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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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This is our monthly place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Open Thread
If pig farms are replaced by asparagus farms, that leaves more soybeans and grains and so forth to feed vegetarian humans with. Thus the sustainable human population can be higher in a world with no pigs in it, in addition to the extra asparagus it produces.
Since a subsistence-level vegetarian human actually consumes a lot less food than a pig being raised for meat, the value of being a pig would have to be substantially higher than that of a subsistence-level human in order for this to be a justifiable trade-off. If a subsistence-level human is better off than a factory-farmed pig, it is better to be a vegetarian by Robin's logic.
On the other hand, some (the antinatalists) would argue that bringing humans into existence, who have awareness of the prospect of their own looming oblivion, is unbearably cruel. Plenty of them might also be relatively indifferent to the fate of mere beasts who can be born and die in large numbers without significant moral hazard (and indeed do so regularly in the course of nature).
If this is the correct point of view, we should first of all distribute birth control to everyone to prevent starvation scenarios, and second of all encourage the eating of meat in order to decrease the available food supply and thereby discourage reproduction. Pets such as dogs and cats which act as surrogate children (and as major meat consumers) would be quite laudable to such a perspective.
Is the universe itself a perpetual motion machine?
How could we know. It might be analogous to a microbe on the space shuttle's hull attempting to understand what they're actually on. We don't know what the universe is. And we might never.