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How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't m

by avar 7y ago

How does that make any sense? In the real world we have resource constraints, so positing something like "there won't be any chickens" as a moral loss doesn't make sense, we'll have something else instead since the resources to raise chickens were freed up. If you're throwing resource constraints out the window the question should be why we're not raising 1 billion blue whales for food in addition to of cows. After all they're smarter, and if you're going to follow this logic that these animals ultimately benefit from their numbers being raised as a result of food production that should go for all of them. Having 1 billion city-sized aquariums isn't an issue if we're assuming we have infinite resources. But we don't, in fact that's the entire reason we ended up with these particular species as food animals, they're the most efficient relatively speaking, not necessarily the tastiest.

gwd 7y ago
> How does that make any sense? Again I'm having trouble figuring out what the "that" is that offends you. I'm guessing that you mean, "How does it make any sense to consider a chicken's life to have any value whatsoever?" All I can say is, you may not think so, but lots of people do. We're discussing a story in which some researchers found millions of ants that had fallen into a pit and were living only by cannibalizing their comrades who had starved to death, and responded by building them a "bridge" to allow them to escape. Why did they do that? Party to see what would happen; but partly because they felt bad for the ants and felt better when they helped them. I mean, not a huge amount. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't have intervened, or even felt that bad, if the ant nest had been destroyed to make way for a parking lot. But there's not a parking lot, and all it takes to help is standing up a wooden beam. Like, sure, why not help if it's so easy? In response to this, someone asked how it was consistent to do this and yet continue eating meat. That person obviously cares enough about chickens to think they shouldn't be slaughtered, and to argue about it on Hacker News. In response, a bunch of other people, like myself, jumped in to explain why it's perfectly consistent to value ants enough to save them, but still eat chickens. It was the person who cared about chickens being killed and eaten I was responding to. I was trying to show how trying to make the current system more humane would be better for chickens than eliminating chicken farms altogether. I'm not going to cry for the grass and ants and crickets if they dig up a field to build a useful building. But I'd rather have grass and ants and crickets than an unused parking lot. And I'm not going to cry too badly if chickens go extinct; but all things being equal I'd rather have happy chickens than no chickens. I mean yeah, if you don't give two figs about ants or chickens, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. But an awful lot of people do -- at least a little bit.

by avar 7y ago

gwd 7y ago

> How does that make any sense? Again I'm having trouble figuring out what the "that" is that offends you. I'm guessing that you mean, "How does it make any sense to consider a chicken's life to have any value whatsoever?" All I can say is, you may not think so, but lots of people do. We're discussing a story in which some researchers found millions of ants that had fallen into a pit and were living only by cannibalizing their comrades who had starved to death, and responded by building them a "bridge" to allow them to escape. Why did they do that? Party to see what would happen; but partly because they felt bad for the ants and felt better when they helped them. I mean, not a huge amount. I'm sure the researchers wouldn't have intervened, or even felt that bad, if the ant nest had been destroyed to make way for a parking lot. But there's not a parking lot, and all it takes to help is standing up a wooden beam. Like, sure, why not help if it's so easy? In response to this, someone asked how it was consistent to do this and yet continue eating meat. That person obviously cares enough about chickens to think they shouldn't be slaughtered, and to argue about it on Hacker News. In response, a bunch of other people, like myself, jumped in to explain why it's perfectly consistent to value ants enough to save them, but still eat chickens. It was the person who cared about chickens being killed and eaten I was responding to. I was trying to show how trying to make the current system more humane would be better for chickens than eliminating chicken farms altogether. I'm not going to cry for the grass and ants and crickets if they dig up a field to build a useful building. But I'd rather have grass and ants and crickets than an unused parking lot. And I'm not going to cry too badly if chickens go extinct; but all things being equal I'd rather have happy chickens than no chickens. I mean yeah, if you don't give two figs about ants or chickens, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. But an awful lot of people do -- at least a little bit.