Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

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Not having been born is neutral from the position of the being not getting born. It is neither good nor bad, because the being does not exist.

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.

Or maybe, by having kids you are subjecting yet another generation of creatures to the existential dread and guaranteed pain of their mortality and it is therefore an unethical thing to do?

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.

There is no position from the perspective of beings that don't exist, let alone a neutral one. It's always the beings that exist that make decisions, and it's always their perspective that counts.

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.

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