Problem
Immanuel Kant says that in order to act ethically, we must not undertake any moral action that we were not willing to make into a universal law, and that in practical terms, this means that we must treat other rational beings as "ends in themselves."
It seems that in order to act ethically by treating other rational beings as ends in themselves, we must have some idea as to what they will their ends to be. What are they experiencing? What makes them happy? What do they want?
• Is it possible to develop an understanding of the experiences of the entities we discussed earlier in this class (Javier, Merf, my MacBook pro, the Golem, the holoanencephalic fetus)? If not, is it possible to act ethically toward them?
• And what about if we expand the boundaries of entities thought to have some element of consciousness and therefore, experience? Like the bat, or the slime mold?