Thank you for the post!
I thought about some of these questions myself. Years ago even, while I was turning into a vegetarian.
“If we would not eat those animals, they wouldn’t exist at all” is sometimes used as a justification for consuming animal products and if the animals in question do in fact have lifes worth living then it is quite a compelling argument. (At least for me. Substantial parts of the animal rights movement would probably disagree.) So I definitley understand why you write it might actually be morally permissible or even obligatory to eat animal products of animals living net-positive lifes.
Still, after some deliberation I came to the conclusion that this is not the case and that we should still try to end factory farming altogether, even in the variations where the animals have lifes worth living. I think it might be worthwile to share my thinking here and I’m also curious about your thoughts.
So first of all when considering our behaviour towards non-human animals (I will from now on write animals for short) I often find it useful to ask myself a simple question: What would I think if they were humans instead? I do this to get a better intuition, since our moral intuitions are mostly calibrated to work with humans instead of other animals. (Of course intuition often goes wrong, but while I don’t put too much credibility on my intuitions I still find them useful as a first orientation.)
If I would find something acceptable even when done to humans then I normally agree with doing it to animals as well. When I would NOT allow this for humans, I see if I can find reasons why humans are so fundamentally different from other animals in regards to this question that different behaviour is warranted. For example, it is easy to see why a right to democratic participation and education it not something that should apply to animals the same way it applies to humans. Maybe the same can be said about some sort of important medical research, though I’m very uncertain in this area. And thinking about humans instead of animals makes it intuitively clear to me that wildlife population control shouldn’t be done by just killing animals whenever we think there are too many of them. (Though admittedly we don’t have perfect alternative solutions yet, so I’m interested where wild animal welfare might lead to eventually.)
So when I stumbled upon aforementioned justification, I applied my method here as well. You may skip this paragraph if you find it unsettling, as it illuminates how and why I came to find my arguments but not the arguments themselves.
With that said, suppose we had the power to bring into existence some humans whom we would keep in captivation and eventually kill for profit. (Since we are not normally interested in human flesh, you may assume it is done in order to harvest their organs.) Since humans may be bothered by captivation much more than some of the animals (though this is just my personal guess), let’s also assume they just don’t really know or care about them being held in some sort of (outside?) prison, or we don’t hold them captive at all. We somehow make sure these humans live lifes that are essentially good. They are held warm, get enough healthy food, they can enjoy going outside, live in small communities without predators, and so on. We essentially grant them the lifes of hunter-gatherers (which is probably the “bar to cross” in regards to humans?) with some limitations and a lot of upsides. Or maybe even the amenities of modern life. In any case, we are nearly certain their lifes are net-positive. (We can even ask them, after all.) We just sometimes take a few of them, kill them and sell their organs—in order to avoid fear and loss, we may always kill a complete group painlessly in their sleep.
Intuitively we probably agree that doing so would be very much wrong. Still, assuming our intuition is correct that leaves the question why. Since these humans live net-positive lifes, it cannot really be out of concern for them, can it?
In the human case the intuition is much more obvious than in the case of animals. Maybe because the case of animals is different—there is ongoing debate if painlessly killing an animal which does not have plans for or even concepts of their own future is permissible. But personally I think killing animals is wrong pretty much for the same reasons killing humans is: we rob them of all the remaining time and happy experiences they might have had. In any case, this possible distinction can not explain my intuition in regards to humans. After all, I would still prefer being born as one of those humans from my thought experiment over not being born at all, yet I am am against creating humans-to-be-slaughtered. Why?
In the end I came up with four reasons to defend my intuition and in turn (mostly) reject the claim that farming happy animals which would otherwise not be born is permissible.
Slippery Slope: From a strictly utilitarian perspective, if killing someone is good or bad depends solely on the outcome. (However, if we give some credibility to moral theories based on rights or at least to moral uncertainty it becomes obvious that regularly killing sentient beings in industrial scale is something … highly problematic.)
But even as a utilitarian I can agree that behaviour changes thinking which in turn changes behaviour again. (For this reason, in the human case the human rights or the principle of treating everyone the same, no matter how they came into existence, is too important to reject easily...) So if we kill (billions of) animals on a regular basis, this may change our general behaviour towards animals and how we see them in unfavourable directions, even if originally only done out of careful consideration. I am generally sceptical of slippery slope arguments, as they rest heavily on some assumption of human thinking and behaviour and how they change. Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.
Abuse of power: This might be somewhat connected to 1, but in my opinion still is a different point. If we grant some farmers near absolute power over some animals and if their welfare interests are in opposition to the economic interests of those in power, then I have very little faith in human conscience. Of course, with strict regulations and controls this problem can be weakened substantially. Still, as long as (individual) humans have an interest in getting higher productivity out of their lifestock, abuse will happen—though maybe seldom enough to accept this as a necessary evil.
Still, even if objections 1. and 2. were taken care of in the human case (so neither abuse nor different behaviour towards the remainig humans would occur) my intuitions would remain unchanged. So it seems some deeper reasons have to be at play here. And I think the reasons are the following:
False Dichotomy: This, I think, is in some sense the strongest point. (It is also the one I mention whenever I hear the argument above that “they wouldn’t exist otherwise” and I don’t have time or opportunity for a detailed discussion.) The basic idea goes like this: If the animals have net-negative lifes we shouldn’t bring them into existence at all. If they have net-positive lifes however, we shouldn’t just end these lifes preemptivly. (Since if they lived longer, the additional “value” would be even bigger.)
Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time. In fact there is nothing wrong with bringing into existence happy beings, while there is pretty much everything wrong with killing happy beings—no matter why they exist in the first place.
So if we really think it is good to have more happy animals, then the conclusion is not organic farming but to bring into existence even more of these happy animals and stop the farming altogether!
(One might argue that having an animal that lives their full life is just as good as having an animal that lives for one year and is afterwards killed and replaced by a new one. I would still prefer for animals to live their full lifes instead, if only for reason 2 and moral uncertainty—and again my intuition if I were to replace them with humans instead.)
Of course we cannot just bring into existence an unlimited amount of happy animals without creating a lot of problems at the same time, which is why we also need to consider the next point.
Animals are expensive: Animal products are notoriously bad for the environment. To feed animals we grow crops which often could just be eaten directly. I find it hard to believe that the most efficient possibility to spend our (us being humanity) limited resources is to raise a lot of animals with slightly net-positive lifes instead of caring for the already existing problems first. (Including wild animal suffering.) If anything creating more happy beings seems like something that might be done with surplus resources after all our immediate problems are resolved.
There are two conclusions to draw from these thoughts. First, it seems as if most production of animal products should still stop. This is mostly due to reasons 3 and 1, but even if killing the animals is not already immoral for those two reasons it still seems inefficient for reason 4. (However, while keeping factory farming is expensive for humanity, fighting it is sadly enough also expensive for EA. In some sense this could mean that the resources of EA might be better allocated to raising welfare instead of ending factory farming if the latter is too hard/expensive to achieve. Alternative Proteins still seem like a good bet, though, and most of EA’s resources within the animal welfare pot already are directed at better welfare regulations anyways, right? In any case, if we adopt stricter welfare regulations this will not only lead to less animal “torturing” but also to increasing prices for animal products, so I suspect that using our resources to promote animal welfare regulations is actually a very good strategy to end factory farming in the long term. Which is also an answer to your last question.)
Second, some sorts of animal farming might actually be permissible: In some instances they do not cost resources but actually gain them—there are areas where farming crops is essentially impossible but animals can be held and eat the grass. Sometimes these animals are even necessary to preserve a natural habitat. And even if our farming methods do take up some resources, if they are not too costly and we also get something out of it, point 4 essentially vanishes and—assuming we have strict welfare regulations and really care for their welfare—my only remaining objection is that it is still not permissible to kill these animals, at least not before they have grown so old and sick that being killed might be in their interest. Of course we wouldn’t want to eat meat from them afterwards, but I can see how we might get ethical leather, wool eggs this way.
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I think it aligns well with what somebody else had shared with me as well privately.
Let me start with where I disagree: I don’t share your view that it is unethical under all circumstances to create “humans to be slaughtered”. If my life ended painlessly without me knowing and affecting nobody around me in a few years because, plot twist, our universe is just one big farm of some aliens, then that would be a pity because I would’ve preferred to live another fourty years but I’m also grateful for the fourty years of life until that point that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. From conversations with friends I do understand that this is not a common view and I understand if yours is different. One reason “it would be a pity” is that of course I had plans for my life and those vanish but here I share the thinking you mentioned that animals probably live a lot less in the future than we do so this might “count less”.
On your false dichotomy argument: “Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time.” I agree but realistically the options are “no life” or “limited life” (becuase animals are expensive), and if those are the options then I think “limited life” is better. And if the animals truely have no concept of the future, isn’t “two animals for half the time” somewhat similar to “one animal for the full time”?
I love how you went from these philosophical points to more practical points at the end, so let me also come back to those. I think no matter the disagreement on the points above, we can both agree that a world without net-negative factory farmed lives is a better world. I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat, it is too deeply culturally engrained in so many cultures. At the same time nobody who sees the suffering of animals is supporting these practices. So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.
In practice that would probably mean supporting organizations that try communicating along those lines and see if that has a better effect than advocating for a vegan diet. I could also imagine that it has the opposite effect: Normalising animal protein and a slippery slope in the direction of also eating net-negative animal protein.
I strongly disagree with your position, Christoph.
First, I agree with Marc: this argument to eat ‘happy meat’ (from happy animals) can be easily applied to justify slavery and cannibalism: let’s breed happy slaves, let’s give birth to happy babies and then eat them.
In population ethical terms: once you bring into existence a farmed animal, that animal would be better-off on an animal sanctuary, so they you have a duty not to kill it but to take care of it on a sanctuary. I wrote a paper on this (Population ethics and animal farming, Bruers 2022, https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45). It also follows from my moral theory ‘mild welfarism’, as explained here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/ . All population ethical views that use cardinal interpersonally comparable welfare and that say that eating happy meat is always better than not breeding farmed animals (e.g. total utilitarianism), entail the repugnant conclusion which in this case means we should breed a huge number of animals, sacrifice ourselves to take care of them on animal sanctuaries such that they have positive lives barely worth living, and definitely not slaughter them. If you believe that the life/welfare of an animal can be compared with non-existence but cannot be compared with the welfare of a human, then you cannot apply those population ethical views like total utilitarianism, and then you can take a view that entails it is permissible or good to eat happy meat. But I think those conditions are very unlikely: if animal welfare can be compared with non-existence, and human welfare can be compared with non-existence, then it is weird why animal and human welfare cannot be compared with each other. It is like heaving a measure with a zero point but no scale. Possible, but weird.
Actually, my theory of mild welfarism gives two reasons why eating happy meat is not allowed: one based on population ethical preferences (to avoid the repugnant conclusion, to respect the procreation asymmetry, to have a more person-affecting view, to be dynamically consistent,...), the other on a deontological principle (not use someone as a means against their will).
So, a coherent ethical theory that gives two arguments against eating happy meat, plus strong intuitions against eating happy babies and breeding happy slaves, makes me pretty confident that eating happy meat is impermissible.
From a practical viewpoint: I think it is harder for consumers to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-based meat products of which the animals had clearly positive lives and where the animals were treated according to their personal animal welfare standards that they would apply to other animals such as dogs, than to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-free meat products. Organic meat is more expensive than a lot of plant-based meats, and even with organic farming people do not seem to be very confident that those animals have positive lives. People would not eat organic dog meat, for example.
Your claim: “I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat”. I also personally don’t think organic meat will result in everybody stopping eating conventional meat. After all, we have organic meat on the market for more decades than plant-based meat and still not many people are buying organic meat. The organic meat market is growing less than the plant-based meat market.
“So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.” Many people also get on board with cultivated meat tech development.
“Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.” Indeed, the relevant studies:
Bastian B., Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Radke H. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The denial of mind to animals used for human consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 38 no. 2 p.247-256.
Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Bastian B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite 55 p.156–159.
Thank you for the post! I thought about some of these questions myself. Years ago even, while I was turning into a vegetarian.
“If we would not eat those animals, they wouldn’t exist at all” is sometimes used as a justification for consuming animal products and if the animals in question do in fact have lifes worth living then it is quite a compelling argument. (At least for me. Substantial parts of the animal rights movement would probably disagree.) So I definitley understand why you write it might actually be morally permissible or even obligatory to eat animal products of animals living net-positive lifes. Still, after some deliberation I came to the conclusion that this is not the case and that we should still try to end factory farming altogether, even in the variations where the animals have lifes worth living. I think it might be worthwile to share my thinking here and I’m also curious about your thoughts.
So first of all when considering our behaviour towards non-human animals (I will from now on write animals for short) I often find it useful to ask myself a simple question: What would I think if they were humans instead? I do this to get a better intuition, since our moral intuitions are mostly calibrated to work with humans instead of other animals. (Of course intuition often goes wrong, but while I don’t put too much credibility on my intuitions I still find them useful as a first orientation.) If I would find something acceptable even when done to humans then I normally agree with doing it to animals as well. When I would NOT allow this for humans, I see if I can find reasons why humans are so fundamentally different from other animals in regards to this question that different behaviour is warranted. For example, it is easy to see why a right to democratic participation and education it not something that should apply to animals the same way it applies to humans. Maybe the same can be said about some sort of important medical research, though I’m very uncertain in this area. And thinking about humans instead of animals makes it intuitively clear to me that wildlife population control shouldn’t be done by just killing animals whenever we think there are too many of them. (Though admittedly we don’t have perfect alternative solutions yet, so I’m interested where wild animal welfare might lead to eventually.)
So when I stumbled upon aforementioned justification, I applied my method here as well. You may skip this paragraph if you find it unsettling, as it illuminates how and why I came to find my arguments but not the arguments themselves. With that said, suppose we had the power to bring into existence some humans whom we would keep in captivation and eventually kill for profit. (Since we are not normally interested in human flesh, you may assume it is done in order to harvest their organs.) Since humans may be bothered by captivation much more than some of the animals (though this is just my personal guess), let’s also assume they just don’t really know or care about them being held in some sort of (outside?) prison, or we don’t hold them captive at all. We somehow make sure these humans live lifes that are essentially good. They are held warm, get enough healthy food, they can enjoy going outside, live in small communities without predators, and so on. We essentially grant them the lifes of hunter-gatherers (which is probably the “bar to cross” in regards to humans?) with some limitations and a lot of upsides. Or maybe even the amenities of modern life. In any case, we are nearly certain their lifes are net-positive. (We can even ask them, after all.) We just sometimes take a few of them, kill them and sell their organs—in order to avoid fear and loss, we may always kill a complete group painlessly in their sleep. Intuitively we probably agree that doing so would be very much wrong. Still, assuming our intuition is correct that leaves the question why. Since these humans live net-positive lifes, it cannot really be out of concern for them, can it? In the human case the intuition is much more obvious than in the case of animals. Maybe because the case of animals is different—there is ongoing debate if painlessly killing an animal which does not have plans for or even concepts of their own future is permissible. But personally I think killing animals is wrong pretty much for the same reasons killing humans is: we rob them of all the remaining time and happy experiences they might have had. In any case, this possible distinction can not explain my intuition in regards to humans. After all, I would still prefer being born as one of those humans from my thought experiment over not being born at all, yet I am am against creating humans-to-be-slaughtered. Why?
In the end I came up with four reasons to defend my intuition and in turn (mostly) reject the claim that farming happy animals which would otherwise not be born is permissible.
Slippery Slope: From a strictly utilitarian perspective, if killing someone is good or bad depends solely on the outcome. (However, if we give some credibility to moral theories based on rights or at least to moral uncertainty it becomes obvious that regularly killing sentient beings in industrial scale is something … highly problematic.) But even as a utilitarian I can agree that behaviour changes thinking which in turn changes behaviour again. (For this reason, in the human case the human rights or the principle of treating everyone the same, no matter how they came into existence, is too important to reject easily...) So if we kill (billions of) animals on a regular basis, this may change our general behaviour towards animals and how we see them in unfavourable directions, even if originally only done out of careful consideration. I am generally sceptical of slippery slope arguments, as they rest heavily on some assumption of human thinking and behaviour and how they change. Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.
Abuse of power: This might be somewhat connected to 1, but in my opinion still is a different point. If we grant some farmers near absolute power over some animals and if their welfare interests are in opposition to the economic interests of those in power, then I have very little faith in human conscience. Of course, with strict regulations and controls this problem can be weakened substantially. Still, as long as (individual) humans have an interest in getting higher productivity out of their lifestock, abuse will happen—though maybe seldom enough to accept this as a necessary evil.
Still, even if objections 1. and 2. were taken care of in the human case (so neither abuse nor different behaviour towards the remainig humans would occur) my intuitions would remain unchanged. So it seems some deeper reasons have to be at play here. And I think the reasons are the following:
False Dichotomy: This, I think, is in some sense the strongest point. (It is also the one I mention whenever I hear the argument above that “they wouldn’t exist otherwise” and I don’t have time or opportunity for a detailed discussion.) The basic idea goes like this: If the animals have net-negative lifes we shouldn’t bring them into existence at all. If they have net-positive lifes however, we shouldn’t just end these lifes preemptivly. (Since if they lived longer, the additional “value” would be even bigger.) Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time. In fact there is nothing wrong with bringing into existence happy beings, while there is pretty much everything wrong with killing happy beings—no matter why they exist in the first place. So if we really think it is good to have more happy animals, then the conclusion is not organic farming but to bring into existence even more of these happy animals and stop the farming altogether! (One might argue that having an animal that lives their full life is just as good as having an animal that lives for one year and is afterwards killed and replaced by a new one. I would still prefer for animals to live their full lifes instead, if only for reason 2 and moral uncertainty—and again my intuition if I were to replace them with humans instead.) Of course we cannot just bring into existence an unlimited amount of happy animals without creating a lot of problems at the same time, which is why we also need to consider the next point.
Animals are expensive: Animal products are notoriously bad for the environment. To feed animals we grow crops which often could just be eaten directly. I find it hard to believe that the most efficient possibility to spend our (us being humanity) limited resources is to raise a lot of animals with slightly net-positive lifes instead of caring for the already existing problems first. (Including wild animal suffering.) If anything creating more happy beings seems like something that might be done with surplus resources after all our immediate problems are resolved.
There are two conclusions to draw from these thoughts. First, it seems as if most production of animal products should still stop. This is mostly due to reasons 3 and 1, but even if killing the animals is not already immoral for those two reasons it still seems inefficient for reason 4. (However, while keeping factory farming is expensive for humanity, fighting it is sadly enough also expensive for EA. In some sense this could mean that the resources of EA might be better allocated to raising welfare instead of ending factory farming if the latter is too hard/expensive to achieve. Alternative Proteins still seem like a good bet, though, and most of EA’s resources within the animal welfare pot already are directed at better welfare regulations anyways, right? In any case, if we adopt stricter welfare regulations this will not only lead to less animal “torturing” but also to increasing prices for animal products, so I suspect that using our resources to promote animal welfare regulations is actually a very good strategy to end factory farming in the long term. Which is also an answer to your last question.) Second, some sorts of animal farming might actually be permissible: In some instances they do not cost resources but actually gain them—there are areas where farming crops is essentially impossible but animals can be held and eat the grass. Sometimes these animals are even necessary to preserve a natural habitat. And even if our farming methods do take up some resources, if they are not too costly and we also get something out of it, point 4 essentially vanishes and—assuming we have strict welfare regulations and really care for their welfare—my only remaining objection is that it is still not permissible to kill these animals, at least not before they have grown so old and sick that being killed might be in their interest. Of course we wouldn’t want to eat meat from them afterwards, but I can see how we might get ethical leather, wool eggs this way.
So, what do you think?
Thanks for taking the time to write this! I think it aligns well with what somebody else had shared with me as well privately.
Let me start with where I disagree: I don’t share your view that it is unethical under all circumstances to create “humans to be slaughtered”. If my life ended painlessly without me knowing and affecting nobody around me in a few years because, plot twist, our universe is just one big farm of some aliens, then that would be a pity because I would’ve preferred to live another fourty years but I’m also grateful for the fourty years of life until that point that I wouldn’t have experienced otherwise. From conversations with friends I do understand that this is not a common view and I understand if yours is different. One reason “it would be a pity” is that of course I had plans for my life and those vanish but here I share the thinking you mentioned that animals probably live a lot less in the future than we do so this might “count less”.
On your false dichotomy argument: “Of course it is better to have a net-positive life then not to be born at all. But it is even better to have a net-positive and not to be killed after some (rather short) time.” I agree but realistically the options are “no life” or “limited life” (becuase animals are expensive), and if those are the options then I think “limited life” is better. And if the animals truely have no concept of the future, isn’t “two animals for half the time” somewhat similar to “one animal for the full time”?
I love how you went from these philosophical points to more practical points at the end, so let me also come back to those. I think no matter the disagreement on the points above, we can both agree that a world without net-negative factory farmed lives is a better world. I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat, it is too deeply culturally engrained in so many cultures. At the same time nobody who sees the suffering of animals is supporting these practices. So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.
In practice that would probably mean supporting organizations that try communicating along those lines and see if that has a better effect than advocating for a vegan diet. I could also imagine that it has the opposite effect: Normalising animal protein and a slippery slope in the direction of also eating net-negative animal protein.
I strongly disagree with your position, Christoph.
First, I agree with Marc: this argument to eat ‘happy meat’ (from happy animals) can be easily applied to justify slavery and cannibalism: let’s breed happy slaves, let’s give birth to happy babies and then eat them.
In population ethical terms: once you bring into existence a farmed animal, that animal would be better-off on an animal sanctuary, so they you have a duty not to kill it but to take care of it on a sanctuary. I wrote a paper on this (Population ethics and animal farming, Bruers 2022, https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45). It also follows from my moral theory ‘mild welfarism’, as explained here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/ . All population ethical views that use cardinal interpersonally comparable welfare and that say that eating happy meat is always better than not breeding farmed animals (e.g. total utilitarianism), entail the repugnant conclusion which in this case means we should breed a huge number of animals, sacrifice ourselves to take care of them on animal sanctuaries such that they have positive lives barely worth living, and definitely not slaughter them. If you believe that the life/welfare of an animal can be compared with non-existence but cannot be compared with the welfare of a human, then you cannot apply those population ethical views like total utilitarianism, and then you can take a view that entails it is permissible or good to eat happy meat. But I think those conditions are very unlikely: if animal welfare can be compared with non-existence, and human welfare can be compared with non-existence, then it is weird why animal and human welfare cannot be compared with each other. It is like heaving a measure with a zero point but no scale. Possible, but weird.
Actually, my theory of mild welfarism gives two reasons why eating happy meat is not allowed: one based on population ethical preferences (to avoid the repugnant conclusion, to respect the procreation asymmetry, to have a more person-affecting view, to be dynamically consistent,...), the other on a deontological principle (not use someone as a means against their will).
So, a coherent ethical theory that gives two arguments against eating happy meat, plus strong intuitions against eating happy babies and breeding happy slaves, makes me pretty confident that eating happy meat is impermissible.
From a practical viewpoint: I think it is harder for consumers to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-based meat products of which the animals had clearly positive lives and where the animals were treated according to their personal animal welfare standards that they would apply to other animals such as dogs, than to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-free meat products. Organic meat is more expensive than a lot of plant-based meats, and even with organic farming people do not seem to be very confident that those animals have positive lives. People would not eat organic dog meat, for example.
Your claim: “I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat”. I also personally don’t think organic meat will result in everybody stopping eating conventional meat. After all, we have organic meat on the market for more decades than plant-based meat and still not many people are buying organic meat. The organic meat market is growing less than the plant-based meat market.
“So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.” Many people also get on board with cultivated meat tech development.
“Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.” Indeed, the relevant studies:
Bastian B., Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Radke H. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The denial of mind to animals used for human consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 38 no. 2 p.247-256.
Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Bastian B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite 55 p.156–159.