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It doesn't, though. If that's your argument, then you have to explain why unintelligent humans have any moral worth. Profoundly retarded people are arguably less intelligent than squid, which at least have the ability to survive on their own , but I don't think anyone would argue that they have the same moral worth.
I would. I think all such people should be euthanized. They aren't really people. They're worthless sacks of flesh that just happen to have human DNA
I wouldn't go that far. Those people are still human, with a human soul. It is a sin to kill another human, regardless of how stupid they may be. You can make arguments about withdrawing intensive care if they are a vegetable who can't survive without it, but killing extremely stupid people who are no danger to anybody else when you can keep them alive at minimal cost kills a part of us as well along with it.
Even if religion isn't true, a society where everyone believes they will be questioned by God for their sins on the day of Judgement is better than one where nobody believes this. This is yet another basic "moral fact" that has been lost by the modern west when it threw away the trappings of religion.
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We literally kill some brain dead people. On the limit, perfectly unintelligent (not)people have no moral worth.
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He gets only the moral benefit of avoiding needless suffering, which is a lower bar of morality, applicable to animals. And he probably has people who care about him, like family, or catholics, so his value by proxy cannot be ignored by other humans.
Would you say that an intelligent alien has less moral worth than a retarded human? On what basis, genetic kindred? The alien can understand cooperation and retaliation, while the retard is morally incompetent and therefore cannot be trusted to cooperate. His own behaviour is random, morally meaningless, so our behaviour towards him loses moral meaning too. It is futile to wait for a dangerous wild animal to ‘defect’ before killing him, as we would if he were intelligent.
Completely agree with this.
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Because multiple things grant rise to moral worth as I said in my post not just intelligence. You could have a model of the form: moral_worth = b_1*intelligence+b_2*is_human + ... + error where the ... includes other things that dictate moral worth where b_2 > 0. In this case profoundly stupid humans have a 1 for is_human and so get some moral worth from just that, while profoundly stupid chickens have a 0 for is_human so have less moral worth (according to a human, a chicken may well want to reverse things).
I can well assume that an equally intelligent human has more moral worth to an equally intelligent chicken, this is no different from the belief that an American has more moral worth than an otherwise equivalent Egyptian that so many people seem to hold without it affecting them very much at all. That doesn't mean a highly intelligent chicken has so low moral worth it's fine to eat it.
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I am prepared to say that there is an IQ/functionality threshold below which a biologically-human entity could have scarcely more moral value than a squid.
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