As a concrete example of philosophical arguments being important, @Wladimir J. Alonso, the founder and innovation director of the Welfare Footprint Institute (WFI), values averting intense suffering more than is justified by its intensity.
2 more notable examples. From the comments under this thread, Bob Fischer, who led Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) moral weight project, and is the president of the Arthropoda Foundation, and Mal Graham, who is the strategy director of Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), and together with Bob “make[s] most of the strategic and granting decisions for Arthropoda”, prioritise farmed invertebrates over soil animals “in part because we don’t endorse precise-probabilities approaches to handling uncertainty”. In addition, at least Bob “also want[s] robustness in the case for sentience”, which I am interpreting as a narrower distribution of the probability of sentience.
2 more notable examples. From the comments under this thread, Bob Fischer, who led Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) moral weight project, and is the president of the Arthropoda Foundation, and Mal Graham, who is the strategy director of Wild Animal Initiative (WAI), and together with Bob “make[s] most of the strategic and granting decisions for Arthropoda”, prioritise farmed invertebrates over soil animals “in part because we don’t endorse precise-probabilities approaches to handling uncertainty”. In addition, at least Bob “also want[s] robustness in the case for sentience”, which I am interpreting as a narrower distribution of the probability of sentience.