[fkyoureadthedoc]

> [2] To preempt the inevitable petty drive-by pedant, I define "human" as any animal with these two properties, so according to this view, an intelligent alien from another planet would also be human, despite occupying a place in a separate phylogenetic tree or whatever.

Your alien might have some 3rd property that you do not, and thus may farm you.

A future AI that can produce and consume the sum total of all recorded human knowledge within the amount of time that you have a single thought will likely have many emergent properties that you do not, and thus may farm you as well.

> Indeed, it usually rests on sentiment or convention rather than a sound and rationally grounded objective ethics.

Your whole argument rests on sentiment and convention, and would have been summarily rejected by the slave owner based on his own.

[lo_zamoyski]

> Your alien might have some 3rd property that you do not, and thus may farm you.

It is irrelevant, because reason and free will are sufficient to guarantee rights. Whether someone respects them is a separate question.

Also, it is a vacuous posit. You can't approach these properties superficially. Intellect and free will are not some arbitrary, contentless properties in some bag of properties of equally arbitrary status. They determine essentially and intrinsically what it means to be human. They are constitutive of humanity. It means something to have an intellect and free will, and they have consequences for things like body plan. You're approach is basically that of a child playing a game thinking he can just mix and match properties arbitrarily in a bucket without any consideration given to cohesion or causal relations. This is perhaps the effect of teleological blindness, which renders the universe unintelligible and ultimately undermines the viability of the entire discussion.

> A future AI that can produce and consume the sum total of all recorded human knowledge within the amount of time that you have a single thought will likely have many emergent properties that you do not, and thus may farm you as well.

First, AI is not intelligent and doesn't possess agency, as I have already explained elsewhere. To attribute these to AI is pure science fiction and fantasy rooted in a failure to grasp what computation is and what it lacks in relation to intellect. Second, even if we assume what you've written, it's not clear what your point is. What you seem to be describing is an evil being. I mean, I can farm people today, right? But I have no right to do so. I would be committing an immoral act.

> Your whole argument rests on sentiment and convention, and would have been summarily rejected by the slave owner based on his own.

Ha! No, it is absolutely not. It is rooted in natural law theory. NLT is one of or the most defensible moral theory there is.