So with consciousness, is it a useful concept? Well it certainly labels something without which I would simply not care about this conversation at all, as well as a bunch of other things. I personally believe p-zombies are impossible, that building a working human except without consciousness would be like building a working gasoline engine except without heat. I mention this for context, I think my believe about p-zombies is actually pretty common.

About the statement "I shouldn't eat chickens because they are conscious" You ask what is it about consciousness that makes it wrong to eat its possessor? You don't really try to answer the question, but I think there is an answer: we shouldn't eat things that don't want us to eat them. Probably more to the point, we shouldn't kill things that don't want us to kill them, and I would imagine the Chicken is much more concerned with our killing it than what happens after that. And with that idea, if we relabel consciousness as zxc, but zxc is still that thing that allows something to want other things, then it still works to say we shouldn't eat chickens because they are zxc and do not want us to kill them.

If I have somehow missed your point, I am sorry. I did hope it would be valuable to suggest that "we shouldn't eat chickens because they don't want us to kill them" was a more fundamental moral statement than appealing to the abstraction of their consciousness.