"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.

Personally, I would accept any form of life before I chose not to exist at all, because I view life itself as a blessing.

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"?

Really? Personally, if I died and there was a deity that gave me a choice to either be reincarnated into a slave that would be tortured from birth to death only to be eaten by my slavers at the end or the deity would go back in time to make it so my parents never met, I'd wholeheartedly choose the latter.

I'm not much of a philsopher, but if you're at all interested in the other side of thinking I would suggest Viktor Frankl. He was a jewish person in a nazi concentration camp and he make a much stronger argument than I can for this point of view.

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.

Not to minimize his suffering, but spending ~3 years out of his 92 year life being tortured isn't the same as a whole life of torture with no meaning or hope of escape.

Yeah, it's not like the Nazi's were breeding Jews for the express purpose of a life of slavery, torture, and slaughter.

I think comparing it is a false equivalency. Also Godwin's Law.

Thank you for the link!

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?

So by extension, don't you have an ethical obligation to have as many children as possible regardless of the quality of life you can provide them?

At least they'll have a life that they wouldn't have had otherwise.

I bet you $10 they are a forced-birther.

Under His Eye. Blessed be the fruit.

I believe abortion is generally immoral, but I also believe that my opinion is not important and should not dictate public policy.

And when I say generally immoral, it obviously becomes nuanced when rape or young age is involved.

My parents decided to have an abortion because they were not financially ready to have children. I probably wouldn't exist if they hadn't. Does that mean their abortion had more right to live than I?

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.

I certainly agree that there can be a lot of utility in abortions. Frankly that's the major reason why I don't support abortion legislation. I am somewhat a utilitarian and I understand that there are instances where the utility might outweigh the ineherent immorality. But I do believe that there is an inherent immorality.

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.

A life where you're tortured for a year and then are slaughtered.

I guess that's how the slaveowners thought back in the day too.

It is recklessly ignorant to compare ownership of animals to humans

Exactly!

> The question really comes down to whether or not you consider the opportunity to experience life, even a particularly difficult life, as a blessing.

This seems to be an extreme pro-life point of view. You could ask exactly the same question about contraceptives.

Just because I don't think it's unethical to produce life in that circumstance, doesn't mean that I think it's your ethical imperative to produce life. Things don't go immediately from unethical to a moral imperative, there is a substantial gap that needs to be crossed.

> Things don't go immediately from unethical to a moral imperative, there is a substantial gap that needs to be crossed.

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?

> barring any other activity with greater utility

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.

Thank you for the answer. It seems we have the same view, but we speak about it differently: while an action may be moral or not, being a prerogative only matters in practice if it can be assessed.

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.

So why do we inseminate animals artificially when there is no ethical imperative to produce life? And if you think life is so valuable by nature, why do we kill them then?

The primary motivation to our livestock farming is certainly the utility, not some sort of ethical imperative. My argument isn't that it's virtuous to farm livestock, my argument is just that it isn't unethical.

You said: > it seems to me that it is less ideal from the perspective of the animal for their entire bloodline to be terminated

I think if you compare the utility that livestock farming provides, with all the externalties and all the suffering it produces is indeed unethical.