I'm just going to refer to the factory farming article from 80000hours:
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/
Considering that "Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally. Over a billion animals live in factory farms at any point of time in the United States. Most experience serious levels of suffering.", I would argue that it's hard to find anything comparable in magnitude to that tragedy if one allows that farmed animals are even a 1/100th fraction as conscious as humans.
I would... probably not enjoy being proven wrong this time :S
Wild animal suffering is a different beast altogether.
Your last question is on the point though. Do the animals raised for meat have lives worth living?
No. For the same reason that murdering your 4 year old is not ethically equivalent to using birth control.
It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally. Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice. In captivity, we force the choice humans made for them.
Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing.
How did you come to that conclusion?
I don't think it's anywhere close to "unquestionably".
Not necessarily more in every case but they do suffer in many different ways. Nonhuman animals in the wild are routinely exposed to: starvation, dehydration, disease, injuries, predation, parasitism and extreme weather conditions:
> The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
– Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
> It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally.
A "natural" life does not necessarily mean a good one.
> Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice.
The choice to do what? The vast majority of nonhuman animals receive no help with their suffering. There are exceptions of course like when we help by rescuing trapped animals, vaccinating and healing injured and sick animals, caring for orphaned animals etc. But the general rule is a very short life (most nonhuman animals in the wild don't live to adulthood) with far more suffering experienced than happiness.
> Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing
No disagreement here, but the same empathy should be given to nonhuman animals suffering in the wild and we should help to reduce their suffering as much as practically possible. Widespread interventions aren't practical now due to a lack of knowledge and resources but our future descendants may well be in a better position to make an effective difference.
Further reading:
* https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-ani...
* https://www.animal-ethics.org/wild-animal-suffering-section/...
* http://www.olemartinmoen.com/wp-content/uploads/TheEthicsofW...
As to the second question, that is an active topic of research:
https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-ani...
with some info on Wikipedia as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering#Ecology_...
From my perspective, the conclusion seems to be wrong, and thus I deny the first premise.
Or, is there an amount of happiness that outweighs some amount of suffering? Among utilitarians, that's one of the major differences.
Your argument is valid and has been made before, and the answers are varied:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism#The_be...
The debate between living vs avoiding suffering has very important implications for artificial life, artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence, and even space colonization and curing aging.
And, it raises an interesting question about the moral gravity of preventing existence.
I don't even attribute the same value to life of different species. I don't think that worm farms are as bad as cow farms.
I tend to buy organic/free range animal products. I think factory farms are terrible, I would not mind seeing them gone, but imposing free range would be terrible for the environment.
Free range ones are not too unethical as they provide to animals close to the best they could hope for if they were free.
It would have to be coupled with other measures to limit resources depletion, but it's the right thing to do imho. It would raise the price much higher, factoring in humane treatment. Sales would drop due to this higher price, there wouldn't be as many farm animals as now.
That's why I wish we solve the environmental issues first, as well as the food security of the whole population.
I agree that factory farming isn't ideal, but it seems to me that it is less ideal from the perspective of the animal for their entire bloodline to be terminated. To make a strong argument against factory farming, you have to provide a feasible alternative that IMO doesn't exist.
The question really comes down to whether or not you consider the opportunity to experience life, even a particularly difficult life, as a blessing.
A life born of slavery, torture, and slaughter is not a life worth living. An animal doesn't really have the idea of a bloodline or legacy (just the primal urge to reproduce). The rationalization that a life of suffering is somehow doing the animal a favor is just asinine.
I understand that this isn't a philosophy that I share with everybody but you should still be respectful of it.
Just how shitty of a life do you need to have to not be worth living? People who spend their lives in prison don't usually kill themselves. You can read stories about people captured as prisoners of war who have no hope that they will ever escape, but they don't attempt to kill themselves. Are they being "asinine"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
> After enduring the suffering in these camps, Frankl concluded that even in the most absurd, painful, and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that, therefore, even suffering is meaningful.
I think comparing it is a false equivalency. Also Godwin's Law.
After reading a little bit about meaning, it seems that it's something that has to be found first
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(existential)
so even if there's meaning in the most miserable of lives, it's not guaranteed that it will be found. However, I haven't found anything suggesting that meaning makes life worth living, only a passing mention of it bringing happiness, which doesn't square with my understanding of torture or concentration camps. Am I misunderstanding what meaning is?
At least they'll have a life that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Under His Eye. Blessed be the fruit.
And when I say generally immoral, it obviously becomes nuanced when rape or young age is involved.
My parents lived for years with the guilt that had been instilled in them by their religious upbringing. It was one of the hardest decisions they ever had to make so they could give their future offspring the best life possible.
Research has shown that abortion laws lead to lower crime rates, lower poverty and a higher educated populous. My sisters and I are living proof of that.
Similarly, I think it is immoral to use force to get other people to do what you want. But that quickly becomes a nuanced argument when you start taking public safety into account, or crime prevention. Life doesn't take place in a vacuum so I'm not trying to pass judgement.
This seems to be an extreme pro-life point of view. You could ask exactly the same question about contraceptives.
I would accept that in the general case, but since you let your utilitarian views slip, I have to ask: what's the difference?
When something is immoral, it means it has a negative utility, and therefore it should be avoided. When something is moral, it has a positive utility, and therefore it's something that should be strived for, barring any other activity with greater utility. In my eyes, that makes every moral thing a utilitarian's moral imperative, with the only gap being things that have no moral value.
How does my view differ from yours?
I can think of a number of activities that would provide greater utility than attemting to impregnate as many women as possible.
I'm not a pure utilitarian and I see a distinction between the concepts of morality and utility. Mostly because I'm not capable of gauging utility all the time, so I can fall back on broader moral principles.
The difference is that I don't mind calling even the smallest, least important actions, which have the least chance to be the best thing to do at the moment, prerogatives.
I think if you compare the utility that livestock farming provides, with all the externalties and all the suffering it produces is indeed unethical.
Side note: in my time in kitchens, I learned that the art of storing/reheating food is just as important as from-scratch preparation.
I understand parent is not motivated to learn it, but I encourage them to rethink it, and I leave this message for everyone else. Personally, cooking has been an incredibly fulfilling and freeing life skill to acquire.
If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
I'd rather not gamble away the rainforest to optimism about humans acting rational. It's already irrational: humans will optimize towards short term gains.
More of a light hearted example. I worked at a grocery store years ago, one summer the 4L ice cream buckets stopped having handles. A lot of people complained, they liked to use them for berry picking and other things. One day I asked the people we ordered the dairy stuff from why. Turns out, some accountant figured out they'd have a marginal gain of 1¢ per ice cream bucket if they removed the handles. In the end though, that year we ended up throwing a lot of them away, whereas the summer before we'd had trouble keeping them in stock. People really liked those bucket handles. I still wonder if the penny savings were worth the loss in sales from people that wanted buckets with handles more than ice cream.
I experienced the same, which was really odd. I guess you can learn to like (or dislike) a taste.
The other thing I noticed that concerns about suffering started to weigh far stronger for me once the environmental concerns made me stop eating meat. I think that I subconsciously ignored or trivialised a lot of the information I got about what was and is actually happening in that sector.
Why does eating meat mean you can cook less?
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimg or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to avoid meat.
Meat's convenient in a way that vegetables aren't.
Veggies are less effort: peel some, chop into suitably sized bits. To compare like with like compare with pre-sliced and peeled veggies, or animal carcass before skinning and butchering. :)
Something like a rosti with cheese or added spinach or cabbage is cooked meat speed fast and tasty, as are a whole host of the traditional leftovers recipes that grew up to use up spuds, carrots, cabbage etc next day.
Are you treating your vegetables like wagyu beef and giving them massages or something? If not, aside from a quick wash, cooking vegetables is no more difficult than cooking meat. Sautee them, bake them, pan fry, deep fry, air fry, broil, steam, sous vide, etc...
Meat on the other hand is greatly benefited by things like marination, mechanical tenderizing, monitoring temperature as it cooks. You can whip up a steak pretty quick, but probably not any faster than you could stir fry some veggies.
Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
Peanut butter celery sticks would be a better example I think.
There are so many variables it's hard to say anything concrete, but on average I'd bet people spend less active time preparing vegetables to eat than meat.
Maybe with very thin, low quality grocery store steaks. When I eat meat I buy steaks from a butcher that are over an inch thick, and require 5-7 minutes minimum per side for medium rare. Sometimes even more for thicker cuts
>prep is less than a minute. Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
A lot of people think vegetables are difficult because they don't have knife skills so it takes multiple minutes to cut a piece of produce. With practice, prep for cooking vegetables should be just as fast. Also, even if it does take an extra couple minutes of my time, its worth it for my own health and morals by not supporting industrialized farming
Imagine if a wizard finished casting a very complicated and resource-intensive spell and the result is that every living cow, pig, chicken and turkey in the meat industry were replaced with a clone of a dog you've met. In the thousands of crowded compound pens, the millions of tiny cages, on the assembly lines facing captive bolt pistols like the one from No Country for Old Men-- there is now that dog. In that moment, what would be an example of something happening that is more unethical? Of course the answer would be different for each person; some people would have the point that we can't compare apples to oranges. For me I find it hard to imagine a war or a process of exploitation in 2019 that measures up.
But I grew up in the countryside, I knew some cows and goats, heard the sad cry of the cows when you take their calves away. The reason why I eat very little beef and pork now but have less problems with chicken and fish is because I do feel different about them.
See I used to be more concerned about the ethics of animal exploitation as a kid than as an adult. (My experience was with free range animals though.) One of the questions I often came back at as a kid was "Do the animals understand what is happening? Why don't they try to escape?" It puzzled me that the cattle seemed to love their captors. Food was more primordial to them than freedom.
Then I realized some things: most humans would take such a deal. Security vs freedom. If I offered you to double your life expectancy (which is basically what wild vs farm animals experience), to feed and cure you, provide a more comfortable shelter than you could be able to get on your own, would you object to me eating your meat at a determined date?
I know I would refuse, I used to think most humans would but nowadays I am far less optimistic about that, and I am pretty certain that most animals would sign in.
I still think the whole system is unethical and an ideal world should not have it, so I do limit my meat consumption, I don't participate in the boohooing of vegans. I just don't see it as the highest priority ethical concern right now.
So the question might reasonably be 'are the conditions these animals face worse than never existing?'.
Not an enviable choice, but it confounds some of the simple ethical arguments for, eg, vegetarianism.
Our goal is to minimize the amount of suffering we are responsible of. In that respect it is obviously better to not breed animals than to breed them and make them suffer.
I'm interested in food insecurity and related things, which is why I ask.
Not even morningstar farms veggie burgers in grocery stores. But that was 10 years ago, things are different now.
Whenever I go home for Christmas I'm amazed at what's available.
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimp or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and I would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to totally avoid meat.
I agree that there is a point in the belief that it is unethical to kill animals. That's not the most unethical thing that is happening in the world, there are a lot of things to argue about, but in general, I agree that in an ideal world, we should not do that.
The environmental concerns, I only buy half-heartedly. I don't really believe that land-owners will transform their pastures or soy cultures into rain forest instead of another profitable exploitation, I'd rather have states force responsible production and norms.
It is just not practical for me to go full-veg, where I live I would need to cook one hour a day for it, and I am a lousy cook, I have neither the inclination or the motivation for it.
But I reduced my consumption more and more. It was surprising to see how my taste changed. I used to be a huge meat eater and now I find eating even a small steak a bit nauseating. I almost eat no beef anymore, little pork but mostly chicken and fish, and even these I eat little.