Vegetarianism vs Omnivoreism .... discussions btw Kichi and bennyboy

[bennyboy]

While we're on the subject of suffering as a metric. Animals in the wild typically endure more pain and suffering in the process of dying in the wild than in farming. (Though this varies.)

I agree this seems quite likely. Farm animals also don't face starvation, for the most part, which is a fundamental form of suffering.

If suffering is how we measure wrong, it would seem raping a woman as a child and leaving them to live with the trauma causes more suffering than killing the child. Yet we don't apportion punishment this way, so something seems amiss.

Good point. Clearly, neither raping her NOR killing her would be acceptable. It would be better if neither was allowed to happen to her, or if she simply didn't exist at all. I think that the calculus of value largely includes abstracts like hope of a chance to recover and experience joy again at some point. So the loss of the CHANCE of a person to interact and hopefully improve her outlook is taken as even more important than her very real physical suffering.

Here's another question: if the child, having been raped, is assessed as being highly unlikely ever to experience joy, and highly likely to suffer psychologically, should she be euthanized?

And if you're talking about the suffering endured during cultivation, then you've moved outside of the realm in which not eating meat is the only ethical way to address the issue, as it's no longer a question about killing animals, just humanely cultivating them.

Is it an anthropomorphism to see the end of a life as a kind of harm in and of itself? Most people accept that murdering humans is bad, no matter whether the person involved suffers during the process or not. Is it that animals are so low on awareness that moving them from existence to non-existence is a philosophically meaningless action?

I think it's worse to kill a human than to kill, say, a chicken, because of the complexity of a human's interaction with the world. A person sees, understands, and processes information on such a qualitatively rich level (presumably). But I wonder-- would I consider it "more okay" to kill a highly retarded person than say a concert pianist, on that same basis? I'm not sure.