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TimS comments on Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (333)
Isn't this just a re-statement of the Repugnant Conclusion?
Essentially all domesticated animals are alive because of demand for products made from them (eggs, milk, meat, etc). If everyone kept kosher, there would be far fewer pig-experience-moments than the current world, including much less pig-experience-suffering. Is that good or bad for someone who values pig utility?
Anyway, I've always taken this kind of reasoning as a reason not to adopt that perspective on these types of questions. But I think that means I'm not a consequentialist - which puts me slightly out of consensus in this community.
I value pig-utility. I'd much rather see a smaller number of comparitively well-kept, well-treated farm pigs and a healthy population of wild boars than the status quo. I'd also rather not see that arrived it by a mass slaughter of all other pigs, though, and pragmatically I'm not going to get that either way, so "a largeish-but-not-contemporary number of reasonably well-treated pigs farmed for food production" would be a much more feasible goal. Temple Grandin does a lot of work in this area, actually.
Isn't this what's happening all the time anyway?
Not in the sense I was using it above, namely, "We kill them all at once to remove their population." What's happening at present is more like "we kill them in batches to meet production demands, and bring in more." Aggregated over the very long term a whole lot more pigs can suffer and die in the second case; I'm simply saying I don't find "One sudden, nearly-complete mass slaughter" to be a preferable alternative.
My point is that the lifetime of a pig (EDIT: being farmed for meat) isn't very long (about 6 months from what I can find on the internet). Thus all we would have to do is stop breeding them for a while and we very quickly wouldn't have many pigs.
That's totally true, but it feels a bit tangential to what I was saying.
I think it is in a similar vein, certainly, but I think it's different in some ways too. For example, I don't think most people would accept cannibalism even if the people (victims? food?) led very happy lives, perhaps like a system where people were pampered in spas all day before being killed for food. But the logical extension of Hanson's argument is that this would be a great system. Assuming that there was a remote economic demand for human meat, which, thankfully, there isn't.
Also, I think cannibalism engages people's sense of moral intuition much moreso than simply having a lot of marginally happy people does.