Chicken Philosophy

Lordy, it’s been a busy week.  I’m finally all moved into my new townhouse.  It’s pretty swank.  I like it a whole lot.  I said that I like it; I’m not in like with it…

In other news, my father was recently laid off after 26 years with his company (which shall remain nameless…BASTARDS).  Just for perspective, that’s longer than I’ve been on this little planet.  BASTARDS.  Anyway, I don’t think that he’s coping with unemployment well, despite the 26 months of severance pay he’ll be receiving.  I sense that he’s laying around the house quite a bit, by the pool if it’s nice out, and entertaining himself with existentialist poultry philosophy.  To wit, he sent me this little ditty at work today:

You might argue that the lives of chickens have intrinsic value, regardless of whether the chickens realize it. However, chickens have such simple minds that chicken consciousness is pretty much interchangeable. If you kill one chicken and replace it with a new one that wouldn’t otherwise have been born, the sum total of chicken consciousness stays the same. (Farming produces many more chicken life-years than there otherwise would have been.) There’s not enough difference between one chicken’s experiences and another’s to worry about how chicken consciousness gets divided up between chickens. I think it’s morally equivalent for eight chickens have two good months vs. one chicken having 16 good months.

And people wonder where I get it from…  So, I forwarded the treatise (soon to become a full-length philsophy text titled The Philosophy of Logical Chickenism*) to my dear Richard, who responded with this:

Are these free-range chickens, or factory-bred chickens?  The implied intrinsic consciousness of a chicken may be affected - those that may roam where they want may have a better “life” experience than those whose life revolves around a small box with a conveyer belt running underneath to catch eggs.  If that is the case, then if you kill 8 chickens living on the range and replace then with 8 forced to live in captivity, then you have lost something in the total conscious experience.

I loves my boys. 

Oh my GOD, could I have found a better picture than this???????

Well, maybe this one, but I still like the first one better.

* On a side note, I couldn’t remember the name of the Bertrand Russell lectures (The Philosophy of Logical Atomism), so I went to the ever-handy Wikipedia to look it up.  To my great surprise, they had listed Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy as a beginner’s text.  My faith in you has been shaken, random contributors to Wikipedia.  Faith!  Shaken!