A generic problem with this type of reasoning is some form of the repugnant conclusion. If you don't put a Schelling fence somewhere, you end up with giving more moral weight to a large enough amount of cockroaches, bacteria or viruses than to that of humans.

In actuality, different groups of people implicitly have different Schelling points and then argue whose Schelling point is morally right. A standard Schelling point, say, 100 years ago, was all humans or some subset of humans. The situation has gotten more complicated recently, with some including only humans, humans and cute baby seals, humans and dolphins, humans and pets, or just pets without humans, etc.

So a consequentialist question would be something like

Where does it make sense to put a boundary between caring and not caring, under what circumstances and for how long?

Note this is no longer a Schelling point, since no implicit agreement of any kind is assumed. Instead, one tests possible choices against some terminal goals, leaving morality aside.

"If all nonhumans truly weren't sentient, then obviously singling out humans for the sphere of moral concern would not be speciesist."

David Pearce sums up antispeciesism excellently saying:

"The antispeciesist claims that, other things being equal, conscious beings of equivalent sentience deserve equal care and respect."

they go from baby to full grown that fast? I had no idea.

Terminal values can change with education. Saying that the coherent extrapolated volition of 19th-century slave owners would have been racist is equivalent to saying that either racism is justified by the facts, or the fundamental norms of rationality latent in 19th-century slave-owner cognition are radically unlike our contemporary fundamental norms of rationality. For instance, slave-owners don't don't on any deep level value consistency between their moral intuitions, or they assign zero weight to moral intuitions involving empathy.

If new experiences and rationality training couldn't ever persuade a slave-owner to become an egalitarian, then I'm extremely confused by the fact that society has successfully eradicated the memes that restructured those slave-owners' brains so quickly. Maybe I'm just more sanguine than most people about the possibility that new information can actually change people's minds (including their values). Science doesn't progress purely via the eradication of previous generations.

Idea: if you're very interested in promoting veganism or vegitarianism, help make it taste better, or invest in or donate to those who are helping make it taste better. As my other much-downvoted comment showed, I am very skeptical that appeals to altruism will have nearly as much of an affect as appeals to self-interest, especially outside of this community. I believe most people eat meat because it just tastes better than their alternatives.

Grown crops are far more efficient to produce than livestock, so there are plenty of other good reasons to transition away from the use of livestock in agriculture. If steak were made to "grow on trees", why pay all that extra for the real thing? If you lower the cost of vegetarianism by improving taste, more people will adopt it. If they don't adopt it they'll still be more likely to forgo meats for vegetarian dishes if those dishes taste better.

In the case of low-quality meats (e.g. McDonalds) the taste bar isn't even set very high.

When I first decided to be a vegetarian, I simply switched from tasty hamburgers to tasty veggieburgers and there was no problem at all.

I think your sample size might have lead you astray here. My personal experience is exactly the opposite. That said, I looked for studies of meat vs. faux meat taste and didn't find anything. I wonder if a love of meat over alternatives is innate or is learned, and if there exist vegetarian recipes which really do taste as good as the real thing.

I agree that this is potentially a high-impact avenue. New harvest is a charity which sponsors meat substitutes, both plant based and tissue engineered, if you are interested.

A question I have is how to evaluate the morality of the two options:

• A) Make it so that an animal is born, then later cause it considerable suffering
• B) Change the conditions so that the animal never exists

If everyone went vegetarian, the animal population would likely be greatly diminished and it isn't obvious to me that I'd choose option B over option A if I were on the menu. Are there some standard objections to the idea that option A is better than option B?

One quick objection might be that it proves too much. If John Beatmykids told me he wouldn't have kids unless he was permitted to beat them, I wouldn't give him a pass to beat any future children. Another objection might be that there's always a choice C, but here I don't see another option as realistic.

Don't farmers kill huge numbers of animals when they grow food because of tractors running over animals or from chemicals designed to kill animals that would otherwise eat the grown food? I suspect that most of the marginal animal suffering arising from my eating steak comes from the production of the food used to feed the cow.

I'll be wearing a black t-shirt that has a star on it and reads Sulaco from the movie Aliens.

I messed up. It should be at 15.00.