The Cricket Dilemma
By: Reinoud Schuijers
Tags: Sustainability, Health, Food, Philosophy, Environment

Statement A

Each life is of equal, absolute value, namely 0

This is the only statement that one can get away with without being brutally hypocritical. Moreover, accepting that all lives are of zero value yields certain freedom. For one, it does not matter that you kill and eat things that were once alive. Nothing is lost in the process of it passing from being alive to not being alive.

The number of lives it costs to feed you also makes no difference. Be it one life a year, a hundred a year or a billion a year. As said, infinity times zero is still zero.

However, truly accepting that life has no value does have its obvious implications. If all life — thus including your own — does not have value, then why live? And if life is of no value, then why cherish the lives of others? Why not take another person’s life, right now? And why not take your own?

Leaning towards statement A means you will have to accept that your life is of zero value, too. A hard (but in some ways liberating) feat.

And there’s something else going on, too. If your life is worth zero, then why bother sustaining it (by breathing, but also by eating)? In this way statement A is paradoxical: you justify eating hundreds of thousands of creatures because you believe that life is worthless — and therefore not worth maintaining — which in turn renders the act of eating (and thereby sustaining one’s life) pointless.

Hedonism could pose a solution to both accepting that life has no value but also accepting that life is worth maintaining. According to Hedonistic reasoning, the primary goal of life is the pursuit of pleasure and goods. This does not collide with accepting that life has no value: one can pursue pleasure and goods and still believe that nothing is lost once this pursuit ends.

A hedonist could see life as a blank canvas. All pleasure and acquired goods are paint strokes on the canvas. The more paint, the happier the hedonist in the present. However, with more paint, the canvas — to the hedonist — does not grow in value. Once life ends, the canvas is destroyed and nothing is left.

Apart from a hedonistic viewpoint, it is hard to imagine how one would live out its life while acknowledging that it is worthless, making statement A a difficult viewpoint to fully embrace.

Statement B

Each life is of equal, absolute value, namely 1

At first sight, statement B looks very similar to statement A. But the seemingly subtle nuance that according to statement B, all lives are of explicitly positive equal value, greatly pivots this statement’s implications.

While this statement might be appealing to many as it is easy to romanticize, it is nearly impossible to truly live by. If all lives are of equal, positive value, a major problem with self-preservation arises.

Life is a constant battle for resources. Even in the modern world, self-preservation means directly taking away from another creature’s chances of survival. The mere fact that we are further distantiated from our food sources (and competitors for the same food) as ever, does not mean it’s not reality. If one’s life is exactly as valuable as another’s life, it is hard to establish why you should get the resources to maintain your life, and the other shouldn’t.

You could argue that this also applies to statement A, but it doesn’t. If the other creature’s life is of zero value, then there is no point in even considering that other life in your actions. And taking away from that other life, putting it at risk to perish, has no negative impact as its value is zero. Furthermore, because your life is of zero value too, preserving yours does not mean anything either. Life is worth equally as much as no life, regardless of who wins or loses.

Obviously, eating other animals, regardless of their size, nutritional value or cuteness, is not compatible with statement B, nor is taking another life for whatever reason.

On the surface, this statement best aligns with a vegan lifestyle, in which no animal (by)products are consumed, worn or used in any way. However, taking into consideration that whatever you take to preserve your life can not be taken by something else to preserve theirs, makes this statement impossible to live by.

Being alive is the direct result of others not being alive. It is therefore impossible to maintain your own life without taking up the resources (space, oxygen, nutrition) that would otherwise have granted life to something else. This makes statement B a theoretically valid, but practically impossible viewpoint to live by.

Euthanasia

Following the reasoning as outlined above, the thought of escaping this loop by committing euthanasia might seem a solution. However, this is against the rules of statement B. All life is of equal, positive value, namely 1. So, taking your own life also yields a negative result.

It therefore seems that with statement B, you’re stuck: you can not exist as this prevents others from existing, yet you can not take your own life as this is also destructive.