Utilitarianism
They might all be happy, but all we’ve essentially done is build a habitat and released animals into i t. We might as well just plant some trees and let wild animals come.
Awareness of death
In addition to intelligence, we could distinguish why it may be g88d to kill some animals and not humans because of the difference in conscious awareness of death. All animals run from recognizable danger; they flee instinctively and because they desire not to feel pain. But few animals are able to conceive of a world without themselves, to consider their own death, and flee danger because they desire to exist. So when we kill a horse we are not crushing any dreams, when we kill a baby we have not crushed any dreams, even painlessly killing a toddler would not destroy the utility of desiring meaning because no such desire has developed in a horse, baby or toddler (yet). Animals appear to live in the moment, without considering that their future is finite and how they desire to spend their time. There’s a fundamental switch when a toddler real ize s the world isn’t happening to them, revolving around them, and the actuality of reality continues to be understood into the teenage years, even all throughout life. Peter Singer claimed it was okay to kill a baby up to around three months as this is when he considered consciousness to develop. 64 But I think it’s what that consciousness stands for: the shift in desire, knowing we will die creates an urgency and necessity to fulfill our desires. Instead of a child wanting milk just as animals desire milk or grass, we shift to wanting to become a fireman or an astronaut. This creates a shift in utility: killing a human who expects to live 80 more years is cutting their desires short; whereas killing a human whose concept of life desires does not yet exist does not create as much negative utility. Obviously, I have not considered the negative effects of killing a baby on the parents and the damage to societal cohesion. Painlessly killing a newborn baby is b8d because of the negative utility it causes the parents, and not ‘bad’ because of the potential utility of the baby because it’s not aware of life. It is a descriptive fact that beyond our close family, we do (rationally) value the lives of strangers differently; based on learning their age, dreams, and potential for creating utility for others based on their career. As the reader you may fear that valuing life has scary connotations, but credit card and insurance companies, even the government, calculates this all the time. 65 Instinctively we feel murder is worse when the victim had more to live for or more to give. How bad ending a person's life is would depend on the potential utility you take away from them, as well as the pain their death would cause to others. Here’s an average person’s potential for utility over life. (Fig.4). 66 64 Singer 2020. 65 The official name for the value of your life if you live in the UK is ‘The Value of a Prevented Fatality (VPF)’. As of 2016 the UK Department for Transport values the prevention of a fatality on Britain’s roads at £1.8million ; see Thomas and Waddington 2016. 66 It could vary greatly from this graph. For example: veteran cha rity hero Sir Thomas Moore (‘Captain Tom’) produced vast amounts of utility when he was 100 years old, as did the Japanese woodblock printer Katsushika Hokusai. It could even be said that painter Vincent v an Gogh’s utility was only redeemed a century after his death.
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