Gedusa comments on [link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism. - Less Wrong

2 Post author: mkehrt 16 October 2011 03:29AM

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Comment author: Yvain 16 October 2011 12:25:40PM *  8 points [-]

I can't remember where I saw it (I hope it wasn't on here), but someone recommended that someone with vegetarian sympathies could do some good just by switching from chicken to beef. The idea is that if you're eating a constant amount of meat by weight, you have to kill a couple hundred chickens to get the same amount of meat as killing one cow. If you don't believe there's a significant "personhood" difference between cows and chickens, that's cutting your death toll by orders of magnitude.

I'm not sure what I think of this argument, because small differences in intelligence can have major differences in "personhood" - for example, I can't even name a number of cows it would take such that I would be equally comfortable killing X cows as one person. That means that even a small intelligence difference between cows and chickens could more than cancel out the gains from extra weight.

Really, what we need is some sort of animal which is both very large and very stupid. If only a stray prehistoric asteroid hadn't killed off our ideal food source.

Comment author: Gedusa 16 October 2011 12:55:33PM 1 point [-]

Here maybe?

Comment author: Bongo 16 October 2011 09:35:33PM *  3 points [-]

It was probably that, but note that that page is not concerned with minimizing killing, but minimizing the suffering-adjusted days of life that went into your food. (Which I think is a good idea; I've used that page's stats to choose my animal products for a year now.)

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 16 October 2011 03:53:30PM 2 points [-]

Unfortunately, it seems that the best choices for which animals to eat are opposite depending on whether your goal is killing fewer animals or minimizing your carbon footprint.

Comment author: Gedusa 16 October 2011 04:39:06PM 2 points [-]

The obvious solution is to stop eating all those kinds of animal/animal products. That would satisfy CO2 concerns and killing concerns.

Of course, it might not satisfy things like fun of eating meat, ease of eating meat, health etc.