http://www.manifestdensity.net/2008/07/14/today-in-blogs/ Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:04:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 http://www.manifestdensity.net/2008/07/14/today-in-blogs/comment-page-1/#comment-1370 Tom Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:04:59 +0000 http://127.0.0.1:8888/?p=604#comment-1370 That's an excellent point. Neuroscientists use the ratio between body and brain mass as a rough stand-in for a species' intelligence, although there are problems with this (it would mean that sheep are smarter than pigs, for one thing). Using intelligence as a stand-in for consciousness is also potentially problematic, but reasonable enough, I think. What you'd really want to do, though, is calculate a cruelty footprint score for a given piece of meat -- something that takes into account how the animal was raised and how it was slaughtered. Obviously this would be a difficult score to plausibly assess. Fortunately, underemployed philosophy majors are easy to come by. It'd be easy enough to ignore the result as meaningless. But at the very least I think an organization like PETA would be smart to try it, if they haven't already. People go nuts for carbon offset scores; this would be a great PR tactic. Of course, this brand of moral calculation inescapably leads to proposals like <a href="http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_7229.html#597207" rel="nofollow">this one</a>. That’s an excellent point. Neuroscientists use the ratio between body and brain mass as a rough stand-in for a species’ intelligence, although there are problems with this (it would mean that sheep are smarter than pigs, for one thing). Using intelligence as a stand-in for consciousness is also potentially problematic, but reasonable enough, I think.
What you’d really want to do, though, is calculate a cruelty footprint score for a given piece of meat — something that takes into account how the animal was raised and how it was slaughtered. Obviously this would be a difficult score to plausibly assess. Fortunately, underemployed philosophy majors are easy to come by.
It’d be easy enough to ignore the result as meaningless. But at the very least I think an organization like PETA would be smart to try it, if they haven’t already. People go nuts for carbon offset scores; this would be a great PR tactic.
Of course, this brand of moral calculation inescapably leads to proposals like this one.

]]> http://www.manifestdensity.net/2008/07/14/today-in-blogs/comment-page-1/#comment-1369 Mike Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:13:29 +0000 http://127.0.0.1:8888/?p=604#comment-1369 Yes, but you need to kill many more chickens to get the same amount of meat as one pig provides. Perhaps someone needs to compute a metric to allow people to make such comparisons, such as sentience per pound. Yes, but you need to kill many more chickens to get the same amount of meat as one pig provides. Perhaps someone needs to compute a metric to allow people to make such comparisons, such as sentience per pound.

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