Your hypothetical seems to be anticipating an argument that farming mentally disabled humans would be repugnant even with slightly net-positive lives, so that therefore something similar must apply to animals. Let’s consider a concrete case: Someone hires a mentally disabled person to provide warmth to their blanket-averse toddler at night, instead of the ‘vegetarian’ solution of turning up the heat (or ‘vegan’ if fossil fuels aren’t involved). If they don’t worry much about their employee’s other living conditions as long as they seem willing to perform the service, we might say there’s room for improvement but not that they’re doing anything particularly wrong.
Consider another concrete case, closer to home for me. My aunt had Down syndrome. From the way my father talked about it, I didn’t realize until my teenage years that Down syndrome isn’t usually fatal in early childhood. The state advised my grandparents that it would be better for the family if they sent her to an institution, where she died of pneumonia (i.e. neglect) a couple years later. It seems like it would’ve been better for everyone involved if she’d been allowed to live until 20, and then some rich person had bought her organs.
You might object that efficient farming is different from neglectful institutionalization. But my landlord works in an Amazon warehouse, spending much of his waking time having value extracted from his labor at maximum efficiency, which can be seriously physically depleting work, and he seems to be pretty cheerful and happy with his life. Or consider Foxconn, where they installed nets to prevent worker suicides—arguably worse conditions than many factory farms—yet we all use smartphones.
This isn’t about catching ethical vegans in hypocrisy—it demonstrates that we can’t solve these problems by drawing bright moral lines around ‘exploitation’ or ‘farming.’ We have to consciously engage with complex trade-offs to get the goods we need while improving conditions where we can. The horror at ‘farming humans’ seems more about aesthetic revulsion at the framing than actual welfare—when we call similar value extraction ‘employment’ it becomes acceptable.
There are principal-agent problems here—if the person is mistreated enough in their off hours, they might not be a safe cuddle buddy for a toddler. These are real decision-theoretic concerns. But these problems are much less applicable to factory farming.
The decision theory argument isn’t just about ability to retaliate—it’s about ability to engage in reciprocal decision-making and honor agreements. Most animals can’t make or understand explicit agreements or intentionally coordinate based on understanding others’ choices. Maybe some corvids and a very few other nonhuman animals can try to imagine our perspectives and take actions based on predictions of what we’re likely to decide, on levels of abstraction that might give us some basis for ongoing noninstrumentalizing cooperation.
This matters more in our current context because:
We’re relatively early in cosmic time, with vast potential ahead
Our capacity for effective coordination and decision-making is precarious and needs strengthening
Given those facts, our priority ought to be preserving and improving our ability to make good individual and collective decisions. While animal welfare matters, compromising human coordination capacity to address it would be counterproductive—we need better coordination to address any large-scale welfare concerns effectively.
Humans are fundamentally an instrumentalizing species—that’s how we solve problems. Animals suffer in factory farms not because we instrumentalize them, but because our capacity for instrumental reasoning is being turned against itself through broken coordination systems. Trying to fix animal suffering without addressing this underlying coordination failure seems like palliative care for a dying civilization.
If you are interested in cooperating with nonhuman animals—say, on the theory that cognitive diversity enables more gains from trade—it would make more sense trying to figure out how to trade more equitably and profitably with whales or corvids, than treating chickens as counterparties in a negotiation.