There are some standard answers to “an you rank animals by how bad eating them is?”. Here is Brian Tomasik’s ranking. The article goes into considerable detail and has a useful results table: How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Different Animal Foods . Various people have proposed alternative ways to count, for example suffering/gram_protein, but this is the standard starting point.
Very interesting, though I don’t fully understand it. For instance, extending the lifetime in the calculator always increases total suffering, which does not seem to make much sense to me.
The longer the animal lives, the longer it must spend on a factory farm. Extended lifespan ceases to be a positive thing when annihilation becomes preferable.
I also thought this may be the reason, but so we have a calculator that is only applicable to animals of which we judge that their life has negative value to themselves.
Since the calculator specifies “animal foods”, that may be reasonable. Hunted foods are a distinct argument, but when talking about animal products in the general sense, I think it’s safe to refer to the common case, which is a factory farm. An argument could be made that the lives of animals on factory farms have negative value to themselves. On the other hand, calculating suffering seems sort of silly since there’s no way to measure it or many of the other categories on the calculator. I think that website’s convincing but I’m not sure it proves anything or presents a real argument.
There are some standard answers to “an you rank animals by how bad eating them is?”. Here is Brian Tomasik’s ranking. The article goes into considerable detail and has a useful results table: How Much Direct Suffering is Caused by Different Animal Foods . Various people have proposed alternative ways to count, for example suffering/gram_protein, but this is the standard starting point.
Very interesting, though I don’t fully understand it. For instance, extending the lifetime in the calculator always increases total suffering, which does not seem to make much sense to me.
The longer the animal lives, the longer it must spend on a factory farm. Extended lifespan ceases to be a positive thing when annihilation becomes preferable.
I also thought this may be the reason, but so we have a calculator that is only applicable to animals of which we judge that their life has negative value to themselves.
Since the calculator specifies “animal foods”, that may be reasonable. Hunted foods are a distinct argument, but when talking about animal products in the general sense, I think it’s safe to refer to the common case, which is a factory farm. An argument could be made that the lives of animals on factory farms have negative value to themselves. On the other hand, calculating suffering seems sort of silly since there’s no way to measure it or many of the other categories on the calculator. I think that website’s convincing but I’m not sure it proves anything or presents a real argument.