Regarding factory farming—what alternative am I comparing it to? It’s worse than happy animals frolicking in the fields, it’s better than those animals not existing.
This is such a weird argument to me. It seems to me self-evident that happy animals > animals not existing > suffering animals. Or don’t you think that factory animals are suffering?
I don’t know what you mean by “suffering.” Google defines it as “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.” But just because you’re going through pain and hardship, doesn’t mean you’d rather be dead. You can be suffering in some ways, and still have a net-positive life—indeed, this is the normal meaning of suffering. Do you deny that the inhabitants of the Syrian refugee camps are suffering? Do you think they’d be better off not to have been born?
Do factory farmed animals sometimes suffer? Surely. Is their life such a constant torment that non-existence would be preferable? Surely not.
They’re not in ‘constant torment’, I think. But ‘unhappy most of the time’, yeah. Not the animals you see outside in pastures, those are probably pretty content a lot of the time; but the ones that spend all their life in a cage, definitely.
The Syrians I don’t know. Anyone in a refugee camp must be very unhappy, surely. But maybe they were happy before they had to go to those camps, and hopefully they’ll get a chance to be happy again sometime. You’d have to ask the people themselves.
But I think most people’s lives are net negative, not just the ones living in camps. Just go sit in a mall or something, and look at people’s faces, and listen to what they’re saying to each other, and in what tones. And it stands to reason. First you have to go to school, and you’d need to be pretty darn happy later in life to make up for that. And then you have to work, which most people hate. You’re lucky if your job is just boring and you like your co-workers. Sure, in your free time you get to do stuff that’s more fun, but you also get physical and emotional pain, and sickness.
This is such a weird argument to me. It seems to me self-evident that happy animals > animals not existing > suffering animals. Or don’t you think that factory animals are suffering?
With my omnivore hat on:
I don’t know what you mean by “suffering.” Google defines it as “the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.” But just because you’re going through pain and hardship, doesn’t mean you’d rather be dead. You can be suffering in some ways, and still have a net-positive life—indeed, this is the normal meaning of suffering. Do you deny that the inhabitants of the Syrian refugee camps are suffering? Do you think they’d be better off not to have been born?
Do factory farmed animals sometimes suffer? Surely. Is their life such a constant torment that non-existence would be preferable? Surely not.
They’re not in ‘constant torment’, I think. But ‘unhappy most of the time’, yeah. Not the animals you see outside in pastures, those are probably pretty content a lot of the time; but the ones that spend all their life in a cage, definitely.
The Syrians I don’t know. Anyone in a refugee camp must be very unhappy, surely. But maybe they were happy before they had to go to those camps, and hopefully they’ll get a chance to be happy again sometime. You’d have to ask the people themselves.
But I think most people’s lives are net negative, not just the ones living in camps. Just go sit in a mall or something, and look at people’s faces, and listen to what they’re saying to each other, and in what tones. And it stands to reason. First you have to go to school, and you’d need to be pretty darn happy later in life to make up for that. And then you have to work, which most people hate. You’re lucky if your job is just boring and you like your co-workers. Sure, in your free time you get to do stuff that’s more fun, but you also get physical and emotional pain, and sickness.