We can’t measure suffering of course across species. (Really, we can barely measure it among humans.) So we have to rely on extrapolation from our own experience, which in a way amounts to extrapolating from one datapoint. My intuition says that non-humans animals don’t have a full consciousness by humans standards, and that their moral value is correspondingly less. I feel relatively confident in that judgement. But given scale of factory farming, how neglected the issue is among the general public, and that it intuitively it feels like at least chickens and mammals have some consciousness I still focus my support for EA causes on animal welfare ones.
I think that if you simply make a point estimate of the scale of human and animal suffering you could end up with them being comparable, (see eg here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TEu5SroJYRezrMuf7/how-much-physical-suffering-is-there-part-ii-animals) but you could also easily end up with human suffering or animal suffering being much larger. One major reason the EA movement works on both causes is I think a form of risk-aversion, not because it is what an expected value calculation suggests.
We can’t measure suffering of course across species. (Really, we can barely measure it among humans.) So we have to rely on extrapolation from our own experience, which in a way amounts to extrapolating from one datapoint. My intuition says that non-humans animals don’t have a full consciousness by humans standards, and that their moral value is correspondingly less. I feel relatively confident in that judgement. But given scale of factory farming, how neglected the issue is among the general public, and that it intuitively it feels like at least chickens and mammals have some consciousness I still focus my support for EA causes on animal welfare ones.
I think that if you simply make a point estimate of the scale of human and animal suffering you could end up with them being comparable, (see eg here https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TEu5SroJYRezrMuf7/how-much-physical-suffering-is-there-part-ii-animals) but you could also easily end up with human suffering or animal suffering being much larger. One major reason the EA movement works on both causes is I think a form of risk-aversion, not because it is what an expected value calculation suggests.