Veganism is on the face of it an extremely simple moral philosophy. If Animals have feelings, then eating animals is bad. Duh.
Effective Altruists tend to be people who actually take moral arguments at face value rather than ignoring them, and unsurprisingly many effective altruists are vegan.
But effective altruists also tend to be utilitarians, and as such are likely to want to minimise total animal suffering in aggregate, rather than taking the more deontologist view that you personally shouldn't cause suffering by eating animals.
So presumably vegan EAs assume that most farmed animals lives aren't worth living and so better not to eat farmed animals, even though this will cause them never to be raised in the first place.
It seems to me that most wild animals lives are just as terrible as those of farmed animals, especially for the vast majority of animals who give birth to thousands of young of which on average only 2 will ever reach adulthood. Their lives are presumably also not worth living.
As a utilitarian then, it should be far more important to wipe out as many animal habitats as possible rather than avoiding eating a relatively small number of animals by being a vegan.
I'm interested if anyone espouses such negative animal utilitarianism, or if anyone has any responses to it?
Wolves don't seem to have any capability to morally introspect. Do you agree with this?
If you do, it seems silly to expect them to behave morally. Humans, on the other hand, can behave morally, at least on average.
There is no such thing as "well-treated livestock." If you think this is incorrect, devise a livestock method behind the veil of ignorance and share it here. But generally murder is not well-treatment. Rape is not well-treatment. If you were a farmed animal, you would have been murdered at the age of seven, extrapolating from the average age of farmed animal murder as a percentage of lifespan. Do you think it is okay to murder a seven-year-old assuming it is painless? If you were murdered at seven, would you consider it a life well-lived? Would you prefer to be slaughtered "painlessly" at age seven, or perhaps live longer and be killed by wolves?
Not to be inflammatory, but I don't believe that the reasons for your abandoning veganism actually were these. It is far too convenient. You probably just wanted to taste meat again. If you have some health excuse, I recommend blending your meat into a tasteless, drinkable slurry to avoid these arguments -- and if you really did abandon veganism simply because you're hopeless about the wild animal's suffering, you should be happy to do this! If it isn't about your ability to eat meat, that is. If it is, you should be honest and say you abandoned veganism because you enjoy the taste of blood in your mouth.
Veganism is on the face of it an extremely simple moral philosophy. If Animals have feelings, then eating animals is bad. Duh.
Effective Altruists tend to be people who actually take moral arguments at face value rather than ignoring them, and unsurprisingly many effective altruists are vegan.
But effective altruists also tend to be utilitarians, and as such are likely to want to minimise total animal suffering in aggregate, rather than taking the more deontologist view that you personally shouldn't cause suffering by eating animals.
So presumably vegan EAs assume that most farmed animals lives aren't worth living and so better not to eat farmed animals, even though this will cause them never to be raised in the first place.
It seems to me that most wild animals lives are just as terrible as those of farmed animals, especially for the vast majority of animals who give birth to thousands of young of which on average only 2 will ever reach adulthood. Their lives are presumably also not worth living.
As a utilitarian then, it should be far more important to wipe out as many animal habitats as possible rather than avoiding eating a relatively small number of animals by being a vegan.
I'm interested if anyone espouses such negative animal utilitarianism, or if anyone has any responses to it?