CULINARY USE - Ethics and the Beast - page 80

VEGAN UTOPIA
Companion animals show that human-animal relations need not be exploitative.
Cows, sheep, and hens are not pets, and people have them for different reasons from
those that lead them to take in cats and dogs. People wish to use farm animals. Use
need not be exploitation, and if our relations with pets present a nonexploitative regu-
lative ideal, the ability to maintain nonexploitative relationships with farm animals de-
pends, in part, on the ability to import elements from our relations with pets into the
world of farm-animal husbandry.
Before asking how such an ideal can be worked out, I need to specify what is bad
about the vegan alternative. If eggs and milk cannot be had without exploitation, a
pro-animal ideal state means that laying hens and cows will either disappear or be
maintained in small numbers in specially created reserves. Quantitatively, such a
world is bad for these animals since less of them would exist. The argument is fa-
miliar, but it has usually been made by meat-eaters against vegetarians, not by veget-
arians against vegans. And so I need to say why considerations of the value of a
lived life can be legitimately employed by vegetarians in this dispute. 7 Philosophers
will also worry about the plausibility of arguing from the projected benefits of nonex-
istent entities: in what sense can a world that does not include a particular cow be
bad for “it” (for the nonexistent cow) relative to a world in which “it” will exist?
Doubtful too is the underlying assumption that more lives are better than few. After
all, the quantitative argument against veganism is not that vegetarianism will enable a
species to remain in existence (vegan utopia could preserve some farm animals), but
that more members of that species will exist. And this emphasis on more-is-better is
suspect.
Here are my reasons against these dismissals. Begin with the projected benefits of
nonexistent entities. Many philosophers say that such moves are meaningless and re-
ject the viability of a standpoint of a yet nonexistent entity that gains or loses. Rul-
ing out such a standpoint is surely correct, but note that it does not follow that judg-
ments regarding projected benefits of nonexistent entities are meaningless (e.g., when
we speak about our obligation to future generations). When we say that a yet nonex-
istent entity gains by our actions—e.g., claiming that future generations benefit or are
harmed by particular ecological steps that are undertaken now; or leaving an inherit-
ance to a yet unborn grandchild; or feeling gratitude to a parent for “giving us
life”—we do not assume an already existing perspective of these future generations,
or future grandchildren, or rely on a comparison with some “preexisting us” that has
benefited by receiving the gift of life. Such statements do not exemplify meaningless
metaphysical blunder, because they are predicated on a conditional projection: a yet
nonexistent entity, if it existed, would benefit or lose through a present action. The