Here is an attack on vegetarianism: Is it better for an animal to exist or not to exist? If it were better for it not to exist, wouldn't it be a virtue sterilising all the animals out there, so that no more come into an unfortunate existence? This would seem absurd. Thus let us conclude that in some cases it is better for an animal to exist. Now the cows, for example, on a farm only exist because someone will eat them later. Assuming also that the cow is kept in humane conditions, and has all the things a cow would want in life, we might conclude that it is better that the cow has been. As this good is wholly dependant on a human being a meat-eater, we conclude that it is virtuous being a meat-eater.

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Sorry, but this is a silly argument. Replace "animal" with "person", and you get an argument in favor of breeding children for slaughter. (Apologies to Jonathan Swift.) But yet, surely, it's better for a person to exist than for it not to exist, right? Actually, that's not so obvious, as we'll shortly see. But if it's not obvious in the case of people, it's certainly not obvious in the case of animals.

The argument purports to show that it's (objectively) better for an animal to exist than for it not to exist by showing that, if it were (objectively) better for it not to exist, then we ought to sterilize all the cows. But this assumes that, if it's not (objectively) better for an animal to exist than for it not to exist, then it must be (objectively) better for it not to exist. But the obvious reply is that there's just no better or worse about it. It's neither (objectively) better for one more cow to exist nor (objectively) worse. But then the argument goes nowhere.

What's fundamentally wrong with the argument, however, is its underlying "utilitarian" premise: that we can judge what's right and wrong by adding up what's valuable and what's not; that's the basic idea behind utilitarianism. And utilitarianism has well-known problems in this area. For example, there seems to be some positive value to each human life. Otherwise, it wouldn't be wrong to kill people. But then it seems as if we ought all be making sure that there are as many people as possible. The mere discomfort people would experience due to the effects of over-population surely can't outweigh the value attaching to a single human life: Otherwise, it would be all right to kill someone and feed him to hungry people, which is absurd.

But the right conclusion here isn't that we should all breed ourselves as often as possible. It's that there is something fundamentally wrong with utilitarianism. The reason it's wrong to kill people isn't that there is some value to each human life, value that outweighs any degree of human suffering. It's wrong to kill people because people have certain rights, for example, the right not to be killed. Fundamentally, it's wrong to kill people not because it's bad, in some objective sense, that that person should die. (Maybe it is, but that's not why it's wrong to kill them.) Rather, it's wrong to kill Fred because it is bad for Fred or bad from Fred's point of view that Fred should die, and Fred's point of view is deserving of a certain degree of respect.

The central arguments for vegetarianism are arguments based upon the idea that animals too have certain rights. One can argue that animals do not have such rights, or one can argue that, even if they do, it's still permissible to kill them for food. But you can't argue against this kind of view in the way illustrated here. To counter such arguments with broadly utilitarian reasoning is to miss their point.

I should add, in closing, that there are people who still want to defend utilitarianism in one or another form. But such people have their own ways of evading the let's-all-make-babies argument, and the moves that work there are likely to work in response to this argument, too.

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