Animals and the Harm of Death - Killing Happy Animals: Explorations in Utilitarian Ethics - page 35

not in an account about the harm of death. Another thing that should
be noted is that a view about the harm of death is not the same as
a view about the wrongness of killing. When considering the wrong-
ness of killing, considerations other than the harm of death need to
be taken into account. For instance, killing can have effects on others.
Furthermore, for laws about killing, certain clear-cut rules rather than
gradual distinctions might be preferable on utilitarian grounds, even if
the harm of death is a gradual matter. Therefore, any view concerning
the harm of death does not translate directly into a view about the
wrongness of killing, nor does it imply any legal position on how killing
should be regulated or punished.
I will mention three major views on the harm of death. A prominent
view is that death is a lesser harm for animals because animals do not have
many desires for the (far) future. Animals, according to this view, lack a
conception of their identity over time, and therefore they do not have any
desire to go on living. An alternative view defines the harm of death in
terms of the loss of what would have been valuable for the being , rather than
in terms of the loss of what a being wants . According to a third view, the
loss of future value for the being must be discounted in some cases.
As we will see, none of these major views on the harm of death,
which are all in principle compatible with utilitarianism, implies that
death is harmless for the animals that usually end up on people's plates.
However, different accounts yield very different conclusions about the
sort of harm death is for these animals. Utilitarians can deny that death
is a lesser harm for animals. Even if they accept that death is a lesser
harm for animals, death is still harmful for animals to some degree.
2 The relevance of future-oriented desires
One influential position among the desire-fulfilment conceptions of
welfare is that death harms a being more if it frustrates the fulfilment of
more and stronger desires. The more unfulfilled desires a being has when it
dies, the more it is harmed by death. 1 This is because harm is defined as the
frustration of desires. If no desires are frustrated, a being is not harmed. The
relevant desires can be specified in different ways. In general, the desires
that are relevant for welfare need not be consciously held.
Beings that have a conception of their own existence over time usually
have plans and projects for the nearer and further away future and the
desire to go on living. Beings that lack a conception of their own exist-
ence over time lack a desire for continued life. They only have imme-
diate and short-term desires, such as the desire to escape frightening or