âI do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering.â
I was responding to my interpretation of the sentence above. I agree that itâs a common position to assign infinitely higher importance to saving a human life compared to preventing any amount of animal suffering. My understanding of the quote above was that you made an even stronger claim since the expression is âany amount of human sufferingâ, which should include very low amounts of human suffering.
But I still think folk ethics on this issue is overconfident and doesnât take moral uncertainty properly into account. I also think that kind of incommensurability claims face other more general theoretical problems. âSavingâ a life is just another expression for extending it, since no intervention makes people immortal. That position would claim 0,0000000001% increase in the chance of prolonging a human life by one day is more important than preventing 1000000000 animals to be born into torture.
âI do not believe that any amount of the qualitatively different animal suffering adds up to any amount of human suffering.â
I was responding to my interpretation of the sentence above. I agree that itâs a common position to assign infinitely higher importance to saving a human life compared to preventing any amount of animal suffering. My understanding of the quote above was that you made an even stronger claim since the expression is âany amount of human sufferingâ, which should include very low amounts of human suffering.
But I still think folk ethics on this issue is overconfident and doesnât take moral uncertainty properly into account. I also think that kind of incommensurability claims face other more general theoretical problems. âSavingâ a life is just another expression for extending it, since no intervention makes people immortal. That position would claim 0,0000000001% increase in the chance of prolonging a human life by one day is more important than preventing 1000000000 animals to be born into torture.