I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
I think that’s fair—beneficial equilibriums could depend on reifying things like this.
On the other hand, I’d suggest that with regard to identifying entities that can suffer, false positives are much less harmful than false negatives but they still often incur a cost. E.g., I don’t think corporations can suffer, so in many cases it’ll be suboptimal to grant them the sorts of protections we grant humans, apes, dogs, and so on. Arguably, a substantial amount of modern ethical and perhaps even political dysfunction is due to not kicking leaky reifications out of our circle of caring. (This last bit is intended to be provocative and I’m not sure how strongly I’d stand behind it...)
Yeah, S-risk minimizer being trivially exploitable etc.