I know common language doesn’t make the distinction, but it’s an important and useful distinction.

Your argument is like saying “why should I help my neighbour if I’m not helping every suffering person in Africa?”. It’s about your the value of your ER (Empathy Radius) — how different a creature can be for us to feel empathy with it. In the future, I hope we will be able to avoid hurting even mice and rats. Now, we can stop hurting Great Apes. There’s no point in following the old fallacy “if you can’t do 100%, there’s no point doing anything”.

What argument is that? If you mean more respect for multicellular organisms I’m with that..
However, should I respect any given life form more than another one simply on the basis of it’s executive functions?
I don’t think so, I can respect a tree or a piece of shrub eventhough it has very little consciousness as compared to that generated by an animal or human brain. The brain doesn’t matter here, let us consider the reason these brains came into existence; survival ánd procreation. My point here is that a central consciousness of suffering is not a necessity for suffering, but more of an alarm system that signals distress on a more or less rational level. Suffering is inherent for all living things, for we all have a single purpose; to live and create life in our own image:P
We’re all survivors! This doesn’t mean we should let the viral loads have their way with us or open up our kitchen to any fungal or bacterial population looking for a place to stay; this would go against our interest as a living being, an interest which is a focus of implicit or explicit attention for any healthy survivor.