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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

If you believe you should reduce suffering, it would be better for you to quickly kill a chicken and eat it. Otherwise, a cat, bird of prey or other animal might kill that chicken. And cats are cruel killers that slowly torture their prey before eating them.

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This is the primary argument I see hunters use to justify hunting as an ethical form of killing, in contrast to factory farming. Obviously it's better to kill someone or something quickly and painlessly than slowly and painfully, but I don't buy this argument. If you truly had that motivation, you would be saving that chicken from predation and finding a sanctuary or home for it, and/or you'd be encouraging mass human euthanization campaigns across various parts of the world to reduce suffering and slow, painful deaths.

If there were a human serial killer killing people via a projectile energy weapon that always instantly killed someone from a long distance before they had any idea what was happening, I don't think you'd argue for a greatly reduced sentence due to their humane method of disposal. If there were an ancient human civilization that went on hunting trips to kill and eat humans in other villages because they believed human flesh was the most prized meat, and they defended it by saying that they were probably all going to soon die of war or starvation or disease anyway, I don't think you'd just go "oh yeah true" without batting an eye.

The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals. Anything else is self-serving rationalization. If you attribute no moral value to them, that puts you in the company of almost everyone who's ever lived, but just state it plainly instead of trying to wiggle around it with mental gymnastics.

Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this:

> The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

Into this:

> The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

The sole reason vegetable eaters find eating vegetables justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-animal life forms.

Uhh, yeah? That was my point. Food has no moral value. It's just food.

One obvious difference is that plants evolved with animals (or influenced the evolution of animals) via an express food-providing mechanism. To eat the leaves or the fruit of a plant does not necessarily kill it; in fact, one could say that the plants evolved these parts in a symbiotic relationship with their animal eaters/caretakers. It's certainly possible to destroy a plant by eating it obviously, but how many examples of plants can you think of where it provides a detachable, replenishable food product?

Animals do not have similar food-providing mechanisms. When you eat an animal, or part of an animal, it'd dead. It doesn't grow back. It wasn't designed to.

All nutrition comes from plants (or the microbiology around them). All protein comes from plants. Anyone who equates the barbary of eating animals with eating plants is choosing to deceive themselves and others.

Based on that logic I should suffocate you now in your sleep so you don't have to get old and die of cancer. Don't look out for me with my pillow I don't buy that logic either.

We can just stop breeding chickens for the slaughter?

Is it better to have lived and die, or not live at all?

Correction: is it better to suffer and die or not live at all? The vast majority of the 8 billion plus chickens slaughtered in the USA each year experience primarily pain and stress for their short lives.

See the repugnant conclusion. I don't have a good answer save that arguments that deal with completely hypothetical people seem to result in completely useless nonsensical results. For example if your argument were correct it would be morally beneficial to breed as many human children as possible to live horrifying, painful, and short lives in order to end their tortured existence as kid burgers because any sort of life is better than none at all.

If we admit the idea that some lives can have negative value for example if they consist solely of suffering it would be OK to breed kid burgers so long as they had a pleasant existence up until slaughter at 7 followed by a quick trip to McKid.

I suspect that my moral philosophy and likely yours is simply insufficient to deal with hypothetical persons and we ought to simply reason about how to treat actual beings that exist.

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