, the father of utilitarianism, laid the groundwork for welfare. He famously wrote: "The question is not, Can they reason ? nor, Can they talk ? but, Can they suffer ?" For Bentham, suffering was the moral currency. If an animal suffers, that suffering matters, but it can be weighed against human benefits.
However, the two camps share a common enemy: . The most urgent reality is that 70 billion land animals are slaughtered annually for human consumption, and countless billions more live in conditions that meet the legal definition of torture.
Humans have higher cognitive capacities (morality, language, abstraction). Therefore, human interests always trump animal interests. Rebuttal: If intelligence is the metric, then human infants and the severely cognitively disabled would also have zero moral value.
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