What’s the latest on moral circle expansion and political circle expansion?
Were slaves excluded from the moral circle in ancient greece or the US antebellum south, and how does this relate to their exclusion from the political circle?
If AIs could suffer, is recognizing that capacity a slippery slope toward giving AIs the right to vote?
Can moral patients be political subjects, or must political subjects be moral agents? If there was some tipping point or avalanche of moral concern for chickens, that wouldn’t imply arguments for political representation of chickens, right?
Consider pre-suffrage women, or contemporary children: they seem fully admitted into the moral circle, but only barely admitted to the political circle.
A critique of MCE is that history is not one march of worse to better (smaller to larger), there are in fact false starts, moments of retrograde, etc. Is PCE the same but even moreso?
If I must make a really bad first approximation, I would say a rubber band is attached to the moral circle, and on the other end of the rubber band is the political circle, so when the moral circle expands it drags the political circle along with it on a delay, modulo some metaphorical tension and inertia. This rubber band model seems informative in the slave case, but uselessly wrong in the chickens case, and points to some I think very real possibilities in the AI case.
What’s the latest on moral circle expansion and political circle expansion?
Were slaves excluded from the moral circle in ancient greece or the US antebellum south, and how does this relate to their exclusion from the political circle?
If AIs could suffer, is recognizing that capacity a slippery slope toward giving AIs the right to vote?
Can moral patients be political subjects, or must political subjects be moral agents? If there was some tipping point or avalanche of moral concern for chickens, that wouldn’t imply arguments for political representation of chickens, right?
Consider pre-suffrage women, or contemporary children: they seem fully admitted into the moral circle, but only barely admitted to the political circle.
A critique of MCE is that history is not one march of worse to better (smaller to larger), there are in fact false starts, moments of retrograde, etc. Is PCE the same but even moreso?
If I must make a really bad first approximation, I would say a rubber band is attached to the moral circle, and on the other end of the rubber band is the political circle, so when the moral circle expands it drags the political circle along with it on a delay, modulo some metaphorical tension and inertia. This rubber band model seems informative in the slave case, but uselessly wrong in the chickens case, and points to some I think very real possibilities in the AI case.