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Notes -
How do you objectively measure "sapience"?
If it is discrete, what's the dividing line?
If is is continuous, this leads to the conclusion that the "less sapient" are less human than the more sapient.
If this is your position, exactly where is the cutoff point for disenfranchising already living humans from their right to remain alive?
If you can identify that point, where is the point (necessarily further upstream) wherein we disenfranchise humans in a democracy from being able to vote because of their substandard sapience?
tl;dr Eugenics and explicit genetic tyranny all the way down.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? (I know you consider that to be the case, this was a rhetorical question)
Modus ponens and modus tollens applies. I can answer each of those questions, I have internally satisfactory cutoffs (and I do not consider it a failing if they're not universally popular, merely saddening), and I am okay with arbitrary cutoffs, at least where a more principled cost-benefit analysis isn't worth it.
Someone born a meter away over the border from the US is a Mexican citizen, and nobody I know claims that they should be considered 50:50 each for that reason alone. Arbitrariness, while ideally avoided, is acceptable.
I will bite every bullet I must bite, and not one more or less (while lead poisoning is less of a concern, I wish to retain my teeth). You have no recourse to someone who does that, short of force of arms, and that's a symmetrical weapon and deprecated by civilized society for good reason.
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