If a being constantly wants to get out of its current state, i.e. if it lives in constant agony, how could that be preferable to non-existence? Maybe if there was an overriding will to live (installed perhaps by an evil AI programmer or by evolution) then one could attempt to make a case for this, but wouldn’t such an unfortunate state of affairs still be bad for the being in question? When you talk about “cruel conditions”, are you trying to imagine them vividly? Have you watched footage from factory farms? I’m just curious because I’m genuinely puzzled by how much people’s intuitions can differ.
Should we all start eating mice/rats instead of cows if this increases the amount of animal sentience by several orders of magnitude?
I see now that the question of whether it is better never to be born than to be raised cruelly is a distraction and misleading. What I’m really trying to get at is, what happens to the animals after most people become vegetarians? The most obvious answer is that they all die, both because people will kill them to squeeze any remaining profits out of them that they can, and because people will stop trying to keep them alive. Even if humans keep a few cows and chickens in a zoo somewhere, it still looks like most of the species will die. How do advocates of vegetarianism address the problem of what you do with the animals after everybody becomes vegetarian? This question is what keeps me from becoming vegetarian.
It depends on one’s reasons for vegetarianism. Personally I’m vegetarian because it prevents suffering. I don’t value a species, I value individuals. A species is just a categorization that cannot feel pain or pleasure. We can imagine a continuous line-up of daughter, mother, grandmother and so on, up to the point of the last common ancestor of humans and cows, and then forwards in time again to modern cows. Within that line-up, there would be thousands of species, and virtually all of them went extinct already. A common definition of “species” is that groups of animals belong to different species if they cannot have fertile offspring together. I don’t see how this is a relevant criterion for awarding moral concern to species rather than individuals. And as for the individual cows, yes, they would die eventually (and then we might as well eat them), but so they would if we keep breeding more cows for food-purposes, so I don’t quite see the point.
Yes, but it’s bad. You’re trying to stop animal death and suffering that is a product of our carnivorous habits by getting people to stop eating meat. But animals will also die and suffer as a result of us ceasing our carnivorous habits. What is your plan for preventing that?
Fewer animals means fewer deaths and suffering. I don’t need to solve every single problem in the universe if I want to do something good. Hopefully though, a future AI will be able to reengineer whole ecosystems so the sentient beings in them won’t have the biological capacity for suffering anymore.
If a being constantly wants to get out of its current state, i.e. if it lives in constant agony, how could that be preferable to non-existence? Maybe if there was an overriding will to live (installed perhaps by an evil AI programmer or by evolution) then one could attempt to make a case for this, but wouldn’t such an unfortunate state of affairs still be bad for the being in question? When you talk about “cruel conditions”, are you trying to imagine them vividly? Have you watched footage from factory farms? I’m just curious because I’m genuinely puzzled by how much people’s intuitions can differ.
Should we all start eating mice/rats instead of cows if this increases the amount of animal sentience by several orders of magnitude?
I see now that the question of whether it is better never to be born than to be raised cruelly is a distraction and misleading. What I’m really trying to get at is, what happens to the animals after most people become vegetarians? The most obvious answer is that they all die, both because people will kill them to squeeze any remaining profits out of them that they can, and because people will stop trying to keep them alive. Even if humans keep a few cows and chickens in a zoo somewhere, it still looks like most of the species will die. How do advocates of vegetarianism address the problem of what you do with the animals after everybody becomes vegetarian? This question is what keeps me from becoming vegetarian.
It depends on one’s reasons for vegetarianism. Personally I’m vegetarian because it prevents suffering. I don’t value a species, I value individuals. A species is just a categorization that cannot feel pain or pleasure. We can imagine a continuous line-up of daughter, mother, grandmother and so on, up to the point of the last common ancestor of humans and cows, and then forwards in time again to modern cows. Within that line-up, there would be thousands of species, and virtually all of them went extinct already. A common definition of “species” is that groups of animals belong to different species if they cannot have fertile offspring together. I don’t see how this is a relevant criterion for awarding moral concern to species rather than individuals. And as for the individual cows, yes, they would die eventually (and then we might as well eat them), but so they would if we keep breeding more cows for food-purposes, so I don’t quite see the point.
In that case, what’s your plan to prevent the suffering of all the animals that will die should too many people switch to vegetarianism?
Those very animals will also die if people don’t switch to vegetarianism, and then new animals will be bred and they will die too.
Yes, but it’s bad. You’re trying to stop animal death and suffering that is a product of our carnivorous habits by getting people to stop eating meat. But animals will also die and suffer as a result of us ceasing our carnivorous habits. What is your plan for preventing that?
Fewer animals means fewer deaths and suffering. I don’t need to solve every single problem in the universe if I want to do something good. Hopefully though, a future AI will be able to reengineer whole ecosystems so the sentient beings in them won’t have the biological capacity for suffering anymore.