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RobertWiblin comments on When should an Effective Altruist be vegetarian? - Less Wrong
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I have no idea what that question even means. I don't want to save the Bengal tiger because I think it has a "life worth living" but because I want the species to flourish.
But to the extent that you are concerned that battery chickens have negative lives, why become a vegetarian? Eat free range meat. Or eat only hunted meat. And why make a fuss about trace amounts of meat products in your cheese or whatever? Isn't it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren't worth living and also cash out that concern by a dietary purity ritual? Were I a cynic, I might even think that the religious-seeming ritual were the whole point, and the elaborate epicyclical theology built around it a mere after-the-fact justification.
"Isn't it suspicious that people who make the strange claim that animals count as objects of moral concern also make the strange claim that animal lives aren't worth living"
No, this makes perfect sense. 1. They decide animals are objects of moral concern. 2. Look into the conditions they live in, and decide that in some cases they are worse than not being alive. 3. Decide it's wrong to fund expansion of a system that holds animals in conditions that are worse than not being alive at all.
Isn't a direct consequence of (2) is that those animals are better off dead than alive and so, if the opportunity to (relatively costlessly) kill some of them arises, one should do so?
Is that supposed to be reductio ad absurdum? Euthanizing feral pets is standard. I'd do the same for livestock.
I don't know whether we'd get to absurdum, so far I'm trying to figure out how far you (that is, the general-vegetarian "you") are willing to take this reasoning.
If you can't otherwise improve their lives, the death is painless, and murder isn't independently bad.
Well, not quite. If you think being dead has positive utility for this creature, this positive utility is not necessarily small. If so, you need to weight the issues in killing against that positive utility.
For example, let's take "death is painless" -- actually, if the negative utility of the painful death is not as great as the positive utility of dying, you would still be justified and obligated to impose that painful death upon the creature as the net result is positive utility.
I was just giving what would be sufficient conditions, but they aren't all necessarily necessary.