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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

>“But in our scenario, you are at least giving consent by taking your own cells. In the world of lab-grown meats, you are taking cells from animals without their consent.”

I'm an ethical vegetarian and this logic puzzles me. For the world to eventually move to lab-grown meat, there's (possibly) eventually going to have to be some living animals from whom some cells are harvested so they can be grown into tissue and organs.

True, the animals can't consent to that, but that seems like an interesting hill to die on given other non-consensual alternatives. If an animal were hypothetically sufficiently intelligent and given an ultimatum between "painlessly scrape some cells out of me and live the rest of my life on a pasture until a natural death" vs. "(probably mercilessly) torture and kill me and trillions of my relatives for eons to come", I wonder which they'd choose.

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Ethical vegan of ~10 years, I completely agree. To be against taking cultures for lab-grown meat, I think you'd also have to be against veterinary care, and trap-neuter-return programs, which similarly improve animal welfare by subjecting them to a medical procedure without their consent.

I think it’s very hard to argue against trap-neuter-return programs or even trap-foster-adopt programs without coming off as a pretty extreme radical. I’m genuinely curious in what sort of arguments one could come up with other than consent and autonomy absolutism. To my untrained eye, that level of support for animal autonomy seems like it could only be informed by an almost Disney-esque anthropomorphism.

The world out there is a cruel, terrifying place. I’ve heard plenty of wild birds and rabbits scream in agony when killed by feral cats, right outside my window.

I don't argue against it because it seems to be a necessity according to people more knowledgeable than me but I'm shocked at how easily it's hand-waved away as a non issue (morally) by most people. I find the act of castrating an animal horrific, first because of the violation of its bodily autonomy and second because genitals are not just a piece of meat but alter how the brain works which to me means it's also a violation of the mind. I think people who care about animals should think twice about having a pet if it means forcing that kind of procedure on a living being.

That's my general take on the subject. To your point about anthropomorphism, I disagree, I think assessing one's health and bodily integrity is a primal instinct that is most likely shared by most animals. I can't say for sure but I have experienced a lot of body horror myself (torn & deformed limbs) and it was never higher thoughts that prevailed, even in situations without pain (like after surgery).

The trap-neuter-return programs are intended to maintain populations of stray animals. This is particularly important in the case of cats. Why? Because cats are an introduced predator with the ability to drive large numbers of bird and other small prey animal species to extinction.

Since we are the ones who introduced cats in the first place, we are responsible for the consequences. Violating the bodily autonomy of individual cats is a small price to pay to avoid a population explosion that would ultimately result in the large scale killing of countless birds and other small animals.

"people who care about animals should think twice about having a pet if it means forcing that kind of procedure on a living being"

I sympathize with your view very much, but there's also the agony that results from unconstrained breeding of cats and dogs to consider.

In developed nations feral cats and dogs are often hunted down and exterminated. Even while they live their lives in are often no picnic, whether they're in a shelter or in the wild.

Also, if you have, say, a cat and you don't get them neutered and you let them out what are you going to do with all the kittens? If you don't let them out, the endless confinement could be argued as a form of misery itself.

Then you could argue about having pets at all, but then what about all the cats and dogs that live miserable lives in shelters or are unwanted or abused in other homes? Wouldn't they be better off with you?

>I find the act of castrating an animal horrific, first because of the violation of its bodily autonomy and second because genitals are not just a piece of meat but alter how the brain works which to me means it's also a violation of the mind. I think people who care about animals should think twice about having a pet if it means forcing that kind of procedure on a living being.

There are two different situations, though: preventing reproduction and preventing potentially undesirable hormone-fueled behavior. You don't need to castrate just to prevent reproduction.

I don't think there'd be anything wrong with performing a vasectomy, for example. I'm not sure if there's a similar analog for female animals, though.

I feel like this is a slow-creep argument (unsure of the actual term, thinking similarly of the Overton window)

Back before we humanly killed animals, an argument could be made

“well it would be better to humanly kill animals as painlessly as possible, versus a painful death. Therefore I’d prefer and support the humane killing”

Now that humane killing is the norm, the act of killing became bad, or at least has become more popular. Obviously the more popular today notion of killing animals being unethical existed back then.

Now we’re onto the argument of consent, regardless of pain (sampling cultures versus not). The next step will be, even having these animals on pastures is unethical, as they cannot be free to go where they want (despite these essentially domesticated livestock being unable to live in the wild without heavy evolutionary pressures I.e. massive death or extinction)

So as “extreme” as it may seem to proclaim that it’s unethical to sample cells from an animal, regardless of pain, I think it’ll surely shift to being more mainstream and acceptable as a viewpoint.

I also think the latter vs in your statement is a straw man, and a poor one at that. To say all livestock grown for meat consumption are “tortured” is a gross generalization.

Sure it exists, but so does ethically raised, pasture raised livestock that are humanly killed (and such practices increasing at a great rate, as grass fed/finished becomes more desirable)

Lastly, this personification of all animals is a misrepresentation of many species. I think there are a few animals we can truly question their sentience (dolphins come to mind), while others I think we can say to a reasonable degree are less sentient than humans, and therefore if killed in the most painless way possible is ethically okay. Obviously this is a philosophical can of worms.

> I feel like this is a slow-creep argument

You're thinking about what some others (including newscasters, politicians, etc.) call a slippery slope[1].

I'm wary about criticizing arguments via slippery slope, because.

1. Most optimal-ethically choices sit at a middle-point of a slope when you consider only one dimension; e.g. a limited right to free speech.

2. With respect to shifting mores, one can also consider the situation of empire and slavery. The argument goes that communication and automation respectively were insufficiently developed in the past that these structures were in fact the most empirically ethical, but that they are generally no longer optimally good given today's communication and automation technology. Analogously, as we have better dietary options today, the ethically optimal option might have shifted. That is, the point in the single dimension has shifted because we have shifted wrt the other dimensions.

[1]: note that this is a misuse and misunderstanding about an actual slippery slope fallacy. In the valid usage, the slippery slope is exhibited completely within the fallacious argument so that the evidence is exaggerated to support the conclusion when the conclusion actually does not follow. In the misuse, one worries that the proposed conclusion would lead to a change in what people think is accepted, such that bad things become accepted.

> Now we’re onto the argument of consent, regardless of pain (sampling cultures versus not). The next step will be, even having these animals on pastures is unethical, as they cannot be free to go where they want (despite these essentially domesticated livestock being unable to live in the wild without heavy evolutionary pressures I.e. massive death or extinction)

The only way for this massive death/extinction (within the current system) is if everyone adopts this vision overnight. What's more likely to happen is by people eating less and less meat, animals will be less and less bred by farmers. Probably something similar to when cars supplanted horses in cities.

> Now that humane killing is the norm

Is it? As far as I know, most animals are "factory farmed" in conditions so inhuman that some countries have laws against... documenting their conditions on video.

>To say all livestock grown for meat consumption are “tortured” is a gross generalization.

I'm aware, and wasn't trying to say that (hence "trillions" instead of "all").

I just said that, for an average (say) cow, if you assume current trends continue for decades and centuries, with no lab-grown alternatives, it is likely that over time trillions of cows will be raised in cruel conditions and killed for food.

While this is happening, there may also simultaneously be billions (or more) of cows that are raised with a lot of open space to graze on and are treated well before being killed. Relative percentages aside, it's still a high absolute number of animals tortured and killed.

They probably will choose the latter one, because the butcher is talking to the nerve cells. A nerve cell cannot speak for the cells that are ultimately harvested. To make it ethical, the nerve cell has to choose the suffering, to at least join the fate of all the crushed other cells. Because one way or another, billions of living cells are killed.

But you can turn this also the other way round: If we are all, humans, cows and trees, ultimately one living creature, why should we worry more about dying cows than we worry about our dying skin cells or dying white blood cells that defend us? We are killing more awareness by drowning our attention in cheap entertainment and we are enduring more suffering by not delivering food to the starving children, and adults around the world.

Yes, but we all draw lines between what we do and don't give moral consideration to. For non-living things, like rocks or water molecules, we offer no direct moral consideration (ignoring potential indirect effects). Unicellular organisms merit the same lack of consideration, in my opinion, given our current scientific understanding. The scientific understanding may change in the future, but that's my current stance.

We are all one conglomerated living creature - the many twisting branches of the LUCA - but over time different aspects of this creature emerged with varying levels of complexity and information processing capability. One could argue that a lot of our atoms come from stars, so why treat ourselves any differently from stars, or that all matter and energy in the universe is just the offspring of a unified low-entropy blob at the Big Bang, so what difference does any of it make anyway.

There is some logical truth to this reasoning, but if we assume sentience to have at least some effectively non-illusory component, then I think it makes sense to consider sentient systems very differently from non-sentient or almost-non-sentient ones.

> this logic puzzles me. For the world to eventually move to lab-grown meat...

Puzzles don't matter. The world doesn't like them much and therefore doesn't do them much. What they do like is tasty food. So that's the route to conversion. Not the puzzles.

This reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide when they met animals that give consent. In fact I think the animal itself was the waiter. I seem to remember something along the lines of "Are you sure? I'm quite well marbled."

You remember correctly - it's from the second book, "The restaurant at the end of the universe", and the animal in question had been genetically altered to strive for its own consumption, and enjoy the whole process of it.

It's quite a terrifying thought, to be honest - maybe because the animal in question is very much conscious and intelligent.

I'm never quite sure whether or not Douglas Adams wrote it for comedic effect or to provoke some deeper discussion.

Might as well be both.

There's no puzzle here, you kill plants for your nourishment without asking for their consent.

We all draw lines between what we do and don't give moral consideration to, and these aren't necessarily purely subjective. There's a reason why almost no one cares if you slice open a grapefruit compared to slicing open a living person's head: we believe sentience and consciousness to be some significant, valued attribute, and at least to some degree non-illusory.

The current scientific understanding is that most animals are so much more sentient and conscious than all plants that it makes sense to give moral consideration up to some threshold lying between the two. (With unicellular organisms even lower.) There are some animals (e.g. jellyfish) that as far as we know appear to reside below the plant threshold, in which case I'd consider it okay to kill and eat those animals.

> I'm an ethical vegetarian

Isn't that a contradiction? You know that mother cows are slaughtered after they're done producing milk, right? And the male calves are mostly slaughtered immediately.

"I'm a celibate prostitute"

I think veganism is much closer to being ethical

You're right, it is. It's cognitive dissonance on my part because theoretically, dairy products can be produced ethically, even though they rarely are.

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