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Marlon's avatar

I was thinking about this topic earlier today. What a remarkable coincidence! As always, this is an excellent article.

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Ape in the coat's avatar

In the most convenient world, form all the creatures on planet Earth only humans are sentient and have ethical worth. I really hope that we live in it, it would mean that there are so much less sufferings to alleviate but it's quite unlikely. There are no reasons why the universe would be so convenient. Most likely there are other sentient creatures that we are torturing with our actions to feed ourselves. And, therefore, veganism is most likely morally correct. But there are obviously less and more evil stances in between. So the idea of estimating "moral worth" of a creature based on the probability that it's sentient makes a lot of sense.

However, these numbers look crazy. In a space of all possible minds sentience may be orthogonal to intelligence, but among the kind of minds that are produced by evolution through natural selection these qualities seem to be highly correlated. And when a report estimating moral weight claims that highly intelligent octopuses, capable of solving complex puzzles, are *less* significant than chickens with tiny brains - this is a clear signal that the methodology is ridiculously off.

The fact that a chicken can in principle live longer doesn't make it more morally valuable while evaluating the evils of factory farming chickens compared to octopuses. If two creature have a life full of torture for half a year and then killed, what matters is how sentient these creatures were during this time, not how long they could have lived counter-factually. If anything, shorter life cycle of octopuses should mean that they are more likely to be sentient from earlier age, while chicken have more probability not to be conscious at the time of the slaughter.

Likewise, Tomasik calculator default values gives a chicken half the moral weight of a pig, which is bizarre if we take into account the difference in the brain size. We also need to take into account that suffering doesn't add up linearly. And the huge second order effect of climate change, towards which beef/milk industry contributes much much then poultry/eggs one.

So in the end, I don't think that the title of the post is correct. I suspect that it's quite likely that eating chicken is, in fact, more ethical than eating beef. On the other hand, turkeys seem to be about as likely to be sentient as chickens but produce more meet per death. So eating them instead of chickens seems a much safer bet.

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