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DanielLC comments on What legal ways do people make a profit that produce the largest net loss in utility? - Less Wrong
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Factory farming.
I don't even remotely see how this is a net negative. Factory farms produce incredible utility through specialization and optimization.
The positive utility they provide to humans is massively outweighed by the negative utility they provide to animals.
For clarification: I took factory farms as including those which focus on plants and produce, not just livestock.
Regardless, I value utility given to humans much higher than I value that given to animals. It is far from obvious to me that the animal side outweighs the human side.
Finally, please list three alternatives to factory animal farms which provide higher net utility.
That's not what the term means.
Why? Do animals feel less pain?
I would expect a being with fewer neurons to feel less pain, in the same way that a being with the same number of neurons that's running the relevant operation on them for a shorter period of time (i.e. not in pain as long) would feel less pain. That's not enough to make factory farming worth it.
Why three? In order to explain it, I only need to give one alternative with much higher net utility.
There are two obvious alternatives. Not eating meat and raising the animals humanely.
Not eating meat has negative net value to me. Raising the animals humanely increases cost, and depending on 'how humanely' we're talking about, can easily become net negative value to me.
Factory farms have a large net loss in utility due to the suffering they cause animals. If you do not value animals, then it's not surprising that they wouldn't cause a large loss in your utility function. However, from the perspective of wanting to prevent harm in all sentient beings, they cause a large negative utility.
Let's take two ecosystems. One is rich and diverse, full of creatures mostly eating each other. Another is poor and sparse, hardly any creatures live there.
Can you gain utility by converting the first ecosystem into the second one?
Yes. If the lives in the first ecosystem involve more suffering than pleasure, then the second almost certainly has more utility.
Considering that dying is a once-in-a-lifetime event, I think it's a bigger issue how they live than how they die.
So, desertification is a good thing then, I guess? Actually, is there anything in that line of reasoning that doesn't argue for converting all wild nature into sterile empty spaces?
That's a question with an answer. Do wild animals suffer so much their lives aren't worth living? Then yes. My gut feeling is that it isn't the case, however, or it varies a lot from specie to specie - some might inherently suffer more than others by being kept in a naturally high state of stress, etc.
To assert that animals experience qualia is hardly an uncontroversial claim.
Vat-grown meat. If only I could buy that already...
I am compelled to point out that the vat-grown hamburger everybody's read about killed quite literally the most cows per hamburger of any burger in human history, by several orders of magnitude.
It was assembled in tens of thousands of strips grown laboriously as near-monolayers of cells in sterile tissue culture (since the muscle cells themselves have no immune system) fed refined protein and cell culture products. All of this has to come from somewhere. Most hilariously, mammalian cells actually require various growth factor proteins around them to divide, they will not do so on their own. Even the HeLa tumor cells from the sixties that I've worked on in the past require at least a little bit of them, and straight up muscle cells require a lot. The best place to get these hormones is from FBS, fetal bovine serum - a fancy name for the filtered blood of unborn cows. This is a slaughterhouse product, made as a byproduct that they sell to labs whenever they get a pregnant cow coming through. Nobody's actually gone and figured out which of the thousands of substances in it are most important for its growth-allowing effects or synthesized them in vitro, and knowing how biology works it's probably a number of them that are necessary.
I've lost the calculation I made, but I saw a source somewhere saying that something like a third of the cost of production was for fetal bovine serum. I went to a laboratory supply company's website and looked at bulk options, found sources from slaughterhouses about the amount of FBS they get from a single pregnant cow, and estimated that it required in the range of 300 pregnant cows to die to make that burger...
edit: great now I'm going to need to go digging for those sources again...
edit2: here comes the calculations:
This indicates 1-3 cow fetuses per litre of serum, a Life Technologies catalog indicates a rate of about $700/litre but other sources indicate bulk rates down to $250/litre can be negotiated, and a Bloomberg article indicates that of the $300,000 cost of the burger, the cost of the FBS is the 'most significant' obstacle to reducing its price. Let's call it 10% of the cost for generosity's sake, and let's go with the most expensive FBS for the same reason.
$30,000/$700 = 42 L = up to 126 pregnant cows. If they got a bulk rate on FBS or any of my assumptions are overgenerous, it could be well up into the hundreds.
Trying another calculation, this time trying to figure out the media used. I can't seem to find hard numbers on it, but given the sheer number of cultured strips and the fact that over the time course of growing each one you WILL need to change the media (several mL, which is typically at least 1% FBS) several times, it doesn't look good. Let's say 10,000 tissue strips, ignore the separate propagation of the stem cells, and assume you have to change 5 mL of media that's 1% FBS 10 times each. That's only 5L of FBS (for up to 15 cows), but the 1% FBS was a very generous assumption. Most mammalian tissue culture media I've actually seen is 5-10% because differentiated non-tumor cells need more growth factors, boosting the amount to 25-50 L, and we're exactly back to where we were at the last calculation. And no I didn't tune the numbers so that would happen, that's literally what I got on my first plugging in of nice round numbers.
Here are four, all of which have higher net utility for humans only:
1)Status quo pre-factory farms
2) Modern CSAs on a broader scale
3) General movement of the average diet to be closer to vegetarian (the demand for factory-farmed meat is mostly artificially created and superstimulus-based anyway)
4) The 'grass farmer' farm model
They are incredibly damaging to the environment and health of consumers.
So are cars, yet few people would give them up because they yield substantial net utility.
Please give three alternatives which are better.