I eat chicken but I don’t eat mammals. This is partly for environmental reasons, but it is also because my ethics are not cosmopolitan. I think beings that are more cognitively similar to me are owed more moral concern (by me, not everyone else), not merely because they are more likely to be sentient or sapient or whatever, but because they are more likely to share my interests and outlook on the world, have emotions that I can identify with, etc. So I believe that I have greater moral obligations to my family and friends than to strangers, greater moral obligations to humans than to great apes, and so on. In the absence of contrary evidence, I use distance on the evolutionary tree as a proxy for cognitive distance. On those grounds, I am pretty uncomfortable with the suffering that cattle (and other mammals) undergo in the factory farming industry. I am significantly less uncomfortable about the suffering that chickens undergo.
So I guess my point is that you shouldn’t be weighing chicken suffering against cattle suffering on a one-to-one scale, because completely cosmopolitan ethical systems are wrong. Our sphere of moral concern shouldn’t work like an absolute threshold, where we have equal concern for all entities within the sphere and no concern for any entity outside it. Instead, it should gradually attenuate with distance. I probably can’t convince you of all this in a single comment, but perhaps you should at least consider it as a morally relevant possibility.
I eat chicken but I don’t eat mammals. This is partly for environmental reasons, but it is also because my ethics are not cosmopolitan. I think beings that are more cognitively similar to me are owed more moral concern (by me, not everyone else), not merely because they are more likely to be sentient or sapient or whatever, but because they are more likely to share my interests and outlook on the world, have emotions that I can identify with, etc. So I believe that I have greater moral obligations to my family and friends than to strangers, greater moral obligations to humans than to great apes, and so on. In the absence of contrary evidence, I use distance on the evolutionary tree as a proxy for cognitive distance. On those grounds, I am pretty uncomfortable with the suffering that cattle (and other mammals) undergo in the factory farming industry. I am significantly less uncomfortable about the suffering that chickens undergo.
So I guess my point is that you shouldn’t be weighing chicken suffering against cattle suffering on a one-to-one scale, because completely cosmopolitan ethical systems are wrong. Our sphere of moral concern shouldn’t work like an absolute threshold, where we have equal concern for all entities within the sphere and no concern for any entity outside it. Instead, it should gradually attenuate with distance. I probably can’t convince you of all this in a single comment, but perhaps you should at least consider it as a morally relevant possibility.