Introduction - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 14

entity ought to be treated depends on the consequences of the action in
terms of overall welfare. It depends on nothing else.
As we have seen, utilitarianism accords equal moral status to all
sentient beings. Equal moral status is compatible with unequal treatment.
If different animals have different interests, treating them differently -
each according to his or her interests - is compatible with granting them
equal moral consideration. For instance, some utilitarians have argued
that killing a normal human teenager is worse than killing a mouse.
According to this view, mice might be killed for reasons that would not
justify the killing of human teenagers. If this unequal treatment is based
on the idea that mice lack the interest in continued life, which human
teenagers have, killing the mice rather than the teenagers is compatible
with equal consideration of their interests. After all, equal consideration
of interests means that equal interests should get equal consideration.
Unequal interests can therefore justify unequal treatment, even in case
of equal moral status. (The question whether death is indeed a lesser
harm to non-human animals will be discussed in Chapter 3.)
5 Outline of this topic
In Chapter 2 I present the basic elements of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism
requires the maximization of welfare, giving equal weight to each
being's welfare. I show that utilitarianism needs a particular argument,
the Replaceability Argument, in order to be compatible with the goal
of animal-friendly animal husbandry. While killing a being that could
otherwise have had a pleasant future counts as a welfare loss within utili-
tarianism, the Replaceability Argument holds, as I said, that this welfare
loss can be compensated by bringing a new animal into existence that
would not otherwise have existed and whose life contains at least as much
welfare as the future of the killed being would have contained. This argu-
ment is controversial. So, in order to know whether utilitarianism can
support animal-friendly animal husbandry, we need to know whether
the Replaceability Argument can be defended within utilitarianism.
In Chapter 3 I start with the above-mentioned feature of utilitari-
anism that unequal treatment can be justified if the beings in question
have unequal interests. I explore whether animals are less interested in
their continued life and whether this difference of interests can justify
the routine killing of animals as implied by animal husbandry. I show
that some accounts of the harm of death indeed imply that death
is a lesser harm to animals than to most human beings, while other
accounts do not have this implication. All accounts imply that death