Life is just an ongoing chemical reaction. Maybe in the future people will start empathizing with metal and feel a moral prerogative to stop its oxidation. Larry David may be onto something when he asks 'Do you even respect wood!?'
Isn't rusting metal just metal that's trying to return to its natural form?
There's a famous phrase about humans being Nature's tool for adding plastics into the world.
1) Life is just a chemical reaction, human sadness / happiness don't matter
2) Humans are fundamentally different than other animals - our pain is somehow more real than animal pain
3) Animal pain does matter.
Personally I favor 3)
Humans are fundamentally different because that's us. And even between humans, there is a scale. To me, the only real pain is mine. But, I also have the ability to feel other people's pain, so the pain of people close to me is also real, but less so, it is indirect. To feel pain for a random human requires some active thinking. The further we go, the less real pain is, simply because our brain can't process and mirror it.
Animals look a bit like us and show similar pain reaction so we can emphasize somehow. But for everything after plants, we are getting too far. And then, we can introduce computers: can an AI feel pain? How advanced does it have to be if it does? Maybe it is all programs. Unit tests must hurt...
But from an ethical perspective, the pain of a random person is just as important, right?
> Animals look a bit like us and show similar pain reaction so we can emphasize somehow. But for everything after plants, we are getting too far.
Animals don't just show similar pain reactions - the biochemical pathways are the exact same. For me, I have to assume basic physical pain is nearly the same, at least for mammals. For plants I don't know. It's possible they have some pain, but I'd expect it to be very different and lesser. For computers I see no reason to think there's any physical pain (though perhaps in the future)