I also find it weird that everyone is like “ah, yes, the thing we shall base our assessments of moral weight on is the person’s ability to formulate the concept of ‘I’”
like
…even ignoring disability issues that seems like a really weird and specific thing to base your “this being is in my sphere of morality” assessments on
like why is being able to have a self-model and say “I exist” more important than, like, tool use or something
OTOH if you drop that you start getting inconvenient questions like “okay, the vast majority of beings have a strong preference to keep existing, does that mean it’s immoral to kill any being” and then we’re all Jains
I mean obviously it is bad to kill humans, and it would be really inconvenient if it were bad to kill plants, but I’m not sure where I draw the line between the two