Here is a question I found myself asking:
Is it better for an animal to be farmed and eaten, or to have never been born at all?
(Assuming we can farm them safely / humanely, even though the article suggests we cannot do so yet)
Is it better for an animal to be farmed and eaten, or to have never been born at all?
(Assuming we can farm them safely / humanely, even though the article suggests we cannot do so yet)
Lets say aliens came and offered you a deal. You can either not exist or live a life of luxury with all delicious food and mates you want, then after 1000 years or so you'd peacefully pass away just like a natural death and you are informed that they'd eat your body. I'm pretty sure quite a few people would be open to this.The choice is even simpler with animals since from all evidence they lack the capacity for existential dread.
Now tell, me what would be the most moral choice assuming chickens are sentient? To indulge them to a pampered existence several times their natural lifespan...and yes, at the end disposing of their bodies in the most practical and beneficial way, its not like a chicken cares what happens to its mortal shell in whatever poultry afterlife may exist. Or leave chicken minds to the terror of being torn up by a fox in the wilderness or to never know the joys of existence in the paradise future ethical meat farms may offer?
If your ethical code is a variation of 'reducing pain and increasing pleasure for all sentient life' this would be orders of magnitude more good then the Peta option of turning them loose to die in the wild or never exist. It would be far more ethical than even artificial meat.
Heck from a strict cost/benefit analysis it may be one of the greatest moral triumphs mankind has ever given the universe.
Why would an industrial food processor care about how luxurious the sentient inventory finds the warehouse?
There is some chance that I will accept the deal, just to buy more time and find weaknesses in the aliens. Anyway, I would prefer to die free on my own, and I would prefer that my family gets to take my body and cremate it, or give it to earthly elements.
If a woman dies, we don't feel sorrow for any children (or their children, or their children's children, etc, etc) that will never be born. I am not a murderer for denying life to the billions and billions of people that will not be born if I've chosen not to have kids. Neither am I a hero for saving billions and billions of people if I choose to have kids (and good God, make sure my kids have kids and their kids have kids, etc, etc).
The question just comes down to: is it OK to keep animals to be farmed and eaten. If the answer is "no", then you gain nothing by bringing new lives into the world to subject them to it. If the answer is "yes", then there isn't a dilemma.
I don't feel like any of these points of view actually anwser the question "is it better to not exist or to exist and suffer", they're just different ways of framing the question.
Really, it doesn't matter if an animal that doesn't exist would 'prefer' to exist in suffering, because that's a purely counter-factual fantasy to begin with. All that matters is whether we should prefer such an animal to exist. Anyone who prefers they wouldn't based on vague moral arguments has to reconcile that with the fact that killing those animals for food is right in line with correcting the 'error' of their birth.
A better way to make the argument is to appeal to things we do actually care about in an ethically consistent manner: how inefficient and wasteful it is to raise animals for food. If you have something that is more efficient, tastes better, and is healthier, then it becomes harder to justify that waste, regardless of anyone's moral position on suffering. Anything else is just an reasonless appeal to emotion.
I don't really know how to classify sentience, but I would have thought that birds qualify.
Quite impossible to answer generic questions and better/worse without defining boundaries.