“To argue from ‘we don’t understand the cognitive basis for consciousness’ to ‘it’s OK to eat non-humans’ is acting as though our ignorance were positive knowledge we could confidently set down our weight on. Even if you have a specific cognitive model that predicts ‘there’s an 80% chance cattle can’t suffer,’ you have to be just as cautious as you’d be about torturing a 20%-likely-to-be-conscious person in a non-vegetative coma, or a 20%-likely-to-be-conscious alien.”

— Rob Bensinger, Inhuman altruism: Inferential gap, or motivational gap?