Do we have a way to measure how happy farm animals happen to be? If we don’t than developing a metric might produce huge gains in animal welfare, because it allows us to optimize for it better.
Temple Grandin has some work that’s relevant, and argues for quantitative measures. One of the easy metrics to use now are bodily integrity things, like the percentage of animals who are lame when they make it to the slaughterhouse. A lame animal is unlikely to be a happy or well-treated animal, and it seems easy to measure and compare.
She’s also done work on what animals are willing to take some trouble to get—chickens apparently care more about having a secluded place to lay eggs than they care about getting outside.
Which reminds me: Would it be ethical to reduce animal suffering by somehow breeding suffering out of animals? Or asked differently: Is suffering a simple concept (that can be selected against) or is it just negative value with all the associated complexity? Or doesn’t this apply to animals?
This is tricky, because if we don’t understand (on the technical level) how “qualia” work, we cannot be sure if we are breeding for “less suffering” or merely “less ability to express suffering”.
In other words, now the humans could play the role of the unfriendly AI who “would rip off your face, wire it into a permanent smile, and start xeroxing”.
I’m not certain if we need to understand how suffering works if we can simply remove the organs that house it.
It seems less tricky when a technological set of solutions come along that allow delicious engineered meat to be grown without all the unnecessary and un-delicious bits.
I think the in vitro meat industry will have an extraordinarily good time when things develop to the point of being able to synthesis a lazy-person’s whole stuffed camel.
In-vitro meat reduces suffering, but also reduces joy and brain-experienced life in general. I don’t know how to evaluate if a current cow or chicken’s life is negative value (to the animal) or not.
If I’m exclusively limiting myself to animals that are raised in an organised fashion for eventual slaughter, I don’t think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.
In my consideration, simple things like the registering of a pain stimulus and the complexity of behaviour to display distress are good enough indicators.
I don’t think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.
I don’t think you can make that decision so easily. They’re protected from predators, well-fed, and probably healthier than they would be in the wild. (About health, the main point against is that diseases spread more rapidly. But farmers have an incentive to prevent that, and they have antibiotics and access to minimal veterinary treatment.)
‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise axe’
This leads me to conclusions I disagree with—like if a person is murdered, then their life had negative value.
I don’t think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.
The comparison at hand is only to non-existence; you’re not proposing any mechanism to improve such lives or to make them similar to a hypothetical nature, only to eliminate any experience of the life while still providing the meat.
As such, you don’t need too much data, but you currently have none, nor even a theory about what data you’d want. Trying to determine a preference for non-existince in animals (or vegetables, for that matter, or lumps of vat-meat) when such units don’t seem to have the concepts (or at least the communication ability) to make choices for themselves doesn’t seem obvious at all to me.
When animals are created and destroyed solely for a purpose attributed to them by their human overlords, that reduces their utilisable preferences to zero or near zero. Unless a meat producer had reason to believe that inflicting pain on an animal improved the resulting meat product, that pain would almost certainly be a by-product of whatever the farmer chose rather than an exclusive intent. I personally know no farmers that inflict ‘pointless’ injury on their livestock.
Given any amount of suffering in the animal stock needed to feed, say the US compared to a zero amount of suffering of the in-vitro meat needed to feed the US, if we were basing decisions solely on the ethics of the situation the choice would be clear-cut. As it stands it is simply one amongst many trade-offs, the numbers and data of which I agree would be laborious to define.
The inability to communicate or even experience a preference for the concept of non-existence compared to an experienced or ongoing pain does not invalidate the experience of the pain. In this field of thought I am happy to start from a non-rigorous framework and then become more so if needs be. At a simple level, my model says [for SolvePorkHunger: ‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise axe’ > ‘sad pig + surprise axe’].
The practical ways to improve such lives as already exist are, broadly speaking, answered by practitioners of veganism, vegetarianism, cooperative existence with animals (raising chooks, goats for milk, etc etc).
Although I can understand the intuitiveness of this ordering, I think it should be pondered more deeply. It’s safe to say that no pig experiences no joy and no suffering, and that sad pig experiences lots of suffering. Also it would seem intuitive that a happy pig dying of natural causes experiences lots of joy. From the point of view of the animal: long lived sad pig < short lived sad pig < no pig < long lived happy pig It is weird not to put short lived happy pig were it seems to belong, and I think it has to do with the fact that killing a happy pig carries a lot of negative moral weight. Would you say the same about a pig genetically engineered to die of natural causes when it’s most delicious?
Ooh! I love the point about it being morally heavier to kill and eat a happy animal than a sad one.
I tend to think even relatively sad lives are not absolutely negative—very nearly any life is better than none, and a good life better than a bad one, but it’s going to give some of my fuzzy-vegetarian friends a good question to ponder.
When animals are created and destroyed solely for a purpose attributed to them by their human overlords
Does this argument apply to humans created or destroyed solely for purposes of evolutionary pressure or environmental accident? I’d argue that nothing happens solely for any purpose.
reduces their utilisable preferences to zero or near zero.
This seems to be the crux of your position. I don’t buy it. Let’s leave aside (unless you want to try to define terms) the difference between happy, sad, and more common mixed cases.
Let’s focus on the main inequality of nonexistence vs some temporary happiness. Would you say ‘no human’ > ‘happy human + surprise cancer’? I assert that neither human nor pig really frames things in terms of the farmer’s or universe’s motivations.
‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise predator’ > ‘sad pig + surprise predator’
I don’t think nature is generally any better than (some kinds of) farming for prey animals. Should vegans be benefitting from lowering the birth rates among natural animals?
Or for that matter, does it also mean
‘no human’ > ‘happy human + eventual death’ > ‘sad human + eventual death’
Even in nature, all life is alive, and then it dies, almost always in a way it would not choose or enjoy. Does life just suck? Are we bad actors for having children?
People who worry that life sucks that much should make sure they correctly priced in the possibility that we can figure out how to arrange it so that life is super great in the future.
Would it be ethical to grow meat in a vat without a brain associated with it? Personally, I think pretty clearly yes.
So breeding suffering out of animals would seem to be between growing meat in a vat and what we have now. So it would seem to be a step in the right direction.
We, and animals, almost certainly have suffering because it had survival value for us and animals in the environment in which we evolved. Being farmed for meat is not that environment. I don’t think removing suffering from our farmed animals has a downside. Of course, removing it from wild animals would probably not be a good thing, but would probably correct itself relatively quickly in the failure of non-suffering animals to survive.
I wonder about more intermediate stages. Animals suffering less is one obviously. Animals with less nervous systems would be another (though probably not practical). More ideas?
Most vegetarians would think that activities that normally make animals suffer are bad in themselves. They may have originally have used suffering as a reason to figure out that those activities are bad,m but they’re bad in themselves. You can’t just take away the bad consequences and make them good.
Also, utilitarianism has a problem with blissful ignorance. Most vegetarians would probably think that animals that are engineered to be unable to suffer have a blissful ignorance problem; they are being harmed and just don’t realize it.
Most vegetarians would probably think that animals that are engineered to be unable to suffer have a blissful ignorance problem; they are being harmed and just don’t realize it.
Do carrots have a blissful ignorance problem, then?
The problem only exists for beings with some sort of mind that has moral relevance. I would guess that most vegetarians believe that animals have such a mind, but not carrots.
I’m not a vegetarian myself. I was just describing how people think. I don’t know that they have a coherent concept of “acts that are bad in themselves”.
Most vegetarians would think that activities that normally make animals suffer are bad in themselves.
Presumably the moral win in reducing or eliminating the suffering of farmed meat would have more to do with non-vegetarians than vegetarians. But really, is the point here to do something better than is already done, or is to impress vegetarians?
Do we have a way to measure how happy farm animals happen to be? If we don’t than developing a metric might produce huge gains in animal welfare, because it allows us to optimize for it better.
Temple Grandin has some work that’s relevant, and argues for quantitative measures. One of the easy metrics to use now are bodily integrity things, like the percentage of animals who are lame when they make it to the slaughterhouse. A lame animal is unlikely to be a happy or well-treated animal, and it seems easy to measure and compare.
She’s also done work on what animals are willing to take some trouble to get—chickens apparently care more about having a secluded place to lay eggs than they care about getting outside.
Which reminds me: Would it be ethical to reduce animal suffering by somehow breeding suffering out of animals? Or asked differently: Is suffering a simple concept (that can be selected against) or is it just negative value with all the associated complexity? Or doesn’t this apply to animals?
Obligatory hitchhikers quote.
This is tricky, because if we don’t understand (on the technical level) how “qualia” work, we cannot be sure if we are breeding for “less suffering” or merely “less ability to express suffering”.
In other words, now the humans could play the role of the unfriendly AI who “would rip off your face, wire it into a permanent smile, and start xeroxing”.
I’m not certain if we need to understand how suffering works if we can simply remove the organs that house it.
It seems less tricky when a technological set of solutions come along that allow delicious engineered meat to be grown without all the unnecessary and un-delicious bits.
I think the in vitro meat industry will have an extraordinarily good time when things develop to the point of being able to synthesis a lazy-person’s whole stuffed camel.
In vitro meat—okay.
Modifying animals so they can’t scream—not okay.
-- this is the part that IMHO depends on details we may not yet understand sufficiently.
In-vitro meat reduces suffering, but also reduces joy and brain-experienced life in general. I don’t know how to evaluate if a current cow or chicken’s life is negative value (to the animal) or not.
If I’m exclusively limiting myself to animals that are raised in an organised fashion for eventual slaughter, I don’t think I need too much data to assign broadly negative values to lives that are unusually brutish, nasty and short compared to either non-existence or a hypothetical natural existence.
In my consideration, simple things like the registering of a pain stimulus and the complexity of behaviour to display distress are good enough indicators.
I don’t think you can make that decision so easily. They’re protected from predators, well-fed, and probably healthier than they would be in the wild. (About health, the main point against is that diseases spread more rapidly. But farmers have an incentive to prevent that, and they have antibiotics and access to minimal veterinary treatment.)
This leads me to conclusions I disagree with—like if a person is murdered, then their life had negative value.
The comparison at hand is only to non-existence; you’re not proposing any mechanism to improve such lives or to make them similar to a hypothetical nature, only to eliminate any experience of the life while still providing the meat.
As such, you don’t need too much data, but you currently have none, nor even a theory about what data you’d want. Trying to determine a preference for non-existince in animals (or vegetables, for that matter, or lumps of vat-meat) when such units don’t seem to have the concepts (or at least the communication ability) to make choices for themselves doesn’t seem obvious at all to me.
When animals are created and destroyed solely for a purpose attributed to them by their human overlords, that reduces their utilisable preferences to zero or near zero. Unless a meat producer had reason to believe that inflicting pain on an animal improved the resulting meat product, that pain would almost certainly be a by-product of whatever the farmer chose rather than an exclusive intent. I personally know no farmers that inflict ‘pointless’ injury on their livestock.
Given any amount of suffering in the animal stock needed to feed, say the US compared to a zero amount of suffering of the in-vitro meat needed to feed the US, if we were basing decisions solely on the ethics of the situation the choice would be clear-cut. As it stands it is simply one amongst many trade-offs, the numbers and data of which I agree would be laborious to define.
The inability to communicate or even experience a preference for the concept of non-existence compared to an experienced or ongoing pain does not invalidate the experience of the pain. In this field of thought I am happy to start from a non-rigorous framework and then become more so if needs be. At a simple level, my model says [for SolvePorkHunger: ‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise axe’ > ‘sad pig + surprise axe’].
The practical ways to improve such lives as already exist are, broadly speaking, answered by practitioners of veganism, vegetarianism, cooperative existence with animals (raising chooks, goats for milk, etc etc).
Although I can understand the intuitiveness of this ordering, I think it should be pondered more deeply.
It’s safe to say that no pig experiences no joy and no suffering, and that sad pig experiences lots of suffering. Also it would seem intuitive that a happy pig dying of natural causes experiences lots of joy. From the point of view of the animal:
long lived sad pig < short lived sad pig < no pig < long lived happy pig
It is weird not to put short lived happy pig were it seems to belong, and I think it has to do with the fact that killing a happy pig carries a lot of negative moral weight.
Would you say the same about a pig genetically engineered to die of natural causes when it’s most delicious?
Ooh! I love the point about it being morally heavier to kill and eat a happy animal than a sad one.
I tend to think even relatively sad lives are not absolutely negative—very nearly any life is better than none, and a good life better than a bad one, but it’s going to give some of my fuzzy-vegetarian friends a good question to ponder.
Does this argument apply to humans created or destroyed solely for purposes of evolutionary pressure or environmental accident? I’d argue that nothing happens solely for any purpose.
Measured how?
This seems to be the crux of your position. I don’t buy it. Let’s leave aside (unless you want to try to define terms) the difference between happy, sad, and more common mixed cases.
Let’s focus on the main inequality of nonexistence vs some temporary happiness. Would you say ‘no human’ > ‘happy human + surprise cancer’? I assert that neither human nor pig really frames things in terms of the farmer’s or universe’s motivations.
Would this also mean
‘no pig’ > ‘happy pig + surprise predator’ > ‘sad pig + surprise predator’ I don’t think nature is generally any better than (some kinds of) farming for prey animals. Should vegans be benefitting from lowering the birth rates among natural animals?
Or for that matter, does it also mean ‘no human’ > ‘happy human + eventual death’ > ‘sad human + eventual death’ Even in nature, all life is alive, and then it dies, almost always in a way it would not choose or enjoy. Does life just suck? Are we bad actors for having children?
The term to search for is ‘wild animal suffering.’
The term to search for is ‘anti-natalism.’
People who worry that life sucks that much should make sure they correctly priced in the possibility that we can figure out how to arrange it so that life is super great in the future.
(But everyone here realizes this).
Would it be ethical to grow meat in a vat without a brain associated with it? Personally, I think pretty clearly yes.
So breeding suffering out of animals would seem to be between growing meat in a vat and what we have now. So it would seem to be a step in the right direction.
We, and animals, almost certainly have suffering because it had survival value for us and animals in the environment in which we evolved. Being farmed for meat is not that environment. I don’t think removing suffering from our farmed animals has a downside. Of course, removing it from wild animals would probably not be a good thing, but would probably correct itself relatively quickly in the failure of non-suffering animals to survive.
I wonder about more intermediate stages. Animals suffering less is one obviously. Animals with less nervous systems would be another (though probably not practical). More ideas?
Most vegetarians would think that activities that normally make animals suffer are bad in themselves. They may have originally have used suffering as a reason to figure out that those activities are bad,m but they’re bad in themselves. You can’t just take away the bad consequences and make them good.
Also, utilitarianism has a problem with blissful ignorance. Most vegetarians would probably think that animals that are engineered to be unable to suffer have a blissful ignorance problem; they are being harmed and just don’t realize it.
Do carrots have a blissful ignorance problem, then?
The problem only exists for beings with some sort of mind that has moral relevance. I would guess that most vegetarians believe that animals have such a mind, but not carrots.
So what happens when you engineer a “mind that has moral relevance” out of an animal?
And going a bit upthread, what do you mean by acts that are “bad in themselves”?
I’m not a vegetarian myself. I was just describing how people think. I don’t know that they have a coherent concept of “acts that are bad in themselves”.
Presumably the moral win in reducing or eliminating the suffering of farmed meat would have more to do with non-vegetarians than vegetarians. But really, is the point here to do something better than is already done, or is to impress vegetarians?