This post combines two drastically different things: human suffering and chickens. I think you are in a bubble if you think they are not only comparable, but so comparable that you can take their similarity as just the natural way everyone is supposed to believe.
I think this is very false, a lot of people will agree when asked that chicken-suffering is very bad, maybe comparably bad to humans. See e.g. this paper.
Out of curiosity, how relatively bad do you think human and chicken suffering is?
I also think a chicken being tortured is much less bad than a human being tortured, but I wouldn’t rush to weighting a chicken’s torment at, say, less than 1/1000th of a human’s. That lower bound gets me to the naive conclusion that 4.5 billion chickens experiencing some form of suffering is likely at least as bad as 4.5 million humans experiencing something analogous. From that perspective the comparisons in the post seem pretty reasonable to me.
Edit: Follow up question—do you actually think the human/chicken suffering comparison is irrational or confused, in addition to being symptomatic of the author’s bubble?
I treat it as exactly zero, even if you can argue otherwise. If I don’t, I am vulnerable to questions like “if there were ten quadrillion chickens, would you murder a human to save them?” I would not murder that human, so 1/1000 or any number you can come up with is too high.
Isn’t that just the trolley problem with chickens? Absent context I value five humans more than one human, that doesn’t necessarily mean I would murder one human to save five. I don’t see why saying that chicken suffering is bad necessarily traps you or obligates you to kill humans to protect even a very large number of chickens.
Yes, but the reason I’d refuse is different. In the case of the chickens, I’d refuse because I think the human is more valuable than the chickens; I’d do this no matter how many chickens you increased the number to. This also applies in a scenario without murder—if I had to save a lot of chickens or one human, I’d save the human every time (ignoring questions of how the chickens are useful to humans), and my answer won’t change no matter how many chickens it is.
It follows that I value the chickens at zero, not at 1/1000.
This post combines two drastically different things: human suffering and chickens. I think you are in a bubble if you think they are not only comparable, but so comparable that you can take their similarity as just the natural way everyone is supposed to believe.
To anyone outside the bubble, this is arson, murder, and jaywalking.
I think this is very false, a lot of people will agree when asked that chicken-suffering is very bad, maybe comparably bad to humans. See e.g. this paper.
I see a $40 gate there.
Out of curiosity, how relatively bad do you think human and chicken suffering is?
I also think a chicken being tortured is much less bad than a human being tortured, but I wouldn’t rush to weighting a chicken’s torment at, say, less than 1/1000th of a human’s. That lower bound gets me to the naive conclusion that 4.5 billion chickens experiencing some form of suffering is likely at least as bad as 4.5 million humans experiencing something analogous. From that perspective the comparisons in the post seem pretty reasonable to me.
Edit: Follow up question—do you actually think the human/chicken suffering comparison is irrational or confused, in addition to being symptomatic of the author’s bubble?
I treat it as exactly zero, even if you can argue otherwise. If I don’t, I am vulnerable to questions like “if there were ten quadrillion chickens, would you murder a human to save them?” I would not murder that human, so 1/1000 or any number you can come up with is too high.
Isn’t that just the trolley problem with chickens? Absent context I value five humans more than one human, that doesn’t necessarily mean I would murder one human to save five. I don’t see why saying that chicken suffering is bad necessarily traps you or obligates you to kill humans to protect even a very large number of chickens.
Yes, but the reason I’d refuse is different. In the case of the chickens, I’d refuse because I think the human is more valuable than the chickens; I’d do this no matter how many chickens you increased the number to. This also applies in a scenario without murder—if I had to save a lot of chickens or one human, I’d save the human every time (ignoring questions of how the chickens are useful to humans), and my answer won’t change no matter how many chickens it is.
It follows that I value the chickens at zero, not at 1/1000.