Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of a consensus is there though, when as soon as you start digging at the edges, the consensus dissolves? And the edges are boundaries of the pool of the experiences we know. What about the experiences we don't know? What if we start considering not only agents with a physical body, but also add a dimension of agents without one (considering that the ways we recognize intelligence in animals is by the way the…
I don't think that hideous things, like eugenics or Nazi racism, happen because of a lack of understanding. They happen because people have their heads up their butts with megalomaniac ideas about the world and their place in it. The "Master Race" was not a misunderstanding, it was some people wanting to be better than everyone else and making up, out of whole cloth -and no empirical evidence at all- that they were.…
There's a paper discussing heuristics for determining the moral worth (not intelligence) of being which advocates the precautionary principle: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/AIRights2...
> avoid acting heinously by the standards of any reasonable ethical principle that draws a significant proportion of well-informed, thoughtful theorists