"They wouldn't have existed otherwise"

 

There's a very interesting line of argumentation commonly used by proponents of animal agriculture. It goes something like this:

 

The argument for (not the worst kind of) meat production

P1) It's better for animals to live, compared to not existing.

P2) By raising and killing farm animals and selling them for meat, you get the resources to keep causing farm animals to exist and live.

C) It's better for farm animals if you continue meat production than not.

It's also known under the name "the logic of the larder" or the "replaceability argument"

P1

Proponents of this argument may say: Clearly you don't want these animals to die, so you recognize that there is something valuable about their lives. This value is probably better than the complete lack of that value (non-existence).

P2

If they were to just kill these animals, and that was the end of it, then someone may object that you're clearly "removing value" by killing them, so it's a loss compared to what could otherwise be. But the point is that by getting money from it, they have the resources to continue the cycle and bring new animals into existence, who otherwise wouldn't live, and they otherwise wouldn't be able to keep up any animal husbandry for the next 15-20 years of the animal's life, for economic reasons.

Objections to the argument

P1

It's probably the case that for the majority of farmed animals globally, their lives are worse than non-existence by quite commonly accepted metrics. This may reduce the cases where this argument is appliccable to a relatively small amount of farms compared to the global picture.

There's a common intuition that since you don't want the animals to die, their life has more value than disvalue, and thus more value than non-existence. However, it may be that their life so far has not been worth living, but it may be worth continuing if they are given the chance of a better life, free from agriculture. But if that's not doable, then perhaps a painless death is preferable to their continued existence in agricultural conditions. And bringing such a being into existence would then be wrong.

When it's perhaps less obvious that someone's life is worse than non-existence, there's the argument for anti-natalism which states that any amount of suffering is worse than non-existence. I am agnostic about whether that is true, but I still think there are strong reasons to be weary of creating life simply due to the risk of great suffering.

See my article about anti-natalism here.

Even if it could be true for many individual animals, it may be that the suffering of those few animals who are born sick and die soon after birth, or who suffer a lot for other reasons, outweigh the benefits of the pleasure the other animals have. In practice that would be too likely to happen. We constantly hear about sick animals who just didn't make it, even from people who conceivably run relatively "idyllic" farms. If we include common experiences at the slaughterhouse, as opposed to a death free from pain and psychological terror, this suffering may also be so bad that they would be better unborn. 

Intuitively it seems like at least there's no harm in not coming into existence, but is a life with an overwhelmingly big weight on the positive sides better? Or is pleasure only the absence of suffering? I think it's not, and would entertain the possibility that a truly idyllic life is good for someone who otherwise wouldn't exist - and at the same time they wouldn't be deprived by not being born. Perhaps you could in theory come up with a situation in which it's better to exist than to not exist, if positive feelings are better than the lack of feelings to begin with. What makes me consider this is the argument for murder that I entertain in the article about anti-natalism, which seems to follow from the idea that non-existence is better than an existence with any amount of suffering.

However true this may be in theory, I don't think it's practically possible to create lives that are so consistently good that no serious harm is involved along the way. I believe reducing suffering is far more important than increasing pleasure. That is to say, it's more important getting from a negative state to a neutral state, than to get from a neutral state to a positive state. Therefore non-existence (a neutral state) can only be improved by converting it to a positive state, but it comes with the risk of introducing seriously negative states. Even just one bad life born is more important to prevent, than the importance of introducing positive states in place of otherwise neutral states. In other words, creating new life comes with the risk of creating a problem, and refraining from creating life can only fail to improve something that is not a problem (a neutral state).

This asymmetry is risk-averse, and doesn't rely on the claim that non-existence and a life in paradise are indifferent in comparison, and therefore it's not identical to anti-natalism as defended by David Benatar. But it shares the existence of an asymmetry that should steer us away from creating new life without very important reasons to do so.

Reasons why it can still be wrong to do animal agriculture, even if the argument is true under certain conditions

If the argument is applied to a relatively narrow range of individuals and ends up being true, it could still be wrong all things considered to bring these animals into existence.

It could harm other animals

While it may be better for certain individuals, having animal agriculture would nonetheless promote speciesism, and this would aggregate into a view society has on animals that doesn't sufficiently protect them against harms that do outweigh the benefits to the animals and to humans. So let's say for example, someone giving an animal a life worth living, and then killing them for what ultimately comes down to someone's culinary preference - this may be on balance bad for how other animals are treated as long as we as a society accept that animals can be raised and killed for such reasons. 

In other words, something that may be justified in isolation may have bad consequences for farmed animals in other situations, because it contributes to a view that legitimizes using animals for non-essential reasons. Other farm animal situations will likely not fit the near perfect conditions necessary for a potentially justified system, and their mis-treatment of animals would also be backed by the same underlying speciesist reasoning. It could be altogether avoided by moving away from animal agriculture across the board and advocating against it.

The illogic of the larder

Another response to the argument is to accept the premises and point to the fact that more animals would exist in the wild if it had not been taken for animal agriculture - which takes up more land. And so if the argument was true, it would be better to abolish animal agriculture in favour of wild land. But given that wild animals may suffer greatly on average as well, this would make the case for animal agriculture instead, as it reduces the amount of suffering individuals in the otherwise wild land.

The answer to this problem is worth an article of its own, but I address it quickly in this article: My position on various animal ethics issues ("Does veganism introduce more wild animal suffering?")

Opportunity costs

Let's say for the sake of argument that the argument is sound, and that it's better for farmed animals to be born and exploited - it would nonetheless be very resource and time intensive, and not all things considered an effective way to influence the balance between good and bad things for animals.

It would be better if the same time and resources were put directly into cost-efficient ways to help animals.

Some may object that it seems strange that some action that does more good than non-action would be wrong, but consider this:

A train is on its way to hit two animals, and only you can save them. If you do nothing, this is clearly the worst as they'll both suffer and die. If you push one out of the way, that is much better than doing nothing, so in that sense you've done something great. But if you stop there, you've also neglected the second animal even though you just as easily could push them out of the way as well. This is the opportunity cost of stopping at a "net-positive" action, and would seem terribly wrong. So if it's wrong to neglect other animals, with your resources, then it could still be wrong even if the argument is sound.

A parallel argument for farming humans

This isn't an objection to the argument presented directly, but attempts to highlight an absurdity if we go on to say that therefore animal agriculture is justified under the conditions that are required for the argument to succeed.

P1) It's better for humans to live, compared to not existing.

P2) By raising and killing farmed humans and selling them for meat on the darkweb, you get the resources to keep causing farmed humans to exist and live.

C) It's better for farmed humans if you continue human meat production than not.

We can imagine some situation where the money you get off human meat allows you to keep breeding humans who find a value in their own life, kill them when they're large enough to be profitable, and continue the cycle. Without that money you couldn't afford to breed them, and there would be a complete lack of value compared to the situation in which you do raise and kill humans for meat.

There are practical objections to this of course - you'd get no subsidies to do this sustainably and couldn't realistically afford it, you would be caught eventually, the humans couldn't be happy enough, compared to farm animals. But if these are the kinds of objections there is, then just imagine a version of this world where it was practically feasible. People would pay handsomely for this exclusive meat, they'd have a good conscience knowing that the humans wouldn't exist otherwise. The humans could be drugged enough to be content enough in captivity, even if their life could be much better. Or we could let them roam free up until a certain point and make it seem like they're moving away to reduce trauma for others. And the perpetrator would be a mastermind who is never caught.

Even if the objection is that humans are just worth so much more than animals and it's therefore wrong, then this would be all the more reason to cause more humans to exist, since the value would be so much higher. Even if there is something particularly wrong about killing humans that doesn't apply the same to animals, then at least the disvalue of killing them should be outweighed or matched by the value of causing them to exist, since this existence is also of higher value than non-humans.

This argument doesn't contradict any of the premises of the original argument, but it seems to be a piece of the cake that would be included with the argument that "they wouldn't exist otherwise".

Conclusion

There are some good reasons to object to P1 - in practice it's rarely feasible to guarantee that the suffering of all the animals born in an agricultural setting, when added together, is outweighed by the pleasure and benefits of the animals that now get to exist as a consequence of meat production.

Anti-natalism, if true, would be a solid dead-end for this argument, but there are other risk-averse alternatives to anti-natalism that can still be sound if anti-natalism is not.

If the argument is true under certain conditions, there are reasons to also reject that it's justified - it is likely to still harm animals outside of the context in which it is justified, and it's not the best you could do with the resources you have. You could be neglecting the well-being of animals overall by only focusing on creating net positivity for a group of individuals.

Finally a reductio ad absurdum for farming humans should make us think twice before going from this argument to the idea that it's therefore justified to farm animals.