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Comment by svrtknst | Hacker News Reader

why are wild animals only used as an ethical measure tape when it comes to animal consumption?

What else can we use? We can compare against the natural state (as GP did), which is mostly horror. We can compare against what would happen if we suddenly left these animals to live by themselves - which is even worse, and followed by extinction. We can compare against hypothetically caring about all animals as pets - but that's beyond our logistical capabilities and thus would cause great suffering for both animals and humans.

There is no good measure tape available.

I don't disagree that animals (cows in this case) in nature (whatever that looks like at this point) do suffer and are constantly under fear of predators.

However, I think saying that there is "no good measure tape available" might be intellectually dishonest since we can probably come up with a rough model to optimize for the minimization of global suffering of all beings involved.

Obviously, most mental models have a higher weight biased for humans rather than animals, so a suffering factor for humans would have a higher multiple than for animals. That is where most of the controversy seems to be.

I'm not an expert but the extinct ancestor of the modern cow, the Auroch was quite a large mammal and at least according to wikipedia [citing van Vuure, T. (Cis) (2005). Retracing the Aurochs – History, Morphology and Ecology of an extinct wild Ox. Sofia-Moscow: Pensoft Publishers. ISBN 954-642-235-5] claims that the main predators were big cats (lions and tigers) and hyenas). Across much of the cows modern range those predators don't exist.

Possibly a wolf, Siberian tiger or large brown bear would predate a cow, similiar to the predators of a moose but it doesn't seem like they are under constant fear of predators any more. Cows are often left to pasture across vast unfenced area of basically wilderness and don't seem particularly afraid nor at risk of predation (otherwise they'd need to be guarded).

>There is no good measure tape available.

There's a difference between having moral worth and being a moral agent. Non-human animals (generally) cannot contemplate the ethical character of their actions, so they are not moral agents, nor should we consider them such. This does not mean they are unworthy of moral consideration. What is being evaluated is the ethics of the behavior of people who are moral agents, and there have been guide sticks for the behavior of people for as long as people have been thinking about ethics.

Hate to quote myself but "How do we score that? What metrics do we use to compare?"

The answers seem sort of trivial: using the same ethical framework that informs your decision-making process on other ethical questions. Regardless of the unique flavor of one's moral tradition, most seek to limit the suffering of sentient beings.

Most mammals have a similar brain architecture. Humans share the limbic system with animals like dogs, cows and pigs. This means these animals have extremely similar subjective experiences of pain, fear, joy and other emotions.

For a consistent framework of ethics, these animals should be treated essentially as lobotomized humans.

Because our ethics distinguish us in many other aspects of life. Rape, murder and cannibalism are generally frowned upon, we have international laws governing warfare, we're waking up go the destructive nature of our expanding population, we have medical care that generally exists to remediate the sick and wounded, etc etc etc. But slavery and torture are open questions in this millennium, and who would expect us to draw a line for animals where we're reluctant to do so for humans?

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