Hypothetically, it could get to the point where it is more ethical to eat meat than not to, ESPECIALLY if they are sentient in the way activists say they are.

Lets say aliens came and offered you a deal. You can either not exist or live a life of luxury with all delicious food and mates you want, then after 1000 years or so you'd peacefully pass away just like a natural death and you are informed that they'd eat your body. I'm pretty sure quite a few people would be open to this.The choice is even simpler with animals since from all evidence they lack the capacity for existential dread.

Now tell, me what would be the most moral choice assuming chickens are sentient? To indulge them to a pampered existence several times their natural lifespan...and yes, at the end disposing of their bodies in the most practical and beneficial way, its not like a chicken cares what happens to its mortal shell in whatever poultry afterlife may exist. Or leave chicken minds to the terror of being torn up by a fox in the wilderness or to never know the joys of existence in the paradise future ethical meat farms may offer?

I'm not quite sure which of the two you're suggesting we do now. They neither live in luxury nor their lifespan. Instead, they're basically tortured all their short life before we kill them.

You don't have to torture animals to eat them. Assuming advances in technology and energy we could get to the point where a hypothetical farmer could raise animals in luxury. As tech increases the luxury will increase. If animals are indeed sentient, farms would essentially transform into happiness factories generating and funneling new minds into earthly paradise.

If your ethical code is a variation of 'reducing pain and increasing pleasure for all sentient life' this would be orders of magnitude more good then the Peta option of turning them loose to die in the wild or never exist. It would be far more ethical than even artificial meat.

Heck from a strict cost/benefit analysis it may be one of the greatest moral triumphs mankind has ever given the universe.

Animals that have lived a full lifespan are not delicious to eat. Meat from old animals is tough and often contains tumors. So you're still stuck with killing them in early maturity.

If you'd like to learn more about this line of thinking:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

As mentioned by zerofries, the only way this would happen is by consumer pressure. Otherwise there’s no way it would ever make sense to raise chickens in the way you’ve said. There’s not enough ROI on ensuring really happy chickens for anything other than boycotting normal chicken meat to make it probably. At least in the near future (next 100 years) I would say not existing is far preferable to the hell theyre put through in factory farming.

> Assuming advances in technology and energy we could get to the point where a hypothetical farmer could raise animals in luxury. As tech increases the luxury will increase.

Why would an industrial food processor care about how luxurious the sentient inventory finds the warehouse?

Consumer pressure

In the glorious future when we can synthesize all the delicious cruelty-free artificial meat we desire, should we nevertheless, on ethical grounds, farm chickens so that we can strap them into VR sims of a life of chicken-luxury?

Not VR, the chickens live a real life as fulfilled and self actualized as a chicken could be. At any rate it doesn't even really matter (from the chicken pov) whether its real or not because as I said, from all the available evidence chickens don't have the innate capacity for existential dread. A chicken doesn't and can't care what happens to it's corpse after its dead or the evolutionary arc of its species. The only ones who care are a few humans projecting anthropomorphic traits on to them.

I think you're on fairly complicated ground here, ethically speaking. This is not a question that ethicists have left unaddressed, and it requires a bit more thought than simply the "existence vs non-existence" dichotomy you've presented here. If you want to look into it further, I know Christine Korsgaard among others has discussed this exact question in her papers.

I'm in the middle of work and lost interest after doing a cursory dig through the links. If she actually has a counterargument you can boil down for me I'd be happy to consider it.

If some alien offers me this deal, I would rather not make a deal at all. I will fight and they have to kill me. But I will die knowing that I was free.

There is some chance that I will accept the deal, just to buy more time and find weaknesses in the aliens. Anyway, I would prefer to die free on my own, and I would prefer that my family gets to take my body and cremate it, or give it to earthly elements.

Not having been born is neutral from the position of the being not getting born. It is neither good nor bad, because the being does not exist.

If a woman dies, we don't feel sorrow for any children (or their children, or their children's children, etc, etc) that will never be born. I am not a murderer for denying life to the billions and billions of people that will not be born if I've chosen not to have kids. Neither am I a hero for saving billions and billions of people if I choose to have kids (and good God, make sure my kids have kids and their kids have kids, etc, etc).

The question just comes down to: is it OK to keep animals to be farmed and eaten. If the answer is "no", then you gain nothing by bringing new lives into the world to subject them to it. If the answer is "yes", then there isn't a dilemma.

Or maybe, by having kids you are subjecting yet another generation of creatures to the existential dread and guaranteed pain of their mortality and it is therefore an unethical thing to do?

I don't feel like any of these points of view actually anwser the question "is it better to not exist or to exist and suffer", they're just different ways of framing the question.

There is no position from the perspective of beings that don't exist, let alone a neutral one. It's always the beings that exist that make decisions, and it's always their perspective that counts.

Really, it doesn't matter if an animal that doesn't exist would 'prefer' to exist in suffering, because that's a purely counter-factual fantasy to begin with. All that matters is whether we should prefer such an animal to exist. Anyone who prefers they wouldn't based on vague moral arguments has to reconcile that with the fact that killing those animals for food is right in line with correcting the 'error' of their birth.

A better way to make the argument is to appeal to things we do actually care about in an ethically consistent manner: how inefficient and wasteful it is to raise animals for food. If you have something that is more efficient, tastes better, and is healthier, then it becomes harder to justify that waste, regardless of anyone's moral position on suffering. Anything else is just an reasonless appeal to emotion.

That is an interesting question - and I think the answer is "it depends very much on how you farm them," which is why I prefer to eat free-range chicken over factory farmed, and don't eat sentient animals / red meat at all - but thanks for your parenthetical, because yeah, we cannot do so yet with octopi.

Do you classify birds as non-sentient?

I don't really know how to classify sentience, but I would have thought that birds qualify.

If you were the animal in question, what would you think? I'd choose the latter, but your answer may differ. The answer may be different for animals that can conceive of the question than for those who can't, and that's probably a less decidable point.

It depends on what you mean by better. Is it better from the perspective of the universe? Or according to your individual personal guidelines that define "better"? Or better as how your society thinks it is? Or better as how Socrates would've define it?

Quite impossible to answer generic questions and better/worse without defining boundaries.

If you're interested in schools of thought that argue on the side of "better off not having been born at all", take a look at negative utilitarianism.