarians.

    • oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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      1 year ago

      there are other approaches to sentientism that aren’t based on valence. I don’t feel like writing a book on the different ones, but to give an example of a rights based one that I think is strong is that every sentient being has, at the very least, a right to their body, since that’s the one thing they’re born with and that is (almost certainly) what gives rise to their sentience in the first place. And to violate another sentient beings bodily autonomy is to forfeit your own (a sort of low level social contract), which allows for self defense and defending others

      but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility. I don’t really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the conversation anyways

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I don’t really feel like getting into the weeds of that discussion though, and I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the conversation anyways

        it is. your ethical position is highly relevant to any ethical argument you present.

        • oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Then present yours lol

          Sentientism answers the question of “who/what matters?”, not “what ethical framework should be used to care about who/what matters?”. It can underly many ethical frameworks, personally I don’t care that much what ethical framework you use as long as we can agree on who’s included in the moral scope (although there are some utilitarians who I think have bad definitions of utility and/or do a bad job weighing the utility)

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        but to go back to utilitarianism, I think there’s a strong argument that most ethical frameworks can be defined in terms of a sufficiently creative definition of utility.

        this is a good reason to doubt the validity of the theory: it is constructed in a way that it is not disprovable.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        to give an example of a rights based one

        I have to admit, I skipped the rest of this sentence on I don’t foresee myself attempting to read it: I don’t believe in rights as an objective phenomenon, either.