Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar? If you are I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities. Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life as an attempt to reach some kind of moral middle ground.
> Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar?
Yes. That's clearly something that happens in human society. For instance, many of the US founding fathers were aware that slavery contradicted the principles they were fighting for. However, slavery was so ingrained in their society that most didn't advocate for abolition, or even free their own slaves.
> We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities.
If that's the case, then why do most Westerners object to eating dogs and whales? As far as I can tell, it's just because we have an established norm of eating pigs and chickens but not dogs or whales.
> Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life
99% of meat is produced in factory farms. It's legal and routine for chickens to have their beaks cut off to prevent them from packing each other to death, which they're prone to do when confined to tiny cages. Most consumers object to such practices when asked, but meat consumption is so ingrained in our culture that most people just choose not to think about.
Have we really chosen to minimize the suffering? That seems more like virtue signaling by the industry at most. Factory farming is very much still the norm, and it's horrific. It seems we've actually maximized it or have at least increased it above the previous norm.
I'm unsure how we would treat a sentient AI, but our track record with sentient, intelligent animals is one of torture and covering up that torture with lies. It's an out of sight, out of mind policy.
We eat pigs and chickens because they are high-value nutrition. It's reasonable to describe meat as a luxury; but not in the sense of something nice but unnecessary. Many people depend on meat, especially if they live somewhere that's not suited to agriculture, like the arctic. And many people depend on fish.
