Hacker News Reader

Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

If this reaches mass scale, is this ethical? What about all the pig, chickens and cows that will never be born because they won’t be reared anymore? We’d have no use for them, we’d take over farmland with meat factories and wipe out 99% of the species.

Is that more ethical than rearing & killing the animal instead?

View on HN

What sort of mental gymnastics do you have to go through to even arrive at this question?

I sincerely hope that this is satire. You can't possibly advocate for the rights of unborn animals while we keep torturing and killing billions of living ones each year.

That is no different to what might happen if the whole population became vegetarian. It is something people have to decide for themselves as a consumer and it will be influenced by other factors like pricing, health, culture etc.

Of course small scale food production is something that a lot of people enjoy and find worthwhile. I have kept chickens and grow vegetables. If land became available it may be bought up by those kind of people. This could become much more common in a world of automation and basic income. The world is full of people who would love to spend their lives growing high quality food inefficiently.

I invite you to watch Earthlings[1] and then answer that question on your own.

1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrlBSuuy50Y

A lot of animals live in ridiculous conditions, but I guess we could ask if living in suffering is better than not existing.

I don't think you can make this an argument against people who are coming to this from the perspective of animal rights or animals having feelings, because without other considerations the logic "it's better for an individual animal to be born for the purpose of being slaughtered than for it to not be born at all" would seem to apply to homo sapiens as well.

I hope this is satire

Yes.

What virtue is there in being born?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com