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I'm not quite sure which of the two you're suggesting we do now. They neither live in luxury nor their lifespan. Instead, they're basically tortured all their short life before we kill them.

You don't have to torture animals to eat them. Assuming advances in technology and energy we could get to the point where a hypothetical farmer could raise animals in luxury. As tech increases the luxury will increase. If animals are indeed sentient, farms would essentially transform into happiness factories generating and funneling new minds into earthly paradise.

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.

Animals that have lived a full lifespan are not delicious to eat. Meat from old animals is tough and often contains tumors. So you're still stuck with killing them in early maturity.

> Assuming advances in technology and energy we could get to the point where a hypothetical farmer could raise animals in luxury. As tech increases the luxury will increase.

Why would an industrial food processor care about how luxurious the sentient inventory finds the warehouse?

Consumer pressure

If you'd like to learn more about this line of thinking:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

As mentioned by zerofries, the only way this would happen is by consumer pressure. Otherwise there’s no way it would ever make sense to raise chickens in the way you’ve said. There’s not enough ROI on ensuring really happy chickens for anything other than boycotting normal chicken meat to make it probably. At least in the near future (next 100 years) I would say not existing is far preferable to the hell theyre put through in factory farming.

In the glorious future when we can synthesize all the delicious cruelty-free artificial meat we desire, should we nevertheless, on ethical grounds, farm chickens so that we can strap them into VR sims of a life of chicken-luxury?

Not VR, the chickens live a real life as fulfilled and self actualized as a chicken could be. At any rate it doesn't even really matter (from the chicken pov) whether its real or not because as I said, from all the available evidence chickens don't have the innate capacity for existential dread. A chicken doesn't and can't care what happens to it's corpse after its dead or the evolutionary arc of its species. The only ones who care are a few humans projecting anthropomorphic traits on to them.

I think you're on fairly complicated ground here, ethically speaking. This is not a question that ethicists have left unaddressed, and it requires a bit more thought than simply the "existence vs non-existence" dichotomy you've presented here. If you want to look into it further, I know Christine Korsgaard among others has discussed this exact question in her papers.

I'm in the middle of work and lost interest after doing a cursory dig through the links. If she actually has a counterargument you can boil down for me I'd be happy to consider it.

If some alien offers me this deal, I would rather not make a deal at all. I will fight and they have to kill me. But I will die knowing that I was free.

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.