[link] SMBC on utilitarianism and vegatarianism.

"I actually have a fair amount of respect for people who go out hunting and shoot their food themselves. "

I hear this a lot and agree in a vague sense that felt a lot like a cached thought. So I started thinking about it: Should we really respect people who go out to hunt and kill animals themselves?

My initial reaction was that I'm wary, not respectful, of someone comfortable/enthusiastic about ending a life! As a display of character, it's worrying.

But on second examination, I changed my mind. Even from a virtue ethics perspective, I admire a person who's willing to face the consequences of their actions rather than letting the factory farming go on out of sight. You're right, willful ignorance is not something to respect.

And from a consequentialist standpoint, hunters almost certainly cause less suffering to the animals than factory farmers do.

Having grown up in a city on the East Coast, I didn't exactly grow up with an appreciation for hunters. But I think I respect them a bit more now.

Erm, that second part of the quote is...

or that are produced in place of and using the resources that could have been directed towards producing other plants humans could be eating directly.

While that does speak to the efficiency difference between meat and vegetables, it doesn't really have an impact on the statement that beef production kills fewer animals than agriculture production. Land used to pasture feed cattle isn't killing mice, which is just as claimed. Note, this tends to vary by country with the US using the most destructive form of cattle feeding.

Even then, the comic is still wrong. Would eating meat somehow become more moral if we were to genetically engineer beef into an almost unrecognizable form with zero neurons to kill? That strikes me as even more evil.

A number of people are motivated to be vegan or vegetarian by the conditions under which factory-farm animals live. For example, Julia Galef in this podcast.

Torture (not murder) is my stated objection to eating meat.

I'm a vegetarian who is fine with deer hunting and chickens/cows that are raised humanely, able to live their lives doing more or less what cows and chickens would normally spend their lives doing.

I'd guess that the poor treatment of animals is the main reason why people switch to vegetarianism. Most don't make the fine distinctions that would allow them to continue to eat the rare well-treated animals (although some do), but if food animals typically had pleasant lives and painless deaths then I expect that there would be far fewer vegetarians.

Those are both moral improvements on typical chicken. Another example is mutton: sheep are commonly kept on rocky hillsides which would otherwise go to waste, and commonly have a life that's about as good as it can get for a sheep, being mostly left alone to live as they would in the wild, except protected from predators and parasites.

I know this comment has already been objected to, but I'll pile on anyway. Torture is my objection to eating dairy and eggs. Stop the torture, and I will switch back to vegetarianism over veganism. I am currently willing to buy dairy, at least, from "humanely raised" farms (though I never see it in stores, it does exist).

Why?

Some methods of dying are more drawn out and painful than others. Given that no rancher has ever killed their animals with a method anywhere near as bad as old age, that's not really a point against ranching.

Why can't we just reject that Parfitian argument?

I was being facetious. Chickens are not literally that stupid, but they're a lot dumber than many of the things we could be eating instead.

I sometimes suspect my family's chickens are smarter than our cat. Bird's brains are organized differently, and while I haven't studies it or even though about it all that deeply so I could be dead wrong, birds seem vastly better at things humans tend to associate with smartness (presumably the things there is the most variation in between humans) than mammals relative to their total intelligence.

The obvious solution is to stop eating all those kinds of animal/animal products. That would satisfy CO2 concerns and killing concerns.

Of course, it might not satisfy things like fun of eating meat, ease of eating meat, health etc.

If ey had actually gone into a discussion of glial cells versus neurons, labelled line vs across fiber organizations, etc. then ey might have a valid argument.

There is something about calling Zach Weiner any 'ey' that just strikes me as offensive. He puts hard work into conveying overtly puerile masculine humor and to attribute him a non-existent gender is disrespectful to him as an artist.

As a vegetarian (which I define as anyone whose utility function contains a negative term for eating meat), neither of those are true for me.

Just to clarify, do you assign negative utility to just you personally eating meat, to the total amount of meat being eaten by every human, to all animals killed by the activities required to feed the human species, or maybe to something else? Or maybe some weighted average of all of those?

But the author commits illusion of transparency when ey assumes that animals that move slowly and are slothful are the "stupidest".

I agree, this comic would be rejected by a peer-reviewed journal.

The comic both strawmans all vegetarians as ones who do it for ethical reasons, and assumes that those ethical reasons are because they don't like killing "conscious" animals

It doesn't. Saying "I am an X because Y" doesn't mean "all X are such because Y".

Even if the character did use the latter formulation, it would be a bit of exaggeration to interpret it as strawmanning. Characters in a joke aren't usually supposed to voice the author's opinions.