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.
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.