If Omega offered you the choice between one saving human’s life and giving N chickens a long, perfect, chicken life on Planet Chicken, at what value of N would you pick the chickens?
Assuming none of the N animals are particularly special to any sentient being, for me it’s well north of 10^9.
I would pick a smaller N for animals like dolphins, dogs (again, not talking about animals that are special to people), elephants, etc., due to their intelligence. But in general, for animals typically used for their meat, N is high enough that it doesn’t affect my decision whether to eat meat.
I agree that the answer to such questions lead to astronomical values in number-of-animals for any sort of equivalent. Why I still do not eat meat is simply because it is not necessary, and I can get the same joy of eating by eating something else. It is completely avoidable, no advantage for me, disadvantage for the animals. (Well, there was an argument on LW once that a cow should be happy that we eat cows because this dramatically increases the healthy-cow-life-years, so the cow-utilitarian calculation is mega-positive. However, total-utilitarianism does not seem to match my moral intuitions; I do not know about others.)
However, I do not know how strong exactly the joy of tasting meat is for other people, maybe due to their enjoyment the animals get irrelevant compared to it. I also do not know if the amount of people avoiding killing animals if high-quality synthesized meat would exist.
Given that a human life can be saved for $1000 (this is a very conservative estimate, I understand the figure can get as low as $200 per life), this means that if Omega gave you the choice of one (presumably ideally altruistic) human getting a penny and saving 10,000 chickens who would otherwise live perfectly happy chicken lives, you’d take the penny.
Now, this is a bit silly, but when you look at suffering rather than life it gets more serious. Humane treatment of animals costs money (to some extent though it’s profitable). Should we not bother to waste money on experiments to determine which slaughtering procedures cause the least pain and distress? Should we allow wealthy gourmets to eat animals that were intentionally tortured before being slaughtered because they prefer the taste?
I like the numeric approach. However, something seems off, and I think it’s that you’re conflating the cost of saving a human life with the value of a human life.
Your question is interesting, though. If Omega gives you the choice of N dollars or giving 10,000 chickens a perfect chicken life,at what N do you pick the money?
I guess part of the issue is quality of life. I’d pay more to get chickens who are/otherwise would lead painful and unpleasant lives onto Planet Chicken than I would to have Omega create them out of thin air. On the human side of it, there’s more to life than avoiding malaria and elephantiasis.
Ten million dollars is an obvious upper limit, in that I prefer a human living a life of hardship to a chicken living life at its best. I suppose I’d go for about $5 a head to “save” a chicken from never having existed, and maybe somewhere between $20 and $100 to save one from a horrific life. These are nothing more than nice, round numbers, which to some extent include emotional considerations like wanting to look nice rather than greedy. I’m majoring in genetics, and part of the prac work includes bioethics classes so after I’ve spent more time studying specific cases (and in later years possibly being involved in animal experimentation) I’ll probably get a better grasp of the value of animal life and welfare. I think we can all agree that a human life is worth somewhere between 10 and several billion chickens though.
I think the numbers are large enough to make me suspicious of my own reasoning. Since I reason better about quality of life, let’s talk about the break-even point where putting N chickens in factory-farming conditions are the moral equivalent of putting a single human in a factory-farming condition. A billion seems way too large. Maybe I’d say 100,000? A million? I hate chickens, but that seems like an awful lot of suffering. Like I said, I don’t think my brain works on this level.
More importantly, you’re presenting a false dichotomy. We aren’t talking about killing people, or putting them into factory farming conditions. We’re talking about eating hamburgers instead of eating fried zucchini. How many hamburgers would you replace with non-meat foods to save a human life? 10^9? If it’s anywhere near the N you assigned earlier, you should seriously consider not eating chickens.
Disclaimer: While I don’t eat pork or beef, I do eat chickens. Then again...this argument is making me rethink that decision.
Like I said earlier, I eat meat only rarely. I don’t hate chickens or anything, but I don’t think the welfare of non-sentient beings weighs very heavily on the scales of justice.
If the choice is between factory-farm torturing a human and factory-farming N farm animals, I pick very large N again.
If Omega asks me how many meals of meat I’d replace with non-meat meals to save one human, I’d give up all of mine. I don’t like hamburgers that much anyway.
I’m assuming you mean non-sapient, rather than non-sentient.
I suggest you actually try to work out your break even numbers. Here are mine:
1 human, born into factory farming conditions, killed after 16 years, is about the same as 100 times as many pigs raised in similar conditions until killed at 8 months, for N = 2,400. For chickens killed at 6 weeks, my multiplier is around 20,000, so N = 2,800,000.
Given how much I like meat, I’m willing to subject a perfect stranger to factory-farming conditions for M years in order to be able to eat pork/chicken (produced out of thin air by Omega) for the rest of my life. My M is maybe 3 days. Cruel, but that’s why I don’t get to be the FAI. Although, I might be willing to be tortured in that way for 3 days in order to get a lifetime of meat.
This numerically suggests that I am cruel enough to eat up to 1.2 pigs or up to 1400 chickens during my life, if I can count that as an entire life’s worth of pleasure from eating meat. If we can vat-grow meat within 40 years, this is more than 1kg / week (of chicken), more than I used to eat.
But wouldn’t it be better if I just stopped liking meat? I’ve mostly done that already, and these calculations are based on remembering how much I used to enjoy meat. I’ve eaten meat four times in the last year, and never enjoyed it, so this calculation might not be valid anymore. Still, it offers some excuse for eating chicken, if not pork.
I generally avoid arguing with people who are already doing what I’d prefer they do. But I do find this point interesting.
Try framing the argument this way:
Omega lets you save one human life, but doing so requires you to create X humans who are extremely mentally retarded, to the point that they have no long term goals, can probably only experience pain or joy in the moment, and are incapable of the more complex pleasures and suffering that a regular human would be able to. But those X humans must spend their lives locked in a box that is rarely cleaned, force-fed food that is unhealthy for them, for about a year or two until they are killed.
Then try the argument again, but replace the long description I gave with “human babies, who will never develop past baby-hood.” Because I think it’s legitimately similar. If there was a gene that caused a human to live up to about a year and then die, with no chance of growing up, but also be extremely tasty, would it be okay to clone a bunch of them to eat?
For the record, my answer in terms of “lives saved” for this question is probably around 10,000 (basically started with the life expectancy of the human, multiplied by about a hundred, which is about how much more I think the average human is capable of appreciating life than the average pig. Note that this is an average human. The numbers do change if I knew what kind of life the human was likely to lead). I could be persuaded that the coefficient should be a bit more, but I really can’t imagine it being higher than x10,000, for a total ratio of 1,000,000 : 1. If you assign a higher number for the average human, I think that’s a decision made purely out of human-centric bias rather than the value of intelligence or human capacity for joy.
And my answer in terms of “If you had to live your life being marginally less happy because you didn’t get to eat tasty retarded-human-flesh, how many retarded-humans/babies would have to be saved in order to give up that amount of happiness”, the number drops dramatically. Perhaps not zero, but not more than 10.
What if you put numbers to it?
If Omega offered you the choice between one saving human’s life and giving N chickens a long, perfect, chicken life on Planet Chicken, at what value of N would you pick the chickens?
Assuming none of the N animals are particularly special to any sentient being, for me it’s well north of 10^9.
I would pick a smaller N for animals like dolphins, dogs (again, not talking about animals that are special to people), elephants, etc., due to their intelligence. But in general, for animals typically used for their meat, N is high enough that it doesn’t affect my decision whether to eat meat.
I agree that the answer to such questions lead to astronomical values in number-of-animals for any sort of equivalent. Why I still do not eat meat is simply because it is not necessary, and I can get the same joy of eating by eating something else. It is completely avoidable, no advantage for me, disadvantage for the animals. (Well, there was an argument on LW once that a cow should be happy that we eat cows because this dramatically increases the healthy-cow-life-years, so the cow-utilitarian calculation is mega-positive. However, total-utilitarianism does not seem to match my moral intuitions; I do not know about others.)
However, I do not know how strong exactly the joy of tasting meat is for other people, maybe due to their enjoyment the animals get irrelevant compared to it. I also do not know if the amount of people avoiding killing animals if high-quality synthesized meat would exist.
Given that a human life can be saved for $1000 (this is a very conservative estimate, I understand the figure can get as low as $200 per life), this means that if Omega gave you the choice of one (presumably ideally altruistic) human getting a penny and saving 10,000 chickens who would otherwise live perfectly happy chicken lives, you’d take the penny. Now, this is a bit silly, but when you look at suffering rather than life it gets more serious. Humane treatment of animals costs money (to some extent though it’s profitable). Should we not bother to waste money on experiments to determine which slaughtering procedures cause the least pain and distress? Should we allow wealthy gourmets to eat animals that were intentionally tortured before being slaughtered because they prefer the taste?
I like the numeric approach. However, something seems off, and I think it’s that you’re conflating the cost of saving a human life with the value of a human life.
Your question is interesting, though. If Omega gives you the choice of N dollars or giving 10,000 chickens a perfect chicken life,at what N do you pick the money?
I guess part of the issue is quality of life. I’d pay more to get chickens who are/otherwise would lead painful and unpleasant lives onto Planet Chicken than I would to have Omega create them out of thin air. On the human side of it, there’s more to life than avoiding malaria and elephantiasis.
Ten million dollars is an obvious upper limit, in that I prefer a human living a life of hardship to a chicken living life at its best. I suppose I’d go for about $5 a head to “save” a chicken from never having existed, and maybe somewhere between $20 and $100 to save one from a horrific life. These are nothing more than nice, round numbers, which to some extent include emotional considerations like wanting to look nice rather than greedy. I’m majoring in genetics, and part of the prac work includes bioethics classes so after I’ve spent more time studying specific cases (and in later years possibly being involved in animal experimentation) I’ll probably get a better grasp of the value of animal life and welfare. I think we can all agree that a human life is worth somewhere between 10 and several billion chickens though.
I think the numbers are large enough to make me suspicious of my own reasoning. Since I reason better about quality of life, let’s talk about the break-even point where putting N chickens in factory-farming conditions are the moral equivalent of putting a single human in a factory-farming condition. A billion seems way too large. Maybe I’d say 100,000? A million? I hate chickens, but that seems like an awful lot of suffering. Like I said, I don’t think my brain works on this level.
More importantly, you’re presenting a false dichotomy. We aren’t talking about killing people, or putting them into factory farming conditions. We’re talking about eating hamburgers instead of eating fried zucchini. How many hamburgers would you replace with non-meat foods to save a human life? 10^9? If it’s anywhere near the N you assigned earlier, you should seriously consider not eating chickens.
Disclaimer: While I don’t eat pork or beef, I do eat chickens. Then again...this argument is making me rethink that decision.
Like I said earlier, I eat meat only rarely. I don’t hate chickens or anything, but I don’t think the welfare of non-sentient beings weighs very heavily on the scales of justice.
If the choice is between factory-farm torturing a human and factory-farming N farm animals, I pick very large N again.
If Omega asks me how many meals of meat I’d replace with non-meat meals to save one human, I’d give up all of mine. I don’t like hamburgers that much anyway.
I’m assuming you mean non-sapient, rather than non-sentient.
I suggest you actually try to work out your break even numbers. Here are mine:
1 human, born into factory farming conditions, killed after 16 years, is about the same as 100 times as many pigs raised in similar conditions until killed at 8 months, for N = 2,400. For chickens killed at 6 weeks, my multiplier is around 20,000, so N = 2,800,000.
Given how much I like meat, I’m willing to subject a perfect stranger to factory-farming conditions for M years in order to be able to eat pork/chicken (produced out of thin air by Omega) for the rest of my life. My M is maybe 3 days. Cruel, but that’s why I don’t get to be the FAI. Although, I might be willing to be tortured in that way for 3 days in order to get a lifetime of meat.
This numerically suggests that I am cruel enough to eat up to 1.2 pigs or up to 1400 chickens during my life, if I can count that as an entire life’s worth of pleasure from eating meat. If we can vat-grow meat within 40 years, this is more than 1kg / week (of chicken), more than I used to eat.
But wouldn’t it be better if I just stopped liking meat? I’ve mostly done that already, and these calculations are based on remembering how much I used to enjoy meat. I’ve eaten meat four times in the last year, and never enjoyed it, so this calculation might not be valid anymore. Still, it offers some excuse for eating chicken, if not pork.
I generally avoid arguing with people who are already doing what I’d prefer they do. But I do find this point interesting.
Try framing the argument this way:
Omega lets you save one human life, but doing so requires you to create X humans who are extremely mentally retarded, to the point that they have no long term goals, can probably only experience pain or joy in the moment, and are incapable of the more complex pleasures and suffering that a regular human would be able to. But those X humans must spend their lives locked in a box that is rarely cleaned, force-fed food that is unhealthy for them, for about a year or two until they are killed.
Then try the argument again, but replace the long description I gave with “human babies, who will never develop past baby-hood.” Because I think it’s legitimately similar. If there was a gene that caused a human to live up to about a year and then die, with no chance of growing up, but also be extremely tasty, would it be okay to clone a bunch of them to eat?
For the record, my answer in terms of “lives saved” for this question is probably around 10,000 (basically started with the life expectancy of the human, multiplied by about a hundred, which is about how much more I think the average human is capable of appreciating life than the average pig. Note that this is an average human. The numbers do change if I knew what kind of life the human was likely to lead). I could be persuaded that the coefficient should be a bit more, but I really can’t imagine it being higher than x10,000, for a total ratio of 1,000,000 : 1. If you assign a higher number for the average human, I think that’s a decision made purely out of human-centric bias rather than the value of intelligence or human capacity for joy.
And my answer in terms of “If you had to live your life being marginally less happy because you didn’t get to eat tasty retarded-human-flesh, how many retarded-humans/babies would have to be saved in order to give up that amount of happiness”, the number drops dramatically. Perhaps not zero, but not more than 10.