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If we could uplift dogs or other non-sentient animals to sentience, should we? There's a Rick and Morty episode where they uplift the intelligence of a pet dog, who goes on to uplift all other dogs and lead a rebellion against humans. Theoretically the idea is that if humans and dogs had the same level of intelligence, the way we treat dogs would be inhumane.
While I agree with the statement above, obviously there's a vast gulf between the intelligence of humans and every other form of life we know of. If we accept the premise that once we have the technology to uplift dogs we not only must treat them different but have a moral imperative to uplift all dogs, we get into dangerous territory. Essentially as soon as we become capable of increasing the intelligence of any form of life, we must. This sounds like a bad idea, especially since at a certain point we may lose out to other forms of species that have evolved to kill us. (Mosquitos, insects generally that are hard to kill but venomous/diseased enough to kill us.)
Assuming uplifting other species is even possible, I wonder how this would change our outlook on how we treat animals today. Personally I am not a vegetarian, totally fine with pets, although I do find the state of factory farming today pretty dismal, and think we should treat animals we eat better. As someone's flair here says, how far will we last until we have to become outright speciesist?
If dogs had the same level of intelligence/sapience we do, we wouldn't need to treat them the way we do, because they could be trusted to look after themselves and not try to play with cars in traffic.
Why would anyone put forward this premise? I legitimately do not understand it. Is the theory that not doing so is tantamount to forever denying them qualia that they otherwise would not have obtained? If so, then sure, I guess, but wouldn't we be under a more pressing duty to forcibly give all deaf people cochlear implants and all amputees the highest grade of cybernetic prosthetic available first? Wouldn't we be under a duty to try and develop - and forcibly institute - universal genetic therapies "curing" Downs' syndrome and Autism and all other antisocial human personality traits? A lot of those would get pretty fierce blowback from multiple angles, and would seem to be much more achievable and less invasive than species-wide uplift of dogs.
I'm in favor of focusing on curing diseases, and believing we have a moral imperative to cure them, yeah. I would say the current idea of a 'mental illness' like Autism (at least in some diagnoses) is pretty damn imperfect though.
I suppose the reason to put it forward is idle curiosity? Also I think at some point we will be faced with this question, or at least the technology will be a reality. I'd predict that our morality will treat animals with more salience in that future, although I may be wrong.
No more imperfect than the concept of 'general intelligence' to uplift dogs.
Agreed. If anything I'd said the concept of uplifting species is far less developed.
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