I, like many utilitarians, do not consume animal products. However, I wonder if this is the right course of action to take. If an animal lives a life with more happiness than suffering, and by eating meat I cause it to exist, isn't that a good thing? Doesn't that mean I should eat meat?

Of course, this leaves the question of whether an animal's life is worth living. Even then, we have an imperative to eat the animals that are the happiest, so the market will raise more of those animals. But according to this theory, it is far better to eat humanely-raised animals than not to eat meat at all.

I realize that veganism is clearly the best option according to prior existence utilitarianism. At present, I value the lives of animals that do not exist yet, although I could possibly be persuaded not to.

What do you think? Is veganism a reasonable option in light of this evidence?

You will get different answers to this question on this forum. As for what the "right" action is, I have so far viewed my personal ethic as an ever-evolving process that hopefully moves toward the best answer in the long run.

I personally find a lack of justification for nominating myself as the personal arbitrator of when an animal is born, when it dies, how it lives, and how it dies--I'm not sure how to measure or weigh the "utility" of that act. I see more potential benefit in either finding ways for people to live with a lower ecological footprint or stemming the exploding population of humans. I don't see a net benefit in finding ways to destroy more of the ecosystem with animals that are slaughtered to satisfy gustatory sensations of humans. To raise the additional cattle, how much forest land must be destroyed for either grazing land or land for alfalfa? How many rabbits, deer, birds, and other animals die for each additional cow? When the calculations become unmanageable, I prefer to err on the side of "minimal impact."

I think that it's best to be vegetarian or vegan, and just to stick to that as a hard and fast rule. If extraordinary circumstances arise, you can make utility calculations, but it's just to send a message to society that the current practice is not okay, and that it's time for action. It will save hundreds of animals from terrible misery, but I think that's actually the least of its significance. The important thing seems to be setting a precedent by being a normal, intelligent, affable person, and eating a diet that is perceived as compassionate.

If an animal lives a life with more happiness than suffering

I get the impression that factory farmed animals do not live lives with more happiness than suffering. As such, you should avoid factory-farmed meat.

MTGandP wrote:Even then, we have an imperative to eat the animals that are the happiest, so the market will raise more of those animals.

Another factor to take into consideration is cost. The animals that can be presumed to be the happiest also tend to cost quite a bit—much more than the equivalent number of plant calories would. The animals would probably be better off if you ate a low-cost plant-based diet and donated what you saved to an animal-welfare organization than if you ate free-range beef.

In addition, it's hard to verify what conditions "free-range" animals were raised in. At least in the US, there aren't any reliable humane certifications that I'm aware of. If your neighbor is a farmer who sings to his cows and gives you a good deal, it would probably be OK to buy beef from him. For most people, though, it's not worth the trouble or expense. And, as RyanCarey said, there are some benefits to hard-and-fast rules.

Welcome to Felicifia!

DanielLC wrote:

If an animal lives a life with more happiness than suffering

I get the impression that factory farmed animals do not live lives with more happiness than suffering. As such, you should avoid factory-farmed meat.

But what about animals that are raised on small family farms or otherwise treated relatively humanely?

They're fine, but see Pat's comment.

DanielLC wrote:I get the impression that factory farmed animals do not live lives with more happiness than suffering.

Almost certainly. Note that this is not an intrinsic property of factory farming, just of the mismatch between the natural psychology of these animal and factory farming. In a way, it's a tragedy: There we have these huge unprecedented systems that create billions of sentient brains in highly controlled environments that decouple their behavioral functions from their survival and reproduction probabilities, and they end up suffering rather than being happy.

If the domestication process had had a strong optimization pressure toward completely fearless, painless minds resistant to boredom, with hypersensitive pleasure centers and a sublime sense of bliss, that would have been a huge utility-generation machine. But of course, that's not the optimization criterion of these industries, they're there to make a profit, and they do that by delivering physical goods to human customers. The only two feedback mechanisms to shift the hedonistic utility of the animals are empathy of workers, customers and the general public, and reduced physical output from overly stressed and therefore unhealthy animals. To my knowledge, both of these feedback mechanisms have so far been too weak to turn the tables and result in positive rather than negative hedonistic utilty, at least to a standard that I would find acceptable for coercive systems.

This could still change, hypothetically, but considering that these brains and their skulls and bones are actually a form of waste to a huge degree, we'll eventually do away with them completely (e.g. through in-vitro meat and other technologies), and my impression is we're probably going to do that before we do anything else sufficient to shift the utility from negative to positive. (There's still some further benevolent breeding going on, e.g. in order to make pig castration obsolete etc., but that's likely not going to turn the tables here).

Nice discussion, HT. I think what you said is exactly right.

Of course, there's been some discussion of anencephalic farm animals, as well as genetically engineered pain-free farm animals, but most likely farm animals will go away before such innovations take hold -- although there is certainly significant scope to improve the welfare and slaughter of regular farm animals in the short term (cage-free hens, CAK for poultry, electric stunning of farmed fish, etc.).

Pat's point about the higher cost of meat is made by Matheny and Chan in "Human diets and animal welfare: The illogic of the Larder."

Welcome to Felicifia, MTGandP.