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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

It does not want to suffer. Not wanting to die has more to do with avoiding suffering/pain than it does with the dying itself.

Ideally I could eat animals that are happy and content then instantly dead without ever knowing what's happening. If we could breed them with little switches in their brain stems that can be turned to Off via a wireless signal ...

I'd want that. That would be great. Press button, chicken drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.

The more important question is how self-aware is the chicken? Does this self-awareness give it rights? Do rights stem from self-awareness, or from humanness, or is it arbitrary based on a wishy washy feeling of "Hm, that looks too severe. Oh but that other thing, that's okay". Or is how we treat them based purely on how much they can take before the taste becomes too poor for us to bear?

Ultimately the point is that meat is tasty.

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> Ultimately the point is that meat is tasty.

If it was only about avoiding suffering/pain and not the dying, would you be okay with farming children for eating?

They will live happy lives pampered and cared for, running around in the backyard until you press a button and child drops dead. Takes 1 microsecond to die.

It's obviously absurd, but you're making that decision with the animals you eat all the time. A chicken (probably) is less self aware than a cow, but we do eat cows.

But how do you decide that another being is un-self-aware enough to be eaten?

Which takes me back to the absurd. If human meat was tasty (I read it isn't), would someone with downs syndrome be morally ok to eat? How about someone in a vegetative state?

If the sliding scale of self awareness is the deciding factor, we might as well eat less aware humans.

I understand it's an absurd argument but children are sentient and has far more potential than a chicken by being allowed to live out their natural life.

If a child grows up and does nothing more than put together a single shoddy chicken coop that lets water in and falls over in a mild breeze it has infinitely out-performed the chicken. People with disabilities are still infinitely more capable than chickens, cows, most any animal we eat.

There's also the problem of disease transmission too if you really want to hash out the idea. Most diseases don't transfer between species (at least not in catastrophic ways), if we were eating other humans there would be a lot of new diseases we'd need to fight or die from. See also BSE [1] and CJD [2] as examples of problems that occur through cannibalism.

[1] Bovine spongiform encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

[2] Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise... - particularly the "Cannibalism" section of Transmission.

Yeah. I find that when you really think about the ethics of eating meat, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify a position somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It's similar to the abortion debate, I've adopted a position (pro-choice) that I can't fully defend. The catch is that the sliding scale isn't a strawman, it's incredibly hard to justify an arbitrary line where one side is okay and the other isn't.

Personally, I draw an arbitrary line between fish and chicken intelligence.

This is true for most people except that pigs are smarter than dogs and many people won't eat dog meat.

Relative intelligence is difficult to measure. Would I eat a person if they were actually dumber than a chicken?

In a survival situation, not having a choice, sure. I would eat the dumb person before the smart dog. That is a strange thing to say though..

Personally, I follow the "rule" of: What you don't want done to yourself, don't do to others.

Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive? Sure, one might argue that once you're dead you don't mind anymore, but while being alive, you usually strongly prefer staying that way.

It's that simple.

It certainly is difficult to determine wheter or not something wants to live, but in the case of chickens we can be fairly sure, as they display somewhat intelligent behaviour, and actively avoid harm.

> Would you mind dying right now? Or would you prefer to stay alive?

Sure I'd prefer to stay alive because I'm curious what happens next. But realistically speaking my death is other people's problem not mine.

Dying is easy. It's other people that suffer the consequences.

Although the process of dying, if drawn out, sounds hella unpleasant. I wouldn't want that part.

If we're talking step into the street and get splattered by a runaway 18-wheeler, instant brain death ... fuck it, not my problem.

If we're talking 8 months of ineffectual chemo followed by 10 hours of drawing my last breath ... I'd rather just shoot myself.

If we're talking normal life vs "eat this pill and aging becomes so slow you will be physically and mentally young well into your 90s followed by death of old age at 140" ... yeah I will definitely take that pill.

I'm not sure that really answers your question but there you go. My views on life and death.

We have things that put things to sleep. Anastasia. I don't hear people complain about operations (except those rare cases). The other option would be C4 that should also be painless. Although you could argue that the pieces of brain still suffer for a moment.

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