begs a very important question as part of its central premise. Even given the idea that animals have moral weight, it does not follow that there exist a number of them that are of equal moral weight to a human (or another kind of animal, etc). There exist infinite sequences that converge to finite values.
It seems pretty clear to me that moral weight is not linearly additive. This is why we consider it worse when a species goes from 1,000 members to 0 members than when it goes from 1,001,000 members to 1,000,000 members, for instance.
''Animal intelligence correlates with X"
But since what we care about is suffering and not intelligence, we're implying that more intelligence = more suffering, which if true would mean that hurting a children or a baby causes less suffering than hurting an adult.
Yet I would argue that the opposite seems to be true given that intelligence allows us to cope and contextualize and understand our suffering better than a child.
At best, there is no correlation between intelligence and suffering.
At worse, the opposite is true.
This post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/26/cortical-neuron-number-matches-intuitive-perceptions-of-moral-value-across-animals/
begs a very important question as part of its central premise. Even given the idea that animals have moral weight, it does not follow that there exist a number of them that are of equal moral weight to a human (or another kind of animal, etc). There exist infinite sequences that converge to finite values.
It seems pretty clear to me that moral weight is not linearly additive. This is why we consider it worse when a species goes from 1,000 members to 0 members than when it goes from 1,001,000 members to 1,000,000 members, for instance.