Maximizing Moral Virtue

[The Grand Nudger]

I suppose it depends on where you get your produce and what you would consider death for food as opposed to, say, death from plastic - for example. You can close the environment off, even to bugs, provided you don't mind going around tickling every blossom with a little vibrator. Been there, done that, sucks. I used to joke that all these bleeding hearts were saving the tomato hornworm by slowly killing me. An acre of land managed as a loop can feed about twenty people. To put it into perspective, that's eight tons of melon. Fifteen tons of cabbage. Twenty tons of onion. These are good numbers..but not great numbers. I've seen forty tons of strawberry from a single acre under open field vertical hydro. You could probably double that if you could afford the glass to cover it. The point is, you can get alot out of an intensively managed acre and..beyond it's establishment, you probably wont have to kill too many animals. It's the off-site input that does most of the killing at present. Say you kept a dairy cow and slaughtered her yearly calf. Around four hundred pounds of beef and alot of dairy and a whopping twenty four tons of manure (enough to feed two acres of mixed veg)...for about four acres of pasture. You don't need the space..really..you just need that much feed. They're basically standing and expanding fridges - and if you compare them to a fridge the ecological calculus is completely one-sided. I'm constantly threatening The Wife about buying a cow - but I just fucking hate cattle..horses too..had entirely enough of that shit and mostly bad memories, lol.

It does give me an idea for a moral question. The hornworm question. We'll consider three options. You can poison them directly with pyrethrin. It's a neurotoxin. In effect, it sends the whole insect into a seizure that ends in paralysis. A relatively quick but gratuitously painful death. You can dust with bt. Nasty stuff - it's activated by the acid in the insects digestive tract where it drills holes through the lining so that it can colonize the whole body. Three to six days in total. You can release braconid wasps. Parasites - with the value added effect of annihilating any and every hornworm they find post emergence until they run out of hornworms and fuck right the fuck off looking for more.

Hornworms are rather gorgeous if you appreciate caterpillars - and stunning when they become sphinx moths...even if you don't like bugs. Point being, even if they make you go squeee - you're still gonna kill em. I think that probably demonstrates that while an emotional response is present - it's not determinative. Even as we've determined that we're okay with killing them, regardless of how much we may or may not appreciate them, we're not out of the weeds of moral import just yet. Do any of them stand out as particularly bad, does any order of bad present itself to you? Which of those three, in your estimation, would serve the goal of maximizing the moral virtue of a production method?

I'll throw in a kink. The end product will be twice as expensive to you as a consumer no matter which of these three we choose. This moral virtue -whatever it is and however you see it- will literally cost you. Does that change how you would put the order of moral import?

(nightsoil is how we bootstrapped our population from distributed grazer to invasive species, btw - just straight up exploded - before the haber process shitting and pissing was the only game in town - quixotically, unintuitively, if we wanted to reduce animal suffering as a consequence of agriculture we'd have to breed and keep loads more livestock than we already do - an entirely different way than we currently do - even if we didn't intend to eat them...which would be extravagantly wasteful.)