Lonewulfeus
Member
This actually leads to a very interesting, and very hard to discuss, argument over the question of "nonexistence vs. negative existence" - is it better to live, suffer, and die, or to never live at all? At that point it's a value judgement, I would say, since it's not a decision anyone can really make on a global scale.
Like, given the choice between the following options (going to the absolute extreme for simplicity's sake):
- All cows forever are allowed to live freely and die of natural causes, but the number of cows born diminishes by a huge number.
- Cows continue to be bred and slaughtered in as ethical a way as possible.
I think we can all agree that the hierarchy of lives is as follows:
1) A long, full life with minimal suffering.
2) A life cut short with minimal suffering.
3) A life cut short full of suffering.
So then it's a question of scale. Less cows with better lives, more cows with worse lives. I dunno. How can we possibly measure that when the only perspective we have is one brief human life?
This argument though, doesn't really make any sense. "You can't eliminate suffering, so therefore you shouldn't try to reduce it." It doesn't follow from any real coherent ethical framework that posits suffering as a negative.
For the first point, option 2 for me.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't try to reduce suffering if you want to and/or feel like suffering is happening that you can change. My question is why would someone so altruistic stop there? Our lives are filled with products of suffering, hell the produce espoused by vegans as suffering free are likely cared for and harvested by immigrants making shitty money to do back breaking work because they have no choice. Why is that suffering ok but animals dying early isn't ok? That why it's easy to draw comparisons between religion and veganism it just a way to assuage guilt and make you feel less bad about how we live as humans. If that's what you need fine but don't push it on the rest of us.