Yup, totally arbitrary. That's why I prefer the poetry yeast writes about the beauty of the universe and the pain of existence to that written by humans.

My point is that the hierarchy is ordered by increasingly sophisticated internal conscious experience. This is the least arbitrary thing ever when it comes to concern around suffering.

My argument was more that there is no association between a theoretical "hierarchy of care" and actual, real brain sophistication. If there were, people would for example eat cats before they ate pigs.

Cats don't have much meat, I imagine larger mammals are farmed because they're large. But inhibition to eating pigs would be larger than that for eating cats, I'd agree on that.

Sorry edit: I disagree strongly that there is no association, it's an 80-20 thing. 80% can be explained by real brain sophistication, with 20% explained by cultural baggage.

I didn't realize that was your argument. I'd agree with that.

"As simple as"--are you placing birds in a hierarchy?

Sure, a hierarchy of complexity. You don't think such a thing would exist?

Why are you trying to seek out a hypocrisy angle in my arguments? I feel like that's a somewhat boring way to go about this.

> why does human experimentation happen ever?

There are a lot of drugs that pass animal testing only to fail human testing. Ethics review boards are a pretty good, but imperfect way to moderate the harm of human experimentation.

> hierarchies like that are almost totally arbitrary

This hierarchy corresponds roughly to some mix of genetic, morphological and behavioral similarity. It's obviously not arbitrary.

> like anything about a culture

lol

Because expiraments on humans can provide information that expiraments on other animals can't, and the information in question is information that we care about.

In addition, humans can consent to things.

Consent is interesting, usually poor people will get paid for it, in which case it's a sort of coerced consent.