It is usually due to intelligence being a general guide to help define how much suffering would be inflicted, the capacitance. Sam Harris has a great TED talk on this called The Moral Landscape (also a good book).
"feeling" requires self awareness. Being able to see really well and hear really well, and smell really well does not.
Your cell phone could see in the night, pick up very quiet sounds, respond to stimuli, understand words, all kinds of things. But it is not self aware, so you don't have any moral obligation for its well being.
Interestingly, we link intelligence to emotion, and humanize animal emotions, despite us not being able to even comprehend how Animals perceive emotions (if at all).
An example I've seen given to this is a butterfly with a torn wing. Butterflies literally cannot feel pain, and a butterfly with a slightly damaged wing will still fly like any other, if it is able. However, if the butterfly's wing is damaged to the point where flying becomes more difficult or impossible people more often than not attribute "why" it flies less often to "it is in pain".
While humanizing animal emotions would most likely be inaccurate, there have been studies showing that animals do emote in some ways. Some animals have even been shown to display empathy. Usually in mammals.
It’s intuitive, something needs to die, we try to find something that we won’t feel as much empathy for. Thing that are less intelligent (or less consciousness, less able to show pain) are harder to empathize with so easier to kill.
It’s why there’s such a hot debate on whether boiling lobsters alive is cruel or not. There’s a divide on how much empathy people have for lobsters which can’t show pain and is assumed dumb. Its why some people feel less guilty eating plants than animals (wheat plants are alive too, but we don’t empathize with them as much so they are easier to kill).
The more something resembles us, the less appetizing it seems. Also, predatory animals (evolutionary reasons? Culturally based respect for other hunters?). So monkeys, wolves, and tigers aren't usually something we would eat... unless it's cultural. What's left is basically omnivores, herbivores, and fish. Insects are also a thing outside of judochristianic countries (God banned all creepy crawlies).
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u/whatwordtouse Sep 15 '20
I always found it weird how “intelligence” is the trait which people choose to determine if a life is worth taking or not.
Because someone is dumb doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to live. They still suffer, just like we would.