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You have tried out a few different arguments, and every time they've either just ended up in a different place or were a nonstarter. That, I'd think, would be an indication to you that this is a fraught position.

The assertion that one ought to behave as a human chauvinist is a moral assertion you have not justified and cannot justify. "Why not?" is not an argument. The assertion that this is what morality is in some metaethical sense is also not something you can or are interested in justifying.

More to the point, you're not arguing for a cognitive trait as what matters, which was the original thing you were disputing.

No current LLM can reason in this sense. That's correct. By saying "Claude Omega" I'm clearly using a joking name to refer to some future AI that might be able to reason. Capacity to reason isn't dependent on human biology. Babies do not have "sophisticated moral reasoning."

Heh. If you're going to do that, just film some people doing it now and try to treat it like news like that one family who needed to buy a small pond's worth of milk every week on CNN.

I don't feel great about this, not because this isn't correct as a matter of who benefits politically, but because blind panic about gas prices is how you get a downward economic spiral spiraling harder, and I feel ambivalent using the harms caused by economic downturns.

He's saying Democrats should try to whip up a panic about gas prices because a general sense that things are in chaos will unto itself hurt the incumbent White House party. You don't need to walk people to who to blame. You need them to think things are in shambles.

I remember the hybrid run in 2008 after people felt squeezed on fuel prices that were then relieved by the crushing recession. What's the equivalent price of that today? $6.50 a gallon?

I'm vaguely aware that American auto manufacturing recently committed a lot of money to move off of EV production, and there's probably a ticking clock on shifts in consumer demand that might make this retroactively a horrible business decision.

Claude omega might be able to do that. There's no reason to think only humans are ever able to do that. You've just moved off of trying to define personhood in terms of human genetics of physiology. Infants, however, definitely are not persons on this view.

Insofar as you think the cognitive trait that matters is capacity to participate in a reciprocal moral community of morality users, that's setting the bar high on people with profound intellectual disability, particularly if you want to exclude every non-human on that basis.

Depends on what you think those requisite cognitive abilities are. I don't think people who are brain dead have rights. They are no longer "people" in the sense of personhood. They lack any plausible list of cognitive capacities that I think might matter for personhood.

You cannot use morality without mentation. How are you proposing someone participates in a mutual relationship of moral concerns without mental states? Cognition doesn't mean "employs sophisticated moral reasoning."

I think people with profound intellectual disabilities who may lack moral intentionality in the way you mean here have rights, but on this criteria, they'd meet your "is human" check, but could fail, "recognizes mutual moral relationships" one.

Mutualism is a different argument. Morality can only apply to a community of morality users locates rights in a cognitive trait as capacity for intentional moral behavior is cognitive, not biological in nature. I don't agree with this position, but it is more plausible than genetics.

It doesn't follow that if a concept is a human construct - assuming morality is an example of this for sake of argument - then that construct can only apply to humans. Species concepts themselves are probably just a human construct, and there are non-human species.

"Capable of communication" is a cognitive trait, not a genetic one. Maybe not the best criteria to locate rights in, but it is a totally different position than the one you were just arguing.

That's not an argument about what morality is. That's an argument about what you personally care about. You can say that because you are male, you only care about males and I couldn't disagree with your internal concerns, but that doesn't mean morality itself only is about males.

Planets are a human construct, therefore only a humans can be planets?

One approach is to look at what the referents of moral language plausibly are. What people deep down *mean* when they talk about their moral sentiments or use morally valenced terms. That kind of analysis does not get you to "they're talking about biological humans."

To your point, species chauvinism has no good arguments in favor of it. Baldly asserting it and demanding it be disproven is no way to advance that position. You've supplied no argument and the typical ones do not work. They're often naive about what justification for personhood might look like.

No one things chimpanzees are human. Lots of people think chimpanzees possess the sort of traits that humans also possess that moral language is aimed at granting them either the same or similar rights. That's a different sort of claim.

Evolution involved the transition of something that wasn't modern human into a modern human, and it'd be absolutely bizarre to me if the beings outside that fuzzy boundary do not count as persons due to morality requiring species chauvinism. Why would it? What's the metaethical argument?

So what if I'm human? It doesn't follow that moral language is only aimed at humans because the speaker is human and being human doesn't create an obligation to care about humans. That's just is/ought fallacy.

That aside, my point wasn't that your idea of personhood plays into the hands of the pro-life position. My point was that your idea of personhood isn't commonly argued outside of pro-life circles where you see it more frequently due to their biases.

Drawing a circle around the rights you think should exist because you find the convenient for what you want to think for other reasons, be it cultural or intuitive, doesn't really justify that position. You can tighten the criteria further if you want if all that matters is what you want.

Saying rights ought to be justified a certain way because you find it practical for them to be that way is a poor argument for grounding them. Obligations exist or they don't. If they do, you have to have a reason for why they do. Why should I care if a species is human or not? Why does that matter?

The arguments for this are very weak and the people most often making this case are pro-lifers married to that position for other reasons who really haven't interacted with criticism of their views much.

If you think that personhood only applies to biological humans - that rights associated with it only concern living things that have a genome or physiology sufficiently similar to current living humans - you have to explain *why* you think that as that's a queer thing for rights to be referring to.

It doesn't follow that because personhood is located in possessing certain cognitive traits that every animal actually possesses those cognitive traits. For example, one common position is that what matters is a sense of self and capacity for conscious desires, which chickens might not have.