Couldn't the same be said for the moral worth of human wellbeing, then?
In both cases inherent strife and conflict takes precedent over well-being in their natural environment, but we can artificially engineer a world with more well-being. For ourselves, and for animals. I personally don't see any good reason to deny sentient beings moral worth. What am I missing according to you?
Humans can coordinate with each other to reduce conflict. We can't coordinate with animals the same way.
We can create a world with more well-being for animals too, and we do, and that's good, but it's not equivalent to placing fundamental moral worth on all sentient experience.
To be concrete, consider a few levels of animal welfare:
1. Don't torture cats in the street for fun
2. Don't keep farm animals in cages
3. Devote significant resources to the welfare of shrimp
Humans being able to coordinate to reduce conflict might make improving human welfare more tractable, but I don't see why this would affect the moral value of their pain and suffering.
The distinction between valuing human and animal wellbeing this differently seems arbitrary and unjustified. You wouldn't keep a cognitively impaired human that you can't coordinate with in a cage and eat their corpse, either.
One could perhaps argue about how to deal with the 3rd level you outlined, but the first two just seem very obvious. Never heard any powerful argument to the contrary.
It's just orders of magnitude easier for humans to ignore (farmed) animal suffering.
It seems both unnecessary and unworkable, given the inherent strife and conflict in nature I described in this essay.
Couldn't the same be said for the moral worth of human wellbeing, then?
In both cases inherent strife and conflict takes precedent over well-being in their natural environment, but we can artificially engineer a world with more well-being. For ourselves, and for animals. I personally don't see any good reason to deny sentient beings moral worth. What am I missing according to you?
Humans can coordinate with each other to reduce conflict. We can't coordinate with animals the same way.
We can create a world with more well-being for animals too, and we do, and that's good, but it's not equivalent to placing fundamental moral worth on all sentient experience.
To be concrete, consider a few levels of animal welfare:
1. Don't torture cats in the street for fun
2. Don't keep farm animals in cages
3. Devote significant resources to the welfare of shrimp
I'm somewhere past 1 and maybe close to 2.
Humans being able to coordinate to reduce conflict might make improving human welfare more tractable, but I don't see why this would affect the moral value of their pain and suffering.
The distinction between valuing human and animal wellbeing this differently seems arbitrary and unjustified. You wouldn't keep a cognitively impaired human that you can't coordinate with in a cage and eat their corpse, either.
One could perhaps argue about how to deal with the 3rd level you outlined, but the first two just seem very obvious. Never heard any powerful argument to the contrary.
It's just orders of magnitude easier for humans to ignore (farmed) animal suffering.