I'd say it's rather simple, the issue is most people are unwilling to make the sacrifices required to live morally.
Given their clear intelligence and ability to suffer the ease with which people deny that animals are moral beings is disgusting.
This is why I am saying that one needs to draw a line, and that it isn't necessarily easy. It sounds like you made your choice and that it was easy for you, but that isn't the case for everybody.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/secret-language-of-plants/
Would you accept a plantation owner claiming slavery's immorality was not obvious because there were arguments to be had about the ethics of "wage slavery" etc?
>but that isn't the case for everybody.
This is a moral failing.
If this were not true why are we repulsed by the beating of an animal? Why do we invent such paradoxical concepts as the "humane" slaughterhouse?
Our moral intuition leads us to the answer but cultural norms and casuistry let us avoid it.
Attempting to quantify subjective matters is arguably one of the big reasons so many of the social sciences are facing replication crises. There are so many factors in play that the quantifications, or justifications, we provide to explain social phenomena like this are not very meaningful even if we think they are! The most important thing is to be aware of the facts, so much as possible, but beyond that simply to take your opinion as what it is - a subjective view based on a complex series of mental interactions that even you are not fully privy to.
What about another ape or an elephant?
Was it just a subjective discussion with no right or wrong answer?
The level of intelligence plays little role, as long as the animals don't use it to actively try to fight back or escape. E.g. pigs are no less smart than dogs.
And on your point about pig vs dogs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat
I just think thad dog meat can't be anything but an expensive delicacy, because to produce one unit of dog meat you already need many more units of other meat, to feed the dog.
This helps dogs and cats stay pets, largely protected from eating by human emotional attachment, while cows or pigs get pushed to the cattle sector, emotionally detached for food purposes.
Thing about consciousness, in the philosophical sense that you clearly mean it, is that it is completely unempirical and therefore does not exist within the scientific model. I know I have consciousness because I experience it, I assume you have consciousness because you are very like me, you assume these low IQ animals don't have consciousness because they are not like you. There exists no objective measurement of consciousness.
no, we wouldn't eat humans who do not have IQ of 1-3 year old, because we would recognize that they are human and don't have that IQ from disease or misfortune, not because of their inherent incapability of having it.
Your original claim implied that you believe this is because lower IQ equates to a lack of consciousness, which as I've already described cannot be objectively determined and is therefore a poor metric. If I understand you correctly, you are now saying that it's really the species that determines consciousness, which is equally invalid.
Either you are taking it on pure faith that certain species have consciousness and others do not, in which case there is little point in further discussion, or you are trying to claim that certain species are worth more than others because they seem to have a greater aptitude in certain categories. For some reason, this does not apply on an individual basis. How convenient for you, then, that these categories align perfectly with all the areas your species has great aptitude!
I invite you to consider this possibility: Your belief is not based on rational reasoning, you are just rationalizing your behavior.
You are not making rational logical arguments. You have started with your preferred conclusion and are employing rationalization to justify it. Every time I show you that your philosophy allows for things you find uncomfortable, you move the goalposts.
Case in point:
>Also, discussing whether or not I would eat a human is silly because I can't go to the supermarket and buy human flesh. So, let's keep this discussion away from meaningless hypotheticals.
This is a copout that means "I am afraid of what my philosophy actually means, so let's just ignore it". You could easily acquire and consume an infant if you wanted. There'd be severe consequences for doing so, of course, but that doesn't mean you can't do it. People do do it. None of that is relevant to the question of whether or not it is morally permissible to do so, now is it?
But you, you're not interested in making sense. You're uncomfortable, so you rationalize. Oh, it's not ok to eat infants even though they're well below my IQ threshold, even though it's completely possible, because they aren't sold in the grocery store!
Please.
In some cultures eating horse meat is normal, in others vegetarianism is the honourable goal. Have you ever asked yourself why you eat or why you don't eat some animals? It is typically a product of the culture we grew up in, rarely the product of an intentional thought process.
Would you eat another human? What about another ape? An elephant? A monkey? A cat? A rabbit? A cow? Where do you draw the line?
I once decided that the "mirror test"[1] was my litmus test for eating or not an animal. But then as I looked more into it I realised that that test isn't as straight forward as I thought, lots of false positive, methodology issues (eg: some animal start passing the test after being exposed to mirrors for a long time). And the final blow was that most humans under 6 months fail the test and I decided not to use this test rather than starting to eat human infants.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test