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deskglass comments on Link: Rob Bensinger on Less Wrong and vegetarianism - Less Wrong
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It's typically the chickens laying the eggs that people are concerned about. And maybe to a lesser extent the male chickens of the chicken breed used for egg production. (Maybe you're already clear on that, but I have spoken to people who were confused by veganism's prohibition on eating animal products in addition to animals.)
It doesn't seem safe to assume that their suffering is subjectively less bad than our suffering. Maybe it's worse - maybe the experience of pain and fear is worse when you can only feel it and can't think about it. Either way, I don't see why you'd err on the side of 'It's an uncertain thing so lets keep doing what we're doing and diminish the potential harms when we can' rather than 'It's not that unlikely that we're torturing these things, we should stop in all ways that don't cost us much.'
But yes, creating vat-grown meat and/or pain-free animals should be a priority.
So, there's a heuristic that I think is a decent one, which is that less-conscious things have less potential suffering. I feel that if you had a suffer-o-meter and strapped it to the heads of paramecia, ants, centipedes, birds, mice, and people, they'd probably rank in approximately that order. I have some uncertainty in there, and I could be swayed to a different belief with evidence or an angle I had failed to consider, but I have a hard time imagining what those might be.
I think I buy into the notion that most-conscious doesn't strictly mean most-suffering, though - if there were a slightly less conscious, but much more anxious branch of humanoids out there, I think they'd almost certainly be capable of more suffering than humans.