Created: February 01, 2022
Modified: February 25, 2022
Modified: February 25, 2022
intelligence is not moral worth
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.Inspired by this tweet: https://twitter.com/davmre/status/841803926051549184
Ways we currently equate intelligence with moral worth:
- animal rights. humans > pigs > cows > plants. (this ranges into 'consciousness' though)
- just desserts political theories. people making bad decisions deserve to be poor.
- every aspect of human status and social structures. prestige jobs require high intelligence. the normative versions of meritocracy.
- the hillary / trump campaign (lol). Denigration of Trump and his supporters for being dumb.
My working hypothesis is that moral worth roughly corresponds to consciousness --- we should care about the experience of conscious beings, and not give moral weight to p-zombies or other entities that do not have conscious experience. So the distinction between intelligence and moral worth falls out from the distinction between intelligence and consciousness: intelligence is not consciousness.