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i had more open on my composer but fell asleep mid-post lol
idk like it's not wrong and ive talked in the past about the value i see in moral psychology and virtuous character cultivation but it just leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. like assume it is an established moral truth that animals are moral patients, and then someone pulls out kants argument.
its like wait no you kind of have to have a take on that, at minimum because even the practical actions you take depend on your beliefs. pragmatism is a theory of truth, not an instruction to behave as if something is true for the selfish benefits.
also if you do go with the practical argument for instrumental benefit to humans you run the risk of hitting empirical uncomfortabilities like "impolite prompts consistently outperformed polite ones, with accuracy ranging from 80.8% for Very Polite prompts to 84.8% for Very Rude prompts"
which i suppose is fine if you're more STEM-pilled and open to your beliefs being falsifiable, but this feels like precisely the territory where that would be inappropriate. i'm aware they are separate arguments but there's a reason they get wheeled out together, it's harder to defend the moral w/o.
not to use a tasteless example (it's hard not to be tasteless when discussing expansion of the moral circle because the subject is either still tender [gender, race] or premature [animals, llms]), but imagine if this rhetoric was used in discussion about black folks.
we'd rightly be uncomfortable if people were to immediately start focusing on how poor treatment reflected poor character of the white person, or pointed out how poor treatment actually undermined the white person's instrumental aims.
intellectually, it's a shallow way to express sympathy without staking a real position that requires rigor and analysis to be defended. it's a rhetorical gesture for the uncommitted (both audience and author)