But isn’t the relevant harm here animal suffering rather than animal death? It would seem pretty awful to prefer that an animal suffer torturous agony rather than a human suffer a mild (1000x less bad) papercut.
I think comparisons to paper cuts and other minor harms don’t work very well with people’s intuitions: a lot of people feel like (and sometimes explicitly endorse that) no number of paper cuts can outweigh torturous agony. See this old LW post and the disagreements around it.
Instead, my experience is people’s intuitions work better when thinking in probabilities or quantities: what chance of suffering for a human would balance against that for a chicken? Or how many chickens suffering in that way would be equivalent to one human?
But isn’t the relevant harm here animal suffering rather than animal death? It would seem pretty awful to prefer that an animal suffer torturous agony rather than a human suffer a mild (1000x less bad) papercut.
I think comparisons to paper cuts and other minor harms don’t work very well with people’s intuitions: a lot of people feel like (and sometimes explicitly endorse that) no number of paper cuts can outweigh torturous agony. See this old LW post and the disagreements around it.
Instead, my experience is people’s intuitions work better when thinking in probabilities or quantities: what chance of suffering for a human would balance against that for a chicken? Or how many chickens suffering in that way would be equivalent to one human?
Fair point, thanks!