My reaction here is complex, because there are levels on which I am in qualified agreement with this, and other levels on which I am in profound disagreement. A first point is that I am motivated to dislike animal agriculture on levels that go beyond my consequentialist principled leanings, into deontological intuitions that become very loud when I use similar reasoning outside of this specific context.
As an example, compare two scenarios. You are part of a city that pollutes a river as part of its industry. This causes grievous harm to a community downstream of you. In another possible scenario, your city instead enslaves this community for their industry, and causes an equal amount of harm in doing so. Both are clearly wrong, but the second feels to me much worse. I think something comparable can be said of many types of indirect harm to animals through plant agriculture versus those caused by animal agriculture.
Similar things can be said for arguments that breeding animals into happy lives and then killing them is mutually beneficial or at least ethically permissible even if factory farming isn’t. Unlike most arguments about our treatment of animals this one doesn’t appeal to anything that differs between humans and farm animals, so on its face it appears to imply that it is permissible to farm humans under similar conditions (indeed if I recall some slavery apologists used arguments like this).
A key difference is that arguments like this are applied to humans in one case and non-humans in the other, but then more specific arguments about what differs between the cases that justifies an argument in one case that we would reject in the other is needed, which pieces like this generally lack, and I think mostly can’t help but lack.
On the more consequentialist end, I am in somewhat more agreement. I think some of these arguments might work for grazing cattle (I think very few of them apply to any other food animal as it is farmed at any kind of scale today). But this level is also complicated by even weirder considerations. As some of the other comments hint at, is it good or bad to reduce wildlife? The answer may depend on how good the lives of wild animals are, which is extremely uncertain, but I think most people working on this issue are either neutral or lean towards negative, in large part because of the prevalence of R-strategists. Another less weird consideration that seems left out is practices to reduce suffering rather than just deaths, as killing wildlife generally doesn’t inflict the same suffering as raising animals in terrible conditions to begin with.
Given this I think arguments like these might work at a certain, middle level of bullet biting, at least to a certain extent in some cases, but winds up encountering serious problems at either the more commonsense morality end of the spectrum, or the more galaxy brained one.
Actually on my second point, about farming animals with worthwhile lives, I want to quickly flag that Abelard Podgorski has a really interesting argument in defense of eating but not farming in this context. I think it is too easy on itself in the examples it gives, but I feel like it is worth noting, both as an interesting attempt to answer these types of concerns specifically, and a proof of concept that not all arguments against farming in this context automatically translate into arguments in favor of veganism.
My reaction here is complex, because there are levels on which I am in qualified agreement with this, and other levels on which I am in profound disagreement. A first point is that I am motivated to dislike animal agriculture on levels that go beyond my consequentialist principled leanings, into deontological intuitions that become very loud when I use similar reasoning outside of this specific context.
As an example, compare two scenarios. You are part of a city that pollutes a river as part of its industry. This causes grievous harm to a community downstream of you. In another possible scenario, your city instead enslaves this community for their industry, and causes an equal amount of harm in doing so. Both are clearly wrong, but the second feels to me much worse. I think something comparable can be said of many types of indirect harm to animals through plant agriculture versus those caused by animal agriculture.
Similar things can be said for arguments that breeding animals into happy lives and then killing them is mutually beneficial or at least ethically permissible even if factory farming isn’t. Unlike most arguments about our treatment of animals this one doesn’t appeal to anything that differs between humans and farm animals, so on its face it appears to imply that it is permissible to farm humans under similar conditions (indeed if I recall some slavery apologists used arguments like this).
A key difference is that arguments like this are applied to humans in one case and non-humans in the other, but then more specific arguments about what differs between the cases that justifies an argument in one case that we would reject in the other is needed, which pieces like this generally lack, and I think mostly can’t help but lack.
On the more consequentialist end, I am in somewhat more agreement. I think some of these arguments might work for grazing cattle (I think very few of them apply to any other food animal as it is farmed at any kind of scale today). But this level is also complicated by even weirder considerations. As some of the other comments hint at, is it good or bad to reduce wildlife? The answer may depend on how good the lives of wild animals are, which is extremely uncertain, but I think most people working on this issue are either neutral or lean towards negative, in large part because of the prevalence of R-strategists. Another less weird consideration that seems left out is practices to reduce suffering rather than just deaths, as killing wildlife generally doesn’t inflict the same suffering as raising animals in terrible conditions to begin with.
Given this I think arguments like these might work at a certain, middle level of bullet biting, at least to a certain extent in some cases, but winds up encountering serious problems at either the more commonsense morality end of the spectrum, or the more galaxy brained one.
Actually on my second point, about farming animals with worthwhile lives, I want to quickly flag that Abelard Podgorski has a really interesting argument in defense of eating but not farming in this context. I think it is too easy on itself in the examples it gives, but I feel like it is worth noting, both as an interesting attempt to answer these types of concerns specifically, and a proof of concept that not all arguments against farming in this context automatically translate into arguments in favor of veganism.