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Terrabod wrote:

I think we're in agreement here. My point is just that we don't live in an ideal world and research shows that due ethical consideration isn't handed out on a scientific basis but on a basis that's tainted with human prejudice. For example, giving dogs human characteristics (like "he/she is a good listener") makes people more invested in the dogs' safety and welfare compared to when the dogs' behaviour is described accurately. This might be beneficial because it tells us how we can encourage people to care for animals but it also shows that if we can't see a particular animal's behaviour through a human lens then our bias denies that animal due ethical consideration for no legitimate reason.

I agree that everything is affected by our human lens but there is no way around that. If you start to look at this from the bottom up you see science does inform the foundation of how we treat animals and then in turn our lens decodes that information. You don’t care what happens to rocks right? Because rocks aren’t alive and we have a high degree of confidence that rocks are not alive. But why is it that you care more about things that are alive vs. not? Well, because you are alive of course. Why else?

Some of you will find this a ridiculous argument but if agree that all creatures should be treated ethically equally(An ant vs a dog) you will start to run into logical inconsistencies on how you arrived there. There is no difference to prefering Alive to Inert in our ethical standards and prefering animals that have additional human traits. And it would be absurd for me to expect you to treat rocks ethically just in case we simply don’t understand them through a human lens.

That being said, I purposefully avoid stepping on ants and bugs even though in some ways its logically inconsistent with what I know. I am nice to my anthropormophic AI devices despite the likelyhood they aren’t sentient. But if other people don’t do that, I am not sure I can fault them on it. That applies to all animals as well.

The only thing we can hold people accountable to ethically is on things we know.