The only way for your argument to work is if you think a human’s brief minutes of taste outweighs the happiness of the entire animal’s life, which is extremely ludicrous.
A good first approximation of the value of a human compared to the value of a chicken would be that the human is 10,000,000 times as valuable, since it is possible to buy a chicken for a few dollars, while the life of a human is usually measured in millions of dollars. If this is the case, there is nothing ludicrous about supposing that those brief minutes outweigh the chicken’s entire life.
This assumes that the cost of a chicken reflects the value of the chicken’s life. Since the chicken has no influence to speak of over that cost, this in turn assumes that humans (collectively, making up The Market) have a good estimate of the value of the chicken’s life.
But (1) it seems fairly clear that The Market doesn’t give a damn about the aspect of the chicken’s life we’re concerned with here, and therefore there’s no way for the price to reflect that value (as opposed to the value of the chicken’s dead body to us, which it certainly will reflect), and relatedly (2) we already know what humans collectively think about the value of a chicken’s life (namely, that it’s extremely small). Anyone who’s asking this question at all is already doubting the common wisdom about the value of chicken lives, and would therefore be ill advised to take The Market’s word for it.
(#1 is perhaps an oversimplification. It’s possible in principle for people who assign some moral value to chickens’ lives to influence the price; e.g., if they buy chickens in order to set them free. But this will only have non-negligible impact on typical chicken prices if those people buy an enormous number of chickens, which requires them to be very numerous or very rich or both. Especially as a serious attempt to improve chicken welfare this way would be a lot more complicated than just buying chickens and letting them go; I doubt chickens do all that well in the wild. You’d have to provide them with somewhere to live. Actually, most likely the biggest effect of this on the welfare of chickens would probably be via whatever the change in price did to the already-existing chicken farming industry. Higher prices would presumably mean fewer chickens sold but more profit per chicken, which probably would end up improving the lives of farmed chickens and reducing their number. But, again, not going to happen until such time as there are a lot more people very keen to improve chickens’ lives.)
Nothing (necessarily) wrong with that. I feel approximately the same way myself. But dressing it up in terms of the price of chickens adds nothing to saying what you just said now.
Sure. I wasn’t trying to use an exact economic calculation. In fact if you tried to do that you would get a factor of less than 10,000,000, while I meant that as a minimum. I think a hundred million might end up being more accurate.
I don’t see what people think is so unreasonable about this. I remember someone making this kind of vegan/vegetarian argument saying, “Let’s assume a chicken has only 5% of the value of a human being...” and my response is “What?!?! Do you think that I’m going to hesitate more than a tenth of a second before choosing to kill 20 chickens rather than a human?”
I suspect people are doing the math wrong here. I agree that the value of chicken’s life is smaller than 5% of value of human’s life. But that doesn’t automatically imply that the value of chicken’s life is smaller than the amount of pleasure the human derives from eating the chicken for lunch, as opposed to eating some vegetables instead.
I suspect that the usual human scope insensitivity makes some people conclude “if it is less than 1% of value of human life, it means that it is for all practical purposes zero, which means I am morally free to waste it in any quantities, because zero multiplied by any number remains zero”. Uhm, it doesn’t work this way.
Making someone eat broccoli for lunch instead of chicken is not the same as literally killing them. So when we discuss veganism, we shouldn’t compare “chicken life” vs “human life”, because that is not what the debate is about; that is a red herring. We should compare “chicken life” vs “additional utility a human gets from eating a chicken as opposed to eating something else”.
I agree that we should be comparing the chicken’s life (or a percentage of its life) to the extra utility from eating the chicken. The point is that the small utility that the human gets is still larger than the value of the chicken life, because the entire value of the human life is so vastly greater than the value of the chicken life.
Some Fermi estimates; feel free to disagree with specific numbers and provide your own.
Let’s take an average human life as a unit of value; i.e. the value of human’s life is 1.
How large part of “a value of human’s life” is “having lunch, in general, as opposed to only having a breakfast and a dinner every day of your life”? Let’s say it’s somewhere between 1⁄10 and 1⁄100, because there are many other things humans value, such as not being in pain, or having sex, or having status, or whatever.
If we estimate an average human life to be about 10 000 or 20 000 days, then “having this specific lunch” is between 1⁄10 000 and 1⁄20 000 of “having lunch, in general”.
But the choice is actually not between having a lunch and not having a lunch, but between having a chicken lunch or having a vegan lunch. Let’s say the taste of chicken provides between 1⁄4 and 1⁄10 of the value of a lunch.
Putting these numbers together, a value of “having a chicken for a specific lunch” is about 1 / 1 000 000 of a value of a human life.
As a quick check, imagine that you are both in a vegan country, where chickens are simply not available for lunch. Would you sell 1% of your remaining lifespan (less than 1 year) to the Devil in return for having a chicken for lunch each day of your life? I guess many people would, probably even more than 1%; and the revealed preferences (e.g. people dying as a result of salmonella) seem to match this.
So, it seems like ethically it is right to eat chicken if and only if a value of a human life is greater than value of 1 000 000 chicken’s lives. Which, according to many people, it is.
Possible methodological problems:
1) Scope insensitivity: maybe people say that 1 000 000 chickens are less worth than humans simply because they cannot imagine what “1 000 000” actually means; they only imagine about dozen chickens when making the emotional judgement. On the other hand, there are people who as a part of their profession kill large numbers of chicken, so they would have a near-mode idea of what it means. How many people would be willing to do such profession, though?
2) How much is the desire to eat chicken a result of cultural brainwashing? Do people in countries where vegetarianism is normal agree that having a chicken instead would increase the value of their lunch by 10%? That is, how much is “wanting to eat a chicken” actually wanting to eat “a chicken”, as opposed to simply wanting to eat “the same thing as yesterday”.
I agree with this calculation, except that I think that the discrepancy between the value of a human life and the value of a chicken could be even greater; as I said, I think a human could be worth up to 100,000,000 times the value of the chicken.
How many people would be willing to do such profession, though?
I don’t think this question is relevant. I would not be willing to be a trash collector (without much higher pay than usual), but have no moral objection to it. In the same way I would not be willing to be an animal slaughterer (without much higher pay than usual), but have no moral objection to it. And the reasons are the same: disgust reaction, not morality.
Do people in countries where vegetarianism is normal agree that having a chicken instead would increase the value of their lunch by 10%?
Since I make fairly intense efforts to save money, occasionally even by not eating meat, I know perfectly well that in general my preference for eating meat and other animal products is strong enough to make me spend nearly double on food. So it is likely worth significantly more than 10% of that value. This is not likely to be “cultural brainwashing,” since I eat more than is considered healthy etc. If anything I have to resist cultural pressures to persist in my behavior.
How large part of “a value of human’s life” is “having lunch, in general, as opposed to only having a breakfast and a dinner every day of your life”? Let’s say it’s somewhere between 1⁄10 and 1⁄100,
I.e. you’d take a 1% chance of being killed straight away over a 100% chance of never being allowed to have lunch again, but you’d take the latter over a 10% chance of being killed straight away?
...Huh. Actually, rephrasing it this way made the numbers sound less implausible to me.
Putting these numbers together, a value of “having a chicken for a specific lunch” is about 1 / 1 000 000 of a value of a human life.
I’d estimate that as ((amount you’re willing to pay for a chicken lunch) - (amount you’re willing to pay for a vegan lunch))/(statistical value of life). But that’s in the same ballpark.
A good first approximation of the value of a human compared to the value of a chicken would be that the human is 10,000,000 times as valuable, since it is possible to buy a chicken for a few dollars, while the life of a human is usually measured in millions of dollars. If this is the case, there is nothing ludicrous about supposing that those brief minutes outweigh the chicken’s entire life.
This assumes that the cost of a chicken reflects the value of the chicken’s life. Since the chicken has no influence to speak of over that cost, this in turn assumes that humans (collectively, making up The Market) have a good estimate of the value of the chicken’s life.
But (1) it seems fairly clear that The Market doesn’t give a damn about the aspect of the chicken’s life we’re concerned with here, and therefore there’s no way for the price to reflect that value (as opposed to the value of the chicken’s dead body to us, which it certainly will reflect), and relatedly (2) we already know what humans collectively think about the value of a chicken’s life (namely, that it’s extremely small). Anyone who’s asking this question at all is already doubting the common wisdom about the value of chicken lives, and would therefore be ill advised to take The Market’s word for it.
(#1 is perhaps an oversimplification. It’s possible in principle for people who assign some moral value to chickens’ lives to influence the price; e.g., if they buy chickens in order to set them free. But this will only have non-negligible impact on typical chicken prices if those people buy an enormous number of chickens, which requires them to be very numerous or very rich or both. Especially as a serious attempt to improve chicken welfare this way would be a lot more complicated than just buying chickens and letting them go; I doubt chickens do all that well in the wild. You’d have to provide them with somewhere to live. Actually, most likely the biggest effect of this on the welfare of chickens would probably be via whatever the change in price did to the already-existing chicken farming industry. Higher prices would presumably mean fewer chickens sold but more profit per chicken, which probably would end up improving the lives of farmed chickens and reducing their number. But, again, not going to happen until such time as there are a lot more people very keen to improve chickens’ lives.)
I don’t disagree much with this. I am simply saying that I actually do care that little about chickens, and so do most people.
Nothing (necessarily) wrong with that. I feel approximately the same way myself. But dressing it up in terms of the price of chickens adds nothing to saying what you just said now.
This is what I would’ve said, but you did it in a much more eloquent fashion. Thank you!
I am sure there are markets where you can buy a human much cheaper.
(This is just a technical statement of fact, without any endorsement.)
Sure. I wasn’t trying to use an exact economic calculation. In fact if you tried to do that you would get a factor of less than 10,000,000, while I meant that as a minimum. I think a hundred million might end up being more accurate.
I don’t see what people think is so unreasonable about this. I remember someone making this kind of vegan/vegetarian argument saying, “Let’s assume a chicken has only 5% of the value of a human being...” and my response is “What?!?! Do you think that I’m going to hesitate more than a tenth of a second before choosing to kill 20 chickens rather than a human?”
I suspect people are doing the math wrong here. I agree that the value of chicken’s life is smaller than 5% of value of human’s life. But that doesn’t automatically imply that the value of chicken’s life is smaller than the amount of pleasure the human derives from eating the chicken for lunch, as opposed to eating some vegetables instead.
I suspect that the usual human scope insensitivity makes some people conclude “if it is less than 1% of value of human life, it means that it is for all practical purposes zero, which means I am morally free to waste it in any quantities, because zero multiplied by any number remains zero”. Uhm, it doesn’t work this way.
Making someone eat broccoli for lunch instead of chicken is not the same as literally killing them. So when we discuss veganism, we shouldn’t compare “chicken life” vs “human life”, because that is not what the debate is about; that is a red herring. We should compare “chicken life” vs “additional utility a human gets from eating a chicken as opposed to eating something else”.
I agree that we should be comparing the chicken’s life (or a percentage of its life) to the extra utility from eating the chicken. The point is that the small utility that the human gets is still larger than the value of the chicken life, because the entire value of the human life is so vastly greater than the value of the chicken life.
Some Fermi estimates; feel free to disagree with specific numbers and provide your own.
Let’s take an average human life as a unit of value; i.e. the value of human’s life is 1.
How large part of “a value of human’s life” is “having lunch, in general, as opposed to only having a breakfast and a dinner every day of your life”? Let’s say it’s somewhere between 1⁄10 and 1⁄100, because there are many other things humans value, such as not being in pain, or having sex, or having status, or whatever.
If we estimate an average human life to be about 10 000 or 20 000 days, then “having this specific lunch” is between 1⁄10 000 and 1⁄20 000 of “having lunch, in general”.
But the choice is actually not between having a lunch and not having a lunch, but between having a chicken lunch or having a vegan lunch. Let’s say the taste of chicken provides between 1⁄4 and 1⁄10 of the value of a lunch.
Putting these numbers together, a value of “having a chicken for a specific lunch” is about 1 / 1 000 000 of a value of a human life.
As a quick check, imagine that you are both in a vegan country, where chickens are simply not available for lunch. Would you sell 1% of your remaining lifespan (less than 1 year) to the Devil in return for having a chicken for lunch each day of your life? I guess many people would, probably even more than 1%; and the revealed preferences (e.g. people dying as a result of salmonella) seem to match this.
So, it seems like ethically it is right to eat chicken if and only if a value of a human life is greater than value of 1 000 000 chicken’s lives. Which, according to many people, it is.
Possible methodological problems:
1) Scope insensitivity: maybe people say that 1 000 000 chickens are less worth than humans simply because they cannot imagine what “1 000 000” actually means; they only imagine about dozen chickens when making the emotional judgement. On the other hand, there are people who as a part of their profession kill large numbers of chicken, so they would have a near-mode idea of what it means. How many people would be willing to do such profession, though?
2) How much is the desire to eat chicken a result of cultural brainwashing? Do people in countries where vegetarianism is normal agree that having a chicken instead would increase the value of their lunch by 10%? That is, how much is “wanting to eat a chicken” actually wanting to eat “a chicken”, as opposed to simply wanting to eat “the same thing as yesterday”.
I agree with this calculation, except that I think that the discrepancy between the value of a human life and the value of a chicken could be even greater; as I said, I think a human could be worth up to 100,000,000 times the value of the chicken.
I don’t think this question is relevant. I would not be willing to be a trash collector (without much higher pay than usual), but have no moral objection to it. In the same way I would not be willing to be an animal slaughterer (without much higher pay than usual), but have no moral objection to it. And the reasons are the same: disgust reaction, not morality.
Since I make fairly intense efforts to save money, occasionally even by not eating meat, I know perfectly well that in general my preference for eating meat and other animal products is strong enough to make me spend nearly double on food. So it is likely worth significantly more than 10% of that value. This is not likely to be “cultural brainwashing,” since I eat more than is considered healthy etc. If anything I have to resist cultural pressures to persist in my behavior.
I.e. you’d take a 1% chance of being killed straight away over a 100% chance of never being allowed to have lunch again, but you’d take the latter over a 10% chance of being killed straight away?
...Huh. Actually, rephrasing it this way made the numbers sound less implausible to me.
I’d estimate that as ((amount you’re willing to pay for a chicken lunch) - (amount you’re willing to pay for a vegan lunch))/(statistical value of life). But that’s in the same ballpark.
And other humans are much more costly to obtain. The actuarial value is an average and an approximation.