Is a humane life better than no life at all?

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tobiasleenaert
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Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by tobiasleenaert »

As a vegan, I'm wondering what you think about this article:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-makes-a-bet ... ne-farming

I've always been of the opinion that unborn life doesn't care whether it's unborn (there's no one to care), but I'm starting to doubt/get confused a bit, as this leads to weird conclusions. I think this is a pretty interesting article about this topic.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

tobiasleenaert wrote:As a vegan, I'm wondering what you think about this article:

https://aeon.co/essays/what-makes-a-bet ... ne-farming
Thanks, I hadn't seen that. It's a pretty good article, but think there are a few omissions and overly conservative speculations.

Coming from a science perspective, I don't think it's plausible to consider that in-vitro meat will be equally inefficient to modern animal agriculture, and definitely not compared to the "humane farming" the author speculates on which is potentially very expensive and less efficient still. I don't think that's optimistic, just thermodynamics. Single cell protein is incredibly efficient compared to any multicellular organism based food sources, and in-vitro meat will be along those lines of efficiency in terms of FCR. I believe I have seen numbers in the range of 90%, where animals are lucky to reach 20%.

The article is correct to point out that a diet of grains and beans might be preferable in terms of efficiency (although I don't think it's a large margin), but that doesn't necessarily mean beans. I think new mock meats like the impossible burger are superior to at least the short term potential in-vitro products, and innovation is only going to drive the market more. The author seems to kind of dismiss that out of hand as unrealistic. I don't see this as a zero sum game of us or the animals. We can do better for ourselves and animals simultaneously.

There's brief mention of environment, but none of human health. Plant based lifestyle isn't a panacea, but there's also credible evidence against many animal based foods and their impact on human well being. From a naive perspective this might seem similar with in-vitro meats (in-vitro meats are actually better in terms of pathogens), but it certainly isn't for the mock meats which can be formulated to be much healthier than animal based meats.

Finally, as to the point of efficiency, he mentions that there might be more human beings (and/or wild animals), but I think the author misses entirely an opportunity to discuss the comparative value and meaning of human life to a cow wandering happily (as he supposes it) around a field.
A cow weighs as much as ten human beings. In terms of thermodynamics, that's a fair approximation of how fewer humans would be able to exist for lack of space, food, and other resources. Is having a sentient cow wandering around somewhere to produce meat instead of veggie burgers or in-vitro meat worth sacrificing the potential lives of ten human beings? I would say no. I think pretty much anybody would say no, no matter how happy that cow's life was.

Chickens may provide a slightly better gambit, but I still don't think that math works out, and it's a shame he didn't go into comparative value of the beings. Life isn't just a hedonic sum of pleasure and pain; there's meaning and value, and that's a relevant difference where I think humans have an edge.

I appreciate the mention of the unrealistic expectation of humane farms and the commercial inevitability of abuse. It is important to remember that the whole debate is really academic since a happy farm isn't a very realistic prospect.
tobiasleenaert
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by tobiasleenaert »

thanks for your response. to me the issues that you mention are correct, but also kind of circumstantial to the main point that the author is making, which is the point about whether it is better to have had no life at all, than to have had a happy life with a killing at the end. i think (as a vegan) that this is a valid question that it's not so easy to answer. suppose we put it in this form:

there's a cow. she's living a great life. when she has, for instance lived 80% of her natural life expectancy, she is painlessly killed and eaten.

i'm making abstraction now of factors like: cows wouldn't live that long, it's hard to commercialize such a system, etc.

if you want to put it a bit more extreme even, just suppose that we mercy-kill the cow right before we know (suppose we know) she'll get a very horrible disease. can we eat her then? Same question goes with animals that would die a long death from starvation. would it be 1. more human to painlessly cull them and 2. could we eat them in that case (if we wanted)

(i'm aware of the many unrealistic hypotheticals, but this is a philosophy forum, right? :-)
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miniboes
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

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tobiasleenaert wrote:thanks for your response. to me the issues that you mention are correct, but also kind of circumstantial to the main point that the author is making, which is the point about whether it is better to have had no life at all, than to have had a happy life with a killing at the end. i think (as a vegan) that this is a valid question that it's not so easy to answer. suppose we put it in this form:

there's a cow. she's living a great life. when she has, for instance lived 80% of her natural life expectancy, she is painlessly killed and eaten.

i'm making abstraction now of factors like: cows wouldn't live that long, it's hard to commercialize such a system, etc.

if you want to put it a bit more extreme even, just suppose that we mercy-kill the cow right before we know (suppose we know) she'll get a very horrible disease. can we eat her then? Same question goes with animals that would die a long death from starvation. would it be 1. more human to painlessly cull them and 2. could we eat them in that case (if we wanted)

(i'm aware of the many unrealistic hypotheticals, but this is a philosophy forum, right? :-)
I know you're trying to remove economics from the consideration in order to make it purely about the ethical question, but I think it's inevitably relevant. A living being requires resources, and therefore, just like buying with any investment, there's an opportunity cost: because you're feeding a cow you can feed fewer humans.

An adult cow weighs about 630kg (compared to humans who weigh ~80kg in western, fat countries). I don't know exactly how much calories cows consume, but I guess you can probably feed several humans with the energy you put into keeping a cow alive. That matters a lot, because on top of that humans are more sentient. That, in my opinion, makes it very hard to justify having cows live to their full lifespan.

I think the consideration we need to make is what is the best happiness bang for our energy buck. I think humans (particularly vegans, who consume less energy) are by far the best energy investment, and I don't think that's just my bias.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Sorry if I seem obtuse in avoiding the principle logical question.

The pragmatic problem with restricted thought experiments is that as they become more restricted in our options and amass more unrealistic qualifiers, they become divorced from the moral reality of our decisions.
Once they are so, I think it can be more confusing to people (not everybody reading is going to be as careful a philosopher) than helpful to paint them with real terms like in-vitro meat or cows.
That is, somebody reading an excerpt from that article may take it as an endorsement of this argument, despite it being removed from the empirical reality and no longer valid since the premises are unrealistic. Such a reader may mistakenly take it as approval for eating meat.

But, as you said, the philosophical question is interesting.

So how do we abstract the examples in a way that will avoid people taking the wrong thing away from it, but still discuss them?
If we frame it in human terms, that would avoid the argument being used to justify meat, but we may look insane from an outside perspective that doesn't understand it's a thought experiment.

Perhaps we talk about fairies instead.

Fairy Farm:
We have to remove all questions of opportunity cost in terms of other lives (of other species) that could have used the resources and focus on the one.
Let's say fairies, being magical beings, don't need to eat, and don't take up any space.
They are created by wishing them into being (at no cost), and can be destroyed by wishing them to die (at no cost).
Fairies don't care about being created, like living (and have a lives of some value to them, and their interests are fulfilled by living), and hate dying (intrinsically, it violates their interests to kill them).
This variety of fairy lives forever (does not die 'naturally').

Causing death, as a violation of interest (when you get into preference based consequentialism and beyond hedonistic consequentialism) makes it a negative.
Facilitating life is a positive, since it continually realizes an interest.

At some point, depending on how severe a violation the death is, and how profound the realization is over time while living, the good of X amount of life cancels out the bad of one death.

We could figure out how many years you'd need to let a fairy live before killing it to break even. And more than that would be a net good.

But, as with all consequentialism, this is still a question of comparing alternatives. We can not so easily say that something is absolutely wrong as much as we can say that one choice is wrong relative to another. And we can do that here.

The trick is to avoid false dichotomies.
tobiasleenaert wrote:there's a [fairy]. she's living a great life. when she has, for instance lived [enough to compensate for the moral harm of death], she is painlessly killed[...]
So we have:

1. No life
2. Just enough to compensate for the moral harm of death

But when the choice is when to kill, and it's freely made, that's a false dichotomy.

Does the executor of this choice not have the option to just allow the fairy to continue living?

If this is genuinely not an option, we could say that either one is precisely a wash.
But that only becomes true when there are no other choices.

Add to this:

3. Allow the fairy to live just beyond that to have net positive, then kill her.
4. Allow the fairy to live indefinitely, and never kill her.

Option #3 becomes superior to #1 or #2, and #4 is superior to that.

When there is no cost in letting the fairy live, and you receive no real benefit from killing her, you basically have to be an asshole to do anything but #4.


So, let's say our options are artificially narrowed by the nature of the creature.

Fairies who live a year break even with the moral harm of death, and at two years they are in surplus. But if they live three years, they turn into goblins and become miserable.

That becomes your second question:
tobiasleenaert wrote: if you want to put it a bit more extreme even, just suppose that we mercy-kill the [fairy] right before we know (suppose we know) she'll get a very horrible disease [turning into a goblin].
Then it does become the most moral option to create fairies, let them live two years until right before they become goblins, then kill them.
tobiasleenaert wrote: can we eat her then?
If the death was morally justified, what you do with the body is pretty much irrelevant.
The only problem with eating animals is that it can yield a cognitive bias that causes us to treat them differently, optimizing our hedonic pleasure rather than their well being. The trick is avoiding that bias. To which, I would say, your best bet is not eating them, but feeding them to cats as a secondary act of altruism (assuming cats eat fairies).
tobiasleenaert wrote:Same question goes with animals that would die a long death from starvation. would it be 1. more human to painlessly cull them and 2. could we eat them in that case (if we wanted)
Back to reality (and away from fairies), in these cases, it becomes a question of effective altruism. It may be more moral to provide them supplemental food, or it may be more moral to mercy kill them, depending on the costs involved and what other good could be done with those resources. And assuming we eliminated possible bias, then generally we should use the resource of those dead bodies rather than wasting them (assuming they would be wasted). Again, feeding to cats is a good option.
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by tobiasleenaert »

thanks, this was very lucidly explained, even though for me (as an amateur philosopher at bes, it's still difficult to wrap my head around). I'll give this some thought!
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

tobiasleenaert wrote:thanks, this was very lucidly explained, even though for me (as an amateur philosopher at bes, it's still difficult to wrap my head around). I'll give this some thought!
No problem. Just let me know if you have any other questions/thought experiments. Also, thanks again for posting this!
If you run into any other interesting articles that bring up tricky questions, please do share.
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Mr. Purple
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by Mr. Purple »

As a vegan, I'm wondering what you think about this article:
This is a really interesting article. It makes a lot of sense.

If we remove the health and environmental parts of veganism, I can't see a way around the conclusion that it would be morally good(or at least neutral) to raise animals to eat if we knew the cows lived a happy life, and we killed the cows in a way that didn't create a negative experience. Like the author of the article, i'm vegan partly because I don't believe we have a system capable of reliably doing this.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Is a humane life better than no life at all?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Mr. Purple wrote:
As a vegan, I'm wondering what you think about this article:
This is a really interesting article. It makes a lot of sense.

If we remove the health and environmental parts of veganism, I can't see a way around the conclusion that it would be morally good(or at least neutral) to raise animals to eat if we knew the cows lived a happy life, and we killed the cows in a way that didn't create a negative experience. Like the author of the article, i'm vegan partly because I don't believe we have a system capable of reliably doing this.
It's important to note for the record that Mr. Purple is a "classical utilitarian", which is founded only on hedonic experience of lived pleasure and pain and not preference or interest (the new and improved versions). This goes to show how influential details like that can be.
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