[nullstyle]

I disagree with your assertion that "People who use the term raise the plant or animal's importance of life to that of a human." Doing that with wildlife or livestock is a much much larger thing than just extending the right to protection from killing by way of murder laws. Perhaps people say they "raise the plant or animal's importance of life to that of a human" but I haven't seen anyone earnestly make that case.

Instead, I often think people who use that line of argumentation are trying to launder the feelings that listeners have towards murder into concern about their dietary choices at best, at worst they are working a rhetorical script in which they get to condemn those who disagree with them as murderers and therefore "win". In my own history, the people who don't fit that mold are willing to have a more nuanced discussion about what types of killing happen throughout the course of our lives, what makes a killing justified or not, how your stances change in a "survival situation" vs. the industrial killing that happens for most meat production, etc.

[strogonoff]

How morally bad a murder is depends on how close to human’s mind we’re talking about; i.e. whether we are able to assume that entity has a consciousness similar enough for us to empathise with.

Saying humans have to die of hunger simply because humans cannot torture and then kill beings substantially like them in an industrialised manner is a disingenuous argument, and the reverse side of the same coin is basically cannibalism.

Murdering a mind that is substantially close to human’s (e.g., a dog) has been considered bad or even off-limits in many cultures for quite a while. Murdering human’s mind for whatever inessential purposes has been considered off-limits for longer (probably after we stopped with sacrificial murder). Morality progresses, news at 11.

[nullstyle]

For the most part, I don't follow your response, but I just want to follow up with a simple disagreement that I've pondered for a bit.

"How morally bad a murder is depends on how close to human’s mind we’re talking about;"

Let's set aside that I don't think animals can be murdered -- My main disagreement with your point is that you don't speak to the mapping between "how morally bad" and "how close to human's mind"; IMO Reality has higher dimensionality and there is no linear ramp between the two. As one example, the morality of killing is weighted more heavily around whether or not I am in "community" -- for lack of a better term -- with the organism and the specifics of the killing rather than mind similarity. Killing spiders when it can be avoided is bad, but killing every last mosquito you get the chance to is good. For the most part, spiders make an area better for people, provided you don't fuck with them too much. Mosquitos always make things worse.

To further illustrate how I disagree with your response, let's consider something topical: Recently some dipshit got convicted for running an online community that bought and sold videos of the torture and killing of monkeys. Whether monkeys, cats, mice, octopi, fish, etc., soliciting the suffering and death of an organism for entertainment is pure evil, and likewise producing and profiting from such entertainment is pure evil. Hell, I still get a little uncomfortable when those cockroaches get bugstomped when watching starship troopers. I'm not saying the complexity of the mind doesn't factor, just that it ain't that simple by a long shot.