So, dissolve “life.” Why do we care if something is alive? To decide if its life has value.
I don’t think that’s the only reason we care. There’s a lot of mostly-true generalizations that we can make about living things—they require energy to keep living, they have some means of internal self-repair, etc. If I ask whether a vaccine has live or dead bacteria, it isn’t because I value the live bacteria more, it’s because it lets me assess risks more accurately.
People routinely value non-living things over living things. For instance, many people wear fur. (Or for that matter, cotton.)
What we value is sentience.
This isn’t really true either. We have lots of different values. For instance, many people are willing to kill mice to feed their pet snakes. I don’t think they’d be dissuaded if it turns out that mice are “more sentient” than snakes by some metric—they like their [distinctive] pet more than they like the mice, which from their point of view are[interchangeable and replaceable.
We also value rarity—consider a rare lizard versus a common bird-of-prey.
And we value several kinds of instrumental utility—foxes might be smarter than chickens, but just ask a farmer which they value more.
tl;dr: Neither life or sentience are strongly correlated with how much most people value something.
I don’t think that’s the only reason we care. There’s a lot of mostly-true generalizations that we can make about living things—they require energy to keep living, they have some means of internal self-repair, etc. If I ask whether a vaccine has live or dead bacteria, it isn’t because I value the live bacteria more, it’s because it lets me assess risks more accurately.
People routinely value non-living things over living things. For instance, many people wear fur. (Or for that matter, cotton.)
This isn’t really true either. We have lots of different values. For instance, many people are willing to kill mice to feed their pet snakes. I don’t think they’d be dissuaded if it turns out that mice are “more sentient” than snakes by some metric—they like their [distinctive] pet more than they like the mice, which from their point of view are[interchangeable and replaceable.
We also value rarity—consider a rare lizard versus a common bird-of-prey.
And we value several kinds of instrumental utility—foxes might be smarter than chickens, but just ask a farmer which they value more.
tl;dr: Neither life or sentience are strongly correlated with how much most people value something.