Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
on whether it principally holds for human beings as well. Singer, for
instance, describes a case of people being brought into existence and
kept in a state of happy infants as a reservoir of spare body parts. Singer
claims that this implication would 'reduce the appeal' of the argument.
11
As far as I can see, though, a Total utilitarian accepting Singer's view on
the harm of death seems to have nothing in principle to bring forward
against this implication.
Summing up, an influential argument in defence of animal-friendly
animal husbandry claims that animal-friendly animal husbandry
actually benefits the animals in question because if it were not for
being kept in animal husbandry those animals would not exist at all.
This argument is not compatible with Prior Existence Utilitarianism.
Centrally, the argument assumes that existence can be better for a
being than non-existence, an assumption that the Prior Existence util-
itarian must deny. Total utilitarians, in contrast, need not find fault
with this underlying assumption of the argument. Total utilitarians
favour adding happy beings to the world provided that this maxim-
ises welfare, either because they do not evaluate outcomes in terms of
harms and benefits to sentient beings but in terms of the total overall
quantity of welfare, or because they believe that causing a being to
exist can benefit that being, or both.
3 Implications concerning animal husbandry
What exactly are the implications of Prior Existence Utilitarianism and
Total Utilitarianism for the practical issue of animal husbandry? What
would follow from both versions of utilitarianism for the practice of
animal-friendly animal husbandry?
As we have seen, Total Utilitarianism implies the Replaceability
Argument. Therefore, it seems to allow for the killing and replacement of
animals and thus be compatible with the goal of animal-friendly animal
husbandry. However, there are some caveats concerning this conclusion.
First of all, as we have seen in Chapter 4, the Replaceability Argument
only permits the killing and replacement of an animal under certain
conditions. One condition is that the animal has a pleasant life. More
precisely, it is crucial that the killed animal could have had a pleasant
future if it were not killed. This is a condition of the Replaceability
Argument, because if the animal had an unpleasant future, there would
be no need to replace it, from a utilitarian perspective. A second condi-
tion of the Replaceability Argument is that the killing does not have
any unbalanced negative side effects, such as causing suffering for the
Search WWH ::
Custom Search