My spouse has agreed to give up either chicken or beef. Beef is significantly worse than chicken from an environmental standpoint, but more chickens die (possibly after suffering) to feed us. How can I compare the two different ethical dimensions and decide which to eliminate?
If you can afford pasture-raised chicken or grass-fed beef, the animal suffering consideration becomes less important than if you’re eating factory-farmed animals.
That is a fair point. We already do that with our chicken, beef and pork having sourced them all locally and made sure that the animals are treated about as well as you could expect. In fact, there may even be a Hansonian argument that these animals generally have lives that are worth living even if you take into account that their last day may be fairly awful. I’m not sure how to factor that in either. I guess if the crappy lives of many factory-farmed chickens outweighs the crappy life of one factory-farmed cow, the nice lives of many hippy-farmed chickens should still outweigh the nice life of one hippy-farmed cow.
Why choose one? If you aren’t sure which is worse, maybe you should assume that they are about equal. Then you should reduce total consumption. Is eliminating one option going to help you do that? Or will the other grow to fill the void?
Yes, but it’s just a commitment to an instrumental goal. To repeat myself: will it actually change, or will the one fill the void of the other? If you go to a wedding where you are offered a choice between fish and beef, the right ban does force the choice of fish, but most menus are longer than that; in particular, cooking at home offers the longest menu.
My goal is to get to neither. My partner is willing to eliminate one and I think that showing that we can substitute veggies for one form of meat will make an emotionally stronger case later that we can make the same substitution for a different meat.
If you think it is going to be a temporary phase, then it is even less important which one you choose.
But, again, flesh and fowl are fungible. Will eliminating one actually reduce your consumption? Perhaps setting a quota for how much meat to buy on weekly grocery store trips, or going by days of the week (the most popular method in the world!) would be more effective.
The current plan is to eliminate meat from lunch and substitute veggie soups and some other kind of sandwhiches (we have a panini grill and I know a few good vegetarian options). Also, we’re going to swap in a veggie pizza once per week as well. It may be a temporary phase, but that is not the goal for either of us.
If your goal is for this to be a temporary step, pick whichever one will make a stronger argument. I.e. if one has much better substitutes available, get rid of it now.
I thought the same. From the way the choice is framed, animal suffering is not a factor to consider. It should be, but if you really were considering it, you’d give up both.
Animal suffering and environmental impact are the primary factors for me but I’m weakly motivated and don’t think I’ll be able to change my habits without my partner changing her eating habits as well (she prepares most of our meals because she likes cooking and I do not). Animal suffering is not important to her and she’s had some health problems on a vegetarian diet before so she’s only willing to cut one form of meat and see how that goes before cutting further. I’d like to cut the one that generates the most problems and replace it with vegetable products first and establish a new, better equilibrium first. I do think that I’ll be better at planning vegetarian replacements than she was, so I’m optimistic that eventually we’ll get to pescitarian at least, but I wanted to get input on how to think about the first step.
Chicken. Far more chickens die per amount of meat, and I suspect that they have worse lives, since it is probably easier to keep a whole bunch of chickens in a small space and cut off bits of them without anaesthesia. Brian Tomasik writes about this question here, although be warned that there are some pretty nasty pictures that you will have to scroll past to get to his estimate of the numbers.
I don’t worry too much about their living conditions. We already eschew factory farmed meats, so the chicken is free range and the cattle is raised and butchered by people with a religious obligation to treat the animals relatively well. These are definitely things that are good to consider though.
I eat chicken but I don’t eat mammals. This is partly for environmental reasons, but it is also because my ethics are not cosmopolitan. I think beings that are more cognitively similar to me are owed more moral concern (by me, not everyone else), not merely because they are more likely to be sentient or sapient or whatever, but because they are more likely to share my interests and outlook on the world, have emotions that I can identify with, etc. So I believe that I have greater moral obligations to my family and friends than to strangers, greater moral obligations to humans than to great apes, and so on. In the absence of contrary evidence, I use distance on the evolutionary tree as a proxy for cognitive distance. On those grounds, I am pretty uncomfortable with the suffering that cattle (and other mammals) undergo in the factory farming industry. I am significantly less uncomfortable about the suffering that chickens undergo.
So I guess my point is that you shouldn’t be weighing chicken suffering against cattle suffering on a one-to-one scale, because completely cosmopolitan ethical systems are wrong. Our sphere of moral concern shouldn’t work like an absolute threshold, where we have equal concern for all entities within the sphere and no concern for any entity outside it. Instead, it should gradually attenuate with distance. I probably can’t convince you of all this in a single comment, but perhaps you should at least consider it as a morally relevant possibility.
I agree that chickens are less likely to be sentient, but is killing an animal with 50 sentience units worse than killing 10 animals with 5 sentience units? How is suffering likely to scale with sentience?
My spouse has agreed to give up either chicken or beef. Beef is significantly worse than chicken from an environmental standpoint, but more chickens die (possibly after suffering) to feed us. How can I compare the two different ethical dimensions and decide which to eliminate?
Which would you eliminate? [pollid:801]
If you can afford pasture-raised chicken or grass-fed beef, the animal suffering consideration becomes less important than if you’re eating factory-farmed animals.
That is a fair point. We already do that with our chicken, beef and pork having sourced them all locally and made sure that the animals are treated about as well as you could expect. In fact, there may even be a Hansonian argument that these animals generally have lives that are worth living even if you take into account that their last day may be fairly awful. I’m not sure how to factor that in either. I guess if the crappy lives of many factory-farmed chickens outweighs the crappy life of one factory-farmed cow, the nice lives of many hippy-farmed chickens should still outweigh the nice life of one hippy-farmed cow.
Also consider which choice is more likely to stick, or make future ethical choices seem reasonable.
Why choose one? If you aren’t sure which is worse, maybe you should assume that they are about equal. Then you should reduce total consumption. Is eliminating one option going to help you do that? Or will the other grow to fill the void?
It’s easier to follow a hard-and-fast rule than it is to promise yourself you’ll do less of something.
Yes, but it’s just a commitment to an instrumental goal. To repeat myself: will it actually change, or will the one fill the void of the other? If you go to a wedding where you are offered a choice between fish and beef, the right ban does force the choice of fish, but most menus are longer than that; in particular, cooking at home offers the longest menu.
My goal is to get to neither. My partner is willing to eliminate one and I think that showing that we can substitute veggies for one form of meat will make an emotionally stronger case later that we can make the same substitution for a different meat.
If you think it is going to be a temporary phase, then it is even less important which one you choose.
But, again, flesh and fowl are fungible. Will eliminating one actually reduce your consumption? Perhaps setting a quota for how much meat to buy on weekly grocery store trips, or going by days of the week (the most popular method in the world!) would be more effective.
The current plan is to eliminate meat from lunch and substitute veggie soups and some other kind of sandwhiches (we have a panini grill and I know a few good vegetarian options). Also, we’re going to swap in a veggie pizza once per week as well. It may be a temporary phase, but that is not the goal for either of us.
If your goal is for this to be a temporary step, pick whichever one will make a stronger argument. I.e. if one has much better substitutes available, get rid of it now.
I thought the same. From the way the choice is framed, animal suffering is not a factor to consider. It should be, but if you really were considering it, you’d give up both.
Animal suffering and environmental impact are the primary factors for me but I’m weakly motivated and don’t think I’ll be able to change my habits without my partner changing her eating habits as well (she prepares most of our meals because she likes cooking and I do not). Animal suffering is not important to her and she’s had some health problems on a vegetarian diet before so she’s only willing to cut one form of meat and see how that goes before cutting further. I’d like to cut the one that generates the most problems and replace it with vegetable products first and establish a new, better equilibrium first. I do think that I’ll be better at planning vegetarian replacements than she was, so I’m optimistic that eventually we’ll get to pescitarian at least, but I wanted to get input on how to think about the first step.
Chicken. Far more chickens die per amount of meat, and I suspect that they have worse lives, since it is probably easier to keep a whole bunch of chickens in a small space and cut off bits of them without anaesthesia. Brian Tomasik writes about this question here, although be warned that there are some pretty nasty pictures that you will have to scroll past to get to his estimate of the numbers.
I don’t worry too much about their living conditions. We already eschew factory farmed meats, so the chicken is free range and the cattle is raised and butchered by people with a religious obligation to treat the animals relatively well. These are definitely things that are good to consider though.
I eat chicken but I don’t eat mammals. This is partly for environmental reasons, but it is also because my ethics are not cosmopolitan. I think beings that are more cognitively similar to me are owed more moral concern (by me, not everyone else), not merely because they are more likely to be sentient or sapient or whatever, but because they are more likely to share my interests and outlook on the world, have emotions that I can identify with, etc. So I believe that I have greater moral obligations to my family and friends than to strangers, greater moral obligations to humans than to great apes, and so on. In the absence of contrary evidence, I use distance on the evolutionary tree as a proxy for cognitive distance. On those grounds, I am pretty uncomfortable with the suffering that cattle (and other mammals) undergo in the factory farming industry. I am significantly less uncomfortable about the suffering that chickens undergo.
So I guess my point is that you shouldn’t be weighing chicken suffering against cattle suffering on a one-to-one scale, because completely cosmopolitan ethical systems are wrong. Our sphere of moral concern shouldn’t work like an absolute threshold, where we have equal concern for all entities within the sphere and no concern for any entity outside it. Instead, it should gradually attenuate with distance. I probably can’t convince you of all this in a single comment, but perhaps you should at least consider it as a morally relevant possibility.
I would add that (vague recollection upcoming:) chicken might be healthier than beef, if you’re just going to eat one of them.
Beef. Chickens are even less likely to be sentient by a considerable margin.
Related to this and your recent poll on Facebook: Do you distinguish between sentience and sapience?
I agree that chickens are less likely to be sentient, but is killing an animal with 50 sentience units worse than killing 10 animals with 5 sentience units? How is suffering likely to scale with sentience?