> > When you say the "human population pressure" would be reduced, what do you > mean? > Do you mean there would be fewer hungry people? >
Yes, and if we could make animal food through chemical processing from CO2 and H2O then we wouldn't require as much land for agriculture and so we could have more forests and parks. > Growing plants for food may be energy inefficient, but eating animals > strikes me as indulgent > and unethical if we could chemical synethsize all our food needs. > > Harry > Is it excessively indulgent to go on holiday? Or own an car? Or own a carnivorous pet like a dog or cat? Have >2.1 children? Or any of a thousand other energy or resource hungry hobbies? You could survive in an unheated single room shack, with no electricity by eating a calorifically restricted diet (known to increase lifespan) while never doing anything that would use more than the bare minimum of energy or resources, because by the same excessive use of resources consumed argument anything more than that would also be unethical. Perhaps even your existence and the cost it imposes on resources is unethical? So it really depends on what your "article of faith" is regarding the utility of human existence. Some examples include; adhering to a set of religious beliefs, perpetuating the human race, maximising your personal enjoyment, improving the average human condition. These various articles of faith are all personal judgements based on what makes different people happy, but none of them can be justified on any rational basis. Personally I am mostly about the last three, and my ethics are grounded in wanting to have a nice friendly society that I enjoy living in. But I would prefer a million cute little puppies or kittens died excruciating deaths than 1 person because I don't see that animals have any intrinsic worth other than their utility to us. For me animal utility includes their contribution to allowing us to survive but also the pleasure they give us by their existence and in some cases how tasty they are. The universe is not a friendly place, animals eat each other with no care for their victims suffering etc, or driving others species to extinction, just as some bacterium or virus is likely to have a good try at wiping humans out in the next few hundred years and all life on earth is likely to be extinct in a billion years without intelligent intervention.
