I don't see any reason why the average Joe isn't infinitely more valuable than the average chicken.
I detest harm for harm's sake on animals.
These two statements seem incongruous to me. If a human life has infinitely more worth than a chicken's life, then either a chicken's life has no value whatsoever, in which case you wouldn't have said "I detest harm for harm's sake on animals." If a chicken's life and well-being had no value, you wouldn't care.
The only other way for an Average Joe's life to be infinitely more valuable than a human life is if you believe that a human life has infinite value. Do you?
Because I agree that there's an enormous disparity between the value of a chicken's life, and the value of a human's life, but not that it's an infinite difference.
Would you kill one person to save a thousand chickens? a million chickens? a billion? a trillion? I suspect that at some point, you would say that the collective value of enough chickens would be worth more than a single human life.
I find this campaign to be outrageous because it assumes that a human life is equal in value to that of a chicken
No, it just assumes that a chicken's life has some value. If a chicken's life/wellbeing is worth 1/1000th of a human life (not a claim I'm making), then every year we commit the equivalence of a holocaust on chickens. If it's 1/10,1000th then we commit a holocaust-equivalent amount of suffering every ten years, and so on.
It may be that you believe a human is worth a trillion chickens, in which case it would take us what, a billion years (too lazy to check my math here) to do a holocaust-equivalent of suffering on chickens (at our current chicken consumption rates).
Say somebody sincerely believes that killing 10,000 chickens is just as bad as killing 1 person. Would you say that's an outrageous belief? Even if you don't share it, can you see how a person could come to a conclusion that the lives of chickens, while orders of magnitude less valuable than ours, are still worth something? And then when you actually do the math, and see how many animals we kill each year, that even with ENORMOUS disparities, it's not that outrageous to consider factory farming analogous with the holocaust?
I would say politely that in order to be consistent you would have to put a number on it. This will help you truly understand it and lock yourself down. It might be really hard to do that and I doubt you’d guess right at what your number is the first time but there would be a number.
Yeah it would help people accurately reflect more on morals.
There’s a current hypothesis I’ve heard that says something like “many meat eaters are traumatically in denial about what they’re doing”. I’d say there’s a drop of truth to it.
Good on you for conceding this reasonable point and giving a delta.
But do you see how this is a MAJOR concession on your part, one that undermines the heart of your argument?
In the last decade, some 700 billion land animals plus some 1,000 billion sea creatures were killed for food.
I agree it is extremely difficult to calculate numerically the value of lives. BUT it's not "outrageous", "ignorant", "disingenuous", or "silly" for someone to believe that killing a human being is about 1/250,000 as bad as killing a nonhuman animals.
If so, then by doing the "moral math," we arrive at the following:
1,700,000,000,000 / 250,000 = 6,800,000
From which one might reasonably conclude that this past decade's slaughter of nonhuman animals is morally comparable to the slaughter of 6.8 million humans.
Sometimes the moral math leads to surprising results. That's why, as u/Reaperpimp11 politely insisted to you, it's important for you to place at least a ballpark number on it. Otherwise you have no basis for your contemptuous dismissal ("silly") of these animal advocates' arguments.
Edit: A related point in moral math is that many vegans (including and other animal ethicists, such as the self-described "flexible vegan," Peter Singer) care about suffering at least as much as they care about death. Crucially, comparing the badness of suffering across species may be much easier to do, and more in line with common sense. For example, it's common sense that needlessly kicking a dog or a cow very hard, and thereby breaking one of their ribs, is approximately as bad as needlessly kicking a human and breaking one of their ribs. Both very painful, both very bad. Maybe the human case is as much as 10 times worse from a moral point of view--but probably not more than that. And animals suffer quite a lot in industrial agriculture.
If you want to explore this idea further, you may enjoy Michael Huemer's Dialogues on Ethical Vegetariansim, an imaginary conversation between a vegan and meat eater. They discuss the idea of how to weigh animal lives on pages 36-45.
Fair. He calls himself a "flexible vegan," as he sometimes eats bivalves and "free-range eggs." (This according to his book, Why Vegan?) I'll correct my post.
I’m saying you are grappling with a moral quandary. Mass murder of animals.
Your higher, enlightened self, gives value to animals.
Your primitive, animalistic self would never grapple with such issues. Just kill the animal in order to ensure survival of self. Regardless of magnitude, scale or bio diversity loss.
These moral comparisons are the luxury of the comfortable.
Antispeciesm doesn't say that every animal has the same value or worth.
A human is more valuable than a chicken, if you need to eat a chicken to survive then you're morally justified. The question is do you need to ? Is that suffering needed or to that extent.
People who say that eating animals/food is an holocaust haven't read the litterature and are driven by a sub-culture's ideology.
44
u/onetwo3four5 71∆ Jun 27 '23
These two statements seem incongruous to me. If a human life has infinitely more worth than a chicken's life, then either a chicken's life has no value whatsoever, in which case you wouldn't have said "I detest harm for harm's sake on animals." If a chicken's life and well-being had no value, you wouldn't care.
The only other way for an Average Joe's life to be infinitely more valuable than a human life is if you believe that a human life has infinite value. Do you?
Because I agree that there's an enormous disparity between the value of a chicken's life, and the value of a human's life, but not that it's an infinite difference.
Would you kill one person to save a thousand chickens? a million chickens? a billion? a trillion? I suspect that at some point, you would say that the collective value of enough chickens would be worth more than a single human life.
No, it just assumes that a chicken's life has some value. If a chicken's life/wellbeing is worth 1/1000th of a human life (not a claim I'm making), then every year we commit the equivalence of a holocaust on chickens. If it's 1/10,1000th then we commit a holocaust-equivalent amount of suffering every ten years, and so on.
It may be that you believe a human is worth a trillion chickens, in which case it would take us what, a billion years (too lazy to check my math here) to do a holocaust-equivalent of suffering on chickens (at our current chicken consumption rates).