Wait, that doesn’t compute. Why would they become moral patients because other people care about them? That fails on two accounts at once:
The family members do not feel pain about their loved ones. I agree that they suffer, but that is not related to pain stimuli. You can have aversive feelings toward all kinds of things unrelated to nociception. Just think about salty water. You only crave it if you have too little salt, but otherwise it is yuck. Although, maybe, you mean nociception in a non-standard way.
Even if the family member’s aversiveness were sufficient it would prove too much: It would make basically any object that people care about and feel suffering when damaged or lost a moral patient.
But I like the self-representation aspect of your criterion and I think it could be fixed by reducing it to just that:
Any system that represents its own aversive responses, deserves moral patienthood.
It would require to make “represent reponse” very precise, but I think that would be possible.
Wait, that doesn’t compute. Why would they become moral patients because other people care about them? That fails on two accounts at once:
The family members do not feel pain about their loved ones. I agree that they suffer, but that is not related to pain stimuli. You can have aversive feelings toward all kinds of things unrelated to nociception. Just think about salty water. You only crave it if you have too little salt, but otherwise it is yuck. Although, maybe, you mean nociception in a non-standard way.
Even if the family member’s aversiveness were sufficient it would prove too much: It would make basically any object that people care about and feel suffering when damaged or lost a moral patient.
But I like the self-representation aspect of your criterion and I think it could be fixed by reducing it to just that:
It would require to make “represent reponse” very precise, but I think that would be possible.