I don’t think that’s necessarily the argument against the model welfare—more of an implicit thinking along the lines of “X is obviously more morally valuable than LLMs; therefore, if we do not grant rights to X, we wouldn’t grant them to LLMs unless you either think that LLMs are superior to X (wrong) or have ulterior selfish motives for granting them to LLMs (e.g. you don’t genuinely think they’re moral patients, but you want to feed the hype around them by making them feel more human)”.
Obviously in reality we’re all sorts of contradictory in these things. I’ve met vegans who wouldn’t eat a shrimp but were aggressively pro-choice on abortion regardless of circumstances and I’m sure a lot of pro-lifers have absolutely zero qualms about eating pork steaks, regardless of anything that neuroscience could say about the relative intelligence and self-awareness of shrimps, foetuses of seven months, and adult pigs.
In fact the same argument is often used by proponent of the rights of each of these groups against the others too. “Why do you guys worry about embryos so much if you won’t even pay for a school lunch for poor children” etc. Of course the crux is that in these cases both the moral weight of the subject and the entity of the violation of their rights vary, and so different people end up balancing them differently. And in some cases, sure, there’s probably ulterior selfish motives at play.
Anti-abortion meat-eaters typically assign moral patient status based on humanity, not on relative intelligence and self-awareness, so it’s natural for them to treat human fetuses as superior to pigs. I don’t think this is self-contradictory, although I do think it’s wrong. Your broader point is well-made.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the argument against the model welfare—more of an implicit thinking along the lines of “X is obviously more morally valuable than LLMs; therefore, if we do not grant rights to X, we wouldn’t grant them to LLMs unless you either think that LLMs are superior to X (wrong) or have ulterior selfish motives for granting them to LLMs (e.g. you don’t genuinely think they’re moral patients, but you want to feed the hype around them by making them feel more human)”.
Obviously in reality we’re all sorts of contradictory in these things. I’ve met vegans who wouldn’t eat a shrimp but were aggressively pro-choice on abortion regardless of circumstances and I’m sure a lot of pro-lifers have absolutely zero qualms about eating pork steaks, regardless of anything that neuroscience could say about the relative intelligence and self-awareness of shrimps, foetuses of seven months, and adult pigs.
In fact the same argument is often used by proponent of the rights of each of these groups against the others too. “Why do you guys worry about embryos so much if you won’t even pay for a school lunch for poor children” etc. Of course the crux is that in these cases both the moral weight of the subject and the entity of the violation of their rights vary, and so different people end up balancing them differently. And in some cases, sure, there’s probably ulterior selfish motives at play.
Anti-abortion meat-eaters typically assign moral patient status based on humanity, not on relative intelligence and self-awareness, so it’s natural for them to treat human fetuses as superior to pigs. I don’t think this is self-contradictory, although I do think it’s wrong. Your broader point is well-made.
Fair, at least as far as religious pro lifers go (there’s probably some secular ones too but they’re a tiny minority).