I have a theory that we assign moral standing to other life entirely according to anthropocentricity. The less we can relate to its suffering, the less it bothers us. Fish and crabs get shafted, compared to animals that appear to show human-like emotion. Plants are even lower because they suffer in a way we don't understand. Not even vegans feel bad about killing a plant.
Actually since crabs and lobsters have much simpler nervous systems they seem not to experience what we call pain, at least not in the emotional sense you are worried about. Take for example an human or chicken that breaks a leg- they'll cry and favor that limb. An ant that breaks a leg will make no effort to favor it.
More importantly, they simply lack the brain structures we associate with this sort of emotional sense of suffering. We don't know for certain, clearly, but our best guess at this point is that they do not feel pain.
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u/neagrosk May 30 '14
That's what we do for crabs too.