I suspect people are doing the math wrong here. I agree that the value of chicken's life is smaller than 5% of value of human's life. But that doesn't automatically imply that the value of chicken's life is smaller than the amount of pleasure the human derives from eating the chicken for lunch, as opposed to eating some vegetables instead.
I suspect that the usual human scope insensitivity makes some people conclude "if it is less than 1% of value of human life, it means that it is for all practical purposes zero, which means I am morally free to waste it in any quantities, because zero multiplied by any number remains zero". Uhm, it doesn't work this way.
Making someone eat broccoli for lunch instead of chicken is not the same as literally killing them. So when we discuss veganism, we shouldn't compare "chicken life" vs "human life", because that is not what the debate is about; that is a red herring. We should compare "chicken life" vs "additional utility a human gets from eating a chicken as opposed to eating something else".
I agree that we should be comparing the chicken's life (or a percentage of its life) to the extra utility from eating the chicken. The point is that the small utility that the human gets is still larger than the value of the chicken life, because the entire value of the human life is so vastly greater than the value of the chicken life.
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