This is mind-boggling. My scepticism about progress just ratcheted up a notch.
The forces against changing this are vastly powerful too. My chosen supplier of 'ethical beef' (slaughtered in the animal's home field at very small scale) just went into administration. The market for cheap unhappy flesh is hard to reform.
Presumably there is some benefit of this atrocity (cheap, plentiful food - although maybe a source of our health issues ironically). That should factor into the equation to some extent? We aren't torturing animals for no reason. Also, the lifespan of an animal and the suffering they would potentially endure without our intervention should be factored in. It's more about marginal suffering than absolute suffering. Plenty of humans also live in abject poverty and endure immense suffering just by the design of society (not intentional). Does that make a difference: the intentionality of it? I find this topic very fascinating and a huge source of cognitive dissonance personally so trying to understand more.
1) benefit - I think the right way to look at this is thinking counterfactually. without animal products, we would still have cheap, plentiful food - in fact, perhaps even more so than we do now, since we currently devote a ton of agricultural resources toward raising the animals that could instead directly nourish humans. so I don't think there's a ton of benefit there. one could argue we get more enjoyment out of diets including animal products than we would out of the alternatives, which I think is plausible though not obviously true, but granting it for the sake of argument, it's hard to make the case that the value of this additional enjoyment is anything more than negligible compared to the suffering on the other side of the ledger, and it is probably somewhat canceled out by the health issues you mention.
2) almost none of the animals involved would exist at all without the "intervention" of factory farming since they're costly to raise and bred only for producing food. so all of the suffering is indeed pertinent to the marginal decision of whether to factory farm or not. there's a thornier philosophical question here about whether you think that their lives are an inherent moral good/whether any pleasure they experience in their lives offsets this suffering somewhat. I personally do not believe that there's much weight to that consideration and am very persuaded that non-existence would be preferable to the lives they actually live since they are so overwhelmingly dominated by pain, abuse, and other forms of suffering, and I can't conceive of a compelling argument otherwise. However, I suppose if you disagreed with that it could be a logically sound reason to disagree with the conclusions of the post, though only if it were also true that either their suffering to this degree is necessary to them living at all, i.e. that it would be impossible to improve their living conditions meaningfully. In other words, this would imply that the process of factory farming is not substantially worse for their well-being than the best feasible way of raising them - in my opinion, an absurd claim.
3) intentionality - from a consequentialist perspective it doesn't make a difference, though on other moral views it could. On a practical level, though, I certainly think that the fact that this is being done intentionally and it is entirely within our collective power to prevent it makes it much more alarming and dismaying that our society allows it to continue.
This is mind-boggling. My scepticism about progress just ratcheted up a notch.
The forces against changing this are vastly powerful too. My chosen supplier of 'ethical beef' (slaughtered in the animal's home field at very small scale) just went into administration. The market for cheap unhappy flesh is hard to reform.
Great piece, thanks.
Thanks!
And we've got octopus farming to scale up yet.
Good read
Doubtful. The worst thing in the world is probably someone increasing the risk of suffering based AGI by a tiny amount.
But yeah if we were torturing 32,000,000,000 babies/year that would also be pretty bad.
I was talking about actual badness not expected badness. In terms of expected badness, things that affect the entire future might be worse.
Presumably there is some benefit of this atrocity (cheap, plentiful food - although maybe a source of our health issues ironically). That should factor into the equation to some extent? We aren't torturing animals for no reason. Also, the lifespan of an animal and the suffering they would potentially endure without our intervention should be factored in. It's more about marginal suffering than absolute suffering. Plenty of humans also live in abject poverty and endure immense suffering just by the design of society (not intentional). Does that make a difference: the intentionality of it? I find this topic very fascinating and a huge source of cognitive dissonance personally so trying to understand more.
Good questions! I'll take a crack at them:
1) benefit - I think the right way to look at this is thinking counterfactually. without animal products, we would still have cheap, plentiful food - in fact, perhaps even more so than we do now, since we currently devote a ton of agricultural resources toward raising the animals that could instead directly nourish humans. so I don't think there's a ton of benefit there. one could argue we get more enjoyment out of diets including animal products than we would out of the alternatives, which I think is plausible though not obviously true, but granting it for the sake of argument, it's hard to make the case that the value of this additional enjoyment is anything more than negligible compared to the suffering on the other side of the ledger, and it is probably somewhat canceled out by the health issues you mention.
2) almost none of the animals involved would exist at all without the "intervention" of factory farming since they're costly to raise and bred only for producing food. so all of the suffering is indeed pertinent to the marginal decision of whether to factory farm or not. there's a thornier philosophical question here about whether you think that their lives are an inherent moral good/whether any pleasure they experience in their lives offsets this suffering somewhat. I personally do not believe that there's much weight to that consideration and am very persuaded that non-existence would be preferable to the lives they actually live since they are so overwhelmingly dominated by pain, abuse, and other forms of suffering, and I can't conceive of a compelling argument otherwise. However, I suppose if you disagreed with that it could be a logically sound reason to disagree with the conclusions of the post, though only if it were also true that either their suffering to this degree is necessary to them living at all, i.e. that it would be impossible to improve their living conditions meaningfully. In other words, this would imply that the process of factory farming is not substantially worse for their well-being than the best feasible way of raising them - in my opinion, an absurd claim.
3) intentionality - from a consequentialist perspective it doesn't make a difference, though on other moral views it could. On a practical level, though, I certainly think that the fact that this is being done intentionally and it is entirely within our collective power to prevent it makes it much more alarming and dismaying that our society allows it to continue.