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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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