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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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