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MTGandP comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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That's some excellent steelmanning. I would also add that creating animals for food with lives barely worth living is better than not creating them at all, from a utilitarian (if repugnant) point of view. And it's not clear whether a farm chicken's life is below that threshold.
I think it's fairly clear that a farm chicken's life is well below that threshold. If I had the choice between losing consciousness for an hour or spending an hour as a chicken on a factory farm, I would definitely choose the former.
Ninja Edit: I think a lot of people have poor intuitions when comparing life to non-life because our brains are wired to strongly shy away from non-life. That's why the example I gave above used temporary loss of consciousness rather than death. Even if you don't buy the above example, I think it's possible to see that factory-farmed life is worse than death. This article discussed how doctors--the people most familiar with medical treatment--frequently choose to die sooner rather than attempt to prolong their lives when they know they will suffer greatly in their last days. It seems that life on a factory farm would entail much more suffering than death by a common illness.
I probably would too, but I am not a chicken. I think you are over-anthropomorphizing them.
I don't see why a chicken would choose any differently. We have no reason to believe that chicken-suffering is categorically different from human-suffering.
If we were to put a bunch of chickens into a room, and on one side of the room was a wolf, and the other side had factory farming cages that protected the chickens from the wolf, I would expect the chickens to run into the cages.
It's true that chickens can comprehend a wolf much better than they can comprehend factory farming, but I'm not quite sure how that affects this thought experiment.
And I expect that a human would do the same thing.
I made a hash of that comment; I'm sorry.
This is testable; give the chickens a lever to peck that knocks them out for an hour.