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that article may take it as an endorsement of this argument, despite it being removed from the empirical reality and no longer valid since the premises are unrealistic.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.