They often have access to the outdoors for a large percentage of their lives. They are cuter so we treat them better. Also, since they’re massive, even if their lives are quite bad, if you ate exclusively cow for a year, you most likely wouldn’t finish a single cow. Compare that to a chicken, which might last you a day. The same logic applies to dairy.
One of my gripes with utilitarians is not taking math and scale seriously enough. These both sound like arguments for “pro eating beef” but taken together they counteract each other. If cows live good lives on the pasture, then we want more cows rather than less, which means taking an entire year of burgers to eat a 1 cow is a tragedy, and we’d rather there be chicken levels of throughput.
Then again, it’s the high chicken throughput that creates the chicken suffering. A better example is bees.
The bentham’s bulldog substack had this article against eating honey that made its way around rationalist & EA twitter. He is correct that bees are small, high animal count per calorie, and surprisingly smart. but he incorrectly thinks that bees live bad lives. on the contrary, hives can produce new queens and easily leave, so beekeepers are heavily aligned with bee welfare. they do things like supplement the hive with sugar if it is lacking. artificial hives are just safer and easier environments. Put together, this implies that I should be honey-maxxing for utilons. I am too egoist, scornful of insects, and skeptical of the health properties of a Hazda / Ray Peat / Yudkowsky-pemmican diet to actually do this. But the article did successfully negatively polarize me into favoring honey as my go-to sweetener and to try it for burn management and colds in the future.
thanks for writing this article. i really liked it.
One of my gripes with utilitarians is not taking math and scale seriously enough. These both sound like arguments for “pro eating beef” but taken together they counteract each other. If cows live good lives on the pasture, then we want more cows rather than less, which means taking an entire year of burgers to eat a 1 cow is a tragedy, and we’d rather there be chicken levels of throughput.
Then again, it’s the high chicken throughput that creates the chicken suffering.
A better example is bees.
The bentham’s bulldog substack had this article against eating honey that made its way around rationalist & EA twitter. He is correct that bees are small, high animal count per calorie, and surprisingly smart. but he incorrectly thinks that bees live bad lives. on the contrary, hives can produce new queens and easily leave, so beekeepers are heavily aligned with bee welfare. they do things like supplement the hive with sugar if it is lacking. artificial hives are just safer and easier environments.
Put together, this implies that I should be honey-maxxing for utilons. I am too egoist, scornful of insects, and skeptical of the health properties of a Hazda / Ray Peat / Yudkowsky-pemmican diet to actually do this. But the article did successfully negatively polarize me into favoring honey as my go-to sweetener and to try it for burn management and colds in the future.
thanks for writing this article. i really liked it.