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shminux comments on Effective Altruism Through Advertising Vegetarianism? - LessWrong
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I'm parsing this as follows: I don't have a good intuition on whose suffering matters, and unbounded utilitarianism is vulnerable to the Repugnant Conclusion, so I will pick an obvious threshold: humans and decide to not care about other animals until and unless the reason to care arises.
EDIT: the Schelling point for the caring threshold seems to be shifting toward progressively less intelligent (but still cute and harmless) species as time passes
Have you read The Narrowing Circle?
I tried. But it's written in extreme Gwernian: well researched, but long, rambling and without a decent summary upfront. I skipped to the (also poorly written) conclusion, missing most of the arguments, and decided that it's not worth my time. The essay would be right at home as a chapter in some dissertation, though.
Leaving aside the dynamics of the Schelling point, did the rest of my reply miss the mark?
What I mostly got out of it is that there are two big ways in which the circle of things with moral worth has shrunk rather than grown throughout history: it shrunk to exclude gods, and it shrunk to exclude dead people.
I'm not sure what your comment was intended to be, but if it was intended to be a summary of the point I was implicitly trying to make, then it's close enough.
"Cute" I'll give you.
"Harmless" I'm not sure about.
That is, it's not in the least bit clear to me that I can reliably predict, from species S being harmful and cute, that the Schelling point you describe won't/hasn't shifted so as to include S on the cared-about side.
For clarity: I make no moral claims here about any of this, and am uninterested in the associated moral claims, I'm just disagreeing with the bare empirical claim.
I think it's simply a case of more animals moving into the harmless category as our technology improves.
... are you including chimpanzees there, by any chance?