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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Do they actually live 25 years in the wild on average? My understanding was that wild animals have dramatically shorter lives than the same animals in captivity, as a general rule. The exact difference varies from species to species but typically the lifespan would be around half.

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Whether a wolf would kill a cow before its 25 years old doesn’t affect our moral duty to not kill animals unnecessarily and prematurely.

Perhaps not under your preferred moral system. But yours is not the only moral system. It should be obvious that there are plenty of moral systems where counterfactuals do indeed affect the morality of actions (e.g. any utilitarian system or compound system with a utilitarian component).

What moral belief system posits that it is moral to do something simply because someone else would do it?

Does anyone actual subscribe to such a belief? Do you?

I think you're reading me more broadly than I meant you to. As I mentioned in my comment, at a minimum, any utilitarian system would consider an action's morality in light of what would happen in the absence of that action. Yes, people absolutely do subscribe to utilitarian systems, at least as a component of their overall moral stance.

There are also of course many moral systems that do not value the welfare of other species as highly as that of humans.

We generally don't kill animals "unnecessarily". We kill them to eat them. If we could eat them without killing them, we wouldn't kill them.

We also don't kill them "prematurely". We kill them when it's time to eat them, or else to relieve them of pain.

Also, since we're onto wolves, wolves will kill animals and not eat them (see "surplus killing" article on wikipedia). Conversely, wolves will often eat animals without killing them first. Humans at the very least kill our food before we eat it most of the time.

Is eating them 'necessary' if we can sustain ourselves without killing them?

I don't know. Is it necessary to shower if you can sustain yourself without it?

I'm asking because your comment is about the meaning of the word "necessary" but the same meaning should apply to every other human activity, not just food. But the discussion about necessity crops up about food, in particular.

Also, I understand that the comparison to showers might sound irrelevant to the discussion about the ethics of eating meat, but it turns out it is anything but. I don't want to preempt your opinion, so I'll leave it at that, but I'm not just making a glib riposte to your comment. Despite appearances, this is an important question: how necessary is it to shower?

When we say that it is unnecessary to eat animals, we mean it is unnecessary in order to survive and be healthy.

So then using that same metric to answer your question about showers, I think it’s fair to say that showers are absolutely not necessary. Nice, sure. Perhaps necessary according to social norms, probably. Required for a normal life span with average levels of health? Nah.

cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

> cheese_goddess, if I ever get you to see the validity of veganism, or at least cede a point, I’ll die a happy person. I don’t see that ever happening though. You are my HN veganism white whale.

That's creepy stalker behavior - again.

lmao you truly are insane

source of that general rule?

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/286147

The general rule was my own synthesis from what little I know of this subject. This study is one of the main sources I used to drive my current understanding. You can also try this search term: "do wild animals die of old age?"

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