https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5908-688X
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ABSTRACT
One popular defence of moral omnivorism appeals to facts about the indirectness of the diner’s causal relationship to the suffering of farmed animals. Another appeals to the claim that farmed animals would not exist but for our farming practices. The import of these claims, I argue, has been misunderstood, and the standard arguments grounded in them fail. In this paper, I develop a better argument in defence of eating meat, one that combines resources from both of these strategies, together with principles of population ethics, and I discuss the argument’s implications for which sorts of meat can permissibly be eaten. According to the diner’s defence, there is an asymmetry between producers of meat and consumers of meat. Producers can prevent the suffering of animals without preventing their existence, but consumers cannot. This asymmetry grounds a defence against harm-based objections to eating meat, a defence that is available to the consumer alone, and that avoids the controversial commitments about moral status or the interests of nonhuman animals endemic to existing attempts to justify omnivorism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 I will focus on the consumption of animals for food, but the argument will generalize in straightforward ways to the use of other animal-based products, like leather, and to the use of products that are not made from animals, but that use animals in the process of their production.
2 Norcross [Citation2004] provides a particularly clear presentation of the vegetarian’s case.
3 See Harman [Citation2011] for a discussion of philosophical worries about this strategy.
4 See, for example, Narveson’s [Citation1987] contractarian defense.
5 These harms may be problematic for consequentialist or for deontological reasons; this paper means to remain neutral about the deeper explanation for the wrongness of harm.
6 By ‘consumption’, I include both the purchase and eating of meat. Although the discussion is often framed in terms of decisions about what to eat, as will become clear, it is the purchase that is the most plausible source of harm.
7 See Singer [Citation1980], Norcross [Citation2004], and Kagan [Citation2011].
8 Even this is not obvious: as Norcross [Citation2004] notes, even if it is not itself a threshold purchase, it might cause some future threshold to be met earlier than would otherwise occur.
9 Matters are complicated slightly by the fact that higher consumption raises prices, offsetting to some degree the effect on production of eating more meat. But this effect isn’t large enough to substantially affect the argument. Incorporating information on price elasticity, Norwood and Lusk [Citation2011: 223] estimate that, on average, an extra pound of meat eaten increases production by 0.68–0.76 pounds.
10 McMahan [2008] considers an argument of a similar sort, although he does not ultimately endorse it.
11 I borrow this distinction from Parfit [Citation1984].
12 The canonical presentation of these issues in population ethics can be found in Parfit [Citation1984]. See Višak [Citation2013] for a discussion specifically with respect to animals and within the context of utilitarianism.
13 One might worry about the claim that beings benefit from having a good existence, on the ground that, had they not existed, they could not have been worse off, since they simply would not have any quality of life at all [Bramble Citation2015]. But, as McMahan [2008] and Parfit [Citation2017] point out, it is plausible that existing with a good life can be good for a person in a noncomparative way. So, we should allow that there can be existential benefits (to people who have lives that are worth living) and existential harms (to people with lives that are not worth living). In any case, the reasoning that denies that animals would benefit from existence would also deny that animals can be harmed by existence, and this would be enough for the person-affecting strategy to challenge the existence of harm-based reasons against omnivorism.
14 It is worth noting that it is consistent with the claim that it is permissible to bring into existence the child with the worse life that it would be better to bring the other child into existence.
15 For discussion of the conditions of different animals under modern factory-farming practices, see, e.g. Rollin [Citation1995].
16 For invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper, I would like to especially thank Bob Beddor, Ben Blumson, Alexander Dietz, Preston Greene, Joe Horton, Qu Hsueh Ming, Michael Pelczar, and Neil Sinhababu, as well as two anonymous referees for this journal.