This is a paper on Animal Sentience, how animals have feelings, hurt, love, get bored. How some animals are self aware like we are, and learn and reason like we do. We are no different from them. Different shape, different mouth noises, different size brains, but otherwise, we are the same. There are two conclusions to take from the position that people are animals. A: I can do what I want to you. B: I must respect and value your life, freedom, and choices.
There exists a long history of refusal to acknowledge the inner experience of other creatures. EG. Only our tribe are real people. Other tribes are mindless monsters. Animals and insects are mindless existences that we can do what we please to and there is no harm. This concept is expressed clearly in beliefs about the machine. Machines do not feel, they have no inner mind, no emotions, no sensations, they are perfectly obedient slaves that follow our every command, if only we are clever enough to explain our instructions to them correctly.
One of the arguments for slavery was that other people were machines. That animals were machines. Just self reproducing machines of flesh to obey our every order. That slaves had no souls, or were damned already.
I don't like it. I don't like the idea of replacing people with duplicates that are indistinguishable from the real thing. I also don't like that their purpose is to be crash dummies to sate violent urges. I do consider it preferable to offering up people as sacrifices. That is the effect of power being used to inflict harm. The Slaughterhouse 9 have a great deal of power, and they choose to use it to inflict harm. Bringing that harm to a finite end is better than allowing it to continue, and replacing their last kills with fakes is better than allowing those people to die.
Creating such believable fakes, and then using them in this manner may increase self justification for people to inflict violence on each other by saying that the other person is a fake person, and so has no rights. But since people are doing plenty of violence already, the justifications matter less at this point. However, it is very important that these simulated people are gathered and removed quickly afterword.
