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They probably will choose the latter one, because the butcher is talking to the nerve cells. A nerve cell cannot speak for the cells that are ultimately harvest

They probably will choose the latter one, because the butcher is talking to the nerve cells. A nerve cell cannot speak for the cells that are ultimately harvested. To make it ethical, the nerve cell has to choose the suffering, to at least join the fate of all the crushed other cells. Because one way or another, billions of living cells are killed. But you can turn this also the other way round: If we are all, humans, cows and trees, ultimately one living creature, why should we worry more about dying cows than we worry about our dying skin cells or dying white blood cells that defend us? We are killing more awareness by drowning our attention in cheap entertainment and we are enduring more suffering by not delivering food to the starving children, and adults around the world.

meowface 6y ago
Yes, but we all draw lines between what we do and don't give moral consideration to. For non-living things, like rocks or water molecules, we offer no direct moral consideration (ignoring potential indirect effects). Unicellular organisms merit the same lack of consideration, in my opinion, given our current scientific understanding. The scientific understanding may change in the future, but that's my current stance. We are all one conglomerated living creature - the many twisting branches of the LUCA - but over time different aspects of this creature emerged with varying levels of complexity and information processing capability. One could argue that a lot of our atoms come from stars, so why treat ourselves any differently from stars, or that all matter and energy in the universe is just the offspring of a unified low-entropy blob at the Big Bang, so what difference does any of it make anyway. There is some logical truth to this reasoning, but if we assume sentience to have at least some effectively non-illusory component, then I think it makes sense to consider sentient systems very differently from non-sentient or almost-non-sentient ones.

meowface 6y ago

Yes, but we all draw lines between what we do and don't give moral consideration to. For non-living things, like rocks or water molecules, we offer no direct moral consideration (ignoring potential indirect effects). Unicellular organisms merit the same lack of consideration, in my opinion, given our current scientific understanding. The scientific understanding may change in the future, but that's my current stance. We are all one conglomerated living creature - the many twisting branches of the LUCA - but over time different aspects of this creature emerged with varying levels of complexity and information processing capability. One could argue that a lot of our atoms come from stars, so why treat ourselves any differently from stars, or that all matter and energy in the universe is just the offspring of a unified low-entropy blob at the Big Bang, so what difference does any of it make anyway. There is some logical truth to this reasoning, but if we assume sentience to have at least some effectively non-illusory component, then I think it makes sense to consider sentient systems very differently from non-sentient or almost-non-sentient ones.