Another thought on ethics of eating animals

I made a mistake: Average Happiness versus Aggregate Happiness w/r/t the Lives of Cows: 

The following was a footnote in the previous essay I published on this blog:

"My own view is that the ecological arguments are far more clear-cut, and far easier to sustain, than the arguments from animal suffering. Do cows living a relatively happy, quite social and interactive life on large paddocks or vast saltbush plains have lives of “negative utility”, just because they get slaughtered at the end? That seems to me absurd. And if you agree that such cattle don’t lead lives of negative utility, then reducing the amount of such cattle in the world means reducing the amount of utility in the world (unless the environments vacated create room and resources for far more new creatures, with more capacity for utility than the cattle – but that’s very uncertain and distant). (One could reasonably argue that chickens in battery farms do have lives of “negative utility”, of course.)

Now, you could try to make the animal welfare case without utilitarianism – you could just say “It’s wrong to kill another innocent, sentient creature no matter what”. The problem is that most people don’t have that intuition, which is why most/all vegetarian/vegan moral philosophers argue from utilitarianism (the moral system that ignores every one of our intuitions except the intuition that morality is about pleasure and pains (or preferences))."

A few days ago, when I wrote this first paragraph about the lives of cows and the consequences of reducing their numbers, I was thinking about "utility" purely in additive terms, ignoring "average utility" completely. This was a mistake: no utilitarian can possibly think only in terms of either average or aggregate utility, since both, famously, lead to morally repugnant conclusions. If you care only about average utility, any scenario in which mass slaughter or species extinction leads to more resources and opportunities for the organisms left alive would seem justified; if you care only about aggregate utility, it would seem justified to massively increase the population of the planet, as long as the extra lives you create are just worth living (and you might want humans to leave absolutely no space for other species, because of the Millian belief that "It's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" (an intelligent, self-aware creature, capable of reflection, has more capacity for utility, broadly understood)). As a result of these truths, it is necessary for any thoughtful utilitarian to strike some sort of balance between their valuation of average and aggregate utility.

Anyhow, what I realised is that it was unfair to think about the argument from animal suffering in terms of aggregate utility. Indeed, it has occurred to me that the argument from animal suffering looks in much better shape if you think of the issue of the lives of cows purely in terms of average utility. Consider the issue this way: if we abolished the entire cattle industry, would that increase the average utility of the lives of cows (with the only cows left being wild cows, roaming free)? I think most vegetarians and vegans think that it would. It does seem the more reasonable conclusion to draw, since a free cow has unlimited territory to roam and will not get slaughtered after a few years (though it might, depending on its geographic location, be preyed upon by other creatures).

Of course, another question might be whether abolishing the cattle industry would increase the average utility of all organisms on the planet. However, this question is too hard. Given the ecological and environmental impact of the cattle industry, the right answer may well be "yes", but it's impossible to know.

So that's all there is to say really: you probably can sustain the argument from animal suffering against eating beef if you think that what matters is average utility rather than aggregate utility.