Farm Animal Lives

The fact that people commonly consume meat from pigs, cattle, chickens, and so on means that there are many more of these animals on earth than there otherwise would be. (The statistics from Sapiens repeated in the immediately prior post suggest populations consisting of "about a billion sheep, a billion pigs, more than a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens.") This fact is sometimes presented as a sort of defense of factory farming and human consumption of animal products: the large effective demand for animals ensures more animals are given the opportunity to live. To be an effective defense of meat consumption, however, at a minimum the "life under current conditions is better than no life" claim would have to be true. For pigs that are kept in small crates all their lives, or for chickens crammed into unholy warehouses and subjected to anesthetic-free beak trimmings, the claim itself is at least doubtful.

But if we grant that, for farmed animals, "life under current conditions is better than no life," does that admission serve to justify the pain and torture and early deaths humans inflict upon them? We surely would not think so with human victims: who would endorse, for human children, a "husbandry regime" supposedly justified by the "logic" that "it is OK if we torture you and kill you at a young age, as long as the life that we subject you to is marginally better than not having been born"? [In the background (or foreground) of many discussions of animal welfare is the question, is it morally OK to treat non-human animals with less consideration than we provide to our conspecifics? In arguing "yes," sometimes the points raised are, like the positive-value-of-life claim, surely unacceptable when applied to humans. These points are textbook examples of "begging the question," supporting unequal consideration for non-human animals with logic that would not be convincing when applied to humans: such logic can only be convincing in the case of non-human animals if you already accept that they do not merit equal consideration.]

Another point is that humans don't seem to put any moral stock in trying to maximize the number of positive-net-value lives brought into being. People with substantial resources don't feel compelled to have tons of children, even though additional children would be likely to have good lives; nor do they continually breed their pets to bring more lives into being. Is such reluctance to produce more beings capable of worthwhile lives itself immoral? If not, then is there anything immoral about the reduction of the number of farm animals on earth that would come with diminished demand for animal products?

A variation on this theme is sometimes called "the logic of the larder"; I hope to return to larder-logic in the future...