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I think so as well, but the wishes of the dead just don't matter that much to me. Personally I'm OK with us not forcefully harvesting the dead's organs for mostly unrelated reasons (slippery slope, potential conflicts of interest, etc.) but wouldn't object all that much if we pivoted on that.
If the only reason you're not killing sleeping people is due to their previous wishes, that's startlingly weak. It strikes me as an unprincipled and poorly-reasoned attempt to declare murder bad now that you've argued against the real reason it's bad. "No it's not murder to kill sleeping people, but acktually we still shouldn't do it because it wouldn't be respecting their wishes. No we shouldn't respect their wishes on virtually anything else. No I'm not being inconsistent."
I suggest that there is a sliding scale of how close a currently nonthinking being is to a thinking one. If it takes a short time to start thinking, if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking, if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity, if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present, that's low on the scale. Sleeping people are low on this scale. Fetuses and random lumps of matter are high on the scale.
When you point out that a sleeping person is not thinking, just like a fetus, you are saying "the sleeping person and the fetus are both somewhere above zero on the scale". But the fetus is much farther along, even if both are nonzero; the quantitative difference is enough to matter.
I think we generally have a moral intuition that people are worth more than potential people. Your paragraph seems to be a more complex way to communicate this moral intuition which loses some value in the process.
I think someone who will be in a coma for 10^10,000 years has the same amount of personhood as someone who will be in a coma for 10 seconds, barring external factors.
I think someone who requires 10^10,000 dollars for their life to be saved has the same amount of personhood as someone whose life will be saved for free. The same applies if they have not yet lived--I think a lump of mud has the same amount of personhood regardless of how much it will cost to turn it into a person.
This one I agree with (to an extent).
This doesn't make much sense to me really, I don't see why it matters morally whether a given being's brain is present yet. I just wrap this into "resources necessary to turn this entity into a person" but perhaps I'm wrong here.
So yeah I think a better version of your argument is just that people are worth more than potential people, and beings which have previously been people and will be again are worth more than beings which have never been people. If you disagree, I'd love to hear about under what circumstances the proposed "sliding scale" model outperforms the "people vs. potential people" model for appealing to our moral intuitions.
I'm mostly just trying to build an intuition pump without the thought experiments getting too complex. I think the intuition pump does hold up to this angle of attack. A sufficiently anomalous sleeping person (someone in a very expensive and long-term coma, perhaps) will be much farther along than the fetus, but I'd argue would still retain personhood.
Just saying that people are worth more is subject to objections like "the sleeper is not conscious at the moment, so why does the sleeper even count as a person, rather than a potential person?"
If time doesn't matter, then destroying a lifeless planet is murder, because the planet could evolve sentient creatures in a few billion years.
I wasn't thinking in terms of cash, but more in terms of where the complexity comes from. When you go from a fetus to a thinking person, the details of the mind are formed by the things that happen to the fetus afterwards, same as with the lump of matter. The previous state of the fetus or lump is essentially blank. This does not apply to the sleeping person.
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Fetuses take only time and the mother’s standard care for herself, with relatively minor differences. If the process is uninterrupted, the child has a good chance of surviving gestation and birth. This is far, far lower on that scale than random lumps of unprogrammed matter, or even piles of formerly living biowaste with identical proportions of elements and tissues, such as corpses.
EDIT: Ninja’d by your edit, where you added the second paragraph.
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