Comment on Why Eat Less Meat?

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 00:44:18 GMT

The thought that highly temporally variable memes might define the values for our AGI worries me a whole lot. But I can't write the possibility off, so I agree this provides at least some reason to try to change the memetic landscape.

I actually don't object to animals being killed, I'm just concerned about their suffering.

Ditto. It might be that killing in general is OK if it doesn't cause anyone suffering. Or, if we're preference utilitarians, it might be that killing non-humans is OK because their preferences are generally very short-term.

One interesting (and not crazy) alternative to lab-grown meat: If we figure out (with high confidence) the neural basis of suffering, we may be able to just switch it off in factory-farmed animals.

I'm especially talking about wild animals because for some animals, life in the wild might be as bad as in factory farms.

I'm about 95% confident that's almost never true. If factory-farmed animals didn't seem so perpetually scared (since fear of predation is presumably the main source of novel suffering in wild animals), or if their environment more closely resembled their ancestral environment, I'd find this line of argument more persuasive.

Discuss