I don’t understand what is the thought connecting the death of a chicken and the possible death of a baby (if it is not a fetus). The premise of your account, I thought, is that a fetus is possibly a human life. If it is a human life, then a genocide is happening every year. If it is true that a fetus is a human life, then why is it a relevant comparison that drastically more broiler chickens get killed yearly? On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made? As an aside, I was very interested to learn that “broiler” is a species of chicken. Broil: “to cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct, intense radiant heat.”
On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made?
You might be interested in this series of posts by Rethink Priorities about moral weights, which targets precisely the question of how different kinds of lives can be weighed against each other. Many utilitarians (which many people in EA are) believe that lives can be compared like this.
I don’t understand what is the thought connecting the death of a chicken and the possible death of a baby (if it is not a fetus). The premise of your account, I thought, is that a fetus is possibly a human life. If it is a human life, then a genocide is happening every year. If it is true that a fetus is a human life, then why is it a relevant comparison that drastically more broiler chickens get killed yearly? On what basis can a comparison of life importance be made? As an aside, I was very interested to learn that “broiler” is a species of chicken. Broil: “to cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct, intense radiant heat.”
You might be interested in this series of posts by Rethink Priorities about moral weights, which targets precisely the question of how different kinds of lives can be weighed against each other. Many utilitarians (which many people in EA are) believe that lives can be compared like this.