That is a great example, exactly the point I am suggesting. The economist and futurist Robin Hanson wrote really well about this in the article “Inequality Talk

That is a great example, exactly the point I am suggesting. The economist and futurist Robin Hanson wrote really well about this in the article “Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing” [0]. The premise is: why do we care about some forms of inequality (financial inequality among households in one nation, or protected class inequality within employment law in one nation), but we don’t care about other things (inequality between socially lonely people and social butterflies, inequality across country boundaries, inequality of physical attractiveness). Hanson suggests it just so happens that we develop “morality” around some forms of inequality because it offers easy ways to politically coordinate to grab money or power and punish your rivals. Other forms of inequality that involve just as much harm, but where it’s not politically easy to drum up support for physically taking money or power, just happen to conveniently not turn out to be big moral concerns, or may even have other competing morals invented over time that make it “wrong” to even treat it as inequality (like the hallowed status of a “right” to control what happens to your body counting for more than inequality based harm of variation in genetic sexual attractiveness outcomes - which is a massive double standard compared with no such “right” to control what happens to the fruits of your labor or intelligence, which undergo forced redistribution via taxes because we just so happen to believe inequality of financial outcomes is not acceptable). For example, most people don’t give a shit about animal suffering on the scale of agribusiness. Most people don’t give a shit if ugly people suffer loneliness or unhealthy lack of sex or job discrimination from their appearance. Most people don’t care much about structural inequality in countries besides their own. These are just convenient moral omissions because in each situation it is not easy to see how you could “redistribute” attractiveness, social companionship, or power structures of some other country. Plus animals don’t have any money or status to give you in exchange for allyship, while big agribusiness has plenty of lobbying power to crush you with. I wish more people appreciated this. We don’t, as a society, advocate for race, gender, or pay equality because it’s “right.” We just know that aging white patriarchy is full of convenient targets we can take money and status from. Conveniently for other domains of inequality, like animal welfare, where no such easy targets exist to take from, it just somehow doesn’t qualify as a moral issue worthy of advocacy. [0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-g...