Can We Eat Animals Whose Existence Depends on It?

Abstract

According to one common argument for moral omnivorism, eating meat produced in sufficiently high-welfare conditions is permissible because the animals we eat would otherwise never exist. While this argument has a long history, it has recently gained renewed attention, with some philosophers now claiming that we can run the argument even if we grant humans and farm animals the same moral status. In this article, I reconstruct what I take to be the best version of this argument, and I then evaluate it. I defend two main conclusions. First, I argue that even the best version of the argument is limited in important ways: it cannot justify the consumption of all animal products, and it implies that we should often stop animals from being killed if we can. Second, I argue that even this improved and limited form of the argument should ultimately be rejected because there are contexts in which it has very counterintuitive implications.