[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Why would I edit it? Do you believe yourself to have supernatural powers of shaming or something?

You're the one that is dangerous, the one people should be worried to share a planet with. When your only principle is whether you feel something is a person or not, then nothing stops you from just suddenly no longer feeling the rest of us to be people.

[YellOh]

Unfortunately I've spent time on Reddit, where people in a controversial conversation would sometimes drastically edit or delete their messages (or mods would delete them), making the conversation unreadable. I hope your comment stays up; it doesn't seem like HN has the same problem.

Theoretically, even if I gave up on the entire project of ethics, there would still be self-interested reasons to be kind to humans. That's what your previous comment was pointing out, right? If I stopped caring about my current ethics, you'd only have to get along with another person with similar thoughts.

Also, as a side note, I don't particularly care whether something is a person or not. I only care whether it's capable of feeling pain. Even if we somehow "discovered" that plants were people, I have zero moral feelings about plants since (as far as I'm aware) they are incapable of pain. I don't think mice are people, but I care about them because I think there's a reasonable chance they can experience pain.