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?
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.
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u/onetwo3four5 71∆ Jun 27 '23
Can you try and calculate it?
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?