I do not eat anything that recognizes itself in a mirror.
Assuming pigs were objects of value, would that make it morally wrong to eat them? Unlike octopi, most pigs exist because humans plan on eating them, so if a lot of humans stopped eating pigs, there would be less pigs, and the life of the average pig might not be much better.
This needs a distinction between the value of creating pigs, existence of living pigs, and killing of pigs. If existing pigs are objects of value, but the negative value of killing them (of the event itself, not of the change in value between a living pig and a dead one) doesn’t outweigh the value of their preceding existence, then creating and killing as many pigs as possible has positive value (relative to noise; with opportunity cost the value is probably negative, there are better things to do with the same resources; by the same token, post-FAI the value of “classical” human lives is also negative, as it’ll be possible to make significant improvements).
Assuming pigs were objects of value, would that make it morally wrong to eat them? Unlike octopi, most pigs exist because humans plan on eating them, so if a lot of humans stopped eating pigs, there would be less pigs, and the life of the average pig might not be much better.
(this is not a rhetorical question)
Yes. If pigs were objects of value, it would be morally wrong to eat them, and indeed the moral thing to do would be to not create them.
This needs a distinction between the value of creating pigs, existence of living pigs, and killing of pigs. If existing pigs are objects of value, but the negative value of killing them (of the event itself, not of the change in value between a living pig and a dead one) doesn’t outweigh the value of their preceding existence, then creating and killing as many pigs as possible has positive value (relative to noise; with opportunity cost the value is probably negative, there are better things to do with the same resources; by the same token, post-FAI the value of “classical” human lives is also negative, as it’ll be possible to make significant improvements).
I don’t think it’s morally wrong to eat people, if they happen to be in irrecoverable states