The Argument From Marginal Cases

I would advise you to be cautious in concluding that an argument is an instance of the Sorites paradox. There is a long tradition of dismissing arguments for this reason which upon closer inspection have been found to be relevantly dissimilar to the canonical Sorites formulation. Two examples are Chalmers's "fading qualia" argument and Parfit's "psychological spectrum" argument.

My point was that this merely shifted the ground of debate. People began saying that blacks, women, etc. were "not really human" or "sub-human". Today there are those who think fetuses have the same moral rights as babies, and those who say fetuses are not "really human [individuals]". And so on.

In other words, it's a game of definitions and reference class tennis. You should taboo "members of H. Sapiens Sapiens" and specify how you really assign moral value to someone. Your definition should also work with outright non-, pre- and post-humans too, unless you're willing to say outright that anyone who can't breed with today's humans necessarily has zero moral worth.

That's a good pragmatic strategy for rulers, but its only moral implication is "might makes right".

(Killing infants is also bad because we expect them to at some point have moral value, so maximizing over all time means we should include them.)

I'll add in:

Will you judge me for the answer I provide? Will someone else do so? Will a potential future employer look this up? Will I, by answering this, slightly alter internal ethical injunctions against murdering children that, frankly, are there for a good reason?

See The Least Convenient Possible World, Better Disagreement.

When you bring up things like the law, you're breaking thought experiments, and dodging the real interesting question someone is trying to ask. The obvious intent of the question is to weigh how much you care about one day old infants vs how much you care about mentally healthy adults. Whoever posed the experiment can clarify and add things like "Assume it's legal," or "Assume you won't get caught." But if you force them to, you are wasting their time. And especially over an online forum, there is no incentive to, because if they do, you might just respond with other similar dodges such as "I don't want to kill enough that it becomes a significant fraction of the species," or "By killing, I would damage my inhibitions against killing babies which I want to preserve," or "I don't want to create grieving parents," or "If people find out someone is killing babies, they will take costly countermeasures to protect their babies, which will cause harm across society."

If you don't want to answer without these objections out of the way, bring up the obvious fix to the thought experiment in your first answer, like "Assuming it was legal/ I wouldn't caught, then I would kill N babies," or "I wouldn't kill any babies even if it was legal and I wouldn't get caught, because I value babies so much," and then explain the difference which is important to you between babies and chickens, because that's obviously what Locaha was driving at.

It could be a feature if the secular value is a big house or something, and the sacred value is whatever you might donate to an effective charity for.

It's definitely not a feature if the sacred value is sacred to the individual because when they imagine compromising it, they imagine scorn from their peers, and if society has handed it down as a sacred value of that sort since antiquity.

Also, not all values that people will treat as lexically lower than their most sacred values (In reality, there are probably more than 2 tiers of values, of course) are things you would probably want to get rid of. Most of fun theory is probably much lower on the hierarchy of things that cannot be traded away than human life, and yet you still want concern for it to have a significant role in shaping the future.

And then there's taboo tradeoffs between a certain amount of a thing, and a smaller amount of the same thing, and following the kind of thought process I warned against leads you to into the territory of clear madness like choosing specks over torture no matter the number of specks.

A more troubling counterargument to what I said is that no matter what you do you are living an answer to the question, so you can't just ignore it. This is true if you are an effective altruist (who has already rejected working on existential risk), and trying to decide whether to focus on helping humans or helping animals. Then you really need to do a utilitarian calculus that requires that number.

If I needed that number, I would first try to spend some time around the relevant sort of animal (or the closest approximation I could get), and try to gather as much information as possible about what it was cognitively capable of, hang out with some animal-loving hippies to counteract social pressure in favor of valuing humans infinitely more than animals. Then I might try and figure things out indirectly, through separate comparisons to a third variable (Perhaps my own time? I don't think I feel any hard taboo tradeoffs at work when I think about how much time I'd spend to help animals or how much I'd spend to help humans, though maybe I've just worn out the taboo by thinking about trading my time for lives as much as I have (Edit: that sounded a lot more evil than is accurate. To clarify, killing people to save time does sound horrifying to me, but not bothering to save distant strangers doesn't)).

Thank you for your reply, JoshuaZ.

How is this relevant to the question?

I think jkaufman and the wikipedia entry cited are making a claim that natural rights exist, and should be afforded to humans and animals. I think this claim is in error, and arguments based on this claim will also be in error. But if no claim of natural rights is made, then the possibility opens to explain a difference between humans and other animals. I say again: difference. Not better, not worse, not within-rights, only different. That difference is that humans make laws and animals do not make laws.

You say some humans don't make laws for cultural reasons. Can you see the paradox within that single sentence? Differentiating laws from 'formal laws' is a true Scotsman sort of argument. Call it cultural or call it formal laws, there are things the hunter gatherer groups you mention do that no animal does.

Moreover, there's no coherent step to get from "humans make laws" to "therefore our laws should only apply to humans or should treat humans and animals differently."

I did not say anything about how humans should treat each other or how humans should treat animals. 'Should' is a natural law sort of a word, and that's what I'm claiming does not exist.

I am often wrong or inarticulate or both, and I thank you for the chance to clarify. What might seem to some a difference between humans and animals is a confusion between laws (which humans make and animals don't) and natural law (which does not exist for humans or animals). Here I think you and I might be in agreement: there's no line between humans and animals in this regard. All us critters share that lack of something.