The argument from marginal cases claims that you can't both think that humans matter morally and that animals don't, because no reasonable set of criteria for moral worth cleanly separates all humans from all animals. For example, perhaps someone says that suffering only matters when it happens to something that has some bundle of capabilities like linguistic ability, compassion, and/or abstract reasoning. If livestock don't have these capabilities, however, then some people such as very young children probably don't either.
This is a strong argument, and it avoids the noncentral fallacy. Any set of qualities you value are going to vary over people and animals, and if you make a continuum there's not going to be a place you can draw a line that will fall above all animals and below all people. So why do I treat humans as the only entities that count morally?
If you asked me how many chickens I would be willing to kill to save your life, the answer is effectively "all of them". [1] This pins down two points on the continuum that I'm clear on: you and chickens. While I'm uncertain where along there things start getting up to significant levels, I think it's probably somewhere that includes no or almost no animals but nearly all humans. Making this distinction among humans, however, would be incredibly socially destructive, especially given how unsure I am about where the line should go, and so I think we end up with a much better society if we treat all humans as morally equal. This means I end up saying things like "value all humans equally; don't value animals" when that's not my real distinction, just the closest schelling point.
[1] Chicken extinction would make life worse for many other people, so I wouldn't actually do that, but not because of the effect on the chickens.
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.
The argument from marginal cases claims that you can't both think that humans matter morally and that animals don't, because no reasonable set of criteria for moral worth cleanly separates all humans from all animals. For example, perhaps someone says that suffering only matters when it happens to something that has some bundle of capabilities like linguistic ability, compassion, and/or abstract reasoning. If livestock don't have these capabilities, however, then some people such as very young children probably don't either.
This is a strong argument, and it avoids the noncentral fallacy. Any set of qualities you value are going to vary over people and animals, and if you make a continuum there's not going to be a place you can draw a line that will fall above all animals and below all people. So why do I treat humans as the only entities that count morally?
If you asked me how many chickens I would be willing to kill to save your life, the answer is effectively "all of them". [1] This pins down two points on the continuum that I'm clear on: you and chickens. While I'm uncertain where along there things start getting up to significant levels, I think it's probably somewhere that includes no or almost no animals but nearly all humans. Making this distinction among humans, however, would be incredibly socially destructive, especially given how unsure I am about where the line should go, and so I think we end up with a much better society if we treat all humans as morally equal. This means I end up saying things like "value all humans equally; don't value animals" when that's not my real distinction, just the closest schelling point.
[1] Chicken extinction would make life worse for many other people, so I wouldn't actually do that, but not because of the effect on the chickens.
I also posted this on my blog.