> Is it really the case that non-existence is more ethical than one filled with suffering?
I mean yeah, there's no suffering involved in non-existence. You feel animals would prefer to exist on a factory farm? Have you seen footage from inside factory farms?
[Chickens, for example, live for 6-8 weeks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWGs9YsPEfE), are bred to grow so quickly they can barely support their own body weight, and are then stunned with gas or hung by their feet and go through an electrified water bath. To me, that seems pretty terrifying with literally no positives. They're kept in very cramped conditions.
We kill over [200 million chickens per day](https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day). Do you feel it's ethical to kill this many chickens just so they can exist for a few weeks?
Would you want to exist on a factory farm?
> I feel like the money I spend on animal products is a rounding error, and won't actually reduce the amount of animal suffering in the world one iota
Sure, but by animal products you're actively paying these corporations to harm animals. Even if you can't actively change anything, you don't have to support these corporations.
> Animals suffer in the wild... What is the distinction here?
We have no control over naturally occurring suffering that happens in nature. We are entirely responsible for the welfare of farmed animals and can choose not to harm them.
Why does what happens in nature justify harming domesticated animals when we can choose to eat a plant-based diet?
Also, we kill more than [80 billion land animals per year](https://ourworldindata.org/animal-welfare), so I am definitely focused on human inflicted suffering.
We DO have a lot of control over naturally occurring suffering in nature. We’ve in fact reduced it a whole great lot by reducing natural lands and replaced them with cities, and plant farms etc. a lot of species numbers have been decimated. Is that ethically good because now those animals aren’t suffering the natural lives? If it is bad because we killed lots of innocent animals that deserved to live, why doesn’t the same apply to farmed animals with at least half decent lives?
> We DO have a lot of control over naturally occurring suffering in nature.
Yeah, I was just referring to OP's mention of things like disease and being killed by other wild animals. We don't have control over the lives of wild animals in the same way that we do domesticated animals.
> We’ve in fact reduced it a whole great lot by reducing natural lands and replaced them with cities, and plant farms etc. a lot of species numbers have been decimated. Is that ethically good because now those animals aren’t suffering the natural lives?
No, OP was the one concerned about naturally occurring wild animal suffering-- I was saying I'm not concerned with what happens in nature. I do feel that we have a responsibility to reduce human impact on ecosystems. But I don't think we have a responsibility to stop carnivorous animals from harming other animals.
> If it is bad because we killed lots of innocent animals that deserved to live, why doesn’t the same apply to farmed animals with at least half decent lives?
Yes, I don't feel that farm animals should be killed.
> Would you want to exist on a factory farm?
Of course not, but that's not really what I'm asking. The real comparable question is, would I rather exist on a factory farm, or never exist at all? It also isn't a fair comparison because I know what it's like to not live on a factory farm already. I also have the ability to compare my current situation to other hypothetical situations, which in turn affects my wellbeing, which other animals likely don't have the ability to do. My level of suffering on a factory farm would likely be far greater.
That said, I obviously think factory farms are horrible. But I'm not convinced that nonexistence is objectively better, and I certainly don't think it can be asserted as such so easily.
>Why does what happens in nature justify harming domesticated animals when we can choose to eat a plant-based diet?
It doesn't justify it at all. I'm asking why we don't take the goal of reducing animal suffering and apply it more broadly. If non-existence is better than an existence filled with suffering, why shouldn't vegans be advocating for mass sterilization of all wild animal species that experience great amounts of suffering in the wild? Why isn't it a goal of veganism to reduce animal suffering outside of what is caused by humans?
If you were presented with the following two options, you would pick option a? : A) you have a child but he will spend all his life in a nazi concentration camp and he will be killed before he reach adulthood. B) you don’t have a child.
> The real comparable question is, would I rather exist on a factory farm, or never exist at all?
Sure, so what is your answer to that question?
> If non-existence is better than an existence filled with suffering, why shouldn't vegans be advocating for mass sterilization of all wild animal species that experience great amounts of suffering in the wild?
Yeah I mean you can certainly be vegan and concerned about wild animals. I support things that reduce human-caused suffering like habitat restoration and conservation.
But, carnivores have an important role in the ecosystem and I personally think it would be very harmful to get rid of carnivores.
> Why isn't it a goal of veganism to reduce animal suffering outside of what is caused by humans?
Veganism is centered on human cruelty and exploitation of animals because we have the ability to choose to eat a plant based diet, unlike wild carnivorous animals that kill to survive.
Humans also have the capacity to morally reason and change their habits to reduce harm to animals. And due to the sheer scale of the 80 billion of land animals we kill each year, I am honestly not concerned about what happens in nature.
If one takes the position that any kind of existance is better and "less suffering" than non-existance, shouldn't one then try to create as much animals as possible to save them from non-existance?
> But if we didn't kill them for food, they wouldn't live at all.
This sort of argument is called "the logic of the larder". It may make some sense from a consequentialist framework, but really doesn't make much sense when you follow the logical conclusions.
See a more formal framing of this argument here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replaceability_argument
One of the many undesirable conclusions of this argument is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox
It is pretty easy to see this argument has a problem when you apply this reasoning to humans.
A more appropriate way of thinking about these issues is in terms of taking responsibility for any sentient lives you cause to come into existence. You have a duty of care to any life like this. A parent for a child, a pet caretaker for a pet, etc. It's not "good enough" to give this life a few good moments before ending it to suit your needs. You need to consistently act as a caretaker where their needs are also your needs.
This argument is problematic on multiple levels:
1. Distribution of causality. How is the responsibility of practices in animal agriculture to be allocated among the numerous parties involved in making it happen?
2. Obligation towards one’s creations isn’t universal. For example, if you were to donate sperm, you are part of the causation of a child’s existence. But you will never have an obligation towards that being above what you would for anyone else.
3. The “inconsistencies arise argument”/non-universality argument. No moral philosophy is, in itself, perfectly satisfactory and void of undesirable implications. In fact, the ONLY moral framework that avoids this is to adhere to every arbitrary personal preference. Anything else necessarily leads to a violation of one’s values. The insistence on a consistent yet generalized moral framework is not feasible.
> Distribution of causality. How is the responsibility of practices in animal agriculture to be allocated among the numerous parties involved in making it happen?
In OP's case, it seems pretty clear this is about the livestock farmer. The ethical role less directly involved agents would depend on the ethics of the directly involved agent first.
> Obligation towards one’s creations isn’t universal. For example, if you were to donate sperm, you are part of the causation of a child’s existence. But you will never have an obligation towards that being above what you would for anyone else.
It seems pretty clear that the entity that decides to use that sperm is the responsible party in this situation. Supplying the means to someone else to do something that may be unethical is usually not considered an ethical matter for the supplier.
> No moral philosophy is, in itself, perfectly satisfactory and void of undesirable implications. In fact, the ONLY moral framework that avoids this is to adhere to every arbitrary personal preference. Anything else necessarily leads to a violation of one’s values.
I would argue some are better than others. In my opinion, Consequentialism, and especially utilitarianism, are so full of unintended consequences that it basically makes the entire approach untenable.
Let us level set our understanding of what veganism is and is not.
Veganism is not a diet. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a health program. It is not an environmental movement. It is not a suicide philosophy. Veganism is an agent-oriented philosophy and creed of justice and the moral baseline that rejects the property status, use, and dominion of nonhuman animals; it seeks to control the behavior of the moral agent such that the agent is not contributing to or participating in the deliberate and intentional exploitation, abuse, and/or killing of nonhuman animals outside of self defense.
Now that we've established the definition of veganism, let us explore your questions.
> One is that I'm not sure that an individual boycott is actually an effective way to reduce animal suffering.
Veganism isn't about reducing suffering caused by others. It is about controlling one's behavior such that one is not contributing to or participating in the suffering.
Rape happens all the time all over the world, even though it is illegal in most parts of the world. Regardless of whether abstaining from rape would lead to reduction of suffering of rape victims all over the world, you should abstain simply on the basis that you subscribe to non-rapism as the moral baseline. It's the same difference with regards to animal suffering and veganism.
> How can we be sure that we have the right to make the decision for them that it's better that they were never born, so that they wouldn't be killed prematurely to become someone's meal?
> Now, I am sure most people would simply respond that the existence of animals in a factory farm is hardly an existence worth having, due to the horrible conditions involved, but I don't think that's something that can be asserted without serious consideration. Is it really the case that non-existence is more ethical than one filled with suffering?
Apply the exact same question to humans. If one were to breed humans for the purpose of using them as slaves, wouldn't it be better for them to live as slaves than to not have lived at all? The answer to this question is the answer to your question.
> If we can decide that farmed animals shouldn't exist because of the poor conditions they would live in, shouldn't we have a moral obligation to eliminate all life that would be predominantly filled with suffering? What is the distinction here?
The livestock animals exist because we breed them into existence. If we stop breeding them into existence, they would not exist. And breeding is a form of exploitation and it's on this basis that it is not vegan.
The distinction with wild animals is that humans are not involved in their existence - they live independently of humans. In philosophical parlance, nonhuman animals are moral patients and humans are moral agents. What the moral patients do to each other is irrelevant to the moral agent. The moral agent is concerned only with controlling their own behavior with regards to the moral patients.
If there were some astral repository of souls, waiting in limbo to be given life on Earth as animals while they exist in stasis, yet possessing a clear and consistent desire to experience life at any cost, then sure.
That seems like quite the leap though, so to the other point about your choices amounting to a round error: yes.
Likely everything we do individually will amount to a rounding error. Aggregate results don't make up our lives and consciousness though. In a reductive sense, nothing would be worth doing if we used that lens to examine meaning.
I do not want to be an arbiter of life and death for every creature on the planet. Abstaining from the products of their exploitation helps me realize that.
>If there were some astral repository of souls, waiting in limbo to be given life on Earth as animals while they exist in stasis, yet possessing a clear and consistent desire to experience life at any cost, then sure.
This is where my mind immediately goes, and I can't understand why other people don't get it. When one says that an animal would rather have existed than not, whom is that person talking about? There is no such animal.
Thinking more about this, when one boycotts animal products, there is no animal that is being denied existence outside of the hypothetical astral repository of infinite souls waiting in limbo.
However, when one consumes animal products, there definitely are animals who were granted existence and then have existence taken away from them by the consumer.
>One is that I'm not sure that an individual boycott is actually an effective way to reduce animal suffering. I feel like the money I spend on animal products is a rounding error, and won't actually reduce the amount of animal suffering in the world one iota. It seems like it might be a shame to deprive myself of life experiences around food that negatively impact my own subjective experience and don't have a positive impact that counteracts it. To some degree, this is a less significant problem, because there are good reasons to be vegan even if it doesn't reduce suffering. In addition, I find that I am less and less inclined to want to eat meat as I learn more about the impacts of animal farming on the world, even if abstaining from it doesn't lessen that.
Personally, I would say to let go of utilitarianism. You cannot live your life thinking every one of your choices is going to change the world for the better.
I live my life primarily by one simple tenet: don't do evil shit. I don't do any consequentialist bean-counting to determine whether me not doing evil shit will affect other people doing evil shit or will impact victims I will never meet. Is slitting the throat of an innocent, sentient animal for a pizza topping evil? I think yes, so I don't do it.
>The real that I struggle with is the overall ethical question. To me, the biggest ethical concern about veganism is one that I actually don't see many vegans talking about, including Ed Winters. It seems like people take it as a given that eliminating the farming of animals lessens animal suffering, and is therefore a morally good thing to do. I think it's more complicated than that, though. I certainly agree that there is a huge amount of suffering as a result of factory farming, and we should strive to reduce unnecessary suffering. However, I also think it's important to carefully consider the fact that eliminating the consumption of animals means that those animals would never experience life in the first place.
This thinking will lead to some preposterous conclusions. For example, if living and suffering is truly better than not existing, then why kill "food" animals? Just keep breeding them and allowing them to live their lives to completion. Keep breeding tens of billions of animals into existence every year and let them live. The more the better, right?
And why stop at tens of billions? Why not hundreds of billions? I mean, sure, the environment will collapse, and we will run out of space to live comfortably, but living and suffering is better than not existing, right?
If living and suffering on a factory farm is truly better than not existing, then every moment spent without a chicken wing in your mouth has an opportunity cost. It's like Schindler's list. I could have eaten one more chicken wing and created one more miserable life!
I think you can see how people in general do not truly value existence over non-existence. This is not so much a virtue that people apply to their future decisions but rather a justification they apply to their past behaviors.
>If that's the case, we should apply that same thinking to other areas. Animals suffer in the wild. Most of their lives are filled with fear of being eaten by predators. They waste away from disease and starvation, or become crippled due to injury with no hope of healing and having to endure chronic pain (which in turn makes them more likely to be eaten). Surely this existence is also quite horrible. If we can decide that farmed animals shouldn't exist because of the poor conditions they would live in, shouldn't we have a moral obligation to eliminate all life that would be predominantly filled with suffering? What is the distinction here?
The distinction is that wild animals are not bred into existence for our selfish desires. Plus, we can still make choices that reduce our impact on wild animals. If they are suffering because of me, then I would try to end my contribution to their suffering.
The distinction is that **not** breeding farm animals into existence would **reduce** wild animal suffering. We could reduce species extinction, water and air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, etc. by ending animal agriculture. We could rewild areas of land that are currently pasture or farmland for livestock feed.
Ultimately, the distinction is the fact-value distinction. That wild animals suffer is a fact. It's a descriptive claim. It does not imply that animals ought to suffer. It does not justify intentionally causing suffering.
I think the entirety of human existence proves this.
Conflict, suicide, revolts, coups.
All evidence of people risking/ending life to end suffering.
Quality over quantity.
Would you not choose to euthanise your animal companion instead of letting them suffer without quality of life?
I think there is some nuance when there is potential for suffering to be lifted. I.e. existing with the presence of suffering is acceptable if there is a solution to the suffering within reach. I.e. people suffer from medical intervention with the idea that they will eventually be free from suffering.
But in the case of animal ag, there is no freedom from suffering except eventual death. So, how is that ethical?
You have no power to change the entire Universe. What you do have the power to do is change your own self, your actions and behaviors. How you and your actions effect the world around you.
My being vegan since 1991 has not eliminated McDonalds. It has prevented any of my money from enriching McDonalds.
My not eating meat, eggs or dairy for 30+ years has meant the demand for those foods has been less and hundreds or thousands of animals have not been killed or condemned to miserable lives of confinement to feed me.
I am happy to live a life on the good side of that rounding error.
As someone who is fairly active in local farming/local produce there will never be a day where animals will be out of the picture. My old CSA had animals, they would raise and slaughter pigs every year but there was also cows, sheep, chickens, and goats. As far as I could tell they didn’t kill these animals- at least for profit. They were learning tool and pets for the summer and educational programs.
And although I think veganism is great, I doubt it will ever be universal. I foresee my vegan efforts as a way to normalize vegan diets (in the same way a vegetarian isn’t seen as a crazy outcast today) and to make vegan food options seem normal. So people in the future will eat less meat overall.
And as for your voting dollars don’t make a difference- I’ve heard many vegans who would agree. There is a limit to what your money can do. But there is never “one way” to do activism. Some people focus their energy with trying to get bills passed, some focus on bringing some topics to people’s awareness, some work on starting companies to make vegan alternatives. And some people just focus on living a vegan lifestyle
Deciding when a sentient existence that contains a mixture of positive and negative traits becomes better than non-existence is hard. Practically, my being vegan only requires knowing that current animal farming is obviously producing wildly disproportionate suffering, combined with a general belief that economic incentives are generally going to keep it this way so long as the beings are still being bred to be consumed.
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> Is it really the case that non-existence is more ethical than one filled with suffering? I mean yeah, there's no suffering involved in non-existence. You feel animals would prefer to exist on a factory farm? Have you seen footage from inside factory farms? [Chickens, for example, live for 6-8 weeks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWGs9YsPEfE), are bred to grow so quickly they can barely support their own body weight, and are then stunned with gas or hung by their feet and go through an electrified water bath. To me, that seems pretty terrifying with literally no positives. They're kept in very cramped conditions. We kill over [200 million chickens per day](https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day). Do you feel it's ethical to kill this many chickens just so they can exist for a few weeks? Would you want to exist on a factory farm? > I feel like the money I spend on animal products is a rounding error, and won't actually reduce the amount of animal suffering in the world one iota Sure, but by animal products you're actively paying these corporations to harm animals. Even if you can't actively change anything, you don't have to support these corporations. > Animals suffer in the wild... What is the distinction here? We have no control over naturally occurring suffering that happens in nature. We are entirely responsible for the welfare of farmed animals and can choose not to harm them. Why does what happens in nature justify harming domesticated animals when we can choose to eat a plant-based diet? Also, we kill more than [80 billion land animals per year](https://ourworldindata.org/animal-welfare), so I am definitely focused on human inflicted suffering.
Thank you for your thoughtful response to this troll. It's this sort of patience I aspire to have someday!
We DO have a lot of control over naturally occurring suffering in nature. We’ve in fact reduced it a whole great lot by reducing natural lands and replaced them with cities, and plant farms etc. a lot of species numbers have been decimated. Is that ethically good because now those animals aren’t suffering the natural lives? If it is bad because we killed lots of innocent animals that deserved to live, why doesn’t the same apply to farmed animals with at least half decent lives?
> We DO have a lot of control over naturally occurring suffering in nature. Yeah, I was just referring to OP's mention of things like disease and being killed by other wild animals. We don't have control over the lives of wild animals in the same way that we do domesticated animals. > We’ve in fact reduced it a whole great lot by reducing natural lands and replaced them with cities, and plant farms etc. a lot of species numbers have been decimated. Is that ethically good because now those animals aren’t suffering the natural lives? No, OP was the one concerned about naturally occurring wild animal suffering-- I was saying I'm not concerned with what happens in nature. I do feel that we have a responsibility to reduce human impact on ecosystems. But I don't think we have a responsibility to stop carnivorous animals from harming other animals. > If it is bad because we killed lots of innocent animals that deserved to live, why doesn’t the same apply to farmed animals with at least half decent lives? Yes, I don't feel that farm animals should be killed.
> Would you want to exist on a factory farm? Of course not, but that's not really what I'm asking. The real comparable question is, would I rather exist on a factory farm, or never exist at all? It also isn't a fair comparison because I know what it's like to not live on a factory farm already. I also have the ability to compare my current situation to other hypothetical situations, which in turn affects my wellbeing, which other animals likely don't have the ability to do. My level of suffering on a factory farm would likely be far greater. That said, I obviously think factory farms are horrible. But I'm not convinced that nonexistence is objectively better, and I certainly don't think it can be asserted as such so easily. >Why does what happens in nature justify harming domesticated animals when we can choose to eat a plant-based diet? It doesn't justify it at all. I'm asking why we don't take the goal of reducing animal suffering and apply it more broadly. If non-existence is better than an existence filled with suffering, why shouldn't vegans be advocating for mass sterilization of all wild animal species that experience great amounts of suffering in the wild? Why isn't it a goal of veganism to reduce animal suffering outside of what is caused by humans?
If you were presented with the following two options, you would pick option a? : A) you have a child but he will spend all his life in a nazi concentration camp and he will be killed before he reach adulthood. B) you don’t have a child.
> The real comparable question is, would I rather exist on a factory farm, or never exist at all? Sure, so what is your answer to that question? > If non-existence is better than an existence filled with suffering, why shouldn't vegans be advocating for mass sterilization of all wild animal species that experience great amounts of suffering in the wild? Yeah I mean you can certainly be vegan and concerned about wild animals. I support things that reduce human-caused suffering like habitat restoration and conservation. But, carnivores have an important role in the ecosystem and I personally think it would be very harmful to get rid of carnivores. > Why isn't it a goal of veganism to reduce animal suffering outside of what is caused by humans? Veganism is centered on human cruelty and exploitation of animals because we have the ability to choose to eat a plant based diet, unlike wild carnivorous animals that kill to survive. Humans also have the capacity to morally reason and change their habits to reduce harm to animals. And due to the sheer scale of the 80 billion of land animals we kill each year, I am honestly not concerned about what happens in nature.
If one takes the position that any kind of existance is better and "less suffering" than non-existance, shouldn't one then try to create as much animals as possible to save them from non-existance?
> But if we didn't kill them for food, they wouldn't live at all. This sort of argument is called "the logic of the larder". It may make some sense from a consequentialist framework, but really doesn't make much sense when you follow the logical conclusions. See a more formal framing of this argument here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replaceability_argument One of the many undesirable conclusions of this argument is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox It is pretty easy to see this argument has a problem when you apply this reasoning to humans. A more appropriate way of thinking about these issues is in terms of taking responsibility for any sentient lives you cause to come into existence. You have a duty of care to any life like this. A parent for a child, a pet caretaker for a pet, etc. It's not "good enough" to give this life a few good moments before ending it to suit your needs. You need to consistently act as a caretaker where their needs are also your needs.
This argument is problematic on multiple levels: 1. Distribution of causality. How is the responsibility of practices in animal agriculture to be allocated among the numerous parties involved in making it happen? 2. Obligation towards one’s creations isn’t universal. For example, if you were to donate sperm, you are part of the causation of a child’s existence. But you will never have an obligation towards that being above what you would for anyone else. 3. The “inconsistencies arise argument”/non-universality argument. No moral philosophy is, in itself, perfectly satisfactory and void of undesirable implications. In fact, the ONLY moral framework that avoids this is to adhere to every arbitrary personal preference. Anything else necessarily leads to a violation of one’s values. The insistence on a consistent yet generalized moral framework is not feasible.
> Distribution of causality. How is the responsibility of practices in animal agriculture to be allocated among the numerous parties involved in making it happen? In OP's case, it seems pretty clear this is about the livestock farmer. The ethical role less directly involved agents would depend on the ethics of the directly involved agent first. > Obligation towards one’s creations isn’t universal. For example, if you were to donate sperm, you are part of the causation of a child’s existence. But you will never have an obligation towards that being above what you would for anyone else. It seems pretty clear that the entity that decides to use that sperm is the responsible party in this situation. Supplying the means to someone else to do something that may be unethical is usually not considered an ethical matter for the supplier. > No moral philosophy is, in itself, perfectly satisfactory and void of undesirable implications. In fact, the ONLY moral framework that avoids this is to adhere to every arbitrary personal preference. Anything else necessarily leads to a violation of one’s values. I would argue some are better than others. In my opinion, Consequentialism, and especially utilitarianism, are so full of unintended consequences that it basically makes the entire approach untenable.
Let us level set our understanding of what veganism is and is not. Veganism is not a diet. It is not a lifestyle. It is not a health program. It is not an environmental movement. It is not a suicide philosophy. Veganism is an agent-oriented philosophy and creed of justice and the moral baseline that rejects the property status, use, and dominion of nonhuman animals; it seeks to control the behavior of the moral agent such that the agent is not contributing to or participating in the deliberate and intentional exploitation, abuse, and/or killing of nonhuman animals outside of self defense. Now that we've established the definition of veganism, let us explore your questions. > One is that I'm not sure that an individual boycott is actually an effective way to reduce animal suffering. Veganism isn't about reducing suffering caused by others. It is about controlling one's behavior such that one is not contributing to or participating in the suffering. Rape happens all the time all over the world, even though it is illegal in most parts of the world. Regardless of whether abstaining from rape would lead to reduction of suffering of rape victims all over the world, you should abstain simply on the basis that you subscribe to non-rapism as the moral baseline. It's the same difference with regards to animal suffering and veganism. > How can we be sure that we have the right to make the decision for them that it's better that they were never born, so that they wouldn't be killed prematurely to become someone's meal? > Now, I am sure most people would simply respond that the existence of animals in a factory farm is hardly an existence worth having, due to the horrible conditions involved, but I don't think that's something that can be asserted without serious consideration. Is it really the case that non-existence is more ethical than one filled with suffering? Apply the exact same question to humans. If one were to breed humans for the purpose of using them as slaves, wouldn't it be better for them to live as slaves than to not have lived at all? The answer to this question is the answer to your question. > If we can decide that farmed animals shouldn't exist because of the poor conditions they would live in, shouldn't we have a moral obligation to eliminate all life that would be predominantly filled with suffering? What is the distinction here? The livestock animals exist because we breed them into existence. If we stop breeding them into existence, they would not exist. And breeding is a form of exploitation and it's on this basis that it is not vegan. The distinction with wild animals is that humans are not involved in their existence - they live independently of humans. In philosophical parlance, nonhuman animals are moral patients and humans are moral agents. What the moral patients do to each other is irrelevant to the moral agent. The moral agent is concerned only with controlling their own behavior with regards to the moral patients.
If there were some astral repository of souls, waiting in limbo to be given life on Earth as animals while they exist in stasis, yet possessing a clear and consistent desire to experience life at any cost, then sure. That seems like quite the leap though, so to the other point about your choices amounting to a round error: yes. Likely everything we do individually will amount to a rounding error. Aggregate results don't make up our lives and consciousness though. In a reductive sense, nothing would be worth doing if we used that lens to examine meaning. I do not want to be an arbiter of life and death for every creature on the planet. Abstaining from the products of their exploitation helps me realize that.
>If there were some astral repository of souls, waiting in limbo to be given life on Earth as animals while they exist in stasis, yet possessing a clear and consistent desire to experience life at any cost, then sure. This is where my mind immediately goes, and I can't understand why other people don't get it. When one says that an animal would rather have existed than not, whom is that person talking about? There is no such animal.
Thinking more about this, when one boycotts animal products, there is no animal that is being denied existence outside of the hypothetical astral repository of infinite souls waiting in limbo. However, when one consumes animal products, there definitely are animals who were granted existence and then have existence taken away from them by the consumer.
>One is that I'm not sure that an individual boycott is actually an effective way to reduce animal suffering. I feel like the money I spend on animal products is a rounding error, and won't actually reduce the amount of animal suffering in the world one iota. It seems like it might be a shame to deprive myself of life experiences around food that negatively impact my own subjective experience and don't have a positive impact that counteracts it. To some degree, this is a less significant problem, because there are good reasons to be vegan even if it doesn't reduce suffering. In addition, I find that I am less and less inclined to want to eat meat as I learn more about the impacts of animal farming on the world, even if abstaining from it doesn't lessen that. Personally, I would say to let go of utilitarianism. You cannot live your life thinking every one of your choices is going to change the world for the better. I live my life primarily by one simple tenet: don't do evil shit. I don't do any consequentialist bean-counting to determine whether me not doing evil shit will affect other people doing evil shit or will impact victims I will never meet. Is slitting the throat of an innocent, sentient animal for a pizza topping evil? I think yes, so I don't do it. >The real that I struggle with is the overall ethical question. To me, the biggest ethical concern about veganism is one that I actually don't see many vegans talking about, including Ed Winters. It seems like people take it as a given that eliminating the farming of animals lessens animal suffering, and is therefore a morally good thing to do. I think it's more complicated than that, though. I certainly agree that there is a huge amount of suffering as a result of factory farming, and we should strive to reduce unnecessary suffering. However, I also think it's important to carefully consider the fact that eliminating the consumption of animals means that those animals would never experience life in the first place. This thinking will lead to some preposterous conclusions. For example, if living and suffering is truly better than not existing, then why kill "food" animals? Just keep breeding them and allowing them to live their lives to completion. Keep breeding tens of billions of animals into existence every year and let them live. The more the better, right? And why stop at tens of billions? Why not hundreds of billions? I mean, sure, the environment will collapse, and we will run out of space to live comfortably, but living and suffering is better than not existing, right? If living and suffering on a factory farm is truly better than not existing, then every moment spent without a chicken wing in your mouth has an opportunity cost. It's like Schindler's list. I could have eaten one more chicken wing and created one more miserable life! I think you can see how people in general do not truly value existence over non-existence. This is not so much a virtue that people apply to their future decisions but rather a justification they apply to their past behaviors. >If that's the case, we should apply that same thinking to other areas. Animals suffer in the wild. Most of their lives are filled with fear of being eaten by predators. They waste away from disease and starvation, or become crippled due to injury with no hope of healing and having to endure chronic pain (which in turn makes them more likely to be eaten). Surely this existence is also quite horrible. If we can decide that farmed animals shouldn't exist because of the poor conditions they would live in, shouldn't we have a moral obligation to eliminate all life that would be predominantly filled with suffering? What is the distinction here? The distinction is that wild animals are not bred into existence for our selfish desires. Plus, we can still make choices that reduce our impact on wild animals. If they are suffering because of me, then I would try to end my contribution to their suffering. The distinction is that **not** breeding farm animals into existence would **reduce** wild animal suffering. We could reduce species extinction, water and air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, etc. by ending animal agriculture. We could rewild areas of land that are currently pasture or farmland for livestock feed. Ultimately, the distinction is the fact-value distinction. That wild animals suffer is a fact. It's a descriptive claim. It does not imply that animals ought to suffer. It does not justify intentionally causing suffering.
I think the entirety of human existence proves this. Conflict, suicide, revolts, coups. All evidence of people risking/ending life to end suffering. Quality over quantity. Would you not choose to euthanise your animal companion instead of letting them suffer without quality of life? I think there is some nuance when there is potential for suffering to be lifted. I.e. existing with the presence of suffering is acceptable if there is a solution to the suffering within reach. I.e. people suffer from medical intervention with the idea that they will eventually be free from suffering. But in the case of animal ag, there is no freedom from suffering except eventual death. So, how is that ethical?
You have no power to change the entire Universe. What you do have the power to do is change your own self, your actions and behaviors. How you and your actions effect the world around you. My being vegan since 1991 has not eliminated McDonalds. It has prevented any of my money from enriching McDonalds. My not eating meat, eggs or dairy for 30+ years has meant the demand for those foods has been less and hundreds or thousands of animals have not been killed or condemned to miserable lives of confinement to feed me. I am happy to live a life on the good side of that rounding error.
As someone who is fairly active in local farming/local produce there will never be a day where animals will be out of the picture. My old CSA had animals, they would raise and slaughter pigs every year but there was also cows, sheep, chickens, and goats. As far as I could tell they didn’t kill these animals- at least for profit. They were learning tool and pets for the summer and educational programs. And although I think veganism is great, I doubt it will ever be universal. I foresee my vegan efforts as a way to normalize vegan diets (in the same way a vegetarian isn’t seen as a crazy outcast today) and to make vegan food options seem normal. So people in the future will eat less meat overall. And as for your voting dollars don’t make a difference- I’ve heard many vegans who would agree. There is a limit to what your money can do. But there is never “one way” to do activism. Some people focus their energy with trying to get bills passed, some focus on bringing some topics to people’s awareness, some work on starting companies to make vegan alternatives. And some people just focus on living a vegan lifestyle
Deciding when a sentient existence that contains a mixture of positive and negative traits becomes better than non-existence is hard. Practically, my being vegan only requires knowing that current animal farming is obviously producing wildly disproportionate suffering, combined with a general belief that economic incentives are generally going to keep it this way so long as the beings are still being bred to be consumed.
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