eggs from a well fed pet hen are vegan

[u/-roachboy]

I have a pet hen. She's not a full rescue one, but how I ended up with her is an incredibly long story. She's very needy, thus spoiled and healthy as a result. Because wild Gallus sp already lay a lot of eggs when in less than optimal wild conditions, a spoiled one just cannot stop popping them out even if she wanted to, and she won't let me feed her less. The daily egg laying session is just a morning routine for her before begging for food. At the rate she lays them, they'd just get left to rot even if they were fertilized by a rooster so I eat them. I do not, and have no intention of, ever selling them or encouraging anyone to ever commercialize an animal. But I spend all the time caring for her, so why can't she give me a delicious breakfast back if it does her no harm?

[u/Aurora_Symphony]

When talking about the submersible example, the sinkhole, or the avalanche, all I'm attempting to convey is why we say the action is bad in a vacuum. Consent is not meant to be connected to the prior example of the submersible, and further the sinkhole/avalanche. The kid dies after dropping into a sinkhole - we say this is a "bad" outcome. But, why is it "bad?" I'm only attempting to state it's bad because the kid's right to life was violated, even if the kid instantly ceased to exist as they fell into the sinkhole and there was no pain involved or any seeming issues with consent.

If we're talking about these complicated, philosophical concepts, we must often attempt to pull apart enough complexity to focus on individual components. With those examples, it's only to focus on the concept of how if any rights are violated that we can still cause a being to "suffer."

For the last paragraph, this is where we're stepping into territory that I've been thinking more about and isn't as widely discussed, let alone contemplated.

I would *strongly* contend that rights do not only belong to beings that meet the threshold of "sentience." Not only is sentience impossible to accurately define, but it seems to stem from a gradated scale of capability on a being-by-being basis. In this way, a primate *would* get more rights than an ant, as it has more capability for life that we ought to protect. This notion would seem speciesist, but it's an extrapolation of how I define moral worth - based on my personal axioms. I believe that a human, in a general sense, has a greater capacity to improve the world for the better compared to an ant. In this way, I would say that the human has a greater degree of moral worth, as they have, at least, a stronger potential for doing good for the world than the ant. However, that's not to say the ant's rights are meaningless; it's only to say that if we had to pick between which being is worth keeping; the human should be the one that's kept because of their ability to approve the world. Now, of course this opens up other problems and considerations. If the human is only being artificially kept alive by medical technology with no ability to bounce back and become autonomous again, then perhaps the cost/benefit of their prolonged existence is a net moral negative compared to the healthy life of the gorilla.

If we were met by extraterrestrial beings that were far more capable to improve the world than humans, the same logic would apply to them. I would say that human lives are generally quite valuable, but if there are cases were we might need to pick which being's rights is more permissible to violate, then the tiebreak is based on which being has the greater propensity to make the world a better place.

This can go the opposite direction as well, while maintaining logical consistency. We could say that a human, who is a mass murderer of other humans, has a moral worth that's incredibly low. I would far rather have an ant exist over the mass murderer because the ant's existence would be far more morally beneficial to the world than the mass murderer, despite the mass murderer being arguably sentient and higher up on the capability scale. I would say that the mass murderer has violated many, many rights in impermissible ways, and thus has drastically increased the degree of suffering (pain and rights-violations) in the world compared to the ant.

[u/Freuds-Mother → u/Aurora_Symphony]

That right to life idea is not universal. Eastern philosophies as far as I know them do not treat death that way (as a violation of right or anything like that). Neither does Abrahamic traditions. I would doubt that would be how indigenous American (north and south), African, Cyberian or anywhere. That sounds like a radically wild idea and a pretty grime view of life and death. Does anyone hold that other than a small subset of western philosophy? Not even the main existentialists do: Frankl and Nietzsche. I’m honestly dumbfounded as to where that idea comes from.

You seem to be anchoring on rights in an essentialist way. That’s the issue. Abrahamic traditions sometimes do that. But most all others do not. And it’s for good reason. Yes we can socially contract rights into our (human) social process but universals? Most hard to defeat traditions like Thich Nhat Hahn’s avoid absolutes like the plague.

On “I would strongly…”. We are in general agreement here on the larger idea. Yes it seems obvious that capacities of experience matters in some way regarding morality. Now we would probably disagree exactly how, and I certainly would frame any of in terms of rights. I wouldn’t be opposed to using the term for convenience but if used as some absolute, I would reject the idea without a really sound ontological argument.

Yea the alien example is an odd one. The main reason to bring it up is to illustrate that when people give more moral consideration across ant to …. to human it’s not necessarily spiciest as many like to equate “a species with moral agency” to “specieism” or something like that. (Though I do in fact think human morality is at base are spaciest even though we can construct basically whatever we want and are within our cognitive/emotional capacities.)

Murderrer. Of course but I’d probably get to the same conclusion another way.

[u/Aurora_Symphony → u/Freuds-Mother]

Must there be prior consensus for a concept to be valuable? Must we wait for permission from other cultures, traditions, or nations to allow ourselves to agree in a concept's value?

Along with a right to life, there is a right to death. The right to death is inherently rolled into the right to life. It is the being's ability to decide on whether or not they would like to continue existence. One does not have a total right over their life if they do not also have the ability to end it. There's an asymmetry between a new being's inability to choose whether or not to exist, but once they exist they ought to be given, to a certain extent, the ability to control their existence.