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.
Some Fermi estimates; feel free to disagree with specific numbers and provide your own.
Let's take an average human life as a unit of value; i.e. the value of human's life is 1.
How large part of "a value of human's life" is "having lunch, in general, as opposed to only having a breakfast and a dinner every day of your life"? Let's say it's somewhere between 1/10 and 1/100, because there are many other things humans value, such as not being in pain, or having sex, or having status, or whatever.
If we estimate an average human life to be ab...
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