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Is there place for animal utility in utilitarianism?
We know that animals can suffer, so they can have different states of well-being, and thus utility applies to them. However, I don't think that animal well-being should weigh as much as human well-being. If you ask someone whether he'd rather kill two flies or one human, probably everyone will choose two flies.
I'd like to know whether there are philosophers who said something about this.
First off, I want to note that this is a good way to extend the concepts you're encountering elsewhere. Second, in contemporary philosophy, the word "Utilitarianism" is often used interchangeably with the word "Consequentialism."
This is important because the classical definition of utilitarianism comes from Jeremy Bentham who defined it as the maximization of pleasure. Moreover, in his view, there's an equation between all forms of pleasure. This view was modified by J.S. Mill who distinguished between qualities of pleasure in the volume we now call Utilitarianism in the first section. To my knowledge, Mill does not include animals in his calculation.
Consequentialism more broadly refers to the set of views where ethics is about maximization or minimization of some property in the world. Probably the most prominent person to take this view and intentionally include animals is Peter Singer. Peter Singer's basic ethical outlook is about the minimization of pain. On Peter Singer's view, animals sufficiently similar to us have pain that we should consider of equal value in this calculation as our own. (See also).
Other consequentialists may or may not make similar moves. For instance, those committed to maximization rationality might want to extend it to some primates and dolphins.
If you ask someone whether he'd rather kill two flies or one human, probably everyone will choose two flies.
I should start by noting that flies don't have pain receptors, so let's change the question to "two pigs or one human".
The utilitarian answer is still to kill two pigs, because the utility from a human (to all "moral agents", as philosophers like to call them) is greater than the utility from two pigs.
It's just like a question: would you kill a (or say, your favourite) political leader or a common fellow on the street? Obviously, the work of the political leader affects a lot more people than that of the common fellow's.
In addition to that, pigs are generally considered to be less intelligent than humans, thus are capable of feeling less "intellectual pleasures" (according to Mill an intellectual pleasure is intrinsically superior to a sensual one, while according to Bentham the superiority comes from the longer duration of pleasure - both arguments are effectively the same).
However, when it's "pig's life vs. human's tastebuds", the utilitarian response, I think, is to save the pig's life because we're directly comparing sensual pleasures here - i.e. animal slaughter and meat consumption are generally not good things in utilitarianism.
You might start from Albert Schweitzer's:
Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of the will to live, a person is constantly forced to preserve his own life and life in general only at the cost of other life. If he has been touched by the ethic of reverence for life, he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot avoid, and never from thoughtlessness
This seems to roll all life up into a single 'energy'. And if the ending of lives is all the same ethical 'currency' or 'cost', no doubt threats to do so should be, and thus so should the suffering and fear which is the biological marker of the threat that your life might end.
I do not know in detail how Schweitzer attempted to weigh lives against one another. But it seems that criteria could be evolved from the single general principle of responsibility to balance death against suffering, resulting in a Utilitarian computation.
Taken 'neet', this principle seems to defy some ordinary aspects of Utility, since it accords a positive value to a life without pleasure, and some Utilitarianisms would accord that a negative value.
