I’m strongly in favor of ‘welfaretarianism’! It’s been my diet* for a few years now and I’m really glad you invented a name for it. I’ve been telling people for ages that I agree you shouldn’t eat animals that suffer while farmed if it causes more of them to exist, but people don’t really internalize the logical conclusion of this, that it’s good to eat animals if it causes happy animals to exist (assuming you don’t subscribe to negative utilitarianism or the person-affecting view) or existing animals to become happier. Hypothetically, if it were more profitable to sell meat from happy chickens than from battery-cage chickens, all factory farms would switch over to raising happy chickens, though this will probably never happen due to costs and I don’t think consumers are willing to pay that much more.
*I don’t actually eat any meat from happily-farmed animals because I don’t know how you would find such a thing, but I’d be willing to eat it if it existed. In practice this resulted in me going from omnivore to lacto-vegetarian by cutting out meat products in order of most to least suffering per calorie.
I’m strongly in favor of ‘welfaretarianism’! It’s been my diet* for a few years now and I’m really glad you invented a name for it. I’ve been telling people for ages that I agree you shouldn’t eat animals that suffer while farmed if it causes more of them to exist, but people don’t really internalize the logical conclusion of this, that it’s good to eat animals if it causes happy animals to exist (assuming you don’t subscribe to negative utilitarianism or the person-affecting view) or existing animals to become happier. Hypothetically, if it were more profitable to sell meat from happy chickens than from battery-cage chickens, all factory farms would switch over to raising happy chickens, though this will probably never happen due to costs and I don’t think consumers are willing to pay that much more.
*I don’t actually eat any meat from happily-farmed animals because I don’t know how you would find such a thing, but I’d be willing to eat it if it existed. In practice this resulted in me going from omnivore to lacto-vegetarian by cutting out meat products in order of most to least suffering per calorie.