Nice point Huw, I agree. I wasn’t trying to lump them together exactly, I agree its very different. Does eating them when they are babies necessarily mean a net negative life though, if the slaughter is humane? It does seem like a weird question though...
The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there’s a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.
From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it’s harder to imagine it’s a good deal overall.
Under some frameworks, you’d be depriving them of many years of happy life; but then again, if you didn’t kill them as children they probably would never have been born for food. Here we’d be getting too deep into the moral philosophy for me to have a confident take 😅. Interesting nonetheless.
Nice point Huw, I agree. I wasn’t trying to lump them together exactly, I agree its very different. Does eating them when they are babies necessarily mean a net negative life though, if the slaughter is humane? It does seem like a weird question though...
The idea behind why eating babies is more likely to be net negative is that there’s a shorter lifespan of positive experiences to balance out the terror and pain of death.
From my experience watching lots of slaughterhouse footage and reading accounts from workers, even the best humane conditions still involve, routinely, a (shorter or longer) period in which the animal goes through the process of dying. This is probably pretty bad. If they only lived for a few weeks before that, it’s harder to imagine it’s a good deal overall.
Under some frameworks, you’d be depriving them of many years of happy life; but then again, if you didn’t kill them as children they probably would never have been born for food. Here we’d be getting too deep into the moral philosophy for me to have a confident take 😅. Interesting nonetheless.