Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

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The only animals that don't generally die mostly from predation are those on top of whatever food chain they're a part of (bears, big cats, etc.) And we don't tend to eat those.

For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.

It is considered by some to be an increase in marginal global utility, when a human eats an animal that would otherwise have been eaten by something else. Because we cause less suffering in the process of (killing and) eating the animal, than anything else would have.

(I don't personally know how I feel about this argument, but I feel like I should put it out here, because it's not very well-known and usually causes more interesting discussion than the usual responses.)

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Also, as a bonus argument: if you're a positive utilitarian, then we increase global utility by a lot simply by raising livestock to eat them that would otherwise have never existed at all. (If you're a negative utilitarian, then all the good humanity has ever done is probably wiped out by the suffering of the great number of chickens we keep.)

Either way, though, it's indisputable that the life of e.g. a sheep kept by a shepherd, has higher total QALY than the life of a wild sheep. For some species, we're giving them a virtual garden-of-Eden to live in until they just, one day, die at our hands.

There's actually a part of the Effective Altruism movement that wants to reduce wild animal suffering—i.e. interject ourselves into nature in order to make more animal lives like that of the tended sheep (with or without the eventual culling.) I think they hope to use synthetic meat to solve the "how do you keep both the fox and the hen happy" problem.

I don't understand how your argument exists alongside the fact that we farm the animals that we eat.

The chicken that you buy at the grocer isn't one we swiped away just as a wolf was about it eat it. The chicken was grown indoors in a factory, likely hadn't even seen the light of day. Even a wolf-eaten wild chicken gets that courtesy.

You can be against factory farming and not be a vegan.

The argument I have is mostly applicable to fisheries (i.e. this discussion re: lobsters); it doesn't have much to say about farming.

Lobsters, like much of our seafood, are just plucked up out of the ocean. If we don't eat them, an otter or something does.

As it happens, adult American lobsters have few predators other than man. They're big, well-armored, have immensely powerful claws and live in deep burrows. Juvenile lobsters are vulnerable to ground fish, but an adult lobster is only likely to be eaten by brave seals and humans.

True enough, for now. It seems climate change has created a lobster population boom, though (they love the warmer water), so I would say it's only a matter of time before evolution takes notice of this "free lunch" and adapts some of the neighbouring predators to better get at them.

Lobsters are basically farmed, at this point.

Whether they suffer more or less when caught vs killed naturally in the ocean, I don't know, but there are other issues with fishing in the ocean, mainly that it is unsustainable.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ocean-fish-number...

A wolf-eaten chicken also gets courtesy parasites.

The Philosophy around procreation is still much debated, but my understanding is that positive utilitarians generally do not believe that _creating_ more lives is necessarily morally good.

While death is often seen as vastly negative (or infinitely, depending on who you ask), positive utilitarians typically reject the idea that procreating more / having more children increases total utility.

Yeah, the simple act of creating the life doesn't have utility in any interpretation, I think; people just talk about the utility of procreation as a sort of Net Present Value on the projected utility that life will experience. Under positive utilitarianism, all lives either experience positive or zero utility, so it's never a net negative to have more of them.

Most positive utilitarians further posit that all [evolved, rather than maliciously-engineered-for-the-sake-of-cruelty] lives likely contain at least a little happiness/reward/satisfaction (positive utility), and since the unhappy moments just axiomatically have zero utility, rather than negative utility, all [evolved] lives should "sum up" to being worth creating from their own perspectives—though creating additional lives might make marginal global utility go down, for Malthusian reasons (ten starving wolves that each live for a year aren't don't have as much utility as one well-fed wolf that lives for ten years.)

Personally, I don't like positive utilitarianism very much—but it's important to understand, since it seems to be the intuitive stance a lot of (often religious, but not always) people have without realizing it.

> For the rest, if we aren't eating them, something else is going to eat them. It's not a question of "taking an animal life"—the animal's life is going to get taken, in a messy, bloody, terrifying way.

Not necessarily, the amount of ocean inhabitants people consume surely tops what would be taken naturally. I don't see how getting scooped from the ocean, hauled in trucks in small boxes, than kept alive in some aquarium beats living in ocean until any kind of death.

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