Sometimes I am alarmed that so few people are “species ethicists.” In a Darwinian sense, the chicken had won a genetic lottery by being tasty, horse by being fast, dog by being friendly. Discontinuing meat is ethically equivalent to species extinction.
I think the typical animal-welfare moralist argument against eating meat has more to do with the conditions of the animals' lives rather than the circumstances of their deaths.
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an interesting variant on Ort's original premise might be, instead of vat-grown meat, suppose that you had the option to live in a community where ALL of the available meat was from hunted wild animals. is vegetarianism morally superior in that situation?
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Assuming hunting carries no risk at all of bringing the hunted species to extinction (unlikely with humans numbering in billions), a "species ethicist" should see as morally equivalent to farming.
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what's the underlying virtue behind privileging preservation of number of species in the world?
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I dunno, but I would rather live in a world with many animal species than with few, because it would be more interesting from my (human) perspective.
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The point though is that most people (frequently the same people who are concerned about welfare of domesticated animals) consider environmentalism to be good and morally justified. It is difficult to imagine environmentalism that doesn't have as its goal preserving species.
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difficult in that I've never seen it because all of the environmentalists I've heard from are committed to biodiversity. not difficult in that I can easily imagine ways of measuring ecological health that are independent of number of species.
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I think there's an underlying aesthetic preference for pristine/virginal wild spaces. Those ecosystems are characterized by very high biodiversity (usually, there are exceptions, e.g. Antarctica) and so the association of biodiversity with ecological health is made.
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I'm also fond of that aesthetic but there are most certainly places that are not even close to pristine and we ought to still care about their ecological health. A healthy farm would have very low species diversity, for example.
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So "quality of life" is being prioritized over suffering? And how is quality of life defined? Closer to natural habitat = good? By that argument, it is highly immoral that humans live in cities and not in mud huts by the river.
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I think that is the argument, yes. There's some kind of moral calculus that has an equation of the form: Suffering = Pain * Time How is quality of life defined? That's the part where it goes off the rails, and is largely why I'm not persuaded by animal-welfare arguments.
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the vat-grown scenario is meant to address the issue of animal suffering. I'd rather take on the issue of ecological damage and misallocation of scarce resources associated with factory-farming though, but that's off topic from what Ort was trying to discuss.
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but, if we're probing into thought experiment hypotheticals, I would insist that the vat-grown meat also be more energy efficient to produce than live animal meat or else it's pointless to begin with, at least according to where my priorities are.
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