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Interesting article, sounds a very good introduction to scope insensitivity.
Two points where I disagree :
I don't think birds are a good example of it, at least not for me. I don't care much for individual birds. I definitely wouldn't spend $3 nor any significant time to save a single bird. I'm not a vegetarian, it would be quite hypocritical for me to invest resources in saving one bird for "care" reasons and then going to eat a chicken at dinner. On the other hand, I do care about ecological disasters, massive bird death, damage to natural reserves, threats to a whole specie, ... So a massive death of birds is something I'm ready to invest resources to prevent, but not a single death of bird.
I know it's quite taboo here, and most will disagree with me, but to me, the answer to how big the problems are is not charity, even "efficient" charity (which seems a very good idea on paper but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of it), but more into structural changes - politics. I can't fail to notice that two of the "especially virtuous people" you named, Gandhi and Mandela, both were active mostly in politics, not in charity. To quote another one often labeled "especially virtuous people", Martin Luther King, "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
This strikes me as backward reasoning - if your moral intuitions about large numbers of animals dying are broken, isn't it much more likely that you made a mistake about vegetarianism?
(Also, three dollars isn't that high a value to place on something. I can definitely believe you get more than $3 worth of utility from eating a chicken. Heck, the chicken probably cost a good bit more than $3.)
Hey, I just wanted to chime in here. I found the moral argument against eating animals compelling for years but lived fairly happily in conflict with my intuitions there. I was literally saying, "I find the moral argument for vegetarianism compelling" while eating a burger, and feeling only slightly awkward doing so.
It is in fact possible (possibly common) for people to 'reason backward' from behavior (eat meat) to values ("I don't mind large groups of animals dying"). I think that particular example CAN be consistent with your moral function (if you really don't care about non-human animals very much at all) - but by no means is that guaranteed.
That's a good point. Humans are disturbingly good at motivated reasoning and compartmentalization on occasion.
It may be more accurate to say something along the lines of "I mind large numbers of animals dying for no good reason. Food is a good reason, and thus do not mind eating chicken. An oil spill is not a good reason."
Birds are the classic example, both in the literature and (through the literature) here.
I very strongly agree with your point here, but would like to add that the problem of finding a political structure which properly maximises the happiness of the people living under it is a very difficult one, and missteps are easy.