It’s really hard to judge whether a life is net positive. I’m not even sure when my own life is net positive—sometimes if I’m going through a difficult moment, as a mental exercise I ask myself, “if the rest of my life felt exactly like this, would I want to keep living?” And it’s genuinely pretty hard to tell. Sometimes it’s obvious, like right at this moment my life is definitely net positive, but when I’m feeling bad, it’s hard to say where the threshold is. If I can’t even identify the threshold for myself, I doubt I can identify it in farm animals.
If I had to guess, I’d say the threshold is something like
if the animals spend most of their time outdoors, their lives are net positive
if they spend most of their time indoors (in crowded factory farm conditions, even if “free range”), their lives are net negative
it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.
To this point, I think the most important things are
whatever the threshold is, factory-farmed animals clearly don’t meet it
99% of animals people eat are factory-farmed (in spite of people’s insistence that they only eat meat from their uncle’s farm where all of the animals are treated like their own children etc)
That’s really interesting on your own life. Even in the midst of my worst emotional states (emotional not physical pain,) I would still feelI’m on the positive side of the ledger.
Yes I agree on your list 2 points, those are the most important in general
In Northern Uganda here though. the majority of animals people eat (not often, many people eat meat once or twice a month) have lives from my first example. In New Zealand almost all beef and sheep meat is from something like options 2 and 3, so I think the question has some relevance to a decent number of people.
It’s really hard to judge whether a life is net positive. I’m not even sure when my own life is net positive—sometimes if I’m going through a difficult moment, as a mental exercise I ask myself, “if the rest of my life felt exactly like this, would I want to keep living?” And it’s genuinely pretty hard to tell. Sometimes it’s obvious, like right at this moment my life is definitely net positive, but when I’m feeling bad, it’s hard to say where the threshold is. If I can’t even identify the threshold for myself, I doubt I can identify it in farm animals.
If I had to guess, I’d say the threshold is something like
if the animals spend most of their time outdoors, their lives are net positive
if they spend most of their time indoors (in crowded factory farm conditions, even if “free range”), their lives are net negative
To this point, I think the most important things are
whatever the threshold is, factory-farmed animals clearly don’t meet it
99% of animals people eat are factory-farmed (in spite of people’s insistence that they only eat meat from their uncle’s farm where all of the animals are treated like their own children etc)
That’s really interesting on your own life. Even in the midst of my worst emotional states (emotional not physical pain,) I would still feelI’m on the positive side of the ledger.
Yes I agree on your list 2 points, those are the most important in general
In Northern Uganda here though. the majority of animals people eat (not often, many people eat meat once or twice a month) have lives from my first example. In New Zealand almost all beef and sheep meat is from something like options 2 and 3, so I think the question has some relevance to a decent number of people.