Seriously, though, people, if the ethical problems with eating animals bother you so much that you’d consider artificial meat, then here’s an idea: Try not eating meat. It’s really not that hard.
actually, for all the trouble some go through in the search for stuff that taste like meat, here’s an idea: try eating meat. it’s really not all that tough, especially if you ask for medium rare.
Although I’m disturbed by what I hear of the conditions endured by food animals in factory farm settings, I can’t quite bring myself to give up meat. But that’s only part, perhaps a small part, of the reasoning behind artificial meat. According to the article cited in the OP, raising animals for food requires a lot of land and results in a very inefficient use of land and plants. If the technology for production of artificial meat can be made economically (and gastronomically) viable, land can be freed for other uses.
You may be guilty of a bit more anthropomorphizing than you may like to admit.
I don’t think this question will ever be adequately answerable until we have a good measure of intelligence and experience from the POV of an animal. An animal that lives in the moment might well be considered in either direction: The good moments outweigh the negative of having never existed, but the bad ones are of exact equal weight to the good. Do we decide by final tally or does the existence of one bad event preclude us from forcing life upon an animal for our own consumption?
We can observe their behaviour in the natural state and deduce what they enjoy when their needs are met, but is that enough to be considered a “good” life? Pigs, for example, are quite intelligent and spend much of their time looking for food. When food is plentiful though, they tend to spend their “leisure” time laying around and sleeping. To a human that might seem the height of tedium after a day or two. The pigs don’t seem to mind though. So is a life free from most stress with plenty of food and time to lay around a good one? By pig standards it would seem to be.
Frankly the issue of consuming meat always comes down to a simple choice for me. Are you comfortable with taking an animal life to feed yourself?
No life. I don’t know what else to say on the matter.
The idea that not even experiencing something is better than experiencing something that will have unpleasantries associated with it is absolutely mind-boggling to me. Particularly given how it is framed in the OP, how is it at all better to never exist than a short fairly content life with a death without too much distress. Hell, tons of people who live longer lives may not necessarily live too content or die with a fair amount of distress. Is it just the length that makes it not worth it?
I think this is along similar lines of the sentiment that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Sure, there’s pain associated with lost love, as there is pain associated with death, but that experience of love or life makes it all worth it. If you love someone enough to be hurt so badly when it ends, then the love was something worthwhile, otherwise you couldn’t have gotten hurt so much. Life is much the same, I think. Certainly there have been times where I’d have given almost anything to bring an end to some of my darkest times, but I’ve eventually come to realize that even that pain is part of what makes life worth living.
How do we define what is too short or too unpleasant to be worth living? Frankly, the idea of foregoing existence entirely to avoid what we may see as a miserable existence as horrifyingly nihilistic, lacking perspective of just how good so many of us have it, and cowardly. Afterall the idea that you can’t miss what you don’t have applies just as much in reverse, with regard to what may seem like a miserable existence to us, in that we DO have so much more and it seems so miserable only because we’re comparing it relatively to what we have.
That’s not to say that I think the cruel way that some in the meat industry treat their “products” is acceptable. As much as we should respect life, part of that is doing what we can to improve the situation for all and share that higher standard that we enjoy.
I found the Economist article interesing as well and in fact I have been thinking about artificial meat as a solution to multiple problems for years. Since it is a tangent to the main topic I think I will start another thread.
It’s the Schopenhauer in me.
Yeah, but veggie burgers don’t have that unpleasant aftertaste of nagging guilt.
Ruby: No, that’s why I phrased the hypothetical as I did.
Martian Bigfoot, Acid Lamp, and shijinn: While I have no problem having an animal live and die in order to feed me and mine the point of the question was not about dietary choices. (Even if some find the considerations inform their decisions about what to eat.) It is indeed about the gut reactions that we have ranging from erl’s to Blaster Master’s and some that vary based on if the animal is livestock or human or other factors. Is there a coherent rational basis to justify these various reactions we have, or to at least explain them?
Logically I find the argument that nonexistence is “worse” leads to a refrain of Every Sperm is Sacred … and I don’t want to go there. Yet the other line leads to the equally (in my mind) absurd conclusion that humanity not existing is preferred to humanity that includes short lives and no small amount of suffering in the world. So what philosophic principles can guide me safely between this Scylla and Charybdis? Or are there none?
One way to think about it… A single human life-time is a terribly brief period.
Maybe 100 years. But the first 20 were spent in figuring out how to live… And the last 20 years don’t look too good… So, 60 measley years.
Now, think about how many millions of books there are… Movies… Symphonies… Plays… Varieties of cuisine… Scenic locations… People! People to meet!
In our stinking 60 years of life, we can’t experience a per cent of a per cent of the good things there are on this planet!
And we’re lucky: we’re in the middle of the best times even, in all of human history. And we’re the lucky ones who live in industrialized nations and have computer access and received an education that’s good enough to permit us to engage in philosophical speculation…
The best we can ever do is skim the surface, and a very limited part of the surface! Our lives are hellishly brief…
So… Kiss someone pretty… Live reasonably well… Have a damn good time if you’re able…
If you feel an ethical obligation of some sort, then spend a little time trying to make it possible for others to live well also…
if it’s all or nothing, that it’s not just me but humanity as a whole, then i would choose life. where there is life there is hope. an individual might not willingly choose the short and brutal life of a prehistoric primate, but who would have guessed then that its descendants would flourish and take over the world?
or, as Trinopus said, the value of a life is subjective. it is much easier to put a value to nothing.
When I am sick, like have the flu or something, I often end up reflecting that I can’t remember what it was like to feel well. Such a limitation of memory is not limited to sickness. Feelings cannot be remembered. You can imagine why: if you remembered what it was like to not have your arm broken while your arm was broken you might end up doing something dreadfully stupid to make things worse.
You can remember that you weren’t sick, and the way you acted in such a state… but what it means to be healthy forever eludes you.
When life is ok, of course you cannot remember the agony of a broken limb, the desperation of high fever, the utter blankness of depression. This is the same kind of non-coincidence, in my view.
Life in fact deals us all manner of pains, real and imagined. We are basically powerless in the face of them. You can close your eyes, but you can’t stop seeing. Pleasure is the cruelest of tricks “fate” has for us. It makes us forget that the entire universe is utterly indifferent if not decidedly hostile to us.
And it made us.
What would be a short life for humans by your definition? A few months, ten years, forty years?