Your claim that 1 year of human life is equivalent to 1,000 years of factory farming for chickens (or 100,000 years for fish) seems extraordinary. You donât provide a justification for this in the piece, despite the whole argument hinging on this numberâdo you have one?
(I also downvoted the postâI think itâs lazily argued and doesnât add much to the debate. As abrahamrowe says, you could assign an arbitrary weight to anything, like a year of life for a person in the developing world being âworthâ 1/â100th of a year of life for a Westerner, and call it done.)
Pretty grim thought experimentâbut I wonder: what amount of living as a chicken, or pig, on a factory farm would people trade for a year of extra healthy (human) life?
Assume that you would have the consciousness of the chicken or pig during the experience (memories of your previous life would be limited to the extent to what a chicken or pig could comprehend), and that you would have some kind of memory of the experience after (although these would be zero if chickens and pigs arenât sentient). Also assume that you wouldnât lose any time in your real life (say it was run as a very fast simulation, but you subjectively still experienced the time you specified).
Edit: thereâs another thought experiment along the same lines in MichaelStJulesâ comment here.
Iâm thinking that for me it would be something like 1â100 of a year! Maybe 1â10 tops. And for those such as the OP who think that âthereâs just no one inside to sufferââwould you risk making such a swap (with a high multiple) if it was somehow magically offered to you?
While I certainly like that argument/âthought experiment, I think itâs very difficult to imagine the subjective experience of an (arguably) lower degree of consciousness. Depending on what animalâs living conditions weâre talking about, Iâd arguably take 1/â10th even assuming human level consciousness (so basically *me* living in a factory farm for 36.5 days to gain one additional year of life as a human), but have naturally a hard time judging what a reasonable value for chicken level consciousness would be.
Also, this framing likely brings a few biases into the mix and reframing it slightly could probably greatly change how people answer. E.g. if you had the choice to die today or live for another 50 years but every year would start with a month experienced as a pig in factory farming conditions, Iâd most certainly pick the latter option.
Your claim that 1 year of human life is equivalent to 1,000 years of factory farming for chickens (or 100,000 years for fish) seems extraordinary. You donât provide a justification for this in the piece, despite the whole argument hinging on this numberâdo you have one?
(I also downvoted the postâI think itâs lazily argued and doesnât add much to the debate. As abrahamrowe says, you could assign an arbitrary weight to anything, like a year of life for a person in the developing world being âworthâ 1/â100th of a year of life for a Westerner, and call it done.)
Pretty grim thought experimentâbut I wonder: what amount of living as a chicken, or pig, on a factory farm would people trade for a year of extra healthy (human) life?
Assume that you would have the consciousness of the chicken or pig during the experience (memories of your previous life would be limited to the extent to what a chicken or pig could comprehend), and that you would have some kind of memory of the experience after (although these would be zero if chickens and pigs arenât sentient). Also assume that you wouldnât lose any time in your real life (say it was run as a very fast simulation, but you subjectively still experienced the time you specified).
Edit: thereâs another thought experiment along the same lines in MichaelStJulesâ comment here.
Iâm thinking that for me it would be something like 1â100 of a year! Maybe 1â10 tops. And for those such as the OP who think that âthereâs just no one inside to sufferââwould you risk making such a swap (with a high multiple) if it was somehow magically offered to you?
While I certainly like that argument/âthought experiment, I think itâs very difficult to imagine the subjective experience of an (arguably) lower degree of consciousness. Depending on what animalâs living conditions weâre talking about, Iâd arguably take 1/â10th even assuming human level consciousness (so basically *me* living in a factory farm for 36.5 days to gain one additional year of life as a human), but have naturally a hard time judging what a reasonable value for chicken level consciousness would be.
Also, this framing likely brings a few biases into the mix and reframing it slightly could probably greatly change how people answer. E.g. if you had the choice to die today or live for another 50 years but every year would start with a month experienced as a pig in factory farming conditions, Iâd most certainly pick the latter option.
InterestingâI would definitely not pick the 50 months as a pig on a factory farm.
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