“but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.”
I’m highly skeptical of this—why do you think it is important for your own moral decision making? It seems to me that whether farmed animals lives are worth living or not is irrelevant—either way we should try to improve their conditions, and the best ways of doing that seem to be: a boycott & political pressure (I would argue that the two work well together).
By analogy, no one raises the question of whether the lives of people living in extreme poverty, or working in sweatshops and so on, are worth living, because it’s simply irrelevant.
This seems relevant to any intervention premised on “it’s good to reduce the amount of net-negative lives lived.”
If factory-farmed chickens have lives that aren’t worth living, then one might support an intervention that reduces the number of factory-farmed chickens, even if it doesn’t improve the lives of any chickens that do come to exist. (It seems to me this would be the primary effect of boycotts, for instance, although I don’t know empirically how true that is.)
I agree that this is irrelevant to interventions that just seek to improve conditions for animals, rather than changing the number of animals that exist. Those seem equally good regardless of where the zero point is.
I suppose I agree with this. And I’ve been mulling over why it still seems like the wrong way to think about it to me, and I think it’s that I find it rather short-termist. In the short term if farms shut down they might be replaced with nature, with even less happy animals, it’s true. But in the long term opposing speciesism is the only way to achieve a world with happy beings. Clearly the kinds of farms @NickLaing is talking about, with lives worth living but still pretty miserable, are not optimal. Figuring out whether they are worth living or not seems only relevant to trying to reduce suffering in the short term, but not so much in the long term, because in the long term this isn’t what we want anyway.
“but it seems important for my own decision making and for standing on solid ground while talking with others about animal suffering.”
I’m highly skeptical of this—why do you think it is important for your own moral decision making? It seems to me that whether farmed animals lives are worth living or not is irrelevant—either way we should try to improve their conditions, and the best ways of doing that seem to be: a boycott & political pressure (I would argue that the two work well together).
By analogy, no one raises the question of whether the lives of people living in extreme poverty, or working in sweatshops and so on, are worth living, because it’s simply irrelevant.
This seems relevant to any intervention premised on “it’s good to reduce the amount of net-negative lives lived.”
If factory-farmed chickens have lives that aren’t worth living, then one might support an intervention that reduces the number of factory-farmed chickens, even if it doesn’t improve the lives of any chickens that do come to exist. (It seems to me this would be the primary effect of boycotts, for instance, although I don’t know empirically how true that is.)
I agree that this is irrelevant to interventions that just seek to improve conditions for animals, rather than changing the number of animals that exist. Those seem equally good regardless of where the zero point is.
I suppose I agree with this. And I’ve been mulling over why it still seems like the wrong way to think about it to me, and I think it’s that I find it rather short-termist. In the short term if farms shut down they might be replaced with nature, with even less happy animals, it’s true. But in the long term opposing speciesism is the only way to achieve a world with happy beings. Clearly the kinds of farms @NickLaing is talking about, with lives worth living but still pretty miserable, are not optimal. Figuring out whether they are worth living or not seems only relevant to trying to reduce suffering in the short term, but not so much in the long term, because in the long term this isn’t what we want anyway.