Finding none fully satisfactory, we then articulate alternative approaches. Part II conducts a critical review of the leading proposed solutions to the problem. Part I specifies the problem in greater detail with some additional stylized examples. 8Īccordingly, this article uses the animals-benefit claim to offer new insights into the nonidentity problem. We make the following core moral claim: if it is wrong to kill an animal for food at the time that one kills the animal (as it is in nearly every circumstance 7), then it is also wrong to kill that same animal even after months of showing kindness to the animal. 5 Put differently, assume, against the overwhelming weight of the evidence, that defenders of “humane” animal exploitation are right in claiming that animals who become meat enjoy happy lives followed by “one bad day.” 6 Still, we will argue that the many good days do not justify what happens on the bad day. (His would hardly be a profitable enterprise, but we are assuming away such practical concerns.) We would consider the farmer’s pets-to-meat program wrong, even if the pigs had led happy lives up until the day of slaughter and thus even if their lives were, on net, worth living. Then, when they reach “slaughter weight,” the farmer kills them as humanely as possible. Imagine that a farmer raises a litter of piglets and treats them as though they were his pets. 4 Similar misfortunes beset the lives of other animals that people raise for food, fiber, and other products. After experiencing this torment repeatedly, the grieving mother cow must join her children at slaughter when she no longer produces as much milk as she once did. 3 So do the dairy cows whose babies the farmer repeatedly takes from them at birth so that the milk produced for baby bovine nursing can instead go to human consumers. The overwhelming majority of egg-laying hens live in confined spaces where they can barely flap their wings and often suffer prolapses from having been bred to lay more eggs than their bodies can handle. We will not attempt to define the term, because by any reasonable definition, most farmed and otherwise exploited animals do not have lives worth living. Although philosophers do not always specify exactly what makes a life worth living, 2 the concept appears to connote at least some sort of minimally satisfying life. One way to challenge what we shall call the animals-benefit objection is to contest its factual premise that farmed animals’ lives are worth living. Thus, the argument concludes, what may appear to be harm to animals is actually a kind of gift, a gift that vegans, vegetarians, and the like misguidedly refuse to convey to the animals they purport to care about. Moreover, the benefits of life that omnivores confer accrue not just to individual animals but to entire species because animals such as domestic pigs, chickens, and cows would not exist were it not for humans breeding, raising, and eating them. 1 Refraining from consuming animals thus deprives those animals of lives worth living. Absent the omnivore’s demand for these products, the animals in question would not exist at all. If a farmed animal-a cow, for instance-has a life worth living, and the animal would never have existed absent the demand for her meat or bodily output, then doesn’t it follow that humans deny that animal a benefit by refusing to eat her or her products? A person who uses animal products accordingly helps rather than harms animals. If you are a vegan, vegetarian, or even pescatarian, you have likely encountered a seemingly paradoxical objection to your ethics. Consideration of the nonidentity problem in the animal context reveals a common thread running through moral reasoning about human obligations toward our own as well as other species. This article responds to the nonidentity problem chiefly by positing an asymmetry between failing to create living beings and harming them, thus building on a moralized version of the endowment effect. Per the nonidentity logic, a slaughterhouse benefits the animals doomed to end there because slaughter is those animals’ raison d’être. This article offers novel solutions to the counterintuitive nonidentity reasoning by placing it in a fresh setting: claims about animal agriculture. If a person has a life worth living, then past wrongs but for which she would not exist seemingly cannot have harmed her. For example, according to the nonidentity logic, descendants of victims of historical injustices such as slavery and the Holocaust cannot complain about those injustices because the terrible events made their very existence possible. The nonidentity problem raises the question whether an act that is necessary for a person’s existence can also harm that person.
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