Because people generally care about animals in an aggregative sense—they care about the total amount of suffering.
That doesn’t seem to do the work you imply it does. Being able to spare 100 lives is a huge feat of good, even if the total amount of people suffering is much greater.
No, firstly because it costs AMF over $3,000 per life, which is 600,000x more than the figure I was discussing. Multiplying a trivial number by 600,000 can yield non-trivial numbers!
But it’s still very cheap, even if it’s much larger than other very cheap figures.
Secondly because we generally think of human lives as being less interchangeable. Killing one human to save one other is not acceptable.
It seems speciesist to apply some moral standards to humans but not nonhumans.
It’s unreasonable to expect people to dedicate 100% of their resources to altruism. But what people are willing to dedicate, we should dedicate in the most efficient manner. It’s better for both the individual and animals in aggregate for someone to eat meat for lunch and donate $1 than to abstain from meat.
As argued elsewhere on this page, it seems dietary change has many more benefits than a small donation that has roughly the same (or even better) direct impact. And your original argument, that “many people are willing to pay much more than 2 cents to eat meat,” doesn’t do any work in addressing those additional benefits and simply draws from personal preference.
That doesn’t seem to do the work you imply it does. Being able to spare 100 lives is a huge feat of good, even if the total amount of people suffering is much greater.
But it’s still very cheap, even if it’s much larger than other very cheap figures.
It seems speciesist to apply some moral standards to humans but not nonhumans.
As argued elsewhere on this page, it seems dietary change has many more benefits than a small donation that has roughly the same (or even better) direct impact. And your original argument, that “many people are willing to pay much more than 2 cents to eat meat,” doesn’t do any work in addressing those additional benefits and simply draws from personal preference.