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You are verging on intentionally being obtuse. If I proposed turning loose the 130 million pigs slaughtered every year to fend for themselves, you would have an argument. Instead I am proposing not having those 130 million pigs at all. The comparison is not between factory farming or wild life, it's between factory farming and non-existence. The state of nature is totally irrelevant to the question of factory farming. It's not an option on the table for these animals.
The torture planet doesn't have to exist. It would be better if it did not exist, no matter how people live on Earth. To say otherwise is to engage in utilitarian sophistry that you were condemning a few posts above.
You cannot derive an ought from an is.
I agree, I feel like you are being quite obtuse. But that’s how these conversations generally go.
The problem with your little analogy is that for the animals, the torture planet was already here. It was here before us and it will be here after us. We didn’t build it. It doesn’t need us to exist. We simply carved out a little portion of it for our own purposes. The only proper way to judge that carve out is by comparing it to the rest.
The is/ought thing is telling, humans can talk about is/ought distinctions because they exist for us, we can decide amongst ourselves to live differently than the state of nature, within some limits. We have options.
For animals there is no “ought”, only “is”. That’s why they are animals. There is only the existence they are born into or no existence at all, which is hinted at even by your own admission and desire, The “final solution” for domesticated animals.
I think our little dialogue has demonstrated that Veganism is part of a whole constellation of beliefs that take an aspect of our existence where there is suffering, radically decontextualizes it, and then compares it to itself.
Anarchism, Pacifism, anti-nuclear activism, deep ecology, they all seem to have this in common and they are all, from my perspective, equally tedious to interact with as they have an almost religious-like aversion to dealing with the plain tragic reality of life.
No, just judge it against not breeding billions of animals in pitiable conditions. They don't have to exist. That's the counterfactual here. The counterfactual of doing X is not doing X.
By this argument, if that torture planet in Andromeda exists, you're basically clear to do whatever you want here on earth. After all, it's unlikely to be worse than the torture planet, and almost all humans live on the torture planet!
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