Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Christopher's avatar

I agree that a specific list of em rights is inappropriate at this juncture when we have no idea what rights the ems would want or need.

We can, however, move up a level of abstraction and perhaps agree that ems may be deserving of certain rights. What rights? Animal cruelty laws would be a good starting point. California Penal Code sec. 597(a), for example, generally prohibits causing an animal "needless suffering." I bet we could agree that ems should have the same right when they are capable of suffering. If they suffer from being shut off then, at least prima facie, they would have a right not to be shut off unless there was some compelling justification for doing so.

Expand full comment
TGGP's avatar

That makes more sense. I'm not a utilitarian, but if I were I'd be a summation utilitarian. If X is good, it seems logical that 2X is twice as good. And summation utilitarianism avoids any divide by zero problems. Summation utilitarianism also better matches what we'd expect an evolutionary algorithm to produce.

Expand full comment
41 more comments...

No posts