I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism.
Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify.
I don’t agree with Hanson’s position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:
We might well agree that wild pigs have lives more worth living, per day at least, just as humans may be happier in the wild instead of fighting traffic to work in a cubical all day. But even these human lives are worth living, and it is my judgment that most farm animal’s lives are worth living too. Most farm animals prefer living to dying; they do not want to commit suicide.
How does he claim to know that? It’s not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don’t kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal’s life is pure misery, it probably doesn’t have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place.
Also: very few office workers get mutilated to prevent them from mutilating their coworkers out of stress, or locked into their cubicles full-time and forced to wallow in their own faeces (periodically being hosed down from outside), or are so over-bred for meat production purposes that even in their cramped conditions the strain of their under-used, oversized muscles strains their skeletons and joints to the breaking point.
Oh, and instead of a salary designed to seem big but actually undervalue your performance, you get paid in being killed (not infrequently a painful and lingering experience) and having any children you bore taken away for no obvious reason.
Yes. “If you have doubts on this point, I suggest you visit a farm” is a massive Appeal to Generalization from One Example. I’m pretty sure some farms are a helluva much worse than others, and I strongly suspect that the farms a random person is most likely to visit will be closer to the good end of the scale.
No, I think there’s a parallel there. The solution in the story was to reduce the babies to chemical reactions, so they weren’t aware, and couldn’t suffer; that doesn’t really lessen the horror implicit in the solution.
Apparently sleep deprivation is making me -more- insightful than normal. I’m going to have to give vegetarianism/veganism more thought. Right on the heels of a huge insight into privilege arguments, which I’m considering writing up.
I think that would be true, assuming you have no additional reasons for opposing cannibalism.
Personally, I have no moral opposition to the idea of eating babies, but I suspect that baby farming would cause much more distress to the general population than the food it would produce would justify.
I don’t agree with Hanson’s position in that essay though. To take an excerpt:
How does he claim to know that? It’s not as if he can extrapolate from the fact that they don’t kill themselves. Factory farmed animals are in no position to commit suicide, regardless of whether they want to or not. And even if a farm animal’s life is pure misery, it probably doesn’t have the abstract reasoning abilities to realize that ending its own life, thereby ending the suffering, is a possible thing.
He compares the life of a farmed animal to a worker who has to fight traffic to spend their time working in a cubicle, but an office worker has leisure time, probably a family to spend time with, and enough money to make them willing to work at the job in the first place. I think the abused child in Omelas is a better basis for comparison.
Also: very few office workers get mutilated to prevent them from mutilating their coworkers out of stress, or locked into their cubicles full-time and forced to wallow in their own faeces (periodically being hosed down from outside), or are so over-bred for meat production purposes that even in their cramped conditions the strain of their under-used, oversized muscles strains their skeletons and joints to the breaking point.
Oh, and instead of a salary designed to seem big but actually undervalue your performance, you get paid in being killed (not infrequently a painful and lingering experience) and having any children you bore taken away for no obvious reason.
Yes. “If you have doubts on this point, I suggest you visit a farm” is a massive Appeal to Generalization from One Example. I’m pretty sure some farms are a helluva much worse than others, and I strongly suspect that the farms a random person is most likely to visit will be closer to the good end of the scale.
I vote we breed animals to be happy under these conditions. Or is that baby-eating?
Hmmm.
If you’re going to do that, why not skip the animals entirely and raise vat meat? Neither happy or sad, but much more cost effective.
not really, the rpoblem with baby eating was the babies were NOT happy
No, I think there’s a parallel there. The solution in the story was to reduce the babies to chemical reactions, so they weren’t aware, and couldn’t suffer; that doesn’t really lessen the horror implicit in the solution.
Apparently sleep deprivation is making me -more- insightful than normal. I’m going to have to give vegetarianism/veganism more thought. Right on the heels of a huge insight into privilege arguments, which I’m considering writing up.